9. Wild Grapes / New Hampshire(1923) - Robert Frost

9. Wild Grapes / New Hampshire(1923) - Robert Frost

What tree may not the fig be gathered from?

The grape may not be gathered from the birch?

It's all you know the grape, or know the birch.

As a girl gathered from the birch myself

Equally with my weight in grapes, one autumn,

I ought to know what tree the grape is fruit of.

I was born, I suppose, like anyone,

And grew to be a little boyish girl

My brother could not always leave at home.

But that beginning was wiped out in fear

The day I swung suspended with the grapes,

And was come after like Eurydice

And brought down safely from the upper regions;

And the life I live now's an extra life

I can waste as I please on whom I please.

So if you see me celebrate two birthdays,

And give myself out as two different ages,

One of them five years younger than I look―

One day my brother led me to a glade

Where a white birch he knew of stood alone,

Wearing a thin headdress of pointed leaves,

And heavy on her heavy hair behind,

Against her neck, an ornament of grapes.

Grapes, I knew grapes from having seen them last year.

One bunch of them, and there began to be

Bunches all round me growing in white birches,

The way they grew round Leif the Lucky's German;

Mostly as much beyond my lifted hands, though,

As the moon used to seem when I was younger,

And only freely to be had for climbing.

My brother did the climbing; and at first

Threw me down grapes to miss and scatter

And have to hunt for in sweet fern and hardhack;

hardhack : 북미산의 조팝나무속의 관목

Which gave him some time to himself to eat,

But not so much, perhaps, as a boy needed.

So then, to make me wholly self-supporting,

He climbed still higher and bent the tree to earth

And put it in my hands to pick my own grapes.

"Here, take a treetop. I'll get down another.

Hold on with all your might when I let go."

I said I had the tree. It wasn't true.

The opposite was true. The tree had me.

Then minute it was left with me alone,

It caught me up as if I were the fish

And it the fishpole. So I was translated,

To loud cries from my brother of "Let go!

Don't you know anything, you girl? Let go!"

But I, with something of the baby grip

Acquired ancestrally in just such trees

When wilder mothers than our wildest now

Hung babies out on branched by the hands

To dry or wash or tan, I don't know which

(You'll have to ask an evolutionist)―

I held on uncomplainingly for life.

My brother tried to make me laugh to help me.

"What are you doing up there in those grapes?

Don't be afraid. A few of them won't hurt you.

I mean, they won't pick you if you don't them."

Much danger of my picking anything!

By that time I was pretty well reduced

To a philosophy of hang-and-let-hang.

"Now you know how it feels," my brother said,

"To be a bunch of fox grapes, as they call them,

That when it thinks it has escaped the fox

By growing where it shouldn't―on a birch,

Where a fox wouldn't think to look for it―

Just then come you and I to gather it.

Only you have the advantage of the grapes

In one way: you have one more stem to cling by,

And some promise more resistance to the picker."

One by one I lost off my hat and shoes,

And still I clung. I let my head fall back,

And shut my eyes against the sun, my ears

Against my brother's nonsense. "Drop," he said,

"I'll catch you in my arms. It isn't far."

(Stated in lengths of him it might not be.)

"Drop or I'll shake the tree and shake you down."

Grim silence on my part as I sank lower,

My small wrists stretching till they showed the banjo strings.

"Why, if she isn't serious about it!

Hold tight awhile till I think what to do.

I'll bend the tree down and let you down by it."

I don't know much about the letting down;

But once I felt ground with my stocking feet

And the world came revolving back to me,

I know I looked long at my curled-up fingers,

Before I straightened them and brushed the bark off.

My brother said: "Don't you weigh anything?

Try to weigh something next time, so you won't

Be run off with by birch trees into space."

It wasn't my not weighing anything

So much as my not knowing anything―

My brother had been nearer right before.

I had not taken the first step in knowledge;

I had not learned to let go with the hands,

As still I have not learned to with the heart,

And have no wish to with the heart―nor need,

That I can see. The mind―is not the heart.

I may yet live, as I know others live,

To wish in vain to let go with the mind―

Of cares, at night, to sleep; but nothing tells me

That I need learn to let go with the heart.

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덩굴포도

무화과는 어떤 나무에서 딸 수 없을까?

포도를 자작나무에서 딸 수는 없겠지?

포도나 자작나무에 대해 아는 것은 이뿐이다.

어느 가을, 포도들에 내 체중을 실은 채로,

자작나무에서 거둬들여진 소녀로서,

나는 포도가 어떤 나무의 열매인지 알아야 했다.

내 생각에, 나는 여느 사람처럼 태어났고,

오빠가 항상 집에 두고 나올 수는 없었던

약간은 머슴애 같은 소녀로 성장했다.

그러나 내가 포도들과 함께 휙 던져져 대롱대롱

공중 그네를 타는데, 에우리디케를 뒤쫓듯이

나를 뒤쫓은 오빠에 의해 내가 허공에서 무사히

끌어내려진 그날의 공포에 그 시절은 말소됐다.

그러니 지금 내가 사는 인생은 가외의 인생이니

내가 좋아하는 이에게 내 맘대로 낭비할 수 있다.

그래서 보다시피 나는 두 개의 생일을 기념하고,

나이도 서로 다른 두 개의 나이를 대는데,

그중 하나는 내 모습보다 5년이 어리다.

