Eucatastrophe Reader

“. . . and then she made the decision that would prove fateful to them all."

The Secret Keeper REVIEW

“. . . and then she made the decision that would prove fateful to them all. “Come on,” she said . . . Let’s go back inside.”

“There was a part of her that wanted to scream - “No,” to curl up in a ball and weep for the things she'd lost, for everything in her life that hadn't turned out the way she'd hoped, but she wouldn't do that. She couldn't.”

Kate Morton’s books (I use the plural even though I am only a few pages into my second one) seem to have a Thomas Hardy-like fixation on how momentary fate combined with young adult decisions can control a whole life’s destiny. Her characters understand that that there are wounds that you endure in life when some “better life” is marred by some unfortunate – on the surface, innocent event – like a letter not being mailed when it should have or a schedule that did not permit for a five minute resolution to a misunderstanding. A war can do it to you as well. There can be, as she puts it, “a physical ache” when you realize that you can “never go back.”  

Morton also seems to like to explore the ways the lives of parents before they have children cast a long shadow into those children’s lives. “Perhaps children are never really interested in who their parents were before they were born,” she says in her book, The Distant Hours, “not unless something particular happens to shine a light on the past.” Sometimes people, like the characters in her books, get intrigued enough to go exploring those parental lives. But honestly, it is easy to see why many people do not take this adventure as they will have no control over what they find.

In the Secret Keeper, 16-year-old Laurel Nicholson is sitting in a tree near her family’s home in 1961 doing a bit of sulking when a man comes down the road. Laurel’s mother comes out of the house with Laurel’s baby brother and the man approaches. Suddenly, the knife that Laurel’s mother – her dear beloved mother – was bringing out to cut a birthday cake – flashes. And Laurel watches as her mother stabs the stranger in the middle of the road and kills him.

Here is how Morton describes the scene as it unfolds:

“The whole scene has an expectant charged feeling like a theater stage in the moments before the actors walk out from the wings. When every possibility stretches ahead and fate has not been sealed by circumstance, and then - ”

It will take Lauren a whole lifetime and us an entire novel to find out just what happened and why. The book is full of regrets about the past and about the family secrets that are embedded into all our lives by these stories that our parents and grand parents and great grandparents wrote with their decisions. It seems odd but, I think we all assume that if anything important happened before us, our parents would tell us . . . and we cannot imagine them lying. In all of those life stories, there were moments - moments infused with meaning for those who experienced them and those of us who still feel their influence.

“There were moments, Lauren solemnly believed, in which a person reaches a crossroads, when something happened, out of the blue, to change the course of life’s events.”

As this story unfolds (I will not spoil the plot), its characters, Dorothy Smitham, Jimmy Metcalf, Vivien Longmeyer, Katie the guardian, Henry Jenkins, Kitty, Jimmy’s father, and a total stranger who finds a misplaced letter and mails it - all bring their peculiar stories to the potluck for fate to cook with. Fifty years later, as Dorothy Nicholson is about to die, she is still not explaining what happened on that hot summer day. But her daughter Laurel has decided that she cannot wait no longer. She intends to investigate this “great unspoken event in the family’s history.”

The investigation takes a winding path that is well worth walking yourself. It involves marriages never meant to be, marriages that never got to be, and marriages that were blessed to be. It involves mis-understandings, rich dowagers, senile fathers, abusive husbands, jealous lovers, and German bombs falling on London all to keep it interesting. And in the end, the pieces kaleidoscope together.

“All this time, Laurel realized, this whole search she’d been on, had been driven by a yearning need to know that her happy family, her entire childhood, the way her mother and father had looked at one another with such rare abiding love, was not a lie. And, now she did. Her chest ached with a complex blend of burning love, and awe, and yes, finally, acceptance. ‘I love you, Ma,’ she whispered, close by Dorothy’s ear, feeling, as she did, the end to her quest. ‘And I forgive you, too.’”

Perhaps there is no way to get to that moment before we die if we do not start asking questions while the clues still exist.

Question for Comment: How does the story of your parents lives before you came along affect you today? Or is it just best not to know?

