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44. The Need of Being Versed In Country Things
The house had gone to bring again
To the midnight sky a sunset glow.
Now the chimney was all of the house that stood,
Like a pistil after the petals go.
pistil : 암술
The barn opposed across the way,
That would have joined the house in flame
Had it been the will of the wind, was left
To bear forsaken the place's name.
No more it opened with all one end
For teams that came by the stony road
To drum on the floor with scurrying hoofs
And brush the mow with the summer load.
mow : 건초
The birds that came to it through the air
At broken windows flew out and in,
Their murmur more like the sigh we sigh
From too much dwelling on what has been.
Yet for them the lilac renewed its leaf,
And the aged elm, though touched with fire;
And the dry pump flung up an awkward arm;
And the fence post carried a strand of wire.
For them there was really nothing sad.
But though they rejoiced in the nest they kept,
One had to be versed in country things
Not to believe the phoebes wept.
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시골의 사물에 정통할 필요
그 집은 사라지고 한 밤중 하늘에
다시 한 번 저녁놀 빛을 일으켰다.
이제 그 집은 굴뚝만 남으니,
꽃잎 떨어진 뒤의 암술 같았다.
길 건너 헛간이 마주하고 있었다.
바람의 의지가 있었더라면
집과 함께 화염에 휩쓸렸을 것인데,
남아서 그 곳의 이름을 외로이 지켰다.
더 이상 헛간은 한 목적으로만 열리지 않으니,
전에는 돌투성이 길을 지나 바쁜 발굽으로 쿵쿵
헛간 바닥을 치면서 여름 짐으로 건초저장소를
갈무리하는 수레 말들만을 위해 문을 열었었다.
하늘을 통해 헛간에 당도한 새들은
깨진 창문들을 들락날락 날아다녔다.
지저귐 소리가 큰 한숨으로 들리는 것은
사라진 것을 과도하게 생각하기 때문이다.
그러나 그들에게 라일락은 잎을 새로 피웠고,
불에 그슬렸지만 늙은 느릅나무도 잎을 피웠다.
그리고 물 마른 펌프는 어색한 팔을 불쑥 뻗치었고,
울타리 말뚝은 철사 한 가닥을 머리에 이고 있었다.
새들에게는 사실 슬픈 것이 없었다.
새들은 자기들이 차지한 둥우리를 기뻐했지만,
딱새들이 울지 않았다고 믿고자 한다면
우리는 시골의 사물에 정통해야 한다.
-신재실 옮김-
단상(斷想): 1923년 출판된 시집 『뉴햄프셔』(New Hampshire)에서 마치 발문(epilogue)처럼 맨 끝에 배열된 이 시는 자연과 문화의 변증법적 순환에 대한 시인의 인식이 복잡하게 표현된다. 당시 뉴잉글랜드 농촌에서 흔히 목격되는 버려진 폐가나 불타버린 집은 프로스트가 피부로 경험한 문화의 표상(emblem)이었고 그의 시에 자주 등장한다.
화자는 사라진 집 앞에서 북받치는 슬픔을 애써 누그러뜨린다. 우선 집의 소실을 일상적 리듬의 하나로 돌림으로써 슬픔을 반감시킨다. 한밤중 불타는 집의 화염을 "저녁놀 빛"과 동일시함은 어색한 비유로 보이지만, 이 또한 슬픔을 완화하려는 시인의 장난기 섞인 장치로 이해된다. 하루의 종결과 한 집의 종결이 똑같이 화려한 화염을 수반한다는 인식은 꺼지기 직전 반짝 불꽃을 발하는 촛불의 생명력을 상기시킨다. 오늘의 저녁놀은 내일 아침을 희망케 한다.
