O to live to be the ruler of life, not a slave,
To meet life as a powerful conqueror,
No fumes, no ennui,
no more complaints or scornful criticisms,
To these proud laws of the air, the water and the ground,
proving my interior soul impregnable,
And nothing exterior shall ever take command of me.
O to struggle against great odds, to meet enemies undaunted!
To be entirely alone with them,
to find how much one can stand!
To look strife, torture, prison, popular odium, face to face!
To mount the scaffold,
to advance to the muzzles of guns with perfect nonchalance!
O to have life henceforth be a poem of new joys!
To dance, clap hands, exult, shout, skip, leap,
roll on, float on!
To be a sailor of the world bound for all ports,
A ship itself
(see indeed these sails I spread to the sun and air),
A swift and swelling ship full of rich words, full of joys.
* * * * *
These verses belong to the poem “A song of joys” by Whitman, which was also included in his work “Leaves of grass”. Since the moment when I first discovered them thanks to the movie “Dead Poets Society” I have enjoyed playing some of these sentences in my mind once and again.
They remind me of the sailor heading for
