I don’t know whether I could have learned what Robert Frost taught me from anyone but Frost. There is in him a confluence of form and subject that flows into my own experience as a reader and outside of books as well. If anyone accuses me of having been too strongly influenced by him, or being merely a very minor branch of his great river, I won’t argue. I grew up hearing, reading, and reciting formal poetry, from Longfellow to Kipling (I’ll leave to others to decide whether that’s a wide or a narrow range), but in Frost I found not only the music of formal verse but also the subject matter with which I had, really, a fairly brief but formative encounter: the fading rural life, the ruined and nearly ruined farms where people had hoped and labored only to be displaced by forces natural and market beyond their control or even their comprehension.
Frost says somewhere that when he reads an unfamiliar poem he begins by scanning the right margin: What happens at the ends of lines? When I first ran into that comment I resisted it. The romantic in me wanted to be able to plunge into a poem and let it happen spontaneously. But in time I recognized that if poetry is to be a performance, whether in its creation by the writer or in the reading of it by the audience, then a little preparation is no more out of place than it is for a musician about to play a new piece of music. After all, I was taught to look over a new sonata before I attempted to play it – look at the phrasing, the modulations, the ornaments, the dynamics. Why not do the same with a poem?
Here’s a lesser known poem of Frost’s that seems to me a wonderful example of craft at its best, and a glance down the right margin reveals a great deal:
The Investment
Over back where they speak of life as staying
(“You couldn’t call it living, for it ain’t”),
There was an old, old house renewed with paint,
And in it a piano loudly playing.
Out in the plowed ground in the cold a digger,
Among unearthed potatoes standing still,
Was counting winter dinners, one a hill,
With half an ear to the piano’s vigor.
All that piano and new paint back there,
Was it some money suddenly come into?
Or some extravagance young love had been to?
Or old love on an impulse not to care –
Not to sink under being man and wife,
But get some color and music out of life?
Frost does just about everything you can do at the end of a line, including nothing. At the end of the third stanza he even extravagantly breaks the boundary he established for himself in the first two stanzas when he doesn’t conclude but instead runs his sentence across the stanza break. Then there’s the play between masculine and feminine rhymes, which seems to my sexist ear to mimic the wordless conversation between the man and woman as he works the potato field and she plays the piano, each fully aware of the other.
Of course there’s much else, such as the lovely sounds of “out in the plowed ground” and “counting winter dinners.” There’s the one fancy word, “extravagance,” perfect in context and itself extravagant.
My sonnet “Brambles” takes up the scene later, perhaps not very much later. I dare not claim to approach Frost’s craftsmanship, but I won’t apologize for trying.
Brambles
A stand of brambles flanks the unused road
with here and there a fenceline showing through.
The field beyond is yellow, long unmowed,
and gone to tansy, thistle, and meadow rue.
Across the field the vines like tangled yarn
have nearly reached the cabin’s chimney top.
Another tangle marks the fallen barn,
the only sign a rotted rafter prop.
The fence, the field, the house, the barn – undone
by brambles, tansy, thistle, rue, and vines
that no one planted, no one reaps; they run
unchecked and heedless to their dark designs.
As if they haven’t done sufficient harm
they leave a mocking outline of the farm.
Richard Wakefield
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Threaded Mode
