#robert frost
There are some events in life that occur which seem to break your world apart…or it feels like that at least.
I remember the first time when it felt like my world was ending. The night before it happened I was restless and I felt happy like everything was starting to make sense. And so I woke up with a smile on my face. I started to hum as I got ready for school… as random as it sounds I still remember the weird taste of the toothpaste. I was brushing my teeth when I got the news. She had passed away. That one phone call changed me forever. Going from quite a high to a depressing low…it all felt strange. In that moment, I fell back into reality. I woke up…I really woke up. At that time I didn’t know it but that would just be the start…there were more bad things to come.
I can say that this quote is in fact true. Life Goes On. You might think it’s all coming down and it won’t get better but it does and it’s good when it does.
I won’t lie and say that it lasts because for me the good times have never lasted! Maybe because I’ve never let them…or it’s just the way life is meant be. You can’t always be happy but then you can’t always be sad either!
I’m soon going to be entering a new phase in my life and I’ve decided that next year I will be travelling and I will somehow get to Italy. I’m trying to follow my instincts here - for many years I’ve been wanting to go but something has always come up. Next year will be the year! Travelling will be a good opportunity to find myself and do a bit of ‘soul-searching’ - as you do! :)
Next year I will do things differently and open myself up to different opportunities. I won’t let little things get to me. Instead I will accept them and move on!
(Fences) Neighbors
If we undo mending, it is only
passively. Seven years lean is careless
following seven years hale. This dare says,
“These are the gaps. Yum: They’re rich in bonely
goodness.” I carry my carry my soy on the left,
carry my grain on the right. He is all
philosophies between “a hurt dog will
holler” and “even fake friends will feed them.”
Mental gymnastics are a worthless skill,
mostly between the choosing and the call.
Ontologies said: nihilism anthem,
but some are balls, or loaves, or spells, or theft;
assuming Newton, assuming balance:
Investor asks Teller for Her two cents.
11 March, 2022
Robert Frost reads his poem Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening at his home in Ripton, Vermont - 1952
Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening. Illustration by Susan Jeffers.
“A jury consists of 12 persons chosen to decide who has the better lawyer.”
~Robert Frost
DA Poets
Honestly, any poetry is DA poetry if you can recite it from memory or sound intelligent while speaking of it.
• T. S. Elliot
Didn’t write much poetry, but what he did write is dense with meaning
• Wisława Szymborska
Any of her poems are instant winners, for a great collection I would recommend Map: Collected and Last Poems
• William Shakespeare
Classic, cannot go wrong with any of his works
• Anne Sexton
For bonus points, listen to the song “Mercy Street” by Peter Gabriel based on the poem “45 Mercy Street”
• John Milton
Paradise Lost is always recognizable by name
• Homer
Both The IliadandThe Odyssey are the best known works, bonus points if you are able to read them in their original Greek for the full effect
• Edgar Allen Poe
Although The Raven is his most notable work of poetry, his short stories are also enjoyable
• Robert Frost
An acquired taste compared to my other favourite poets, but my top four are definitely “The Road Not Taken”, “Mending Wall”, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”, and “Acquainted With the Night”
• Mark Twain
Recognizable in name and work
• Lord Byron
An older poet, much of his language is obsolete in the modern era yet conveys meanings we could not hope to comprehend without it
• Sappho
An excellent romantic, “Slender Aphrodite has overcome me with longing for a girl” Bonus points if you read it in the original Greek for the full effect
• Walt Whitman
The modern-day version of a classical poet: free verse is his specialty!
• Edgar Allan Poe
The O.G. dark academic, the literature teacher’s favourite Halloween lesson. Nothing can beat the simple and unsettling Poetry of Poe!
• Oscar Wilde
Nothing will ever be as iconic as The Picture of Dorian Gray has become in the DA aesthetic! a definite must-read.
A WORD FROM THE AUTHOR
A letter from David Orr, author of The Road Not Taken
When I think about libraries, I think about my mother, who grew up an only child in Greenville, South Carolina. Her parents were the practical-minded offspring of hardscrabble farmers: the stories they knew turned on the hard lessons of Job, not the nimble ironies of Austen. But their daughter was a reader. She started with books from the neighborhood bookmobile, since her parents didn’t know much about libraries, and couldn’t have transported her to one even if they had. She read the same books over and over. Her middle school had a modest library – that’s probably overstating it – and she quickly read all of its books, and then started over again with them as well.
It was in high school that she first encountered something approximating a real library. A librarian noticed how many books she was checking out, and began making suggestions: Stephen Vincent Benet, Flaubert, Dickens. Within a couple of years, Mom had read all of Hardy. It was, she tells me, the great transformative experience of her life, as “the world just opened and opened.” By the end of high school she had a knowledge of classic American and European fiction that would have served her well in college, had there been money for that.
School taught me to read. But when I was a boy, my mother taught me to be a reader – and by extension a writer. I expect everyone reading this newsletter understands that distinction intimately.
My book The Road Not Taken: Finding American in the Poem Everyone Loves and Almost Everyone Gets Wrong is about being a reader – in this case, a reader of the most popular American poem and of its equally popular creator, Robert Frost. It’s a book about how our misreadings of both are inevitable because both hold multiple, sometimes contradictory possibilities in tension – much like the American culture they have come to represent. It’s a book about what it means to choose, and how our own choices can seem to depend on other choices of which we were unaware (for instance, the decision to take the advice of a kindly high school librarian). It’s a book about discovering who, or what, the choosing self is.
I should add that the first real reader of my book was my mother (editors and spouses don’t count, I think, as they’re more allies than readers). She read it in one afternoon. And then she read it again.
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“Just living is not enough… one must have sunshine, freedom and a little flower.”
-Hans Christian Andersen
“I’m not confused. I’m just well mixed.”
-Robert Frost
“Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.”
-Robert Frost
“Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or self-confidence.”
-Robert Frost
“In three words I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life: it goes on.”
-Robert Frost
“Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.”
-Robert Frost
“Love is an irresistible desire to be irresistibly desired.”
-Robert Frost
* * *
“Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.”
― Robert Frost
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“ormanda iki yol belirdi önümde, ve ben daha az yürünmüş olanı seçtim, bütün fark buradaydı işte.”— robert frost - karlı bir akşamda orman tarafından durdurulmak
Nature’s first green is gold, Her hardest hue to hold. Her early leaf’s a flower; But only so an hour. Then leaf subsides to leaf. So Eden sank to grief, So dawn goes down to day. Nothing gold can stay. -Robert Frost
Model: Ava Galindo
Mua: KissbyKatieTX
Photographer: Simon Ly
Flowers: petalsbydesignkaty
The West Studios
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As I came to the edge of the woods,
Thrush music – hark!
Now if it was dusk outside,
Inside it was dark.
Too dark in the woods for a bird
By sleight of wing
To better its perch for the night,
Though it still could sing.
The last of the light of the sun
That had died in the west
Still lived for one song more
In a thrush’s breast.
Far in the pillared dark
Thrush music went –
Almost like a call to come in
To the dark and lament.
But no, I was out for stars;
I would not come in.
I meant not even if asked;
And I hadn’t been.
Robert Frost
I finally got to animate a poem and it happens to be the best poem (as well as the most misinterpreted one): Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken”:
https://www.theatlantic.com/video/index/555959/robert-frost-road-not-taken/
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