It's a real education to work with a poem like "Stopping by Woods" or "Mending Wall" in a classroom of first or second year college students and discover how baffling many of them find the seemingly mild inversions of those first lines. Although my policy has always been that learning poetry is good for its own sake, the experience is a reminder that some of the most expressive and suble resources of the language go unused in daily life -- and that daily life is poorer for their absence. I always hope that a few students discover that an idea or feeling can be approached from various directions and that the destination is always a little different for our having reached it in a different way. Part of being anywhere, maybe the biggest part, is how we got there.
RPW
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