Flights of Fancy

I think I read too much dramatic poetry/fiction as a kid. It helped to warp my corruptible young mind. I was asked a short time ago (by G) what books influenced me as a young'un. Ok, so I asked him first and he just returned the favor. Morte de Arthur, Black Beauty and Edgar Allen Poe, if you must know.

But...I must also add the poems The Highwayman and The Lady of Shalott. They encouraged fanciful flights of imagined woe when I was a child. Especially The Highwayman but especially The Lady of Shalott. I was on an Arthurian kick as a child and somehow I got it into my thick noggin that chivalry (that kind of chivalry anyhow) was what love was supposed to be.

*Sigh*. As a child, I thought that love made you complete, that love cured whatever evil lurked around the corner or in your soul. I was wrong. I think people make LOVE complete. I think that people have to be whole and healthy themselves before they ever truly find the kind of love that lasts.

But, I don't want to go all lovey-dovey on anyone. So... Look up those two poems I linked up. It might to surprise you to find that poems have death, despair and futile longing in them.