Poetry Friday: He's Never About Just the Apples

Which is why I love Robert Frost so very much.

Last year, I posted Reluctance as I bid farewell to autumn. I said:

I really didn't get Robert Frost until I was older.

When I was in high school, I thought of him as the death poet, stopping by woods to think about that final nap, or as the rugged individualist, taking New England roads less traveled.

But as I grew up -- lived, moved, loved, worked, lost, made mistakes, grieved, hated, healed, and grew every year to love the shape and layering of words more dearly, I found that I also loved the roads Frost traveled.

Yes, Frost appeals to my middle-aged mature self.  He's keenly aware of fallen nature, desperate wants, lonely needs, steadfast love. And, as I mentioned last year, he stuns me with his talent for tackling the simplest subject and transforming it into a metaphysical wallop. 

After Apple-Picking
by Robert Frost

My long two-pointed ladder's sticking through a tree
Toward heaven still,
And there's a barrel that I didn't fill
Beside it, and there may be two or three
Apples I didn't pick upon some bough.
But I am done with apple-picking now.
Essence of winter sleep is on the night,
The scent of apples: I am drowsing off.
I cannot rub the strangeness from my sight
I got from looking through a pane of glass
I skimmed this morning from the drinking trough
And held against the world of hoary grass.
It melted, and I let it fall and break.
But I was well
Upon my way to sleep before it fell,
And I could tell
What form my dreaming was about to take.
Magnified apples appear and disappear,
Stem end and blossom end,
And every fleck of russet showing clear.
My instep arch not only keeps the ache,
It keeps the pressure of a ladder-round.
I feel the ladder sway as the boughs bend.
And I keep hearing from the cellar bin
The rumbling sound
Of load on load of apples coming in.
For I have had too much
Of apple-picking: I am overtired
Of the great harvest I myself desired.
There were ten thousand thousand fruit to touch,
Cherish in hand, lift down, and not let fall.
For all
That struck the earth,
No matter if not bruised or spiked with stubble,
Went surely to the cider-apple heap
As of no worth.
One can see what will trouble
This sleep of mine, whatever sleep it is.
Were he not gone,
The woodchuck could say whether it's like his
Long sleep, as I describe its coming on,
Or just some human sleep.

~~~~~~~~~~

The Poetry Friday round up is at The Writer's Armchair. 

Poetry Friday: Atticus, Grading Essays, and George Bilgere

School has started.

I've lost not only an excellent cook, but a beloved evening companion.

When one is married to an English teacher, one measures out one's life not in coffee spoons but in the number of hours one will actually get to spend with one's husband once school and essay-grading have begun.

Is there a Mrs. Bilgere? Does she feel as I do about those stacks of essays? Is she, too, guilty of being the voice of temptation, the one who whispers lies about how those wretched stacks can wait?

Robert Frost 
by George Bilgere

Over there on the dining room table
are just twenty-five of the thousands of essays
on the poetry of Robert Frost
produced this week alone in the USA,
the world leader in essays on Robert Frost.

The essays are about ambiguity...

...And yet two days have passed, an entire weekend,
and it's Sunday evening and I am having a glass of wine
and the essays on ambiguity in the poetry of Robert Frost
remain unassessed by me, and this is getting very serious.

(Read the whole poem here, at The Writer's Almanac.)

The Poetry Friday round up is at Steps and Staircases today.

A Deliberate Life

"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, 

to front only the essential facts of life, 

and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, 

and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived."

~~ Henry David Thoreau 

Shortly after I started this blog, I considered alternate names for it -- I humbly acknowledged that "Karen Edmisten" is not particularly clever, and I daydreamed about what I might've named my blog had I given it more thought before I hit the "Create Blog" button. My favorite alternate-universe name was A Deliberate Life.  It summed up what I want my world to be: Deliberate. Thoughtful. A life with love and purpose. Conviction.

"Deliberate" also tends to conjure the notion of "A Plan." But I've never been terribly good at plans, and certainly not at anything like The Five Year Plan.

But not to worry, because "deliberate" and "planned", it turns out, are not at all the same thing.

I can think of numerous deliberate lives that were not particularly planned.

Take Robert Frost, for instance. Although he went to Dartmouth and Harvard, he never earned a degree. He worked at a variety of jobs just to make a living. A biography at Poets.org notes that "Frost drifted through a string of occupations after leaving school, working as a teacher, cobbler, and editor of the Lawrence Sentinel." From the outside, before anyone knew that Robert Frost would be Robert Frost For Heavens' Sake, he might've appeared to be something of a slacker. A job hopper. People perhaps shook their heads over the college dropout.

But he was deliberate.

He was a poet. It's who he was, and he knew it.

Van Gogh was an artist. He was a mess, but he was an artist, and he knew it. Blessed Teresa of Calcutta fed the hungry for Jesus, even when she felt dry and far from His embrace. It's who she was. Marie Curie was a scientist, Madeleine L'Engle was a writer. Though difficulties and sufferings came upon them, they lived deliberately. They knew the essential facts of their lives.

