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I don't read a lot of poetry, but I do have some favorites, and Frost is one of them. I find that his poems often speak to my heart, and resonate with something inside me, sometimes in ways I don't fully understand until much later. It is only on reflection, for example, that his "Good-by and Keep Cold" seems to me to bring some deeper insight into raising children and the need to allow them space to grow from adversity, and trust that God will bring them through.

"Into My Own" reflects what I have often experienced as a consequence of my travels, both physically in other lands and places, and internally, in the journeys through my own heart and mind. Sometimes I feel that others try to follow my paths, but without much success, and with Frost, I can feel to say:

I do not see why I should e'er turn back,
Or those should not set forth upon my track
To overtake me, who should miss me here
And long to know if still I held them dear

And even so, though I have seen and learned much in those same travels, they have best served to reinforce my most deeply held convictions and faith, and bring me also to the conclusion that...

They would not find me changed from him they knew -
Only more sure of all I thought was true

I recall one time while on a long motorcycle ride, looking ahead to the gathering storm clouds...a passage from "A Line-Storm Song" brings that memory back powerfully, so that I can almost smell the air, pregnant with the coming rain:

The line-storm clouds fly tattered and swift,
The road is forlorn all day,...

Yet later, after ten days gone, I am a block from home, paused a moment in time, sitting astride my machine, and gazing down the street at my home where my family awaits my arrival. Strangely, though I miss them terribly, and can hardly am anxious to hold them in my arms again, yet I also yearn to return to the open road again.

Out through the fields and 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 heart is still aching to seek,
But the feet question "Whither?"

So much of wisdom in "Mending Wall" -- who among us, in one way or another, has not been reluctant to "go beyond his father's saying?"

And among my favorites (though not in this volume) is this passage from "Two Tramps In Mudtime" that describes what I believe to be the profoundest moments of a person's life, those times in which everything has come together in some eternal, fundamental, significant way:

Only where love and need are one
And the work is play for mortal stakes
Is the deed ever really done
For heaven and the future's sakes."