Sorrow is one of my favorite themes, perhaps because it is such a pervasive feeling, and one which is a close companion to all of us "sensitive" types.  You know who you are!!!  It has a profound mystical dimension because it directs us away from triviality and toward the essential; away from the ephemeral and toward the eternal.  I would go so far as to say that sorrow is a true friend and that only shallowness, evasion and denial can do without her.  I'll go even further and assert that sorrow is, in this world, the handmaid of Wisdom.  Here is another Poetic offering:  a prose poem.

                                     TO MELANCHOLY

O Melancholy, who can ever love enough those eyes of yours, remote and intimate, which hold each votary without exclusion in their unsullied and compassionate gaze?  Or your flawless and sapiential brow which soars upward like a pure cloud of marble - cool, serene and smoothe - and leaves us alone with the breadth of your diffused and muted light...

Your sighs settle like pale, golden leaves which fall and sink in reflecting pools of pearl, or spill whispering down the slopes of abandoned parks, or drift against the lips of empty fountains...

You are the dim, translucent veil which time drapes over childhood's pure and radiant delights.  O how you teach us to despise vulgarity, distraction!  And how your virginal alchemy transmutes our failures into hushed, sustaining music!

                                                                            - Tod Jones