|
37. [It Takes All Sorts…]
It takes all sorts of in- and outdoor schooling
To get adapted to my kind of fooling.
---------
온갖 교육이 필요하다
내 유형의 농담에 적응하려면
온갖 실내 및 실외 교육이 필요하다.
-신재실 옮김-
단상(斷想): 프로스트는 자주 시를 "일종의 농담"이라고 정의했다. 농담은 그의 시에 쓰이는 외부 지향적 또는 내부 지향적 풍자를 뜻한다. 프로스트가 어떻게 자연의 사물이나 현상을 상징들로 사용하는지 알려면 “실외 교육”이 필요하고, 평범한 사물에 놀라운 의미를 부여하는 그의 지성적 기법을 이해하려면 “실내 교육”이 필요하다. 나아가 경험과 희롱하는 그의 상상력을 이해하려면 실내 및 실외 교육이 결합된 “종합 교육”이 필요하다. 프로스트의 “농담(fooling)은 책을 사랑하는 지성인은 물론 자연을 사랑하는 농부, 노동자, 그리고 시를 사랑하는 보통사람 모두를 포용한다.
-신재실 씀-
-------
“[It takes all sorts of in and outdoor schooling]” (1962)
One of the short poems etched in wood along the
Frost Trail in Ripton, Vermont, this aphoristic cou
plet acts as a quick guide to reading Frost. In the
first line he suggests that his poetry is not only for
those who are “book smart” (or paper-trained, like
a domestic pet) but for farmers, laborers, and lay
men of poetry. Then he reveals a secret he has not
kept well: that his is a “kind of fooling.” The inside
joke is that his poetry is a sort of trickery, and it is
not only the masters of literature who can get it.
The poem was meaningfully first published as
“The Poet” in A Remembrance Collection of New
Poems (1959), but later became one of the closing
poems of Frost’s last collection, In the Clearing.
---------
My kind of fooling - Robert Frost
In an appearance at Harvard University on December 3, 1956, held under the auspices of its Morris Gray Poetry Fund, Mr. Frost made near the beginning of his remarks a reference to the celebrated portrait painter Charles Hopkinson (1869–1962), who lived in the North Shore area of Massachusetts and maintained a studio at Boston.
I THOUGHT I would begin today in a way I heard another poet friend of mine begin once. He said, “This is the first time I have declared myself in public on the subject of—” Well I’ve changed the subject; never mind what his subject was. But this is the first time I have declared myself in public on the subject of whom I’m writing these poems for.
This was brought up in my mind by Mr. Hopkinson, the artist. He asked me how near I felt to the audience I’m writing to. And he meant me to ask him how near he felt to the man whose portrait he was painting. That’s pretty close up, isn’t it? Mine is certainly more remote than that. […]
But it’s a question that I’m often asked: who I’m writing the poems for.
Some singer said the other day—in answer to the question which she liked of her own songs best—she said, “The one you like.” Nice answer.
Which one of my poems do I like best? The one I heard last praised. And that’s no jest, though you laugh. It’s true that I am very happy about a poem for a few hours after I’ve heard it praised, quite a little while—maybe all night; sleep well on it.
But when you ask me further, I think I can say. Probably my education was in conversation, all the way along, without my knowing it. I said in verse somewhere:
It takes a lot of in- and outdoor schooling
To be admitted to my kind of fooling.26
I certainly write for what you might call “a cloud of witnesses,” a cloud of people that I’ve been thrown with—not definitely for any person or any kind of person. I certainly don’t write for the kind of people that enjoy looking up my references. Not particularly for them; I don’t mind them.
But suppose, as in one poem I’m going to read you today, I mention “Igdrasil.” I’d rather you didn’t have to look it up. I’d rather; that’s just preference.
I do this on a percentage basis, as I often say. Some get one thing and some another. But the things you get on the spot are the things that I want you to get, that I enjoy your getting most. The pleasure I have is from the things you respond to at once.
