Monday's Poetry: "Reluctance"

by Pa Rock
Poetry Appreciator

New England poet Robert Frost penned the poem "Reluctance" in 1912.   The verse expresses the feelings of the poet as he comes in from a long walk in the countryside.  It conveys a sense of loneliness and melancholy, and some critics have cast it as a yearning for a lost love.  To me it describes the desolation of winter as the earth awaits its rebirth in the spring, and it acknowledges the seasons of the year as well as the seasons of life.  

This tired old man is feeling the onset of his winter, and he takes some comfort in the warm cloak of the poet's familiar allusions.  More than a centrury onward and the dead leaves lie huddled and still across my  horizon.  I am here but for awhile, and I have climbed my own hills and walked.my own fencerows, but through it all I have been little more than a distraction in a process that has gone on for eons and will continue long after I, myself, lie huddled and still, beneath the ground - and beneath those dead leaves of winter.  I know my fate, and accept it with reluctance.

Reluctance

by Robert Frost

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?