At my house, we will embark this week on our twelfth year of homeschooling. My life has been full of meanderings, changes, about-faces, and periods when I appeared undoubtedly to the world to be a slacker. But, since my conversion, I have been living that deliberate life. Unquestionably still full of twists and turns, alarming developments -- such as becoming a mother, becoming a Catholic, becoming a homeschooler -- and messy days and sometimes anguished nights. But deliberate.

I know who I am.

And I can only hope that as we continue to follow this adventure that is homeschooling -- as we look at the final year of "high school" (whatever that is, really), and college, and job and life possibilities, and the swirling middle of the teen years for another daughter, and at an age that the world calls "fourth grade" for yet another --  that I can pass on to my cherished children the essence of the soul-calming peace that comes with knowing how you want to live.

I followed Jesus because I wished to live deliberately, 

to front only the essential facts of life, 

and see if I could not learn what Jesus had to teach, 

and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not loved Him. 

Poetry Friday: Reluctance

I really didn't get Robert Frost until I was older.

When I was in high school, I thought of him as the death poet, stopping by woods to think about that final nap, or as the rugged individualist, taking New England roads less traveled.

But as I grew up -- lived, moved, loved, worked, lost, made mistakes, grieved, hated, healed, and grew every year to love the shape and layering of words more dearly, I found that I also loved the roads Frost traveled.

I've been saving this one for the end of fall, for the real turn of weather that is winter upon us. Oh, I know ... winter may not arrive officially for a couple of weeks, but now that we are in the Advent season, and we saw our temperatures dive this week from deliciously mild to twenty degrees, I must reluctantly admit that my beloved autumn is gone.  Of course, Frost is talking about a lot more here than reluctantly letting go of autumn rust and woodsy bonfires.  He leaves me in awe, at times, with the way he can take the simplest subject and turn it into a metaphysical wallop. 


Reluctance
by Robert Frost

Out through the fields and the woods
And over the walls I have wended;
I have climbed the hills of view
And looked at the world, and descended; ...

... Ah, when to the heart of man
Was it ever less than a treason
To go with the drift of things,
To yield with a grace to reason,
And bow and accept the end
Of a love or a season?

(Go read the whole poem here.)

The Poetry Friday round up can be found at Wild Rose Reader. 

Poetry Friday extra: Happy Birthday, Robert Frost

Be sure to visit Jama Rattigan's Alphabet Soup for a wonderful post on Robert Frost. And thanks, Jama, for reminding me that it's his birthday.

"And were an epitaph to be my story I'd have a short one ready for my own. I would have written of me on my stone: I had a lover's quarrel with the world."

~~ Robert Frost 

Mini-Retirement

(From a few years back, which explains why Atticus isn't really out buying donuts at 11 p.m., and why it isn't really Poetry Friday today. But the explanation of mini-retirement is still accurate. I love you, Atticus!)

Summer with Atticus goes something like this:

1. We experience a period of what my friend Sally calls "mini retirement." Sally's married to a teacher. She knows what it's like to suddenly have her husband around the house more often than usual. And how it feels to be extremely grateful for the privilege while simultaneously struggling to reorder a routine. She knows what it's like to tell herself to just shut up about where he tends to leave the salt shaker.

2. Adjustment period ends quickly. Everyone is happy.  Who cares where the salt shaker is?

3. Atticus takes over meal planning and cooking for a couple of months.

4. If I were the kind of person who jumps up and down and claps, I would do so at this point. You know how I feel about cooking. I'm figuratively jumping up and down right now.

5. Atticus is, at this very moment, out buying donuts from the new donut shop in town for the girls.  They've been wanting to try it. I keep saying, "Oh, yeah.  We need to do that. We'll get there soon ...." whereas Atticus actually goes out and buys the donuts.

6. He selects this moving piece from Robert Frost for Poetry Friday:

Two Look at Two
by Robert Frost

Love and forgetting might have carried them
A little further up the mountain side
With night so near, but not much further up.
They must have halted soon in any case
With thoughts of a path back, how rough it was
With rock and washout, and unsafe in darkness;
When they were halted by a tumbled wall
With barbed-wire binding. They stood facing this,
Spending what onward impulse they still had
In One last look the way they must not go,
On up the failing path, where, if a stone
Or earthslide moved at night, it moved itself;
No footstep moved it. 'This is all,' they sighed,
Good-night to woods.' But not so; there was more.
A doe from round a spruce stood looking at them
Across the wall, as near the wall as they.
She saw them in their field, they her in hers.
The difficulty of seeing what stood still,
Like some up-ended boulder split in two,
Was in her clouded eyes; they saw no fear there.
She seemed to think that two thus they were safe.

(Read the whole poem here.)

I do love Robert Frost (as evidenced by the number of times he's been invited over for Poetry Friday.) 

I do love summer.

And I do truly, madly, deeply love that man I call Atticus.

Poetry Friday: "Dust of Snow" by Robert Frost

A little bit of perfection, so needed in January, from Robert Frost today: 

Dust of Snow
by Robert Frost

The way a crow
Shook down on me
The dust of snow
From a hemlock tree

Has given my heart
A change of mood
And saved some part
Of a day I had rued.

(This poem is in the public domain.)

