The Most of It
He thought he kept the universe alone;
For all the voice in answer he could wake
Was but the mocking echo of his own
From some tree-hidden cliff across the lake.
Some morning from the boulder-broken beach
He would cry out on life, that what it wants
Is not its own love back in copy speech,
But counter-love, original response.
And nothing ever came of what he cried
Unless it was the embodiment that crashed
In the cliff's talus on the other side,
And then in the far distant water splashed,
But after a time allowed for it to swim,
Instead of proving human when it neared
And someone else additional to him,
As a great buck it powerfully appeared,
Pushing the crumpled water up ahead,
And landed pouring like a waterfall,
And stumbled through the rocks with horny tread,
And forced the underbrush–and that was all.
Notes
Where Anna Świrszczyńska surrendered the fragile somatic body to the vast, engulfing rhythm of the open tide, Robert Frost stands alone at the edge of a mountain lake, shouting into the cliffside only to demand an impossible, human-counterpart response from the wilderness. The lone speaker mistakes the acoustic rebound for genuine communion, until a colossal buck crashes through the water—a startling encounter with the indifferent Real that shatters our ideological projection and proves the universe returns only an alien, non-human presence in place of our spoken desire. It anchors September’s theme of Echo in the deceptive space of the landscape, reminding us that repetition does not validate our inner cries, but reverberates back as an altered, unsympathetic force that forces us to confront our own solitude. #September #RobertFrost #Echo #Poetry #Nature