Robert Frost’s “Revelation” is a compact yet profoundly resonant meditation on the human impulse toward concealment and disclosure, on the paradox that while we construct elaborate façades to shield our inner lives, we simultaneously ache for someone to pierce through them. Though unassuming in its diction and form, the poem operates with the precision of a philosophical aphorism wrapped in lyrical tenderness. Its brevity belies a depth that invites sustained contemplation—not only about interpersonal intimacy but also about the broader existential condition of being known in a world that often encourages performance over authenticity. To read “Revelation” closely is to encounter a distilled vision of what it means to be human: desiring connection yet fearful of exposure, crafting personas yet yearning to be seen beyond them.

At the heart of the poem lies a tension between surface and depth, between the performative self and the vulnerable core it seeks to protect. The opening lines—“We make ourselves a place apart / Behind light words that tease and flout”—establish this dynamic immediately. The phrase “light words” suggests speech that is airy, evasive, perhaps even charmingly ironic; these are the conversational gambits we deploy to keep others at a safe emotional distance. They “tease and flout,” implying a playful yet defiant resistance to genuine engagement. Such language functions as both shield and lure: it invites attention without risking true revelation. Frost captures here a quintessentially modern anxiety—the sense that authentic communication is increasingly difficult in a culture saturated with superficial exchange. Yet his tone is not accusatory; rather, it is empathetic, recognizing this behavior as a shared human strategy, not a personal failing.

The third line introduces the emotional counterweight to this linguistic evasion: “But oh, the agitated heart.” This exclamation—simple, almost childlike in its directness—marks a pivot from description to confession. The heart is “agitated” precisely because it longs for something the “light words” cannot provide: recognition, understanding, intimacy. The agitation arises not merely from loneliness but from the dissonance between outward composure and inward yearning. Frost masterfully compresses complex psychological dynamics into this single phrase, evoking the restlessness that accompanies unmet emotional needs. The fourth line—“Till someone really find us out”—clarifies the nature of this longing. To be “found out” is not to be exposed in a shaming sense, but to be truly seen, understood, and accepted. The verb “find” carries connotations of discovery, rescue, even salvation. It implies that the hidden self is not lost by choice alone but is waiting, perhaps even hoping, to be located by another.

This interplay between hiding and seeking forms the structural and thematic backbone of the poem. Frost frames concealment not as an act of malice or deceit but as a universal human tendency, extending it across the spectrum of existence—from childhood games to divine mystery. In the second stanza, he introduces a note of rueful self-awareness: “A pity if the case require / (Or so we say) that in the end / We speak the literal to inspire / The understanding of a friend.” Here, the speaker acknowledges the irony that genuine connection may demand a kind of linguistic surrender—the abandonment of wit, metaphor, and indirection in favor of plain speech. The parenthetical “Or so we say” is crucial; it signals that this belief—that only literal language can foster true understanding—is itself a social convention, perhaps even a rationalization. We tell ourselves that clarity requires simplicity, but Frost subtly questions whether this is always true. Is it possible that poetry itself—indirect, allusive, layered—can also reveal the self more fully than blunt declaration? The poem, after all, is itself an act of poetic indirection that nonetheless communicates profound emotional truths.

The final stanza expands the poem’s scope from the interpersonal to the cosmic. Frost draws a parallel between human behavior and a fundamental pattern of existence: “But so with all, from babes that play / At hide-and-seek to God afar.” The reference to children playing hide-and-seek is particularly illuminating. In this game, the joy lies not in remaining hidden indefinitely but in the moment of discovery—the triumphant cry of “Found you!” The child who hides too well may eventually grow anxious, calling out to ensure they are not forgotten. Frost suggests that adults operate under a similar dynamic, albeit with higher stakes and more complex defenses. The inclusion of “God afar” elevates the metaphor to a theological plane. If even the divine is imagined as one who “hides too well away,” then the human desire to be known mirrors a deeper metaphysical longing—for communion with the sacred, for signs that the universe is not indifferent. This gesture toward the divine does not necessarily imply orthodox belief; rather, it reflects Frost’s recurring interest in the limits of human knowledge and the persistent hope for meaning beyond the visible world.

