Melancholy

            On Monday I reached a new level of flexibility in one of my yoga poses. With my left leg straight and my left leg bent so my left foot is touching my groin, I twist my body to the left as far as possible and bend down over my right leg. I hold my right foot with both hands and continue the leftward twist, trying to bring my right elbow to the floor on the left side of my right leg while my left arm is stretched over my left ear. On Monday I was able to touch my elbow to the floor for the first time. I’ve been able to do it on the opposite side for quite a while but one side of the body is always more flexible than the other.

            It was about seven degrees outside in the late morning and so I wore one less layer of shirts and kept my jacket open for my ride downtown. Although the snow banks were melting they were still high and I anticipated having to step in them to lock my bike. Because of this I wore my Kodiaks and so I had to wear four pairs of socks for them to fit, despite the higher temperature.

            The Bloor bike lane was clear but full of puddles and so I did feel my ass get a bit damp by the time I got to OISE. I was about eight minutes early but the biology class got out ahead of schedule and I was able to put most of the tables into rows before my fellow students came in.

            It was so warm in the classroom that I stripped down to a tank shirt for the first half of class.

            In this lecture we began to look at Keats’s odes.

            1819 was the beginning of the period of Keats’s great odes, which are considered some of the finest accomplishments of literature. They are sometimes quite complex but his “Ode On Melancholy” is often assessed as being his simplest.

            “Ode On Melancholy" is concrete in its imagery and Keats is committed to and invested in the dialectical.

            “Negative capability" is his idiom for being able to maintain a condition of doubt without reaching for certainty. He can enter into sympathetic identifications to throw himself in without commitment. He can identify with all aspects but then explore the opposing side. When we say that Keats is the least dogmatic of the Romantics we mean that he is very invested in ideas but he is also aware of their vulnerability. He deals in self-contradiction and sometimes paradox. His “Ode On Melancholy” is a fusion of paradox.

            Professor Weisman asked me to read the poem.

            Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey" is an ode, as is Coleridge’s “Lime Tree Bower".  In these the speaker is situated and localized within time and place. Keats’s odes are not quite the same. He and Shelley struggle to understand the objects of address.

            Melancholy is an abstraction. She is a goddess and her shrine is in the Temple of Delight.

            Lethe is the river of forgetfulness.

            The herbs mentioned are pain-killing poisons.

            Keats urges from the start of the poem:

            Don’t try to forget.

            Don’t kill yourself.

            Don’t run from sorrow.

            We live in a world of melancholy. The solution of the first generation Romantics was to retreat. A poem in itself can be a retreat.

            The Invitation Poem in Renaissance poetry of English letters was also a retreat. “Ode On Melancholy" is an inversion of the Invitation Poem.

            Beginning with “No no” Keats acknowledges that our reflex is to retreat to forgetfulness.

            The weeping cloud is the source of our tears.

            On the lines “ … if thy mistress some rich anger shows / emprison her soft hand and let her rave / and feed deep, deep upon her peerless eyes …” the professor told us it’s bad advice and urged us not to do that. I suggested though that this is a metaphor and that he’s not really advising the grabbing hold of an angry woman to stare into her eyes. If Melancholy is the female figure in this poem he might be simply advising the reader to grab hold of melancholy and stare into her eyes. He does refer in line ten to the “wakeful anguish of the soul”, which implies that it's in moments of anguish that we are most awake.

            To experience the delights of intensity we need a dynamic range. Experience with melancholy is a battle honour hanging in the Temple of Delight. There is no joy without melancholy.

            We looked at “Ode to a Nightingale”. In this poem he is feeling the insufficiency of intensity. He feels forgetful, numb and drowsy as if he’s taken hemlock and become anaesthetized to joy. This is a similar state to that depicted in Coleridge's "Dejection Ode".  The motif of self-alienation is what we now call not being in touch with one’s feelings.

            The poem contains a spatial paradox. He feels burdened while experiencing transcendence. He is addressing the flying bird and birds are a favourite image in poetry. It is not just its ability to fly but it’s melodious sound.

            A "beaker full of the warm south" refers to wine.

            She asked what is the imagery presented by Keats in the first two stanzas and told us to describe the image patterns.

