Frost at Midnight
White skies, tall pines, blue spruce
give way to evening darkness total.
I read Robert Frost’s “New Hampshire,”
twice, getting stuck on a line where “Nothing”
is a thing or event, like “the nothing that is”
in Stevens’s “The Snow Man.” The line:
“Nothing not built with hands of course is sacred,”
which is not only a metrical way
of praising manual labor but also an elevation
of “nothing,” before waving the subject away,
the real problem having less to do with the sacred
than with “what to face or run away from.”
That’s Frost for you, who elsewhere said Nirvana
was “the only nothing that is something.”
— David Lehman
Read two other poems by the author here.