The phrase “So all who hide too well away / Must speak and tell us where they are” serves as the poem’s quiet climax. The word “must” carries ethical and existential weight—it is not merely desirable but necessary that those who withdraw re-engage, that silence give way to voice. This imperative applies equally to the friend who cloaks vulnerability in irony, the child crouched behind a tree, and the distant deity whose absence provokes both doubt and devotion. In insisting on the necessity of self-disclosure, Frost aligns himself with a long tradition of thinkers who view communication as essential to human flourishing. Yet he avoids sentimentality; the poem does not promise that speaking will guarantee understanding, only that it is the necessary first step. There is courage in this act, and risk—and, implicitly, dignity.

Historically, “Revelation” fits within Frost’s early body of work, written during a period when he was refining his distinctive voice—one that blended New England vernacular with philosophical depth. Published in his 1923 collection New Hampshire, the poem emerges from a cultural moment marked by rapid modernization, the aftermath of World War I, and growing skepticism toward grand narratives. In such a context, Frost’s focus on intimate, face-to-face communication takes on added significance. While many of his contemporaries turned to fragmentation and abstraction to express the disillusionment of the age, Frost often sought solace in the possibilities of human connection, however fragile. “Revelation” exemplifies this tendency: it acknowledges alienation but refuses to accept it as inevitable. Instead, it posits that even in a fractured world, the impulse to reach out—to be found—remains vital.

Thematically, the poem resonates with concerns that preoccupied Frost throughout his career: the boundaries between self and other, the tension between isolation and community, the role of language in mediating experience. Like “Mending Wall” or “The Death of the Hired Man,” “Revelation” explores the ways in which people negotiate closeness and distance. But whereas those poems often depict failed or ambiguous attempts at connection, “Revelation” offers a more hopeful, if conditional, vision. It suggests that mutual understanding is possible—but only if both parties are willing to lower their defenses. The poem’s emotional impact derives from its delicate balance of realism and idealism: it recognizes how hard it is to be truly known, yet insists that the effort is worth making.

From a literary standpoint, Frost’s technique in “Revelation” is deceptively simple. He employs a conversational tone that belies the poem’s philosophical sophistication. His diction is plainspoken, his syntax unadorned, yet every word is carefully chosen for its emotional and conceptual resonance. Consider the verb “flout”: it conveys not just mockery but a kind of proud defiance, suggesting that our “light words” are not merely evasive but actively resistant to scrutiny. Similarly, “agitated” is a precise psychological descriptor—it implies restlessness, turmoil, a state of unresolved tension. Frost avoids abstract nouns in favor of concrete images and actions, grounding his meditation in bodily and behavioral realities. The reference to hide-and-seek is especially effective: it transforms a complex emotional dynamic into a familiar, almost primal scenario that readers of all ages can grasp intuitively.

Comparatively, “Revelation” shares affinities with the work of Emily Dickinson, another poet deeply concerned with the dialectic of concealment and disclosure. Dickinson’s famous dictum—“Tell all the truth but tell it slant”—echoes Frost’s intuition that directness is not always the most effective path to understanding. Both poets recognize that the self is not a fixed entity to be unveiled but a shifting constellation of moods, masks, and moments. Yet where Dickinson often embraces ambiguity and withdrawal as modes of survival, Frost leans toward dialogue and presence. His vision is more dialogic, more invested in the possibility of mutual recognition. In this sense, “Revelation” can be read as a quiet rebuttal to the romantic ideal of the solitary genius; for Frost, the self is constituted in relation to others, and its fullest expression requires an audience willing to listen.

Philosophically, the poem engages with questions central to existential and phenomenological thought: What does it mean to be seen by another? How does recognition shape identity? Frost anticipates thinkers like Martin Buber, who distinguished between “I-It” and “I-Thou” relationships, arguing that true encounter occurs only when we meet the other as a subject, not an object. In “Revelation,” the desire to be “found out” is precisely the desire for an “I-Thou” moment—a meeting in which both parties are fully present. The poem also resonates with Emmanuel Levinas’s ethics of the face, which holds that the other’s gaze calls us to responsibility and reveals our own humanity. To be seen, in this view, is not merely to be observed but to be summoned into relationship.

