May

2

By Peg

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Home Is the Place

In high school, I performed a reading of Robert Frost’s “The Death of the Hired Man” for a drama class project. I fell in love with the gentle spirit of the poem and a particular line about the meaning of home.

No, not the line that everyone quotes: “Home is the place where, when you have to go there,/They have to take you in.”

That’s Warren speaking, the husband who isn’t thrilled with the return of an old man — Silas — who has been more nuisance and burden than help around the farm in recent years. My gut always told me that was the belief of frustration, a belief with a resentful edge to it. It might be the truth, but the grace was missing.

In the poem, the next line comes from Warren’s wife, Mary, a woman whose soft heart who always softened my voice when I performed her lines. The line is awkward — I used to think Frost could’ve done better – and that makes it true to the awkward way we often speak, especially when we’re trying to articulate the ineffable. In response to her husband, Mary says: “I should have called it/Something you somehow haven’t to deserve.”

Home is something we somehow don’t have to deserve. It is simply there for us, ready for us to claim. A place where we will hopefully be met, not with judgment or long-suffering resignation, but with the soft spirit of unconditional love. The forgotten quote from Frost, for me, resonates with truth and grace; it’s the one I wish people quoted.

Comment Feed

4 Responses

  1. Jaye May 2, 2010 | 5:18 pm

    Love this one Peg! And you are right, it resonates with that intersection of truth and grace (sometimes referred to as the “sweet spot”).

  2. Mike Moses May 5, 2010 | 9:19 am

    ahhh. how nice to have a literary friend and influence in the blogosphere. this post is lovely. But i almost stopped reading because of how ugly that organge box is over there – who in the world suggested you add that????? (jk – now i’ll be a regular reader through rss feed – thanks)

  3. Brenda May 5, 2010 | 11:25 am

    Yes, indeed, the orange box thing-y is sooo ugly! Ditto, Mike. When I “plug into” the orange box, all I get is scrambled, encoded mess, something like my house when I’m not minding the business at hand, which exclude that horrendous orange boxy thing-y…. ugh.
    Brenda

  4. Peg May 16, 2010 | 6:14 pm

    Addendum: Apparently Joyce Carol Oates has been a less-than-discerning reader of Frost, also. In a March, 2010, issue of “Smithsonian” magazine, about returning to the hometown of her childhood, she wrote, “…home isn’t a street address or a residence, or, in Robert Frost’s cryptic words, the place where, ‘when you have to go there, they have to let (sic) you in’…” I long for the day when everyone quotes Mary and not Warren. (And BTW, the quote is “take you in,” not “let you in. VERY different connotation. Should I write the copy editor, or is the sole responsibility Joyce Carol’s? I’m in a quandry.)



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