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Yesterday's poem, "It is a Beauteous Evening, Calm and Free" was a form of sonnet by William Wordsworth. There was something about its feeling of calm - and its feeling of being somewhat alone, for all that the speaker in the poem addressed a young girl with whom he was walking - that reminded me of Robert Frost's poems "Mowing" and "The Tuft of Flowers", both of which were found in the same 1910 collection of poems (A Boy's Will), and both of which have to do with making hay (literally, not figuratively, although perhaps there's a bit of that as well). Rather than choose one or t'other (I tried, I really did), I'm giving you both today. I liked "The Tuft of Flowers" for the revelation to be found in a bit of nature (thematically related to yesterday's poem) and "Mowing" for its being a rather interesting sonnet (or sonnet-like) poem, as well as its content. Hard-pressed to select a favorite among the two, I give you both, with analysis tucked behind cuts for those of you reading it at Live Journal.

The Tuft of Flowers
by Robert Frost

I went to turn the grass once after one
Who mowed it in the dew before the sun.

The dew was gone that made his blade so keen
Before I came to view the leveled scene.

I looked for him behind an isle of trees;
I listened for his whetstone on the breeze.

But he had gone his way, the grass all mown,
And I must be, as he had been,—alone,

‘As all must be,’ I said within my heart,
‘Whether they work together or apart.’

But as I said it, swift there passed me by
On noiseless wing a ’wildered butterfly,

Seeking with memories grown dim o’er night
Some resting flower of yesterday’s delight.

And once I marked his flight go round and round,
As where some flower lay withering on the ground.

And then he flew as far as eye could see,
And then on tremulous wing came back to me.

I thought of questions that have no reply,
And would have turned to toss the grass to dry;

But he turned first, and led my eye to look
At a tall tuft of flowers beside a brook,

A leaping tongue of bloom the scythe had spared
Beside a reedy brook the scythe had bared.

I left my place to know them by their name,
Finding them butterfly weed when I came.

The mower in the dew had loved them thus,
By leaving them to flourish, not for us,

Nor yet to draw one thought of ours to him.
But from sheer morning gladness at the brim.

The butterfly and I had lit upon,
Nevertheless, a message from the dawn,

That made me hear the wakening birds around,
And hear his long scythe whispering to the ground,

And feel a spirit kindred to my own;
So that henceforth I worked no more alone;

But glad with him, I worked as with his aid,
And weary, sought at noon with him the shade;

And dreaming, as it were, held brotherly speech
With one whose thought I had not hoped to reach.

‘Men work together,’ I told him from the heart,
‘Whether they work together or apart.’

Form and analysis: The poem is written in iambic pentameter, meaning that each line consists of five iambs (a poetic "foot" consisting of two syllables - an unstressed one followed by a stressed one: taDUM taDUM taDUM taDUM taDUM). It is also written in rhymed couplets - two lines that rhyme with one another - and Frost has made that abundantly clear by setting each couplet separately. The way Frost has written his couplets in iambic pentameter and with masculine end rhymes makes them "heroic couplets". Many of the lines are end-stopped (with punctuation like a comma, period or semi-colon) which makes the end-rhy

Yesterday's post was "The First Violet" by Karl Egon Ebert, which was completely evocative of Spring. And here in the mountains of New Hampshire, Spring is just now starting to spring: the forsythia, tulips and daffodils are out, the trees are in bud, the snowmelt is racing in the stream outside my window. And so it was that I came to today's poem choice:

Nothing Gold Can Stay
by Robert Frost

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.

On the surface, this is a poem about spring, and early growth of plants and leaves, when the first yellow greens appear on the trees. In the fifth line, the leaves are just leaves, but use of the word "subsides" shows a settling or falling sort of motion. And then the sixth line is the "turn," where Frost gets to his real topic. The subsidance of leaves reminds him of the fall of man in the Garden of Eden. Dawn is lost, but day remains. And then that last, killer line with a fatalistic ring to it, decrees that "Nothing gold can stay."

It can be taken to mean that nothing can stay gold, but I think it means that nothing can stay young. For me, the poem is about the transient nature of youth, with a hint of loss. And in my mind today, remembering this poem (I don't yet have it committed to memory, but I sure remembered the leaf references), I thought that "Nothing gold can stay" suited the brilliant-gold of the autumn leaves quite well. And so, evidently, did Robert Frost. Here are the last three lines of this poem from an earlier draft, at a time when the poem was called "Nothing Golden Stays":

In autumn she achieves
A still more golden blaze
But nothing golden stays.

