My object in living is to unite
My avocation and my vocation
As my two eyes make one in sight.
Only where love and need are one,
And the work is play for mortal stakes,
Is the deed ever really done
For Heaven and the future’s sakes.
Robert Frost. It seems a bit much to imply that if you love your work and manage to do it for a living that you have made your beachhead on the shores of eternity or anything, but Frost is a romantic poet, after all. Nothing less than Mount Parnassus will do.
I hadn’t read that before, and it strikes me as glorious. As you say, it overstates things a bit, but overstatement with style is a poet’s business.
(I had a sonnet published in a magazine this week! Eeeeeeeee!)
I am too exhausted from a day of this art crap to make sense of it.