Everyman, and The Road Drill Man drilling a hole in the street, despite the vibrations making thought rather impossible, may be stuck in Melancholia (Not a place in England, but a Country of the Mind) just as much as the over-rated poets whose genius is as The Voice of a Higher Being voiced through Earthly Beings.
Melancholia is that land out to sea being towed off into the mist, as you gaze from the white windswept cliffs of Velvet Beds next to the Mustard Paths.
These poets often dying young because they Know Too Much.
Pity those comfortable Ladies who can grow old and Make Do perhaps. The only salvation for poets and over sensitive souls whose mood takes a dive as the temperature drops is Deliverance*.
Cycle from Marsden to South Shields and gaze over to Tynemouth.
By October ‘These People’ will have left Melancholia being distracted by keeping warm.
* De`liv´er`ance
1. The act of delivering or freeing from restraint, captivity, peril.
2. Act of bringing forth children.
Here is the full text of Sculptor (1958) by Sylvia Plath
Sculptor (1958)
“To his house the bodiless
Come to barter endlessly
Vision, wisdom, for bodies
Palpable as his, and weighty.
Hands moving move priestlier
Than priest’s hands, invoke no vain
Images of light and air
But sure stations in bronze, wood, stone.
Obdurate, in dense-grained wood,
A bald angel blocks and shapes
The flimsy light; arms folded
Watches his cumbrous world eclipse
Inane worlds of wind and cloud.
Bronze dead dominate the floor,
Resistive, ruddy-bodied,
Dwarfing us. Our bodies flicker
Toward extinction in those eyes
Which, without him, were beggared
Of place, time, and their bodies.
Emulous spirits make discord,
Try entry, enter nightmares
Until his chisel bequeaths
Them life livelier than ours,
A solider repose than death’s.”
toteskerl 