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39. Build Soil—A Political Pastoral
Why, Tityrus! But you’ve forgotten me.
I’m Meliboeus the potato man,
The one you had the talk with, you remember,
Here on this very campus years ago.
Hard times have struck me and I’m on the move.
I’ve had to give my interval farm up
For interest, and I’ve bought a mountain farm
For nothing down, all-out-doors of a place,
All woods and pasture only fit for sheep.
But sheep is what I’m going into next.
I’m done forever with potato crops
At thirty cents a bushel. Give me sheep.
I know wool’s down to seven cents a pound.
But I don’t calculate to sell my wool.
I didn’t my potatoes. I consumed them.
I’ll dress up in sheep’s clothing and eat sheep.
The Muse takes care of you. You live by writing
Your poems on a farm and call that farming.
Oh, I don’t blame you. I say take life easy.
I should myself, only I don’t know how.
But have some pity on us who have to work.
Why don’t you use your talents as a writer
To advertise our farms to city buyers,
Or else write something to improve food prices.
Get in a poem toward the next election.
Oh, Meliboeus, I have half a mind
To take a writing hand in politics.
Before now poetry has taken notice
Of wars, and what are wars but politics
Transformed from chronic to acute and bloody?
I may be wrong, but, Tityrus, to me
The times seem revolutionary bad.
The question is whether they’ve reached a depth
Of desperation that would warrant poetry’s
Leaving love’s alternations, joy and grief,
The weather’s alternations, summer and winter,
Our age-long theme, for the uncertainty
Of judging who is a contemporary liar—
Who in particular, when all alike
Get called as much in clashes of ambition.
Life may be tragically bad, and I
Make bold to sing it so, but do I dare
Name names and tell you who by name is wicked?
Whittier’s luck With Skipper Ireson awes me.
Many men’s luck with Greatest Washington
(Who sat for Stuart’s portrait, but who sat
Equally for the nation’s Constitution).
I prefer to sing safely in the realm
Of types, composite and imagined people:
To affirm there is such a thing as evil
Personified, but ask to be excused
From saying on a jury ‘Here’s the guilty.’
clash : 충돌
I doubt if you’re convinced the times are bad.
I keep my eye on Congress, Meliboeus.
They’re in the best position of us all
To know if anything is very wrong
I mean they could be trusted to give the alarm
If earth were thought about to change its axis,
Or a star coming to dilate the sun.
As long as lightly all their live-long sessions,
Like a yard full of school boys out at recess
Before their plays and games were organized.
They yelling mix tag, hide-and-seek, hop-scotch,
And leap frog in each other’s way—all’s well
Let newspapers profess to fear the worst!
Nothing’s portentous, I am reassured
portentous : 불길한
dilate : 넓어지다; 부풀다, 팽창하다
mix tag : 술래잡기
hop-scotch : 사방치기, 비석놀이
leap frog : 말뚝박기
portentous : 전조의; 중대한; 불길한, 흉조의.
Is socialism needed, do you think?
We have it now. For socialism is
An element in any government.
There’s no such thing as socialism pure—
Except as an abstraction of the mind.
There’s only democratic socialism
Monarchic socialism—oligarchic,
The last being what they seem to have in Russia.
You often get it most in monarchy,
Least in democracy. In practice, pure,
I don’t know what it would be. No one knows
I have no doubt like all the loves when
Philosophized together into one—
One sickness of the body and the soul.
Thank God our practice holds the loves apart
Beyond embarrassing self-consciousness
Where natural friends are met, where dogs are kept,
Where women pray with priests. There is no love.
There’s only love of men and women, love
Of children, love of friends, of men, of God,
Divine love, human love, parental love,
Roughly discriminated for the rough.
roughly discriminated for the rough : 대강의 사람을 위해 대충 구분된
Poetry, itself once more, is back in love.
Pardon the analogy, my Meliboeus,
For sweeping me away. Let’s see, where was I?
But don’t you think more should be socialized
Than is?
What should you mean by socialized?
Made good for everyone—things like inventions—
Made so we all should get the good of them—
All, not just great exploiting businesses.
We sometimes only get the bad of them.
In your sense of the word ambition has
Been socialized—the first propensity
To be attempted. Greed may well come next.
But the worst one of all to leave uncurbed,
Unsocialized, is ingenuity:
Which for no sordid self-aggrandizement,
For nothing but its own blind satisfaction
(In this it is as much like hate as love)
Works in the dark as much against as for us.
Even while we talk some chemist at Columbia
Is stealthily contriving wool from jute
That when let loose upon the grazing world
Will put ten thousand farmers out of sheep.
Everyone asks for freedom for himself,
The man free love, the business man free trade,
The writer and talker free speech and free press.
Political ambition has been taught,
By being punished back, it is not free:
It must at some point gracefully refrain.
Greed has been taught a little abnegation
And shall be more before we’re done with it.
It is just fool enough to think itself
Self-taught. But our brute snarling and lashing taught it.
None shall be as ambitious as he can.
None should be as ingenious as he could,
Not if I had my say. Bounds should be set
To ingenuity for being so cruel
In bringing change unheralded on the unready.
sordid : 야비한, 더러운
aggrandizement : 확대, 증대, 강화
jute : 황마(의 섬유)
grazing : 목초지의, 방목
abnegation : 자제, 포기
I elect you to put the curb on it.
Were I dictator, I’ll tell you what I’d do.
What should you do?
I’d let things take their course
And then I’d claim the credit for the outcome.
You’d make a sort of safety-first dictator.
Don’t let the things I say against myself
Betray you into taking sides against me,
Or it might get you into trouble with me.
I’m not afraid to prophesy the future,
And be judged by the outcome, Meliboeus.
Listen and I will take my dearest risk.
We’re always too much out or too much in.
At present from a cosmical dilation
We’re so much out that the odds are against
Our ever getting inside in again.
But inside in is where we’ve got to get.
My friends all know I’m interpersonal.
But long before I’m interpersonal
Away ’way down inside I’m personal.
Just so before we’re international
We’re national and act as nationals.
The colors are kept unmixed on the palette,
Or better on dish plates all around the room,
So the effect when they are mixed on canvas
May seem almost exclusively designed
Some minds are so confounded intermental
They remind me of pictures on a palette:
‘Look at what happened. Surely some God pinxit.
Come look at my significant mud pie.’
It’s hard to tell which is the worse abhorrence
Whether it’s persons pied or nations pied.
Don’t let me seem to say the exchange, the encounter,
May not be the important thing at last.
It well may be We meet—I don’t say when—
But must bring to the meeting the maturest,
The longest-saved-up, raciest, localest
We have strength of reserve in us to bring.
pinxit : 그리다
Tityrus, sometimes I’m perplexed myself
To find the good of commerce. Why should I
Have to sell you my apples and buy yours?
It can’t be just to give the robber a chance
To catch them and take toll of them in transit.
Too mean a thought to get much comfort out of.
I figure that like any bandying
Of words or toys, it ministers to health.
It very likely quickens and refines us.
bandy : 주고받다
minister : 에 도움이 되다
To market ’tis our destiny to go.
But much as in the end we bring for sale there
There is still more we never bring or should bring;
More that should be kept back—the soil for instance
In my opinion,—though we both know poets
Who fall all over each other to bring soil
And even subsoil and hardpan to market.
To sell the hay off, let alone the soil,
Is an unpardonable sin in farming
The moral is, make a late start to market
Let me preach to you, will you, Meliboeus?
Preach on. I thought you were already preaching.
But preach and see if I can tell the difference.
Needless to say to you, my argument
Is not to lure the city to the country.
Let those possess the land and only those,
Who love it with a love so strong and stupid
That they may be abused and taken advantage of
And made fun of by business, law, and art,
They still hang on. That so much of the earth’s
Unoccupied need not make us uneasy.
We don’t pretend to complete occupancy.
The world’s one globe, human society
Another softer globe that slightly flattened
Rests on the world, and clinging slowly rolls.
We have our own round shape to keep unbroken.
The world’s size has no more to do with us
Than has the universe’s. We are balls,
We are round from the same source of roundness.
We are both round because the mind is round,
Because all reasoning is in a circle.
At least that’s why the universe is round
If what you’re preaching is a line of conduct,
Just what am I supposed to do about it?
Reason in circles?
No, refuse to be
Seduced back to the land by any claim
The land may seem to have on man to use it.
Let none assume to till the land but farmers.
I only speak to you as one of them.
You shall go to your run-out mountain farm,
Poor castaway of commerce, and so live
That none shall ever see you come to market—
Not for a long long time. Plant, breed, produce,
But what you raise or grow, why feed it out,
Eat it or plow it under where it stands
To build the soil. For what is more accursed
Than an impoverished soil pale and metallic?
What cries more to our kind for sympathy?
I’ll make a compact with you, Meliboeus,
To match you deed for deed and plan for plan.
Friends crowd around me with their five-year plans
That Soviet Russia has made fashionable.
You come to me and I’ll unfold to you
A five-year plan I call so, not because
It takes ten years or so to carry out,
Rather because it took five years at least
To think it out. Come close, let us conspire—
In self-restraint, if in restraint of trade.
You will go to your run-out mountain farm
And do what I command you. I take care
To command only what you meant to do
Anyway. That is my style of dictator.
Build soil. Turn the farm in upon itself
Until it can contain itself no more,
But sweating-full, drips wine and oil a little.
I will go to my run-out social mind
And be as unsocial with it as I can.
The thought I have, and my first impulse is
To take to market—I will turn it under.
The thought from that thought—I will turn it under
And so on to the limit of my nature
We are too much out, and if we won’t draw in
We shall be driven in I was brought up
A state-rights free-trade Democrat. What’s that?