~~~~~

Kathryn Apel has the round-up this week. 

(Learn more about Poetry Friday here.) 

Poetry Friday: October, by Robert Frost

This one speaks for itself, but I have to say that I love the way Frost captures the alternately creeping and wild qualities of autumn.

October
by Robert Frost

O hushed October morning mild,
Thy leaves have ripened to the fall;
Tomorrow’s wind, if it be wild,
Should waste them all.
The crows above the forest call;
Tomorrow they may form and go.
O hushed October morning mild,
Begin the hours of this day slow.
Make the day seem to us less brief.
Hearts not averse to being beguiled,
Beguile us in the way you know.

(... read the rest here, at The Poetry Foundation.)


The round up today is at Teaching Young Writers.

Poetry Friday: Robert Frost, loving the things we love

I really enjoy the Poetry for Young People seriesfrom Sterling Publishing.

In the Robert Frost volume is Hyla Brook, a perfect little poem that is about a lowly, local brook, but is really all about the last line.


Hyla Brook

by Robert Frost

By June our brook's run out of song and speed.
Sought for much after that, it will be found
Either to have gone groping underground ...

... A brook to none but who remember long.
This as it will be seen is other far
Than with brooks taken otherwhere in song.
We love the things we love for what they are.

(Read the entire poem here.)

The Poetry Friday round-up can be found at Poetry for Children.

Poetry Friday ... Summer with Atticus

 Summer with Atticus goes something like this:


1. We experience a period of what my friend Sally calls "mini retirement." Sally's married to a teacher. She knows what it's like to suddenly have her husband around the house more often than usual. And how it feels to be extremely grateful for the privilege while simultaneously struggling to reorder a routine. She knows what it's like to tell herself to just shut up about where he tends to leave the salt shaker.

2. Adjustment period ends quickly. Everyone is happy.  Who cares where the salt shaker is?

3. Atticus takes over meal planning and cooking for a couple of months.

4. If I were the kind of person who jumps up and down and claps, I would do so at this point. You know how I feel about cooking. I'm figuratively jumping up and down right now.

5. Atticus is, at this very moment, out buying donuts from the new donut shop in town for the girls.  They've been wanting to try it. I keep saying, "Oh, yeah.  We need to do that. We'll get there soon ...." whereas Atticus actually goes out and buys the donuts.

