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  #1  
Unread 12-02-2021, 07:51 AM
Jim Moonan Jim Moonan is offline
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Default Frost

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No November should go by without some Frost...


My November Guest
Robert Frost

My sorrow, when she’s here with me,
.....Thinks these dark days of autumn rain
Are beautiful as days can be;
She loves the bare, the withered tree;
.....She walks the sodden pasture lane.

Her pleasure will not let me stay.
.....She talks and I am fain to list:
She’s glad the birds are gone away,
She’s glad her simple worsted grey
.....Is silver now with clinging mist.

The desolate, deserted trees,
.....The faded earth, the heavy sky,
The beauties she so truly sees,
She thinks I have no eye for these,
.....And vexes me for reason why.

Not yesterday I learned to know
.....The love of bare November days
Before the coming of the snow,
But it were vain to tell her so,
.....And they are better for her praise.

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  #2  
Unread 12-02-2021, 03:31 PM
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R. S. Gwynn R. S. Gwynn is offline
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I wonder if this poem was written in England. The weather sounds like a British November.
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  #3  
Unread 12-02-2021, 04:02 PM
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Sarah-Jane Crowson Sarah-Jane Crowson is offline
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I'm not sure.

It might be that climate change has skewed things, but I live very, very close to where Frost lived when in the UK, and the weather is certainly sodden in November, but claggy-sodden, deep red clay - wet - lacking those uplifting sonics in the poem.

I suspect it might be a kind of rural-represented remembered and presented as an evocation of nature rather than a reflection of the real, but who knows (and I'm certainly no Frost scholar).

Sarah-Jane
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  #4  
Unread 12-02-2021, 04:21 PM
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RCL RCL is offline
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Default say what?

Yes, published in London: his first book A Boy's Will

This seems to me the best poem in that book:

Mowing

There was never a sound beside the wood but one,
And that was my long scythe whispering to the ground.
What was it it whispered? I knew not well myself;
Perhaps it was something about the heat of the sun,
Something, perhaps, about the lack of sound—
And that was why it whispered and did not speak.
It was no dream of the gift of idle hours,
Or easy gold at the hand of fay or elf:
Anything more than the truth would have seemed too weak
To the earnest love that laid the swale in rows,
Not without feeble-pointed spikes of flowers
(Pale orchises), and scared a bright green snake.
The fact is the sweetest dream that labor knows.
My long scythe whispered and left the hay to make.
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Ralph

Last edited by RCL; 12-02-2021 at 04:50 PM.
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  #5  
Unread 12-02-2021, 06:46 PM
Jim Moonan Jim Moonan is offline
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.
It is a serenade to sorrow. As for the geography and climate of the poem being drawn from where he was living in England at the time, I think it's just as likely he was drawing from his memories in New England, Massachusetts and New Hampshire. The weather in both those spots is dreary in late November, and when it's wet, all the more sodden it gets.

My recollection of the English Novembers mirrors the mood of this poem perfectly. The Novembers I remember in Richmond, Surrey as I walked daily up the hill that borders the park would also be a fine inspiration for the poem. So the inspirational setting for the poem could have come from either New England or England.
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Last edited by Jim Moonan; 12-03-2021 at 05:40 AM.
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  #6  
Unread 12-03-2021, 08:04 AM
W T Clark W T Clark is offline
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Frost has never done it for me. His poems read as bland and mostly quite boring. His language is nowhere near the invention or intensity of Stephens who I am more in sink with. They vibrate along different affinities. His most famous poems have almost become clichés, and done to death with parodies.

With all that said: "the slow smokeless burning of decay" that warms the woods in the final lines of The Wood-Pile is sublime.
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  #7  
Unread 12-03-2021, 12:33 PM
James Brancheau James Brancheau is offline
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I only disagree slightly, Cameron. He sometimes finds that spot, very well. It just takes so, so long to get there. And he is too often boring. Thanks Ralph- I love, love the close of that poem.
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Unread 12-03-2021, 01:15 PM
Roger Slater Roger Slater is offline
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Have you listened to him reading his own poems? It can make a big difference. "Death of the Hired Man," for example, went from being a poem I never managed to read all the way through, to one of my favorite poems ever, after I heard him read it.

And can you really think this one (to pick just one of many I could have used to make my point) is boring, even the last seven lines?:

‘Out, Out—’

The buzz saw snarled and rattled in the yard
And made dust and dropped stove-length sticks of wood,
Sweet-scented stuff when the breeze drew across it.
And from there those that lifted eyes could count
Five mountain ranges one behind the other
Under the sunset far into Vermont.
And the saw snarled and rattled, snarled and rattled,
As it ran light, or had to bear a load.
And nothing happened: day was all but done.
Call it a day, I wish they might have said
To please the boy by giving him the half hour
That a boy counts so much when saved from work.
His sister stood beside him in her apron
To tell them ‘Supper.’ At the word, the saw,
As if to prove saws knew what supper meant,
Leaped out at the boy’s hand, or seemed to leap—
He must have given the hand. However it was,
Neither refused the meeting. But the hand!
The boy’s first outcry was a rueful laugh,
As he swung toward them holding up the hand
Half in appeal, but half as if to keep
The life from spilling. Then the boy saw all—
Since he was old enough to know, big boy
Doing a man’s work, though a child at heart—
He saw all spoiled. ‘Don’t let him cut my hand off—
The doctor, when he comes. Don’t let him, sister!’
So. But the hand was gone already.
The doctor put him in the dark of ether.
He lay and puffed his lips out with his breath.
And then—the watcher at his pulse took fright.
No one believed. They listened at his heart.
Little—less—nothing!—and that ended it.
No more to build on there. And they, since they
Were not the one dead, turned to their affairs.
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  #9  
Unread 12-03-2021, 01:20 PM
Jim Moonan Jim Moonan is offline
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I'll have you know I posted the poem just to write the punny intro...

(No November should go by without some Frost...)

But I do think Frost is the quintessential New England pastoral poet. Boring? Yankee-style boring. (And I'm not talking NYY)

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  #10  
Unread 12-03-2021, 01:27 PM
James Brancheau James Brancheau is offline
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I think it's a little over the top and unimaginative, Roger. No, I don't think it's radical, or good. Lowell is more pointed. And on the money. Frost I like, but I don't love. He's a relic. Lowell, for example, isn't.
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