David Mason will be joining us as Guest Lariat on January 1, and David is one of the many accomplished poet-critics of my generation. His prose is eloquent and apprehensible. A magnificent teacher whom I have watched in action, he brings his teaching alive on the written page. Here's the first of two essays from his terrific recent book, The Poetry Of Life And The Life Of Poetry, which I'll be posting before his arrival as our guest. The collection of essays is published by Story Line Press.
ROBERT FROST, SEAMUS HEANEY, AND THE WELLSPRINGS OF POETRY
“What’s that? Water. Ah, that’s intelligent.”
- Ernest Hemingway
The writers we discover for ourselves, unprompted by teachers or friends, often have a special place in our lives. They may or may not be writers of the first rank, but because we stumble onto them at an opportune moment they always stay with us. That only partly explains my long-standing affection for the work of Seamus Heaney- I knew about him before my professors did, and I was blissfully unaware that plenty of other readers had already made the same discovery. In college I used to haunt the library periodical stacks, and I recall reading an article about Heaney in a glossy, short-lived magazine called Quest. I walked downtown there in Colorado Springs and promptly ordered his new book, North. It was 1975. I had just returned to college from a year in which I made money by unloading crab boats in Alaska, then hitch-hiked for seven months through Britain and Ireland, including a few days in Belfast. Though I knew little of Irish literature and dimly comprehended Heaney’s metaphorical use of the bogs, what attracted me to the poems was a whole verbal texture that seemed excitingly unfamiliar, and the whiff of something dangerously significant in their political subject matter. Here was a poet with a public.
Since that time I have followed Heaney’s career with an almost proprietary interest. Though I now feel equal affection for the work of other contemporary poets, Derek Mahon among them, I continue to believe that Heaney is a brilliant literary figure. At this writing he is 58 years old; even without the Nobel Prize, he would still have made an impact on his times, and who knows what my yet lie ahead for him? It’s still too early to pass final judgment on him or make the sort of sweeping proclamations, thumbs up or thumbs down, others have made, but it’s not too early to confess the pleasure I take in his work, or to discern why it is that I like what I like in it.
In the past few years, I have had many conversations about Heaney with my friend John Devitt, a Dublin teacher and critic, and it was John who first gave me the idea for this essay, telling me of a spontaneous session in which he and Heaney had recited a great many Frost poems together. The anecdote fascinated me because Frost is my favorite American poet, and I am continually reminded of his popularity overseas. Then John pointed me to “Above the Brim,” Heaney’s excellent essay on Frost, in which one feels that the poet is defining himself, or part of himself, in relation to his subject.
For most readers, the differences between these two poets may be more obvious than any similarities. Heaney the Ulster Catholic farm boy turned academic, Frost of Scottish stock, the son of a Swedenborgian Christian and a journalist who had sympathized with the South in the American Civil War. Heaney was born to the farm, while Frost came to it relatively late. Heaney has found political subjects unavoidable, and has written of their painful complexity with both feeling and tact, while Frost maintained (in “The Figure a Poem Makes”), “Political freedom is nothing to me. I bestow if right and left.” And of course Frost never would have countenanced Heaney’s prosodic experiments or understood their partial debt to the Irish language tradition.
Yet, if I may compare them in the present tense, both are popular poets, no matter what the critics say about them. Both are learned teachers, yet both would agree with Wallace Stevens that “The greatest poverty is not to live/In a physical world.” Both write well about manual labor and the mysteries of perception embodied in nature. These are issues I want to touch upon, but first I want to notice an even more particular matter of technique. Both Frost and Heaney have made use of colloquial speech in their poetry, refreshing rhythm and idiom with materials that are at least partly extra-literary.
Anyone who has ever tried to write verse knows that technical mastery is the price of admission, as it were, utterly necessary but also insufficient. One might say that too many poets have tried to “gain entry” without first earning the ticket, but one must also have ideas and a full-bodied sense of experience, not to mention the ability to tap one’s own sources of urgency in the work. In “Above the Brim,” Heaney refers to Frost’s “artesian energies” (a phrase he used earlier to describe Kavangh), as if poetry arose from underground springs- and of course it does. But once it arises, once the inspirational water surfaces, how is one to catch and hold it and allow others to drink from it? Clearly, the language of one’s own time, the resources genuinely at one’s own command, present the best opportunities. In the course of this essay, I will draw connections between seemingly disparate images- work, play, and water- to suggest that Frost and Heaney often adopt a similar stance toward poetic inspiration. That stance has much to do, of course, with their technique.
