Skip to main content

Frost

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 moment when the potential energy of a poem is released.

As the Regional Advisor for the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators Swiss chapter, it's part of my responsibility to facilitate professional development opportunities for the writers and illustrators in our region. Last week we held a webinar during which poet and writer Bridget Magee talked about how to write poetry for young readers, as well as about ways we can incorporate lyrical language into our prose. At the end of the presentation, she shared a pandemic-themed poem that she wrote using the Golden Shovel poetic form and then challenged us to attempt our own poem using this form.

Today I finally had time to sit down in the study and start pulling books of poetry off the shelf: Emily Dickinson, The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, Leonard Cohen, Carl Sandburg, and finally, Robert Frost.

My first collection of Frost's poetry is long gone, a casualty of many moves, both domestic and international, so a couple of years ago I went online and ordered a new (used) copy of my long-lost book of Frost's poems. It had to be the exact same edition - with the same cover - that I had read and loved before.


This morning I opened it up and reacquainted myself with poems so long unread that I felt as if I was reading them for the first time, and then I found it:

"the footpath down to the well is healed"

The line speaks to me with a voice so strong that I have to answer it - engage in dialogue with it through my own poem. Write my response to its call.

And so here is my own pandemic-themed poem in the Golden Shovel form.




Our footsteps crunch on the
gravel footpath
Life’s tempo slowed down
Viral army marches around the world as we walk to
the castle, past blooming apple trees to the
farm. We are well
Uncertainty is
our travel companion. We wait for the world to be healed.

©  Elisabeth Norton, 2020, All Rights reserved

A Golden Shovel poem, based on a line from Robert Frost’s “Ghost House”



Comments

  1. Lovely, Elisabeth! I love that Frost's poems have so much resonance with you to begin with - makes for a fertile place to find an inspirational line for your Golden Shovel poem. I love the journey your poem takes the reader on and especially your line "Uncertainty is our travel companion" - so true in our new world. Keep going with your poetry! :)

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Thank you for your comments! Comment moderation is active. Your comments will be posted after they have been reviewed. Thank you for your patience!

Popular posts from this blog

Poetry Friday: Welcome to the Party!

There is so much happening in our world right now, it can be hard to take it all in. In these times, more than ever, I am grateful for poetry.  Sometimes I write it.  Sometimes I have no words of my own, so I read and reflect on the poetic words of others.  Either way, poetry helps me process my thoughts and feelings about the world and my experiences in it. My poetic offering today is a poem I wrote earlier this spring, on a rare day when my husband had to go to the office for an in-person meeting and I took our usual lunchtime walk alone.  I am a creature of habit, but on that day I challenged myself to break routine and change direction, and this poem was the result. Today I go against the grain, turn left  Instead of right, Let the path take me away from home Instead of towards it. Today I go against the grain, go up the slope I usually walk down. Climbing uses different muscles Than descent. Today I go with the grain, walk downstream Instead of up, Walk with the flow, Instead of a

Poetry Friday: Spooktober

I've been immersed in poetry and verse in the past couple of weeks - first in a Novel in Verse virtual workshop led by the amazing Nikki Grimes and Padma Venkatraman, then in my own work as I dived in deep to apply all the insights and tips that I took away from that experience.  Poems arrived in my inbox this week, via the Academy of American Poets newsletter featuring a selection of poems for Indigenous Peoples' Day.  I particularly loved the poem by Rainy Dawn Ortiz that starts: Something Else. Some one else Some where else That place is here, In my home, We are here. You can read the rest of the poem and learn more about the poet here .  One of the things I love about being a part of Poetry Friday is the inspiration to play with different poetic forms. Thoughts about poetic forms were milling around in my mind when they bumped into Inktober, an annual event in which illustrators create a drawing each day during the month of October. Sparks flew and an idea was born. I searc

Poetry Friday: The Party is Here!

 Welcome everyone to Poetry Friday! If you're new to Poetry Friday, you can read more about it here . I've been chasing deadlines all week, but poetry always provides a welcome pause in the busiest of schedules. Perhaps because of the kind of writing I've been doing (which is not related to poetry at all) it was a bit hard to get started on a poem this week. I looked at a few of the poetic forms I've bookmarked over the past months, but in the end, turned to one of my favorite forms, the acrostic .  Thanks for joining the Poetry Friday party today! Add your link to the party below. You are invited to the Inlinkz link party! Click here to enter