It is not generally known that the poet Robert Frost was an avid golfer.  Unfortunately, his avidity for the game was not in the least matched by any skill at playing it.  On the golf course, Frost exhibited ineptitude’s ineptitude; it was artlessness syncopated by lavish bungling, incompetence sung in the key of clamoring ungainliness, an anvil upon which his equanimity was hammered molecule-thin.  Angels wept at the sight.  But, as poets are sometimes wont to do, Frost turned his frustration into poetry.  It offered catharsis.

Frost secretly compiled his golf poems and hid them away.  No one knew of their existence until your Intrepid Researcher (IR), rummaging through uncatalogued boxes mausoleumed in the basement of the Lamoni Iowa Public Library discovered them.  Below, your IR presents one of the poems.  Perhaps more will, for the first time, see the light of day.

Robert Frost Suffers Depression after a Particularly Bad Round of Golf*

Scores rising and hopes falling fast oh fast,

On a golf course I played this weekend past.

My effort, like my game, is out of bounds.

My game’s a bag of botches first and last.

The trees and ponds have them, they are theirs.

My golf balls are smothered in their lairs.

And just when I think my game’s come around,

A double bogey takes me unawares.

And those double bogeys will be more ere they be less.

How many would be impossible to guess.

My stock and store of curse words are expended;

I can express nothing—there’s nothing to express.

I am not fooled by talk of golf’s graces,

As if it were a promised-land oasis.

No Canaan looms to redeem my duffing game.

I wander lost in its desert places.

*In all of the golf poems, Frost refers to himself in the 3^rd person, perhaps an indication of how the implacably woeful state of his golf game caused him to be beside himself.