Wednesdays with Words: From Delight to Wisdom

Our poet for this term is Robert Frost. AmblesideOnline schedules him in Year 6, which Mr. D is doing, but I decided to read his poetry during Morning Time and memorize another of his poems together (we memorized “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” several years ago). I will probably just read from the Ambleside selections, but I did find a nice hardback edition of The Complete Poems of Robert Frost at Half Price Books, and the beauty of the last paragraph of Frost’s introductory essay caught my eye:

More than once I should have lost my soul to radicalism if it had been the originality it was mistaken for by its young converts. Originality and initiative are what I ask for my country. For myself the originality need be no more than the freshness of a poem run in the way I have described: from delight to wisdom. The figure is the same as for love. Like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting. A poem may be worked over once it is in being, but may not be worried into being. Its most precious quality will remain its having run itself and carried away the poet with it. Read it a hundred times: it will forever keep its freshness as a metal keeps its fragrance. It can never lose its sense of a meaning that once unfolded by surprise as it went.

Also read/listened to in the past week:

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