pō’ĭ-trē

Robert Frost

Listen (to Hoon read)

Come with rain, O loud Southwester!
Bring the singer, bring the nester;
Give the buried flower a dream;
Make the settled snow-bank steam;
Find the brown beneath the white;
But whate’er you do to-night,
Bathe my window, make it flow,
Melt it as the ices go;
Melt the glass and leave the sticks
Like a hermit’s crucifix;
Burst into my narrow stall;
Swing the picture on the wall;
Run the rattling pages o’er;
Scatter poems on the floor;
Turn the poet out of door.

Hoon writes,

‘One of the many short sweet lyrics in Frost’s first book, A Boy’s Will (1913).
(Frost was 39 at the time.)
Short lines, tetrameter, couplets,
till the end where a triplet of identical rhymes completes the piece,
as a whole it might be taken as the hallmark of a mere rhymer, but note,
as the poem progresses from stream-bank, to window, to room,
the movement from stream to window is graced by a quick metaphor
that compares the window’s glass to a sheet of ice,
which the speaker hopes will melt,
leaving the frame, like a hermit’s crucifix;
which slyly brings in the theme of the artist’s isolation,
which is not simply seasonal.’

Updated : The Kubla Khan post has been updated with Hoon’s reading and commentary.

[blackmamba]