Today's poem, "Nothing Gold Can Stay," was first published in 1923, in The Yale Review. But Frost played around with it for several years, and several earlier versions of it exist. The earliest of these other versions was sent to a friend in 1920, and ended as you see above.

Frost's initial focus was on the evanescent quality of new growth. Buds are golden before green. Leaves appear to be flowers before they unfold and "subside" to be leaves. Trees burst forth in color again in the fall, then the leaves subside once and for all to earth. In later revisions, he decided to universalize the poem more. By introducing the idea of Eden, Frost injects a human element into the poem without spelling it out. The sinking of Eden is a reference to the "fall of man," but it echoes the idea of transience: Eden was short-lived, but the rest of man's time on earth has been much longer. Dawn, usually the time when the sun rises, is describes in falling terms as well, but dawn "goes down" to the bright light of day. Is that really a decline, or an improvement? Again, dawn is transient and over quickly, but day lasts far longer. Perhaps, then, Eden was transient, and the longer time spent after the fall is to be preferred? Is our preference for "gold" really such a good thing? Is not the long day better than the short dawn? Is not the summer longer and more durable than the budding spring? Is it not worth our while to recognize that youth's a stuff will not endure* and to appreciate our adulthood?

The poem concludes strongly, for a number of reasons:

"Nothing gold can stay."

Why does that line pack such a wallop?

Well, first, looking at metre, it is different than all the rest. The first seven lines are essentially iambic (a two-syllable poetic foot in which an unstressed syllable is followed by a stressed syllable, ta-TUM), although the first line has an oddball because "nature" is usually read NAture, not naTURE. The first seven lines each have six syllables to them. That last line has only five. And it's trochaic, with a truncated ending. (Don't panic - it means that it has two-syllable feet that are trochees, in which a stressed syllable is followed by an unstressed syllable, TUM-ta, but that the last foot only has one syllable, which is accented, so the line reads TUM-ta TUM ta TUM.)

It's written in rhymed couplets. Not just any rhymed couplets, either: but end-stopped rhymed couplets (which is to say that each line logically pauses at the end, where the commas and periods and semicolon can be found). This could easily become sing-songy in the wrong hands, yet Frost manages his images well enough that I find myself not truly noticing the rhyminess of it on a conscious level. Particularly if I read it aloud (as one should), where the pause after a comma is not as long as that created by a semicolon or a period. Especially since the lines "So Eden sank to grief,/So dawn goes down to day" form a single sentence, and don't rhyme with one another. Instead, they create a break before that last line, which stands alone.

Second, looking at word choice, the line begins with a negative: "Nothing." While there have been hints at loss and falling and evanescence throughout the poem, creating a vaguely melancholy tone, this word is aggressively negative. Also, as written that last line can be read as a command, rather than as a commentary on loss. It is a far broader statement than any that comes before it, generalized as it is to all things (in the negative). Gold cannot stay.

A possible stretch: While folks don't usually interpret the poem this way, one could stretch so far as to say that gold in that last line might not refer to the "just-Spring" qualities in the poem (with a nod to e.e. cummings), but could refer as well to money, which one cannot, after all, take with them.

For some other commentaries on the poem, check out these essays over at Modern American Poetry. The second one, analyzing it from a linguistic point of view, is fascinating to me, although I'm sure most people don't have the patience for it.

I should note that this poem is well-known to a lot of readers of the S.E. Hinton novel, The Outsiders, which both M and S read in middle school.

"That's a sad poem," said S. "It was used in The Outsiders. Have you ever read that book?"

The answer is that I haven't. In the time and town where I grew up, once you were done with children's books, you moved on to grown-up titles. S.E. Hinton's The Outsiders, first published in 1967 (when I was three), was clearly around when I was a teen, but I never heard of it until S read it in middle school. But the poem plays a key role in the book in the relationship between the characters Ponyboy and Johnny. Johnny says that the poem's about the importance of appreciating the things you loved in youth, and about staying "golden", or young. And because S so strongly associates the poem with the characters in the book, she finds it sad. And really, it is sad, or at least fatalistic.

What think you?

* The quote "Youth's a stuff will not endure" is the closing line of "O Mistress Mine" by William Shakespeare. It was a song sung by the character Feste in Twelfth Night.

