[MacArthur]

The Pasture

I'm going out to clean the pasture spring;
I'll only stop to rake the leaves away
(And wait to watch the water clear, I may):
I shan't be gone long. -- You come too.
I'm going out to fetch the little calf
That's standing by the mother. It's so young,
It totters when she licks it with her tongue.
I shan't be gone long. -- You come too.

Like every American poet, I’ll make a confession— I dislike the poetry of Robert Frost...I detest it! It’s a deep, abiding and life-long distaste. Like feeling hungry, and eating one of the candy-canes off the Christmas-tree. I used to believe it was because he was taught in school when I was a kid— except, I like the “school” poems (relatively) better than the others.

I’ve tried. About four or five times I’ve bought or borrowed a collection, painfully attempted “close readings”, perused plenty of criticism and had it all explained to me by persons whose opinions I respect. And, I’m not one to assume that everyone’s a fool, save me.

Let’s do the poem:

I'm going out to clean the pasture spring;
I'll only stop to rake the leaves away

Sing-songy, kinda? I’ll break the suspense— you wait in vain for a three-syllable word. You could go for pages through this “prosodic genius” without stumbling on one…then it would be a proper name, or an animal.
Now, everyone with an IQ over sixty will sometimes speak (still more, write) in poly-syllables...except Frost, when he’s doing “poetry”.
Frost is often compared to Shakespeare (a comparison he was fond of suggesting, himself). Shakespeare used an incredibly rich diction, and coined dozens, if not hundreds, of new expressions. Frost routinely deploys a diction that would disgrace a fifth-grader.

(And wait to watch the water clear, I may):

Even Golias would have a tough time with this rhyme-driven inversion. I doubt whether this is legitimate New England usage. The parentheses don’t help.

I shan't be gone long. -- You come too.

We’ll come back to the meter on the second appearance of this abomination.

“Shan’t”, I take it, is something someone in New England might have said at some time— about as bracing as reading Robert Burns (UGH!)…I’m proud of my Scottish ancestors, too— but not because they couldn’t speak English.
“You come too” is something a ‘tard might say.

I'm going out to fetch the little calf
That's standing by the mother. It's so young,
It totters when she licks it with her tongue.

Sing-songy, needless to say. There is some confusion about who is licking whom or what— caused in no small part by the use of “it” three times in two lines, and beginning a line with “that” apostrophed. This could be an actual Frostism—the man who never finished college never tired of condescending to his (presumably) educated audience. That could be why this poem rhymes hap-hazardly, why the dumbell syntax, even why Lil Abner’s “fetching” the calf.
(Why is he fetching the calf?)

Or, it could be Frost just assumed his readers were stupid...correctly?

I shan't be gone long. -- You come too.

About the meter...what can I say? How would this weather on Metrical III?

About Frost. To my own cost, I am probably missing something (a lot). About this poem...probably not. A while ago on this board, Julie posted a topic on a Byron effort, entitled “Great Poem or Foul-smelling Tripe?” Well, this one smells like cow-manure to me.

I invite response— and expect to get lynched. This has taken longer than it takes to fetch a calf. Duh...you come too!

[ChrisW]

Let’s do the poem:

I'm going out to clean the pasture spring;
I'll only stop to rake the leaves away

Sing-songy, kinda? I’ll break the suspense— you wait in vain for a three-syllable word.
I don't really agree that it's sing-songy -- both sound so much like something someone might just happen to say, never realizing he was speaking in iambs. Also, I think the first line in modifying one noun (spring) with another (pasture) diminishes the apparent regularity of the first line -- pasture gets more emphasis than a mere trochaic adjective would get.


You could go for pages through this “prosodic genius” without stumbling on one…then it would be a proper name, or an animal.
Well, the first poem I turned to ["Snow"] had 2 in the first 4 lines 'listening' in the first line and disheveled in the fourth. You're right that he keeps the number down, but I don't find him monotonous

(And wait to watch the water clear, I may):

Even Golias would have a tough time with this rhyme-driven inversion. I doubt whether this is legitimate New England usage. The parentheses don’t help.
Well, I'd read this, not as rhyme driven inversion, but as a resistance to being pinned down (I may, then again maybe I won't)
I shan't be gone long. -- You come too.

“Shan’t”, I take it, is something someone in New England might have said at some time— about as bracing as reading Robert Burns (UGH!)…I’m proud of my Scottish ancestors, too— but not because they couldn’t speak English.
“You come too” is something a ‘tard might say.

Not sure what your problems are here. You don't object to all contractions, do you? Probably no one now would say shan't, but that's because we no longer mark the distinction between 'shall' and 'will' in American English. 'You come too' is just the imperative -- a casual (possibly not very heart-felt invitation).

