A luminous thing

I am making up for lost poetry Fridays but there are things I need to learn from Robert Frost. I was reading last night haphazardly through A Book of Luminous Things, collated by Czeslaw Milosz, who won a Nobel Prize for literature (after I was done with trying to word the story of The Fall for 5-9 year olds). It is a book full of strange and different international poetry, translated from Polish, Chinese, Swedish, just to name a few. Some of them are illuminate something, for me, and some of them remain impenetrable (as of last night). I came across one and thought ‘oh that one is grand’ only to discover that it is written by good old Robert Frost. It’s about an echo and a deer and so much more than an echo and a deer. (And it gathered further luminosity in my mind, and another rather more literal meaning, after reading Genesis 2:18-23.)

The Most of It

He thought he kept the universe alone;

For all the voice in answer he could wake

Was but the mocking echo of his own

From some tree-hidden cliff across the lake.

Some morning from the boulder-broken beach

He would cry out on life, that what it wants

Is not its own love back in copy speech,

But counter-love, original response.

And nothing ever came of what he cried

Unless it was the embodiment that crashed

In the cliff’s talus on the other side,

And then in the far-distant water splashed,

But after a time allowed for it to swim,

Instead of proving human when it neared

And someone else additional to him,

As a great buck it powerfully appeared,

Pushing the crumpled water up ahead,

And landed pouring like a waterfall,

And stumbled through the rocks with horny tread,

And forced the underbrush – and that was all.

Robert Frost

Picture from www.bryan-hart.com