The Road Not Taken (Or Was It?) - weekly column 1.29.2023

 

Lawrence Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

The Road Not Taken – Or Was It?

 

 

In Memoriam (Easter, 1915)

 

The flowers left thick at nightfall in the wood

This Eastertide call into mind the men,

Now far from home, who, with their sweethearts, should

Have gathered them and will do never again.

 

-Edward Thomas

 

Those of us of a certain age (cough) remember the dim, blue-ish television images of Robert Frost reciting from memory his short poem “The Gift Outright” at the inauguration of President Kennedy. Because of the wind and the glaring winter sunlight Frost could not read the poem he had written for the occasion and so made a quick save with an older one he knew by heart.

 

“The Gift Outright” would now be condemned as imperialist, colonialist, and all the other usual “ist” suspects if anyone read poetry at all, so it’s safe enough. Indeed, in an arc from Mexico City to Ottawa via Washington the idea of any North American carrying a book is now as unthinkable as Odysseus carrying the Winnowing Oar as directed by Tiresius.

 

But it was not always so. For most of history literature was poetry; prose was for recording facts and shopping lists. When you read through what is dismissed as Victorian parlour poetry you can see that although the sentiments are often mawkish the technical skills of ordinary people in their letters and notebooks are also very highly developed.

 

The First World War created such a crisis of culture and a failure of hope that although well-written work continued for a generation as a sort of existential  brenschluss, poetry after Frost is often little more than self-pitying, self-referential free verse that connects only with whether or not the writer’s feelings have been hurt today or if he (the pronoun is gender-neutral) has had a satisfactory bowel movement lately.

 

In 1912-1915 Robert Frost’s metaphorical road took him to England where he hoped to develop a career as a poet. He became great friends with the successful travel writer, Edward Thomas, who encouraged him and made some useful introductions that indeed began making Frost famous.

 

Frost admired Thomas’ descriptive travel essays and encouraged him to render some of his work as verse.

 

In 1915 Frost returned to America and Thomas remained in England undecided as to whether to follow Frost and continue his career in the U.S.A. or, at 36, to join the British Army.  When Frost published “The Road Not Taken,” Thomas, thinking the poem a criticism of his well-known indecision in most matters, enlisted, and was killed in action in 1917.

 

Indeed, the poem may have been nothing more than a little joke based on the fact that Frost and Thomas, who loved hiking, often really did argue about what trail or road they should take.

 

As for “The Road Not Taken,” it is very much alive and the subject of badly-written undergraduate essays beginning with the ever-useless, “In my opinion…”

 

An acquaintance reminds me that even a very young reader understands “The Road Not Taken” on levels, but that an older reader, looking back upon the decisions he has made in life, truly feels it.

 

Most of the poems of Frost are as fresh and relevant now as they were in the last century, and worth a re-read without the unholy inquisition of some tiresome English teacher asking you what a line means when it’s darned obvious what the line means.

 

Just don’t read in public; people will stare at you.

 

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For the 20th of January 1961 and 2021 - poem

 

For the 20^th of January

1961 and 2021

 

The deed of gift was many deeds of war

 

-Robert Frost

 

Miz Hawkins brought a television to school

So we could watch the inauguration

Of a president “born in this century”

But he seemed really old to us anyway

 

God looked like President Eisenhower

And God was surely a Methodist

President Kennedy was a Cath’lic

(In their basements they hid shortwaves and guns)

 

Shortwaves tuned to the Vatican and that ol’ Pope

So could a Cath’lic be a good American?

But the nation was young, and so were we

And America was God’s best creation

 

And because America was the Leader of the World

And we had whipped the Nazis and the Japs [sic]

All by ourselves, and invented the Bomb

We were the blessing of democracy over all

 

Robert Frost spoke grand words in the January frost

I was hoping for his “Stopping by Woods”

Because I had memorized that in school

But he gave us something else, “The Gift Outright”

 

And then with frosted breath the President

Asked us what we could do for our country

Our country later asked us about Viet-Nam

But for now Miz Hawkins shushed all us deeds of gift

 

The nation was young that day, and so were we –

 

And everything seems so much older now

Our long ago optimism a deed of gift

To angry old men whose voices rattle

 

Rattle from behind armored glass and barbed wire

Barbed wire left over from DaNang and Saigon

And a hundred abandoned desert posts

Each a gift outright to Ozymandias

 

Who late bestrode the littered Capitol steps

His wrinkled lips loud-yelping in command

Over our increasingly antique land

“Made it, Ma! Top of the World!”