문화와 자연은 팽창과 수축의 리듬을 공유한다. 또 다른 비유, 즉 “굴뚝”과 “꽃잎 떨어진 뒤의 암술”의 비교도 마찬가지다. “이제 그 집은 굴뚝만 남으니”란 표현에 허탈과 슬픔이 배어 있지만, 굴뚝과 암술의 비교로 다시 슬픔을 억제한다. 수정된 암술이 다시 필 꽃을 암시하듯, 암술 같은 굴뚝의 이미지는 재건축의 가능성을 배제하지 않는다. 인간의 구조물과 자연은 서로 다른 궤적을 순환하는 것이 분명하지만, 둘 다 팽창과 수축, 생과 사의 기본 구조를 공유하고 있음을 생각할 때, 꽃과 집 모두 있던 자리에 그대로 다시 피고 다시 설 가능성도 있다.
바람의 의지가 없었던지 헛간만은 용케 불에 타지 않았다. 바람이 헛간만 남겨둔 이유는 무엇일까? 남아서 그곳의 이름을 외로이 지키고 있는 데서 그 이유가 발견된다. “그곳의 이름”이란 집 주인의 명패, 그 집의 문화적 주체, 어쩌면 가부장적 문화의 남성 주체를 의미하는 것이 아닐까? 이렇게 본다면 이는 자연과 인간의 대결에서 인간이 위축의 궤에, 그리고 자연이 팽창의 궤에 있는 시점, 그리고 어쩌면 남성 중심의 가부장적 문화가 한 획을 긋고 여성이 문화의 주체로 대신 들어서는 시대가 왔음을 타고 남은 굴뚝이 말없이 증언하는 것이 아닐까? 이제 굴뚝은 거세된 남근으로서 꽃을 수정(受精)시키고 꽃잎을 떨어뜨리는 것으로 그 기능을 다한 것이고, 대신 수정된 암술이 미래를 기약하고 있다는 해석이 가능할 것이다. 이를 바라보는 화자의 심경은 쓸쓸하고 우울한 것이 분명하다.
“헛간”은 여성의 섹슈얼리티(sexuality) 상징으로 해석할 수 있다. 집이 불타기 전 헛간은 건초를 수레에 실어 쿵쿵 헛간 바닥을 두들기는 말들을 위해 “한 목적으로만”문을 열었다. 여기서“한 목적으로만”은 남성중심의 문화에서 평가받는 여성의 지조를 함의하고, 출입문은 여성의 성기를 의미한다고 볼 수 있다. 그러나 집이 불타버린 지금 헛간은 말들에게 문을 열어줄 수도 없고, 그럴 필요도 없게 되었다. 여성의 섹슈얼리티는 반드시 말이 상징하는 남근이나 문화를 위해서만 존재하는 것은 아니다. 헛간은 한 때 남근의 힘으로 상징되는 문화에게 문을 열어주었지만, 이제는 자연이 그 헛간을 차지할 차례다. 여성성은 문화와 대립하는 자연과 상통한다.
이제 헛간은 말이 아닌 새에게 창문을 연다. 새는 헛간의 닫힌 문이 아니라 깨진 유리창을 통해 들락거리며, 무엇인가 속삭인다. 타버린 집에 애써 감정을 누그러뜨리려던 화자의 슬픔은 오히려 고조되고, 속삭이는 새의 소리가 더욱 깊은 한숨소리로 들린다.
하지만 때마침 잎을 피우는 라일락과 느릅나무, 헛간에 새로 얻은 둥지를 기뻐하는 딱새, 이들은 결코 타버린 집을 슬퍼하지 않는다. 화자는 이런 사실을 발견하고 어떤 깨달음에 다다른다. 감상의 허위는 금물이다. 자연과 문화는 별개의 질서에서 순환한다.
-신재실 씀-
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Robert Frost and the Challenge of Darwin(2001) - Robert Faggen, pp. 69~70
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William H. Pritchard: On "The Need of Being Versed in Country Things"
"The Need of Being Versed in Country Things" tells of desolation, of a farmhouse which burned leaving only its barn, into and out of which the birds now fly through broken windows, "Their murmur more like the sigh we sigh / From too much dwelling on what has been." Yet, the poet corrects himself, the murmur is only like it, not the same as it. Birds do not grieve over what the human imagination finds desolate and sad; instead, nature seems to renew itself for them, lilacs, dry pump and fence post are still there, still carrying on in the way things do. In the final stanza Frost insists that
For them there was really nothing sad. But though they rejoiced in the nest they kept, One had to be versed in country things Not to believe the phoebes wept.