Now, do I write the poems to read them aloud? I write them to my ear, certainly, my own ear. I write them to the ear—(I would hate to admit I didn’t.)—that before anything else, probably. So, it ought to be that I write them to be read aloud.
But I recognize a considerable difference. Some of them I don’t dare to read aloud. They’re too intimate maybe or too something, you know. I have a feeling that they’d be helped by your seeing them, as well as hearing them.
In fact, I went so far once as to get my publishers to make me a little pamphlet of half a dozen of them, that I could distribute to an audience at the door—give out at the door—so
But the great thing is my metaphor. That’s my kind of fooling. That’s what I mean by “my kind of fooling”—my kind of metaphor, my kind of double meaning, double entendre, intimation, innuendo, insinuation, simile; anything you want to call it. (“Symbol” is the dread word you were waiting for!) And I suppose each has his own kind.
I understand that over at Technology now they’ve introduced a whole lot of cultural courses. Fifty percent now, you can take going through there, fifty percent cultural. And that’s so’s to get ’em ready for my kind of fooling. That must be it. And that means my kind of play with the metaphor.
I encountered one of them, head on, the other day, one of the M.I.T. scientists; interesting man. We tried to come to an understanding about the metaphor. And we didn’t succeed, not very well. It would take more time. He felt a little standoffish with me, suspicious of me.
I claimed that all science—everything, all advances in everything—rested on this little expression you can make a singsong out of: “How she differs from what she’s like.” You see, “How she differs from what she’s like.”
The order, you know, would be “what she’s like,” first. And then where the metaphor breaks down is where the progress is. That’s the way science is advanced, I’m sure. But that was news to him. Probably we’d mean the same thing after an hour or two of it; didn’t have long enough.
His great difficulty about poetry was—and regular verse—was that it purposely “handicapped” itself. I didn’t say to him, but right away he’s used a metaphor, hasn’t he: handicap? And a bad one and a vulgar one!
You see, that’s what that is: that I assume the responsibilities of form, as in any game or as anywhere you look.
For instance, is it a handicap in a race to say that it shall be a mile long? No, that’s not a handicap, is it? That would be a dreadful use of it. There’s the mile, two miles, the hundred yards, and so on.
Those are forms—no handicap to be thought of, unless there’s somebody butts in to place one person two or three feet ahead of somebody else, as in a Sunday-school picnic. In the horse races they do. It hurts all that. That’s handicapping.
But he brought that into the whole thing. He said, “Why do you rhyme, then, and why do you use metre?” I said, “From the craving I have for form—for something that rounds it out, that shapes, you know.”
But he still said he thought that I was handicapping myself. I said, “Well, I’m handicapping myself, if you want to put it that way, in using the English language.” You see, all those words, why should I use them? […]
I said: “You don’t come into the world to find out whether it’s a good world or not. You come into it to find out whether you’re any good at it—to try yourself; not to try the world, but to try yourself—just as you come onto a tennis court not to find out whether it’s a good court, but to find out whether you can play tennis.”
He couldn’t say much to that. He couldn’t say “handicap” to that. That broke down his metaphor.
Well, that’s the whole story.
I’d like to say one thing more that I care about. I wish in all my poems that people listen to, that they hear something of the voice—more than the words, more than the vowels and the consonants—something that changes in every sentence and something that I like to think no notation could indicate; there’s no help for it but the context of the story or the verse.
Suppose I just show you—away from a poem—a little case of it. I asked a friend of mine if another friend of mine was really crazy. And he said, “Well, you know.”
You see, now that’s enough. I knew a lot from that tone when he said, “Well, you know.” You see? Now, how much more do I need to add to that? That tone does it.
Somebody said, “Well, if it were me, I would have run this campaign in another way.” He thought a minute, and he said, “I would have winked at what the French and British and Jews were doing.” See, all the tone of that, where he sounded very wicked. (I would have winked, too. Talking politics now!)
