Revelation
We make ourselves a place apartBehind light words that tease and flout,But oh, the agitated heartTill someone find us really out.'Tis pity if the case require(Or so we say) that in the endWe speak the literal to inspireThe understanding of a friend.But so with all, from babes that playAt hide-and-seek to God afar,So all who hide too well awayMust speak and tell us where they are.
~Robert Frost (1913)
25 comments:
'Tis is out, 'tis ain't no more,
'Cept in 'tis pity she's a whore.
A big part of having good manners is not saying what you really want to say.
I noticed last night that 'Frost Bites' can be taken two ways :)
Mitchell, that is why artists, and poets especially, needs must be assholes. If they aren't, they aren't doing what they need to do in order to create something worth the offense.
Comfortably numb, deborah?
Hey :(
It's almost like Chick's taking a shot at someone or something.
“My words are nearly always an offense.
I don’t know how to speak of anything
So as to please you. But I might be taught,
I should suppose. I can’t say I see how.
A man must partly give up being a man
With womenfolk. We could have some arrangement
By which I’d bind myself to keep hands off
Anything special you’re a-mind to name.
I'm sorry if you felt insulted, deborah. I didn't mean it that way.
Please translate your meaning...all of it, don't hold back, see, I can take it.
Where you gonna take it, Deb?
Out for lunch? To a hardware store? Movies? Release it unharmed by the side of the road a few miles from your house?
"“My words are nearly always an offense.
I don’t know how to speak of anything
So as to please you. But I might be taught,
I should suppose. I can’t say I see how.
A man must partly give up being a man
With womenfolk. We could have some arrangement
By which I’d bind myself to keep hands off
Anything special you’re a-mind to name."
Frost forgive me, I never knew till recently what a marvelous poet he was.
Frost forgive me, I never knew till recently what a marvelous poet he was.
I believe we all suffered from overexposure to Frost. Plus he was considered to be square.
Cody Jarrett said...
It's almost like Chick's taking a shot at someone or something.
I'm having a quarrel with hipness.
Well, except for this one:
The house had gone to bring again
To the midnight sky a sunset glow.
Now the chimney was all of the house that stood,
Like a pistil after the petals go.
The barn opposed across the way,
That would have joined the house in flame
Had it been the will of the wind, was left
To bear forsaken the place’s name.
No more it opened with all one end
For teams that came by the stony road
To drum on the floor with scurrying hoofs
And brush the mow with the summer load.
The birds that came to it through the air
At broken windows flew out and in,
Their murmur more like the sigh we sigh
From too much dwelling on what has been.
Yet for them the lilac renewed its leaf,
And the aged elm, though touched with fire;
And the dry pump flung up an awkward arm;
And the fence post carried a strand of wire.
For them there was really nothing sad.
But though they rejoiced in the nest they kept,
One had to be versed in country things
Not to believe the phoebes wept.
Up till then he seemed mostly glib and rhymey.
That's the point of Frost, to me anyway. Everyone's always going on about the overexposure or over saturation, but most people have really only heard/read about 6 of his poems. It's just that it's always the same handful.
But the dude was deep. Man had more layers than a Bermuda onion.
The Tuft of Flowers.
Total rh bait.
The last four lines from "The Oven Bird":
The bird would cease and be as other birds
But that he knows in singing not to sing.
The question that he frames in all but words
Is what to make of a diminished thing.
Imagine the bird is red.
Holy Crap! Formatting Hell from here down!
I noticed that Icepick. Should I make it conform?
Please make it conform!
Re-reading "Mending Wall", Frost's narrator really is something of a prat. Are we supposed to find in that poem what generations of hippie dicks have found in it, that casual, unthinking skepticism towards traditions like wall-mending and dated Victorian notions of privacy and individualism? His neighbor isn't a Chesterton to demand Frost's neighbor explain why the wall was in its place before he would let it fall into ruin. He just repeats his aphorism, secure in the knowledge that traditions are their own justification in absence of reasons otherwise.
Frost's "Something there is that doesn't love a wall" isn't elves or nature or anything supernatural, though he leaves that notion hanging in the verse as if it were self-evident. That something isn't a thing but someones, busy-bodies who would rather there not be a wall between themselves and their neighbors.
The narrator prattles about pine and apple trees, as if the neighbor had nothing better to do with his time but cultivate trash pine on his property. What does the neighbor actually do on his property? None of the narrator's business, and that's why "good walls make good neighbors" - they're privacy screens, that keep people living close out of each other's proper business, that keep them neighbors and not nags or stalkers or creepers peering into each others' windows late at night.
Excellent comments, Mitch
Yeah, excellent comment, Mitch, except totally wrong.
Stone walls aren't a privacy screen. They're a boundary marker. People back then (and even today in some places) take great pride in their stone work. There are stone walls on my property set into the downward slope, so they're over 8 feet tall on the down side to be the standard 3ish feet high on the top.
And the neighbor isn't cultivating trash pine, he's managing a forest of saw logs, but it's not about what he's cultivating, it's about the pride in the fence itself.
His father or grandfather or great grandfather built the fence, and he wants it to stand, tall proud and strong through his lifetime and into the future.
This is a beautiful poem.
I think this is something I feel and struggle with, in every single significant relationship I've ever had and have to another human being.
Cody, if Frost didn't seed his poem with all that business about neighbors, then I'd agree with your point. The neighbor does show some pride of craftsmanship in the details of the mending. But the emphasis is, indeed, on what makes good neighbors, and it's clearly about a sense of boundaries, and demarking spheres - that is yours, this is mine, preserve the distinction between the two, and how they keep neighbors out of each others' business.
And doing some reading on white pine in Vermont, I see I was mistaken about the status of the wood in that area. I tend to think of the cheap, fast-growing pines that they use these days for balloon-frame structural materials, that knotty, pitchy rubbish that is used only where it can be safely hidden from view behind drywall, that shouldn't be burned and can hardly be worked, even if you were fool enough to want to. The stuff this guy was probably growing would have been much finer stuff, and definitely the kind of multi-generational growth that represents the kind of solid, stolid traditions Frost was questioning.
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