Easy Wind, Downy Flake

On rare occasion a poem will contain the qualities that make it as near to perfect as we can imagine. Feasible within a limitless set of themes and subject matter, if the poet’s heart and mind are turning in sync is it not then possible that the result will be a superior poem, whether one about trout fishing, refrigerator mechanics or the failure of love? Whatever the circumstances or subject matter, the quality of a poem will always depend upon the poet’s understanding of both his subject and his craft. Many will say that Robert Frost achieved this ‘near perfection’ in more than a few of his poems. And after all, it isn’t easy to win four Pulitzer Prizes for Poetry with work that is less than superior.

On March 7, 1923 Robert Frost’s poem “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” was published in The New Republic magazine. It was Frost’s favorite of his own poems, and one he called ‘my best bid for remembrance.’ Though it is a poem about winter, Frost wrote the poem on a warm morning in the middle of June. On one occasion he said that it was the work of just a few minutes, almost without lifting his pen off the page. Describing the process he said, “It was as if I’d had a hallucination.” Despite the claim, an early draft of the poem shows clearly that it was reworked several times.

STOPPING BY WOODS ON A SNOWY EVENING

Whose woods these are I think I know.

His house is in the village, though;

He will not see me stopping here

To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer

To stop without a farmhouse near

Between the woods and frozen lake

The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake

To ask if there is some mistake.

The only other sound’s the sweep

Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,

But I have promises to keep,

And miles to go before I sleep,

And miles to go before I sleep.

Frost himself told the story this way: He wrote the poem based on an experience he had one Christmas season. At the time he was troubled that he and his wife wouldn’t be able to afford Christmas presents for the children. He wasn’t a successful farmer, but scrounged up some produce from their farm, hitched up his horse and took a wagon into town to try and sell enough produce to buy some gifts. He was unable to sell a single thing. As evening came it began to snow and he headed home. Along the way he was overwhelmed with the shame of telling his family about his failure, and as if sensing his mood, the horse stopped. Frost sat on his wagon in the falling snow and cried like a baby. Eventually, the horse jingled its bells, and Frost collected himself and continued the ride back home to his family. He later told his daughter: “A man has as much right as a woman to a good cry now and again. The snow gave me shelter; the horse understood and gave me the time.”

Returning to the idea of how Frost wrote the poem, a few minutes examination of “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” reveals a work that defies any claim to quick, uninterrupted composition. As a contemplation on escape and responsibility, the poem is a combination of language, sound and rhythm in which words are like actors in a drama. In the technical sense, the poem is a series of rhymed couplets in iambic tetrameter, sixteen lines divided into four lines with alternating rhymes. Taking the craft one step farther, Frost wrote each of the poem’s sixteen lines in precisely eight syllables. As example, look at the opening and closing lines:

Whose / woods / these / are / I / think / I / know

And / miles / to / go/ be / fore / I / sleep

Choose any of the poem’s sixteen lines and the syllable count will be eight. With everything else this is quite a feat. 

Poetry is writing that cries to be read aloud and “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” couldn’t be a better example.

Apple-Picking

With a feeling for something traditional, today I pulled down a book of Robert Frost and came across one of his better known poems from the 1914 collection, North of Boston. The poem is “After Apple-Picking” and describes a time after a long day’s work when the speaker is tired of apple picking. He has felt drowsy and dreamy since the morning when he looked through a sheet of ice lifted from the surface of a water trough. Now he feels tired, feels sleep coming on, but wonders whether it is a normal, end-of-the-day sleep or something deeper.

Frost once said, “After Apple-Picking” is about picking apples, but with its ladders pointing ‘toward heaven still,’ with its great weariness, and with its rumination on the harvest, the coming of winter, and inhuman sleep, the reader feels certain that the poem harbors some ulteriority.” Well, there is always something concealed in the poetry of Robert Frost though he himself was many times prone to discourage critical implications of the ‘ulterior’ in his work.

In this case Frost transforms an ordinary experience, into a meditation, a philosophical musing. He moves gradually away from harvesting apples to considering how life has been experienced fully despite the regrets and mistakes. Reference to winter in the poetry of Frost often carries implications of mortality. In this poem he wonders if his sleep will resemble the long hibernating sleep of the woodchuck.

AFTER APPLE-PICKING

My long two-pointed ladder’s sticking through a tree

Toward heaven still,

And there's a barrel that I didn’t fill

Beside it, and there may be two or three

Apples I didn’t pick upon some bough.

But I am done with apple-picking now.

Essence of winter sleep is on the night,

The scent of apples: I am drowsing off.

I cannot rub the strangeness from my sight

I got from looking through a pane of glass

I skimmed this morning from the drinking trough

And held against the world of hoary grass.

