A Song Of Opposites - Analysis

A hymn that refuses to choose

The poem’s central insistence is simple and stubborn: the speaker wants life whole, not purified. He doesn’t ask joy to replace sorrow; he welcomes them as paired guests: welcome joy, and welcome sorrow. That welcome isn’t resignation. It’s appetite. The repeated pull toward both together sounds like someone deliberately training his own desire, forcing it to widen until it can hold contradictions without snapping into denial or sentimentality.

Forgetfulness and flight: Lethe’s weed, Hermes’ feather

Keats begins with two mythic objects that sketch the poem’s stakes. Lethe’s weed points to the river of forgetfulness: a drug that would numb pain by erasing memory. Hermes’ feather, by contrast, suggests speed, lightness, and passage between worlds. Put together, they imply two opposite strategies for surviving intensity: to forget it, or to move through it. The speaker loves them both together, which hints that he isn’t choosing a single cure. He wants the capacity to feel fully and still keep going—forgetting and remembering, sinking and lifting.

Weather-crossed emotions: laughter in thunder

The poem quickly brings these abstract opposites down into sensory scenes. The speaker loves sad faces in fair weather and a merry laugh amid the thunder. That pairing is not merely decorative; it describes a mind that finds pure moods suspicious. A laugh that survives thunder feels truer than a laugh in sunshine, and sadness in fair weather feels like a deeper weather system underneath the surface. The tone here is buoyant, almost teasing—he’s collecting paradoxes with the glee of someone who has discovered a secret: that mixed feelings are not a flaw but a heightened kind of perception.

Beauty with teeth: roses hissing, Cleopatra with the asp

As the catalogue grows, the opposites become sharper, even dangerous. We get Nightshade pressed against woodbine kissing, and Serpents in red roses hissing: images where sweetness and poison occupy the same space. The Cleopatra vignette—Cleopatra regal-dress’d with the aspic at her breast—pushes this further. It’s not just that death stands near beauty; death is staged as an ornament at the heart. The contradiction becomes erotic and theatrical: the breast, the jewel-like asp, the queen’s costume. The poem suggests that what we call beauty often already contains its ending, and that the speaker is drawn to that fatal completeness rather than frightened by it.

Play beside the grave: the infant and the skull

One of the poem’s most unsettling miniatures is Infant playing with a skull. Unlike the Cleopatra image, which is grand and historical, this is intimate and obscene in its innocence. It collapses the distance we usually keep between beginnings and endings. Nearby, the poem offers Morning fair, and shipwreck’d hull: the day’s brightness laid against wreckage. The tension here is moral as well as emotional. Are we meant to admire the speaker’s inclusiveness, or worry that he aestheticizes ruin? The poem flirts with that danger, and its power comes partly from refusing to reassure us.

Invoking the muses: a turn from catalog to vow

Midway, the poem turns from listing to pleading. The speaker addresses the Muses directly: Muses bright, and muses pale, Bare your faces of the veil. The tone becomes more urgent and personal: Let me see; and let me write. This is the poem’s clearest claim about art: writing requires the full spectrum, Of the day, and of the night. The famous-sounding paradox Oh the sweetness of the pain! is not a slogan here; it’s the emotional engine of composition. He wants to slake his thirst with sweet heart-ache, as if ache were not merely endured but drunk, chosen for its flavor.

The bower that is also a tomb

The closing wish makes the poem’s contradictions architectural. He asks for a bower made of yew—a tree associated with graveyards—yet Interwreath’d with myrtles new, a plant linked to love and marriage. Even the setting mixes fertility and enclosure: Pines and lime-trees full in bloom, but the resting place is a low grass-tomb. The final image resolves nothing; instead, it builds a home where death is not outside the garden but part of the furniture. The poem ends by making a bed that is explicitly grave-like, suggesting that the speaker’s desire for both is not a philosophical pose but a chosen way of living—one that keeps mortality close enough to sharpen joy, and joy close enough to keep sorrow from becoming mere darkness.

If the speaker truly gets what he asks for—a couch that is a grass-tomb—does that make him brave, or does it reveal an addiction to intensity? The poem keeps pressing that question without answering it, and the pressure is the point: Keats makes a song that tastes sweet precisely because something bitter is always in it.