I promised this post on Robert Frost’s “Birches” in the event that we have an ice storm. I don’t know yet whether we will have one, but we had frozen rain for much of the night, and as I write this (Wednesday morning) we are being attacked by a blizzard. So if I don’t arrange […]
Tag Archives: Robert Frost
Snow Days Open Up Cracks in Time
An unusually heavy snowstorm has locked us into our homes these past few days, cancelling my Monday classes and locking down the county. Years ago, in an essay I’d love to find again, an author wrote about the “found time” of a snow day. She noted that, because we normally believe we must make every […]
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged "Stopping by Woods on a Winter Evening", Nature, Time Comments closed
You, Sir, Are No Jay Gatsby
Everyone has something to say about Barack Obama, who has been the subject of non-stop scrutiny since last year’s Democratic primaries. It therefore is not surprising that some would turn to literature to understand what he means. Including, in recent weeks, two New York Times columnists. Stanley Fish, the subject of three posts this […]
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged "Oven Bird", American Dream, Julius Caesar, Nationalism, Obama, politics, Roger Cohen, Stanley Fish, William Shakespeare Comments closed
Our Most Famous (and Most Misread) Poem
Today I walk into my first classes after a year of sabbatical. After having spent all day Friday meeting with new entering students and hearing about their momentous decision (as they see it) to attend St. Mary’s, it makes sense for me to write on decision making. In what is arguably America’s most famous poem is about […]
After Apple-Picking, Then What?
So much of the poetry that comforts us in time of death is infused with images of nature, poems like (in my case) Mary Oliver’s “Lost Children,” Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Adonais, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Perhaps the reason is that, with death, our natural side asserts its primacy in a way that cannot […]
Posted in Uncategorized Also tagged After Apple-Picking, death of a parent, Hamlet, John Donne, Sonnet X Comments closed
