When I inquired, my student lifeguard at the swimming pool volunteered that his name is Myles.  That set me thinking, during the next fifteen minutes, as I moved slowly up and down the lane.

On emerging from the water, I asked Myles if he had ever heard poetic lines that had been reverberating in my head.  “And miles to go before I sleep. And miles to go before I sleep.”

No, Myles had not heard of the lines, nor did he recognize the name of the poet, Robert Frost. “Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening,” a poem that had charmed me for some six decades or more, had never swum into his awareness.

I had thought the sound of his own first name might have made him sensitive to its use by one of America’s signature poets.  But most people I meet, young and old, do not attach much of any importance to their names the way I do. Nor do they seem to care about our poets, no matter their place in our history.