The Impulse is one of my favorites of Frost's. It's such a simple poem, but it packs a wallop.

[Note: This post originally contained The Impulse but the moderator inserted the four other portions that constitute the entire poem.]

The Hill Wife

I. Loneliness

Her Word

One ought not to have to care
So much as you and I
Care when the birds come round the house
To seem to say goodby;

Or care so much when they come back
With whatever it is they sing;
The truth being we are as much
Too glad for the one thing

As we are too sad for the other here--
With birds that fill their breasts
But with each other and themselves
And their built or driven nests.

II. House Fear

Always--I tell you this they learned--
Always at night when they returned
To the lonely house from far away,
To lamps unlighted and fire gone gray,
They learned to rattle the lock and key
To give whatever might chance to be,
Warning and time to be off in flight:
And preferring the out- to the indoor night,
They learned to leave the house door wide
Until they had lit the lamp inside.

III. The Smile

Her Word

I didn't like the way he went away.
That smile! It never came of being gay.
Still he smiled--did you see him? I was sure!
Perhaps because we gave him only bread
And the wretch knew from that that we were poor.
Perhaps because he let us give instead
Of seizing from us as he might have seized.
Perhaps he mocked at us for being wed,
Or being very young (and he was pleased
To have a vision of us old and dead).
I wonder how far down the road he's got.
He's watching from the woods as like as not.

IV. The Oft-repeated Dream

She had no saying dark enough
For the dark pine that kept
Forever trying the window latch
Of the room where they slept.

The tireless but ineffectual hands
That with every futile pass
Made the great tree seem as a little bird
Before the mystery of glass!

It had never been inside the room,
And only one of the two
Was afraid in an oft-repeated dream
Of what the tree might do.

V. The Impulse

It was too lonely for her there,
And too wild,
And since there were but two of them,
And no child,

And work was little in the house,
She was free,
And followed where he furrowed field,
Or felled tree.

She rested on a log and tossed
The fresh chips,
With a song only to herself
On her lips.

And once she went to break a bough
Of black alder.
She strayed so far she scarcely heard
When he called her —

And didn’t answer — didn’t speak —
Or return.
She stood, and then she ran and hid
In the fern.

He never found her, though he looked
Everywhere,
And he asked at her mother’s house
Was she there.

Sudden and swift and light as that
The ties gave,
And he learned of finalities
Besides the grave.

Robert Frost


------------------
Caleb
www.poemtree.com



[This message has been edited by Caleb Murdock (edited May 06, 2001).]

MacArthur said on the other Frost thread:

"(And Caleb-- maybe I'm nuts...maybe I'm deaf, dumb and blind-- but "The Impulse" doesn't seem like a very good poem at all, to me. It looks and sounds winceingly, embarassingly bad.)"

Mac, you didn't say why you didn't like it, but I think your remark is a good illustration of how far apart people can be on a topic which, to both of them, seems obvious. To me, The Impulse isn't just a successful poem, it's a perfect poem in every respect. The language is clear, simple and lovely; the story builds perfectly to its conclusion; the rhythms and rhymes are pleasant; it has a good opening and a good ending. I could make a list of all the elements that make a poem successful, and this poem would succeed on all counts.

Why don't you like it? Is there anyone else who doesn't like it?

To the Thawing Wind

Come with rain, O loud Southwester!
Bring the singer, bring the nester;
Give the buried flower a dream;
Make the settled snow-bank steam;
Find the brown beneath the white;
But whate'er you do to-night,
Bathe my window, make it flow,
Melt it as the ice will go;
Melt the glass and leave the sticks
Like a hermit's crucifix;
Burst into my narrow stall;
Swing the picture on the wall;
Run the rattling pages o'er;
Scatter poems on the floor;
Turn the poet out of door.

I knew there was one I liked, and I've been half-heartedly rummaging for about a week...DUH!, begin at the beginning. (It's early in A Boy's Will...and stylistically, would appear to be a very early Frost poem.)

I've always been partial to this one...I'm not sure why-- you have to make allowance for the "O" and "o'er" and "whate'er", and lines 3 and 14 are a tad awkward. I don't get why L15 says "out of door". "Melt it as the ice will go" is an uninspired line. "sticks...crucifix" is too cute, and an irrelevant image. "stall" is a peculiar euphemism for a bedroom. All that, and I still like the poem throughout...go figure?

Let the others look at "The Impulse"...but I feel as if using this ("The Impulse") instead of "The Pasture" would have been stacking the deck.




[This message has been edited by MacArthur (edited May 02, 2001).]

This is one of those poems I'd have to use the word "nice" about. Possibly even "very nice." There are whole anthologies full of this kind of stuff; and it's all very nice. It's supposed to make you feel sorry for the people in the poem, but not very deeply. It's hinting at the darkness beneath the surface of country life, but in no particularly different way than a thousand poems about rural suicide, murder, getting lost in snow storms etc, etc... Rural Tragedy Poems.

And the girl is the standard rural witchy wild-child, who can't be tamed and perhaps shouldn't, then escapes... yawn.

And the last verse sums it up oh-so-neatly, as if we haven't already got whatever point it was trying to make already. Oh yes, there are other losses than death. He might as well have written the word MORAL above that verse.

