Mr. Frost’s engagement at Boston University on October 30, 1958, was less than a week before the national biennial elections, and in his opening remarks he alluded to the fact that on the Massachusetts ballot that year there would be a referendum question pertaining to whether pari-mutuel betting on horse and dog racing would be allowed within the respective counties of the state.
I’VE BEEN TALKING various ways various places lately, and it just occurred to me tonight that I think you’re all having to vote on an interesting subject here. I’m not, because I’m a Vermonter. But I believe you’re all voting on the subject of gambling, aren’t you? Is that going on here in Massachusetts?
Many thoughts about that, I’ve had. The common thought is that it’s a minor evil that will go on, anyway, and you might as well profit by it. Now, that’s low, isn’t it?
But there is another strange thing that I’ve thought of many times: that if my life hadn’t gamble in it, I would buy some gamble, the Irish Sweepstakes or something. Probably would—I don’t know; I’ve never been without gamble, daily gamble.
You see, life is like that: love and need or love and desire, and enterprise and gamble. And the love should include desire, shouldn’t it? And the enterprise should include gamble. And you shouldn’t have to go outside for the desire or outside for the gamble—shouldn’t have to. That’s the high way of looking at it.
I sort of pity the people on the production line, who don’t see what it’s all about and have no gamble in their lives, unless it’s in having an occasional riotous strike; something like that. And you can sympathize with it, the strike, because it introduces into their life something of uncertainty. They may get knocked on the head.
So, I just wanted to say that. And, now, in my poems, always along, I say things like this—in one line and pass over them, whether they get noticed or not. I say somewhere:
But yield who will to their separation…
You see, the two things, separating the gamble from the enterprise.—
…yield who will to their separation,
My object in living is to unite
My avocation and my vocation…
That is, the “vocation” is the regular part of it; the “avocation” is the irregular part of it, the gambler part of it. To unite them—
As my two eyes make one in sight.
Only where love and need are one,
And the work is play for mortal stakes…
And I’m sure people have misunderstood that a lot, where I say, “And the work is play for mortal stakes.” They think I mean the work is play. No, I mean the work is a gamble. You see? I want to put a hyphen into that; I should. The next time I print that I shall have it, “And the work is play-for-mortal-stakes.” You see, the work is a gamble.—
Is the work ever done…33
to any great purpose.
It’s got to have that element in it. There must be uncertainty in it. And you can make what you please of that. You can make your religion out of that.
Somewhere else I say, “…something has to be left to God.”34 That’s the part of life that is the most important of all: the gamble and the enterprise.
And I’m perfectly unscrupulous in saying that if I hadn’t any enterprise at all that I can call an enterprise of my own, and there was no uncertainty in it, I’d buy some tickets in the Irish Sweepstakes, so I wouldn’t know what might not happen to me anytime. I’d dedicate a certain amount of my miserable little bit to introducing some uncertainty into my dull life.
You do that about all things. Of course, you don’t need to set any money on it at all. You go to games, and all you have to do is to set your heart on one side or the other, and win or lose with ’em. You go home defeated or victorious with the team. You get your uncertainty of an afternoon.
Some people work themselves all up. They get way up, a hope on one touchdown. And then they get way down on two touchdowns by the other side. And they scream and holler.
I’m more patient than that. In another poem I say, “…the strong are saying nothing until they see.”35 I wait till the last thing before I scream. But I’m the same uncertainty. I will have it.
—at Connecticut College for Women, December 8, 1959:
ONE OF THE THINGS you’re doing in poetry is bringing expression to a place where you never had it before. You know the expression and how the tone is to be taken, but it didn’t belong quite in this place. You fetched it from somewhere. You got it in church or in school or in a game or something. That’s very important to me.