The Voice of An Old Mans Winter Night :: Old Mans Winter Night

The Voice of  An Old Mans winter Night       Perhaps the most haunting poem in Mountain breakup is An Old Mans Winter Night, a poem about an gray-haired man dying in the wintry climate of New England and al oneness.  Here, more so than in The Oven Bird, the comfort of a warmly human subject is held out no one who ever responded to a Norman Rockwell magazine cover could but be taken by the old man, alone in his house (All out-of-doors looked darkly in at him), unable to summon up the resources to hold the winter dark at bay What kept his eyes from giving back the gaze Was the lamp tilted near them in his hand. What kept him from remembering what it was That brought him to that creaking room was age. only when if lovers of Rockwell had paused over these lines and tried to read and listen to them, they might well have noted how odd is their disposition. The sense of them is that the old man cant see out because the lamp wont support him to see out -- al l he gets back is an image of himself. And if he cannot see out, neither can he see in he is so old that he cant remember how or why he is where he is. But what, in the prose paraphrase are concerned and sympathetic insights into the plight of old age, sound rather different when experienced through the sing-song, rather telegraphic formulations of the lines. As with The Oven Bird there is a heavy use of the verb to be was occurs terzetto times in four lines, something a novice writer of poetry would try to avoid. And there are also three whats, two of which occur in a single line (What kept him from remembering what it was), designed to make it hard to indulge in sad feelings about old age -- one notices the way that age is quietly buried at the very end of the next line. Apropos of his sister Jeanie, Frost claimed that as he grew older he found it easier to lie awake and worry about other peoples troubles. But he is at least as much a critic of such(prenominal) sympathetic identi fication with others -- lonely old men or oven birds -- as a practitioner of it. Or rather, some of the best poems in Mountain Interval derive their energy from the play of movement toward and withdrawal from the subject contemplated, play such as can be seen in two lines further on which summarize the old man in his setting