An inconsistency. The state shall be
Laws to itself, it seems, and yet have no
Control of what it sells or what it buys.
Suppose someone comes near me who in rate
Of speech and thinking is so much my better
I am imposed on, silenced and discouraged.
Do I submit to being supplied by him
As the more economical producer,
More wonderful, more beautiful producer?
No. I unostentatiously move off
Far enough for my thought-flow to resume.
Thought product and food product are to me
Nothing compared to the producing of them.
I sent you once a song with the refrain:
Let me be the one
To do what is done—
My share at least lest I be empty-idle.
Keep off each other and keep each other off.
You see the beauty of my proposal is
It needn’t wait on general revolution.
I bid you to a one-man revolution—
The only revolution that is coming.
We’re too unseparate out among each other—
With goods to sell and notions to impart.
A youngster comes to me with half a quatrain
To ask me if I think it worth the pains
Of working out the rest, the other half.
I am brought guaranteed young prattle poems
Made publicly in school, above suspicion
Of plagiarism and help of cheating parents.
We congregate embracing from distrust
As much as love, and too close in to strike
And be so very striking. Steal away
The song says. Steal away and stay away.
Don’t join too many gangs. Join few if any.
Join the United States and join the family—
But not much in between unless a college,
Is it a bargain, Shepherd Meliboeus?
quatrain : 4행시
prattle : 수다
plagiarism : 표절
Probably, but you’re far too fast and strong
For my mind to keep working in your presence
I can tell better after I get home,
Better a month from now when cutting posts
Or mending fence it all comes back to me
What I was thinking when you interrupted
My life-train logic. I agree with you
We’re too unseparate. And going home
From company means coming to our senses.
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지력을 높이자
地力)을 높이자
저, 타이티루스! 당신은 나를 잊으셨군요.
나는 고구마 농부, 멜리보이오스입니다.
기억하겠지만, 몇 년 전 바로 이 캠퍼스에서,
당신과 대화한 적이 있는 농부입니다.
불황의 직격탄을 맞아 지금은 떠돌이 신세입니다.
나는 이자를 감당 못하고 골짜기 사이의 농장을
포기해야 했지요. 대신 현금 지불은 전혀 않고
산전(山田)을 샀는데, 인가(人家)라곤 없고,
숲과 풀밭뿐이어서 양(羊)이나 키울 수 있지요.
그래서 이젠 양을 키워볼까 합니다.
1부셸에 겨우 30센트인 고구마 농사는
영원히 끝장냈습니다. 양을 키워볼래요.
양모(羊毛)도 1파운드에 7센트로 하락했습니다.
하지만 양모를 팔려는 계산은 안 하니까요.
고구마도 팔지 않았거든요. 내가 소비했지요.
내가 양모 옷을 빼입고 양고기를 먹을 것입니다.
시신(詩神)이 당신을 돌보시죠. 단신은 글을 써서 살잖아요.
당신은 농장에 대한 시를 쓰고 농사(農事) 짓는다고 하죠.
오, 당신을 힐난하는 건 아니고요. 부디 마음 편하게 사세요.
나 자신도 그래야겠지만, 그 방법을 모르겠어요.
하지만 일해야 먹고사는 우리네를 좀 불쌍히 여기세요.
당신이 가지신 작가로서의 재능을 활용하여서
도시 구매자들에게 우리 농장들을 선전해주고,
아니면 무엇인가를 써서 식료품 가격을 높여주세요.
다음 선거 즈음에 시 한편을 전해주시지요.
오, 멜리보이오스, 글을 써서 정치에 관여할
생각이 전혀 없는 것은 아니에요.
이전(以前)에도 시가 전쟁에 주목했고,
전쟁이란 게 정치가 만성병(慢性病)에서 급성병(急性病)
그리고 유혈(流血)로 변형되는 게 아니고 무엇이겠어요?
타이티루스, 내가 잘못 행각하는지 모르나,
내가 보기에는 경기가 유례없이 나쁩니다.
시가 우리의 아주 오랜 주제(主題)인
사랑의 변형들, 기쁨과 슬픔,
그리고 날씨의 변형들, 여름과 겨울을 버리고,
그 대신 당대의 거짓말쟁이가 누구인지―
야심이 충돌하는 가운데 모두 거짓말쟁이라 불리는데,
특별히 누가 거짓말쟁이인지 심판하는 불확실한 주제가
정당화 될 만큼 우리가 깊은 절망에 빠졌는지가 문제지요.
삶이 비극적으로 나쁜지도 모르겠고, 나 역시
감히 나쁘다고 지저귀고는 있지만, 내가 감히
이름을 대며 누가 사악한지 거론해야겠어요?
아이어슨 선장을 거론한 휘티어의 행운―
위대한 워싱턴과 마주한 많은 사람들의 행운이 경탄스러워요
(워싱턴은 스튜어트가 초상화를 그리게 했을 뿐 아니라,
똑같이 국가가 헌법을 그리도록 한 분이죠).
나는 유형(類型)적 인물들, 상상의 복합적 인물들의
영역에서 안전하게 지저귀는 게 더 좋아요.
의인화(擬人化)된 악이란 게 있다는 것을
확인하되, 배심원으로서“이건 유죄”라고
말하지 않아도 되기를 요청하는 셈이지요.
당신은 세월이 나쁘다고 확신하는지 모르겠군요.
멜리보이오스, 나는 의회를 주시(注視)합니다.
무엇이든 아주 나쁜지 어떤지 아는데 의원들이
다른 우리 모두보다 더 좋은 위치에 있습니다.
지축(地軸)이 바뀔 것이라고 예측되거나,
어떤 별이 태양을 팽창시키러 온다면,
믿건대 경보를 발령할 것은 의원들이라는 말입니다.
놀이와 게임들이 조직(組織)되기 전,
휴식시간에 운동장에 나온 학생들처럼,
긴 회기 내내 들떠서, 의원들이 제각각 고함치며
술래잡기 하고, 숨바꼭질하고, 사방치기하고,
등 짚고 뛰어넘기를 하는 한―만사가 좋습니다.
신문이 세월이 최악일 거라고 공언하도록 놔두세요.
내가 자신하건대, 불길한 징조는 전혀 없어요.
당신이 생각하기에, 사회주의가 필요한가요?
지금도 사회주의 요소가 있어요. 어느 정부건
사회주의는 정부의 한 요소(要素)이니까요.
순수 사회주의 같은 것은 없습니다―
그건 추상적 개념으로만 존재하지요.
민주 사회주의, 군주 사회주의,
과두(寡頭) 사회주의 밖에 없어요―
러시아에는 과두 사회주의가 있는 것 같고요.
군주제에서 사회주의가 가장 흔하고,
민주제에서 가장 적어요. 순수 사회주의가, 실제,
어떤 것이 될지는 모르겠어요. 아무도 모르지요.
모든 사랑이 철학적으로 하나로 결합되면―
육체와 영혼이 하나의 질병에 걸리는 것인데,
그와 같은 것이 순수 사회주의라고 확신합니다.
당연한 친구들은 어디서 영접하고, 개들은 어디서 기르고,
여자들은 어디서 목사와 함께 기도하는지,
이런 난처한 자의식(自意識)의 문제를 넘어서, 실제 우리는
고맙게도 사랑을 쪼개지요. 사랑이 없어요.
단지 남자와 여자의 사랑, 어린이들의 사랑,
친구들, 사람들, 신의 사랑이 있을 뿐이니,
대강의 사람들을 위해 대강 구분(區分)된 사랑,
즉 신의 사랑, 인간의 사람, 부모의 사랑이 있지요.
시가, 제자리로, 사랑으로 되돌아왔다는 말이군요.
멜리보이오스, 내 생각을 단숨에 밝히려고
비유를 써서 미안하군요. 어쨌건. 내가 어디까지 말했죠?
하지만 당신은 더 많은 것이 사회화돼야 된다고
생각하지 않으세요?
사회화된다는 게 무슨 뜻인가요?
모든 사람에게 이롭게 하는 거죠―예컨대 발명 같은 것들을―
그렇게 해서 우리 모두가 발명의 이득을 얻게 하는 거죠―
대기업만 이득을 탈취할 것이 아니라, 모두가 봐야지요.
우리는 때때로 발명들로 인해 해(害)를 입지요.
당신이 뜻하는 의미에서의 야심은 사회화되었는데―
야심은 그럴만한 첫 번째 성향이죠. 다음은 탐욕이겠죠.
그러나 재갈을 물리지 않고, 사회화하지 않고,
놔두면 가장 나쁜 것은 바로 창의력이겠죠.
창의력은 천하지 않은 자아의 확대를 위하고,
오로지 자체의 맹목적 만족을 위하기 때문에
(이 점에서 그것은 사랑이나 증오와 유사하죠),
어둠속에서 일하면 우리에게 이로우면서 해롭거든요.
우리가 이야기하는 중에도 콜롬비아의 어느 화학자는
은밀히 황마(黃麻)에서 양털을 개발하고 있는데
그게 양털 시장에 풀리는 날에는 그 양털이
만 명의 농무를 양치기에서 쫓아낼 것이에요.
모두가 자기를 위한 자유를 요구하고 있으니,
남자는 사랑의 자유, 기업인은 무역의 자유,
작가와 말꾼은 언론과 출판의 자유를 요구하죠.
정치적 야심은, 처벌로 억제함으로써,
자유로운 것이 아닌 것으로 교육되었기에,
어느 단계에서는 그것을 우아하게 자제해야죠.
탐욕은 약간의 자제가 교육되었으니,
조금 더 교육 받으면 극복되겠지요.
그게 저절로 교육된다는 생각은 정말 어리석어요.
우리가 사납게 고함치고 꾸짖어서 가르친 덕분이죠.
