Explore "As by Fire" by Ella Wheeler Wilcox on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Sometimes I feel so passionate a yearning / For spiritual perfection here below, / This vigorous frame, with healthful fervor burning, / Seems my determined foe,
So actively it makes a stern resistance, / So cruelly sometimes it wages war / Against a wholly spiritual existence / Which I am striving for.
It interrupts my soul's intense devotions; / Some hope it strangles, of divinest birth, / With a swift rush of violent emotions / Which link me to the earth.
It is as if two mortal foes contended / Within my bosom in a deadly strife, / One for the loftier aims for souls intended, / One for the earthly life.
And yet I know this very war within me, / Which brings out all my will-power and control, / This very conflict at the last shall win me / The loved and longed-for goal.
The very fire which seems sometimes so cruel / Is the white light that shows me my own strength. / A furnace, fed by the divinest fuel, / It may become at length.
Ah! when in the immortal ranks enlisted, / I sometimes wonder if we shall not find / That not by deeds, but by what we've resisted, / Our places are assigned.