Percy Bysshe Shelley: Poor captive bird who from thy narrow cage pourest such music

Bitter-sweet verses from my favourite Romantic poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem “Epipsychidion”:

Jacob Maris, The Girl feeding her Bird in a Cage, oil on mahagony, 1867

“Poor captive bird! who, from thy narrow cage,
Pourest such music, that it might assuage
The rugged hearts of those who prisoned thee,
Were they not deaf to all sweet melody;
This song shall be thy rose: its petals pale
Are dead, indeed, my adored Nightingale!
But soft and fragrant is the faded blossom,
And it has no thorn left to wound thy bosom.”

Romantic Melancholy

“Sad; so sad, those smoky-rose, smoky-mauve evenings of late autumn, sad enough to pierce the heart…anguish of the turn of the year, the time of impotent yearning, the inconsolable season.“ (Angela Carter, Saints and Strangers)

Caspar David Friedrich, Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog, 1818

In these lonely autumn evenings, I yearn to escape the enveloping dreariness of November through poetry, pressed flowers and scented candles. Suffocated by thick fogs and the smell of rotting corpses of daydreams and high hopes that never come true, I hear Melancholy quietly knocking on my door and silently, without disturbing the yellow roses in my vase, it wrapped my tired shoulders with a fragrant lace cloth of spring naivety and summer innocence, of silver dandelions and spider webs, white roses and kindness of strangers. I try to smile at this stranger dressed in a purple gown and jangling earrings of silver and amethyst, but my lips of a doll have become rusty. I take the imaginary book of memories in my hand and blow away the dust. A few rose petals fall on the floor, and my crystal tears join them in their fall. Memories of summer’s gold and bloom dance in my head like skeletons, memories of things that were painfully beautiful but might never return. Memories of poppy meadows and river’s cheerful murmurs, of May’s pink roses, white butterflies and forest groves, of golden sunlight and juicy pears, of stars and perpetually dreamy days of July, and long warm enchantingly golden afternoons of August. I have a withered rose instead of a heart, and it pulsates melodiously in a rhythm of yearning and anguish. I am a forgotten abbey in the oakwood; all my hopes have fallen like leaves on the trees and my soul is but a skeleton covered in moss. I take a pen and command: Melancholy, oh speak to me!

Caspar David Friedrich, Moonrise Over the Sea, 1822

Melancholy is kind and generous, and since I begged her, she spoke to me in a mellifluous voice of all the places where she resides… First thou shall find me, said Melancholy, in ethereal sounds of Chopin’s Nocturnes, whose trembling ecstasies and passions lie hidden under flimsy veils of sadness. As Oscar Wilde said: “After playing Chopin, I feel as if I had been weeping over sins that I had never committed, and mourning over tragedies that were not my own. Music always seems to me to produce that effect. It creates for one a past of which one has been ignorant, and fills one with a sense of sorrows that have been hidden from one’s tears.” When Chopin’s Nocturne turns to mute silence of dreary chambers, I dance my way to beautiful objects and inhabit them; old ballet slippers, worn out lamé dresses of 1920s, a box of old letters and photographs, empty perfume bottles, dusty cradles of children who are now adults, summer dusks with fireflies and strong scent of roses and a pale moon appearing coyly on the horizon, worn out names on tombstones and graves that no one visits any more, flowers slowly withering in a vase, unfinished charcoal drawings, drafts of letters never finished, smell of old books… Every place of beauty is my abode, ye can find me in poetry and songs too; in vocals and wistful violins of the Tindersticks and their song Travelling Light:

“There are places I don’t remember
There are times and days, they mean nothing to me
I’ve been looking through some of them old pictures
They don’t serve to jog my memory

I’m not waking in the morning, staring at the walls these days
I’m not getting out the boxes, spread all over the floor
I’ve been looking through some of them old pictures
Those faces they mean nothing to me no more”

Caspar David Friedrich, Abtei im Eichwald (Abbey in the Oakwood), 1808-1810

I closed my eyes and listened to Melancholy as it spoke to me, with a voice like flowing honey, and she said: I hide in canvases too; German Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich adored me as his muse. Do not believe his landscapes, they are not at all what they seem; a tree is not a tree and fog is not simply fog as it is with John Constable. Led by his pantheistic vision of nature, he portrayed emotions and his states of mind. “Abbey in the Oakwood” is a melancholic masterpiece. An abandoned Gothic abbey is a corpse, a ruin, which speaks of happier times when it served its purpose. Tall oaks with crooked bare branches surround it. Sublime, eerie mood pervades the painting; crosses disappearing into the fog, a barely noticeable procession of monks, a freshly dug grave, and the endlessly lead coloured sky. In early 19th century Germany, Romanticism was closely associated with the National awakening, and Goethe considered Gothic architecture to be Germanic in origin. In contrast to the Classical architecture, the plans of Gothic cathedrals were done by “romantic intuition” rather than mathematical calculations. Gothic abbeys and oaks possess the same grandeur, the same melancholy when covered in deep snow or grey fogs.

I am not always obvious at first sight; do not let the screaming ecstatic yellow of Vincent van Gogh and Kirchner deceive you, for I was their friend too. I was the pencil that Egon Schiele used to sketch his nude beauties with worn out smiles and hollow cheeks, I kissed every yellow petal of the sunflowers he was obsessed with.

Egon Schiele, Sunflower, 1909

As I wipe my tears and feel my cheek’s returning rosy hue, I eagerly listen to Melancholy and her story. She says: I was the lover of John Keats, and the illness of young Werther. All artists find a muse in me, and Romanticists loved me deeply, but the idealist and dreamy escapist Keats adored me in particular, and dressed himself in my cloth of flowers, tears and beauty. In his rosy-coloured visions of the Middle Ages, he found beauty that the world of reality had denied him. Keats knew when he sang of me that Beauty is my other face, and he knew my strength well enough so he never tried to defeat me but rather embrace me and heal the sorrow I cause by contemplating things of Beauty:

“But when the melancholy fit shall fall

Sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud,

That fosters the droop-headed flowers all,

And hides the green hill in an April shroud;

Then glut thy sorrow on a morning rose,

Or on the rainbow of the salt sand-wave,

Or on the wealth of globed peonies;

Or if thy mistress some rich anger shows,

Emprison her soft hand, and let her rave,

And feed deep, deep upon her peerless eyes.

*

She dwells with Beauty—Beauty that must die;

And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips

Bidding adieu; and aching Pleasure nigh,

Turning to poison while the bee-mouth sips:

Ay, in the very temple of Delight

Veil’d Melancholy has her sovran shrine…”

Percy Bysshe Shelley confided in me too, but found me too bitter at times, and yet he wrote these verses: “Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.”

Photo by Laura Makabresku

John Singer Sargent, Polly Barnard (also known as study for Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose), 1885, Medium: pencil

Photo by Laura Makabresku

“There is a life and there is a death, and there are beauty and melancholy between.” (Albert Camus)

Caspar David Friedrich, Two Men Contemplating the Moon, 1825-30

Caspar David Friedrich, A Walk at Dusk (detail), ca.1830-35

In November dreariness, my only consolation lies in long evening walks by the river. The Moon is my lover; I year for his caresses and weep at sunset when we must part. He greets me, smiling through the bare branches of tall trees, and I turn my face to his glow and whisperingly ask to fulfil all my longings, to kiss my cheeks and hug me. I hear the river murmuring of happier times, but the Moon is wise and he offers me a “nepenthe”. ‘What is it?’, I ask the Moon and he replies: ‘It is an ancient Greek word, defined as a medicine for sorrow. It can be a place, person or thing, which can aid in forgetting your pain and suffering.’ I follow the Moon, yearning for a more precise answer, but it disappears behind the clouds and I am left alone … yet again.

