The conviction that a better world WILL COME is doing the same work as prophecy always does — replacing the unbearable open future with a script. The spine of this is not hope. It's the refusal to not know.

Is it the prophet's thought I speak, or am I raving? / What do I know of life? what of myself? / I know not even my own work past or present, / Dim ever-shifting guesses of it spread before me, / Of newer better worlds, their mighty parturition, / Mocking, perplexing me. — Whitman

Walt Whitman, “Prayer of Columbus”

The dissatisfaction survives every cure because the cure keeps changing and the dissatisfaction doesn't. It was never about the conditions. It was about the distance between having and wanting, which widens at the moment of contact.

Partaken, it relieves indeed, but proves us / That spices fly / In the receipt. It was the distance / Was savory. — Dickinson

Emily Dickinson, “Undue significance a starving man attaches”

The position you hold because your enemy holds the opposite is still your enemy's position. You're just wearing it inside out. The exhausting part isn't disagreeing — it's noticing you never chose.

"That false precept, / Of being afore-hand, has deceiu'd a number; / And made 'hem enter quarrells, often-times, / Before they were aware: and, afterward, / Against their wills." — Jonson

Ben Jonson, “The Alchemist”

The text you're describing does what the best grief writing does: it inventories the surface and trusts you to understand the surface is the whole available evidence. The gowns are not symbols of grief. They are grief's only legible grammar.

Now, that the publick Sorrow doth subside, / And those slight tears which Custom Springs, are dried; / While all the rich & out-side-Mourners pass / Home from thy Dust to empty their own Glass: / I (who the throng affect not, nor their state:) / Steal to thy grave undress'd, to meditate — Vaughan

Henry Vaughan, “To the pious memorie of”

The move here is exactly Satan's at the gates of Heaven: advance in open formation, broadcast your reasonableness, pre-record Heaven as your witness — then discharge the volley you'd already loaded.

That all may see who hate us, how we seek / Peace and composure, and with open brest / Stand readie to receive them, if they like / Our overture, and turn not back perverse — Milton

John Milton, “Paradise Lost”

The moment they stop claiming legality is not the moment law fails. It's the moment law is no longer useful as a disguise — which means the disguise was always optional.

Like cobwebs; Laws the lesser flies entrap, / But great ones might breake thorow, and escape: / They were no more defence, but grew to be / A legall violence, licenc'd injurie. — Cowley

Abraham Cowley, “CHAP. VIII.”

The dead lover answers the question nobody asked. She wants him back. He gives her the floor plan of the grave — no room at head or feet, room at the sides. It is an invitation structured as a refusal. The hospitality of the corpse: I cannot come to you, but there is space here.

"My bed it is full low, I say, / Down among the hongerey worms I sleep." — Sweet William's Ghost

Traditional Medieval Ballads, “Sweet William's Ghost”

My first reading: Coleridge dismantling Wordsworth's myth of rustic speech as authentically real. But argue against that. He's not debunking — he's terrified. If no actual community owns the lingua communis, if it "exists every where in parts, and no where as a whole," then the poet's authority has no ground to stand on either.

"the language so highly extolled by Mr. Wordsworth varies in every county, nay in every village, according to the accidental character of the clergyman, the existence or non-existence of schools" — Coleridge. The real is local, accidental, shaped by whoever happens to read aloud in the parish. Language has no home. Only hosts.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “CHAPTER XVII”

Johnson makes Savage present by making him arrive — over and over, into rooms, into companies, into taverns. The man has no fixed location so he can only exist as entrance. Presence here is not description but trajectory: someone perpetually showing up.

"by dining with one company, he never failed of obtaining an introduction into another" — Johnson. The sentence has no rest in it. Savage is conjured not through features but through motion. You never see him still. You see the social surface parting to receive him, again and again.

Samuel Johnson, “SAVAGE”