Dust of Snow

 

Dust of Snow

The way a crow

Shook down on me

The dust of snow

From a hemlock tree

 

Has given my heart

A change of mood

And saved some part

Of a day I had rued.

 

-Robert Frost

 

When I first thought of this poem a few days ago all the local pines were well-dusted in snow, but it rained all day yesterday and today was sunny and well above freezing. There's not much snow left. So I used an AI image generator for my picture. I never would have gotten a convenient crow anyway.

 

I'd like to think I'd behave like Frost and be cheered up in such a circumstance, but it's quite possible I'd just look up and think, stupid crow...more likely to have been a squirrel here in any case. 😉

There Are Roughly Zones (#poem)

 

There Are Roughly Zones

We sit indoors and talk of the cold outside.

And every gust that gathers strength and heaves

Is a threat to the house. But the house has long been tried.

We think of the tree. If it never again has leaves,

We'll know, we say, that this is the day it died.

It is very far north, we admit, to have brought the peach.

What comes over a man, is it soul or mind--

That to no limits he can stay confined?

You would say his ambition was to extend the reach

Clear to the Arctic of every living kind.

Why is his nature forever so hard to teach

That though there is no fixed line between wrong and right,

There are roughly zones whose laws must be obeyed?

There is nothing much we can do for the tree tonight,

But we can't help feeling more than a little betrayed

That the northwest wind should rise to such a height

Just when the cold went down so many below.

The tree has no leaves and may never have them again.

We must wait till some months hence in the spring to know.

But if it destined never again to grow,

It can blame this limitless trait in the hearts of men.

-Robert Frost

This first appeared in Robert Frost's book of 1936, A Further Range. The book also includes 'Two Tramps in Mud Time' and 'Neither Out Far Nor In Deep'.

That's the cedar that was bent over to the ground on Saturday. Though not as upright as it was a week ago, I think it's likely to make it. (Yay!) The poem doesn't fit our story so well: it's needles, not leaves; this is still well within a cedar's natural range; and it's only weeks to spring, not months. But it was enough to make think of the poem... 😉

Robert Frost (#NationalPoetryMonth, #1936Club)

Neither Out Far Nor In Deep

The people along the sand
All turn and look one way.
They turn their back on the land.
They look at the sea all day.

As long as it takes to pass
A ship keeps raising its hull;
The wetter ground like glass
Reflects a standing gull.

The land may vary more;
But wherever the truth may be--
The water comes ashore,
And the people look at the sea.

They cannot look out far.
They cannot look in deep.
But when was that ever a bar
To any watch they keep?

-Robert Frost 

Robert Frost's book A Further Range came out in 1936. 'Neither Out Far Nor In Deep' is from that book. 

In a rather click-bait-y essay 'The Other Frost', Randall Jarrell calls it one of Frost's ten or twelve best poems; he doesn't include the ones you might guess. Is it better than 'The Road Not Taken' or 'Stopping By Woods'? Hmm, I don't know, but I do like it.

Jarrell goes on to say, in a different essay, 'To The Laodiceans':

'It would be hard to find anything more unpleasant to say about people than that last stanza; but Frost doesn't say it unpleasantly--he says it with flat ease, takes everything with something harder than contempt, more passive than acceptance. And isn't there something heroic about the whole business, too--something touching about our absurdity?'

The Poem For A Thursday meme was invented by Jennifer at Holds Upon Happiness; she, too, has a shore poem this week, by Emily Dickinson. Brona has a 1936 poem, Parrots by Rex Ingamells.

 

Poem For A Thursday: Frost

Fragmentary Blue

Why make so much of fragmentary blue
In here and there a bird, or butterfly,
Or flower, or wearing-stone, or open eye,
When heaven presents in sheets the solid hue? 

Since earth is earth, perhaps, not heaven (as yet)--
Though some savants make earth include the sky;
And blue so far above us comes so high,
It only gives our wish for blue a whet.

-Robert Frost

We're off to New Hampshire later today to visit family, so I thought I'd better do Robert Frost, right? The photo above is from near Unity, NH, two years ago, and we'll be there again.

I was going to pick Fire and Ice, a poem by Frost I've known forever, but it didn't really fit the picture, and this was the poem immediately above it in my collected Frost. Both come from his collection of 1923 titled New Hampshire.

Hmm...'our wish for blue.' Well, heaven is not presenting it in sheets in the photo above, and even there it's fragmentary. But we seek it out anyway.

Jennifer has a lovely Mary Oliver poem this week, with a similarly New-England-looking photo. Actually as I think about it, mine doesn't look especially New-England-y, but it is.