Photo by Laura Makabresku

I gaze at the river for a long time, longing to see the Moon’s whimsical silvery reflection in the dark water. I cup the dark water in my hands and the dazzling rays of moon slip through my fingers… just as every happy moment does.

Idea of Death in Writings of the Romantics and Morrissey

In every age there’s an artist who captures the spirit of the times and gives a voice to the generation. In the 1980s, posters of The Smith and their lead man Morrissey graced the walls of teenage bedrooms. Had the custom been around a century and a half earlier, teenage girls would probably put pictures of Lord Byron, Keats and Shelley above their beds in their exceedingly elegant Regency-era bedrooms. In the post-revolutionary and newly industrialised world, Romantic poets sang of beauty, love, nature and death, while at the same time living lives of rebellion, much to the dismay of the bourgeois class. Likewise, in the eighties which were a difficult decade for idealists*, in the era of Thatcherism, recession and miners’ strikes, pop music was an escape and individuals such as Morrissey intentionally detached themselves from the political instabilities by moving their focus to introspection and individual struggles and singing of loneliness in the nightclubs, ill-fated relationships, home town claustrophobia, dullness of everyday life, and a strong longing for death. More than a century and a half divides the poets of Romanticism and Morrissey, and yet the same melancholy, introspectiveness, ideals and views on death connect them.

I love this black and white picture of The Smiths with pink letters; it’s the perfect aesthetic for the band’s music and lyrics, or at least the way I see it – pink rose petals and a grey sky, promises and disappointments, wittiness and misery, shyness, idealism and memories…

 

Romantics and Death

A Lament

“O World! O Life! O Time!

On whose last steps I climb,

Trembling at that where I had stood before;

When will return the glory of your prime?

No more -Oh, never more!

Out of the day and night

A joy has taken flight:

Fresh spring, and summer, and winter hoar

Move my faint heart with grief, but with delight

No more -Oh, never more!”

When I say Romantics, I will focus on the second generation of English Romantics or the “groovy trio” which consisted of Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley and John Keats; all three died very young in tragic circumstances, all cherished beauty in their poetry, used elaborate language, showed interest in the Classical world and Mediterranean countries, all three saw poetry as a challenge because its reward is the immortality itself; through the verses, the poet lives, long after the frail human body becomes tired from life. I will focus on Percy Shelley in particular, and then Keats, because I feel that Shelley and Morrissey have a lot in common but about that later on.

Source: Romantics who have ruined my life.

Percy Shelley; the rebel, the idealist, a ferocious promoter of free love, non-violence, atheism and vegetarianism, a young man with an insatiable hunger for knowledge who spent up to sixteen hours a day reading, at the same time attending only one lecture while at Oxford, an act which by itself carries a rebellious massage; conventions and formal education mean nothing to me. Elopements and self-pity are his forte. Suicides and unrequited loves followed him like a shadow. He was no stranger to romantic encounters at graveyards at night which irresistibly reminds me of The Smiths song “Cemetery Gates”; when Shelley and Mary proclaimed their love for each other at her mother’s grave in St Pancras Churchyard on 26th June 1814, did Shelley say: “Dear Mary, meet me at the cemetery gates… I’ll bestow a kiss upon thy sweet lips above your mother’s grave in a quiet nocturnal hour when the distant church bells announce midnight.”

In times when he met Mary, Shelley was bored with his wife Harriet (women seem to bore him easily) and he was eagerly longing for an intellectual female companionship. And Mary was a lonely teenage girl with a wild imagination; the two were a perfect match, although soon Mary bored him too. Shelley quickly abandoned Harriet, their baby daughter and their unborn child, and accused Harriet of marrying him for money.

Is he a hippie lad from the sunny South Kensington clad from head to toe in the latest groovy gear from Granny Takes a Trip? No, he is a poet, and his verses speaks of romantic rebellion, exalted and idealistic belief in the triumph of love and liberty, at the same time inviting the reader to act upon social justice as well as believing in the indestructible nature of beauty. His poems appear to be either manifestos of his political views, which were socialist and verged on anarchy; sweet and innocent verses on love, moonbeam, kisses, roses and larks; or deep, profound, honest longing for death and sighing on the idea of transience and passing of everything.

Elle Fanning as Mary Shelley

Shelley was morbidly obsessed with death; he saw it as a state of perfection, and for his self-pitying personality, it seemed to offer an alternative to the mundaneness and despairs of life – death promises all the sweet delights and mysterious, dark, ethereal pleasures that life denies us. Death equals dreams, peace, perfection and happiness. Death is mystical, otherworldly; it is an escape from all miseries.

“I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!”

Shelley’s verse above, from his poem “Ode to the Westwind”, best illustrates his view on his own life, or human life in general. He often sets his poems in an autumnal setting, in days when one feels transience the most; nature is dying slowly, vibrantly, richly, lushly, in colours of ruby and amber; in the most beautiful way. The poem shows Shelley’s view of nature as carrying both the strength of destruction and creation for after the death in autumn, a new life awakens in spring. Likewise, after death, one awakens in another world, a better world. Here are verses from Shelley’s “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty” which speak of the unique beauty of autumn:

“The day becomes more solemn and serene

When noon is past–there is a harmony

In autumn, and a lustre in its sky,                                 

Which through the summer is not heard or seen,

As if it could not be, as if it had not been!”

I feel that Shelley was ruled by or tormented by two different moods, a victim of which I am myself, and they are evident in his poetry. There’s one mood when he is in darkest thoughts, drowning, not in alcohol, but in self-pity, despair and melancholy, overindulging in his miserable existence, seeing himself as a martyr, deeply and honestly longing for death, so much so that you can imagine him sighing at the moon and just thinking “I want to die…” This is the mood that produced his poems such as “A Lament”, “Death” and “Mutability”. Then there is another mood, one which is responsible for his best poems, lyrically and stylistically, such as “Ode to the Westwind” or “The Indian Serenade”: a passionate, lyrical, imaginative mood when he is especially sensitive toward beauty that surrounds him, and often very gentle too, writing verses sweeter than cotton-candy such as these:

“I fear thy kisses, gentle maiden;
 Thou needest not fear mine;
My spirit is too deeply laden
 Ever to burden thine.

I fear thy mien, thy tones, thy motion;
 Thou needest not fear mine;
Innocent is the heart’s devotion
 With which I worship thine.”

Even in “The Indian Serenade”, he has that passionate and theatrical flair proclaiming “I die! I faint! I fail!”:

“Oh lift me from the grass!
I die! I faint! I fail!
Let thy love in kisses rain
On my lips and eyelids pale.
My cheek is cold and white, alas!
My heart beats loud and fast;
Oh press it close to thine again,
Where it will break at last!”

