Recently, I came across the poet Robert Frost's epithath on his grave stone:
"I HAD A LOVER'S QUARREL WITH THE WORLD."
Why would he say that? A little googling will tell you that Frost wrote a poem entitled, "The Lesson for Today". He recited it at an event celebrating a Harvard University's Phi Beta Kappa Society's Anniversary. It isn't a popular poem. It is full of obscure references, that maybe the brothers in Phi Beta Kappa knew, but not we uninitiated. However, the poem's last stanza reads:
“I hold your doctrine of Memento Mori
And 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.”
One of the last interviews Frost did, before he died, was a documentary by Shirley Clarke, where the program was called, "I had a lover's quarrel with the world." Perhaps, this is why it is on his gravestone.
What do you want on your headstone?