Discussing Frost’s colloquial rhythms, Heaney quotes several familiar lyrics, including “Desert Places.” Here is the first stanza of that poem:
Snow falling and night falling fast, oh, fast
In a field I looked into going past,
And the ground almost covered smooth in snow,
But a few weeds and stubble showing last.
And here is what Heaney says about it:
The curves and grains of the first tow lines of “Desert Places” are correspondingly native to living speech, without any tonal falsity. who really notices that the letter “f” alliterates five times within thirteen syllables? It is no denigration of Hopkins to say that when
such an alliterative cluster happens in his work, the reader is the first to notice it. With Frost, its effect is surely known, like a cold air that steals across a face; but until the lines are deliberately dwelt upon a moment like this, we do not even think of it as an “effect,” and the means that produce it remain as unshowy as the grain in the wood.
Of course, to those who love lumber, the grain is quite noticeable, its whorls providing visual and tactile pleasures much like the poet’s audible ones. Heaney is talking on one level about art that, following Horace’s advice, disguises its artfulness; on another level he’s talking about meter- not meter imposed upon speech, but meter propelled by and barely containing speech. It’s the sort of balancing act that, in Heaney’s terms, distinguishes genuine technique from mere craft. In his second stanza, Frost commits what to a purist might be unpardonable sins- using the pronoun “it” three times in one line, for example, yet his lines succeed:
The woods around it have it- it is theirs
All animals are smothered in their lairs.
I am too absent-spirited to count;
The loneliness includes me unawares.
Frost’s poem is tightly controlled yet colloquial, a masterpieces of it’s kind. Perhaps Heaney is thinking of such colloquial models when he creates some of his own effects, such as the voice of the fisherman in “Casualty,” saying, “Puzzle me/The right answer to that one.” In “Man and Boy,” a poem from Seeing Things, Heaney moves back and forth between lofty diction and a kind of Frostian, deceptively casual line. Here is the second part of the poem:
In earshot of the pool where the salmon jumped
Back through its own unheard concentric soundwaves
A mower leans forever on his scythe.
He has mown himself to the center of the field
And stands in a final perfect ring
Of sunlit stubble.
‘Go and tell your father,’ the mower says
(He said it to my father who told me),
‘I have it mowed as clean as a new sixpence.’
My father is a barefoot boy with news,
Running at eye-level with weeds and stooks
On the afternoon of his own father’s death.
The open, black half of the half-door waits.
I feel much heat and hurry in the air.
I feel his legs and quick heels far away.
And strange as my own- when he will piggyback me
At a great height, light-headed and thin-boned,
Like a witless elder rescued from the fire.
Perhaps it is the casual use of parentheses here that reminds me of Frost, or the bits of quoted speech, or the precise description of “The open, black half of the half-door…” There is also a Frostian slyness in the way he toys with an image from the Aeneid in his last stanza. Perhaps, too, it is the almost timeless image of the mower, calling to mind several of Frost’s poems, but especially the sonnet “Mowing”:
There was never a sound beside the wood but one,
And that was my long scythe whispering to the ground.
What was it it whispered? I knew not well myself;
Perhaps it was something about the heat of the sun,
Something, perhaps, about the lack of sound-
And that was why it whispered and did not speak.
It was no dream of the gift of idle hours,
Or easy gold at the hand of fay or elf:
Anything more than the truth would have seemed too weak
To the earnest love that laid the swale in rows,
Not without feeble-pointed spikes of flowers
(Pale orchises), and scared a bright green snake.
The fact is the sweetest dream that labor knows.
My long scythe whispered and left the hay to make.