Today, because I'm pressed for time, and because I was thinking of this poem, and because today is the start of the Great Backyard Bird Count, I am providing you with an "encore" of a post that I put up in April of 2007. Man, I love this poem. Happy Poetry Friday, everyone!

The Oven Bird
by Robert Frost

There is a singer everyone has heard,
Loud, a mid-summer and a mid-wood bird,
Who makes the solid tree trunks sound again.
He says that leaves are old and that for flowers
Mid-summer is to spring as one to ten.
He says the early petal-fall is past
When pear and cherry bloom went down in showers
On sunny days a moment overcast;
And comes that other fall we name the fall.
He says the highway dust is over all.
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.

I've returned to this poem often throughout my life, after studying it in a course in college. It's the question in the last line that sticks with me, that pulls me back: "what to make of a diminished thing." I thought of this line today, as I was casting about thinking what poem I might want to post to mark the passing of Kurt Vonnegut, whose books meant so much to me when I was a young adult reader. Not a teen, mind you -- I came to him when I was in my twenties -- but I loved his vision and his prose. And the world is diminished a little by his passing, I think.

But enough of elegies, let's look at the poem. It's got ten syllables to each line (Frost treated "showers" and "flowers" as single-syllable words here), and it ends decidedly iambic, although it starts a bit shifty, if you must know. It has its own peculiar rhyme scheme (AABCBDCDEEA'FA'F), which makes it a "nonce" form -- a nonce form is a poetic scheme invented for a particular poem. This one has fourteen lines, so it's kinda like a sonnet, but it doesn't fall into a recognized rhyme scheme, not even as a Pushkin, or Eugene Onegin, stanza. Still, I think it likely started as a sonnet, and that Frost decided deliberately to depart from the usual sonnet rules to create something new -- a lovely bit of form meeting function, I believe, if you believe, as I and some others do, that Frost was announcing a new kind of poetry for a changing world.

If you'd like, you can read this as a simple nature poem -- an observation on the call of the oven bird (a loud "Teacher, Teacher", if you didn't know). The oven bird is loud at a time of year when many other birds are not, and Frost tries to decipher what his call means. And if that's how you read the poem, it is an excellent poem.

But.

The poem also works on a deeper level. The oven bird becomes not just the "teacher" implicated in his call, but is a symbol representing the poet. This poem was, in some respects, a war poem.* It was written in 1916, and reflects the sense that it is the world that has diminished, with "dust . . . over all". And the poet is left to ask what is to be done. Can art go on? Can poetry continue in the face of such ruination? (This is not unlike the question implied in yesterday's poem, "Sonnet: To Science", in which Edgar Allen Poe explores the effect of science on creativity and myth.) In the early twentieth centuries, with the horrors it brought along with it in the form of trench warfare, mustard gas, and mechanized warfare, and in its greed and vanity (think about the robber barons we studied once upon a time, and the practice of child labor, and the inhuman working conditions faced by so many people), how can one respond to such indignities and horrors?

Another reading of the poem focuses closely on the line "he knows in singing not to sing." Some commentators believe this line is the answer to a question posed in an earlier poem by a Victorian poet named Mildred Howells, "And No Birds Sing", a Keatsian poem in which Miss Howell asks how the bird can sing with winter approaching.

Full text of Howell's poem

There comes a season when the bird is still
  Save for a broken note, so sad and strange,
Its plaintive cadence makes the woodlands thrill
  With sense of coming change.

Stirred into ecstasy by spring's new birth,
  In throbbing rhapsodies of hope and love,
He shared his transports with the listening earth
  And stormed the heavens above.

But now how should he sing—forlorn, alone—
  Of hopes that withered with the waning year,
An empty nest with mate and fledgelings flown,
  And winter drawing near?


Frost's line, "he knows in singing not to sing," is seen as meaning that silence itself is part of the song. And/or that the oven bird, here representing the poet, is rejecting the old school of thinking and finding a new way to express himself. And this particular bird finds a way to express himself -- loudly, as it turns out.

Finally, others have seen Frost's poem as a criticism of encroaching development -- an environmental poem with a Thoreau-like sensibility, based on the line "the highway dust is over all."

*Perhaps my favorite of the war poems, and one of the best-known, is Wilfred Owen's "Dulce et Decorum Est", which I believe will be a topic for another day. The title comes from a line in the poem Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori (It is sweet and seemly to die for one's country).

We're homebound again on this wintery day in northern Illinois. They're expecting about eight inches throughout the day. So rather than fighting the traffic and the snow covered roads, I thought I'd snuggle up with my coffee and enjoy the snow from inside, maybe read some poetry.



