Time Out
Nuno Amado
Every time I linger on Frost’s collected poems, I stop at this one and think that I shouldn’t have forgotten the impact of reading it, more than the poem itself or that extraordinary line made of names of plants. It is true that the situation at the outset of the poem shares the basic situation of other poems by Frost, and it is a standing point we recognise as the axis of this limpid juxtaposition between poetry and speculation: a stop on the way, a clear situation in “The Road not Taken” (“long I stood”) or “Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening”, for example, where the interruptions in the poem mimic those of the journey, and make reflection its natural course.
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