This seems like a good morning, as 2019 is passing, to share a little rhyme by a somewhat obscure late 19th and early 20th century poet named Ella Wheeler Wilcox, who began life during 1850 on a Wisconsin farm and ended it, claimed by cancer, in Connecticut during 1919, a century ago.
Wilcox was not a great poet; in fact some of her works are included in anthologies of the world's worst. But she was a popular poet, prone to sentimentalities of her day and to enthusiasms --- like spiritualism and Theosophy --- that seem odd to us today when we're preoccupied by even more peculiar enthusiasms.
She's probably best known for this line from her poem "Solitude" --- "Laugh, and the world laughs with you; Weep, and you weep alone."
And I especially like this, from "The World's Need" --- "So many gods, so many creeds; So many paths that wind and wind; While just the art of being kind; Is all the sad world needs."
But here's her New Year poem:
What can be said in New Year rhymes,
That’s not been said a thousand times?
The new years come, the old years go,
We know we dream, we dream we know.
We rise up laughing with the light,
We lie down weeping with the night.
We hug the world until it stings,
We curse it then and sigh for wings.
We live, we love, we woo, we wed,
We wreathe our brides, we sheet our dead.
We laugh, we weep, we hope, we fear,
And that’s the burden of the year.
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