Paulo Seabra

My favorite portuguese poet of all time is a pretty easy guess, and a man about whom I've written quite a bit already. But maybe my favorite poet of all time is Robert Frost, a man about whom I've written a little bit less but whose work I greatly admire all the same. I read his poems at the tail-end of a pretty horrible summer, which is funny because most of his poems, or at least the most beautiful ones to me, always capture the stark beauty of winter and autumn. My November Guest does so, with the beauty of an autumn day possessing the poet's state of mind, and The Road Not Taken, arguably one of the most recognizable poems of all time, leaving us with that lingering what-could-have-been sensation when we're at a crossroads, but not during a summer as it is so often the case, and as it is so often the case with me, but of an autumn and winter, amidst the yellowing leaves of a nearby woods wherein the poet wrote, or at least came up with, his masterpiece. And now t...

I suppose belated congratulations might be in order because this little blog of mine celebrated its very first birthday yesterday, and as such I did write something down about it, but I still felt it wasn't quite enough. In my constant obsession with time, its oddly deformed circularity and its inherent synchronicity, or so I like to imagine, I started thinking about how my life was like in those days. They were weird times indeed, and though my life was and still is kinda stuck, so was everyone else's. However, for the first time in a long while I now had some business to attend to, I now had a place on which to impulsively write all of my many ideas. Of note I wrote something that can't quite be called an essay on Robert Frost's My November Guest, a poem I've been fascinated by for a long while now, and thus it's my personal favorite. I published said something on the first of may but I can't quite recall what kind of day it was. I do distinctly remembe...

This poem was something of a revelation to me. I discovered it sometime in august of 2014, when summer was still in full swing, and yet, as I eagerly awaited its end, something drew me towards a book of winter landscapes, that is to say, a book of Robert Frost. I just knew two things about the man – one was the poem about the famous two roads in a yellow wood, the other was that he had a cool name. So I impulsively ordered the book, briefly forgot about it until it arrived, and when it did I immediately skimmed through the first pages. And at least in my version, My November Guest is on page six. I'm now reminded of something the pious often talk about, namely the idea that when they present a person with a holy book, they can immediately tell within the first pages whether or not that person will believe. It's almost instinctive, it's something that bypasses all reason, the book just speaks to us or it doesn't. For me that rarely happens but it did when reading Rober...