So, we'll go no more a roving the latter part of it, and sitting up late o' nights--had knocked me up a little. But it is over--and it is now Lent, with all its abstinence and sacred music... Though I did not dissipate much upon the whole, yet I find 'the sword wearing out the scabbard,' though I have but just turned the corner of twenty nine." The poem seems to have been suggested in part by the refrain of a Scottish song known as "The Jolly Beggar." The Jolly Beggar was published in Herd's "Scots Songs" in 1776, 41 years before Byron's letter, and goes partially
A Question (poem) "why" we bear the unhappiness that is life, which makes readers think that Frost was heavily intrigued and curious about the "why." There is also a Christian interpretation, in which God proposes the titular Question to his followers, the "men of the earth". He asks whether all the suffering and pain we go through during our lives is worth the gift of life. A similar Christian interpretation would also be that the "soul-and-body" scars represent the wounds of Christ, and thus the poem is asking whether humanity has proven itself worthy of such redemption. A Question (poem) "A Question" is