By Robert Frost (1913)
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.
Analysis
In “My November Guest,” Frost personifies Sorrow as a teacher of aesthetic perception. She delights in the bleakness of late autumn—the withered trees, the grey mist, the sodden pastures—and gently chastens the speaker for not seeing beauty there. Through her eyes, melancholy becomes insight. Frost’s quatrains, precise and symmetrical, capture the discipline of learning to love austerity.
The poem dramatizes a reconciliation between feeling and intellect. The speaker admits that he has long known this love of bare November days, yet lets Sorrow believe the discovery hers. The modest irony preserves affection and humility. “My November Guest” turns emotional heaviness into attentiveness, suggesting that sadness refines rather than diminishes the capacity to see.