“She decided to put a tourniquet on the past for once and for all.”

Second Glance REVIEW

Second Glance by Jodi Picoult is a story full of contrivances but gives us characters we can relate to – even if some of them are ghosts. Aimee, Az, Shelby, Ethan, Lucy, Eli, Leah: all of the characters have to deal with disappointment and loss.

“Regret hung from the hem of everyone's lives, a rip cord reminder that what you want is not always what you get. Look at himself, outliving Aimee. Or Az, trying to find his daughter, only to have her wind up dead. Look at Shelby, with a child who was dying by degrees. Ethan, born into a body nobody deserves. At some point or another, everyone was failed by this world. Disappointment was the one thing humans had in common. Taken this way, Ross didn't feel quite so alone. Trapped in your whirlpool of what might have been, you might not be able to drag yourself out - but you could be saved by someone else who reached in.”

A good deal of the book is based on the actual history of the Vermont eugenics movement, a subject well covered in Nancy Gallagher’s book, Breeding Better Vermonters.  Ghosts from that time period are haunting the lives of the people of the fictional town of Comtoosic, Vermont - near Burlington when a real estate developer seeks to build a mall on Abenaki land. The main character, Ross, is a ghost hunter, called in to find and perhaps dispose of the ghosts that are holding up the building project. Ross has his own agenda though. He is trying to find evidence that it might still be possible to connect with his former wife, fatally killed in a car crash. His search for ghosts turns real when he meets the ghost of a long dead Abenaki woman and his story and her story become intertwined.

Second Glances is all about how we recover from trauma – personal trauma, family trauma, or racial trauma. How do we recover from the loss of something that either might have been or should have been? How do we recover from a poor decision? An accident? An act of injustice? racial discrimination? Or any life event or person or prejudice that shoves us out of the train car of the life we were “supposed to have”? Throughout the novel, Ross deals with his regrets and the loss of his wife. His sister Shelby deals with her son Ethan’s rare genetic disease. Az Thompson deals with the suicide of his daughter. And so on.   

The following are some representative lines:

“If he [Ross] inhaled deeply. It had been nearly a decade since Ross had felt this. . . . He had been looking for the ghost of a woman for so long it was unsettling to find himself fascinated by one sitting right beside him.”

“She decided to put a tourniquet on the past for once and for all.”

 “For years had he been looking for the answers to Amy’s death. Only recently had he learned that he had been asking the wrong question. Before you can grab onto something else, you had to let go.”

“Most of the time when Ross thought about his life he imagined living it alone. The very concept of a family did not appear to be in the cards for him . . . He was not commitment shy or unattractive … but whenever he tried to give his heart away, he found himself holding it out to a person who was no longer there.”

“Losing a child was something you kept coming back to like the hole in your gum when you lost a tooth or a scar you’d worry with your fingertips, a disfigurement that you felt over and over.”

“I think he [Ross] is lost and that is a circumstance that only lasts until you are found by someone else.”

 “What he would have liked now is five minutes in the past – five minutes to talk to Meredith Oliver . . . “

As I said, the book has its share of contrivances and you have to suspend your critical faculties to enjoy the ride, what with the constant reminder that the ghost of Comtoosic are making their presence known. But on the whole, the feelings expressed by people caught in the vortex of losses they cannot recover from occurs to this reader anyway, as real enough.

Question for Comment: Is it possible to “put a tourniquet on the past?”

"The music in my heart I bore, Long after it was heard no more."

Only Love REVIEW

E ’l lampeggiar dell’angelico riso
Che solean far in terra un paradiso,
Poca polvere son, che nulla sente.
Ed io pur vivo; onde mi doglio e sdegno,
Rimaso senza ’l lume ch’amai tanto,
In gran fortuna e ’n disarmato legno.
Or sia qui fine al mio amoroso canto:
Secca è la vena dell’usato ingegno,
E la cetera mia rivolta in pianto.*

• From Petrarch’s Sonnets for Laura

Only Love, starring Marissa Tomaei, Rob Morrow, and Mathilda May is a melodramatic film based on the book by the same name by Erich Segal. Two young doctors on a medical mission in Africa fall in love but are separated by a cruel trick of fate and a malignantly controlling parent. It is a case of a relationship being ended abruptly when the feelings compelling it do not end at all. Like separating a child from a mother’s womb without separating the umbilical cord or taking off an arm without severing the nerves that connect it.