The diminished thing, so often celebrated in Mountain Interval, can be viewed here in the way the phoebes persist in their housekeeping, and to recognize this persistence for what it is one needs to be versed in country things. It is a nice stroke that Frost does not end the poem with the positive security, potentially complacent, of being so versed, as if the speaker were a wise know-it-all. Rather, the last line reaches out to what one would believe if one were deluded. That possibility is strongly there in the stanza's first line -- "For them there was really nothing sad" -- where the "really" acts as a check on the equally strong impulse (and a traditional poetic one all the way back through pastoral poetry) to believe that the birds are responsively grieving at the spectacle of human loss. Thus, in the last line, "Not to believe" doesn't cancel out the impulse to believe. After all, the poem's last word is "wept."
From Frost: A Literary Life Reconsidered. Copyright © 1984 by William Pritchard.
Frank Lentricchia: On "The Need of Being Versed in Country Things"
I am claiming Frost as a central modern--as central as Wallace Stevens, though few would be ready to grant that much--and "The Need of Being Versed in Country Things" as a centrally modern poem; one of his subtlest treatments of the problem of personal salvation through the redemptive act of imagination.
The poem opens with the evocation of a familiar symbol and with an attempt by the speaker to suppress a pervasive funereal attitude toward his circumstance:
The house had gone to bring again To the midnight sky a sunset glow. Now the chimney was all of the house that stood, Like a pistil after the petals go.
The barn opposed across the way, That would have joined the house in flame Had it been the will of the wind, was left To bear forsaken the place's name.
The effort to blend the emotions that attend the witnessing of a house's destruction with what one is likely to feel while watching a lovely sunset cannot be expected to succeed when the one attempting such a union of disparates is a figure in a poem by Robert Frost.
In the middle two stanzas the self in the poem indulges his memory of things past--specifically of the "teams that came by the stony road / To drum on the floor with scurrying hoofs." His feelings appear to become excessive, for the moment, particularly in the lines about the barn that remains and the birds that live in it:
The birds that came to it through the air At broken windows flew out and in, Their murmur more like a sigh we sigh From too much dwelling on what has been.
The speaker saves himself from sentimentalism by taking back his incipient romantic predication of interdependence of the human and natural realms.
For them there was really nothing sad. But though they rejoiced in the nest they kept, One had to be versed in country things Not to believe the phoebes wept.
But if skeptical and self-ironic treatment of romantic attitudes is what makes Frost's poem centrally modern, then perhaps we need not read far beyond certain well-enough known Victorian and fin-de-siècle expressions of similar attitudes toward man's relationship to nature.
There truly is a solid individual talent at work in "The Need of Being Versed in Country Things," but the whole performance is brought off with such deceptive ease that we tend to miss the display of virtuosity. Frost's tack in this poem is to manipulate (rather quietly) perspectives on nature and time. His major differentiation is between kinds of memory: it is only the human mind, he suggests, that is capable of the enormous leap backwards in time. The curse of human memory is that it alone is capable of recalling a past that can never return, that has been destroyed utterly and irrevocably by the fire. "Bird-memory" has little grasp of a human past. Human beings flash across the scene of bird-awareness but (blessedly) the grooves of impression are rarely made: only the larger features of a scene and the broad patterns of seasonal change are retained. The phoebes belong to a separate order of reality and "for them the lilac renewed its leaf."
Returning again to the poem's opening stanza, the lines "The house had gone to bring again / To the midnight sky a sunset glow" evoke the image of the dramatic persona as one who is consciously assuming something other than his human perspective, for it is from the perspective of the bird's awareness that the sudden redness in the night sky can be correlated to a sunset glow. Contrarily, in the penultimate stanza, the line "The dry pump flung up an awkward arm," though given from the perspective of the phoebe is actually the speaker's. In the first instance the speaker's attempt is to mitigate the facts of destruction by viewing them as a natural happening; while in the second instance he attempts to blend human and bird perspectives on nature by attributing to the bird humanizing powers. Both are acts of sympathetic imagination which may be modestly valued as acts which lead the self into the fictive world where no ontological discoveries are made, but where the precious state of serenity is restored, where enclosure is regained and the burden of the human awareness of temporality is lifted:
Now the chimney was all of the house that stood, Like a pistil after the petals go.
