Eucatastrophe Reader

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?  

“The spirit of the instructor seems to be infused into the whole school.”

Lectures in School Keeping by Samuel Reed Hall (1829)

Samuel Read Hall (October 27, 1795 – June 24, 1877) was an educator and later clergyman who wrote the first teachers training manual for teachers in the United States (published in 1829 with a companion volume for female teachers in 1832). For most of his young life he was either teaching or teaching teachers in Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and Vermont. Samuel was instrumental in getting Horace Mann appointed as superintendent of the Massachusetts Common Schools and was a clear and articulate voice calling for the expansion of common schools in American life. It is also interesting to know that Samuel was the first to introduce the slate chalkboard and chalk erasers in education. In short, he was an educator with a disposition to use new tech in old school ways – a man after my own heart.

As you read the following excerpts from his 1829 manual on teaching (selected from the original work by yours truly), can you identify any ideas that have been outdated by research done on education in the last 190 years? Or is his advice timeless? If you could have Samuel Reed Hall as the principal of your children’s school or as a teacher in one of your children’s classrooms, would you support your school board in hiring him? It may be interesting to know that Samuel Hall was homeschooled himself. 

Excerpts follow:

“When the meeting [to found or fund a school] is organized, some arrangements are made in relation to the board of the teacher, and fuel for the school; and the committee is appointed to provide a master. This committee is often directed by vote, not to employ an instructor above a certain price, which is frequently very inadequate. The instructor is engaged with the reference to his cheapness, or is selected on account of relationship, or something equally unconnected with his character or morality, literature or ability to teach.

The fact however may be that he [the parent] has from his very youth formed a habit of considering the school a subject of far less consequence than it is. He has imperceptibly imbibed the sentiments of his own parents and as they appeared but little interested in the character of the school which they maintained so the habit has come down to him.”

“They see not the connection between the institutions in which the character of their children are molded and the future welfare of their children.”

“I shall now and divert to several other causes which I’ve had an influence to prevent the usefulness of our schools. . . .

“One. There is a backwardness on the part of many parents to furnish the necessary apparatus. It is not known or realized that a few dollars expended in obtaining some very cheap apparatus would probably add very greatly to the usefulness of the institutions where their children are placed to obtain the first rudiments of knowledge.”

“Two. Another cause of injury to the usefulness of district schools is the existence of parties within the district. There is but a minority of school districts where there is not from some cause or other disagreement among parents that eventually grows into a ‘party thing.’ This has originated often from causes at first very triffling and has been in some instances continued from father to son. Sometimes, differences of religious opinions has caused it. Sometimes parties have arisen from different political views – at other times merely at the location of the school house or of the families that compose the district has originated difficulties and discussions that have been kept up for many years. One part of the district is more wealthy than another or more enlightened or a part of the families may be connected with each other by consanguinity and combine to form a party and in this way strife is engendered. There is sometimes a party that wishes great severity in the school and another that wishes great laxness of government - one party is in favor of having an instructor from college and another wishes one who has never been in sight of it. One party wishes to give high wages and another cares only for an instructor who will keep cheap. A thousand trifling causes give rise to these ever varying divisions ...”

“Three. Another source of injury to common schools is the disposition of the more wealthy to place their children at some Academy or high school. Many are able to be at the expense of sending their children to some Seminary of higher order and hence feel but little interest in the common school. Its character is a subject of little interest. A few unsuccessful efforts to have the school what they wish and in discouragement they often say ‘well, if we cannot have a good school at home we can send to the Academy.’”

“By withdrawing their influence and assistance the work is left to those who have not the means and often to those who have not sufficient weight of character to afford the requisite support. Hence the public sustain much injury and though it is not the design of the rich to do wrong in this way yet a very little reflection must show that an evil to the community of considerable magnitude is unquestionably the result.”

“Four. There is a want of Christian effort to raise the standard of moral influence in school. It is a remark which has often fallen on my ear that our children learn more of bad than of good and increase in vice faster than they gain in knowledge.”

Five. The next prominent reason why common schools are not more useful is the imperfect qualifications of instructors. . . .”

“Six. Another reason why the standard of education in common schools has not been more elevated is to be found in the unwillingness on the part of school districts to make adequate compensation to teachers of approved talents and qualifications. How else does it happen at a time when the merchant is overstocked with clerks and the professions of law and medicine are thronged with students there is such a lamentable deficiency in the number of those who have the inclination and ability to engage in the business of instruction? ... The business of education should be committed to the best talents in the country and it is vain to expect the choicest fruit without paying them the market fee. The monthly wages of the teachers of district schools are frequently on third less than the amount paid to experienced clerks and journeyman mechanics in the same vicinity. In consequence of this state of things, many of the schools are taught by those who resort to the employment as a temporary expedient to help them in acquiring some other profession. These persons are without experience and can have little excitement to establish a character in the business they have resorted to as a temporary employment.”

