Ulysses

Poetry is something I've tip-toed around with cautious curiosity, like blindly seeking a dangling light bulb string off a dark basement ceiling coated in cobwebs, to illuminate the room. Some of it to me is utterly incomprehensible. Anything earlier than Wordsworth (1770-1850) is inaccessible to me. This includes Chaucer, Spenser, Ben Jonson, John Donne, and most unfortunately, Shakespeare. Sorry, I just can't wade through the thick verbiage; I can't get the rhythm off the page and into my head (or heart).

One exception, I suppose, is John Milton (1608-1674). I've started Paradise Lost half a dozen times, and one life goal is to eventually wade thoroughly through it. William Blake (1757-1827) is another; however, I've found his poetry deceptive. Despite its apparent simplicity, apparently, according to commentators, there's a deep mystical system of theology to his work. Alas, it is completely unseen by me, and I looked. Well, before hopping on to others things.

What do I enjoy? Wordsworth: "She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways"; Byron: "The Destruction of Sennacharib"; Shelley: "Ozymandias"; Tennyson: "Ulysses", "The Eagle", "Flower in the Crannied Wall"; Whitman: "When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer", "On the Beach at Night"; Hopkins: "Pied Beauty"; Frost: "Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening"; Sandburg: "Grass", "Cool Toombs"; Eliot: "The Hollow Men". Yeah, most of it's from a massive anthology I have, but I do own Whitman's Leaves of Grass, Christus by Longfellow, Blake and Milton's stuff, and a volume of Robert Browning's work that I'm interested in.

Again, let me reinforce that I really don't know what I'm talking about here. I've only written two or three poems in my life and they are truly and absolutely horrible. But there's something in the poems above that move me. Something attractive. Ray Bradbury advises young authors to read poetry every day. I can see the value of that advice in numerous ways.

Who can not rise inspired after reading these final lines in Tennyson's Ulysses?

.................................. Come, my friends,
'Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order to smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.
Though much is taken, much abides; and though
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are -
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.