Keywords
suicide, Melancholia, depression
Document Type
Essay
Description
John Keats once wrote that melancholy and beauty dwell together. He certainly seems qualified to make that assertion-he suffered the deaths of his close family members, desperate financial straits, career difficulty, bouts of depression, and a fatal case of tuberculosis yet still managed to write some of the most sublime poetry in the English language. In his "Ode on Melancholy" (1819), he describes the eponymous emotion as a sudden, unavoidable rain shower. Yet Keats warns readers to resist the temptation to seek for relief through poisonous Wolfs-bane or yew-berries, claiming that "in the very temple of Delight / Veil'd Melancholy has her sovran shrine." While this may be a poetically pleasing paradox, it has been my experience that the balance between melancholy and beauty is not an equal one-the two occasionally show up together, but in terms of quantity, the scale often tips toward melancholy.
Recommended Citation
Safsten, Sarah
(2020)
"On Melancholia,"
Inscape: Vol. 40:
No.
2, Article 8.
Available at:
https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/inscape/vol40/iss2/8