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The title for this piece comes from a poem of the same name by New England poet Jane Kenyon. In it, the writer describes the beloved details of her home and the surrounding hills and fields as each familiar thing is cloaked in evening’s slow falling. In the last stanza, she addresses the reader directly, but her words can be heard as her own searching as well. Don’t be afraid, she tells us. We will not be left comfortless as night falls. And thus it was with Frodo on the long eve of his departure from the Shire. This piece chronicles that time.
Endurance Beyond Hope
Out Of Love
The following five poems are all written from Sam’s point of view and can be read as a series. The first is “Winter Morning on the Beach” and the time is 1422 – the first winter following Frodo’s departure. The second is “Making Apple Butter,” and the time is fall 1422, a year after Frodo’s departure. The third poem is “Saplings,” and its timing is far more indeterminate – sometime between Elanor’s sixth and tenth birthdays. The fourth poem and the companion to “Saplings” is “After Snow.” The timing for this poem is also fairly indeterminate – Elanor is somewhere between the ages of six and ten. The final poem in the series is “Dawn at the Solstice,” which is set on the winter solstice, twelve years after Frodo’s departure. I didn’t intend it as such when I first wrote it (in fact I didn’t see these poems as a series until long after I wrote them), but I now see “Dawn” as a kind of bookend poem to “Winter Morning.” It feels like a full circle to me, somehow.
Posted: November 5, 2005
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