“Seven. The next thing I shall mention as having an influence unfriendly to the progress of common school education is a want of books of the character needed. Many of the school books in common use in the country have been and still are entirely unfit for use.”

“Eight. The last thing of which I shall treat in this connection is the improper construction and the inconvenient location of school houses. Many are cold so that in the winter a part of the scholars must either be very uncomfortable or make constant disturbance by going to the fire. In others the chimney is defective and the house is constantly filled with smoke. The seats and desks in the majority of school rooms are badly constructed so that it is very tedious to sit in them.”

Lecture III.

“Having adverted in the preceding lecture to certain existing evils unfriendly to the character and usefulness of common schools I shall in this call your attention to the requisite qualifications of an instructor. The subject is one of high importance. . . .

“Among these qualifications common sense is the first. This is a qualification exceedingly important as in teaching school one has a constant occasion for its exercise. Many by no means deficient in intellect are not persons of common sense. I mean by the term that faculty by which things are seen as they are. It implies judgment and discrimination and the proper sense of propriety in regard to the common affairs of life. ... it is the exercise of reason uninfluenced by passion or prejudice.”

“Second, uniformity of temper is another important trait in the character of an instructor. Where this is wanting it is hardly possible to govern or to teach with success. He whose temper is constantly varying can never be uniform in his estimation of things around him. An uneven temper in any situation of life subjects one to many inconveniences. But when placed in a situation where his every action is observed and where his authority must be in constant exercise the man who labors under this malady is especially unfortunate. It is impossible for him to gain and preserve respect among his pupils. No one who comes under the rule of a person of uneven temper can know what to expect or how to act.”

“Third, The capacity to understand and discriminate character is highly important to him who engages in school-keeping. Dispositions of children are so various, the treatment and government of parents so dissimilar, that the most diversified modes of governing and teaching need to be employed. The instructor who is not able to discriminate but considers all alike and treats all alike does injury to many. The least expression of appropriation to one is often more than the severest reproof to another; a word of encouragement will be sufficient to excite attention in some while another will require to be urged by every motive that could be placed before him.”

“Fourth. It is desirable that teachers should possess much decision of character. ... I would say that it should be known as one of your first principles in the school keeping that what is required must be complied with in every case unless cause can be shown why the rule ought in a given instance to be dispensed with. There should then be a frank confession of error.”

“Five. A schoolmaster ought to be affectionate. The human heart is so constituted that it cannot resist the influence of kindness. No object is more important than to gain the love and goodwill of those we are to teach. In no way is this more easily accomplished than by a kind interest manifested in their welfare; an interest which is exhibited by actions as well as words.”

“Six. A just moral discernment. The cultivation of the virtuous propensities is more important to children than even their intellectual culture. The virtuous man, if illiterate, will be happy, while the learned, if vicious, must be miserable in proportion to his attainment.”

“Seven. Passing over the many topics connected with those already mentioned, I shall now remark on the necessary literary qualifications of a school master. It will at once be apparent that no one is qualified for this business without knowledge of the branches required to be taught in common schools. These are reading, writing, grammar, arithmetic, geography, and in some cases, the history of the United States. All these branches are necessary to enable individuals to perform the common business and common duties of life.”

Lecture IV

“I shall now proceed to give you some general directions which I consider important to your success. You will expect me to use great plainness for the subject requires it. . . .

“First; The first direction which I give is the following: Endeavor to become acquainted with the nature of your employment.

“Without some knowledge of the duties you have to perform, the perplexities and difficulties that may arise, and the constant care that must press upon you, you cannot but experience much inquietude and uneasiness. The very different tempers of those you have to teach and govern, and the wide difference of treatment they have received from their parents at home, will give you much trouble, if you awake to the reality of your situation only when a mountain of care presses upon you.”

“Form not expectations that cannot be realized for disappointment will not only make you unhappy at the time but will unfit you for the duties of the moment. The nature of your business should, as much as possible, be learned beforehand.”

“Disappointment in regard to the nature of your business as schoolmasters will have an important effect on your enjoyment. For, if you form only ideal notions – if you expect, in spite of evidence to the contrary, that everything will be perfectly pleasant – if you suppose the labor to be performed is easy and without anything to render it difficult and disagreeable, you will be entirely unprepared to bear the trials invariably attendant upon it. When these trials come, you will experience disappointment which will make you unhappy at the time and of course unfit you for the duties of the hour. In a discontented state, you are not prepared to proceed with that, which, at another time, might be perfectly easy. Nor, in this state, are you prepared to enjoy what is pleasant and agreeable. It is generally true, that we bear unexpected difficulties with far less composure, then when we had expected them and of course made up our minds to bear them.”