아무도 자기 능력껏 야심적이면 안돼요.
아무도 자기 능력껏 창의적이어도 안돼요.
내 견해로는 안돼요. 준비되지 않은 사람들에게
예기치 않은 변화를 가져옴에 있어서 아주 잔인한
창의력에 범위를 설정해야 할 거예요.
그것에 재갈을 물리는 직책에 당신을 선출합니다.
내가 독재자라면, 내가 무엇을 할지 당신에게 말하죠.
무엇을 하겠습니까?
나는 흘러가는 대로 놔뒀다가
그 결과에 대한 공적만 요구할 것입니다.
당신은 말하자면 안전제일의 독재자가 되겠군요.
내가 나 자신에 반(反)하여 말하는 것들로 인하여
당신이 나를 배신하고 내 반대편에 서거나,
아니면 나와 불화하는 일이 없도록 합시다.
멜리보이오스, 나는 주저 없이 미래를 예언하고
그 결과로 심판을 받을 것입니다.
위험을 무릅쓰고 말하겠으니 들어보세요.
우리는 항상 너무 많이 나가거나 들어갑니다.
현재는 우주가 팽창하여서
우리가 매우 많이 나갔기 때문에
다시 안으로 들어갈 가능성이 거의 없습니다.
그러나 우리가 취할 것은 안으로 들어가는 겁니다.
친구들은 모두 내가 대인적(對人的)이라고 알지만
나는 내가 대인적이기에 훨씬 앞서,
내심(內心) 깊숙이 개인적(個人的)입니다.
마찬가지로 우리가 국제적(國際的)이기 전에,
우리는 국가적(國家的)이고 국민으로 행동합니다.
물감들은 팔레트에 섞이지 않고 보관되거나,
방을 빙 두른 따로 접시들에 보관하는 게 더 좋은데,
그것들이 캔버스에 혼합될 때 그 효과가
거의 독점적으로 디자인된 것으로 보일 것이거든요.
어떤 마음들은 놀랍게도 상호적(相互的)이어서
그들은 팔레트에 빚은 그림들을 연상시키니―
“무엇이 생겼는지 보라. 분명 신의 그림이다. 어서
의미심장한 내 진흙 파이를 보라”고 말하는 듯해요.
파이가 된 개인들과 파이가 된 국가들 중
어느 것이 더 혐오스러운지 말하기는 어려워요.
내가 교환(交換), 조우(遭遇)가 결국 중요하지
않다고 말하는 것으로 생각지는 마세요.
그게 중요할지 모릅니다. 서로 만나야죠―때가 되면―
그러나 가져올 목적으로 힘껏 비축한 것 가운데서도
가장 성숙하고, 가장 오래 모으고, 가장 활기차고,
가장 지역적인 것을 그 만남에 가져와야 해요.
타이티루스, 상업(商業)의 이점을 알고는
나 자신이 때때로 헷갈립니다. 내 사과는
당신에게 팔고 당신의 것을 살 이유가 뭐겠어요?
운송 중의 사과를 덮쳐서 가로챌 기회를
강도에게 준다니 그것은 말도 안 됩니다.
너무 비열한 생각이어서 심사가 불편해요.
말이나 장난감을 서로 주고받는 것처럼,
건강에 도움이 되는 상업을 그려봅니다.
그럼 활기차고 세련된 우리가 될 거에요.
시장에 나가는 것이 우리의 운명이에요.
결국 우리가 팔려고 그곳에 가져오는 것이 많지만,
결코 가져오지 않거나 가져와야 할 것도 더 많습니다.
시장에 내지 않고 은밀히 보관할 것이 더 많습니다.
나의 견해로, 흙을 예로 들면, 흙과 심지어 하층토
그리고 미개간 토지까지 시장으로 가져오도록
서로를 지나치게 치켜세우는 시인들이 있잖습니까.
흙은 말할 것도 없고, 건초를 몽땅 파는 것도
농사에서는 용서받지 못할 죄(罪)입니다.
시장으로 늦게 출발하라는 것이 교훈입니다.
멜리보이오스, 당신에게 설교해도 괜찮습니까?
어서 하세요. 당신은 이미 설교하고 있었습니다.
설교를 하시고 내가 차이를 구별할 수 있는지 보세요.
당신에게 말할 필요도 없이, 나의 주장은
도시를 시골로 끌어들이지 말라는 것입니다.
아주 강하고 어리석은 사랑으로 땅을 사랑해서
기업, 법, 그리고 예술에 의해 남용되고,
이용당하고, 웃음거리가 되는 사람들,
그런 사람들만 땅을 소유하게 해야지요.
그들은 아직 땅을 떠나지 않고 서성입니다.
공한지(空閑地)가 많다고 걱정할 필요는 없습니다.
완전한 점유를 욕심내는 것은 아니니까요.
세계는 하나의 구체(球體)이고, 인간 사회는
약간 평지가 되어 그 세계에 누운 채, 꼭 부여잡고
천천히 굴러가는, 더 부드러운 또 다른 구체지요.
우리 자신의 둥근 형상을 그대로 유지해야 합니다.
우주의 크기와 마찬가지로 세계의 크기는
우리와 별 상관이 없습니다. 우리는 공이고,
우리는 같은 구심(球心)의 둥근 공입니다.
우리 두 사람이 다 둥근 것은 마음이 둥글고,
모든 판단이 하나의 원 안에 있기 때문입니다.
적어도 그것이 우주가 둥근 이유입니다.
당신이 행동노선을 설교하는 것이라면,
내가 그것에 대해 어떻게 해야 되겠습니까?
원 안에서 판단하라는 겁니까?
천만에, 토지는 이용할 자에게
그 소유권이 있다는 주장에 현혹되어서
그 토지로 돌아오는 것을 거부하세요.
농부 이외에 누구든 땅을 경작하면 안 됩니다.
나는 한 농부로서의 당신에게 말할 뿐입니다.
당신은 당신의 척박한 산전(山田)으로 가세요.
상업의 불쌍한 낙오자로서, 당신은 이제 아무도
당신이 시장에 나오는 것을 보지 않도록 사세요―
오래고, 오랜 동안 그렇게 하세요. 심고, 가꾸고, 생산하세요.
그러나 당신이 사육하거나 기른 것을, 저, 싹 소비하세요.
그것을 먹거나 그 자리에 두고 갈아엎어서,
지력(地力)을 높이세요. 힘 빠진 흙, 창백하고 금속성인
흙보다 더 저주 받은 것이 무엇이겠어요?
우리 농부들이 그런 흙보다 더 불쌍히 여길 것이 무엇이겠어요?
멜리보이오스, 행동은 행동, 계획은 계획으로 당신에게
어울리는 것을 찾아줄 계약을 내가 당신과 맺을 것이오.
소비에트 러시아가 유행시킨 5개년 계획을 들고
친구들이 내 주변에 몰려옵니다.
당신이 내게 온다면 내가 5개년 계획을 하나 펼치겠소.
내가 그렇게 부르는 것은 실천에 10년 정도
걸리기 때문이 아니라, 오히려 그것을 고안(考案)하는데
적어도 5년이 결렸기 때문입니다. 우리 머리를 맞대봅시다―
상업의 제약에서, 우리 자제력을 발휘합시다.
당신은 당신의 척박한 산전(山田)으로 가서
내가 명령하는 일을 하세요. 나는 어쨌든
당신이 해야 할 일만 명령하도록 조심하겠소.
그것이 나의 독재자 스타일입니다. 지력을 높입시다.
농토를 갈아엎고 또 갈아엎으면 마침내 땀방울 얼룩지고,
약간의 기름과 포도주를 뚝뚝 떨어뜨리는 흙이 될 것이오.
나는 나의 척박한 사회적 마음으로 가서
그것을 가급적 거칠게 다룰 것이오.
내가 가진 생각 말이오, 그리고 나의 첫 충동은
출시(出市)하는 것이니―우선 그것을 갈아엎을 것이오.
그 생각에서 나온 생각―그것을 또 갈아엎을 것이오.
내 천성의 한계까지 계속 갈아엎을 것이오.
우리는 너무 나왔고, 스스로 들어가지 않으면
끌려 들어갈 것입니다. 나는 주권(州權)과 자유무역의
민주당원으로 자랐습니다. 그런데 그게 무엇입니까?
하나의 모순입니다. 주(州)가 그 자체의 법이라야 하는데,
팔거나 사는 것에 대한 통제권을 가지고 있지 않습니다.
말과 사고의 수준에서 나보다 훨씬 우수한 분이
내 가까이에 온다고 가정하는 경우
나는 주눅 들고, 침묵하고, 낙담할 것입니다.
더 경제적인 생산자로서,
더 훌륭하고, 더 아름다운 생산자로서,
그가 공급하는 것에 내가 굴복할까요?
천만에. 나는 허세부리지 않고 멀찌감치
물러나서 내 생각의 흐름을 되찾을 겁니다.
내가 보기에 생산된 사상(思想)과 생산된 식량은
생산의 과정에 비하면 아무것도 아닙니다.
언젠가 내가 당신에게 보냈던 시의 후렴입니다.
나로 하여금 이룩된 것을
이룩한 자가 되게 하소서―
무위도식이 안 되게, 최소한 내 몫은 내가 해야죠.
서로 침범하지 말고 서로 접근하지 못하게 합시다.
그러니까 내 제안의 아름다운 점은 그게
일반적 혁명을 기다릴 필요가 없다는 거지요.
나는 당신에게 1인 혁명을 권유합니다―
다가오는 유일한 혁명이 1인 혁명입니다.
우리는 팔 상품과 나눠줄 개념들을 가지고―
서로 뒤엉켜 너무 특색 없이 나왔어요.
