[MacArthur]

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).]

[Tim Murphy]

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.

[MacArthur]

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

[momdebomb]

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.

[Caleb Murdock]

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).]

[ewrgall]

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).]

[momdebomb]

It's quite clear that this is about divorce.

[MacArthur]

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!

[Tim Murphy]

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.

[Kate Benedict]

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.