Eucatastrophe Reader

"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?  

"Our missiles always make too short an arc"

A Soldier by Robert FROST REVIEW

He is that fallen lance that lies as hurled,
That lies unlifted now, come dew, come rust,
But still lies pointed as it plowed the dust.
If we who sight along it round the world,
See nothing worthy to have been its mark,
It is because like men we look too near,
Forgetting that as fitted to the sphere,
Our missiles always make too short an arc.
They fall, they rip the grass, they intersect
The curve of earth, and striking, break their own;
They make us cringe for metal-point on stone.
But this we know, the obstacle that checked
And tripped the body, shot the spirit on
Further than target ever showed or shone.

There are two things to note before beginning an analysis of this poem. One is that it is written in the form of a sonnet (there are three four-line stanzas followed by a couplet).  In a sonnet, there is typically a problem posed, a “volta” – a turn of the eye - that is followed by some resolution.

The second thing to note is that the poem may well be inspired by the death of Edward Thomas, the man that Frost would describe as responsible for “the best year of friendship I ever had.” Edward Thomas was an Englishman who, like Frost aspired to make a living by his writing  but was frustrated in his ability to do so. As the young Frost got caught up in high school teaching and chicken farming to support a family, so also Edward Thomas was forced by family necessities to make his living writing book reviews (literary chicken-farming). The friendship between the two reminded me of something that C.S. Lewis once said of friendship:

“Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another: What! You too? I thought I was the only one. . . . It is when two such persons discover one another, when, whether with immense difficulties and semi-articulate fumblings or with what would seem to us amazing and elliptical speed, they share their vision - it is then that Friendship is born.”

Frost would later say that what he and Thomas had in common, they “had from before they were born.” Robert Frost and Edward Thomas could both fall into crevasses of despair about their failure to reach or even come close to their potentials. Frost would however eventually reach the apex of fame as a poet, becoming poet laureate of the United States and reading a poem at the inauguration of John F. Kennedy. Thomas never did so. Faced with a decision to come to New England and pursue a life of the poet or to enlist in the army when WWI broke out, Edward Thomas enlisted and was killed in battle in France in 1917. He was a lance corporal.

One must wonder if Frost’s choice of the “lance” as the central subject in this poem is a strong hint that he is talking about a particular soldier; his dear friend, Lance Corporal Edward Thomas, a man characterized by unfulfilled intentions, fallen on the battlefield, cut down before fulfilling his “mission” as a poet or a soldier.

In the poem, we see a lance (a spear) that was thrown by someone but fell terribly short of its mark. And there it lies decaying back into dirt providing evidence of both aspiration and failure. It is an object that clearly had aimed for something and clearly failed to hit its intended mark, whatever it was. From the vantage point of years, we can look at it and try to understand what purpose it was launched to achieve but ultimately, nothing falls into view that would justify the sacrifice. If we assume that Frost is speaking of Edward Thomas the writer or Edward Thomas the soldier, his life seems like a failure. We do not even know what he was intending to accomplish when he died either militarily or literarily.

 We are,” says Frost, “like men.” We are almost never able to see beyond the curve of the earth to what lies beyond that horizon. Likewise, we are almost never able to see what someone was aspiring to be when they fail and fall in pursuit of it. “Our missiles always make too short an arc.” It is part and parcel of the human condition to land short of our dreams.

 Shortly before he died, according to an article by Paul Cubetta in the New England Quarterly, Edward Thomas wrote Frost from the battlefield and said “I should like to be a poet, just as I should like to live, but I know about as much of my chances in either case.” Thomas understood that it was not likely that he would succeed in poetry or battle no matter what his aspirations in either case. But he kept writing poetry even as a soldier and it may be this courage that Frost is celebrating in his poem about the lance in the dirt.

The poem resolves its own despair by suggesting that something of the spirit of a courageous man lives on even after absolute failure. As if one passes through the pearly gates and gets the chance to do what he died wanting to do.

As Frost wrote in an earlier poem (The Trial by Existence):

EVEN the bravest that are slain
Shall not dissemble their surprise
On waking to find valor reign,    
Even as on earth, in paradise;    

I have no reason to think it the case, but if he was aware of Colonel Joshua Chamberlain’s speech dedicating a memorial to the soldiers of the 20^th Maine at Gettysburg, Frost would have agreed with it.

 “In great deeds, something abides. On great fields, something stays. Forms change and pass; bodies disappear; but spirits linger, to consecrate ground for the vision-place of souls. And reverent men and women from afar, and generations that know us not and that we know not of, heart-drawn to see where and by whom great things were suffered and done for them, shall come to this deathless field, to ponder and dream; and lo! the shadow of a mighty presence shall wrap them in its bosom, and the power of the vision pass into their souls. This is the great reward of service. To live, far out and on, in the life of others; this is the mystery of the Christ,–to give life’s best for such high sake that it shall be found again unto life eternal.”

Dedication of the Maine Monument on October 3, 1888:

Dare to aspire to something Frost says. Heaven will let you finish it if this world doesn’t.

Robert Frost and Edward Thomas: Two Soldier Poets. Paul M. Cubeta, The New England Quarterly, Vol. 52, No. 2 (Jun., 1979), pp. 147-176

Question for Comment: What are you aiming at?

