"Each Day A Life" by Robert William Service

 

Each Day A Life

I count each day a little life,

With birth and death complete;

I cloister it from care and strife

And keep it sane and sweet.

 

With eager eyes I greet the morn,

Exultant as a boy,

Knowing that I am newly born

To wonder and to joy.

 

And when the sunset splendours wane

And ripe for rest am I,

Knowing that I will live again,

Exultantly I die.

 

O that all Life were but a Day

Sunny and sweet and sane!

And that at Even I might say:

"I sleep to wake again."

Enjoy the  poem with beautiful music.

poem video👇

https://youtu.be/5M1CBjLWveI

Who wrote the poem "Each Day A Life"?

Robert W. Service (January 16, 1874 – September 11, 1958)

Robert William Service was a British-Canadian poet and writer. As a bank clerk, he had to travel widely in the Western U.S. and Canada. When his bank sent him to the Yukon, he wrote poems about the Klondike Gold Rush and achieved an immediate and great commercial success. His poems had often been criticized as literarily inferior by the critics, as in the case of Rudyard Kipling, and he was nicknamed “the Canadian Kipling.” This, however, didn’t bother Service, who classified his work as “verse, not poetry.”

"Each Day A Life" explanation

In the poem, the speaker describes his relationship with his beloved that is more than love, which is too often misused and vulgarized. He expresses his pure devotion of her, and even pity from her is better than love from another woman. This poem was written for Jane Williams. The poet and his wife Mary met Jane Williams and her lover Edward Ellerker Williams in Pisa in 1821. The two couples befriended each other, and the poet in particular developed a special “platonic” relationship with Jane Williams and wrote many poems for her. Shelley and Edward Williams drowned together in a sailing accident in 1822.