VPR News: Vermont Reads: Robert Frost - Conflict & Contradiction

VPR News: Vermont Reads: Robert Frost - Conflict & Contradiction
Excerpt:
A leaping tongue of bloom the scythe had spared
Beside a reedy brook the scythe had bared.
I left my place to know them by their name,
Finding them butterfly weed when I came.
The mower in the dew had loved them thus,
By leaving them to flourish, not for us,
Nor yet to draw one thought of ours to him.
But from sheer morning gladness at the brim.
The butterfly and I had lit upon,
Nevertheless, a message from the dawn,
That made me hear the wakening birds around,
And hear his long scythe whispering to the ground,
And feel a spirit kindred to my own;
So that henceforth I worked no more alone;....
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It was a year before Rob began to emerge from the darkness of this last despair. He had lost his daughter, his wife and his son in the space of only six years. But he was winning his battle to keep his sorrow beneath the surface. He could make his poetry the medium through which he could view his grief. And he could write, One Step Backward Taken.
Not only sands and gravels
Were once more on their travels,
But gulping muddy gallons
Great boulders off their balance
Bumped heads together dully
And started down the gully.
Whole capes caked off in slices.
I felt my standpoint shaken
In the universal crisis.
But with one step backward taken
I saved myself from going.
A world torn loose went by me.
Then the rain stopped and the blowing
And the sun came out to dry me.....