The melancholy in my May
Introduction and synopsis to May, an epic poem about youth by Herman Gorter
M. Kruijff, March 2020
May for everyone
The epic poem May, first published in the Dutch language in 1889 as Mei, stands out as one of the poetic milestones in Dutch literature. This lyrically rich modern saga brings to life ponderings on many themes: nature and love, the perishable and the eternal, the physical versus the spiritual, youth and melancholy. It is the story of the short but wonder-filled, hopeful, intense, and finally tragic journey of the stunningly unspoiled girl, May: through the Dutch landscape of sea, dunes, and pastures, on an ambitious search within the spiritual world and finally into submission in the face of mundane city life.
It has been argued that there is a May for everyone. May can be viewed through many different lenses. Much has been written about its sparkling depiction of nature in spring, and about May’s attempt and failure to unify the physical and the spiritual. And for good reason, as the first, second and third books of May cover these topics marvellously. It is difficult to capture in a single brief review the meaning and motivation behind a great work of art: it is hard to put a formal finger on the spontaneously inspired expression of an all-encompassing emotion – which May certainly is an example of. It is my hope that this translation will let you experience the same full spectrum of reflections as the original has done for many people in The Netherlands.
For me personally, May resonates with the sweet melancholy of my youth. I have always wanted to share that emotion with those around me but found that nearly impossible. In the end I realised that the best way for me to express it was by preparing and sharing a translation of May. Please allow me briefly to describe the melancholy in my May. It all starts, and every year again, with a new spring.
The spring is new
The spring as depicted in May is decidedly north-western European, with its wind-torn clouds in pale-blue skies over dark foamy waves and sandy beaches, their western flanks tinted pink and orange by the light of sunset in the salty air. Air thick with the scent of ozone. It is the spring that Monet immortalised in his painted impressions.
Yet the emotional association with spring is universal, and so is, more generally, the link between the months of the year and the cycle of life. It is so for many creatures of Nature. The primal response that this life story evokes in many supports the idea that this relationship between the seasons and our own lives is also deeply engraved in mankind.
In Roman times, March was the start of the cycle, the first month, the birth. Life grows, flourishes, explodes, levels, wanes, and finally withers and dies when the last month is reached. But life itself does not disappear, far from it. Every cycle plants the seeds for the next, and this seed magically refreshes and even increases life every new spring. Every new spring brings a new opportunity, a new hope, a new innocence, a new wonder. And in such boundless optimism the poem starts. A new sound.
Gorter chose to personify the month of May as the main character for his epic poem, quite possibly out of an already nostalgic love for the period of life it represents. Gorter was only 24 when he finished his Mei, and as he looks back on his childhood and first love, as for many, the memory of this phase of life is heavy with a colourful melancholy, one that must be captured before it is lost. May chronicles childhood and early adolescence: the growing up from a small world of beauty in every detail within arm’s reach not seen before, inside the endless sea of the unknown and looming loneliness; the first limitless love for another person – the greatest, unsurpassable love that seems to endow life with purpose and with the ambition to grasp for eternity; and, finally, the unavoidable confrontation with the limits of hope and innocence, the realisation of the unattainability of a perfect world. This is the moment when adolescence turns into grown-up life. Daily duties and city life take over. And that intensity of experience may never come back, may for ever remain the subject of nostalgia.
Melancholy
Melancholy is often simply defined as depression, but in my view, such a limited definition does not do justice to the depth and optimism that melancholy also embodies. Melancholy for me is an unbounded intensity of the senses, which due to the nature of most of reality, can sometimes be taken for depression. It borders on nostalgia perhaps: the realisation of the elusiveness of being, of the past that we struggle to remember, of beauty that we struggle to preserve, and of our feelings that can never be perceived by anyone outside our own body. Yes, in melancholy, emptiness and endlessness are experienced like deep holes and black voids with at best a few dim lights on the far horizon. But there is also beauty that comes with the brightest of colours. It jumps clawing at the eyes, engraving itself in them, it wants to be remembered and appreciated. It is magical, almost painful. Yet there is a draining sense of loneliness for not being able to share such an experience. This drives, I believe, the rich expressions of many melancholic artists. Indeed, this might be why melancholics can often only be artists. It might be why Gorter wrote his poem so elaborately and full of metaphors. May could well reflect a desperation to immortalise and share his feelings about this richest episode in his mental life.
If my personal experience can serve as one example, the realisation of my melancholy, the intensity of my experience of life, and the heaviness of it, came at age nine, when a friend of my father told us hunting stories one summer in the hilly fields of Denmark. We were camping, spending the evening with family and friends in a large tent, with only cloth to separate us from the sky. It may have rained that day, for I remember vividly the smell of soil and leaves, as my father's friend told us of the state of mind of the deer at night. For a deer, every night requires alertness if it is to survive to the next. There is no safety, and the cold or warmth, the wetness or the hungry drought inexorably comes as it comes. The lives of beasts collide, and in the dark, stories are played out between them that the morning doesn't remember. The hunter finds an antler; a dropping; deep footsteps in the mud; some hair on a twig. And suddenly from a silent bush bursts loudly a boar and the hunter becomes part of the story.
