Here are your waters and your watering place.

Drink and be whole again beyond confusion.

The poem’s final line is an overt reference to Frost’s well-known description of a successful poem’s ending as “a momentary stay against confusion.” But why the word “whole”? And why “again”? The suggestion appears to be that the “you” of the poem, though previously one entity, has somehow become divided.

Divided, we might say, by the road taken. Divided when the process of choosing gives way to the fact of choice.

The Choice

The mind is a baby giant who, more provident in the cradle than he knows, has hurled his paths in life all round ahead of him like playthings. . . . They are vocabulary, grammar, prosody, and diary, and it will be too bad if he can’t find stepping stones of them for his feet wherever he wants to go. The way will be zigzag, but it will be a straight crookedness like the walking stick he cuts himself in the bushes for an emblem. He will be judged as he does or doesn’t let this zig or that zag project him off out of his general direction.

FROST, “THE CONSTANT SYMBOL,”
The Atlantic Monthly, October 1946

What does it mean to make a decision? This is perhaps the only question to be debated with equal intensity by neuroscientists, business executives, philosophers, economists, game show contestants, and married couples, and it’s unlikely to be resolved by, of all things, a poem. Nor would this be surprising even if the question were a much simpler or more poetic one—something about melancholia or spring, for example. As a general matter, poems aren’t good at resolving dilemmas.

They are, however, very good at illustrating concepts—or maybe embodying them would be a better way to put it. Typically the concepts in question involve the standard themes of English literature (love, mortality, justice), and the resulting form is one we respond to as if guided by an instinct we didn’t realize we possessed. As Samuel Johnson puts it in describing Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” the poem “abounds with images which find a mirror in every breast; and with sentiments to which every bosom returns an echo.” As Johnson sees it, we don’t just read Gray’s great meditation on death—“Full many a flow’r is born to blush unseen, / And waste its sweetness on the desert air”—we recognize it.