Robert Frost, one of the foremost American poets of the 20th Century, wrote much about the natural world, often as a way of exploring human psychology and aspects of the human condition. He was a farmer in the first decade of the last century, clearly something that was formative, though he went on to be a jack of all trades.

Frost is popular for many reasons - he eschews the obscurity and difficulty of modernism - so one can pick up a volume and read quite happily about snowy evenings in the woods, the end of the apple-picking season, mending farm walls, swinging from birch branches and so forth. But of course, there is inevitably a deeper meaning, or meanings, which make the lighter reading more satisfying.

I am thinking of Frost today because yesterday a huge tree down the road was chopped down and is in the process of being carted away. Yes, it was dying or most nearly dead but it was also a perch for countless birds. From a window in my back room, I watched them in the mornings as the sun rose and in the evenings when the branches and trunk lit up with the glow of fading sunlight. It had to come down sometime, I know. and Frost would doubtless have found a way of writing about it. That would have been a lovely epitaph.

In the next post, I'll compose a poem on the subject in a Frostian style, though likely, with a genuflection to Thomas Hardy.