Spend
a Fall Day in
Southern Vermont's Gateway:
Old First Church and the
Robert Frost Gravesite
Dateline: 09/30/99
"I had a
lover's quarrel with the world," reads the epitaph on Robert Frost's grave
stone in the cemetery adjacent to Old First Church in Bennington,
Vermont. Frost (1874-1963), a New Englander and one of the most loved poets of his
time, wrote the line in a 1942 poem titled, The Lesson for Today.
The Old First Church dates to 1805--it
replaced a 1763 meeting house on the spot--and the cemetery is also the final resting
place for five Vermont governors and many of the brave volunteers who died at the Battle of Bennington in
1777. Frost bought a plot there following his wife Elinor's unexpected death--she had
hoped to have her ashes scattered at their farm in New Hampshire.
Before I set out on my Bennington pilgrimage, I found my book of Frost's complete works, The Poetry of Robert Frost, tucked away on the bookshelf in my office, intending simply to know its whereabouts when I returned. I was surprised to find that I was carrying it with me when I got down to my car. And even more surprised that after visiting the poet's gravesite, when I opened the 607-page book randomly, I opened straight to one of my favorite Frost poems (insert eerie coincidence music here).
THE MASTER SPEED
No speed of wind or water rushing by
But you have speed far greater. You can climb
Back up a stream of radiance to the sky,
And back through history up the stream of time.
And you were given this swiftness, not for haste
Nor chiefly that you may go where you will,
But in the rush of everything to waste,
That you may have the power of standing still--
Off any still or moving thing you say.
Two such as you with such a master speed
Cannot be parted nor be swept away
From one another once you are agreed
That life is only life forevermore
Together wing to wing and oar to oar.
Back to The Bounty of Bennington
The Bennington Battle Monument
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All photographs by Kimberly Knox, copyright 1999. Leaf graphic from MediaBuilder Image Library public domain clipart collection.
