I haven't featured any compositions by the freethinking poet Philip Appleman lately, so with this edition of Poetry Sunday, I intend to address that. This is an especially lovely piece by Prof. Appleman from the November 2007 edition of the FFRF's newsletter Freethought Today, one I've been wanting to reprint on Daylight Atheism for some time. Whom can an atheist thank for the good fortune in their life, if not a deity? This poem suggests an answer to that question.

Philip Appleman is the Distinguished Professor Emeritus of the Department of English at Indiana State University, the author of seven volumes of poetry and numerous fiction and nonfiction books, including the widely used Norton Critical Edition, Darwin. His poetry has won many awards, including a fellowship in poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Castagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America, the Friend of Darwin Award from the National Center for Science Education, and the Humanist Arts Award of the American Humanist Association. His work has been published in Harper's Magazine, The Nation, The New Republic, The New York Times, and elsewhere. His latest book is New and Selected Poems, 1956-1996.

Thanksgiving

O let us give thanks for the glorious spasm
that spurted atoms on an endless quest
for the far edge of everything, let's
praise the ancient heave and buckle,
the burn, blister, and boil
that birthed our blue-green planet,
be grateful for the lucky spark
that seasoned our primal soup,
and honor the ultimate sacrifice
of the creeping pioneers
who dragged us up onto dry land.
Let's be thankful for the heroism
of all those fallen fathers
who bequeathed to us these novelties,
our clever arms and legs,
thankful too for the company
of moles and manatees, sloths and seals,
horses and hedgehogs - and thankful for
the monkeys, gibbons, and gorillas
who once upon a time set off
on gambles of their own, aping our long,
long hunger, vines
choking trees to reach the sun,
predators lurking at water holes.
Now, somewhere out there, the atoms race on,
still searching for the edge of everything,
but here, snug in our tundra and grassland,
our forest and savanna, let us thank
the furry ancestors who brought us
along this way, and now stay at our side
as we press on to some great adventure
just beyond our dreams.

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• Poetry Sunday

Most connoisseurs of poetry have heard of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, a collection of poems originally written in Persian and attributed to the eleventh-century poet and polymath after whom it is named. The various translations of the Rubaiyat have given the English language some of its most enduring verses and images (most notably "a jug of wine, a loaf of bread, and thou"). And yet, how many people know the distinctly freethought sentiments of this famous poem? Today's Poetry Sunday will explore some of them.

As pointed out by Christopher Hitchens' The Portable Atheist, the author of these quatrains was far more than a simple poet. Khayyam was a noted mathematician who wrote pioneering works on algebra and geometry, including algorithms for expanding binomials and solving cubic equations by means of conic sections. He was a renowned astronomer as well; he correctly measured the length of the solar year to six decimal places and contributed to a standardization of the Persian calendar which is still used today. Khayyam's calendar, the so-called Jalali calendar, is complicated but more accurate than today's widely-used Gregorian system. Khayyam may also have proposed a heliocentric model of the solar system several hundred years before Copernicus.

Nevertheless, Khayyam is most famous for his poetry. The Rubaiyat is famous for, as Hitchens puts it, its "warm recommendations of wine, women and song". The poem's outlook is similar to the biblical book of Ecclesiastes: that life is vanity, our knowledge is limited, our time is brief, and the existence of another world uncertain. Thus, the poet counsels us to eat, drink and be merry, enjoying the simple pleasures of life and making the most of the time that we have. Although Khayyam does not seem to have been an atheist, the poem is strikingly unorthodox in its tone, dissenting from the established Islam of the poet's day and scorning the ideas of an afterlife or a god who performs miracles or gives revelations. Like the ancient Greeks, the Rubaiyat espouses a kind of deistic rationalism. Some of the verses as translated by Richard Le Galliene make this sentiment compellingly clear:

From The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam

The bird of life is singing on the bough
His two eternal notes of "I and Thou"—
O! hearken well, for soon the song sings through,
And, would we hear it, we must hear it now.

The bird of life is singing in the sun,
Short is his song, nor only just begun,—
A call, a trill, a rapture, then—so soon!—
A silence, and the song is done—is done.

Yea! What is man that deems himself divine?
Man is a flagon, and his soul the wine;
Man is a reed, his soul the sound therein;
Man is a lantern, and his soul the shine.

Would you be happy! hearken, then, the way:
Heed not To-morrow, heed not Yesterday;
The magic words of life are Here and Now—
O fools, that after some to-morrow stray!

