In New England, an old part of America, there are old places where people have been living for centuries. But because such places are in rural parts of the country, remote from large cities, or because they are poor communities in inner cities like Boston, parts of them are abandoned and fall to ruin. Robert Frost was a New Englander, though he was born in San Francisco. His poetry has strong associations with New England, and Amy Lowell, a member of a very old New England family, wrote about New Englanders in her review of Frost's second book of poems, North of Boston:
"What is there in the hard, vigorous climate of these states which plants the seeds of degeneration? Is the violence and ugliness of their religious belief the cause of these twisted and tortured lives? Have the sane, full-blooded men all been drafted away to the cities, or the West, leaving behind only feeble remainders of a once fine stock? The question again demands an answer after the reading of Mr. Frost's book... Mr. Frost has reproduced both people and scenery with a vividness which is extraordinary. Here are the huge hills, undraped by any sympathetic legend, felt as things hard and unyielding, almost sinister, not exactly feared, but regarded as in some sort influences nevertheless. Here are great stretches of blueberry pasture lying in the sun; and again, autumn orchards cracking with fruit which it is almost too much trouble to gather. Heavy thunderstorms drench the lonely roads and spatter on the walls of farm-houses rotting in abandonment; and the modern New England town, with narrow frame houses, visited by drummers alone, is painted in all its ugliness. For Mr. Frost's is not the kindly New England of Whittier, nor the humorous and sensible one of Lowell; it is a latter-day New England, where a civlization is decaying to give place to another and very different one... His people are left-overs of the old stock, morbid, pursued by phantoms, slowly sinking to insanity."
In his last great, flawed, poem, "Directive," from his 1947 collection Steeple Bush, Frost described what his world had come to:
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.
Since last Friday, when news of the mass shooting in New Zealand broke, I've been watching the images of the mourners and the flowers left at the places in Christchurch where the victims had fallen. Such killing sprees are a routine occurrence in America, but now they seem to be spreading, along with the racist doctrine that inspires them. But New Zealand is reacting to their mass shooting differently. Cearly, something extreme needs to be done in response. And it's getting done. It's a marvel, really, to watch how a society based on some of the same principles as our own, with even some of the same liberties, is dealing with an atrocity that is the "new normal" in the USA. America is a new place but New Zealand, which became an independent nation in 1907, has something it can teach us.
In his book, New Hampshire, Frost included poems that seem to follow me wherever I go. I returned to one of those poems over the weekend:
IN A DISUSED GRAVEYARD
The living come with grassy tread
To read the gravestones on the hill;
The graveyard draws the living still,
But never any more the dead.
The verses in it say and say:
'The ones who living come today
To read the stones and go away
Tomorrow dead will come to stay.'
So sure of death the marbles rhyme,
Yet can't help marking all the time
How no one dead will seem to come.
What is it men are shrinking from?
It would be easy to be clever
And tell the stones: Men hate to die
And have stopped dying now forever.
I think they would believe the lie.
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