There's a right way and a wrong way to read poetry. First of all, you have to read it out loud, not in your head. You have to hear it. Second of all, you have to read it slowly, with the occasional pause here and there to let things sink in. And third of all, you want to go back to it a few times, though not necessarily in the same day.
It's also important to remember that you don't have to understand everything in it. Some things are not meant to be understood, or at least not fully. Some words or sentences are there just to evoke certain images in our head, and some things are only known to the author and no one else. A sort of "inside joke" to which we are not privy, and that's fine.
There's a poem by William Ernest Henley (1849-1903) which I really like. But before I share it with you, let me take a detour.
A while ago I asked a colleague of mine if he'd rather be blind or in a wheelchair. (That's right, that's the kind of things I think about sometimes.) Immediately he said "blind", without having to think about it. That's insane.
As much as I'd hate to be in a wheelchair (and you know how I feel about being able to poop by myself), for me it's wheelchair every day. I mean, what the hell am I gonna do if I'm blind? Listen to music? Fuck music. Well, not fuck music. I do like music, but I have to be able to read. Thank Zeus nowadays we have audio-books. Learning braille sounds like an awful lot of work. But either way I couldn't read comics anymore, that's for sure.
(That reminds a short joke: "Yesterday I went with a blind prostitute. You gotta hand it to her." I know, I'm horrible.)
The fact that millions and millions of people out there go through life being blind or in a wheelchair (or both) is mind-boggling to me. It makes me think of something that the character of Alvy Singer says in Woody Allen's movie Annie Hall:
"Life is divided up into the horrible and the miserable. Those are the two categories. The horrible would be like, I don't know, terminal cases, you know, and blind people, crippled. I don't know how they get through life. It's amazing to me. And the miserable is everyone else. So when you go through life you should be thankful that you're miserable, because you're very lucky to be miserable."
I suspect there's something of Woody Allen himself in that quote. I'm not sure I share that philosophy. That's too bleak even for me. Lots of people seem reasonably happy, and I count myself among those. But it does make me think about how I would cope under extreme hardship. The answer is probably not very well. Not very well at all. Perhaps I'm not always as brave as I'd like to be. And that's where Henley's poem could help. (That's the power of poetry, which someone has defined as "the right words in the right order".)
Henley had a tough life. At the age of 12 he contracted tuberculosis of the bone. A few years later the disease progressed to his left foot, which had to be amputated below the knee. A few years later he was told that the disease had spread to his right foot, and it needed to be amputated as well. He spent three years in hospital. (Luckily in the end they managed to save his right foot.)
While in hospital, Henley wrote a poem to give himself courage in those difficult times. Originally the poem had no title, but later a publisher gave it the title Invictus, which is Latin for unbeaten, or unconquered, and it stuck. I don't particularly like that name, but that's how the poem is now known.
There are a few lines in the poem that I don't fully understand. I can look up every word, but when those words are put together I'm not quite sure what the author meant. But that's ok. Even with those gaps it's an incredibly powerful poem, and it has inspired countless people to be brave in the face of adversity.
There are many bad things life can throw at us. These things can either come from other human beings, or from natural occurrences like earthquakes, or tsunamis, or viruses, or cancerous cells.
(By the way, I find it odd that, of all people, it's religious people who would label those natural occurrences as "acts of God". If those are, indeed, acts of God, it would make God truly despicable, would it not? In the words of African-American poet Countee Cullen, "Inscrutable His ways are [...] to slightly understand what awful brain compels His awful hand".)
But while there are some things in life that are beyond our control, there's also something inside of us, in our head or in our heart, that nothing and no one can touch, unless we allow it.
Please bear in mind my earlier advice: read it slowly, and read it aloud. (Sometimes, when I recite it to myself, it gives me goosebumps.)
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
