Monday 9 June

This is a PS to my earlier post. For some reason I was thinking about the poet A E Housman — no, I remember why; it was because when I was scrolling through Instagram yesterday, I came upon Judy Dench reciting ‘Loveliest of Trees,’ school-girlishly, then with her mischievous smile. I was pleased that I could still recite it along with her.

It came to me that ‘Loveliest of Trees’ must have helped inspire Robert Frost’s poem ‘Stopping by woods on a Snowy Evening,’ but to what a enormous difference of tone. Housman’s being pure reason (and joy) and Frost’s poem very dark, as every reader, even a schoolchild must intuitively understand, without the help of Joseph Brodsky’s brilliant essay. I also read Housman’s ‘Shropshire Lad XXX’’ and notice that he speaks of ‘fire and ice,’ not perhaps coincidently the title of another Frost poem: “Some say the world will end in fire, Some say in ice…’

This naive discovery exemplified for me the difference between Romanticism and Classicism. Duh!