[Tim Murphy]

Charles Albert has posted a delightful poem, "Confederacy," on the Metrical Board. It slyly alludes to a little Morgan colt which led him in boyhood to poetry. I thought we could discuss the technical mastery of this poem and also talk about what other grown-up poems led each of us as children to this pursuit.

The Runaway

Once the snow of the year was beginning to fall,
We stopped by a mountain pasture to say, “Whose colt?”
A little Morgan had one forefoot on the wall,
The other curled at his breast. He dipped his head
And snorted at us. And then he had to bolt.
We heard the miniature thunder where he fled,
And we saw him or thought we saw him, dim and gray,
Like a shadow against the curtain of falling flakes.
“I think the little fellow’s afraid of the snow,
He isn’t winter-broken. It isn’t play
With the little fellow at all. He’s running away.
I doubt if even his mother could tell him ‘Sakes,
It’s only weather.’ He’d think she didn’t know.
Where is his mother? He can’t be out alone.”
And now he comes again with clatter of stone,
And mounts the wall again with whited eyes
And all his tail that isn’t hair up straight.
He shudders his coat as if to shake off flies.
“Whoever it is that leaves him out so late,
When other creatures have gone to stall and bin,
Ought to be told to come and take him in.”

[Richard Wakefield]

Tim, two interesting things to talk about. The first: What grown-up poems led us to poetry when we were children? For me it was a variety of poems that I heard from my father, learned at his knee, and would sometimes recite with him: "Gunga Din," "Annabel Lee," "The Wreck of the Hesperus." They are wonderful poems for a kid to learn, with lots of splendid music and correspondingly strong emotion. There's a nice little volume out called "First Loves" in which various writers talk about the poems that first drew them in as children. Joyce Carol Oates, of all people, writes a fine essay on RF's "After Apple-Picking."
The other thing to talk about is "The Runaway." This poem to me is like a rather small number of RF's poems. He often stands back from the action, stands back in space or in time or in some kind of emotional reserve, so that the emotion is a bit attenuated. I like that-- the spontaneous overflow of emotion, sure, but (as so many forget) recollected in tranquility. In this poem -- and in, I think, "The Draft Horse," "Neither Out Far nor In Deep" and a few others -- he stands so far back that the emotion is attenuated almost to the breaking point. That is to say that I love the scene, I admire the craft, but I can't quite catch the tone. But, as the man in "Home Burial" says, "I might be taught, I should suppose."
Richard

[Charles Albert]

Tim, thanks for posting this wonderful poem. I love the idea of people talking about seminal poetic experiences and hope other people will share somethingthe way Richard did. What about you, Tim?

The Runaway has been a part of my brain ever since the fourth grade. My brother Peter in the fifth grade and I would recite this to each other out of memory. Partly to show off, I suppose, but mostly because we loved it. We had just moved to California from Vermont and felt the nostalgia in that first line deeply. I wouldn't call it a sentimental poem as per another thread in this board because of the attenuation that Richard mentions.

Five things have always struck me about this piece:
1. The narrator's sympathetic description of the colt's wild panic is what especially draws in children.
2. That crazy syntax of "all his tail that isn't hair up straight" was completely incomprehensible to me even though I knew exactly what he meant.
3. The rhythm is beautifully natural and the rhyme scheme unobtrusive.
4. The solid imagery, Frost's hallmark, has no amiguity of place, even if there is ambiguity of what he means by describing the place.
5. Or is there ambiguity? Richard wonders the same thing. Does the runaway represent something? What about the irresponsible owner? Is the whole thing a trope for some grandiose theme-as in The Road Not Taken? Or is this a simple description of scene?

For years the cutting-edge poets considered Frost a sort of Norman-Rockwell lightweight, a painter of precious New England postcards. I think there is plenty to chew on in his work, although that didn't stop me from writing the following parody of it:


THE URCHLING

Once, when another school night was beginning to fall
We passed through the ghetto and said, "Whose kid?"
A little urchling had one spraycan on the wall,
The other on a mailbox. He glared menacingly at us,
And so we hit the gas.
We heard the distant cursing as we fled,
And saw him, or thought we saw him, smoking crack,
Like a shadow against a curtain of evil smoke.
"You'd think he wouldn't be able to afford that shit.
It's awfully expensive. Where's he get the dough?"
And now he comes again with eyes all lit
And runs us off the road in a new Cadillac
And all his gang that isn't whacked on coke
To mug us. "Who's this fucker's mother? The 'ho'
That begged some judge to suspend his last sentence
Ought to be tried for a criminal offense."

