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Unit 18: The Triumph of Romanticism (Melancholy in Poetry of the Age)

We look before and after, Notes
And pine for what is not.
Our sincerest laughter
With some pain is fraught;
Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.

18.4 Keats
Without mincing matters it may be said that more than any other romantic, Keats was an escapist.
He built up his spiritual home in the romance-draped middle ages and the Greece of yore which he
considered to be a land of ideal beauty. Any intimate contact with the harsh world of reality was
abhorrent to him. He was a patient of tuberculosis which ultimately cut him down in the flower of
youth. By turns he feared and courted death. His sonnet “When I have fears that I may cease to be”
is quite typical of him. In the ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ he gives vent to really poignant feelings. He
is in love with “easeful Death.” He desires
To cease upon the midnight with no pain
The nightingale is a denizen of some other immortal and romantic world, unaware of the misery
of this world in which human beings are destined to live.
The weariness, the fever, and the fret
Here, where men sit and hear each other goan,
Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs,
Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;
Where but to think is to be full of sorrow
And leaden-eyed despairs;
Where Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,
Or new Love pine at them beyond tomorrow.
Self Assessment

Fill in the blanks:
1. Melancholy is one of the inevitable products of the .................... .
2. .................... political disillusionment was also responsible for some utterances of melancholy.
3. Wordsworth’s emotional career was calculated to arouse .................... feelings.
4. .................... was, essentially, an optimistic dreamer.
5. Without mincing matters it may be said that more than any other romantic, keats was
an .................... .

18.5 Byron
Byron shared very little of the true romantic melancholy. However, he was the most cynical
and misanthropic of all the major romantic poets. He was a megalomaniac who regarded himself
to be superior to the entire world which he openly and persistently despised. What we are aware
of in him are not exactly spells of melancholy but of withering scorn and scarifying contempt
which often lead him to a end of all-denying cynicism not free from depression. Well does Joseph
warren Beach describe Byron as “the elevated soul tortured by his own perversities and doomed
by his superiority to a life of lonely pride.” But whereas Shelley’s loneliness led him to melancholy,
Byron’s led him to spells of gross ill-temper.

Task Write short note on melancholy in poetry of the Age.

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