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Poetry of the Depressed and Existentially Challenged

Anja

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Yes, the title is a bit of a hook.

Some of you are familiar with Gerard Manley Hopkins, an English poet, who wrote wonderfully complicated and vivid poetry toward the end of the Nineteenth Century.

He was a Jesuit who suffered from depression in an era which had little to offer from a medical perspective for those so afflicted.

I imagine he used his creative power to express and deal with his emotional pain.

His poetry was published posthumously in 1918.

As someone who faces the bugaboo of Seasonal Affective Disorder in Autumn, I have grown to appreciate this poem. And every year the clever wording and subtleties grow more rich.



Spring and Fall
To a young child

Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! as the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you will weep and know why.
Now no matter child, the name:
Sorrows springs are the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed.
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

Gerard Manley Hopkins 1981



Do you have favorite poetry which evokes the loss of summer's gifts?
 

Salomé

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The Flower

How fresh, O Lord, how sweet and clean
Are thy returns! Ev'n as the flowers in spring:
To which, besides their own demean,
The late-past frosts tributes of pleasure bring.
Grief melts away
Like snow in May
As if there were no such cold thing.

Who would have thought my shriv'd heart
Could have recover'd greenesse? It was gone
Quite under ground; as flowers depart
To see their mother-root, when they have blown;
Where they together
All the hard weather,
Dead to the world, keep house unknown.

These are thy wonders, Lord of power,
Killing and quickning, bringing down to hell
And up to heaven in an houre;
Making a chiming of a passing-bell.
We say amisse,
This or that is:
Thy word is all, if we could spell.

O that I once past changing were,
Fast in thy Paradise, where no flower can whither!
Many a spring I shoot up fair,
Offring at heav'n, growing and groning thither:
Nor doth my flower
Want a spring-showre,
My sinnes and I joining together.

But while I grow in a straight line,
Still upwards bent, as if heav'n were mine own,
Thy anger comes, as I decline:
What frost to that? What pole is not the zone,
Where all things burn,
When thou dost turn,
And the least frown of thine is shown?

And now in age I bud again,
After so many deaths I live and write;
I once more smell the dew and rain,
And relish versing: O my onely light,
It cannot be
That I am he
On whom thy tempests fell all night.

These are thy wonders, Lord of love,
To make us see we are but flowers that glide;
Which when we once can finde and prove,
Thou hast a garden for us, where to bide.
Who would be more,
Swelling through store,
Forfeit their Paradise by their pride.

-George Herbert
(manic depressive)
 

Anja

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Makes a good companion piece, Blue. His theme is very similar and it's good counterpoint.

Now you've added something to my to-do list! George Herbert.
 

Salomé

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Makes a good companion piece, Blue. His theme is very similar and it's good counterpoint.

Now you've added something to my to-do list! George Herbert.

George is past the doing - long time dead. ;)

I don't know why I like this poem because I'm not into the religious motifs, but then I like John Donne too....maybe it speaks to the latent Christian in me.

I just think it's one the the best descriptions of the cyclical nature of bipolar disorder, which typically manifests seasonal patterns too.
 

Anja

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Yes. The everything interconnected stuff. Patterns in nature mirroring pattern in humans.

Well, and to me Christian themes are reflections of universal thoughts long before the established church arose. I've never seen a need to discard them although I'm no longer Christian. Lots of good stuff there.
 

Gish

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From childhood's hour I have not been
As others were---I have not seen
As others saw---I could not bring
My passions from a common spring.
From the same source I have not taken
My sorrow; I could not awaken
My heart to joy at the same tone;
And all I lov'd, I loved alone.
Then---in my childhood---in the dawn
Of a most stormy life---was drawn
From ev'ry depth of good and ill
The mystery which binds me still:
From the torrent, or the fountain,
From the red cliff of the mountain,
From the sun that 'round me roll'd
In its autumn tint of gold---
From the lightning in the sky
As it pass'd me flying by---
From the thunder and the storm,
And the cloud that took the form
(When the rest of Heaven was blue)
Of a demon in my view.

