A rocking chair, a fading sunset and a galaxy to roller skate across: Nathaniel S. Rounds fits a whole attitude to life into a few spare lines. The speaker announces the theme at the outset, "It's all about choices," and then proves it by choosing. The home of his youth will be furnished with "old poems and new songs." He will doze in his rocker as the day ends, and the sleep will open into "dream time," where the evening's quiet turns into play among the stars. The central idea is that imagination is something you decide on, and that the end of a day, or perhaps of a stage of life, can be a doorway rather than a closing.
The title, "Frost on Edna's Window," promises something the poem never delivers. There is no frost in the lines, no Edna, no window. Frost suggests cold, stillness and a view from indoors, so judging by the title, the poem may imagine a chilly night seen from a warm room, and the poem then warms it. Who Edna is, the text does not say, and that gap is part of the poem's quiet mystery. The opening line, "It's all about choices," sounds more like a motto than a line of verse, flat and conversational. Everything after it reads as an illustration of that claim.
The poem is in free verse, with no rhyme and no fixed meter, yet it has a lilt. "I choose to furnish the home of my youth" rolls along with a gentle, rocking beat. The next line sets two opposites side by side: "old poems and new songs." The speaker is not retreating into the past. He is moving the old and the new in together. The verb "furnish" matters too. It makes poems and songs into things you sit in and live among, as ordinary as chairs.
As the poem goes on, the stanzas shrink. "And to nod off in my rocker" is deliberately humble, with its casual "nod off" and the lulling motion of the chair. Then comes "As the sunset dies," the only strongly dramatic verb in the poem. The sunset's death is gentle and natural, and it hands the poem over to the night sky. After that the lines thin to almost nothing: "And then," "Wake up to dream time," "Where." The white space imitates drifting into sleep. "Where," alone on its line, works like a threshold the reader must step across. The phrase "Wake up to dream time" also turns an expectation upside down. Waking normally ends a dream, but here waking is how the dream begins, so the imagined world becomes the one the speaker is most alive in.
The last stanza is where the language gets most inventive. The pronoun changes from "I" to "We," so someone has joined the speaker, though the poem never says who. Readers might think of the Edna in the title, but that is a guess the text does not confirm. "We drop anchor in time streaks of stars" sets a nautical image in the sky. An anchor is meant to hold a ship still, yet the stars here are "streaks," which suggests motion. Stillness and speed share one line. The phrase "time streaks" fuses two words without a hyphen, as if time and space had run together. Then comes "Roller skating Andromeda sky," with the preposition missing so the grammar itself seems to glide. The sky becomes a rink, and the childlike joy echoes "youth" from the first stanza. Andromeda is a name that belongs both to a galaxy and to a figure from Greek myth, so old stories and vast space meet in a single word.
The poem has no full stops at all. Nothing is shut off, and the final image simply keeps moving. This openness suits a poem about refusing to let an evening end in resignation. The speaker does not complain about the dying light. He swaps the slow rocker for roller skates and the small room for a galaxy. What makes the poem worth reading is that it treats imagination as a decision rather than a gift. The circumstances may be quiet, even cold, as the title hints. But the speaker chooses what goes inside the house, and that choice is the poem's real subject.