Frost
 

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No November should go by without some Frost...


My November Guest
Robert Frost

My sorrow, when she’s here with me,
.....Thinks these dark days of autumn rain
Are beautiful as days can be;
She loves the bare, the withered tree;
.....She walks the sodden pasture lane.

Her pleasure will not let me stay.
.....She talks and I am fain to list:
She’s glad the birds are gone away,
She’s glad her simple worsted grey
.....Is silver now with clinging mist.

The desolate, deserted trees,
.....The faded earth, the heavy sky,
The beauties she so truly sees,
She thinks I have no eye for these,
.....And vexes me for reason why.

Not yesterday I learned to know
.....The love of bare November days
Before the coming of the snow,
But it were vain to tell her so,
.....And they are better for her praise.

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I wonder if this poem was written in England. The weather sounds like a British November.

I'm not sure.

It might be that climate change has skewed things, but I live very, very close to where Frost lived when in the UK, and the weather is certainly sodden in November, but claggy-sodden, deep red clay - wet - lacking those uplifting sonics in the poem.

I suspect it might be a kind of rural-represented remembered and presented as an evocation of nature rather than a reflection of the real, but who knows (and I'm certainly no Frost scholar).

Sarah-Jane

say what?
 

Yes, published in London: his first book A Boy's Will

This seems to me the best poem in that book:

Mowing

There was never a sound beside the wood but one,
And that was my long scythe whispering to the ground.
What was it it whispered? I knew not well myself;
Perhaps it was something about the heat of the sun,
Something, perhaps, about the lack of sound—
And that was why it whispered and did not speak.
It was no dream of the gift of idle hours,
Or easy gold at the hand of fay or elf:
Anything more than the truth would have seemed too weak
To the earnest love that laid the swale in rows,
Not without feeble-pointed spikes of flowers
(Pale orchises), and scared a bright green snake.
The fact is the sweetest dream that labor knows.
My long scythe whispered and left the hay to make.

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It is a serenade to sorrow. As for the geography and climate of the poem being drawn from where he was living in England at the time, I think it's just as likely he was drawing from his memories in New England, Massachusetts and New Hampshire. The weather in both those spots is dreary in late November, and when it's wet, all the more sodden it gets.

My recollection of the English Novembers mirrors the mood of this poem perfectly. The Novembers I remember in Richmond, Surrey as I walked daily up the hill that borders the park would also be a fine inspiration for the poem. So the inspirational setting for the poem could have come from either New England or England.
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Frost has never done it for me. His poems read as bland and mostly quite boring. His language is nowhere near the invention or intensity of Stephens who I am more in sink with. They vibrate along different affinities. His most famous poems have almost become clichés, and done to death with parodies.

With all that said: "the slow smokeless burning of decay" that warms the woods in the final lines of The Wood-Pile is sublime.

I only disagree slightly, Cameron. He sometimes finds that spot, very well. It just takes so, so long to get there. And he is too often boring. Thanks Ralph- I love, love the close of that poem.

Have you listened to him reading his own poems? It can make a big difference. "Death of the Hired Man," for example, went from being a poem I never managed to read all the way through, to one of my favorite poems ever, after I heard him read it.

And can you really think this one (to pick just one of many I could have used to make my point) is boring, even the last seven lines?:

‘Out, Out—’

The buzz saw snarled and rattled in the yard
And made dust and dropped stove-length sticks of wood,
Sweet-scented stuff when the breeze drew across it.
And from there those that lifted eyes could count
Five mountain ranges one behind the other
Under the sunset far into Vermont.
And the saw snarled and rattled, snarled and rattled,
As it ran light, or had to bear a load.
And nothing happened: day was all but done.
Call it a day, I wish they might have said
To please the boy by giving him the half hour
That a boy counts so much when saved from work.
His sister stood beside him in her apron
To tell them ‘Supper.’ At the word, the saw,
As if to prove saws knew what supper meant,
Leaped out at the boy’s hand, or seemed to leap—
He must have given the hand. However it was,
Neither refused the meeting. But the hand!
The boy’s first outcry was a rueful laugh,
As he swung toward them holding up the hand
Half in appeal, but half as if to keep
The life from spilling. Then the boy saw all—
Since he was old enough to know, big boy
Doing a man’s work, though a child at heart—
He saw all spoiled. ‘Don’t let him cut my hand off—
The doctor, when he comes. Don’t let him, sister!’
So. But the hand was gone already.
The doctor put him in the dark of ether.
He lay and puffed his lips out with his breath.
And then—the watcher at his pulse took fright.
No one believed. They listened at his heart.
Little—less—nothing!—and that ended it.
No more to build on there. And they, since they
Were not the one dead, turned to their affairs.

