Thanks, Robert Frost by David Ray
Do you have hope for the future?
someone asked Robert Frost, toward the end.
Yes, and even for the past, he replied,
that it will turn out to have been all right
for what it was, something we can accept,
mistakes made by the selves we had to be,
not able to be, perhaps, what we wished,
or what looking back half the time it seems
we could so easily have been, or ought…
The future, yes, and even for the past,
that it will become something we can bear.
And I too, and my children, so I hope,
will recall as not too heavy the tug
of those albatrosses I sadly placed
upon their tender necks. Hope for the past,
yes, old Frost, your words provide that courage,
and it brings strange peace that itself passes
into past, easier to bear because
you said it, rather casually, as snow
went on falling in Vermont years ago.
those albatrosses I sadly placed
upon their tender necks
Wow. Beautiful.
I can’t even describe how much I needed to hear such a thing this morning.
Actually just a sermon that started off with a reference to Frost’s epitaph
I had a lover’s quarrel with the world.
ripping this off immediately.
It was a pretty good sermon (is this a thread hijacking progress?). The point was that whatever we try to do, change, advise, improve, cajole, to do it out of love; that we need to find love first and keep it at our center and to let it breath out from us from there.
there, I’m done.