Yet Frost never allows philosophy to overwhelm poetry. His insights emerge organically from image and rhythm, not exposition. The emotional power of “Revelation” lies in its understatement—in what it leaves unsaid as much as in what it articulates. The poem does not dramatize a specific scene of confession or reconciliation; instead, it distills the universal structure of such moments. This universality is part of its enduring appeal. Readers bring their own experiences of hiding and seeking to the poem, finding in its lines a mirror for their private struggles. A young person navigating the complexities of friendship, a lover afraid to voice their feelings, a believer wrestling with divine silence—all may hear their own story in Frost’s spare verses.

Moreover, the poem’s title, “Revelation,” carries rich connotations. In religious contexts, revelation denotes the unveiling of divine truth; in psychological terms, it suggests sudden insight or self-awareness. Frost plays on both meanings, implying that the act of being truly known by another can be as transformative as any mystical vision. The revelation here is not of cosmic secrets but of ordinary human need—and in Frost’s hands, that need becomes sacred. The poem elevates the everyday drama of intimacy to the level of spiritual quest, suggesting that the search for understanding is among the most profound endeavors of human life.

In conclusion, “Revelation” stands as a testament to Robert Frost’s ability to weave profound philosophical inquiry into the fabric of accessible, emotionally honest verse. With economy and grace, he captures the paradox at the heart of human connection: we build walls with our words even as we hope someone will climb them. The poem’s enduring relevance lies in its recognition that this tension is not a flaw but a feature of the human condition—a source of both pain and possibility. In an age of curated online personas and algorithmic interactions, Frost’s call for authentic presence feels more urgent than ever. “Revelation” reminds us that to be found, we must first allow ourselves to be seen—and that the greatest courage may lie not in hiding well, but in whispering, at last, “Here I am.”

Nora Hopper Chesson’s “St. Maurice” is a compact but remarkably capacious meditation on sainthood, memory, struggle, and the unsettling possibility that perfect peace may cost something essential to the human spirit. The poem enters the imagined afterlife not chiefly to celebrate its consolations, but to test them. Its speaker dreams of a realm in which wounds are healed, faith is secure, love is “wingless,” and human beings behold God directly. Yet this ostensibly blessed vision becomes increasingly charged with doubt. Addressing the soldier-martyr St. Maurice, the speaker wonders whether heavenly rest can satisfy one who once discovered his deepest identity in resistance, endurance, and courageous suffering. The result is a poem of great emotional delicacy: devotional in imagery, but searching rather than merely pious; reverent toward martyrdom, yet alert to the strange diminishment that can accompany an existence without danger, conflict, or the need to choose.

The poem’s power arises partly from the unusual character of its central figure. St. Maurice, according to Christian tradition, was the commander of the Theban Legion, a military company said to have come from Egypt and served in the Roman army during the late third century. The legend recounts that Maurice and his fellow Christian soldiers refused to take part in acts understood to violate their faith, often described as the persecution of other Christians or participation in pagan sacrifice. Their refusal brought execution. Whether every detail of this account can be verified historically has long been debated, but its cultural force has been immense. Maurice became one of medieval and early modern Europe’s most resonant military saints: a figure in whom soldierly discipline, communal loyalty, racial difference, religious conviction, and martyrdom converged. Chesson does not rehearse the legend as narrative. Instead, she assumes its imaginative potency and asks what might happen after the heroic story seems to have ended.

This choice is especially revealing because St. Maurice is not represented alone. In the heavenly bower he stands with “his Theban men,” still a commander and still surrounded by the community that shared his ordeal. Their continued presence suggests that martyrdom is not merely an individual drama of private conviction. It is collective witness. The Thebans “mount guard” even in paradise, a phrase that preserves the language and posture of military duty while translating it into a spiritual setting. They have apparently escaped worldly violence, yet they retain the habits of vigilance formed by it. This is a beautiful and slightly uncanny image. What does it mean to stand guard where no enemy can enter? Is the gesture ceremonial, an eternal honor paid to their former courage? Or does it hint that identity itself survives through repeated forms of attention, duty, and readiness, even when the original conditions of duty have disappeared?

Chesson’s portrait of paradise initially draws upon familiar Christian language of restoration. The speaker enters “the blissful place / Of the heart’s heal, and deadly woundes’ cure,” phrases that deliberately sound archaic. Their diction evokes older devotional and medieval poetic traditions, making heaven feel less like an abstract theological destination than a space inherited from sacred literature. The “heart’s heal” is especially rich. Healing applies both to bodily injury and emotional sorrow; it promises a mending of inward division. “Deadly woundes’ cure” similarly recalls the wounds of martyrs, soldiers, lovers, and fallen humanity. In this realm, what kills is cured. The phrasing suggests an ultimate reconciliation in which pain is not denied but transformed. Yet the poem’s later questions prevent this consolation from settling into simplicity. The cure for wounds may not entirely restore the energies that wounds once called forth.

