The Poetry of the Commonplace

The famous physician, Sir William Osler, expressed a thought that brings routine functions into focus. The “poetry of the commonplace,” he called it. “Nothing will sustain you more potently,” he said, “than the power to recognize in your humdrum routine,…the true poetry of life – the poetry of the commonplace, of the ordinary man, of the plain, toil-worn woman, with their love and their joys, their sorrows and their griefs.”

We often emphasize the unusual, the spectacular, the artificial, but the world goes on, day to day, by the honest effort of ordinary, faithful people, facing their problems, meeting debts, caring for children, nursing the sick, caring for each other, performing essential services, doing their work well, as they keep going against discouragement. And without these wonderful daily doers of what has to be done, this wouldn’t be much of a world.

Machines can never altogether take the place of faithfully performing people. Glamour or leisure can never take the place of the solid work of the world, of doing what needs to be done today. “If you do your work with complete faithfulness…” said Phillips Brooks, “you are making just as genuine a contribution to the…universal good as is the most brilliant worker…Oh, go take up your work and do it…with cheerfulness and love…profoundly devoted to [your] work, and yet…profoundly thankful for the work which other men are doing…that everything should reach its best, that every man should do his best in his own line…” To know what has to be done, and then to do it, is not only essential, but is often heroic in its own way.

Thank God for sincere and wonderful men, women, mothers, fathers, children, who do earnestly and honestly what they have to do each day, despite difficulties and disappointments – for faithful people – for simple things – for routine duties – for work well done – for “the poetry of the commonplace.”