They are irrevocably separated and yet the love between them remains unaltered as they both slowly entwine themselves in new lives with new partners (she quickly, he ever so very very slowly). He finds that he can no longer play piano. His music seems to be gone. He seems incapable of moving on.

Fifteen years later, they re-enter each other’s lives as she comes to his hospital for treatments for a brain tumor. She has two teenage boys. He has two teenage step-daughters. She the wife of a successful businessman. He the husband of a music teacher at Juliard. Ever so slowly, as they work through the medical issues related to her tumor, the pain of their separation works itself to the surface like rocks in a Vermont farm field.

“Have you remembered me Matthew?”

He pulls out the ring she gave him. He has attached it to a key chain that he has carried with him in his pocket and his heart.

Her husband wonders if it is difficult seeing him again. “There aren’t those sorts of feelings Nico,” she says, “I am only another patient.” They both are good people – wondering how much they can afford to say about what lies so close to the surface it must be hidden. At one point during the treatment, they share a meal together and she shares a line of poetry written by the Romantic era poet, William Wordsworth.  

“The music in my heart I bore long after it was heard no more.”

The line comes from the poem, “The Solitary Reaper”

Behold her, single in the field,
Yon solitary Highland Lass!
Reaping and singing by herself;
Stop here, or gently pass!
Alone she cuts and binds the grain,
And sings a melancholy strain;
O listen! for the Vale profound
Is overflowing with the sound.

No Nightingale did ever chaunt
More welcome notes to weary bands
Of travellers in some shady haunt,
Among Arabian sands:
A voice so thrilling ne'er was heard
In spring-time from the Cuckoo-bird,
Breaking the silence of the seas
Among the farthest Hebrides.

Will no one tell me what she sings?—
Perhaps the plaintive numbers flow
For old, unhappy, far-off things,
And battles long ago:
Or is it some more humble lay,
Familiar matter of to-day?
Some natural sorrow, loss, or pain,
That has been, and may be again?

Whate'er the theme, the Maiden sang
As if her song could have no ending;
I saw her singing at her work,
And o'er the sickle bending;—
I listened, motionless and still;
And, as I mounted up the hill,
The music in my heart I bore,
Long after it was heard no more.

“Poets always speak best for us, don’t they?” she says quietly, “Damn them.”

The flat-affective veneer of the doctor-patient relationship thaws and real questions must now be asked and answered. Though she has come for treatments for brain tumors, the real reason she has come is to resolve a bleeding artery of the heart that had been left uncauterized. “Did you forgive me Matthew?” she asks plaintively, “Please. Did you? Did you forgive me in time?”

The treatments do not go well.

“No matter how many years go by,” she says, “Some feelings don’t change. Try as I might, some feelings don’t stop.”

“Will you play again?” she asks him as she passes away, her husband off on a business trip.  

He throws the ring into the river and goes home. The film ends as he finds his wife playing her cello in the music room. He sits down and plays the piano to accompany her. The first time he has played since his heart had been broken all those years before. We are left to believe that death has now made it possible for him to move on. But not all are so lucky.

Some people in his condition suffer from Petrarch’s disease forever.

Question for Comment: Was Petrarch responsible for the pain he felt so many decades after Laura died?  

* And the soft lightning of the angelic smile
That changed this earth to some celestial isle,—
Are now but dust, poor dust, that nothing knows.
And yet I live! Myself I grieve and scorn,
Left dark without the light I loved in vain,
Adrift in tempest on a bark forlorn;
Dead is the source of all my amorous strain,
Dry is the channel of my thoughts outworn,
And my sad harp can sound but notes of pain.

"My proof of being not unbounded."

