As I was scrolling down the list of poems on the Poetry Out Loud website, I would randomly click and skim before going back to the list. I'll admit, I was getting pretty frustrated. All of the poems were nice, some even beautiful--but none of them seemed to relate to ME, personally. Then, I saw a title and stopped scrolling. I just looked at it for a few seconds. Solitude was its name. I thought about how powerful the title was. It literally gave me chills. It is packed with connotation, and can mean a different thing to every person. To someone, it might mean isolation, exclusion, and sadness. But another could see it as a word describing serenity and rejuvinating peace. I clicked the link. As soon as I began reading, I was lost in the words. The writing was beautiful. I read it aloud. I simply spoke it, yet it sounded like a song with delicious language and a lovely melody. Ella Wheeler Wilcox created a poem that spoke to me.
The most prominent lines in the poem, in my opinion, are in the following section:
"There is room in the halls of pleasure,
For a large and lordly train,
But one by one we must all file on
Through the narrow aisles of pain."
In a way, this line voices my worries, but I also disagree with the poet which makes this poem perfect for me. Everyone worries that their friends are only around us because they want a share of your happiness, energy, wealth, whatever. That they don't care about us personally. I know this is not true, however, but the poem is still touching. My friends are there even when I am at my worst, my unhappiest. Human nature is to avoid people who bring you down, though, and I think that this is true in a lot of cases. The only things that can overcome this shallow human tendency is love and care. When you actually care about someone's feelings, it isn't difficult to stay with them even at their worst.
