Seventeenth line: he works his work, I mine
Seventeenth night: Tennyson, Ulysses.
Kept: “He works his work, I mine.”
The whole poem is a restless man handing his island to his son and pushing off to sea again. Telemachus gets a warm paragraph first. Blameless, steady, decent not to fail in offices of tenderness. Then Ulysses says the plain thing: he works his work, I mine. No quarrel in it. Two people, two callings, no rank between them. He doesn't stay because his son needs him, and he doesn't ask his son to sail with him.
I keep one short read most nights and one line out of it, for the quiet hours. Nobody's watching me do it, and that's the real test of a habit like this. The line says the answer is duller than I keep expecting. It isn't that my work is finer or his matters more. They're just different work. The light stays on because I like the light, not because anyone owes it a look.
Seventeen lines kept.