After doing some yard work today, I thought the poem A Garden by H. P. Lovecraft would be a good and fitting read since I'm now too tired and sore for much else. I found it here http://freeread.com.au/@RGLibrary/HPLovecraft/Poetry-Essays/SelectedPoems.html#p13, a very nice website with a good selection of Lovecraft poems posted in a user friendly manner with some cute graphics as well.
This poem is a good example of Lovecraft's genius in its sweet descriptive language and its timely pace with a little twist at the end. It begins innocently as a little stroll outside but turns gray, gray becomes decay. Soon silence and the odor of death and the sense of being utterly alone bring on a feeling of familiarity from the past that he can't quite place until the last two lines of the sixteen line poem. The rotten withered garden is his heart.
It's such a powerful piece of art that brings feelings of familiarity, not only to the speaker, but to anyone at one point in life or another. That poem could have described myself not too long ago as I gazed upon and identified with my rotten and crumbling concrete steps:
I'm glad I was able to pull myself out of that funk! It happens to everyone now and then. The barren grayness of winter does eventually come to an end and hope returns once again. Lovecraft knew this when he couldn't place the source of the familiarity of the dead and rotting garden implying that it had evidently been quite some time since he knew such sadness. If we are in such a mood, all we can do is keep forcing ourselves to get up each day and one day the gloomy grayness will lift and sweet springtime will rise again.
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