Happy Birthday, Ella Wheeler Wilcox! | Poems Rethabile Likes
🎂 Happy Birthday, Ella Wheeler Wilcox!
Poet • Novelist • Journalist • born 5 November 1850
Today we celebrate the birthday of Ella Wheeler Wilcox — an American poet, novelist, and journalist whose accessible, rhyming verse reached a large readership during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Often associated with optimism and emotional directness, she published collections including Poems of Passion (1883), Poems of Pleasure (1888), and Poems of Peace (1906). Her Poems of Passion initially met publishers' resistance because its acknowledgement of women's passions was considered improper — once published, it sold 60,000 copies in two years. Here is her "Bleak Weather," a bright, defiant love poem: let the snow fall, the wind call, the year die; we have each other.
Bleak Weather
Dear love, where the red lillies blossomed and grew,
The white snows are falling;
And all through the wood, where I wandered with you,
The loud winds are calling;
And the robin that piped to us tune upon tune,
Neath the elm—you remember,
Over tree-top and mountain has followed the June,
And left us—December.
Has left, like a friend that is true in the sun,
And false in the shadows.
He has found new delights, in the land where he's gone,
Greener woodlands and meadows.
What care we? let him go! let the snow shroud the lea,
Let it drift on the heather!
We can sing through it all; I have you—you have me,
And we’ll laugh at the weather.
The old year may die, and a new one be born
That is bleaker and colder;
But it cannot dismay us; we dare it—we scorn,
For love makes us bolder.
Ah Robin! sing loud on the far-distant lea,
Thou friend in fair weather;
But here is a song sung, that’s fuller of glee,
By two warm hearts together.
Ella Wheeler Wilcox (1850–1919) was an American poet, novelist, and journalist whose accessible, rhyming verse reached a large readership during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. She is often associated with optimism and emotional directness, though her work also engaged with grief, loss, and the social questions of her day. Her collections include Poems of Passion (1883), Poems of Pleasure (1888), and Poems of Peace (1906).
Read more: Poetry Foundation • ThriftBooks
Read more: Poetry Foundation • ThriftBooks
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