To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield

April is poetry month.  Something that even this prosaic blogger remembers and likes to blog about every April.

Poetry speaks to the emotional beings that we are.  I did not realize the emotional appeal of poems until I was well into adulthood, as a working stiff in the US.  I went to a poetry reading.  The poet was a local boy who had made it big on the other coast.  As the middle-aged poet read lines from his poem, it hit me: This is what poetry is about!  Those lines spoke to me, which is what we expect from good poetry.

Since then, I have come to realize that when the right person reads a great poem, oh boy, it is as if the mysteries of the universe are being solved.  One word at a time, and one verse at a time.

We collectively experienced that when we listened to Amanda Gorman reading her poem at President Biden's inauguration.  When her reading ended, we wanted more.  Remember?

As Margaret Renkl writes in the NY Times:

Thank God for our poets, here in the mildness of April and in the winter storms alike, who help us find the words our own tongues feel too swollen to speak. Thank God for the poets who teach our blinkered eyes to see these gifts the world has given us, and what we owe it in return.

Thank god, indeed!

The title of this post is from the final stanza of Lord Tennyson's Ulysses.   Ulysses reaches Calypso’s island, exhausted after a shipwreck.  The goddess Calypso offers herself to Ulysses and also promises him immortality.  Think about this: The most beautiful woman ever and immortality.

Ulysses turns down the offer.

He then heads to the high seas.  An unknown expanse of adventure.

Ulysses wanted to live a life that he would not regret.

Tennyson writes:

Old age hath yet his honour and his toil;
Death closes all: but something ere the end,
Some work of noble note, may yet be done,
Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.
The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks:
The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep
Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,
'T is not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order 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 that the gulfs will wash us down:
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.
Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho'
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.

I wish us all well with the chances that we take, and may we never have to regret the chances we didn't, and don't, take!