Early Frost Bite

Columbus may have worked the wind
A new and better way to Ind
And also proved the world a ball,
But how about the wherewithal?
Not just for scientific news
Had the Queen backed him for a cruise.

Remember he had made the test
Finding the East by sailing West. 
But had he found it?
Here he was Without one trinket from Ormuz
To save the Queen from family censure
For her investment in his future.

There had been something strangely wrong
With every coast he tried along.
He could imagine nothing barrener.
The trouble was with him the mariner.
He wasn’t off a mere degree;
His reckoning was off a sea.

And to intensify the drama
Another mariner Da Gama

 ~ Robert Frost

Fire And Ice

"A huge fire ripped through Titanic before it struck iceberg, fresh evidence suggests"

The burning bunker news was published in 1912. I wrote about that here: Fire And Ice.
I've read other theories about how that fire contributed to the sinking: the fire weakened a crucial bulkhead and failed dramatically on contact with cold seawater, compromising the elaborate bulkhead system designed to keep her afloat.

But there is always comforting authority:

The Court, having carefully inquired into the circumstances of the above mentioned shipping casualty, finds, for the reasons appearing in the annex hereto, that the loss of the said ship was due to collision with an iceberg, brought about by the excessive speed at which the ship was being navigated. 

That was the conclusion of the British Admiralty at the time of the sinking. (h/t EBL).

A ship sank. People died. Who cares?

Some say the world will end in fire, 

Some say in ice. 

From what I’ve tasted of desire 

I hold with those who favor fire. 

But if it had to perish twice, 

I think I know enough of hate 

To say that for destruction ice 

Is also great 

And would suffice.

~Robert Frost (1920)

Was Robert Frost An Open Borders Guy?

Mending Wall

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun;
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs.  The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
‘Stay where you are until our backs are turned!'
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of outdoor game,
One on a side.  It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, ‘Good fences make good neighbors.'
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
'Why do they make good neighbors?  Isn’t it
Where there are cows?  But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offense.
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That wants it down.'  I could say ‘Elves’ to him,
But it’s not elves exactly, and I’d rather
He said it for himself.  I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father’s saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, ‘Good fences make good neighbors.'

~Robert Frost (1914)

Simon Says...

Overheard at Althouse:

There are no valid new ideas in Christianity lurking, waiting to be excavated. 

Link for context

Simon sounds downright Ratzingerian there. What do you think?
_____________________

There may be nothing new in Christianity, but Christianity is always in the new:


But God's own descent 
Into flesh was meant
As a demonstration
That the supreme merit
Lay in risking spirit
In substantiation.
Spirit enters flesh
And for all it's worth
Charges into earth
In birth after birth
Ever fresh and fresh.
We may take the view
That its derring-do
Thought of in the large
Is one mighty charge
On our human part
Of the soul's ethereal
Into the material.

~Robert Frost

Fire and Ice

Fire And Ice (1920) 

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice. 

~Robert Frost

From the Wiki:

In an anecdote he recounted in 1960 in a "Science and the Arts" presentation, prominent astronomer Harlow Shapley claims to have inspired "Fire and Ice". Shapley describes an encounter he had with Robert Frost a year before the poem was published in which Frost, noting that Shapley was the astronomer of his day, asks him how the world will end. Shapley responded that either the sun will explode and incinerate the Earth, or the Earth will somehow escape this fate only to end up slowly freezing in deep space. Shapley was surprised at seeing "Fire and Ice" in print a year later, and referred to it as an example of how science can influence the creation of art, or clarify its meaning. Link

Science should inspire art. Full stop.

Morning Frost Bite

Nothing Gold Can Stay 

Nature's first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf's a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay. 

~ Robert Frost 

The poem went through a few early drafts. link I know what Frost meant by the "first green is gold" -- it's that golden seen on tree limb buds before they burst.

The second hardest hue to hold is the yellow-green of new shoots given by nascent chloroplasts which later darken into stems and leaves.

Chlorine gas, anathema to plant and animal life, got its name because of its pale green hue. Another paradox.

In Winter In The Woods Alone

In winter in the woods alone
Against the trees I go
I mark a maple for my own
And lay the maple low. 

At four o’clock I shoulder ax,
And in the afterglow
I link a line of shadowy tracks
Across the tinted snow. 

I see for Nature no defeat
In one tree’s overthrow
Or for myself in my retreat
For yet another blow. 

~Robert Frost (1962)

Morning Frost Bite

October 

O hushed October morning mild,
Thy leaves have ripened to the fall;
Tomorrow’s wind, if it be wild,
Should waste them all.
The crows above the forest call;
Tomorrow they may form and go.
O hushed October morning mild,
Begin the hours of this day slow.
Make the day seem to us less brief.
Hearts not averse to being beguiled,
Beguile us in the way you know.
Release one leaf at break of day;
At noon release another leaf;
One from our trees, one far away.
Retard the sun with gentle mist;
Enchant the land with amethyst.
Slow, slow!
For the grapes’ sake, if they were all,
Whose leaves already are burnt with frost,
Whose clustered fruit must else be lost—
For the grapes’ sake along the wall. 