I'll have you know I posted the poem just to write the punny intro...

(No November should go by without some Frost...)

But I do think Frost is the quintessential New England pastoral poet. Boring? Yankee-style boring. (And I'm not talking NYY)

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I think it's a little over the top and unimaginative, Roger. No, I don't think it's radical, or good. Lowell is more pointed. And on the money. Frost I like, but I don't love. He's a relic. Lowell, for example, isn't.

Ashamed somehow, for years I've agreed with Cameron Clark, though Stevens can be a bit too arch. As to Frost, my persistent question has always been, "What's he got that's so great?" Maybe I should think of Frost as a great performer, because I've tried and tried and more recently tried to appreciate most of his writing. Never worked. Often I've sensed condescension. Still, there he is and was at Kennedy's inauguration, why I may never know.

Never mind. I would be interested in seeing/reading that reproduction, Sarah-Jane...

Massive digression, but I have a friend/colleague who has a large-scale reproduction of Hughes' Crow, with Leonard Baskin's illustrations.

It's breathtaking.

I don't have any type of issue with Frost, though. I like how he gently nudges, dwells in the mundane real. In terms of poetry, I like Robert Graves much more, but that's probably because I haven't spent enough time with Frost.

(but none of them beat Remedios Varo and Hairy Locomotion)

Sarah-Jane

For me, and despite his lacks or faults, Robert Graves is ten times the poet that Frost pretended to be. (That said, don’t go near Graves’s ideas about legend and folklore. Whew! Don’t. He’s so full of nuts.)

Wow, I would have thought it went without saying that Frost was a great poet, and I never would have included (or even considered) Graves on a list of my ten or twenty favorite poets. Or even top fifty. "Juan at Winter Solstice" is the best Graves poem I know, and Frost has written dozens of better poems than that. IMHO.

I hear you Roger. I was beginning to wonder if Eratospherians were from another planet.

Allen: "Ashamed somehow, for years I've agreed with Cameron”


Cameron, are you going to let Allen dis you like that? Ha!

(And the rest of you: Are you going to keep dissing Frost?) Ha!

How masterly must you be to get a green card on this board? I don’t know how anyone wouldn’t at least acknowledge that, although he may not light your poetic fire, he was a master American poet; certainly on the “first team” of American poets (Frost, Poe, Whitman, Dickenson, Cummings, I think.)

Frost’s best poems are iconic. Especially at this time of year in New England, if you’re at all in tune with the season and the majestic beauty of the landscape, you hear Frost’s voice/sentiment everywhere. In every woodpile, in every snowy field, in every smokey chimney, in every apple orchard, in every crumbling stone wall,in every small village that dot the New England countryside. You all know the poems. I don’t have to list them.

I came across this November poem and, probably because it was a dreary late November day, it struck a chord for me in capturing the mood of deep Fall. He addresses November as Sorrow. Then he procedes to befriend it.It’s really exquisite in my book. But I am not well-read. And as I said, I was in the mood.

Frost seems to me indubitably a greater poet than Graves. (Yes, this view immediately raises issues of categories and definitions.) His first collection, A Boy’s Will, appeared in London in 1913. He lived a long life and over a period of perhaps thirty years produced an estimable body of work. I like to remember that he was born in 1874. He was therefore four years older than Stevens. To consider them as belonging to the same “generation” once again invites a discussion of categories and definitions. Edward Thomas, born in 1878 in Lambeth, London, might seem in terms of “generations”, close to Frost—and, as everyone interested in these matters knows, was close to Frost in rather more important ways. By contrast, Graves was born in 1895, also in London, in Wimbledon, in fact. He, too, lived a long life and went on writing verse into old age.

