The Voice of "An Old Man's Winter's Night" Perhaps the most haunting poem in Mountain Interval is "An Old Man's Winter's Night," a poem about an old man who dies in the winter weather of New England and alone. Here, more than in "The Oven Bird", the comfort of a warmly human subject is offered; no one who had ever responded to a Norman Rockwell magazine cover could fail to be surprised by the old man, alone in his house ("Everyone who was outside looked at him darkly"), unable to muster the resources to get through the winter. night at bay: What kept his eyes from looking back Was the lamp tilted next to them in his hand. What kept him from remembering what brought him to that creaky room was his age. But if Rockwell lovers had stopped over these lines and tried to read and listen to them, they might have noticed how strange their character is. Their "sense" is that the old man cannot see outside because the lamp does not allow him to see outside: all he gets in return is an image of himself. And if he can't see outside, he can't see inside either; he is so old that he cannot remember how or why he is where he is. But what in the prose paraphrase are concerned and sympathetic insights into the plight of old age, sound quite different when experienced through the sing-song, rather telegraphic formulations of the lines. As in "The Oven Bird" there is heavy use of the verb "to be": "was" occurs three times in four lines, something a novice poetry writer would try to avoid. And there are also three “things,” two of which occur in a single line (“What prevented him from remembering what it was”), designed to make it difficult to indulge in sad feelings about old age – you notice the way “ age" is quietly buried at the very end of the next line. Of his sister Jeanie, Frost stated that as she got older she found it easier to stay awake and worry about other people's problems. But he is at least as much a critic of such empathetic identification with others – lonely old men or baker birds – as a practitioner of it. Or rather, some of the best poems in Mountain Interval draw their energy from the play of movement towards and withdrawal from the contemplated subject, play as can be seen in two lines later which summarize the old man in his environment.;