David Ray’s Poem, “Thanks, Robert Frost”

You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it. I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette. We recently had a conversation about the word regret, and it reminded me of a poem by David Ray called Thanks, Robert Frost. It goes, do you have hope for the future? Someone asked Robert Frost toward the end.

Yes, and even for the past, he replied, that it will turn out to have been all right for what it was, something we can accept, mistakes made by the selves we had to be, not able to be perhaps what we wished or what looking back half the time it seems we could so easily have been or ought.

The future, yes, and even for the past, that it will become something we can bear. And I, too, and my children, so I hope, will recall as not too heavy the tug of those albatrosses I sadly placed upon their tender necks.

Hope for the past, yes, old frost, your words provide that courage. And it brings strange peace that itself passes into past, easier to bear because you said it rather casually as snow went on falling in Vermont years ago.

I’ve always enjoyed poetry that invokes or evokes poetry that we all know. So this lesser-known poem calls on the strength and power of the snowy woods, the poem that Robert Frost wrote that you probably learned in school.

Yeah, a couple of them, stopping by the woods on a snowy evening, and also the idea of two roads diverged in a yellow wood. I really like this as a rumination on regret.

And a lot of Robert Frost poems were that, at least the ones that I know. They were thinking about what he had done and had not done. And I think maybe it’s something that happens later in life.

But the best poetry for me now is poetry that connects to my own thoughts about roads that I could have taken of jobs or lives or people that I should have known better or should have taken up or should have pursued.

The phrase hope for the future is such a cliche, but it’s jarring to hear somebody talk about hope for the past like that. You know, in this whole poem, the word albatrosses leaps out at me as being the only thing that’s really idiomatic.

Everything else is idiom-free. He’s talking about putting albatrosses upon their tender necks. Right. And, of course, that’s a reference to another poem, come to think of it, the Rime of the Ancient Mariner.

Yeah. So that’s why it leaps out at you. And you’re like, wait a second. Why is the word albatrosses in here? And yet there we are. It’s another poem.

Thank you, David Ray, for your permission to use the poem. Thanks, Robert Frost. We’ll link to it on our website at waywordradio.org.

And if you have a poem that you want to share with us, send it to words@waywordradio.org or send it to us on Twitter @wayword.