Coates Kinney

Is Life Worth Living?

You ask, in scorn, if life is worth the living.
  But tell me, then, what is it you call life?
Is it the joy of getting or of giving?
  Is it repose of thought or thrill of strife?

Who toils from rising of the sun to setting,
  And robs his nights of peace, and murders sleep,
Giving his whole soul to the greed of getting,
  Gets no possession that the soul can keep.

The young rich man who turned away in sadness
  When Jesus bade him all his riches give
Had never tasted how the heavenly gladness
  Of making others glad helps one to live.

His life is not worth living who remembers
  No other living than of self and sense;
To kindle warmth and light in such dead embers
  Were past the power of Omnipotence.

Nor deem that in pursuit of pure thought solely
  (The palefaced passions back of prison-bars)
You ever reach the height of living wholly;
  Go forth in night and think among the stars!

If majesties of worlds there do not crush you,
  Nor miracles of distance hold you fast,
Nor mysteries of motion awe and hush you,
  You are not living then in thought, at last.

Yet if you were, the keen eternal yearning
  To know what never can be known would make
A mockery of all your little learning—
  The thirst that no Pierian spring can slake.

But, since high thinking is not life’s fruition,
  Try action—Is not that the life indeed?
To struggle for the prizes of ambition?
  To rule in council or in battle lead?

Ah, vanity! on wings of fancy rising,
  Behold earth through a million miles of air—
Man and the monuments of his devising
  All blank and silent in her moony glare.

But then? There is, above the life’s illusions,
  Above its greed and strife and pride, above
Death and the grave and faith’s and doubt’s confusions,
  One life worth living—love, love’s joy of love.