I shan't be gone long. -- You come too.

About the meter...what can I say? How would this weather on Metrical III?
Well, I don't know how it would do on Metrical III. But from my perspective it's not far from regular:
i SHANT be GONE long YOU come TOO -- is the underlying pattern -- I'd assume that speaker emphasizes 'you' and 'too'. It's true that "LONG is more strongly accented than "GONE", but as I understand it this isn't really relevant -- assuming the very plausible emphasis on 'you', "you" has even more emphasis than "long" -- WITHIN EACH FOOT, the 1st syllable is relatively less stressed than the second syllable. Here Frost is avoiding the singsongyness you accused him of earlier.

I invite response— and expect to get lynched. This has taken longer than it takes to fetch a calf. Duh...you come too!

I won't lynch you -- why shouldn't you confess? (especially if it stirs up discussion). But you haven't yet persuaded me even about this poem, and I wonder what you make of "Death of the Hired Man" (esp. lines 95-120) or "Home Burial". I'll confess to admiring Frost -- though I don't aim to write like him.

[This message has been edited by ChrisW (edited April 20, 2001).]

[ChrisW]

Hope someone will come along to attack or defend Frost!
Andrew, I think you should have titled this to mirror the provocativeness of the content -- who would guess the depth of your iconoclasm from the title?

[SteveWal]

Much as I enjoyed ChrisW's defence of this little poem, I don't think it amounts to much. Which is a pity, because Frost has more substantial poems than this, and I think it's rather unfair to do a poet down on account of their poorer work. We've all written bad poems - and sometimes thought they were good.

I'm not a particular fan of Frost - I'd rather have Appollinaire and Eliot and WC Williams; but if you're going to diss someone, don't just pick on their weak poems. Wordsworth was a better poet than these infamous lines about a puddle:

"I measured it from side to side,
it's three feet long and two feet wide."



------------------
Steve Waling

[Richard Wakefield]

It would be fun to have a confession thread where each of us admits to disliking this or that big shot. As much as I enjoy your parsing of "The Pasture" (and not merely because I disagree with what you say about it and about RF in general), I doubt that any detailed analysis will ever account for our differing tastes. Our likes and dislikes arise from a welter of temperament and experience (some of it not even entirely remembered consciously); our analytical skills, no matter well developed, are really pretty superficial in comparison.
Here are a couple of questions for you, Mac: How do you like the various poets who are often compared with RF in various ways (Robinson, maybe Hardy, Francis, Thomas)? Which Frost poems do you find least annoying? I don't mean these questions as a challenge to your taste. I'm curious whether we'll find that things you find intolerable in a poet you otherwise dislike don't bother you in poets you do like -- I suspect as much of myself.
Richard

[Tim Murphy]

Last night I regaled friends of Scandinavian and German descent by singing eleven peerless songs by Burns. Frost, Burns and Hardy are my three favorite lyric poets in English, and dammit, Mac, in the words of the judge at Alfie Packer's trial: "They was on'y three dimmiecrats in Summit County, and you done et two of 'em!"

The Pasture Spring is a children's poem, and a pretty good one. I once saw a foal of four hours birthing step out from behind his momma into a thirty knot south wind and get knocked flat, and I always remember that when I read the "totters" line. Say it aloud, earless one--the its and esses come so thick it's like licking wool, and that alone is worth the price of admission to this little bagatelle.

[Richard Wakefield]

Tim: Although I share your enthusiasm for Frost, I'm still interested in Mac's lack thereof. I wonder how much my own rural experience (like yours) conditions me to appreciate his scenes, how much the rather hard-edged language of those people tunes my ear to his. As you know, my own poetry owes an awful lot to Frost, and sometimes it seems as if he gave me some kind of permission to see significance in my own world, my own language.
For the record, as much as I like the literal imagery of "The Pasture," I have come to read it more and more figuratively: Waiting to watch the water clear is the final and essential part of all our labors. We roil things up and then must let time do its part to bring about clarity. It is partly about reading and writing poetry, I think, and I'm pretty sure that's why RF chose it as the epigraph to his collected poems. He says somewhere that he is fond of "dark statements I must leave the clearing of to time." That's a pretty good description of a poem that has some legs to it. A children's poem? Well, yes, but like many great children's poems, one that continues to speak to us in unexpected ways long after our literal childhood is past. People say I lean too hard on such a slight lyric. So be it.
Richard

[MacArthur]

Tim: (I am no outdoorsman, so I'm a little hazy on wind-speeds, but wasn't it a 25-knot wind that knocked Miami flat?)

They are all children's poems! Except for "Death of the Hired Man", "Fire and Ice" etc. ...which is Poetry for Young Adults. Spare me a lecture on "the Dark Frost"-- I've gotten the Briefing, and I don't find it convincing. "Apple-picking" is a clumsy bore.