Were I a Sultan, say what greater bliss
Were mine to summon to my side than this,—
Dear gleaming face, far brighter than the moon!
O Love! and this immortalizing kiss.

To all of us the thought of heaven is dear—
Why not be sure of it and make it here?
No doubt there is a heaven yonder too,
But 'tis so far away—and you are near.

Men talk of heaven,—there is no heaven but here;
Men talk of hell,—there is no hell but here;
Men of hereafters talk, and future lives,—
O love, there is no other life—but here.

Look not above, there is no answer there;
Pray not, for no one listens to your prayer;
Near is as near to God as any Far,
And Here is just the same deceit as There.

But here are wine and beautiful young girls,
Be wise and hide your sorrows in their curls,
Dive as you will in life's mysterious sea,
You shall not bring us any better pearls.

Allah, perchance, the secret word might spell;
If Allah be, He keeps His secret well;
What He hath hidden, who shall hope to find?
Shall God His secret to a maggot tell?

So since with all my passion and my skill,
The world's mysterious meaning mocks me still,
Shall I not piously believe that I
Am kept in darkness by the heavenly will?

The Koran! well, come put me to the test—
Lovely old book in hideous error drest—
Believe me, I can quote the Koran too,
The unbeliever knows his Koran best.

And do you think that unto such as you,
A maggot-minded, starved, fanatic crew,
God gave the Secret, and denied it me?—
Well, well, what matters it! believe that too.

Old Khayyám, say you, is a debauchee;
If only you were half so good as he!
He sins no sins but gentle drunkenness,
Great-hearted mirth, and kind adultery.

But yours the cold heart, and the murderous tongue,
The wintry soul that hates to hear a song,
The close-shut fist, the mean and measuring eye,
And all the little poisoned ways of wrong.

So I be written in the Book of Love,
I have no care about that book above;
Erase my name, or write it, as you please—
So I be written in the Book of Love.

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• Poetry Sunday

Today's Poetry Sunday features the British poet Stevie Smith. The Literary Encyclopedia calls her "one of the most important female British poets of the twentieth-century, and the most original voice to emerge from the 1930s".

Stevie Smith was born in 1902 in Hull (her birth name was Florence Margaret Smith; she acquired the nickname "Stevie" later in life). Her poetry was much shaped by her personal life: her father abandoned his family before she was three years old, and her mother died when she was a teenager. Stevie Smith and her sister lived for the rest of their lives with their aunt, Madge Smith, whom Stevie admired greatly and called "the Lion". In a household without men, she acquired a spirit of independence and a feminist slant that often appears in her writing, although she was often lonely, and her poetry reflects that as well. She never married, but she did correspond with other prominent writers and artists of the day - most notably George Orwell, who was rumored to be her lover, and Sylvia Plath, who was a great personal fan of hers.

Smith's poetry defies easy classification. At turns whimsical, morbid, playful and ironic, it freely mixes verse on lighthearted, defiantly trivial subjects with somber meditations on death (the "only god who must come when he is called"). She was also a freethinker. In the introduction to her Collected Poems, James MacGibbon writes, "[S]he rejected the dogmas of her high Anglican background, as unreasonable and morally inferior... she was scornful of what she considered watered-down reformulations of the faith, and disgusted by their liturgical expression". Smith's freethought bent can be seen in long poems such "How do you see?" (an argument against Christianity in blank verse), as well as today's poem. Her books include A Good Time Was Had By All (1937), Mother, What is Man? (1942), Not Waving But Drowning (1957), and Scorpion and Other Poems (1972).

Away, Melancholy

Away, melancholy,
Away with it, let it go.

Are not the trees green,
The earth as green?
Does not the wind blow,
Fire leap and the rivers flow?
Away, melancholy.

The ant is busy
He carrieth his meat,
All things hurry
To be eaten or eat.
Away, melancholy.

Man, too, hurries,
Eats, couples, buries,
He is an animal also
With a hey ho melancholy,
Away with it, let it go.

Man of all creatures
Is superlative
(Away melancholy)
He of all creatures alone
Raiseth a stone
(Away melancholy)
Into the stone, the god
Pours what he knows of good
Calling, good, God.
Away melancholy, let it go.

Speak not to me of tears,
Tyranny, pox, wars,
Saying, Can God
Stone of man's thoughts, be good?
Say rather it is enough
That the stuffed
Stone of man's good, growing,
By man's called God.
Away, melancholy, let it go.

