A Time To Talk

For a reader of the new millennium, there is something wonderfully quaint or curiously nostalgic about Frost’s short poem. In a techno-charged modern era with less in-person communication, a poem that celebrates a speaker who relishes the opportunity to have an actual face-to-face conversation adds to the poem’s sense of time and place.

Imagine in the poem if the speaker, setting down his hoe and scanning the horizon and seeing the approaching figure, had just whipped out his smartphone and sent a quick text coded in cryptic abbreviations and emojis and then just gone back to his hoe. What is gained? What is lost? What is the definition of loneliness in this new millennium when we are more connected and more alone than ever before? Those are questions raised by a poem still relevant today.

The poem celebrates the power of communication to alleviate, even for a moment, the oppressive drudgery and loneliness of everyday life. Even the horse understands the immensity offered by this accidental encounter. The horse slows to “meaning walk” (2). Of course, the word should be “meaningful”—but the adjective “meaning” freights this moment with a kind of purpose that even a dumb animal feels.