March 10th, 2014

Poetic License

by Brian Walker, Greg Walker and Chance Browne

In 1962, my fourth-grade teacher, Mrs. McCormick, had us memorize a number of classic poems and recite them every day.  One that I still remember is “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Morning” by Robert Frost.

Frost penned these evocative lines at his Shaftsbury, Vermont house in 1922.  After working all night on the long poem, “New Hampshire,” he went out to see the sunrise.  Inspired, he claimed he wrote the new poem “about the snowy evening and the little horse as if I’d had a hallucination” in just “a few minutes without strain.” In a later letter Frost described it as “my best bid for remembrance.”

In 1999, my elementary school memories triggered an idea for a Hi and Lois Sunday page.

Hi and Lois Sunday page, February 7, 1999.

I wonder what might have happened if Frost got chased off his neighbor’s property back in 1922.  He might not have written his wonderful ode to winter.

– Brian Walker