Man aspires
To good,
To love
Sighs;

Beaten, corrupted, dying
In his own blood lying
Yet heaves up an eye above
Cries, Love, love.
It is his virtue needs explaining,
Not his failing.

Away, melancholy,
Away with it, let it go.

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• Poetry Sunday

Today's poem was one I first read in Christopher Hitchens' The Portable Atheist. This is slightly odd since its author was not an atheist himself. However, this poem is a biting little satire of prayer, one whose point is all the more valid for having been made by a believer, and as such, it makes for a good entry in this series.

John Betjeman was an English poet who lived during the twentieth century. He studied at Oxford, where he ultimately left without obtaining a degree. While there, he studied under C.S. Lewis. According to Betjeman's blank-verse autobiography Summoned by Bells, Lewis did not like him, and the feeling was mutual.

After Oxford, Betjeman began to publish poetry. His work was nostalgic, sentimental and evocative, yet with a playful and humorous streak. Combined with his work as a television broadcaster, it made him hugely popular with the public. In 1972, he was named the UK's Poet Laureate, which title he held until his death in 1984.

Betjeman was an Anglican, but many of his poems contain elements of uncertainty and doubt. In his poem "The Conversion of St. Paul", he writes: "But most of us turn slow to see / The figure hanging on a tree / And stumble on and blindly grope / Upheld by intermittent hope". All these tendencies are also on display in today's poem, a sharp, witty satire of the self-centered nature of most personal prayer, written from the viewpoint of a high-class English lady during World War II.

In Westminster Abbey

Let me take this other glove off
  As the vox humana swells,
And the beauteous fields of Eden
  Bask beneath the Abbey bells.
Here, where England's statesmen lie,
Listen to a lady's cry.

Gracious Lord, oh bomb the Germans.
  Spare their women for Thy Sake,
And if that is not too easy
  We will pardon Thy Mistake.
But, gracious Lord, whate'er shall be,
Don't let anyone bomb me.

Keep our Empire undismembered
  Guide our Forces by Thy Hand,
Gallant blacks from far Jamaica,
  Honduras and Togoland;
Protect them Lord in all their fights,
And, even more, protect the whites.

Think of what our Nation stands for,
  Books from Boots and country lanes,
Free speech, free passes, class distinction,
  Democracy and proper drains.
Lord, put beneath Thy special care
One-eighty-nine Cadogan Square.

Although, dear Lord, I am a sinner,
  I have done no major crime;
Now I'll come to Evening Service
  Whensoever I have the time.
So, Lord, reserve for me a crown.
And do not let my shares go down.

I will labour for Thy Kingdom,
  Help our lads to win the war,
Send white flowers to the cowards
  Join the Women's Army Corps,
Then wash the Steps around Thy Throne
In the Eternal Safety Zone.

Now I feel a little better,
  What a treat to hear Thy word,
Where the bones of leading statesmen,
  Have so often been interr'd.
And now, dear Lord, I cannot wait
Because I have a luncheon date.

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• Poetry Sunday

The sea is calm tonight,
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night air!

I was originally going to post the poem "Dover Beach", by the Victorian poet Matthew Arnold, as the next installment of my Poetry Sunday series. Arnold was Professor of Poetry at Oxford and was said to be one of the three great Victorian poets, along with Alfred Tennyson and Robert Browning. Though fascinated by church ritual, he does not seem to have been a believer himself. He called God a "literary term", compared the Christian god to the mythological deities of the Greeks, and defined religion as "morality touched with emotion".

For all these reasons, Arnold seemed ideal. But upon rereading "Dover Beach", I realized it had a very different message. Despite the tranquil beginning, its final verses take a much darker turn. The poet compares the tide going out to the ebbing of religious faith. But far from a good thing, he sees this as a source for despair, as all the old certainties retreat and leave the world in chaos and darkness.

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

This despair is not atypical of those who are leaving the small, comforting certainties of religious faith behind, although usually it fades in due time. Arnold made it as far as the "darkness" stage of deconversion that I described in my essay "Into the Clear Air", but he doesn't seem to have taken those last few steps.

Religious apologists, of course, are apt to claim that atheism leads inevitably to nihilism. It's possible that Arnold, though a nonbeliever himself, unintentionally absorbed that gloomy vision and persisted in the belief that despair was the consequence of atheism, even as he himself left religion behind.

