I was drawn to a particular poem last month after watching a documentary film about Robert Frost. This is 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.
I heard Frost recite this poem in the documentary in his dry, unemphatic way, and saw Richard Wilbur and Seamus Heaney discussing it. Heaney called it "Frost's Ode to Autumn. In fact it's the one place where he surrenders to the wood." The woods appear and reappear in several of Frost's poems; the best-known are probably "Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening" and "Come in".
Certain that I'd encountered the poem before many years ago (when I read it much less attentively), reading it again was like reading it for the first time. It measures up to what Frost wrote in the introduction to his Collected Poems: "Like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride all its own melting. A poem may be worked over once it is in being, but may not be worried into being. Its most precious quality will remain its having run itself and carried away the poet with it. Read it a hundred times: it will forever keep its freshness as a metal keeps its fragrance. It can never lose its sense of a meaning that once unfolded by surprise as it went."(1)
Right away, I could see that the poem was not one of Frost's easier poems. There are two Robert Frosts, and the difference between them goes much deeper than poetic success or failure. It must have been deliberate, since he noticed that some of his poems got a great deal more attention from readers than others, and who better than Frost knew that they were not always his most important poems. In his 1963 essay on Frost, "A Momentary Stay," Irving Howe addresses this:
"It might be convenient, but is also a dangerous simplification, to draw a sharp line between his popular and superior poems. The two have a way of shading into one another ... in his small number of distinguished lyrics ... the archness and sentimentalism have been ruthlessly purged; he is writing for sheer life. To read these poems, as they confront basic human troubles and obliquely notice the special dislocations of our time, can be unnerving—for they offer neither security nor solace. They are the work of a poet who, without the mediation of formal thought or religious sentiments, gives close and hard battle to his own experience. They seek to capture those moments when we confront experience in its bareness, observing some natural event or place with a pure sense of the dynamics of reception. They set out to record such tremors of being in their purity and isolation: as if through a critical encounter with the physical world one could move beyond the weariness of selfhood and into the repose of matter. But Frost, now supremely hard on himself, also knows that the very intensity with which these amounts are felt makes certain their rapid dissolution, and that what then remains is the familiar self, once again its own prisoner. Approaching a pure state of being, these lyrics return with the necessity of shaped meaning. And in their somewhat rueful turning back to the discipline of consciousness, the effect is both painful and final: they conclude with the reflection that the central quandary of selfhood, that it must forever spiral back to its own starting point, cannot be dissolved."
"After Apple-picking" is a very odd Frost poem, one that is so ambiguous as to invite different conclusions about its meaning. Only recall what Amy Lowell wrote when the Frost collection North of Boston was published in America in 1915: "The charming idyll 'After Apple-picking,' is dusted over with something uncanny." That "something" is not easily identified. On its smooth surface, with a lilting cadence and rhyme, the poem describes how very late in the year, the speaker has finished picking nearly every available apple from his apple trees. He is so weary from his labors that he wonders if he might sleep the whole winter, like the woodchuck (who is already hibernating in his hole). But he was already tired, he says, when he began picking in the morning. Like the world around him, he is winding down toward something more than simply "human sleep." The grass is hoary with frost. The snow will come soon.
If "After Apple-picking" is Frost's Ode to Autumn, it doesn't fall easily in line with an idyll like John Clare's "To Autumn":
Come, pensive Autumn, with thy clouds and storms
And falling leaves and pastures lost to flowers;
A luscious charm hangs on thy faded forms,
More sweet than Summer in her loveliest hours,
Who in her blooming uniform of green
Delights with samely and continued joy:
But give me, Autumn, where thy hand hath been,
For there is wildness that can never cloy –
The russet hue of fields left bare, and all
The tints of leaves and blossoms ere they fall.
In thy dull days of clouds a pleasure comes,
Wild music softens in thy hollow winds;
And in thy fading woods a beauty blooms
That’s more than dear to melancholy minds.
A mind must be melancholy to prefer Autumn to Summer. At the close of "After Apple-picking," does the speaker, as Seamus Heaney claims, "surrender to the wood"? I have written before about two other poems by Frost, "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" and "Come in," in which the speaker is momentarily beguiled by a presence in a wood. "In many of Frost's poems," I wrote a year ago on this blog, "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." The weariness of which the apple-picker speaks isn't simply physical. The sleep to which he is leaning, and the dreams he predicts will visit him, speak of a long year (a long life) coming to its close. It would be going too far, in this case, to say that what the speaker is going to is death. As Heaney says, it would rob the poem of all of its sensuous life.
(1) Robert Frost, "The Figure a Poem Makes."
I don't suppose it would surprise someone of my parents' generation, who lived through the Great Depression, World War II, and who engendered the Baby Boom, of which I am a part, that in the second decade of the 21st century, we have arrived at an interpretation of the words American Dream in purely materialistic terms. A bigger house in a nicer part of town, a better-paying job (that is less demanding and requires less effort) - a better life, in other words, is what we mean when we talk about the American Dream today. When we remind ourselves of the labor that our parents put into securing for us the better lives we now enjoy, does anyone ask themselves, as I have always done, if it is exactly the kind of life that they had in mind?
Looking back on American literary criticism of the 20th century, it doesn't surprise me that the politics of almost all of the great critics was at least of the Liberal persuasion and occasionally leaning further to the Left. In his great book, To the Finland Station, Edmund Wilson chronicled the intellectual (as well as quite emotional) roller-coaster on which communism took him from the 1920s all the way through to the Cold War and beyond. Though somewhat disillusioned by the experience, Wilson remained, I think, nostalgic for the debate that Stalinism effectively stifled, but which subsequent cultural critics have never let go.
