[HN Gopher] America's Great Poet of Darkness: A Reconsideration ...
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America's Great Poet of Darkness: A Reconsideration of Robert Frost
at 150
Author : samclemens
Score : 67 points
Date : 2024-04-03 05:30 UTC (17 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (hedgehogreview.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (hedgehogreview.com)
| FergusArgyll wrote:
| > Frost is the darkest of poets
|
| Interesting, I always thought of him as quite optimistic. Maybe
| because my introduction to him was The way a crow
| Shook down on me The dust of snow From a hemlock tree
| Has given my heart A change of mood And saved some
| part Of a day I had rued.
|
| it goes well with Monet's The Magpie and hot coffee
| PyWoody wrote:
| 'Out, Out--' The buzz saw snarled and rattled
| in the yard And made dust and dropped stove-length sticks
| of wood, Sweet-scented stuff when the breeze drew across
| it. And from there those that lifted eyes could count
| Five mountain ranges one behind the other Under the
| sunset far into Vermont. And the saw snarled and rattled,
| snarled and rattled, As it ran light, or had to bear a
| load. And nothing happened: day was all but done.
| Call it a day, I wish they might have said To please the
| boy by giving him the half hour That a boy counts so much
| when saved from work. His sister stood beside him in her
| apron To tell them 'Supper.' At the word, the saw,
| As if to prove saws knew what supper meant, Leaped out at
| the boy's hand, or seemed to leap-- He must have given
| the hand. However it was, Neither refused the meeting.
| But the hand! The boy's first outcry was a rueful laugh,
| As he swung toward them holding up the hand Half in
| appeal, but half as if to keep The life from spilling.
| Then the boy saw all-- Since he was old enough to know,
| big boy Doing a man's work, though a child at heart--
| He saw all spoiled. 'Don't let him cut my hand off-- The
| doctor, when he comes. Don't let him, sister!' So. But
| the hand was gone already. The doctor put him in the dark
| of ether. He lay and puffed his lips out with his breath.
| And then--the watcher at his pulse took fright. No one
| believed. They listened at his heart. Little--less--
| nothing!--and that ended it. No more to build on there.
| And they, since they Were not the one dead, turned to
| their affairs.
|
| or
|
| 'Desert Places' 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.
|
| are both pretty dark, off the top of my head. He has a number
| of poems that are more subtle and dig away at you in the best
| possible way.
| ghaff wrote:
| Yeah. Frost has some really dark poems. The chainsaw one is
| always my go-to example. I've had people basically not
| believe them when I've told them.
| hermanradtke wrote:
| > chainsaw
|
| buzz saw - blade; no chain
| ghaff wrote:
| The actual text makes it sound a lot more like a chainsaw
| than something else but I don't actually know given the
| period written.
| bdamm wrote:
| The 1916 poem was based on a true story about a boy that
| Robert knew, who died in 1910. They did have circular-saw
| like machines in 1910 that were popular for cutting
| firewood, according to my wiki dive.
| ghaff wrote:
| Thanks. I would have assumed cutting firewood would have
| involved a chainsaw but apparently not.
| mikestew wrote:
| It's a fixed buzzsaw. One might be confused by the
| "leaped at his hand", but Frost says in reality that "he
| must have given the hand".
|
| Basically, his sister called him to supper, which
| apparently distracted the boy enough that he accidentally
| stuck his hand in the blade.
|
| A buzzsaw is in essence a large version of a table saw,
| and table saws eat many fingers and thumbs every year.
| Now imagine that the table saw blade is four feet tall.
| greenie_beans wrote:
| i've got to pickup a frost book asap
| dev_tty01 wrote:
| Hmm. I think that can be read different ways. He had a dark
| foreboding for the day and the crow encounter only saved a part
| of the day. Rather than optimistic, it could be perceived as
| still able recognize a small bit of light through his darkness.
| That's what great about art. The perception and situation of
| the viewer shapes the experience.
| FergusArgyll wrote:
| To me, that's optimism. It's really the same feeling I get
| from The Magpie. It's like; There aren't many good things
| about the winter, it's cold, it's miserable, but look how
| pretty it can be sometimes
| saltcured wrote:
| Well, it's full of conventionally dark symbols: the crow,
| hemlock, and cold winter season. And the diction echoes this
| with words like shook, dust, and rued. Other word choices
| could have told a very similar story in a more cheery mood,
| if desired.
