Prime Minister Narendra Modi addressed President Joe Biden as ‘Drishta Sahasrachandro’: a wise man who has seen one thousand moons on the completion of 80 years and eight months. He presented Biden a copy of the first print edition of The Ten Principal Upanishads by Shree Purohit Swami and WB Yeats, published by M/s Faber and Faber Ltd of London, and printed at the Glasgow University Press in 1937. The gift is a tribute to Biden’s admiration for the Irish poet William Butler Yeats, as the President has often quoted poetry from Yeats and made references to his writings and poetry in his public speeches. In return, Prime Minster Modi received the first edition of the poems of Robert Frost, the Poet Laureate of the Congressional Library and four-time winner of the Pulitzer Award.
Many of us in India are aware of his famous lines ‘the woods are lovely dark and deep/ but I have promises to keep / and miles to go before I sleep / and miles to go before I sleep’, from his poem ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’, as these adorned the worktable of Prime Minister Nehru. But Frost is best remembered for the poem, ‘The Gift Outright’, which he read out at the Inauguration of his ideal, John F Kennedy in 1961:
‘She was our land more than a hundred years
Before we were her people. She was ours
In Massachusetts, in Virginia,
But we were England’s, still colonials,
Possessing what we still were unpossessed by,
Possessed by what we now no more possessed.
Something we were withholding made us weak.
Until we found out that it was ourselves
We were withholding from our land of living,
And forthwith found salvation in surrender.
Such as we were we gave ourselves outright.
(The deed of gift was many deeds of war)
To the land vaguely realizing westward,
But still unstudied, artless, unenhanced,
Such as she was, such as she would become.’
And when he died in 1963, President Kennedy said, “Frost saw poetry as the means of saving power from itself. When power leads man towards arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the areas of man’s concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of his existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses.”
