I'd welcome any moderate disaster
That might be calculated to postpone
What evidently nothing could conclude.
The thing that made me more and more afraid
Was that we'd ground it sharp and hadn't known,
And now were only wasting precious blade.
And when he rasied it dripping once and tried
The creepy edge of it with wary touch,
And viewed it over his glasses funny-eyed,
Only disinterestedly to decide
It needed a turn more, I could have cried
Wasn't there danger of a turn too much?
Mightn't we make it worse instead of better?
I was for leaving something to the whetter.
What if it wasn't all it should be? I'd
Be satisfied if he'd be satisfied.
Cf Frost to Louis Untermeyer, August 18 1917: “Sometime the world will try cutting the middle class out of our middle. But my mind misgives me that the experiment will fail just as the eighteenth century experiment of getting rid of the lowest class by cutting it out and dumping it on distant islands failed. You know how the lowest class renewed itself from somewhere as fast as it was cut out.”
The Grindstone