 

"We should see which one would be first to yield."

The Thatch by Robert Frost REVIEW

Out alone in the winter rain,
Intent on giving and taking pain.
But never was I far out of sight
Of a certain upper-window light.
The light was what it was all about:
I would not go in till the light went out;
It would not go out till I came in.
Well, we should see which one would win,
We should see which one would be first to yield.
The world was black invisible field.
The rain by rights was snow for cold.
The wind was another layer of mold.
But the strangest thing: in the thick old thatch,
Where summer birds had been given hatch,
had fed in chorus, and lived to fledge,
Some still were living in hermitage.
And as I passed along the eaves,
So low I brushed the straw with my sleeves,
I flushed birds out of hole after hole,
Into the darkness. It grieved my soul,
It started a grief within a grief,
To think their case was beyond relief--
They could not go flying about in search
Of their nest again, nor find a perch.
They must brood where they fell in mulch and mire,
Trusting feathers and inward fire
Till daylight made it safe for a flyer.
My greater grief was by so much reduced
As I though of them without nest or roost.
That was how that grief started to melt.
They tell me the cottage where we dwelt,
Its wind-torn thatch goes now unmended;
Its life of hundred of years has ended
By letting the rain I knew outdoors
In on to the upper chamber floors.

One has to piece together clues to understand this poem. I imagine that the story it tells is something like this: Frost and his wife are having an argument. He has left the house but it is raining a cold rain on a dark night and he is skulking in the shrubs next to the house staying under the eaves to stay dry if he can. He keeps his eye on the upstairs bedroom and he plans to wait until the light goes out (until the wife goes to sleep) before he comes back into the house.

The light was what it was all about:
I would not go in till the light went out;
It would not go out till I came in.
Well, we should see which one would win,

It’s a lover’s quarrel and he intends to “out-stubborn her.” He has no intentions of being the first to “break.”

The world was black invisible field.
The rain by rights was snow for cold.
The wind was another layer of mold.

It’s dark. It’s a rain colder than snow. And there is a wind that just makes the whole experience even more miserable. But not so miserable that he is going in. He is intent on “giving and taking pain.”

And then, somehow with all his shuffling in the shrubbery, he knocks some baby birds out of the tree who are not old enough to fly yet. Frost realizes pretty quickly that they will not be able to get back up to their little nest. Poor little things are going to have to just suffer in the mud hoping that their little feathers and body warmth will keep them alive all night. He calls this a grief within a grief. His grief, he asserts is a greater grief but he realizes that while the birds cannot get back in their cozy little nest until morning, all he has to do is walk in the front door of his little cottage. The thought that he has caused these birds to suffer by dispossessing them of their nest causes him to feel some remorse. He understands that while not intentional, they are suffering because of something he did. Maybe he could have been somewhat at fault in his domestic conflict as well perhaps?

“That was how the grief started to melt” he says.  

The last lines are a reflection about the cottage, perhaps many years later.

“They tell me the cottage where we dwelt
Its wind-torn thatch goes now unmended
Its life of a hundred years has ended
By letting the rain I knew outdoors
In onto the upper chamber floors.”

It’s a realization that without mending, even a house that has lasted a 100 years will die if you allow it to. Same goes for a relationship. I suspect that there may be a sense that the rain that has been “let in onto the upper chamber floors” may well be a double entendre, referring to not mending a roof and having the rain water destroy the floors but also a reference to his causing the unrelenting tears being shed in that upper chamber window. Perhaps he is applying a little of that Frostian wit in recollecting that his willingness to let his wife cry all night was the thing that destroyed the house?

The little fledglings are screwed out there in the cold until morning. For them, there is no relief.

Frost has a choice if he wants to go back inside and end his misery and hers.

He can make that difficult – sometimes excruciating - “first move.”

He can, in the words of his poem, "let her win."

Perhaps he was not willing to do so and this poem is about that or perhaps it is about why he did decide to relent and go in before the light went out. Frost likes to put you in positions where you have to choose “Two roads diverged in a wood” (Road Less Traveled); “a wood lovely dark and deep (Stopping by the Wood on a Snowy Evening); “out in a frozen swamp one grey day” (The Woodpile); “You come too” (The Pasture); or the decision that the newlywed has to make as to whether he will or will not invite a tramp into the cabin on his honeymoon (Love and a Question), etc.

Question for Comment: Do you know anyone who may be waiting for you to make the first conciliatory move? Why don’t you?    

"In my life alone"

"Bereft" by Robert Frost REVIEW

Where had I heard this wind before
Change like this to a deeper roar?
What would it take my standing there for,
Holding open a restive door,
Looking down hill to a frothy shore?
Summer was past and the day was past.
Sombre clouds in the west were massed.
Out on the porch's sagging floor,
Leaves got up in a coil and hissed,
Blindly struck at my knee and missed.
Something sinister in the tone
Told me my secret must be known:
Word I was in the house alone
Somehow must have gotten abroad,
Word I was in my life alone,
Word I had no one left but God.

Bereft: archaic past participle of “bereave.” Adj. Deprived or lacking something, especially a non-material asset. A profound absence deeply felt.

