Using 'Ode on Melancholy' and one other, examine how Keats uses language to explore his muses
Keats Using 'Ode on Melancholy' and one other, examine how Keats uses language to explore his muses In 'Ode on Melancholy' Keats accepts the truth he sees: joy and pain are inseparable and to experience joy fully we must experience sadness or melancholy fully. The first stanza urges us not to try and escape pain; stanza two tells us what to do instead - embrace the transient beauty and joy of the nature and human experience, which contain pain and death. Stanza three makes clear that in order to experience joy we must experience the sorrow that beauty dies and joy evaporates. The more intensely we feel happiness, the more subject we are to melancholy. The poet's passionate outcry not to reject melancholy is presented negatively - "no," "not," "neither," "nor." The degree of pain that melancholy may cause is implied by the ways to avoid it, for example "go to Lethe" and "suffer thy pale forehead to be kissed by nightshade..." The first two words, "No, no," are both accented, emphasising them; their forcefulness expresses convincingly the speaker's passionate state. In the first stanza, the language used presents "the wakeful anguish of the soul". Keats speaks of "yew-berries" which are generally associated with mourning; the mood of the stanza is joyless which mirrors the subject it speaks of. However, Keats describes the "anguish" as "wakeful" because the sufferer still