어느 날 오빠는 그가 아는 흰 자작나무가

홀로 서 있는 숲속의 빈터로 나를 데려갔다.

뾰족한 잎들로 된 얇은 머리장식을 쓰고,

뒤의 수북한 머리 위, 그녀의 목덜미에,

흰 자작나무는 두툼한 포도 장식을 걸고 있었다.

분명 포도였다. 작년에 봤기에 그게 포도인지 알았다.

한 다발의 포도, 이윽고, 에릭슨의 빈랜드 주변에

포도가 자라듯이, 내 주변 사방의 흰 자작나무에서

자라는 포도들이 다발 다발로 나타나기 시작했지만,

내가 더 어렸을 때 달이 늘 손에 닿지 않았듯이

그것들은 대개 아무리 손을 뻗쳐도 닿지 않았고,

나무를 올라가야 겨우 마음대로 먹을 수 있었다.

오빠가 나무에 올라갔고, 처음에는 나무 아래의

나에게 포도를 던졌지만 나는 잡지 못해 흩뿌리고는

향긋한 고사리와 조팝나무를 뒤지며 찾아야 했다.

그래서 오빠는 자신이 먹을 시간이 약간 생겼으나,

아마도, 소년이 필요한 만큼 양껏 먹지는 못했으리라.

그래선지, 내가 완전히 자급자족하도록 하려고,

그는 더욱 높이 올라가서 나무를 땅까지 굽혀서

그것을 내 손위 쥐어주고 포도를 직접 따먹게 했다.

"자, 나무 끝을 잡아, 또 한 가지 땅까지 굽힌다.

내가 손을 놓으면 있는 힘을 다해 잡고 있어라."

나는 잡았다고 말했다. 그것은 사실이 아니었다.

사실은 그 반대였다. 나무가 나를 잡았다.

내가 나무를 혼자 잡게 되자마자,

나는 물고기이고 나무는 낚싯대인양

나무가 나를 낚아 올렸다. "손 놔!

계집애야, 너 아무것도 모르냐? 손 놔!"

오빠의 콘 고함소리에 맞춰 나는 귀천(歸天)했다.

그러나 지금의 가장 거친 어머니들보다 더 거친

어머니들이 젖먹이들을 나무 가지에 손을 묶어 매달고,

그들을 말리는지 씻는지 햇볕에 그을리는지,

어느 것인지 모르지만 (진화론자에게 물어야 될 거다)―

그런 시절 바로 그런 나무에서 조상전래로 획득한

젖먹이의 아귀힘과 같은 신통한 힘으로―

나는 불평하지 않고 목숨을 다해 쥐고 있었다.

오빠는 나를 돕기 위해서 나를 웃기려고 애썼다.

"너 천국(天國)의 포도 속에서 뭘 하고 있는 거냐?

겁내지 말거라. 포도 몇 개가 널 해치진 않을 거다.

네가 포도를 안 따면 그들도 널 안 딸 거라는 말이다."

내가 무얼 딴다는 것은 매우 위험하다 이거지!

이때쯤에는 나는 ‘매달고 매달리자’의

철학에 이를 정도로 거의 완전히 오그라들었다.

오빠가 말했다."이제 너는, 이른바, 여우의

신포도 송이가 되는 것이 어떤 기분인지 알겠지.

자라서는 안 되는 곳―여우가 포도를 찾을 생각도

하지 않을 것이고, 혹여 여우가 보고 그것을 발견해도,

그것에 미칠 수 없는 곳, 즉 자작나무에서 자람으로써―

포도가 여우를 따돌렸다고 생각하고 있는데,

바로 그때 너와 내가 포도를 따러 온 거야.

다만 너는 포도보다 한 가지 면에서 더 유리하다.

너에게는 붙들고 매달릴 가지가 하나 더 있어서

너를 따려는 자를 더 저항할 수 있다는 말이다."

나는 모자와 구두를 하나하나 잃었지만,

여전히 매달렸다. 나는 머리를 젖히고,

해를 향해 내 눈을 감고, 오빠의 허튼 소리에

내 귀를 닫았다. 그가 말했다."손 놔,

내가 너를 팔로 받을 거야. 가까운 거리야."

(오빠의 길이로 말하면 가까울지 모르지.)

"손 안 놓으면 나무를 흔들어 떨어트릴 거야."

암담한 침묵 속에 나는 점점 아래로 가라앉고,

내 작은 손목들은 늘어나 마침내 힘줄이 보였다.

"아니, 너 대수롭지 않게 생각하는 모양이구나!

어떻게 할지 생각해볼 테니 당분간 꼭 붙들고 있어라.

내가 나무를 아래로 굽혀서 너를 땅에 내려놓겠다."

나는 땅에 내려놓는 것에 대해 그다지 모르지만,

일단 내가 양말을 신은 발로 땅을 감촉하면서

세상이 빙빙 돌아 내게로 다시 돌아왔을 때,

나는 오그린 내 손가락들을 오래 쳐다보고서야,

손가락들을 펴고 나무껍질을 털어냈던 걸 안다.

오빠가 말했다. "넌 몸무게가 전혀 안 나가냐?

다음번에 몸무게가 좀 나가도록 노력한다면,

자작나무에 실려 공중으로 쫓겨나는 일은 없을 거다."

