Frosty Folklore

In the words of John F. Kennedy, “[Robert Frost] has bequeathed his a nation a body of imperishable verse from which Americans will forever gain joy and understanding.” The winner of four Pulitzer prices, Frost was born in San Francisco but migrated to New England later in his adult life. It was in New Hampshire that he first began to notice the beauty of nature, capturing its essence with colloquial poetry for common humanity. As a teacher, Frost accepted professorships at various universities and colleges across the Northeast, namely Middlebury College and the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. It was at these fine American institutions that Frost procured his rendition of the deep emotions tied in with the natural rural settings that surrounded his residence.
“I often see flowers…” said Frost, quoted in one of his poems, referring to his uncannied ability to capture what others cannot from Mother Nature, heralded for capturing blossoming beauty with a pen and paper. In his book, You Come Too, Frost gathers a cornucopia of his poetry that transforms simple yeoman speech into gleaming verses from the abstract. The individual poems of the book flow well together, in fact the order in which the poems are read plays a role in this reader’s overall understanding of the book. Two particular poems that work well together side by side are “A Hillside Thaw” and “Good-By and Keep Cold.” Both belonging to my list of Frost favorites, I believe that these poems were paired together because the reader takes away a certain sense of winter darkness in New England from the way that Frost uses especially simple vocabulary.
Frost’s work in You Come Too emphasizes his belief that God exists in Nature, “But something has to be left for god” is the last line of “Good-By and Keep Cold” and I feel that his diction is quite clear in portraying his understanding of that function. This reader comprehends the theme that Frost is attempting to convey in his poetry, that is the existence of beauty in nature as evidence of God’s existence. However, the tone is clearly negative in many of his pieces, there are subliminal intricacies that jump out at the reader when one scrutinizes each stanza from a selected Frost work. Perhaps Frost is angry with God or even debating his very existence when he pessimistically points out his laxidazical attitude towards daily news in his piece “A Patch of Old Snow.” Pointless in reality, snow has nothing to do with his actual emotions, rather it is the melting action of frozen precipetation that caught his panties in a bunch. When he says “the news of a day I’ve forgotten—if I ever read it,” I feel like respectfully slapping his cheeks because his tone impresses me in a way that makes the world seem like an aweful place, even though sometimes I also despise watching the news. However, ss an aspiring American writer, I look up to Frost and have a great deal of respect for his works.