Welcome to the Abyss (With a Feather Quill)
Ah, Romanticism—our old, overemotional, candlelit friend. In Episodes 1 and 2, we pranced through flowery meadows of poetic yearning and heart-fluttering delusion. But today, we blow out the candles, close the velvet curtains, and descend into the basement of the Romantic psyche—the place where beauty meets madness, and art stares into the void.
This episode is not for the faint of heart, the optimists, or the proudly well-adjusted. We’re talking death, decay, obsession, sublime terror, and the poetic equivalent of scrolling through existential memes at 3 a.m.
Romanticism had a shadow. And today, we’re dancing in it.
Gothic Isn’t Just a Phase, Mom
By the late 18th century, the Gothic was becoming a full-blown literary movement, and Romanticism gleefully dove into its pitch-black depths. Think decaying castles, stormy landscapes, Byronic antiheroes, and that delicious blend of fear and awe known as the sublime.
Let’s kick things off with a poem by Charlotte Dacre, a Gothic novelist and poet often overshadowed by her male contemporaries. Her poem The Confession is a raw glimpse into a female psyche unraveling under guilt and desire:
The Confession
by Charlotte Dacre
I sin’d—but not in thought, nor word, nor deed—
Yet in my soul there lurk’d a wish unholy:
My virtue fled—my heart refus’d to plead,
Though Reason whisper’d with her counsel slowly.
I saw him—and I knew he was not mine—
I spoke not—but I look’d—’twas very wrong:
He did not know me, yet his eyes divine
Read mine, and linger’d on my glance too long.
No vow I broke—no hand I touch’d in sin,
Yet when I pray’d, my prayer was not sincere—
For him I dream’d, and felt the fiend within,
And call’d on Heaven, yet held my idol dear.
This isn’t about ghosts or albatrosses—it’s about the gothic interior: the mind as a haunted house. It’s the kind of darkness you carry with you quietly, beneath the folds of respectability. The true horror? Knowing your own capacity for destruction.
Dacre’s speaker is consumed not by action, but by thought—precisely the kind of introspective guilt and moral ambiguity that Romanticism made fashionable. The poem explores unacted desire as its own form of sin, a quietly devastating form of emotional rot. This inward collapse is the real horror—self-awareness without resolution, guilt without redemption.
Romanticism peeled back the wallpaper of politeness and pointed to the rot underneath. And then, like a proper drama queen, it wept beautifully in the candlelight.
Nature Isn’t Your Therapist. It Wants to Kill You.
Forget peaceful lakes and chirping birds—this is nature as destroyer. The Romantics worshipped the raw, terrifying power of the natural world because it reminded them that they were small, mortal, and profoundly insignificant.
Let’s give the spotlight to James Thomson, whose massive poem The Seasons prefigured the Romantic obsession with wild natural forces. His section on Winter is a snow-swept hymn to sublimation, isolation, and the terrifying beauty of a world indifferent to human life:
from Winter
by James Thomson
Through the hush’d air the whitening shower descends,
At first thin wav’ring; till at last the flakes
Fall broad and wide and fast, dimming the day
With a continual flow. The cherished fields
Put on their winter robe of purest white.
‘Tis brightness all: save where the new snow melts
Along the mazy current. Low, the woods
Bow their hoar head; and, ere the languid sun
Faint from the west emits his evening ray,
Earth’s universal face, deep hid and chill,
Is one wide dazzling waste that buries life.
This is not the forest bathing of your wellness influencer’s TikTok. This is nature swallowing you whole in the silence of snow. There is beauty here—but it’s lonely, cold, and offers no comfort.
Thomson paints a scene of profound stillness and visual beauty that is—at its core—deadly. The snow doesn’t simply fall; it erases. It buries. His winter isn’t cozy—it’s a gleaming shroud. This is nature as indifferent god, one that neither listens nor cares, but remains terrifyingly beautiful. In many ways, Thomson anticipates the Romantics’ obsession with the sublime: the moment when beauty overwhelms and becomes terror.
We want nature to soothe us, to restore our sense of self. Thomson says: no. Sometimes, it just ends you.
Sublime Terror and Existential Whiplash
Let’s bring in Friedrich Schiller—playwright, philosopher, and expert in metaphysical dread. His poem The Gods of Greece laments the rise of rationality and the spiritual bankruptcy it left in its wake. It’s part theology, part panic attack.
from The Gods of Greece
by Friedrich Schiller (trans. William Wordsworth)
Ye in the age gone by,
Who ruled the world—a world how lovely then!—
And guided still the car of destiny!
Ye dwellers in the Unseen Power of men!
Oh, ye were holy once! Ye dwellings true!
And reverenced as God’s bright avatars!
Where are ye now? What spectres meet our view?
What shade-revealing mockery bars
The gates once open to the heart of man?
The stars shine on, but colder now they glance;
The sacred grove is mute; no fates advance.
This is the spiritual hangover of Enlightenment: once we believed in gods who laughed and wept with us. Now? We have cold stars and mute groves.
Schiller isn’t merely nostalgic—he’s accusing modernity of stripping the world of wonder. The poem mourns not the loss of specific deities, but the loss of communion. The “sacred grove” is now just a clump of trees. The stars still shine, but offer no guidance. He’s lamenting the disenchantment of the world—a core Romantic anxiety.
It’s a cosmic form of ghosting. The divine left us on read.
Death as Devotion – The Dream-Mysticism of Novalis
If the rest of the Romantics flirted with death, Novalis wanted to marry it.