문제는 내 몸무게가 전혀 안 나가서라기보다는

내가 아무것도 몰랐던 것이다―

오빠가 전에 했던 말이 아주 옳은 말이었다.

내가 지식의 첫발을 내딛지 못했던 것이다.

내가 손을 내려놓을 줄 몰랐던 것이다.

아직도 나는 마음을 내려놓을 줄 모르고,

마음을 내려놓을 소망도 없으며―그럴 필요도 없으니,

나는 그것만은 알 수 있다. 머리는―마음이 아니다.

다른 사람들도 살고 있으니, 아마도 나 역시 살면서,

밤에 잠을 자기 위해 근심들을 머리로 내려놓기를

헛되이 소망하겠지만, 내가 마음으로 내려놓는 법까지

터득할 필요가 있다고는 아무것도 말하지 않는다.-

-신재실 옮김-

단상(斷想): 프로스트의 시「자작나무」의 자작나무 타는 소년은 이렇게 말한다. “나는 자작나무를 기어오르고 싶다./ 검은 가지를 잡고 눈처럼 흰 줄기를 타고/ 하늘로 오르다가, 나무가 더 이상 견디지 못해/ 고개를 숙여 나를 다시 내려놓을 때까지./ 그렇게 갔다가 돌아오는 게 좋을 게다./ 자작나무 타는 사람도 되지 못할 수 있다.”소년은 낚시꾼이 낚싯대를 다루듯 자작나무를 능숙하게 그네 탄다. 하늘과 땅을 오가는 부단한 그네타기로 마침내 아치형의 자작나무를 낚는다. 하늘과 땅, 비상과 하강, 자유와 속박, 분방과 억제, 상상과 지성의 균형이야말로 예술의 모태다. 균형은 성숙이 필요하다. 소년은 예술가 되기에 충분할 만큼 크게 성숙했다.

「덩굴포도」의 소녀는 「자작나무」의 소년과 달리 균형을 잡을 만큼 크지 못했다. 불과 5살의 어린 소녀이기 때문이다. 오히려 “나[그녀]는 물고기이고 나무는 낚싯대인양/ 나무가 나[그녀]를 낚아 올렸다.”그녀는 직접 나무에 올라, 가지를 잡고 그네를 탄 것이 아니고, 오빠가 아래로 휘어준 가지 끝을 잡았고, 오히려 나무가 그녀를 물고기인양 상공으로 낚아채고 말았다. 대롱대롱 허공에 매달린 소녀는 불귀의 객이 된 듯 공포에 떨었다. 손을 놓고 점프하면 땅에 닿으려만 계속 낚싯대에 매달린다. 그녀는 자작나무를 다룰 만큼 충분히 크지도 않았고, 충분한 기술도 없다. 포도의 유혹에 하늘로 올랐지만 유혹을 뿌리치고 다시 땅으로 내려올 줄을 모른다. 자작나무를 지배하기는커녕 자작나무의 지배를 받는다. 오빠가 동생의 능력을 과신한 탓 아닐까?

하지만 소녀는 이 끔찍한 경험으로 인해 “지식”의 첫발을 내디뎠다. 손을 놓기만 하면 된다는 사실을 알게 된 것이다. 하지만 손을 놓는다는 것이 그리 쉬운 일인가? 인간은 무엇인가를 마냥 하고픈 감성의 존재다. 사랑하고픈, 날고픈, 상상하고픈, 먹고픈, 싸고픈, 살고픈, 죽이고픈, 죽고픈 존재다. 하지만 …고픈 감성과 욕망의 자작나무 줄기를 타고 오르다가, 그 줄기를 타고 다시 땅으로 돌아오는 지성의 용기와 지혜가 결여된다면, 아치형 자작나무 즉 사랑, 예술, 그리고 땅의 인생은 물거품이 되리라.

감성과 지성의 균형―이것이 바로 둥근 원의 원리가 아닐까? 우리에게는 적기에 손을 내려놓는 지혜 즉 마음을 비우는 지혜가 필요하다. 하지만 소녀의 말대로“머리[지성]는―마음[감성]이 아니다.” 「망설임」의 화자는 말한다. “아, 흔쾌히 이성에 굴복하여/ 사물의 흐름과 동행하고,/ 사랑이나 계절의 종말을/ 고개 숙여 받아들이는 것은/ 인간의 마음에는 언제나/ 반역이지 않았던가?” 그렇다. 아직 이성에 굴복하여“마음을 내려놓을 줄 모르는”어린 소녀가 아름답다. 사람이 사람인 이유는 이성이 아니라 마음 아닌가?