Robert Frost apparently wrote this poem when his childhood sweetheart and future wife went off to college and left him. The image that came to my mind as I read was of Adam at the moment when, in the story of the temptation and Fall, Adam realizes that Eve has been lured off by Satan.

There is something in the air that is foreboding . . . of winter, of night, of the dangers of temptation (the leaves are personified as a serpent). The knowledge that he is alone and lonely in the house and in his life seems to have gotten out and the poet feels a certain vulnerability in that loneliness that is no longer secret.

His opening line, “Where had I heard this wind before/ Change like this to a deeper roar?” makes me wonder if his sense of present abandonment by Eleanor has brought back his feelings about losing his father? (Which Frost did when he was 11). He feels the change. 

Frost feels vulnerable because he feels his aloneness. And he is fearful because he believes that his vulnerability is not a secret to those who would love to exploit it to his detriment. One gets the sense that the poet knows that he has God still but that this is not enough. Something that Adam seems to have felt even when he had God and God said that it was not good for him to be alone. There is a sense that Frost may be saying, like Adam might have, that having God alone leaves him dangerously alone. Not just alone.

Question for Comment: If you felt terribly abandoned and alone, would you want it known that you were? Why or why not?  

"ta hell with ya."

 

A Star in a Stone Boat

Robert Frost: “Star in a Stone Boat” REVIEW

This poem is growing on me (as do many of Frost’s poems). I always strive to understand a Frost poem in the exact way that I think he intended it to be understood but there are times when I think  that he will be forgiving if I “see it my way” and not his. This may be one of those poems.

In trying to understand this poem, I began with the dedication “For Lincoln McVeagh.” The original published poem did not include this dedication, but Frost seems to think it was an oversight not to have done so at first. So, who was Lincoln McVeagh and how might knowing the answer that question be a clue to understanding the poem?

We get a hint from an excerpt of a letter that Frost wrote to G.R. Elliot on Nov 16, 1920.

“I’m just going to tell you a matter that may amuse you. You know I left Amherst all so irresponsible. You must have wondered how I could go and come as I pleased on nothing but poetry and yet seem to be taken care of as if I hadn’t defied fate. I’ve wondered myself. The latest interposition in my favor when I had ceased to deserve further clemency is an appointment as Consulting Editor of Henry Holt and Co. I owe this under Heaven to Lincoln MaeVeagh a younger member of the firm. The pay will be small but large for a poet …”

It turns out that McVeagh was a functionary in a publishing company that provided Frost with a small bit of income from editing that allowed him to survive being a poet just long enough to make a living at it. It may well be that Lincoln McVeagh was offering Frost a permanent position that Frost ultimately refused. If that were the case, the 1923 dedication of this poem makes some sense.

The poem is about a piece of meteor (a star) that a New Hampshire farmer is digging out of the ground and inserting into a stone wall. Frost begins the poem by asserting that, though he has not personally witnessed such things happening, he knows that they must have at some time. It is, he argues, inevitable that at some point, someone has tried to put a divine thing (like a meteor or creative genius for example) into a mundane system (like a stone wall or a corporation for example). Perhaps this poem is about Frost’s own experience as a literary genius who almost got turned permanently into a New Hampshire chicken-farmer, high school teacher, and publishing house editor because no one recognized him for what he was? The poem begins with the following challenge:

Never tell me that not one star of all
That slip from heaven at night and softly fall
Has been picked up with stones to build a wall.

Even though the hypothetical laborer who committed this atrocity against the star is clueless, Frost insists that there were clues.

Some laborer found one faded and stone-cold,
And saving that its weight suggested gold
And tugged it from his first too certain hold,

He noticed nothing in it to remark.
He was not used to handling stars thrown dark
And lifeless from an interrupted arc.

He did not recognize in that smooth coal
The one thing palpable besides the soul
To penetrate the air in which we roll.

He did not see how like a flying thing
It brooded ant eggs, and had one large wing.”

In spite of the fact that the rock would have felt different than common stones, the laborer does not stop to reflect that he might be holding something that had travelled through space and that had a greater density and destiny and a finer purpose than what appeared on the surface.

“He noticed nothing … He did not recognize … He did not see …”

And later in the poem,

“He did not know …”

One is reminded of that passage from the New Testament Gospel of John

“He was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him. He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him.”

And the later passage about the stone the builders reject becoming the chief corner stone.

What does this star represent in the poem? It is interesting that the first time it is referred to as an “it” but over the next few lines, it begins to anthropomorphize. What was regarded as an “it” comes alive. Frost refers to this piece of star as “the one thing palpable besides the soul.” Something that is palpable is something that, while technically not material, is so felt by the senses that it is regarded as if it were “real.” i.e. “The tension was palpable.” When Frost says that this star-shard is like a soul, he is telling you how to understand the symbols of the poem. The star in the poem is a soul and the stone boat represents all the things short of that glory that souls deserve that we do with souls.

And if I had to guess, the poem is about taking people with a divine inner light and a poetic genius and thoughtlessly relegating them to clerical work. “Don’t tell me that it does not happen,” Frost insists. He ought to know. It almost happened to him. Makes me think of the life of Frederick Douglas and how his culture tried to take this great mind and relegate it to picking cotton his entire life.

What does the laborer do with this divine star? He loads it onto a wooden sled used for dragging stones out of a field (like a bucket loader or a tow truck).  

