Life Grows Fairer by Ruth Collie
"Life Grows Fairer" is a short reflective poem by Ruth Collie that opens Ruth Collie's collection of the same name, built around the declaration that life becomes more beautiful with age rather than more burdensome. The speaker asserts that this deepening beauty should persist even as death approaches, framing mortality not as something to be feared but as a lover advancing toward the end of life. The poem explicitly rejects worldly markers of success as the source of this growing fairness: pomp, social status, ambition fulfilled, lucky fortune, and material wealth (the Midas image underscores how gold specifically is dismissed as meaningless). The speaker notes with wry self-awareness that her own bank account has not changed, making clear that the poem's claim about life's increasing beauty is not tied to any improvement in circumstance or possession. Instead, the poem locates the source of this fairness in love, tenderness, and grace, which the speaker says make the world lovelier "day by day." A simple joy—seeing a friendly face while going bravely through life—is offered as more valuable than any accumulation of status or wealth. The poem also downplays intellect, knowledge, and wit as forces that shape a good life, conceding only that they help "a bit" before pivoting to gratitude for simpler, God-given gifts: sunlight and flowers, peace under starlit skies, friends gathered around a fire, books that amuse, help, and instruct, and love that fulfills the heart's deepest desire. Structurally and tonally, the piece functions as a devotional or inspirational lyric, using plain, conversational language and a gently persuasive first-person voice to argue that aging, rightly understood, is not decline but enrichment. The poem's rhetorical strategy is contrastive throughout: it repeatedly names what does *not* make life fairer (ambition, luck, wealth, cleverness) before affirming what does (love, friendship, nature, faith, books), building its case through accumulation of small, accessible pleasures rather than grand philosophical argument. The closing image—love crowning the heart's desire—serves as the emotional and thematic culmination of the piece, tying the poem's meditation on aging back to its central claim that human connection and gratitude, not achievement or acquisition, are what render a life increasingly beautiful as it nears its close.
By Ruth Collie · First published 1938 · Genre: Poetry, Philosophical Poetry, Inspirational/Motivational Literature