Robert Frost has taken over our life here at the Whitmer estate. It started with my maternal grandmother, who died a couple years back. My daughter, now seven, is more than a little on the sensitive side, and fixated on her death.

It turns out that of all the things I'm lousy at as a parent, it's dealing with grief at which I'm lousiest. I don't believe in God, cosmic energy, universal life connections, nor any of the other shit you can use to platitudinize a child. But I knew her grandmother's favorite poet was Robert Frost, so I suggested we read a poem or two when she got sad. And it seemed to work.

And, unsurprisingly, she got a little obsessed. And lately my five-year-old boy's been joining in, so we've been reading a poem or two at bedtime. They're pretty perfect for reading with children, in that there's always stuff to figure out, and nice concrete images.

They're also really, really dark. Before I actually read much of him, I had Frost pegged as the kind of cute, folksy shit I avoid like sitcoms and Starbucks music. But, Jesus, they're dark. Brooding and menacing and full of doom and gloom.

Example #1, his first poem from his first collection, A Boy's Will:

Into My Own

ONE of my wishes is that those dark trees,

So old and firm they scarcely show the breeze,

Were not, as 'twere, the merest mask of gloom,

But stretched away unto the edge of doom.

I should not be withheld but that some day

Into their vastness I should steal away,

Fearless of ever finding open land,

Or highway where the slow wheel pours the sand.

I do not see why I should e'er turn back,

Or those should not set forth upon my track

To overtake me, who should miss me here

And long to know if still I held them dear.

They would not find me changed from him they knew—

Only more sure of all I thought was true.

Update: If there's a better epitaph I don't know what it is. (Picture pilfered from here.)

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