It's a shame that a poet of such evident talent didn't see the fallacy in this. Religious faith is not the only source of joy, love, peace or help for pain. We can receive those things from our fellow human beings, regardless of their beliefs, and we can give out that solace to others in turn.

If only Matthew Arnold had gone just a little farther, he might have written something very different. It's true that the deconversion process often involves a period of despair, while the believer's old certainties retreat but before they've found anything to replace them. To complete the analogy, it's true that after the last waves of the Sea of Faith retreat, for a time the world is murky and black, like a dream of absolute darkness.

But this spell of darkness rarely lasts for long. If Arnold had explored further rather than giving in to despair, he could have ended his poem in a very different way. Rather than leaving readers with the image of armies battling on a dark and sweltering plain, he could have told us of a glorious sunrise on Dover Beach: the dawn that comes after the night passes, when the new-made rays of the sun spear out of the east and envelop the world in light. Had he gone further, he would have found, as many other freethinkers have found, that love, joy and the other qualities that make life worth living do not vanish when their supernatural underpinnings are knocked out. In the end, those supports prove to be unnecessary, and they return as strong as ever.

Today's Poetry Sunday features one of the classics of Western literature, written by one of its greatest and most fearlessly freethinking poets. Percy Bysshe Shelley was born in 1792 and wrote at the zenith of the English Romantic period. In 1811, while enrolled at Oxford, Shelley and his fellow student T.J. Hogg published a pamphlet titled The Necessity of Atheism (a title that's given much inspiration to others). This was a major scandal, and when Shelley refused to recant, he was expelled. Two years later, he included an expanded version of the tract as an introduction to his long poem Queen Mab. Another of his works was titled "Refutation of Deism".

Today's poem is said to have come about as the result of a bet between Shelley and his friend Horace Smith, who both wrote on the same topic (Smith's poem did not stand the test of time as well). The narrator tells of meeting with a traveler from the "antique land" of Egypt, who witnessed the ruin of a colossal monument raised to a long-dead ruler. (The ruler in question was a real person: "Ozymandias" is an alternate transliteration of the name of Ramesses the Great, one of the most powerful pharaohs of the Egyptian New Kingdom era. His mortuary temple, the Ramesseum, may have been the inspiration for this poem.) In sparse, haunting imagery, Shelley memorably conveys the inexorable grinding of time and the foolish hubris of those who seek to outlast it. The implicit conclusion is that every empire, no matter the heights of greatness it attains, ultimately falls into ruin and obscurity and becomes nothing more than shadowy memories and scattered remnants of the past.

Ozymandias

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter'd visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp'd on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock'd them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains: round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

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• Poetry Sunday

To commemorate the Fourth of July, here's this month's Poetry Sunday. American readers will likely recognize today's poem immediately, as well they should: it's engraved on a plaque mounted on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty. But what may not be as widely known are the freethought sympathies of the poet.

Emma Lazarus was born in 1849 in New York City, the daughter of parents who were descended from generations of Sephardic Judaism. But according to the Jewish Virtual Library, "the Lazarus family relegated their Jewish religious life to the formal, occasional expression that good manners required." Emma, the fourth of seven children, displayed poetic talent from an early age, and her proud father published her first volume of poetry when she was sixteen. Her work attracted the attention of Ralph Waldo Emerson, who befriended her and to whom she dedicated a later work, Admetus and Other Poems.

It was nationality and heritage that moved Lazarus, not religion. After personally meeting some of the Jewish immigrants who fled to America after a series of brutal pogroms in Russia, she became a passionate advocate of the nascent Zionist movement. In books and letters, she argued that only the establishment of a Jewish homeland would put a stop to then-rampant anti-Semitism and persecution. But when a local rabbi invited her to use her poetic talent to contribute to a hymn book, she responded, "I will gladly assist you as far as I am able; but that will not be much. I shall always be loyal to my race, but I feel no religious fervor in my soul."

After a brief but impassioned life, Emma Lazarus died in 1887 at the age of 38. The following poem, her most famous work, was written in 1883 to assist a fund-raising endeavor to build the pedestal upon which the statue now sits. In the poem's title and opening lines, she contrasts the Statue of Liberty against the Colossus of Rhodes, one of the wonders of the ancient world, describing it as a monument to freedom rather than conquest. Her enduring conception of the Statue as a beacon shining out to oppressed and disenfranchised people everywhere has resounded through America's history and given voice to the ideals our country stands for. Though America has not always lived up to its founding principle of liberty, when we have honored this principle, we have given hope and courage to the downtrodden throughout the world.

