A Robert Frost poem for when you need an uplift

    From time to time since our undergraduate years we have Sauntered in The Modern Library edition of The Poems of Robert Frost, particular reading his nature poems. A few of the short ones we’ve memorized, word pictures we sometimes recite silently. “Dust of Snow” can be relied on for an uplift:

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.

    (From page 233 of The Modern Library edition, 1946). For a brief biography of Robert Frost, click here.

Comments

[James Radford]

I’m taking a Teaching Company Course titled “Classics of American Literature,” taught by Arnold Weinstein, Ph.D., Brown University. I just watched his third (of three) lectures on Robert Frost. He closed the lecture by reading Frost’s poem titled “The Span of Life.” Weinstein explained that the title seems to imply that the poem is a discourse about major events in human life. However, that is not the case. The poem is only two lines long and reads as follows.

The Span of Life

by Robert Frost

(1936)

The old dog barks backwards without getting up.
I can remember when he was a pup.

The poem involves a very economical use of words and makes you do the work of retracing and filling in the details of the dog’s life. Weinstein said that this hit home when he was researching for this lecture, because his 13-year golden retriever was resting on the floor, giving out an occasional bark without getting up. Weinstein said he had to stop and reflect on his dog’s life from the day he first got him as an eight-week old pup.

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