1/1/2024 0 Comments Red frost poems![]() Mending Wall has already been sufficiently unpeeled in terms of anti/pro-globalisation. Those who know already that they have been grappling with demons inside them will be less scared these days. Seem to press their sinister meaningfulness into contemporary readers’ minds. “And lonely as it is, that loneliness/Will be more lonely ere it will be less”, “The woods around it have it - it is theirs/All animals (read humans) are smothered in their lairs,” Lines like “Snow falling and night falling fast, oh, fast,” Reading this poem in the days of the new pathogen plaguing our world, we observe that tropes of ‘snow’ and ‘woods’ instantly morph into the State’s measures of security and caution clamped on people everywhere. In my reading, it underscores the idea that fear is all subjective and congenital. What makes it a typical Frost poem is the insistence of the first-person narrator that, he has his own subjective horrors to be scared of and he doesn’t need markers of fear and loneliness staged outside to be reminded of the horrors that exist. My first hunch after reading this poem is that it is a fine example of objective correlative when it insists on gazing in on the internal ‘desert places’ instead of watching a sense of desolation in the outer environment. It scares you out of your wits unless you are a stickler for interpretation. In this context, it might not be surprising that the coronavirus issue demands a renewed critical engagement with Nature.ĭesert Places is one of Frost’s signature poems. He does not baulk at espousing Tennyson’s view (expressed in In Memoriam) that nature shrieks against God’s law of universal human love, and is sometimes, “red in tooth and claw.” He prefers not to jump on Wordsworth’s bandwagon to worship Mother Nature unconditionally. That is how one experiences the cosmic sweep of his poetry.īefore I embark upon trying to read Frost’s poems anew in the present context, it would be instructive to say that his attitude towards nature is inspired by “practical idealism” presented in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Nature and Henry David Thoreau’s Walden. Since Frost is known for his deceptive simplicity and understatement, one has to approach his poetry with both caution and a sense of abandon. This made me think about revisiting some of his poetry, especially given these uncertain times, to hunt for perhaps, a different message, something that I might not have noticed before. March 26 marked the 146th birthday of Robert Frost. And lonely as it is, that loneliness / Will be more lonely ere it will be less - Robert Frost
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