July 13: John Clare (1793-1864)

[Image description: Engraved portrait of the poet John Clare, shown with tousled hair, wearing a suit with a heavy coat, vest, and a shirt loosely tied up with a print kerchief]

English poet John Clare was born on this date in 1793, in Helpston, near Peterborough. He was the son of a laborer, and himself a laborer, a gardener, who wrote poetry when he could, to be published by an acquaintance. His earnings were never enough to adequately support his wife and seven children (and his alcohol consumption); he experienced depression and later erratic behavior. In 1837 he was placed in a private asylum. After four years, he tried to live at home again, but his wife soon committed him again, this time to the Northampton General Lunatic Asylum, where he eventually died in 1864. It was at Northampton that he wrote his best known poem, "I Am," reflecting his sense of being abandoned by friends and loved ones, his vivid torments, and his longing for rest, "untroubling and untroubled."

I AM
John Clare

I am; yet what I am none cares or knows,
My friends forsake me like a memory lost;
I am the self-consumer of my woes,
They rise and vanish in oblivious host,
Like shades in love and death's oblivion lost;
And yet I am! and live with shadows tost

Into nothingness of scorn and noise,
Into the living sea of waking dreams,
Where there is neither sense of life nor joys,
But the vast shipwreck of my life's esteems;
And e'en the dearest--that I loved the best--
Are strange--nay, rather stranger than the rest.

I long for scenes where man has never trod;
A place where woman never smil'd or wept;
There to abide with my creator, God,
And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept:
Untroubling and untroubled where I lie;
The grass below--above the vaulted sky.

Conference: Before Depression (19-21 June)

[Image description: A blue background fades to white, with a grey spiral around a torn bit of dictionary with the words "Melacholy. adj." and "1. Gloomy; dismal" legible, and the title "Before Depression, 1660-1800" beneath that in blue]

This conference program titled "Before Depression: The Representation and Culture of Depression in Britain and Europe, 1660-1800," caught my attention today--the conference itself is just part of a three-year project that also includes an ongoing lecture series, planned publications and an exhibit this summer of visual representations of depression in the 18th century. Too bad for me it's all happening at the University of Northumbria and the University of Sutherland--but good for any of you who happen to be in that neighborhood. If you attend any component of this project, I'd love to hear more about it.

Blue Christmas/Darkest Night services

[Image: a newspaper announcement for a "Blue Christmas" service tonight.]

Across North America, churches (mostly mainline Protestant or interfaith congregations) are offering "blue Christmas" or "Darkest Night" services tonight, in recognition that not everyone experiences the holidays as a time of joy and celebration. They invite folks who, for reasons related to depression, anxiety, pain, loneliness, grief, or personal crisis, want to avoid the traditional jollity and cheer of community gatherings, to attend a winter solstice service that more closely reflects a complicated relationship with the season.

I haven't attended one of these services, but the effort is encouraging: better than casual "hey, cheer up, it's Christmas" responses, anyway. It may be a once-a-year thing for some congregations, but in others, such offerings could well represent a broader commitment to respect and address difficulty and diversity.

November 17: Dahlia Ravikovitch (1936-2005)

When I am depressed, I am less than a driven leaf.

Today (or November 27) would have been the seventieth birthday of Israeli poet and translator Dahlia Ravikovitch (also sometimes found as Dalia Rabikovitz), who died last year in Tel Aviv (suicide was presumed, but later dismissed, as the cause). Ravikovitch has been called "the greatest Hebrew woman poet of all time," and her ten books of poetry include verses taught to Israel's schoolchildren and set to music. She also translated poems by Yeats, TS Eliot, and Poe, as well as PL Travers's Mary Poppins. She slept days, and wrote in the night. She wrote only by hand (no typewriter or computer), and kept every draft she ever penned, back to school notebooks from childhood.

Ravikovitch spoke and wrote about her life with depression, including hospitalizations and several suicide attempts. One of the stories in her collection Winnie Mandela's Football Team (1997) is set in a psychiatric hospital; her poem "Pride" ends with the lines

I told you, when rocks crack, it comes as a surprise.
All the more so, people.

August 11: Louise Bogan (1897-1970)

American poet Louise Bogan was born on 11 August 1897, in a mill town in Maine. She reviewed poetry for the New Yorker for almost thirty years; and she experienced depression throughout her life, times she described as "tearless sorrow." She was (voluntarily) committed for psychiatric hospitalization more than once in the 1930s.

Here's a poem by Bogan (copied from here):

Evening in the Sanitarium

The free evening fades, outside the windows fastened with decorative iron grilles.
The lamps are lighted; the shades drawn; the nurses are watching a little.
It is the hour of the complicated knitting on the safe bone needles;
of the games of anagrams and bridge;
The deadly game of chess; the book held up like a mask.

The period of the wildest weeping, the fiercest delusion, is over.
The women rest their tired half-healed hearts; they are almost well.
Some of them will stay almost well always: the blunt-faced woman whose thinking dissolved
Under academic discipline; the manic-depressive girl
Now leveling off; one paranoiac afflicted with jealousy.
Another with persecution. Some alleviation has been possible.

O fortunate bride, who never again will become elated after childbirth!
O lucky older wife, who has been cured of feeling unwanted!
To the suburban railway station you will return, return,
To meet forever Jim home on the 5:35.
You will be again as normal and selfish and heartless as anybody else.

There is life left: the piano says it with its octave smile.
The soft carpets pad the thump and splinter of the suicide to be.
Everything will be splendid: the grandmother will not drink habitually.
The fruit salad will bloom on the plate like a bouquet
And the garden produce the blue-ribbon aquilegia.

The cats will be glad; the fathers feel justified; the mothers relieved.
The sons and husbands will no longer need to pay the bills.
Childhoods will be put away, the obscene nightmare abated.

At the ends of the corridors the baths are running.
Mrs. C. again feels the shadow of the obsessive idea.
Miss R. looks at the mantel-piece, which must mean something.

See also:

Nell Casey, ed. Unholy Ghost: Writers on Depression (Harper Collins 2001).

June 3: Robert Tannahill (1774-1810)

Scottish poet Robert Tannahill was born on June 3, 1774. He was known to be sensitive most of his life, with a melancholy that would now probably be labeled depression. Here's how David Semple described Tannahill's state of mind in an 1875 edition of his works:

The Poet, it will be observed from our preceding remarks, was sinking under constitutional disease, and the symptoms of aberration of mind were developing. His mental strength had been overworked, and his mind, like a musical chord brought to its fullest tension, was ready to snap. His fine feelings were overcome by unjust criticism, and the sensibility of his nature overwhelmed with captious remarks. Both diseases were rapidly increasing, and his reason hung like the beam trembling in the balance. His relations observed the progress of the physical disease, but they were loth to believe he was suffering from a disorder the most calamitous that can afflict the human race.

The "constitutional disease" mentioned here was tuberculosis, which had already taken the lives of his father, his sister, and three of his brothers. Just before he turned 36, Tannahill slipped from his family's house in the night, and drowned himself in the Paisley Canal. Few of his unpublished poems survive--he burned the manuscripts shortly before his death, after a publisher rejected his work. The Complete Tannahill is an online archive of his verse.