The Tragic Poet

Abstract

As winter began to come on and Lamb found himself alone with his unrelenting duties, his mood darkened. In September he sent to Coleridge, together with the ‘Lloyd’ poem, one ‘Written a Year After the Events’ (‘Alas! how I am chang’d’), in which he calls on God to restore him from the ‘spiritual death’¹ he has suffered ever since the loss of his mother, hoping that he and Mary will see their mother again beyond the grave, regretting once more the worldliness of the Ann Simmons episode, regretting his lost childhood. Mary is still away from home (he is not, he cries, sufficiently grateful for her recovery), his friends ‘gone diverse ways’:

I only am left, with unavailing grief

To mourn one parent dead, and see one live

Of all life’s joys bereft and desolate…

(P, 21)

Forgive me, O my Maker!

If in a mood of grief I sin almost

In sometimes brooding on the days long past,

And from the grave of time wishing them back…

‘Written a Year After the Events’

(P, 21)