Victory in Defeat
The great, radiant souls of earth—the Davids, the Shakespeares, the Lincolns—know grief and affliction as well as joy and triumph. But adversity is never to them mere adversity; it
“Doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange”;
and in the crucible of character their suffering itself is transmuted into song.
Defeat may serve as well as victory
To shake the soul and let the glory out.
When the great oak is straining in the wind,
The boughs drink in new beauty, and the trunk
Sends down a deeper root on the windward side.
Only the soul that knows the mighty grief
Can know the mighty rapture. Sorrows come
To stretch out spaces in the heart for joy.
Edwin Markham.
From “The Shoes of Happiness, and Other Poems.”