O, what could it grieve for? Its feet were tied,
With a silken thread of my own hand's weaving;
Sweet little red feet! why should you die—
Why should you leave me, sweet bird! why?
You lived alone in the forest-tree,
Why, pretty thing! would you not live with me?
I kiss'd you oft and gave you white peas;
Why not live sweetly, as in the green trees?
ODE ON MELANCHOLY
Lord Houghton, in the Aldine edition of 1876, makes the following prefatory note: 'A singular instance of Keats's delicate perception occurred in the composition of this Ode. In the original manuscript he had intended to represent the vulgar conception of Melancholy with gloom and horror, in contrast with the emotion that incites to—
"glut thy sorrow on a morning rose
Or on the rainbow of the salt sand-wave,
Or on the wealth of globed peonies;"
and which essentially
"lives in Beauty—Beauty that must die,
And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips
Bidding adieu."
The first stanza, therefore, was the following: as grim a passage as Blake or Fuseli could have dreamed and painted:—
"Though you should build a bark of dead men's bones,
And rear a platform gibbet for a mast,
Stitch shrouds together for a sail, with groans
To fill it out, blood-stained and aghast;
Although your rudder be a dragon's tail
Long sever'd, yet still hard with agony,
Your cordage large uprootings from the skull
Of bald Medusa, certes you would fail
To find the Melancholy—whether she
Dreameth in any isle of Lethe dull."
I
No, no! go not to Lethe, neither twist
Wolf's-bane, tight-rooted, for its poisonous wine;
Nor suffer thy pale forehead to be kiss'd
By nightshade, ruby grape of Proserpine;
Make not your rosary of yew-berries,
Nor let the beetle, or the death-moth be
Your mournful Psyche, nor the downy owl
A partner in your sorrow's mysteries;
For shade to shade will come too drowsily,
And drown the wakeful anguish of the soul.
II
But when the melancholy fit shall fall
Sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud,
That fosters the droop-headed flowers all,
And hides the green hills in an April shroud;
Then glut thy sorrow on a morning rose,
Or on the rainbow of the salt-sand wave,
Or on the wealth of globed peonies;
Or if thy mistress some rich anger shows,
Emprison her soft hand, and let her rave,
And feed deep, deep upon her peerless eyes.