Editorial

Excerpt

Although the words I am writing now will not be read, at least in their print version, until December 2009, they are being written in late September. Here in Vermont, where I live, the fall foliage has begun to appear in all its dazzling and multicolored beauty. One of my friends had just returned from a hike to Knee Top, a lovely mountain between my home and his, and was excited to tell me that he had spotted one of Vermont’s most beautiful yet elusive wild flowers, the mysterious Purple-Fringed Gentian, on his hike. This exquisite herbal wild flower apparently only grows in relative wilderness and blooms only from September to November. She is hard to find and often hikers come upon her quite serendipitously. My friend reminded me that this lovely flower inspired one of Robert Frost’s poems, “The Quest of the Purple-Fringed”. Frost, in his poem, describes his own hike into the country “beyond the scythe”, following the path of a “slender fox” and there coming across the Purple-Fringed at the very hour, or so it seemed to him, of its blooming. He had found this “far-sought flower”! Frost writes:

There stood the purple spires with no breath of air

Nor headlong bee

To disturb their perfect poise the livelong day

Neath the alder tree.

I only knelt and putting the boughs aside

Looked, or at most

Counted them all to the buds in the copse’s depth

that were pale as a ghost.

Then I rose and silently wandered home,

And I for one

Said that the fall might come and whirl of leaves,

For summer was done.

…