To the Thawing Wind REVIEW
An ode is a poem written to an object that leads to some revelation. (See John Keats’ Ode to a Nightingale. People have written odes to belt sanders, fish, and spoons. Robert Frost’s “Ode to the Thawing Wind” thus follows a long tradition dating back centuries.
In the poem, Frost personifies a spring warm front and asks a favor of it. Or rather, two favors. The first favor involves bring Spring back to frozen nature and the second request is to drive the barricaded poet out into that nature.
To the Thawing Wind
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.
Frost is asking for some outside force to intrude into his monastic isolation and force him from the contemplation of words to the experience of the thing itself. One could imagine a contemporary petition made in a similar vein to “unplug the blogger’s computer” or better yet, shut his electricity right off – or to set the novel-readers bookshelves on fire and drive him out into the world of living humans where he can participate in his own life’s plotline.
Question for Comment: What makes you make the effort to experience life rather than settle for watching it?
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