But he had gone his way, the grass all mown,
And I must be, as he had been,—alone,
‘As all must be,’ I said within my heart,
‘Whether they work together or apart.’
—Robert Frost, “Tuft of Flowers”
He thought he kept the universe alone;
For all the voice in answer he could wake
Was but the mocking echo of his own …
—Robert Frost, “The Most of It”
I am comforted by the poet who shows the lack of comfort in the universe. Robert Frost begins his poem, “The Most of It,” with a Rilkean cry—not “who will hear me” in that universe, but “what is the language of the reply?” God’s silence is the poet’s implicit theme, veiled behind exploration of the tension in human desire for comfort and autonomy from the vast and frightening cosmos. Do we go to poems for comfort in our darkest hours? I do not think I would still be a poet if that were not so. And yet, it is not a comfortable comfort that poetry gives. Did Frost discern, in that erotic and sudden crashing “embodiment” of the great buck, a kind of original response? His conclusion from that startling event was: “—and that was all.” Which says it all, as the em dash and understatedness leave the event unsaid. Frost showed that the signs are not always within language that we recognize. Writing the poem, the reply does become a kind of echo, but taking in the original response and transforming it to language, the alchemy of art occurs. Maintaining the hidden, the reader can have her own experience to embody and make meaning of the silent reply. And this is our comfort.
The problem with comfort is that it veils. Comfort risks closing what should be left open. But all language is itself a rent upon the flesh, so to speak; T. S. Eliot’s “raid on the inarticulate / With shabby equipment always deteriorating” (Four Quartets) is a necessity, a wounding. The poem is already a place for the veiled, so it may be that the poet lifts the veil from the veil. Why do we choose to write poems and not prose, if not to account for the veil while also leaving openings in the line breaks? I think poetry is a kind of mercy. We need mercy in “times of crisis” within both the interior and exterior world. But comfort and mercy are not the same thing. Yes, language always conceals as it reveals. Transformation is at work here, as the French visionary philosopher Simone Weil said, the task is to choose not to be consoled: “[W]e must not wish for the disappearance of any of our troubles, but grace to transform them;”(Gravity and Grace) the violence of the worm’s dissolution in the chrysalis towards the imago of Psyche.
If I called my state laureate project “Reading Past Vermont Poet Laureates in Times of Crisis,” as a possible comfort for the potential audience, it was only in the contradictory sense of John Berryman’s Dream Song 366: “These Songs are not meant to be understood, you understand. / They are only meant to terrify & comfort.” We are citizens of a world in crisis. Should poetry give us the comfort we deserve? Rather than comfort or its opposite, despair, the poem proposes:
“there are secrets, secrets, I may yet—
hidden in history & theology, hidden in rhyme—
come to understand.”
(John Berryman, “Dream Song 159”)
It is not compensation from the other we need, but a solitude with what needs to pass through us, to leave behind knowledge. Rare and subtle knowledge stands at the wound; only certain poets can ignorantly transpose that threshold into their poem—perhaps by cultivating their intuition alone—for the reader to step through. It is not an act of solidarity, but generous intimacy.
When people speak of poetry as something that brings people together, I think they are defending poetry’s usefulness to the community. Perhaps poetry’s greater function is to draw us to something beyond ourselves.
W. H. Auden, in his elegy to Yeats, spoke of poetry as making “nothing happen,” and while often quoted thus, we should remember that the line was not at all finished: A colon ended those words, a punctuation mark which functions the same as Frost’s em dash does—a symbol of the caesural brink of action:
“For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.”
Poetry is born out of isolation, touching another heart. It is in existence for that which is no longer in existence—griefs busily becoming immortal beauty. Poetry is on the side of truth and death(Weil). Auden shows humans erroneous belief in the material and worldly social, rather than the prophetic act of the poem’s mouth. In this act of “a way of happening,” poetry becomes not a destination but an approach; not explanation, but invitation; not comfort, but silence in which to receive. Then act. This element of its function must be shown to the reader, and they must answer the call; it cannot be given. It cannot be a comfort. But can this astounding possibility of craft, God willing, be taken up by writers intentionally? Yes and no. It is a great subtlety, surrender, and continuous work.
So there I stood before my own townspeople in Vermont, as a laureate with such a … project. No matter who arrived, I knew each had within them that Frost and Rilke cry; that question of wanting consolation in reply, of original language. I wanted to show them, even if they didn’t quite know it yet, that one can arrive only with the words of such books, only with the mouth.
I began the lectures with Frost and circled his loneliness. Like Berryman’s Henry, Frost reckoned with disillusionment amid shattered political, racial, and domestic dividedness. Berryman’s urban, drunk academic loneliness wasn’t the same as Frost’s lone dark woods and desert places aspiring farmer, but so too in Frost do we witness the realization of our American dream unable to surrender itself to the veiled truthfulness of dreams. The inherited dream was only the copy-speech of some proud fantasy. America continues to fall from the heights of disillusionment to the depths of existential and spiritual crises—and it is exactly this that the poet presses upon. Poetry remains a subtle undercurrent of the collective consciousness, yet resisting the homogeneous market. The poet’s true work is rapport with solitude and presence. There’s no violent insanity of language, brawling in Cambridge gutters in Frost, but sober formalism with tidy end rhyme; Vermont sugar shacks and birds perched on woodpiles. However, like a knife the lover bakes into a cake for the beloved prisoner, so too the poet sneaks in contradiction. Frost’s terror and suicidal proximity to the void is clear, just as Berryman sneaks in a gentleness. The mystical heights of the sacred, the pressures and presences of the ancient words are veiled but there. The necessary object is hidden, baked in: latent butterfly, or shiv, I cannot say—both oscillate. But those objects are only a mouth, for “a way of happening,” That way is presence itself, which cannot be described or represented. In my lecture on Louise Glück (Vermont Poet Laureate, 1994–98), the theme again returned to the solitary cry and intimate presence:
I have
a lord in heaven
called the sun, and open
for him, showing him
the fire of my own heart, fire
like his presence.
–Louise Glück, “The Red Poppy”
The poet’s loneliness is not a literal lack of company, but an acknowledgement of lack itself. Their muscles twitch to bow to it, asking as Berryman’s Henry did: “Can I go on? / I am a half-closed book.” For me, poetry has ceased to be a project of a genre of feeling, of mindfulness, comfort, bridging divides, finding community. It is not a narrative, memoir, philosophy or aphorism, history or fiction. Yet it is all those things; but baffling, rare and estranging. There is enormous love within the loneliness of the poet. As Jacques Lacan put it, “Love is giving something you don’t have to someone who doesn’t want it”("Conversations with Lacan"). I will end with something from someone I loved very much, who lived loneliness, and whose poetry bewilders and comforts me: former Vermont poet laureate Ruth Stone’s (2007–2011) opening of “Wild Asters,” which articulates the mission perfectly:
I am here to worship the blue
Asters along the brook,
Not to carry pollen on my legs
Or rub strutted wings in mindless
sucking
But to feel with my eyes
The loss of you and me […]
*
Bianca Stone
Brandon, Vermont
July 23, 2026