Transient sources of happiness are not good ones.

John Keats in these selected lyric poems is skeptical of happiness because the inevitable transiency of its doomed objects cannot truly yield it. In Ode on Melancholy, the narrator describes that though beauty found in physical objects is doomed, some “glut thy sorrow on a morning rose,…rainbow… wealth…mistress” (45). The verb “to glut” here illustrates that a rose, rainbow, wealth, or mistress does not satisfy one’s sorrow but rather continues to feed and grow it. These transient, physical objects further sorrows because they “[dwell] with Beauty—Beauty that must die” (45). The inevitability of an object’s end for the narrator is enough to disregard any possibility of that object eliciting happiness. Therefore, the narrator is skeptical of any being exhibiting happiness because nothing can possibly provoke it. The narrator suggests that anything happy is merely fooling itself, for it resides “in the very temple of delight/ Veil’d Melancholy has her Sovran shrine” wherein its ‘soul shall taste the sadness of her might” (45-46). By equating happiness to veiled melancholy, anything that feels happiness actually feels just depression. By this theory the narrator expresses skepticism of happiness in positing that simple things like “leaves hast never known,/ the weariness, the fever, and the fret” of a ‘realistic’ life in which happiness does not exist (34). Objects without the proper realistic perspective see the happiness they feel as true are ignorant of their actual sorrow.

            The narrator further demonstrates his skepticism of happiness through outright disbelieving a bird’s happy existence, trying and failing to find happiness for himself, and questing where it could possibly be. The narrator examines a bird and describes its miserable condition as “half in love with easeful Death,” “While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad/ In such an ecstasy!” (35) ‘Thou’ in this case refers to the bird that somehow manages to exhibit joy while the narrator suffers. Unable to believe the bird is happy in a world in which happiness is a lie, the narrator claims that “Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!,” expressing the idea that something happy must not be a part of this real, unhappy world (35). In order to feel happiness for himself, the narrator tries to fool himself by living in a “blissful cloud of summer-indolence” that only serves to “Benumb [his] eyes; [his] pulse [grows] less and less;/ Pain [has] no sting, and pleasure’s wreath no flower” (49). Since the narrator cannot trick himself into feeling happy, he feels further depressed as his knowledge of the veiled melancholy in every happiness predicts. Finally, the narrator asks himself, “What is love! and where is it?/ And for that poor Ambition! it springs/ From a man’s little heart’s short fever-fit” (50). Just as these positive emotions are short-lived from a little, feverish heart, so are the objects of happiness which provoke these positive emotions. Since the narrator believes that deriving happiness from such doomed, transient objects is impossible, he is skeptical of all happiness and joy, even to the point at which a singing bird seems unreal. Therefore, if happiness did not require a source object, it could be real. Here, Augustine’s beliefs suggest that if the narrator were to make the infinite, incorruptible god his object of happiness, he would not have this problem.