Catching up with Frost

I have been so busy with reading that I've had little time to post, but I want to keep up with my posting, so I have another layer of reflection on my readings. I read several of Robert Frost's poems during the last week of June, and now in the last week of July, I'll try to remember some of my observations, with the help of some very sketchy notes.

1) Mending Wall-- two neighbors walk a wall in spring putting the stones back in place. Speaker perhaps sees the neighbor as from some outmoded era...written in blank verse, but few lines match iambic pentameter. Most lines have five stressed syllables, but feet vary extensively to sustain the feel of natural speech. There are no patterns of rhyme, but much assonance (i.e. wall/ hill, bulls/ walls...)...why do we put up walls? Segregate, alienate ourselves? It's really impossible and yet we persist in attempts to cloister. Some have suggested this poem comments on the act of writing creatively, or any kind of creation, is a kind of duality of construction vs. destruction...also, the idea that destructive acts can result in creations, and constructions can sometimes disrupt.

2) After Apple Picking-- after a hard day of picking apples, speaker wonders about sleep coming on (is it just sleep, or something deeper?) This is a rhyming poem, but it has no regular rhyme scheme. The changing rhythms keep the reader "awake" as the speaker drifts off to "sleep". Is this the big sleep that comes at the end of human endeavor? Apples have obvious symbolic meaning in the western tradition (Adam and Eve/ Eden/ the Fall/ Genesis). Apples may represent knowledge and a punishable claim to godliness/ creation.

3) The Wood Pile-- on a walk in a frozen swamp, a speaker considers going back, follows a bird, finds a woodpile, and wonders why someone left it there to rot. This poem has typical Frostian 5 stress lines/ no discernible rhyme pattern/ looks like poetry, but sounds like speech. Something urges the speaker to get thoroughly lost. There seems to be despair in the poem's final line "the slow, smokeless burning of decay". Somehow bring Shelly's Ozymandias's last line to mind, "  Round the decay of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare the lone and level sands stretch far away..."...makes me wonder is there is some sense of futility here???


4) The Road not Taken-- speaker stands at a fork in the road and chooses which road to take. He may take the other road later, but that's unlikely. He will tell this story to someone later, but will say he took the less traveled road. This is strict masculine rhyme scheme (ABAAB). For me, I think I've misunderstood this poem ever since memorizing it in 8th grade. This is not a simple Hallmark card which proclaims "I've made the hard choice; I'm an American rugged individualist; because of my trueness to myself, I've benefited in the long run." The idea that we can not know what we are choosing when we choose, makes perfect sense to me, now at 41, and feeling somewhat disappointed. I mean, we may know what we are going to get, but we can not predict how getting it is going to feel. We can't really know "what" we are choosing when we choose. The speaker in this poems, proclaims that he "will be telling this with a sigh"....is that sigh because he knows he is lying to himself and to someone else when he tells some young person, "stick to your guns and choose the road less traveled..."? In fact, we aren't really sure the speaker has actually chosen a less traveled road; the poem does say "the passing...had worn them really about the same..." So this poem is really--whether less common or more common-- about the road we did not take. There is something fascinating about that path we didn't go down, and we will try to tell ourselves we made the right choice to bring some peace of mind, but this is really just rationalizing. Is there really a right and a wrong path? We can never know. Wrong decisions? Right decisions? Who Knows? Reminds, me as I mentioned in an earlier post on Frost or the old Buddhist story of the farmer who finds the horse (Sae-ung-ji-ma) in Korean.


5) An Old Man's Winter Night-- An old man alone in the wintry climate of New England. This poem has been described as having a complicated, even Miltonian, structure-- long sentences (lines 8-13), with much enjambment (breaking of lines in mid-sentence). This is a dark, lonely story of going to one's maker alone, but is there really any other way to do it?


6) The Oven Bird-- The oven bird sings during the height of summer, perhaps near the vernal equinox. He sings that the spring's bloom was more beautiful than the bloom of mid-summer ("as one to ten"), and hints of the coming fall. This poem is a non-traditional sonnet (fourteen lines with rhyme). It seems to be a meditation on mid-life, and, once again, I completely relate and understand this feeling. I immediately related this poem to Ulysses, in terms of the setting. Ulysses takes place in Bloom's middle years, and it also takes place in the summer (June 17, the longest day of the year). By this point, the year is half over, life is half over, and maybe this is the peak. If it isn't what you'd hoped, well, that's sad. If it is all you'd hoped, well, you realize this is the beginning of the end. The "highway dust" that the oven bird acknowledges is "over all" reminds me of Eliots "handful of dust" from the Wasteland. 


7) Birches-- Ice storms have weighed down and bent birch trees, and the speaker fantasizes a young boy has climbed to the top and pulled them down. There is a tension evident between the real world and the world of imagination.


8) Putting in the seed-- A sonnet. A meditation on creation/ the creator/ the earth/ mother earth/ springtime's fruit as "love child of nature"...the physical act of planting and of sex results in new life...