Our Hold On The Planet

Many days, when I'm catching up on the news and it all seems to be bad news, I remember the words of this Robert Frost poem for comfort.

Our Hold On The Planet

We asked for rain.  It didn't flash and roar.

It didn't lose its temper at our demand.

And blow a gale.  It didn't misunderstand

And give us more than our spokesman bargained for;

And just because we owned to a wish for rain,

Send us a flood and bid us be damned and drown.

It gently threw us a glittering shower down.

And when we had taken that into the roots of grain,

It threw us another and then another still

Till the spongy soil again was natal wet.

We may doubt the just proportion of good to ill.

There is much in nature against us.  But we forget:

Take nature altogether since time began,

Including human nature, in peace and war,

And it must be a little more in favor of man,

Say a fraction of one per cent at the very least,

Or our number living wouldn't be steadily more,

Our hold on the planet wouldn't have so increased. 


(Photo courtesy of Greenzer.com)

Happy Birthday, Robert Frost

Robert Frost, born March 26, 1874,  has long been one of my most-loved poets.  One of my favorite things about his poems, other than the style, is the realism I've always seem in them.  The scenes and situations Frost chronicled always appeared very clearly in my mind, making me feel as though I were there.  

When I read "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening", I can see the dark trunks and branches of the trees and the white of the snow against them, as well as feel the cold pressing around me.  That poem and "The Road Not Taken" were my introductions to Frost in a middle school English class, but the following poem is the one I love best.  My own poems tend to be full of questions and in this one verse, to me, Frost asks one of the ultimate questions.

A Question

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.