JOLLY DAYS

The Garden Wall

Randall Jarrell's enthusiasm for Robert Frost is infectious. Jarrell quotes a short poem called Atmosphere, subtitled Inscription for a Garden Wall:

Winds blow the open grassy places bleak;
But where this old wall burns a sunny cheek,
They eddy over it too toppling weak
To blow the earth or anything self-clear;
Moisture and color and odor thicken here,
The hours of daylight gather atmosphere.

Those last two resonant lines — they evoke the interior space where we accumulate scattered daily experience into “thickened” memory.