I’ve been struggling over the collected poems of Marianne Moore. Is it just me? Or is a six-line poem supposed to take an hour or longer to understand? I’m still working on it and hopefully by next week I’ll have found one that I can make head or tail of. In the meantime, here’s another old favorite of mine. From T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets:

So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years –

Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l’entre deux guerres

Trying to learn to use words, and every attempt

Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure

Because one has only learnt to get the better of words

For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which

One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture

Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate

With shabby equipment always deteriorating

In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,

Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer

By strength and submission, has already been discovered

Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope

To emulate — but there is no competition –

There is only the fight to recover what has been lost

And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions

That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.

For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.

I just love that so much. It’s both the story of my life (”trying to learn to use words”) and my motto (”there is only the trying”).