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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Edgar Lee Masters
Edgar Lee Masters
Born in Kansas in 1868, Edgar Lee Masters wrote several collections of verse, including the popular Spoon River Anthology in 1915...
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FURTHER READING
Poems about Ambition
Essay on Man, Epistle II
by Alexander Pope
All those Attempts in the Changing Room!
by Anne Stevenson
Civilization
by Carl Phillips
Failing and Flying
by Jack Gilbert
Famous
by Naomi Shihab Nye
Fisherman
by Kurt Brown
See It Through
by Edgar Guest
That Everything's Inevitable
by Katy Lederer
The Ecstasy
by Phillip Lopate
To You
by Walt Whitman
Untranslatable Song
by Claudia Reder
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George Gray

 
by Edgar Lee Masters

I have studied many times
The marble which was chiseled for me--
A boat with a furled sail at rest in a harbor.
In truth it pictures not my destination
But my life.
For love was offered me and I shrank from its disillusionment;
Sorrow knocked at my door, but I was afraid;
Ambition called to me, but I dreaded the chances.
Yet all the while I hungered for meaning in my life.
And now I know that we must lift the sail
And catch the winds of destiny
Wherever they drive the boat.
To put meaning in one's life may end in madness,
But life without meaning is the torture
Of restlessness and vague desire--
It is a boat longing for the sea and yet afraid.



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