"Alone and with an oil-paper umbrella in hand,
I hesitate up and down a long, long
and solitary rainy lane,
hoping to meet
a girl like a lilac
budding with autumn complaints"

So wrote symbolist poet Dai Wangshu in his masterful "A Rainy Lane" in 1928. Dai was in love with a younger woman who had spurned his advances and perhaps this induced the melancholia that suffuses the poem. For even as he wishes to meet her, "her colour is lost" and "fragrance gone" in the "sad song of the rain." By the end, he merely hopes to see her "floating past" as if she is an apparition.

Who hasn't felt this way sometime?