When Robert Frost was nineteen or twenty, in the early 1890s, he experienced a period of deep despair that led him nearly to suicide. (Many years later his son would succumb to despair, taking his own life in his late thirties.) The immediate cause seems to have been a falling out with Elinor, later to be his wife, and there seems to have been an exchange of intemperate letters. His wandering took him south and included some moments of crisis at Kitty Hawk. In 1953, he revisited Kitty Hawk and later wrote a long poem in trimeter about it. Much of the poem is doggerel (but very good doggerel!), but true to its theme it swoops and soars, sometimes barely avoiding a bloody crackup and other times rising very high indeed.
What makes the poem, to my ear, more than just a tribute to the fiftieth anniversary of the Wrights' flight is that layered into it is Frost's very personal experience.
Here's a bit of it:
Kitty Hawk, O Kitty,
There was once a song,
Who knows but a great
Emblematic ditty,
I might well have sung
When I cam here young
Out and down along
Past Elizabeth City
Sixty years ago.
I was, to be sure,
Out of sorts with Fate,
Wandering to and fro
In the earth alone,
You might think too poor
Spirited to care
Who I was or where
I was being blown
Faster than my tread --
Like the crumpled, better
Left-unwritten letter
I had read and thrown.
He goes on with those images of wind and will that also recall the Longfellow poem from which he borrowed the title of his first book, "A Boy's Will": "And a boy's will is the wind's will / and the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts" -- "My Lost Youth").
Then he turns to the first flight, but to him it's more important as a metaphor or perhaps as an expression of some universal human urge. Here's where he climbs his highest:
Pulpiteers will censure
Our instinctive venture
Into what they call
The material
When we took that fall
From the apple tree.
But God's own descent
Into flesh was meant
As a demonstration
That the supreme merit
Lay is risking spirit
In substantiation.
Doggerel or not, he concludes by discovering a fresh and appropriate rhyme for "satan":
God of the machine,
Peregrine machine,
Some still think is Satan,
Unto you the thanks
For this token flight,
Thanks to you and thanks
To the brothers Wright
Once considered cranks
Like Darius Green
In their home town, Dayton.
(Darius Green was a character from a poem by John Townsend Trowbridge that was popular in Frost's youth, "Darius Green and His Flying Machine.")
This seems to me one of those rare occasional poems that transcends its occasion without obscuring it, that not merely commemorates but enriches the occasion of its composition.
RPW
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Hybrid Mode