When Frost writes about manual labor it is not to create a sentimental pastoral image; he is too tough-minded to be sentimental about rural life. He writes, I would say, out of the experience of work and the self-forgetfulness of work. It is what work has in common with play, touching on our strongest impressions of what it is to be alive in the world. In another context he would speak about work that is “play for mortal stakes,” one of the best definitions of poetry I know, especially because it does not only define poetry. Existence for Frost is known through the body, yet something in it remains unknown. “What was it it whispered?” he asks in “Mowing,” as if he would learn the language of the scythe and doubts that he can make it sing. “Anything more than the truth would have seemed too weak/To the earnest love that laid the swale in rows,/Not without feeble-pointed spikes of flowers/(Pale orchises), and scared a bright green snake.” Frost allegorizes nature, puts the danger in his Eden- or is the snake harmless?- in order to challenge allegory itself; what do these things mean? “The fact is the sweetest dream that labor knows.” Work and knowledge. Work as the act of knowing, or The Work of Knowing, as Richard Poirier aptly put it in the title of his excellent book on Frost. Whatever the scythe whispers, it leaves the hay to make, a bounty and memento mori.
Frost admired Emerson, and is often thought of in what might be called Emerson’s neo-Platonic terms-that Emerson who said, “Nature is a symbol of spirit.” Richard Wilbur sees Frost’s message differently: “…our diminished age should not aspire to high visions and revelations; the thing to do is keep faith with what has been revealed, and dwell in the shelter of it.” But even Wilbur’s interpretation allows for some degree of revelation, no matter how small. The fact may be only a dream because we do not know its ultimate relevance, but “the fact is the sweetest dream that labor knows.” It can’t be known without the motion of work, and I would say play as well. Here, perhaps, one assents to a truth one does not fully understand. “Let be be finale of seem,” Wallace Stevens says, and Frost’s mower swings that scythe somewhere between being and seeming.
In his essay on Frost, Heaney admires some of the qualities that can also be found in his own work. He refers to “a lifetime of pleasure in Frost’s poems as events in language, flaunts and vaunts full of protective force and deliquescent backwash, the castings of a tide that lifts all spirits. Frost may have indeed declared that his whole anxiety was for himself as a performer, but the performance only succeeded fully when it launched itself beyond skill and ego into a run of energy that brimmed up outside the poet’s conscious intention and control.” This “play for mortal stakes” is a bit like that boy in Frost’s “Birches” climbing toward heaven, only to have the thinning trunk bend and set him back upon the earth. Heaney has a similar image in “The Swing,” a lovely, meditative sequence published in The Spirit Level:
…in the middle ground, the swing itself
With an old lopsided sack in the loop of it,
Perfectly still, hanging like pulley-slack,
A lure let down to temp the soul to rise.
He associates the playful suspension of swinging with something let down into a well, seeking those hidden waters and bringing them to the surface. Work and play join together, vocation and avocation, to use Frost’s terms again, as if inspiration arose from such play for mortal stakes. They are important to the poet because they are central to human existence. They are not quite what we know but how we know.
As lovers of words, Frost and Heaney also love the motions and vocabularies associated with work and play. Heaney says he admires “the way [Frost] could describe (in ‘The Code’) how forkfuls of hay were built upon a wagonload for easy unloading later, when they have to be tossed down underfoot.” Images of work occur from the beginning in Heaney’s poems. The most obvious early examples are “Digging” and “Follower,” both of which self-consciously reveal Heaney’s distance from manual labor even as they vividly recall it: “The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft/Against the inside knee was levered firmly.” The detail is precise, like that moment in Frost’s great poem, “After Apple-Picking,” when the speaker recalls exactly how the round rung of a ladder feels against his “instep arch.” Both of these early Heaney poems are autobiographical, but both find parables of generational change in their descriptions of labor. Here is the whole text of “Follower”:
My father worked with a horse-plough,
His shoulders globed like a full sail strung
Between the shafts and the furrow.
The horses strained at his clicking tongue.
An expert. He would set the wing
And fit the bright steel-pointed sock.
The sod rolled over without breaking.
And the headrig, with a single pluck
Of reins, the sweating team turned round
And back into the land. His eye
Narrowed and angled at the ground,
Mapping the furrow exactly.
I stumbled in his hobnailed wake,
Fell sometimes on the polished sod;
Sometimes he rode me on his back
Dipping and rising to his plod.
I wanted to grow up and plough,
To close one eye, stiffen my arm.
All I ever did was follow
In his broad shadow round the farm.
I was a nuisance, tripping, falling,
Yapping always. But today
It is my father who keeps stumbling
Behind me, and will not go away.
