It is better to have tried and failed...

“The Swimmer’s Moment” by Margaret Avison
Reader’s Response

“It is better to have tried and failed…”
“The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.” -Martin Luther King Jr. (1929 - 1968), Strength to Love, 1963. Life is riddled with challenge after challenge; this ensures the growth of child to adult. Everyone meets challenges in their lives, and the only thing that separates the winners from the losers is which they choose; to ignore the challenge, hoping it will go away, or to face the challenge, hoping to win against it. The worst possible response to a challenge is no response at all. In the poem “The Swimmer’s Moment,” the author Margaret Avison discusses these common responses to challenges.
In this poem Margaret Avison uses a swimmer to symbolize humans and the whirlpool in this poem symbolizes a challenge. She demonstrates that for the most par...