Beauty Rises Again

A Summer Day

by Edgar Guest

Blue in the sky and green in the tree
and a bird singing anthems of gladness for me,
a breeze soft and fair
as a little girl’s hair,
with nothing that’s ugly or base anywhere.
A world that’s swept clean
of the doubtful and mean,
with nowhere a hint of the care that has been.

I stand at my gate with the sun in my face,
and I thank the good Lord for such beauty and grace.
Time was, I declare,
when the snows drifted there,
and those boughs with their blossoms were ugly and bare.
Now the sin and the wrong
of the cold days and long
are lost in life’s splendor of sunshine and song.

God makes it all right in good time, I believe –
we doubt when we’re troubled, we doubt when we grieve;
like a stark, barren tree
looms the wrong which we see.
Hurt, anguish and care hide the splendor to be
but at last from the pain
rises beauty again,
and there’s never a bough that has suffered in vain.

Perhaps at the last, ‘neath a lovelier sun,
when the anguish and hurt of life’s growing is done,
we may rise from our pain
showing never a stain
of the cares of the years which fell on us like rain.
When the soul is set free
all the flaws we now see
may be lost in the joy of the new life to be.

From his book, Collected Verse of Edgar A Guest
© 1934 by The Reilly & Lee Company