For Shelley, life is either a thorn which brings pain, or the lush rose blossom in whose velvety sweetness he wishes to be drowned; life is either a “dim vast vale of tears” (Hymn to Intellectual Beauty) or a “silver vision” (Alastor; or the Spirit of Solitude)*. At times, his idealistic spirit seems indomitable, his fight for justice, his passion for defending his ideas, thoughts and world views seem so ardent and strong, and yet, other times, his verses witness nothing but defeatism and despair, and in such times he feels this death-urge strongly and wishes, like Rimbaud, to “fall into nothingness”.

In some moments, I feel, verses of Shelley and Morrissey carry the same bittersweet, spiritless, yet charming mood. For example, when Morrissey sings “I really don’t know and I really don’t care” in the song Hand in Glove, it is that same careless, low-spirited, verging on pathetic, no-one-understands-me and have-pity-for-me mood that possessed Shelley rather often. And then, when he grabbed a quill and a piece of paper to gather his thoughts and wrote his poem “Invocation to Misery”, did he really mean “Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now”? I’m sure he did. Also, the voice of calm resignation in which Morrissey sings “I’ll probably never see you again!” in the song Hand in Glove reminds me so much of Shelley’s cute lyrical moaning “No more, oh never more!”

Although a century and a half divides their artistic periods, I feel that Shelley and Morrissey are philosophical equals. They were both vegetarians who promoted non-violence; both were very self-indulgent in terms of allowing themselves to spent days drowned in self-pity, melancholy and negativism, let’s say that “being miserable” could be considered their hobby; both exercised a certain idealistic version of “purity” of some sort; Shelley by abstaining from alcohol and Morrissey being celibate, both have that unswayable obsession with death and see it in the most romantic, glamorous terms. But again, this is just my opinion.

In his poem “On Death”, Shelley deals with the subject directly, again death as bringing us mortals into an otherworldly place, a place that no one can visit and return to tell, a place which will forever be covered with thousand veils of mystery:

“(…) When all that we know, or feel, or see,
Shall pass like an unreal mystery.

The secret things of the grave are there,
Where all but this frame must surely be,
Though the fine-wrought eye and the wondrous ear
No longer will live, to hear or to see
All that is great and all that is strange
In the boundless realm of unending change.

Who telleth a tale of unspeaking death?
Who lifteth the veil of what is to come?
Who painteth the shadows that are beneath
The wide-winding caves of the peopled tomb?
Or uniteth the hopes of what shall be
With the fears and the love for that which we see?”

Poppies by: Nataliya Kalinina.

Shelley continues this romantic vision of death as a state equalling sleep and dreams in his poem “Mont Blanc” whose main theme, though, is again the sublime power of nature, it’s the highest mountain in Europe, and for the second generation of Romantics nature has what man can only long for, but will never possess: eternity or immortality.

“Some say that gleams of a remoter world
Visit the soul in sleep,-that death is slumber,
And that its shapes the busy thoughts outnumber
Of those who wake and live. -I look on high;
Has some unknown omnipotence unfurled
The veil of life and death? or do I lie
In dream, and does the mightier world of sleep
Spread far and round and inaccessibly
Its circles?….”

Equalling death with dreams brings me to the wonderful flower often connected to dreams and sleep: poppy – its bright red colour speaks of passion, while the delicate petals whisper of fragility. Shelley used opium for relief, and so did another Romanticist, Edgar Allan Poe who said: “Sleep, those little slices of death — how I loathe them.”

Both Shelley and his wife Mary were interested in the supernatural, and Mary, as we all know, later wrote Frankenstein. But Shelley too shows his fascination with the otherworldly creatures in “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty”:

“While yet a boy I sought for ghosts, and sped

Through many a listening chamber, cave and ruin,                    

And starlight wood, with fearful steps pursuing

Hopes of high talk with the departed dead.”

Here are Shelley’s wonderful verses written by the hand of Richey Edwards, the great lyricist of the Manic Street Preachers, a set list for their show at the Glasgow Barrowlands, on October 15, 1994, found here. It’s not Morrissey per se, but it certainly links Romanticism with rock music.

Still, there were moments when Shelley was faced by death and mortality in real life, not just in imagination. First, there was the sad death of Fanny Imlay in October 1816, the half-sister of Mary Shelley and the out-of-wedlock daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft, who travelled to Swansea in Wales and overdosed on laudanum in an inn; the always quiet, sombre and modest twenty-two year old Fanny was secretly in love with Shelley and she was heartbroken when he eloped with Mary. When Shelley heard of her death and the reason, he composed these poignant verses:

“Her voice did quiver as we parted,
Yet knew I not that heart was broken
From which it came, and I departed
Heeding not the words then spoken.
Misery—O Misery,
This world is all too wide for thee.“

Then, in December 1816, his first wife Harriet was found drowned in a lake in Hyde Park in London, the reason was not Shelley but her death finally enabled him to make Mary Mrs Shelley. And then, the youngest and the first of the three beautiful blossoms of Romanticism to wither, John Keats, died on the 23th February 1821. This occasion inspired Shelley to write his poem “Adonais”, in which he states: “No more let life divide what death can join together.”

Even though I’ve focused on Shelley because he is my favourite Romantic poet and his lyrical vision is the most similar to Morrissey’s, my musing on death in Romantic poetry wouldn’t really be complete without mentioning this beautiful poem by John Keats:

“Can death be sleep, when life is but a dream,

And scenes of bliss pass as a phantom by?

The transient pleasures as a vision seem,

And yet we think the greatest pain’s to die.

 

How strange it is that man on earth should roam,

And lead a life of woe, but not forsake

His rugged path; nor dare he view alone

His future doom which is but to awake.”

_____________________________________________________________________________

Morrissey and Death

“I’m bereft of spiritual solutions. I do believe that there has to be a better world, but that’s rather simple. I’m quite obsessed with death. I’ve gone through periods of intense envy for people who’ve died. Yes, I have a dramatic unswayable unavoidable obsession with death. I can remember being obsessed with it from the age of eight and I often wondered whether it was quite a natural inbuilt emotion for people who’re destined to take their own lives, that they recognise it and begin to study it. If there was a magical beautiful pill that one could take that would retire you from this world, I think I would take it and I suppose that’s the extremity of the obsessiveness.” (From “Stop me if you’ve heard this one before”, interview by Len Brown in NME (20th February 1988)

 

Ah, Morrissey, a man so adored by the misfits in the eighties as well as now, and a man for whom the general public has such an ardent hatred; that is something I am unable to comprehend for I think he is simply a charming man or a handsome devil, as you wish. Maybe the general dislike lies in the fact that he himself doesn’t like people, that he seems to look through the society’s hypocrisies, and he says what he means and that’s not a quality people like. Whether you like the charming persona of the “son and heir of a shyness that is criminally vulgar” or you’d prefer to think that he is the “son and heir to nothing in particular”; you’d have to agree that their music is just damn good, their melodies are cheerful and whimsical, they are simply magical.

It was his lyrical vision, along with Marr’s wonderful musical contribution, that made The Smiths immortal. No one knows what it’s like to be an outsider better than Morrissey, and certainly no one sang about it better than he did. Here’s a quote from a book about Pulp called “Uncommon” by Owen Hatherley describing a situation which you can just translate to Morrissey’s teenage years: “What Pulp had in common most of all with the lineage outlined at the start of this introduction was a certain ‘vengeful self-creation’; the sense that they, like Bowie, Bryan Ferry, Siouxsie Sioux, David Sylvia, Morrissey, Richey Edwards or countless legions of bored suburban stars who never made it into the spotlight, had spent their lives transforming themselves into characters, with countless hours in their terrace, semi of tower-block bedrooms devoted to achieving the exact conjunction that would make them unique, and that they could then use as a weapon against a world that had already wronged them beyond forgiveness.”

