Time & Perspective Quote by Robert Frost

Frost’s metaphor flatters poets with the glamour of the mound, then immediately undercuts them with the grind of innings. “Both have their moments” is the easy part: the clean strikeout, the perfect line, the inning where everything clicks. The real point lands in the second sentence, where “intervals” becomes the quiet villain. Frost isn’t romanticizing inspiration; he’s isolating the long, untelevised stretches between flashes of mastery, the stretches where craft is either built or abandoned.

The comparison is slyly democratic. A baseball pitcher is judged by outcomes, but he lives in process: warmups, mechanics, recovery, the mental reset after a hit. Frost implies poetry works the same way. The public remembers the “moments” - the quotable stanza, the anthology favorite - while the maker endures the blank page, the revision, the waiting for language to return. “Intervals” also suggests time itself: seasons, slumps, aging. For a poet writing across decades, the toughest opponent isn’t a rival; it’s the lag between creative peaks.

Context matters: Frost’s persona often leaned rugged, plainspoken, anti-mystical. This line fits that posture. He’s pushing back against the idea of the poet as a perpetual conduit of genius. Like a pitcher, you can have a gift and still get shelled; you can do the work and still not have it that day. The subtext is bracing, almost managerial: talent earns you moments, discipline gets you through the intervals.