In his classic book on nature and art titled Memory and Landscape, Simon Schama examines “the connection between nature and symbolism”, claiming that “memory is the landscape on which we write our recurrent obsessions”. In his elegant, timely personal essay on Robert Frost for this month’s issue for Plume titled “Robert Frost And The Cultural Landscape”, Lea expounds on Frost’s gift for employing both pathetic fallacy in his identification with such “diminished” creatures as oven birds and his poetic role as a straw man for unveiling his cold-eyed revelations about the inextricable human connections he divines to the natural world. In a similar “lover’s quarrel” as Frost’s with nature, Lea identifies unabashedly with his mentor’s split persona as both besotted Adamic witness and cold-eyed naturalist. “My own profound attraction to Robert Frost”, he confesses, “has something to do with the fact that my imagination has also long been in mourning for the dissolution of a traditional north country culture, part real, part no doubt imaginary, but it has also been perversely enabled by that mourning, even if I know full well the culture had its share of warts.” He then goes on to speculate both traditionally and presently: “Would Wordsworth have called Walt Whitman a poet? Would Whitman have called Hilda Doolittle one? Would she have felt collegial toward contemporary icons like Jorie Graham or Rae Armantrout?”
Chard deNiord
Sydney Lea: ROBERT FROST AND THE CULTURAL LANDSCAPE
I want to begin by reproducing a poem published in Robert Frost’s A Boy’s Will, published in 1915, shortly after the poet had returned from a few years in England. It is not one of his most engaging compositions, but it can serve here as a kind of epigraph, and I hope to show why it should function well as such.
Pan With Us
Pan came out of the woods one day,–
His skin and his hair and his eyes were gray,
The gray of the moss of walls were they,–
And stood in the sun and looked his fill
At wooded valley and wooded hill.
He stood in the zephyr, pipes in hand,
On a height of naked pasture land;
In all the country he did command
He saw no smoke and he saw no roof.
That was well! and he stamped a hoof.
His heart knew peace, for none came here
To this lean feeding save once a year
Someone to salt the half-wild steer,
Or homespun children with clicking pails
Who see so little they tell no tales.
He tossed his pipes, too hard to teach
A new-world song, far out of reach,
For sylvan sign that the blue jay’s screech
And the whimper of hawks beside the sun
Were music enough for him, for one.
Times were changed from what they were:
Such pipes kept less of power to stir
The fruited bough of the juniper
And the fragile bluets clustered there
Than the merest aimless breath of air.
They were pipes of pagan mirth,
And the world had found new terms of worth.
He laid him down on the sun-burned earth
And raveled a flower and looked away–
Play? Play?–What should he play?
However hifalutin its title, the following meditations comprise a patchwork of literary-historical speculation and to some degree an old man’s cultural rant. My spiel is a bit autobiographical too. It reflects on some longtime relations I’ve had to Frost. I live not far from any of his upper New England residences, so if I’ve felt the breath of a local spirit, a genius loci, it is inevitably he. Let me turn to another one of his poems:
The Need of Being Versed in Country Things
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.
Some details to notice: the aged elm is touched with fire; the pump is dry. the single fence post carries one strand of wire. These will be significant in a moment, I trust.
Like all of Frost’s best work, this poem is taxingly ambiguous. I think, however, that it’s an example of what my old professor Geoffrey Hartman referred to as “westering” poetry. Consider a familiar line from The Waste Land, by Frost’s contemporary T.S. Eliot: “Jerusalem. Athens. Alexandria. Vienna. London. Unreal.” Eliot synopsizes that “westering” of high civilization, which for him culminates in the brutal unreality of World War One.
In much English-speaking poetry, it seems, the artist sees him- or herself caught, precisely, in the sunset of a tradition, which– from a western perspective– was born in Greece or the Holy Land, traveled the breadth of Europe, then popped across the Atlantic. If, like Eliot, Frost spent time in England, unlike him, he came back to the United States.
Both in England and in New England, Frost often concerns himself with “dwelling on what has been.” Of course, poets have always found themselves in a frequent retrospective mood, believing their art is on the cusp of death. Like men and women who have reached a certain age, they can fall into lament for a better time, real or fanciful, though mostly a mix. The impulse seems hard-wired into our species, and at its worst shares a vision with Hemingway at his worst: “Long time ago good. Now no good.”