He moved it roughly with an iron bar,
He loaded an old stone boat with the star . . .

He dragged it through the plowed ground . . .

Frost contends that divine souls are, even so, compelled to live their lives in obscure jobs and meaningless purposes because no one recognizes them for what they are. For Frost, this is inexcusable, and he declares that he will not allow it to happen on his watch.

It went for building stone, and I, as though
Commanded in a dream, forever go
To right the wrong that this should have been so.

It may perhaps be the work of the poet to see and publish the divine in things thought mundane. Perhaps it is the poet’s burden, like a prophet of old, to traverse the world of mortal men and say, over-and-over again, “This thing too is precious and more than you realize.”

I can’t help but think of the passage in Thorton Wilder’s play, Our Town, where the stage manager has the following exchange with Emily:

“EMILY: "Does anyone ever realize life while they live it...every, every minute?"

STAGE MANAGER: "No. Saints and poets maybe...they do some.”

At the end of the play, Emily says,

“Let's really look at one another!...It goes so fast. We don't have time to look at one another. I didn't realize. So all that was going on and we never noticed.”

And the Stage Manager delivers his homily:

“Now there are some things we all know, but we don't take'm out and look at'm very often. We all know that something is eternal. And it ain't houses and it ain't names, and it ain't earth, and it ain't even the stars… everybody knows in their bones that something is eternal, and that something has to do with human beings. All the greatest people ever lived have been telling us that for five thousand years and yet you'd be surprised how people are always losing hold of it. There's something way down deep that's eternal about every human being.”

For Frost, that single rock is an entire planet – a world – a thing of infinitely more worth than has been ascribed to it. And even if he does not know what that purpose is, he refuses to let that common laborer, with all his ignorance, haul it off and put it in his publishing company (stone wall) when it came here from somewhere beyond and was on its way to greater things.

Question for Comment: Have you ever felt like a star in a stone boat?

Five Regrets of the Dying

The Top Five Regrets of the Dying by Bronnie Ware REVIEW

Bronnie Ware has spent a good deal of her life caring for dying people. Her book is full of their stories and the messages that they conveyed to her about life as they were dying.

I suspect that we all know that there is this person who we will someday be in the future. There is a version of me that will be 65 someday. There is a version of me that will be 70. But none of us can every really know who that person will be as we mature. Twenty-year-old me had no idea who forty-year-old me would be. So it is hard for twenty-year-old me to care about forty-year-old me because that forty -year-old me is such a stranger.

But somehow, we all know that there is going to be some version of ourselves who is five minutes away from dying. We all know intellectually that that person will be a real person someday. It is hard for us to not feel some compassion for that person. It is hard for us not to care about what that person will want. This book collects the wisdom of many dying people and declares that all of them (including you dear reader) will want to be spared the feeling of regret that will ensue if we do not insure against it with the way that we live now.

Here are the five regrets of the dying that Bonnie Ware writes about:

• I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.
• I wish I had not worked so hard.
• I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.
• I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.
• I wish I had let myself be happier.

Bronnie Ware supplies a parade of anecdotes and stories to illustrate her message, but I suspect that we do not need evidence to know that she is speaking the truth.

So, what can I do today to leave a better inheritance for that about-to-die-in-five-minutes me?

Question for Comment: What can you do?

Range Finding

Range Finding by Robert Frost

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44271/range-finding

I think Robert Frost’s poem, “Range Finding” is deceptively simple in many ways but still thought provoking. 

First of all, you can identify it as a Petrarchan Sonnet because of the eight-line then pivot and six-line structure. A Petrarchan Sonnet will typically discuss an emotional dilemma in the first eight lines and then line nine is called the "volta" in Italian - the turning point and then the dilemma gets resolved in the last six lines (typically). 

Sonnets are usually about some great theme or great love. Petrarch wrote a whole book of them to this woman named Laura that he fell in love with after church one day but never actually met. He wrote poems about her for decades after she died. 

The title, "Range Finding" is worth noting. A range finder is a device for measuring the distance between a weapon and the targets it hits and the poem is exploring the flight of a bullet on its way to kill a human soldier but it is examines all the "collateral damage" it is doing on the way. In other words, the poem is trying to ascertain just what a single bullet in a modern war might be destroying and who it might likely be devastating.

In the first eight lines, Frost uses the bullet’s trajectory through an inch or two of meadow to explore the possibilities. We might call what he observes “micro-collateral damage” because the effects are registered on a spider, the spider’s web, a flower, and a butterfly. At the risk of committing a serious act of apophenia (seeing connections where they do not exist in reality) I think it is entirely possible that Frost is not just talking about butterflies when he talks about butterflies here.

“The battle rent a cobweb diamond strung”

The word “rent” speaks of a violent tearing apart of a web (think metaphorically here of how war destroys human communities). The reference to the web being “diamond strung” no doubt can refer to the way that a cobweb will collect drops of water that sparkle in the sun but one can also see the obvious deeper meaning that speaks to how war destroys wealth.

But the bullet’s impact is not just on webs and wealth. It also cuts down life and beauty.

“The stricken flower bent double and so hung.”