 

The happy crowds of ’61 are sand

There are no crowds in ’21, only silence

Behind ranks of soldiers (properly vetted)

Standing in empty streets, waiting for a Traveller

 

References:

 

Robert Frost, “The Gift Outright”

Shelley, “Ozymandias”

Warner Brothers, White Heat (film), 1949

Robert Frost: "I Had a Lover's Quarrel with the World" - weekly column

Lawrence Hall
Mhall46184@aol.com
Poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

“I Had a Lover’s Quarrel with the World”

Here along Beer Can Road and County Dump Extension y’r ‘umble scrivener has set himself to reading all of Robert Frost in a third-hand Library of America edition.

In school we all studied “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” “The Road not Taken,” “Fire and Ice,” “Nothing Gold Can Stay,” and other of Mr. Frost’s more familiar pieces, and they stay with us. They stay with us because they are good, both in form and in content.

Mr. Frost crafts smooth, flowing iambic tetrameter and iambic pentameter, usually rhyming but often not. That he makes rhyme work so well demonstrates the excellence of his art; there are only five – arguably six – vowel sounds in English, which rhymed through the pen or keyboard of a learner usually ends in clunkiness or unintended comedy.

Most modern poetry is free verse, which is not poetry at all but only prose lazily sorted out into artless broken lines. As Stephen Fry says in his foreword to The Ode Less Travelled, free verse is like a child who knows nothing about music simply beating on piano keys and calling it music.

As for content, Mr. Frost writes about everything except himself, thus sharing Creation with us. Most modern poetry is a closed loop of endless, self-pitying, self-referential loop, I, I, I, my, my, my me, me, me, poor me, nobody understands me.”

“But it’s from the heart” is no excuse for this sort of thing in any art.

One of my, my, my (appreciate the irony) recent discoveries is Mr. Frost’s “The Lesson for Today,” a speech given before Harvard’s Phi Beta Kappa Society in the summer of 1941. Mr. Frost gave his address in blank verse with the occasional end rhyme. That his presentation was in verse was not only appropriate for a professional poet but which could be, and often was, accomplished with some skill by the ordinary high school graduate whose curriculum was predicated upon civilization.

And then came Sputnik.

“The Lesson for Today” is a meditation on mortality, eternity, and purpose. Mr. Frost’s daughter died in 1934, his wife died in 1938, his son died in 1940. The Second World War had been going on in China since 1933 and in Europe since 1939. In “The Lesson for Today” Mr. Frost sometimes has a little fun, but the arc connects all these sorrows without directly mentioning them.

The speaker of the poem, perhaps Mr. Frost himself, has a dialogue with Alcuin of York, the Master of Charlemagne’s palace school, in order to “Seek converse common cause and brotherhood” in exploring life during personal and cultural crises. The poet, best known for his rustic works, considers the minor goddess Dione (within the context of a line of iambic pentameter, pronounced as die-ON-ney), the Emperor Charlemagne, Alcuin of York and his concept of the Memento Mori, God, the Paladins (the 12 champions of Christendom), Roland, Olivier, the Battle of Roncesvalles, and the brevity of life:

There is a limit to our time extension.
We are all doomed to broken off careers,
And so’s the nation, so’s the total race.
The earth itself is liable to the fate
Of meaninglessly being broken off.

In conclusion, the speaker – or Mr. Frost – says to Alcuin:

I hold your doctrine of Memento Mori.
And were an epitaph to be my story
I’d have a short one ready for my own.
I would have written of me on my stone:
I had a lover’s quarrel with the world.

In one of his last speeches, President Kennedy, who survived Mr. Frost by less than a year, said at the groundbreaking of the Robert Frost Library,

“In [a] free society art is not a weapon, and it does not belong to the spheres of polemics and ideology. Artists are not engineers of the soul. It may be different elsewhere. But in a democratic society the highest duty of the writer, the composer, the artist, is to remain true to himself…”  (https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/08/the-purpose-of-poetry/309470/).

And truth sometimes leads to a lover’s quarrel with the world.

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Note: I have no connection with the Library of America. If I did, I'd recommend you buy their excellent volumes new, but since I don't, I recommend that you find them used via the InterGossip, garage sales, and, I regret to say, library sales. The sharp-eyed reader will note that I covered the name of a public library in order to save some assistant librarian embarrassment for selling for a dollar or so a cultural treasure, and some other assistant librarian's ignorance in labelling (via computer code, for he or she obeyed the mindless chant of LEARN. TO. CODE.) the book as a reference work instead of as an anthology of poetry.