Despite disingenuousness about his own deep learning, I think Frost often refers to that sunset theme, if only indirectly. He represses the claims of more grandiose predecessors because, however blessed he is with imagination, he resolutely resists its sentimental inclinations. The ending of the lyric I just read stresses a need not to believe when belief is unwarranted, which means among other things not to construe some inherent, sympathetic Spirit of Nature or Place in what he beholds. In a word, he is not a latter-day Coleridge or Wordsworth, or even more aptly, an Emerson. He dismisses the idea of weeping swallows, for example, aware that the scene’s melancholy is his, not theirs. His vision provides an even more thoroughly scoured attention to what his great predecessor Wordsworth called “the simple produce of the common day.”
Let me go back to “The Need of Being Versed in Country Things”– and let me emphasize the physical accuracy of the poem. I’m an inveterate explorer of the woods of New England, so I’ve seen my share of old burn sites, for instance, and none could ring truer than the scene this poem establishes. I could call attention to that magnificent figure of the remnant chimney as “a pistil after the petals go.” But the “murmur” of the phoebes is almost equally strong, and so is the detail about the broken windows, and, stunningly, the “awkward arm” of the idle hand pump. Yes, these are simple produce of the common day but they’re robbed of transcendence; and yet somehow – typically of Frost at his best– to me they’re uncannily moving too. This means that the spiritual dimension of this poem, to call it that, is not only connected to the poem’s physical accuracy but would be unavailable without it.
“The Need of Being Versed in Country Things” was published over a century ago, and it reflects a New England landscape already fading. Even the word need in the poem’s title has its double edge, suggesting that any true observer must be credentialed but also sounding a plaintive ring: much is missing or broken in the tableau he restores to momentary life, and he feels the pain of the disenchantment, the pain of his own need.
Frost’s New England had been an important agricultural region, over 85 per cent of it cleared of forest for farming. As late as 1950, Vermont’s population of livestock was six times that of humans; but even by 1923, many farmers were leaving the north country for the more congenial soil of the midwestern prairie. Refrigeration had arrived, which meant competition from as far away as Australia. The woods were returning, the stone walls threaded among them even today recalling a way of life that’s now almost exotic. You might keep those rock fences in trim, as Frost’s neighbor famously does in “Mending Wall,” but the very gesture is elegiac, because “here there are no cows.”
Today, the proportion of woodland to open land in both Frost’s New Hampshire and Vermont has been reversed since he wrote “The Need of Being Versed in Country Things”: 85 percent forested to 15 cleared. What few farms remain are perishing ever more rapidly. In my town, there used to be fifty dairies. Now there are two, and those two are barely hanging on. Similarly New Englanders have for some time worked in the woods as choppers, sawyers, skidder operators, truck drivers, and millhands. But they too have long faced competition from our own west and south, and more recently from places like Poland, Slovakia and Siberia. All this threatens another means of north-country sustenance.
Throughout his career, Frost will unflinchingly face the challenges implicit in such depletion, perhaps most concisely in the last line of “The Oven Bird”: “What to make of a diminished thing?’
Let’s look now at another Frost poem, which, like the one I started with, is among my favorites:
Hyla Brook
By June our brook’s run out of song and speed.
Sought for much after that, it will be found
Either to have gone groping underground
(And taken with it all the Hyla breed
That shouted in the mist a month ago,
Like ghost of sleigh-bells in a ghost of snow) —
Or flourished and come up in jewel-weed,
Weak foliage that is blown upon and bent
Even against the way its waters went.
Its bed is left a faded paper sheet
Of dead leaves stuck together by the heat —
A brook to none but who remember long.
This as it will be seen is other far
Than with brooks taken otherwhere in song.
We love the things we love for what they are.
Again, I am struck by the physical accuracy here, by how Frost uses the odd tendency of jewelweed, say, to lean upstream in what had been a freshet; or the likening of that freshet’s song to ghostly sleigh-bells. And again, these details are marshaled in service of a peculiar, sturdy elegy.
“A brook to none but who remember long”: Frost once more locates himself in the evening phase of a cultural tradition. Summer has not even begun before “our brook’s run out of song and speed.’” It’s as though Frost were stacking himself up against prior poets with a grander sweep, ones who looked at grander waters: Spenser’s Thames, Shelley’s Arve, Whitman’s Potomac, Eliot’s Mississippi, so on.
Hyla Brook’s ephemerality and slightness mean that Frost’s relation to it is “other far/Than with brooks taken otherwhere in song.” And it must tell us something about poetry’s prospects that the brook bed becomes “a faded paper sheet/ Of dead leaves,” the only thing to flourish on that sheet being the jewelweed, itself a token of transiency, its more common name being Touch-Me-Not. Frost – back home from Europe, in mountain fastness– surveys his landscape, then willfully cleanses it of any “classical” habitation, banishes any notion of inherited genius loci.
