How to use this Page

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.

Thomas Bailey Aldrich was born in New Hampshire in 1836, and died in Boston in 1907 after a life of journalism and other writing, including at turn as editor of The Atlantic Monthly. He was friends with William Dean Howell and Walt Whitman, among others. He is possibly best-known for his short stories, although he wrote quite a bit of verse as well. His semi-autobiographical novel Story of a Bad Boy is said to have been admired by Mark Twain, who later used it as a jumping-off point for Tom Sawyer. His last words were "In spite of it all, I'm going to sleep."

Memory
by Thomas Bailey Aldrich

My mind lets go a thousand things,
Like dates of wars and deaths of kings,
And yet recalls the very hour—
'Twas noon by yonder village tower,
And on the last blue noon in May—
The wind came briskly up this way,
Crisping the brook beside the road;
Then, pausing here, set down its load
Of pine-scents, and shook listlessly
Two petals from that wild-rose tree.

This short poem is written in rhymed couplets (AABBCCDDEE) using iambic tetrameter (four iambic feet per line: ta-DUM ta-DUM ta-DUM ta-DUM), which makes the formal elements of it very simple indeed. Aldrich's lines all break naturally at the end of the line until you reach the end of the eighth line, when everything shifts. Based on punctuation and natural line breaks, the more natural (or, if you prefer, less forced) way to read the last three lines of this poem would be:

Then, pausing here, set down its load of pine-scents,
and shook listlessly two petals from that wild-rose tree.

What I like about this poem is its attention to detail, and its comments on the vagaries of memory. Names and dates — even some that are important — can fade, but the mind will hold on to seemingly smaller things quite handily. One of the details that evokes memory in this poem is that of scent, which is of course one of the strongest triggers of memory. Aldrich does a good job of using more than just his visual sense in this poem, incorporating movement (brisk wind that crisps the brook), smell (pine-scents) and touch (crisping the brook, "shook listlessly two petals"). The poem is rooted in the details of a single, small moment in time involving nothing more than a bit of wind and two rose petals.

I've posted about epigrams before, including this one by Samuel Taylor Coleridge:

What is an Epigram? A dwarfish whole;
Its body brevity, and wit its soul.

But I was feeling the need for something short and to the point today, so epigrams seem just the thing. An epigram need not rhyme, although poetic ones often do. An epigram is a short, clever, usually witty statement that is memorable. Here is an epigram from Benjamin Franklin, writing as Poor Richard:

Early to bed and early to rise
makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise

Franklin used repetition (early to), internal rhyme (healthy and wealthy) and alliteration (wealthy and wise) as well as end-rhyme, virtually guaranteeing that this would be memorable after only one hearing.

For those of you who read Latin, here's quite an old one:

Admiror, O paries, te non cecidisse ruinis
qui tot scriptorum taedia sustineas.

For those of you who don't read Latin, here's a translation: "I'm astonished, wall, that you haven't collapsed into ruins,/since you're holding up the weary verse of so many poets." Funny, yes?

William Blake's "Auguries of Innocence" is composed almost entirely of phrases that can be pulled out as epigrams.

Angelina Jolie as Lara Croft, Tomb Raider said these, the first four lines of the poem:

To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour.

Hannibal Lecter quoted the next two lines in Red Dragon:

A robin redbreast in a cage
Puts all heaven in a rage.

Small sentences, small words - but mighty in their content and staying power.

Got a favorite epigram?

Today, another poem by Puritan poet, Anne Bradstreet, who emigrated to Ipswich, Massachusetts in the 1630s with her husband, Simon Bradstreet, a Cambridge graduate who eventually became Governor of the Colony of Massachusetts. Anne and her husband had eight children, despite Anne suffering from some paralysis, possibly as a lasting effect of smallpox. She wrote in the Elizabethan tradition, as her mastery of rhymed couplets and iambic pentameter show. A volume of poems was published in England during her lifetime. Shortly after her death, a volume of her work (containing today's poem) was published in America. A third collection of religious poems was published in the 19th century.

I started reading more Bradstreet after a dear friend confessed a massive crush on Anne, and I completely see why. Happy birthday, B!

Today's poem is a beautiful love poem, methinks. I don't believe I know too many women who are as content in their marriages as Anne seems to have been, gauging from this poem, but it is decidedly something to aspire to.


To My Dear and Loving Husband
by Anne Bradstreet

If ever two were one, then surely we.
If ever man were loved by wife, then thee;
If ever wife was happy in a man,
Compare with me ye women if you can.
I prize thy love more than whole mines of gold,
Or all the riches that the East doth hold.
My love is such that rivers cannot quench,
Nor ought but love from thee give recompense.
Thy love is such I can no way repay;
The heavens reward thee manifold, I pray.
Then while we live, in love let's so persever,
That when we live no more we may live ever.

hi everyone, this is my first post here. this is a fun challenge.. all based on mike's squiggle...4 quick ones done with mspaint.

hmmm...now what could THIS turn out to be?

:))

tadpoles just rush right outta there...afraid of being stepped on, i guess.

oh OH! i flipped it. that ok or am i in trouble?