“take off the dress take off the face/i’ll hold you close before i leave/oh you’ve the darkest eyes”

For Poetry Monday:

My November Guest, Robert Frost

My Sorrow, when she’s here with me,
    Thinks these dark days of autumn rain
Are beautiful as days can be;
She loves the bare, the withered tree;
    She walked the sodden pasture lane.

Her pleasure will not let me stay.
    She talks and I am fain to list:
She’s glad the birds are gone away,
She’s glad her simple worsted gray
    Is silver now with clinging mist.

The desolate, deserted trees,
    The faded earth, the heavy sky,
The beauties she so truly sees,
She thinks I have no eye for these,
    And vexes me for reason why.

Not yesterday I learned to know
    The love of bare November days
Before the coming of the snow,
But it were vain to tell her so,
    And they are better for her praise.


Published as the third poem of his first collection, A Boy’s Will (1913).

---L.

Subject quote from One More Hour, Sleater-Kinney.