View Single Post
  #27  
Unread 10-16-2017, 12:28 PM
RCL's Avatar
RCL RCL is offline
Member
 
Join Date: Oct 2000
Location: Los Angeles, CA
Posts: 6,761
Default

Douglas, ain’t it the truth!?


Acquainted with the Kite

after Frost, Schulz, Charlie Brown and Dante

I have been one acquainted with the kite.
I have exposed it to the wind and rain.
I have released my kite to errant flight.

I have relaxed fall flights near Lovers’ Lane.
I let it swoop near Lucy on our street
And looked away, expecting she’d complain.

It had annoyed some birds, who sang Defeat!
But I heard Marcie’s sigh and Snoopy’s cry.
And Pigpen’s: Do it, Chaz. Don’t get beat.

Make your gnarly marks up in the sky.
I let my paper kite rise out of sight
When Franklin shouted: Charlie, fly it high—

Kite-Eating Trees will always bite for spite!
I have been one acquainted with the kite.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poe...acquainted-wit


(Aside: That stilted column of I’s, and its repetitions elsewhere, along with all those end-stopped lines, make me suspect Frost isn’t crazy about N’s overly formalized egocentricity—as in, “Who in hell hasn’t been acquainted with the night!” Plus that evasive “time was neither wrong nor right”! Closing a neat, if not vicious, circle, arc-welded by the echoing rhymes of start and finish. I don’t buy that Frost himself was much depressed, but rather clever, as usual, in a roundabout way.)
__________________
Ralph

Last edited by RCL; 10-16-2017 at 12:32 PM.
Reply With Quote