I read Bereft by Robert Frost after a long time today. I had been in love with this poem since the time I read an excerpt from it in an Erich Segal novel in my early teens. It is dark, weirdly rhythmic despite a very odd rhyming scheme, it is about loneliness, and even more so about the fear that comes with that loneliness.
Bereft
Where had I heard this wind before
Change like this to a deeper roar?
What would it take my standing there for,
Holding open a restive door,
Looking down hill to a frothy shore?
Summer was past and the day was past.
Sombre clouds in the west were massed.
Out on the porch's sagging floor,
Leaves got up in a coil and hissed,
Blindly striking at my knee and missed.
Something sinister in the tone
Told me my secret my be known:
Word I was in the house alone
Somehow must have gotten abroad,
Word I was in my life alone,
Word I had no one left but God.
My love for poetry began as a kid with Robert Frost. 'Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening' remains till date one of my favorite poems. Stopping by the woods was the beginning of my love-affair with dark poetry laced with cold imagery. Yet, all was not dark and morose. Some of the happiest memories of my boyhood years revolve around enjoying the pleasures of masterpieces by Lewis Carrol, Edward Lear, Ogden Nash and our very own Sukumar Ray. But even in this genre, my favorites remain the macabre 'Macavity the Mystery Cat' by Eliot or the quiet, funny reflections in poetry by Roald Dahl and Ogden Nash. Sonnets 18 and 116 of William Shakespeare led me to love poetry. In the meantime, I tried my hand at writing some of my own, mostly self-indulgent attempts at unrequited love poetry, sad and morose, though in this case, more so by the circumstances of my inspiration than a taste for gloom. Through adolescence and if I may term it so, early adult life, I have often turned to poetry for inspiration (Whitman), beauty of language and the power of metaphor (Donne, Herbert) simplicity (Jonson), quiet reflection and rhyme (Seth) escapism (Nash, Lear) or the sheer beauty of words (Neruda). And while the uplifting and inspiring works of Whitman or the drama in Donne's works have at various times blown away and enchanted me, more often than not I turn to poetry for gloom, subtlety and irony, which is were Frost, Daruwalla and to some extent, Vikram Seth give rich dividends.