“Some children that come into your care have been governed at home; others have not. Some are quick of apprehension, others dull. Some will have learning and desire to make all the improvement of which they are capable; others will have no taste for learning and no desire to be improved. Some will be easily governed; others will require all your wisdom, firmness and prudence to restrain them from what is wrong and lead them to a better course. Some have formed habits of application; and others have been brought up in idleness. Some will be too bashful; others to bold. Some will be benevolent and affectionate; others, selfish and unsocial. Some will be found very nearly what you desire them to be; others the opposite in everything. Such is the diversity that will be found in every school.”

“You may be equally benefited perhaps in learning the nature of your business by reflecting on the great variety in the character of parents. Some will wish you to govern the school, others will wish to govern you. One parent wishes you to be very strict, another to be very lenient. Some will wish you to whip your scholars, others dread nothing so much is that their favorite children should feel the rod of correction. Some will wish you to pursue a certain mode of teaching, others will be strong advocates for a system entirely different. Some will wish you to close early, others will fear that you will not keep your hours. One man will admonish you to show no partiality, and another will solicit very particular attention to his children. Mr. A is willing to trust the school entirely to your management, while Mr. B is very jealous lest you assume more than your delegated power. Some will be very anxious to have the school successful, others will be entirely indifferent to the subject. So will cheerfully furnish all the necessary books, while others will think it enough to send their children without any, or with such as are entirely unfit for use. Some will be ready to listen to every complaint of their children, and others will teach them to tell no tales out of school. The wealthy may perhaps think their children entitled to more attention than those of the poor, and the latter may be ready to imagine such a distinction, even if none really exists. In this enumeration I have not mentioned a single difficulty which I have not had personal opportunity to observe and in regard to many of them I have noticed the same thing in many different places. This diversity among children and among parents renders it very necessary for you to reflect much on the manner of securing that influence with both which will enable you to benefit your scholars in the greatest degree. You must be prepared to govern your scholars at school and may often find it necessary to exert nearly as much influence with parents as with them.”

“You may also learn something of the nature of your business by frequent conversation with teachers. They will be able to impart to you results of their own experience. . . .”

“After having gained all the knowledge within your reach on the subjects already mentioned, it is of equal importance for you to understand the nature of your business as it regards the mode of teaching. Without this you can hardly hold for success.”

Many have appeared to imbibe the sentiment that the whole business consists in keeping order in the school room and going through a daily round of recitations in reading, spelling and writing, the teacher, meanwhile furnishing copies, making pens, and performing certain operations in arithmetic which the students may not be able to perform themselves. But all of this has little better claim to the name of teaching then the chatter of the magpie has to be dignified with the title of language. Such a course maybe entirely destitute till actual exercise; and is like the operation of a machine.” “A writer in the Journal of Education, number 19, has made some remarks on this mode of teaching which are worthy of particular attention. .... there is very little if any intellectual exercise than among the children in the cotton manufactory.”

“Let it be well fixed in your minds that to teach is to communicate ideas. To teach then it is indispensable that you should be understood. The words of an experienced teacher in point. Use language that your scholars can understand. Let your illustrations be drawn from topics within their knowledge. It is entirely out of place in the common elementary school to use the language of a professor at the University or to affect the use of terms understood only by the more advanced student.”

[See p. 48 religious education.]

Lecture V

“Endeavor to ascertain by what means you are to gain that ascendancy over your pupils which is necessary in order to confer on them the highest degree of benefit.”

“First, endeavor to convince the scholars that you are their friend – that you are friendly to their improvement and desire their best good. It will not take long to convince them of this if you are so in reality if you pursue the course with them which would with your own instructor have excited this belief in you in regards to him. Remember however that merely a declaration of being their friend will be very far from proving to be such . . . You must prove it to them by showing a greater regard for their welfare than for your own ease.”

“Second, in order to secure a proper degree of their confidence, you must not be hasty. Be not hasty to reprove, be not hasty to praise; be not hasty to promise, be not hasty to threaten; be not hasty to punish and be not hasty to forget a fault.”

“Thirdly if you wish to secure the confidence of your school, never allow yourself to speak angrily or unusually loud and be sure never to fret or scold. All these things are disagreeable. And you cannot expect to secure the confidence of the school by indulging yourself in those habits which make you disagreeable to everyone.”

“The spirit of the instructor seems to be infused into the whole school.”

