POETS Day! Robert Frost
If you don’t sell beer, hot dogs, fireworks, gauze, charcoal brickettes, or are named Joey Chestnut you probably didn’t work on Tuesday. Independence Day, and the lounging inherent, is your inheritance as a citizen. But it was Tuesday. Even if you went in on Monday, did you really work? Is there any point in trying to claim productivity on a three-day work week? Accept the loss and claim the weekend now. Piss Off Early. Tomorrow’s Saturday.
CHORUS: Dissemble, obfuscate, fudge the truth, and gleefully trespass the norms and delicate pieties that preserve our hopefully durable civilization. Nearly all means are justified by the urge to prematurely escape the bonds of employment and settle in at a friendly neighborhood joint a few hours before even happy hour begins, lay comfortably in the grass at a local park, go for a swim, or God forbid, go for a light jog. It’s your weekend.
Do with it as you will, but in homage to the mighty acronym may I suggest setting aside a moment for a little verse? It’s a particularly good way to pass time waiting on friends who may not run as roughshod over the delicate pieties and were not as successful as you were in engineering an early exit.
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“Have just discovered another Amur’kn. Vurry Amur’kn, with, I think, the seeds of grace.”
-Ezra Pound in a March, 1913 letter to Alice Corbin Henderson of Poetry
The image of Robert Frost in my, and I assume many people’s, mind doesn’t jibe with what I conjure when thinking “Modern Poetry.”
I think of Eliot and Yeats out fastidiousing each other while Pound prowls the room in a feathered sombrero that matches his green velvet suit with blue glass buttons. H.D. oozes weird-girl-who-wears-black between visits to the flapper closet. Amy Lowell fixating, Wyndam Lewis – more of a painter but still – looking like an evil silent movie capitalist cum Byron, Wallace Stevens – no matter how buttoned down he’s supposed to have been – getting punched by Hemingway. All those varied and diverse figures share a crackling intensity. Not Frost.
Even trying to picture him in his late thirties as a newly minted expatriate, I still imagine him a grandfatherly figure who speaks a folksy but erudite Live Bait & General with a Hahvahd lilt. That image doesn’t fit with the other Moderns. He’s Sha Na Na at Woodstock.
But he does belong.
I’ve read that he cultivated the wizened elder projection. I’ll not claim to know how or why. Our conception of Frost today is influenced by the three-volume biography Robert Frost by Lawrance Thompson, and that is how he spelled his first name. James Tuttleton, in “The rehabilitation of Robert Frost” (The New Criterion, June 1996), writes, “Thompson’s biography is an appalling instance of the old saw that familiarity breeds contempt. Far from being the friend Frost thought him, Thompson actually detested Frost, felt chronically put upon, and paid off every single slight in a savage hatchet job on the poet.”
Thompson apparently paints Frost as a backstabber who’d sabotage fellow poets to get ahead. From what I’ve read that’s unfair, but before the trilogy was the dismissal, which still endures, of Frost as simple. During his lifetime that dismissal was well challenged by Randall Jarrell in two essays, “To the Loadiceans” and “The Other Robert Frost” but Frost played into the simple assuming (or not caring if) we’d realize the complexities. Not everyone did. He lacks dimension in the public mind. William Logan notes in “The other other Robert Frost” (The New Criterion, June 1995) “By the time John F. Kennedy asked him to read at the 1961 Inaugural, Frost was more a monument than half the equestrian statues in Washington—a brass-necked cold calculation, standing proudly on all fours,” the reality of the man obscured by the image.
(A quick aside: Per Wikipedia, Frost wrote “Dedication” for JFK’s inaugural, but the sun’s glare was such that he couldn’t read it so he recited “The Gift Outright.”)
The assumption that we’d realize complexities is a hallmark of Frost’s better works. Many of his images are surrogates. That we expect. Pound wrote that while it’s fine to let a hawk be a symbol for whatever you want it to be, for the reader unaware that it carries a second meaning, it must remain clearly a hawk. What’s impressive is how elegantly Frost preserves both an image and the idea he imbeds in it in the music of common speech.