The self in the poem attempts to link human artifice and nature in a poetic figure. His comparison of the chimney with the pistil of a flower "after the petals go" raises the image of the rebirth of the artificial human enclosure: the house will come back even as the flowers shall bloom again. But such expectations cannot be satisfied, and one versed in country things knows that very well. The simile compels ironic consciousness: an awareness of the image of the destroyed house as transmuted in the figure and a simultaneous awareness of the impossible-to-traverse gulf between human artifice and nature's flowers. Destroyed houses regenerate themselves only in the illusions projected in the poet's language, not in reality; the value (and disvalue, as we saw earlier) of enclosures is guaranteed by an act of the mind or not at all, and this constitutes knowledge of poetic things.
From Robert Frost: Modern Poetics and the Landscapes of Self. Copyright © 1975 by Duke University Press.
George F. Bagby: On "The Need of Being Versed in Country Things"
"The Need of Being Versed in Country Things," serves a function roughly analogous to that of "Design"; it reads a natural lesson the point of which is the potential uncertainty of natural lessons. The poem presents an interesting contrast to Promethean pieces like "Wild Grapes" and "There Are Roughly Zones." In each of those poems, an apparent natural lesson suggesting the limitations on human desire is cast aside in favor of a transcendent lesson reasserting the primacy of aspiration. "The Need of Being Versed in Country Things," on the contrary, deduces first an apparent lesson which implies the centrality of human concerns, and then a corrective lesson which insists that the heart's desires are not so central after all.
The first descriptive portion of the poem (lines 1-14) paints a somber natural emblem: a burned-out house, no longer occupied by humans, and a deserted barn now inhabited only by birds, which "At broken windows flew out and in." The preliminary, mistaken lesson of this scene, implicitly drawn in the next two lines, sees natural melancholy at the passing of human presence: the birds' "murmur" seems "more like the sigh we sigh / From too much dwelling on what has been." Such excessive "dwelling on" or living in the burned-out shell of the past would obviously be an un- Thoreauvian lesson, however; indeed, as the first poem of "The Hill Wife" group reminds us, it represents an essentially neurotic view of natural solicitude.
The poem, consequently, traces a second movement in its last two stanzas. There, as the poem's perspective broadens, the scene, though emptied of human activity, is perceived as no less hospitable to the phoebes, to life in the broad sense, than it has always been. In these lines personification, ironically, not only assures us that the birds do not weep for the loss of human companions ("they rejoiced in the nest they kept"—always a double-edged verb in Frost). It also suggests that the nonhuman world—not only the "aged" elm, but even the inanimate pump which "flung up an awkward arm" and fence post which "carried a strand of wire" to provide convenient perches—manifests just the sort of solicitude for the phoebes which the phoebes do not manifest for the departed humans. Thus even a scene of human desolation, perceived in a sufficiently broad natural context, is an emblem of continuing vitality (and nonhuman community). That true lesson has been hinted at as early as the poem's opening quatrain, where the submerged metaphor suggests a Thoreauvian kind of springtime renewal out of apparent autumnal death. "The house had, gone to bring" a glow to the sky, but the chimney is left standing "Like a pistil after the petals go"—like the reproductive center of the faded flower, bearing the seed of another generation.
As its structure and title imply, however, "The Need of Being Versed in Country Things" is not primarily about natural resilience and regeneration; it uses that lesson chiefly to illustrate a larger concern: the dangers of a too narrowly human perspective-not unlike that parodied in "The Most of It." The poem does not suggest that natural wisdom is inaccessible to the human observer (the true lesson, after all, waits to be read in the scene); but it does chasten what might be called the Blakean tendencies of the imagination and warn us of the dangers (not to mention the emptiness) of finding only our immediate selves in the natural text. The legitimate use of personification here is to represent something like solicitude in the natural world, not for us, but for itself.
