Tag Archives: Poems

Fire and Ice

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I’ve decided, during this time of uncertainty, to learn off by heart a short poem or fragment of a poem, every second day. Here’s today’s from Robert Frost’s  “Fire and Ice.”

Some say the world will end in fire,

Some say in ice.

From what I’ve tasted of desire

I hold with those who favour fire.

I must say I too prefer fire, but thinking about it – give me both.

Daffodils

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Yesterday, in the soft rain, I walked over to where we park our car. The sky and everything else seemed so grey – all a bit depressing. Then I saw them, pressed up against the trunk of a tree, a glorious clump of Daffodils. As I looked at them I was ushered into my day with a new sense of joy and vigour, and my mind turned to one of my favourite poets:

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;

 

Champing The Grasses

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This morning I stopped alongside a fence and listened to a horse grazing in the field. It was a beautiful sound, breathy and hollow with an echoing kind of chomp, punctuated now and then by the slight sound of the grinding of teeth. It was a lovely moment and I was transported back to some of the words of a favourite poem of mine, “The Listeners” by Walter de La Mare:

Is there anybody there? said the Traveller,   
   Knocking on the moonlit door;
And his horse in the silence champed the grasses   
   Of the forest’s ferny floor:
I loved, and still love, the phrase – “The forest’s ferny floor” –  I can go on saying it forever – “The forest’s ferny floor” – and I can hear his horse in the silence champing away at the grasses.