Like many of the previous writers, John Keats experiences a early loss of his parents. His father died in a riding accident when Keats was nine, and at the age of fourteen his mother died of an illness. He had some medical knowledge from apprenticing yet he didn't take on that field as a career but had his eye set on poetry. Keats is well known for his quote "Beauty is truth, truth is beauty" from the poem Ode on a Grecian Urn (440).
In Ode on Melancholy, it seems as if Keats is stating that in a way for every good thing that happens melancholy has it's match up.
"Beauty that must die;
And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips
Bidding adieu; and aching Pleasure nigh,
Turning to poison while the bee-mouth sips:
Ay, in the very temple of Delight
Veil'd Melancholy has her sovran shrine" (442).
He creates the image of pleasure and pain dealt together. I think that putting the two together, you don't take the beauty for granted unless you have a grasp of suffering. In his other odes, they seem to have a more positive aspect to the nightingale, and the urn, yet in this he seems to give more empathy to melancholy rather then beauty of nature.
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2 comments:
Linh,
OK comments on Keats's "Ode on Melancholy," although you don't develop your observations in sufficient depth. Also, I assume you said "you don't take the beauty for granted unless you have a grasp of suffering"; I assume you meant the opposite, and that you do take beauty for granted unless you are aware of suffering (at least, that is Keats's point).
I agree with what you say about being able to appreciate beauty only after we've known the opposite. It seems like the women, or feminine objects, in his poetry are idealized and I wonder if that would have been different if his mother had not died.
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