 

On those rare occasions when my thoughts go on like this “Hmm, wouldn’t it be nice to be normal and have a friend and go out, and do whatever it is normal, sociable people do?”, I just go and listen to a few songs by The Smiths and Morrissey’s brilliant, at turns haunting, melancholic, poignant or witty, but always gorgeous lyrics such as: “Under the iron bridge we kissed“, “No, I’ve never had a job because I’m too shy“, “Hills are alive with celibate cries“, “I’ve lost my faith in womanhood“, “and though I walk home alone my faith in love is still devout“, and I laugh at my own silly thoughts. To have a social life, why – I have books. To have a real friend, why – I have a mirror.

Morrissey’s lyrics have made me feel like I belonged, like I don’t need anyone or anything as long as I hear their music. And when he proclaimed: “Throw you homework onto the fire, come out and find the one that you love and who loves you“: that’s exactly what I did on many occasions; who has time for homework when there’s evenings to be spent listening to The Smiths and dancing a lonely dance with flowers because they’re all I have. I know exactly how he felt as a teenager, oh how I do. Welcome to Morrissey’s world, shaped by the years of loneliness in his small bedroom with posters of James Dean, days spent reading Oscar Wilde, walking the grey suburban streets with dull red-brick houses that linger on and on, watching kitchen sink dramas and listening to sixties pop stars and New York Dolls. Being happy and sociable is passé and being miserable is tres chic.

Just like Shelley’s, the lyrics of The Smiths, all written by Morrissey, are a glamorous beautiful mix of lyricism and self-pity, bittersweet verses of irony filled with longings and rejections at the same time, wanting to belong and arrogantly showing the world the middle finger, his music was “so intoxicatingly melancholic, so dangerously thoughtful, so seductively funny that it lured its listeners, most of whom were not really damned, just slightly cursed, into a relationship with him and his music instead of the world. The Pop Pied Piper knows that life doesn’t imitate great art, it is destroyed by it.“*

Smiths 1984 De Montfort Hall

Look at those gorgeous red carnations that he’s swaying about, from whose garden did he snatch them, I wonder?

If you don’t want to die, go and read Oscar Wilde, or be charming and wear flowers in your pocket after listening to The Smiths, that you haven’t really listened to them. Well, maybe their music awakens other desires in you, but you are soulless and heartless if it leaves you feeling nothing. Their first album, called The Smiths (1984) is the best example of those gorgeous, witty, bedroom-years inspired lyrics which speak of “the passions and preoccupations that consumed Morrissey for years, alone in his darkened bedroom“*, and these lines, despite being from the third album, pondering on life and death, can serve to illustrate the mood – the mood I am engulfed in majority of my time:

“And when I’m lying in my bed
I think about life
and I think about death
and neither one particularly appeals to me.” (Nowhere Fast)

“I’m not happy and I’m not sad” and “neither life nor death appeal to me”; how outrageously gorgeous is this ambivalent attitude towards such important matters?! Life or death, happiness or sadness, whatever, I dunno…

Death, yearning for death because you’re depressed, miserable in a humdrum town where rain falls hard all the time, rejected, unloved, tired, disappointed, and the graveyard seems a more exciting place than your bedroom, or simply because, in a manner of Oscar Wilde, it’s an aesthetically alluring idea, and to die for love, beauty or mere boredom is just original, romantic and glamorous. Wilde said himself that “The artistic life is one long lovely suicide.”

When Morrissey says: “If there was a magical beautiful pill that one could take that would retire you from this world, I think I would take it…” My thoughts exactly! The manner in which Shelley and Morrissey see death is vastly different from the way people who really take their own lives see it. Shelley and Morrissey’s view on death is not seriously depressed or suicidal, but rather “artistic”, deeply romantic and idealistic view of death as something mystical, glamorous, as a dream, and dreams are better than reality. I think it’ i that constant discord between beautiful and sad, magical and mundane aspects of life that drives the imagination to devise an escape from the prison cell of life, to fantasise about something different, something better, and sometimes all these longings turn into melancholy and an obsession for death. Death is the last step, the fulfilled longing; and only death can make beauty immortal. No other theme is greater than love, beauty and death combined.

And speaking of beauty: “To this day, there are precious few Smith songs that can’t mist my vision … Not because they are “sad” or “miserable”, but because they are so unutterably, unfeasibly, unlawfully handsome. Which is the deadliest drug of all. If ever there was a proof that Keats’ assertion “Beauty is truth, truth beauty” is anything more than just a trite line or simply wishful thinking, it is in The Smiths.”*

 

Morrissey and yellow daffodils, I love a man with flowers! Morrissey waving a bouquet of gladioli on the Top of the Pops performing This Charming Man must be the coolest thing ever! I also love something that Morrissey said in 1984 when interviewed by kids, when one boy asked “Why do you hold flowers when you sing?”, Morrissey gave a wonderful reply: “Why do I hold flowers?… I think flowers are beautiful things. Very nice and innocent things. They don’t harm anybody. They don’t burp and they don’t do anything ugly. So, why not, it’s better, I think, than waving socks about.”

In his book “Dark Stuff”, Nick Kent called Marianne Fatihfull “Morrissey’s first love”, and in this interview when she was just 21 years old her view on death is as romantic as it can get, she says; “I love death!… I feel it’s important to stay in the world and do things, but on the other hand death and dreams are another thing. I’d really like to go there… into death. But it’s wrong to make your own death, death is when you get it. I think it’s a beautiful thing, death, such a relief, just imagine if there wasn’t any death….”

And now some of Morrissey verses that deal with death:

What She Said

“What she said:
“How come someone hasn’t noticed
that I’m dead
and decided to bury me
God knows, I’m ready”
What she said was sad
but then, all the rejections she’s had
to pretend to be happy
could only be idiocy
What she said was not for the job or
lover that she never had.”

 

That Joke Isn’t Funny Anymore

“….time’s tide will smother you
and I will too
when you laugh about people who feel so
very lonely
their only desire is to die (…)

well, it suddenly struck me
I just might die with a smile on my
face after all.”

Well I Wonder

“Well I wonder

do you see me when we pass?

I half-die

Please keep me in mind

please keep me in mind

 

Gasping – but somehow still alive

this is the fierce last stand of all I am

Gasping – dying – but somehow still alive

this is the final stand of all I am

Please keep me in mind”

Madame Bovary (1991)

How Soon Is Now

“There’s a club if you’d like to go
you could meet somebody who really loves you
so you go, and you stand on your own
and you leave on your own
and you go home, and you cry
and you want to die…”

Song Cemetery Gates always reminds me the Gothic romance of Percy and Mary Shelley and their graveyard meeting, always. And there’s also the mention of Keats and Wilde, that’s cool too:

“A dreaded sunny day
So I meet you at the cemetery gates
Keats and Yeats are on your side
While Wilde is on mine

So we go inside and we gravely read the stones
All those people all those lives
Where are they now?
With the loves and hates
And passions just like mine
They were born
And then they lived and then they died
Seems so unfair
And I want to cry.”

