The yew-berry is the seed (also poisonous) of the yewtree, which, because it is hardy and an evergreen, is traditionally planted in English graveyards. Wolfsbane and nightshade are poisonous plants. Lethe is a river in the classical underworld. Keats brought together a remarkable collection of objects in the stanza. The stanza with which Keats decided to begin the poem is startling, but not crude. The stanza is crude and Keats realized it. Moreover, he may have felt that two stanzas on death were more than enough. He was straining to create images of death that would convey something of the repulsiveness of death - to give the reader a romantic shudder of the Gothic kind - and what he succeeded in doing was repulsive instead of delicately suggestive and was out of keeping with what he achieved in the rest of the poem. We don't know why Keats rejected this original beginning stanza, but we can guess. Your cordage large uprootings from the skull To fill it out, blood-stained and aghast Stitch creeds together for a sail, with groans Though you should build a bark of dead men's bones, The abruptness with which "Ode to Melancholy" begins is accounted for by the fact that the stanza with which the poem begins was originally the second stanza. In the "Ode to Melancholy," Keats, instead of rejecting melancholy, shows a healthy attraction toward it, for unless one keenly experiences it, he cannot appreciate joy. He was himself a very sensuous individual. His happiness was constantly being chipped away by frustration. Keats' own experience of life and his individual temperament made him acutely aware of the close relationship between joy and sorrow. Therefore the most sensuous man, the man who can "burst Joy's grape against his palate fine," as Keats put it in a striking image, is capable of the liveliest response to melancholy. Keats' special variation on the theme was to make the claim that the keenest experience of melancholy was to be obtained not from death but from the contemplation of beautiful objects because they were fated to die. One of the effects of this somber poetry about death, graveyards, the brevity of pleasure and of life was a pleasing feeling of melancholy. Such poetry came to be called the "Graveyard School of Poetry" and the best-known example of it is Thomas Gray's "Elegy in a Country Churchyard." The romantic poets inherited this tradition. The "Ode to Melancholy" belongs to a class of eighteenth-century poems that have some form of melancholy as their theme. He is the one who can have the deepest experience of melancholy. It is to be found at the very heart of delight, but only the strongly sensuous man perceives it there. Melancholy dwells with beauty, "beauty that must die," joy, and pleasure. Or if the one he loves is angry, let him hold her hand and feed on the loveliness of her eyes. When a melancholy mood comes to the individual, he should feed it by observing the beauty of roses, rainbows, and peonies. Death and all things associated with it numb the experience of anguish. The reader is not to go to the underworld (Lethe), nor to drink wolf's-bane (a poison), nor to take nightshade (also a poison), nor to have anything to do with yew-berries, the beetle, the death-moth, and the owl (all symbolic of death).
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