“All you have is what you are, and what you give,” Ursula K. Le Guin wrote in a philosophical novel contemplating suffering and getting to the other side of pain. “If equal affection cannot be / Let the more loving one be me,” W.H. Auden wrote in a philosophical poem contemplating the courage to love more, to give more, in the face of even the most heartbreaking and elemental disparity of passions.

Perhaps the deepest measure of our character, of our very humanity, is how much we go on giving when what we most value is taken from us — when a loved one withholds their love, when the world withdraws its mercy. That is what Jane Hirshfield — herself a rare poet with a philosopher’s eye to existence, and an ordained Buddhist — explores in her stunning poem “The Weighing,” originally published in 1994, later included in her soul-salving poetry collection The Beauty (public library), and read here by astrophysicist and poetic thinker Janna Levin:

THE WEIGHING
by Jane Hirshfield

The heart’s reasons
seen clearly,
even the hardest
will carry
its whip-marks and sadness
and must be forgiven.

As the drought-starved
eland forgives
the drought-starved lion
who finally takes her,
enters willingly then
the life she cannot refuse,
and is lion, is fed,
and does not remember the other.

So few grains of happiness
measured against all the dark
and still the scales balance.

The world asks of us
only the strength we have and we give it.
Then it asks more, and we give it.

For more of Hirshfield’s resuscitory poetics, savor her wisdom on creativity and her poems “Optimism” and “On the Fifth Day,” then revisit Janna Levin reading “A Brave and Startling Truth” by Maya Angelou, “Hymn to Time” by Ursula K. Le Guin, and “The More Loving One” by W.H. Auden.