Though summer’s rife and the warm rose in season,
Rebuke me not, I have a winter sort of reason.
- Edna St. Vincent Millay – Sonnet XXXV
Dear Edna, cheer-up. Celebrate the sunny summer day. Live, stop and smell the roses. Cast gloom aside. Rejoice in the blue sky. Banish gray from your mind. “Well enough, but where will the gray be banished to? Never far away.
The blue sky will return to gray. The rose will crumple and die. Winter will bury the warmth of summer in icy snow”.
We should enjoy the good while we have it. “Yes and we appreciate the good all the more when we reflect on the transience of happy times and the inevitability of sadness. These are the seasons of this world: happy; sad; happy; sad; happy; sad - over and over again”.
I prefer to whistle through my troubles. “I suppose you whistle through the graveyard as well. Denial changes nothing”.
Oh, Edna, do you want us all to be as unhappy as you. Do you expect us all to be tight-lipped, always looking over our shoulders for trouble coming around the corner.
Is happiness foolish?
“Happiness is not foolish, only temporary. So too is sadness. It is foolish to think either will last for long. I can laugh in the sunshine as well as anyone. I do not forget about the sorrows I know will comes. Both have their season. It is wise to expect both. I am not unhappy”.
You sound unhappy. I can’t imagine you getting any closer to a laugh than a pale smile. You are the quiet person at any party who sits in the corner wondering when you can politely leave. You look ympathetically at the festive crowd. You remain apart.
“Ah, well. You have me there. Poets are aways apart. Our work is necessary lonely. Well-turned phrases, even when about frivolity, rarely come in the midst of frivolity. Poets tend to view the world from beyond the world”.
Is that what you mean by a winter sort of reason?
“Yes, in part. Though it’s not confined to poets. Anyone who watches life dispassionately will see the pattern more easily than those caught in the passion of daily struggle or the passion of temporary rejoicing”.
Sounds gloomy to me . . . Mmm, look at the time.
Got to go, I’m late for the party.
“Have fun”.