The Voice of An Old Mans Winter Night :: Old Mans Winter Night

The Voice of  An Old Mans Winter Night       Perhaps the most haunting poem in Mountain Interval is An Old Mans Winter Night, a poem about an darkened man dying in the wintry climate of New England and alone.  Here, more so than in The Oven Bird, the comfort of a warm human subject is held out no one who ever responded to a Norman Rockwell magazine c over could but be taken by the sure-enough(a) man, alone in his house (All out-of-doors looked darkly in at him), unable to summon up the resources to hold the winter night at bay What kept his eyes from giving back the gaze Was the lamp tilted near them in his hand. What kept him from remembering what it was That brought him to that creaking room was age. But if lovers of Rockwell had paused over these lines and tried to read and listen to them, they might well have noted how odd is their disposition. The sense of them is that the old man cant dupe out because the lamp wont permit him to see out -- all h e gets back is an image of himself. And if he cannot see out, neither can he see in he is so old that he cant remember how or why he is where he is. But what, in the prose paraphrase are concerned and clement insights into the plight of old age, extend rather different when experienced through the sing-song, rather telegraphic formulations of the lines. As with The Oven Bird there is a heavy use of the verb to be was occurs three time in four lines, something a novice writer of poetry would try to avoid. And there are also three whats, two of which occur in a single line (What kept him from remembering what it was), designed to make it hard to indulge in sad feelings about old age -- one notices the itinerary that age is quietly buried at the very end of the next line. Apropos of his sister Jeanie, Frost claimed that as he grew older he prepare it easier to lie awake and worry about other peoples troubles. But he is at least as much a critic of such sympathetic identification w ith others -- lonely old men or oven birds -- as a practitioner of it. Or rather, some of the best poems in Mountain Interval generalize their energy from the play of movement toward and withdrawal from the subject contemplated, play such as can be seen in two lines further on which tot up the old man in his setting