“While I am firm in the belief that the laborer is worthy of his hire and while I am as firmly of the opinion that the ordinary compensation is lower than it ought to be, I cannot conceive that anyone ought to engage in this highly responsible business of teaching merely for the purpose of compensation. In a business less responsible, it may be justifiable to make that the first object. But where an influence so important is to be exerted - an influence that will probably affect the character and happiness of men during the rest of their lives, it does seem to me that patriotism, to say nothing of higher inducements, requires that the first object of a teacher should be to do good and that those only should engage in teaching who are willing to devote the largest portion of their time that can be rendered beneficial to the school.”

Lecture VI

“In order to be able to govern your pupils you must govern yourselves. . . . if a pupil commit a fault he ought certainly to be called into account but if the teacher, by an unmanly indulgence of passion descend to the level of the child, you cannot expect to benefit him materially by any correction administered in such a state of mind.”

“There is another particular in which it is very important you should govern yourselves. Be careful to make no contemptuous remarks concerning any of your pupils. Such remarks may excite smiles from the rest of the school but it will not be the smile of approbation. The affections of that pupil you have lost and every effort to benefit him by your instructions will do him very little good ... if the pupil make a blunder, he may be reproved calmly for his carelessness, but never should he be made the butt of ridicule.”

“It is of equal importance that you should govern yourselves in regard to such speeches as may hold up families to derision. You may see many things in family management to excite a smile and many things which really deserve censure. But such censure does not come well from the instructor of their children. To be ridiculed by the school master will have very little effect to correct improprieties. .... I know well that the eccentricity sometimes observable cannot fail to amuse and to vex you. But still, keep your reflections to yourself.”

“The moment the instructor indulges in the apprehension that he cannot govern - that it is impossible for him to have proper order, he may just as well tell these feelings to the whole school; the scholars will not be slow to read his thoughts and will govern themselves accordingly. It is not my design to say that all have an equal ability to govern or that the object is accomplished when the teacher has made the decided resolve to be master, but I wish to be understood to say that no one can exercise a proper and uniform authority any longer than he believes he can do so. This is a matter of principle. When we believe we can obtain the desired object we try, but when we think we cannot, our efforts are futile.”

“The next direction in regard to government is to consider your scholars as reasonable and intelligent beings. As such, they will be influenced by motives when properly presented.”

“The next direction in regards to government is let it be uniform.”

“I will only add that without firmness of purpose in the government of the school it will be impossible to make that school pleasant to the teacher or profitable to the pupil.”

“It will generally be found true that the tone of address adopted by the teacher in speaking to the scholars will be copied by them in addressing each other. Everything dictatorial, lordly, and austere should be avoided. Your spirit of affection should be infused into the whole school. Ask a scholar to do what you desire in just such a tone as you would naturally use in asking a favor of a superior. It is very ill judged to display your authority before there is any encroachment upon it or any disposition shown to disregard it.”

“Connected with punishment is the subject of rewards. This may sometimes be beneficial but as they are usually bestowed they probably do as much harm as good. To promise a reward is often an excitement to study for the sake of the reward; not as a duty, or from the love of learning, or desire to merit the approbation of the wise and good. When a prize is offered to a number of competitors, those who hope to gain it will be excited to emulation and to envy; and those who have no such hope will usually be discouraged and probably make less progress that if no reward had been offered.”

“If rewards are given at all, let them be rewards of merit and not rewards of intellectual capacity. The dull of apprehension are not to be punished for being so, neither do the more gifted merit praise for what they have received from the hand of God.”

Lecture IX

“In the first place, I would have you guard yourselves against supposing that your whole duty consists in enabling your scholars to acquire a knowledge of the books put into their hands for the purpose of study. This will be but a part, and sometimes the least part of your duty. It is the subject, not the book, which is more important. The book is the instrument which you are to teach them to use in order to obtain the knowledge desired. To direct and assist them in this and to teach them to exercise their own powers and elicit their own strength is the principal duty of an instructor. In teaching, let it be your first object to have everything understood.”

“... take nothing on trust but question and examine until you know that they understand the subject and have correct views of its bearings on other subjects. When this is done, you will have done your duty, and not till then.”

Lecture XII

The use of emulation as a stimulus in schools lays the foundation for ambition in the pursuit of life. ‘I wish to beat’ - ‘I’ll try to beat’ - ‘I can beat’ is the language you will hear from children and youth as common as any language where emulation is the instrument of excitement in any institution of learning. It is introduced into amusements and leads to all of those games where the trial of agility or strength is to see who will beat. A foundation is thus laid for what we so often see in afterlife of the race of popularity, office seeking management, and maneuvers and efforts to elevate oneself by the downfall of others.”

“Emulation is often injurious to those who are successful and has a bad affect on the unsuccessful. It is connected with pride, vanity, envy, hatred and slander, and is in opposition to real nobleness of character.”