Frost is Robinson toned down for "Life" magazine-- Robinson is the poet Frost would have been if he had ever taken a drink.

Frost is the Reader's Digest Condensed Books version of Hardy...and Hardy's reputation is sinking. Of course, he'll reach a point of suspension somewhere...well below the buoyant surface, perhaps side-by-side with Houseman and Burns. Where will Frost be? Who cares?...it doesn't matter.

But I like Frost...Of course you do-- he's trying terribly hard to be liked! So is "Wendy's", and I like to eat there some days. It's "great".
People who like Jazz inevitably say something stupid like "Miles Davis is better than Beethoven!"...in the sense that a statement like that is worth making at all-- they're wrong.

When you are cleaning out a cellar packed with rubbish you have to start with the largest object closest to the foot of the stairs. Frost is that old recliner or sofa-- you can't say it's worthless...but it isn't worth keeping (and some of the family think it was always a white elephant).

Steve, I went to the library the other day for one last look. "The Pasture" was the dedication page on three seperate volumes, including a collection of laudatory criticism. It serves as well as any manageable sample-- if you don't like this one, you likely don't really like Frost that much.

Richard, the idea of a de-bunking thread would be almost a good idea. Except it would fill up with complaints about how difficult it is to appreciate Eliot-- with the implication that the same readers breakfast on Keats, snack mid-morning on Wordsworth, have a hearty lunch of Shakespeare, afternoon tea is Tennyson, a heavy supper of Milton, and for late-nights it's Yeats...how come I doubt this? GREAT poets push themselves and their readers-- Frost doesn't even qualify.

Sometimes it is tempting to try and get more respect for "accessible" Pop artists eg. the Wyeth family of painters. But why should I care more about their critical reputations than they did. They knew what they were doing-- they made their choices.

Possibly Frost didn't. Like Steinbeck, he may have been a genuine literary naif-- truly unaware of how decidedly Second-Rate all his choices were. After all, respectable critics were comparing him to Homer and Shakespeare. It's hard not to believe rave reviews...but sometimes you should.

(Interesting that the comparisons were seldom on the order of, say Keats or even Tennyson. For certain kinds of looniness, only an absolutely outsize scale will do.)

[ChrisW]

I don't think Shakespeare tried to push his readers (or scare away hoi polloi, which is what the modernists seem to have wanted to do). Rather, he pulls you in by whatever hook will grab you (slapstick or political philosophy or both). Those who start off liking only the clowns might move on to appreciate the other dimensions. Something like this might be Frost's strategy as well.
You mention Tennyson as a challenging poet, yet I think he was quite popular -- and as far as I know, he MEANT to be popular.
The challenge needn't bar the door to all but the elect -- seems like the best way to continue the marginalization of poetry.
I don't know what the critics who compared Frost to Shakespeare were thinking of, but F is great at revealing character and rather doomed relationships dramatically. There is a real sense of the tragic in Home Burial -- in the way that the husband and wife simply can't come to any understanding.

[MacArthur]

Although I am no scholar, I've never really believed that very many "groundlings" saw King Lear, or could have gotten much out of it. I've seen the size of the theaters-- not that many people could have attended King Lear in a generation.

In Shakespeare's time, perhaps 5% of a generation was literate, and 2% had a kind of Humanities education.
(BTW: Falstaff's jokes weren't meant for plebians, but for Shakespeare's foppish companions-- the equivalent of "frat-boys".)


In Tennyson's day about 40% of his contemporaries were literate, and 10% attended University.

In Eliot's maturity, literacy had reached 80-90% of the population of North America, and about 20% of Americans attended college.

In the 60's half a generation entered college, and an adequate level of literacy had become essentially universal among English-speakers.

And the audience for highly-accomplished poetry hasn't changed a bit. Socially, elites have cycled in and out...but culturally the High-Brows have retained an astonishing and unmistakeable continuity.

Why? Simple...some things just are better than others. But the Wit to appreciate them is vanishingly rare. So why should those with the requisite sophistication (for that is what it is) to appreciate Eliot lower their standards? When I want a break from real poetry, I'd rather read Steven King.

Frost sold his celebrated 50,000 copies to the middle-class...don't kid yourself. And who cares what the bourgeois read, if the best they can do is Frost-- it might as well be Steven King.

Tennyson cared. And got nothing for it. Oh. they made him Laureate and the (bad) Arthurian romances sold well. But Victorians, critics and audience alike, didn't really accept him...they suspected him (rightly) of genius, and didn't really approve.

(I think "Home Burial" is a poem about Poetry...Frost's. My impression is that Elinor didn't believe in Frost's poetry.)