HOPE FOR THE PAST

Robert Frost

(1874 - 1963)

Photo by Walter Albertin

The concept of hope is usually reserved for the future.  As Robert Frost and David Ray's poem remind us, however, it may be that a more pressing question is whether there is hope for one's past — all of the actions, decisions, and indecisions that undergird what one has become.

                                                 Thanks, Robert Frost

                                                         by David Ray

                                Do you have hope for the future?

                                someone asked Robert Frost, toward the end.

                                Yes, and even for the past, he replied,

                                that it will turn out to have been all right

                                for what it was, something we can accept,

                                mistakes made by the selves we had to be,

                                not able to be, perhaps, what we wished,

                                or what looking back half the time it seems

                                we could so easily have been, or ought . . .

                                The future, yes, and even for the past,

                                that it will become something we can bear.

                                And I too, and my children, so I hope,

                                will recall as not too heavy the tug

                                of those albatrosses I sadly placed

                                upon their tender necks.  Hope for the past,

                                yes, old Frost, your words provide that courage,

                                and it brings strange peace that itself passes

                                into past, easier to bear because

                                you said it, rather casually, as snow

                                went on falling in Vermont years ago.

Credit:  David Ray's poem, "Thanks, Robert Frost," is published in Music of Time: Selected and New Poems (The Blackwater Press, 2006).  Thanks also to Parker J. Palmer's column, Meaning Changes As Life Unfolds, published March 18, 2015, on Krista Tippett's excellent site, "On Being".