Explore "Unanswered Prayers" by Ella Wheeler Wilcox on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Like some schoolmaster, kind in being stern, / Who hears the children crying o'er their slates / And calling, "Help me, master! " yet helps not, / Since in his silence and refusal lies / Their self-development, so God abides / Unheeding many prayers. He is not deaf / To any cry sent up from earnest hearts; / He hears and strengthens when He must deny. / He sees us weeping over life's hard sums; / But should He give the key and dry our tears, / What would it profit us when school were done / And not one lesson mastered?
What a world / Were this if all our prayers were answered. Not / In famed Pandora's box were such vast ills / As lie in human hearts. Should our desires, / Voiced one by one in prayer, ascend to God / And come back as events shaped to our wish, / What chaos would result!