-신재실 씀-

출처 : http://blog.naver.com/PostList.nhn?from=postList&blogId=js9660&categoryNo=31¤tPage=50

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youtu.be/8I6ssF8FC_o

youtu.be/MRqzuZ1t2Yk

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“Wild Grapes” also presents a complex mythology of the feminine relation- ship with nature. In this lyric, which was a complement to “Birches,” a girl recollects a traumatic childhood experience of nearly being carried away by abirch tree. Beginning with the title, the poem is replete with gnomic and

suggestive references to biblical, classical (Bacchus, Dionysus, and Orpheus), and scientific literature, which all become stories whirling around her defiance and her desire for independence.14 The title refers not only the wild grapes 
that were growing in an unexpected place but also the wayward children of God prophesied by Isaiah in his parable of the vineyard: “My well beloved hath planted a vineyard in a very fruitful hill: and he fenced it, and gathered out the stones thereof, and planted it with the choicest vine, and built a tower in the midst of it, and also made a winepress therein: and he looked that it should bring forth grapes, and it brought forth wild grapes.” The narrator begins her story with a wry wink to a passage in Luke 6:44 that says only certain fruit can be gathered from certain trees: “For every tree is known by his own fruit. For of thorns men do not gather figs, nor of a bramble bush do they gather grapes.” She, however, had become, like the grapes, a wild anomaly. She appears delib- erately to chafe at the codes and expectations of those around her, including her brother. She tells us, as well, that she grew “to be a little boyish girl,” and resistant to the control of her brother:

What tree may not the fig be gathered from? 
The grape may not be gathered from the birch? 
It’s all you know the grape, or know the birch. 
Asagirl gathered from the birch myself 
Equally with my weight in grapes, one autumn, 
I ought to know what tree the grape is fruit of. 
I was born, I suppose, like anyone, 
Andgrewtobealittle boyish girl 
My brother could not always leave at home. 

Buther experience that day would lead to a trauma and, yet, a new beginning. Her life would be in a positive sense “a waste,” indifferent to the demands around her: 

But that beginning was wiped out in fear 
The day I swung suspended with the grapes, 
And was come after like Eurydice 
And brought down safely from the upper regions; 
And the life I live now’s an extra life 
I can waste as I please on whom I please. 
So if you see me celebrate two birthdays, 
And givemyselfoutastwodifferent ages, 
One of them five years younger than I look – 

She recounts the story, virtually a fable of temptation, of her brother leading her to a glade and offering her some grapes from a branch. But she becomes

caught in the branch and cannot and will not let go. “The tree had me,” she said. She refuses despite the imperatives of survival and of her brother to “let go.” And she ignores her brother’s literal demand that she be less of a girl and “weigh more.” She insists, instead, on the heart before the mind: 

My brother had been nearer right before. 
Ihadnot taken the first step in knowledge; 
Ihad not learned to let go with the hands, 
As still I have not learned to with the heart, 
Andhavenowish to with the heart – nor need, 
That I can see. The mind – is not the heart. 
Imay yetlive, as I know others live, 
To w ish in vain to let go with the mind – 
Of cares, at night, to sleep; but nothing tells me 
That I need to let go with the heart. 

We sense the same refusal “to let go with the heart” in the short lyric “The Rose Family,” despite the encroachments of “theories” and complexities of taxonomies of naming on the mind. The narrator laments the fact that science has shown that the rose, associated with love and with femininity, is quite literally descended from the apple and related to other fruit. The ghostly figure of the tree life haunts the poem. Knowledge tends to undermine the poetic fictions we would like to hold eternally in our minds: 

The rose is a rose, 
And was always a rose. 
But the theory now goes 
That the apple’s a rose, 
And the pear is, and so’s 
The plum, I suppose. 
The dear only knows 
What will next prove a rose. 
You, of course, are a rose – 
Butwere always a rose. 

The narrator lovingly bestows the essence of “rose” upon the one to whom he addresses the poem, even though he recognizes that the poets he has quoted on roses – Edmund Waller, Shakespeare, Gertrude Stein – no longer hold against the unruly facts about nature.

from "The Cambridge Introduction to Robert Frost - Robert Faggen"

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Of rapid reading and what we call “completion”

This excerpt, from an appearance before a community audience in Hanover, New Hampshire, on December 15, 1954, contains reminiscences of Robert Frost’s own undergraduate days at Dartmouth, as well as brief references to two Dartmouth friends, Henry C. Morrison, New Hampshire’s Superintendent of Public Instruction, 1904–17, and John Sloan Dickey, the President of the College, who was on the platform with Mr. Frost to introduce him on this occasion.

I GO BACK to memories in New Hampshire of a great stir there was—in, oh, the early part of this century—in the educational world among teachers under Henry Morrison (a Dartmouth man, then State Superintendent) about “rapid reading.” And I’m hearing the swan song of the rapid-reading people now, in the educational world.

I’ve just been seeing somebody who says we’re busy now disabusing everybody of the idea of rapid reading. Fifty years that makes, just about—a little less than fifty years—cycle like that. And I’ve lived through it all. I didn’t like it anytime, because I was never a rapid reader. I’m glad it’s over.

The fact is I’ve been reading slower and slower, and I had to say something on my side about it. And I said what I still would hold. (You say many good things in self-defense, and you needn’t be ashamed of ’em simply because they’re in self-defense, you know. People may say, “Oh, you just say that!” Well, you do “just say that.”)

And my defense was this: that anyone who is used to poetry can’t read any faster than he hears it. And if he doesn’t read much poetry, and forms the kind of skipping-eye sort of reading, that’s all right. I don’t know too much to say against that, though there’s something. But the great thing is that: that if you read, prose and verse, to the speed of the ear, you’ve got to be a slow reader.

And the custom of reading verse will establish a habit of slow reading, as if it were spoken, though you don’t move your lips. And of course poetry, and prose that is as good as poetry, must be read that way.

No one who ever writes good prose or verse but will write to the reading ear. That’s what makes the essayist. That’s what makes a person stand out among editorial writers, like E. B. White—with that to the ear.

