Anguish

The fascination of what’s difficult Has dried the sap out of my veins, and rent Spontaneous joy and natural content Out of my heart.

O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed.

When you’re lying awake with a dismal headache, and repose is taboo’d by anxiety, I conceive you may use any language you choose to indulge in, without impropriety.

God strengthen me to bear myself; That heaviest weight of all to bear, Inalienable weight of care.

For each ecstatic instant We must an anguish pay In keen and quivering ratio To the ecstasy.

Ah, what a dusty answer gets the soul When hot for certainties in this our life!

Forlorn! the very word is like a bell To toll me back from thee to my sole self!

My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk, Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk.

Oh, lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud! I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!

Lord of himself—that heritage of woe.

In which the burthen of the mystery, In which the heavy and the weary weight Of all this unintelligible world, Is lightened.

My specter around me night and day Like a wild beast guards my way. My emanation far within Weeps incessantly for my sin.

Like a fiend in a cloud, With howling woe, After night I do crowd, And with night will go.

Two souls alas! dwell in my breast.

From reveries so airy, from the toil Of dropping buckets into empty wells, And growing old in drawing nothing up.

Wise wretch! with pleasures too refin’d to please; With too much spirit to be e’er at ease; With too much quickness ever to be taught; With too much thinking to have common thought. You purchase pain with all that joy can give, And die of nothing but a rage to live.

There is a pleasure sure In being mad which none but madmen know. 3

Made still a blund’ring kind of melody; Spurr’d boldly on, and dash’d through thick and thin, Through sense and nonsense, never out nor in. Free from all meaning, whether good or bad, And in one word, heroically mad.

Suspense in news is torture.

For evil news rides post, while good news baits.

Me miserable! which way shall I fly Infinite wrath, and infinite despair? Which way I fly is hell; myself am hell; And in the lowest deep a lower deep, Still threat’ning to devour me, opens wide, To which the hell I suffer seems a heaven.

The hell within him.

Affection! thy intention stabs the center: Thou dost make possible things not so held, Communicat’st with dreams.

Past cure I am, now Reason is past care, And frantic-mad with evermore unrest.