Poet Robert Frost (1874-1963)

I came out to California in 1966 after getting my college degree at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire.With Robert Frost, his movement was in the opposite direction: Born in San Francisco, he is best known for the poems he wrote while living in New Hampshire.

I had the good fortune of seeing Frost give a poetry reading at Dartmouth in the last year of his life. Then, years later, Martine and I visited his home in Franconia, New Hampshire in 2005.

The following poem is one of his most un-New-England works:

Once by the Pacific

The shattered water made a misty din.
Great waves hooked over others coming in,
And thought of doing something to the shore
That water never did to land before.
The clouds were low and hairy in the skies,
Like locks blown forward in the gleam of eyes.
You could not tell, and yet it looked as if
The shore was lucky in being backed by cliff,
The cliff in being backed by continent,
It looked as if a night of dark intent
Was coming, and not only a night, an age.
Someone had better be prepared for rage.
There would be more than ocean-water broken
Before God’s last Put out the Light was spoken.