Lecture XIII to female instructors

“The qualifications natural and acquired which it is important for male teachers to possess are not stated higher than those to be expected from you. The mode of governing in teaching recommended to gentlemen should be nearly the same with a teacher of either sex.”

“To confine a volatile child for six hours in a day one place, without employment with no change of scenery - with nothing but a dull round of exercises in which it takes a little or no delight, is not only unreasonable and cruel, but is a sure way to make the school an unpleasant place and to make dolts of the scholars themselves.”

“It is indeed, rather a matter of wonder that more children do not form an aversion to school so great that it is never overcome in subsequent years. They will often indeed attend school with pleasure from no other motive than the opportunity it affords them to play with their little associates while going and returning and during the intermission. Aside from the facilities for play the school would be an object of aversion. By so much confinement, they suffer in their health, and more in their spirit. Where there is nothing of more interest before the child while in the school room than simply his letters on the spelling book, it is no wonder that it should take him a great while to learn them, for curiosity is not awakened and he sees nothing to attract attention.”

“Who is studying to please children, it is important to unite amusement with instruction.”

“Another part of your duty will be to teach the children propriety of conduct. The remark is often made to an unmannerly child, ‘you must go to school to learn manners.’ But with what propriety is it made when so little attention is generally given to the subject in schools? Still it is important and should receive attention. The children should be instructed how to go into a room and how to speak when they have entered. They should be told what is proper when leaving the house of a neighbor or when spoken to by persons in the street or addressed by a visitor at home. Propriety of address and manner should be incorporated in regard to every situation in which they may be placed. Every species of rudeness and clownishness should be carefully corrected less it grow to a habit when they become older. If children are early taught to treat each other with politeness the habit will be likely to show itself in their treatment of everybody else. The truly polite person will never say or do that unnecessarily which will make anyone around him unhappy. Every mode of speaking or alluding to things which will injure the feelings of others is therefore to be discounted and reproved. All vulgar joking, blackguarding, or desire to accuse others of things of which they are not guilty of, must be considered as the opposite of politeness and good manners. It is the duty of the teacher to keep a watchful eye on everything connected with this subject.”

“The town-bred farmer failed to understand”

The Code By Robert Frost REVIEW

https://poets.org/poem/code

“The town-bred farmer failed to understand”

Robert frost’s poem is about communication in farming culture but it applies to communication in any work culture where bosses and the people who work for them have to communicate with one another (like the place where I work). If you work somewhere where people work for people, you will no doubt see all the phenomena that the characters of this poem experience. You will see miscommunication between workers and the people who they work for. You will see people delivering messages in passive aggressive ways when they want to send messages to those who are not their peers. You will see workers trying to “educate” their employers in the “corporate culture” and you will see the supervisors trying to censure people for “misunderstanding” them. You also get to listen in on employee-to-employee conversations about their bosses.

What emerges is the simple fact that there is a “code” that exists in the workplace and that it is often written in stories not constitutions. It is a multi-generational process of storytelling that determines what is appropriate and what is not and it would be a mistake not to hear those stories told and to leap into a supervisory role. It may be that Frost intends the double entendre in the title. A code is typically something written, as in a set of rules. But it is also a form of communicating that involves deciphering. As in a secret code. A lot of the messages that are sent in this poem are not overt. They are found in tone of voice, in action of inaction, or in non-verbal protests. Ironically, people avoid talking with each other when they talk. Imagine.

 Here are some of the questions you could bring up at your place of work if you wanted to bring the unwritten “code” that people use to communicate at your place of work to the surface.

1. What does this poem have to say about the choices that supervisors make when they communicate with the people who work for them?
   
   
2. What does this poem say about the choices that employees make when they communicate with the people they work for?
   
   
3. What does this poem have to say about the choices employees make when they communicate with each other about their supervisors?
   
   
4. The title suggests that there is a “code” or a “standard” of communication rules in any given workplace. It is something everyone is supposed to know but no one gets a course in. You just have to learn the hard way if you don’t keep your ears open so you can learn it the easy way. In this poem “the town-bred farmer” violates the code without knowing it. The code has to be explained to him. As CCV transfers several hundred students and faculty to other “supervisors” what are some ways that we can make the implicit “code” explicit so that we do not make these errors? What might we do to prevent people from feeling the need to quit or to dump an entire wagon load of hay on the boss’s head as correctives to communication “code violations”?

The origins of influence

The Influential Mind REVIEW

Imagine hooking a wire from one mouse’s brain to another and asking mouse one to learn something that mouse two can benefit from. Sound like something from a science fiction novel? And yet it is not. Indeed, we can now wire one human up to another and ask human one to move human two’s fingers. That is what I would call “influence.”

