A Lover’s Quarrel with the World

Delivered by Rev. Dr. Randy K. Hammer, Oct. 20, 2019

Ecclesiastes 2:18-23; Philippians 1:20-26 GNT

“You work and worry your way through life, and what do you have to show for it?” Ecc. 2:22 GNT

“I am pulled in two directions . . .” Phil. 1:23 GNT

Lines from Robert Frost’s “A Lesson for Today”

One of the things we most enjoyed about living in Upstate New York was being able to drive over to Vermont, especially at this time of the year. We lived a short, 45-minute drive from historic Bennington, Vermont. In the middle of Bennington’s village square is Old First Church, one of the quintessential New England Congregational churches.

But another noteworthy fact is that poet Robert Frost is buried in the cemetery behind Old First Church. We visited and paid our respects to Frost on a number of occasions during our many drives through Bennington and past Old First Church.

Robert Frost was the first poet I fell in love with when I began taking college literature classes. And Frost probably is still my favorite traditional poet of the past. While vacationing with our kids several years ago, we visited the Robert Frost Home in Derry, New Hampshire, the place where Frost penned many of the poems for which he is best known.

But back to Frost’s grave behind Old First Church. Inscribed on Frost’s tombstone are some words penned by the poet himself in one of his lesser-known poems, “A Lesson for Today.”   And the line on Frost’s gravestone is this: “I had a lover’s quarrel with the world.”

Now, “A Lesson for Today” is a long poem, and it not a very popular one; hence, it generally is not included in current anthologies.  But in the course of this poem, Frost talks about strolling through a cemetery where he concerned himself with reading the inscriptions on the gravestones, and taking note of how long those lying beneath had lived upon the earth, “Which,” he confessed, “is becoming my concern of late.”  He goes on to say, “There is a limit to our time extension. / We all are doomed to broken-off careers.”

And then Frost concludes the poem by saying,

“. . . were an epitaph to be my story

I’d have a short one ready for my own.

I would have written of me on my stone:

I had a lover’s quarrel with the world.”

Now, it is uncertain as to whether or not Frost really intended for that to be his epitaph.   But whether he intended it so or not, it ended up being that way:

“I had a lover’s quarrel with the world.”

At the risk of trying to read the dead poet’s mind, we might conjecture what the basis was for Frost’s “lover’s quarrel with the world.”  In studying Frost’s life, we know that he was plagued with inner turmoil most of his life.  As a boy, he endured his father’s drunken rages.  Frost was afraid of the dark, even into manhood.  He endured years of poverty and hardships in New England.  He suffered from depression and what some think was at times a “death wish” and contemplation of suicide.  He at times suffered discouragement over “getting nowhere as a poet.”  And he and his wife Elinor lost a child at a young age to typhoid fever, something that greatly impacted both of them.

But then on the flip side, Frost eventually realized notoriety as a poet when John F. Kennedy asked him to read a poem at his inauguration.  Frost would become “America’s poet” because of those iconic lines that have become a part of us:

“Two roads diverged in a road, and I,

I took the road less traveled by.

And that has made all the difference.”  And,

“Whose woods these are, I think I know,

His house is in the village though.

I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep.”

Well, I sought to find one word to describe the essence of Frost’s sentiment in “I had a lover’s quarrel with the world,” and the one word I came up with was ambivalence.  I think when it came to life, Robert Frost experienced ambivalence – “the state of having mixed feelings or contradictory ideas about something.”  Frost knew life’s success, but he also knew much of life’s heartache, struggle, and pain.  He saw things in life and the world that greatly troubled him.  And so, he was ambivalent about life; he had a lover’s quarrel with the world.

But wouldn’t most of us have to admit that we have experienced a certain ambivalence about life?  One day everything is going our way, everything about us is beautiful and gay, we feel so blessed, we are happy as a lark, and it is good to be alive.  Then a week later the tables can turn, the bottom can fall out of life, everything seems to fall apart, and the world turns to crap.  One week happy and blessed, and the next week the car breaks down, we bite down and break a tooth or a crown, we get a bad report from the doctor’s office, a child breaks our heart, a grandchild is admitted to the hospital with a serious illness, a child wakes up sick and you have no daycare and you have to go to work, and so on.  Most of us have experienced something like this at one time or another – an ambivalence about life, a lover’s quarrel with the world.

The Preacher of Ecclesiastes long ago experienced this ambivalence about life, I believe.  In some places in Ecclesiastes he talks about how beautiful life can be – God has made everything beautiful in its time; eat, drink and enjoy life with the wife you love; enjoy the work you do and what your work provides for you; be happy and cheerful; and so on.  And then in the same short book he complains that life is full of trouble and worry: “As long as you live, everything you do brings nothing but worry and heartache,” he says (2:23).  Yes, the Preacher, too, I believe, had his own ambivalence, his own “lover’s quarrel with the world.”

Perhaps the Apostle Paul did as well – have his own ambivalence, his own “lover’s quarrel with the world,” that is.  In the passage read from Philippians – written while Paul was lying in prison, by the way – he vacillates between wanting to continue to live upon the earth and continue the missionary work he felt Christ has called him to do, or to go ahead and die and go “be with Christ” in the afterlife, as he understood it.  Paul, too, had known great struggles, suffering, persecutions, beatings, shipwreck, imprisonments, and so on.  But he had also known many joys and successes in the new churches he had established and the wonderful friends he had made in those churches.  And so, he was ambivalent – had mixed feelings about living and dying.  Such, perhaps, is a much more common state of mind that we might first imagine.

I have begun reading Anne Lamott’s latest book, Almost Everything: Notes on Hope.  And I was somewhat surprised to read Lamott’s confessions that for as long as she can remember, she has had fleeting thoughts of jumping off tall buildings, turning the wheels of her car into the path of an oncoming truck, opening her passenger-side car door while speeding across the Golden Gate Bridge and jumping out, and so on.  “I have just always found it extremely hard to be here, on this side of eternity,” Lamott confesses, “because of, well, other people; and death.” 

While visiting Cairo, Egypt, once and standing on a very high place, Lamott confessed her thoughts of jumping to a Coptic minister.  Quickly waving her concern away, the Coptic minister replied, “Oh, who doesn’t?”  I believe that one could safely say that famous writer Anne Lamott is also ambivalent about life.  I think Lamott also would confess to having “a lover’s quarrel with the world.”  Now, I have yet to read the entire book, so I haven’t read Lamott’s every word on the subject.

But the bottom line to it all is life is a mixed bag of joys and sorrows, pleasure and pain, beauty and ugliness, beautiful sunrises and frightening storms.

What is it that keeps us going in our ambivalence about life?  What enables us to endure a “lover’s quarrel with the world?”  For Frost, it was belief – belief that things can get better; believing yourself into existence; belief in other people; belief that life and going on is worthwhile.

For the Apostle Paul, I believe it was faith, hope, and love.

And for Anne Lamott – I skipped ahead to the last page – it is hope.  She writes, “Against all odds, no matter what we’ve lost, no matter what messes we’ve made over time, no matter how dark the night, we offer and are offered kindness, soul, light, and food, which create breath and spaciousness, which create hope. . .”

So, if you have ever felt ambivalent about life; if you have ever felt that you were having a lover’s quarrel with the world (though you may not have named it as such), don’t despair.  You are in good company. 

But the one thing to hold onto and never let go of is hope – hope and her sisters, faith and love.  May it be so.  Amen.

Cited: ¹Jay Parini, Robert Frost: A Life.  New York: Henry Holt & Company, 1999. ²Anne Lamott, Almost Everything: Notes on Hope.  New York: Riverhead Books, 2018.