The Hour

This is the world's stupendous hour -
    The supreme moment for the race
To see the emptiness of power,
    The worthlessness of wealth and place,
To see the purpose and the plan
Conceived by God for growing man.

And they who see and comprehend
    That ultimate and lofty aim
Will wait in patience for the end,
    Knowing injustice cannot claim
One lasting victory, or control
Laws that bar progress for the whole.

This is an epoch-making time;
    God thunders through the universe
A message glorious and sublime,
    At once a blessing and a curse.
Blessings for those who seek His light,
Curses for those whose law is might.

Ephemeral as the sunset glow
    Is human grandeur.    Mortal life
Was given that souls might seek and know
    Immortal truths; and through the strife
That shakes the earth from land to land
The wise shall hear and understand.

Out of the awful holocaust,
    Out of the whirlwind and the flood,
Out of old creeds to Bedlam tossed,
    Shall rise a new earth washed in blood -
A new race filled with spirit power,
This is the world's stupendous hour.

Ella Wheeler Wilcox

Ella Wheeler Wilcox was an American author and poet, born on November 5, 1850, and died on October 30, 1919. She was known for her works expressing optimistic views and moral lessons. Her most famous book was 'Poems of Passion'. Her poem 'Solitude' contains the famous lines, 'Laugh, and the world laughs with you; weep, and you weep alone'. Over her career, Wilcox became popularly known as a 'people's poet'.

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English

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The Meeting Of The Centuries

A curious vision on mine eyes unfurled
    In the deep night.    I saw, or seemed to see,
    Two Centuries meet, and sit down vis-a-vis
Across the great round table of the world:
One with suggested sorrows in his mien,
    And on his brow the furrowed lines of thought;
    And one whose glad expectant presence brought
A glow and radiance from the realms unseen.

Hand clasped with hand, in silence for a space
    The Centuries sat; the sad old eyes of one
    (As grave paternal eyes regard a son)
Gazing upon that other eager face.
And then a voice, as cadenceless and gray
    As the sea's monody in winter time,
    Mingled with tones melodious, as the chime
Of bird choirs, singing in the dawns of May.

THE OLD CENTURY SPEAKS

By you, Hope s...

Ella Wheeler Wilcox

To-Day

I love this age of energy and force,
    Expectantly I greet each pregnant hour;
Emerging from the all-creative source,
    Supreme with promise, imminent with power.
The strident whistle and the clanging bell,
    The noise of gongs, the rush of motored things
Are but the prophet voices which foretell
    A time when thought may use unfettered wings.

Too long the drudgery of earth has been
    A barrier 'twixt man and his own mind.
Remove the stone, and lo! the Christ within;
    For He is there, and who so seeks shall find.
The Great Inventor is the Modern Priest.
    He paves the pathway to a higher goal.
Once from the grind of endless toil released
    Man will explore the kingdom of his soul.

And all this restless rush, this strain and strife,...

Ella Wheeler Wilcox

The Message

I have not the gift of vision,
    I have not the psychic ear,
And the realms that are called Elysian
    I neither see nor hear;
Yet oft when the shadows darken
    And the daylight hides its face,
The soul of me seems to hearken
    For the truths that speak through space.

They speak to me not through reason,
    They speak to me not by word;
Yet my soul would be guilty of treason
    If it did not say it had heard.
For Space has a message compelling
    To give to the ear of Earth;
And the things which the Silence is telling
    In the bosom of God have birth.

Now this is the truth as I hear it -
    That ever through good or ill,
The will of the Ruling Spirit
    Is moving and ruling still.
In the clutch of the blood-red ter...

Ella Wheeler Wilcox

The Goal

All your wonderful inventions,
    All your houses vast and tall,
All your great gun-fronted vessels,
    Every fort and every wall,
With the passing of the ages,
    They shall pass and they shall fall.

As you sit among the idols
    That your avarice gave birth,
As you count the hoarded treasures
    That you think of priceless worth,
Time is digging tombs to hide them
    In the bosom of the earth.

There shall come a great convulsion
    Or a rushing tidal wave,
Or a sound of mighty thunders
    From a subterranean cave,
And a boasting world's possessions
    Shall be buried in one grave.

From the Centuries of Silence
    We are bringing back again
Buried vase and bust and column
    And the gods they worshipped th...

Ella Wheeler Wilcox

New Year's Day

When with clanging and with ringing
    Comes the year's initial day,
I can feel the rhythmic swinging
    Of the world upon its way;
And though Right still wears a fetter,
    And though Justice still is blind,
Time's beyond is always better
    Than the paths he leaves behind.

In our eons of existence,
    As we circle through the night,
We annihilate the distance
    'Twixt the darkness and the light.
From beginnings crude and lowly,
    Round and round our souls have trod
Through the circles, winding slowly
    Up to knowledge and to God.

With each century departed
    Some old evil found a tomb,
Some old truth was newly started
    In propitious soil to bloom.
With each epoch some condition
    That has handicapped the...

Ella Wheeler Wilcox

High Noon

Time's finger on the dial of my life
Points to high noon! and yet the half-spent day
Leaves less than half remaining, for the dark,
Bleak shadows of the grave engulf the end.
To those who burn the candle to the stick,
The sputtering socket yields but little light.
Long life is sadder than an early death.
We cannot count on ravelled threads of age
Whereof to weave a fabric.    We must use
The warp and woof the ready present yields
And toil while daylight lasts.    When I bethink
How brief the past, the future, still more brief
Calls on to action, action!    Not for me
Is time for retrospection or for dreams,
Not time for self-laudation or remorse.
Have I done nobly?    Then I must not let
Dead yesterday unborn to-morrow shame.
Have I done wrong?    Well, l...

Ella Wheeler Wilcox