He is that fallen lance that lies as hurled,
That lies unlifted now, come dew, come rust,
But still lies pointed as it plowed the dust.
If we who sight along it round the world,
See nothing worthy to have been its mark,
It is because like men we look too near,
Forgetting that as fitted to the sphere,
Our missiles always make too short an arc.
They fall, they rip the grass, they intersect
The curve of earth, and striking, break their own;
They make us cringe for metal-point on stone.
But this we know, the obstacle that checked
And tripped the body, shot the spirit on
Further than target ever showed or shone.
We are all the soldier in this poem, the lance is every project into which we put our heart, which crashed into screeching failure, and afterward seemed as though it had always been pointless. He is saying that it wasn't pointless from a spiritual point-of-view
En som har tagit hand om sina barn är Pernilla Wahlgren. Ja, dom blir ju bara fler och fler. Det är 100,000 totalt med alla, som vi inte har plats för.
I am memorizing this one for a school project and it is going very well! ! !
This poem has not been translated into any other language yet.
I would like to translate this poem
I interpret this poem as: The narrator is walking on the grounds of an ancient battlefield. He stumbles upon a weathered spear (lance) that is still stuck in the ground (don't ask me why the lance is still there, it just is) . Unlike most people who approach the spear and think nothing worthy of its target, the narrator sees that this spear is there for a reason, visioning the last seconds of a dying man's life at the end of this spear (his body rotted away long ago) . The narrator breaks his day dream and thinks about how men today are now shooting rockets at one another for the same reasons their ancestors threw that spear eons ago. He sees the rockets of today as the spears of tomorrow, future generations will see rocket parts lying around and wonder, What was so important that it had to result in killing and death? (They make us cringe for metal-point on stone) He relapses back into his daydream about the dying warrior. He now knows that there is something bigger at play here (But this we know, the obstacle that checked) . The spear that tripped the soldier's body, killing him, released his spirit. His spirit then moved into the next realm of existence (Heaven) which is further away than anything man can throw/launch at. In essences, the larger work at play here was that it was the soldiers destiny to die at that place at that exact time.