I enjoy poetry that evokes a feeling from the reader. The best poems give voice to those feelings we have that are difficult to describe. Even a common emotion or feeling like love can be described in incredibly evocative ways such that one feels the meaning rather than understands it.

The following work by Robert Frost, is such a poem. With vivid images, Frost makes me understand that ache, that disappointment, that finality that we all feel at various times in life.


Reluctance

Out through the fields and the woods
And over the walls I have wended;
I have climbed the hills of view
And looked at the world, and descended;
I have come by the highway home,
And lo, it is ended.

The leaves are all dead on the ground,
Save those that the oak is keeping
To ravel them one by one
And let them go scraping and creeping
Out over the crusted snow,
When others are sleeping.

And the dead leaves lie huddled and still,
No longer blown hither and thither;
The last lone aster is gone;
The flowers of the witch hazel wither;
The heart is still aching to seek,
But the feet question "Whither?"

Ah, when to the heart of man
Was it ever less than a treason
To go with the drift of things,
To yield with a grace to reason,
And bow and accept the end
Of a love or a season?


This poem was first published in England (where Frost met with more success early in his career than in his home country of America) in 1912 when Frost was 38 years old. It was the last poem in the collection called A Boy’s Will, which includes a number of wonderful poems, but none of the standard high school English class fare we all read. Obviously, it was the absolutely perfect poem to end a collection.

I wonder that it isn’t more well-known, because I think this inability to bear the end of a thing is at least as common today as it was then, perhaps even more so. We are eternally nostalgic, yet we are also continuously moving on. Our ends are necessarily as numerous as our beginnings. We finish high school, we finish college, we end relationships, we move out of our family’s house, we wreck our favorite car, our dog dies, we have a child (thus ending our youthful freedom), we leave a job. Our favorite TV show goes off the air, our favorite blog comes to an end, summer vacation ends, our best friend moves away, a parent dies, our health fails. And ultimately we all have in our future the time when we will end our lives on earth.

Life is full of the end.

To me this is a very poignant poem and one that I know I will reread often now that I’ve discovered it. Fall has long been my favorite season (though spring is making a go at it in recent years) but it is the perfect illustration of the emptiness and sadness with which we are left when something important ends—those crisp, dried leaves of our regrets blowing away as memory fades, the snow covering the past.

A little melancholy, but still sweet in a way. It seems to me that bittersweet sentiment most accurately captures real life.