First of all, sorry about the crummy formatting. The lines I meant to quote are:

And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Erin, that's a great point, I agree with you about the poem leaving a space for hope. A poem can be the expression of a desire to hope/believe while simultaneously providing the very condition that makes it almost impossible to do so. That seems like a fundamentally religious notion.

I love those poems that produce those discussions in class. Another poet who is great to debate in terms of degree of hope is Frost. "The Oven Bird" for instance is a poem that leaves a lot of space for either despair or hope glimmer (though people can really get hung up on : "He says that leaves are old and that for flowers/ Mid-summer is to spring as one to ten," and the whole thing can just disintegrate into a math class. Ugh.

I also really like the idea that a great poem would enact (and further reveal itself in discussion) the possibility of clarity without moralizing. Which leads us back to Keats and Negative Capability. As always.