-Edgar Allan Poe
 

ygolo

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Alien, Estranged

Perchance, touched.
Perchance, cursed.
Alien, estranged.

Dream in night.
Sleep in day.
Not wise--thus arranged.

Lacking hope.
Striving? Nope.
For long, nothing has changed.

Dreams crushed.
Esteem mushed.
Soul has been exchanged.

Labor loathing.
Spoiled clothing.
If met, you'd think me deranged.

Lonely in kind.
Alone in spirit.
Alien, estranged.
 

bronte

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I love gm hopkins
here's another hymn of pain!


"No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief,
More pangs will, schooled at forepangs, wilder wring.
Comforter, where, where is your comforting?
Mary, mother of us, where is your relief?
My cries heave, herds-long; huddle in a main, a chief
Woe, world-sorrow; on an age-old anvil wince and sing -
Then lull, then leave off. Fury had shrieked 'No ling-
-ering! Let me be fell: force I must be brief'.

O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall
Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap
May who ne'er hung there. Nor does long our small
Durance deal with that steep or deep. Here! creep,
Wretch, under a comfort serves in a whirlwind: all
Life death does end and each day dies with sleep."

-- Gerard Manley Hopkins.
 

bronte

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Toads

Toads

Why should I let the toad work
Squat on my life?
Can't I use my wit as a pitchfork
And drive the brute off?

Six days of the week it soils
With its sickening poison -
Just for paying a few bills!
That's out of proportion.

Lots of folk live on their wits:
Lecturers, lispers,
Losers, loblolly-men, louts-
They don't end as paupers;

Lots of folk live up lanes
With fires in a bucket,
Eat windfalls and tinned sardines-
They seem to like it.

Their nippers have got bare feet,
Their unspeakable wives
Are skinny as whippets - and yet
No one actually _starves_.

Ah, were I courageous enough
To shout, Stuff your pension!
But I know, all too well, that's the stuff
That dreams are made on:

For something sufficiently toad-like
Squats in me, too;
Its hunkers are heavy as hard luck,
And cold as snow,

And will never allow me to blarney
My way of getting
The fame and the girl and the money
All at one sitting.

I don't say, one bodies the other
One's spiritual truth;
But I do say it's hard to lose either,
When you have both.

-- Philip Larkin
 

Noel

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George is past the doing - long time dead. ;)

I don't know why I like this poem because I'm not into the religious motifs, but then I like John Donne too....maybe it speaks to the latent Christian in me.

I just think it's one the the best descriptions of the cyclical nature of bipolar disorder, which typically manifests seasonal patterns too.

Ah yes, the metaphysical poets. Herbert favouring more tamer conceits contrary to Donne's highly sexualized ones (especially in his Holy Sonnets). I should note that allegedly, Herbert had a volume just as if not more obscene than Donne's before he decided to burn them and put out his collection called The Temple.
 

Argus

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This is not a riddle but it’s meant to entertain.
I’ll be your loyal Apostle,
just send me in to take the blame.
Well what would you expect to say?
It never mattered anyway
There’ll be a site (sight)
and an invisible light shown down on them and took them in
There’ll be a time when, Maybe tonight temptations win And I give in.
This is not a puzzle or mainframe
But it’s meant to strengthen your faith
And each time the night falls upon us
We always end up the same,
Were we not born into original sin?
What you ask for is what you get
and what you were given
So fold your hands and get down on your knees
 

Dr Mobius

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An excellent thread idea. BUMP!


Ask me no more

Ask me no more: the moon may draw the sea;
The cloud may stoop from heaven and take the shape,
With fold to fold, of mountain or of cape;
But O too fond, when have I answer'd thee?
Ask me no more.

Ask me no more: what answer should I give?
I love not hollow cheek or faded eye:
Yet, O my friend, I will not have thee die!
Ask me no more, lest I should bid thee live;
Ask me no more.

Ask me no more: thy fate and mine are seal'd:
I strove against the stream and all in vain:
Let the great river take me to the main:
No more, dear love, for at a touch I yield;
Ask me no more.

Alfred Lord Tennyson
 
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