Poor Robert Frost has been pulled in so many directions in the fifty years since his death that it looks more like he's been drawn and quartered. He is a victim of an excess of familiarity. Too many people who should know better think they know who he is. Biographies and critical works have tried to add greater detail to the popular image of the rustic New Englander with his farmer's almanac aphorisms, either to demonstrate how much more profound a poet he was or to expose him as some kind of egotistical fraud. Some critics have apparently made up their minds that Frost was anachronistically anti-modernist, going in the opposite direction of Eliot and Stevens, too dependent on the integrity rather than the ambiguity of words.
Meanwhile, his poetry remains stubbornly real and alive and, at its best, frighteningly modernist in its understanding of life in the universe. There appears to be an innate mistrust among critics of writing that is clear, that doesn't try to be difficult, that presents no great challenges to our interpretation. There is a serene openness and clarity to Frost's poetry that one isn't used to encountering in great poetry. This doesn't mean that there is nothing to explore and celebrate. The precision of Frost's poetry makes every word crucial to each poem's cumulative effect. There are some Frost poems that don't measure up to the greatness of others because their effect is marred by a single word.
In many of Frost's poems the voices of nature can be heard addressing him directly, but the things they tell him aren't at all what one might expect. Like the thrush calling him to "come in" to the woods at dusk. Or the beguiling beauty of a snowy woods that he stops to admire, until his horse pulls at his harness to remind him of his promises. When I think of Frost I have an overpowering feeling of solitude. Not loneliness, since that implies a want of company. Frost is so often encountered in his poems walking alone. It seemed to be his natural habitat. His voice is unmistakable and one of the most intimate. He seems to be addressing me personally. The only other poet who has this effect on me is Philip Larkin.
He wrote a great deal - he was writing from about 1890 and he had enough material to fill two books (A Boy's Will and North of Boston) and part of a third (Mountain Interval) when he was in England in 1912-1915 and managed to get them published. Ezra Pound befriended him and wrote a favorable review of North of Boston that was published in Chicago. Frost's friend Edward Thomas wrote an ecstatic review for a British magazine. Poetry was his vocation and his avocation. But he wrote substantial, powerful poems well into his Seventies. "Desert Places" and "Provide, Provide" are there in A Further Range (1937).
Randall Jarrell celebrated his long poems, like "Home Burial" for their dramatic use of vernacular speech. I would normally defer to Jarrell, but he loves too much of Frost's work, I think, to bear to let some of it go: "The Witch of Coös," "Home Burial," "A Servant to Servants," "Directive," "Neither Out Too Far Nor In Too Deep," "Provide, Provide," "Acquainted with the Night ," "After Apple Picking," "Mending Wall," "The Most of It," "An Old Man's Winter Night," "To Earthward," " Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," "Spring Pools," "The Lovely Shall Be Choosers," "Design," and "Desert Places." While I would eliminate a few of Jarrell's choices, I am surprised that he neglected to include one of Frost's more perfect poems, "Meeting and Passing."
Irving Howe is no less enthusiastic than Jarrell about Frost's poetry, and his own list of his "superior lyrics" includes several of Jarrell's choices, along with "Storm Fear," "The Oven Bird," "Dust of Snow," "Happiness Makes Up in Height for What It Lacks in Length," and "Never Again Would Bird's Song Be the Same" - though Howe, too, omits "Meeting and Passing" from his list.
I wanted to choose just one poem that would stand for him, for his strengths but also his weaknesses (since I have a weakness for him, an indulgence that comes from years of familiarity with him). It is a late poem, from Steeple Bush (1947), his last great poem, and just the poem to bewilder a reader - like me - who thought they knew him, who thought he had no more surprises for him.
DIRECTIVE
Back out of all this now too much for us
Back in a time made simple by the loss
Of detail, burned, dissolved, and broken off
Like graveyard marble sculpture in the weather,
There is a house that is no more a house
Upon a farm that is no more a farm
And in a town that is no more a town
The road there, if you'll let a guide direct you
Who only has at heart your getting lost
May seem as if it should have been a quarry --
Great monolithic knees the former town
Long since gave up pretense of keeping covered.
And there's a story in a book about it:
Besides the wear of iron wagon wheels
The ledges show lines ruled southeast-northwest,
The chisel work of an enormous Glacier
That braced his feet against the Arctic Pole.
You must not mind a certain coolness from him
Still said to haunt this side of Panther Mountain.
Nor need you mind the serial ordeal
Of being watched from forty cellar holes
As if by eye pairs out of forty firkins.
As for the woods' excitement over you
That sends light rustle rushes to their leaves,
Charge that to upstart inexperience.
Where were they all not twenty years ago?
They think too much of having shaded out
A few old pecker-fretted apple trees.
Make yourself up a cheering song of how
Someone's road home from work this once was,
Who may be just ahead of you on foot
Or creaking with a buggy load of grain.
The height of the adventure is the height
Of country where two villages cultures faded
Into each other. Both of them are lost.
And if you're lost enough to find yourself
By now, pull in your ladder road behind you
And put a sign up CLOSED to all but me.
Then make yourself at home. The only field
Now left's no bigger than a harness gall.
First there's the children's house of make-believe,
Some shattered dishes underneath a pine,
The playthings in the playhouse of the children.
Weep for what little things could make them glad.
Then for the house that is no more a house,
But only a belilaced cellar hole,
Now slowly closing like a dent in dough.
This was no playhouse but a house in earnest.
Your destination and your destiny's
A brook that was the water of the house,
Cold as a spring as yet so near its source,
Too lofty and original to rage.
(We know the valley streams that when aroused
Will leave their tatters hung on barb and thorn.)
I have kept hidden in the instep arch
Of an old cedar at the waterside
A broken drinking goblet like the Grail
Under a spell so the wrong ones can't find it,
So can't get saved, as Saint Mark says they mustn't.
(I stole the goblet from the children's playhouse.)
Here are your waters and your watering place.
Drink and be whole again beyond confusion.
There is so much here that is familiar but made strange, so much like a dream, the dream of an old man now lost in a world grown old like him. In his New York Times review of Steeple Bush, Randall Jarrell found in "Directive," "so much longing, tenderness and passive sadness, Frost's understanding that each life is tragic because it wears away into the death that it at last half-welcomes -- that even its salvation, far back at the cold root of things, is make-believe, drunk from a child's broken and stolen goblet hidden among the ruins of the lost cultures."
If "Directive" were anthologized more and became better known than such comparably harmless poems as "Birches," perhaps Frost's reputation even among more cynical and susceptible critics would be unassailable.
No comments:
Post a Comment