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Life Poems
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| Read inspiring life poems such as this one by Grantland Rice entitled Might Have Been. We tend to look back and moan and groan about all that has happened in the past and what we would have done differently. And in our imaginations, what "might have been" is always wonderfully better. But as this poem shows us... what "might have been" may have actually turned out worse than it did! So count your blessings on what is good in your life right now. |
"Yes, it's pretty hard," the optimistic old woman admitted. "I have to get along with only two teeth, one in the upper jaw and one in the lower--but thank God, they meet."
Might Have Been
Here's to "The days that might have been";
Here's to "The life I might have led";
The fame I might have gathered in--
The glory ways I might have sped.
Great "Might Have Been," I drink to you
Upon a throne where thousands hail--
And then--there looms another view--
I also "might have been" in jail.
O "Land of Might Have Been," we turn
With aching hearts to where you wait;
Where crimson fires of glory burn,
And laurel crowns the guarding gate;
We may not see across your fields
The sightless skulls that knew their woe--
The broken spears--the shattered shields--
That "might have been" as truly so.
"Of all sad words of tongue or pen"--
So wails the poet in his pain--
The saddest are, "It might have been,"
And world-wide runs the dull refrain.
The saddest? Yes--but in the jar
This thought brings to me with its curse,
I sometimes think the gladdest are
"It might have been a blamed sight worse."
~Grantland Rice (1880 - 1954)
Rice was born in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, and subsequently attended Montgomery Bell Academy and Vanderbilt University in Nashville. After taking early jobs with the Atlanta Journal and the Cleveland News, he later became a sportswriter for the Nashville Tennessean. Afterwards he obtained a series of prestigious jobs with major newspapers in the Northeastern United States. He is best-known as being the successor to Walter Camp in the selection of college football All-America teams beginning in 1925, and for being the writer who dubbed the great backfield of the Notre Dame team of 1924 the "Four Horsemen" of Notre Dame, a Biblical reference to the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, in a famous account published in the New York Herald Tribune on October 18 that describes the Notre Dame vs. Army game played at the Polo Grounds.
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