REELY'S POETRY BLOG

Um, sorry Glen – but this was written by Edgar A. Guest (1881-1959) and was published around 1909, whereupon it became very popular and was often quoted in magazines and journals and included in devotional calendars. Glen called the song “Less of Me.” Edgar Guest called it:

A Creed

Let me be a little kinder,
Let me be a little blinder
To the faults of those around me,
Let me praise a little more;
Let me be, when I am weary
Just a little bit more cheery,
Let me serve a little better
Those that I am striving for.

Let me be a little braver
When temptation bids me waver,
Let me strive a little harder
To be all that I should be;
Let me be a little meeker
With the brother that is weaker,
Let me think more of my neighbor
And a little less of me.

Let me be a little sweeter,
Make my life a bit completer
By doing what I should do
Every minute of the day;
Let me toil, without complaining,
Not a humble task disdaining,
Let me face the summons calmly
When death beckons me away.

See Breakfast Table Chat (1914) at p. 130, by Edgar Albert Guest. Click on the link to see the poem on google books.

Also, please note that Edgar Guest named several of his poems “A Creed.” There are 3 with that same title in the 1914 edition of Breakfast Table Chat, which is being linked to. The other poems entitled “A Creed” appear on pages 53 and 159.

The one that begins “Let me be a littler kinder …” is on page 130 as referenced above. The poem was often reprinted without a title and without the last stanza.

Power is an interesting them for a poem since the word itself can generally fall into one of these categories: physical power, emotional power, mental power. It would undoubtedly be ideal to possess all three at once, but we do admire power in any form. I would say ‘except evil,’ but some folks do admire power even when it is evil; otherwise there would not be such a great interest in crime in general and organized crime groups, like the American and Sicilian Mafia, and the many other criminal cartels spread across the world. Dictators and religious cults are other examples of power put to bad uses.

Here is a poem simply entitled “Power” that takes a look at one woman’s power. See if you agree with it:

Power

Living in the earth-deposits of our history

Today a backhoe divulged out of a crumbling flank of earth
one bottle amber perfect a hundred-year-old
cure for fever or melancholy a tonic
for living on this earth in the winters of this climate.

Today I was reading about Marie Curie:
she must have known she suffered from radiation sickness
her body bombarded for years by the element
she had purified
It seems she denied to the end
the source of the cataracts on her eyes
the cracked and suppurating skin of her finger-ends
till she could no longer hold a test-tube or a pencil

She died a famous woman denying
her wounds
denying
her wounds came from the same source as her power.

by Adrienne Rich.
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Teaching with Fire: Poetry That Sustains the Courage to Teach is a poetry book in which teachers share poetry that has had a motivational impact on their lives and profession. It is divided into different sections from Hearing the Call, Cherishing the Work, On the Edge, Holding On, In the Moment, to Daring To Lead with a total of 88 poems by Rumi, Billy Collins, Mary Oliver, Rainier Marie Rilke, Marcie Hans and Anne Sexton, just to name a few.

Each poem has a short introduction from the teacher who submitted it telling how the poem had an impact on his or her life. One commentary tells how an Emily Dickinson poem, Chariot, helped a young girl cope wih the death of her mother and later become a teacher. Another teacher shares how Tennyson’s Crossing the Bar has helped her deal with the tragedies affecting some of her students, even dying young.

Among the contributors are college professors and presidents, principals, elementary, middle and high school teachers, organizational consultants, from all over the USA and as far away as Israel.

Is it just for teachers? Well, I don’t think so. I think it would be especially good to give to people who say they don’t like poetry because they had a teacher who made the subject a drag. I’d give it to students for the insight they would gain on the profession of teaching. I’d give it to parents. Aren’t parents teachers and often in need of some courage bolstering? The bell never rings for parents.
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Last night I came across a website selling the “Edgar Allan Poe Ultimate Audio Collection” that you can download immediately for $12.95. Savor 9 hours of inside the mind of Edgar Allan Poe, it says.

Sound like a good deal? Well, it’s not. All the files come from Librivox and are already online available to download for free. Why would anyone want to pay $12.95 to download something you can download for free? The only reason I can think of is they don’t know it’s freely available.