The following is the dictionary definition of “flower”

flow·er /ˈflou(ə)r/  noun

1. 1. the seed-bearing part of a plant, consisting of reproductive organs (stamens and carpels) that are typically surrounded by a brightly colored corolla (petals) and a green calyx (sepals).

1. 2. the finest individuals out of a number of people or things.

I suspect but do not know that Frost understands that the image of the flower he has chosen has a literal meaning and a deeper meaning. I am tempted to see Frost making an allusion to John McCrae’s famous WWI poem “In Flanders Fields” about the dead soldiers of WWI lying in the fields like dead poppies:

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

The fact that Frost publishes this poem in 1920, a year after the war ended is not inconsequential.

But it is not simply the dead flower that is affected by this battle’s bullet. The butterfly, who may not itself be dead can be seen clinging to the flower as it lay on the ground. It is not hard to imagine this butterfly representing all those who expected a son or a brother to come back “soul-clinging” to their fallen dead.

A butterfly its fall had dispossessed
A moment sought in air his flower of rest, 
Then lightly stooped to it and fluttering clung.

Thus the first eight lines of the poem explores just what the range of a war's devastation is? How far does war’s actual impact reach? And then we arrive at line nine – the “volta” in a Petrarchan Sonnet. The last six lines of this poem return to the experience of the spider who feels a slight vibration in his well-constructed web and comes out to get the dinner he thinks will be waiting for him.

On the bare upland pasture there had spread 
O'ernight 'twixt mullein stalks a wheel of thread 
And straining cables wet with silver dew. 
A sudden passing bullet shook it dry. 
The indwelling spider ran to greet the fly, 
But finding nothing, sullenly withdrew. 

Alas, what the spider thought was a fly was a bullet passing through on its way to kill someone. This war has inconvenienced his evening meal. Frost describes the spider as “sullen” as he discovers that he won’t be eating what he thought he would be eating.

I find myself wondering if that spider represents all the people (in America) whose interactions with this devastating European war amounted to problems with rationed beef or sugar or butter. As Frost explores the effects of war through this one patch of meadow in a war torn country, he may be reflecting that its impact in some places was devastating and in others, hardly felt at all.  His poem is literally “range finding.”

I wish Robert Frost were here and I could ask him if this poem is about what I think it is about.

"One should be the sort of atheist who is not an atheist I suppose."

Seven Types of Atheism REVIEW

One often hears people referring to “Christians” as though that term described a singular point of view. In reality, we know that there are many kinds and many denominations of Christianity. There are Lutherans, Pentecostals, Quakers, Catholics, Methodists, Baptists, and Anglicans to name a few. In a similar way, the word “atheist” is used as a means of describing all people who do not believe in God but, as John Gray points out, the terms is too general. There are many kinds of atheists. This book asserts that there are at least seven. The author tries to take the views of several scores of atheists who happened to write about their atheism to distill these seven categories. He is well read. This cannot be denied. That said, his categories are not easily deciphered and certainly cannot be easily remembered. He is clear that he is a fan of two of the seven types of atheist and not a fan of five of them. “I have no interest in converting anyone to or from any of these types of atheisms” he writes, “But my own preferences will be clear. Repelled by the first five varieties, I am drawn to the last two.”

So, let’s try and summarize the denominations of atheism that John Gray could not see himself belonging to. The first (covered in the first chapter) is the sort of atheism that says that religion is the product of a few conniving power-seekers who exploited the ignorance of the masses to concoct narrative explanations for the physical universe in ways that granted them power. This atheism is an assertion that the God or gods that religions concoct amounts to no more than a scientific hypothesis that science has now proven untrue. i.e. since scientists have never taken an X-ray and seen a demon, there is no God. This sort of atheism argues that science can answer any and all questions that matter without reference to God and thus God does not exist. It assumes that science will eventually uncover some world view that will make all other world views appear foolish to anyone who considers them.

“There is no reason for supposing that the progress of science will reach a point where only one world view is left standing” Gray counters. This sort of blind attack on all religion for failing to turn up under a microscope is something that the author cannot adhere to. “Religion may involve the creation of illusions,” he writes,

“But there is nothing in science that says illusion may not be useful, even indispensable, in life. The human mind is programmed for survival, not for truth. Rather than producing minds that see the world ever more clearly, evolution could have the effect of breeding any clear view of things out of the mind. The upshot of scientific inquiry could be that the need for illusion goes with being human.”

Gray dismisses these atheists in the following words:

“The organized atheism of the present century is mostly a media phenomenon and best appreciated as a type of entertainment.”

As you will see, Gray prefers the sort of atheism that sees religion and belief in God pragmatically and even indulgently. So long as it serves a beneficial purpose, it ought not be attacked and it may even be in an atheists best interest to support it.  

A second form of atheism that the author disdains is the sort of atheism that seeks to retain all the benefits of the religious world view while dismissing its foundation (“castrating the gelding and bidding it be fruitful” as C.S. Lewis put it). Gray notes that many atheists are trying to practice a philosophical sleight of hand magic trick when they pretend that conclusions based on faith in revealed religion can be maintained even though the ground of the conclusion is dismissed. For example, theism argues that God can make the world a better place and even, in time, a perfect place. An atheist can dismiss the existence of God and then, without so much as an explanation, maintain that the world can be made a better place and even a perfect place by simply replacing the part that God played in that narrative with humans.

