Poetry Corner
Let’s take a pause and refresh ourselves with a bit of poetry for Sunday morning. I’ve been thinking a lot about Robert Frost lately, especially with the attention that Brian Hall is getting for his new novel of the poet’s life, Fall of Frost. He is also getting some heat for taking a nonconventional approach to a revered figure in American letters and a novelist’s liberties with the hearts and minds of his ‘characters,’ but the Boston Globe calls it ‘intensely moving and supremely intelligent.’ In any event, while sitting on my porch last weekend I was watching the first tiny, unfurling leaves of the maple across the street, of so new a green as to be gold and thought of this poem by Frost:
Nothing Gold Can Stay
Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.
Deceptively simple, like all of Frost’s poems! Here’s another favorite:
A Prayer in Spring
Oh, give us pleasure in the flowers today;
And give us not to think so far away
As the uncertain harvest; keep us here
All simply in the springing of the year.
Oh, give us pleasure in the orchard white,
Like nothing else by day, like ghosts by night;
And make us happy in the happy bees,
The swarm dilating round the perfect trees.
And make us happy in the darting bird
That suddenly above the bees is heard,
The meteor that thrusts in with needle bill,
And off a blossom in mid air stands still.
For this is love and nothing else is love,
To which it is reserved for God above
To sanctify to what far ends he will,
But which it only needs that we fulfill.