How come people never resort to vocabulary when they want to express joy? How come it’s always agony that touches the core of our hearts that we’re unable to keep it to ourselves and search for ways to express it? Why do we coddle tragedy? Never in my life have I ever known a poet who wrote about happiness. It’s always about pain, hopelessness, loss, loneliness, death, longing, hardships of life. Even if the poet is writing about nature there’s an element of longing in it. For instance, in 1896 A.E Housman wrote
Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.
Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.
See the poet is captivated by cherry trees but still mourns that he didn’t appreciate it earlier. This is a very shallow example but I wanted to start from basic. If I quoted Dostoevsky, Franz Kafka or Sylvia Plath here it would’ve loss its essence.
Sorrow is the base of poetry. Perhaps poetry was invented with the sole purpose of alluring pain. To make it look like something it isn’t. To romanticize pain. As someone said
All that blood was never once beautiful, it was just red.
Poetry is like the universal language of melancholy. It doesn’t matter if the poet is french, Arab, English, Spanish or to whatever ethnicity he/she may belong to. The roots are same. I read somewhere:
There are people who set their wounds
on fire in order to explore pain and discover
how loud their hearts can scream.
And you, are you a poet too?
Gosh, my heart.
It doesn’t end here. Franz Kafka, the legend, said that:
“I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we’re reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief.”
