Melancholia

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Watch what happens sometimes when a young child is allowed to just have his or her feelings. The feelings usually run their course and the child comes full circle. 
—Tobin Hart, The Secret Spiritual World of Children 

“I’m sad. 
It feels like the whole world 
is inside me,” says 
my five-year-old grandson, naming, 
as well as any poet or philosopher, 
the invisible darkness 
of heart, 
the black bile 
of soul, 
that oppresses 
like an anvil sky. 

This ancient affliction, 
grief gathering to greatness, 
anomie the enemy 
of King Saul and Jeremiah, 
Hamlet and Camus, 
Woolf and Styron, 
among so many. 

Dowland sang it darkly 
and Dickinson, 
oppressed by winter light, 
felt a funeral in her brain: 
countless generations 
descending to darkness. 

Such sadness of soul reaches 
even the heavens, as shown 
in Dürer’s drawing 
where the despondent angel, 
ungladdened by rainbow or sunburst, 
broods with alchemical lassitude 
amid symbols of falling time 
and empty scales. 

Even God, 
who sang the whole world into being, 
must feel it himself 
when the weight of history 
presses down, when 
sequestered hates 
and serial annihilations 
lean everything backward to chaos 
and no flood or fire 
can extinguish 
the blackness. 

For some it seems an eternity. 
For others, it passes 
like the going of a great storm, 
as with my grandson, 
who says, 
hours later, 
“I’m okay now— 
the whole world 
is outside me.”