The Truth Teller

by Ella Wheeler Wilcox

   The Truth Teller lifts the curtain,
      And shows us the people’s plight;
   And everything seems uncertain,
      And nothing at all looks right.
   Yet out of the blackness groping,
      My heart finds a world in bloom;
   For it somehow is fashioned for hoping,
      And it cannot live in the gloom.

   He tells us from border to border,
      That race is warring with race;
   With riot and mad disorder,
      The earth is a wretched place;
   And yet ere the sun is setting
      I am thinking of peace, not strife;
   For my heart has a way of forgetting
      All things save the joy of life.

   I heard in my Youth’s beginning
      That earth was a region of woe,
   And trouble, and sorrow, and sinning:
      The Truth Teller told me so.
   I knew it was true, and tragic;
      And I mourned over much that was wrong;
   And then, by some curious magic,
      The heart of me burst into song.

   The years have been going, going,
      A mixture of pleasure and pain;
   But the Truth Teller’s books are showing
      That evil is on the gain.
   And I know that I ought to be grieving,
      And I should be too sad to sing;
   But somehow I keep on believing
      That life is a glorious thing.

from An Englishman and Other Poems by Ella Wheeler Wilcox (1912)
A Ballade of the Unborn Dead	Just You

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