Jul
3
Nameless: Some Thoughts on Frost’s “The Gift Outright,” for July 4th
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The Gift Outright
Robert Frost
The land was ours before we were the land’s.
She was our land more than a hundred years
Before we were her people. She was ours
In Massachusetts, in Virginia,
But we were England’s, still colonials,
Possessing what we still were unpossessed by,
Possessed by what we now no more possessed.
Something we were withholding made us weak
Until we found out that it was ourselves
We were withholding from our land of living,
And forthwith found salvation in surrender.
Such as we were we gave ourselves outright
(The deed of gift was many deeds of war)
To the land vaguely realizing westward,
But still unstoried, artless, unenhanced,
Such as she was, such as she would become.
Comment:
This is a strange poem, but then again, America is a strange place, even if everyone professes to understand it. The name “America” does not occur in the poem: “the land,” “ours,” “she” and the ambiguous-enough “the gift outright” all substitute. The last word of the poem is “become:” does America even exist yet?
A relation between existence and possession is posited. “The land” – again, not “America” – “was ours.” At a later point, “we were the land’s.” Possession, at the least, marks existence, even if it does not properly name what is: “our land,” “her people.” Reciprocal possession might be love, but note “before” – reciprocal possession starts with one claiming possession. This creates the problem of time: did anyone make a claim on us? Did we make prior claims?
On that latter question, we most certainly did: there are two distinct sets of colonies and traditions, Massachusetts and Virginia. Our claim to those plots was based on the English claim to us; do we want to say England loved us? Part of the poem seems to refute this idea. If love is reciprocal possession, then “Possessed by what we now no more possessed” seems to imply England had nothing like true love. But that’s a shallow, lazy way out given this: The deed of gift was many deeds of war. And Frost is well-aware of the significance of “life, liberty and property” to our heritage, the precursor of “Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.”
Possession seems to be the possibility of love by mid-poem, though. After all, “we” were “withholding” “something,” and we felt enervated. Possession is about strength; when we feel weak, we are experiencing the most base reaction. This is not love, not yet. This is only “salvation in surrender.” We are brought to the final of 5 sentences, which is itself 5 lines. “We” are “the gift outright,” it seems, but all the doubts the modern Left has about America are there: “vaguely realizing westward” implies we did not and do not know where we are going. “But still unstoried, artless, unenhanced, / Such as she was, such as she would become” implies that leaving the Old World came at enormous cost: can we ever progress, or are we forever marked by frontier crudity?
What is unsaid is vital: we have a name for the New World, and it is ours, all of ours. As many of us were slavers, that many more died to emancipate. The lack of the name is the will to sacrifice, and that is the authentic piety of love. We have surrendered to the land, it takes us where it will; there is a body/soul relation throughout the poem, and a comment on what spirit is in “unstoried,” “unenhanced.”
Nov
26
My November Guest
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Just contrasting moods with Frost. Robert Frost, “My November Guest:”
My Sorrow, when she’s here with me,
Thinks these dark days of autumn rain
Are beautiful as days can be;
She loves the bare, the withered tree;
She walks the sodden pasture lane.
The trees are bare, but not quite withered yet. It is damp and getting darker, but there is a crispness outside that I wish to match in my work. Winter is coming methodically, working in clearly defined increments.
I’m anxious, not sorrowful.
Her pleasure will not let me stay.
She talks and I am fain to list:
She’s glad the birds are gone away,
She’s glad her simple worsted gray
Is silver now with clinging mist.
Anxiety doesn’t talk. She just stares at you, and once you think your mind is off her, she’s still there, staring.
In a way, she’s comforting. It feels at times like you’re loved, held to some higher standard. Even when worrying about one’s immediate security, there’s the concern of doing the best one can now, showing gratefulness for all that’s been given and will be given.
It’s not the worst thing to know someone is watching.
The desolate, deserted trees,
The faded earth, the heavy sky,
The beauties she so truly sees,
She thinks I have no eye for these,
And vexes me for reason why.
Anxiety takes no solace in Spring; her solace is in the certainty of decay. Fear is her motivator: maybe this desolate, faded, weighted condition can be transcended for a moment, and if so, then you’ve accomplished something. If not, all goes to rot anyway.
In this, anxiety is linked with sorrow: both deny the whole purposefully. And they think they have something to teach us.
Not yesterday I learned to know
The love of bare November days
Before the coming of the snow,
But it were vain to tell her so,
And they are better for her praise.
Those more attuned to the whole – those of us who are human – know implicitly the importance of “my sorrow,” “my anxiety.” They’re parts of a whole we’re trying to piece together. In Sorrow’s case, she should be allowed to speak: she’s only articulating what would weigh too heavily otherwise.