Not an objectionable poem, of course. The language is very nice, and there's no particular problems with meter or rhyme. I can't see any reason why it can't be held up as an example of how to write a good poem in meter.

Except it's dull, predictable and safe.

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

This is one that exerted a force on me without my quite realizing it. The last lines have remained part of my way of looking at the world, and the story itself often comes to mind. I disagree that there's anything hackneyed about it, unless one reads it with expectations so strong that they obscure what's actually being said. (RF said that he wanted to say things "that almost but don't quite formulate," and this is one of many poems that seem to say something familiar but actually challege what's familiar -- the famously mis-read conclusion of "The Road Not Taken" being a case in point.) There's nothing to suggest that the woman in this poem is a "wild child." In fact, the place she's living is "too wild," among other things. It's important to my reading of the poem that she not be restless or wild, but that she simply give in to an impulse and, having done so, discover that it's easier and easier to go farther and farther. The ties attenuate and finally break, but without her intending for them to do so. The rural setting is pretty much incidental, in my eyes, except perhaps that it allows the presence of those spooky woods.
This is one of many poems of RF's that don't get a lot of attention but deserve it. "The Thatch" is another. But don't get me started.
Richard

This poem is about the loneliness and dangers ("too wild") of isolated farm living. (I believe Frost has another poem about a couple who, everytime they have been away from the farm and return, open the front door and shout to give thieves a chance to escape out the back.) It takes a certain type of person to put up with that type of life and this girl couldn't. (A woman could be raped in her own home while her husband worked in the fields.) She returned to her family. When Frost wrote this poem, divorce was frowned upon and what the girl did was "far more extreme" then we would view it now---marriage actually was "until death do us part" (and he learned of finalities beside the grave).

Frost is actually writing a poem about rural farm life and using the effects it can have on people not suited to it to show off what type of people DID live out there. (City people, of course, were the ones who would buy and read the book--Frost as a writer knew who his readership was.) This poem is a contrast between the girl and her husband--who never even had a glimpse of insight into what his wife was going through in the months or years they had lived out there (The poem is called "The Impulse" but could almost have been called "The straw that broke the camel's back"). In reality, since Frost's subjects were rural people and not city people, this poem is really about the husband, we just learn about him through the contrast with his wife.

The problem with this poem is that it, in some respects, has not aged well. Our views on divorce have changed radically and true rural isolation is a thing of the past. We no longer truly understand the unstated premises of the poem which powered it in Frost's day. Therefore some people think it is banal. But it still is a very good poem. It still tells us much about human nature.

ewrgall




[This message has been edited by ewrgall (edited May 02, 2001).]

A great poem is helpful when shaving, because the bristles rise on your face.
Housman or maybe Frost said something like that, and both of them, to me are a help when shaving.
Not too many others, though.
Is it different for women, who don't shave? Or maybe it's the hairs on their legs?
Regards

The Impulse

It was too lonely for her there,
And too wild,
And since there were but two of them,
And no child,

And work was little in the house,
She was free,
And followed where he furrowed field,
Or felled tree.

She rested on a log and tossed
The fresh chips,
With a song only to herself
On her lips.

And once she went to break a bough
Of black alder.
She strayed so far she scarcely heard
When he called her —

And didn’t answer — didn’t speak —
Or return.
She stood, and then she ran and hid
In the fern.

He never found her, though he looked
Everywhere,
And he asked at her mother’s house
Was she there.

Sudden and swift and light as that
The ties gave,
And he learned of finalities
Besides the grave.

The Impulse

It was too lonely for her there,
(An uninspired line by anyone’s standard)
And too wild,
(This is unlikely to have applied to any part of New England that Frost was actually acquainted with. There were too many neighbors in Thoreau’s day. The first trochaic line—the first two—start with promotions.)
And since there were but two of them,
(Someone will have to tell me—is this use of “but” New England just-plain-folks-talk or Poetic Diction? “since” rather than “as” is, at least, common.)
And no child,
(This line alone would be enough to guarantee this poem would be rejected by any Formalist journal-- let alone a Mainstream publication. Kids, don’t try this in the XXIst Century!)

And work was little in the house,
(This must either an inversion, or some more of Frost’s Pre-School expression...hey, you come too!)
She was free,
And followed where he furrowed field,
(“President Proposes Project for Portland”)
Or felled tree.
(The third of three entirely idiotic inversions-- well not inversions, exactly, but "poesy". BTW, is “or” supposed to take a stronger stress than “felled”? I suppose it could...but this is just the kind of metrical insensitivity that Pound complained of, re—infelicities.)

She rested on a log and tossed
(The set-up for a very unconvincing enjambment.)
The fresh chips,
(The metrical expectation here has you stressing “The”...that’s ‘cause Frost is a GENIUS.)
With a song only to herself
(The purpose of the clunky reversed foot here is to disguise the fact that, on any natural reading, this line is short a stress. Correction-- the promoted "to" is the missing stress...hard to keep up with genius! I don't know about you, but I stutter saying it with four stresses, and am more inclined to elide the "ly"...leaving only three stresses.)
On her lips.
(This enjambment, while not as awkward as the previous, is nathless a flat-tire-- they all are.)

