Acceptance

When the spent sun throws up its rays on cloud
And goes down burning into the gulf below,
No voice in nature is heard to cry aloud
At what has happened. Birds, at least, must know
It is the change to darkness in the sky.
Murmuring something quiet in its breast,
One bird begins to close a faded eye;
Or overtaken too far from its nest,
Hurrying low above the grove, some waif
Swoops just in time to his remembered tree.
At most he thinks or twitters softly, “Safe!
Now let the night be dark for all of me.
Let the night be too dark for me to see
Into the future. Let what will be be.”

This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on August 11, 2024, by the Academy of American Poets.

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“Acceptance” appears in Robert Frost’s poetry collection, West-Running Brook (Henry Holt and Company, 1928). In his article, “The Use of Irony in Robert Frost,” author, professor of English, and director of graduate studies at the University of South Carolina, Donald J. Greiner wrote: “The sonnet ‘Acceptance’ deals entirely with this balance of trust and mistrust, but its tone seems much darker than that of the other poems of ironic acceptance. […] The bird twitters ‘safe,’ but Frost shows that he does not consider this any great victory when he qualifies ‘safe’ with ‘at most.’ This bird strikes no boastful pose, utters no bragging words; ‘at most’ it notes to itself that it is safe. But the irony comes from the rest of its statement. […] As in so many of Frost’s poems, the fear stems from the recognition that some unknown force is at work in the universe. The title ‘Acceptance’ is almost bitterly ironic, for the bird accepts only because it can do nothing else. Its safety is a night-by-night struggle, and its only defense against overwhelming fear is acceptance of its predicament.”