The Beech by Robert Frost REVIEW

The book of poetry that this poem was published in was entitled “A Witness Tree.” Beech was one of two introductory poems to the book. You might say that it is a declaration of what the book is or what Frost the poet is. The principle metaphor he is using is the “witness tree” -  typically, a tree identified by a surveyor as unique enough to stand as a permanent marker to identify where the corner of a piece of property is. The surveyor might build a cairn of stones around an iron bar to serve as the exact spot but would then reference that spot to a particular tree nearby. This made it easy to spot the rough location of the marker and it made it impossible for anyone to gain ground by moving the bar and pile of stones.

You might say that the witness tree might not stand on any certain spot but it will get you close enough that you can find that spot yourself without much effort. And you can bank on it not to move around and leave any confusion as to where the lines are drawn. Everything else may be relative but not the witness tree. All in all the witness tree serves the same role as a good poet.

 Where my imaginary line
Bends square in woods an iron spine
And pile of real rocks have been founded.
And off this corner in the wild,
Where these are driven in and piled,
One tree, by being deeply wounded,
Has been impressed as Witness Tree
And made commit to memory
My proof of being not unbounded.
Thus truth's established and borne out,
Though circumstanced with dark and doubt
Though by a world of doubt surrounded.

This is a poem where the rhyming scheme may matter to the message (I often wonder if it always does in a Frost poem). If you look closely, you will see a pattern:

Line
Spine

Founded

Wild
Piled

Wounded

Tree
Memory

Unbounded

Out
Doubt

Surrounded

What strikes you is that word “wounded.” It looks like it should rhyme with the other words in the pattern (founded, unbounded, and surrounded) but even though it has the same spelling, it does not rhyme. You almost want to make it rhyme so that the poem will sound right. But you know that “wounded” is not the past tense of wound and would not make sense in the poem if it were. The word has to be “wounded” [woond-ed] – something scarred – something injured – something less than whole and healthy. And there it is – the wrong word smack dab in the middle of the poem. Doesn't this dumb poet know that "wounded" does not sound like "bounded?" you want to ask. "Doesn't he read his own poetry out loud?" 

Just so is the poem itself scarred by this word. There is something wrong with it and it draws your attention to it. Just like the tree in the poem would. It has a slash in it that the surveyors left so that you would know exactly what tree they were talking about in their deeds. “That tree there!” “The one with the blaze cut into it!” “The wounded one!” The poem is imperfect and that is somehow important.  

There is another feature to this poem that works on you but only under the surface of your consciousness if you are not paying close attention. Frost uses a number of words that have associations to books.

The word “line” as in a “line of text.”
The word “spine” as in “the spine of a book.”
The word “impress” from the same root as “press.”
The word “proof” – a word used to describe the first run of a book used to find errors before publishing.
The word “unbounded” as in a “book binding.”  

Perhaps, and I cannot say for sure, Frost is suggesting that this book of poetry itself is a witness tree. And maybe it too is flawed. Maybe it too is not what it his previous books of poetry were but is still serving its role of being a marker to the whereabouts of truth - Something that gets you close enough to truth to find it yourself perhaps.

Was the book scarred? One might argue that it was. It had a few great poems in it but you won’t find many poems that people would recognize as Robert Frost's. The line “My proof of being not unbounded” strikes me as relevant here. There is a complicated double negative in the line. Something bounded is limited. Something unbounded is not limited. Something “not unbounded” is thus back to being limited. It is a complicated phrase but to me, it speaks to me of Frost struggling with his artistic self. “This book of poems” he may be saying is evidence (proof) that I am not everything I once was. That my talent has its limits or has been compromised by the wounds I have experienced. Maybe it is proof that I have always been limited."

Maybe the truth is that life wounds us and makes it difficult to achieve our potential? I don’t know if Frost though of his work as “wounded” but . . .

But we do know that the poet himself was wounded when he assembled it. In the four years before he published this book, he had lost his daughter, his wife, and his son (the later to suicide). He had fallen into a deep depression. He dedicates A Witness Tree to Kay Morrison his secretary.  