Tali Sharot has set out in this book to try and explain the inner workings of human influence in somewhat less technologically driven ways. Each chapter contains a number of experiments and what they reveal about why we succeed and fail to be people of influence or why we succeed and fail to remain free from excessive influence by others. I have decided to try and distill what she has learned into a set of applications that involve my work as a teacher. What are some things I can do to be more influential in this work that I spend so much of my life doing?

First, we have to debunk a myth: “Evidence changes minds.” While this may be true in some cases, it is not automatically true. Sharot has some sad news to share. While human exposure to information has expanded in quantum leaps over the past generation, the human brain has not changed much at all (if any) and continues to work as it has worked for eons of time. In other words, it does not think a whole lot differently than the brain of our grandmothers thought even though it has 10000 times more information to think with. What the internet can do is provide massive amounts of evidence but so long as it provides sufficient evidence to confirm a pre-existing belief, the tendency to leave an internet session with the same opinion as one entered it is reinforced rather than undermined.

So, if people go into a classroom believing in climate change, the only way that they will likely change their opinion is if you give them evidence that the problem is worse than they thought. That is, they will move in the direction of being more certain but not in the direction of being less certain. As Sharot puts it, “Google is always on our side.” Rather than assisting us in finding better answers, the internet is typically used to confirm previously held answers. For instance, you can give people the same set of manufactured data and they will find it compelling when it relates to skin rashes but not to gun control if they come to the data with no opinion about skin rashes but loaded with bias about gun control.

A second myth that Sharot debunks is the myth that more intelligent people are less susceptible to this intrinsic problem. They are not. Some scientists have concluded that human brains are dedicated to convincing others that we are right more than they are dedicated to finding truth. 

Now we can get to work on improving our IQs (Influence Quotients). What are some ideas for becoming more effective at being more planet like and less moon like?

First, spend more time seeding the world with new ideas rather than trying to tear old ideas down. The simple fact is that attacking other people’s ideas is more likely to get them to reinforce them. You are better off planting flowers than pulling weeds essentially.

Secondly, you need to cultivate your inner romantic rather than always nurturing the inner rationalist. People are more likely to synchronize their brains with your emotion than with your logic. Brains are more influenced by people they can feel with than they are with people they can agree with. Emotions hijack the human brain in ways that reasons do not. Our brains are wired to pay attention to emotion because generally the information attached to emotion “matters” more than information that is attached to data … and so we do. Even if the data is actually more reliable than the sentiment.  

Thirdly, you need to use warnings and promises judiciously. People are better moved with pleasure and better frozen with fear, Sharot writes. She uses the illustration of signs in restaurant and hospital bathrooms that tell people they must wash their hands before going back to work. In both environments, studies show that only about 40% of people will obey the sign. In studies that have experimented with raising this percentage, it has been found that finding ways to reward always works better than finding ways to threaten punishment. A study about “the law of approach and avoidance” was revealing. If you take newly hatched chicks and put them on a conveyor belt that takes food away from them as they approach it and brings food closer to them as they run away from it, the chicks will never learn to run away from it to get the food. The instinct to approach what you want is too strong.

The fear of a loss of something will generally cause a human being to freeze and become inactive. Sharot explains that these reflexes have to do with brain wiring, not logic. Like the chicks, we will often do what our brains tell us to do and not what would make the most sense for them to do. Fear causes us to freeze and therefore, it does not make an effective tool for inducing action. The key is to ask yourself: “do I want to influence people to stop doing something they are doing or do I want to influence them to start doing something that they are not doing. Promises of reward and threats of punishment do not have equivalent effects in those two different scenarios.

Fourth, you need to know something about the personal histories of people to know what effect promises of reward or punishment will have on them. People do not make decisions in historical isolation from their memory. In the famous marshmallow experiment, the children who were more likely to delay gratification based on a promise had a history of reliable adults in their life. Experiments demonstrate that if the child is promised something they do not receive just before the marshmallow experiment is conducted, the rate at which they will delay gratification for another [promise drops precipitously. “It is difficult to get people to work for something that may or may not happen,” Sharot writes.

Fifth, the author makes use of social-psychology to remind us of something that we may know intuitively. People do not like losing control. As a matter of fact, research has shown that people will pay a price for retaining control even when they would save money or make more money by delegating that control to an expert. She provides a list of things that people are most afraid of next to a list of things that people should be most afraid of and they are not the same list. People would be better off giving control to someone who actually knew the facts as it were and who was not influenced by rational sentiment but … they prefer not to. Why? Because the loss of control is a disturbing sensation. What to influence other people? Do not take away their sense of agency and control. It may sound counter-intuitive that you will influence them more if you control them more but the opposite is true. It is not agency itself but the sense of agency that is difficult for people to surrender. This phenomenon is “rooted in our biology” she says.

