Payment

[pegkerr]

Are you to pay for what you have
with all you are?

from Edwin Arlington Robinson's poem "Cassandra."

Discuss.

Comments

[misia.livejournal.com]

I love Edwin Arlington Robinson, but he can sometimes be so bleak.

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

I know it's not at all what Robinson was getting at, but for me it's more that I've paid for all I've been and done with all i am. Or possibly the other way 'round.

[amandageist.livejournal.com]

I think I have a basic disagreement with what seems to be the assumption underlying the statement. It seems to be obligation-based. By that I mean, what you have is something you're not entitled to; rather it's something you have to buy--with a corollary that if you don't pay for it, you possibly should feel guilty.

My sentiment, if I were phrasing a similar thought, would likely be responsibility-based. I would ask: are you going to use what you have to the fullest? And then I would consider the values that go into how it's used. But the only obligation I think that comes with "what you have," is the obligation to use it well and wisely. Not the obligation to pay for it--but the responsibility to use it well.

I went to read the whole poem, and it's technically wonderful, but I don't have the mental capacity to fully analyze what the whole thing is saying, or how this one quote may have gained or lost by being lifted out of context. And I only was looking at it out of context.

~Amanda

[snippy]

Haven't I already done so? Isn't what I have today gathered at the price of who I have become?

[shusu.livejournal.com]

The only thing you can't give for your heart's desire is your heart.

Paraphrased Memory, naturally. :)

It is late. I am tired and thus disjointed and lyrical. Quite possibly I make no sense at all.

[callunav.livejournal.com]

Are you to pay for what you have
With all you are?

I had to write it out in order to think about it. I didn't follow your links, so I'm reading this as a thing entire, with which I have no connections and for which I have no context.

If the 'you' is me, then I think I have to invert it, like dichroic did but differently: I think I pay for what I want to be with what I might have had - and I do so over and over, almost helplessly, because that's the only way I know how to be. It's mine. I don't really want another. But sometimes it startles me how little I feel I've chosen. Not how little choice I have, just how little I've--wittingly--chosen.

But it doesn't sound to me like the 'you' means me at all. It sounds as though I am reading the writer grieving for someone, someone who seems to be making this poor bargain without noticing what they are giving up, what price they are being asked to pay, and for what little gain. If 'pay' means to give up or sell or give away, if 'have' means possess, own, control--what a very bad bargain. Our understanding of who we are may be distorted and flawed, but having is almost entirely illusory, and the comfort having gives is very transient and unreliable.

Being - doing - having - becoming....they're all in a dance with each other. Becoming is the only one I feel like I really understand well. I always want to have, or I think I do - *stuff* makes me feel safe, at least momentarily - but if possession really mattered to me as much as I keep thinking it does, I'm pretty sure I would be more careful, more cherishing, of the things I have, for the time in which the world allows me to have them. I'm thinking, here, of Miss DeVine in Sayers's Gaudy Night: we can tell which things are most important to us by the care we take of them.