"I Have Felt."

So I don't profess to have much of a passion for poetry (despite my being a literature major...) but when I was nineteen, I read this poem by Alfred Lord Tennyson and it had a very significant impact on my life. VERY significant. It was one of those moments when you come to yourself and realize who you really are and what it really means. Since then, I have read anything of Tennyson's that I could find. The man is a genius. Tennyson's best friend and closest confidant died suddenly and in his grief he began writing (and continued for seventeen years) a series of poems in a work he titled "In Memoriam." In times of fear, doubt, loneliness and confusion, I return to these lines as a reminder.

If e’er when faith had fall’n asleep,
I heard a voice ‘believe no more’
And heard an ever-breaking shore
That tumbled in the Godless deep;

A warmth within the breast would melt
The freezing reason’s colder part,
And like a man in wrath the heart
Stood up and answer’d ‘I have felt.’

No, like a child in doubt and fear:
But that blind clamour made me wise;
Then was I as a child that cries,
But, crying, knows his father near;

And what I am beheld again
What is, and no man understands;
And out of darkness came the hands
That reach thro’ nature, moulding men.

-Alfred Lord Tennyson- "In Memoriam"

Thought I'd share.