To the Greeks, melancholia was one of the four humors to be avoided—a black bile that brought on an unhealthy state of sadness, fear, mania; a condition that was negative and to be avoided. Over time, humans came to realize that there were appropriate times to be melancholy; to reflect; to grieve.

I tend toward prose, myself, but find it does not easily lend itself to such deep and mournful ideas. Prose usually takes more time, more words. It is the poet with their sparse form, imagery, meter, tone who can more quickly touch our emotions. There is an intimacy in the poetic voice that prose rarely can achieve.

Take the lovely elegy “Mid-Term Break” by Irish poet and Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney. It describes a student who has returned from college for the burial of his younger brother, now laid out at home. It reads:

Next morning I went up into the room. Snowdrops
And candles soothed the bedside; I saw him
For the first time in six weeks. Paler now,
Wearing a poppy bruise on his left temple,
He lay in the four-foot box as in his cot.
No gaudy scars, the bumper knocked him clear.
A four-foot box, a foot for every year.

One does not need to have lost a child to experience the impact of this poem: “A four-foot box, a foot for every year.”

At age 86, I have lost an adult son, lost a husband who was my soul mate; my parents are long gone, all my forebears, a brother–so I am comforted by poetry that can speak to me. Like the final lines of Mary Oliver’s “In Blackwater Woods.”

To live in this world
you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it
against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it
go,
to let it go.

While the poets have the edge on melancholy, my own bias toward prose has often gotten in the way of my finding expressive works. And if I struggled to connect to poetry, imagine the difficulty for my college students, who, as I recall, spoke in argot and wrote in emojis! I finally gave up trying to get them to dig in to Thomas Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard.

Even the shorter, more accessible Funeral Blues by W. H. Auden failed to help them connect. They easily enough got the references in that poem . . . stop all the clocks . . . someone I love has died . . . but it was an intellectual activity. They did not feel the poem–its underlying grief.

It was not until we watched a scene from a movie that their emotions were stirred. In the British film, Four Weddings and a Funeral, a character dies and his lover reads Auden’s poem at the service. Between the beautiful lines of verse (as well as a church full of weepy mourners and elegiac music) even the most apathetic young student was touched.

JONNIE MARTIN

(Image by Kagteryna Hliznitsova courtesy Unsplash)