Momentary Stay Against Confusion...

I once took a group of my students to the Old Bennington Cemetery in Vermont where Robert Frost is buried.  We had stopped at a fast-food restaurant and picked up sandwiches which we enjoyed as we sat around the edges of the flat marble grave covering and talked about him and how we knew he would enjoy their company, our company, if he were having lunch with us. Besides his name and the dates of his birth and death, the marble stone is engraved with the words Frost said he wanted said about him, “I had a lover’s quarrel with the world.” 

I imagine all people who love reading and thinking (and maybe writing) have bits of wisdom writing that they are drawn back to read and to think about over and over.  Kept handy on my desk are some books of poems that I reach for and open often. One of the books most worn from opening is The Complete Poems of Robert Frost.  Frost would chuckle at anything written by or about him that suggests completeness.  With him there was always more to come.  Nothing is finished.  One of my favorite essays is the short one he wrote to explain “The Figure a Poem Makes.”  

My favorite paragraph from that essay:  “It should be of the pleasure of a poem itself to tell how it can (make a statement, a figure)... The figure a poems makes.  It begins in delight and ends in wisdom.  The figure is the same as for love.  No one can really hold that the ecstasy should be static and stand still in one place.  It begins in delight, it inclines to the impulse, it assumes direction with the first line laid down, it runs a course of lucky events, and ends in a clarification of life-not necessarily a great clarification, such as sects and cults are founded on, but in a momentary stay against confusion.”