Jen’s preemptive poetry week part 3

Today is just parts of a poem. Not that I don’t love all of Tennyson’s Ulysses, but there are parts of the poem that just stand out to me.

I am a part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough
Gleams that untravelled world, whose margin fades
For ever and for ever when I move.
How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnished, not to shine in use!

To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.

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
Though much is taken, much abides; and though
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.

Doesn’t that just make you want to shout it out? To stand on a shore and yell it into the waves? When I read these words on paper, they make me want to try new things, to go out and explore and have an adventure.