Over Here: "Love has the patience to endure the fault it sees but cannot cure"

By Edgar Guest

Edgar Albert Guest was born in Birmingham, England on August 20th 1881.

In 1891 the family moved to the United States. Guest began his career at the Detroit Free Press as a copy boy and then moved on to reporting. The paper published his first poem

• Language: English
• Publisher: Portable Poetry
• Release date: Jan 1, 2020
• ISBN: 9781839671760

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Over Here by Edgar Guest

Edgar Albert Guest was born in Birmingham, England on August 20th 1881.

In 1891 the family moved to the United States.  Guest began his career at the Detroit Free Press as a copy boy and then moved on to reporting. The paper published his first poem on 11th December 1898.

Guest became a naturalized citizen in 1902. For 40 years, he was read widely and avidly throughout North America.  His intrinsically sentimental, optimistic poems brought him a large audience and following as well as the moniker of ‘People’s Poet’.

During his career he wrote an astounding 11,000 poems which were syndicated in some 300 newspapers and collected and published across more than 20 books.  Guest was also made Poet Laureate of Michigan, the only poet to have been awarded the title.

Such was the devotion of his readership that he was given a weekly Detroit radio show from 1931 until 1942. In 1951 NBC gave him his own TV series, ‘A Guest in Your Home’.  In between he hosted a thrice-weekly transcribed radio programme from January 15th, 1941, sponsored by Land O'Lakes Creameries. The singer Eddy Howard featured.

Guest was also a Freemason and a lifetime member of Ashlar Lodge No. 91. In honour of Guest's devotion to the Craft, community, and humanity in general, the Grand Lodge of Free and Accepted Masons of Michigan established the Edgar A. Guest Award for lodges to present to non-Masons within the community who demonstrated distinguished service to the community and their fellow man.

Edgar Albert Guest died on 5th August 1959, at the age of 77, in Detroit, Michigan. He was buried in Woodlawn Cemetery.

Index of Contents

Over Here

Why We Fight

America

The Time for Deeds

Everywhere in America

The Things That Make a Soldier Great

The Flag

A Battle Prayer

Good Luck

A Prayer, 1918

The Change

Mothers and Wives

The Call to Service

Kelly Ingram

The Joy to Be

He Should Meet a Mother There

A Father's Tribute

Runner McGee

The Girl He Left Behind

A Patriotic Creed

His Room

Envy

For Your Boy and Mine

Soldierly

The Alarm

The Boy Enlists

The Mother Faith

Thoughts of a Soldier

The Flag on the Farm

The Mother on the Sidewalk

The Big Deeds

The Wrist Watch Man

Follow the Flag

We've Had a Letter From the Boy

Exempt

Duty

A Prayer

Sympathy

Hate

General Pershing

The Better Thing

To a Lady Knitting

A Good Soldier

His Santa Claus

Show the Flag

The Honor Roll

The Princess Pats

July the Fourth, 1917

Spring in the Trenches

Bigger Than His Dad

The Boy's Adventure

Out of It All

The Christmas Box

A Plea

Your Country Needs You

A Creed

The Struggle

As It Looks to the Boy

Fly a Clean Flag

To a Kindly Critic

War's Homecoming

Next of Kin

See It Through

Hope

The Gold Givers

The Undaunted

The Discovery of a Soul

Here We Are!

We Who Stay at Home

Do Your All

The Future

A Father's Prayer

The Glory of Age

Beautifying the Flag

To the Men at Home

From Laughter to Labor

United

April Thoughts

The Chaplain

My Part

The Call

Thanksgiving

A Patriotic Wish

A Patriot

Memorial Day

The Soldier on Crutches

The Friendly Greeting

We Need a Few More Optimists

Taking His Place

Christmas, 1918

The New Year

Our Duty to Our Flag

The Unsettled Scores

Warriors

Easy Service

A Father's Thoughts

The Waiter at the Camp

The Complacent Slacker

A Christmas Greeting

Ideals

Rebellion

Drafted

Reflection

A Wish

Living

Life's Slacker

The Proof of Worth

Follow a Famous Father

The Important Thing

Selfishness

Constant Beauty

When the Drums Shall Cease to Beat

Prophecy

Edgar Guest – A Concise Bibliography

Over Here

Pledged to the bravest and the best,

We stand, who cannot share the fray,

Staunch for the danger and the test.

For them at night we kneel and pray.

Be with them, Lord, who serve the truth,

And make us worthy of our youth!

Here mother-love and father-love

Unite in love of country now;

Here to the flag that flies above,

Our heads we reverently bow;

Here as one people, night and day,

For victory we work and pray.

Nor race nor creed shall difference make,

Nor bigot mar the zealot's plan;

We give our all for Freedom's sake,

Each man a king, each king a man.

Make us the equal, Lord, we pray

Of them who die for truth to-day!

Let us as gladly give our best,

Let us as bravely pay the price

As they, who in the bitter test

Meet the supremest sacrifice.

Oh, God! Wherever we are led,

Let us be worthy of our dead!

Let us not compromise the truth,

Let us not cringe so much in fear

That foes may whisper to our youth

That we have failed in courage here.

Lord, strengthen us, that they may know

Our spirits follow where they go!

Why We Fight

This is the thing we fight:

A cry of terror in the night;

A ship on work of mercy bent—

A carrier of the sick and maimed—

Beneath the cruel waters sent,

And those that did it, unashamed.

A woman who had tried to fill

A mother's place; had nursed the ill

And soothed the troubled brows of pain

And earned the dying's grateful prayers,

Before a wall by soldiers slain!

And such a poor pretext was theirs!

Old women pierced by bayonets grim

And babies slaughtered for a whim,

Cathedrals made the sport of shells,

No mercy, even for a child,

As though the imps of all the hells

Were crazed with drink and running wild.

All this we fight—that some day when

Good sense shall come again to men,

Our children's children may not read

This age's history thus defamed

And find we served a selfish creed

And ever be of us ashamed!

America

God has been good to men. He gave

His Only Son their souls to save,

And then he made a second gift,

Which from their dreary lives should lift

The tyrant's yoke and set them free

From all who'd throttle liberty.

He gave America to men—

Fashioned this land we love, and then

Deep in her forests sowed the seed

Which was to serve man's earthly need.

When wisps of smoke first upwards curled

From pilgrim fires, upon the world

Unnoticed and unseen, began

God's second work of grace for man.

Here where the savage roamed and fought,

God sowed the seed of nobler thought;

Here to the land we love to claim,

The pioneers of freedom came;

Here has been cradled all that's best

In every human mind and breast.

For full four hundred years and more

Our land has stretched her welcoming shore

To weary feet from soils afar;

Soul-shackled serfs of king and czar

Have journeyed here and toiled and sung

And talked of freedom to their young,

And God above has smiled to see

This precious work of liberty,

And watched this second gift He gave

The dreary lives of men to save.

And now, when liberty's at bay,

And blood-stained tyrants force the fray,

Worn warriors, battling for the right,

Crushed by oppression's cruel might,

Hear in the dark through which they grope

America's glad cry of hope:

Man's liberty is not to die!

America is standing by!

World-wide shall human lives be free:

America has crossed the sea!

America! the land we love!

God's second gift from Heaven above,

Builded and fashioned out of truth,

Sinewed by Him with splendid youth

For that glad day when shall be furled

All tyrant flags throughout the world.

For this our banner holds the sky:

That liberty shall never die.

For this, America began: