9. Hyla Brook / Mountain Interval(1916) - Robert Frost

9. Hyla Brook  / Mountain Interval(1916) - Robert Frost

By June our brook's run out of song and speed.

Sought for much after that, it will be found

Either to have gone groping underground

(And taken with it all the Hyla breed

That shouted in the mist a month ago,

Like ghost of sleigh bells in a ghost of snow)―

Or flourished and come up in jewelweed,

jewelweed : 봉선화, 물봉선화

Weak foliage that is blown upon and bent,

Even against the way its waters went.

Its bed is left a faded paper sheet

Of dead leaves stuck together by the heat―

A brook to none but who remember long.

This as it will be seen is other far

Than with brooks taken otherwise in song.

We love the things we love for what they are.

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致虛極, 守靜篤,

萬物竝作, 吾以觀復,

夫物芸芸, 各復歸其根,

歸根曰靜, 是謂復命,

復命曰常, 知常曰明,

不知常, 妄作凶,

知常容, 容乃公, 公乃王, 王乃天, 天乃道,

道乃久, 沒身不殆.

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하일라 시냇물

6월엔 시냇물의 노래와 속도가 사라진다.

아쉬워 열심히 찾아보면, 그것은

땅속으로 더듬더듬 스며들었거나

(도깨비 눈의 도깨비 썰매 방울처럼

한 달 전 안개 속에서 울어대던

청개구리 족속도 함께 사라진다)―

아니면 봉선화 줄기로 기운차게 올라,

연약한 잎이 되니 바람의 공격을 받고

자신의 물길에 반(反)하여 고개를 숙였다.

하상(河床)에 남은 것은 색 바랜 종이 한 장,

태양열에 엉겨 붙은 죽은 잎들뿐이다―

오랜 기억의 소유자 이외에 아무에게도 시냇물이 아니다.

밝혀지겠지만 이것은 노래하며 다른 곳으로

이동한 시냇물과는 정반대의 시냇물이다.

우리는 그대로가 좋아서 사랑하는 사물을 사랑한다.  

-신재실 옮김-  

단상(斷想): 이 시는 물의 이미지로 변화의 성격을 다루고 있다. 여기서 물의 고갈은 생명력 상실의 메타포이다. 처음 9행은 빠르게 달리던 하일라 시냇물이 6월이 되면 어느새 힘차게 노래하던 청개구리와 함께 땅속에 스며들어 없어지거나, 아니면 바람에 불려 굽은 봉선화의‘약한 잎’이 되는 변화의 과정이 기술된다. 나머지 6행은 6월의 초라한 하일라 시냇물의 모습과 힘찬 봄의 모습의 대조를 통해 추상적 성찰에 다다른다.  

“하상(河床)에 남은 것은 색 바랜 종이 한 장,/ 태양열에 엉겨 붙은 죽은 잎들뿐이다―" 이처럼 칙칙한 모습의 시냇물은 결코 유쾌한 것일 수가 없다. 이런 시냇물은 노래하며 흘렀던 봄의 시냇물과는 완전히 상반적이다. 그럼에도 불구하고 “우리는 그대로가 좋아서 사랑하는 사물을 사랑한다.”는 화자의 논평은 예기치 못한 역설이다. 소멸의 두려움에도 불구하고, 어떤 변화든지, 그것을 두려워하지 않고 받아들이는 태도는 변화를 초월한 득도의 경지가 아닐까?  

-신재실 씀-

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When the children and Elinor were asleep, Frost sat at the kitchen table, often well past midnight, writing his poems. Not surprisingly, the atmosphere of the Derry farm permeates the products of those years. It was here, for example, that Frost wrote “Hyla Brook,” one of his finer lyrics. Years later, he recalled to John Haines that the poem was about “the brook on my old farm. It always dried up in summer. The Hyla is a small frog that shouts like jingling bells in the marshes in the spring.”16

By June our brook’s run out of song and speed.

