Robert Frost

American poet Robert Frost, lauded for his depictions of New England rural life, his poetic use of American colloquial speech, and his realistic portrayals of ordinary people, was born this day in 1874. While he is not generally regarded to be a Christian poet, it appears some of the elements of his being pulled back and forth between faith and unbelief come out in his work. Frost’s friends and correspondences show that for most of his life he wavered between belief and skepticism, piety and irreverence. “He tossed the idea of God up and down like a ball,” said critic Alfred Kazin. And yet he often alluded to his fear of God in lectures and letters, like this one written to his friend G.R. Elliott in 1947:

My fear of God has settled down into a deep and inward fear that my best offering may not prove acceptable in his sight.

In a 1932 letter to poet Louis Untermeyer, Frost specified that the one he feared was the “God of Israel, who admits he is a jealous god.”

Whatever God’s eternal judgment upon him may be, there is nonetheless some theological weight in his work. The following is one of his tersest statements on the transiency of everything this side of the New Jerusalem. “Nothing Gold Can Stay” was first published in Frost’s 1923 volume, New Hampshire, his first book to win a Pulitzer Prize.

Nothing Gold Can Stay

Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

And here are a few to accompany the season of Lent.

Bereft

Where had I heard this wind before
Change like this to a deeper roar?
What would it take my standing there for,
Holding open a restive door,
Looking down hill to a frothy shore?
Summer was past and the day was past.
Sombre clouds in the west were massed.
Out on the porch’s sagging floor,
Leaves got up in a coil and hissed,
Blindly striking at my knee and missed.
Something sinister in the tone
Told me my secret my be known:
Word I was in the house alone
Somehow must have gotten abroad,
Word I was in my life alone,
Word I had no one left but God.

Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village, though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound’s the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark, and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

Acquainted with the Night

I have been one acquainted with the night.
I have walked out in rain — and back in rain.
I have outwalked the furthest city light.

I have looked down the saddest city lane.
I have passed by the watchman on his beat
And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.

I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet
When far away an interrupted cry
Came over houses from another street,

But not to call me back or say good-bye;
And further still at an unearthly height,
A luminary clock against the sky

Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.
I have been one acquainted with the night.