I think anxiety needs to be spoken to, but not badly. Anxiety may deny Spring initially, but she doesn’t deny hope. She’d like to be resolved, and the only question is how. The trick is to move her away from fear towards something rational. Small victories, then, matter far more than bigger accomplishments. Thanksgiving wasn’t about conquest in the New World, but more about getting through the harshest of times.
Apr
20
Entry #500: The Search for Truth – On Frost’s "For Once, Then, Something"
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For Once, Then, Something
Robert Frost
Others taught me with having knelt at well-curbs
Always wrong to the light, so never seeing
Deeper down in the well than where the water
Gives me back in a shining surface picture
Me myself in the summer heaven godlike
Looking out of a wreath of fern and cloud-puffs.
Once, when trying with chin against a well-curb,
I discerned, as I thought, beyond the picture,
Through the picture, a something white, uncertain,
Something more of the depths – and then I lost it.
Water came to rebuke the too clear water.
One drop fell from a fern, and lo, a ripple
Shook whatever it was lay there at bottom,
Blurred it, blotted it out. What was that whiteness?
Truth? A pebble of quartz? For once, then, something.
Comment:
What sort of teaching occurs at well-curbs? The religious imagery of kneeling, experiencing light, and then using that light to see into a reflective darkness gives this poem a seriousness it might not have. Is life on the farm so boring that you have to hang out near the well and try to look at the bottom? There’s nothing else to do? We have seen before that pastures are meeting places of a sort. But still, one wonders if Frost grew up on the weirdest farm known to man.
The water here gives one thing only to most people, but it is interesting. They look into the darkness with total conviction that they are seeing deeply, and they are rewarded. Turns out that the center of the universe is yourself, if you look carefully enough. Down there in the well is you smiling back at yourself, and not just any “you,” but the new and improved version. The one that will hang out with angels in the next life and sit on clouds and be crowned with leaves and maybe even eat from trees.
Is that surface all that is there? Are all our searches for truth doomed to giving us back what we think initially? Is the only religion that exists the one where we delude ourselves into thinking we’re humble, when we really want knowledge/power/immortality and read those “wants” as the moral truth underlying the world?
Our narrator kneels wrongly once. One is supposed to kneel with one’s hands at the next pew, not arms on top of what is ahead – you’re not supposed to lean forward and use the kneeler as a crutch. You’re not supposed to look anywhere but down, in the spot you resided at. Prayer demands focus, not curiosity.
Our narrator kneels wrongly and guesses (“discerned, as I thought”) there is something beneath the surface conception of things. Whatever it was, it was white, and he only got a glimpse of it. “Water came to rebuke the too clear water” – God will never flood the Earth again, but our conception of Creation could still necessarily depend on the existence of Chaos. The fern, of all things, is responsible for blotting out – blotting out what, exactly?
We move from “white, uncertain, something more” to “truth, a pebble of quartz,” and “for once, then, something.” The central issue is the concreteness we move to. Before, the picture of “me myself in the summer heaven godlike” had visual elements that corresponded to this world, but it was just an image. Now the image may have dispelled, just for a second, and we want to know what else from this world could underlie the image. “White” is a color and could describe any number of objects. But Truth is only one object. “Uncertain” has been resolved, in a sense – it could be “a pebble of quartz,” something that can be fashioned for human use if retrieved. And then, the temporal progression of the last element – “something more” is only accessible in the context of what has been. Therefore, “once,” meaning not just this moment, but all the other moments prior like this one; “then,” meaning this moment, leading up to something futural; and finally that “something,” a concrete thing or even an experience crowning the whole endeavor.
Images are all there are. The question is where human seeing is directed, or where the images truly lie. That ripple shook nothing but our speaker’s sight temporarily; there are somethings Chaos cannot deny.
Jan
24
The Oven Bird
Robert Frost
There is a singer everyone has heard,
Loud, a mid-summer and a mid-wood bird,
Who makes the solid tree trunks sound again.
He says that leaves are old and that for flowers
Mid-summer is to spring as one to ten.
He says the early petal-fall is past
When pear and cherry bloom went down in showers
On sunny days a moment overcast;
And comes that other fall we name the fall.
He says the highway dust is over all.
The bird would cease and be as other birds
But that he knows in singing not to sing.
The question that he frames in all but words
Is what to make of a diminished thing.
Comment:
Everything you wanted to know about Ovenbirds – the actual bird having a nest like a dome, an enclosure seemingly separate from the rest of nature, is probably relevant to this poem.