Sixth, take advantage of natural human curiosity. Human beings get a dopamine “rush” from solving a riddle or answering a question. It is much easier to influence people to learn something if you create a knowledge gap before providing the instruction. Sharot uses the example of pregnancy tests. How much money will people pay to find out if they are pregnant a few weeks before they could find out before spending that money? Click bate is based on the psychology of human curiosity reflexes. No one cared to know which politicians got a nose job until the question is asked and you do not know. Even monkeys in experiments will pay to get advanced information about things that they cannot even change. Studies of their brains reveal that the knowledge is almost as important to them as the thing itself. The brain rewards itself for learning about when the reward will arrive. In other words, an answer to a relevant question about a reward is itself a reward to the brain. Information literally is as important to the brain as water.

This information must be modified with one caveat however. We appear to be very biased about what information is a surrogate reward. Information about something you look forward contains within it a reward itself. But information about punishment you do not want to happen is as big a punishment as the punishment. Not all information is equally motivating. An experiment where people played a slot machine revealed that the higher the probability of winning, the more people wanted to know the results. The higher the probability of losing money, the less they wanted to know. Knowledge is its own reward and its own punishment. If people assume that your messages will contain scoldings, they will avoid them even if the information in them would help them avoid scoldings in the future.

Seventh, people under stress cannot be expected to be influenced in the same ways that they are influenced when they are not under stress. Stress literally changes the way that we relate with influences around us. When under stress, we are much more attuned to threat levels and will react to non-threats in ways that we would not react to if we were calm and tranquil. When under threat, we automatically start “absorbing cues about danger.” The lesson? If you want people to act in accordance with rationality, start by reducing the stress level in the environment.

Eighth, even one alternate influence in a swarm of unified pressure can make a huge difference. It is hard to over-estimate the influence one voice can have in a crowd because that one voice will give people reason to believe there may be an alternative worth thinking about (even if it is not likely). Two words: Alice Newton. She was the eight year old who read the first chapter of J.K. Rowling’s novel Harry Potter and the sorcerer’s Stone and thereby influenced Barry Cunningham to offer Rowling an advanced to finish the book. The work had been rejected by twelve other publishers.  

Ninth, understand heuristics. Heuristics are rules that your brain uses to save itself time and energy. For example, one heuristic is to rely on the majority when drawing a conclusion. It is more work to identify who in the room is an expert but that takes time and energy and so we apply the rule that says that the majority is usually trustworthy. Sharot calls this an “equality bias” a disposition to believe, although it is demonstratively not so, that everyone is equally intelligent and informed.

Tenth, simply attend to others and how you are influencing and being influenced by them. We do have the capacity to alter what is going on in the brains of the people around us and to have our own brains altered by what they are doing. It pays to attend to these causes and effects and to become more aware of what gravity you and the people you surround yourself with have in these matters.

Question for Comment: If people you know were asked to list the top three most influential people in their lives, would you come up on their lists? Why or why not?

"The Welshman got it planted"

The Black Cottage by Robert Frost REVIEW

https://www.bartleby.com/118/7.html

I have always liked this poem. To me it is about truth that does not change and people who pretend that it can.

The sons promise to come back to the cottage but the minister says “it will be hard for them to keep their word.” To use a metaphor from the poem, things like floor boards and asserted truths once nailed down don’t stay that way if people don’t keep stepping on them (re-affirming them). If no one holds society accountable to them.

The warping boards pull out their own old nails 
With none to tread and put them in their place.

The minister notes that Jefferson’s assertion that all men are created equal is one of those old-timey assertions that had sort of “gone out of fashion” by 1915. Indeed, the old woman who used to live in the cottage had been a staunch believer in the principle of racial equality and insisted that social equality between whites and blacks was the reason her husband went off and died in the war. “She had seen Garrison And Whittier” the minister says, referring to two of the leading advocates for social and political equality between races during the Civil War era.

By 1915 though, American historians had re-interpreted this assertion and were saying that the war was actually never about equality at all. It was about the economy. It was about geographical disharmonies in white society, etc. The minister sees the dead widow’s idealism and commitment to absolute truth as somewhat naïve and sentimental. She actually believed that Jefferson’s assertion in the Declaration was a statement of a universal truth and held to it just as she did to lines in her church’s creed about hell and damnation.

That’s a hard mystery of Jefferson’s.
What did he mean? Of course the easy way
Is to decide it simply isn’t true.
It may not be. I heard a fellow say so.
But never mind, the Welshman got it planted
Where it will trouble us a thousand years.
Each age will have to reconsider it.

