Is this the worst front cover of all time?

Yeah yeah so take the Road Not Taken and Stop by Woods on a Snowy Evening and I guess these two poems must be in every Robert Frost collection by law.

Imagine Frosty handing over a new collection of poems and the editor flipping through them looking for the next Road Not Taken. Is this poem the next Harry Potter of its time? Perhaps this one about roses. Goddammit I need more rhyming!

Index of First Lines

In the back of this collection is an alphabetical arrangement of first lines and it makes one very nice meta-poem. The first few lines:

A bird half wakened in a lunar noon

A boy, presuming on his intellect

A lantern-light from deeper in the barn

A scent of ripeness from over a wall

Some nice lines, which I suppose is one of the ways in which poetry is useful to the world. If not useful, perhaps beautiful. Like seeing a mixture of paint colours which the eye finds attractive but mean nothing, many of Frost’s poems are beautiful arrangements of words which also mean nothing.

This isn't in any of the poems ... I think.

If that’s too deep for you, don’t worry

Actually, you should worry. Normally I can assure you there is plenty of sex, drugs, burning down houses, mime-punching, catapults or anything to get past the boring stuff but not in this collection. It’s poetry. It could be talking about sex and loading a mime into a catapult but that’s just one interpretation of the line about the snow elf feeling sad.

How to enjoy the hell out of a poem

Poems work best if you don’t push too hard into overthinking. Let them be like a painting. Glance, look away. Think. Look back, notice more details. Think some more. Look at some other painting. Come back. Think some more. Repeat.  Come back in six months, look again.

Sometimes I think poems are lyrics written by musicians who can’t play instruments. If only Frosty had had a guitar we might have had a number one hit: The Road Less Travelled.

Then Cobain could have covered it before he shot himself.

Will poetry get you jumped?

What the hell kinda images do you put with poems?

For guys, writing a few feeble lines is a risk. If you’re on the I was blue, she said boo, let’s go to the zoo level then stick with simply having a volume or two on your bookshelf. If your mad poetry skills are a little more refined then write something that is a bit hot, a bit funny, a bit cheeky and try it out. If it works then you can keep it for the next girl and the next girl and the next …

For girls … I’ve never seen a girl write poetry to a boy. I’ve never heard about it. I guess most girls don’t need to impress girls with some intellectual romantic side.

Where I got Robert Frost Selected Poems

Some second-hand shop for about twenty cents I suppose. You can find almost all his work online which is a good way to read poetry.

Happy reading,

Mat

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we perfected our perception

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Aww ... wubbsy.