[Caleb Murdock]

The Impulse is one of my favorites of Frost's. It's such a simple poem, but it packs a wallop.

[Note: This post originally contained The Impulse but the moderator inserted the four other portions that constitute the entire poem.]

The Hill Wife

I. Loneliness

Her Word

One ought not to have to care
So much as you and I
Care when the birds come round the house
To seem to say goodby;

Or care so much when they come back
With whatever it is they sing;
The truth being we are as much
Too glad for the one thing

As we are too sad for the other here--
With birds that fill their breasts
But with each other and themselves
And their built or driven nests.

II. House Fear

Always--I tell you this they learned--
Always at night when they returned
To the lonely house from far away,
To lamps unlighted and fire gone gray,
They learned to rattle the lock and key
To give whatever might chance to be,
Warning and time to be off in flight:
And preferring the out- to the indoor night,
They learned to leave the house door wide
Until they had lit the lamp inside.

III. The Smile

Her Word

I didn't like the way he went away.
That smile! It never came of being gay.
Still he smiled--did you see him? I was sure!
Perhaps because we gave him only bread
And the wretch knew from that that we were poor.
Perhaps because he let us give instead
Of seizing from us as he might have seized.
Perhaps he mocked at us for being wed,
Or being very young (and he was pleased
To have a vision of us old and dead).
I wonder how far down the road he's got.
He's watching from the woods as like as not.

IV. The Oft-repeated Dream

She had no saying dark enough
For the dark pine that kept
Forever trying the window latch
Of the room where they slept.

The tireless but ineffectual hands
That with every futile pass
Made the great tree seem as a little bird
Before the mystery of glass!

It had never been inside the room,
And only one of the two
Was afraid in an oft-repeated dream
Of what the tree might do.

V. The Impulse

It was too lonely for her there,
And too wild,
And since there were but two of them,
And no child,

And work was little in the house,
She was free,
And followed where he furrowed field,
Or felled tree.

She rested on a log and tossed
The fresh chips,
With a song only to herself
On her lips.

And once she went to break a bough
Of black alder.
She strayed so far she scarcely heard
When he called her —

And didn’t answer — didn’t speak —
Or return.
She stood, and then she ran and hid
In the fern.

He never found her, though he looked
Everywhere,
And he asked at her mother’s house
Was she there.

Sudden and swift and light as that
The ties gave,
And he learned of finalities
Besides the grave.

Robert Frost


------------------
Caleb
www.poemtree.com



[This message has been edited by Caleb Murdock (edited May 06, 2001).]

[Caleb Murdock]

MacArthur said on the other Frost thread:

"(And Caleb-- maybe I'm nuts...maybe I'm deaf, dumb and blind-- but "The Impulse" doesn't seem like a very good poem at all, to me. It looks and sounds winceingly, embarassingly bad.)"

Mac, you didn't say why you didn't like it, but I think your remark is a good illustration of how far apart people can be on a topic which, to both of them, seems obvious. To me, The Impulse isn't just a successful poem, it's a perfect poem in every respect. The language is clear, simple and lovely; the story builds perfectly to its conclusion; the rhythms and rhymes are pleasant; it has a good opening and a good ending. I could make a list of all the elements that make a poem successful, and this poem would succeed on all counts.

Why don't you like it? Is there anyone else who doesn't like it?

[MacArthur]

To the Thawing Wind

Come with rain, O loud Southwester!
Bring the singer, bring the nester;
Give the buried flower a dream;
Make the settled snow-bank steam;
Find the brown beneath the white;
But whate'er you do to-night,
Bathe my window, make it flow,
Melt it as the ice will go;
Melt the glass and leave the sticks
Like a hermit's crucifix;
Burst into my narrow stall;
Swing the picture on the wall;
Run the rattling pages o'er;
Scatter poems on the floor;
Turn the poet out of door.

I knew there was one I liked, and I've been half-heartedly rummaging for about a week...DUH!, begin at the beginning. (It's early in A Boy's Will...and stylistically, would appear to be a very early Frost poem.)

I've always been partial to this one...I'm not sure why-- you have to make allowance for the "O" and "o'er" and "whate'er", and lines 3 and 14 are a tad awkward. I don't get why L15 says "out of door". "Melt it as the ice will go" is an uninspired line. "sticks...crucifix" is too cute, and an irrelevant image. "stall" is a peculiar euphemism for a bedroom. All that, and I still like the poem throughout...go figure?

Let the others look at "The Impulse"...but I feel as if using this ("The Impulse") instead of "The Pasture" would have been stacking the deck.