한 젊은이가 4행 연구(聯句) 시의 반절을 들고
내게 와서 나머지 반절을 완성하는 수고를
할 만한 가치가 있다고 생각하는지 묻습니다.
나는 표절 혐의와 속이는 부모의 도움 없이,
학교에서 공개적으로 지은 것으로 보증 받은
젊은이들의 습작(習作) 시들을 받습니다.
우리는 사랑 못지않게 불신으로 모여서
서로 포옹하는데, 너무 붙어서 공격할 수도 없고
눈에 띄는 것도 없어요. 흑인 영가는 말합니다,
‘슬쩍 사라져라, 슬쩍 사라져 그곳에 머물러라.’
너무 많은 패거리에 가입하지 마세요. 소수만 가입하세요,
미합중국에 가입하고 가족에 가입하세요―
그리고 대학이 아니면 그 중간에는 소수만 가입하세요.
양치기 농부 멜리보이오스, 흥정치곤 싸구려 흥정이죠?
그럴 겁니다만, 당신은 너무 빠르고 강해서
당신 면전에서는 내 마음이 계속 움직일 수 없습니다.
내가 귀가한 뒤, 지금부터 한 달 뒤쯤 말뚝을 자르거나
울타리를 고치면서 당신이 내 인생열차의 논리에
끼어들었을 때 내가 생각하고 있던 것이 모두
내게 돌아온다면 더 잘 말할 수 있을 겁니다.
내가 당신과 동의하는 것은
우리가 너무 서로 붙어있다는 겁니다. 패거리에서
내 집으로 돌아오는 것이 의식을 회복하는 길입니다.
-신재실 옮김-
단상(斷想): 1932년 6월 미국 민주․공화 양당의 전당대회가 있었고, 그 해 대통령 선거에서 민주당의 프랭클린 루스벨트가 32대 미국 대통령으로 당선되었다. “A political pastoral”(정치적 전원시)란 부제(副題)가 말하듯, 이 시는 1930년대 대공황의 정치적 상황이 그 배경이다. 1932년 6월 민주․공화 양당의 전당대회가 열리기 전인 5월 31일 콜롬비아 대학(Columbia University)에서 낭독된 바 있는 시로서 루스벨트의 뉴딜(New Deal)정책이 태동하던 무렵의 사회적 화두가 무엇이었는지 짐작할 수 있게 한다.
뉴딜(New Deal)정책은 Relief(구제), Recovery(부흥), Reform(개혁)을 슬로건으로, 기업의 도산, 1500만 명에 달하는 실업자, 무한정 쌓이는 농산물 문제 등의 처리에서 자유방임의 시장 원리를 수정하여, 연방정부의 기능과 대통령의 권한을 확대하고 대규모의 토목공사를 일으켜 실업자 문제를 해결하는 한편 광범위한 사회복지정책을 도모하였으니, 자유방임주의(自由放任主義)에 바탕을 둔 전통적인 자본주의가 정부의 계획과 통제, 집산주의 등 사회주의(socialism) 요소들의 도입으로 수정된 것이었다.
이 시는 베르길리우스의 『田園詩)』1편에서 빌려온 농부시인 타이티로스와 그의 친구 멜리보이오스 농부와의 대화이다. 대화의 초점은 “사회주의가 필요한가?”에 모아진다. 불황으로 고구마 농사를 포기하고 떠돌이 신세가 된 멜리보이오스는 위기의 농촌에 필요한 것은 자본의 사회화와 이득의 공유라고 주장한다. "모든 사람에게 이롭게 하는 거죠―예컨대 발명 같은 것들을―/ 그렇게 해서 우리 모두가 발명의 이득을 얻게 하는 거죠―/ 대기업만 이득을 탈취할 것이 아니라, 모두가 봐야지요."
시인 타이티로스는 사회주의는 모든 정부의 한 요소이며, 정부의 통제는 항상 필요하다는 것을 인정하면서도, 좋은 상품을 출시할 수 있는 지력의 증진이 선행(先行)되어야 한다고 주장한다. 그는 출시에 앞선 자기성찰(自己省察)의 중요성을 이렇게 강조한다. "당신은 당신의 척박한 산전(山田)으로 가서/ 내가 명령하는 일을 하세요. 나는 어쨌든/ 당신이 해야 할 일만 명령하도록 조심하겠소./ 그것이 나의 독재자 스타일입니다. 지력을 높입시다./ 농토를 갈아엎고 또 갈아엎으면 마침내 땀방울 얼룩지고,/ 약간의 기름과 포도주를 뚝뚝 떨어뜨리는 흙이 될 것이오./ 나는 나의 척박한 사회적 마음으로 가서/ 그것을 가급적 거칠게 다룰 것이오./ 내가 가진 생각 말이오, 그리고 나의 첫 충동은/ 출시(出市)하는 것이나―우선 생각을 갈아엎을 것이오./ 그 생각에서 나온 생각―그것을 또 갈아엎을 것이오./ 내 천성의 한계까지 계속 갈아엎을 것이오./ 우리는 너무 나왔고, 스스로 들어가지 않으면/ 끌려 들어갈 것입니다."
농부가 첫 수확을 갈아엎어 지력(地力)을 높임으로써 결국 더 좋은 농산물을 출시하는 것과 똑같이 지식인들도 그들의 첫 생각들을 갈아엎음으로써 사고의 지력을 높임으로써 결국 더 좋은 지적 상품을 출시할 수 있을 것이다. 우리는 결국 시장에서 만나서 “대인적interpersonal" 관계를 가져야겠지만, 그에 앞서 우선 ”개인적personal" 능력을 제고하고, 시장에 나올 때는 “힘껏 비축한 것 가운데서도/ 가장 성숙하고, 가장 오래 모으고, 가장 활기차고,/ 가장 지역적인 것을” 가져와야 한다고 타이티로스는 말한다. 비판의 대상은 시장에 가는 것이 아니라 아직 출시 준비가 안 된 산물을 들고 가는 것 즉 이익만 생각하고 시장에 내는 것이다.
타이티로스는 사회주의적 조우(遭遇)와 나눔의 필요성을 인정하면서도, 자칫 자립능력과 자립의지, 개성의 상실을 큰 위험으로 본다. 이런 견해에서 지력을 높이자는 그의 중심적 은유가 생산되었다. 타이티로스는 시험장으로서의 시장의 기능을 옹호하면서 농촌과 도시는 각자의 특징을 유지해야 한다고 주장한다. 인간의 발달과 진보를 위한 최고의 모델은 도시와 농촌이 각각의 지력을 높이는 것이기 때문이다. 「지력(地力)을 높이자」는 개인적, 예술적, 정치적, 그리고 특히 지적 발달에 모두 통할 수 있는 은유가 된다. 타이티로스는 창의적 아이디어들은 준비되지 않은 사람들에게 예기치 않은 변화를 가져옴에 있어서 아주 잔인할 수 있기 때문에 주의 깊게 검토할 것을 요구한다. 또한 창의력의 사회화 또는 공유, 자주(自主)와 자립(自立)의 약화로 이어질 위험성이 있다. 예컨대, 제자 시인이 스승의 창의적 아이디어나 기법의 맹종에 그친다면, 언제 시인다운 시인이 될 수 있겠는가? 그러기에 농부는 우선 그의 “척박한 산전(山田)으로 가서 … 농토를 갈아엎고 또 갈아엎어” 지력을 높여야 하고, 시인은 그의 “척박한 사회적 마음으로 가서” 생각을 갈아엎고 또 갈아엎어서 지적 지력을 높여야한다.
사실 「지력(地力)을 높이자」는 1930년대 공황기의 농촌 문제에 대한 정치적 해결책이 되기에는 부족하다. 생산력을 증진하기 위해 지력을 높이는 것은 농부, 시인, 또는 국가에 값진 목적이지만, 그것이 당장 국민이나 국가의 경제를 회복시키는 방법이 될 수는 없을 것이다. 중요한 것은 이런 생활방식이 낳는 인물이다. 독립적인 정신과 인간적 존엄의 중요성은 21세기에도 쇠퇴하지 않았다. 사실 이런 특질들의 필요는 오히려 증가했을지 모른다. 고도로 문명화된 생활방법을 견딜 만하게 만드는데 필요한 것이 바로 이런 특질들이기 때문이다. 개인은, 과거와 마찬가지로, 모든 사회의 기초이다, 개성을 소유한 사람들이 발휘하는 힘은 정부나 권력이 강요할 수 있는 것이 아니다. 실로 모든 것이 데이터화 되고, 조직화된 사회는 무의식적으로 인간을 조종 가능한 로봇으로 만들 위험이 크기 때문에 개인의 역량 강화는 그 만큼 더 중요하다. 우리는 대인적(interpersonal)이기에 앞서 개인적(personal이고, 국제적(international)이기에 앞서 국가적(national)이어야 한다.
-신재실 씀-
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Frost liked to create schemas—an aspect of his love of form; the process was part of his method as a thinker, and this thinking eventually settled into lines of poetry. Increasingly his poems dealt with social themes, and these often went over well with audiences, since they were easy to follow and often amusing. “Departmental,” for example, was written in the thirties and remained a favorite at readings. The public liked it, though it was not among Frost’s better work. On the other hand, some of his discursive, political poems—“Build Soil,” written in 1932, is a good example of this—brought a discursive element into American poetry that had long been missing.
