by Jay Wright
Is it just me, or did 2024 seem hotter, dryer, and more exhausting than other years? I, frankly, am looking forward to 2025. Including more “inside days” to just chill and stay warm. I’m sure I’ll soon be looking for that burst of spring to unfold in our evolving towns and state.
Here’s a fitting poem for the new year by Edgar Guest (1881 – 1959). Guest carried hope, optimism, and ambition throughout his life. His family emigrated from England in 1891 and settled in Michigan. He was hired as a copyboy for The Detroit Free Press at the age of thirteen and worked his way up from there to the news department. Over the next sixty-five years, his daily columns were syndicated to over three hundred newspapers in the USA.
Guest published over twenty volumes of poetry and wrote over 11,000 poems in his life. Here is one of his best poems to inspire us in this new year. It is in the public domain.
It Couldn’t be Done
by Edgar Guest
Somebody said that it couldn’t be done,
But he with a chuckle replied
That “maybe it couldn’t,” but he would be one
Who wouldn’t say so till he’d tried.
So he buckled right in with the trace of a grin
On his face. If he worried, he hid it.
He started to sing as he tackled the thing
That couldn’t be done, and he did it.
Somebody scoffed: “Oh, you’ll never do that;
At least no one ever has done it”;
But he took off his coat and he took off his hat,
And the first thing we knew he’d begun it.
With a lift of his chin and a bit of a grin,
Without any doubting or quiddit,
He started to sing as he tackled the thing
That couldn’t be done, and he did it.
There are thousands to tell you it cannot be done,
There are thousands to prophesy failure;
There are thousands to point out to you one by one,
The dangers that wait to assail you.
But just buckle in with a bit of a grin,
Just take off your coat and go to it;
Just start in to sing as you tackle the thing
That “cannot be done,” and you’ll do it.