3 Poems

I've been dipping again into The Golden Treasury Of Poetry. 3 poems leaped out at me. The 1st is by Robert Frost and is called The Runaway. It's a good choice for this time of year:

The Runaway

Once when the snow of the year was beginning to fall,
We stopped by a mountain pasture to say, 'Whose colt?'
A little Morgan had one forefoot on the wall,
The other curled at his breast. He dipped his head
And snorted at us. And then he had to bolt.
We heard the miniature thunder where he fled,
And we saw him, or thought we saw him, dim and grey
Like a shadow against the curtain of falling flakes.
'I think the little fellow's afraid of the snow.
He isn't winter-broken. It isn't play
With the little fellow at all. He's running away.
I doubt if even his mother could tell him, 'Sakes,
It's only weather.' He'd think she didn't know!
Where is his mother? He can't be out alone.'
And now he comes again with a clatter of stone,
And mounts the wall again with whited eyes
And all his tail that isn't hair up straight.
He shudders his coat as if to throw off flies.
'Whever it is that leaves him out so late,
When other creatures have gone to stall and bin,
Ought to be told to come and take him in.'

What a word picture Frost paints here! You can just feel the cold, hear the hooves, see the falling snowflakes and the whites of the colt's eyes.

Apart from Shakespeare's, the sonnets of Keats are some of the most perfect sonnets ever written. This sonnet, On The Grasshopper And The Cricket - among other poems by Keats - also appears in The Golden Treasury:

On The Grasshopper And The Cricket

The poetry of earth is never dead:
When all the birds are faint with the hot sun
And hide in cooling trees, a voice will run
From hedge to hedge about the new-mown mead.
That is the grasshopper's - he takes the lead
In summer luxury, - he has never done
With his delights; for, when tired out with fun,
He rests at ease beneath some pleasant weed.

The poetry of earth is ceasing never.
On a lone winter evening, when the frost
Has wrought a silence, from the stove there shrills
The cricket's song, in warmth increasing ever,
And seems, to one in drowsiness half lost,
The grasshopper's among some grassy hills.

Yes, how we yearn for summer during these last endless wintry months!

Finally, there's this short, succinct poem by the wonderful Emily Dickinson:

I'm Nobody! Who Are You?

I'm nobody! Who are you?
Are you nobody, too?
Then there's a pair of us - don't tell!
They'd banish us, you know.

How dreary to be somebody!
How public, like a frog
To tell your name the livelong day
To an admiring bog!

Frog-celebrities of Celebrity Big Brother, please take note...