Tag Archives: sadness

Tonight I can Write The Saddest Lines, By Pablo Nerud

Leave a reply

Until yesterday I was unfamiliar with the work of Pablo Nerud. His poem, Tonight I can Write The Saddest Lines is beautiful and poignant. My only criticism (of the reading, not the poem) is the music which accompanies it, which, to my mind acts as a distraction to the reader.

For the reading please go to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2zR7brOA3E

Ode On Melancholy By John Keats

Leave a reply

No, no, go not to Lethe, neither twist
Wolf’s-bane, tight-rooted, for its poisonous wine;
Nor suffer thy pale forehead to be kiss’d
By nightshade, ruby grape of Proserpine;
Make not your rosary of yew-berries,
Nor let the beetle, nor the death-moth be
Your mournful Psyche, nor the downy owl
A partner in your sorrow’s mysteries;
For shade to shade will come too drowsily,
And drown the wakeful anguish of the soul.
But when the melancholy fit shall fall
Sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud,
That fosters the droop-headed flowers all,
And hides the green hill in an April shroud;
Then glut thy sorrow on a morning rose,
Or on the rainbow of the salt sand-wave,
Or on the wealth of globed peonies;
Or if thy mistress some rich anger shows,
Emprison her soft hand, and let her rave,
And feed deep, deep upon her peerless eyes.
She dwells with Beauty—Beauty that must die;
And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips
Bidding adieu; and aching Pleasure nigh,
Turning to poison while the bee-mouth sips:
Ay, in the very temple of Delight
Veil’d Melancholy has her sovran shrine,
Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue
Can burst Joy’s grape against his palate fine;
His soul shalt taste the sadness of her might,
And be among her cloudy trophies hung.

Windy Morning

2 Replies

Sitting at my desk, the wind gusting outside. Something indefinable, slippery as an eel escaping my grasp. What is it, a sense of beauty combined with loss. The loss of connection between humanity and nature. A sense of sadness, of something passing perhaps never to be regained. We wrap ourselves in the comforting blanket of technology shutting out nature’s wonders. People walking through beautiful places glued to their mobiles. Ipods turned up, humans unaware of their fellow man, and still the wind cries outside.

The Darkling Thrush By Thomas Hardy

2 Replies

Thomas Hardy’s The Darkling Thrush is one of my favourite poems. I recollect having had similar thoughts to those described by Hardy while pausing to listen to the song of a bird. In my case it was, I think a blackbird rather than a thrush which produced the emotions so aptly described by the poet in the below poem.

 

“I leant upon a coppice gate

When Frost was spectre-grey,

And Winter’s dregs made desolate

The weakening eye of day.

The tangled bine-stems scored the sky

Like strings of broken lyres,

And all mankind that haunted nigh

Had sought their household fires.

The land’s sharp features seemed to be

The Century’s corpse outleant,

His crypt the cloudy canopy,

The wind his death-lament.

The ancient pulse of germ and birth

Was shrunken hard and dry,

And every spirit upon earth

Seemed fervourless as I.

At once a voice arose among

The bleak twigs overhead

In a full-hearted evensong

Of joy illimited;

An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,

In blast-beruffled plume,

Had chosen thus to fling his soul

Upon the growing gloom.

So little cause for carolings

Of such ecstatic sound

Was written on terrestrial things

Afar or nigh around,

That I could think there trembled through

His happy good-night air

Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew

And I was unaware.”