“Hope and the Sufferer”
For me, health gushes from a thousand springs;
Seas roll to waft me, suns to light me rise;
My foot-stool earth, my canopy the skies.[1]
So enthused Alexander Pope, a hunchback, crippled from childhood by spinal tuberculosis, barely four foot six inches tall. Would that every sufferer – and we all suffer – should so sing!
Perhaps he could because for him
Hope springs eternal in the human breast.[2]
—
[1] An Essay on Man, Epistle 1, lines 137-140.
[2] Ibid., 95.