My father was born in 1910 (in Buckinghamshire) three years before Frost’s first book. His father was born in Wales in 1864. I was born in 1945. I mention these personal details to illustrate my sense of Frost’s place in time.

To return to my initial assertion, Frost (1874–1963) remains, for me, among the poets born in the last quarter of the nineteenth century (there or thereabouts) to whom I most often return. Others include Thomas, Stevens, Marianne Moore, T. S. Eliot, Wilfred Owen and David Jones.

Clive Watkins

You'll be lucky. It's shown rarely, and there's a story about the acquisition of it (a nice story) that comes with the show of being shown it. Hidden treasure.

But visceral, amazing, and I was transfixed in a way that I rarely am by prints ( I've worked with art and artists for so long now that reproductions have to really be special to spark that gut reaction that used to come so easily).

Sarah-Jane

I deeply appreciate Hugh's Crow. I haven't read enough of Graves. I should read more.

I can certainly tell that Frost has poetic powers. -- A good deal of poetic genius. But mostly his images and phrase-making bore me. I feel as if he made things well, while Stevens made them new.

I'll let it pass, Jim. I am the pariah of taste, sometimes, a few, against their better judgement, will shuffle to join me for a matter of seconds under my black umbrella.

Poe was one of the first poets I read, along with Browning. You really think Poe was a good poet? Most of his poems read like badly rhyming gothic clichés: "OH Lenore!" And Cummings? Far too much gimmick, his poems are weak with gimmick. And surely Whitman should be above Poe and Cummings? He is another poet who I can understand but don't personally like.

Roger, how far is the objective subjective?

Jim, taste is a vast galaxy, and our own planets orbit only distantly the same blackhole.

Cam - I like the idea of the black umbrella - but the thing with umbrellas is that they're mostly differentiated by their handles, so I am wondering what the handle of your umbrella looks like? (go on, push the metaphor).

I promise I linked to Remedios Varo for a reason.

Look how far we can travel on our moustaches. What matters, perhaps is that we are travelling. And travelling in company where disagreement is the norm, and acceptable.

Sarah-Jane

(Poe or Lovecraft, that is another question)
(I love Whitman)

Do you find this boring? Graves was never this sublime or profound. Maybe Hardy--and the influence is obvious--but not Graves.

Come In

As I came to the edge of the woods,
Thrush music — hark!
Now if it was dusk outside,
Inside it was dark.

Too dark in the woods for a bird
By sleight of wing
To better its perch for the night,
Though it still could sing.

The last of the light of the sun
That had died in the west
Still lived for one song more
In a thrush's breast.

Far in the pillared dark
Thrush music went —
Almost like a call to come in
To the dark and lament.

But no, I was out for stars;
I would not come in.
I meant not even if asked;
And I hadn't been.

I think my problem with Frost is partly his frequent choice of subject matter.

So if we can travel on our mustaches and hair, why are so many young American males shaving their heads? It's a plot.

In one of his great essays on Frost, the poet-critic Randall Jarrell said that a third of the poems can be read with at least a measure of appreciation, a third could be tossed out completely, and the rest should be recognized as the dark masterpieces they are. The darkness inherent in his best poems belies the common image of Frost as a poet of simple, homespun wisdom.

These lines from the "The Oven Bird" have stayed with me for 50 years:

The oven bird would be as other birds
Except he knows in singing not to sing.
The question that he frames in all but words
Is what to make of a diminished thing.

The same with these lines from "Provide, Provide":

No memory of having starred
Atones for later disregard
Or keeps the end from being hard.

Incidentally, Brad Leithauser, a notable poet-critic himself who judged one of last year's contests for Able Muse, wrote the introduction to the indispensable "No Other Book," a collection of Jarrell's finest essays.

In “Robert Frost: The Way to the Poem” (1958), John Ciardi also noted the dark Dantean tone in Frost, “Stopping by Woods” a strong example.

Quite possibly I far over-rated Graves. I still don’t like Robert Frost. I have tried. Something in me almost always doesn’t like a Frost poem.

As for "The Raven," I hope that my ear is never so refined that it can fail to be ravished by such a line as this:

"And the silken, sad, uncertain rustling of each purple curtain"

Poe was another great poet-critic. In our own day, William Logan writes penetrating essays about the worth, or rather the worthlessness, of much of modern poetry.