The Voice of An Old Mans Winter Night :: Old Mans Winter Night

The Voice of  An Old Mans overwinter Night       Perhaps the closely haunting poem in Mountain Interval is An Old Mans Winter Night, a poem ab off an antiquated man dying in the wintry climate of New England and al bingle.  Here, more so than in The Oven Bird, the comfortableness of a warmly human subject is held out no one who ever responded to a Norman Rockwell magazine cover could but be taken by the venerable man, alone in his house ( all(prenominal) out-of-doors looked darkly in at him), unable to summon up the resources to hold the winter night at bay What unbroken his eyeball from giving back the gaze Was the lamp tilted near them in his hand. What kept him from retrieve what it was That brought him to that creaking room was age. solely if lovers of Rockwell had paused over these lines and tried to indicate and listen to them, they might well have noted how odd is their disposition. The experience of them is that the old man cant see out because the lamp wont permit him to see out -- all he gets back is an image of himself. And if he cannot see out, neither can he see in he is so old that he cant remember how or why he is where he is. But what, in the prose paraphrase are concerned and sympathetic insights into the plight of old age, sound rather different when experienced through the sing-song, rather telegraphic formulations of the lines. As with The Oven Bird there is a heavy use of the verb to be was occurs three times in four lines, something a novice author of poetry would try to avoid. And there are also three whats, both of which occur in a single line (What kept him from remembering what it was), designed to make it hard to indulge in sad feelings somewhat old age -- one notices the way that age is quietly conceal at the very end of the next line. Apropos of his sister Jeanie, rhyme claimed that as he grew older he found it easier to lie energise and worry about other peoples troubles. But he is at le ast as much a critic of much(prenominal) sympathetic naming with others -- lonely old men or oven birds -- as a practitioner of it. Or rather, some of the best poems in Mountain Interval descend their energy from the play of movement toward and withdrawal from the subject contemplated, play such as can be seen in two lines further on which summarize the old man in his setting