Lovely, dark, and deep

It's very odd. Of late I've been thinking in snippets of lyrics, songs and poems. I've always found a great deal of comfort in song, why I doubt I'll ever know. It seems to resonate with my soul somehow. What's more odd for me is the prevalence of poetry in my internal thought process. I can account for the random appearance of the Beatles in my thoughts: they play at work and the Across the Universe soundtrack has completely captured my fancy. It's the presence of poetry that I find odd.

I'm a poli sci major, not lit. Several people over the years have remarked on the oddity of that to them: sure it's my bent and I know it, but they figured me for a literature major. No one ever did tell me why. But when I think back to Rome I think in snippets of Wilbur: the Piazza di Spagna at sunrise, how ceremony never did conceal how much we are the woods we wander in (oh how that resonates with me even now, much to my chagrin). When I think of school I find random phrases half remembered from Writing Workshop winging their way in. And lately it's been Frost. Funny, really. I never cared for Frost. I found his meaning far too obscured in his New England particulars: what did I know of stone walls making good neighbors, or birch trees bent by ice storms, or woods of any type? I've only ever loved one Frost poem, and I've been in love with half a stanza of "Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening" since before I knew it was poetry: "The woods are lovely, dark and deep/but I have promises to keep/ and miles to go before I sleep,/and miles to go before I sleep." It's that woods bit that gets me every time. Lovely, dark, and deep: there's something so... I don't even know in it. And I always wanted to get lost in woods that way.

And the whole poem of his I liked? It sticks in my mind more then anything, especially when I think of school now:

We dance around in a circle and suppose
while the secret sits in the middle and knows.

I was told by my one Frostian expert friend that this little couplet of his was among the more overlooked of his writings, because it's too open ended and difficult. I suppose its open ended, but I love it for it. It's the only poem of his I can think of that doesn't have an ounce of New England imagery in it, and it hardly suffers from it. There's something so human about the thing, and if you ask me why I can't tell you, just like I can't tell you why Wordsworth's dancing daffodils send a thrill through my soul, or why Wilbur's Ceremony is so frustrating and true. I guess that's why people do literature as a major: because if you had the ability, why would you ever want that feeling to go away.