We Could All Use Some Rest

I have Robert Frost on my brain. It's not the first time. About a year ago I posted this photo and thought regarding the road less taken.

Nothing Gold Can Stay

i
Robert Frost

i
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.

k

I am amazed by how deceptively simple Frost's work seems, how he is understandably often misquoted and misunderstood. "The only way out is through," is in this poem in a much less straightforward way than you'd expect. The road less traveled is not so clearly the better path (see above cited link). The third line in each stanza of Stopping By Woods, etc. is the rhyme at the end of the first line of the following verse.

l

Frost once said, "Poetry begins in trivial metaphors, pretty metaphors, 'grace' metaphors, and goes on to the profoundest thinking that we have. Poetry provides the one permissible way of saying one thing and meaning another. People say, 'Why don’t you say what you mean?' We never do that, do we, being all of us too much poets. We like to talk in parables and in hints and in indirections — whether from diffidence or some other instinct. " That's from Education By Poetry, available to read in full at this link.

k

"A liberal is a man too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel, " Frost is purported to have said. There are many good quotes here at Wikiquotes.

;

And now closing words of poetry from yours truly (me):

d;

Good night and

G-d bless

Lest I say more

I confess

We could all

use some rest

We could all use some rest