Here is the first stanza with more to come of John Doane's --
A Nocturnal Upon St. Lucy's Day, Being The Shortest Day
'Tis the year's midnight, and it is the day's,
Lucy's, who scarce seven hours herself unmasks;
The sun is spent, and now his flasks
Send forth light squibs, no constant rays;
The world's whole sap is sunk;
The general balm th' hydroptic earth hath drunk,
Whither, as to the bed's feet, life is shrunk,
Dead and interr'd; yet all these seem to laugh,
Compar'd with me, who am their epitaph.
And the dead leaves lie huddled and still,
No longer blown hither and thither;
The last lone aster is gone;
The flowers of the witch-hazel wither;
The heart is still aching to seek,
But the feet question 'Whither?'
Ah, when to the heart of man
Was it ever less than a treason
To go with the drift of things,
To yield with a grace to reason,
And bow and accept the end
Of a love or a season?
A December poem, one of Keats's earliest efforts, a bit crude, in fact (but what I still wouldn't give to have written it). I recall my seminar professor saying that critics thought the line "The feel of not to feel it" was barbarous. "Feel" used as a noun? Unacceptable! It's my favorite line in the poem.
This work was written in December 1817 and first published in the Literary Gazette in 1829.
IN DREAR-NIGHTED DECEMBER
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In drear-nighted December,
Too happy, happy tree,
Thy branches ne'er remember
Their green felicity:
The north cannot undo them
With a sleety whistle through them;
Nor frozen thawings glue them
From budding at the prime.
In drear-nighted December,
Too happy, happy brook,
Thy bubblings ne'er remember
Apollo's summer look;
But with a sweet forgetting,
They stay their crystal fretting,
Never, never petting
About the frozen time.
Ah! would 'twere so with many
A gentle girl and boy!
But were there ever any
Writhed not at passed joy?
The feel of not to feel it,
When there is none to heal it
Nor numbed sense to steel it,
Was never said in rhyme.
--John Keats
I'd like to nominate winter as the most poetic season of all, by the way. It seems to crystallize thought and perception through the absence which it brings on. If it reminds us of loss, well that is a prime ingredient of poetry, too.
The sun rose on fields
snow blown and misted
ghostly swirls and dervishes.
No fog this---
for fog simply lies.
No---this was living
as it arched and twisted,
fingering out to the road
and reaching for me
like the shade of a beloved friend.
There was white inside,
trying to seep out of pores,
I felt it strain
trying to mesh and meld
with this sentient wraith
fingers touching
joining
and suddenly
I am the morning mist
dancing in the crystal air.
Probably his most well known poem of all, do you think? There is an interesting controversy about the editing of this poem that shows what a great difference a single mark of punctuation can make. The editor of my volume The Poetry of Robert Frost, Edward Connery Lathem, went against tradition and supposedly based on some manuscript evidence, inserted a comma after "dark" in line 13. This totally destroys the meaning! Instead of "dark and deep" explaining the adjective "lovely" in an unexpected manner, now there is a much less interesting series of three adjectives . I'm glad his editing apparently hasn't become standard.
This may be his most well known poem, i'm no expert on Robert Frost. I agree that inserting a comma where you indicated would detract from the meaning.
I posted this poem because it resonates with me, with the experience of being in the bush on a still, cold winter night and just a glimmer of a moon .. I feel an awesome stillness and the question about why stop here goes through my head ... inside I hear voices calling me back to the "real world" .. anyway that is my personal interpretation of his poem.
Maybe this one is his best known. It has a wistful feel to it, almost a regret, and then the last line which belies that sentiment. The Snowy Woods poem seems the other way around with the regret at the end.
The Road Not Taken
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I-
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
I posted this poem because it resonates with me, with the experience of being in the bush on a still, cold winter night and just a glimmer of a moon .. I feel an awesome stillness and the question about why stop here goes through my head ... inside I hear voices calling me back to the "real world" .. anyway that is my personal interpretation of his poem.
I like your interpretation. It doesn't even seem like an interpretation, which is all the better. You feel it. I have to admit getting a little annoyed when I hear, "Oh, this poem is talking about death, just like so many of Frost's poems." Well, it could be, but that does not exhaust the possibilities.
Maybe this one is his best known. It has a wistful feel to it, almost a regret, and then the last line which belies that sentiment. The Snowy Woods poem seems the other way around with the regret at the end.
It's interesting that it seems to take him the perspective of years even to realize that the road he chose was the less worn one. He really made his first choice based on a whim, not sure that there was a clear difference between the two choices. And then the significance becomes apparent years later: he made an uncommon decision. Because he sighs over the road not taken, I'm not sure that he's making an affirmative statement in the last line. The choice did make all the difference, but there could minuses as well as pluses in the life he ended up choosing.
Maybe this one is his best known. It has a wistful feel to it, almost a regret, and then the last line which belies that sentiment. The Snowy Woods poem seems the other way around with the regret at the end.
It's interesting that it seems to take him the perspective of years even to realize that the road he chose was the less worn one. He really made his first choice based on a whim, not sure that there was a clear difference between the two choices. And then the significance becomes apparent years later: he made an uncommon decision. Because he sighs over the road not taken, I'm not sure that he's making an affirmative statement in the last line. The choice did make all the difference, but there could minuses as well as pluses in the life he ended up choosing.
The common theme of these two poems seems to be life choices, or at least one common theme. I don't see a lot of regret in the Snowy poem, perhaps some wistfulness. I tend to see the poem ending on an upbeat note, that its is a good thing that he has miles to go. Maybe that's twisted, but that's how I read it. It faintly reminds me of Milan Kundera and The Unbearable Lightness of Being.
I think life choices will always have pluses and minuses and perhaps these will only be revealed in time. Also, one could ask, plus or minus from who's perspective?
I tend to see the poem ending on an upbeat note, that its is a good thing that he has miles to go.
I thought the ending was a little wistful, in that he could not stay and enjoy the night because he had promises to keep, and I read the miles to go as tiring. But, you are right, it could be very upbeat. The promises don't have to be burdens at all and the miles to go could be the many years of life left to enjoy and many more woods to walk through.
I am not a painter, I am a poet.
Why? I think I would rather be
a painter, but I am not. Well,
for instance, Mike Goldberg
is starting a painting. I drop in.
“Sit down and have a drink” he
says. I drink; we drink. I look
up. “You have SARDINES in it.”
“Yes, it needed something there.”
“Oh.” I go and the days go by
and I drop in again. The painting
is going on, and I go, and the days
go by. I drop in. The painting is
finished. “Where’s SARDINES?”
All that’s left is just
letters, “It was too much,” Mike says.
But me? One day I am thinking of
a color: orange. I write a line
about orange. Pretty soon it is a
whole page of words, not lines.
Then another page. There should be
so much more, not of orange, of
words, of how terrible orange is
and life. Days go by. It is even in
prose, I am a real poet. My poem
is finished and I haven’t mentioned
orange yet. It’s twelve poems, I call
it ORANGES. And one day in a gallery
I see Mike’s painting, called SARDINES.
