November 5th 2015

Dates are just little milestones on the face of a calendar; or are they?
Last night Patience and the Prodigal hugely enjoyed the movie of Jack Kerouac’s famous novel,

“On the Road”. By a coincidence Jack was born in 1922, the same year as my old man. His birthday was March 12th which is my own birthday. By another coincidence I picked up an ancient volume today in the attic called “Poems from Ella Wheeler Wilcox” and glanced through it. She is famous for many quotable quotes, the most memorable being:

  “Laugh, and the world laughs with you; Weep, and you weep alone;
  In Chinatown, San Francisco, California there is an alley called Jack Kerouac Alley whose focal feature is a number of plaques with quotations from famous poets, among them John Steinbeck, Maya Angelou and Kerouac himself. Nestled in among these is Ella Wheeler Wilcox whose quotation is:
 “Love lights more fires than hate extinguishes”

She also wrote;
“All love that has not friendship for its base
Is like a mansion built upon the sand”
By a curious coincidence, today is Ella Wheeler Wilcox’s birthday.

Incidentally, Kerouac’s quotation from “On the Road” is:
“The air was soft, the stars so fine, the promise of every cobbled alley so great,
that I thought I was in a dream.”

Some lines from one of Ella’s more thoughtful poems: (Progress)

“Why should the spirit peer through some priest-curtained orifice
And grope along dim corridors of doubt?
When all the splendour from unfathomed seas of space
Might bathe it with the golden waves of love?
Sweep up the debris of decaying faiths;
Sweep down the cobwebs of worn-out beliefs,
And throw your soul wide open to the light
Of Reason and Knowledge”

Happy Birthday Ella!