Robert FrostThe Soldier
To stand in the doorway is to stand
in more brief worlds than this one,
and within the intermundium,
where the small rain falls as part
of the kingdom of silence. It falls
on the houses and on the houses.
Looking out from the doorway
it is so much more than a landscape
where the weather enters into your heart
like a word: ideas belong to the world
and your local body, the elective place.
But at the same time, like the mansuctude
and inweaving of sentences and their tiderace
of meanings. There is only ever the world.
But what happened there? Then?
The rain was also blanketing
the darkening land of history as it swept
all the miles to your door.
It was falling for millennia with its own
mind and then across gardens, reflecting pools,
draggled hedges and into deserted grey squares
and lengthening colonnades; like a population.
And now into the field of Europe
where it descends on the man fallen briefly
under curtain-fire; his body going back to earth,
mouldering into the blood-wet marl,
under the small rain. I know it’s raining
but once we will walk out through the doorway
of events into a wider prospect of ideas;
but again weighed down with the blandishment
of the years and their nets of change, stumbling,
the rain in our faces, into the sound of firing.