I was a senior in High School when I discovered poetry. The year before we had been asked to explicate a poem in English class and I was befuddled by the requirement forced upon us to find some obscure meaning hidden in the figurative language of the poem. It was American literature and my keen insights had already been dulled by interpreting Moby Dick and The Death of a Salesman.
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A Recent Poem By Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Invictus
Okay. How many of you out there were forced to memorize this “thrilling” poem in Junior High? How did it improve your life? Or did it turn you away from poetry forever?
Invictus
Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll.
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.
– By William Ernest Henley
A Celebration of Reading 