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Melancholy Pleasures

© Kirk Johnson

I closed my previous article, entitled Garden Hermits, with a suggestion that we should have a place for melancholy pleasures in our gardens. When I wrote that, I had just begun to think about what melancholy pleasures were. In his book The English Garden: Meditation and Memorial, David R. Coffin mentions a poem entitled The Pleasures of Melancholy, by Thomas Warton Jr. I did a websearch and found this poem on a webpage. The following excerpt is a good introduction to the pleasures of melancholy.

Ye youths of Albion's beauty-blooming isle,
Whose brows have worn the wreath of luckless love,
Is there a pleasure like the pensive mood,
Whose magic wont to soothe your soften'd souls?
O tell how rapturous the joy, to melt
To Melody's assuasive voice; to bend
Th' uncertain step along the midnight mead,
And pour your sorrows to the pitying moon,
By many a slow trill from the bird of woe
Oft interrupted; in embow'ring woods
By darksom brook to muse, and there forget
The solemn dulness of the tedious world,
While Fancy grasps the visionary fair:
These are delights unknown to minds profane,
And which alone the pensive soul can taste.
The taper'd choir, at the late hour of pray'r,
Oft let me tread, while to th' according voice
The many-sounding organ peals on high,
The clear slow-dittied chaunt, or varied hymn, And lapp'd in Paradise.

Thomas wrote this poem in 1745 at the tender age of seventeen and it reminds me of what I was like as a teenaged art student. I thought that I couldn't be creative unless I was ready to cut off an ear, so I cultivated depression. For me, playing with depression was about as real as Marie Antoinette playing at being a milkmaid, but it did give me some insight into the dangers that the pleasures of melancholy can pose for people who are more inclined towards depression than I am. I came to the conclusion that the Romantic Movement's influence on the arts was unhealthy because it encouraged artists to develop mental and emotional problems. I still feel that way, but I am beginning to wonder if it might be healthy to walk through a gloomy forest when you are feeling a bit depressed. Maybe it is good to indulge the feelings that Thomas expressed when he wrote the following:

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