[This message has been edited by MacArthur (edited May 02, 2001).]

[SteveWal]

This is one of those poems I'd have to use the word "nice" about. Possibly even "very nice." There are whole anthologies full of this kind of stuff; and it's all very nice. It's supposed to make you feel sorry for the people in the poem, but not very deeply. It's hinting at the darkness beneath the surface of country life, but in no particularly different way than a thousand poems about rural suicide, murder, getting lost in snow storms etc, etc... Rural Tragedy Poems.

And the girl is the standard rural witchy wild-child, who can't be tamed and perhaps shouldn't, then escapes... yawn.

And the last verse sums it up oh-so-neatly, as if we haven't already got whatever point it was trying to make already. Oh yes, there are other losses than death. He might as well have written the word MORAL above that verse.

Not an objectionable poem, of course. The language is very nice, and there's no particular problems with meter or rhyme. I can't see any reason why it can't be held up as an example of how to write a good poem in meter.

Except it's dull, predictable and safe.

------------------
Steve Waling

[Richard Wakefield]

This is one that exerted a force on me without my quite realizing it. The last lines have remained part of my way of looking at the world, and the story itself often comes to mind. I disagree that there's anything hackneyed about it, unless one reads it with expectations so strong that they obscure what's actually being said. (RF said that he wanted to say things "that almost but don't quite formulate," and this is one of many poems that seem to say something familiar but actually challege what's familiar -- the famously mis-read conclusion of "The Road Not Taken" being a case in point.) There's nothing to suggest that the woman in this poem is a "wild child." In fact, the place she's living is "too wild," among other things. It's important to my reading of the poem that she not be restless or wild, but that she simply give in to an impulse and, having done so, discover that it's easier and easier to go farther and farther. The ties attenuate and finally break, but without her intending for them to do so. The rural setting is pretty much incidental, in my eyes, except perhaps that it allows the presence of those spooky woods.
This is one of many poems of RF's that don't get a lot of attention but deserve it. "The Thatch" is another. But don't get me started.
Richard

[ewrgall]

This poem is about the loneliness and dangers ("too wild") of isolated farm living. (I believe Frost has another poem about a couple who, everytime they have been away from the farm and return, open the front door and shout to give thieves a chance to escape out the back.) It takes a certain type of person to put up with that type of life and this girl couldn't. (A woman could be raped in her own home while her husband worked in the fields.) 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. (City people, of course, were the ones who would buy and read the book--Frost as a writer knew who his readership was.) 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 poem is called "The Impulse" but could almost have been called "The straw that broke the camel's back"). In reality, since Frost's subjects were rural people and not city people, this poem is really about the husband, we just learn about him through the contrast with his wife.

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. Therefore some people think it is banal. But it still is a very good poem. It still tells us much about human nature.

ewrgall




[This message has been edited by ewrgall (edited May 02, 2001).]

[David Anthony]

A great poem is helpful when shaving, because the bristles rise on your face.
Housman or maybe Frost said something like that, and both of them, to me are a help when shaving.
Not too many others, though.
Is it different for women, who don't shave? Or maybe it's the hairs on their legs?
Regards

[MacArthur]

The Impulse

It was too lonely for her there,
And too wild,
And since there were but two of them,
And no child,

And work was little in the house,
She was free,
And followed where he furrowed field,
Or felled tree.

She rested on a log and tossed
The fresh chips,
With a song only to herself
On her lips.

And once she went to break a bough
Of black alder.
She strayed so far she scarcely heard
When he called her —

And didn’t answer — didn’t speak —
Or return.
She stood, and then she ran and hid
In the fern.

He never found her, though he looked
Everywhere,
And he asked at her mother’s house
Was she there.

Sudden and swift and light as that
The ties gave,
And he learned of finalities
Besides the grave.

The Impulse

It was too lonely for her there,
(An uninspired line by anyone’s standard)
And too wild,
(This is unlikely to have applied to any part of New England that Frost was actually acquainted with. There were too many neighbors in Thoreau’s day. The first trochaic line—the first two—start with promotions.)
And since there were but two of them,
(Someone will have to tell me—is this use of “but” New England just-plain-folks-talk or Poetic Diction? “since” rather than “as” is, at least, common.)
And no child,
(This line alone would be enough to guarantee this poem would be rejected by any Formalist journal-- let alone a Mainstream publication. Kids, don’t try this in the XXIst Century!)

