Courage is the price that life exacts for granting peace by Amelia Earhart

Courage is the price that life exacts for granting peace
by Amelia Earhart

Courage is the price that
Life exacts for granting peace.

The soul that knows it not
Knows no release from little things:
Knows not the livid loneliness of fear,
Nor mountain heights where bitter joy can hear the sound of
wings.

Nor can life grant us boon of living, compensate
For dull gray ugliness and pregnant hate
Unless we dare
The soul’s dominion.
Each time we make a choice, we pay
With courage to behold the resistless day,
And count it fair.

---

I’ve thought of the first two lines fairly often in my life, and find them to be true. And then to know that this is a woman who wrote this before her aviation made her famous, as someone who wrote this and lived by it makes me just appreciate it with a certain poignancy. I hope in the end she found it fair, and certainly she lived with a courage I admire still for what she took on.

Amelia Earhart wrote this in her mid-twenties, before the transatlantic flights that made her famous and the circumnavigation attempt that ended her life. She was working as a social worker and aviator, and poetry was part of her broader literary engagement. The poem circulated privately during her lifetime and was widely reproduced after her 1937 disappearance over the central Pacific.