April 12th: Acceptable and Unacceptable

I'm teaching mythology in eighth grade right now, and I love finding poems that go along with the mythological stories.  Here's one that I haven't ever shared with my students, "Parable of the Hostages," by Louise Glück.  I shared it in this post in April 2010.  The original post has one of my own poems in it, too.

Today I'm particularly struck by these lines:

There on the beach, discussing the various
timetables for getting home, no one believed
it could take ten years to get back to Ithaca;
no one foresaw that decade of insoluble dilemmas—oh unanswerable
affliction of the human heart: how to divide
the world’s beauty into acceptable
and unacceptable loves!



Do you have any favorite mythological poems to share?

Janet has today's line for the Progressive Poem here, at Irene's blog.