AS WE leave British Summer Time (that fictional Utopia) behind, and fall back into darker nights and drearier weather in the mirky days of November, there are some of us who will find our inner weather following suit. Whatever one thinks of the scientific validity of seasonal affective disorder (SAD) as a term for a tendency to winter depression, many people feel a melancholy undertow in this season, or, at least, a greater difficulty in kindling hope to forfend the emotional darkness.

As someone who prefers poetry to prose, my prescription for myself in this season is poetry, not Prozac, but not necessarily cheerful ditties, which often make things only worse. On the contrary, it is precisely the poetry that gives voice to our gloom which gives it relief: to have expressed it at all is to have begun the healing.

Naturally, I could turn to Larkin, or to The Waste Land; but it is often the much-neglected Victorian poets who best express the worst of our inner weather. They told me at school that the Victorians were stifled and repressed, whereas we, in contrast, were free and uninhibited. I think that it’s the other way round. Ours is an age of self-censorship, of carefully curated Instagram cheerfulness and success, hiding quiet desperation, whereas our Victorian forebears could always find expression and, with it, empathy for their grief.

So, in his bicentenary year, I turn again to the poetry of George MacDonald. He is probably best known for the beautiful enchantments of his fantasy writing, inspiring Tolkien and Lewis; but I also enjoy his more personal and confessional poetry, and, especially, at this time of year, the opening of his poem “God, not Gift”:

Gray clouds my heaven have covered o’er;
My sea ebbs fast, no more to flow;
Ghastly and dry, my desert shore
Parched, bare, unsightly things doth show.

That’s a perfect expression of how many of us sometimes feel! And he goes on, boldly, to lay the blame on God:

’Tis thou, Lord, cloudest up my sky;
Stillest the heart-throb of my sea;
Tellest the sad wind not to sigh,
Yea, life itself to wait for thee!

And, yet, it is just at this point, when even hope seems to disappear, that faith and trust are deepened:

Shall hope too go, that I may trust
Purely in thee, and spite of all?
Then turn my very heart to dust-
On thee, on thee, I yet will call.

At last, amidst the emptiness — indeed, because of the emptiness — MacDonald knows that it was for God and God alone that he hungered:

List! list! his wind among the pines
Hark! hark! that rushing is his sea’s!
O Father, these are but thy signs! —
For thee I hunger, not for these!

Seamus Heaney once said that great poetry offered us “phrases that feed the soul”; that last line, “For thee I hunger, not for these!”, with its memorable internal rhyme and wordplay, is just such a phrase: soul food for dark days.