Nov 5, Beginning Frost

I've started with Frost at night instead of the morning. I was feeling the need for something grounded and stabilizing. I love the hardcover volume I found at a used bookstore for $4. Though it feels no older than 10-20 years, the copyright page gives no year beyond 1969, no reprintings. The book itself, with its embossed cover, feels stately. There is no introductory material beyond a photo of white-haired Frost sitting on a stacked-stone wall opposite the poem "The Pasture." The collection is arranged from earliest work to latest, starting with poems included in A Boy's Will (1913).

Although I enjoyed the meaning of the first poem presented, "Into My Own," I'm not taken by the music of any of the poems until I reach "Storm Fear." I paused at the end of this poem thinking it was free verse and ironic that I come to Frost's work for form and the first poem that strikes me as having beautiful music would be free verse. However, I was wrong. The poem might be considered a hybrid. It has no regular line length or meter. It can't be said to have a rhyme scheme but every line ending has a match somewhere in the 18 line poem, some of them 3 times. Alliteration and assonance occur frequently throughout, giving it much of its music. It could very well be that Frost eschewed regular form in the poem because it's about a frightening storm. The result is more pleasing to me than the strictly formal poems I'd read in the book to that point, which seemed stilted and include some of the common flaws forms are prone to: language twisted to get a rhyme at the end and adding junk lines (ones that in no way add to the movement or meaning of the poem) to get a rhyme ending.

So I came to the book wanting stability and between the hard stately covers end up favoring a poem about a storm that any formalist would consider discombobulated.