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.

Robert Frost

I know that for many people, the holidays are "the most wonderful time of the year." For others, based on medical statistics, they are stressful and possibly depressing. For me, they are a wintry mix. (I know - I kill me.)

I really enjoy Chanukah and Christmas and knowing that once we've passed the solstice and it's officially Winter, the days are actually trending longer, even though they remain short for now. In recent years, I find myself using the time between the holidays of light and the new year to reflect a bit, take stock of life, and plan for the new year. A bit of looking back over this year, and over the course of my life as well; a bit of planning for the future. Things are in balance. Happy memories combine with bittersweet (and occasionally, painful) ones, and I push to remember to look at now, too, amongst all that looking back and forward.

And so it is that today, I'm sharing with you a somewhat melancholy but decidedly feeling poem by one of my favorite poets, Robert Frost. First the poem, and then the analysis and discussion.

To Earthward
by Robert Frost

Love at the lips was touch
As sweet as I could bear;
And once that seemed too much;
I lived on air

That crossed me from sweet things,
The flow of--was it musk
From hidden grapevine springs
Downhill at dusk?

I had the swirl and ache
From sprays of honeysuckle
That when they're gathered shake
Dew on the knuckle.

I craved strong sweets, but those
Seemed strong when I was young;
The petal of the rose
It was that stung.

Now no joy but lacks salt,
That is not dashed with pain
And weariness and fault;
I crave the stain

Of tears, the aftermark
Of almost too much love,
The sweet of bitter bark
And burning clove.

When stiff and sore and scarred
I take away my hand
From leaning on it hard
In grass and sand,

The hurt is not enough:
I long for weight and strength
To feel the earth as rough
To all my length.


Before moving to anything else, I'd like to take this moment to sigh. *sigh* And to pause and really let that one sink in, with all its weight and strength. It's dead sexy, I think, even though it speaks of sorrow. And not just because he's talking about his length and being stiff, although I do not believe those words were chosen idly.

About the form
It is written using eight cross-rhymed stanzas: ABAB, CDCD, etc. The meter selected is iambic, which was pretty common for Frost. The first three lines of each stanza contain three iambic feet; the fourth contains only 2. Folks familiar with hymnal representations of metre will recognize that this one would be written as 6-6-6-4, although it's not a highly common metre.

Analysis
The poem splits in the middle, temporally at least. The first four stanzas are about the past. Whether it's long past or lost youth is up to interpretation, but it's clear that the first four stanzas are all about what the speaker thought "then". The latter four stanzas are about the present, what the speaker feels and believes "now".

"Then" was all about things that were sweet: kisses, scents in the air (honeysuckle, musk and more), the feel of a rose petal. Then, those sweet things were too much for him. The rose's petal was enough to cause a stinging sensation - not the thorn, the silken petal. The touch of a lip was almost overpowering. He was able to live off the scents in the air. One gets the sense of a young romantic intoxicated by the pretty, pleasant things of life.

"Now" is all about things that are salty. References to taste opposites (sweet vs. salty) are entirely intentional, by the way, as the poet works to engage all of his senses. Not content with the one so many poets rely on exclusively (sight), he's including smell, taste, touch and sound as well. He's seeking more complex, less straightforwardly beautiful things. He seems not to mind the salt of tears, if the tears are the aftermath of having loved too much. The scents he seeks out are no longer the sweet scents of honeysuckle, but include scents like bark and burnt cloves.

Now, the speaker sits on the ground, his hand pressed flat to the earth, leaning heavily on his arm, wrist flexed. When he stands, the pain and soreness he feels is not enough for him; he wishes he could feel the roughness of the earth along the full length of his body. Now, pain does not diminish his pleasure - and, in fact, pain appears to contribute to his pleasure. I don't think he's a masochist; he's a realist who accepts the complexities of the world, including the negatives along with the positives. It includes sensual details now that were lacking when he was a younger man, caught up in the pretty superficialities.

Throughout the poem, the speaker is interacting with the physical world, and not with another person. He focuses on love as represented by the gifts of the earth-- simple pleasures like honeysuckle, grapevines and rose petals, and more complex (one might say complicated) pleasures like burnt cloves, bitter bark and feeling the roughness of the earth along his length. Whether those last few lines refer to sexual desire or a longing for the grave is open to interpretation, and I am nearly certain any duality is intentional, particularly given some of the terms that Frost uses leading up to the concluding lines, which are, to my way of thinking, anyhow, a bit reminiscent of Whitman, if I'm being honest ("I sing the Body electric" anyone?)

