Real Grapes

I've been enjoying some real grapes - remember them? They rarely turn up these days, when seedlessness rules. Seedless grapes save you the minor inconvenience of dealing with a few little seeds, but there's a price to day - they are also mostly flavourless and juiceless, they feature gristly little bits that are the undeveloped seeds, and they're encased in a tough chewy skin. A real grape, by contrast, is fragrant, thin-skinned and bursting with juice and flavour. It's the kind of grape you can indeed, like Keats, burst against your palate - which leads me to his Ode On Melancholy (see lines 27-28). What a strange and beautiful ode this is, though there's something forbidding, declamatory, almost angular, about it that perhaps explains its relative lack of popularity, compared to Keats's other odes - but what an ending! And now for another grape...