Sought for much after that, it will be found

Either to have gone groping underground

(And taken with it all the Hyla breed

That shouted in the mist a month ago,

Like ghost of sleigh-bells in a ghost of snow)—

Or flourished and come up in jewel-weed,

Weak foliage that is blown upon and bent

Even against the way its waters went.

Its bed is left a faded paper sheet

Of dead leaves stuck together by the heat—

A brook to none but who remember long.

This as it will be seen is other far

Than with brooks taken otherwhere in song.

We love the things we love for what they are.

In many of Frost’s better poems, one finds him musing on his art surreptitiously, keeping the focus elsewhere. “You don’t want to say directly what you can say indirectly,” he once remarked, echoing Emily Dickinson’s injunction to “Tell the truth but tell it slant. ” In another poem, “Spring Pools,” he muses on much the same theme: the things we love often seem to disappear on us, but they come up elsewhere. Typically, in “Hyla Brook” Frost begins with a fetching line and ends with a totalizing aphorism; also typically, it is not easy to connect the aphorism to what has apparently gone before. Why should we “love the things we love for what they are,” especially when they have gone underground, have deserted us? There is something willful about this stream, which has “gone groping underground”—not a pretty image. It has ruined the lovely Hyla breed, too, both the frogs and their music.

The poem is, as much as anything, about the source of inspiration, and what one does when it has dried up—literalized here in the stream. The frogs represent song, or poetry: the voice that “shouted in the mist a month ago, / Like ghost of sleigh-bells in a ghost of snow.” That last line, so unexpected and haunting, is Frost to a T: the sort of gorgeous linguistic turn that moves the language into a realm beyond normal discourse. This “otherness” in Frost is also apparent in the odd, penultimate lines that precede the final aphorism: “This as it will be seen is other far / Than with brooks taken otherwhere in song.” What can this mean? There is, perhaps, an echo here of Tennyson’s “The Brook,” which Frost knew well. Tennyson wrote, “For men may come and men may go, / But I go on forever.” The brook, as poetic inspiration, goes on forever, though hidden from view. One rarely, if ever, comes upon “other far” or “otherwhere”—colloquialisms that Frost has naturalized as poetic language. These lines seem to suggest that the disappearance of this brook, and its underground life, are quite different from the usual disappearing brook. The very oddness of the language ingeniously guarantees their untranslatability; one cannot even put these lines into standard English without losing something essential to their meaning.

The origins of this poem lay in the happy conjunction of Frost’s firsthand observation of the frogs near his house in Derry and his reading of Darwin’s The Voyage of the Beagle, which he numbered among his favorite books. In the relevant passage, Darwin writes:

Nature, in these climes, chooses her vocalists from more humble performers than in Europe. A small frog, of the genus Hyla, sits on a blade of grass about an inch from the surface of the water, and sends forth a pleasing chirp: when several are together they sing in harmony on different notes.17

from "Robert Frost, A Life"

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Summary

It is June, and the speaker observes that Hyla Brook

Analysis

"Hyla Brook" appeared in Mountain Interval (1916). This poem, a modified sonnet, is about a brook named for the frogs that breed there. The speaker describes elements of the brook that are lodged in his memory. Just as many of Frost's poems employ elements of the natural world to metaphorically demonstrate the turns of thought that are the poem, the elements of the brook that wind through the poem evoke the movements of the poet's thoughts. In "Tuft of Flowers

Although it would play havoc with the meter, the closing line might profitably be extended: "We love the things we love for what they are" to us. "Hyla Brook" is, after all, a deeply personal poem. Although the reader of poetry is generally encouraged not to assume that the speaker of the poem and the poet are the same, this poem could be deemed an exception. The unidentified speaker in the poem's opening line calls his subject, "our brook," as indeed it was. The brook is on the property of the Robert Frost

The poem opens with the speaker acknowledging that the brook has "run out of song," yet the uninterrupted flow of iambic pentameter invites the reader to hear the flow of water. The meter is abetted by an assonance of soft vowels—June, our, brook's, run, out, of song—amidst the trills of r's variously placed—our, brook's, run—which are the water's conduits. The alliterated s's of song and speed recall the flowing brook. Moreover, the water has "gone groping" its way underground. In the poet's memory, the water has taken the sounds of the Hyla frogs with it.

Still, in the real world, not much is left of the "brookness" of the little stream. It is a dry creek bed lined with leaves, "a faded paper sheet." Readers mustn't be too quick, however, in conceding how little is left. The brook bed is a "faded paper sheet." Along with the "dead leaves," the image reminds readers that the brook has been fixed not only in memory but on paper, as a poem.

This poem of 15 lines formally recalls the Petrarchan sonnet. It is based on an opening octave (Hyla Brook adds a ninth line to the opening portion) with a rhyme scheme of ABBACCADD and a sestet, EEFGFG. To note the proximity in form, meter, and rhyme to the Petrarchan sonnet is to recall Frost's use of conventional verse forms. In "The Figure a Poem Makes," he discusses the "sound of sense," the accomplishment of the poem's "dramatic tones of meaning struck across the rigidity of a limited" meter. "Hyla Brook" is another demonstration of Frost's mastery of the defined rhyme scheme.

출처 : https://www.coursehero.com/lit/The-Poems-of-Robert-Frost/hyla-brook-summary/

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Autograph manuscript of his poem "Hyla Brook", comprising fifteen lines, opening: "By June our brook has lost both song and speed..." and ending "...We love the things we love for what they are", initialled at the foot ("R.F."); together with an accompanying autograph letter signed ("R.F."), to Jack Haines ("Dear Haines"), pondering at length on the unexpected success he has experienced on his return to America and the possible effect this might have on him as a poet ("...If I was a man dazed by the reviews that happened to me last summer and the friendliness of the English, what am I now? These people once my enemies in the editorial offices are trying to be my generous friends. Some are making hard work of it. Some are making very hard work. They can't help trying to explain away my success with the English critics. It must be due to my lack of polish. And I sit so scornful of the pack and yet so willing to get all the glory going and see my books sell that you would think I was in some dream. It has a curious effect upon me. Twenty years I gave some of these people a chance. I wish I were rich and independent enough to tell them to go to Hell. You ought to have seen the lovely recollections I did (by request) of my life at Dartmouth college... You know me well enough to have read under the surface of it... I had a little fun. I weep inwardly over it all. Remember there are good people against whom I harbour no resentment. There's Alice Brown... and Amy Lowell... I'm glad of such friends in a country where I had not one three years ago. While this excitement lasts you will see that it would be affectation for me to pretend not to be interested in it. It means nothing or next to nothing to my future poetry, it may even hurt that; but there is me personally to think of. It may save me from ruin and starvation. So I shall send you a good review now and then just as if I was as vain as you think I am..."); he begins the letter by giving vent to the acute disappointment he feels at the lack of British success at the front, and describing his own hunt for a farm ("...What I long for is certainties where I have fixed my heart. I am not permitted to be certain of anything. It is the same with my own personal affairs as with the war..."), and ends: "I'll write you out a little poem about the brook on my old farm. It always dried up in summer. The Hyla is a small frog that shouts like jingling bells in the marshes in spring./ Don't flirt with your cousins./ Get me credit with your wife for having said that..."); the poem docketed by Haines in pencil as sent on 25 April 1915; autograph envelope, stamped and postmarked, the poem 1 page, the letter 4 pages, envelope torn, the poem taped at edges, with consequent discolouration, covering title and Frost's initials but not affecting the rest of the text, 8vo, Littleton, New Hampshire, 25 August 1915

Footnotes

WE LOVE THE THINGS WE LOVE FOR WHAT THEY ARE' – FROST SENDS HAINES AN EARLY DRAFT OF HIS POEM ʻHYLA BROOK', while, in the accompanying letter, he continues to wonder at the sudden success and fame as a poet that has greeted him on his return to America.

