Please give a summary of "Ode on Melancholy" by Keats.

The "Ode to Melancholy" belongs to a class of
eighteenth-century poems that have some form of melancholy as their theme. Such poetry
came to be called the "Graveyard School of Poetry" and the best-known example of it is
Thomas Gray's "Elegy in a Country Churchyard." The romantic poets inherited this
tradition. One of the effects of this somber poetry about death, graveyards, the brevity
of pleasure and of life was a pleasing feeling of
melancholy.

Keats' special variation on the theme was to
make the claim that the keenest experience of melancholy was to be obtained not from
death but from the contemplation of beautiful objects because they were fated to die.
Therefore the most sensuous man, the man who can "burst Joy's grape against his palate
fine," as Keats put it in a striking image, is capable of the liveliest response to
melancholy. Keats' own experience of life and his individual temperament made him
acutely aware of the close relationship between joy and sorrow. His happiness was
constantly being chipped away by frustration. He was himself a very sensuous individual.
In the "Ode to Melancholy," Keats, instead of rejecting melancholy, shows a healthy
attraction toward it, for unless one keenly experiences it, he cannot appreciate
joy.

The abruptness with which "Ode to Melancholy" begins
is accounted for by the fact that the stanza with which the poem begins was originally
the second stanza. The original first stanza was

Though you
should build a bark of dead men's bones,
And rear a phantom gibbet for a
mast,

We don't know why Keats rejected this original
beginning stanza, but we can guess. He was straining to create images of death that
would convey something of the repulsiveness of death — to give the reader a romantic
shudder of the Gothic kind — and what he succeeded in doing was repulsive instead of
delicately suggestive and was out of keeping with what he achieved in the rest of the
poem. Moreover, he may have felt that two stanzas on death were more than enough. The
stanza is crude and Keats realized it.

The stanza with
which Keats decided to begin the poem is startling, but not crude. Keats brought
together a remarkable collection of objects in the stanza. Lethe is a river in the
classical underworld. Wolfsbane and nightshade are poisonous plants. The yew-berry is
the seed (also poisonous) of the yewtree, which, because it is hardy and an evergreen,
is traditionally planted in English graveyards. Replicas of a black beetle were
frequently placed in tombs by Egyptians; to the Egyptians, the scarab or black beetle
was a symbol of resurrection, but to Keats they were a symbol of death because of their
association with tombs. The death-moth or butterfly represented the soul leaving the
body at death. The owl was often associated with otherworldly symbols because of its
nocturnal habits and its ominous hooting. Death is the common denominator of the
displays in Keats' museum of natural history. The language of the stanza is vastly
superior to that of the discarded stanza. Nothing in it can compare with calling
nightshade the "ruby grape of Proserpine," the queen of the underworld, nor with making
a rosary of yew-berries and thereby automatically suggesting prayers for the dying or
the dead. The stanza is one of the richest and strangest in Keats'
poetry.