~ Robert Frost

h/t Cody Jarrett

Is Scything Addictive?

h/t: Cody Jarrett at Trooper York

The Grindstone

Having a wheel and four legs of its own

Has never availed the cumbersome grindstone

To get it anywhere that I can see.

These hands have helped it go, and even race;

Not all the motion, though, they ever lent,

Not all the miles it may have thought it went,

Have got it one step from the starting place.

~from Robert Frost's The Grindstone (1923)

__________________________
A grindstone belonged to my grandma's yard when I was little. It stood outside withstanding Wisconsin weather year after year. I saw it once a month or so on Sundays when we visited. I guess it had been my grandpa's and maybe his father's before that but they were already dead by then and I forgot to ask my dad about it too. My dad never farmed for a living and so the grindstone never passed down. He showed me other useful things.

A grindstone must have been handy on a farm in the days of steel plows and scythes. I never saw it make sparks fly but it must have done that in its day. Come to think of it, that's probably why it was outside (and why Frost's grindstone was outside too). It's not the kind of tool to keep and use in a barn around sawdust or straw. But farming changed and that grindstone became a relic—a sort of lawn ornament and a plaything for me, my brother, and my cousins while the grown-ups chatted inside.

No doubt that grindstone had abetted the killing of countless blades by whetting blades, but those of the surrounding weeds by then outnumbered the kind that this device had sharpened. I thought of none of that then. It was enough to just play with it and turn its heavy wheel. A fixed handle cranked the stone disk around and around. Getting it going really fast and then letting go of the handle made it hard to grab it again without getting hurt—such was its angular momentum. But that's not what I called that force then. I didn't know what to call that force then—I just knew that the grindstone had it and I never forgot it. And though that grindstone is long gone, it was a starting place for lessons learned many years on.

Frost Bite in the Morning

Revelation  

We make ourselves a place apart

     Behind light words that tease and flout,

But oh, the agitated heart

    Till someone find us really out.

'Tis pity if the case require

    (Or so we say) that in the end

We speak the literal to inspire

    The understanding of a friend.

But so with all, from babes that play

    At hide-and-seek to God afar,

So all who hide too well away

    Must speak and tell us where they are. 

 ~Robert Frost (1913)

War Thoughts At Home

Photo by the author at the Cleveland Flats, 1984

On that old side of the house

The uneven sheds stretch back

Shed behind shed in train

Like cars that long have lain

Dead on a side track. 

~Robert Frost (January 1918)

The whole poem is here and the backstory is here

Suburban Frost Bite

Cody Jarrett recommended this Frost poem. I had never read it but it triggered a personal memory.

A Brook In The City 

The farmhouse lingers, though averse to square
With the new city street it has to wear
A number in. But what about the brook
That held the house as in an elbow-crook?
I ask as one who knew the brook, its strength
And impulse, having dipped a finger length
And made it leap my knuckle, having tossed
A flower to try its currents where they crossed.
The meadow grass could be cemented down
From growing under pavements of a town;
The apple trees be sent to hearth-stone flame.
Is water wood to serve a brook the same?
How else dispose of an immortal force
No longer needed? Staunch it at its source
With cinder loads dumped down? The brook was thrown
Deep in a sewer dungeon under stone
In fetid darkness still to live and run --
And all for nothing it had ever done
Except forget to go in fear perhaps.
No one would know except for ancient maps
That such a brook ran water. But I wonder
If from its being kept forever under,
The thoughts may not have risen that so keep
This new-built city from both work and sleep. 

~Robert Frost

Daily Frost Bite

From Iron 

TOOLS AND WEAPONS 

To Ahmed S. Bokhari 

Nature within her inmost self divides

To trouble men with having to take sides. 

~Robert Frost (1956)

Daily Frost Bite

America is hard to see.  

Less partial witnesses than he*  

In book on book have testified  

They could not see it from outside— 

Or inside either for that matter.  

We know the literary chatter.

~ Robert Frost

_____________________
*Christopher Columbus. The entire poem,  America Is Hard To See, is here.

But God's Own Descent

But God's own descent 

Into flesh was meant

As a demonstration

That the supreme merit

Lay in risking spirit

In substantiation.

Spirit enters flesh

And for all it's worth

Charges into earth

In birth after birth

Ever fresh and fresh.

We may take the view

That its derring-do

Thought of in the large

Is one mighty charge

On our human part

Of the soul's ethereal

Into the material.

~Robert Frost