What Counts is the Set of Your Sails, 
Not the Gales

Among art's most important purposes, it should exult, it should inspire, and should aim for the exalted and the beautiful.  Among the poets taken most seriously by the Twentieth century's literati, there was less of this exultation than in the century before them--a sad and disheartening fact.

Here is Ella Wheeler Wilcox, an ebullient cheerleader from that earlier century, who offers some guidance for unfolding your life, a voice that confidently sang out long before the debilitating fog of postmodern nihilism rolled in from the sea of bad philosophy.

                      Winds of Fate

                      Ella Wheeler Wilcox

One ship drives east and another drives west
With the selfsame winds that blow.
Tis the set of the sails
and not the gales
Which tells us the way to go.

Like the winds of the seas are the ways of fate,
As we voyage along through the life:
Tis the set of a soul
That decides its goal,
And not the calm or the strife.

E   P   N

2018.1021