And once she went to break a bough
Of black alder.
(Here’s an opportunity to stress “of” over “black”—O, the joys of reading a GENIUS—important information, though...she should have fetched a calf. I think he should have used another tree.)
She strayed so far she scarcely heard
When he called her —
(Frost is presently going to “push the envelope” with a four-syllable word—not even the name of a state!—so I won’t comment on these ugly little words, unimaginatively put together. Tim Murphy, note the two-part rhyme.)

And didn’t answer — didn’t speak —
Or return.
She stood, and then she ran and hid
In the fern.
(Have I commented yet?...this guy only has to rhyme on every other line, and he makes it look like hard work.)

He never found her, though he looked
Everywhere,
(Now I don’t know whether she’s dead or—heavens—divorced…but it stretches credulity that he didn’t find her sooner or later, dead or alive—did he check New Orleans?)
And he asked at her mother’s house
(Another line short a stress…I know, ‘cause he’s a GENIUS. Either that, or Frost is tossing stress around like a drunken bohunk laying brick. Mezey might think this is a perfectly natural Tetrameter…in a manner of speaking, it is natural.)
Was she there.
(Punctuation on this deathless prose?…ah Hell! who cares? In Hollywood they give booby-prize awards for scripts as poorly-written as this.)

Sudden and swift and light as that
The ties gave,
(The only really good line. This time you can’t stress “the”, so the tag is “loosely iambic”, ie. Free Verse—Bob’s playing tennis without the net.)
And he learned of finalities
(I suppose the awkward promotion at the end of this line is a sorry pun on the previous “ties”. You have to drop a brick on "and" to get four stresses-- or..."And HE learned OF"?...nah, not even Frost!)
Besides the grave.
(This is clever...no, she's not dead. But, this usage of "besides" sounds...well, childish.)

Excepting the ham-fisted alliteration (licking wool?), the poem contains no internal music, and rhythmically chugs (and falters) along like the Little Engine That Could. There is no arresting imagery, and no remarkable narrative detail. The point eludes me—I don’t feel like I know any more about people who take to isolated living, people who don’t, or human nature generally.



[This message has been edited by MacArthur (edited May 02, 2001).]

[b]>A great poem is helpful when shaving, because the >bristles rise on your face.
>Housman or maybe Frost said something like that

Housman (but he may have put his tongue in cheek to
facilitate shaving; a professor who spends a great
chunk of his life anatomizing a text in classical
latin probably does not hold the intellect in such
contempt, but rather may have been casting a cold eye
on the inadequacy of the criticism of his contemporaries
to explain it...).

MacArthur >> It was too lonely for her there,
(An uninspired line by anyoneÕs standard) <<

Your critique is silly because it doesn't even try to take in what the poem is doing; it's just a fault-finding mission applying arbitrary standards to decontextualized objects. The inspiration of any single line can only be judged in context, but you have no inkling of the context -- it's as if you hadn't read the whole poem, only each line separately. It's like interpreting a sentence word-by-word without any consideration of the relations between the words.

Therefore, to be even more particular, you could criticize the opening word of the poem: "It". Is not "it" a rather low, uninspired word? You could go letter-by-letter through the whole poem, ruthlessly laying waste to any pretensions to inspiration. Criticize the bricks when you have no idea of the building.

Wake up & read the poem! It really is quite wonderful. Frost has an amazing ability to distil archetypal patterns of experience in radically simplified narratives. You have to get inside this first, then you can see the extraordinary tact of the particulars.

AE

AE...I was challenged to give my reasons, and that may have made me a bit defensive and pettifogging. I repent of the tone of my above note (which is more disrespectful than I really feel), but not it's conclusion. I did wince for Frost when I first read though this poem last night, and further re-readings have only made it more apparent why it is not very good. Frost had an ear developed when metrical practice was the norm for poetry and popular poetry was forgiven a LOT of clumsiness. It is real clear that Frost was the (dare I say?) Great 19th-Century Poet that America never had. You have to automatically grant him the poetic license for obsolete literary convention you readily concede to most traditional poets...and in that sense he is not Modern at all-- not contemporary in the same sense as Auden, Thomas or Roetke.

And this poem is not his best. Not lovely. Not good.

(It's just that those who like Frost, like everything. They are as undiscriminating as addicts...that should tell you something.)



[This message has been edited by MacArthur (edited May 03, 2001).]

Caleb, you've done this much-sullied board a service by posting Impulse but done Frost a disservice by quoting him out of context. Don't you people realize that this is Part V of The Hill Wife and that you're discussing--as it were--the concluding couplet of a sonnet without having ever encountered the poem? At least ewrgall has the wit to say it reminds him of another Frost poem, as indeed it should, that being Part II., House Fear. My esteemed friends, Mssrs. Clawson and Mezey, didn't mention Hill Wife on their short list of great Frost poems, but it's on mine. It's a terrifying narrative told not in blank verse, but in five tight little lyrics which MacIdiot, possessed as he is of what Mezey and the Jesuits condemn as "Invincible Ignorance," hasn't the craft to scan much less the wisdom to understand. "Promote a fourth stress?"
The long lines are hypermetric trimeters, and you are a savage.

Trimeters??? Tim...you're smoking crack!

Yikes, you savages, um.. ah.. i mean you crack heads, um...ah...I mean, you guys.

There's no law saying someone has to like or dislike Frost.

