“Anxious Cares”: From Pope’s Spleen to Coleridge’s Dejection

Abstract

William Cowper, one of the great depressives among English poets, asserts that is a pleasure poetic pains / Which only poets know, but it is also the case that is an aesthetic pleasure the representation of emotional pain with which many are familiar (lines 285-86). A modern example might be Bob Dylan's Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues, as performed and reworked by Bryan Ferry on Dylanesque. Ferry's stripped- down cover, almost toneless but with a vocal quiver of feeling, is full of repetitive chording and percussive intensity interrupted by and finally married to the harmonica's jauntily sad, sardonic wail. title is one of Dylan's mysteries: Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues. Are we the presence of parody and pastiche, not singing the blues, but something Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues? And is Tom Thumb some kind of self-deprecating alter ego? There is an inventive use of that old stand-by for the expression of bleak and intense feeling, namely monorhyme, found the stanzas--though only on the even lines--until the superb last verse, are alternating rhymes (see Ricks 43). Yeats finishes The Circus Animals' Desertion with a beginning: Now that my ladder's gone / must lie down where the ladders start / In the rag and bone shop of the heart (38-40). A poem about endings turns into one that makes a new start, a snarled celebration of the foul rag and bone shop of the heart, perhaps the greatest of Yeats's masterful (33), to borrow a phrase from the same poem. Dylan concludes, as Christopher Ricks remarks, by starting out with I started out, and that odd sense of a new beginning at a time of hitting rock-bottom imbues the verse with an aggrieved grace and exuberance (43): started out on burgundy But soon hit the harder stuff Everybody said they'd stand behind me When the game got rough But the was on me There was nobody even to bluff I'm to New York City do believe I've enough (Dylan 351) Ricks comments on this stanza that all its lines are rhyming away, and glosses this fact with the laconic observation, An ending, not a stopping (44). Certainly its images of failure come to a focus the wry awareness that the joke was on me, but that newly gleaned awareness is grounds for a going back and a cathartic sense of having had enough. It's a beginning, not an ending, precisely because, the end, there was nobody even to call my bluff. All the half-glamorous, fable-like, sinister others have gone: the hungry women the Poe-like Rue Morgue Avenue; the decidedly unsaintly Saint Annie, dispenser of gifts that leave the fingers in a knot; the medical friend whose lips are zipped; and Sweet Melinda who leaves you howling at the moon (Dylan 351). But what a cast is conjured up; what a contemporary fit of spleen they compose. What energy is released this tragicomic discovery of erotic and existential nada, nothingness, the self's sense that it's had enough. Ferry's response is to allow the instrumental finale to play on and on, as though reluctant to stop. Negativity may not pull you through, but the song displays creative positivity. exhilaration of grim despair Dylan achieves an idiosyncratic, even unique, inflection. But the argument pursued the present paper is that is an imaginative intensity, even a release, that may feel like a victory to be found the depiction by Pope and Coleridge of states that we might wish to associate with depression or its many cognate terms. Robert Burton's seventeenth-century masterpiece Anatomy of Melancholy (first edition 1621) derives morose pleasure from the language of melancholy, even as he views as intimately twinned with writing: I write of melancholy, by being busy to avoid melancholy (25). Writing wards off the very that provides it with its subject matter. …