International Poetry Day: The Great Minimum

So, it's International Poetry Day today, a fact that the Spanish-speaking twitterverse seems to be a lot more excited about than its anglophone counterpart, from what I can gather. I'm not a huge poetry connoisseur but in the spirit of the day I thought I'd share the one poem that I know off by heart.

G. K. Chesterton - The Great Minimum

It is something to have wept as we have wept,
It is something to have done as we have done,
It is something to have watched when all men slept,
And seen the stars which never see the sun.

It is something to have smelt the mystic rose,
Although it break and leave the thorny rods,
It is something to have hungered once as those
Must hunger who have eaten the bread of gods.

To have known the things that from the weak are furled,
Perilous ancient passions, strange and high;
It is something to be wiser than the world,
It is something to be older than the sky.

Lo, blessed are our ears for they have heard;
Yea, blessed are our eyes for they have seen:
Let the thunder break on man and beast and bird
And the lightning strike. It is something to have been.

I learnt it way back in Year 7 (first year of secondary school) when we had to find a poem to recite in class. I'd found it, of all places, as the epigraph to a book about teen human/vampire romance, a kind of Twilight before Twilight had been written. I later realised that there are a two verses missing, but I prefer it without them! It may be very simple, lacking the phonetically pleasing combinations of words that usually draw me to poetry, but it's stuck with me over the years and become almost a mantra. No matter how bad things may seem, we are lucky to be alive and have always achieved more than we think.