I remember my school teacher introducing it to us at a time that I simply couldn’t appreciate it. I presented a different poem to him, one I found with little effort or meaning, and he looked me soberly in the eye and gave me a low mark.

He must have questioned what the point of his career even was dealing with a kid like me, and I wish I could go back in time or reach out to him now (if he’d even remember me) and tell him that - yes, it took a few decades for it to sink in, but his efforts to better my wordly horizons with the written word did in fact reach me at a fundamental level, and his teaching career was not in vain