I like Frost. I think his genius is in the simplicity. The "writing" doesn't get in the way. It never upstages the meaning. (I know some will jump on that statement. Tough, I know what I mean and I think others do too.)

I was agreeing with Mac on this one though, until it was mentioned that this is not the whole poem. Now I'm going to read the whole thing.

BUT, what I really popped in to say is, I find racial slurs offensive folks.

Tim, I'm not home right now, so I can't look up the poems, but I was aware that this poem is part of a group. I feel, however, that it stands by itself very nicely. There is not one single word in this poem that requires explication beyond what is said in the poem. I have not done Frost any disservice.

Ewrgall, you read too much into the poem. It has nothing to do with marriage or divorce -- there's no indication that the woman is unhappy with the marriage. Nor is it about farm living. I read it as being about fate, about chance, about the unexpected, about the forces we can't control. Get thee to a marriage counsellor, and don't read your problems into Frost's poems!

AE, thanks for your great comeback to MacArthur.

MacArthur, your criticisms are just lame. You can't see the forest for the trees.

P.S. I like "To the Thawing Wind" also.



[This message has been edited by Caleb Murdock (edited May 02, 2001).]

Quote of Tim Murphy---Don't you people realize that this is Part V of THE HILL WIFE and that you're discussing as it were--the closing couplet of a sonnet without having ever encountered the poem. At least ewrgall has the wit to say it reminds him of another Frost poem as indeed it should, that being Part II, House Fear.
Small praise Is better than no praise at all, isn't it??


Quote of Caleb Murdock---Ewrgall, you read too much into the poem. It has nothing to do with marriage or divorce -- there's no indication that the woman is unhappy with the marriage. Nor is it about farm living. I read it as being about fate, about chance, about the unexpected, about the forces we can't control. Get thee to a marriage counselor, and don't read your problems into Frost's poems!
You are disagreeing with a man who has just received small praise from Tim Murphy? My views are correct. Yours are ridiculous. It sounds like something Helen Vendler would say. Get thee to The Amazing Randi and have your mysticism debunked.

ewrgall


[This message has been edited by ewrgall (edited May 02, 2001).]

It's quite clear that this is about divorce.

Momdebomb...bohunks?

I grew up with that expression-- a drunken bohunk laying brick. My mother's people were bohunks in Chicago. Nothing wrong with bohunks, 'cept when they're drunk (which come to think on it, is much of the time)...then they can't lay brick worth a damn!

Sorry, Mac. I'm the savage. They are tets. I've typed in the entire poem for any Frost fan or critic who doesn't have his book. I think we can all agree that the subject is madness and not divorce, and that Part V. gains appreciably from being read in its proper context.

Madness? A woman wakes up to her situation and does something sane. No doubt she has fulfilled the expected thing: married an impoverished woodsman like her own father and set about trying to be a grownup "hill wife." But it is not a sweet life. Threat seeps out of every natural thing -- the pine scratching the glass -- and ever artful thing -- their own empty house. The isolation unnerves her but doesn't necessarily drive her mad.

The unsaid, unexplained things in the poem lead one to imagine the actual contours of this young woman's life: does her husband treat her cruelly? is he a clumsy lover or not a lover at all (no children)? a non-talker? someone who takes her for granted? She trails along with him each day because she doesn't want to be alone; then, in a sudden insight, she realizes she is still alone, utterly alone in a double solitude. But she is free! Unburdened by children and heavy housework, she is free to walk the woods with her husband; one day she realizes she is also existentially free. She leaves him; she disappears.

It is so interesting to me that this poem, centered on the hill wife, ends with the hill husband and his utter bewilderment. She becomes a symbol of the fragility of all human ties.

Around 1969, in the grubby Bronx, I first encountered this poem about a hill wife and thought I could read my future in it.

Frost must have really liked women. I like to imagine that the hill wife matured into a woman of power and grace, someone free but not entirely free, someone who might inspire that other Frostian meditation on a woman and human freedom, The Silken Tent.

The Hill Wife is a layered poem, to be sure; I'd be interested to hear your madness angle, Tim.

Sorry, but this kind of narrative was very ably dissected by Stella Gibbons in Cold Comfort Farm a long time ago. Even with the additional parts, it still seems like a bad pastiche of rural Gothic nonesense like Gone To Earth and Woman Into Fox. However good or bad its meter, or however vivid or simple its language, it's still a cliche.



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

First I want to congratulate Mac on his courage and on having started an interesting and spirited discussion. I hope there will be more bashing of the greats -- if they can't take it, then they aren't all that great after all. If they are great, then they are poorly served by becoming such icons that nobody remembers the reasons why they are great because it's been so long since the issue was debated.
(This message brought to you by John Stuart Mill.)

Second, I want to reply briefly to Steve.

1. Cold Comfort Farm was published in 1933. Mountain Interval (in which the Hill Wife appeared) was published in 1920 -- very likely the poem was around a good while before the collection came out.

It sounds like you're criticizing Frost for telling the same story that others have told. The trouble is that there really aren't that many basic stories -- I recall somebody claiming htat there were only about 5 main plots.
You put aside all of the poetic treatment as irrelevant, but that's pretty much all that's going to be new.
In this short form, he won't have the space for deep characterization. In forms that allow more space for such characterization, Frost characterizes brilliantly -- the wife in Home Burial for instance (and her character is not too far from this woman, as far as I can tell).