|
| It's also a vignette devoid of human contact, which is common
| to many of Frost's more introspective poems. The narrator is
| the main character in an empty or lonely scene, except for a
| brief interaction with an animal.
|
| Even the choice to say "change of mood" delays clarity until
| the words "save" and "rued" provide disambiguation. Yet it is
| also quite short, almost an epigram.
|
| So while the final message is one of positive valence, it is
| rooted in dark humor, almost a wink emerging from a scowl. I
| think this is an example where Frost is revisiting some of
| the ground shared with one of his early influences, Edgar
| Allen Poe.
| imjonse wrote:
| More than optimistic, I found it funny. Then I realized I
| misread crow as cow.
| ajkjk wrote:
| I dunno anything about poetry but the meter of that poem bugs
| me. Why not "from hemlock tree"? there are like random extra
| syllables.
| browningstreet wrote:
| > The way a crow
|
| > Shook down on me
|
| > The dust of snow
|
| > From a hemlock tree
|
| a.. on.. of.. a
|
| Also, it's all colloquial, "From hemlock tree" isn't how we
| speak.
| Jtsummers wrote:
| It's 4/4/4/6 syllables and ABAB rhyming. The second verse,
| first line, is 4 syllables if you pronounce "given" more as
| "g'ven", smashing the g into the v.
| ksenzee wrote:
| Poetry in English is usually less about syllables and more
| about stressed syllables.
| Amorymeltzer wrote:
| To put a title to it, that's _Dust of Snow_
| temp0826 wrote:
| Considering symbolism of hemlock and of the crow? It's hard to
| say at one glance, it could be taken with some heck of a lot
| darker implications.
|
| Then again, "rued" may have an extra meaning too (rue = ruta
| graveolens = "herb of grace").
|
| Great poem nonetheless :).
| QuercusMax wrote:
| One of my favorites is Birches. He does talk about wanting to
| leave the earth and then come back.
|
| https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44260/birches
| greenie_beans wrote:
| i enjoyed this, learning more about him and thinking about his
| writing in this way. i've been getting into frost after moving to
| new england.
| ksenzee wrote:
| > two parallel but separate levels: one, the corncob bard of
| Yankee wisdom who appears on t-shirts and mugs: the other, the
| critic's darling who is "bleak, dark, complex, and manipulative."
|
| This is the genius of Frost. You can read Fire and Ice in
| elementary school, when you're just figuring out what a poet is,
| and you get it. Then you can read him again in college and see a
| whole new level underneath what you thought you understood. Both
| levels are there on purpose. Both are valid.
| ghaff wrote:
| It's interesting how the meaning of "The Road Not Taken" seems to
| have widely(?) come to have been differently interpreted over the
| years. I had a long-ago English professor talk about that and I
| think it was a fairly non-mainstream optinion at the time. (He
| taught an American literature in the 20s course in the 80s.) It
| seems to be sort of the standard interpretation today--perhaps
| the view of Frost generally has shifted.
| rwbt wrote:
| It is probably the most misunderstood poem of all time! There's
| no going back now though.
| ghaff wrote:
| Probably depends on the audience. Readers of the New Yorker
| or who have taken courses from Ivy League English professors
| are probably different from the random person on the street
| (who is even vaguely familiar with the poem).
| Amorymeltzer wrote:
| Number two is probably Frost's Mending Wall and "Good fences
| make good neighbors."
| smueller1234 wrote:
| "Before I built a wall I'd ask to know What I was walling
| in or walling out, And to whom I was like to give offense."
|
| Only poem I can cite by heart a quarter of a century after
| spending time with it in school.
| Amorymeltzer wrote:
| A couple of years ago I read through his complete works. Highly
| recommend doing so, but I will say that, unlike with many (most?)
| other poets, I found that the Robert Frost poems you already
| know-- _Mending Wall_ , _The Road Not Taken_ , _Fire and Ice_ ,
| _Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening_ --are indeed his best.
| There are plenty of other good ones and some truly great lines as
| well, but it was oddly reassuring to find out.
| olvy0 wrote:
| I really enjoyed that essay.
|
| The last paragraph seems to sum up my view of the world.
|
| In school when learning Stopping By Woods I'm pretty sure the
| death/suicide interpretation was mentioned by my teacher, and
| seemed pretty obvious to me even before she mentioned it.
| velcrovan wrote:
| Underappreciated, I think: The Tuft of Flowers
|
| https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44275/the-tuft-of-flo...
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(page generated 2024-04-03 23:01 UTC)