ODE ON MELANCHOLY:
RESEARCH PROJECTS

• Keats wrote five famous odes in 1819. Read "Ode on a Grecian Urn", "Ode on Indolence", "Ode to a Nightingale", and "Ode to Psyche." Explain which, if any, makes a lick of sense.

• Fellow Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley was such an admirer of Keats that he had a copy of Keats’s poems in the pocket of his coat when he drowned in a sailing accident in 1822. Read about Shelley’s death, and explain whether you think it was an accident, or whether Keats’s word-heavy, lumbering poems weighed him down like rocks.

• In line 6 Keats refers to a “death-moth.” Though uncommon in these days, death moths were a cause for serious concern in the early nineteenth century, and in fact were killed poet/cocaine fiend Samuel Taylor Coleridge, eating him, as Lord Byron phrased it, “like a wool sweater.” Design an article of clothing from moth balls that can repel death moths or a sleeping chamber, like a drawer, that can be lined with moth balls, to keep you safe at night.

• Write a poem about a time in your life when you were depressed, but found yourself cheered up by the fact that everything must die.

• In this poem Keats refers to “Beauty that must die.” Review the trial notes of four or five convicted murders, either psychotic or melancholic, and see which one was most like this popular Romantic poet.