[Alan Sullivan]

Thanks for putting this up, Tim. It's a great tie-in with the metrical board. First the Frost---I don't agree with Richard. I think there is something very dark behind the whiteness, dark as the pupils of the colt's "whited eyes." And it isn't just the culpability of the owner, which represents by extension, all human neglect and malfeasance. The poem also alludes to the injustice of life, for the young of every species, at least every "higher" species, are born to suffer fear and pain. Both anger and compassion inhabit the poem---anger at the deity, if there is one, for so ordering things, or at the lack of a deity to order things at all; and compassion for the fellow sufferer. If "The Runaway" seems a little distanced, it is only in proportion to these emotions, so that they can be borne long enough for the writing.

My first real connection with a poem, beyond the songs and nursery rhymes of childhood, was probably "The Highwayman" by Alfred Noyes, which I had to recite publicly at about age twelve. The music and rhythm of that poem affected me profoundly, in a way I had never felt before.

Charles, your parody is a hoot. If we were dividing up the metrical board thematically, I would want to suggest a parody board. There may very well be an exercise page, and parody should be a part of it. An underappreciated genre, I think, and an invaluable practice for any student of the art.

Alan Sullivan

[Tim Murphy]

Charles, this may surpass Bruce Bennet's four line Silken Tent as the funniest Frost parody I ever saw! One suggestion, lengthen the trimeter: "flipped us the finger, and so we hit the gas."

My parents read me Frost when I was little, and about a week before JFK's inauguration they suggested I memorize three poems. I had just turned ten, so I chose short ones, Fire and Ice, Nothing Gold, and Dust of Snow. Of course I loved all the children's poems. Afflicted with red hair and blue eyes, I was named for Milne's Timothy Tim. But Frost was the first adult poet I really loved, and the titles of both my first and my third (forthcoming) books are his phrases, "The Deed of Gift" and "Very Far North."

Richard, your debt to Frost may even exceed my own, so let me make a few observations. This is one of great "loose iambics." Lines run from 10 to 14 syllable pentameters, and they flow as effortlessly as the speech of a gifted storyteller. The rhymes fall magically wherever they will, but everyone just right. If they get too far apart, he hits us a triple to assure the ear. The emotional punch comes because that little fellow is every child, indeed everyman. I've been in the North for fifty years and I'm not winter-broken yet. Like Charles I'll close with one of my own, a tribute rather than a parody.

Nothing Goes to Waste

Rearing on spindly legs
a pair of famished stags
nibble our apple twigs
while does heavy with fawn
file from the woods at dawn
and tiptoe across the lawn
to feast on orchard mast
scattered in harvest haste
before the first hard frost.
Nothing goes to waste.

Needless to say I also owe a debt to Alan for brutally editing this poem!



[This message has been edited by Tim Murphy (edited March 17, 2001).]

[Len Krisak]

To all, greetings, and yes, a wonderful poem.

I'm solidly with Alan on this--Frost doesn't
generally involve equus in his work without
some fairly serious intent ("a night of dark
intent"?) behind even the most utterly charming
of poems. "The Draft Horse" gives me chills, for
instance, though I doubt if many have ever accused
it of "charm." Even "Stopping by Woods" has that
famous little horse and the bells that shake.

But here we have one of those perfect examples of
what Frost could do like no other poet--the charming
picture at first glance, the cute anecdote almost,
which on further readings deepens and deepens.
Who has this dialogue? Whose are the voices?
Has any one of us never felt the way that colt
feels, that we "can't be told"? And I don't even
want to begin to ask about metaphors for poetry
and the hellish hint of Pegasus.

(No, I'm not advocating any specific reading here,
just pointing out how haunting Frost can be.)

First poems? Nursery rhymes at my mother's knee.
(This was followed by of course Noyes's "Highwayman" !)

