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A Look At Poetry

A Look at Poetry
I would not say that I am a connoisseur of poetry, but I have written and read my fair share of poems or literary works. Lovely are the words of the wordsmiths from our past. It is difficult, at times, to extrapolate the words it takes to explain feeling, but every thought or emotion that has ever been fabricated has been put into words at some time or another. Sometimes, I think that all originality has been usurped by history. Never again will we suffer an original thought. We would like to think that each and everyone one of us is unique; each of us with our own little exclusive slice of reality. But the truth is, at some place in our past, someone, somewhere has shared our emotion. Not only have they shared it, but they have managed to capture that feeling, emotion, or action in a way that will render it immortal.
It is not a heartrending thing to realize that our thoughts are just the doppelganger to someone else’s contemplations from the past. We can use their words to put meaning to things that are otherwise indescribable to us; to help us reflect on our own imaginations and/or confusions. For example, The Soliloquy, from William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and the poem Aedh Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven by William Butler Yeats, are two of the most profound poems I’ve ever read, and these two poems have allowed me to reflect on two of the most important ideologies I have ever pondered: mortality and approbation of reality.
It may seem like a cliché or a worn out phrase, but “to be or not to be” carries with it one of the most insightful inquisitions into life that I’ve ever read. I struggled with the thought of mortality several times in my life, and in some ways I still do. However, this master piece by Shakespeare has allowed me to place my thoughts into perspective and come to an understanding with the one universal truth: We all die eventually. Here is the first half of the poem:
“To be or not to be, that is the question;...