Irving Howe was perhaps the last, and I would say the par excellence, of the line of great American critics that included Wilson, Dwight Macdonald, Lionel Trilling, Alfred Kazin, Stanley Edgar Hyman, and Randall Jarrell, who witnessed and celebrated, as best they could, the rise and fall of the novelists Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Faulkner, and Bellow, and the poets Stevens, Bishop and Lowell. Howe - alone it seemed - wanted to extent criticism to include life as he knew it and took it in, the life of the intellect as much as the conscience of his age.
His introduction to a collection of essays that he called A World More Attractive, published in 1963, shows the extent to which Howe took the American Dream seriously, as a promise of something much more than just material comforts, of people rising not just out of poverty but into riches. He reminds us how hollow such promises ring when we examine the history of our country. Greater liberty (now known more simply as freedom) and equality are what upward mobility is about - a constant moving toward a better society. These values, however, are more threatened today than ever before. Conformity has intensified exponentially. Apathy is taking over. People have grown too comfortable to continue the struggle.
Howe would surely have cheered Bernie Sanders's run for the nomination of the Democratic Party as candidate for president. Even the failure of his candidacy was a thrilling spectacle for a democratic socialist (like myself) and every believer in the progressive political philosophy. Here is Howe's introduction (I have taken the liberty of italicizing certain passages):
Composed in the years between 1950 and 1963, the essays in this book range in kind from literary criticism to political analysis, from intellectual portraiture to cultural polemic. They cover a wide spectrum of topics and figures, but if varied in subject, they are, I believe, unified in outlook. Behind almost all of them can be found a stable complex of values and convictions, a persistent concern with problems and ideas, having to do primarily with that style of experience and perception sometimes called the "modern." By the "modern" I have in mind neither the merely contemporary nor the momentarily fashionable, either in our culture or our politics. I have in mind the assumption that the twentieth century has been marked by a crisis of conduct and belief that is perhaps unprecedented in seriousness, depth and extent.
The "modern," as it refers to both history and literature, signifies extreme situations and radical solutions. It summons images of war and revolution, experiment and disaster, apocalypse and skepticism; images of rebellion, disenchantment and nothingness. To claim that all of these are visibly present in the essays that follow, would be absurd; but I would say that the sense of their presence has been a dominant pressure, setting both the terms and the limits, of what I have written here. Whether it be strictly literary, or primarily political, or a crossing of the two — as in the study of T. E. Lawrence, which forms the centerpiece of the book because it brings together so many of its themes — the work presented in these pages takes its meaning and its shape as a response to the problem of the "modern."
A number of the essays are literary in character, written from the assumption that literary criticism, like literature itself, can be autonomous but hardly self-sufficient. There is strong reason to stress the integrity of the work of literature, as an object worth scrutiny in its own right and in accordance with its own nature; but I would also insist — and in the last two decades it has become quite necessary to insist — that the work of literature acquires its interest for us through a relationship, admittedly subtle, difficult and indirect, to the whole of human experience. The kind of detailed or close analysis of particular texts which has been favored in recent years and which I have occasionally undertaken in lengthier studies, will not be found here. What I have tried for has been to provide a description of the characteristic qualities, the defining mode of vision, by which a writer can be recognized and valued; I have hoped to isolate the terms through which he confronts the experience of our time.
The few strictly political pieces in this book are drawn from a larger body of writing in which I have tried to speak for, even while criticizing, the tradition of socialism. Being a socialist in the mid-twentieth century means, for anyone who aspires to seriousness, a capacity for living with crisis, doubt and reconsideration. The ideal of socialism has become a problematic one, but the problem of socialism remains an abiding ideal. Some traditional doctrines of socialism now seem to me outmoded or mistaken, but I remain convinced of the need for a democratic and radical renovation of society, through which to give a fresh embodiment to the values of freedom and fraternity. A good part of the effort to preserve the animating purpose of socialist criticism in the past decade can be observed by turning to the files of Dissent, the quarterly of which I have been an editor; but some of that effort, the more speculative and less topical side of it, can be found in these pages.
If one side of my political writing has required the kind of self-questioning and reorientation which must today go on among serious socialists, another side has been devoted, in the years since the war, to an attack upon the growing acquiescence and conservatism of the American intellectual community. The early 'fifties in particular struck me as a time in which too many intellectuals abandoned their traditional privilege and responsibility of criticism. In "This Age of Conformity" — a polemic in which certain references maybe seem dated but the controlling ideas of which seem to me still valid — I joined in a counter-attack which a few intellectuals launched against the turn to political quietism and conformity, the acceptance of the social status quo, the dilution of liberalism into a kind of genteel conservatism. Now, only a few years later, I find myself especially eager that such writings speak to those younger people who have recently come to their intellectual maturity and seem not quite to recall what happened in this country only a decade ago.
I have brought together in this volume about half my periodical writing over the last twelve or thirteen years. Whatever struck me as merely journalistic or too closely interwoven with a transient polemic, has been omitted. Yet I have included a few pieces that are journalistic and polemical, first because I believe them to possess a certain value in commenting upon significant discussions of the past decade, and second because I wish to write, not for some dim posterity, but for living men and women caught up, as I am caught up, with the problems and interests of our time.
"In my eyes," Leon Trotsky once wrote, "authors, journalists and artists always stood for a world that was more attractive than any other...." One need not accept Trotsky's political outlook in order to appreciate the force of his remark, both as it indicates respect for the intellectual life and a complex, perhaps, ironic sense of the difficulties faced by those who would preserve a relationship between politics and literature, action and reflection. A world more attractive — from sentiments of this kind I have tried to live and work, . . .
A World More Attractive: A View of Modern Literature and Politics (New York: Horizon Press, 1963)
