winterbadger | so much for that plan

I had conceived, at some point, the idea of posting a favourite poem each day during April, it being National Poetry Month. Obviously that hasn't happened, but I will try to post thirty all the same; same idea, just starting a bit late.

Some may think my first choice too predictable, too pat, too well known. I'm not sure that any poem can be too well known, and I want, at least here, to put off the heavy cloak of feeling defensive or apologetic for my choices that I feel as if I wear too often. (A statement that I suppose will confound those who feel I don't wear it enough, but there it is. Remember, it's not necessarily a visible garment.)

I don't have a close, organic, instinctive relationship with poetry the way I think some people do. I have often to be reminded to seek it out. But whenever I do, I recall how powerful it can be, how much meaning can be conveyed, both by intent and by personal association, by how few words.

New England is a place I feel strongly about; it feels like home to part of me, even though I have formally lived there for less than half a dozen years out of my 46. But it was home to my mother, who I believe never ceased to think it the most comforting and beloved part of her world. My father, too, adopted it in his curious scholarly, analytical way. Where she would see rolling, wooded hills or tree-swallowed stony walls and simply drink in their presence, he needed to learn the names and nature of the trees, explore the history of the farmers who left behind those field to be retaken by the woods, chart and map the hills and know their names and heights. In leaving behind his midwestern family, he found older roots, the remains of the farmhouses of our Dutch ancestors who dwelt in the same valley where my mother's grandfather chose to buy a lakeside cabin for his summers away from his work as rector of a grammar school in New Haven.

New England was also where many of my other relatives lived (though, since we lived far away, I never got to know them very well, to my regret) and where my parents and I would spend almost every summer when I was young. It's where I went to college, met my first wife, had my first full-time job, rented my first apartment, bought my first car. I love its hills and mountains, its rivers and lakes, its towns and cities as if I had been born and brought up among them (maybe more--perhaps they mean less to someone who has spent a life among them, though I doubt it).

Another New Englander by adoption, Robert Frost, is certainly one of the most recognizable poets associated with the region. He came to the area from California when he was young, went to school and college there and, save for a few years to live in the UK, lived most of his life in Massachusetts and Vermont. I can think of worse places. :-) This, one of his most famous poems, is (for me) about making choices and being content with them, both things I struggle with constantly. But it also evokes the leafy forest paths of New England, that I, and my parents, have always loved so well.

The Road Not Taken

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I--
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.