Long, long before we were from any creature, You have seen me when I was taken and swept To everything on earth the compass round Upon my way to sleep before it fell By countless silken ties of love and thought. This sleep of mine, whatever sleep it is Could be profound. And so I dream of going back to be Between you and me. And there is something sending up the sun As if regret were in it and were sacred. Anything more than the truth would have seemed too weak; The universal cataract of death That spends nothingness—and unresisted, That is its pinnacle to heavenward— It is this backward motion toward the source, What form my dreaming was about to take. You’d think the inner dome of heaven had fallen. White feathers from the struggle of whose breast Told me my secret must be known: Here we, in our impatience of the steps To fill the abyss’s void with emptiness. And life is too much like a pathless wood: Then leaf subsides to leaf, Make the day to us seem less brief, To separate us for a panic moment The which it is reserved for God above As the breeze rises, and turn many-colored And Pirouette, forever in one place, Not to return. Earth’s the right place for love: We must be something. If design govern in a thing so small, It is from this in nature we are from: Nothing gold can stay. Word I had no one left but God. It seriously, sadly, runs away Save by some strange resistance in itself— It has this throwing backward on itself— Stands still and dances, but it runs away. May no fate willfully misunderstand me And half grant what I wish and snatch me away Word I was in my life alone. It’s when I’m weary of considerations, Such heaps of broken glass to sweep away, I’d like to get away from earth awhile. That would be good both going and coming back With the same pains you use to fill a cup. The heart is still aching to seek, But I was going to say when Truth broke in For this is love and nothing else is love, And then come back to it and begin over, Get back to the beginning of beginnings. But I was well And all but lost, Not gaining but not losing, like a bird. The fact is the sweetest dream that labor knows, I was looking for you. And the white water rode the black forever. But it flows over us. It flows between us; I don’t know where it’s likely to go, To go with the drift of things. The total sky almost without defect, But strictly held by none, is loosely bound. It is most us, And I could tell We love the things we love for what they are Whether they work together or apart. ----- This cento was composed of my favorite lines from a list of poems by Robert Frost given to me by a Frost scholar I met last week. The title comes from the epitaph on Frost’s tombstone: “I had a lover’s quarrel with the world.” The lines come from the following poems: A Prayer in Spring, Mowing, The Tuft of Flowers, October, Reluctance, Nothing Gold Can Stay, After Apple-picking, Hyla Brook, Birches, The Last Word of a Bluebird, Spring Pools, Tree at My Window, West Running Brook, Design, The Silken Tent.
