A Perfect World
In honor of National Poetry Month, here’s one of my favorite poems by a Victorian Englishman known for his spiritual optimism:
The year’s at the spring
And day’s at the morn;
Morning’s at seven;
The hillside’s dew-pearled;
The lark’s on the wing;
The snail’s on the thorn;
God’s in His heaven—
All’s right with the world.
Robert Browning (1812-1889)
The way to a peaceful life is to notice the perfection in God’s world and in ourselves, and nurture that perspective. When you look out with wide eyes of wonder and appreciate all that you see as a gift from God, including your own life working in harmony with nature, you will know what the poet meant.
Rather than seeing ourselves as connected to this world, we often feel we are in it to push it around and make it conform to us. Rather than accepting it, we twist it to feed our ego, creating havoc, imbalance, and what we call imperfection. Then the ultimate irony, we blame God for the very conditions we create out of the perfection that is our gift from God. The poet says, Continue Reading