The joy of melancholy

As I read it for the third time, or maybe the fourth, I realised just how complex the language, both the vocabulary and the grammar holding it together, were in a BBC News article that I would normally skip over. I can't remember now what attracted me - perhaps the title or the image fit my mood, but I clicked and enjoyed it.

In "Where winter is cold, dark and beautiful," Antonia Quirke (2015) presents her very personal account of the lives the people of Greenland, describing how the long winter and landscape of varied ice forms shapes the expectations as they enjoy the "season-long bruised purple." Quirke also tells some history of explorers of this frozen land, and how the people still hunt in peril using sleds drawn by huskies.

Quirke did a good job in her description: as I wrote the last bit of my summary above, I shivered, although that could also be a result of my air conditioning. I could never live in any such place as Greenland, however icily beautiful it might be. I hate cold weather. Even Sydney is too cold for my for half the year, so I always time my visits to Australia to coincide with Songkran. In Australia, summer has just ended and autumn is cooling things nicely with a little rain, but it's not cold. Actually, sometimes the nights are chilly, but my brother is always happy to lend me a sweater if I need one before snuggling under the blankets and looking up at the stars through the windows of his home in the country.

One of the words that Quirke uses is melancholy, which she describes as "intrinsically wound into [the] landscape" (2015), and as well as suggesting a cool title, it reminded me of a poem I love by John Keats. It isn't his best, but "Ode on Melancholy" (1819) is still pretty good. In fact, Keats is so good that even having had to study him in high school, I think in year 10, couldn't turn me off him. His images are precise and used to create the moods that often contrast with the themes he develops over the course of a poem. My favourite is perhaps his "Ode on a Grecian Urn," (1819,) where his question: "To what green altar, O mysterious priest, / Lead'st thou that heifer lowing at the skies"? (stanza 4) Shows us, along with the other details, exactly what is painted on the ancient Greek pottery container that is the topic of his poem.

And Keats' ancient pottery topic reminds me of the rather less sophisticated pottery figure that Pamela Hartmann (2007) uses for her introduction to approaches to works of art on page 73 of Quest 2. Compared to the Greek works of about the same period, the ancient Edomite figure really isn't very impressive. But I suspect that Keats could have turned this topic too into a source of enduring, if also melancholy, beauty, "and be among her cloudy trophies hung" ("Ode on Melancholy", last line).

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References

Hartmann, P. (2007). Quest 2 Reading and Writing (2nd ed.). New York: McGraw-Hill. [There is a slightly expanded version of Hartmann's reading with colour images of the Edomite figure online here.]

Quirke, A. (2015, November 8). Where winter is cold, dark and beautiful. BBC News. Retrieved from http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-34744473