John William Waterhouse, Miranda – The Tempest, 1916

The haunting beginning of the song I Know It’s Over reminds me of Edgar Allan Poe’s stories of people buried alive. What a spooky picture for the imagination; to feel the soil falling over your head….

“Oh mother, I can feel the soil falling over my head

See, the sea wants to take me

The knife wants to slit me

Do you think you can help me?….

 

Oh Mother, I can feel the soil falling over my head

Oh Mother, I can feel the soil falling over my head

Oh Mother, I can feel the soil falling over my head

Oh Mother, I can feel the soil falling over my head

Oh Mother, I can feel the soil falling over my head”

John William Waterhouse, Sleep and his Half-brother Death, 1874

Don’t listen to this one, Asleep, if you’re feeling depressed and vulnerable to begin with:

“Sing me to sleep
Sing me to sleep
I’m tired and I
I want to go to bed

Sing me to sleep
Sing me to sleep
And then leave me alone
Don’t try to wake me in the morning
‘Cause I will be gone
Don’t feel bad for me
I want you to know
Deep in the cell of my heart
I will feel so glad to go

(…)

There is another world
There is a better world
Well, there must be
Well, there must be
Well, there must be
Well, there must be
Well…Bye bye
Bye bye
Bye…“

Queen cover image with model wearing a nightdress by Angela Gore. Photographed by John Hedgecoe. Scanned by Miss Peelpants from Queen, 17th July 1968.

Shakespeare’s Sister

“Young bones groan
And the rocks below say :
“Throw your skinny body down, son!”

But I’m going to meet the one I love
So please don’t stand in my way
Because I’m going to meet the one I love“

Pre-Raphaelite painting by John Everett Millais is perhaps the most beautiful, most romantically idealised depiction of someone dying in the art history, and Morrissey’s lyrics of the song There Is A Light That Never Goes Out are possibly the most romantic and glamorous vision of death and love combined:

 “And if a double-decker bus
Crashes in to us
To die by your side
Is such a heavenly way to die
And if a ten ton truck
Kills the both of us
To die by your side
Well the pleasure, the privilege is mine”

And here’s another quote from the same book which just perfectly describes the feeling you get from listening to The Smiths:

“He cooed in my ear that, yes, adolescence, like the Smiths and pop music, might be a moment that passes, that one day you might be laughing and dancing and finally living, but that feeling of aloneness and the bittersweet prospect of a life of disappointment stretching out before you (…) is the purest, truest, noblest feeling you will ever have.“*

Apart from dealing with the subject of death in his lyrics, you can take this post as a certain “Ode to Morrissey” too because there is no other person from popular culture that I can relate to more strongly. A few days ago, I spent an amazing afternoon listening to all albums by The Smiths in a chronological order, absolutely fantastic way to waste an afternoon, fully recommend it. Also, I am neither a girl of Romanticism nor a teenager of the 1980s, and yet I have pictures of both Shelley and Morrissey on my wall; what can I say, I love charming men! So, let us all walk around with flowers and kindness, read books, be charming and die… from beauty!

_________

* Mark Simpson, Saint Morrissey: A Portrait of This Charming Man by an Alarming Fan

Romanticism – Age of Sentimentality, Melancholy, Love, Death and Fallen Heroes

I dedicate this post to Frederic Chopin who died on 17th October 1849 and all the other Romantics who ‘ruined’ my life in the most positive way! ___________________________________________________________

Exploration of the inner self lead the Romantics to discover a prodigious world of mysticism, imagination and dreams.

“To romanticize the world is to make us aware of the magic, mystery and wonder of the world; it is to educate the senses to see the ordinary as extraordinary, the familiar as strange, the mundane as sacred, the finite as infinite.”(Novalis)

Romantic era is very appealing to me; all those sad young people that died way too soon, unrequited loves, themes and love towards nature, focus on individuality and imagination,beautiful portraits where ladies’ faces are framed with curls and delicate roses, escapism, melancholy as a state of mind, feeling of alienation.

Every movement in art, music and literature comes as an answer to the previous one and acts as its opposite. Romanticism came as an answer to Classicism and deemed its ‘cult of reason’, coldness, formality and restraint characteristic for the art and literature of the time. In Romanticism an artist is a genious, a gifted person who stands lonely and misunderstood against the meaningless masses. Art itself is originality whereas the principle of Classicism was imitating the Antic models. Romanticism praised the aesthetic function of literature while Classicism valued the educational purpose of it. Artist had more freedom in expressing himself in the Romantic era than in the rigid worldview of Classicism.

In the Romantic era young individuals felt powerless against that rigid regime. Melancholy pervaded the air and the atmosphere of oppressive disappointment after the ideals of equality and justice of the French Revolution were never fulfilled, and the Napoleon’s demise made the society to perceive him as a fallen hero, fallen self-proclaimed hero, which again brought the disappointment. ‘Cult of reason‘ couldn’t and can’t explain the inequality of the world that hurt the young people so much. I find one of Novalis’ quotes very appropriate “Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason.” How could rationalism answer the existentialistic questions one might ask oneself? What solution could rationalism have to cure the disappointment of the people with the false social values? Young people; misunderstood poets, artists, musicians and all the other sensitive individuals couldn’t find fulfillment and refuge in rationalistic ideas that were so popular only a century before so they had to find their own way to survive.

In literature this disappointment, unexplainable sadness and melancholy manifested themselves by escaping into solitude and one’s own vision of the world. Those are the sources of the pessimistic worldview, that is the Weltschmerz. ‘World-pain’ or Weltschmerz is an expression for the sense of sadness and despondency induced by discrepancy of reality and ideals. Physical reality can never satisfy the demands of the mind. Weltschmerz resulted in the ‘cult of pain’; a pessimistic sense of how there is no cure for evil in the world. This world pain that caused depression, escapism and resignation as the individual felt powerless against all the injustice in the world, occurred as early as in Rousseau’s (New Heloise) and Goethe’s work (The sorrows of young Werther). However, the world-pain gained its fullest form in works of Byron and Chateaubriand.

Artists of the time felt helpless, sad and disappointed. Surrounded by the tranquil solitude they found comfort in four major themes and preoccupations; intimacy and love, nature (especially exotic landscapes), history and folklore, and mystic and occult. Theme of love and intimacy is the most evident in Goethe’s work The Sorrows of Young Werther, historical themes were the most interesting to Victor Hugo thought he came to the scene a little bit later, and the dark romantic, Edgar Allan Poe is the king of mystical and occult, combing the themes of beauty and death.

Romanticism in English literature begins with the publication of Wordsworth and Coleridge’s collection of poems Lyrical ballads (1798). These two poets, along with Robert Southey, belonged to a group called ‘Lake poets’ for they lived in the Lake district; a picturesque mountainous area in north-west England. William Wordsworth considered poetry as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings,” which he then “recollect[s] in tranquility.” Nature was, however, Wordsworth’s biggest inspiration and he admired it deeply, not only for its aesthetic values; he felt in it the closeness with the sources of life and inexhaustible wellspring of simple and eternal cognition of life. Nature mirrors the state of your soul; romantic poets reflected their feelings into nature, but they also did the opposite, the nature acted on the poets’ sensibility and his inner experiencing. These poets have been very important in setting the ground for the English Romanticism, especially for the second generation of poets.

