Two great poems about "hope" and "love"

The first poem is called "An Essay on Man: Epistle I—Of the Nature and State of Man, with Respect to the Universe", by Alexander Pope. Much like the title, the poem is relateively long. I decided to read the poem after seeing the title "Hope Springs Eternal" in a cover story of the current issue of Newsweek magazine. Here is an excerpt of the poem, which contains the phrase "hope springs eternal":


What future bliss, he gives not thee to know,
But gives that hope to be thy blessing now.
Hope springs eternal in the human breast:
Man never is, but always to be blest:
The soul, uneasy and confin’d from home,
Rests and expatiates in a life to come.


And one of the greatest poems ever written about love - indeed, as the last two lines indicate, eternal love - is William Shakespeare's "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?". Here is the sonnet in its entirety.


SHALL I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate;
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm’d:
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature’s changing course, untrimm’d.
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;
Nor shall Death brag thou wanderest in his shade
When in eternal lines to time thou growest.
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.


Blog focus

Just to finalize what will likely be discussed on the blog: as I noted in the "About me" section and has been the trend for much of the blog posts so far, the focus will be for the most part about volunteerism and its potential for far-reaching positive influence. To this end, I will read and comment on news developments and books directly associated with volunteerism.

However, I will also post blog entries that are not directly related to volunteerim. First, I will comment occasionally on ideas and trends about positive change as well as pressing social issues. A few examples of things I may discuss that concern questions of positive change: an article called What Makes Us Happy? from The Atlantic Monthly; the book Good Work: When Ethics and Excellence Meet; the recent article in The New York Times called "Fill it up with electricity, please". Second, I will periodically post entries about leisure interests, such as movies, music, novels, sports, photograhs, travel and so on.