When Robert Frost was Invited to the White House - poem

Lawrence Hall
mhall46184@aol.com

When Robert Frost was Invited to the White House

When Robert Frost visited President Kennedy
They spoke of poetry and power, of man
Of greatness and of God, of man’s swagger
Of poetry saving power from itself

When Robert Frost visited President Kennedy
They spoke of the poet’s responsibility
The duties of good men to other men
Of magnanimity and liberation

When Robert Frost visited President Kennedy
We lived a golden age in those few hours

Stopping by Commas on a Snowy Evening

Mack Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

6 July 2014

 

Stopping by Commas on a Snowy Evening

 

An acquaintance, disagreeing with some fashionable and muddy deconstruction in a newspaper article, defended the obvious in Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.”  She was exactly right to do so.

 

Mr. Frost wrote this perfect little poem in 1922, and for the rest of his long life people told him what he really meant by it.  His insistence that the poem was about stopping by woods on a snowy evening and nothing more was taken as a wink-wink, nudge-nudge prevarication, as if it were unthinkable that anyone should ever speak plainly about anything.

 

One very common – and very wrong - interpretation is that the poem is about suicide.  This allegation is based on a line in the last stanza: “The woods are lovely, dark and deep.”  The woods are said to be symbolic of death, and the last line (“But I have promises to keep…”) are the speaker’s repudiation of the temptation to suicide. 

 

This spurious argument is built on the flimsiest of foundations, a comma that doesn’t even exist.  The claim is that because there is no Oxford comma – the comma preceding “and” – in “The woods are lovely, dark and deep,” then it follows that the woods are lovely because they are dark and deep, reflecting a desire for death.

 

Blaming something on a comma that isn’t there is too, too thin, but it sells articles to journals and newspapers, rather like the recycled twaddle that Shakespeare wasn’t really Shakespeare.

 

Commas can indicate a separation of thoughts, a pause for breath, or a pause in speaking.  Fowler’s Modern English Usage (Oxford, 1952) gives four columns of small print to the comma, and after reading all that the reader still isn’t sure what a comma is for. 

 

But let us narrow our search to the topic at hand, a line of Frost, and consider the comma as used in series.  We say that the colors of our flag are red, white, and blue.  The commas separate each item in order to give them equal weight:

 

Red.

 

White.

 

Blue.

 

However, Mr. Frost says that his friend’s woods are “lovely, dark and deep,” a series of three items with only one comma.  Thus the argument that these are not three discrete (spelled “discrete,” meaning separate, not “discreet,” meaning subtle) things, but rather one thing (“lovely”) as proven by “dark and deep.”

 

The problem is the absence of the Oxford comma (I don’t know how a comma or a shoe can be Oxonian), which as a fashion comes and goes.  One generation holds as an article of faith that the colors of our flag should be written as “red, white, and blue,” and the next generation is ready to take to the barricades in defense of “red, white and blue” sans Oxford comma.

 

Robert Frost wrote “The woods are lovely, dark and deep” with only one comma because omitting the Oxford comma was the usual punctuation of his time.  There is no hidden meaning in this.

 

The defense of this questionable usage is that when items are listed in a series the reader already knows that there are items, that they are different items, and that they are in a series.

 

This argument fails, in Mr. Frost’s time or in ours, because if any comma is unnecessary in a series because of an omniscient reader, then why should the series be cluttered with commas at all?  Thus, according to the No Oxford Comma crowd, if we make a list of children who are, for instance, taking a Sunday school trip, we can safely and accurately list them as “Mandy Taylor Brooke Kelly John Conrad McKenzie Sebastian Madison,” and so on.

 

The confusion is obvious: Are Mandy and Taylor two different children, or is Mandy Taylor one child and Brooke Kelly another?

 

If we write of our flag that the colors are red, white and blue, do we then say that there are only two categories, one of them red and the other a portmanteau of white and blue?

 

The Oxford comma is useful for clarifying items in series.  Mr. Frost, however, did not employ it.  The lapse is hardly a fault, but it does give the sort of people who are always telling others what they really mean an excuse for deconstructing (that is, botching it) a given line that, even with a comma missing, is perfectly clear.

 

“Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” is what its author said it is, and it is a snowflake-brilliant poem of great artistry crafted in iambic tetrameter, clear monosyllables, and a connect-everything rhyme scheme of AABA-BBCB-CCDC-DDDD.

 

Read it, and live.

 

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