The technique of pararhyme common to many Heaney poems- plough/follow- has its roots in the Irish tradition, as Bernard O’Donoghue demonstrates in his book, Seamus Heaney and the Language of Poetry. Recently Heaney has more comfortably adopted traditional English accentual-syllabic meter, occasionally with full rhymes. But from early on he was adept at capturing the sounds and rhythms of certain kinds of work. His new book, The Spirit of Level, which takes its title from a carpenter’s tool, is also full of such passages, like this playful description of a mason at work”
Over and over, the slur, the scrape and mix
As he trowelled and retrowelled and laid down
Courses of glum mortar. Then the bricks
Jiggled and settled, tocked and tapped in line.
His gift for onomatopoeia, for matching sound and sense, is quite astonishing.
What I hope I have demonstrated here, and what Heaney freely admits, is that Frost is a touchstone poet for him; the American poet’s technique and stance translates usefully to Ireland, to some of Heaney’s own concerns as an artist. The association of poetry with other kinds of work and play is extremely helpful, a way of keeping poetry human, like the use of colloquialism with other kinds of diction and syntax.
In a poem called “The Backward Look” from Winterting Out, Heaney describes the movement of a snipe as follows:
A stagger in air
as if a language
failed, a sleight
of wing.
I happen to dislike the blatant comparison of that strange bird to something in language, or at least wish it had been more subtle, but that phrase, “sleight/of wing,” has Frost’s magician’s touch- perhaps because it is a quotation of Frost’s poem “Come In”:
As I come to the edge of the woods,
Thrush music-hark!
Now if it was dusk outside,
Inside it was dark.
Too dark in the woods for a bird
By sleight of wing
To better its perch for the night,
Though it still could sing.
The last of the light of the sun
That had died in the west
Still lived for one song more
In a thrush’s breast.
Far in the pillared dark
Thrush music went-
Almost like a call to come in
To the dark and lament.
But no, I was out for stars:
I would not come in.
I meant not even if asked,
And I hadn’t been.
Like Heaney, Frost locates himself in a world that is hard to know, where one survives by work, cunning and wit. Heaney has rarely worked in such resolute meter and rhyme (techniques too many of our contemporaries mistrust). The traditional English meter of his fine early poem, “Requiem for the Croppies,” seems to be coming back to him the latter half of his career, beginning with “Casualty” in Field Work, and he has recently done a fine trochaic elegy for Joseph Brodsky.
Frost also has a metaphor that has not been quite so available to Heaney: the Dantesque forest in which we are trying to find our way. In both poetry and fairy tales, the path through the woods is associated with fundamental anxieties and resolutions. Perhaps we can only make small bits of order, like Frost’s wood pile, in what we perceive to be a chaotic universe, or perhaps we can cultivate a garden there, or we can play a game, first marking off a football pitch, then setting rules, or we can climb a birch or swing suspended between heaven and earth. Knowledge and survival come together in such pleasureful activities, yet we intuit something beyond our knowledge- perhaps it is the goal of science or the solace of religion. Our experience may often be fragmentary, yet we may also believe that reality is not fragmented, a wholeness just beyond our ken. One apparently universal image of this principle is water, flowing and flown, changing and stable, clear and sustaining. “Thousands have lived without love,” Auden reminds us, “Not one without water.” Water beats time on our shores, covers two-thirds of the earth, composes the largest part of our own bodies. Think of its magical properties. Water is a liquid that contains solids and very easily evaporates, becoming a gas. It is elemental, the source of life, associated with gods and the inspiration of poets. In Phaedrus, Socrates speaks on a summer’s day in the shade of a plane tree beside a stream, and this veteran city-dweller claims to derive his inspiration, as he discourses on love and language, from the genius of that place.
Perhaps the poetic Muse is an antiquated notion, but the impulse to muse upon inspiration’s sources is certainly not. Milton calls upon the “Sisters of the sacred well/That from beneath the seat of Jove doth spring,” and “Lycidas” becomes a veritable catalogue of waters bringing both death and resurrection. Michael Drayton refers to Ben Johnson, “Who had drunk deep of the Pierian spring.” That spring was originally associated with Muse worship in the north of Greece, which eventually spread south toward Delphi and Mount Helicon, and I suppose it is also associated with the spring created by the winged horse Pegaus was certainly in Frost’s mind when he wrote “For Once, Then, Something,” but the trickster in him won’t grant the symbol an easy stability:
Others taunt me with having knelt at well-curbs
Always wrong to the light, so never seeing
Deeper down in the well than where the water
Gives me back in a shining surface picture
Me myself in the summer heaven godlike
Looking out of a wreath of fern and cloud puffs.