The poem itself is divided into six sentences. It begins by introducing the bird: when and where it occurs, and how we notice it. Then there are three sentences that begin “he says,” where the bird interprets nature’s motions for us. After that, we are given a sentence describing the bird’s uniqueness, and finally a sentence telling us the bird’s question.
Where the bird is located ties into the time of year: the sun is literally too bright and hot to dwell in always. It also “makes the solid tree trunks sound again:” when was the last time trees made sounds? More than likely spring, when life was just reemerging, not becoming abundant and spreading itself far and wide. The oven bird seems to mimic us in our separateness from the seasons: we are not wholly removed from nature’s cycles, perhaps we are even put in a particular place by nature. But we still seem separate from the rest of life, if only because of memory.
After all, we see as this one bird “sees” – maybe it doesn’t know anything, maybe it is only focusing our attention. We remember when the leaves were more alive and when flowers were more plentiful. How beautiful trees that fruited once were, and how even they have lost their appeal. And we are most sensitive to the dust being over all.
The allusion to the Fall is in the center of the list of motions, but it is not the first observation of the bird. Old leaves and disappearing flowers are what first confront us: it is the smallest of changes, perhaps even the possibility of change, that brings us to the wrong tree. In this poem, we get there, but are we tempted? Maybe on those sunny days a moment overcast we’re out plucking fruit, but maybe not. The overriding concern is not morality, but mortality – how is it we even care for something like justice when we are a part of an inevitable cycle of decay?
What happens next and finally is most curious: the bird is distinguished from other birds, brought closer to us in its asking a question, and yet ultimately distinguished from us too. We’re left standing with the question of our own mortality, the Ovenbird itself is immortal. It does not cease because it knows “in singing not to sing.” There is only one thing more permanent than Being, as you are well aware: Nothing.
So what do we make of a diminished thing? Ultimately, we see nature’s cycles and know that with every Fall, there is a Spring. And we know that isn’t our lot – the changes we experience are far more permanent. That marks us as a part of nature that diminishes.
But the Ovenbird is immortal inasmuch as it echoes Nothingness. Nature is beyond us because all it does is diminish: it only rises again to waste away again. Are we ourselves really a diminished thing?
The Ovenbird is a loud, annoying bird, bugging us in our shelter. It’s our question, not his, and we make something of a diminished thing every day.
Jun
5
Hyla Brook
Robert Frost
By June our brook’s run out of song and speed.
Sought for much after that, it will be found
Either to have gone groping underground
(And taken with it all the Hyla breed
That shouted in the mist a month ago,
Like ghost of sleigh-bells in a ghost of snow)—
Or flourished and come up in jewel-weed,
Weak foliage that is blown upon and bent
Even against the way its waters went.
Its bed is left a faded paper sheet
Of dead leaves stuck together by the heat—
A brook to none but who remember long.
This as it will be seen is other far
Than with brooks taken otherwhere in song.
We love the things we love for what they are.
Commentary:
I suppose formal criticism would ask, “How do we get from the first line to the last line? How does a brook being gone inform us that love exists, in an important sense, only in the present?”
Well, something is curious about this brook. It has been “sought for much” even after it has run out. By whom? I think we can assume our speaker is doing the seeking. He considers two possibilities for where the brook has gone: 1. It has gone groping underground, taking with it life that makes itself manifest in a joyful noise, & 2. It has gone underground, but come up again, this time in lousy plant life that the wind throws around.
What do we make of these two possibilities? They’re both bleak, obviously. And both speak to the lack of volume of water. It is the volume of water that allows for animal life to congregate. It is the volume of water that allows for resistance against the wind. (Frost is very subtle about his baptism imagery – cf. “The Pasture.” Also, in “The Pasture,” note how companionship and a baptism reference are tied. One person alone does not baptize.)
The water was there in the Spring, that time of love. Now it has taken the music of nature – something we lovers pay far too much attention to – away. And if it is still around, it is only manifest in something weaker: mere plants, plants, that like thoughts, proliferate after a failed relationship, but are useless against the moods that are like the wind, against the circumstances that are like the wind.
“A faded paper sheet of dead leaves stuck together by the heat” reminds us that this poem exists, that the writer/speaker has remembered, and remembered what the brook was, and what its full significance was. Those who see the brook now could not possibly believe the magic of what went on there once. But the writer preserves the best of times, even when the heart aches. And hence “We love the things we love for what they are” – this brook only truly mattered when it existed. The writer remembers it because love was there, not because the “brook” is anything now. One wonders, if love is indeed sacred, about the temporality of the divine.