[SteveWal]

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

[ChrisW]

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).]

[MacArthur]

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).]

[Tim Murphy]

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!

[MacArthur]

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.

[ewrgall]

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).]

[MacArthur]

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.

[Nigel Holt]

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

[Richard Wakefield]

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

[MacArthur]

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).]