The New Colossus

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

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• Poetry Sunday

For my northern hemisphere readers, the full flush of summer has arrived. In honor of the season, I've picked an appropriate poem for this installment of Poetry Sunday: the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas' idyllic, evocative hymn to nature and childhood, "Fern Hill", from his 1946 collection Deaths and Entrances.

Born in 1914, Dylan Thomas was named in honor of his uncle, a Unitarian minister. He moved to London in 1934 and that same year published his first volume of poetry, 18 Poems, which was highly acclaimed. A sought-after speaker, he frequently gave readings of his work both in person and on the radio: both his poetry and also scripts and plays such as Under Milk Wood. He was excused from military service in World War II on account of chronic pulmonary illness, but witnessed the Blitz firsthand while living in London. He recounted the experience in a poignant poem, "A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London", which reveals the author's freethought sympathies: "After the first death, there is no other." As Ian Lancashire puts it in his analysis of the poem, "Without relying on religious belief in personal salvation or an afterlife, Thomas represents death consolingly as part of life" (source).

Thomas' poems are luminous, dense with imagery, rich with brilliant detail and metaphor. During his life and after, he was internationally acclaimed. His deservedly most famous work, "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night", was written for his father, who was dying of cancer. Like "Refusal", it does not appeal to an afterlife for consolation, but rather calls upon us to face death with dignity and defiance in this world. Thomas died in 1953 at the age of 39; his death was generally supposed to be the consequence of alcoholism, but evidence surfaced in 2004 indicating it may have been a result of complications from pneumonia.

Fern Hill

Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs
About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,
     The night above the dingle starry,
          Time let me hail and climb
     Golden in the heydays of his eyes,
And honoured among wagons I was prince of the apple towns
And once below a time I lordly had the trees and leaves
          Trail with daisies and barley
     Down the rivers of the windfall light.

And as I was green and carefree, famous among the barns
About the happy yard and singing as the farm was home,
     In the sun that is young once only,
          Time let me play and be
     Golden in the mercy of his means,
And green and golden I was huntsman and herdsman, the calves
Sang to my horn, the foxes on the hills barked clear and cold,
          And the sabbath rang slowly
     In the pebbles of the holy streams.

All the sun long it was running, it was lovely, the hay
Fields high as the house, the tunes from the chimneys, it was air
     And playing, lovely and watery
          And fire green as grass.
     And nightly under the simple stars
As I rode to sleep the owls were bearing the farm away,
All the moon long I heard, blessed among stables, the nightjars
     Flying with the ricks, and the horses
          Flashing into the dark.

And then to awake, and the farm, like a wanderer white
With the dew, come back, the cock on his shoulder: it was all
     Shining, it was Adam and maiden,
          The sky gathered again
     And the sun grew round that very day.
So it must have been after the birth of the simple light
In the first, spinning place, the spellbound horses walking warm
     Out of the whinnying green stable
          On to the fields of praise.

And honoured among foxes and pheasants by the gay house
Under the new made clouds and happy as the heart was long,
     In the sun born over and over,
          I ran my heedless ways,
     My wishes raced through the house high hay
And nothing I cared, at my sky blue trades, that time allows
In all his tuneful turning so few and such morning songs
     Before the children green and golden
          Follow him out of grace,

Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days, that time would take me
Up to the swallow thronged loft by the shadow of my hand,
     In the moon that is always rising,
          Nor that riding to sleep
     I should hear him fly with the high fields
And wake to the farm forever fled from the childless land.
Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,
          Time held me green and dying
     Though I sang in my chains like the sea.

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• Poetry Sunday

This month's Poetry Sunday features another classic by a famous poet who's already made an appearance: Robert Frost, the skeptical New Englander whose work has become iconic of the American experience.

Frost's views on God are complex. In some of his letters, he calls himself "an old dissenter", "secular till the last go down", and said there were "no vampires, no ghouls, no demons, nothing but me". In others, he expresses belief in and even fear of God, whom he usually identifies as the wrathful Old Testament deity Jehovah. Still, after twenty years of marriage, his wife said he was an atheist, and he did not deny it. (See Robert Frost: Old Testament Christian or Atheist? for a fuller exploration of Frost's religious beliefs.)

