Saturday 26 July 2014

Sad Song


In an essay nominating Gerard Manley Hopkins' “Spring and Fall” as the saddest poem ever written, Nick Ripatrazone ponders why the form is so good at making us cry.
Poetry’s brevity and tendency toward paradox through interiority of content make it the perfect artistic vehicle for melancholy. We spend our days living and speaking in prose. Poetry is manual transmission. Poetry is an old vehicle made new. In order to read a poem, we must occupy another, more monastic space. In that sense, melancholy is an excellent fit for poetry, since the feeling is an emotional rattling. Novels have hurt me. Stories have punctured my skeptical skin. Essays have made me rethink the world. But a melancholic poem shatters me, pushes me to another emotional space. It extends my self.

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