Psalm of Life

You know how something gets into your head and just won't go away?  It's so annoying.  I sometimes think it's worse if it's a tune.  No, I used to think it was worse if it was a tune.  Now I know there is nothing as annoying as a few words which keep repeating when you know they aren't right but that they mean something.  Or would mean something if you could just get it right.

It started after I'd had a very late night watching the cycling at the Commonwealth Games.  After laying in bed for a few minutes after I woke the following morning, not really wanting to get out of bed, telling myself I couldn't stay there all, then arguing with myself that I could if I so chose but probably shouldn't.  And who would care anyway?  Whose business was it but my own?  I finally said to myself, "OK, then, let's be up and doing."  Then thought, "No, that's not right.  But what should it be?"  Those few words annoyed me for two days.  Every time I went to do anything I'd tell myself to "Let's be up and doing."

Finally I handed the question over to Mr Google who, it turns out, can be quite reluctant to provide you with good information when you feed him  rubbish to start with.  Or rubbish with which to start, I'm not feeling argumentative.

I finally found it as a line in Wordsworth's 'Psalm of Life', but am unconvinced that's where I got it from because I swear I've never heard of that poem, let alone read it.  The only work I associate with Wordsworth is the 'Wreck of the Hesperus' and then only because that is something we used to say as children about ourselves or someone else who looked a bit dishevelled.  The nuns must have reasoned that if were going to use that term, then we should know where it came from.  That totally took away any satisfaction we had in using such a descriptive phrase.  I'm pretty sure we didn't study Wordsworth in any depth.

So, I read the poem and have re-read it many time over the past couple of days and have fallen in love with the correct words.

Let us, then, be up and doing,

   With a heart for any fate;

Still achieving, still pursuing,

   Learn to labor and to wait.

 

And in particular, this verse.

Lives of great men all remind us

   We can make our lives sublime,

And, departing, leave behind us

   Footprints on the sands of time.

 

Footprints on the sands of time.  Love that.