Bliss Carman, et al., eds. The World’s Best Poetry. 1904.
IV. Comfort and CheerAunt Philliss Guest
William Channing Gannett (18401923)I
The summer was bursting from sky and plain,
Thrilling our blood as we bounded along,—
When a picture flashed, and I dropped the rein.
Slipping through low green leagues of sedge,
An ebbing tide, and a setting sun;
A hut and a woman by the edge.
The wrinkles lay close on the withered face;
Children were buried and sold away,—
The Freedom had come to the last of a race!
And praised the Lord, if “the pain” passed by;
From the earthen floor the smoke curled out
Through shingles patched with the bright blue sky.
I asked, and pitied the gray old head;
Sure as a child, in quiet tone,
“Me and Jesus, Massa,” she said.
With a presence I had not seen before;
The air was full of a music low,
And the Guest Divine stood at the door!
Who seeth the widow give her mite,
Had watched this slave in her weary strife,
And shown himself to her longing sight.
The grovelling want and the darkened mind,—
I looked on this; but the Lord, within:
I would what he saw was in me to find!
To see what the angels see in bliss:
She lived, and the Lord lived; so, of course,
They lived together,—she knew but this.
As something to pity, so poor and low,
Had already borne fruit that the Lord so prized
He loved to come near and see it grow.
A few more days of the hut’s unrest,
A little while longer to sit in the sun,—
Then—He would be host, and she would be guest!
Should stop on his errand of love some day
To ask, “Who lives in the mansion bright?”
“Me and Jesus,” Aunt Phillis will say.
And things are not as Aunt Phillises dream?
For this I know,—
That our faiths are foolish by falling below,
Not coming above, what God will show;
That his commonest thing hides a wonder vast,
To whose beauty our eyes have never passed;
That his face in the present, or in the to-be,
Outshines the best that we think we see.