“No man can be a failure ...Robert W. Service Jan. 16, 1874 - Sept. 11, 1958

“No man can be a failure if he thinks

he’s a success; if he thinks

he is a winner, then he is.”

Found, Written on the Wall, in Mother Teresa’s Home for Children, in Calcutta:

People are often unreasonable,

Irrational and self-centred

Forgive them anyway.

If you are kind, people may accuse

you of selfish, ulterior motives.

Be kind anyway.

If you are successful, you will

win some unfaithful friends

and some genuine enemies.

Succeed anyway.

If you are honest and sincere

people may deceive you.

Be honest and sincere anyway.

What you spend years creating,

others would destroy overnight.

Create anyway.

If you find serenity and happiness,

some may be jealous.

Be happy anyway.

The good you do today

will often be forgotten.

Do good anyway.

Give the best you have

And, it will never be enough.

Give your best anyway.

In the final analysis,

It is between you and God.

It was never between you and them;

Anyway.

Spring Breaks in Foam-Sir Charles G. D. Roberts (1860-1943)

Spring breaks in foam

Along the blackthorn bough.

Whitethroat and goldenwing

Are mating now.

With green buds in the copse

And gold bloom in the sun

Earth is one ecstasy

Of life begun.

And in my heart

Spring breaks in glad surprise

As the long frosts of the long years melt

At your dear eyes.

Burnt Lands-Sir Charles G. D. Roberts (1860-1943)

On other fields and other scenes the morn

Laughs from her blue,--but not such fields are these,

Where comes no cheer of summer leaves and bees,

And no shade mitigates the day's white scorn.

These serious acres vast groves adorn;

Bur giant trunks, bleak shapes that once were trees,

Tower naked, unassuaged of rain or breeze,

Their stern grey isolation grimly borne.

The months roll over them, and mark no change

But when spring stirs, or autumn stills, the year,

Perchance some phantom leafage rustles faint

Through their parched dreams,--some old-time notes

ring strange,

When in his slender treble, far and clear,

Reiterates the rain-bird his complaint.

The Squatter-Sir Charles G. D. Roberts (1860-1943)

Round the lone clearing

Clearly the whitethroats call

Across the marge of dusk and dewfall's coolness.

Far up in the empty

Amber and apple-green sky

A night-hawk swoops, and twangs her silver chord.

No winds astir,

But the poplar boughs breathe softly

And the smoke of a dying brush-fire stings the air.

The spired, dark spruces

Crowd up to the snake fence, breathless,

Expectant till the rising of the moon.

In the wet alders,

Where the cold brook flows murmuring,

The red cow drinks--the cow-bell sounds tonk tonk.

*********           ********          ********   ******

From his cabin door

The squatter lounges forth,

Sniffs the damp air, and scans the sky for rain.

He has made his meal,--

Fat bacon, and buckwheat cakes,

And ruddy-brown molasses from Barbados.

His chores all done,

He seats himself on the door-sill,

And slowly fills his pipe, and smokes, and dreams.

He sees his axe

Leaning against the birch logs.

The fresh white chips are scattered over the yard.

He hears his old horse

nosing the hay, in the log barn

Roofed with poles and sheathed with sheets of birch-

     bark.

Beyond the barn

He sees his buckwheat patch.

Its pink-white bloom pale-gleaming through

     twilight.

Its honeyed fragrance

Breathes to his nostrils, mingled

With the tang of the brush-fire smoke, thinly ascending.

Deepens the dusk.

The whitethroats are hushed; and the night-hawk

Drops down from the sky and hunts the low-flying

     night-moths.

*****  *****  *****  *****  *****  *****  *****

The squatter is dreaming.

Vaguely he plans how, come winter,

He'll chop out another field, just over the brook.

He'll build a new barn

Next year, a barn with a haymow,

No more to leave his good hay outside in a stack.

He rises and stretches

Goes in and closes the door,

And lights his lamp on the table beside the window.

The light shines forth.

It lights up the wide-strewn chips.

For a moment it catches the dog darting after a rabbit.

