Some times the most seemingly unrelated things entwine in your brain like one big colorful tangle you can no way make out. It happens with song lyrics, poems, even ad jingles or these gross Jumbo ads that play on the radio all the time, like a brain deja-pense (thought equivalent to deja-vu) that tumbles in your brain and won’t go away.
Like when I read a fragment of verse from a poem last night…
“Miles to go before I sleep”…………..
“and many promises to keep” echoed in my sleepy mind, searching its endless (so not) lyric database. I finally remembered where I had last read this verse (my translation of The last book in the Universe) but I had to google the poet (sorry, Robert) and voila! Stopping by woods on a snowy evening, by Robert Frost:
Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.
My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.
He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound’s the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.
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.
Now this is what I call Music In Poetry.
This has been playing in my head all day and really reminds me of one of my favorite songs by Leonard Cohen, Famous Blue Raincoat:
“…I hear that you’re building
your little house
deep in the desert
you’re living for nothing now
i hope you’re keeping,
some kind of record…”
The man to whom Cohen is writing is for me the same man whose woods these are in the Frost poem. Maybe the rider is Cohen himself, going down there to see if Jane’s with that other man…
And that, for me, is Poetry in Music….