“Frost was the man, even more than Eliot and Pound, who both formulated and demonstrated the modernist principle of listening for the rhythms of poetry in the language around us,” Clive James writes in “The Sound of Sense: Clive James on Robert Frost” (Prospect, January 23, 2014). “His most formidable detractors think that his reaching out was too often a folksy grab at the lapels. The truth of the matter is that the typical, seemingly unambitious little Frostian poem is a wonder of sophisticated construction: no other poet could have done it.”
Frost wrote of “skilfully breaking the sounds of sense with all their irregularity of accent across the regular beat of the metre,” and, unlike many of his fellow Moderns, he was a stickler for meter. Today’s poem, “Birches,” is blank verse iambic pentameter. (The more I read the more I’m beginning to realize that when “blank verse” is invoked, iambic pentameter is assumed and metric feet are pointed out only when it’s otherwise, but until I’m sure, you get the phrase “blank verse iambic pentameter.” Sorry.) The hawk is a boy playing among birch trees, learning about tensile strength and how much a branch can bear under his play. Underneath the poem is about testing the world and its limits. Beneath that, it’s one of those marvelous solipsistic poems about poetry; a declaration of the Modern Poet and his mission to push beyond Victorian and Elizabethan conceits and wring all that can be wrung from his inheritance.
One by one he subdued his father’s trees
By riding them down over and over again
Until he took the stiffness out of them,
And not one but hung limp, not one was left
For him to conquer.
“Birches” was published in 1916. Eliot hadn’t set off his “The Waste Land” bomb yet, but “Prufrock” was published a year before. The Modern movement was turning toward urban. Frost and his pastoral New England was, and he remained, a Romantic throwback despite Modern sensibilities. It’s one of his more popular poems, which is a danger when discussing Frost because so many of most famous lines – “miles to go before I sleep”, “the one less travelled by” – have been so often repeated as to become trite. This is one of his less popular more popular poems, so it has freshness yet. A firm cadence, too.
Birches
Robert Frost (1874-1963)When I see birches bend to left and right
Across the lines of straighter darker trees,
I like to think some boy’s been swinging them.
But swinging doesn’t bend them down to stay
As ice-storms do. Often you must have seen them
Loaded with ice a sunny winter morning
After a rain. They click upon themselves
As the breeze rises, and turn many-colored
As the stir cracks and crazes their enamel.
Soon the sun’s warmth makes them shed crystal shells
Shattering and avalanching on the snow-crust—
Such heaps of broken glass to sweep away
You’d think the inner dome of heaven had fallen.
They are dragged to the withered bracken by the load,
And they seem not to break; though once they are bowed
So low for long, they never right themselves:
You may see their trunks arching in the woods
Years afterwards, trailing their leaves on the ground
Like girls on hands and knees that throw their hair
Before them over their heads to dry in the sun.
But I was going to say when Truth broke in
With all her matter-of-fact about the ice-storm
I should prefer to have some boy bend them
As he went out and in to fetch the cows—
Some boy too far from town to learn baseball,
Whose only play was what he found himself,
Summer or winter, and could play alone.
One by one he subdued his father’s trees
By riding them down over and over again
Until he took the stiffness out of them,
And not one but hung limp, not one was left
For him to conquer. He learned all there was
To learn about not launching out too soon
And so not carrying the tree away
Clear to the ground. He always kept his poise
To the top branches, climbing carefully
With the same pains you use to fill a cup
Up to the brim, and even above the brim.
Then he flung outward, feet first, with a swish,
Kicking his way down through the air to the ground.
So was I once myself a swinger of birches.
And so I dream of going back to be.
It’s when I’m weary of considerations,
And life is too much like a pathless wood
Where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs
Broken across it, and one eye is weeping
From a twig’s having lashed across it open.
I’d like to get away from earth awhile
And then come back to it and begin over.
May no fate willfully misunderstand me
And half grant what I wish and snatch me away
Not to return. Earth’s the right place for love:
I don’t know where it’s likely to go better.
I’d like to go by climbing a birch tree,
And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk
Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more,
But dipped its top and set me down again.
That would be good both going and coming back.
One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.
