My book for Classics Club Spin #10 is Selected Poems of Robert Frost. I have to confess to not having quite succeeded in finishing my selection this time, but more than 300 pages of poetry is a lot of poetry to read. I got about halfway through the book.
Poetry is just not my thing, I guess. I did enjoy many of the poems in this book, but they were the same ones I’ve enjoyed before, so it was like visiting old friends—“Mowing,” “Mending Wall,” “After Apple-Picking,” “The Road Not Taken,” “Acquainted with the Night,” “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” Most of these, I notice, are devoted to observations about nature or are about rural work.
I do not so much enjoy what Robert Graves refers to in the introduction as his “poignant country dramas,” like “The Death of the Hired Man.” They seem more like prose to me, which is ironic, since I am generally more comfortable with prose. But they are not what I come to Frost for. I come to him for things like this:
My long two-pointed ladder’s sticking through a tree
Toward heaven still,
And there’s a barrel that I didn’t fill
Beside it, and there may be two or three
Apples I didn’t pick upon some bough.
But I am done with apple-picking now.
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