Most wisdom was discovered long ago, and if you were to boil it down to something short, it would all come out in things that sound like cliches.
One danger for the poet is to just recycle cliches, without adding any new spin.
The opposite danger (which looks more daring, but really isn't) is to avoid cliche by staying far away from any sort of wisdom -- by saying things that aren't worth saying at all.
The latter is another way to stay "safe" -- even if Frost fails (which I don't concede) maybe we should give him credit for daring a cliche.



[This message has been edited by ChrisW (edited May 03, 2001).]

Well...golly.

This is a much stronger poem. I have been going through this for about 90 minutes and it keeps improving. The analysis I offered above, I believe, is still valid as observation...but not as critique. The choices Frost made in the fifth section were artful, not naive.

There is a shape to this cycle: the punch is in the IIIrd middle section. Bracketed by two more lyrical, but less intense, sections-- and further enveloped by the outer sections, which are parodies of the wife and husband, respectively. The (truly) flat writing I detected in section five, and the (clumsy) meter are representative of the husbands stolidity and confusion.
And this:

One ought not to have to care
So much as you and I

...can you imagine Frost beginning a lyric poem in his own voice with a line (only the opening clause in a longer sentence) as dreadful as that!? This is truly awful-- but it represents "her word", and suggests that the young wife is a shade more sophisticated than her mate-- not really, though...just compared to him. She's even more wordy than him-- the lines alternate Tetra- and Trimeter, as opposed to Tetra- and Dimeter.

On another thread, I posed as an open question whether Frost could handle a literary assignment with the kind of scope tackled by Yeats and Eliot-- perhaps this goes some way toward it. A very ambitious poem, and mostly successful.

I have misgivings about placing the strongest part in the middle. It's something Mozart always did-- in Mozart's day music was always realised in live performance, and only infrequently. By Beethoven's time, recording was an idea (B. composed for "player-pianos") and regular professional repetory orchestras were becoming common-- Beethoven preferred a strong climax. What do you think?

My take on the poem is that the vagrant may have something more to do with this...there is a hidden seduction/abduction theme-- which would (either way) explain why the husband actually couldn't find her.

Section III may be a snub at Williams...it's the poem WCW wished he could write. (Sec. I might be a slap at Stevens...I believe they didn't like each other, and it has some of Stevens artificial verbosity). II could have been written by Robinson, but that may be EA Poe on both of them.

Thoroughly enjoying this, though it hasn't satisfied all my misgivings about Frost (I still think he's yesterday's man).
Anyone to comment on "Thawing Wind".


[This message has been edited by MacArthur (edited May 03, 2001).]

ChrisW, Hill Wife appeared in The Yale Review in 1916. Mac, welcome to the choir. I often stitich together little lyrics to try to tell a story (Hunting Time on Metrical Order being an example), and I'm fascinated by how Frost tells this story. Kate, I'm delighted to see your entirely different slant, and isn't it a mark of important poetry that diferent readers take different things away? OK, not madness, but see how layer upon layer, the paranoia builds.
I've a lilac that scratches at my window whenever the North wind blows. It's trying to get into my house!

Well sure...lets look at some other things. BTW all of Frost is available free on-line (copyrights must be exhausted)...just hit Yahoo and ask for Frost-- it's almost the first thing in the thread.

I shall reprint a few quotes from what I said earlier about "The Impluse", before the rest of the poem was added. Some have disputed the analysis I then gave. After seeing the whole poem who say I was wrong?


This poem is about the loneliness and dangers....of isolated farm living......It takes a certain type of person to put up with that type of life and this girl couldn't...... She returned to her family..... When Frost wrote this poem, divorce was frowned upon and what the girl did was "far more extreme" then we would view it now---marriage actually was "until death do us part" ("and he learned of finalities beside the grave").

Frost is actually writing a poem about rural farm life and using the effects it can have on people not suited to it to show off what type of people DID live out there.....This poem is a contrast between the girl and her husband--who never even had a glimpse of insight into what his wife was going through in the months or years they had lived out there.

The problem with this poem is that it, in some respects, has not aged well. Our views on divorce have changed radically and true rural isolation is a thing of the past. We no longer truly understand the unstated premises of the poem which powered it in Frost's day.

Some have now suggested that the woman was driven mad--that is incorrect--she had to be crazy to stay there!--Isolation and fear do effect people and that is what Frost is displaying in the poem--not "madness". She seems to get a little paranoid but she has reasons. In part II "House Fear" the very first line says---"Always--I tell you this they learned"--THIS THEY LEARNED? How did they learn it--to not enter their house without first giving warning to a thief who might be inside?---they learned it through a bad experience--that how they learned it. Is it any wonder that in part III, "The Smile" that this young girl worries that the bum who begs food might still be lurking in the woods? A woman has different worries than a man. She was not mad--self-reservation is not madness.

ewrgall





[This message has been edited by ewrgall (edited May 03, 2001).]

This one is like a cake that didn't rise...

