I STARTED dipping into Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy when I was myself a fairly melancholy teenager. I was reading it because I knew that Keats knew and loved it and drew inspiration and imagery from it, and I was, at that stage in my life, basically a wannabe Keats. In some respects, I still am. And I am still prone to melancholy, especially as the days darken and we turn towards winter.

I would distinguish here between melancholy and depression in its full clinical sense. Depression can be completely debilitating, and poetry alone won’t get you through it. Indeed, in that state, reading itself may be out of the question, and what you need is professional help.

But melancholy, experienced as a kind of elegiac undertow, flowing beneath and colouring your perceptions, can be, in its own strange way, a good teacher and a source of wisdom. Far from being an illness, melancholy can be a sane and healthy response to the world in which we find ourselves, with its fleeting beauties and its enduring sorrows. I am sure that Jesus felt it as part of the fullness of his humanity, and that he feels it with us when we are feeling it ourselves. That is part of what it means for him to be Emmanuel: God with us.

Perhaps, to be conscious of eternity and yet still to be in time, to “stay amid the things that will not stay”, as Geoffrey Hill puts it, is itself a kind of melancholy. For that reason, there is, I think, an element of elegy, of lamentation and exile, in all art, and especially in music; and, returning to Keats, I think it is, above all, for the yearning music of his rich language that I value his poetry. When he describes music in “The Eve of St Agnes”, he does so with the memorable phrase “the music yearning like a god in pain”. His “Ode to Melancholy” is still the poem that I go to when this seasonal melancholy is upon me, not just for the good advice that he gives in its second verse —

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. . .

 
— but also for the insight he offers in the final verse, that “in the very temple of Delight Veil’d Melancholy has her sovran shrine. . .”

Once one knows that, and has come to expect it, then one can approach Melancholy on more intimate terms, and, as Keats says, “taste the sadness of her might”.

It was only many years after first encountering Keats that I allowed myself, in a November poem of my own, “And Is It Not Enough?”, to touch directly on all he means to me:

And is it not enough that I should walk
Through low November mist along the bank,
When scents of woodsmoke summon, in some long
And melancholy undertone, the talk
Of those old poets from whose works I drank
The heady wine of an autumnal song?