[Maryann Corbett]

bump

[Mike Todd]

I take The Runaway, among other things, as a comment on deity. Frost has our gaze pan down from the snowy sky through mountain and pasture to the Morgan—a substantiation in stages. And then he has some fun: he had to bolt; we heard the miniature thunder. Line eight speaks loudly to me of the antithetical nature of deity. It's a poetic manifestation of the word adumbrate. It's a great notion: shadow as something which both reveals and conceals; revelation and mystery. The word speaks to the intellect, the line to the imagination. It's a gem.

[Mark Allinson]

Apart from the big anthologized poems, I knew little of Frost till I went back to university as a mature-age student of 35. And though pleased and impressed, I can’t say that the works had a significant effect on me.

But I have drawn extensively on Frost’s ideas on metaphor in my teaching, even in disciplines other than literature. Frost wrote:

I do not think anybody ever knows the discreet use of metaphor, his own and other people’s, the discreet handling of metaphor, unless he has been properly educated in poetry.

And that applies to scientists as much as to writers. Poetry should be a foundational study at university.

But I did once write a reasonable poem based upon the form and rhythms of Frost’s “The Strong are saying Nothing”.

What grown-up poems led us to poetry when we were children?

Although I have come to the writing of poetry late in life, I started reading very early. By the time I was 6, my party piece for adult company in the house was to recite this poem from memory.

CLANCY OF THE OVERFLOW

A.B. (Banjo) Paterson


I had written him a letter which I had, for want of better
Knowledge, sent to where I met him down the Lachlan, years ago,
He was shearing when I knew him, so I sent the letter to him,
Just "on spec", addressed as follows: "Clancy, of The Overflow".

And an answer came directed in a writing unexpected,
(And I think the same was written with a thumbnail dipped in tar)
'Twas his shearing mate who wrote it, and verbatim I will quote it:
Clancy's gone to Queensland droving, and we don't know where he are."

In my wild erratic fancy, visions come to me of Clancy
Gone a-droving "down the Cooper" where the western drovers go;
As the stock are slowly stringing, Clancy rides behind them singing,
For the drover's life has pleasures that the townsfolk never know.

And the bush hath friends to meet him, and their kindly voices greet him
In the murmur of the breezes and the river on its bars,
And he sees the vision splendid of the sunlit plains extended,
And at night the wondrous glory of the everlasting stars.

I am sitting in my dingy little office, where a stingy
Ray of sunlight struggles feebly down between the houses tall,
And the foetid air and gritty of the dusty, dirty city
Through the open window floating, spreads its foulness over all.

And in place of lowing cattle, I can hear the fiendish rattle
Of the tramways and the buses making hurry down the street,
And the language uninviting of the gutter children fighting,
Comes fitfully and faintly through the ceaseless tramp of feet.

And the hurrying people daunt me, and their pallid faces haunt me
As they shoulder one another in their rush and nervous haste,
With their eager eyes and greedy, and their stunted forms and weedy,
For townsfolk have no time to grow; they have no time to waste.

And I somehow rather fancy that I’d like to change with Clancy,
Like to take a turn at droving where the seasons come and go,
While he faced the round eternal of the cashbook and the journal -
But I doubt he’d suit the office, Clancy of "The Overflow".

Not only the meter and the rhythms have been influential here, but the Romantic tenor of the poem also had its influence.

In fact, I seem to have been born with a Romantic disposition. I recall another highly influential lyric from childhood – this time from a song on the radio – a lyric by Don Williams, with the chorus:

And I'm just a country boy
money have I none
But I've got silver in the stars
And gold in the morning sun
Gold in the morning sun

I know, it’s very corny, but the truth is, these words seem almost prophetic, since I actually live like this today, fifty years later.

And, to add another prophetic detail, the subject of the song also loses the girl -

Never could afford a store bought ring
With a sparkling diamond stone
All I could afford is a loving heart
The only one I own

Well, I was born with a Romantic character, and character is destiny, they say.

Better than being born a blank slate, at least.



[This message has been edited by Mark Allinson (edited June 19, 2008).]

[Janet Kenny]

This New Zealand poem about a poor farming couple was the first native poem to reach me in my childhood. Although the Australian magpie (not the northern hemisphere variety) was not a native it had spread through the North Island of New Zealand and its bell-like song pervaded the countryside.


.....The Magpies .....
.....
.....

