Once in a While by Ella Wheeler Wilcox

Name: Once in a While
Author: Ella Wheeler Wilcox

"Once in a While" is a lyric poem by Ella Wheeler Wilcox that meditates on the extreme rarity of genuine emotional constancy in human relationships. Structured in three parallel stanzas, each opening with the titular phrase, the poem identifies three interconnected human virtues — faithfulness of heart, enduring love, and true friendship — and argues that all three are vanishingly uncommon in a world defined by change, sorrow, and hardship. The first stanza establishes the poem's central paradox: though the world is filled with transience and regret, there occasionally exists a heart that remains true through all alteration, one that does not forget its bonds despite the passage of time or the weight of circumstance. Wilcox uses compressed natural imagery — a rose blooming in December, a bird in the Arctic — to convey just how abnormal and precious such constancy is. The italicized emphasis on the word "heart" underscores that she is speaking not of a superficial sentiment but of something intrinsic to a person's character. The second stanza extends this argument to romantic or devoted love, a love capable of surviving not merely life's trials but death itself — one that persists into spiritual continuation. Wilcox heightens the rarity here, declaring such love even stranger than a spring found in desert sand. The inclusion of toil, danger, and strife signals that this love is tested, not theoretical; it is defined precisely by its survival under conditions designed to destroy it. The third stanza turns to friendship, the social dimension of the preceding two virtues. A true friend, Wilcox argues, cleaves through good fortune and ill alike, following the individual regardless of social station — whether they inhabit squalor or splendor. The stanza gathers all three qualities together in its closing lines — the true heart, the tender love, the faithful smile — and delivers the poem's definitive verdict: these are encountered only "once in a while." Tonally, the poem balances elegy and affirmation. Wilcox does not deny that such constancy exists; she has encountered it, or imagines its existence with conviction. But the poem is suffused with wistfulness, even a kind of philosophical resignation. The world is acknowledged as strange and grief-laden, and the rarity of these virtues is not a spur to cynicism but rather an occasion for cherishing them all the more intensely when they appear. The repetition of the opening phrase across all three stanzas creates a cumulative effect, each instance reinforcing the same truth from a slightly different angle — character, love, friendship — until the final quotation marks around "once in a while" give the phrase the weight of a proven aphorism rather than a casual observation. The poem is characteristic of Wilcox's broader body of work in its directness of sentiment, its accessible diction, its use of natural analogy to ground abstract emotional claims, and its earnest belief in the moral significance of loyalty and constancy. It belongs to the tradition of sentimental Victorian verse while anticipating the more colloquial emotionalism that would mark popular poetry in the early twentieth century. Its enduring appeal rests on its honest acknowledgment of disappointment alongside its quiet insistence that rarity does not mean nonexistence.

By Ella Wheeler Wilcox · First published 1873 · Genre: Poetry, Lyric Poetry, Love Poetry · 267 words

First lines

Once in a while, in this world so strange, / To lighten our sad regrets, / We find a heart that is true through change -- / A heart that never forgets. / Oh, rare as a blossoming rose in December -- / As a bird in an Arctic clime, / Is a heart, a _heart_ that can remember / Through sorrow and change and time.

Once in a while we find a love / That will live through life and death, / Ay! that will follow the soul above. / Not passing away with the breath. / But rarer, Oh, rarer by far and stranger / Than a spring in the desert sand, / Is a love that will last, with toil, and danger, / And strife on every hand.

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Once in a While is listed on Textopian as a poem by Ella Wheeler Wilcox, dated 1873 CE.

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Work type: Poem
Author: Ella Wheeler Wilcox
Date: 1873 CE
Language: English
Genres: Poetry, Lyric Poetry, Love Poetry, Victorian Poetry, Philosophical Poetry
Length: 267 words
Structure: 1 section, 3 paragraphs
Reading fit: Easy (6th Grade)

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Genres

Poetry — The work is fundamentally a poem structured in verse form with consistent rhyming couplets and poetic language throughout.
Lyric Poetry — Expresses personal, emotional reflections on human connections with musical quality and introspective meditation on rare emotional truths.
Love Poetry — Centers on celebrating romantic love that transcends life and death, emphasizing its rarity and power to endure through sorrow and change.
Victorian Poetry — Written in Victorian era style with characteristic rhyme schemes, sentimental idealism, and romantic themes typical of the nineteenth century.