The manuscript of "Hyla Brook" that Frost encloses with this letter differs markedly from the final version as it was to be printed for the first time in his third collection, Mountain Interval (1916), most notably in the twelfth line where our reading "A wisp of dead [leaves deleted] grass in a willow prong" is altered to ʻA brook to none who remembers long'. Other alterations are, in line 1, "By June our brook has lost both song and speed" (MS) to ʻBy June our brook's run out of song and speed' (1916); in line 8, "Pale foliage that is blown upon and bent" to ʻWeak foliage that is blown upon and bent'; and, in line 10, "It leaves its bed a dingy paper sheet" to ʻIts bed is left a dingy paper sheet'. It is rare that we should be afforded a glimpse such as this of Frost at work drafting a poem – he normally being at such pains to cover his creative tracks – and especially gratifying that it should be a poem as well-known as this.

The letter itself (without its enclosure, which has only just come to light among papers remaining with the Haines family) is printed in Letters from a typescript held by the Gloucestershire Record Office (rather than the usual photocopy), where Frost's admonition "Don't flirt with your cousins" in the original letter comes out in the wash as ʻWon't flirt with your cousins'.

For a further discussion of the poem, with reference to Frost's letter but prior to the rediscovery of the draft, see the essay by David Sanders in The Robert Frost Encyclopedia, edited by Nancy Lewis Tuten and John Zubizarreta, 2000, pp.157-8.

출처 : https://www.bonhams.com/auctions/24634/lot/266/

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Robert Frost and the Challenge of Darwin(2001) - Robert Faggen

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youtu.be/DuTPVj05iYk

youtu.be/DUgy4eUI8qs

youtu.be/mXvhmj01Nlo

youtu.be/noSQ3ELal1o

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

In 1973, Kiffin Rockwell suggested still another way in which one may understand the poem’s tender vignette of rustic chores. He points out that by evoking the tradition of a whole string of Greek and Roman poems – poems that go back as far as the Homeric Hymn to Apollo –Frost is announcing a new poetic program for North of Boston.4 In 1975, Lowell Edmunds, picking up on this brief and somewhat elliptical statement, expands on the recurrent use of “The Pasture” throughout the rest of Frost’s life as an epigraph to many of his selected and collected poems from 1923 to 1949.5 In 1962, the year before he died, in his final selection, In the Clearing, the epigraph occurs as the single line, “And wait to watch the water clear, I may –,” an expressive leave-taking from one who talks “about everything in terms of New England.” This epigraphical reappearance before every major volume of Frost’s poetry affirms, according to Edmunds, Rockwell’s original perception that Frost had already announced at the opening of North of Boston, “reticently but with his Classics in mind,” a program for a completely new kind of poetry, which, as Edmunds goes on to point out, the poet reaffirmed for the rest of his life, by recalling “The Pasture” in all subsequent collections.

In this simplest of rural poems, at the very beginning of his publishing career, Frost evokes one of the oldest conventions of Western poetry. As it does in the work of his Greek and Roman predecessors, this convention proclaims both his affiliation with that tradition and his own original contribution to it. The additional depth and range that this twofold application gives to his little poem is quite typical of what Frost’s incorporation of classical literature gives to many of his poems.

Frost’s well-known belief in the metaphor as being the heart of poetry – indeed, the heart of all thinking – caused him to refrain from the kind of obvious learning, sometimes accompanied by footnotes, that impressed readers of Pound and Eliot. “Success in taking figures of speech,” Frost asserted, “is as intoxicating as success in making figures of speech”(CPPP, 814). He despised footnotes because they “robbed the heart of the chance to see for itself what a poem is all about” and so to arrive at the “clarification of life,” that poetry can achieve. He claimed to write for his equals, namely, “those I don’t have to write footnotes to. The footnotes, if I used them, would be a condescension to the people that can’t keep up with me.” It irritated him that, as time went on, fewer and fewer of his readers could rise to the challenge of keeping up with him. Too many failed to recognize the depth and range of the intellectual background he drew upon.

