The more I read Robert, the more he seems like me. Or vice versa. Amid segues from Saramago and the bucolic interlude, I see how cow's can be a great inspiration. A chance glimpse of Alistair Cooke's essay on Frost showd me how much I still loved Cooke's writing - the way he retold history as if over dinner. I used to hear Cooke's 'Letter from America' on the BBC in the old days. The essay is simply titled 'Robert Frost' and it told me a lot more of the man - in fact both men - than I knew till now. Stumbling upon the collection on the musty shelves of a college library was a diadem in disguise.
An estimate of a poet written in a yankee drawl is just the thing for a lazy mid-morning to take your poetry students on a romp to New England. We discovered new and Frostian applications for words like SIM (Symbol, intontion, and meaning)!, and noted how not eager to please, yet committed he was. Amid the raft of poems we took on board that furtive semester in the second year BA class (elective/allied) I found one that was not 'prescribed' - 'Acquainted With the Night.' It reminded me of one other poem on this blog written in Barcelona by the Argentinean poet Borges. Yes, the city has its quiet moments - and its roads that lead to nowhere.
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Alistair Cooke Talk About America, New York: Knopf, 1969
Image from catherine's collection - a collection of handmade and digitally enhanced creations
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