What I find remarkable is that so many of Frost's poems, when speaking of people and their relationships, are warm, welcoming, thoroughly humanist. Only when he turns to the subject of God does his poetry become dark and terrifying. Consider poems like "Once by the Pacific", Frost's famous vision of the apocalypse, or "A Loose Mountain", which envisions God as a cosmic destroyer waiting to hurl a meteor at the Earth like a stone thrown from a sling. I think the best way to describe Frost is as a frustrated freethinker, one who never fully shook off the religious indoctrination of his past.

Today's poem, simply titled "Design", explores some of Frost's own beliefs about God and nature. It comes from his 1936 collection A Further Range. In it, the poet muses on the experience of witnessing a camouflaged spider capture a helpless moth, and poses a version of the same question that has stymied philosophers since antiquity: why would a benevolent deity create a world where predation and death were integral parts of the natural order? If God oversees the course of events, then must not the evil be part of his will, as well as the good?

Design

I found a dimpled spider, fat and white,
On a white heal-all, holding up a moth
Like a white piece of rigid satin cloth —
Assorted characters of death and blight
Mixed ready to begin the morning right,
Like the ingredients of a witches' broth —
A snow-drop spider, a flower like a froth,
And dead wings carried like a paper kite.

What had that flower to do with being white,
The wayside blue and innocent heal-all?
What brought the kindred spider to that height,
Then steered the white moth thither in the night?
What but design of darkness to appall?—
If design govern in a thing so small.

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• Poetry Sunday

Today's Poetry Sunday features a few selections from the American poet Ella Wheeler Wilcox. Wilcox was born in 1850 in Wisconsin and soon acquired renown as a poet, becoming well-known for her writing by the time she graduated high school. Her poems were resolutely plain and optimistic, and though her simple, sometimes singsong verse was often scorned by critics, during her lifetime she was immensely popular among the public. Among the best-known quotes from her poetry are "Love lights more fires than hate extinguishes" and the well-known line, "Laugh and the world laughs with you; weep, and you weep alone" (from "Solitude"). Some of her many published works include Drops of Water (1872 - written in support of the temperance movement), Poems of Passion (1883), Poems of Pleasure (1888), and Poems of Sentiment (1906).

Though no friend of religious orthodoxy, Wilcox was not an atheist - she flirted with spiritualism, Theosophy, New Thought, and other New Age-like beliefs throughout her life, and grew distressingly attached to them after the death of her husband Robert, whom she repeatedly tried to contact from beyond the grave. Nevertheless, I think she deserves to be considered an honorary freethinker on the strength of poems such as "The World's Need", reprinted below.

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.

Protest

To sin by silence, when we should protest,
Makes cowards out of men. The human race
Has climbed on protest. Had no voice been raised
Against injustice, ignorance, and lust,
The inquisition yet would serve the law,
And guillotines decide our least disputes.
The few who dare, must speak and speak again
To right the wrongs of many. Speech, thank God,
No vested power in this great day and land
Can gag or throttle. Press and voice may cry
Loud disapproval of existing ills;
May criticise oppression and condemn
The lawlessness of wealth-protecting laws
That let the children and childbearers toil
To purchase ease for idle millionaires.

Therefore I do protest against the boast
Of independence in this mighty land.
Call no chain strong, which holds one rusted link.
Call no land free, that holds one fettered slave.
Until the manacled slim wrists of babes
Are loosed to toss in childish sport and glee,
Until the mother bears no burden, save
The precious one beneath her heart, until
God's soil is rescued from the clutch of greed
And given back to labor, let no man
Call this the land of freedom.

From "Here and Now"

Stand not aloof nor apart,
Plunge in the thick of the fight.
There in the street and the mart,
That is the place to do right.
Not in some cloister or cave,
Not in some kingdom above,
Here, on this side of the grave,
Here, should we labor and love.

From "Settle the Question Right"

However the battle is ended,
Though proudly the victor comes,
With flaunting flags and neighing nags
And echoing roll of drums;
Still truth proclaims this motto
In letters of living light,
No question is ever settled
Until it is settled right.

...Let those who have failed take courage,
Though the enemy seem to have won;
If he be in the wrong, though his ranks are strong,
The battle is not yet done.
For sure as the morning follows
The darkest hour of night,
No question is ever settled
Until it is settled right.

Other posts in this series:

• Poetry Sunday