Elegiac Tributes

Fr dear Fr: “Be loosed upon the grey silent waves, and leave me to rest” - What is the purpose of Melancholia in poetic versicles in the modern mood? Is it a positive?

The lines above come from the poetry of a young Anglo-Irish poet, from his melancholic poem “Silken Wings”, written it is believed after the death of Princess Diana in France. The poem begins on a solemn note - “Thou art invisible to me now, I cannot see thee again; leave me by my wings to go, to be loosed upon the gray silent waves and thence to Kent.” There is a lovely line in the poetry of that poet - “Fair Science smiled upon his humble birth, and Melancholia took him for a friend” and though it is believed to be from Longfellow originally by many commentators on the Anglo-Irish Canon, the astute and somewhat acerbic Irish canon who lived with the poet in his last years in Britain near Eton College, reports that the original line in an underived negative form comes mutatis mutandis from the poem “Elegy in a Country Churchyard” by the gifted poet Thomas Gray writing in those zones near Stoke Poges. There the lawyer turned poet reports - “Fair science frowned not upon his humble birth.” And Oscar Wilde too asserts that in that astonishing meditation on human suffering, in the epic pretiosissimum opusculum, “De Profundis”, that only great, great real pandemic style suffering can produce really great art and greater poetry still. Furthermore, he argues that only when an artist embraces Truth in its darkest depths in his own soul, only then can he produce fine poetry, as the young Keats had to when he lost his struggle to keep his girlfriend by Hampstead and then had to choose exile and then a slow impossibly melancholic death in a foreign city near Roma, a dying disease that produced the now famous poem of Keats, ”Ode to Psyche”, all this was often asserted by the young Anglo-Irish poet, Pip Smythe his real name, in those terrible and tragic years after the Diana Grecian Tragedy. So there you have it - Melancholia is a real impetus for grande poetry in many young souls, especially nowadays after Covid, for those lucky enough to be alive.