...my favorite poem was Lonfellow's "A Psalm of Life". This was partly because my father told me that it was my grandfather's favorite poem, and after saying this, would quote the last stanza with tears in his eyes and a crack in his voice. After reading the poem for myself i realized that he quoted it wrong usually, his meter unbalanced, his memory blurred. But when he spoke it I felt a truth passed from father to son over two generations: a strange truth, with meaning more in the sound and the incantation perhaps than the words themselves. It ends:
Let us then be up and doing,
With a heart for any fate,
Still acheiving, still pursuing,
Learn to labor and to wait.
what is this last stanza calling me to do as a son, as a man? Is it simple or complex? more basically: is it one or many?
What is the will and how does it act?
What is the soul and where is its will?
It has left me like memories written and forgotten;
Oh that we had heeded the king when he rebuked the god!
Then would my memories stay within me,
Here at my heart to act into speech.
And what is speech but the clothing of thought,
Or the moving image of idea?
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