“I owe everything in the world to her” Frost once told Louis Mertins,

“She found me in the gutter, hopeless, sick, run down. She bundled me up and carted me to her home and cared for me like a child, sick child. Without her I would be in my grave. If I have done anything since I came out of the hospital, it is all due to her.”

Maybe every prophet or poet truly worth listening to has been wounded at some point. I know I sure have.

Question for Comment: Can you think of a time where a piece of art (a novel, a painting, a poem, a piece of music, a sculpture, a photograph, etc.) got you close enough to truth that you could see it?

 

"So vivid as to seem to speak"

Missive Missile by Robert Frost REVIEW

In Southern France, there is a cave where a community of prehistoric humans lived. And in that community, someone must have felt the inclination to pick up a tool and a rock, not to make fire or make clothes or to make dinner or to make a weapon – but to make art. He or she began painting pebbles. Perhaps the first artistic movement that would eventually lead to Monet and Cezanne. Thousands of years later, Robert Frost stares at the pebble and regards it as a piece of art made specifically for him.

Some one in ancient Mas d'Azil
Once took a little pebble wheel
And dotted it with red for me,
And sent it to me years and years—
A million years to be precise—
Across the barrier of ice:
Two round dots and a ripple streak,
So vivid as to seem to speak.

He begins to analyze it like one might analyze a poem.

But what imperfectly appears
Is whether the two dots were tears,
Two tear drops, one for either eye,
And the wave line a shaken sigh.
But no, the color used is red.
Not tears but drops of blood instead.
The line must be a jagged blade.
The sender must have had to die,
And wanted someone now to know
His death was sacrificial-votive.  

This is the same process that I go through when I read a Robert Frost poem and I am sure he is playfully thinking of me sitting here in my office as he writes this poem. For I too have sat and thought about his metaphors and wondered to myself, “I wonder if he meant this? – or this?”

“So almost clear and yet obscure.
If only anyone were sure
A motive then was still a motive.”

In other words, Frost wonders, was there an intended purpose for the choices that were made at the moment of creation. Did the artist “intend” to say what I imagine him saying?

Frost imagines the ghost of the artist standing next to him in frustration at Frost’s inability to see what should be so clear – the meaning.  

How anyone can fail to see
Where perfectly in form and tint
The metaphor, the symbol lies!
Why will I not analogize?
Oh slow uncomprehending me,
Enough to make a spirit moan

Or rustle in a bush or tree.
I have the ochre-written flint,
The two dots and the ripple line.
The meaning of it is unknown,
Or else I fear entirely mine,
All modern, nothing ancient in't,
Unsatisfying to us each.

I am reminded of Frost’s poem, “Tuft of Flowers” where the poet comes across a patch of spared wildflowers in a mown field and feels connected to the person who left them – he senses himself and the mopwer “kindred spirits.” I wonder if the long dead Frost stands next to me sometimes and rustles the bushes in some attempt to get me to see what he meant by “lovely, dark, and deep” or a woodchuck’s sleep.

Sometimes, the task of communicating through art is just impossible. Sometimes the distance between the artist and the viewer/reader is too great a chasm to breach:

Far as we aim our signs to reach,
Far as we often make them reach,
Across the soul-from-soul abyss,
There is an aeon-limit set
Beyond which they are doomed to miss.
Two souls may be too widely met.
That sad-with-distance river beach
With mortal longing may beseech;
It cannot speak as far as this.

All we can do is say, “I think the painted pebble in this poem is a symbol of Robert Frost’s own poetry and that he sees himself as someone, very much like the ghost artist of Mas Azil, who wishes that he could be there in the room when people try to understand his art and speak.

Question for Comment: What has been your relationship to art lately?

Build Soil

Build Soil by Robert Frost Review

Dedicated to my colleague, L.M.

Robert Frost first read his poem “Build Soil” in 1932. It was just before the political conventions that nominated Herbert Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt for their respective parties that year (Hoover lost in a landslide by the way). Much of the talk in the air would have been about people losing their homes and farms, about whether socialism was the only answer in a world where hard times were being felt by many but not all, and about what one should do either as a laborer or as an artist or intellectual in the face of the massive economic disruptions of the Great Depression.

