Happy Birthday, Robert Frost!

Today is Robert Frost's birthday. Frost is often considered one of the most 'American' poets, just as pie is considered one of the most American foods, and just as pie can have much darker implications (nothing-in-the-house pies, stealing of pies, gender dynamic, etc.) than a cutsy American dessert, so too is frost much darker than the 'road less traveled' cliche. Beyond that silly little stretch of an analogy of my own creation, I came across this poem that some consider to be a lost manuscript of Frost's. I think it's pretty clear that it's not, but it's a decent parody:

Pumpkin
o pumpkins in an open field stood,
And sorry I could not harvest both
And one pie make, long I stood
And looked over one as best I could
To where it anchored in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was brassy and wanted air;
Though as for that the sunning there
Had ripened 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 pie!
Yet knowing how many pies end in the sty,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence;
Two pumpkins in a field stood, and I - -
I took the lesser for my pie,
And that has made all the difference.

For an actual Frost poem, this one about berry picking, check out 'Blueberries.' It's a little too long to post here, though.

And finally, a picture taken when some friends and I visited Frost's grave in Bennington, VT on the way back from NELP in the Summer of 2003. We had our own little ceremony-- Erik read "Too Anxious For Rivers" and we all recited "Into My Own", of course.