"Ode to Melancholy- is a short poem. In it the author, John Keats, pays respect to the polar emotion that is melancholy. It sounded like Keats was saying that without melancholy a person could not have joy. "She dwells with Beauty "Beauty that must die;/ And Joy ."" She being melancholy. Keats sees that melancholy and joy coexist as well as are contingent on the other. A person doesn't know its cold unless he remembers what was hot.
Keats' life was full of disease, death, despair, and a daily awareness of pain; a daily awareness of joy. His father died, his mother died. He took care of his brother, Tom, who also died. They all died of consumption. However, the Romantic in Keats saw past their deaths; he saw past it to find love. He did not " let the beetle, not the death-moth be/ Your mournful Psyche - but instead found love whose name to him was Fanny Brawne. His life was hard and short. He chose the melancholy as a topic because it is a necessity of a complete life. He was dying of consumption, his family's "Wolf's-bane ."" He was aware that his life was to end soon. He must have been wracked with melancholy. No one inexperienced with melancholy could describe it as "A partner in your sorrow's mysteries;/ For shade to shade will come too drowsily,/ And drown the wakeful anguish of the soul."" .
In the first stanza Keats describes the wrong way to handle melancholy. I'm actually tired of the word melancholy; I'll use it interchangeably with sorrow, and sadness. Actually he doesn't describe it more than warn against dealing with sorrow in this manner. He says to not allow yourself to just let in fill you with death; to not allow yourself to be consumed with fantasies of your own demise. "No, no, go not to Lethe,"."" Lethe was a river in Hades and it was the river of forgetfulness. Keats is saying that you should not just ignore the source of your pain or let the sadness fall into oblivion.