Frost reaches back in time to a poetic form from the classical world and expresses his own thoughts using that medium. His poem, “Build Soil” adopts the format and characters of the Roman poet Virgil’s Eclogues. Two farmers, one who is more writer than farmer and one who has just been forced off his land, get into a conversation with each other about the political and economic times they live in and how to respond to them.

Frost has his farmers discuss a number of things, but the heart of the conversation resides in the passage where he articulates what he thinks is the best use of an economically depressed period of a national economy (as there was in Rome when Virgil wrote and in 1932 when Frost was writing). “Build soil,” he says (thus, the title of the poem). His message is stated in agricultural terms but, as with all his poetry, it is about some deeper theme. He is talking about the importance of using economic down-time to think and rethink – to create and recreate – perhaps to read and reflect on reading. To generate ideas and plans and works of art and then to cultivate them, not for some present market that does not have money for them and would not pay for flimsy spurious inventions anyway, but for the future. One senses that he is talking about his own use of the ten years of unproductive farming that he used to develop the poetic material that he harvested in order to write his first book of poetry. Frost’s character, Tityrus expresses it this way in the poem:  

To market 'tis our destiny to go.
But much as in the end we bring for sale there
There is still more we never bring or should bring;
More that should be kept back—the soil for instance
In my opinion,—though we both know poets
Who fall all over each other to bring soil
And even subsoil and hardpan to market.
To sell the hay off, let alone the soil,

It is an unpardonable sin in farming.
The moral is, make a late start to market.

. . . Build soil. Turn the farm in upon itself
Until it can contain itself no more,
But sweating-full, drips wine and oil a little.
I will go to my run-out social mind
And be as unsocial with it as I can.
The thought I have, and my first impulse is
To take to market—I will turn it under.
The thought from that thought—
I will turn it under.

And so on to the limit of my nature.

 This is Frost’s notion of how to best use one’s time when in a state of economic malaise. “Build soil.” Let yourself think and rethink - let yourself learn to think - so that when the time comes for it, you have a "farm" you can grow something worthwhile in.

Are you a college teacher out of work? Build soil.
Are you a chef out of work? Build soil.
Are you an entrepreneur without a market? Build soil.
Are you a minister without a church? Build soil.
Are you a childcare worker without children? Build soil.
Are you a poet with little income?

Read books about the classes you teach. Try out some new recipes on yourself. Write a new business plan. Work out some outlines for some new sermons. Create lesson plans. Write poems about poverty. Write book reviews.

Build soil.

Question for Comment: How do you make productive personal use of economic recession?

"This I saw when waking late"

On the Hearts Beginning to Cloud the Mind By Robert Frost REVIEW

Something I saw or thought I saw
In the desert at midnight in Utah,
Looking out of my lower berth
At moonlit sky and moonlit earth.
The sky had here and there a star;
The earth had a single light afar,
A flickering, human pathetic light,
That was maintained against the night,
It seemed to me, by the people there,
With a God-forsaken brute despair.
It would flutter and fall in half an hour
Like the last petal off a flower.
But my heart was beginning to cloud my mind.
I knew a tale of a better kind.
That far light flickers because of trees.
The people can burn it as long as they please:
And when their interests in it end,
They can leave it to someone else to tend.
Come back that way a summer hence,
I should find it no more no less intense.
I pass, but scarcely pass no doubt,
The other without demur agrees.
They can keep it burning as long as they please;
They can put it out whenever they please.
One looks out last from the darkened room
At the shiny desert with spots of gloom
That might be people and are but cedar,
Have no purpose, have no leader,
Have never made the first move to assemble,
And so are nothing to make her tremble.
She can think of places that are not thus
Without indulging a 'Not for us!'
Life is not so sinister-grave.
Matter of fact has made them brave
He is husband, she is wife.
She fears not him, they fear not life.
They know where another light has been,
And more than one to theirs akin
But earlier out for bed tonight,
So lost on me in my surface flight.
This I saw when waking late,
Going by at a railroad rate,
Looking through wreaths of engine smoke
Far into the lives of other folk.

