Sherry Chandler

We get letters…

…from guys named Charlie.

Charlie Whitt has lost a round of “Stump the Poet” and is calling for a friend for help with this mystery plant:

Can anyone identify this wild plant. Note the little purplish-brown flower. It looks something like pawpaw.

Has a sort of Mayapple look. Anybody out there recognize it?

Meanwhile, Charlie Hughes, having read my little rant about explicating Frost, points us to:

these helpful comments by Bob Sloan responding to a couple of students’ on-line requests for help with their homework

Sure I’ll help you with your homework, says Bob:

Robert Frost was, of course, a New England peasant-farmer, which makes it clear why you’d come to alt.appalachian.literature for this information. He was also notoriously homosexual, and unlike some of his nature poems, this one [Acquainted With The Night] is one of his simplest to understand. He is being quite literal, quite plain spoken, though a European might easily miss the fact this is essentially a description of a gay man’s prowl through city streets, at a time when such behavior was, in this country, fraught with danger.

…Poems like “Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening” are far more obscure in their imagery, though “My little horse must think it queer…” does make clear what’s really going on.

Wonder what my son’s high school English teacher would have made of that interpretation?

Be sure to read the whole interpretation of Frost’s “Acquainted with the Night” and the following treatment of The Catcher And the Rye.

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