JANUARY JOURNAL: DAY 30
Bauer is memorizing "The Road Not Taken" for school, and I've joined in. This wonderful Robert Frost poem is my new bathroom counter memory work.
As I've been working on it, something about the rhythm of the poem brought to mind another Frost poem I had copied on an index card years ago and stuck in the early pages of my first commonplace book. That was at least fifteen years ago. Memory work works.
"Fire and Ice" is addicting, to know the words and say them on beat, and to ponder them even moreso.
After I remembered this old poem, I was reading through my commonplace book as I often do, just swimming around in my collection of quotes for fun. For me, it's the experience of looking for treasure in a place where treasure is sure to be found. Here's what I landed on while thinking about poetry:
Domenica...had not thought of the poem for years. But Burns was still there, engraved in her memory, drummed into her as a small child at school, in an age when children still learned poetry by heart, and took those lines as baggage, for comfort throughout their lives. (Alexander McCall Smith, in The Unbearable Lightness of Scones)
I hope my kids don't have to carry much baggage from their childhood, but I'm happy to load them up with some weighty Frost lines. Carry them forever, children, and let them do their beautiful work in you.