The poet is on a train looking out the window somewhere in the Utah desert as the evening descends. The moon is lighting up the desert landscape. A few stars are already visible. He can see the glow of the sun over the horizon growing dimmer every minute. He imagines that it is some human-created firelight – some band of people around a fading bonfire trying to stay alive in the face of extinction. He calls the sunlight over the horizon a “flickering human pathetic light.” He refers to the people stoking the fire as “god-forsaken” and refers to their condition as “brute despair.” They are hanging on in the last moments before a dark extinction.

Just then he interrupts himself and says, “But my heart was beginning to cloud my mind.”

What I assume he means by that is that his subjective mood was beginning to take control of his rationality and common sense. Most certainly, a sun setting is NOT evidence of a group of pathetic humans about to fall into a dark oblivion. Surely, these threatened people are not in so much peril. They can keep their fire going. They can pass their civilization on to others.

“I knew a tale of a better kind,” he says in the next line. In his new framing project, these humans are perfectly capable of keeping the light on. They can keep it going as long as they want. They can hand it off to others in another generation to keep burning strong. It is not flickering out. There is plenty of fuel in the very trees around them and plenty of people to supply that fuel indefinitely. Come back that way in a year or two and the band of humans will be just fine still. In this “tale of a better kind” the darkness does not overwhelm them – they are not under siege.

It is difficult for me to understand where this poem goes from there. Frost seems to introduce a woman into the story without clarifying who she is. Was his wife in that train car with him? Were they talking about current events (like the rise of Naziism in 1933) and did she take the position that things were not as bad as they seemed or that even if they were, it was a darkness that should not be scaring people in America into states of gloomy foreboding? What seems to be the case is that his mood shifts, perhaps because of the influence of this woman (I have to assume it is his wife) who, though acknowledging his concern, dismisses the fear as a distant one and not something that will involve them. Somewhere in the world, perhaps evil forces are assembling (it was after all, 1934 when this poem was published). In 1934, Hitler met with Mussolini, appointed Himmler head of the Gestapo, executed his political rivals in the “Knight of the Long Knives” and became the Fuhrer of Germany. The film Triumph of the Will was produced at the 1934 Nuremberg Rally*1. This may have been cause for great concern for someone like Frost who was clearly a person of deep insight and feeling.

Frost and his wife (I assume) look out at the desert at the shadows of trees that look like men. The trees are not assembling into political bodies and armies and thus, evoke no fear in those who see them in the moonlight.

At the shiny desert with spots of gloom
That might be people and are but cedar,
Have no purpose, have no leader,
Have never made the first move to assemble,
And so are nothing to make her tremble.

Note: That word “leader” is the English word for “Fuhrer.”

I am gathering from the poem that the conclusion that is being drawn is that a dark night of tyranny may be descending on people far away but this does not mean that they will not be able to hold out against that darkness or or that they have no allies or that she and her husband have to get involved or be part of that gathering storm. Life does not have to be so “sinister grave” for them here in America.

Life is not so sinister-grave.
Matter of fact has made them brave
He is husband, she is wife.
She fears not him, they fear not life.
They know where another light has been,
And more than one to theirs akin

Perhaps this is a reminder that even in 1934, people like Mr. and Mrs. Frost knew that there were many places where opposition to Hitler and Mousolini and the Japanese Emperor could be found – England, France, America, etc. They had lived in England and knew that a “light to theirs akin” was capable of fighting back. Frost’s closing line makes me think that his mood is still pensive when he wakes in the morning. .

“This I saw when waking late,
Going by at a railroad rate,
Looking through wreaths of engine smoke
Far into the lives of other folk.”

These are powerful lines. He realizes that he is looking at something that he had not been paying enough attention to before (he is waking late), that he sees them only superficially (going by at a railroad rate), that his perception may be clouded with distorting influences of media (through wreathes of engine smoke) and that the matters he is thinking about are distant (far into the lives of other folk). What he has is a premonition only. A fear that is based on seeing a situation through a glass darkly and on a moving train no less. His mood speaks to him of human extinction and yet he is trying to reassure himself that this is but a conjecture- maybe a mirage.

