Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, A DOCTOR'S CENTURY, by SILAS WEIR MITCHELL


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

A DOCTOR'S CENTURY, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: A doctor's century dead and gone!
Last Line: And to the past a glad good-night.
Subject(s): Healing; Physicians; Universities & Colleges; Cures; Doctors


READ AT THE CENTENNIAL DINNER OF THE COLLEGE OF PHYSICIANS OF PHILADELPHIA, 1887

A DOCTOR'S century dead and gone!
Good-night to those one hundred years,
To all the memories they bear
Of honest help for pains or tears;

To them that like St. Christopher,
When North and South were sad with graves,
Bore the true Christ of charity
Across the battles' crimson waves.

Good-night to all the shining line,
Our peerage,—yes, our lords of thought;
Their blazonry, unspotted lives
Which all the ways of honor taught.

A gentler word, as proud a thought,
For those who won no larger prize
Than humble days well lived can win
From thankful hearts and weeping eyes.

Too grave my song; a lighter mood
Shall bid us scan our honored roll,
For jolly jesters gay and good,
Who healed the flesh and charmed the soul,

And took their punch, and took the jokes
Would make our prudish conscience tingle,
Then bore their devious lanterns home,
And slept, or heard the night-bell jingle.

Our Century's dead; God rest his soul!
Without a doctor or a nurse,
Without a "post," without a dose,
He's off on Time's old rattling hearse.

What sad disorder laid him out
To all pathologists is dim;
An intercurrent malady,—
Bacterium chronos, finished him!

Our new-born century, pert and proud,
Like some young doctor fresh from college,
Disturbs our prudent age with doubts
And misty might of foggy knowledge.

Ah, but to come again and share
The gains his calmer days shall store,
For them that in a hundred years
Shall see our "science grown to more,"

Perchance as ghosts consultant we
May stand beside some fleshly fellow,
And marvel what on earth he means,
When this new century's old and mellow.

Take then the thought that wisdom fades,
That knowledge dies of newer truth,
That only duty simply done
Walks always with the step of youth.

A grander morning floods our skies
With higher aims and larger light;
Give welcome to the century new,
And to the past a glad good-night.





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