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Frost, Robert - That far off day the leaves in flight
Identifier
006379
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
A description of the experience
Robert Frost – from The Poetry of Robert Frost
That far off day the leaves in flight
Were letting in the colder light.
A season ending wind there blew
That, as it did the forest strew
I leaned on with a singing trust
And let it drive me deathward too.
With breaking step I stabbed the dust,
Yet did not much to shorten stride.
I sang of death – but had I known
The many deaths one must have died
Before he came to meet his own!
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A bird half wakened in the lunar noon
Sang halfway through its little inborn tune.
Partly because it sang but once all night
And that from no especial bush's height,
Partly because it sang ventriloquist
And had the inspiration to desist
Almost before the prick of hostile ears,
It ventured less in peril than appears.
It could not have come down to us so far,
Through the interstices of things ajar
On the long bead chain of repeated birth
To be a bird while we are men on earth,
If singing out of sleep and dream that way
Had made it much more easily a prey