Monday's Poetry: "A Prayer in Spring"

 

by Pa Rock

Poetry Appreciator

Spring officially arrived a week ago yesterday on Sunday, March 20th, and the next Saturday, March 26th, was the birthday of one of America's best loved poets, Robert Frost.  To mark both occasions, the internet publication, "The Writer's Almanac," featured Frost's ode to the season, "A Prayer in Spring," on his birthday.  It's a beautiful offering of thanksgiving, not for a harvest but for the bursting spring that is ultimately responsible for the harvest.

Robert Frost, who was born in San Francisco in 1876, lived and wrote in England, and is best known for being a hard-scrabble farmer in New Hampshire.   He was educated and well-traveled, but with a connection to the earth that dominated his poetry.  Frost is the only poet to have won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry four times, and he was the first poet to ever speak at a presidential inauguration.   John F. Kennedy had asked Frost to read an original poem at his inauguration on January 20, 1961.  Frost wrote a special poem for the occasion but was unable to read it due the glare from the sun, so he recited another of his works "The Gift Outright," from memory.

Here, in appreciation of spring and the life of Robert Frost, is "A Prayer in Spring":

A Prayer in Spring

by Robert Frost

Oh, give us pleasure in the flowers to-day;

And give us not to think so far away

As the uncertain harvest;  keep us here

All simply in the springing of the year.

Oh, give us pleasure in the orchard white,

Like nothing else by day, like ghosts by night,

And make us happy in the happy bees,

That swarm dilating round the perfect trees.

And make us happy in the darting bird

That suddenly above the bees is heard,

The meteor that thrusts with needle bill,

And off a blossom in mid air stands still.

For this is love and nothing else is love,

The which it is reserved for God above

To sanctify to what far ends He will,

But which it only needs that we fulfill.