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His poem was “Build Soil.” To utter aloud this somewhat reactionary poem in this setting at the beginning of the Great Depression took courage. It contained none of the quasi-socialist sympathies current among intellectuals and artists in the United States at the moment. On the contrary, Frost explicitly makes an argument against socialism, or any form of group thinking. The poem is, for me, one of Frost’s most successful forays into the realm of political verse. As a format, he chose a well-known pastoral mode, writing in superficial imitation of Virgil’s “First Eclogue,” which takes the shape of a dialogue between two stock figures: the farmer (Tityrus) and the farmer-poet (Meliboeus). Lest anyone miss the Virgilian echo, Frost adopts their names, though he has them talking in distinctly twentieth-century terms:
Why, Tityrus! But you’ve forgotten me.
I’m Meliboeus the potato man,
The one you had the talk with, you remember,
Here on this very campus years ago.
Hard times have struck me and I’m on the move.
Meliboeus has had to “give [his] interval farm up”—an interval being a New England dialect term for land in a valley (as in the title of Frost’s Mountain Interval, where the term carries a double meaning, suggesting a pause in a journey as well as a dip in the landscape). He has taken to stony, uphill pastureland, where he can raise sheep. His attitude toward the farmer-poet is ambivalent: “You live by writing / Your poems on a farm and call that farming.” Frost’s blank verse is fluent and wonderfully simple. As W. H. Auden said of his style, “The music is always that of the speaking voice, quiet and sensible, and I cannot think of any modern poet, except Cavafy, who uses language more simply.” 15
Tityrus (who represents Frost) confesses to being tempted to turn his poetic gifts to politics: “I have half a mind / To take a writing hand in politics.” It has, he notes, been done well before. He admits to thinking that the “times seem revolutionary bad.”
Meliboeus wonders how bad the times have become, and whether or not they warrant the poet leaving off the traditional themes of poetry for politics—themes such as “love’s alternations, joy and grief, / The weather’s alternations, summer and winter.” Then the talk turns to socialism as a possible solution to the crisis, and Tityrus suggests calmly that “socialism is / An element in any government.” But he is against the more general use of “love” as a concept in these political arrangements, as in love of the people. “There is no love” of this general kind, he argues: “There’s only love of men and women, love / Of children, love of friends, of men, of God.”
The poem meanders through an ingenious, utterly Frostian examination of the concept of freedom. “Everyone asks freedom for himself,” Frost muses, “The man free love, the business man free trade, / The writer and talker free speech and free press.” Everything, in Frost’s view, comes down to self-interest. The argument moves quickly into the concept of greed, which is intimately related to self-interest:
Greed has been taught a little abnegation
And shall be more before we’re done with it.
It is just fool enough to think itself
Self-taught. But our brute snarling and lashing taught it.
None shall be as ambitious as he can.
None should be as ingenious as he could.
That is, our “brute snarling and lashing” in the marketplace have brought on greed, which is bad because it ultimately limits ambition and ingenuity—an argument that is highly original and runs against the typical conservative grain.
Indeed, Frost is hardly a typical conservative; he is not, in fact, a conservative in the contemporary sense. He is an agrarian freethinker, a democrat with a small “d,” with isolationist and libertarian tendencies. “My friends all know I’m interpersonal,” Tityrus says. But long before “I’m interpersonal / Away ’way down inside I’m personal.” The poem goes on to talk about national identities:
Just so before we’re international
We’re national and act as nationals.
The colors are kept unmixed on the palette,
Or better on dish plates all around the room,
So the effect when they are mixed on canvas
May seem almost exclusively designed.
Some minds are so confounded intermental
They remind me of pictures on a palette.
Frost had used similar language in his talk to the Amherst Alumni Council, “Education by Poetry,” in which he spoke of the internationalists:
I should want to say to anyone like that: “Look! First I want to be a person. And I want you to be a person, and then we can be as interpersonal as you please.… But, first, you have got to have the personality. First of all, you have got to have the nations and then they can be as international as they please with each other.”
I should like to use another metaphor on them. I want my palette, if I am a painter, I want my palette on my thumb or on my chair, all clean, pure, separate colors. Then I will do the mixing on the canvas. The canvas is where the work of art is, where we make the conquest. But we want the nations all separate, pure, distinct, things as separate as we can make them; and then in our thoughts, in our arts, and so on, we can do what we please about it.
In this period Frost often moved from prose to poetry, formulating his ideas in lectures and letters, then putting them into verse. In fact, much of the central thinking that went into “Build Soil” is found in a letter to Louis Untermeyer that was sent from South Shaftsbury on May 13, 1931. It was headed by a motto from Tennyson’s “The Lotos-Eaters”: “Courage he said and pointed toward the land ” (Frost’s italics). The letter was written to encourage Untermeyer, who had just purchased a farm in the Adirondacks:
The land be your strength and refuge. But at the same time I say this so consonant with your own sentiments of the moment, let me utter a word of warning against the land as an affectation. What determines the population of the world is not at all the amount of tillable land it affords: but it is something in the nature of the people themselves that limits the size of the globulate mass they are socially capable of. There is always, there will always be, a lot, many lots of land left out of the system. I dedicate these lots to the stray souls who from incohesiveness feel rarely the need of the forum for their thoughts of the market for their wares and produce. They raise a crop of rye, we’ll say. To them it is green manure. They plow it under. They raise a crop of endives in their cellar. They eat it themselves. That is they turn it under. They have an idea. Instead of rushing into print with it, they turn it under to enrich the soil. Out of that idea they have another idea. Still they turn that under. What they finally venture doubtfully to publication with is an idea of an idea of an idea.
There is Frostian brilliance here, an example of the way he can extend metaphor further and further into thought. The essential point of “Build Soil” concerns plowing under the first crops, of letting the land go fallow, of not stripping the soil but enriching it. It makes good sense in both farming and writing, and Frost was perpetually drawn to the figurative alliance between these two arts. Thus, Tityrus condemns those poets who rush into print, just as he chastises those farmers who rush to market:
More that should be kept back—the soil for instance
In my opinion,—though we both know poets
Who fall all over each other to bring soil
And even subsoil and hardpan to market.
To sell the hay off, let alone the soil,
Is an unpardonable sin in farming.
The moral is, make a late start to market.
The poem builds to a fine frenzy of oracular didacticism as Tityrus gives his best advice to Meliboeus:
You shall go to your run-out mountain farm,
Poor castaway of commerce, and so live
That none shall ever see you come to market—
Not for a long long time. Plant, breed, produce,
But what you raise or grow, why feed it out,
Eat it or plow it under where it stands
To build the soil. For what is more accursed
Than an impoverished soil, pale and metallic?
What cries more to our kind for sympathy?
“Build Soil” is an Emersonian plea for self-reliance, a quirky caution against excessive reliance on the market economy, a warning about the rush to internationalism, or socialism, or any “ism.” It is the lone striker’s grand testament. As Frost’s Tityrus says at the end:
Steal away and stay away.
Don’t join too many gangs. Join few if any.
Join the United States and join the family—
But not much in between unless a college.
Independence of thought, for Frost, goes hand in hand with financial and ideological independence.
Frost actually took his own advice, spending many years, even decades, “plowing it under” and building soil—in Derry, for example, the years when so much was sown and very little reaped or sent to market. He let ideas come, but felt no compulsion to rush into print with them; he let them play in his head, play on his tongue in endless conversations; he put them into letters, into prose, which formed a kind of halfway stage between speech and poetry. What reached print was “an idea of an idea of an idea.” When it finally emerged, it was fully formed and richly developed.
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Frost’s poetry in the early thirties ran deeply against the grain of what was being said and written in intellectual circles, as Stanley Burnshaw says in Robert Frost Himself. Burnshaw notes that people were often overheard talking about “where Frost stood” with regard to the current political scene. They were aware he was not a leftist or a liberal, but they found him difficult to read. “No poet alive could be more elusive,” Burnshaw says, “though we granted from all that was argued about ‘Build Soil’ that Frost’s views were not our views and his faith—whatever it was—differed from ours. And in terms of political practice and program, we were probably on opposing sides.” 19
By “we” Burnshaw refers to that group of urban intellectuals who subscribed to such journals as the weekly New Masses, which Burnshaw edited. Oddly enough, Burnshaw and Frost became good friends, which suggests that Frost was not prickly about the politics of those around him; he was quite happy to surround himself with people who thought differently from himself. (Untermeyer, for instance, was a man of the left—and he was Frost’s closest intellectual companion through much of his adult life.)
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Newton Arvin, a well-known scholar and critic, launched a major volley in the Partisan Review, suggesting that Frost’s philosophy of “strategic retreat” now seemed “as profitless as a dried-up well.” He took Frost to task for writing once again about a dismal New England full of “unpainted farmhouses and so many frostbitten villages and so many arid sitting-rooms.” 27 This was followed quickly by further attacks: a mauling by Horace Gregory in the New Republic, another by R. P. Blackmur in the Nation, and another by Rolfe Humphries in the New Masses. Humphries wrote, “The further range to which Frost invited himself is an excursion into the field of political didactic, and his address is unbecoming.… A Further Range? A further shrinking.” 28
The attacks continued into the fall, with a review in New England Quarterly in which Dudley Fitts praised some of the lyrics but derided the political poems; of “Build Soil,” for instance, he commented, “The voice is still the voice of Frost, it is true, and all the tricks are here; but the diction is faded, the expression imprecise, and the tone extraordinarily tired and uneasy. It is a strange thing that Robert Frost, pondering the problem of a sick society, should suddenly become ineffectual, should seem unable to deal abstractly with matter that he has powerfully suggested in many of his best lyrics.” 29
Frost recoiled from these criticisms, spiraling downward into depression, even though a number of his friends, including Louis Untermeyer and E. Merrill Root, weighed in with extremely positive reviews. Needing to make another strategic retreat, Frost decided not to deliver the Phi Beta Kappa poem at Harvard as promised; he also canceled most of his public lectures and readings scheduled for late summer and early fall. He even ducked out of a fall stint at Amherst that he had promised to President King in exchange for being allowed to give the Norton lectures at Harvard in the spring.
from "Robert Frost: A Life - Jay Parini"
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Introduction
Meliboeus has been dispossessed of his pastures and Tityrus has been put into possession of his, and sits contentedly under a beech tree playing his pipe.
