Kids shows don't always get it right

The Baby Einstein Company, LLC created an episode of their television program called Baby Shakespeare, World of Poetry. In it, (I think this is true) Baby Einstein creator Julie Aigner-Clark recites a poem by Robert Frost.

So since is this is one of only two Baby Einstein dvds she owns, I've seen it many times. And I never quite understood what Aigner-Clark was saying, and she says it really breathy and sensitively, making her words even harder to pick out. Over time I stopped caring, and after Lou had watched it fifty or so times, I stopped noticing.

Then one day last week, during our daily constitution, we walked over to Roosevelt High School. And by God, that poem is etched in stone on the ground as you reach the top of the steps to the front door, the south entrance off 66th. And I read that thing and it brought me to tears.

There's a reason that poem is powerful. Seeing it in that all-caps, old type font, not attached to a voice, made it much more real.

It then occurred to me that poetry is made to be read out loud. Poetry is meant to be recited by people, with their own voices and unique personalities. These differing characteristics lead to differing inflections. So you can't help having poetry be spun in a way the author may not have intended.

I shouldn't blame Aigner-Clark for making the poem boring for me, when in reality it's such a beautiful thing that its crafting is mesmerizing and it may have come down from some higher plane. But then you realize it was written by a guy, just a guy who liked writing. It's amazing.

Let me post this motherfucker right here.

Nature's first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf's a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

-Frost, 1923