A German mystic and poet, Novalis viewed death not as an end, but as a spiritual homecoming. In Hymns to the Night, written after the death of his fiancée Sophie, he constructs an entire theology of nocturnal transcendence. Night becomes a divine mother, death a beloved, and the afterlife a mystical union with eternity.
from Hymns to the Night (Part I)
by Novalis (translated by George MacDonald)
Sacred, inscrutable Night!—
Far off is the world—
sunk in a deep grave:
wast thou only a dream,
and did the earth but jest?
Art thou only a mask
for the fearful life of day,
and does reality dwell
in thy realm of silence?
For each pain
there grows a flower in thy field;
and where I have buried
my sorrow, stands a chapel.
This isn’t just poetic melancholy—it’s metaphysical architecture. Novalis is building a universe where grief has geography, and silence speaks louder than light. The “night” in his poems isn’t merely absence of day—it’s a sacred presence, where human longing collapses into cosmic love.
His use of paradox—grief as growth, sorrow as sanctuary—is what gives the poem its mystical texture. Unlike Byron’s darkness or Keats’ fatal women, Novalis isn’t afraid. He welcomes death the way one welcomes a secret lover. Death is not dramatic; it’s intimate.
You can see why the 21st century would struggle with this. We aestheticize death with filters and fonts—Novalis offered it a temple.
The real twist? Hymns to the Night isn’t nihilistic. It’s hopeful, in that strange, aching way where hope and sorrow are indistinguishable. For Novalis, pain is the beginning of eternity.
He doesn’t want to conquer death. He wants to hold its hand and walk home.
Gothic Gluttony – Matthew Lewis and the Joy of Being Damned
If Novalis longed to die gently in the arms of eternity, Matthew Lewis wanted to kick open the gates of hell and throw a party inside.
Lewis was the enfant terrible of the Gothic tradition. His novel The Monk (1796) is a fever dream of lust, murder, ghosts, demons, and bleeding nuns. It reads like a hallucination scribbled in a candlelit panic—and became an overnight scandal and sensation.
But Lewis also dabbled in poetry. His verses aren’t subtle—they are full-throttle Gothic melodrama. Let’s look at his poem The Fragment—a short burst of blasphemy, love, and damnation.
The Fragment
by Matthew Lewis
‘Tis midnight!—On the mountains brown
The cold round moon shines deeply down;
Blue roll the waters, blue the sky
Spreads like an ocean hung on high,
Bespangled with those isles of light,
So wildly, spiritually bright…
Lost in a desert without end,
Where no beginning, no end can blend.
Here we have Romanticism going full goth opera. The speaker isn’t just alone—he’s cosmically abandoned. Midnight becomes a sacred hour of ruin, and even the stars feel like a judgment.
Lewis’s poetic voice leans into excess: spiritual longing curdles into despair, beauty turns sickly sweet. And like many Gothic creators, he fixates on the body and its betrayals—decay, desire, damnation.
His work anticipates horror tropes we now take for granted: the tormented priest, the forbidden chamber, the punishment of desire. The Monk gave us the blueprint for sexy doom—and The Fragment distills that ethos in miniature.
You could argue Lewis was the first writer to say: “Let’s make this creepy—and also kind of hot.” And culture loved it. Still does.
Mirror, Mirror – Romanticism’s Digital Descendants
So what do a guilt-ridden Victorian woman, a snow-blind seasonal poet, a disillusioned German philosopher, a death-obsessed mystic, and a scandal-loving chaos goblin have in common?
Us.
Modern culture is soaked in Romantic residue—we’ve just rebranded it with better fonts and worse attention spans. We still crave transcendence. We still romanticize the broken. We just do it with Spotify playlists called “existential indie autumn” and TikTok therapy sessions filmed with ring lights.
Take the aestheticization of sadness. In the Romantic era, you wrote sonnets in graveyards and waxed poetic about moonlight and sorrow. Today, we caption crying selfies with “healing isn’t linear” and monetize our breakdowns on social media.
Romanticism said: suffering makes you deeper. Culture today says: suffering makes you marketable.
We haven’t moved past the death-worship or the fascination with emotional collapse—we’ve turned it into branding. Burnout is a personality. Anxiety is a hashtag. Depression is moodboarded with pale color palettes and soft piano loops.
But here’s the uncomfortable truth: beneath all the ironic detachment and branding is the same ache. The same human cry for meaning, connection, and release. When Novalis whispered to the Night, when Lewis screamed into the abyss, when Schiller longed for a god who’d ghosted him—they were doing what many of us still do.
Only we’ve replaced temples with timelines. Sacred groves with curated feeds. And instead of hymns, we send out 280-character prayers into the void, hoping for likes.
Romanticism didn’t die. It just got digitized.
And perhaps that’s why it still speaks to us—not because we’ve inherited its eloquence, but because we’ve inherited its hunger.
Light a Candle. Or Don’t.
Romanticism wasn’t afraid of the dark. It waded into it, wrapped itself in velvet, and made a home there.
Its poets and thinkers gave us more than melodrama. They gave us language for what it means to suffer with style—to be crushed by the weight of existence but still reach out a trembling hand and write something beautiful.
Today, we’re still doing that. Whether we know it or not.
So the next time you find yourself alone in your room, overthinking your life, surrounded by empty LaCroix cans and ambient despair—just know: you’re in very Romantic company.
You, too, are dancing in the shadow.
Until next time, keep your metaphors dark, your candles flickering, and your soul at least a little bit haunted.