This poem is spectacular, in my opinion, for looking back and looking at the now, and maybe, maybe looking forward. It suits my mood in this time between the holidays. And it makes me think - and I do so love to think.

In closing, I think I'll thank Jennifer Knoblock at Ink for Lit for the lovely Christmas present she gave me: a butterfly award. Thanks, Jennifer, for your kind words, and for the lovely butterfly.

Today's Poetry Friday is hosted by my friend Tricia at The Miss Rumphius Effect. I just checked her post to be sure my little Poetry Friday button works properly and lo! She has posted something from Robert Frost as well. Great minds, etc.

This week I'm here in Gold Canyon, near the foot of the Superstition Mountains. Gold Canyon and, indeed, all of the surrounding area, is part of the Sonora Desert. For those of you who don't know, the Sonora Desert is the only one in which the saguaro cactus grows. The desert here is littered with them, as well as with barrel cacti, cholla, jojoba, organ pipe cactus and more, along with scrubby brush and ocotillo. The foothills are, at present, green (a rarity) and, in some cases, yellow from all the blooming wildflowers thereon. The Superstition Mountains themselves (and the Santans and others) are mostly rock. Bare rock. And in between the scrub and the cactus is a lot of bare sand. Lots around here are sometimes hundreds of acres in size, and even with encroaching population growth, enormous stretches of desert are still easy to find (and easy, one supposes, to become hopelessly lost in, were one on foot in the hot desert sun). At night, if I turn my back to the light pollution coming from the valley that holds Phoenix, I can see many, many stars in a sky darker than what I can manage to see at home in suburbia.

I mention all this as an introduction to today's poem by Robert Frost, whose birthday it would have been on Wednesday. Frost wrote it while living in New England, of course, and so he refers to the falling snow. Friends of mine in Vermont and New Hampshire still can't see the ground for the snow that remains from winter. And I am in the desert now, where it's sunny and the cactus hold their arms up in silent salute. And all of these circumstances led me to this poem, which is guaranteed to make you think, even if the snow is gone where you are, and you are far from sand and cactus.

Desert Places
by Robert Frost

Snow falling and night falling fast, oh, fast
In a field I looked into going past,
And the ground almost covered smooth in snow,
But a few weeds and stubble showing last.

The woods around it have it--it is theirs.
All animals are smothered in their lairs.
I am too absent-spirited to count;
The loneliness includes me unawares.

And lonely as it is that loneliness
Will be more lonely ere it will be less--
A blanker whiteness of benighted snow
With no expression, nothing to express.

They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between stars--on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places.

The above poem was originally published by Frost in 1936 in a collection called A Further Range. It is comprised of only sixteen lines organized into four stanzas, and yet it says more in that space than many a much longer poem ever manages. Each line has ten syllables, but the metre is not, strictly speaking, iambic pentameter (as in other poems he wrote), nor is it stable; it starts out vaguely trochaic and settles into iambic by the end (perhaps in an "order out of chaos" sort of way?) The rhyme scheme is AABA CCDC EEFE GGHG, with a caveat that the "odd" word in the third stanza is "snow", the same as the odd word in the first stanza, so it might also be considered EEBE. The scheme is close to that he used in Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening, but there he nested his rhyme (AABA BBCB CCDC DDDD), which makes for a lovely linking effect. His decision not to link in "Desert Places" is a conscious one, and is meant to keep all the stanzas in isolation, and lonely, as it were.

Although many folks think of Frost's poems as straightforward stories or nature poems, this one is clearly psychological in nature, with direct references to loneliness (and oblique references, perhaps, to depression). The fall of night is both a fact and a metaphor, as is the chill of the falling snow and idea of it blanketing the world and smothering the living things therein. The speaker then turns his attention to space, and the vast emptiness between the stars, which is what sets him musing on loneliness in the first place (a fiction, I believe, for plainly Frost knew his theme long before the poem was completed and revised and published, even if, in the first draft, the connection was not there in the first line). He is not frightened of the loneliness of outer space, but of the space within, both a well-reasoned and sensible fear, I think. And one we've all experienced (the fear and the loneliness) at some time, if we're being honest with ourselves. For another take on the loneliness aspect, check out this blog post by Mopo which I found whilst poking about. For those seeking even more scholarly discussion, check out this pageat Modern American Poetry.