After Apple-picking

My long two-pointed ladder's sticking through a tree
Toward heaven still,
And there's a barrel that I didn't fill
Beside it, and there may be two or three
Apples I didn't pick upon some bough.
But I am done with apple-picking now.
Essence of winter sleep is on the night,
The scent of apples: I am drowsing off.
I cannot rub the strangeness from my sight
I got from looking through a pane of glass
I skimmed this morning from the drinking trough
And held against the world of hoary grass.
It melted, and I let it fall and break.
But I was well
Upon my way to sleep before it fell,
And I could tell
What form my dreaming was about to take.
Magnified apples appear and disappear,
Stem end and blossom end,
And every fleck of russet showing clear.
My instep arch not only keeps the ache,
It keeps the pressure of a ladder-round.
I feel the ladder sway as the boughs bend.

And I keep hearing from the cellar bin
The rumbling sound
Of load on load of apples coming in.
For I have had too much
Of apple-picking: I am overtired
Of the great harvest I myself desired.
There were ten thousand thousand fruit to touch,
Cherish in hand, lift down, and not let fall.
For all
That struck the earth,
No matter if not bruised or spiked with stubble,
Went surely to the cider-apple heap
As of no worth.
One can see what will trouble
This sleep of mine, whatever sleep it is.
Were he not gone,
The woodchuck could say whether it's like his
Long sleep, as I describe its coming on,
Or just some human sleep.

This poem has been recommended to me countless times, but leaves me cool. There isn't anything to dislike about it, especially, and some of the imagery is well-handled. Curiously, it resembles Eliot's early style a little in the opening hexameter, the irregular line-lengths and inconsistent rhyme pattern...but without Eliot's pace, startling content and syncopated rhythms. The lines are almost excessively regular.

Is this a take on the C19th novel with its limited endings for the heroine? In Nice Work by David Lodge, he played on the madness, marriage or legacy endings.

It does strike me as very C19th century in its setting - is that what Frost intended? Anyone know?

Nigel

Mac:
It's interesting that you should choose "After Apple-Picking" as another example of a failed Frost poem. For me it's one of the all time greats. Although I regret that stupid woodchuck (seems to me just an inescapably funny word), the poem is otherwise as moving and lasting as any poem I know, right up there with "Mowing." There's no point in my enumerating its wonders because, after all, these differences of taste are finally inexplicable, but I'll say that I'd be a happy poet if I could ever come up with something as true and universal as the dream vision of the apples.
Richard

Well...failed is a stronger word than even I would have used. The glimpse through the sheet of ice, and the dancing apples in the dream are really admirable (the latter could easily have seemed silly-- but Frost handles it so well it comes off). It is too bad about the woodchuck..."How much wood could a woodchuck chuck...?etc" Why not Groundhog?...Those are the guys you think of as sleepers.
But I don't think of it as a failure, so much as an approach that doesn't suit Frost very well...it's different for Frost-- which is why some people like it.



[This message has been edited by MacArthur (edited May 04, 2001).]

Dear Mac,

Well, some folk think it's a stunning use of the ode, or nonce form. You should get the audiotape, because Frost reads it brilliantly--blasting his way through the line endings like a fine Shakespearean actor. If you're actually interested in finding out why so many poets love Frost, that might be a good place to start.

I am nonplussed by how much effort you're spending trying to concince us that most lovers of poetry, and the best judges of it, in near total accord (Jarrel, Pinsky, Heany, Mezey, Brodsky, and some people whose names don't even end with "y"), that all off us have been suffering from a mass hallucination, which only you have escaped. And yet I imagine Frost's reputation is unscathed. I can't help but think of the gnat on the bull's horn in Aesop.

"Sorry to have burdened you, my good fellow."

"Oh, I hadn't noticed you were there."

Well...I wouldn't want anyone to change their mind...why would I?

For two decades I comforted myself: "He didn't publish After Apple Picking until he was forty." Now I'm fifty, and I haven't anything to show as good. There's a video I once saw in which William Pritchard interviews Heaney, Brodsky and Wilbur about Frost. Wilbur is sitting by his woodpile (of course) in the Berkshires, and does After Apple Picking from memory, then analyzes its miraculous heterometrical structure from memory, starting right out with the long, two-pointed ladder's hexameter. I think the woodchuck is terrific, combining as it does the folk fable of groundhog day and the old mnemonic tongue-twister. My dad thought this was Frost's greatest poem, and I rarely argued poetry with Dad.

The first time Sam Gwynn read my poem "The Path Mistaken," he said he was reminded of Frost's instep arch when he encountered my couplet "My back and shoulders recall the ache/ of hard work done for the forest's sake." Although the poem is a deliberate tribute to Frost, that connection was subconscious. But isn't that how great poems should resonate?

Getting back to The Hill Wife ...

First things first: Tim, I'm not happy that you changed my post. If you wanted to type in the whole thing, you should have done it in your own post.

I am astonished by the things that some of you have read into these poems, especially The Impulse. All of these notions are completely off the wall: that the woman is "wild", that the woman is mad, that the woman is unhappy, that the poem is about divorce, that the poem is about farm living, that the poem is about the woman or the husband, that the husband mistreats the woman, that the woman ran away, etc., etc. You are taking "reading between the lines" way beyond reason. The only person who got it right was Richard Wakefield.

Frost tells us what the poem is about: it is about an impulse -- an impulse that has an unexpected result in that it breaks the ties between the husband and wife. He doesn't explain WHY the woman doesn't comes back, and we aren't supposed to know why -- that's not the point of the poem. The point of the poem is that life isn't predictable.