6. He selects this moving piece from Robert Frost for Poetry Friday:

Two Look at Two
by Robert Frost

Love and forgetting might have carried them
A little further up the mountain side
With night so near, but not much further up.
They must have halted soon in any case
With thoughts of a path back, how rough it was
With rock and washout, and unsafe in darkness;
When they were halted by a tumbled wall
With barbed-wire binding. They stood facing this,
Spending what onward impulse they still had
In One last look the way they must not go,
On up the failing path, where, if a stone
Or earthslide moved at night, it moved itself;
No footstep moved it. 'This is all,' they sighed,
Good-night to woods.' But not so; there was more.
A doe from round a spruce stood looking at them
Across the wall, as near the wall as they.
She saw them in their field, they her in hers.
The difficulty of seeing what stood still,
Like some up-ended boulder split in two,
Was in her clouded eyes; they saw no fear there.
She seemed to think that two thus they were safe.

(Read the whole poem here.)

I do love Robert Frost (as evidenced by the number of times he's been invited over for Poetry Friday.) 

I do love summer.

And I do truly, madly, deeply love that man I call Atticus.

You'll find the Poetry Friday round up at The Art of Irreverence.

Poetry Friday: Good-bye, and Keep Cold

Good-bye, and Keep Cold by Robert Frost stirs my fiercest maternal instincts.

There is only so much we can do, no?




Good-bye, and Keep Cold
by 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 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.


Read the whole poem here at the Poetry Foundation.

Poetry Friday is hosted today by Laura Purdie Salas. Run over there and leave her your linky goodness.

Poetry Friday: An Atticus Pick

Another by Robert Frost this week.  Thanks, Atticus.


The Sound of Trees 
by Robert Frost 

I wonder about the trees.
Why do we wish to bear
Forever the noise of these
More than another noise
So close to our dwelling place?
We suffer them by the day
Till we lose all measure of pace,
And fixity in our joys,
And acquire a listening air.
They are that that talks of going
But never gets away;
And that talks no less for knowing,
As it grows wiser and older,
That now it means to stay.
My feet tug at the floor
And my head sways to my shoulder
Sometimes when I watch trees sway,
From the window or the door.
I shall set forth for somewhere,
I shall make the reckless choice
Some day when they are in voice
And tossing so as to scare
The white clouds over them on.
I shall have less to say,
But I shall be gone.

~~~~~
The Poetry Friday round up is at Jama Rattigan's Alphabet Soup today.

Poetry Friday: "Too present to imagine."

Do you even have to ask? After today's post, the only choice for Poetry Friday is Robert Frost.

I chose this one because the older I get -- the longer I am married, a mother, a teacher, a writer, a friend  -- the more I understand this rearview mirror of life, the way that, "The present is too much for the senses,/Too crowding, too confusing-/Too present to imagine." It is only in looking back from that favored future vantage point that the past makes sense, that the past becomes real and immediate and necessary.

And it's from that still, small spot in the future that I can see my present steadily arranging itself, and I can trust that the crowding and confusion are falling into place.

Carpe Diem
by Robert Frost

Age saw two quiet children
Go loving by at twilight,
He knew not whether homeward,
Or outward from the village,
Or (chimes were ringing) churchward,
He waited (they were strangers)
Till they were out of hearing
To bid them both be happy.
"Be happy, happy, happy,
...

But bid life seize the present?
It lives less in the present
Than in the future always,
And less in both together
Than in the past. The present
Is too much for the senses,
Too crowding, too confusing—
Too present to imagine.

Read the entire poem here, at Poets.org.

The Poetry Friday roundup is at Check It Out.

Poetry Friday: For Once, Then, Something

I love the questing and questioning nature of this one by Robert Frost.

For Once, Then, Something
Robert Frost

Others taunt me with having knelt at well-curbs
Always wrong to the light, so never seeing
Deeper down in the well than where the water
Gives me back in a shining surface picture
Me myself in the summer heaven godlike
Looking out of a wreath of fern and cloud puffs.
Once, when trying with chin against a well-curb,
I discerned, as I thought, beyond the picture,
Through the picture, a something white, uncertain,
Something more of the depths—and then I lost it.
Water came to rebuke the too clear water.
One drop fell from a fern, and lo, a ripple
Shook whatever it was lay there at bottom,
Blurred it, blotted it out. What was that whiteness?
Truth? A pebble of quartz? For once, then, something.

("For Once, Then, Something" is in the public domain.)

