Ode on Melancholy
The opening refuses every conventional narcotic — no Lethe, no wolf's-bane, no nightshade, no beetle or death-moth for mourners — on the grounds that they drown the wakeful anguish of the soul instead of sharpening it. When the fit falls sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud, the instruction is to glut it on a morning rose, on the rainbow of a salt sand-wave, or on the eyes of a mistress caught while she raves. Keats cancelled an opening stanza of ghoulish sea-tackle before printing it in the 1820 volume.
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