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18. Dust of Snow / New Hampshire(1923) - Robert Frost
The way a crow
Shook down on me
The dust of snow
From a hemlock tree
Has given my heart
A change of mood
And saved some part
Of a day I had rued.
rue : 후회하다, 뉘우치다, 비탄
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가루눈
까마귀 한 마리가
솔송나무를 흔들어
내 머리에 퍼부은
가루눈이
내 가슴의
기분을 전환하여
슬픔에 젖었던 하루의
일부를 구원했다.
-신재실 옮김-
단상(斷想): 추운 겨울이다. 요사이 제대로 되는 일이 없다. 슬프고 짜증스럽다. 어젯밤 친구와 술을 마셨다. 하찮은 일로 언성을 높였다. 이래저래 잠을 설치다 늦잠이 들었다. 어쩌다 눈을 떠보니 해가 중천에 있다. 몸이 무겁다. 친구와 다툰 것이 못내 슬프다. 죽마고우 아닌가? 삶이 고단하니 공연한 트집을 부렸구나. 나 자신이 슬프고 밉다.
간밤에 눈이 내렸나보다. 창문을 연다. 30년 된 솔송나무에 하얀 눈꽃이 피었다. 하얀 눈꽃과 함께 상큼한 소나무 향기가 나를 이끈다. 나무 아래에 서니 마침 까만 까마귀가 나를 환영하듯 가지를 흔든다. 머리에 하얀 꽃가루가 쏟아진다. 내가 눈을 드니 가라앉았던 내 마음도 하늘을 본다. 기분이 상쾌하다. 늘 푸른 솔송나무, 하얀 눈꽃, 까마귀의 경쾌한 동작과 더불어 나도 춤을 춘다. 자연은 영원한 벗이다. 오늘도 즐거운 하루가 될 것이다.
-신재실 씀-
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ROBERT FROST
SPEAKING ON CAMPUS
Contents
Introduction
Getting up things to say for yourself
Where poetry comes in
Handling figures of speech
“Anxiety for the Liberal Arts”
A book side to everything
Not freedom from, but freedom of
Of rapid reading and what we call “completion”
No surprise to me, no surprise to anybody else
Pieces of knitting to go on with
Everything in the world comes in pairs
My kind of fooling
About “the great misgiving”
Wondering how convictions are had
Something you live by till you live by something else
Some gamble—something of uncertainty
The future of the world
Hang around for the refinement of sentiment
What I think I’m doing when I write a poem
Of the “elect” and the “elected”
Fall in love at sight
Thinking about generalizations
“In on the Ground Floor”
A certain restlessness
About thinking and of perishing to shine
A gentler interest in the fine things
Let’s say bravely…that poetry counts
I’ll tell you a little about my walks
Editor’s Note
References
The future of the world
During 1958 Mr. Frost was named Consultant in Poetry at the Library of Congress an appointment that would lead to his becoming, two years later, the library’s Honorary Consultant in the Humanities. In the text that follows, from a presentation made at the University of Iowa on April 13, 1959 (less than three weeks after a gala observance in New York City of the poet’s eighty-fifth birthday), he refers to meeting “some scientists pretty soon, in a big way,” that being his intended participation in an international symposium on “The Future of Man,” which was to be held at New York City in late-September 1959.
WHEREVER I GOthey talk about me as if I was a wise guy, as if I had some sort of wisdom. And a young reporter in Washington the other day came to consult me about my wisdom—right like that. (I’m a consultant in the library down there for the year, just for the moment.) He said he wanted to ask me about the future of the world.
I said: “You want to know […] about the future of the world? All right, I’ll do the best I can.
“The future of the world. Well,” I said, “hard as it is to tell about the past of the world”—(Everybody gets it different every time he writes a book, the Greeks and the Romans—and the Hittites; they must have been baseball players, I think!—and all that sort of thing.)—“hard as it is to get the past, it’s harder to get the future.
“But listen,” I said, “the future is going to be much the same as the present”—(This is me telling him.)—“for a long, long time, and maybe to end with.
“You see, there have been evolutionary changes, all down the ages, that we are the tip-front of. But many branches of the evolutionary thing have just come to nothing. They’ve died out. And I think our tip is about to die out; the next hundred thousand years or so. But it’s not going any further. There’s never going to be any superman,” I told him. You see, never.
