Catherine:
Your personal connection to the poem is striking. Each of us finds a private way into the public utterance of a poem, and I think one of the marks of a great poet is that there are so very many openings.
On another thread there's some talk of what I think of Frost's dialogue poems, often dialogues between a man and a woman, husband and wife. This one is a dialogue without words, but the two strands of the conversation add up to a shared world. The woman's music and man's labor -- neither complete without the other. (Frost isn't naive, of course, and doesn't imagine that a woman's only contribution is music and a man's only contribution labor. In this particular conversation at this particular moment, however, that's what's going on.)
Another of his man-woman dialogues without words is "Never Again Would Birds' Song Be the Same." There too the woman's voice is the music that she has enabled the man to hear in sounds that would otherwise be prosaic.
As a critic I run into many, many poems that seem to offer me no entrance and thus no opportunity to be entranced. I try to leave them for later in hopes that my experience and the poet's will someday overlap enough to let me in. But sometimes, alas, I suspect that the poet takes a perverse pride in excluding all but the select few. Maybe that's just me being defensive, however.
Richard
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