How do I know they are from Librivox? Well, I have seen these same files being sold on CDs on eBay before, only on eBay the seller acknowledges that Librivox is the source. Here’s the link to the entire free ’shurtagal’ Poe audio readings: http://librivox.org/edgar-allan-poe-poems-by-edgar-allan-poe/. Here’s the site where they are being sold. Compare the running times. What a coincidence!

I’ve actually had occasion to listen to shurtagal’s Annabel Lee when I was looking for particular version of the poem (The Griswold version), but it wasn’t what I needed in terms of the words. I had to use the reading by Mr. H. Jeong.

So, what is Librivox (for anyone who doesn’t already know)? It is an online digital library of free public domain audiobooks and poetry, read by volunteers and released into the public domain. As of July 2009, it boasts a catalog of 2,500 unabridged books and shorter works available to download – FREE.
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Here is a poem that weaves in the names of all who served as pastors of the Harrison Square Church in Dorchester (Boston), Mass. up to 1878. All of them were authors and many were poets. Rev. Caleb Davis Bradlee, who was the current Pastor at the time, wrote it and although he lists all the names at the bottom of the poem, I will list them first and tell you what I found out about them. Just posting the poem would give you no idea how famous these guys really were in their time, although few have made it into wikipedia (and the ones that did only because of their connection to another person who has a page).

Rev. Charles Brooks – The church was opened for Unitarian worship in Nov. 1848 with the illustrious Rev. Brooks on hand till the end of the year. He was known as the Father of Normal Schools for his labors in education. A memoir about this Rev. Brooks (picture and all) appears in an 1880-1881 volume of The Massachusetts Historical Society at p. 174. At one point in his life, it says he became friends with William Wordsworth, and he also turns up in John Quincy Adams’ memoirs. He is not the Rhode Island Unitarian minister in wikipedia, Rev. Charles Timothy Brooks.

Rev. Francis C. Williams took over In Jan. 1849 and stayed, as we also see in the poem, a year. From there he went to Vermont. When the Civil War broke out, he served as the chaplain for the Eighth Regiment of Vermont Volunteer Infantry. One report states he had an “impetuous nature,” while another describes him in his later years as appearing much younger than he really was.

Rev. Samuel Johnson came on next in Jan. 1850, staying until the spring of 1851. No, not THAT Samuel Johnson. This Samuel Johnson was a classmate and friend of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s brother, Samuel. Together they published a book of hymns entitled “Hymns of the Spirit,” which included a poem attributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson, later discovered to really be by a lady named Miss Eliza Thayer Clapp. (If Emerson was the one who eventually corrected this, he took a long time doing it). There’s a page about Rev. Johnson on this site: Amos Bronson Alcott (Louisa May Alcott’s father).

Rev. Dr. S. G. Bulfinch came on board in August of 1852. While editor at the Southern Messenger, Edgar Allan Poe corresponded with Rev. Bulfinch in 1836. (links here), mentioning his Boston cousins, Robert and William, in one. Rev. Dr. Bulfinch served at All Soul’s Church in Washington, D.C. from 1838 to 1847, but Poe had left The Messenger in 1837. Stephen Greenleaf Bulfinch was the son of architect, Charles Bulfinch, (dome of the U.S. Capitol and many Boston landmarks), and brother of Thomas Bulfinch, author of Bulfinch’s Mythology.

Rev. J. B. Marvin’s stint at Harrison Square Church appears, according to the poem, to have been pretty short, but he did hire Ralph Waldo Emerson to lecture on 4 occasions, which cost $35.00 each time.

Rev. Frederic Hinckley began his work as a Unitarian minister in Windsor, Vt. He served at All Soul’s Church in Washington, D.C. for five years beginning in 1870. He died in Barnstable in Dec. 1891. His son Frederic Allen Hinckley was also a minister, who was listed in early editions of Who’s Who In America as well as a grandson, Allen Carter Hinckley who was an opera singer with the Met.

Rev. Prof. Henry C. Badger was married to Ada Shepard, known as the model for the character of Hilda in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Marble Faun.” Rev. Badger was also an author. His brother, William, published a post-mortem tribute to him in The Unitarian, Vol. IX, Jan. 1894, p. 464, which reveals a great deal about his prolific career and his personal life, including the tragic ending of his marriage.

Rev. Nathaniel Seaver, Jr. was a little hard to pinpoint. Perhaps it’s because his first name is really spelled Nathanael, Harvard Divinity School has a page with a short bio on him.

Now for the poem:
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