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The Accidental Orthodox: Robert Frost and “A Prayer for Spring”

None of my Greek-school teachers valued poetry.  This always seemed a peculiar irony to me, since so much of our time in Greek school was dedicated to mastering poems—patriotic poems to be learned and recited by rote at annual Greek-school community events such as Ochi Day, Independence Day, and graduation day.  But these poems were not taught as poetry, they were not accompanied by story, commentary, or reflection—they were merely words to be memorized.

While my Greek-school teachers taught me poems, I learned poetry from my “American-school” teachers, and that first meant reading and studying two poets, one ancient and the other modern: Homer and Robert Frost.  I devoured with Greek pride the epic tales of the heroic Achilles and the wily Odysseus, but as a twelve year-old, Frost eluded me.  As a twenty year-old college student, when I first truly encountered Cavafy, Elytis, Palamas, Seferis, Sikelianos, Solomos, and Ritsos, I also rediscovered Frost and finally came to appreciate America’s warm reverence for its most cherished poet.

However, as much as Frost’s poetry moved me, it also sometimes left me troubled, frustrated.  Often I would encounter in Frost’s peaceful, beautiful writing a familiar voice or feeling, but one I could not identify.  That illusive, ethereal sense ultimately revealed itself to me through Robert Frost’s 1915 classic reflection, “A Prayer for Spring.”  In this poem, Frost reminds us that both the mystery of God and His love for mankind are expressed in the beauty of nature and in humanity’s purposeful relationship with physical wonder.  Inasmuch as truly great poetry aims to express universal truths, and inasmuch as Orthodoxy embodies truth, Robert Frost, without intention or awareness, came to rest his poetic truth atop an Orthodox theological set of beliefs. Robert Frost wrote:

Oh, give us pleasure in the flowers today;

And give us not to think so far away

As the uncertain harvest; keep us here

All simply in the springing of the year.

 

Oh, give us pleasure in the orchard white,

Like nothing else by day, like ghosts by night;

And make us happy in the happy bees,

The swarm dilating round the perfect trees.

 

And make us happy in the darting bird

That suddenly above the bees is heard,

The meteor that thrusts in with needle bill,

And off a blossom in mid-air stands still.

 

For this is love and nothing else is love,

The which it is reserved for God above

To sanctify to what far ends He will,

But which it only needs that we fulfill.

In “A Prayer for Spring,” Frost asks us to recognize as constant the beauty of the world by witnessing in the moment the pleasure of spring, of nature gifted to man from God.  As the poem’s title indicates, the spiritual exuberance for natural beauty it celebrates is a declaration of gratitude to God.  Frost’s “prayer” calls us to not labor over the unpredictable, unforeseeable future—something, after all, which reflects God’s mystery and His plans for us—but to experience the sacred beauty of life and nature for what they are: expressions of God’s love for mankind. 

Indeed, it is incumbent upon us to appreciate God’s gift and to be grateful in the present, just as we can be confident in a future we cannot perceive, control, or comprehend, because that future rests with God whose love for us is limitless.  Both Frost and Orthodoxy address this theological principle as a tangible reality we can behold in something as awesome and splendid as the beauty of a spring day.  This aesthetic mystery is a tenet of faith central to Eastern Christianity, expressed beautifully by the devotional poetry of Robert Frost, an accidental exponent of Orthodox thought.          

Dr. Alexandros K. Kyrou is Professor of History at Salem State University, where he teaches on the Balkans, Byzantium, and the Ottoman Empire.