Another shepherd, Corydon, alone in the noontime midsummer heat, hopelessly in love with a beautiful boy, sings of his love with confused ridiculous convincing passion.
Menalcas and Damoetas, rubes, quarrel furiously and hilariously, and then compete in songs of love, and riddles, and work songs, and Palaemon, their neighbor, declares their singing contest a tie.
The poet offers a charming birthday gift to a newborn child. The gift is immense, a prophecy that the child will preside over a new golden age and a new society, in which there will be no war, no labor, no sorrow.
Mopsus and Menalcas, with exquisite mutual courtesy, take turns singing about the shepherd Daphnis, first about his death and its bad consequences for the crops and then about his apotheosis and how there will be offerings to him, blessing the fields.
A drunken satyr, Silenus, the tutor of Bacchus, god of wine and song, having been playfully tied up with his own garlands by two boys and a water nymph, sings the songs he had promised them he would sing: stories, among others, of the beginning of the world, the love of Pasiphaë for a bull, the violent murderous story of Procne, the story of Scylla the whirlpool drowning the Ithacan sailors, and the story of the calling of Gallus, an actual poet and important figure in Virgil’s world of literature and politics, to be a poet under the sign of Hesiod and Linus.
Daphnis, maybe the same Daphnis, maybe not, calls Meliboeus, who maybe is or maybe is not the same Meliboeus, to hear a singing contest between the Arcadian shepherds Thyrsis and Corydon, and Corydon, who may or may not be the same Corydon, is declared the victor, though it is hard to see why, both songs being so compellingly beautiful. But Corydon’s is the sweeter.
Damon, at the brink—or, in his song, as if at the brink—of suicide, sings of Nysa’s abandonment of him, and of her marriage to Mopsus. Alphesiboeus sings a contending song, as if in the voice of a woman who loves Daphnis and casts spells to bring him back to her. Perhaps Daphnis does return or perhaps she deludes herself.
Moeris and Lycidas are going to town. Evening is coming on, and perhaps a rainstorm is coming as well. One of them has been dispossessed of the ownership of his land. The shepherd Menalcas (surely not the clown Menalcas?) had promised to hold their world together with his music. “But what can music do / Against the weapons of soldiers?” Moeris and Lycidas, as they journey toward town, past the tomb of still another shepherd, are remembering and yet forgetting their songs.
Gallus is heard lamenting Lycoris’s desertion of him. He says, as his song comes to an end, “now farewell, Nymphs; / No longer do our songs give pleasure now; / Farewell to the groves.” And the poet of the Eclogues echoes him: “Go home, my full-fed goats, you’ve eaten your fill, / The Evening Star is rising; it’s time to go home.”
* * *
Wendell Clausen says that “not only did Virgil compose the Eclogues, he also, and to some extent simultaneously, composed the Book of Eclogues, a poetic achievement scarcely less remarkable … [In] Virgil’s book the design of individual poems has been adjusted to the design of the book as a whole.”1 Many scholars have discussed the nature of this design and have interpreted its meanings (and responded to its pleasures) in different ways, and it is remarkable how the book has sustained and nourished multifarious interpretations and resolved and pacified them with its harmonies. Not resolved, really, or pacified, but, in Paul Alpers’s term, “suspended” them “in the harmonies of verse.”2
The Eclogues are a book in ways that are obvious and not so obvious. Eclogue IX, almost at the end of the series, clearly echoes Eclogue I and sadly completes it, as the shepherds, dispossessed like Meliboeus, journey to the town, and the songs are being forgotten. Eclogues II, VIII, and X tell versions of the same erotic story, of abandonment and longing, and each one says hard things about the implacability of love and love’s cruelty: “Each creature is led by that which it most longs for”; “I know what Love is … Love / Is not of our blood and he is not of our kind”; “what could teach the god of love to pity?… Love conquers all, and all must yield to Love.” Eclogues VII and III are alike in being singing contests, and V is a contest too, uncontentiously, and all three of them sing about, among other things, the hardness of labor in the fields and vineyards and the precariousness of the shepherd’s and cowherd’s life: “The field is dry; in the blighted air the grass / Is dying for lack of water; Bacchus denies / The shade of his vines to the arid hill”; “Round up the sheep, boys, find the cool of the shade; / This heat will dry the milk up in the udders … My flock is skin and bones, and it isn’t for love; / The evil eye is on my lambs. But whose?”; “Apollo has left our fields, and Pales too. / In the furrows where we hopefully planted barley, / Darnel and tares and sterile oat-grass grow.” Eclogues IV and VI invoke the Muses, and each, in its own way, goes out beyond (while still remaining within) the limiting fiction of pastoral song. Clearly their occurrence at the center of the sequence, along with the sublime apotheosis in V, is a significant feature of our experience of the shape of the book.
There are patterns, too, of political attitudes, attitudes toward power, and specifically toward the Julian house, the house of Julius Caesar and Octavian (Augustus). In Eclogue I there is Tityrus’s gratitude to Octavian for his land, in tension with Meliboeus’s having been unpropertied so that it could be given to Octavian’s veterans. Meliboeus says bitterly: “This is what civil war has brought down upon us. / So Meliboeus, carefully set out / Your plants and pear trees, all in rows—for whom? / For strangers, for others, we have farmed our land.” In Eclogue V it may be that one way (though only one way) to read Daphnis’s death is to think of the death of Julius Caesar, and in Eclogue IX one of the half-forgotten, half-remembered songs predicts the rising of Julius Caesar’s star in the sky: “Venus’s grandson Caesar’s star is rising … / The star that brings such joy to the ripening grain … / Daphnis, plant your pear trees … years from now / The children of your children will gather the pears.”
That this is a book is implicated in every expression of the opening passage of Eclogue VII:
Daphnis, one day, was sitting in the shade
Of a murmuring ilex tree, and Corydon
And Thyrsis, both nearby, were tending their flocks,
Thyrsis his sheep and Corydon his she-goats,
Their udders swollen with milk. Thyrsis and he
Were both like flowers in bloom, the two of them,
Arcadians both, and ready to compete
With song replying to song replying to song.
And I was a little way off, mulching the roots
Of my myrtle plants to keep them from the cold.
My billy goat, the boss man of my flock,
Had wandered away somewhere, away from the others.
Then I saw Daphnis and Daphnis caught sight of me
And he called out, “O Meliboeus, come here,
Come here and sit in the shade, and rest yourself.
Your goats and kids are perfectly safe and sound;
Your oxen will come this way all by themselves
Across the fields and down to the stream to drink
From Mincius’ cool waters where the reeds
Flower along the riverbanks and where
The bees are humming around the ancient oak.”
I thought, why not? I have no Phyllis at home
And no Alcippe to care for the just-weaned lambs,
But Corydon and Thyrsis in a contest
Is a contest not to miss.
The rural scene is very actual, the she-goats’ udders brimming with milk, Meliboeus mulching his plants to protect them from the cold, no Phyllis or Alcippe at home to share his chores, his billy goat wandering off. The river Mincius is the actual river of Virgil’s own childhood. Daphnis and Corydon and Thyrsis are local herdsmen and shepherds. But they have names from literature, from Theocritean Idylls, and two of them, Corydon and Thyrsis, who are like flowers in bloom, are not from Italy but from Arcadia, matrix of pastoral song. The verse that tells us this is utterly unsurprised and unperturbed by the juxtaposition of fantasy to actuality, taking it for granted and thereby making each element, fantasy and actuality, and the oddness of their coming together, all the more vivid.
There was a Meliboeus in Eclogue I, dispossessed of his farm and going into exile, leading his poor little goats along with him:
… one of them I could hardly get to follow;
Just now, among the hazels, she went into labor
And then, right there on the hard flinty ground,
Gave birth to twins who would have been our hope,
Back on our farm.
He is a different goatherd in Eclogue VII; or, if he is the same, then he has been given back his farm, or else has not yet been dispossessed of it—a magical restoration or the foreboding of a loss to come, and of course therefore both, restoration and loss, at once. There was a Daphnis in Eclogue V, who died and was apotheosized. This Daphnis, in Eclogue VII, may not be the same, since this is a different song, but because of the name the sense of a miraculous resuscitation is inescapable here, along with the sense that the death that has not yet taken place is surely coming. Daphnis is only a shepherd, but there is something godlike in his sweet hospitable authority here. We remember that when Daphnis was apotheosized in Eclogue V “the countryside, the woods … [were] all of them filled at once with holiday bliss,” and this affects the way we hear this Daphnis, in Eclogue VII, say, as he invites Meliboeus to take a rest from his labor: “O Meliboeus, come here, / Come here and sit in the shade, and rest yourself. / Your goats and kids are perfectly safe and sound.” It is all naturalistic; but there’s something holy and magical about it too, because it is Daphnis speaking, as if he were the confident protector of the beasts and of the scene. The lines “Your oxen will come this way all by themselves / Across the fields and down to the stream to drink” remind us, too, of Eclogue IV and its prophecy that in the new Golden Age there will always be holiday joy and “The goats will come back home all by themselves / Without being called, their udders full of milk; / The browsing herds will have no fear of lions.” The beasts in Eclogue VII will come down to drink from a stream “where the reeds / Flower along the riverbanks and where / The bees are humming around the ancient oak.” We remember that it was Meliboeus, dispossessed, who said to Tityrus, in Eclogue I, with unrancorous envy: “Often beside the hedge of willows that marks / This edge of what you own, the humming of bees / That visit the willow flowers will make you sleepy.” The passage from Eclogue VII is sad as well as joyful, with the sadness that haunts the entire book. As Paul Alpers says, “Virgil’s shepherds regularly come together for song and song is what unites them. But … separation and loss are the conditions of their utterance.”3 In this passage the shade, relief from labor and from the heat, engenders ease and music. But in Eclogue X, as the book of Eclogues itself comes to an end, the poet says, “Now we must go; the shade’s not good for singers.”
