The Grief Room

 

                        Grief with a glass that ran

                                     —Swinburne 

Grief is a room that was built on to the side of consciousness, an attached dwelling, a room that may seem abandoned but it stays as part of one's psychic construction; unless you have experienced grief you don’t have this room. If you know grief you will never "get over" grief; once the room is constructed it is there permanently. Grief is the child of time, as sand falls through an hourglass grief is present, it accompanies each grain of sand on its journey. What will you do with your Grief Room? Will you inhabit it? Will you renovate it? Will you try to demolish the Grief Room? Or board up the entrance to this room? Or try to forget it exists? It may fall into disrepair, cobwebs on the walls, dust dust dust of the dead on the floors and under the single bed of dead desire. The abandoned Grief Room will not be ignored, it is inhabited by ghosts who play loud music, weep and wail, laugh uncontrollably, and talk their insane talk throughout the night and into the morning. 

Sunday, 12 April 2026

“Before The Beginning Of Years" by Algernon Charles Swinburne

 

Algernon Charles Swinburne

Before the beginning of years
There came to the making of man
Time, with a gift of tears;
Grief, with a glass that ran;
Pleasure, with pain for leaven;
Summer, with flowers that fell;
Remembrance, fallen from heaven,
And madness risen from hell;
Strength without hands to smite;
Love that endures for a breath;
Night, the shadow of light,
And life, the shadow of death.

And the high gods took in hand
Fire, and the falling of tears,
And a measure of sliding sand
From under the feet of the years;
And froth and the drift of the sea;
And dust of the laboring earth;
And bodies of things to be
In the houses of death and of birth;
And wrought with weeping and laughter,
And fashioned with loathing and love,
With life before and after
And death beneath and above,
For a day and a night and a morrow,
That his strength might endure for a span
With travail and heavy sorrow,
The holy spirit of man.

From the winds of the north and the south,
They gathered as unto strife;
They breathed upon his mouth,
They filled his body with life;
Eyesight and speech they wrought
For the veils of the soul therein,
A time for labor and thought,
A time to serve and to sin;
They gave him light in his ways,
And love, and space for delight,
And beauty, and length of days,
And night, and sleep in the night.
His speech is a burning fire;
With his lips he travaileth;
In his heart is a blind desire,
In his eyes foreknowledge of death;
He weaves, and is clothed with derision;
Sows, and he shall not reap;
His life is a watch or a vision
Between a sleep and a sleep.”

―Algernon Charles Swinburne