One doesn’t have to labor that too much. But the thing I thought I’d speak of tonight was ideas of poetry, like that. I haven’t thought of that for quite a while. But every little while I think of something that arises from my interest in poetry.

That’s very sound. Some of them are sort of wickedly unsound. I like to be that way sometimes. I can’t help liking to be that way. There’s so little chance left for rebellion in the world—unless we have a great rebellion. Little rebellions: the liberties I take, not the liberty that’s given me; the liberties I take. […]

Just let me say, too, in passing, that it’s interesting to me about poetry and Dartmouth and New Hampshire and those first days of my interest in it all, early in my days of interest in it all. The next year after I ran away from here, I was in print in one of the better magazines. I was already started on this poetic career. And I’ve often told it around here—probably never as publicly as this—that the literary magazine that I sent my first poem out to, took my first poem out, and that it was a magazine I got acquainted with on the newspaper rack in the old library here.

I didn’t know where to send things. I didn’t go to summer schools where they teach people where to send their manuscripts. I didn’t know how to make a manuscript out. And, in fact, when the little check came for the poem and a little note asking me who I was and so on, they asked me to spell the name of the magazine correctly next time I wrote to them.

You can guess the way I may have misspelled it. (I still misspell words, I notice; people say I do.) The magazine was known as The Independent. You can guess what I did to that, maybe.

I can remember in that poem the first sense I had of the nicety of the words—that nobody else—that I couldn’t myself say differently. That is to say, I couldn’t translate it even into other English. It’s the same thing.

If I know anything about writing, or about reading either, it’s that if you have an idea so complete that it’s already in phrases and everything—partly in phrases—you are in danger of being a translator when you write. […]

If you had the idea and wrote it out in prose, it’s done. You can’t turn it into a poem. That would be a translation, from English into other English.

And that’s all very, very close to the truth. That’s being too fastidious, you think; being precious? No; no.

When I have an idea a long time before I get to writing, it can reach a point when I’m aware of its being too much done to be made into a poem. (So, I use it for a lecture!) It’s past the point; too well-done.

And that’s very, very true. A whole lot of my life I’ve been so kind of idly busy—around, you know—that many a time I wasn’t where I could have dealt with a poem as the idea came on, as it dawned on me. And it went on into something, resolved itself into something, to talk about.

And as I was saying to Mr. Dickey as we came, about our lives: What is the thing that you’ve lived on all the years? Ambition? Yes, ambition of a kind. To get anywhere? No, the ambition was to understand and to have things in poetry and in prose, phrases and certain things, to say back to the world—to say to the bomb, to say to the sphinx; anything from the sphinx to the bomb. Sass it; find something to say.

Understanding; not to have anything come up, in a card game or anything else, that you didn’t see what this comes to. […]

Now, just to finish this off a little, that’s where you come round to rapid reading. The only rapid reading is skipping what you don’t need to read. I can tell by the spine of some books that I can get along without it, and so can everybody else. And a few pages or a page here and there tell me.

The conscientious thoroughness that makes you think you’ve got to read everything to do it justice, and read every word of it, that’s stupid reading, not slow reading. […]

Well, I’ll leave that. But the poetry is the basis of it all. That’s what we mean. But prose and verse, though—(I’m not saying just rhyme and metre; but prose and verse.)—the essence of it is insight and meaning and purification; clarification, getting rid of the dross, getting down to what this really comes to, taking the bunk out of everything.

Let me say one more thing about poetry, though this doesn’t fit into the scheme so much. This occurred to me the other day. I was talking about George Washington, in a foreign country, and I was thinking that the thing about his life was that it contained its own determination, its own terminal. He knew where to stop.

Now, the beauty of everything that we call a “poem”—(In prose or verse, again; I want to be sure about that: prose or verse—or free verse, if they want it that way.)—the thing about a poem is that from the very first sentence in it there’s a logic beginning that’s going to close it at a certain place. It’s got its own closure.

And all the great men that I’ve thought about in the world, most of them were not like that. They went until somebody else stopped ’em—the way some men go. (You know, some of them go with the ladies that way. They go till they’re slapped down.)

The beautiful thing that you call “form”—(It’s a beautiful word in athletics, too.)—but as we use it in the arts, the thing is that it has in it the logic of its own termination, conclusion; knows its own stoppage.

And that’s what every little poem has. That’s what we call “completion.” And that doesn’t mean the whole universe, but it has its own little completion. […]

When I was here, back there, the first poems I wrote didn’t seem to want to close themselves that way. They seemed to end that way, and that was the trouble.

And I always ascribe my experience on a newspaper for a short time—(Very short; enough so that I can boast of being a newspaperman to newspapermen when I meet ’em, and I have to meet ’em pretty often now. You have to have something to say. I ought to bring that in.)—I learned to kind of end things.

I thought texture was everything, just a kind of poetic texture. Whether I made a poem out of it or not didn’t bother me. And yet I felt a little troubled. But I had to finish everything on the newspaper, had to run and get it and conclude it.

And I had a little column for a short time—what would be called a “column” now. I wrote paragraphs. They relegated me to that. I wasn’t a very good reporter on murders and things like that. And they had me doing a little column on the editorial page, before they called ’em “columns” at all.

And I wrote some little things, paragraphs, that were the beginning of the book of mine I call North of Boston, then—little narrative bits out of life that I got. And I learned to finish ’em off. They’re in prose, not in verse. This is the way the education came.

