Tags
death of the hired man, Father Sky, home, homeless spirit, love, Mother Earth, poetry, rejected, robert frost, Spirit, spirit travel, surcease, The Death of the Hired Man, Twinkle of a Eye
‘Warren,’ she said, ‘he’s come home to die:
You needn’t be afraid he’ll leave you this time.’
‘Home,’ he mocked gently.
‘Yes, what else but home?
It all depends on what you mean by home.
Of course he’s nothing to us, any more
Than was the hound that came a stranger to us
Out of the woods, worn out upon the trail.’
‘Home is the place where when you have to go there,
They have to take you in.’
‘I should have called it
Something you somehow haven’t to deserve.’
(The Death Of The Hired Man. [excerpt] Robert Frost.)
And to where on Earth may you go if there is no place you can call home, but to earth itself? Willingly or not it is the ‘Home’ to which we all retreat. Having fought the corporeal battle and lost, we must return to base from whence the war began. And, assuredly or not it is the place that must take you in deservedly or not.
Once gone to Earth, where does the other part retreat once separated from the host? Is that ‘Home’ as well? I trust it is. And, must that place also be deserved? I think not, unless the one who thus journeys rejects the paternal love thus proffered.
In such a case, to where does the homeless spirit travel in search of surcease? Why, to nowhere. Once divorced, the immaterial many no longer mingle within its former environs. The two are incongruous. It must needs perish.
Mother Earth and Father Sky are merely homes of a forever estranged but endlessly married couple. The latter begat the former. If one cannot and the other may not, because the gift of the Father is rejected, the child, now cast adrift, must vanish forever and be drawn beneath an ocean of spurned love and forgetfulness. The Mother will incorporate the child into her bosom, and the Father as well, if He is simply granted access before the fact.
It happens in the twinkle of an eye.