November 2023 - My November Guest

We New Englanders know well the sorrow of November: The darkness of foreshortened days, the decay of frost-blackened blooms, the fresh grief of an empty place at the Thanksgiving table. Robert Frost, too, knew November’s sorrow; but, as he reveals in this month’s featured poem, he also knew its beauty.

My November Guest

by Robert Frost

My sorrow, when she’s here with me,
     Thinks these dark days of autumn rain
Are beautiful as days can be;
She loves the bare, the withered tree;
     She walks the sodden pasture lane.

Her pleasure will not let me stay.
     She talks and I am fain to list:
She’s glad the birds are gone away,
She’s glad her simple worsted grey
     Is silver now with clinging mist.

The desolate, deserted trees,
     The faded earth, the heavy sky,
The beauties she so truly sees,
She thinks I have no eye for these,
     And vexes me for reason why.

Not yesterday I learned to know
     The love of bare November days
Before the coming of the snow,
But it were vain to tell her so,
     And they are better for her praise.

Robert Frost (1874 –1963), the 1892 co-valedictorian of Lawrence High School, won the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry four times - a feat no other poet has yet accomplished. “My November Guest” is included in Frost’s debut collection, A Boy’s Will, published in 1913. The poem is now in the public domain.