I lights up the lean face

Of the squatter as he sits reading,

Knitting his brow as he spells out a month-old paper.

*****  *****  *****  *****  *****  *****  *****

Slowly the moon,

Humped, crooked, red, remote

Rises, tangled and scrawled behind the spruce tops.

Higher she rises,--

Grows rounder, and smaller and white,

And sails up the empty sky high over the spruce-tops.

She washes in silver

illusively clear, the log barn,

The lop-sided stack by the barn, and the slumbering 

     cabin.

She floods in the window,--

And the squatter stirs in his bunk,

On his mattress stuffed with green fir-tips, balsamy

     scented.

*****  *****  *****  *****  *****  *****  *****

From the dark of the forest

The horned owl hoots, and is still.

Startled, the silence descends, and broods once more

     on the clearing.

The Clearing-Sir Charles G. D. Roberts (1860-1943)

Stumps and harsh rocks, and prostrate trunks all

charred

And gnarled roots naked to the sun and rain,--

They seem in their grim stillness to complain,

And by their plaint the evenings peace is jarred.

These ragged acres fire and the axe have scarred,

And many summers not assuaged their pain.

In vain the pink and saffron light, in vain

The pale dew on the hillocks stripped and marred!

But here and there the waste is touched with cheer

Where spreads the fire-weed like a crimson flood

And venturous plumes of goldenrod appear;

And round the blackened fence the great boughs lean

With comfort; and across the solitude

The hermits holy transport peals serene

Thou Art Not Fair-Thomas Campion (1575?-1620?)

Thou art not fair for all thy red and white,

For all those rosy ornaments in thee,--

Thou art not sweet, though made of mere delight,

Nor fair, nor sweet, unless thou pity me.

I will not soothe thy fancies; thou shalt prove

that beauty is no beauty without love.

Yet love not me, nor seek thou to allure

My thoughts with beauty, were it more divine;

Thy smiles and kisses I cannot endure,

I'll not be wrapp'd up in those arms of thine:

Now show it, if thou be a woman right--

Embrace and kiss and love me in despite.

Poem and Song, There is a Garden-Thomas Camppion (1575?-1620?)

There is a garden in her face,

Where roses and white lilies grow;

A heavenly paradise is that place,

Wherein all pleasant fruits do flow.

There cherries grow, which none may buy

Till Cherry-ripe themselves do cry.

Those cherries fairly'do enclose

Of orient pearl a double row;

Which when her lovely laughter shows,

They look like rose buds fill'd with snow.

Yet them nor peer nor prince can buy,

Till Cherry-ripe themselves do cry.

Her eyes like angels watch them still;

Her brows like bended brows do stand,

Treat'ning with piercing frowns to kill

All that attempt with eye or hand

Those sacred cherries to come nigh,

 Till  Cherry-ripe  themselves do cry.

Sleep, Angry Beauty-Thomas Campion (1575?-1620)

Sleep angry beauty, sleep and fear not me.

For who a sleeping lion dares provoke?

 It shall suffice me here to sit and see

 Those lips shut up that never kindly spoke.

What sight can more content a lover's mind

Than beauty seeming harmless, if not kind?

My words have charm'd  her, for secure she sleeps,

Though guilty much of wrong done to my love;

And in her slumber, see, she, close-ey'd, weeps:

Dreams often more than waking passions move.

Plead, sleep, my cause, and make her soft like thee: 

That she in peace may wake and pity me.

The Little Dancers-Laurence Binyon (1869-1943)

Lonely, save for a few faint stars, the sky
Dreams; and lonely, below the little street
Into its gloom retires, secluded and shy.
Scarcely the dumb roar enters this soft retreat;
And all is dark, save where come flooding rays
From a tavern window; there, to the brisk measure
Of an organ that down in an alley merily plays,
Two children, all alone and no one by,
Holding their tattered frocks, through an airy maze
Of motion, lightly threaded with nimble feet,
Dance sedately: face to face they gaze,
Their eyes shining, grave with a perfect pleasure.