Literature Poem

Their tales are full of sorcerers and ogres
Because their lives are: the capricious infinite
That, like parents, no one has yet escaped
Except by luck or magic . . .
[W]olves, mice, bears, children, gods, and men
In slow perambulation up and down the shelves
Of the universe are seeking . . . who knows except themselves?
What some escape to, some escape: if we find Swann’s Way better than our own, and
trudge on at the back Of the north wind to – to –
somewhere east Of the sun, west of the moon, it
is because we live
By trading another’s sorrow for our own; another’s
Impossibilities, still unbelieved in, for our own . . .

 Randall Jarrell, The Complete Poems (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1981).