When Tom and Elizabeth took the farm
When TThe bracken made their bed,
And Quardle oodle ardle wardle doodle
When TThe Magpies said.

Tom’s hand was strong to the plough
When TElizabeth’s lips were red
And Quardle oodle ardle wardle doodle
When TThe Magpies said.


Year in year out they worked
When TWhile the pines grew overhead,
And Quardle oodle ardle wardle doodle
When TThe Magpies said.


But all the beautiful crops soon went
When TTo the mortgage man instead,
And Quardle oodle ardle wardle doodle
When TThe Magpies said.


Elizabeth is dead now,( it’s years ago)
When TOld Tom went light in the head;
And Quardle oodle ardle wardle doodle
When TThe Magpies said.


The farm’s still there. Mortgage corporations
When TCouldn’t give it away.
And Quardle oodle ardle wardle doodle
When TThe Magpies say.
When T
Dennis Glover

And this gripped my imagination when I was fairly small. I spent my childhood holidays at a wild beach:
The Sands Of Dee

Charles Kingsley


‘O Mary, go and call the cattle home,
..... And call the cattle home,
.....And call the cattle home,
.....Across the sands of Dee.’
The western wind was wild and dark with foam,
..... And all alone went she.

The western tide crept up along the sand,
..... And o’er and o’er the sand,
.....And round and round the sand,
.....As far as eye could see.
The rolling mist came down and hid the land:
.....And never home came she.

‘O is it weed, or fish, or floating hair—
.....A tress of golden hair,
.....A drownèd maiden’s hair,
..... Above the nets at sea?’
Was never salmon yet that shone so fair
.....Among the stakes of Dee.

They row’d her in across the rolling foam,
.....The cruel crawling foam,
.....The cruel hungry foam,
.....To her grave beside the sea.
But still the boatmen hear her call the cattle home,
.....Across the sands of Dee.


And I was deeply into Tennyson by the time I was about ten years old. Especially "The Lady of Shalott"
This stanza gripped me:

She left the web, she left the loom,
She made three paces thro' the room,
She saw the water-lily bloom,
She saw the helmet and the plume,
..... She look'd down to Camelot.
Out flew the web and floated wide;
The mirror crack'd from side to side;
'The curse is come upon me!' cried
.....The Lady of Shalott.

And Edward Lear--all of him including the drawings.
And Lewis Carroll--all of him including Tenniel's illustrations.
And A.A. Milne--all of him including E. H. Shepard's illustrations.

I should have included "The Highwayman" by Alfred Noyes and "The Listener" by Walter de la Mare and "Cargoes" by John Masefield.

And I played the piano for morning assembly at school and could scarcely contain my terror when I played for the hymn based on this psalm:

THEY THAT GO DOWN TO THE SEA IN SHIPS, that do business in great waters; These see the works of the LORD, and his wonders in the deep. For he commandeth, and raiseth the stormy wind, which lifteth up the waves thereof. They mount up to the heaven, they go down again to the depths: their soul is melted because of trouble. They reel to and fro, and stagger like a drunken man, and are at their wits' end. Then they cry unto the LORD in their trouble, and he bringeth them out of their distresses. He maketh the storm a calm, so that the waves thereof are still. Then are they glad because they be quiet; so he bringeth them unto their desired haven.


Psalms, 107:23-30, KJV



~~~~~
I didn't really meet Frost before I started to communicate online with American poets. He seems to me to be the most natural poet of them all. He is poetry in the way that Mozart is music. He is simplicity in its most elevated condition. He has deep resonance.

My poet aunt, who had never spoken to me about Frost, left a first edition of Frost's poems and it came to me eventually. It falls open at what was already a very favourite Frost poem of mine.

On a Bird Singing in its Sleep

A bird half wakened in the lunar noon
Sang halfway through its little inborn tune.
Partly because it sang but once all night
And that from no especial bush's height;
Partly because it sang ventriloquist
And had the inspiration to desist
Almost before the prick of hostile ears,
It ventured less in peril than appears.
It could not have come down to us so far
Through the interstices of things ajar
On the long bead chain of repeated birth
To be a bird while we are men on earth
If singing out of sleep and dream that way
Had made it much more easily a prey.




[This message has been edited by Janet Kenny (edited June 20, 2008).]