Good-bye, and Keep Cold

[AdamSmith]

I usually find Frost "our dullest great poet," as John Ashbery once cracked. But this piece, noted by poet Jay Parini (http://www.cnn.com/2013/01/25/opinion/parini-cold-weather/index.html?iid=article_sidebar), seems apt for today...

Good-bye, and Keep Cold

Robert Frost

This saying good-bye on the edge of the dark

And cold to an orchard so young in the bark

Reminds me of all that can happen to harm

An orchard away at the end of the farm

All winter, cut off by a hill from the house.

I don't want it girdled by rabbit and mouse,

I don't want it dreamily nibbled for browse

By deer, and I don't want it budded by grouse.

(If certain it wouldn't be idle to call

I'd summon grouse, rabbit, and deer to the wall

And warn them away with a stick for a gun.)

I don't want it stirred by the heat of the sun.

(We made it secure against being, I hope,

By setting it out on a northerly slope.)

No orchard's the worse for the wintriest storm;

But one thing about it, it mustn't get warm.

"How often already you've had to be told,

Keep cold, young orchard. Good-bye and keep cold.

Dread fifty above more than fifty below."

I have to be gone for a season or so.

My business awhile is with different trees,

Less carefully nourished, less fruitful than these,

And such as is done to their wood with an axe—

Maples and birches and tamaracks.

I wish I could promise to lie in the night

And think of an orchard's arboreal plight

When slowly (and nobody comes with a light)

Its heart sinks lower under the sod.

But something has to be left to God.

[RA1]

RF is no Sandburg but then, who is, to include him?

Would you rather read about woods, cold and dank, or Chicago, hog butcher to the world?

I would rather see pix of naked boys.

Best regards,

RA1

[AdamSmith]

My hypothesis is that a prerequisite for enjoying Sandburg is to be from the Midwest (wherever that is!): Any form of stimulus will do.

Nor is criticism of much help, tending toward such blinding aperçus as this from Wikipedia: "Much of Carl Sandburg's poetry, such as "Chicago", focused on Chicago..." Really.

We take no responsibility just because of his long sojourn in N.C. Just as we wash our hands of Pres. Andrew Johnson, Jesse Helms, Clay Aiken... (Who am I forgetting?)

With you on the naked boys. Including any from Chicago!