But this is a leap of faith with no evidence, says the author. This is a case of thinking with one’s hopes. The atheist is doing exactly what the theist was doing – specifically, believing in something with no evidence. “The idea that civilizations improve throughout history has never been a falsifiable hypothesis,” the book insists in chapter two. “If it had been, it would have been abandoned long ago.” Evidence suggests that humans are not able to achieve anything close to perfect societies and it suggests that even brief episodes of “better than average” are always followed with regressions of an equivalent nature.

“No thread of progress in civilization is woven into the fabric of history. The cumulative increase of knowledge in science has no parallel in ethics or politics, philosophy or the arts. Knowledge increases at an accelerated rate, but human beings are no more reasonable than they have ever been. Gains in civilization occur from time to time, but they are lost after a few generations. . . . The evidence that the human animal learns from his mistakes and follies is at best mixed. On this point, empiricism and liberalism are at odds.”

Gray has a problem with people calling themselves atheists while they maintain the entire superstructure that only a belief in God allows. “Nowadays there are millions of liberal humanist who have never had a religion of the ordinary kind,” he writes, “Few of them have asked themselves – as Mill did - whether their faith in human improvement can be supported by reason.”

“... they think they have no religion.”

“Partisans of revolution, reform and counterrevolution think they have left religion behind,” Gray writes in a later chapter, “when all they have done is renew it in shapes they fail to recognize.”

“The belief that we live in a secular age is itself an illusion. If it means only that the power of the Christian church has declined in many western countries, it is a description of fact. But secular thought is mostly composed of repressed religion. ... Since secular thinking was not much more than repressed religion, there never was a secular era.”

In a similar way, Gray decries the sort of atheism that only works if people do not stop thinking like theists. He uses John Stewart Mill as an example. Mill dismisses God as having no relevance to life on this planet and then devises a moral theory that requires them all to acts as though they were devout Christians of the most committed variety. “Mill never questioned the Christian idea that morality is an overriding imperative,” Gray says, but then “he failed to explain why anyone should want to be moral.”

Morality, he says, is a relic of monotheism. At least altruism is anyway. Gray makes his argument with references to Ayn Rand and the Roman Epicurean, Lucretius. The sentiment captured in Lucretius’ poem is, Gray argues, more consistent with honest atheism. It cultivates a serene indifference to the mass of humankind:

A joy it is, when the strong winds of storm
Stir up the waters of a mighty sea,
to watch from the shore the troubles of another.
No pleasure this in any man’s distress,
But joy to see the ills from which you are spared,
and joy to see great armies locked in conflict
Across the plains, yourself free from the danger.

“Watching calmly as others drowned in misery,” chapter two of the book concludes,

“The Epicureans were content in the tranquil retreat of their secluded gardens. Humanity could do what it pleased. It was no concern of theirs.”

The third form of atheism that the author cannot ascribe to is the sort of atheism that asserts that jettisoning a belief in God will somehow magically make all humans better. I suspect one might quote John Lennon here: “Imagine there’s no heaven.” Somehow, the belief in God is what has made human beings go to war with each other and the absence of the belief will lead, as sure as water leads to wet, to world peace. To the contrary says Gray, many of the world’s great atheists were loaded up like Jethro Clampitt’s car with racist, war-nurturing ideas. “Modern racist ideology is it in enlightenment project,” he writes citing numerous examples of racist atheists from Voltaire to Trotsky. “Though the 21st-century missionaries for enlightenment values resist the fact,” we read in chapter three, “modern racism emerged from the work of enlightenment philosophers. Voltaire was a pivotal figure in this process.”

One could easily cite Vermont’s own Ethan Allen here (though Gray does not think to mention him). In Ethan Allen’s notorious publication Reason, the Only Oracle of Man, Allen has a chapter articulating his convictions about the inferiority of people of African descent.

In short, this sort of atheism is the sort that would suggest that if a person does not believe in God, they are insured against the possibility of ever holding any other noxious idea so long as they cling to their atheism. Gray wonders if maybe being an atheist increases the odds of holding noxious ideas.

Another form of atheism that the author would have his readers discard is the sort of atheism that literally hates the being that they say does not exist. He calls the chapter, “God Haters.”

So long as a belief in God is a essential component of a healthy life, it is a mistake to try to eradicate that belief he suggests. And for Gray, belief in God is a not so much an opiate as it is air to human well-being. For Gray, “man has done nothing but invent God so as to live without killing himself; in this lies the whole of world history up till now.”  

In the final two chapters of this book, the author attempts to introduce us to those philosophers of atheism that he admires. Chapter Six is entitled “Atheism Without Progress” and Chapter Seven is entitled “The Atheism of Silence.” These chapters introduce us to thinkers like George Santayana, Joseph Conrad, Arthur Schopenhauer, and Baruch Spinoza. The argument is difficult to follow but I think the gist of it is that there is a certain wisdom to denying the existence of God without living like you have and without working against the idea of God being believed. In discussing the atheism of Joseph Conrad, Gray writes:

“Conrad asks if illusion might not be more humanly worthwhile than a heightened self-awareness that denudes life of meaning. Any prospect of a worthwhile life without illusions might itself be an illusion.”