The declaration that “Love is wingless found, and Faith is sure” further establishes a realm beyond ordinary instability. Love without wings may mean love no longer fluttering, changing, fleeing, or suffering the restlessness traditionally associated with desire. Faith, meanwhile, becomes “sure” because its object is directly present: “men and maidens look in God His face.” In Christian mystical thought, the direct vision of God is often called the beatific vision, the consummation of spiritual longing. Chesson’s formulation presents this state with sincerity, but the word “wingless” is not entirely uncomplicated. Wings conventionally signify transcendence, aspiration, movement, imagination, and freedom. A wingless Love may be settled and secure, but it is also still. The poem gently begins to question whether rest, even holy rest, can become a form of immobility.

The setting intensifies this ambiguity through its vegetation. Green leaves “twine closely in a bower,” creating an enclosed, intimate, fertile space. The bower is a traditional literary image associated with shelter, erotic beauty, dream, and enchantment. In medieval and Renaissance poetry, it can be a place of courtly love, pastoral leisure, or dangerous seduction; in religious writing, natural enclosure may suggest the garden of the soul or a recovered Eden. Chesson’s bower holds these associations in delicate suspension. It is peaceful, verdant, and protective, but its closeness also makes it feel contained. The saints’ eternal guard takes place not on an exposed battlefield but beneath intertwined leaves. Martial openness has given way to floral enclosure. The contrast between soldierly history and garden-like eternity helps generate the poem’s central pressure: can the heroic self flourish in a world from which ordeal has been permanently removed?

The poem’s most arresting visual image appears when the speaker sees “the martyr’s sard / Burn in the white cup of a lily-flower.” A sard is a reddish-brown gemstone, related in older nomenclature to carnelian or sardius. In Christian symbolic traditions, red stones could suggest blood, sacrifice, and the testimony of martyrs; their hard brilliance makes them fitting emblems of spiritual constancy under pressure. Chesson places this burning red sign within the “white cup” of a lily, a flower long associated with purity, resurrection, the Virgin Mary, and sanctified innocence. The image condenses the poem’s major oppositions: blood and whiteness, fire and flower, violence and beauty, bodily death and spiritual transcendence. The martyr’s blood has not vanished in heaven. It survives as an ornamental, almost jewel-like flame, held within a blossom. Yet its beauty may also make the reader uneasy, since a real history of suffering has been converted into an eternal aesthetic symbol.

Such transformation is characteristic of hagiography, the literature and tradition of saints’ lives. Martyrdom is remembered through emblems: palms, crowns, wounds, relics, jewels, lamps, flowers. These symbols preserve sacred memory, but they can also soften the rawness of the event they commemorate. Chesson’s poem is keenly alive to this tension. The “sard” burns; it retains heat and color. But it burns in a lily, an image of serene perfection. The saint’s violent death has become part of paradise’s decorative and sacramental beauty. This is not necessarily a criticism of religious symbolism. The poem recognizes the human need to make suffering meaningful. Nevertheless, its final question implies that memorial beauty cannot wholly replace lived trial. The red stone may preserve the fact of martyrdom, but it cannot reproduce the inward intensity of having faced “sword and fire and wrack.”

Chesson’s direct apostrophe—“O bold St. Maurice”—marks a dramatic turn from vision to interrogation. The speaker does not merely describe heaven; she speaks into it. This address gives the poem an intimacy that devotional description alone would lack. St. Maurice is treated as a saint worthy of honor, but also as a person whose possible desires can be imagined. The question “is it good to rest” has a deceptively plain sound. In ordinary religious language, rest after suffering would seem unquestionably good. The poem’s daring lies in its refusal to make the answer automatic. Rest may be a blessing, but could a warrior-martyr sometimes desire the old world’s severe testing? The question does not glorify pain for its own sake. Rather, it asks whether moral and spiritual vitality depend partly on resistance to what threatens one’s deepest commitments.

