Eucatastrophe Reader

"If---if he stood! Enough of ifs!"

The Lone Striker by Robert Frost

There was a law of God or man
That on the one who came too late
The gate for half an hour be locked,
His time be lost, his pittance docked.
He stood rebuked and unemployed.
The straining mill began to shake.
The mill, though many-many-eyed,
Had eyes inscrutably opaque;
So that he couldn’t look inside
To see if some forlorn machine
Was standing idle for his sake.
(He couldn’t hope its heart would break.)

And yet he thought he saw the scene:
The air was full of dust of wool.
A thousand yarns were under pull,
But pull so slow, with such a twist,
All day from spool to lesser spool,
It seldom overtaxed their strength;
They safely grew in slender length.
And if one broke by any chance,
The spinner saw it at a glance.
The spinner still was there to spin.
That’s where the human still came in.
Her deft hand showed with finger rings
Among the harplike spread of strings.
She caught the pieces end to end
And, with a touch that never missed,
Not so much tied as made them blend.
Man’s ingenuity was good.
He saw it plainly where he stood,
Yet found it easy to resist.

He knew another place, a wood,
And in it, tall as trees, were cliffs;
And if he stood on one of these,
‘Twould be among the tops of trees,
Their upper branches round him wreathing,
Their breathing mingled with his breathing.
If---if he stood!  Enough of ifs!
He knew a path that wanted walking;
He knew a spring that wanted drinking;
A thought that wanted further thinking;
A love that wanted re-renewing.
Nor was this just a way of talking
To save him the expense of doing.
With him it boded action, deed.
The factory was very fine;
He wished it all the modern speed.
Yet, after all, ‘twas not divine,
That is to say, ‘twas not a church.
He never would assume that he’d
Be any institution’s need.
But he said then and still would say,
If there should ever come a day
When industry seemed like to die
Because he left it in the lurch,
Or even merely seemed to pine
For want of his approval, why,
Come get him---they knew where to search.

It is during the Great Depression. A worker arrives to the factory a minute or two late. The gates are closed on him. The rules of the factory are that he must wait for a half an hour and be docked pay for being a half hour late even when he was only a minute late. He imagines the mill running along without him, his place empty. His work undone. The mill owners would rather penalize him for being late than have him working. Fine then. One senses that he gets the message; “he is not essential to anything going on there.”

“Well fine then!” he says, “If they do not need me. I do not need them.” He has something he would rather do than spend that whole day in the factory anyway. There is a path in the woods that takes a hiker to the top of a cliff where one can breath in the sweet smells of the trees. There is a spring nearby “that wanted drinking.” He can sit and ponder thoughts worth thinking. Or he can day dream about a sweatheart. All that is needed is a moment of decision:

”If --- if he stood! Enough of ifs!”

The lone striker decides to actually do what he thinks of doing. He does not plan to let *thinking* about taking the day off suffice for actually taking the day off.  Why should he regard the factory as having some divine ownership of his soul? “Twas not divine . . . twas not a church.”

If industry needs him, it knows where to find him.

And if called to service, maybe he would re-enlist.

But for now, on this particular day . . . he is on strike. Like Henry Thoreau.

The lone striker.

Question for Comment:  Have you ever said “Enough of ‘ifs” and just quit (or went on strike for a day). Just take off work and drive to Vermont. Or go skiing. Or for a nice long hike up Deer’s Leap?

"We are riders"

Riders by Robert Frost Review

The surest thing there is is we are riders,
And though none too successful at it, guiders,
Through everything presented, land and tide
And now the very air, of what we ride.

What is this talked-of mystery of birth
But being mounted bareback on the earth?
We can just see the infant up astride,
His small fist buried in the bushy hide.

There is our wildest mount- a headless horse.
But though it runs unbridled off its course,
And all our blandishments would seem defied,
We have ideas yet that we haven't tried.

Robert Frost’s poem “Riders” is about human agency in a world that seems to be dragging us all down the road like a tin can tied to the bumper. “The surest thing there is,” he says, “is that we are riders.” We are at the mercy of forces larger than us and very few people really have anything but the smallest of influence in guiding the direction of the life we wind up “getting.” “We are like babies mounted bareback on a headless horse,” he says. If we have any strength at all, we do not presume to influence. We merely use the strength to hang on and hope to avoid falling off too early.

“All our blandishments would seem defied” he tells us. A blandishment is a “subtle influence.” It involves coaxing, pleading, flattering, manipulating. In other words, we try to get the world we live in to head in a direction we would like it to but . . . nine times out of ten or ninety-nine times out of a hundred, it just goes in its own way, like the erratic flight of a loosed balloon. This is the way that it is, Frost insists, and yet, in spite of that fact, we still all have “ideas yet that we have not tried.” Futility does not seem to dampen our optimism and we charge out into the hurricane with our little lasso and bridle in the hopes that this next time, we will prove to reverse the hierarchy between human aspiration and chaos.

Question for Comment: Do you think Frost is under-estimating our agency?