Desert Places – A Poem for Thursday
What I appreciate about Robert Frost’s poetry is the “rhythmic logic” that always seems to yield a kind of desperately honest beauty. Here is comes especially in two places. “And lonely as it is that loneliness / Will be more lonely ere it will be less” and “I have it in me so much nearer home / To scare myself with my own desert places.”
Might part of the genius of Lent be the need to say no, to create space, to withdrawal for a time so that we can be more in touch with our “desert places” so that we find the courage, if not to embrace them, at least to acknowledge them and face them without fear? I wonder. I do know, though, that I think of this poem in relation to the Temptation scene we heard read last Sunday, where Jesus is driven – by the same Spirit that named and confirmed him – to a desert place that got more lonely before it got less. Perhaps knowing this we can believe that even when we are in those places of our own, so much scarier than the empty wilderness or world Frost describes, we are not alone.
“Desert Places”
Snow falling and night falling fast, oh, fast
In a field I looked into going past,
And the ground almost covered smooth in snow,
But a few weeds and stubble showing last.
The woods around it have it–it is theirs.
All animals are smothered in their lairs.
I am too absent-spirited to count;
The loneliness includes me unawares.
And lonely as it is that loneliness
Will be more lonely ere it will be less—
A blanker whiteness of benighted snow
With no expression, nothing to express.
They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between stars–on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places.
Robert Frost, from A Further Range (1936)
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