Let’s see if I think of another one. Milton says somewhere, makes one of the brothers say——
Oh, say, just speaking of Milton, do you suppose Milton wrote all that stuff so you’d have to look up a lot of things in it? You know, I don’t assume that he did. But I don’t feel sure of him. I’m sure Shakespeare didn’t write anything for you to look anything up about. And I’m sure Chaucer didn’t.
I can’t think of writing purposely to have anybody look anything up. I’m not sure of Milton. You see the way I say that, too, you know—humbly. I don’t suppose I know. I’m among a lot of scholars here.
I was going to give you an example from Milton. One of the brothers says to another two nice questions, such natural questions that they break in on you in the middle of a great deal of sort of almost pompous English. But it says in one place, “Shall I go on?”—one brother says to the other—“Shall I go on? / Or have I said enough?”27
What two pretty questions those are, for their tone of voice. They’re right in the blank verse, too. “Shall I go on?” I say to you—(I said that once in class years ago, and I said it so naturally that one of the boys said, “Go on.”)—“Shall I go on? / Or have I said enough?”
Take another place in Milton—(I like to take Milton, because it is on that high plane. You won’t think it’s colloquial ever.)—he says:
Begin then, Sisters of the sacred well,
That from beneath the seat of Jove doth spring,
Begin, and somewhat loudly sweep the string.
And then he says:
Hence with denial vain, and coy excuse….
That sentence always delighted me:
Hence with denial vain, and coy excuse….28
Don’t say you’ve got a cold. Or don’t say you can’t sing. Or don’t say you can’t please us. It’s in Shakespeare you get that, you know. He says, “I know I can’t please you.” And the other fellow says, with a beautiful tone of voice, “We don’t ask you to please us.” He says, “We just ask you to sing.”29
It’s all that play of those tones that I like to think people are hearing when I read to them or when they read me themselves. It’s a great temptation to go colloquial, just on that account. I remember an old colloquial poem about an old woman who was asked if she was ready to die. And she says, “As ready as I’ll ever be, I reckon.”—“As ready as I’ll ever be, I reckon.”30 Just hear it.
Now I’m going to read to you. But one of the things they say to me is, “You don’t dare to read ’em new things.” (Did I write ’em to read ’em right off, or did I write for them to get around in the anthologies first, so they’ll get ready for me to read ’em aloud?) So, I’m going to take my courage in hand today. This is the first time I’ve done that on a challenge. I’m going to dare to read you something a little too new to be read.
All right? Not the first thing, I’ll start with something else.
Oh, I tell you one. I will go back to one early one, for this reason. It has in it the real line of why I write the poems. Do I write ’em for me? Do I write ’em for you? Or do I write ’em into the wastebasket?
You know, I never could decide that. This poem will help you, make you see, I think. […]
This is a little farming poem that has in it one line that gives you my position, probably, all the years of my life. I wrote it back in the nineties—fifty years ago, anyway, and maybe more. It’s about mowing in the morning.
The mower in the morning mowed when the grass was wet, with his scythe, because it made the cutting easier—just as shaving is easier when ’tisn’t dry. And I came after the mower in the dew, as a boy, and I tossed the grass out to dry in the sun, shake the dew out of it and open it up to the sun. And that’s the surface of it.
It’s called, though, “A Tuft of Flowers.” You see, what’s that doing in the mowing poem, a tuft of flowers? That’s the real secret of it all. […]
[Mr. Frost said the opening twenty-six lines of “The Tuft of Flowers” then, interjected:]
And this is the place:
Nor yet to draw one thought of ours to him,
But from sheer morning gladness at the brim.
That’s the source of it all. I’ll finish the poem, but that’s where I wanted to get you.—
The mower in the dew had loved them thus,
By leaving them to flourish, not for us…
That’s the way the poems are written.—
Nor yet to draw one thought of ours to him,
But from sheer morning gladness at the brim. .