Dark days

Bessie had a stroke tonight and had to be put down. It was a shite old day before that, but now it's confirmed as one to consign to the dustbin of memory. The following passage came to mind from nowhere on my train journey home tonight . . . perhaps it was a premonition? It's funny because, I HATED this poem when I had to study it for A' level English. But re-reading it tonight, it is the most perfect description of the way dark winter days like today make me feel.

Light the prime work of God to me is extinct,

And all her various objects of delight

Annull'd, which might in part my grief have eas'd,

Inferiour to the vilest now become

Of man or worm; the vilest here excel me,

They creep, yet see, I dark in light expos'd

To daily fraud, contempt, abuse and wrong,

Within doors, or without, still as a fool,

In power of others, never in my own;

Scarce half I seem to live, dead more then half.

O dark, dark, dark, dark, dark, amid the blaze of noon,

Irrecoverably dark, total Eclipse

Without all hope of day!

O first created Beam, and thou great Word,

Let there be light, and light was over all;

Why am I thus bereav'd thy prime decree?

The Sun to me is dark

And silent as the Moon,

When she deserts the night

Hid in her vacant interlunar cave.

Since light so necessary is to life,

And almost life itself, if it be true

That light is in the Soul,

She all in every part; why was the sight

To such a tender ball as th' eye confin'd?

So obvious and so easie to be quench't,

And not as feeling through all parts diffus'd,

That she might look at will through every pore?

Then had I not been thus exil'd from light;

As in the land of darkness yet in light,

To live a life half dead, a living death,

And buried; but O yet more miserable!

- from Samson Agonistes, by Milton