A Commonplace Song

Ebbs and flows the restless river

   In the city street

Where the great nerve centres quiver,

   Where the pulses beat.

Where the human waves are driving

   Drifts a woman’s face,

White and worn by ceaseless striving

   With the commonplace.

Want has written strange inscriptions

   On the brow and cheek;

Pain could weave some weird descriptions

   If the lips would speak;

Toil has touched the lines of beauty

   And, the curves of grace.

Comeliness is good, but duty

   Rules the commonplace.

Thick-soled shoes and shabby bonnet,

   Dingy cotton gloves,

Old turned dress with darns upon it

   (Not what woman loves),

Gaunt umbrella, green with weather—

   One must self efface

To keep home and bairns together

   In the commonplace.

Late and early, never shirking

   Tub and scrub and broom,

Late at night with needle working

   In the dwelling-room;

Yet when week’s receipts are thinner

   Grocers’ bills to face—

Tenpence means three children’s dinner

   In the commonplace!

Poets sing their wild Iambics—

   Love and War and Gods—

Let us sing of humble women

   Fighting fearful odds,

Not where steel and bullets rattle

   And the squadrons race,

But the grim unending battle

   With the commonplace.

Now they shriek the creeds are dying!

   Faith is of the air!

Wailfully their lyres are sighing

   Sonnets of despair!

All the scheme of things evolving

   Somehow out of Space!

Darken then, instead of solving,

   This grim commonplace!

Rogues may win success and glory,

   Beauty pride of fame,

Statesmen make a nation’s story,

   Poets deathless name.

But the patient woman Toiler

   What is hers to win?

On the one hand—Want, the Spoiler,

   On the other—Sin!

Ye who swear and strut and bluster,

   So-called manly pride,

When you answer at the muster

   On the other side,

Will the courage you have vaunted

   Stand you in such grace

As weak hands that fought undaunted

   With the commonplace?

Noblest worth works ever humbly,

   Oftest is unseen,

Half the world is toiling dumbly

   In the gray routine.

Sing, O Poet of the Morrow!

   Cheer the weary face

Where brave women moil and sorrow

   In the commonplace!