"Seemed at once some penanced lady elf,
Some demon's mistress, or the demon's self;"
the grim story in Isabella of Lorenzo's ghost, who
"Moaned a ghostly undersong
Like hoarse night-gusts sepulchral briers along."
all lead us over the borderland. In a rejected stanza of the Ode on Melancholy, he abandons the horrible:
"Though you should build a bark of dead men's bones
And rear a phantom 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 severed, yet still hard with agony,
Your cordage, large uprootings from the skull
Of bald Medusa, certes you would fail
To find the Melancholy—"
Keats's melancholy is not to be found amid images of horror:
"She dwells with Beauty—Beauty that must die,
And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips
Bidding adieu."
In La Belle Dame sans Merci he conveys with delicate touch the memory of the vision which haunts the knight, alone and palely loitering. We see it through his eyes:
"I saw pale kings and princes too,
Pale warriors, death-pale were they all:
They cried—'La Belle Dame sans Merci
Hath thee in thrall!'
"I saw their starv'd lips in the gloam
With horrid warning gaped wide,
And I awoke and found me here,
On the cold hill's side."