Years ago, I stumbled across “Come In,” a curious little poem from New England’s much-loved bard, Robert Frost. In this haunting verselet, Frost takes us along the edge of a darkening forest as twilight surrenders to dusk. Peering into the inky-black woods, he sees little but is surprised by the sublime birdsong offered by a thrush. How, he wonders, could this bird pipe so joyfully while being suffocated in darkness? The music, if listened to closely, almost seemed to invite the listener in. But Frost stops short:
But no, I was out for stars;
I would not come in.
I meant not even if asked;
And I hadn’t been.
“Too dark for me,” Frost essentially says. “I’ll stay where I am.”
Many of us have suffered in one form or another, at one time or another, to one degree or another. And none of us like it. We all know the brutality of seasons weathering injuries or deaths or family trials or financial strains—the inferno of shock, the firestorm of pain, the smoky suffocation of exhaustion, and the dreary smolder of recovery. Honestly, true suffering leads us to wince at the stirrings of any new trials. We find ourselves at the forest’s edge, but not willing to go in.
Robert Frost knew suffering.
“In three words I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life . . .”
His father died of tuberculosis when he was a boy and his mother from cancer when he was a young man. A sister and daughter were committed to mental hospitals. One son succumbed to cholera in childhood, a daughter died in childbirth, and another son committed suicide. Frost’s wife preceded him in death by twenty-five years. The sheer volume of tragedy meant the poet nearly became a professional sufferer, limping—if not crawling—through brutal loss after loss. In 1923, one of Frost’s poems spoke of the foundation of suffering: ruthless impermanence.
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.
“A Question” goes even further with a Camus-like inquiry that almost subtly flirts with suicidality:
A voice said, Look me in the stars
And tell me truly, men of earth,
If all the soul-and-body scars
Were not too much to pay for birth.
In 1958, at his eighty-fifth birthday party, Robert Frost was feted by famous literary critic Lionel Trilling. However, Frost and his guests were surprised (if not scandalized) when Trilling bluntly confessed that “Robert Frost is a terrifying poet,” in that he opens doors into dark corridors, pulls back curtains obscuring deep secrets, and surprises us with stark mirrors hidden in idyllic pastoral scenes. Frost, Trilling claimed, confronts us with ourselves.
Trilling was right.
Robert Frost knew suffering. But in knowing suffering, he coped with it, grew from it, and decided to pay that experience forward. In his poetry, he reminds us again and again that we are not alone in our suffering, much less in our stumbling, fumbling responses to it.
In nearing his life’s end, Robert Frost was asked by an earnest journalist what enduring lesson he had learned from a life of suffering and a vocation trading in the human condition. The avuncular, measured Frost smiled and answered simply and finally, “In three words I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life: it goes on.”
Indeed, it does.
Thanks be to God.