From Frost and the Book of Nature. Copyright © 1993 by The University of Tennessee Press.
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“Need of Being Versed in Country Things, The” (1923)
House and home figure prominently in Frost, as do
chimneys. Here the house is on fire when it brings
“[t]o the midnight sky a sunset glow.” And the
chimney is all that remains after the fire, similar to
the chimney in “Ghost House.” “Ghost House” was
written in 1901 and was inspired by “an old cellar
hole with a broken chimney standing in it—what
remained of a nearby farmhouse after a fire had
destroyed it in 1867” (Parini, 91). The remains
were near one of Frost’s farms in Derry, New
Hampshire. The image here might have been
inspired by the same experience, except it is cast as
a reminder of a flower stem that has lost all its petals;
the chimney is the remaining pistil.
The wind went in the opposite direction of the
barn, saving it from the fire. But the barn has been
abandoned since the house burned down. There are
no longer teams of livestock kept there. The birds
still come through broken windows, but they sigh
about what is gone and their chirping is not cheerful,
“[t]heir murmur more like the sigh we sigh /
From too much dwelling on what has been,” the
speaker says. For the birds there is still something of
home, however. The lilacs are still there, the elm
scarred by its touch of fire, the dry water pump, the
fence post. These objects all remain for a bird to
alight upon. But the speaker muses, “One had to be
versed in country things / Not to believe the phoebes
wept.” An outsider would believe the birds are
weeping, but a country person knows better. Robert
Faggen finds that “education or uneducation of
human emotions is the focus” of the poem (69).
To be versed in country things is to, if not anticipate,
at least expect happenstance. Those not
versed in country things think that nature cares
about human beings and other living things. Those
who are versed know about the indifference of
nature, that it does not respond to human affairs.
To be versed in country things is not to know how
to mow a field or lead a team of cattle, as city folk
might suppose. It is deeper than that. Those who
think nature is concerned with human affairs are
not at all versed in country things.
The expression sounds like a shallow country
saying, but it is more serious than that. It appears to
be playful, but it is too dark. Faggen describes the
title as sounding “like a prelude to a piece of moral
wisdom, but its folksy sound belies the cruelty of
what is to come. ‘Country Things’ echoes Hamlet’s
question to Ophelia about indecent ‘country matters’;
Frost lures his readers to consider nature’s
wisdom only to find that the joke is on them” (69).
The poem is not about milking a cow but about
knowing that for nature “there was really nothing
sad” in the burning down of a house. Faggen further
notes that “[s]adness is our emotion, and the
true need of being versed in country things is to
recognize the uselessness of that emotion and to
avoid attributing it to other creatures” (70).
Demonstrating the pun on the word “verse” as
well as Frost’s own knowledge of country things,
Robert Pack writes, “One must understand the
indifference of nature and country things, and be
versed in nature’s separateness to write (in verse) a
believable nature poem” (157).
The poem was first published in the December
1920 issue of Harper’s Magazine and was later collected
in West-Running Brook. See COUNTRY VERSUS
CITY and HOME, THEME OF.
FURTHER READING
Bagby, George F. Frost and the Book of Nature. Knoxville:
University of Tennessee Press, 1993, 132–133.
Elder, John. “The Poetry of Experience,” New Literary
History 30, no. 3 (Summer 1999): 649–659.
Faggen, Robert. Robert Frost and the Challenge of Darwin.
Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,
1997, 69–70.
Pack, Robert. Belief and Uncertainty in the Poetry of
Robert Frost. Hanover, N.H.: Middlebury College
Press, 2003.
Parini, Jay. Robert Frost: A Life. New York: Holt, 1999.
Wolosky, Shira. “The Need of Being Versed: Robert
Frost and the Limits of Rhetoric,” Essays in Literature
18, no. 1 (Spring 1991): 76–92.
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