The Signpost

Annie Soudain

The Signpost

The dim sea glints chill.  The white sun is shy,
And the skeleton weeds and the never-dry,
Rough, long grasses keep white with frost
At the hilltop by the finger-post;
The smoke of the traveller's-joy is puffed
Over hawthorn berry and hazel tuft.

I read the sign.  Which way shall I go?
A voice says:  You would not have doubted so
At twenty.  Another voice gentle with scorn
Says:  At twenty you wished you had never been born.

One hazel lost a leaf of gold
From a tuft at the tip, when the first voice told
The other he wished to know what 'twould be
To be sixty by this same post.  'You shall see,'
He laughed -- and I had to join his laughter --
'You shall see; but either before or after,
Whatever happens, it must befall,
A mouthful of earth to remedy all
Regrets and wishes shall freely be given;
And if there be a flaw in that heaven
'Twill be freedom to wish, and your wish may be
To be here or anywhere talking to me,
No matter what the weather, on earth,
At any age between death and birth, --
To see what day or night can be,
The sun and the frost, the land and the sea,
Summer, Autumn, Winter, Spring, --
With a poor man of any sort, down to a king,
Standing upright out in the air
Wondering where he shall journey, O where?'

Edward Thomas

A little back story about this poem. Edward Thomas and Robert Frost were friends. They would walk and talk. Thomas had critiqued Frost's poetry and brought him more recognition, Frost had read Thomas's writing about nature and encouraged him to try turning that into poetry. They saw a lot of things in the same way. In their walks, Frost discovered his friends' struggle with indecision, and remarked, "No matter which road you take, you'll always sigh, and wish you'd taken another." Which might remind you of Frosts' "The Road Not Taken"? Anyway, this is Thomas's take on the difficulty of making choices. The first stanza is my favorite of all of them. What a genius he was at describing nature! And that question, "Which way shall I go?"  - we aren't human if we aren't wrestling with that one.