title: The Mercy: Poems
author:  Philip Levine 
description: Over the last four decades, Philip Levine has earned a reputation as America's consummate blue-collar bard--a kind of postindustrial Walt Whitman, albeit one with a taste for surrealism and bebop. To a degree, of course, this is an accurate picture. Levine <i>has</i> written about the working life with a hard-nosed clarity and tenderness that few American poets can match: it's no accident that his pivotal 1991 collection was called <i><a href="/exec/obidos/ASIN/0679740589/${0}">What Work Is</a></i>. Still, his penchant for lunch-bucket lyricism has tended to overshadow his other gifts, of which there are many. For starters, Levine is a superb elegiac poet. His imaginative engagement with the past enlivened almost every line in <i><a href="/exec/obidos/ASIN/0679765840/${0}">The Simple Truth</a></i>, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1994. And his 17th collection, <i>The Mercy</i>, entails a similar search for lost time--even as it demonstrates the mournful, memorializing power of language itself.
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  # Mercy Philbrick's Choice
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ### Helen Hunt Jackson
  
  
  
  
  
    
  
  This page copyright © 2003 Munsey's.
  
  
  http://www.munseys.com
  
  Chapter I.
  
  
  Chapter II.
  
  
  Chapter III.
  
  
  Chapter IV.
  
  
  Chapter V.
  
  
  Chapter VI.
  
  
  Chapter VII.
  
  
  Chapter VIII.
  
  
  Chapter IX.
  
  
  Chapter X.
  
  
  Chapter XI
  
  
  Chapter XII.
  
  
  Chapter XIII.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
      
  
  Produced by Distributed Proofreaders
  
  
  
  
  
  MERCY PHILBRICK'S CHOICE.
  
  
  1876
  
  
  
  
  
  I.
  
  
  _To one who found us on a starless night,
  
  
    
  All helpless, groping in a dangerous way,
  
  
    
  Where countless treacherous hidden pitfalls lay,
  
  
    
  And, seeing all our peril, flashed a light
  
  
    
  To show to our bewildered, blinded sight,
  
  
    
  By one swift, clear, and piercing ray,
  
  
    
  The safe, sure path,—what words could reach the height
  
  
    
  Of our great thankfulness? And yet, at most,
  
  
    
  The most he saved was this poor, paltry life
  
  
    
  Of flesh, which is so little worth its cost,
  
  
    
  Which eager sows, but may not stay t