The poem, written in 1908 by Minnie Louise Haskins and privately published in 1912, was part of a collection titled The Desert. It caught the public attention and the popular imagination when King George VI quoted it in his 1939 Christmas broadcast to the British Empire.
Her words live on inscribed at the entrance to the George VI memorial chapel in St George’s Chapel, Windsor, and in a window at the Queen’s Chapel of the Savoy. The poem was read at the funeral of Elizabeth, the Queen Mother in 2002.
God knows
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And I said to the man who stood at the gate of the year:
“Give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown.”
And he replied:
“Go out into the darkness and put your hand into the hand of God.
That shall be to you better than light and safer than a known way.”
So I went forth, and finding the hand of God, trod gladly into the night.
And he led me towards the hills and the breaking of day in the lone east.
So heart be still: what need our little life our human life to know, if God hath comprehension? In all the dizzy strife of things both high and low, God hideth his intention.
God knows. His will is best. The stretch of years which wind ahead, so dim to our imperfect vision, are clear to god. Our fears are premature; in him, all time hath full provision.
Then rest: until God moves to lift the veil from our impatient eyes, when, as the sweeter features of life’s stern face we hail, fair beyond all surmise God’s thought around his creatures our mind shall fill.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gate_of_the_Year
http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lsehistory/2013/12/10/the-gate-of-the-year-minnie-louise-haskins-1875-1957/
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherhowse/3561497/At-the-Gate-of-the-Year.html
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