Wendell Clausen says that “pastoral, as a form of poetry (for pastoral moments occur in earlier Greek poetry), is the invention of Theocritus of Syracuse,”4 and Paul Alpers says that pastoral “was, as the horsebreeders say, by Virgil out of Theocritus. Historically it was the work of both poets … It is from Virgil’s self-conscious handling of Theocritean representations and usages that the figure of the herdsman emerged as representative both of the poet and of all humans.”5 There’s nothing in those Idylls of Theocritus that corresponds to the way Virgil makes us aware of the world of politics, economics, and war, whose pressures are felt within and upon his pastoral world. Richard Tarrant has said that “the Eclogues are paradoxically both the work in which contemporary events are most pervasively present and the one in which they are most thoroughly transformed to subordinate them to a poetic context.”6
And not just “contemporary events” but the range of things that human beings actually experience, long for, and lose are pervasively there in the Eclogues, and they are so in strangely beautiful and convincing ways because of their transformation and subordination to a poetic context. The Eclogues are a radical instance of what is always true of poetry: our vivid consciousness of the artifice of its forms makes us vividly, radiantly, conscious of our experience of its meanings. Of course this is always true in good poetry, but its truth with regard to the Eclogues has a special intense relationship to the pretense that it is shepherds talking, alone or together, and not just talking but singing, “song replying to song replying to song” (et cantare pares et respondere parati).
It is no wonder that the pastoral structure established in the book of Eclogues has, as resource and model, so deeply affected subsequent literature in all the languages of Europe. In these pastoral situations our faults and virtues are written large; the pastoral structure simplifies what we all share and, by doing so, makes it more tolerable while at the same time demonstrating how vulnerable we are. It provides figures of refuge and ease, and of the precariousness of that refuge and ease. It is associated with the essential, in its simplicity, and because the occupations of its actors, tilling the soil, tending the animals, are themselves essential and seem to go back to the beginning of time.
There were few immediate imitators of the Eclogues in Latin literature, but their influence in later centuries, in all the vernacular languages of Europe, has been powerful and, for good reason, has gone very deep. To speak only of literature in English, there are the works whose descent from the Eclogues is explicit—as in Spenser’s The Shepheardes Calender, Sidney’s “Ye Goatherd Gods,” Marlowe’s “Passionate Shepherd,” Marvell’s “Mower” poems, Milton’s “Lycidas,” Pope’s “Pastorals,” Book VIII of Wordsworth’s The Prelude, Shelley’s “Adonais,” Matthew Arnold’s “Thyrsis,” Frost’s “Build Soil”—or deeply implicit—as in passages of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, The Tempest, Marvell’s “The Garden,” Milton’s Paradise Lost, Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” lyric after lyric of Wordsworth, the songs of Blake, Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale,” lyric after lyric of Frost, and so much else. The Eclogues are everywhere.
* * *
Virgil’s Bucolica, which we know as The Eclogues,7 are his earliest authenticated work, dating at the latest from the mid-30s B.C.E. The next work, the four books of the Georgics, are said to have been read to Augustus in 29. Virgil began the writing of his epic of the founding of Rome, the Aeneid, shortly afterward and had almost completed it when, attempting to return to Rome after three years in Greece and Asia Minor, he fell ill, and died at Brundisium in September, 19 B.C.E. He was buried near Naples, where he owned a villa.
He had left orders that his unfinished Aeneid be burned, but Augustus ordered his literary executors Varius Rufus and Plotius Tucca to preserve it and publish it. It was issued two years later.
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ECLOGUE I
[MELIBOEUS / TITYRUS]
MELIBOEUS
Tityrus, there you lie in the beech-tree shade,
Brooding over your music for the Muse,
While we must leave our native place, our homes,
The fields we love, and go elsewhere; meanwhile,
You teach the woods to echo ‘Amaryllis.’
TITYRUS
O Meliboeus, a god gave me this peace.
He will always be a god to me, and often
The blood of a newborn lamb will be offered to him.
Because of him, as you can see, my cattle
Can browse in the fields as they please, and as I please,
I idly play upon my slender reed.
MELIBOEUS
It’s not that I’m envious, but full of wonder.
There’s so much trouble everywhere these days.
I was trying to drive my goats along the path
And one of them I could hardly get to follow;
Just now, among the hazels, she went into labor
And then, right there on the hard flinty ground,
Gave birth to twins who would have been our hope,
Back on our farm. I should have been able to tell
That something like this was going to happen to us,
When the lightning struck our oak the other day.
But Tityrus, what god is this you speak of?
TITYRUS
I used to be silly enough to think the big
City of Rome was comparable to the town
To which we drive our tender lambs to market,
As grown-up dogs are comparable to puppies,
Or grown-up goats are comparable to kids,
But Rome is as much taller than other cities
As cypress trees than the little viburnums below them.
MELIBOEUS
How did it come about that you went to Rome?
TITYRUS
Well, freedom took her own sweet time about it
And waited till my first gray hairs showed up
In the haircut cuttings, but, however late,
She came along at last and favored me.
This was just at the time when Galatea
Left me and just at the time when I became
Possessed by Amaryllis. When I belonged
To Galatea I certainly had no hope
Of saving any money; I wasn’t free.
Many a beast I took to town for slaughter,
And carried many a rich cheese there to sell,
And I can’t say I ever brought home much
Money to show for what I’d brought to market.
MELIBOEUS
I wondered, Amaryllis, why you grieved so,
And called out to the gods, and why the apples
Were left to hang neglected in your orchards.
For Tityrus was gone; he wasn’t there;
The pines called out for him, the springs, the orchards.
TITYRUS
What else could I do? I couldn’t otherwise
Be free of servitude, and I couldn’t find
Gods anywhere else to help me out, but there
In Rome I found the young man in whose honor
We sacrifice at our altars every month.
He said, “Go feed your flocks as in the old days;
Herdsmen, raise your cattle as you used to.”
MELIBOEUS
Most fortunate old man, no matter if
Your fields are stony or, by the brook’s edge, marshy
And weedy, still they’re yours, and enough for you.
No unaccustomed fodder there will tempt
Your pregnant ewes nor will your flock be threatened
By bad diseases from your neighbor’s farm.
O fortunate Tityrus, lucky old man,
Here you will seek and find the cool of the shade
Beside your hallowed springs and the streams you know;
Often beside the hedge of willows that marks
This edge of what you own, the humming of bees
That visit the willow flowers will make you sleepy;
And over there, at the other edge of your land,
Under the ledge of that high outcropping of rock,
The song of a woodman pruning the trees can be heard;
And always you can hear your pigeons throating
And the moaning of the doves high in the elm tree.
TITYRUS
Stags will browse in the pastures of the air
And the sea will cast up its fish on the naked shore,
The exiled Parthian drink from the river Saône
And the German drink from the Tigris, before that face,
The way he looked at me, will fade from my heart.
MELIBOEUS
But we have to leave our homes and go far away,
Some to the thirsty deserts of Africa,
Some to Scythia, some to the region where
Oaxes rushes over its chalky bed,
Some as far away as among the Britons,
Utterly cut off from all the world.
Oh, will it ever come to pass that I’ll
Come back, after many years, to look upon
The turf roof of what had been my cottage
And the little field of grain that once was mine,
My own little kingdom. Have we done all this work
Upon our planted and fallow fields so that
Some godless barbarous soldier will enjoy it?
This is what civil war has brought down upon us.
So Meliboeus, carefully set out
Your plants and pear trees, all in rows—for whom?
For strangers, for others, we have farmed our land.
Come on, my goats, once happy flock, go on.
Never again will I, stretched out at ease
In the mouth of some mossy cave, see how, far off,
Browsing you seem to hang from the high cliff side;
No longer will I sing my songs; no more,
My goats, will I watch over you as you crop
The flowering clover and the acrid willow.
TITYRUS
Nevertheless, tonight you might stay here
And rest yourself awhile on these green fronds;
The apples are ripe, the chestnuts are plump and mealy,
There’s plenty of good pressed cheese you’re welcome to.
Already there’s smoke you can see from the neighbors’ chimneys
And the shadows of the hills are lengthening as they fall.
D.F.
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In "Build Soil," a "political pastoral" that he delivered at Columbia University on May 31, 1932, before the political party conventions of that year and later published in A Further Range, Frost airs his opinions about the farm problem through the personae of Tityrus, the farmer-poet who voices Frost's personal politics, and Meliboeus, his farmer friend who has been dispossessed of his land. That he borrows his characters from Virgil's first eclogue would seem to suggest that he is evading the issues of industrialism in his own time, but the poem is as much about them as is "A Lone Striker." His use of that eclogue is apposite, too, since Virgil's ideal landscape is put at risk by an alien world encroaching from without (in Virgil's case, the government in Rome). In "Build Soil" the forces of industrialism that impinge on the farm threaten the bucolic environment on which Frost stakes so much. In conversation with Tityrus, Meliboeus wonders why things should not be "Made good for everyone—things like inventions—/ Made so we all should get the good of them—/ All, not just great exploiting businesses" {CP 291). His concern about the effects of untempered capitalism on the small farmer leads him to ask, "But don't you think more should be socialized/ than is?" to which Tityrus makes ironic reply:
None shall be as ambitious as he can.
