'Where love and need are one'

     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 eclipes 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 smalltime farmers 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 dad

      They may not mean to, but they do. 

      They fill you with the faults they had

      And 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:

Out of the mud two strangers came
And caught me splitting wood in the yard,
And one of them put me off my aim
By hailing cheerily "Hit them hard!"

     Which echoes with "Out, Out—" where the doomed boy is also distracted, by his sister calling him to supper:                     

                                    At the word, the saw,
As if to prove saws knew what supper meant,
Leaped out at the boy’s hand, or seemed to leap—

     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.
     The appearance of the pair leads directly into to two dozen lines about the 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 forget
The lurking frost in the earth beneath
That will steal forth after the sun is set
And show on the water its crystal teeth.

     Frost, like many a liberal, feels guilty to be doing for pleasure what others do to stay alive.

With what was another man's work for gain.
My right might be love but theirs was need.
And where the two exist in twain
Theirs was the better right—agreed.

     "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, or possibly grasp these lines, even if I could remember them, which I couldn't, here they are anyway:

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.