March 24, 2011

In one day I taught the sad Keats movie Bright Star, The Trojan Women, and “In Memoriam.” No wonder at the end of it I should feel spent and melancholy. Have been developing such sympathetic communion with Keats that I felt for a moment today that his spirit was entering me. For a while I thought that he entered that I might protect him. For a while I thought he entered that he might enrich and inflame me. Perhaps it was both. I actually was Keats, with all the aspirations and enthusiasms and exploratory vigor we see in his letters, except that I had nobody to talk to, so all that was lost, except to my own memory.

Renaissance viols on the CD. Melancholy chooses music to deepen its own mood.