Now it’s me talking. And then I said: “You know, this is the analogy: When a man gets so that he’s thoroughly self-conscious, his growth stops. And we are the self-consciousness of creation.”
That scare you? We are the self-consciousness of creation. Creation has reached its self-consciousness in us. And that means we’re going to fold out, spread out, and all that. But this is a dead end—hundred thousand years from now. (I just don’t set the date. I’m cautious about that.) And that’s good.
I’m going to meet some scientists pretty soon, in a big way, who are interested in us this way. I say reached a point of high self-consciousness, which is completion. But they say that we’ve reached a point where we can take our own evolution in hand and make ourselves anything we please. (And that’s amusing, too, their prediction against my prediction.)
I said, “Don’t believe ’em.”—I told this fellow, this newspaperman. And he went off and reported that I’d nominated Kennedy for President. You never know what a newspaperman will get out of it! I hadn’t mentioned Kennedy then. But that’s what he got out of it.
The beautiful thing—just to linger a minute longer—I told him the beautiful thing about that is that science may talk as it pleases—(And it is the greatest enterprise of all enterprises.)—but whose enterprise is it? It’s ours.
And what’s the best statement of who we are? It’s man’s enterprise, and what’s the best statement of what man is? The best statement of what man is is all the literature, all the music,all the humanities of the past. It’s a very, very enormous thing, a very great thing.
It’s slowly realized in life but that man is the owner and manager and director of science. That makes the reconciliation with science and the humanities.
Humanities is an attempt, anyway, to describe the man whose enterprise is science. Get that. The history of the world describes the man whose enterprise science is.
It’s our enterprise. Very grand thing; all for it, we all are, the enterprise. But it doesn’t mean that that enterprise will ever tell you anything about our personal relations with each other, our passions and our loves and hates and all that. That will never be touched by science.
That’s us; that’s man. And he is the owner and swayer and manager, altogether, of science. And there’s no antagonism at all. Heroism and glory and all are in this enterprise of ours, clear into anywhere you want to go.
I’m in a position to tease the scientists about what they are talking about doing, but haven’t done yet. I think it’s a great joke. Here we are; you’d think we were in the moon tomorrow.
A friend of mine, talking to me on the telephone from England, said he was in favor of stopping science. And I said to him, “But you’re not in favor of stopping literature, even when it’s a little pornographic.”
He said, “You have me there.” And I said: “What do you want to stop science for? It’s our science. It’s our greatness.” And he said: “Well, I don’t want the moon spoiled. That’s for lovers.”
That’s sentimental talk, you see. But wherever we go, we’ll be earthlings going—earthlings—and we’d better take our lunch with us. […]
You have to think that all over. You have to think about who has the best description of what we are. Who? It’s too big to talkabout: all the great drama, the great poems, the great songs, the great histories.
Thucydides; everybody’s in it, you know, with their great history like that. Herodotus is in it. And whatarewe?
Now, you can’t believe that any extempore talker like me or any extempore psychiatrist or psychologist can give you a better description of what we are than that vast book of the past, the book of the worthies and unworthies. […]
And then I turn from that. My poetry is only a little contribution to that book of the worthies and unworthies—what they call the “wisdom,” all the vast wisdom of it all—that is the description of us, the statement of us, of man.
And when you wonder what the humanities are, that’s what they pretend to be—anyway, what they undertake to be—to cover that: all the poetry in prose and verse of many languages; prose and verse, mind you. And religion—with the Bible; the strange wisdom that’s scattered through the Bible and all that—that’s got to do with it.
—at Dartmouth College, May 13, 1952:
PERHAPSI ought to say that the more dangerous a thing is, the more beautiful it is. Everything beautiful, that’s truly beautiful, is dangerous.
ALLthere is to your life and mine is mixing with everybody. That’s all, in the give and take. And as soon as that gets discovered and there’s too much give on one hand and too much take on the other—as between a professor and his class it can be, it could be, it might be (It’s always the fear of the professor with his class, that it’s too much give on his end and too much take on their end.)—that’s a disorder.