Poetry and Literature of Ice and Fire

Such a perfect parallel! The list of names, promises to oneself to cross those off - crossing the winter woods : Seven hells but it's like Martin read this poem and wrote Arya



This would be perfect for the tinfoilers who think Arya is killing Bran (the rightfull lord of Winterfell) with the Valyrian dagger he got. His wierwood tree, his North, he has Winterfell (aka the village).

Hi Nyx , I'm glad you enjoyed the poem.  There's often a quiet disquiet in Frost's poems which creeps up on the reader insidiously -- so, as you say, it suits Arya perfectly!  GRRM alludes to Frost a lot, including the obvious one 'Fire and Ice' as well as 'The Road Not Taken' which he directly references in the text (don't get lynn and me started on that one!  )  This is an excerpt from the discussion over at the 'W':



As far as Arya killing Bran, that thought did occur to me when Bran handed over the dagger so deliberately.  Perhaps when the time comes to sacrifice himself (I don't think Bran will be murdered by Jon, Arya or Dany or anyone else), Arya is the one he knows he will be able to trust not to flinch while delivering the 'gift of mercy'.  The gift of mercy is for the world -- Bran electing to die for the world (baring his breast to the sword like Nissa Nissa) -- not necessarily for Bran himself.  I have a 'tinfoilish' idea that Bran will skinchange the Night's King, whom I believe to be another greenseer (his ancestor) and fight a greenseer war on the virtual plane of the dream platform for dominion over the forces of Winter itself (think of other such greenseer/skinchanger 'wars' in which two seers vie for possession over one body, e.g. Varamyr and Haggon tussling over the wolf, or Varamyr and Thistle over the spearwife's body, etc., except in the 'Dance of the Brandons' the body at stake will be the icy collective body of Winter itself!)  This is how Winter is felled.

Here's another poem of Frost's which has relevance to ASOIAF, as we go about trying to elucidate the original purpose of the Wall -- as Frost puts it, 'Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offense.
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall
That wants it down.' I could say ‘Elves’ to him,
But it’s not elves exactly...'  Considering the poem concerns itself with the inevitability  of 'gaps' or 'chinks' appearing in the wall, and how one responds to the chinks rather than the wall itself, I have a feeling voice will appreciate it too  :



Mending Wall



Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,

That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,

And spills the upper boulders in the sun;

And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.

The work of hunters is another thing:

I have come after them and made repair

Where they have left not one stone on a stone,

But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,

To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,

No one has seen them made or heard them made,

But at spring mending-time we find them there.

I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;

And on a day we meet to walk the line

And set the wall between us once again.

We keep the wall between us as we go.

To each the boulders that have fallen to each.

And some are loaves and some so nearly balls

We have to use a spell to make them balance:

‘Stay where you are until our backs are turned!'

We wear our fingers rough with handling them.

Oh, just another kind of outdoor game,

One on a side. It comes to little more:

There where it is we do not need the wall:

He is all pine and I am apple orchard.

My apple trees will never get across

And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.

He only says, ‘Good fences make good neighbors.'

Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder

If I could put a notion in his head:

'Why do they make good neighbors? Isn’t it

Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.

Before I built a wall I’d ask to know

What I was walling in or walling out,

And to whom I was like to give offense.

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,

That wants it down.' I could say ‘Elves’ to him,

But it’s not elves exactly, and I’d rather

He said it for himself. I see him there

Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top

In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.

He moves in darkness as it seems to me,

Not of woods only and the shade of trees.

He will not go behind his father’s saying,

And he likes having thought of it so well

He says again, ‘Good fences make good neighbors.'



ROBERT FROST, 1874 - 1963

Sometimes I dedicate poems to different people. This one links to the following post in which I speculate whether it's possible for someone to skinchange the mind of winter; and it's for voice , with compliments of the 'ravenous'  :

The Snow Man 


One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.



WALLACE STEVENS

It's a pleasure and you're welcome  .

Definitely.  "Quoth the raven '[Septa Lemore...Hold the Door...] Nevermore!'"  Both Drogon and Hodor perform a similar underworld-gatekeeper role to Poe's enigmatic bird with the cryptic one-word vocabulary.  In the House of the Undying, Drogon even perches like Poe's pesky raven on the mantle of the wooden door, pecking at the wood in defiance of those purportedly offering 'wisdom' and the keys to unlocking the 'secret speech of dragonkind' (in the poem, the raven similarly perches on the bust of Athena, the goddess of wisdom, framing the door, as well as seeming to make a mockery of the narrator's questions which the bird refrains from answering with anything other than the hypnotic death-knell of the 'nevermore').


Jon and your 'blind spot'  Bran!


I love that Stevens -- ever the ebullient optimist, despite his apparent skepticism -- ends his poem with the word 'is,' that powerful affirmation and the rich, tactile descriptions abounding in the poem for the attentive listener/observer seeming to negate the 'nothing' of which he speaks.