I thus learned the meaning of melancholy and to illustrate it, to test it, to nourish it, my father's friend recited to me many an episode from May, for he knew it largely by heart. I lived my life with an intensity of experience that sometimes scared me, often absorbed me. Whether I was photographing as many different kinds of mushrooms as I could find in the autumn forest of the Luxemburg Ardennes, climbing a tall, steep rock without my parents’ consent, or drawing a poster to raise ecological awareness – father and son covered in oil – these were activities I was dedicated to much more than any external motive would justify: melancholy filled my life with necessity.
My episode of melancholic life ended about 10 years later. I never suspected it would actually end; it felt like an inseparable part of who I was. But when my father suddenly died of cancer when I was 18 years old, I, at the time deeply dedicated to my studies, was thrown into a search for myself. I wondered where my grief lives inside me. What is it that truly drives me? How come I felt so lonely? How do others look at me, how should I behave towards others? I think I lost my innocence, and with it somehow the melancholy; that part of me just evaporated and did not return.
What has been lost inside you
This story is not unique. When adolescence ends, often melancholy wanes with it. Maybe this happened to Gorter as well. At first it feels like a relief, an easing of day-to-day experience in the face of duties, of work, of the pace of modern life. But then one starts to realise that what has replaced it is actually a kind of numbness. And you realise that people who have never known melancholy possibly have always been numb. It becomes a gentle torture to feel that one is missing out on the sensing of the nature of things that is somewhere out there, in the details. Indeed, in Nature. That flag moving erratically in the wind, undeterred and unaffected by the expectations of the world around it. That tile that does not lie flat, that always wobbles when you walk over it. And when you finally lift it, it bares a microcosmic world of tiny creatures, some of shapes and a manyness of legs you have never seen before, each living its tiny life in that tiny place. It becomes frustrating to find yourself unable to explain to yourself and others what exactly has been lost inside you.
You may want to recover some of that melancholy, search for it, try to revive it somehow. You start to revisit the same places, listen to the same songs, read the same books. You talk to the same people about the same things that submerged you into that absorbing state of mind before. Sometimes it works. But less and less.
Does the parting monologue of Balder, the young god that May so deeply falls in love with, give voice to this very same journey? When May finally finds him, he is searching for his soul, embittered by the loss of his eyesight. He can no longer truly experience all that is May: her elation or her youthful innocence. It is music, poetry, in which Balder still finds most of his former self. But he gets stuck in there, locked within himself. And May, heartbroken, disillusioned, cannot deal much better with her own loss. What remains for her is most people’s reality: an all-absorbing effort to get by. But that is not her. And she withers.
In the wind
It may only be back in nature, without the pressures of modern life, that one can remember that original spark. And it may pour into you a sense of gratitude and fulfilment that you have lived without for so long. In the forest, flowery dunescapes or in the mountains: that is where she thrived. You are back into the world of May.
Gorter’s people, the Dutch, love the wind. They love to stand on the beach, even in autumn when it is cold, and let the wind blow through their hair, to get their feet back into that primal world, even for a moment. With each grain of sand carried by the wind through the hair, along the skin of the face or hands, some of the pressures of life are drained away. It is easy to appreciate the sun, a white blanket of snow and the silence of the ice. If one can appreciate even the wind, one can stand up to all seasons.
Thus I hope May can also impact your life if you let it.
There are more than 4380 lines in May. Each line, with its rigid rhyme and the pliable, reassuring regularity of the iambic pentameter, acts like one brush stroke in an Impressionist painting, putting you in a trance that plunges you into the idea that Gorter wants to share with you.
If you are young in mind, still blossoming and full of wonder, I hope May will invite you to entrust images and memories to the mind, and cherish the tinting of it by emotion and the filtering lens of retrieval. And if you once were so, but now are seeking the colour of your memories, these blessed abilities to create them, to soak in the light and dark of days gone by, to be that observant again, to open the mind once more to nature and its bare, beautiful, sometimes brutal reality, I believe that reading May could show the way there and lead you back to it.
To stand in the wind, the rain, the sun, the snow, whatever the season, and experience full appreciation and love of every single day. Of life.
The spring is new and new the sound it brings
May, an epic poem about youth is available in stores in English-only and bilingual editions.
Synopsis of May
Book I - The girl May is born from the Sun and the Moon. She arrives on the shores of Holland and travels through the flowery dunescapes. The sea and all its magical creatures celebrate May's arrival, but at the same time, they mourn her sister April's death. Everywhere May sets foot, springtime comes to life in all its wonder and beauty. May eventually meets a stream lady, who tells May of the coming and going of the seasons. May also meets the poet, but soon she leaves him, for new paths are inviting her.
Book II - The poet waits in vain for May, while she has moved on and travelled far. She has heard a mesmerising voice in the distance and longs for more of it. Then the young god Balder appears. He sings of how he was once all-powerful, until one day he woke up blind and in loneliness. But he leaves May behind. She is now desperately in love and rises through a magical cloud-world in search of him. She ends up in Valhalla with the supreme god Wodan and Balder's bride Idun. They are delighted to hear that Balder is alive but they don't know where he is. May runs off and is then pulled into a world of music that is Balder's soul. Balder himself approaches her. He tells her that he wants to be eternal and therefore must remain with his soul only.
Book III – May, disillusioned, has sunk back to Earth. There she reunites with the poet. He shows her the bustle of his town, but that cannot console her. May spends her final days with the poet. While her sister June arrives and May withers, the city life continues undisturbed until finally, and inevitably, the poet is left without May.
Credits
Photos in this article by Hylke de Vries, M. Kruijff. Illustrations Eva Polakovičová, Cisca Baars.