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from "Frost and the Ancient Muses - HELEN BACON / The Cambridge Companion to Robert Frost"

Up to now we have been considering the way ancient ideas of the Muses and their followers pervade the way Frost thinks of the art of poetry and himself as a poet in relation to poets past and present. I will only show how two of Frost’s poems – “Wild Grapes” and “One More Brevity” –rely for their “ulteriority” to a large extent on two extended individual ancient poems, one Greek and one Latin.

“Wild Grapes” was written at the request of Susan Hayes Ward, the poetry editor of The Independent magazine. Frost referred to her as “my first discoverer” because she was his first publisher (“My Butterfly,” 1894). From then on, she and her brother, who was editor-in-hief of The Independent, were friends and encouragers of the young Frost. Miss Ward asked Frost to write her a poem that would do for girls what “Birches” did for boys – a poem to be based on her own childhood experience. Her older brother had bent down a birch tree so that she could reach the wild grapes entangled on vines in its upper branches. When he released it, she was carried heavenward as she grasped the vines, only getting back to earth when her brother bent the tree back down again. Riding heavenward and back to earth on a birch tree is the central motif of “Birches” and “Wild Grapes.” In the case of the boy, both the ascent and the descent are achieved with conscious mastery; in the case of the little girl both are involuntary – “run off with by birch trees into space,” then rescued when her brother bends the tree back down. This same motif links “Wild Grapes” to Euripides’ Bacchae.

The climax of Bacchae is the messenger’s account of what happens when Pentheus, the young king of Thebes, disguises himself as a Maenad in order to spy on the Theban women who, against his orders, have followed Dionysus to revel as Maenads in the nearby mountains. Dionysus, disguised as his own priest, lures the deluded king who has repudiated him to climb to the top of a pine tree, which the god bends to earth, like the birch in “Wild Grapes,” and then gently releases so that Pentheus is carried up into the sky the better to witness what he imagines to be the orgies of the Theban women. When the women, who include Pentheus’ mother and aunts, catch sight of a male intruder in the top of the tree peering at their rituals in honor of Dionysus, they tear down the tree and bring him to earth, where in their ecstatic frenzy they fail to recognize him and literally tear him limb from limb.

Frost is working with a twofold motif –on the one hand, that of his own poem “Birches,” and on the other, that of Euripides’ play with all of its complex Dionysiac lore of Maenadism in the wilderness.

This complex of motifs seems to have had a special importance for Frost. Although “Wild Grapes” was first published in Harpers in 1920, and “Birches” in the Atlantic in 1915, it appears from his unpublished papers that he was contemplating in 1958 a collection of poems (never published) that went from “Birches” to “Wild Grapes” “with an inner logic that I don’t have to account for.” The motif of the tree bent down to earth and in some sense functioning as an intermediary between earth and heaven is common to Bacchae and both Frost’s poems. It is an aspect of one of his lifelong preoccupations with the relation of matter and spirit. Already in “Birches” his longing for a retreat toward heaven is tempered by the reminder that “Earth’s the right place for love.” In “Wild Grapes,” the little girl who is “run away with by birch trees into space” achieves a second birthday, is born again, when her brother brings her safely back to earth by bending down the birch tree. The same relation of matter and spirit is developed at length in “Kitty Hawk” –a poem that existed in several early forms, but was not published until 1962 in his final volume, In the Clearing. Frost chose an eighteen-line passage from it, in which he condenses his idea of the relation of matter and spirit, to affix to the dedication of the volume that contains the whole poem, as though to emphasize for his friends and for the public this lifelong concern.

As so often, when Frost appropriates foreign material, ancient or modern, he drastically modifies it. The little girl’s journey heavenward on a bentdown tree has an opposite outcome to that of Pentheus. Pentheus when he rides the tree to the sky is brought to earth by the outraged Theban women and dismembered. The little girl, as she travels to the sky with the birch tree, has to be 

come after like Eurydice 
And brought down safely from the upper regions 

–a second inversion, of course, because Orpheus failed in his attempt to bring back Eurydice from the nether regions. Eurydice failed to acquire “an extra life” as her little counterpart did; who, as a result of her adventure, can for the rest of her life celebrate two birthdays. She has become twice born, like Dionysus himself, whom his father, Zeus, had ripped from his mortal mother Semele’s womb as she was being consumed in flames at the sight of Zeus in his full glory. Zeus then sewed his premature offspring up in his own thigh and nurtured him there until he was ready for his second birth in the sky. The twice-born are children both of earth and sky. Dionysus was the offspring of a mortal mother, Semele, and her immortal celestial lover, Zeus; whereas Frost’s little heroine is both carried off to heaven on a birch branch and returned to earth. She is thereby born again, as she immediately realizes.