I must say that I prefer the second generation of English Romantic poets; Byron, Shelley and Keats. Byron, as a person and an artist, is characterised by the fact that in reality he had lived a life of his romantic heroes. His numerous love adventures, travels to exotic lands and the willingness to sacrifice for the ideals of freedom; most importantly, for the freedom of another country – that shows the true nobleness. Byron is responsible for many innovations in poetry and for creating a new type of hero, that is, anti-hero or Byronic hero. Alongside Byron there were two more important poets; Shelley and Keats; both of them cherished a ‘cult of pure beauty’ and both of them died very young in tragic circumstances.

Literary type that emerged from the literature of Romanticism was a romantic hero; a sensitive, courageous and adventurous young man with a great love for nature and everything that is natural, and yet he is unable of controlling his own emotions. He is usually a victim of scheming, mistakes from his youth, his abruptness or his pessimistic attitudes towards life. Typical romantic hero, the best example is young Werther, perhaps even Karl Moor from Schiller’s play The Robbers, does not fit in in society, has a rebellious spirit, can be self-destructive and highly pathetic and excessive in statements.

Other type of romantic hero is Byronic hero, created by Lord Byron. Byronic hero is a man who despises everything and everybody. Though he can have many positive traits like courage or intelligence, he is not noble, kind or humane. He is a cynic and a skeptic, most commonly a materialist and an atheist, often full of contradictions. He loves to live life to the fullest but that desire is usually induced by boredom and a sense of meaninglessness. Byronic hero is a ‘cursed person‘, doing everything that stimulates his own demise. Since Lord Byron was extremely popular with Russian romantic authors, Pushkin was the first to be inspired by the Byronic hero, and derived a similar hero – Superfluous man. It’s a hero who feels superior to his surrounding and yet he submits himself to aimless actions not taking advantage of his potentials. Prone to self destruction, the superfluous man has a strong sense of boredom which compels him to seek oblivion on wanderings and travels. Typical examples include Eugene Onegin and Pechorin from Lermontov’s novel and the first novel of Russian literature – A Hero of our Time.

Romantic hero and Superfluous man are different but they do have similarities such as feeling of alienation and loneliness, intelligence, sensitivity, they both have tendencies towards traveling and excitement and the are fighters against the established social and moral norms.

Though poetry was the most popular form of expressing oneself in Romanticism, it was music that was considered the most romantic of all arts. E.T.A. Hoffman commented on the subject of music ‘The magic of music is so strong, getting stronger, it should break any shackle of another art.‘ Romanticists considered music to be almost like a mind-expanding experience; music revealed unknown areas to man, a word of imagination, a world completely cut out from earthly senses; music was romantic because its theme was the fathomless itself. Music was not only considered to be the most romantic of all arts, but also the spring of all other arts, and therefor lies its true greatness and importance. Novalis also made a remark on music –  “Every disease is a musical problem; every cure is a musical solution.”

Beethoven was a musician whose work is considered to mark a transition between Classicism and Romanticism. Other Romantic composers were Frederic Chopin, Franz Liszt, Schumann and Schubert. Romantic musicians were rebellious when it came to themes, they were fascinated by nocturnal, mystic and spooky, longing to the infinite they were inspired by fantastic seeing and spiritual experiences, fascinated by the past, especially Middle Ages, interested in the autobiographical and emphasised extreme subjectivism, at the same time surrendering to nature.

My favourite romantic composer is Chopin; I absolutely adore his Nocturnes; their melody is of greatest melancholy and sadness and yet it possess untamed beauty and mystique. Oscar Wilde commented on Chopin’s music ‘After playing Chopin, I feel as if I had been weeping over sins that I had never committed, and mourning over tragedies that were not my own. Music always seems to me to produce that effect. It creates for one a past of which one has been ignorant, and fills one with a sense of sorrows that have been hidden from one’s tears.‘ Frederick Chopin grew up in Warsaw. His father was French, and Frederick soon moved to Paris, the center of Romanticism in music and the center of arts in general, and as soon as he arrived, his playing style amazed the posh aristocrat audience and gained him admirers. He soon befriended many famous artists and writers of the time; Victor Hugo, H. Balzac, H. Heine, Eugene Delacroix, and also F. Listz all became his friends.

Frederick was elegant and posh, he loved modern and beautiful clothes, champagne, he changed his white gloves every day and traveled in his own carriage. However, he was profound when it came to music and his playing style reflected both great strength and sophistication and sensitivity. ‘It should be like dreaming in beautiful springtime – by moonlight.‘ – he once described his sonata. However, Chopin was of frail health, always thin, weak and melancholic, he died aged thirty nine from consumption. Although befriended with many famous artists of the time, Chopin had a person in Paris he loved even more, it was George Sand with whom had a ten year long relationship. The two met on a party, but Chopin was repelled by her clumsy posture and short, fat, unattractive build. The two met again, two years later; Chopin was in state of melancholy because a young Polish girl had proved unfaithful him, and, devastated, he was improvising a lamentations on a piano when he saw George Sand standing on the doors. His eyes met with her eyes which were black, magical and velvety as the night. After he finished playing, she bent down and kissed him softly. The rest is history.

Romantic era with its emphasis on love and emotions, was an era of many great love stories; Elizabeth Barrett-Browning and Robert Browning, Clara Schumann and Robert Schumann, Mary and Percy Shelley, Lord Byron and Lady Caroline Lamb… the list is endless.

1781. The Nightmare – Henry Fuseli

In Romantic era even death was romantic; it was considered a beautiful land of dreams where one could escape the harshness, troubles and greyness of reality. When one sleeps, one dreams and in death one would be dreaming forever, eternally united with nature. In dreams we see our innermost thoughts and desires, and when we die, we would be dreaming forever and ever; death is a dream and one should not be afraid of it. In life, Romantic poets were sad, melancholic, disappointment, alienated, lonely, burdened with social injustices, and powerless against established social and moral norms, and the only comfort and sweetness they could get was sleep; dreams. For Wordsworth, death is nothing more than returning to a more complete and satisfactory existence. Keats considered a death to be an eternal dream which is as beautiful as we create it; death is for him merely a sleep in which one sees the picture they most desire. There are no fears in death, only the ones we create for ourselves. Death is opposite of life, it’s an escape from reality and misunderstanding society, it’s the submerging in nature, becoming a part of the universe again. Life was hard for romantic spiritual philosophy since they lived in times when the Industrial revolution was changing lives and materialism was becoming dominant.

John Keats – ‘On Death’

‘Can death be sleep, when life is but a dream,
And scenes of bliss pass as a phantom by?
The transient pleasures as a vision seem,
And yet we think the greatest pain’s to die.‘

Percy Shelley, mon préféré Romantic poet, was especially fascinated with death and dreams. Highly sensitive, he hated life; its trivialities and the conventionality of society. Extremely devoted to the beauty and peace which he believed could only be found in dreams and death, Shelley was very close to committing suicide, as he felt an enormous ‘death urge‘; he wished to lose all his senses, all attachment from life, all communication with society and emerge himself forever in enormous beauty and magic that death beholds. He wrote a poem ‘A Lament’ in which he expressed his deep desires and longings for death.

