![]() ![]() Here, Larkin reconnects with his childhood self as spring comes into view again, and he feels mysteriously happy. What, Philip Larkin, the poet who famously said that ‘deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth’, appearing on a list of the most inspirational poems? But this quietly happy poem is arguably all the more inspiring and uplifting precisely because it is understated and written by a poet isn’t predominantly known for writing joyously about the world. In just eight short lines, probably the best-known poet of the Harlem Renaissance, Langston Hughes (1901-67), gives us words to live by – reminding us that it’s important to ‘hold fast to your dreams’ because a life without them is a ‘barren field’. ![]() The poem thus became one of the great inspirational poetic messages of the twentieth century, particularly in the United States. Having drafted the poem in 1921 and registered it for copyright in 1927, Ehrmann then distributed the poem in a Christmas card in 1933.Ī few years later, the psychiatrist Merrill Moore was given a copy of the poem, and he distributed 1,000 copies to his patients and soldiers during World War II. This poem from the 1920s is a little different from others on this list, in that it’s an example of the prose poem. This is summed up well in the reference to meeting with triumph and disaster and ‘treat those two impostors just the same’ – in other words, be magnanimous in victory and success (don’t gloat or crow about it) and be dignified and noble in defeat or times of trouble (don’t moan or throw your toys out of the pram).Ī phrase that is often used in discussion or analysis of ‘If-’ is ‘stiff upper lip’, that shorthand for the typically English quality of reserve and stoicism in the face of disaster. Stoicism looms large in Kipling’s famous poem – that is, the acknowledgment that, whilst you cannot always prevent bad things from happening to you, you can deal with them in a good way. Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,Īnd yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise … If you can wait and not be tired by waiting, If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,īut make allowance for their doubting too ![]() If you can keep your head when all about you The poem introduced a couple of famous phrases into the language: ‘bloody, but unbowed’, and the final two lines: ‘I am the master of my fate: / I am the captain of my soul.’ ‘Invictus’ was partly inspired by Henley’s (pictured right) own struggles as an invalid (he lost a leg when young) and his determination to remain ‘bloody but unbowed’. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.Clint Eastwood’s 2009 film about the 1995 Rugby World Cup in South Africa is named Invictus after this poem, and for good reason: Nelson Mandela recited the poem to his fellow prisoners while he was incarcerated on Robben Island. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. ![]() It’s not desiring the fall it’s terror of the flames. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view i.e. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. “The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. ![]()
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