For each of us, life has its share of pleasure and sorrow. Most of us prefer the pleasure, but we also need the wisdom, patience, and understanding that sorrow offers.
Robert Browning Hamilton expressed it well in his poem “Along the Road”:
I walked a mile with Pleasure;
She chattered all the way,
But left me none the wiser
For all she had to say.
I walked a mile with Sorrow
And ne’er a word said she;
But oh, the things I learned from her
When Sorrow walked with me!1
The poet’s daughter, Virginia Hamilton Adair, was very young when she first read this poem. “It had a Mother Goose simplicity to it,” she remembered. “A perfect little lyric with . . . meaning that would reveal itself to me later.”2 At the time, however, she wondered how one can learn anything from sorrow.
Virginia Hamilton Adair, herself a poet, eventually walked along her own road with Pleasure and Sorrow. For many years she enjoyed a loving marriage, a happy family, and a successful career; then she had to deal with her husband’s suicide and a bout with glaucoma that finally left her blind. But she continued to write poetry even as she lost her eyesight and at the age of 83 attained considerable celebrity with her first book of poetry, Ants on the Melon. She passed away in 2004 at the age of 91, wiser and more sensitive because of what she had experienced.
It’s true that pleasure can be fun and enjoyable—an important part of life. But because it doesn’t stretch our souls, it does not teach. If we are willing, the mile that, eventually, all of us walk with sorrow can soften our hearts and school our souls.
Program #4015
1 In Hazel Felleman, sel., The Best Loved Poems of the American People (1936), 537
2 In Carmela Ciuraru, ed., First Loves: Poets Introduce the Essential Poems That Captivated and Inspired Them (2000), 25.