            I said that he speaks of having metaphorically drunk poison in the first stanza but then in the second he wants to drink wine. He’s talking bout two kinds of forgetfulness. In the first he has forgotten his joy but in the second he aspires to forget his sorrow. He wants to fade away into the forest like the nightingale, which has no attachment to worry.

            She recommended T.S. Eliot’s “For Cortez” and quoted the line, “Ease is cause of wonder.”

            Wine is an anaesthetic and people talk of drinking to forget, but it is also considered to bring an intoxicating inspiration to transcendence.

            He does not want shallow escapism. The bird is singing with full-throated ease because it is uninhibited. The bird is the ideal poet, or poetry itself. The immortal bird.

            He refers to the Biblical homesick Ruth who went to Bethlehem and became a gleaner.

            Keats’s brother died of tuberculosis the year before the writing of this poem.

            “Ode to a Nightingale" is the direct opposite of "Ode On Melancholy".

            Viewless wings are invisible. He wants to transcend with poetry.

            Stanza five presents an extremely self-reflexive mood.

            He represents himself as transcendent while longing for what he has escaped. This is similar to Coleridge’s “Lime Tree Bower”. It’s in his moment of transcendence that he becomes most aware of the world that he is escaping. The sensuous nature of the imagery brings him back down to Earth.

            He wakes up in stanza eight with “Forlorn!”

            Poetry is like a balm. Poetry cannot cheat you out of sorrow. He recognizes that he belongs in a world of sorrow. Does he wake or sleep? Was this a dream?

            That was the end of the class. She said we should pay special attention to “Ode On A Grecian Urn”

            I told Professor Weisman that the line, "Attach your sorrow to a morning rose" from “Ode On Melancholy” reminds me of some lines from "The Window" by Leonard Cohen, " ... and leave no word of discomfort / and leave no observer to mourn / Just climb on your tears and be silent / like a rose on its ladder of thorns …” She nodded appreciatively and said she sees how it fits.

            I went immediately to the Admissions office to see if they could help me with my application for both the Noah Meltz grant and for OSAP. The counter person I spoke with tried her best to be helpful. She reset my OSAP password and gave me an Ontario Access Number. She suggested that once I’ve successfully applied for OSAP it might clear up the problems I’ve experienced on the Noah Meltz website. She said that if it doesn’t then I should bring my laptop in and she’d help me. She was surprised that I didn't just get my Noah Meltz grant automatically in January and so was the counsellor she spoke with about my case. But on reading the new instructions she saw that the process is under a new set of rules this year and that I do need to apply twice for every full term and also twice for OSAP.

            I rode down St George to Queen and headed west. On the way home I stopped at Freshco. They had black grapes but they were all very soft. I got a bag anyway and a couple of bags of red grapes from Peru. I got a pint of blueberries from Chile, three bags of milk, a strawberry-rhubarb pie, a whole chicken and some Greek yogourt.

            I’ve got plenty of meat in my freezer but it's all pig and I'm getting bored with pork.

            When I got home there was an email from the model coordinator at OCADU offering me a couple of bookings for this coming Wednesday. Traditionally I’ve been the model she could count on to take last minute bookings. One booking was for the late afternoon and the other was for the night. I still wasn’t sure if I’d have to take my laptop to the Admissions office after class on Wednesday, and if so how long it would take. I considered taking the evening booking but I decided to look at the weather forecast and saw that freezing rain was predicted for during the time of both of those bookings and for the times that I would be riding to and from them. In the thirty-some years that I’ve been working at OCADU, Tracy has given the least advanced bookings. Previous coordinators have given most of the winter and spring bookings in January, or even sometimes in December. If she had given me these bookings she was offering me now in January I would have taken them and gone to them in any weather, but getting them at the last minute and knowing that I might be risking my life to get to and from them, I told her I couldn’t do this Wednesday.

            I had a late lunch and a late siesta.

            I typed out my lecture notes.

            For dinner I had a piece of pork with a potato and some gravy and watched an episode of Peter Gunn.

            In this story apparently random people are being killed with a crossbow. An antique dealer specializing in medieval weapons has just had a crossbow stolen and he wants Gunn to find the real killer so he will not be a suspect. A female fire-eater is killed and then a judge. Gunn figures out that the judge was the target all along and that the random killings were just to make the cops think they were looking for a psycho. Gunn confronts the judge’s son and he confesses.