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The dark sides of beauty

Many are distraught by that tremendous melancholy
of those sentimental moods and melodies
that fill the golden music of Chopin
and makes it overwhelming,
and he was a sick divinity indeed,
just crying all his life for all his lost engagements,
all the girls that wouldn't have him for his poverty
or for George Sand, who just maltreated him
and made his illness worse by mental cruelty.
But there is one more side to it, an even darker one,
the passion and the storms,
the raving fury of the world's political injustice;
and that's where you have the universal illness:
It was not Chopin's but all the world's.
His Polish motherland was cruelly occupied,
suppressed, stamped down and ruined by the Russians,
and for that Chopin's heart bled itself to death
not from relentless harm and righteous fury
but from bottomless compassion.
What he did was to cry all his soul out
and to waste it in a pathos of wild mad and bitter sorrow
with no ends, no cure and nothing else for it but hopelessness,
like in the case of any bolting horse,
that can't be stopped except by her own heartbreak.
That's the darkness, the supremest terror,
the compassion that can find no end,
no bottom to its sorrow
and no choice but to continue crying out
forever.

Poetry by Christian Lanciai