The poem’s final line suggests that those who can fully access both sorrow and joy will “be among her cloudy trophies hung.” The image of the “cloudy trophies” indicates fame and immortality, which are perhaps granted to those sensitive souls (such as Keats) attuned to the deep, bittersweet melancholy of the human condition.

This is an elaborate but effective metaphor. The only people capable of experiencing melancholy are also those who “Can burst Joy’s grape,” the grape here serving as a reference to the revelrous joys of wine. More simply stated, those who feel joy most intensely also feel melancholy, for the two emotions are inseparable. As Keats’s fellow Romantic poet William Blake put it, “The deeper the sorrow, the greater the joy.” This counterintuitive notion is the poem’s key theme.

Once again, we see the role melancholy plays in life’s joyful experiences. The image here balances poison with honey, that which the “bee-mouth sips.” This is a striking line in that it evokes one of the sweetest tastes in the world, as well as the sour taste of deadly poison. The key idea is that the moments of greatest delight contain in them the bittersweet knowledge of death.

According to Keats, another condition of melancholy is an appreciation of mortality. Touching on the theme of [“Ode on a Grecian Urn”] (https://www.owleyes.org/text/ode-grecian-urn), the speaker laments the transient nature of beauty and joy. One of Keats’s central themes is that the sweetest things in life must be met with melancholy because they do not last. Keats finally makes his personification of melancholy explicit in the phrase “She dwells with Beauty.”

Keats furthers the idea of melancholy as a gateway to appreciation. In the scene of a quarrel between lovers, Keats turns the mistress’s rage into “rich anger” and attends to “her soft hand.” The final line of the stanza finds beauty in the enraged mistress’s eyes. Keats creates emphasis by repeating the hard e sound in “feed deep, deep” and “peerless.” There is a clever pun in “peerless”: On one level, the word means “matchless,” without peer. On another, it means the mistress’s eyes cannot “peer,” or see, in the way her melancholic lover can. Her rage does not allow for the same appreciative vision.

In the second stanza, the speaker begins to build a case for the uses of melancholy. As the speaker reveals, melancholy attunes us to the beauty of the world and provides poetic inspiration. This series of images, from the “morning rose” to the “salt sand-wave” and “peonies,” illustrates the inherent beauty of the natural world. These lines also show a poetic mind at work, for it is the poet who finds the “rainbow” in the salt sand-wave and sees the peonies as “globed.” Keats’s argument, then, is that melancholy serves as a gateway to the appreciation of beauty and to creative inspiration.

Keats describes the emotion of melancholy with a pre-modern account. In contemporary scientific literature, emotions such as melancholy or depression are viewed as interior states. The ancient Greeks externalized emotions, personifying them as deities who would affect humans with their different moods. While Keats does not refer to a specific Greek deity (Oizys is the Greek goddess of melancholy), he externalizes and personifies melancholy in a similar fashion.

Keats uses “shade” here in two different senses. The first “shade” refers to drug-induced oblivion. The second “shade” is the addressee, the melancholy person; “shade” in this usage means “ghost” or “soul.” Keats creates a subtle transition between the two lines in the “drowsily”/“drown” rhyme. The thesis of this couplet is that one should not “drown the wakeful anguish” because, as will become clear, melancholy is an important emotion.

In ancient Greek, “Psyche” refers to the human soul and has its origin in a verb meaning “to breath.” Psyche is also the name of the Greek goddess of the soul. In Greek myth, Psyche is married to Eros, the god of love, a tale Keats writes about in his “Ode to Psyche.”

Keats alludes to the yew, a common European tree whose parts are toxic to humans. By referring to the rosary, a string of beads used in Catholic prayer, Keats expands the poem’s cultural scope beyond Greek mythology to include the Judeo-Christian tradition.

The speaker continues to request that the reader not turn to poison. Once again, Keats draws on a Greek reference, calling the poisonous nightshade flower the “ruby grape of Proserpine.” Proserpine is another name for Persephone, the Greek princess who winters with her husband, Hades, in the Underworld and who summers with her mother, Demeter, in the meadows and fields of the earth. The vibrant nightshade flower similarly represents the gateway between death and bounteous life.

“Wolf’s-bane” is a colloquial name for the Aconitum genus of flowers, the majority of which are known for being incredibly poisonous. Like many of Keats’s references and images, Wolf’s-bane figures prominently in Greek myths: the witch Medea tried to poison Theseus with it, and the flower is said to have originated in the drooling mouth of Cerberus. The subtle allusion to Cerberus, the guard hound of the Underworld, is important. In the first stanza, the speaker urges melancholic souls not to drug themselves to death.

The River Lethe is one of the four rivers of the Greek underworld. It is the river of oblivion, whose waters souls must drink so as to forget their past lives. Keats’s speaker warns the addressee not to escape melancholy through opiates and numbness.

The poem begins with a barrage of negative, commanding words, preparing the reader for a lesson. As the speaker’s plea—a request to the sorrowful not to numb or kill themselves—becomes clear, the arresting tone of these initial words makes sense.