Pentheus, on the other hand, is only earth-orn. His ascent to heaven and back results not in second birth but in being torn apart by Maenads. He has rejected Dionysus and forbidden the attempt to introduce his cult in Thebes. He does not believe in miracles and thinks the claim that the son of Semele is also a son of Zeus is just a cover-up for an illegitimate affair, and, moreover, that the celebrations in the wilderness are some kind of sexual orgy that he has a lubricious desire to witness. Dionysus plays into this delusion, persuading him to put on female dress and follow the Theban Maenads to spy on them. Because of their initial cynicism about Dionysus, they too, like Pentheus, have fallen under his spell and have rushed off into the wilderness as Maenads. Both Pentheus and the Theban women, having self-righteously rejected the miraculous claims of the Dionysiac religion as physical impossibilities advanced by an effeminate charlatan, have lost their grip on reality. Pentheus’ delusion about his own identity is revealed in his complacent reply to the taunts of the disguised Dionysus, that he does not know what he is doing or who he is, “I am Pentheus, son of Agave, my father was Echion.” His blindness to the possibility of the miracle of second birth has led him to ignore the forces which, when denied, can lead to insanity. The women’s delusion about reality is equally great. Though his mother, Agave, and her two sisters, his aunts, are among them, they fail to recognize him in the treetop where Dionysus has lodged him, and so take him for a lion. They drag him to earth and destroy him. His mother then carries his head home in triumph believing it to be the head of a lion. Her father, King Kadmos, brings her back from her ecstatic state to everyday life by getting her to recognize first the actual sky, then by stages to name her husband, then her son, then to say what she holds in her hand; and only finally, to look at what it is. Frost suggests a similar staged return for the little girl when her brother bends down the tree, and lowers her to earth again from where she dangled among the grapes. Frost represents her as having been as far away from the ordinary world as Euripides’ Agave:

I don’t know much about the letting down; 
But once I felt ground with my stocking feet 
And the world came revolving back to me, 
I know I looked long at my curled up fingers, 
Before I straightened them and brushed the bark off. 

For Agave it is the sight of the sky that triggers her return to the real world; for the little girl it is the feel of earth under her feet that brings the world “revolving back” to her. Her experience, so different from Agave’s, is to have been “translated,” as she herself says.

The Dionysiac context of this experience is the heart of Frost’s tribute to Miss Ward. The birch tree that carries her off is an ivy-crowned Maenad. 

Wearing a thin headdress of pointed leaves, 
And heavy on her heavy hair behind, 
Against her neck, an ornament of grapes. 

Frost reflects Euripides here, who implies that the pine tree that Pentheus rides skyward is a Maenad. When he describes how Dionysus gently prevents the pine tree from shaking Pentheus off, he uses a Greek verb that means literally “shake the hair while throwing back the head.” This is the traditional gesture of a Maenad dancing in Dionysiac frenzy, very familiar in ancient literature, sculpture, and painting. Almost certainly Frost recognized its implications for the pine tree that carried Pentheus to his death, and adapted them to the birch tree that carried the little girl to hang among the grapes. Her brother’s description of her as having been 

run off with by birch trees into space. 

implies that she has been swept up and carried away by reveling Maenads. Her own perception of the grape-laden birch trees when her brother first shows them to her is also highly Dionysiac: 

Grapes, I knew grapes from having seen them last year. 
One bunch of them and there began to be 
Bunches all around me growing in white birches. 

Frost must have been familiar with accounts of such miraculous burgeonings. They are commonplace in ancient literature and art about Dionysus –signs of his magical power, as when the mast of the ship in which pirates are trying to abduct him turns into a grape-laden vine and the pirates into dolphins.

The many Dionysiac motifs that I have been pointing out indicate Frost’s very attentive reading of Bacchae, almost certainly in Greek, as his picking up the notion of the Maenad tree suggests. It is one of the signs of his deep involvement with ancient texts, his poet’s awareness of their nuances of language. It is a poet’s reading of a fellow poet –a reading that some scholars might not agree with. In my opinion it comes close to the heart of the play. Many further themes of Euripides that are built into “Wild Grapes” will appear in the discussion that follows.

But first, what do the cult of Dionysus and maenadism have to do with a tribute to Susan Ward? The cult of Dionysus, as represented by Euripides, is a celebration of freedom and wildness, most prominently by women, but open to men, too. Dionysus’ female worshippers temporarily abandon their traditional female roles in the domestic interiors of the house and rush off in groups to celebrate him with ecstatic dances in the wilderness – the traditional province of men only. There they behave in culturally forbidden ways – clothed in fawnskins, wreathed in snakes and sprays of ivy, oak, or pine, carrying sacred wands and torches, reveling barefoot in the mountains, and forcibly attacking profaners of their rites. They revel as do Artemis and the nymphs and other woodland divinities –all virgins who resist male domination. They also briefly enjoy the freedom of the wilderness. The loss of identity that they experience in their ecstatic self-abandonment leads to a kind of second birth. The little girl of “Wild Grapes” also abandons herself. Carried away by birches, she holds on by both hands with her eyes shut against the sun and her ears deaf to her brother’s advice, and throws back her head in the traditional Maenad gesture (the same gesture of throwing back the head that Dionysus stops the pine tree from making, as it carries Pentheus skyward. She feels when she returns to herself that she has acquired a second birthday. She is “a little boyish girl” who, like a Maenad, had repudiated conventional female restraints and escaped temporarily into the wilderness. Frost has turned Susan Ward’s childhood anecdote into a characteristically inverted version of Bacchae, casting Susan Ward as a Maenad because of her untraditional role (for a female of the 1890s) as a single woman, the poetry editor of The Independent, functioning in the traditional male world outside the home.