Spinoza, it seems, satisfied his intellect by denying the existence of a personal God but continued to maintain the existence of pantheistic divinity in all material things. In other words, he maintained a cause for meaning while discarding the God of the Bible, the Qur’an, and the Quakers along with the gods of the Hindus and the Kami of the Shintos.

Gray approves of the atheism of an Arthur Schopenhauer who he says

“led a double existence, carefully cultivating his pleasures while endlessly preaching the futility of desire. For anyone who believes that philosophers must live by their teachings – as Santayana did, for example, this may look like hypocrisy.”

In other words, the sort of atheism that one should consider for their own life, is the sort that would keep a wall of separation between what they thought and what they lived. One should be the sort of atheist who is not an atheist I suppose.

Professor Gray is, I admit, more widely read than I and I doubt I could win an argument about anything with him if the subject were philosophy. He knows his stuff. I often like to finish these book reviews by affirming to myself that I have represented the views of the authors I read fairly. I struggled a bit to keep up with Professor Gray because of my own lack of expertise in the field he writes about. I hope he will forgive if I have misrepresented his views.

Thanks to my friend and colleague, David, for gifting me this book.

 Question for Comment: Do you have any beliefs that do not serve you well and yet you cannot discard them?

“I had mud on my shoes and that didn’t seem right to them for a poet.”

A Divided Poet REVIEW

David Sanders’ book A Divided Poet: Robert Frost, North of Boston, and the Drama of Disappearance is a thought provoking look at Robert Frost’s conflicted relationship with the subjects of the poems in North of Boston. Each of the poems in the book receives some form of treatment and analysis and Sanders strays from his central theme from time to time but the path he takes through the work has a definite direction. What Sanders finds so interesting about the work as a whole involves the complexity of Frost’s attempt to capture the essence of a region and its people while interacting with them as an outsider (if not actually then psychologically). Frost lives and farms (or teaches) in Derry, New Hampshire as he writes most of the poems included in the book but he lives there as one waiting for the day when he will not have to live there.

It may help to understand the context. Robert Frost married his high school sweetheart and they began to have children quite young. In order to provide for his family, Frost raised chickens and taught high school, neither of which did he particularly enjoy. His nature was far more intellectual and contemplative for the grinding demands of these necessary occupations. Fortunately, his grandfather left him some annuities that helped to augment his paltry earnings and allowed him to write. The same grandfather gave him the farm he lived on (freeing him from mortgage payments) and made it a condition of Frost’s possession of it that he could not sell the farm for ten years.

This seems to have had a marked impact on how Robert Frost interacted with the farmers of Derry. Frost knew that eventually, he would be selling the farm and using the money to pursue a career as a poet and so, he bided his time collecting the material for those poems and giving himself a literary head start when the time of his emancipation came. All the time that he was engaged in listening to his neighbor’s stories he knew that he was planning his escape by means of those stories. His work would be a poetic version of the work anthropologists do. He was therefore, among them but not of them. He no doubt understood this and they, no doubt, suspected it. No one in Derry could imagine Robert Frost as a man who was committed to handing his farm down to his children.  As Sanders puts it,

“As a labor of ambition as well as love, North of Boston registers indirectly but unmistakably the tension between the poet moved to celebrate a fading culture and the poet determined to find his place in the modern economy that was pushing rural Derry toward the past.”

Robert Frost in Derry was somewhat like a Jane Goodall watching gorillas. He was too smart and too educated and too ambitious and too financially secure to feel trapped like the trapped people he writes about. But he was unable to break away just yet because of the conditions laid upon him by his rich grandfather. He was a “Man without a country.” “The literary world didn’t want to hear from me when I was a farmer in New Hampshire,” Frost said decades later. “I had mud on my shoes and that didn’t seem right to them for a poet.” At the same time, his neighbors could not quite embrace him as a member of their community either. “Perhaps it will help you to understand,” Frost wrote a friend in England years later, “if I tell you that I have lived for the most part in villages where it were better that a millstone were hanged around your neck then that you should own yourself a minor poet.”

Derry’s own history of its first 150 years, From Turnpike to Interstate: 1827 to 1977, suggests that the people of Derry were later glad to have had Frost as a neighbor but offer that up with the following qualifications. The book describes the poet as,

“a lover of nature but not a farmer, a dreamer whose chores would come second to the dream, a man careless with his credit. Such a way of life was alien to people who could never have built their town under such conditions. In truth, this man of thought, temporarily curtailed in his activities due to hayfever and the weakness in his lungs, remained a stranger in the midst of a town whose residents were traditionally energetic and hard-working.”

Louis Mertins reports that Frost, when older, often laughed at a reputation he got among his farm neighbors“ and quotes him directly:

“They would see me starting out to work at all hours of the morning - approaching noon, to be more explicit. I always liked to set up all hours of the night planning some inarticulate crime, going out to work when the spirit moved me, something they shook their heads ominously at, with proper prejudice. They would talk among themselves about my lack of energy. I was a failure in their eyes from the very start – very start. Certainly I couldn’t be a farmer and act like this. Getting into the field at noon! What a farmer!”

