Autumn Leaves

Chapter 94: “’TIS FOLLY TO BE WISE.”

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About This Book

A compact poetry collection gathers short lyrical and didactic pieces that reflect on mortality, memory, love, duty, and spiritual consolation, often using nature and seasonal imagery to frame moral and emotional insights. Many poems shift between wistful reverie and exhortation, imagining dreamlike flights, harvest metaphors about deeds and consequences, prayers, meditations on motherhood and friendship, and speculative lines about reincarnation and the afterlife. The work mixes tender sentiment, moral counsel, and pastoral description across brief, accessible poems that alternate consolation with sober reminders of life's hardships.

“’TIS FOLLY TO BE WISE.”

Poor Folly will build a grand mansion,
And in it the wise man may live.
Poor Folly may hoard up his money,
But Wisdom will gladly it give.

Poor Folly Life’s game is aye playing,
And often the game he may win.
And Folly may build a cathedral,
And Wisdom may pray therein.

Though Folly knows how to make money,
He spends it full oft like a fool,
And Wisdom may do the same also,
But it is not always the rule.

If Folly were better than Wisdom,
’Twere foolish for us to be wise,
Perhaps though there’s folly in wisdom,
And wisdom in folly oft lies.