It is always idle to say of a worthy poem that it contains a single, specific theme. Whether or not you accept my allegorization of “Hyla Brook,” however, the poem clearly deals with diminished things, and again it faces up to the challenge of song in spite of such diminishment.
Or perhaps because of it: one thing I’ve always admired in this poet is precisely how, having examined all the facts, he fares forward, and without resorting either to despair or to mere elegy. “We love the things we love for what they are”: the line sounds the doubled note of poignance and resolve. Frost deals with living life on life’s terms, which to me seems a more exemplary gesture than some from a more operatic figure like Yeats. If diminishment is the hand we are dealt, it’s the hand he will play.
Like his Pan. Frost appears to have asked, “Play? Play?—What should he play?
Well, he obviously found a lot of things to play.
My own profound attraction to Frost’s poems has a lot to do with the fact that my imagination has also long been in mourning for the dissolution of a traditional north country culture, part real, part no doubt imaginary, but it has also been perversely enabled by that mourning, even if I know full well the culture had a catalog full of warts.
Not that my lamentation or Frost’s is restricted to the cultural landscape of upper New England, but that this landscape is simply the one we both came to know at an early age. (Like a majority of today’s Vermonters, and in fact like Frost, I’m a transplant, but I’ve lived here almost sixty years, and our family connection to the Maine woods goes back generations.) I’m not as physically able as I once was, but for decades no day felt normal if I didn’t go rambling alone in some wild corner of the territory, and, conversely, if I didn’t come face to face with the old-timers, all of them gone now, from whom I learned more about voice than I did from any literary influence, including Frost’s.
I began by stressing this poet’s attention to physical detail, and I’ll wind up with some thoughts on our own cultural and physical landscape. If these were under siege back in the 1920s, as I say, they are even more so a century later. In Frost’s young years, one mode of physical connection to the land, the agricultural, was yielding to the silvicultural. Today we have seen a different change, in which the disembodied world of technology is replacing our hold on the literal– and to my mind, therefore, the liter-ary– landscape.
This concerns me as man and writer, because as Wallace Stevens, of all improbable allies here, once wrote: ‘One needs to know the trees of the place,’ and elsewhere, “the greatest poverty is not to live in a physical world.” I know my ideals are vague and easily disputed, but I know that none of them is attainable by means of technology alone. Poetry for me still begins as a flume rising from my lungs and resonating along actual, fleshly vocal chords.
In short, the Frostian tension between lament and resolve, between pessimism and optimism, is one I persistently indulge in my own minor way; but I try to check myself if I start echoing fellow sentimentalists of bygone eras, who, yes, especially in old age like my own, pine for those purported good old days. I remain aware that maternal and infant death in childbirth, dirt poverty, isolation, lack of medical care, and so on are not things to yearn for in our time. And there is no way to avoid change anyhow. Within the canon of English-speaking poetry alone, would Alexander Pope have considered the works of Wordsworth to be poetry? Would Wordsworth have called Walt Whitman a poet? Would Whitman have called Hilda Doolittle one? Would she have felt collegial toward contemporary icons like Jorie Graham or Rae Armentrout?
I will end with a poem from Frost’s last collection, In the Clearing, a book dismissed in its time as the work of a has-been. I was part of that chorus of disappointment, but I find many good poems there now, and I think this one shows the blend of lament and Yankee sturdiness that I’ve sought to address. Indeed, in its way, it synthesizes my argument. Frost’s use of the word speed early on may remind us of how Hyla Brook “runs out of song and speed.” And bear in mind, of course, that we measure poems in feet, very regular ones in Frost’s case, something the poet plays on at the end.
Closed for Good
Much as I own I owe
The passers of the past
Because their to and fro
Has cut this road to last,
I owe them more today
Because they’ve gone away
And come not back with steed
And chariot to chide
My slowness with their speed
And scare me to one side.
They have found other scenes
For haste and other means.
They leave the road to me
To walk in saying naught
Perhaps but to a tree
Inaudibly in thought,
“From you the road receives
A priming coat of leaves.
“And soon for lack of sun,
The prospects are in white
It will be further done,
But with a coat so light
The shape of leaves will show
Beneath the brush of snow.”
And so on into winter
Till even I have ceased
To come as a foot printer,
And only some slight beast
So mousy or so foxy
Shall print there as my proxy.
