Explore "Why Not?" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Why not look forward far as Plato looked / And see the beauty of our coming life, / As he saw that which might be ours to-day? / If his soul, then, could rise so far beyond / The brutal average of that old time, / When icy peaks of art stood sheer and high / In fat black valleys where the helot toiled; / If he, from that, could see so far ahead, / Could forecast days when Love and Justice both / Should watch the cradle of a healthy child, / And Wisdom walk with Beauty and pure Joy / In all the common ways of daily life,- / Then may not we, from great heights hardly won, / Bright hills of liberty, broad plains of peace, / And flower-sweet valleys of warm human love, / Still broken by the chasms of despair / Where Poverty and Ignorance and Sin / Pollute the air of all,-why not, from this, / Look on as Plato looked, and see the day / When his Republic and our Heaven, joined, / Shall make life what God meant it? / Ay, we do!