Bleak&Icy

Man and Woman Contemplating the Moon by Caspar David Friedrich

Percy Bysshe Shelley, Ozymandias

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert ... Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp'd on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;

And on the pedestal these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

From I Have A Special Plan for This World (2000) by Thomas Ligotti

There are many who have designs upon this world
And dream of wild and vast reformations--
I have heard them talking in their sleep
Of elegant mutations and cunning annihilations
I have heard them whispering in the
corners of dark houses
And in the alleys and narrow backstreets
Of this crooked creaking universe
Which they--with their new designs--would make
straight and sound

But each of these new and ill-conceived designs
is deranged in its heart
For they see this world as if it were alone and original
And not as only one of countless others
whose nightmares all proceed
Like a hideous garden grown from a single seed

I have heard these dreamers talking in their sleep
And I stand waiting for them
As at the top of a darkened flight of stairs--
They know nothing of me
And nothing of the secrets of my special plan
While I know every crooked creaking step
of theirs

From "For K." (1925) by Eugenio Montale, trans. William Arrowsmith

O, distant one . . .
you are one of those restless ones wearied by the world's
evil, who wear their sufferings like an amulet.

But this I can say: the thought of your likeness
drowns my spasm of pain in tidal calm;
the candor of your image needles my dull memory
like the spear of a young palm . . .

“Truth is one, but error proliferates. Man tracks it down and cuts it up into little pieces hoping to turn it into grains of truth. But the ultimate atom will always essentially be an error, a miscalculation.”-Rene Daumal

"The Shakedown" (pub. 1955) by Gregory Corso

I spun another man's prayer
with the wind of my words
and another man's god
answered me with death.

It came in form of a mouth
and it kissed my mouth with breath.
Passionate breath; cold breath,
freezing my body in lifeless snow.

It floated before me, smiling;
and soon the sun appeared.
It melted me,
and the mouth knelt down to drink my terrible flow

Star of the Morning (1932) by Nicholas Roerich

"Hour of Grief," wr. c. 1912-14 by Georg Trakl, trans. Alexander Stillmark

Footfall in black follows the gleaming moon
In the autumnal garden,
By freezing wall sinks the almighty night.
O, the thorny hour of grief.

Silver the solitary man's light flickers in twilit room,
Dying by degrees, since that man ponders a dark thing
And the stony head is bent over transience,

Drunk with wine and nocturnal harmony.
The ear ever follows
The thrush's gentle lament in the hazel bush.

Dark Rosary hour. Who are you
Solitary flute,
Forehead, freezing, bowed over gloomy times.

"To Diotima," wr. 1797, by Friedrich Holderlin:

Beautiful being, you live as do delicate blossoms in winter,
In a world that's grown old hidden you blossom, alone.
Lovingly outward you press to bask in the light of the springtime,
To be warmed by it still, look for the youth of the world.
But your sun, the lovelier world, has gone down now,
And the quarrelling gales rage in an icy bleak night.

For you, Matthew, some lines from Cesare Pavese's "La terra e la morte":

Your face is sculpted stone,
your blood hard earth,
you come from the sea.
You gather and examine
and push away all things
like the sea. In your heart
silence and swallowed words
abide. You are dark.
Dawn for you is silence.

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