The list “sword and fire and wrack” concentrates the physical violence of Maurice’s legendary ordeal into three hard, elemental nouns. The sword signifies military and judicial power; fire suggests torture, purification, destruction, and martyrdom’s traditional iconography; “wrack” evokes ruin, torture, or wreckage. Chesson’s language here is deliberately forceful after the soft foliage and lilies of the earlier vision. The sound and semantic weight of these words bring history’s cruelty back into the heavenly garden. But the poet’s concern is not voyeuristic. The trials are important because they made possible a particular kind of integrity. Maurice “kept unhurt the bird within your breast.” The body may be exposed to violence, but the inward bird remains beyond injury. This bird is at once soul, conscience, song, courage, and living desire. It is the protected core of personhood, but also the source of a voice.

The bird metaphor gathers together several traditions. Birds have long represented the soul’s aspiration toward heaven, the imagination’s freedom, and the fragile but persistent life of song. A bird enclosed in the breast may recall the heart as an inner chamber where spirit sings despite outward oppression. The image is particularly apt for a martyr: Maurice could not preserve his physical life, but he could preserve the inward freedom that persecution sought to conquer. Chesson’s phrasing, “kept unhurt,” emphasizes active guardianship. The saint has defended the bird, as he and his men continue to “mount guard” in paradise. Yet this guarded interior life undergoes a troubling change. Its “voice with peace has somewhat tuneless grown.” Peace has not killed the bird, but it seems to have altered its song. The qualifying word “somewhat” is essential: the poem is not cynical about heaven, only poignantly uncertain about a peace that may silence the very music struggle once elicited.

“Tuneless” is a startling and profoundly suggestive final word. It does not simply mean silent. A tuneless voice may still make sound, but its sound lacks shape, energy, harmony, or expressive force. The word therefore avoids a crude opposition between heaven and life. Chesson does not imagine paradise as annihilation; rather, she imagines a possible weakening of intensity. The saint’s voice has perhaps lost the tune created by courage under pressure. This thought touches a major philosophical problem: if human beings are formed through striving, how can an existence without lack, danger, or uncertainty preserve individuality? Classical and Christian accounts of heaven typically answer that the fullness of divine presence perfects rather than erases the self. Chesson’s lyric does not offer a doctrinal counterargument. Its achievement is poetic and emotional: it gives form to the earthly intuition that adversity, however unwanted, can awaken capacities otherwise dormant.

This tension makes the poem especially resonant within the late nineteenth-century cultural world from which it emerged. Nora Hopper Chesson belonged to the Irish literary revival’s wider orbit, though her writing cannot be confined to a single movement or national label. Born in 1871 and writing during an era of Celtic revivalism, aesthetic experimentation, spiritual searching, and renewed fascination with medieval legend, she cultivated a poetic voice drawn to dream, folklore, religious symbolism, and the charged borderlands between visible and invisible worlds. Her early death in 1906 has sometimes encouraged readers to view her work through a lens of fragility or loss, but such a view should not obscure her intellectual boldness. In “St. Maurice,” her spiritual imagination is not merely ornamental. She stages a serious inquiry into the value of heroic experience and the ambivalent relation between fulfillment and longing.

Victorian and fin-de-siècle culture offered several contexts for this inquiry. The period saw revived interest in saints, medieval art, ritual, and sacramental symbolism, particularly through Anglo-Catholic currents and the broader medievalism associated with artists and writers who sought alternatives to industrial modernity’s utilitarian outlook. Saintly legend could offer an intense imaginative vocabulary of beauty, suffering, and conviction. At the same time, the era often idealized heroism in ways that linked masculinity, military sacrifice, moral strength, and national destiny. Chesson’s treatment of Maurice partly participates in this fascination with courageous endurance, but it also complicates it. Her speaker does not simply praise combat or suffering. She asks whether an identity built through ordeal can find an equivalent mode of expression after the ordeal is over. The poem is less a hymn to violence than a meditation on what courage means when there is no longer anything to resist.

