Poetry Blog 6

I really loved "Desert Places" by Robert Frost. It took reading it a few times and jotting down some notes for me to fully understand it's meaning, but once I grasped the concept, I completely related to it. I think by titling the poem "Desert Places," Frost is referring more to places that are deserted, rather than a desert--what he describes is not at all a place with cacti and lizards--and the poem is all about loneliness. I have always felt that winter is a really lonely season, maybe because I tend to stay inside a lot, usually working on homework alone; maybe because animals migrate or hibernate and all the plants die. But I definitely understood what Frost meant when he described everything as becoming lonely. I loved the two middle stanzas after I read them a few times: "The woods around it have it--it is theirs./ All animals are smothered in their lairs./ I am too absent spirited to count;/ The loneliness included me unawares." This stanza, it took me a bit to realize, is talking about loneliness. The field has it, the woods have it because all the animals are beneath the snow in hibernation, and even the narrator has it: I took "too absent-minded to count" as meaning too mentally absent to count as being there, and by the last line he means the loneliness sort of absorbed him without his knowing. The next stanza I figured "ere" to mean "before" and it made sense that he would say, "And lonely as it is that loneliness/ Will be more lonely ere it will be less--," because things always get worse (including winter) before they get better. I also liked how he concluded by talking about how sometimes places on earth can seem just as lonely and isolated as outer space. And i thought it rhymes were very creative and pleasing to read, specifically when he rhymes "race is" with "places." This poem was unexpectedly good.