[This message has been edited by Caleb Murdock (edited May 06, 2001).]

Well, yes, when one starts speculating about the nitty-gritty details of the Hill Wife's circumstances, one risks missing the "point" entirely. My own musings in that regard were intended less as an argument than as a testament to the poem's richness and layeredness; it makes a reader wonder about what might have led up to the impulse, even though a firm answer is ultimately impossible. Frost likes to leave things ambiguous, mysterious. Like the deserted hill husband himself, we are "left in the dark."

But maybe a little less in the dark. The Impulse works as a stand-alone poem (that's how I first encountered it myself, in a college anthology), but clearly Frost meant it to be read as the final poem in a multi-part series. Those other poems plant tantalizing clues; what careful reader can resist mulling them over?

I'd argue that the poem's theme is more complex than a simple statement that life isn't predictable. I'd say that the multi-part poem depicts the absolute terror that lies close beneath the surface of the predictably led life, the possibility of escaping that death-in-life through an act of human freedom, however impulsive (a nuanced word), and perhaps the rarity of such a choice -- for most of us are like the hill husband, accepting our lot, repressing the very idea of alternatives. She leaves him flat, as we said in grade school, and with a flattened affect: he does a methodical search and then stoically accepts the finality of her simple gone-ness. I see existential truths embodied by both these characters, boiling up from the page.

Frost tells us what this poem is about: it is about an impulse -- an impulse that has an unexpected result in that it breaks the ties between husband and wife. He doesn't explain WHY the women doesn't come back, and we aren't suppose to know why -- that's not the point of the poem. The point of the poem is that life isn't predictable.


Caleb,

WAKE UP AND SMELL THE COFFEE!!!!!!

You seem to have difficulty understanding what people write. This is probably because you dont understand what words mean. An "Impulse" is an effect created by an originating event or events. (The heart beats, the impulse of that beating causes us to have a pulse in our wrist. We may have an impulse to fix dinner but either our own hunger or the kids coming home from school originate that impulse.) My dictionary gives as a third sense the following--"a sudden spontaneous inclination or an incitement of the mind or spirit <u>arising directly from feeling or from some outer influence</u> and prompting some unpremeditated action". An impulse is dependent on originating factors ("feeling or from some outer influence")--it is not independent. There are four poems that precede "The Impulse". Those poems lay out the originating factors that cause the girl to "implusively" leave her husband. The sudden "impulse" had been building up for a long time. What held it off for so long was her love for her husband and that she was MARRIED--which meant a great deal more back in 1915 then it means today. MARRIED women did not leave their husbands--IT WASNT DONE!!!!!


First things first: Tim, I'm not happy that you changed my post. If you wanted to type in the whole thing, you should have done it in your own post.
One thinks you are unhappy with this because including the whole poem makes it obvious you dont know what you are talking about.

I am astonished by the things that some of you have read into these poems, especially The Impulse. All of these notions are completely off the wall: that the woman is "wild", that the woman is mad, that the woman is unhappy, that the poem is about divorce, that the poem is about farm living, that the poem is about the woman or the husband, that the husband mistreats the woman, that the woman ran away, etc., etc. You are taking "reading between the lines" way beyond reason.
A number of things that you "claim" were said about this poem weren't actually said by anyone. No one said "the woman is wild" or "the woman is mad" or "that the poem is about divorce" or "that the husband mistreats the woman"---not only can't you understand Frost's words but you also demonstrate an inability to understand other people on this site. The poem is about "the woman and her husband"--"farm living"--the woman "is unhappy"--"the woman did "run away".

I repeat---WAKE UP AND SMELL THE COFFEE!!!!!

ewrgall

Kate, thank you for a well-reasoned response. You're right that terror is one of the themes of the series.

If I sounded overly emphatic in my last post, it's because so many of the interpretations sounded irrational to me. Indeed, I've read the entire series and it seems clear to me that the wife isn't unhappy in any way, and therefore wouldn't leave her husband. (Incidentally, there's no reason to assume that all 5 poems are about the same individual(s). The "hill wife" may be a composite figure, in that Frost may have been writing about a type of person rather than a particular person.)

Ewrgall, you need to double up on your therapy sessions. There's nothing in the poem to suggest that the wife ran away. Personally, I have always imaged that the wife met an untimely death and her body couldn't be found. It's clear from the poem that the wife is hiding from her husband out of play, and that she is not hiding in earnest. The fact that she has a "song on her lips" in a previous stanza indicates that she is in a light-hearted mood. A wife who is intent on escaping from her husband would not follow him into the field; she would stay in the house and make her escape from there.

There are hints in the poem that this is a young married couple, which makes it less likely that the wife would run away because of marital strife: they have no children; her behavior is casual (tossing chips and singing); and her mother is still alive and living nearby. A middle-aged wife would not be following her husband around the field -- that is something that a young, bored wife would do.

Your interpretation of this poem is nothing short of bizarre.

[This message has been edited by Caleb Murdock (edited May 07, 2001).]

She strayed so far she scarcely heard
When he called her —

And didn’t answer — didn’t speak —
Or return.
She stood, and then she ran and hid
In the fern.

