My Virtual Reading Room

The Choice
by Edmund Vance Cooke


The little it takes to make life bright,
If we open our eyes to get it!
And the trifle which makes it black as night,
If we close our lids and let it!
Behold, as the world goes whirling by,
It is gloomy, or glad, as it fits your eye.

As it fits your eye, and I mean by that
You find what you look for mostly;
You can feed your happiness full and fat,
You can make your miseries ghostly,
Or you can forget every joy you own
By coveting something beyond your zone.

In the storms of life we can fret the eye
Where the guttering mud is drifted,
Or we can look to the world-wide sky
Where the Artist’s scenes are shifted.
Puddles are oceans in miniatures,
Or merely puddles; the choice is yours.

We can strip our niggardly souls so bare
That we haggle a penny between us;
Or we can be rich in a common share
Of the Pleiades and Venus.
You can lift your soul to its outermost look,
Or can keep it packed in a pockebook.

We may follow a phantom the arid miles
To a mountain of cankered treasure,
Or we can find, in a baby’s smiles,
The pulse of a living pleasure.
We may drink of the sea until we burst,
While the trickling spring woud have quenched our thirst.



From Impertinent Poems (Dodge Publishing Company, 1903).
This poem is in the public domain.


Edmund Vance Cooke (1866 - 1932), often referred to as "the poet laureate of childhood," was born in 1866, in Ontario, Canada. He began working at the White Sewing Machine Co. factory as a teenager and stayed there for 14 years, until he became a self-employed poet and lecturer in 1893. His first book of poems, A Patch of Pansies, came out the next year. Edmund was a fine and highly entertaining poet whom many critics consider underrated; he published sixteen collections of poetry during the course of his career, plus many children's books.

(from yourdailypoem.com)
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Yes, a bit simplistic, but still, I rather like it...

Came across this site the other day (ad popped up); it seems to have good reviews.

Would you buy one? If so, which saying?

https://www.mantraband.com/collections

Here's one of those I like:

Originally posted by levkonoe at Lucie Bilodeau