Sadness and Melancholy

O Sorrow, wilt Thou live with me No casual mistress, but a wife.

 

There is no greater sorrow Than to be mindful of the happy time In misery. 9

But whate’er you are That in this desert inaccessible, Under the shade of melancholy boughs, Lose and neglect the creeping hours of time; If ever you have look’d on better days, If ever been where bells have knoll’d to church, If ever sat at any good man’s feast, If ever from your eyelids wip’d a tear, And know what ’tis to pity, and be pitied, Let gentleness my strong enforcement be.

You may my glories and my state depose, But not my griefs; still am I king of those.

But, alas! to make me A fixed figure for the time of scorn To point his slow and moving finger at.

Alas! that all we loved of him should be, But for our grief, as if it had not been, And grief itself be mortal!

Deep in the shady sadness of a vale Far sunken from the healthy breath of morn, Far from the fiery noon, and eve’s one star, Sat gray-hair’d Saturn, quiet as a stone.

No, no, go not to Lethe, neither twist Wolf’s-bane, tight-rooted, for its poisonous wine.

The skies they were ashen and sober; The leaves they were crispèd and sere— The leaves they were withering and sere: It was night in the lonesome October Of my most immemorial year.

Into each life some rain must fall, Some days must be dark and dreary.

After the first death there is no other.

Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar.

I am a lone lorn creetur … and everythink goes contrairy with me.

Alas, regardless of their doom,

Demoniac frenzy, moping melancholy

Hence, loathèd Melancholy,

And ever changing, like a joyless eye

Joy’s smile is much closer to tears than laughter.

Cynics are only happy in making the world as barren to others as they have made it for themselves.

Pity is the most agreeable feeling among those who have little pride and no prospects of great conquests.

[T. S. Eliot achieves] the difficult feat of making modern life out to be worse than it is.

And if I should live to be The last leaf upon the tree In the spring, Let them smile, as I do now, At the old forsaken bough Where I cling.

 

There is something in the pang of change More than the heart can bear, Unhappiness remembering happiness.

When you depict sad or unlucky people, and want to touch the reader’s heart, try to be colder—it gives their grief, as it were, a background, against which it stands out in greater relief. As it is, your heroes weep and you sigh. Yes, you must be cold.