He never found her, though he looked
Everywhere,
And he asked at her mother’s house
Was she there.

Sudden and swift and light as that
The ties gave,
And he learned of finalities
Besides the grave.


"and then she ran and hid
In the fern.

He never found her"

certainly sounds like someone running away. Maybe she fell down a hole or something but he never found her, She didn't come back. This still sounds to me to be basically a "woman = force of nature, man = force of reason" scenario. The suggestion is that she wasn't at her mother's house either, otherwise why does he learn of "finalities /beside the grave"? She's gone, mate. Probably into the same mythical wilderness the rest of these characters go.

Incidently, if this is from 1920ish, he would probably be familiar, via his previous friendship with Edward Thomas, of this same kind of theme in English Georgian poets of the time, such as Charlotte Mew. I don't know New England, but the landscape sounds terribly like Wessex country.

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

She strayed so far she scarcely heard
When he called her —

And didn’t answer — didn’t speak —
Or return.
She stood, and then she ran and hid
In the fern.

He never found her, though he looked
Everywhere,
And he asked at her mother’s house
Was she there.

Sudden and swift and light as that
The ties gave,
And he learned of finalities
Besides the grave.

Caleb--you are a hopeless case.

To any others still interested.

He never found her, though he looked
everywhere,
and He asked at her mother's house
was she there

What does this actually say? He looked everywhere around his farm and couldnt find her. And he went to her mother's house and asked if she was there--What was he told at her mother's house? That she was not there or that she was there? That question is answered by what he learns--he learns of FINALITIES---NOT MORE UNCERTAINTIES about what happened to his wife but FINALITIES and he learns of FINALITIES BESIDES THE GRAVE--SHE WAS NOT DEAD BECAUSE SHE WAS AT HER MOTHER'S HOUSE!!!! The finalities that he learned was that his marriage (which was supposed to be "until death do us part") was over, that other things can be just as certain as death--THAT NO WAY UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES WHATSOEVER WAS THAT GIRL GOING TO GO BACK TO THE FARM WITH HIM!

Sudden swift and as light as that the ties gave---This explains the man's point of view--to him it was sudden swift and as light as that---but in the previous four poems we have been getting the girl's point of view--that for a long time she had been living in lonilessness, boredom and fear--finally she just couldnt take it and she left. The husband, dense unfeeling oaf that he was (a typical male), was totally unaware of his wife's unhappiness.

The problem you might have in interperting this poem is that the girl disappears from the poem as well as from the farm. <u>The last two stanzas are written entirely about and from the man's point of view of the events.</u> Let me repeat that--THE LAST TWO STANZAS ARE WRITTEN FROM THE MAN'S POINT OF VIEW--<u>the girl has disappeared from the poem as well as the farm.</u> We learn what the man learned--about finalities besides death. His wife ran away to her mother's house and intended to dump him--period--end of poem.

I definately think the problem with understanding this poem comes about because people miss the complete change in perspective--that the last two stanzas tell the story from the niave husband's point of view.

ewrgall



[This message has been edited by ewrgall (edited May 07, 2001).]

Ewrgall, there is nothing in the previous poems to suggest the wife is unhappy. Fear of robbers and trees scratching at the window is part of country life; there's nothing to suggest that she wasn't willing to tolerate these things. The series isn't about the wife getting fed up and making her escape.

Let's examine the poem line by line:

It was too lonely for her there,
And too wild,
And since there were but two of them,
And no child,

And work was little in the house,
She was free,
And followed where he furrowed field,
Or felled tree.
[That she is lonely and bored doesn't suggest that she is looking to escape. Loneliness and boredom are part of life. The fact that she is voluntarily following her husband around the field suggests that she is happy in the marriage.]

She rested on a log and tossed
The fresh chips,
With a song only to herself
On her lips.
[In this stanza she's doing stuff to break her boredom -- there is still no suggestion that she is so miserable that she needs to escape. Tossing chips and singing suggest that she was in a care-free mood, not the mood of a person so unhappy that she would run away just moments later.]

And once she went to break a bough
Of black alder.
She strayed so far she scarcely heard
When he called her —
[All Frost is saying here is that she was just able to hear him. Again, the fact that she is working with her husband in the field suggests that she is happy in the marriage.]

And didn’t answer — didn’t speak —
Or return.
She stood, and then she ran and hid
In the fern.
[As I said in my previous post, everything prior to this suggests that she was in a light-hearted mood. Her hiding was a form of play -- she probably expected her husband to come looking for her.]

He never found her, though he looked
Everywhere,
And he asked at her mother’s house
Was she there.
[I don't see how you can extrapolate from this that she was still alive.]

Sudden and swift and light as that
The ties gave,
And he learned of finalities
Besides the grave.
[The "finalities" mentioned here are the finalities of permanent separation and loss. That the final two stanzas are written from the husband's point of view is irrelevant.]

In suggesting that she didn't run away, I'm not saying that she didn't perhaps run a little further as part of the game she was playing with her husband, and then meet some untimely end. Or perhaps she got lost and, for whatever reason, never made her way back to the life she was living. There's just no evidence that she ran away because she was UNHAPPY. These poems are not about marital unhappiness, or even unhappiness with her life.

[This message has been edited by Caleb Murdock (edited May 07, 2001).]