Unexpected Intersections

I first encountered the poetry of Robert Frost in high school, and I was captivated enough to buy my own unabridged collection of his poems, which took up residence on my nightstand along with the collected works of Charles Dickens and Arthur Conan Doyle. Frost's Stopping By The Woods on a Snowy Evening is one of the first poems I can remember learning by heart. It is the poem that taught me that poetry holds, at its essence, potential energy. For the first time I connected with a poem so deeply that it took up residence and became a part of me, where it remains at rest, until suddenly it isn't. I'll be walking a dog when the night is dark and snowy, and the trees stand silent vigil between the brook and the pasture, and the poem is drawn spontaneously, instantly, into motion, its lines moving easily, rhythmically through my mind, perfectly capturing my experience in that moment and I think "This! This is what Frost was distilling onto the page." I love the m...