~~~~~~~~~~

Molly is exploring the monotetra, a new form created by Michael Walker. I love her results! 

Go check out her work — and all the other Poetry Friday contributions — at Nix the comfort zone. 

You Find What Works and You Do It, Part II

Part 1 is here.

Today I'm taking a look at this question:

"What did you think high school would look like for your oldest and how that has become a reality?"

I'm not sure I had any idea what high school would look like. (I apparently once told my daughters, "We'll deal with that when we get to it.") But that lines up neatly with not really knowing what my life will look like from one year to the next. I like to make plans, but I'm always open to the changes that I know life will throw our way.  And I know that living a deliberate life can certainly be compatible with flexibility and surprises.

What we did know was that we wanted to consider the following as Anne headed into high school:

• Anne's strengths and interests
• Her goals (personal, spiritual, educational, vocational) 
• Her gaps/areas of complete disinterest/weaker areas
• My strengths as a teacher 
• Atticus' strengths as a teacher 
• Outside resources (such as job shadowing or community college classes) 
• What an education means, what it is for: in high school, in college
• The reasons we started homeschooling in the first place 

Atticus adds: "As Robert Frost said, we must have 'the courage to start with insufficient knowledge.'"

And so, with insufficient knowledge, we started.

What we knew:

Reading and discussion have always been at the center of education in our house, so (as I always have) I made booklists:

• books I love
• books Atticus loves
• books Anne loves
• books Anne will love once she reads them
• books everyone should read
• books no one should have to read but everyone does
• books about history
• books about our faith
• books about science
• books about culture
• books about art
• biographies
• poetry
• Shakespeare
• books that defy categorization

I knew I wanted Anne to start keeping her own list -- she kept track of everything she read (which was very helpful down the road at transcript time.)

I knew that we would write (and we've had a weekly writing group with friends since Anne's sophomore year.)

I knew that we would probably use some stuff from The Teaching Company. (Budget note: you can often buy these on sale, or find used copies that are very inexpensive.)*

I knew that we would make use of a math curriculum (because I don't unschool Algebra well. I'm too busy hating advanced math to live it/learn it joyfully and my daughters inherited the anti-math gene from me).

I knew that I would continue making use of Living is Learning Guides -- for ideas, checklists, and resources.

I knew that we would use the community college* (via the early enrollment program), especially for foreign language classes.

I knew that I would be grateful for homeschoolers who blazed the trail and inspired me.

I knew that I would read books about homeschooling through high school. My list:  College Prep Homeschooling, Homeschooling the Teen Years, Homeschooling: A Family's Journey,  Homeschooling Through High School.  I can't say any single book is the book to get but I did take away helpful bits and pieces from each of these. (These days, I would add A Little Way of Homeschooling, but not my chapter -- I didn't have high schoolers when I wrote that, but other contributors did.)

I knew that I would take notes and keep records. I have always kept lots of notes on what we do, no matter how off-the-beaten-school-track it seems.

~~~~~

That's what we knew going in. And my half-formed vision did come into focus, did become the reality. I had a vague idea that high school would be a continuation of the ways in which we've always approached education at our house. For the most part it was, with various periods of panic, doubt, terror, or fatigue. Punctuated with happiness and delight, and saturated in gratitude that we kept going. 

I still have insufficient knowledge, and I'm still tweaking the process -- I'm guessing I won't have this whole high school thing perfected until sometime after Ramona's graduation. Too late for my own girls, but then I can pass my sufficient knowledge on to my daughters, in case they homeschool their offspring. Then they can say, "Mom, everything you did is old and out of date! This is insufficient knowledge!" 

And I'll say, "Yes! It is! Now go read some Robert Frost to your children."

* We ended up using Teaching Company courses for some American history, neurobiology, and math. Anne took courses at the community college and did a great job with Spanish I and II.

Part III is here.
Part IV is here. 

Poetry Friday: "Revival" by Luci Shaw

"What makes a poet a poet? 

The slender antenna of awareness 

combing the air for messages." 

— Luci Shaw

In "Revival" Luci Shaw anticipates spring and, like Shaw, I'm here for it. 

Revival
by Luci Shaw

March. I am beginning
to anticipate a thaw. Early mornings
the earth, old unbeliever, is still crusted with frost
where the moles have nosed up their
cold castings, and the ground cover
in shadow under the cedars hasn't softened
for months, fogs layering their slow, complicated ice
around foliage and stem
night by night,

....

(Read the rest here.) 