Once, when trying with chin against a well-curb,
I discerned, as I thought, beyond the picture,
Through the picture, a something white, uncertain,
Something more of the depths-and then I lost it.
Water came to rebuke the too clear water.
One drop fell from a fern, and lo, a ripple
Shook whatever it was lay there at bottom,
Blurred it, blotted it out. What was that whiteness?
Truth? A pebble of quartz? For once, then, something.
As many other critics have noted, Frost tricks us into assigning meaning to his allegorical images. Is truth the whiteness seen at the bottom of a symbolic well? Some pollywog version of Moby Dick, perhaps? I sense him laughing here, depicting himself as his critics see him: a woodsy, narcissistic poet gazing down at this own image and finding a laureate’s wreath in his reflection. But Frost’s laughter is also serious. What is it we see when we look and when we assign our meanings? As in Auden’s great poem, “Atlantis,” where the traveler never reaches the desired destination but is lucky even to glimpse it in a vision, Frost taunts his would-be tormentors by suggesting that his troubled sight may prove truer than their certainty. Part of this scoffing at his critics occurs in the very form he has chosen, classical hendecasyllabics, which, he says in a 1920 letter to G.R. Elliott, were “Calculated to tease the metrists.” Anyone who thinks Frost unsophisticated or undesigning is a damned fool.
Heaney’s poetry can be said to begin with elemental earth and water, not only those amniotic bogs but also classical and modern wells. It’s no accident that his early poem called “Personal Helicon” is dedicated to the classically trained poet Michael Longley:
As a child, they could not keep me from wells
And old pumps with buckets and windlasses.
I loved the dark drop, the trapped sky, the smells
Of waterweed, fungus and dark moss.
One, in a brickyard, with a rotted board top.
I savoured the rich crash when a bucket
Plummeted down at the end of a rope.
So deep you saw no reflection in it.
A shallow one under a dry stone ditch
Fructified like any aquarium.
When you dragged out long roots from the soft mulch
A white face hovered over the bottom.
Others had echoes, gave back your own call
With a clean new music in it. And one
Was scaresome, for there, out of ferns and tall
Foxgloves, a rat slapped across my reflection.
Now, to pry into roots, to finger slime,
To stare, big-eyed Narcissus, into some spring
Is beneath all adult dignity. I rhyme
To see myself, to set the darkness echoing.
I cannot imagine Heaney writing this poem without recalling Frost. Though he personalizes the images, he plays with the same charge of childish narcissism that is so often leveled against poets. He even accepts it: “I rhyme/To see myself…” But, like Frost, he assumes a deeper mystery in the well even as he questions it; he also rhymes “to set the darkness echoing.” The disembodied voice of that echo may lie at the heart of poetry’s anxious triumph. What does it all mean? What good is it? What does it have to do with life as we live it, the world’s heartbreaking beauty and trouble?
Both Heaney and Frost answer such questions with sly games and parables. They remind us that what is sacred can also be terrifying. In “Once by the Pacific” Frost recalls the territory where he was born, at the western extreme of American expansion, where the vast ocean seems an image of the destructive element:
The shattered water made a misty din.
Great waves looked over others coming in,
And thought of doing something to the shore
That water never did to land before.
The clouds were low and hairy in the skies,
Like locks blown forward in the gleam of eyes.
You could not tell, and yet it looked as if
The shore was lucky in being backed by cliff,
The cliff in being backed by continent;
It looked as if a night of dark intent
Was coming, and not only a night, an age.
Someone had better be prepared for rage.
There would be more than ocean-water broken
Before God’s last Put out the light was spoken.
Come to think of it, there’s something amniotic in the breaking water here as well, though the italicized quotation of murderous, irrational Othello- Put our the light- is almost the last word. I recall an Andrei Konchalavsky film called Runaway Train, based on a story by Akira Kurosawa, in which Jon Voight portrays a killer escaping from a prison somewhere in the frozen wasteland of a symbolic Alaska. Voight’s character is a defiant force, ultimately inexplicable, the sort of thing the Greeks comprehended in their portrayals of Dionysus. Frost faces a similar blind force in his poem.