According to the author, Frost was compelled to make a rather Faustian decision about these people of New Hampshire. His poetry would celebrate their lives and their virtues but it would document the slow steady demise of their economy and culture and the impact that the harsh weather and stony soil and declining real estate values would inflict upon their joie de vivre. Frost would be respectful but ultimately, he would coin their hardships into his own fame and fortune. Sanders’ central point is that his conscience felt this transaction and that it was not always comfortable with it. While Frost would not be the first person or the last to make his bread off the hardships of the downtrodden peasant, he at least saw what he was doing and confessed his reticence about it.

“Integral to the Frost who loved this Derry world was the poet determined not to vanish with it,” Sanders writes,

“and here lay something of a problem. Frost knew, that to be the poet he wished to be, to make his act of poetic creation one of economic advantage, he must turn the people and culture of Derry into a salable commodity, bringing North of Boston into the commerce of capitalism and allying himself with the economic interests that the book portrays as an indifferent and sometimes hostile force.”

“There is a kind of success called of esteem and it butters no parsnips,” Frost would later explain to a friend,

“It means a success with the critical few who are supposed to know. But really to arrive where I can stand on my own legs as a poet and nothing else I must get outside that circle to the general reader who buys books in their thousands. I may not be able to do that. I believe in doing it - don’t you doubt me there. I want to be a poet for all sorts and kinds. I could never make a merit of being caviar to the crowd the way my quasi- friend [Ezra] Pound does. I want to reach out.”

Frost did “reach out.” In North of Boston, he attempts to do for New England what Mark Twain did for the culture of the Mississippi River: He sets out to capture the sound of people talking.

In the book’s last poem, “Good Hours,” Frost describes his relationship with the villagers and his intention while living among them.

I had for my winter evening walk—
No one at all with whom to talk,
But I had the cottages in a row
Up to their shining eyes in snow.

And I thought I had the folk within:
I had the sound of a violin;
I had a glimpse through curtain laces
Of youthful forms and youthful faces.

I had such company outward bound.
I went till there were no cottages found.
I turned and repented, but coming back
I saw no window but that was black.

Over the snow my creaking feet
Disturbed the slumbering village street
Like profanation, by your leave,
At ten o'clock of a winter eve.

I thought I had the folk within, he says. “I had the sound of the violin.” In this book of poems, he is saying, “I think I captured the essence of these people. If you read my poems, you will have heard the sound of them talking.”  The poem suggest that he has been an observer of the entire village, voyeuristically peeking in their windows and listening in on their conversations from one side of the town to the other. He turns his invasion of their privacy into poetry (referred to here as “creaking feet.” This activity is something that he feels some shame about as he refers to his decision to go back to town as “a repentance.” His presence and the resulting poetry is something he refers to as a “profanation” – a word that implies that he has used something sacred for a commercial purpose.

He can only say that he has done so “by your leave.” In other words, it is an offense that the reader has given him permission to do. It is as if to say “go ahead and blame me for how I have looked in the windows of the people of my town but the fact that you bought this book of poems means that you wanted me to. The sin is not mine alone.” In making North of Boston, Sanders concludes, the poet has “exchanged the community of rural neighbors to which he was never fully joined for an audience of readers of which he was far from assured.”

As it turns out, frost’s instincts were sound. North of Boston became an almost instant best seller. People did want to reconnect with these struggling farmers in New Hampshire. It may well be that many of the people who bought the book could see their parents and grandparents in it. It connected them to the places that they had, like Frost, left to survive.  They appreciated Frost’s ability to capture for them all that they had lost in leaving and all that they hoped that they had not lost. “Much as he would look back to [Derry] with longing,” says Sanders, “[Frost] was never quite ‘of’ that place, never rooted there as his poetic subjects were, and when it came time to leave, he had the poetic craft, the courage, and just enough cash to do so. . . . Unlike the people of his forthcoming book, he had the talent and the will to leave, and in 1911, when the farm became his to sell, he had the funds as well.”

There were many Americans who, like Robert Frost’s father, had moved to California for precisely the same motives. They were financially better off there in Chicago and san Fransisco and Seattle, but they felt – the word here is “deracinated” – a fancy word for “uprooted.” Frost’s North of Boston was something of an antidote. His elixir was “just what Americans needed in their disconnection and Frost understood that he had a market before the market knew that they were looking for what he offered. “My dream,” Frost said,

“would be to get the thing started in London and then do the rest of it from a farm in New England where I could live cheap and get Yankier and Yankier.”

Ironically, the title of the book itself, North of Boston, was one of the headings under which the Boston Globe listed country properties for sale. Frost’s own farm had been purchased by his grandfather and bargain prices and no doubt some struggling farmer had sold the farm for less than he had paid for it. Allen Ginsberg, Sanders explains, once referred to Robert Frost as “the original intrapreneur of poetry.”

I particularly liked the way that David Sanders expressed his central theme in the following passage.

“Like Ishmael in Moby Dick, sole survivor of the wrecked Pequod who makes a life preserver of Queequeg‘s intended coffin, Frost’s escape from that Derry world depends on what he can make from the remains of his former community. . . . In Frosts case, that burden includes an awareness of life‘s inequities, which include his personal fame and fortune gained an apparent exchange for way of life that he could save only in imagination.”

Question for Comment: Do you think there is anything necessarily wrong with benefitting from other people’s suffering so long as you are not the one causing it and so long as what you are doing is in some way a comfort to that suffering?