~~~~~~~~~~

Rose Cappelli has the Poetry Friday round-up at Imagine the Possibilities. 

Photo courtesy of Don White at Pixabay. 

Poetry Friday: "October" by Paul Laurence Dunbar

A final farewell to October. 

In this one, by the incomparable Paul Laurence Dunbar, October is the haughty "treasurer of the year," caring not for the troubles of the other months, but rather reveling in her royalty, and accepting her final fate. 

Farewell, beloved October! 

October
by Paul Laurence Dunbar

October is the treasurer of the year,
And all the months pay bounty to her store;
The fields and orchards still their tribute bear,
And fill her brimming coffers more and more.
But she, with youthful lavishness,
Spends all her wealth in gaudy dress,
And decks herself in garments bold
Of scarlet, purple, red, and gold.

She heedeth not how swift the hours fly,
But smiles and sings her happy life along;
She only sees above a shining sky;
She only hears the breezes' voice in song.
Her garments trail the woodlands through,
And gather pearls of early dew
That sparkle, till the roguish Sun
Creeps up and steals them every one.

But what cares she that jewels should be lost,
When all of Nature's bounteous wealth is hers?
Though princely fortunes may have been their cost,
Not one regret her calm demeanor stirs.
Whole-hearted, happy, careless, free,
She lives her life out joyously,
Nor cares when Frost stalks o'er her way
And turns her auburn locks to gray.

("October" is in the public domain.)

~~~~~~~~~~~~

Jone Rush MacCulloch is hosting the Poetry Friday round-up this week.

Poetry Friday

Some days it seems as if Atticus and I are in a race to The Writer's Almanac. He beat me to this one the other day, suggesting it for Poetry Friday. I am in complete agreement.

Revival 
by Luci Shaw

March. I am beginning
to anticipate a thaw. Early mornings
the earth, old unbeliever, is still crusted with frost
where the moles have nosed up their
cold castings, and the ground cover
in shadow under the cedars hasn't softened
for months, fogs layering their slow, complicated ice
...

(Read the rest here, at The Writer's Almanac.)

~~~~~

Poetry will be gathered in today at Gathering Books.

Poetry Friday: "Any Common Desolation" by Ellen Bass (and I'm hosting)

I've been quiet here lately but I'm popping in to host Poetry Friday this week, and to share this beauty by Ellen Bass. This poem spoke to me, especially after the results of the election, and I hope it might speak to you too. 

Hug each other, stand for what is right and good, and keep creating and embracing beauty. 

And one other note on hope: Go listen to Dolores Huerta on Julia Louis Dreyfus's podcast, "Wiser Than Me." 

Any Common Desolation
by Ellen Bass

can be enough to make you look up
at the yellowed leaves of the apple tree, the few
that survived the rains and frost, shot
with late afternoon sun. They glow a deep
orange-gold against a blue so sheer, a single bird
would rip it like silk. You may have to break
your heart, but it isn’t nothing
to know even one moment alive. The sound
of an oar in an oarlock or a ruminant
animal tearing grass. The smell of grated ginger.

....

(Read the rest here, at Poets.org.) 

~~~~~~~~~~

Leave your links with the ever-helpful Mr. Linky: 

Poetry Friday: "November Night" by Adelaide Crapsey

I've shared this one before but it's always worth a re-share. 

Maisy thinks so too: 

"Adelaide Crapsey? Inventor of the cinquain?
Oh, yes, please, I'd love that." 

November Night 

by Adelaide Crapsey 

Listen. . .
With faint dry sound,
Like steps of passing ghosts,
The leaves, frost-crisp'd, break from the trees
And fall.

~~~~~~~~~~

Heidi Mordhorst has the Poetry Friday round-up this week at My Juicy Little Universe.