Poet's Perch : World Poetry Day

March 21st is World Poetry Day as declared by UNESCO in 1999.

From http://www.un.org/en/events/poetryday/ :

"Poetry reaffirms our common humanity by revealing to us that individuals, everywhere in the world, share the same questions and feelings."

Over the last year or so, I (Julie) have published on this blog, famous poems.  I am finding them, for the most part, in a book called The Family Album of Favorite Poems.  I didn't study much poetry in school, and honestly never had much of an interest in it.  However, I have found that many familiar quotations and phrases have their origins in poetry and as I have grown older I have come to appreciate the beauty in many poems. 

Today, I am sharing a poem taken from Hamlet by Shakespeare.  Reading through it, I find several phrases familiar to me that I had forgotten came from Shakespeare.  I chose this poem in particular because Mrs. Laughton (Minnie Birdsong) made us memorize it in our Senior English class. 

To Be Or Not To Be

To be, or not to be:  that is the question:

Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer

The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,

Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,

And by opposing end them?  To die: to sleep,

No more; and, by a sleep to say we end

The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks

That flesh is heir to, 'tis a consummation

Devoutly to be wish'd.  To die, to sleep;

To sleep:  perchance to dream:  ay, there's the rub;

For in that sleep of death what dreams may come

When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,

Must give us pause.  There's the respect

That makes calamity of so long life;

For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,

The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,

The pangs of dispriz'd love, the law's delay,

The insolence of office, and the spurns

That patient merit of the unworthy takes,

When he himself might his quietus make

With a bare bodkin? who would fardels bear,

To grunt and sweat under a weary life,

But that the dread of something after death,

The undiscover'd country from whose bourn

No traveler returns, puzzles the will,

And makes us rather bear those ills we have

Than fly to others that we know not of?

Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;

And thus the native hue of resolution

Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,

And enterprises of great pith and moment

With this regard their currents turn awry,

And lose the name of action.

William Shakespeare