Only one thing a man can do (A movie review)

Only one thing a man can do
Find something that's his
Make an island for himself
If I can never meet you in this life
Let me feel the lack…
A glance from your eyes
And my life will be yours

I ran across these beautiful lines from the pacific war movie A Thin Red
Line.Quite a surprise? A war movie might be the last place you would expect such deep,romantic lines.

In the movie, Witt is a soldier who sees the spark of light and glory in
people. He's a idealist who believes in existence of another world -- an
anachronistic figure in a battlefield. His superior officer, Sergeant Welsh (by Sean Penn) is polarized different. Welsh is cynical about the war, the people and the whole world. They fight through a series of bloodshed battles and ponder the morality of the conflicts between human beings from their own perspective… After they control the mountains along the shore, they were sent out into the interior of the island, where they encounter a group of Japanese troops and find themselves outnumbered. Witt, the idealist, lures the Japs away from his comrades and died. Later the unit buried Witt.Sergeant Welsh pays his respect at Witt's tomb.

In the end of the movie, Welsh has a paragraph of monologue:

Only one thing a man can do
Find something that's his
Make an island for himself
If I can never meet you in this life
Let me feel the lack…
A glance from your eyes
And my life will be yours

Maybe it's not only a reflection of a soldier in a war? I can connect myself to it. So do many of us, I believe. Out of the despair, loneliness and self-pity, We wish to find something we can cling to – a hobby, a book or ultimately love? One movie review claims that this film is three hours of movie poetry. It has my endorsement.