Poetic Melancholia

I have been busy reading quite a lot of poetry over the semester and wanted to share some of the poems that I find particularly enchanting. These poems tap into the darkness of love and life, particularly the Arnold poem, and how being aware of feeling intensifies the senses. 

I love these poems not because I have a thing for depressing poetry about loss or anger, but because through the poet's expression of their feelings I am able to temporarily commune with my own. What makes a poem meaningful to me is not just the subject matter, but the way that the language of the poem creates a symbiosis of poet and reader. To feel the love, hurt, or loss of the subject helps me learn about my own ability to feel. John Keats wrote that 

"poetry should surprise by a fine excess and not by singularity—it should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance".
Anyways, I hope you enjoy a small taste of a very poets that I admire and that you love their beautiful bleakness just as much as I do.

'Prologue'- Arthur Symons, London Nights
MY life is like a music-hall. 
Where, in the impotence of rage, 
Chained by enchantment to my stall, 
I see myself upon the stage 
Dance to amuse a music-hall. 

'Tis I that smoke this cigarette. 

Lounge here, and laugh for vacancy, 

And watch the dancers turn ; and yet 
It is my very self I see 

Across the cloudy cigarette. 

My very self that turns and trips. 

Painted, pathetically gay. 
An empty song upon the lips 

In make-believe of holiday : 
I, I, this thing that turns and trips ! 

The light flares in the music-hall. 
The light, the sound, that weary us ; 

Hour follows hour, I count them all. 
Lagging, and loud, and riotous : 

My life is like a music-hall. 

'Before the Mirror': Part III- Algernon Charles Swinburne

Glad, but not flushed with gladness,

Since joys go by;

Sad, but not bent with sadness,

Since sorrows die;

Deep in the gleaming glass

She sees all past things pass,

And all sweet life that was lie down and lie.

There glowing ghosts of flowers

Draw down, draw nigh;

And wings of swift spent hours

Take flight and fly;

She sees by formless gleams,

She hears across cold streams,

Dead mouths of many dreams that sing and sigh.

Face fallen and white throat lifted,

With sleepless eye

She sees old loves that drifted,

She knew not why,

Old loves and faded fears

Float down a stream that hears

The flowing of all men's tears beneath the sky. Matthew Arnold "Dover Beach"

The sea is calm to-night.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand;
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the A gaean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.