Two New Recordings Celebrate Music by John Prine

09 September 2010

Robert Frost's farm in Derry, New Hampshire

DOUG JOHNSON: Welcome to American Mosaic in VOA Special English.

(MUSIC)

I’m Doug Johnson.

Today, music by Sahara Smith.

And we answer a question about the Statue of Liberty.

But first, a visit to the Robert Frost Farm in New Hampshire, where the harvest is poetry.

(MUSIC)

Robert Frost Farm

ROBERT FROST: (from “The Road Not Taken”)

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I--

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

DOUG JOHNSON: Robert Frost was one of America’s greatest poets, and most influential teachers and thinkers. He won four Pulitzer Prizes, a Congressional Gold Medal and served as the nation’s Poet Laureate.

Many of Frost’s best-loved poems were about the years he spent with his young family on a farm in Derry, New Hampshire. Faith Lapidus takes us there.

FAITH LAPIDUS: You could drive right by the Robert Frost Farm if you were not looking for it. It is a simple, white wooden farm house. It is not unlike other farmhouses of the same age in the area.

The grounds are still green and flowery at this end of the summer visit. Birds sing loudly; insects buzz. There is a cleared field but trees are what you mostly see. Some of them are the birches Frost wrote about. Here he reads part of the poem, “Birches.”