It melted, and I let it fall and break.

But I was well

Upon my way to sleep before it fell,

And I could tell

What form my dreaming was about to take.

Magnified apples appear and disappear,

Stem end and blossom end,

And every fleck of russet showing clear.

My instep arch not only keeps the ache,

It keeps the pressure of a ladder-round.

I feel the ladder sway as the boughs bend.

And I keep hearing from the cellar bin

The rumbling sound

Of load on load of apples coming in.

For I have had too much

Of apple-picking: I am overtired

Of the great harvest I myself desired.

There were ten thousand thousand fruit to touch,

Cherish in hand, lift down, and not let fall.

For all

That struck the earth,

No matter if not bruised or spiked with stubble,

Went surely to the cider-apple heap

As of no worth.

One can see what will trouble

This sleep of mine, whatever sleep it is.

Were he not gone,

The woodchuck could say whether it’s like his

Long sleep, as I describe its coming on,

Or just some human sleep.

Half-Eaten Cake

A thousand Christmas trees I didn’t know I had!
Worth three cents more to give away than sell,
As may be shown by a simple calculation.
Too bad I couldn't lay one in a letter.
I can’t help wishing I could send you one,
In wishing you herewith a Merry Christmas.

Allusion

This morning I was reading in James Lee Burke’s novel, Pegasus Descending when I came upon a passage I recognized as an allusion, but one I couldn’t identify. Burke’s sentence was this: ‘Our appointment in Samarra is made for us without our consent, and Death finds us of its own accord and in its own time.’ Appointment in Samarra is the title of a 1934 John O’Hara novel, which uses as an epigraph an earlier story taken from Somerset Maugham. Burke’s line took on a clearer and richer meaning after reading a short synopsis of the old story — In Baghdad, a merchant sends his servant to the marketplace, but the servant soon returns pale and trembling, saying that he jostled a woman he recognized as Death, that she made a threatening gesture. He flees to Samarra, where he believes Death will not find him. Concerned abut his servant, the merchant goes to the marketplace, finds death and asks about her threatening gesture to his servant. She answers that her gesture was, on the contrary one of surprise at seeing the servant in Baghdad, and continuing…“Surprised because I have an appointment with him tonight in Samarra.”

Not many many pages later Burke alludes to the Robert Frost poem, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” when he writes, ‘But I still had miles to go before I slept,’ hinting at a similar complexity that had troubled the Frost character. Most fans of Burke will agree that his frequent use of allusion heightens the impact of his stories.

‘Allusion’ is a word we have taken from the Latin alussio meaning ‘to play with, to touch lightly upon,’ Most of us learned somewhere during high school or college that an allusion is a figure of speech that makes reference to, or representation of, a place, event, literary work, or work of art, sometimes directly, sometimes by implication.

Modern writers, for the most part, have pretty much abandoned the use of allusion in their writing, but a great many earlier writers (particularly the more classical) relied upon allusion to add depth and erudition to their writing. It was also a way to draw parallels in linking one writer’s thought to another, to broaden the basis of a position or argument. In modern terms the parenthesis to allusion might be something like, ‘the great so and so said the same thing, like this…’ Allusion was in fact a common tool for classical writers, and while its use among modern writers has declined, it certainly hasn’t disappeared, and we can still enjoy the extra richness it brings to our reading, fiction or otherwise.

Another recent example that sent me off to the reference desk comes from Colum McCann’s Let the Great World Spin. In a section about one of his main characters, he writes… ‘In Hartford as a junior counsel he would walk along the narrow paths with Wallace Stevens, of all people, both men in sleeveless shirts. It did not give of bird or bush, like nothing else in Tennessee.’ I was confused by this sudden non-sequitur in italics, and so typed it into Google. The line comes from the Wallace Stevens poem, “Anecdote of the Jar,” a rather difficult work to fathom, but somewhere in there is the idea of authority. By no means a Eureka! type of unveiling, but I did finally conclude that McCann’s use of the line was probably an allusion to the authority of his character’s position as a New York judge. Once again I felt as though the allusion had added some salt to the character, as well as to the story.

One last example is the history-making 1963 speech by Dr Martin Luther King, “I Have a Dream,” a veritable gold mine of allusions to literature, song, drama, Bible and historical documents. At one point in his speech King alludes to Shakespeare’s Richard III in saying, ‘This sweltering summer of the Negro’s legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality.’ In the final lines he calls up the words of a traditional African-American spiritual when he says, “Free at last, free at last; thank God Almighty, we are free at last,” knowing that the majority of his listeners will be able to quote with him the final words of his speech.

Frankly, Dr King’s speech would have been weakened without his powerful use of allusion.