“To the Thawing Wind,” from A Boy’s Will (1913), by Robert Frost (1874-1963):
Come with rain, O loud Southwester!
Bring the singer, bring the nester;
Give the buried flower a dream;
Make the settled snowbank steam;
Find the brown beneath the white;
But whate’er you do tonight,
Bathe my window, make it flow,
Melt it as the ice will go;
Melt the glass and leave the sticks
Like a hermit’s crucifix;
Burst into my narrow stall;
Swing the picture on the wall;
Run the rattling pages o’er;
Scatter poems on the floor;
Turn the poet out of door.
Books recently acquired from various sale racks and discount bins:
- The Faber Book of Gay Short Fiction, edited by Edmund White
- With Chatwin: Portrait of a Writer, Susannah Clapp
- Alexander Solzhenitsyn: A Century in His Life, D. M. Thomas
- The Poetry of Robert Frost, edited by Edward Connery Lathem