‘O World! O Life! O Time!
On whose last steps I climb,
Trembling at that where I had stood before;
When will return the glory of your prime?
No more -Oh, never more!‘

I’m fascinated by deaths in Romantic era, thought people were always dying, and artists died young in many eras, there something so appealing in deaths of Romantic poets, musicians, painters or princesses. Perhaps the shortness of their lives, perhaps the sadness and tranquility that tortured them and maybe even induced their deaths… Shelley, Byron, Keats, Schubert – they all died young, but tragic and romantic death did not spare the members of aristocracy either, particularly interesting to me are Russian Grand Duchesses, sisters Alexandra and Elena Pavlovna who died very young; Alexandra died aged seventeen and Elena was just a year older when she succumbed to her eternal sleep. Later, Grand Duchess Alexandra Nikolaevna died aged only nineteen. In her portraits, she gazes at the viewer with a hint of melancholy and resignation, dressed in elegant satin, while her pale skin shows the beauty of her innocence, her stately neck stands as if it was fragile as a feather, carrying a beautiful face crowned with dark hair in braids. Aura of sadness followed Alexandra on her portraits like a shadow.

P.S. I wrote this post exactly one year ago but due to the connection between Autumn and Romanticism, and my current obsession with Romanticism, I decided to re-post it.

Percy Bysshe Shelley – I Fear Thy Kisses…

1782-88. Paul Sandby – Music by Moonlight

‘I fear thy kisses, gentle maiden;
Thou needest not fear mine;
My spirit is too deeply laden
Ever to burden thine.

I fear thy mien, thy tones, thy motion;
Thou needest not fear mine;
Innocent is the heart’s devotion
With which I worship thine.’

P.S. Shelley is mentioned in one episode of Darling Buds of May, when Primrose falls in love with Roger, a Liverpool lad. When the two met, Primrose was sitting outdoors and reading Shelley’s poems out loud, and Roger dared to say that Shelley is ‘soft’. How very rude! Shelley is by far my favourite poet of Romanticism, despite the fact that I’ve named my blog after Byron. I’m not a big fan of the show though, but my mum is, and she had to tease me about Shelley. Ma comforted Primrose at the end, telling her ‘You’ll never be sixteen and listening to nightingales again.‘

 

Romanticism – Age of Sentimentality, Melancholy, Love, Death and Fallen Heroes

Exploration of the inner self lead the Romantics to discover a prodigious world of mysticism, imagination and dreams.

“To romanticize the world is to make us aware of the magic, mystery and wonder of the world; it is to educate the senses to see the ordinary as extraordinary, the familiar as strange, the mundane as sacred, the finite as infinite.”(Novalis)

Romantic era is very appealing to me; all those sad young people that died way too soon, unrequited loves, themes and love towards nature, focus on individuality and imagination,beautiful portraits where ladies’ faces are framed with curls and delicate roses, escapism, melancholy as a state of mind, feeling of alienation.

Every movement in art, music and literature comes as an answer to the previous one and acts as its opposite. Romanticism came as an answer to Classicism and deemed its ‘cult of reason’, coldness, formality and restraint characteristic for the art and literature of the time. In Romanticism an artist is a genious, a gifted person who stands lonely and misunderstood against the meaningless masses. Art itself is originality whereas the principle of Classicism was imitating the Antic models. Romanticism praised the aesthetic function of literature while Classicism valued the educational purpose of it. Artist had more freedom in expressing himself in the Romantic era than in the rigid worldview of Classicism.

In the Romantic era young individuals felt powerless against that rigid regime. Melancholy pervaded the air and the atmosphere of oppressive disappointment after the ideals of equality and justice of the French Revolution were never fulfilled, and the Napoleon’s demise made the society to perceive him as a fallen hero, fallen self-proclaimed hero, which again brought the disappointment. ‘Cult of reason‘ couldn’t and can’t explain the inequality of the world that hurt the young people so much. I find one of Novalis’ quotes very appropriate “Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason.” How could rationalism answer the existentialistic questions one might ask oneself? What solution could rationalism have to cure the disappointment of the people with the false social values? Young people; misunderstood poets, artists, musicians and all the other sensitive individuals couldn’t find fulfillment and refuge in rationalistic ideas that were so popular only a century before so they had to find their own way to survive.

In literature this disappointment, unexplainable sadness and melancholy manifested themselves by escaping into solitude and one’s own vision of the world. Those are the sources of the pessimistic worldview, that is the Weltschmerz. ‘World-pain’ or Weltschmerz is an expression for the sense of sadness and despondency induced by discrepancy of reality and ideals. Physical reality can never satisfy the demands of the mind. Weltschmerz resulted in the ‘cult of pain’; a pessimistic sense of how there is no cure for evil in the world. This world pain that caused depression, escapism and resignation as the individual felt powerless against all the injustice in the world, occurred as early as in Rousseau’s (New Heloise) and Goethe’s work (The sorrows of young Werther). However, the world-pain gained its fullest form in works of Byron and Chateaubriand.

Artists of the time felt helpless, sad and disappointed. Surrounded by the tranquil solitude they found comfort in four major themes and preoccupations; intimacy and love, nature (especially exotic landscapes), history and folklore, and mystic and occult. Theme of love and intimacy is the most evident in Goethe’s work The Sorrows of Young Werther, historical themes were the most interesting to Victor Hugo thought he came to the scene a little bit later, and the dark romantic, Edgar Allan Poe is the king of mystical and occult, combing the themes of beauty and death.

Romanticism in English literature begins with the publication of Wordsworth and Coleridge’s collection of poems Lyrical ballads (1798). These two poets, along with Robert Southey, belonged to a group called ‘Lake poets’ for they lived in the Lake district; a picturesque mountainous area in north-west England. William Wordsworth considered poetry as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings,” which he then “recollect[s] in tranquility.” Nature was, however, Wordsworth’s biggest inspiration and he admired it deeply, not only for its aesthetic values; he felt in it the closeness with the sources of life and inexhaustible wellspring of simple and eternal cognition of life. Nature mirrors the state of your soul; romantic poets reflected their feelings into nature, but they also did the opposite, the nature acted on the poets’ sensibility and his inner experiencing. These poets have been very important in setting the ground for the English Romanticism, especially for the second generation of poets.

I must say that I prefer the second generation of English Romantic poets; Byron, Shelley and Keats. Byron, as a person and an artist, is characterised by the fact that in reality he had lived a life of his romantic heroes. His numerous love adventures, travels to exotic lands and the willingness to sacrifice for the ideals of freedom; most importantly, for the freedom of another country – that shows the true nobleness. Byron is responsible for many innovations in poetry and for creating a new type of hero, that is, anti-hero or Byronic hero. Alongside Byron there were two more important poets; Shelley and Keats; both of them cherished a ‘cult of pure beauty’ and both of them died very young in tragical circumstances.

Literary type that emerged from the literature of Romanticism was a romantic hero; a sensitive, courageous and adventurous young man with a great love for nature and everything that is natural, and yet he is unable of controlling his own emotions. He is usually a victim of scheming, mistakes from his youth, his abruptness or his pessimistic attitudes towards life. Typical romantic hero, the best example is young Werther, perhaps even Karl Moor from Schiller’s play The Robbers, does not fit in in society, has a rebellious spirit, can be self-destructive and highly pathetic and excessive in statements.