None should be as ingenious as he could.
Not if I had my say. Bounds should be set
To ingenuity for being so cruel
In bringing change unheralded on the unready.
Tityrus does not advocate socializing ingenuity, even if he does see that new technologies will mean the end of a livelihood for some (he remarks that a hypothetical new wool substitute when "let loose upon the grazing world/ Will put ten thousand farmers out of sheep"). He mocks the notion that such a force could be bounded—that our ambition could or should be held in check so as to protect those who would be ad- versely affected. Refijfing Meliboeus's distrust of big business and wariness of commerce, Tityrus claims: "To market 'tis our destiny to go./ But much as in the end we bring for sale there/ There is still more we never bring or should bring." He urges Meliboeus to adopt not a five-year plan like the one "That Soviet Russia has made fashionable," but his own plan of self-enrichment:
You shall go to your run-out mountain farm.
Poor castaway of commerce, and so live
That none shall ever see you come to market—
Not for a long long time.
The embargo that Tityrus proposes does not depend for its efficacy on collective political action (what he calls "general revolution"), but on action undertaken by a lone farmer: "I bid you to a one-man revolution—I The only revolution that is coming." The New Deal solution to increase the standard of living of farmers was to levy taxes so that the price of crops at market would rise artificially, with the tax revenues then redistributed to the farmers in proportion to their crop production. In a May 1933 article in Harper's Benjamin Ginzburg labeled that plan a "radical socialistic remedy of state control and fixed prices" (670), an assessment with which Frost would have agreed, as evidenced by Tityrus's individualism and laissez-faire economics ("Were I dicta- tor .../ I'd let things take their course/ And then I'd claim the credit for the outcome"). Lest Untermeyer mistake the "revolution" for which he was calling in "Build Soil," Frost plainly stated his vision to him: "It isn't rebellion I am talking. ... It is simply easy ties and slow commerce" (Thompson, Years of Triumph, 432).
In a letter to Frost, Ferner Nuhn, a family friend who worked for a time in the Roosevelt administration, challenges that political vision, and Frost's response sheds more light on his struggle with the complex issues raised by industrialism—his opposition to New Deal liberalism and guarded sympathy for the proletariat. Nuhn tries to explain to Frost the inadequacy of Tityrus's prescriptions:
[A] s once we changed modes from monarchy to democracy, so now we are changing modes from individual to corporate economics. ... If any large proportion of farmers took the advice given Moloebeus [sic] and "dug in" and ate and wore their own products and didn't go to market to buy and sell more than a little dribble of excess, city people and easterners including poets and homilizers would pretty quickly be starved out, by the millions. . . . You'll excuse this finger-counting arithmetic, but you know, a westerner, a corn-belter, some times has to stand up and talk western farm arithmetic to Vermonters with their hankering for self-sustaining mountain farms which, however excellent as a way of life, are not sustaining the United States at present.... Farmers and poets and machine-tenders, we've all got beyond self-containment economically; the mode has passed; the emphasis is misplaced.... (Thompson, Years of Tri- umph, 457)
Nuhn finds that Frost "give[s] comfort to ... the real surplus-grabbers, who want to see all the Moelebeuses [stay contented and quiet," that by defending the times Tityrus in effect aids and abets the "fat boys, the cashers-in on the system as it works now." In a letter to Untermeyer, Frost expresses his distaste for Nuhn's position, claiming that his subject is "not the sadness ofthe poor" (Selected Letters 467- 68). However, in a letter of reply to Nuhn that he never sent. Frost seeks to moderate his hardline stance, informing him that "Both those people in the dialogue are me" (Thompson, Years of Triumph, 460). Our ability to see Frost in Meliboeus is hampered, though, by Frost's own remarks outside of his poetry, which suggest a clearer ideological cotmection with Tityms, whose concem about the New Deal solution to "send squads of city industrials on weekly wage into the country for spells to cultivate the land" is Frost's:
Needless to say to you, my argument
Is not to lure the city to the country.
Let those possess the land, and only those,
Who love it with a love so strong and stupid
That they may be abused and taken advantage of
And made fun of by business, law, and art;
They still hang on.
(CP 294)
In these remarks Tityrus vents Frost's hostility to the New Deal Resettlement Administration, one aim of which was to resettle urban slum dwellers in autonomous garden cities and submarginal fanners in new, productive farm villages. The idea made Frost see red (in both senses), and when Tityrus pronounces, "Let none assume to till the land but farmers," he inveighs against the plan to use agriculture to liquidate the industrial surplus.
In his poem "A Roadside Stand" Frost steps up his attack on New Deal farm policy—particularly on this matter of resettlement. At the beginning of the poem we see what might seem innocent enough—a stand selling wares to city dwellers out for a drive in the country. But for Frost the country folks' plea for city money symbolizes a dangerous desire to imitate city ways—including the ways of industrialism.
The speaker scorns the govemment solution to the problem of these submarginal farmers just as Tityms does:
It is in the news that all these pitiful kin
Are to be brought out and mercifully gathered in
To live in villages next to the theater and store
Where they wont have to think for themselves any more;
While greedy good-doers, beneficent beasts of prey.
Swarm over their lives enforcing benefits
That are calculated to soothe them out of their wits.
And by teaching them how to sleep the sleep all day.
Destroy their sleeping at night the ancient way.
(CP261)
The "beneficent beasts of prey" are the "good-doers" of the federal govemment who claim to want to make life easier and better for the people, but only by stripping them of their free will; their idea of resettlement is unnatural {"teaching them how to sleep the sleep all day"). Frost maintains, and the cooperative farms proposed will only make the people dependent on the welfare of the state. The speaker offers at the end of the poem to put these "pitiful kin" out of their misery to prevent such a fate {the original title of the poem was the not so subtle "Euthanasia") {Thompson, Years of Triumph, 439).
Frost's assault on federal govemment policies that he believed would erase the distinction between the city and the country follows from his view that the family farm represents a "natural," restorative space, an antidote to the "artificial" {i.e., mechanical) forces of industrialism in urban America. In an interview published in the magazine Rural America in 1931, Frost asserts the need for measure in our lives—a measure that requires the existence of both worlds: "I should expect life to be back and forward—now more individual on the farm, now more social in the city—striving to get the balance" (Interviews 76). When the boundaries between farm and city are blurred, the ability to strike this healthy balance is imperiled, and Frost notes the damage that the spread of industrialism has wrought:
We are now at a moment when we are getting too far out into the social- industrial and are at the point of drawing back—drawing in to renew our selves. The country life we are going back to I can't describe in ad- vance, but I am pretty sure it will not be the country life we came out of years ago. Fanning, what survives of it, has demeaned itself in an attempt to imitate industrialism. It has lost its self-respect. It has wished itself something other than what it is. That is the only unpardonable sin: to wish you were something you are not, something other people are. It is so in the arts and in everything else. . . . The farmer has industrialized to his own hurt right on the farm. He has entered into the competitive outside life. The strength of his position is that he's got so many things that he doesn't need to go outside for. The country's advantage is that it gives many pleasures and supplies many needs for nothing. The tendency of our day is to throw away all of these things and count them worthless. {Interviews 76)
Frost finds that the farmer has compromised his self-sufficiency by submitting to industrialism, and fails to give credence to Nuhn's statement that "we've all got beyond self-containment economically; the mode has passed." In the Denver Po5i (October 11, 1932) an article entitled "Robert Frost, Famous Poet, Praises Farm Strike Idea" quotes Frost as saying, "We Americans are doing everything in our power to narrow, industrialize and mechanize this [agricultural] base." Exhorting midwestem farmers to decrease productivity. Frost claims that "[i]f the farmers would go Robinson Crusoe and dole out just enough of their produce to keep the cities alive for purposes of visiting and recreation, the agricultural problem might be settled, without benefit of politics, politicians or congress, for the good of all." Here he crosses the line between "a one-man revolution" and "general revolution," asserting his interest in the latter, provided that the action is not tainted by "politics." Of course, the action is inevitably political, but, because it is the idea of farmers, and not of "politicians or congress," Frost sees it in a positive light. Later in the interview he speaks collectively: "We do not need to sacrifice individualism in the struggle for recognition and a living, nor do we need to take a chance on being industrialized or mechanized. We hold the weapons with which to create our own success and security. All we must do is to leam to use them." The Denver Post reporter traces Frost's remarks, particularly his call "urging farmers to plot together to save themselves," to his poem "Build Soil." This political reading of Frost's poem seeks to justify what midwestem farmers already had begun to do. Mary Heaton Vorse's article "Rebellion in the Combelt" in Harper's (December 1932) refers to the "banding together of farmers for mutual protection," and notes that "A Farmers' Holiday Association had been organized by one Milo Reno, and the farmers were to refiise to bring food to market for thirty days or 'until the cost of producfion had been obtained'" (3). Although Frost would not have quarreled with the spirit behind such action, he makes clear in the 1930s his suspicion of "movements" of any kind, and in "Build Soil" has Tityms exhort, "Don't join too many gangs. Join few if any" (CP 296).
Even before the dawn of the New Deal, in his poem "The Egg and the Machine," which was first published in 1928, Frost addresses concems about the rapidly changing economic landscape, depicting a struggle between invasive mechanical forces and one worker. The title itself announces an opposition between the natural and the unnatural, and in the poem the speaker blasts what Leo Marx calls "the machine in the garden":
He gave the solid rail a hateful kick.
From far away there came an answering tick
And then another tick. He knew the code:
His hate had roused an engine up the road.
He wished when he had had the track alone
He had attacked it with a club or stone
And bent some rail wide open like a switch
So as to wreck the engine in the ditch.
(CP 248)
from "Robert Frost and the Politics of Labor - Tyler B. Hoffman"