美国人物志:罗伯特·弗罗斯特 （二）（8/9)

英语自学网

罗伯特·弗罗斯特是20世纪最受欢迎的美国诗人。他曾赢得4次普利策奖和许多其他的奖励及荣誉，被称之为美国文学中的桂冠诗人。
Hints:
Robert Frost
Emerson
"Desert Places"
stubble
smothered
absent-spirited
benighted

sub_523.gif

btn_listen1974123.gif

Among Frost's nature poems, there are more about winter than about any other season. Even the poems about spring, autumn, or summer remember winter. They are not poems about happiness found in nature. They are moments of resistance to time and its changes. And even the poems that tell stories are mainly pictures of people who are alone.
Frost shared with Emerson the idea that everybody was a separate individual, and that groups weakened individuals. But where Emerson and those who followed him looked at God and saw a creator, Frost saw what he says is "no expression, nothing to express.” Frost sees the world as a "desert place.”
In a poem called "Desert Places," he says:
Snow falling and night falling fast, oh, fast
In a field I looked into going past,
And the ground almost covered smooth in snow,
But a few weeds and stubble showing last.
The woods around it have it, it is theirs.
All animals are smothered in their lairs.
I am too absent-spirited to count;
The loneliness includes me unawares.
And lonely as it is that loneliness
Will be more lonely ere it will be less--
A blanker whiteness of benighted snow
With no expression, nothing to express.
They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between stars, on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places.