One feels the floor boards of this fundamental Jeffersonian assertion working loose. Maybe it is not true? Maybe it is true. Some people still say it is true and some do not but … the minister is not ready to go off and die for it like the widow’s dead husband did. Truth is something he only sort of cares about. You can see this when he mentions that the widow's husband may have died at Gettysburg or Fredericksburg and it should probably matter but it doesn't. Racial equality is something that he will be okay with if it happens to wind up that way but it won’t be something he fights and dies for. “I shouldn’t be surprised if in this world It were the force that would at last prevail,” he says. He is comfortable being agnostic and passive about it. Racial equality was an ideal worth committing to at one point and maybe it will be again. Who knows? Like the sons of the widow who made a promise but found it hard to keep, so also “The Welshman’s” idea that all men are created equal may be a difficult check to cash (as Martin Luther King noted in his I Have a Dream speech)

The minister has a fanciful idea that he would like to rule over a society where truths stayed nailed down. But he seems to lack the temperament to be firm about truths himself. He leaves phrases of his creed he no longer believes undisturbed because of social pressure. Doesn’t want to create waves with the woman in the bonnet. He believes that Jefferson was probably right about equality but he won’t commit to the idea so long as there is some guy who thinks otherwise. Etc. Part of his job is to keep nailing down truth but he is not especially adept at it.

I love the ending.

This poem literally is intended to smack a hornet’s nest. There is something in it that is intended to inspire anger (“Fierce heads looked out”) and change (“small bodies pivoted”) and action (“We rose to go”) and enlightenment (“Sunset blazed on the windows.”)

Those are my thoughts about it anyway.

Always a pleasure to get a chance to think about poetry.

Question for Comment: What is a truth that you are on a mission to keep people from forgetting or neglecting? 

"Something you somehow haven’t to deserve.”

Death of a Hired Man by Robert Frost

https://www.bartleby.com/118/3.html.

There is a lot going on in this poem. Warren and Mary (husband and wife) are discussing what to do with Silas, the hired man who has returned and collapsed near the barn. Mary has invited him in and he now sits slumped near the stove while Mary attempts to persuade Warren to let him stay. Warren represents the demands of justice and the memory of past offences. Mary represents the desire for mercy and the reality of present need. Warren is all logic and Mary is all heart. The conversation involves a working out of an internal dialog within the poet who may be expressing two sides of his own nature (masculine and feminine?)

What it comes down to is two people looking at the same person but attending to different things about them. Warren recalls the following:

• Silas had been hired as a year-long farm hand in exchange for room and board for the year but then had taken off for higher wages right at the peak of the harvest season when everyone needs help. In other words, he had broken an agreement to his own advantage and left Warren in the lurch just when he needed him most.
• Silas had been told directly that if he left during the harvest for some other job, he should not think that he could come back when it was over. Silas had made his choice in full knowledge of the consequences. Warren has no interest in housing Silas all year so that he can go off just when he is needed and get paid.
• Silas was old and worn out and did not have a whole lot to offer a farm anymore anyway. In other words, he was no longer an attractive candidate for a job.
• Silas had family that could care for him (a local banker) that only lived a dozen or so miles away. If Silas needed assistance, that was the proper place for him to go for it.
• Silas had not taken advantage of his opportunities in life to better prepare for his waning years. His position of destitution was, in large part, a consequence of his own life decisions – his spending his money on tobacco rather than education or land, etc.

These are all part of what Mary might refer to as “the market things.” Her goal is “kindness” while his is “fairness.” It is a debate between the market and mercy and Frost tells us as much right from the outset.

Here is what Mary is attending to:

• Silas has returned in bad shape, huddled against the barn door. (Warren is skeptical)
• Silas had to be dragged into the house where Mary tried to revive him (to no avail).
• Silas had insisted that he had come back to do work not for a handout.
• Silas was not entirely coherent but kept insisting that he wanted to teach a former farm hand how to stack hay – how to farm. He wanted to pass on something that he was good at to a young person.
• Silas has the need of a dying person to know that he had done something in life worthy of his life – that he had been good at something and taught someone that thing.
• Silas is a man about to die and this is more important than the fact that Silas was a hired man who had not been reliable.

Warren’s message is a message of markets where one should get what they deserve and no more and no less. Mary’s message is a message of mercy where one should get help in their hour of need irrespective of what they have done to earn that help.

Lines from Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice comes to mind:

The quality of mercy is not strained;
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath. It is twice blest;
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes:
'T is mightiest in the mightiest; it becomes
The throned monarch better than his crown:
His sceptre shows the force of temporal power,
The attribute to awe and majesty,
Wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings;
But mercy is above this sceptred sway;
It is enthronèd in the hearts of kings,
It is an attribute to God himself;
And earthly power doth then show likest God's
When mercy seasons justice.

Question for Comment: How can you see this conversation between Warren and Mary intruding into your own life?