Skip to content
Linespedia

Mission

Topics: classic

If you are sighing for a lofty work,          If great ambitions dominate your mind,     Just watch yourself and see you do not shirk          The common little ways of being kind.     If you are dreaming of a future goal,          When, crowned with glory, men shall own your power,     Be careful that you let no struggling soul          Go by unaided in the present hour.     If you are moved to pity for the earth,          And long to aid it, do not look so high,     You pass some poor, dumb creature faint with thirst -          All life is equal in the eternal eye.     If you would help to make the wrong things right,          Begin at home:    there lies a lifetime's toil.     Weed your own garden fair for all men's sight,          Before you plan to till another's soil.     God chooses His own leaders in the world,          And from the rest He asks but willing hands.     As mighty mountains into place are hurled,          While patient tides may only shape the sands.

AI analysis available. Enable JavaScript to interact.

About this line

"If you are sighing for a lofty work,..."

Exploring the themes of classic, Ella Wheeler Wilcox delivers a powerful performance in "Mission"... ### Why We Love This Line At Linespedia, we believe that poetry is the ultimate sanctuary for the soul...

Classified Tags

Related lines

"Luck is the tuning of our inmost thought          To chord with God's great plan.         That done, ah! know,     Thy silent wishes to results"

"I stand in the blaze of the candle rays,          While my merry maidens three     Arrange each tress, and loop my dress,          And render m"

"I held the golden vessel of my soul     And prayed that God would fill it from on high.     Day after day the importuning cry     Grew stronger"

"How happy they are, in all seeming,          How gay, or how smilingly proud,     How brightly their faces are beaming,          These people"

"Here morning in the ploughman's songs is met     Ere yet one footstep shows in all the sky,     And twilight in the east, a doubt as yet,     S"

"The Text is taken from Percy's Reliques (1765), vol. i. p. 71, 'given from two MS. copies, transmitted from Scotland.' Herd had a very similar bal"

Continue Reading

"Luck is the tuning of our inmost thought          ..."

Weekly Poetic Insight

Join our literary Sanctuary

Get the most inspiring lines, poetic analysis, and secret shayaris delivered to your inbox every Sunday.