Robert Frost is like Norman Rockwell — an American icon who many wrongly assume to be a purveyor of mere kitsch — since his popular work obscures his more challenging material. Just as Rockwell's depictions of heart-tugging small town tableaus for The Saturday Evening Post — which, to be clear, are both technically brilliant and, to me, emotionally satisfying — are far better known than his unblinking looks at American racism for Look magazine, so Frost's two roads diverging in a yellow wood and wagon ride on a snowy evening eclipse more demanding poems like "Out, Out—" where a boy cuts his hand off on a buzz saw and dies.
Frost plumbs the thorny questions of work and class, in poems like "The Death of the Hired Man," where farm couple Mary and Warren sit on the front steps musing on the return of Silas, the near tramp who has come by intending to help them hay their field, a poem containing the immortal lines, "Home is the place where, when you have to go there,/They have to take you in."
On Friday, I looked at work through a different poet, Philip Larkin, author of one of my favorite poems, "This be the verse," one that I was lucky enough to deliver at the the Uptown Poetry Slam at the Green Mill, looking directly into the eyes of my older son, who deigned to attend:
They fuck you up, your mum and dadThey may not mean to, but they do.They fill you with the faults they hadAnd add some extra, just for you...
The Larkin column drew some nice emails from that, but the best was from Joseph Harrison, who sent a link to Frost's poem "Two Tramps in Mud Time," which begins:
The appearance of the pair leads directly into to two dozen lines about the mercurial weather in April, which can read as a parable about how economic success can evaporate and hard times come on fast:
Out of the mud two strangers cameWhich echoes with "Out, Out—" where the doomed boy is also distracted, by his sister calling him to supper:
And caught me splitting wood in the yard,
And one of them put me off my aim
By hailing cheerily "Hit them hard!"
At the word, the saw,In "Two Tramps," nothing more dire comes from the interruption than one of the wanderers wanting to split the wood for pay that Frost is splitting, for free. Making it an apt poem for Labor Day.
As if to prove saws knew what supper meant,
Leaped out at the boy’s hand, or seemed to leap—
The appearance of the pair leads directly into to two dozen lines about the mercurial weather in April, which can read as a parable about how economic success can evaporate and hard times come on fast:
Be glad of water, but don't forgetFrost, like many a liberal, feels guilty to be doing for pleasure what others do to stay alive.
The lurking frost in the earth beneath
That will steal forth after the sun is set
And show on the water its crystal teeth.
With what was another man's work for gain."The final stanza of Two Tramps is worth memorizing for times when young people ask for career advice," said Harrison. While I cannot imagine that any young person would ever ask me for career advice, nor grasp these lines, even if I could serve them up, which I couldn't, here they are anyway:
My right might be love but theirs was need.
And where the two exist in twain
Theirs was the better right—agreed.
But yield who will to their separation,
My object in living is to unite
My avocation and my vocation
As my two eyes make one in sight.
Only where love and need are one,
And the work is play for mortal stakes,
Is the deed ever really done
For Heaven and the future's sakes.
Although now that I re-read that, it seems awfully grand. And while I can't speak for Heaven, Frost certainly caught the future's eye, as this post is proof. For the rest of us, the considerable pleasure of doing the work, for love or money, and pleasing ourselves, if few else, will have to do.
Yes absolutely
ReplyDeleteIn 2000, I saw Rockwell's New Television Attenna at Chicago History Museum (then Chicago Historical Society, for a bit of history...). I was struck by how even as it sort of look like one of the "small town tableaus", painted in 1949 it was perceptive of the recording this was the start of before TV/after TV. The steeple, signaling one place people used to be in touch with the larger world, was receding. The contrast of the Victorian gable full of gingerbread and wooden shingles topped by metal made with no sense of aesthetic.
ReplyDeletePoets of the ages transcend time to speak to us directly. Poet Naomi Shahib Nye wrote that “poetry resides at the bottom of our shoes.” Lines that nourish us are out there waiting to illuminate the mysteries of our unique life experience, if only a little.
ReplyDeleteIn my early thirties I went through a period of depression and struggle adjusting to a new life landscape that included full time work in a field in which I had no real interest. I had little confidence in myself or in my ability to balance my responsibilities at home, work, life in general.
One day a friendly co-worker literally handed me Marge Piercy’s poem, The Seven of Pentacles and the axis of my world shifted. Through decades it remains one of my most cherished touch points through hell and high water. A few lines:
“Weave real connections, create real nodes, build real houses.
Live a life you can endure: Make love that is loving.
Keep tangling and interweaving and taking more in,
a thicket and bramble wilderness to the outside but to us
interconnected with rabbit runs and burrows and lairs.”
That poem is a beauty from start to finish as it derives a world of possibility from the ground of daily life. In the gentlest of ways the poet reminded me that awareness, persistence, and assurance of interconnectedness is vital to wellness in a fiercely unpredictable world. Another line: “Live as if you liked yourself, and it may happen…”
Perhaps the fact that someone I barely knew handed me this poem is why it continues to move me so, and why I persist in exploring those rabbit runs, burrows and lairs.
The Larkin poem ends with:
ReplyDeleteMan hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don't have any kids yourself.
My father was an abusive bastard. My mother was a hard-working ditz.
She endured sixty years of servitude. Knew by age ten that I didn't want kids.
No regrets.
Wasn't much later...12 or 13...that I knew I wanted to "get out" of the rat race.
House, career, family. Wanted to be a beatnik, like my uncle was, in the Village.
He told me: "Even if you win the rat race, you're still a rat."
Became a radical/ hippie at 20.
Tried to beat the system by sitting on my ass.
Only ended up beating myself.
Happy Labor Day!
Thanks to all for all of that.
ReplyDeleteArtists like Rockwell and Frost are no different than others we try to put in a box and label.
ReplyDeleteMartin Luther said that we are all saints and sinners, and this is most certainly true.
Great men can do stupid things, and stupid men can do great things. (except one, of course)
Yes stupid people can do great things
ReplyDeleteThanks for this, and thanks, Linda C-B for the lovely bit from Marge Piercy.
ReplyDeleteI loved reading all the poetry excerpts in Mr S's post and in the comments section. Thank you, all!
ReplyDeleteMy husband and I both enjoy poetry. One year I bought a book of 365 poems which we took turns reading aloud to one another. Sometime during the course of that year, I decided I could do better job of selecting poems. So I secretly compiled poems from poets we particularly like and matched them to the season, to our anniversary, our birthdays, and other important dates. (after all the recent talk of tomatoes here, I'm proud to add that I included Pablo Neruda's "ode to a tomato" as one of the poems for late summer). When I was finished, I brought the document to Office Depot and they printed and bound the book. I gave it to my husband for Christmas and it was a big hit. It was his favorite present!
That sounds like a wonderful idea, Jill A, and I'm sure you executed it in fine fashion. No wonder it was his favorite present!
DeleteI just read "Ode to Tomatoes" and was perplexed by the line "In December, unabated, the tomato invades the kitchen..." Being slow on the uptake, I wondered about that timing, until I got to "a cool sun, profound, inexhaustible, populates the salads of Chile..." Oh, right, Pablo Neruda was Chilean. 🍅😉
Yes, Jakash, Neruda was once Poet Laureate of Chile, yet he was a complicated man who left a controversial legacy. Many feminists now despise him and want his work banished and his accolades erased. He apparently raped a woman and then wrote a poem about it, among other truly despicable things. I like many of his poems, though, so I conveniently separate the work from the artist. Not unlike when I listen to the antisemitic Mahler.
Delete