The Books: “The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry” – Robert Frost

Daily Book Excerpt: Poetry

The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, Volume 1: Modern Poetry, edited by Jahan Ramazani, Richard Ellmann, and Robert O’Clair

I have always thought that Robert Frost was darker than he is given credit for. His poems sometimes have this cheery homespun wisdom tone, but that’s never what moves me about his work. It’s there … but I feel that it’s more a defense against madness and darkness. He “goes there” in his poems, the awareness of death, of the other world, of events that we can’t understand … and then he usually does wrap things up with a bit of wisdom, an aphorism, a two-line ending that seems to say that everything is going to be okay. Just pull yourself up by your bootstraps (or Gilstraps), and look at the sunset, and you’ll be fine. But I can’t forget the rest of the poem, where he hears the quietness of the house around him, or where he is aware that things could get prickly with that neighbor of his, or where he knows the long journey ahead of him before he will arrive home.

There is also the “road not taken” which comes off as rather self-satisfied in a first reading. This man is proud of himself and his choice, it “has made all the difference”, the one road he took. Well, bully for you, aren’t you special. BUT if you read the poem more carefully, you can see that there really isn’t that big a difference between the two roads – they are both “just as fair”, and “the passing there had worn them really about the same”. So okay what do we get from that? What I get, again, is the sense of Frost erecting a defense against the madness of not choosing. He is the type of man who makes a decision and then erects all the justifications and reasons afterwards. He looks back on the “two roads diverged in a yellow wood” – and what is NOT said is that if you contemplate that the other road might have been better, therein lies madness and doubt. Hence, the self-satisfied tone. He is damned if he isn’t going to be pleased with his choice. This is what I mean when I say that I’m not sure he’s given enough credit for how uncertain he is in his poems. Sometimes the voice is so SURE, it dispenses wisdom, it tells you what to do (erect a wall because ‘good walls make good neighbors’), it knows it is right. But why? Why is it important to be right? The uneasy tension that those kinds of questions creates makes Robert Frost seem very different than his reputation would suggest. I like him better that way. I’m not wacky about people who think they’re right, anyway, more often than not they are either just boring people OR they NEED to think they’re right, because to contemplate the opposite is just too frightening. Robert Frost puts that tension into all of his poems. It’s quite wonderful. But I think sometimes people just see the “wisdom”, the folksy advice … and take it for its surface. To my view, the poems suffer if you read them that way.

Robert Frost said that he didn’t like big idea poems – or he didn’t like there to be big ideas without actual objects and dirt and shovels and turnips. He also said:

Poetry provides the one permissible way of saying one thing and meaning another. People say, ‘Why don’t you say what you mean?’ We never do that, do we, being all of us too much poets. We like to talk in parables and in hints and in indirections – whether from diffidence or some other instinct.

Frost, in that quote, shows that he is fully aware of what he is doing. He was a master at “saying one thing and meaning another”.

His life is a mixture of great joy, determination, lackadaisacal indecision (he dropped out of college multiple times) and unbelievable tragedy. The mid-30s were full of tragedy – his daughter and his wife died in quick succession. In 1940, his son committed suicide and then in 1947 his daughter went mad and was put into an institution. Horrifying. Just reading the bare bones of those events make me shiver. Not to mention the fact that WWII was heating up and exploding at the same time. It must have been unbearable for him.

He won the Pulitzer four times. He had traveled to London with his family and met all the big poets of the day – Pound, Yeats, Amy Lowell. He started getting published, and was quite lucky in that regard. He was well-received. Honored. He made it into the canon during his own lifetime, which is really rare – and lived a long long life, even reading a poem at the inauguration of President Kennedy. This was a man who was born in the 19th century.

The introduction to Frost in my Norton Anthology reads:

Although no poet need do more than Frost did, and few can do so much, he presents, in comparison with other eminent writers of his time, an impressive example of reserve or holding back in genre, diction, theme, and even philosophy. This at times bitter man left his readers poems that they quite simply love; and to love a poem by Frost is to begin, at each rereading of a poem, to hear a voice that does not set aside its task before that task has been performed.

For some reason I have tears in my eyes.

Because Robert Frost is so casually quoted, by high-brow and low-brow, by college professors and cross-stitch wall hangings … I went back and re-read a lot of his stuff as an adult. I felt I wanted to re-encounter it, see what I felt about him. I knew many of his poems by heart because you have to read them in almost every class you have ever taken, from age 14 to 22. You’re like, “Oh God, Road Not Taken AGAIN? If I have to read Stopping By the Woods one more time, I’m cracking skulls …” It was well worth the trouble to re-read them. There are voices and dialects, and as a New Englander, his landscape and cadences and weather are all as familiar to me as my own neighborhood at home. I love his local-ness, but more than that – I love the complexity there, hidden beneath the folksiness, the too-easy truths spouted forth. I feel a poet needing to assert his truth, not because he knows it is true, but because he fears it is not. And “that has made all the difference” in how I read him.

Here is one of his poems that I love. It weaves a spell of weirdness. It is not what it seems to be. He’s just picking apples, right? But … look at where he goes in the poem.

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.