Who are those “other folk”? Are they the Jews of Germany? Are they the people of Austria and Poland and Russia? Are they the people threatened by Hitler’s already expressed expansion program?

The clues offered in this poem are few and far between.

But in hindsight, they seem almost prophetic.

Question for Comment: How much do you trust your instincts when you look at the future and the distant future? Are these premonitions things that cloud your mind or are they the essence of a deeper wisdom, a truer insight than what you conclude when you use your “matter of fact” mind?

*1 Note: From Wikipedia:  [Nuremberg Rally] 1934 – The 6th [Nazi] Party Congress was held in Nuremberg, September 5–10, 1934, which was attended by about 700,000 Nazi Party supporters. Initially it did not have a theme. Later it was labeled the "Rally of Unity and Strength" (Reichsparteitag der Einheit und Stärke), "Rally of Power" (Reichsparteitag der Macht), or "Rally of Will" (Reichsparteitag des Willens). The Leni Riefenstahl film Triumph des Willens [Triumph of the Will] was made at this rally.  

"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?

"To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield."

The Flower Boat by Robert Frost

Frost’s poem, “The Flower Boat” seems simple on the surface. An old man swaps stories in the barber shop. Meanwhile, the fishing boat that he spent so much of his life in is now being used as a large flower pot next to his house and barn.

At anchor she rides the sunny sod
As full to the gunnel of flowers growing
As ever she turned her home with cod
From George’s bank when winds were blowing.

The fisherman is retired. His adventurous days are over. Or appear to be.

The last stanza hints that neither boat nor skipper have any apparent adventures left in this lifetime. And yet Frost suggests that the desire for some adventure still remains and will require only some sort of “rougher weather” to get fisherman and boat to launch back out to sea. This “rougher weather” may be some sort of life-ending illness, heart attack, or old age itself and the adventure may be death itself. Or, conversely, it may simply be some sort of challenge worthy of the old man’s effort.

And I judge from that elysian freight
That all they ask is rougher weather,
And dory and master will sail by fate
To seek the Happy Isles together.

Elysium is a reference to what ancient Greeks and Romans thought of as “heaven” or what the Norse might have referred to as Valhalla. The Elysian Fields are where the noble ancients of the classical world go when they die (Warriors like Achilles). When Frost refers to “the Happy Isles” he is referring to a poem, “Ulysses,” by Alfred Tennyson.

“Ulysses” is a poem about the elderly hero of Homer’s epic poem who longs to return to the life of an adventurer. “I cannot rest from travel: I will drink life to the lees,” Ullysses says at the beginning of Tennyson’s poem. He wants to leave the dull and boring life of running a country to his capable son, Telemachus, while he goes back to his former life a seafaring explorer.

How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnish’d, not to shine in use!
As tho’ to breathe were life! 

Here is Ulysses estimation of his present work:

I mete and dole
Unequal laws unto a savage race,
That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.

Some days, I can totally understand how he feels.

Ulysses refers to death and the afterlife as “that untraveled world whose margin fades.” And yet, the old sailor with all his memories of the Trojan War and the journey home from it wonders if there might not be one last journey in this world left.

Death closes all: but something ere the end,
Some work of noble note, may yet be done.
Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods

He invites his aged comrades to head back out to sea.

Come, my friends,
’Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.

The poem closes with a challenge to defy old age and to summon up their youthful fearlessness.

. . . . and tho’
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

Thus in the last few lines, Frost leaves us wondering just what he means. Is he saying that the old man in the barber shop just needs to be given some challenge worthy of him in order to return to a life of experience and adventure rather than a life of reminiscence and nostalgia for former “glory days”? OR is Frost suggesting that this boat has sailed its last on this terrestrial shore and the only great adventure left to the old fisherman is what lies beyond the grave?

Question for Comment: How old do you feel? Why?