The Optimistic Sisyphus Poem by Paul Hartal

Punished by the gods, Sisyphus toils hard to push
the heavy rock up the hill. Unfortunately, every time
when he reaches the top, the bulky boulder rolls down.
So he must repeat the task again and again
in an unending cycle.

Sisyphus suffers. His persistent efforts to bring
the massive stone to the top of the hill end
in eternal failure. And yet strangely enough,
Sisyphus is not necessarily a symbol of despair.
Hope never abandons him. He continues the struggle.
And so he becomes an allegory of the absurd
human condition, a metaphor of man's will
to control our destiny. Sisyphus symbolises our
permanent war against chaos, against violence and crime,
against poverty and disease, our never ending battle to fix
the problems of the world.

Sisyphus actually must be an optimist. In the bottom
of his heart he believes that he has a chance to succeed.
His journey can be even more important
than his arrival. Perhaps, in spite of all his frustration,
Sisyphus does find meaning in the vain work.

Interestingly enough, Chinese folklore has a legend
paralleling the Sisyphean myth. In this version a character
named Wu Gang by divine punishment is exiled
to the moon and assigned there to do an endless toil.
He must interminably chop a self-healing osmanthus tree,
which grows back every time that Wu Gang cuts it down.

Nature abounds in Sisyphean phenomena.
Take, for example, the disk of the sun:
It rises everyday in the east from the mists of the morning
and sinks into the shadows of the evening in the west.
And Sisyphus also personifies the endless motion
of the murmuring waves arising and falling in the sea.