Explore "Summer Dreams" by Ella Wheeler Wilcox on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
When the Summer sun is shining, / And the green things push and grow, / Oft my heart runs over measure, / With its flowing fount of pleasure, / As I feel the sea winds blow; / Ah, then life is good, I know.
And I think of sweet birds building, / And of children fair and free; / And of glowing sun-kissed meadows, / And of tender twilight shadows, / And of boats upon the sea. / Oh, then life seems good to me!
Then unbidden and unwanted, / Come the darker, sadder sights; / City shop and stifling alley, / Where misfortune's children rally; / And the hot crime-breeding nights, / And the dearth of God's delights.
And I think of narrow prisons / Where unhappy songbirds dwell, / And of cruel pens and cages / Where some captured wild thing rages / Like a madman in his cell, / In the Zoo, the wild beasts' hell.
And I long to lift the burden / Of man's selfishness and sin; / And to open wide earth's treasures / Of God's storehouse, full of pleasures, / For my dumb and human kin, / And to ask the whole world in.