turning 82 yesterday and enjoying it made me reflective on the randomness of our lives - and in particular when reading the local paper and seeing the obituary of a good friend who had reached 80 this year I could not help but think that life is so various as Mathew Arnold once said in his poem
Dover Beach
. . . .
"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."
Meditative and rhetorical, Matthew Arnold’s poetry often wrestles
with problems of psychological isolation and has influenced writers as
different from each other as W. B. Yeats, James Wright, and Sylvia Plath
https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/dover-beach
https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/dover-beach
