Welcome to Things Worth Remembering, in which writers share a poem or a paragraph that all of us should commit to heart—because once upon a time, as Ryan Holiday writes today, Americans could “pick up their daily newspaper and find a totally straightforward, understandable poem full of advice on how to be a good person.” He shares some of his favorite verses in the following column.
Poems have always been earnest. Rhapsodizing about nature. Pouring out your heart to a lover. Finding deep meaning in small things. Brooding on mortality. It can all seem a bit cringe.
A few years ago, I was talking to Allie Essiri for my podcast, The Daily Stoic, about her wonderful anthology, A Poem for Every Night of the Year—which I have been reading to my sons since they were little—and I mentioned that I was struck by the earnestness, the desire for self-help and self-mastery, in many 19th-century poems.
You might be familiar with some of them.
Rudyard Kipling’s “If—” is obviously a classic of the genre, its advice both cliché and yet still profound: If you can keep your head when all about you / Are losing theirs and blaming it on you / If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you / But make allowance for their doubting too. So is William Ernest Henley’s “Invictus,” with its famous lines, I am the master of my fate, / I am the captain of my soul. Adam Lindsay Gordon’s “Ye Wearie Wayfarer” is another, ending:
Life is mostly froth and bubble,
Two things stand like stone,
Kindness in another’s trouble,
Courage in your own.
It must be acknowledged that many of the most famous of these poems were products of the British Empire at the height of its imperial power—and I’m pleased that we no longer publish poems calling on a generation to pick up “the white man’s burden” or celebrating the suicidal (and totally avoidable) charge of the Light Brigade. But I would like to point out that there was once a time, not that long ago, when an average person would pick up their daily newspaper and find a totally straightforward, understandable poem full of advice on how to be a good person or navigate the difficulties of life.
