Blake Tarot - 5 of Music - Melancholy

[Bat Chicken]

Buryn's keywords: sorrows and regrets, awareness of mortality, disappointment in love, deep emotional conflict, repressed emotions, need to transcend and move on.

The art from this card is from Blake's illustration of Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard". The poem in the block, however, is from Blake's own "Songs of Experience - To Tirzah".

Where Blake's poem is about the desire to abandon the mortal skin in favour of a completeness with Spirit, Gray's Elegy is more about the contemplation of mortality. I'll have more to say about that in the next post.

"To Tirzah" is about dis-connection with the body, with family and mortal concerns; sex, pain, loss. The "Songs of Experience" are the second part of a series of poems that begin with the "Songs of Innocence" which are mainly about childhood and the period of free and unrestrained imagination that is lost in adulthood (Experience). Many of the poems in "Innocence" have their darkened mirror in the "Songs of Experience".

Here is a link to the plate of the original "To Tirzah" from "Songs of Experience":
http://www.blakearchive.org/exist/blake/archive/object.xq?objectid=songsie.z.illbk.52&java=yes

The card may be too hard to read, so here are the words in the block:

Whate'er is Born of Mortal birth
Must be consumèd with the Earth,
To rise from Generation free:
Then what have I to do with thee?

In the illustration we see the muse at a tombstone engraved with Blake's own name. With this illustration he is contemplating his own mortality. The words that accompany the original art from Gray's Elegy:

Far from the madding crowd's ignoble strife,
Their sober wishes never learn'd to stray;
Along the cool sequester'd vale of life,
They kept the noiseless tenour of their way.

Yet ev'n these bones from insult to protect,
Some frail memories still erected nigh,
With uncouth rhymes and shapeless sculpture deck'd,
Implores the passing tribute of a sigh.

Their name, their years, spelt by th' unletter'd muse,
The place of fame and epitaph supply;
And many a holy text around she strews,
That teach the rustic moralists to die.

For who to dumb forgetfulness a prey,
This pleasing anxious being e'er resing'd,
Left the warm precincts of the cheerful day,
Nor cast one longing ling'ring look behind?

 

[Bat Chicken]

Buryn calls this card 'melancholy'. Through melancholy we are often deeply inspired to create great art. The myth of artists in the 20th century bought forward the idea of the 'tortured' artist, constantly in conflict with powerful emotions that are the source of his art. Musician Sarah McLachlan even mentioned that her best work comes from dark places.

Gray's "Elegy" is one of my favourite poems. I found it to touch on the themes of my own work of late. The sadness and loss that are felt by many who behold an old, abandoned farmhouse and wonder about who the occupants were and what their lives were like.

I came across this poem quite accidentally in a used bookshop. There were two small leather books with gold stamped titles sitting on a table in the poetry and lit section. One was Gray's "Elegy". The leather was grey and worn to the texture of velvet. It was the tactile element of the book that got me to buy it. The words inside changed how I saw my own creative experience.

I am a painter, much of my subject matter is rural landscapes and abandoned farms. I am trained as a historian and many of the places I paint have incredible histories and folklore attached. My research begins with the legacy itself - the house.

When I read these words near the end of the Elegy, I knew I had found the words that described what I do:

For thee, who mindful of th' unhonour'd dead,
Dost in these lines their artless tale relate:
If chance, by lonely contemplation led,
Some kindred spirit shall enquire thy fate.

Through my own contemplation, I have found quiet remains and dug up the long and nearly lost histories of these houses and the people, slowly being reclaimed by nature. And soon all traces left will be gone. Do I feel the melancholy of those who once lived there? Sometimes, but, there are many emotions to be experienced on the creative journey.