Philip Larkin - Kenneth Clark TV - Altered Statesmen TV - John Keats - James Boswell & Samuel Johnson - William Shakespeare - Robert Burton - Samuel Rogers - John Ford - John Milton - Gerard de Nerval - Christian Nestell Bovee - Thomas Gray - James Joyce -
I have a sense of melancholy isolation, life rapidly vanishing, all the usual things. It’s very strange how often strong feelings don’t seem to carry any message of action. Philip Larkin
A gentle melancholy: gentle poetry was inspired by that mood. Kenneth Clark, Civilisation 11/13: The Worship of Nature, BBC 1969
This high-flyer [Churchill] had a secret: he was sometimes gripped by dark moods of introspection and periods of melancholy he couldn’t shake off. Altered Statesmen: Churchill, Discovery 2003
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;
Made not your rosary of yew-berries,
Nor let the beetle, nor the death-moth be
Your mournful Psyche, nor the down owl,
A partner in your sorrow’s mysteries;
For shade to shade will come too drowsily,
And drown the wakeful anguish of your soul. John Keates, Ode on Melancholy
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. ibid.
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
Veiled Melancholy has her Sovran shrine,
Thou seen of one save him whose strenuous tongue
Can burst Joy’s grape against his palate fine;
His soul shall taste the sadness of her might,
And be among her cloudy trophies hung. ibid.
Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, he said, was the only book that ever took him out of bed two hours sooner than he wished to rise. James Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson, 1791
I inherited a vile melancholy from my father, which has made me mad all my life, at least not sober. Samuel Johnson
I can suck melancholy out of a song as a weasel sucks eggs. William Shakespeare, As You Like It II v 12
Rosalind: They say you are a melancholy fellow.
Jaques: I am so. I do love it better than laughing. ibid. IV i 3-4
My cue is villainous melancholy, with a sigh like Tom o’ Bedlam. William Shakespeare, The History of King Lear I ii 151
All my joys to this are folly,
Naught so sweet as Melancholy. Robert Burton
I write of melancholy, by being busy to avoid melancholy. Robert Burton
Go – you may call it madness, folly;
You shall not chase my gloom away.
There’s such a charm in melancholy,
I would not, if I could, be gay. Samuel Rogers, 1763-1855
Tell us, pray, what devil
This melancholy is, which can transform
Men into monsters. John Ford, The Lady’s Trial
Hence, loathed Melancholy,
Of Cerberus, and blackest Midnight born,
In Stygian cave forlorn
‘Mongst horrid shapes, and shrieks, and sights unholy. John Milton, L’Allegro, 1645
Moping melancholy,
And moon-struck madness. John Milton, Paradise Lost XI:485
I am the darkly shaded, the bereaved, the inconsolate, the prince of Aquitaine, with the blasted tower. My only star is dead, and my star-strewn lute carries on it the black sun of melancholy. Gerard de Nerval, French poet, Les Chimeres, 1854
Melancholy sees the worst of things — things as they may be, and not as they are. It looks upon a beautiful face, and sees but a grinning skull. Christian Nestell Bovee, Intuitions and Summaries of Thought, 1862
Here rests his head upon the lap of earth,
A youth, to fortune and to fame unknown;
Fair Science frowned not on his humble birth,
And Melancholy marked him for her own. Thomas Gray, Elegy in a Country Churchyard, The Epitaph
He tried to weigh his soul to see if it was a poet’s soul. Melancholy was the dominant note of his temperament, he thought, but it was a melancholy tempered by recurrences of faith and resignation and simple joy. If he could give expression to it in a book of poems perhaps men would listen. James Joyce, Dubliners: A Little Cloud