DAY FIVE: MENTAL HEALTH
My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk…
I am half in love with easeful Death,
Call’d him soft names in many a mused rhyme…
from “Ode to a Nightingale” (1819)
I am in that temper that, if I were under water,
I would scarcely kick to come to the top.
from a Letter to George and Georgiana Keats, 22 November 1817
John Keats
I fall upon the thorns of Life! I bleed!
from ”Prometheus Unbound“, Act III (1820)
A grief without a pang, void, dark, and drear,
A stifled, drowsy, unimpassioned grief,
Which finds no natural outlet, no relief
In word, or sigh, or tear—
I see the Deep has treasures which are never mine.
from “Stanzas Written in Dejection, near Naples” (1818)
Percy Bysshe Shelley
My spirit is too weak; mortality
Weighs heavily on me like unwilling sleep…
from “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage“, Canto IV (1818)
When coldness wraps this suffering clay
In its last sleep—and Earth resumes her dust—
I but endure, and chafe not at my doom.
from “Manfred“, Act IV (1817)
There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society, where none intrudes…
from “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage“, Canto IV (1818)
Lord Byron
JAN NOBLE 