The figure of Maurice also carries cultural dimensions that are not explicit in the poem’s language but remain historically significant. In many European artistic traditions, St. Maurice was represented as a Black African saint and armored knight, a depiction that made him a notable, though complexly framed, presence in European sacred art. His association with the Theban Legion linked him to Egypt, then often imagined as part of Africa, and his cult became especially important in regions of Switzerland and Germany. Chesson identifies the “Theban men” but does not dwell on ethnicity, geography, or visual difference. Her emphasis falls instead on their shared spiritual fraternity and military vigilance. Still, the legend’s transregional character matters. The poem’s heaven gathers a Roman officer, Egyptian soldiers, Christian martyrdom, Greek floral symbolism, medieval imagery, and English poetic archaism into one visionary scene. This cultural layering gives the lyric an almost illuminated-manuscript richness while also reminding readers that sainthood is shaped by stories moving across languages, empires, and centuries.

The asphodels among which Maurice rests contribute another important layer. Unlike the lily’s strongly Christian associations, the asphodel belongs prominently to classical mythology, especially to the meadows of the dead in Greek conceptions of the afterlife. Its presence introduces a pagan literary inheritance into a Christian paradise. Chesson’s heaven is therefore not narrowly sectarian; it is a composite poetic realm where multiple symbolic traditions can coexist. Asphodels often suggest the quiet, pale, shadowed existence of the departed. In this setting, they deepen the question of whether death’s peace might become too still. The flowers are lovely, but their literary history carries a faint chill of underworld passivity. By placing them beside lilies, Chesson creates a mingling of resurrection and death, Christian purity and classical memory, radiant hope and the muted melancholy of the shades.

The poem’s dream frame is equally important. “I slept and entered” establishes the speaker’s experience as a vision rather than an orthodox theological report. Dream permits a form of imaginative freedom: the poet can visit paradise, see saints, and ask questions that might seem irreverent in declarative religious discourse. Dreams also unsettle certainty. The speaker’s heaven is intensely visible—the bower, leaves, flowers, gems, soldiers—but its meaning remains open. Is she discovering a truth about the afterlife, or projecting an earthly need for challenge onto the dead? The poem wisely refuses to decide. Its questions may reveal more about the living observer than about St. Maurice. A person still bound to time, desire, and conflict may find it difficult to imagine a fulfillment that does not resemble heightened earthly experience. Thus the poem’s final unease can be read both as a concern for the saint and as a confession of the speaker’s own restless temperament.

There is an implicit contrast between two kinds of peace in “St. Maurice.” One is the sacred peace promised by the opening vision: the healing of wounds, the certainty of faith, the face-to-face presence of God. The other is the emotional quiet that may resemble depletion if it lacks movement, struggle, and song. Chesson does not crudely oppose peace to life. Indeed, the poem’s first movement makes peace beautiful, healing, and deeply desired. But she suggests that peace becomes emotionally intelligible to human beings only when it does not erase the history that made it meaningful. Maurice’s martyrdom remains visible as the burning sard in the lily. His military discipline remains visible in the guard he mounts with his men. His inward bird remains alive, however “tuneless” its voice may have become. Heaven contains the traces of earth because identity cannot be imagined without its remembered forms.

The poem’s emotional effect depends upon this balance of radiance and melancholy. Readers are invited first into a realm of healing beauty, then gradually made aware of a question that no image of beauty quite resolves. The closing thought does not attack faith; it gives faith an emotional complexity often absent from simpler consolations. It recognizes that suffering can be terrible and unjust while also acknowledging that resistance to suffering can produce courage, solidarity, and a fierce inward music. In asking whether Maurice misses the time of trial, Chesson touches the paradox that people sometimes miss not pain itself but the clarity, purpose, and intensity that accompanied survival. The poem’s tenderness lies in its willingness to grant this paradox dignity. It neither romanticizes torture nor mocks the desire for transcendence.

“St. Maurice” ultimately demonstrates how a brief lyric can carry historical legend, theological speculation, symbolic richness, and psychological subtlety without losing its concentrated musical force. Its images of lilies, gems, leaves, birds, weapons, and flowers are not decorative accessories; each becomes an instrument for thinking about the relation between bodily pain and spiritual freedom. The poem honors the martyr as a figure of extraordinary conviction, but it also asks what becomes of conviction when it no longer needs to withstand oppression. Such a question remains moving because it reaches beyond saints and soldiers. Every reader may recognize some version of the problem: after a hard-won struggle ends, how does one preserve the living voice that struggle awakened? Chesson’s answer is not final, and that is part of the poem’s enduring beauty. It leaves us in the luminous garden, listening for the bird within the saint’s breast, and wondering whether peace itself can learn again to sing.