Poetry, which is Susan Ward’s sphere of activity, is also part of Dionysus’ function. Dionysus and Apollo as patrons of music (poetry in the largest sense) share a cult on Mount Parnassus, as already described in connection with “Directive.” Within that cult Apollo represents harmony or order, and Dionysus, wildness or instinct. These are the two necessary bases of poetry, which Frost describes in his projected (1958) preface to the never-published volume of poems that were to go from “Birches” to “Wild Grapes” –that is, “footbeats for the meter, and heartbeats for the rhythm” (see the discussion in “The Figure a Poem Makes,” CPPP, 776). The little girl’s transport hanging on by both hands among the grapes in the birch tree leads to her having two birthdays. Her brother points out that she has a special qualification beyond the ordinary grapes: 

“Now you know how it feels,” my brother said, 
“To be a bunch of fox-grapes . . . 
“Only you have the advantage of the grapes 
In one way: you have one more stem to cling by, 
And promise more resistance to the picker.” 

Unlike an ordinary grape, she has “one more stem to cling by.” Though her brother is joking, she interprets the experience as a sign that 

I had not taken the first step in knowledge; 
I had not learned to let go with the hands, 
As still I have not learned to with the heart. 
I have no wish to with the heart – nor need, 
That I can see. The mind is not the heart. 

. . . but nothing tells me 
That I need learn to let go with the heart. 

She seems to understand “the one more stem to cling by” as the instinctive knowledge of the heart. Her brother insists on her lack of knowledge: 

“Don’t you know anything, you girl, let go!” 

His knowledge is of the mind. The same knowledge with which he mastered the trees in “Birches” and rescued her in “Wild Grapes” is what she had yet to learn, as she ignored his cries to let go, and clung instinctively with 

the baby grip 
Acquired ancestrally in just such trees 
[referring to the wild practices of prehistoric times] 
I held on uncomplainingly for life. 

The knowledge of the heart belongs to the sphere of wildness and primitive instinct –the sphere of Dionysus. This knowledge Susan Ward acquired during her adventure among the grapes and has not let go since. As her brother said, she had “one more stem to cling by.”

This Dionysiac experience, going back to her early childhood, is a necessary part of Susan Ward’s connection with poetry, but we must not forget what Frost (in that preface to the proposed 1958 collection) referred to as “footbeats for the meter,” the sphere of Apollo –the world of order and harmony which is the other prerequisite of poetry. It is with this sphere, the knowing with the mind when to let go, that the little girl must still learn to deal. The comparison of her rescue to that of Eurydice implicitly links the brother with Apollo, the father of Orpheus. Orpheus, as already pointed out, failed because he succumbed to passion, whereas the brother succeeded because he kept his head. This Apollonian knowledge involves conscious self-control – good judgment about the way things work. It is not to be confused with the seeming common sense of earth-born Pentheus and the Theban Maenads that causes them to reject the miraculous claims of Dionysus and to imagine that they can master him. They are therefore carried away by powers they have already rejected. This contrast between true enlightenment and earthbound common sense that leaves no room for wildness and instinct is a central theme of Bacchae. Frost’s earliest poetry reflects the Dionysiac/ Apollonian theme, which in his 1958 unpublished preface he referred to as heartbeats and footbeats.

It is part of Frost’s extraordinary ability that he sees the underlying human reality that links Susan Ward’s childhood experience (at least as he imagines it) to the complex Dionysiac themes in Euripides’ Bacchae. That discernment lifts the episode from a charming personal anecdote to a universal experience, turning it also into a tribute to Susan Ward’s special gifts. We have often observed how Frost can expand from the personal and particular the stage on which his poems are enacted to take in great stretches of space and time and human experience.

“The artist must value himself,” Frost said, “as he snatches a thing from some previous order in time and space into a new order with not so much as a ligature clinging to it of the old place where it was organic.” In another context, he again asserts: “In the little poem it ought to be – even in a short one you know – that you can put your finger on five or six items that come from different quarters of the universe . . . I summon something I almost didn’t know I had. I have command.”6 These two related descriptions of the way he combines superficially unconnected material to produce a kind of ulteriority which draws it all together come late in his career.

In “Wild Grapes” (a relatively early poem, 1920), the links with Bacchae extend beyond Susan Ward’s personal adventure to include some implications of the ancient cult. Her allusion to bunches of grapes growing round her in the birches 

The way they grew round Leaf the Lucky’s German 

unexpectedly transfers the scene to a different time and place –the discovery of grapes in Vineland by Leif Erikson’s German foster father Tyrker. As recounted in the Greenland Saga, he has the distinction of discovering the grapes growing in the New World and introducing them to his Norse companions, together with wine making, which he had learned in his native Germany. Euripides’ Dionysus brought the culture of the vine and the beliefs of his cult to Greece from the ancient civilized East. Tyrker is a New World Dionysus. He introduces grapes with viticulture and all that goes with it – from the well-established vineyards of the Rhine to the wilder, more westerly worlds. Leaf, who is Tyrker’s foster son, in turn brought back grapes and the culture of the vine to Greenland. He too had a Dionysiac role, and like Dionysus, can claim a second birth.

These are some, by no means all, of the “items that come from different quarters of the universe” that Frost has put his finger on in order to present Susan Ward’s childhood adventure in the context of a Dionysiac experience. Dionysiac impulses go back to the Stone Age. They involve not just the world of Euripides but its diffusion westward through Europe to the cultures of Greenland and the Americas.