A Witness Tree

1943

Brasch PS3511 R94 W57

London: Jonathan Cape

Robert Frost was troubled by loss, grief, and depression, and his poetry explores questions of existence and human experience. In ‘The Lesson for Today,’ he is engaged in an imaginary discussion with medieval scholar Alcuin of York about whose age is the darkest. He suspects that every age has darkness, some injustice or woe: ‘One age is like another for the soul,’ and earth is ‘a hard place in which to save the soul.’ Prompted by such thoughts and mindful of Alcuin’s epitaph, Frost writes the words for his own headstone: ‘I had a lover’s quarrel with the world.’