Famous Single Poems
“The poem was written as a comfort to myself and it was more felt and more spontaneous than anything else I ever put into verse. Because it voiced a real feeling, it has touched others. The ideal that what is good for us will come, and that we need not be uneasy or in haste, has proved true in my own case. Much good has come to me that I had no reason to expect—came just as a matter of luck in the unfolding of the great world life.
“The theme of the poem accorded with the religious ideas of my people. They were Old School Baptists who believed in predestination, foreordination, and all that sort of thing. I inherited their feeling, but I wasn’t so theological. It took the shape with me that you see in the poem. It is predestination watered down, or watered up.
“‘Waiting’ was published in the Knickerbocker Magazine, but it attracted no attention until, many years later, Whittier put it in his Songs of Three Centuries. Since then it has kept floating around and has won wide popularity. Every once in a while it makes a tour of the newspapers. Sometimes they give it a new title, or drop my name, or change lines, or add verses, or subtract them. Recently the Congregationalist printed it under the title ‘Serenity’ and credited it to the British Weekly. In the usual version there is one less verse than
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