The irrational element in Heaney’s poetry derives at least partly from the political situation of his homeland, the sheer brutality of an argument based upon prejudice and blind pride, and Heaney’s responses to this predicament have been both shrewd and responsible. Some of his strongest poems about such violence are in the latest book, poems like “Keeping Going” and “Mycenae Lookout,” in which he seems to see the violence as a timeless human impulse. While acknowledging the precariousness of his position, Heaney has consistently refused to speak for a group or tribe. Like Frost, he insists upon the freedom of the poet to make his own way in the world, distinct from the madness of crowds.
I must confess that I do not yet fully understand the visionary aspects of his last two books, Seeing Things and The Spirit Level. He seems to be taking a great risk, perhaps partly letting go of the skepticism one often finds in Frost. In one sense, Heaney’s self-consciousness about language keeps him at a remove from life, so his visionary leaps seem wishful thinking more than accomplished experiences. What I can say is that images of work, play and water pervade these poems. In “The Rain Stick,” which opens the new collection, one even finds some of the same vocabulary used in Heaney’s descriptions of Frost:
Upend the rain stick and what happens next
Is a music that you never could have known
To listen for. In a cactus stalk
Downpour, sluice-rush, spillage and backwash
Come flowing through. You stand there like a pipe
Being played by water, you shake it again lightly.
And diminuendo runs through all its scales
Like a gutter stopping trickling. And now here comes
A sprinkle of drops out of the freshened leaves,
Then subtle little wets off grass and daisies;
The glitter-drizzle, almost-breath of air.
Upend the stick again. What happens next
Is undiminished for having happened once,
Twice, ten, a thousand times before.
Who cares if all the music that transpires
Is the fall of grit or dry seeds through a cactus?
You are like a rich man entering heaven
Through the ear of a raindrop. Listen now again.
It is not rain that Heaney hears, but an approximation of rain. Does this mean that the poet who called his Nobel lecture “Crediting Poetry” has trouble really crediting poetry himself? Is language always a barrier between us and experience, and is this why Heaney has sometimes avoided resolute form in his work? It seems to me that the experience of Heaney’s poems is a mixture of directness and indirectness, and that this stance presents both dangers and human pleasures. Play becomes essential, like the contrary “spirit” of Frost’s “West-Running Brook”:
“It is this backward motion toward the source,
Against the stream, that most we see ourselves in,
The tribute of the current to the source.
It is from this in nature we are from.
It is most us.”
Whatever the sources of the poetic imagination, Heaney seems to have learned as much about them from Frost as from his more commonly acknowledged non-Irish masters, Dante, Mandelstam and Lowell. Dante’s allegory underlies Frost’s as well, yet Frost makes it uniquely his own. His Collected Poems contains some work that I would not want to save, but the best of it conveys an indomitable spirit, in form if not in content. Heaney describes the man and the work well:
Demonically intelligent, as acute about his own
Masquerades as he was about others’, Frost obeyed the
Ancient command to know himself. Like Yeats at the end of “Dialogue of Self and Soul,” Frost would be “content also
to “cast out remorse.” Unlike Yeats, however, he would expect neither a flow of sweetness into his breast nor a flash of beatitude upon the world to ensue from any such bout of self-exculpation. He made no secret of the prejudice and contrariness at the center of his nature, and never shirked the bleakness of that last place in himself.
All of that is true, but Frost also knows how to laugh at himself, and perhaps it is some of that canny humor that Heaney has now discovered for himself.
In his famous, relatively late poem called “Directive” (which Heaney quotes in The Redress of Poetry), Frost Americanizes the sacred spring as well as the Arthurian quest for the Grail. His traveler, by implication his reader, seeks the sustaining water, the Grail, in a landscape of natural change as vast as the last glacier, as quick and skittish as the animals now inhabiting the woods. These woods seem to have overgrown a farm or homestead, as well as a smaller house where children once played. “Weep for what little things could make them glad,” he says. He presents himself as a kind of Virgil, a poet guide, but in this case a guide “Who only has at heart your getting lost.” I suppose this landscape is purgatorial, somewhere between hell and paradise, partly mitigated by the questing spirit. Frost views life as a struggle, but he understands that the human spirit does not survive only by practical means. One cannot find the poet’s hidden grail unless one learns to accept the fact of being lost, and to play in spite of it- perhaps I should say to play because of it. “Here are your waters and your watering place,” Frost says at last. “Drink and be whole again beyond confusion.”
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