Here are two further poems to do with listening, silence, secret ineffable languages, unanswered calls, lingering questions, and 'keeping ones peace'; and the importance nevertheless of striving to honor ones oaths, despite the uncertainty of the enterprise: the first entitled 'The Listeners' by Walter de la Mare; the second, a late poem by Robert Frost -- 'One More Brevity' -- which I offer in celebration of the mysterious bond between Jon and his mute wolf (He might have been the dream of a ghost
/ In spite of the way his tail had smacked /
My floor so hard and matter-of-fact...), as well as a nod to GRRM, not for his (non-existent) powers of 'brevity', but who in his relationship to the reader perhaps embodies that between the man and the dog who appears like an unbidden yet unfulfilled gift, likened to a fallen star in the poem, intimating that a visitation is always a goodbye, and some things will just have to remain unsaid.  

Robert Frost famously died as he lived -- without explicitly explaining himself or his poems, having constructed elaborate scaffolds of language to at once explore and obfuscate that essential fact!  In the spirit of 'Mending Wall,' which I quoted upthread, Frost builds up his defenses against the reader at the same time as he reaches out to us, drawn time and again to making some kind of tentative, yet indelible, contact across the divide.  Similarly, toward the end of this quest in which we are engaged, we may have to conclude of GRRM:

A symbol was all he could hope to convey,

An intimation, a shot of ray,

A meaning I was supposed to seek,

And finding, wasn't disposed to speak.

(It also reminds me of the poetic antics of a certain playfully 'coy' linguist...although, of course, even he, when pressed, is more forthcoming than either GRRM or Frost  .  Perhaps the more one knows of language, curiously the less one wishes to express oneself, truly, using that medium..?! )


The Listeners



‘Is there anybody there?’ said the Traveller,

Knocking on the moonlit door;

And his horse in the silence champed the grasses

Of the forest’s ferny floor:

And a bird flew up out of the turret,

Above the Traveller’s head:

And he smote upon the door again a second time;

‘Is there anybody there?’ he said.

But no one descended to the Traveller;

No head from the leaf-fringed sill

Leaned over and looked into his grey eyes,

Where he stood perplexed and still.

But only a host of phantom listeners

That dwelt in the lone house then

Stood listening in the quiet of the moonlight

To that voice from the world of men:

Stood thronging the faint moonbeams on the dark stair,

That goes down to the empty hall,

Hearkening in an air stirred and shaken

By the lonely Traveller’s call.

And he felt in his heart their strangeness,

Their stillness answering his cry,

While his horse moved, cropping the dark turf,

’Neath the starred and leafy sky;

For he suddenly smote on the door, even

Louder, and lifted his head:—

‘Tell them I came, and no one answered,

That I kept my word,’ he said.

Never the least stir made the listeners,

Though every word he spake

Fell echoing through the shadowiness of the still house

From the one man left awake:

Ay, they heard his foot upon the stirrup,

And the sound of iron on stone,

And how the silence surged softly backward,

When the plunging hoofs were gone.


WALTER DE LA MARE






One More Brevity


I opened the door so my last look

Should be taken outside a house and book.

Before I gave up seeing and slept

I said I would see how Sirius kept

His watch-dog eye on what remained

To be gone into, if not explained.

But scarcely was my door ajar,

When, past the leg I thrust for bar

Slipped in to be my problem guest,

Not a heavenly dog made manifest,

But an earthly dog of the carriage breed;

Who, having failed of the modern speed,

Now asked asylum -- and I was stirred

To be the one so dog-preferred.

He dumped himself like a bag of bones,

He sighed himself a couple of groans,

And head to tail then firmly curled

Like swearing off on the traffic world.

I set him water, I set him food,

He rolled an eye with gratitude

(Or merely manners it may have been),

But never so much as lifted chin.

His hard tail loudly smacked the floor

As if beseeching me, “Please, no more,

I can’t explain -- tonight at least.”

His brow was perceptibly trouble-creased.

So I spoke in terms of adoption thus:

“Gustie, old boy, Dalmatian Gus,

You’re right, there’s nothing to discuss.

Don’t try to tell me what’s on your mind,

The sorrow of having been left behind,

Or the sorrow of having run away.

All that can wait for the light of day.

Meanwhile feel obligation-free.

Nobody has to confide in me.”

‘Twas too one-sided a dialogue,

And I wasn’t sure I was talking dog.

I broke off baffled. But all the same,

In fancy, I ratified his name,

Gustie, Dalmatian Gus, that is,

And started shaping my life to his,

Finding him in his right supplies

And sharing his miles of exercise.



Next morning the minute I was about

He was at the door to be let out

With an air that said, “I have paid my call.

You mustn’t feel hurt if now I’m all

For getting back somewhere or further on.”

I opened the door and he was gone.

I was to taste in little the grief

That comes of dogs’ lives being so brief,

Only a fraction of ours at most.

He might have been the dream of a ghost

In spite of the way his tail had smacked

My floor so hard and matter-of-fact.

And things have been going so strangely since,

I wouldn’t be too hard to convince,

I might even claim, he was Sirius.

(Think of presuming to call him Gus)

The star itself, heaven’s greatest star,

Not a meteorite, but an avatar,

Who had made an overnight descent

To show by deeds he didn’t resent

My having depended on him so long,

And yet done nothing about it in song.

A symbol was all he could hope to convey,

An intimation, a shot of ray,

A meaning I was supposed to seek,

And finding, wasn't disposed to speak.


ROBERT FROST