Self-motivation

Some days its brutal work to make the brain
Ease into effort, and then into motion;
It takes a kind of academic pain
To change the tide of one's own mental ocean,
Which would but ebb and flow beneath the moon
Not heeding our mere mortal Canutism;
To make the tide of thought dance to our tune
Requires an emphatic optimism
Joined to a certain willful disbelief
In all we have self-learned in all our days
Thinking we can turn a newer leaf
Without the springtime to provide new rays.
But we can do it, if we tell our mind
To disregard the facts that it will find.