It's a warm day in December, and I'm indoors reading poetry

I have a habit of reading my assignments for Chinese and Western Poetry aloud, so as to understand them better. This weekend I was assigned to read "The Waste Land" by T S Eliot, and a couple of poems by Robert Frost.

First, the Frost poems. I read probably the two big ones. "The Road Not Taken" is one of my favorite poems, because I think it sums up my life pretty concisely: I often find myself wondering what would have happened, or what would have become of me, had I made certain decisions differently. Would I have a different major? Attend a different college? Not be a virgin? Would I be happier or less happy, or even alive?

Let's not be morbid anymore. I think this is my favorite line:
"And sorry I could not travel both/And be one person..."
You're one person if you take one path, another person if you take another, and then this ties back into the end of the poem, where the traveler realizes that even if he were to come back to this precise fork in the road and take the other path, it still wouldn't be the exact same other path because he himself will have changed. I may have more chances to make certain big decisions, but it won't be the same me making them, which in itself changes the paths.

There's a bit of an observer paradox in here. The decision is affected by what information you have and what you're inclined to do with the information. If any of you lurkers are quantum physicists in training, please explain what I'm thinking to me: why does macro-level decision making remind me of subatomic particles and their quantum states?

The second poem I read was "Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening." I don't know that there's much to understand in this one; it tells a story, and one I've always sort of liked: a peaceful evening, a weary traveler who has a lot left to do before he reaches his destination, and a horse that isn't quite sure what's going on. But with all the things the traveler has to do, he still takes time to stop and admire the snow on the trees. I hope I can always do that: no matter how busy I am, or what life is throwing at me, I pray I will always be able to appreciate the world for what it is.

I've been interrupted by a couple of yutsos outside joking loudly about how "mail" boxes are sexist, and they want a "femail" box. Not that I haven't made that joke before, but there are almost always people being loud outside my room when I want to think or sleep. And I bet they wonder why I recite poetry loudly.

Then I read "The Waste Land," all five sections of it. I'm really not sure what it was about: some of the sections were about sex, some were about death, and maybe the first one was about the loss of innocence in childhood...and all throughout, there are strange bits of birdsong and untranslated Italian and German passages. The only places where it rhymes are places where Eliot is sampling other poems.

Hmm. T S Eliot as a remixer. I'm not a fan of remixes on the whole, but seeing a written-down one from before the DJ era is an interesting thing. Did the one spawn the other, I wonder?

But here's what I think, upon finishing the poem: I feel that I have experienced something great and ancient and sad and important without really knowing what it was. And yet I feel at some level the meaning of the poem is tied up in the onomatopoeia, and the sounds of the foreign languages, and if I understood what everything meant and what it referred to, the effect of the poem would be lessened. It would be drier, simpler, an accounting of Eliot's life, instead of the ocean of evoked emotion and potential meaning it is now.

My father was an Eliot fan when he was the right age for it; tonight I shall talk to him about it, maybe get up to my knees in that ocean. And then on Tuesday or Thursday I'll come to my poetry class and half-listen to my professor drain all that ocean away.

If there were water
and no rocks
If there were rocks
and also water