Hi!!
This is my creative writing piece for the Romanticism elective. Any feedback would be greatly appreciated!!
Thank you
Dearest May,
It takes every strength within my soul to grasp such an undoing letter with the same love as I did before. I hoped to pen this letter to you, my sweetest love, in the solace of the English afternoon sunset, but rather I find myself in the anguish of fervent rainfall, attempting to evade the watery bullets as they target the marks on my page and provoke the bleeding ink to run. It is only when I receive your letters that I allow myself to become one with nature and transcend to a world beyond machinery and production. A world I knew once before. A world that knew me. I only hope this letter will fill my loneliness as I attempt to become apart of the soft roots under me and draw my connection closer to you. However as I write these words I can’t help but realise the dwindling connection I have with my world as it falls away. The dwindling connection I share with you my dear. It feels like an eternity between each moment I share with what is left of the world I once knew; a longer eternity than before. And so on this ninth day of August, I close my eyes and I wonder.
I brushed the corners of your letter with my fingertips and breathed in what could be the last physical traces of your scent from the boundless escapes within your piece. But do not be mistaken my love, they are embedded within me, and from them I will never travel far. It is truly magnificent my dearest May, the worlds you are able to so eloquently create from the confines of a home we once shared together. It makes me long for such a connection with my previous world. Within your script you have captured the very essence of my current landscape and my separation from this world which encompasses me daily. Please do tell me my love, how you understood the image of my town? How you could capture the rolling hills which have been forced to become one with the red brick establishments, which have stolen the beauty of the land. How you could capture the thick smoke which puffs from the chimneys like billies and joins with the now poisoned sky. I do so hope you do not tell me you have; as I have, faced your impending nightmare of this working world.
I began work two months ago this Sunday, but none of the sort you could imagine my fairest Lady. Rather, the prints of my hands have been stained with the strenuous fruits of our labour and the tears which cross my face at the agonising reality of my days. Truly I tell you, the smoke is a dear friend of my lungs and the thick black stain on my hand, as dark as the hull on the barge from which your farewelled me; cannot be removed. Perhaps not without the tender care of your touch to remove it. Or maybe even just the tender care of your touch to return home too. Truly I ask of you, to please not curse at my reluctance to bring you aboard with me. My sorrow eats at me deeper as the days blend into one long lifetime. I could not introduce you to an unnatural world away from the beauty of our dear farm in Saville.
We are alone here, however. Each day I stop and stare at the frame of the opening to what they call here a factory. It is my barnhouse, but not the kind you know dear May, it is cold and damp, sterile. It smells of old oils and the beaten sorrows of fathers who worked here; whose cries echoed and become trapped within the hollow metal foundations. In the privacy of my own mind, I consider it’s opening as the passage to my impending nightmare. It haunts me in my dreams, a hellish kind of prison I am bound to both day and night. The previous tortures scream at me as I touch my hands to metal. I never wish such a life upon you. I hope your days are filled with the wonders of our previous world, are enhanced with the blessed mysteries performed by the secret ministry of the wind dancing across the blooming blocks of green on our trees.
I miss the dear rolling fields of green like a spool on your threaded wheel. I felt at one with the mountains, danced on by the midday sun, dressed with the snow of the winter solstice and washed in the autumn showers. Here, there is no such thing. You would hate it here. My mind is filled with awe at every thought of you May. It entrances me in every consideration. My old landscape encompassed you. Without such, my life is soulless. Man was not made to be alone. It is our achilles heal, our strongest weakness, that we are nothing without the most basic human interactions.
This arduous labour draws to it a ferocious kind of master, one that is cold and ruthless; driven by the shallow gratification of wealth and power. Ours is a time of servitude and despair. The other men mirror my internal mourning for the delights of our families and the flourish splendours of the spring time heat. Day in, day out, my dearest love, we are choked by the chimney’s of change and progress which in each turn of the gears corrupt the lungs and souls of humanity; as did power corrupt the souls of those above us.
But my sweetest love, all I can seem to ponder is the corrupted love of ours, tainted by our separation and the harsh reality of our very days, alone. Love is merely the absence of hate and yet all that is absent is the truest of true loves, ours. Once I was defined by my love for you, but my world has encompassed me and sent me to a realm of new perspective. Love and consolation are not one my dear. It was through my love for you, that I was consoled. My love for you is no longer merely an emotional reciprocation of your love, but rather based on your greatness; the life you lead; my desire for you. I imagine a corrupted landscape. If our love for one another is based on the lives we lead in our physical world, evergreen and built through us; then why can all I see are ruins and a destroyed world. I cannot help but allow my mind to ponder around this very world, analysing the rolling rubble rather than the rolling hills, the broken foundations and wonder if maybe my dearest May, all we are is but the same. Rubble, broken foundations. Please in your next letter tell me it is not so. That I am wronger than wrong. That you too are consoled by my love. The detriment of our physical environment matches with the detriment of our love and our emotional landscape and that is a world that I do not wish to live in.
I beg of you to remember that I work in the name of you sweetest May. So I may come home to you one day and bear children with our love. So we may escape in the boundless lands and become one with the mountains which stare at us when we wake and when we rest, and the trees that sustain themselves for our living breath.
I must rest now, to arise in the cool dawn of morrow. Please hold me closer to you now more than ever, so I may feel your warmth through the kindness of nature.
Look at the moon my dearest may, so for a brief moment we may be holding our gaze through the same moon; and the boundless escapes of the sky.
Yours,
Thomas ‘Saville’ Easton
xx