Robert Frost - "Desert Places": Lonely in the crowd
They cannot scare me with their empty spaces / Between stars--on stars where no human race is.
When I went back to reread this poem, I decided to try reading it aloud, as we did in class with other poems during our poetry slam, and I was surprised by the way I interpreted these lines.
It seems to me that here the speaker is brushing aside the empty spaces between the stars and the planets as if they're negligible simply because they are not home to the "human race."
It's a little odd that he feels that loneliness is more prevalent on a populated planet than on an empty star. I think that maybe he is alluding to a feeling that I am familiar with: the feeling that, in a crowded room full of people, one is still alone.
Comments
My favorite poem by Robert Frost is "The Road Not Taken"
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I-
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
Source:
famouspoetsandpoems.com
Posted by: Helen | May 8, 2006 7:02 AM