A Poem

I taught this poem yesterday.  After what we went through last night, when David was holding onto me, the words of the last stanza came into my head.

It turns out that Matthew Arnold was right.

Ah, love, let us be true

To one another!  for the world, which seems

To lie before us like a land of dreams,

So various, so beautiful, so new,

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;

And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by night.

(1867)