The past few weeks have been some of the worst I've had in my life. The unbearable pain kept me awake at night and immobilized during the day. I was desperate.  And to top it off a three day blackout had cut me off from the comforts of civilization: without electricity there was no running water, no heating, no cooking, no Internet, no TV, no distraction to forget about the pain.

So when the power finally came back on I latched onto the Internet with all my might, and re-discovered an old bookmark: open lit courses at MIT. I was just going to delete them, but I decided to give one a glance. I opened the readings for the first week of "Reading Poetry". My bleary eyes scrolled through the page until something caught my attention. A phrase, written so long ago and referring to a different context, but that spoke to my personal situation: " too long a sacrifice can make a stone of the heart, oh how long may it suffice?" (Yeates: Easter 1916).

Forgive me if I misquote Yeates, but how could I not notice? My heart had been turning into stone along with the rest of my physical self, stone immobilized by pain into a scream, surrounded by other people's stone walls of indifference each on our own path to self destruction. How long will it suffice? I kept repeating the words over and over in my head.  It is still there, the pain, the despair. But in Yeates words I found understanding and a feeling of companionship. I understood my own situation better from a perspective of that poem, a poem about a struggle that seemed as fruitless and endless as mine.

I kept thinking about it at night, and the next day, and after a few failed attempts, I finally started on the course. I ordered my (used) textbook over the Internet and I even read the sample assignments. While I refuse to write lit-student-like assignments, counting syllables to make a rhyme and parsing sentences to over-analyze the structure of each poem, I will from time to time scribble to share with Open Salon my progress in this, my introduction to reading English poetry.

I hope you join me! 

Vaeth, Kim. 21L.004 Reading Poetry, Spring 2009. (Massachusetts Institute of Technology: MIT OpenCourseWare), http://ocw.mit.edu (Accessed 19 May, 2011). License: Creative Commons BY-NC-S