The Figure A Poem Makes ~ Robert Frost

The figure a poem makes.

It begins in delight and ends in wisdom.

The figure is the same as for love.

No one can really hold that the ecstasy should be static and stand still in one place.

It begins in delight, it inclines to the impulse, it assumes direction with the first line laid down, it runs a course of lucky events, and ends in a clarification of life – not necessarily a great clarification, such as sects and cults are founded on, but in a momentary stay against confusion.

It has denouement.

It has an outcome that though unforeseen was predestined from the first image of the original mood – and indeed from the very mood.

It is but a trick poem and no poem at all if the best of it was thought of first and saved for the last.

It finds its own name as it goes and discovers the best waiting for it in some final phrase at once wise and sad – the happy-sad blend of the drinking song.

No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader.
No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader.

For me the initial delight is in the surprise of remembering something I didn’t I didn’t know I knew.

I am in a place, a situation, as if I had materialized from cloud or risen out of the ground.

There is a glad recognition of the long lost and the rest follows.

Step by step the wonder of unexpected supply keeps growing.

The impressions most useful to my purpose seem always those I was unaware and so made no note of at the time when taken, and the conclusion is come to that like giants we are always hurling experience ahead of us to pave the future with against the day when we may want to strike a line of purpose across it for somewhere.

The line will have the more charm for not being mechanically straight.

We enjoy the straight crookedness of a good walking stick….
More than once I should have lost my soul to radicalism if it had been the originality it was mistaken for by my young converts.

Originality and initiative are what I ask for my country.

For myself, the originality need be no more than the freshness of a poem run in the way I have described: from delight to wisdom.

The figure is the same as for love.

Like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting.

A poem may be worked over once it is in being, but may not be worried over into being.

Its most precious quality will remain its having run itself and carried away the poet with it.