Classic Poem

When pain assails your heart to tear it,
Your naked heart, its helpless prey,
Receive the gift of grief and bear it,
Soul of my dark departing day.

When times of torment strike unbidden,
With weeping eyes, through pain and stress,
You peer at mistery, dimly hidden:
God's ways are ways of deep distress...

We take the tasks that life enforces,
Grope to light its drabness bars
And raise the load of mundane courses
Up to the festival of stars.

And he, and only he, can sever
His ties with dust in throes of birth
Who loves the crown of thorns, forever
Renouncing all he owned on earth.