Example

A melancholy poem reflects on comparisons between expectations of life and what happens in reality.

Sad it is for me to see
What I am and ought to be

To the dreams of eager youth
Beauty seemed at one with truth
All the world methought was fair,
All was good that dwelled there
And I sought to make my soul
Worthy of its lofty goal;
Worthy as a mate to stand
With the noble; with the grand,
With the dweller in the land.

But, alas! I woke to find
Sin and error in my kind
Woke to find the squalid real
Choke and crush my high ideal
Felt I had not strength to move it,
Felt I could not rise above it-
And I fell - from sky to slime;
Reached the level of my time

Yet it sometimes seems to me
As I ponder, musingly,
Had I one man chanced to see
Such as I had hoped to be,
(Such as I had surely been, had I but that visions seen)
At the shining of that ray
All my night had turned to day;
I had never lost my way

Sad it is for me to see
What I am and ought to be

Yet the bitterest gall I drink
Is the thought I sometimes think-
When my neighbor’s step I mark
Stumbling blindly in the dark-
Had I reached the higher plane,
Had I been the noble man,
Had I made his high ideal
Once incarnate is the real,
At the shining of that ray
All his night had turned to day;
He had never lost his way.
--New York Herald

“Example,” Black Virginia: The Richmond Planet, 1894-1909, accessed February 19, 2026, https://blackvirginia.richmond.edu/items/show/693.