And work was little in the house,
(This must either an inversion, or some more of Frost’s Pre-School expression...hey, you come too!)
She was free,
And followed where he furrowed field,
(“President Proposes Project for Portland”)
Or felled tree.
(The third of three entirely idiotic inversions-- well not inversions, exactly, but "poesy". BTW, is “or” supposed to take a stronger stress than “felled”? I suppose it could...but this is just the kind of metrical insensitivity that Pound complained of, re—infelicities.)

She rested on a log and tossed
(The set-up for a very unconvincing enjambment.)
The fresh chips,
(The metrical expectation here has you stressing “The”...that’s ‘cause Frost is a GENIUS.)
With a song only to herself
(The purpose of the clunky reversed foot here is to disguise the fact that, on any natural reading, this line is short a stress. Correction-- the promoted "to" is the missing stress...hard to keep up with genius! I don't know about you, but I stutter saying it with four stresses, and am more inclined to elide the "ly"...leaving only three stresses.)
On her lips.
(This enjambment, while not as awkward as the previous, is nathless a flat-tire-- they all are.)

And once she went to break a bough
Of black alder.
(Here’s an opportunity to stress “of” over “black”—O, the joys of reading a GENIUS—important information, though...she should have fetched a calf. I think he should have used another tree.)
She strayed so far she scarcely heard
When he called her —
(Frost is presently going to “push the envelope” with a four-syllable word—not even the name of a state!—so I won’t comment on these ugly little words, unimaginatively put together. Tim Murphy, note the two-part rhyme.)

And didn’t answer — didn’t speak —
Or return.
She stood, and then she ran and hid
In the fern.
(Have I commented yet?...this guy only has to rhyme on every other line, and he makes it look like hard work.)

He never found her, though he looked
Everywhere,
(Now I don’t know whether she’s dead or—heavens—divorced…but it stretches credulity that he didn’t find her sooner or later, dead or alive—did he check New Orleans?)
And he asked at her mother’s house
(Another line short a stress…I know, ‘cause he’s a GENIUS. Either that, or Frost is tossing stress around like a drunken bohunk laying brick. Mezey might think this is a perfectly natural Tetrameter…in a manner of speaking, it is natural.)
Was she there.
(Punctuation on this deathless prose?…ah Hell! who cares? In Hollywood they give booby-prize awards for scripts as poorly-written as this.)

Sudden and swift and light as that
The ties gave,
(The only really good line. This time you can’t stress “the”, so the tag is “loosely iambic”, ie. Free Verse—Bob’s playing tennis without the net.)
And he learned of finalities
(I suppose the awkward promotion at the end of this line is a sorry pun on the previous “ties”. You have to drop a brick on "and" to get four stresses-- or..."And HE learned OF"?...nah, not even Frost!)
Besides the grave.
(This is clever...no, she's not dead. But, this usage of "besides" sounds...well, childish.)

Excepting the ham-fisted alliteration (licking wool?), the poem contains no internal music, and rhythmically chugs (and falters) along like the Little Engine That Could. There is no arresting imagery, and no remarkable narrative detail. The point eludes me—I don’t feel like I know any more about people who take to isolated living, people who don’t, or human nature generally.



[This message has been edited by MacArthur (edited May 02, 2001).]

[graywyvern]

[b]>A great poem is helpful when shaving, because the >bristles rise on your face.
>Housman or maybe Frost said something like that

Housman (but he may have put his tongue in cheek to
facilitate shaving; a professor who spends a great
chunk of his life anatomizing a text in classical
latin probably does not hold the intellect in such
contempt, but rather may have been casting a cold eye
on the inadequacy of the criticism of his contemporaries
to explain it...).

[Alder Ellis]

MacArthur >> It was too lonely for her there,
(An uninspired line by anyoneÕs standard) <<

Your critique is silly because it doesn't even try to take in what the poem is doing; it's just a fault-finding mission applying arbitrary standards to decontextualized objects. The inspiration of any single line can only be judged in context, but you have no inkling of the context -- it's as if you hadn't read the whole poem, only each line separately. It's like interpreting a sentence word-by-word without any consideration of the relations between the words.

Therefore, to be even more particular, you could criticize the opening word of the poem: "It". Is not "it" a rather low, uninspired word? You could go letter-by-letter through the whole poem, ruthlessly laying waste to any pretensions to inspiration. Criticize the bricks when you have no idea of the building.

Wake up & read the poem! It really is quite wonderful. Frost has an amazing ability to distil archetypal patterns of experience in radically simplified narratives. You have to get inside this first, then you can see the extraordinary tact of the particulars.

AE