To him, who still would gaze upon the glory of the summer sun, there comes, when that sun will from him part, a sullen hopelessness of heart.
Interpretation
The quote reflects on the deep emotional pain experienced when one has to part from something beautiful and uplifting.
Edgar Allan Poe's quote captures the melancholy that arises when a person must bid farewell to the joys and warmth provided by the summer sun, symbolizing happiness or beautiful moments in life. This sorrow, characterized as a 'sullen hopelessness of heart,' speaks to the universal experience of loss and the emotional struggle that follows the departure from something that brings joy.
In practice
In a speech about the fleeting nature of happiness, one might quote Poe to emphasize the inevitability of loss.
But evil things, in robes of sorrow, Assailed the monarch's high estate; (Ah, let us mourn, for never morrow Shall dawn upon him desolate!) And round about his home the glory That blushed and bloomed, Is but a dim-remembered story Of the old time entombed.
Most writers - poets in especial - prefer having it understood that they compose by a species of fine frenzy - an ecstatic intuition - and would positively shudder at letting the public take a peep behind the scenes.
...the agony of my soul found vent in one loud, long and final scream of despair.
Where the good and the bad and the worst and the best have gone to their eternal rest.
I could have clasped the red walls to my bosom as a garment of eternal peace. "Death," I said, "any death but that of the pit!" Fool! might I have not known that into the pit it was the object of the burning iron to urge me?
In our endeavors to recall to memory something long forgotten, we often find ourselves upon the very verge of remembrance, without being able, in the end, to remember.
All the dark, intricate, puzzling providences at which we were sometimes so offended...we shall [one day] see to be to us, as the difficult passage through the wilderness was to Israel, "the right way to the city of habitation".
In the next few years the struggle will not be between utopia and reality, but between different utopias, each trying to impose itself on reality ... we can no longer hope to save everything, but ... we can at least try to save lives, so that some kind of future, if perhaps not the ideal one, will remain possible.
I am Oz, the Great and Terrible," spoke the Beast, in a voice that was one great roar. Who are you, and why do you seek me?
The rise and fall of civilizations in the long, broad course of history can be seen to have been largely a function of the integrity and cogency of their supporting canons of myth; for not authority but aspiration is the motivator, builder, and transformer of civilization.
I had the feeling . . . that my experience was very different from other peopleβs. (Are we all under this illusion?)
Society is a wave. The wave moves onward, but the water of which it is composed does not.
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