Frost
“We had a student who argued that Robert Frost’s poem ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’ was about Christmas… But the argument, though in some ways shaped like a close reading, is weak in an instructive way. It is neither likely nor lovely. It does a poor job of analyzing its evidence. The speaker travels with a horse, not a reindeer, as the student asserted. The tone of resignation—’But I have promises to keep’—doesn’t belong to the idea of Santa as we understand him.”
—Dan Sinykin and Johanna Winant, Close Reading for the Twenty-First Century
You have no idea. Of course there’s no way you could know
How many flapping maps I’ve had to unfold and decipher (although
The Internet helps), nor how hard this velocity makes it to hear
The team wheezing under my reins, nor how the receding snow
Line, warmer oceans and greener Decembers require
Horses, since Nordic mounts overheat, even so near
Historic regions of skis, firs, tiny berries, and once reliable lake
Ice to touch down on. Everything’s melting. Each year
It’s tougher to see you as worth it: I can’t shake
The notion that I’m in the wrong line of work, a mistake
Nobody alive now can fix. I’d look like a wasted chimney sweep,
A miner or a photographer’s glitch by morning if I gave every pre-teen flake,
Test-acer or social climber the lump you carbon fans so deep-
Ly deserve. Even the littlest, who still trust me, won’t keep
Their joy: they’ll stumble back into their polyacrylate sleep,
Then grow up to burn the world more. The truth is I sleep
All summer, my naughty list under my pillow, till it gets longer than my sleep-
Less nights. Once I wanted to save you: tonight it feels hope-
Less, a drunkard’s walk in a too-tight harness, a hoary hoax
We perpetrate. Wind chafes my wrists, cold scores my cheeks, and ten thousand hom-
Ing pigeons could do what I do. I wish I could stop at a stable, or a ho-
Tel, or even a manger. I can’t quit. Maybe I just need sleep.