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290 A Face to Meet the Faces Robert Frost, The Derry Farm, New Hampshire,1906 Andrew Mulvania I am sure that anyone standing in my place tonight, charged with the happy office of greeting Mr. Frost on his birthday, on his massive, his Sophoclean birthday, would be bound to feel, as I do indeed feel, a considerable measure of diffidence. —Lionel Trilling, March 26th, 1959, Waldorf-Astoria, in celebration of Robert Frost’s eighty-fifth birthday He sat reflecting in his cane back chair on the bitter wisdom of old Sophocles in the Oedipus at Colonus: Never to have been born is best, / But if we must see the light, the next best is quickly returning whence we came. That would surely have been true for poor Elliot and he had—hadn’t he?—taken the poet’s advice, returning from the arms of Frost and Elinor to wherever “whence we came” from was—if anywhere. The other children—the four left—were at play out in the pasture down by Hyla Brook. He’d written about that once in a little poem he’d called “The Trial By Existence”—the thought that all of us come “trailing clouds of glory,” as Wordsworth had it, from some prior life of which we have no memory and that whatever pain or joy befalls us is ours by rights as what we somehow chose. But had the children chosen this country life of isolation?—for lately he’d noticed they’d grown strange from having only one another for playfellows. It was fine for him, misanthrope that he was, but the strain had been too much for Elinor and, after Elliot died, something within her died with him and a wall went up between them. It couldn’t be true that Elliot had chosen to die, 291 From the Page to the Pen to be ensouled for only four short years and then go back. No, Sophocles was right— this whole business of living was for the birds, those goddamn chickens squawking to be fed even now in the chicken coops behind the house. Still, there were days like this one: children at play in the near pasture, April sun warming the fields and the back of his neck where he sat in the chair. Yes, maybe it wasn’t so terrible after all. White wings burst briefly upward in the air. ...

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