Other type of romantic hero is Byronic hero, created by Lord Byron. Byronic hero is a man who despises everything and everybody. Though he can have many positive traits like courage or intelligence, he is not noble, kind or humane. He is a cynic and a skeptic, most commonly a materialist and an atheist, often full of contradictions. He loves to live life to the fullest but that desire is usually induced by boredom and a sense of meaninglessness. Byronic hero is a ‘cursed person‘, doing everything that stimulates his own demise. Since Lord Byron was extremely popular with Russian romantic authors, Pushkin was the first to be inspired by the Byronic hero, and derived a similar hero – Superfluous man. It’s a hero who feels superior to his surrounding and yet he submits himself to aimless actions not taking advantage of his potentials. Prone to self destruction, the superfluous man has a strong sense of boredom which compels him to seek oblivion on wanderings and travels. Typical examples include Eugene Onegin and Pechorin from Lermontov’s novel and the first novel of Russian literature – A Hero of our Time.

Romantic hero and Superfluous man are different but they do have similarities such as feeling of alienation and loneliness, intelligence, sensitivity, they both have tendencies towards traveling and excitement and the are fighters against the established social and moral norms.

Though poetry was the most popular form of expressing oneself in Romanticism, it was music that was considered the most romantic of all arts. E.T.A. Hoffman commented on the subject of music ‘The magic of music is so strong, getting stronger, it should break any shackle of another art.‘ Romanticists considered music to be almost like a mind-expanding experience; music revealed unknown areas to man, a word of imagination, a world completely cut out from earthly senses; music was romantic because its theme was the fathomless itself. Music was not only considered to be the most romantic of all arts, but also the spring of all other arts, and therefor lies its true greatness and importance. Novalis also made a remark on music –  “Every disease is a musical problem; every cure is a musical solution.”

Beethoven was a musician whose work is considered to mark a transition between Classicism and Romanticism. Other Romantic composers were Frederic Chopin, Franz Liszt, Schumann and Schubert. Romantic musicians were rebellious when it came to themes, they were fascinated by nocturnal, mystic and spooky, longing to the infinite they were inspired by fantastic seeing and spiritual experiences, fascinated by the past, especially Middle Ages, interested in the autobiographical and emphasised extreme subjectivism, at the same time surrendering to nature.

My favourite romantic composer is Chopin; I absolutely adore his Nocturnes; their melody is of greatest melancholy and sadness and yet it possess untamed beauty and mystique. Oscar Wilde commented on Chopin’s music ‘After playing Chopin, I feel as if I had been weeping over sins that I had never committed, and mourning over tragedies that were not my own. Music always seems to me to produce that effect. It creates for one a past of which one has been ignorant, and fills one with a sense of sorrows that have been hidden from one’s tears.‘ Frederick Chopin grew up in Warsaw. His father was French, and Frederick soon moved to Paris, the center of Romanticism in music and the center of arts in general, and as soon as he arrived, his playing style amazed the posh aristocrat audience and gained him admirers. He soon befriended many famous artists and writers of the time; Victor Hugo, H. Balzac, H. Heine, Eugene Delacroix, and also F. Listz all became his friends.

Frederick was elegant and posh, he loved modern and beautiful clothes, champagne, he changed his white gloves every day and traveled in his own carriage. However, he was profound when it came to music and his playing style reflected both great strength and sophistication and sensitivity. ‘It should be like dreaming in beautiful springtime – by moonlight.‘ – he once described his sonata. However, Chopin was of frail health, always thin, weak and melancholic, he died aged thirty nine from consumption. Although befriended with many famous artists of the time, Chopin had a person in Paris he loved even more, it was George Sand with whom had a ten year long relationship. The two met on a party, but Chopin was repelled by her clumsy posture and short, fat, unattractive build. The two met again, two years later; Chopin was in state of melancholy because a young Polish girl had proved unfaithful him, and, devastated, he was improvising a lamentations on a piano when he saw George Sand standing on the doors. His eyes met with her eyes which were black, magical and velvety as the night. After he finished playing, she bent down and kissed him softly. The rest is history.

Romantic era with its emphasis on love and emotions, was an era of many great love stories; Elizabeth Barrett-Browning and Robert Browning, Clara Schumann and Robert Schumann, Mary and Percy Shelley, Lord Byron and Lady Caroline Lamb… the list is endless.

1781. The Nightmare – Henry Fuseli

In Romantic era even death was romantic; it was considered a beautiful land of dreams where one could escape the harshness, troubles and greyness of reality. When one sleeps, one dreams and in death one would be dreaming forever, eternally united with nature. In dreams we see our innermost thoughts and desires, and when we die, we would be dreaming forever and ever; death is a dream and one should not be afraid of it. In life, Romantic poets were sad, melancholic, disappointment, alienated, lonely, burdened with social injustices, and powerless against established social and moral norms, and the only comfort and sweetness they could get was sleep; dreams. For Wordsworth, death is nothing more than returning to a more complete and satisfactory existence. Keats considered a death to be an eternal dream which is as beautiful as we create it; death is for him merely a sleep in which one sees the picture they most desire. There are no fears in death, only the ones we create for ourselves. Death is opposite of life, it’s an escape from reality and misunderstanding society, it’s the submerging in nature, becoming a part of the universe again. Life was hard for romantic spiritual philosophy since they lived in times when the Industrial revolution was changing lives and materialism was becoming dominant.

John Keats – ‘On Death’

‘Can death be sleep, when life is but a dream,
And scenes of bliss pass as a phantom by?
The transient pleasures as a vision seem,
And yet we think the greatest pain’s to die.‘

Percy Shelley, mon préféré Romantic poet, was especially fascinated with death and dreams. Highly sensitive, he hated life; its trivialities and the conventionality of society. Extremely devoted to the beauty and peace which he believed could only be found in dreams and death, Shelley was very close to committing suicide, as he felt an enormous ‘death urge‘; he wished to lose all his senses, all attachment from life, all communication with society and emerge himself forever in enormous beauty and magic that death beholds. He wrote a poem ‘A Lament’ in which he expressed his deep desires and longings for death.

‘O World! O Life! O Time!
On whose last steps I climb,
Trembling at that where I had stood before;
When will return the glory of your prime?
No more -Oh, never more!‘

I’m fascinated by deaths in Romantic era, thought people were always dying, and artists died young in many eras, there something so appealing in deaths of Romantic poets, musicians, painters or princesses. Perhaps the shortness of their lives, perhaps the sadness and tranquility that tortured them and maybe even induced their deaths… Shelley, Byron, Keats, Schubert – they all died young, but tragic and romantic death did not spare the members of aristocracy either, particularly interesting to me are Russian Grand Duchesses, sisters Alexandra and Elena Pavlovna who died very young; Alexandra died aged seventeen and Elena was just a year older when she succumbed to her eternal sleep. Later, Grand Duchess Alexandra Nikolaevna died aged only nineteen. In her portraits, she gazes at the viewer with a hint of melancholy and resignation, dressed in elegant satin, while her pale skin shows the beauty of her innocence, her stately neck stands as if it was fragile as a feather, carrying a beautiful face crowned with dark hair in braids. Aura of sadness followed Alexandra on her portraits like a shadow. She died, tortured by life, her beauty preserved in an eternal dream.