Explore "Three Women" by Ella Wheeler Wilcox on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
In a bare little room of a tenement row / Of the city, Maurice sat alone. It was so / (In this nearness to life's darkest phases of grief / And despair) that his own bitter woe found relief. / Joy needs no companion; but sorrow and pain / Long to comrade with sorrow. The flowery chain / Flung by Pleasure about her gay votaries breaks / With the least strain upon it. The chain sorrow makes / Links heart unto heart. As a bullock will fly / To far fields when an arrow has pierced him, to die, / So Maurice had flown over far oceans to find / No balm for his wounds, and no peace for his mind.
Cosmopolitan, always, is sorrow; at home / In all countries and lands, thriving well while we roam / In vain efforts to slay it. Toil only, brings peace / To the tempest tossed heart. What in travel Maurice / Failed to find -- self-forgetfulness -- came with his work / For the suffering poor in the slums of New York.