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.
The Resurrection was the greatest ‘eucatastrophe’ possible in the greatest Fairy Story — and produces that essential emotion: Christian joy which produces tears because it is qualitatively so like sorrow, because it comes from those places where Joy and Sorrow are at one, reconciled, as selfishness and altruism are lost in Love.
What kind of world would we create if three times a day we activated our compassion and reason as we sat down to eat, if we had the moral imagination and the pragmatic will to change our most fundamental act of consumption?
Cold hopes swarm like worms within our living clay.
Thus Carol hit upon the tragedy of old age, which is not that it is less vigorous than youth, but that it is not needed by youth.
... and it is probably that there is some secret here which remains to be discovered.
On that gray street, with the smell of industrial smokes in the air and the afternoon bleeding away to evening, downtown Derry looked only marginally more charming than a dead hooker in a church pew.
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