Almost as slight and apparently rustic as “The Pasture” is “Hyla Brook,” published in Mountain Interval. An awareness of how it interacts with an almost equally slight poem of Horace (Odes III, 13, often referred to as Fons Bandusiae, “The Spring of Bandusia”) deepens and enlarges both its charm and its frame of reference to reveal previously unexpected implications. Horace’s poem has its own kind of ulteriority, not generally known to classical scholars until pointed out by Steele Commager in 1962: an ulteriority confirmed and elaborated on by Gordon Williams in 1969. In 1916, Frost had already noticed and built into “Hyla Brook” this “ulteriority” of Fons Bandusiae, that apparently had escaped two millennia of Horatian scholarship. Fons Bandusiae, like many of Horace’s poems, celebrates a ritual, an offering to a perpetual spring, on his rustic farm in the Sabine hills, to which Horace often escaped from the crowds and sophisticated society of Rome to enjoy the simpler and more peaceful life of the country. On the following day, the spring will be honored not only with the usual rustic offering of wine and flowers but also with the sacrifice of a kid whose prospect of love and war will be cut off when his red blood stains the icy waters. Horace praises the spring for the coolness and surrounding shade that it offers to straying sheep and oxen weary from the plow in the savage heat of August. He ends by declaring, 

You too shall become one of the renowned springs 
When I tell of the ilex that overhangs your hollow 
Rocks, whence your voluble 
Waters leap down. 
Odes III, 13 (author’s translation) 

It is clear from the offerings of flowers and wine and the promise of a sacrificed kid that the spring is a rustic deity. Horace’s audience would also have realized that his little poem is in standard hymnal form, which reinforces the idea of celebration and worship. Nor would they have had trouble, as some modern critics do, in seeing the implications: a kid cut off before realizing his destiny in lovemaking and war. Here is a variation on the theme of loss transmuted into art, such as we see in the myth when Pan plucks the reeds into which the nymph Syrinx had been changed as she fled his embrace, and makes them into Pan pipes (syrinx), on which he then plays music. Horace’s audience would also have known that the goat is sacred to Dionysus – the god of lyric and dramatic art. The never-ailing spring under a spreading tree that offers refuge from the ferocious August heat is still a familiar Mediterranean scene today. When Horace tells of the ilex tree that overhangs its rocks, he declares that his spring too will become one of the “renowned” ones. Horace’s “renowned” founts can only refer to the several springs of the Muses (Castalia, Hippocrene, Peirene are the most renowned) that are scattered throughout Greek literature. The gushing life of these year-round springs symbolizes the sphere of the Muses – the unfailing creativity of art and its capacity to make the dead past live again. Even as Horace claims membership for his spring in this august group whose cult pervades Greek literature, he seems to distinguish it as belonging to an Italian rather than a Greek world. Castalia, Helicon, and Peirene are all in places made famous by myth, known and visited by worshippers and travelers throughout antiquity. Horace’s Italian spring is known only to Horace and the few rustics in the Sabine hills who honor it with rustic offerings. Generally, throughout Greek literature, and even today, it is a giant plane-tree that shades Greek springs; but Horace’s spring is shaded by the ilex, or live oak, as though to underline the fact that his Muses have migrated from their more famous homes to his humble farm in Italy’s Sabine hills. However, like the waters of the Greek springs, they suggest renewed life and song as their chattering (loquaces) waters leap down (desiliunt) across the rocks.

Though Frost’s “Hyla Brook” runs out of “song and speed” by June, it is, as we shall shortly see, a celebration of the Muses, evoking many of the themes of Horace’s poem. In a fifteen-ine poem (Horace’s poem is sixteen lines), Frost describes a short-lived watercourse on his New Hampshire farm. It is quite typical of Frost’s borrowings that he should claim for his brook the same properties that Horace claims for his Sabine farm spring – though at first glance, the brook is the opposite of Horace’s spring, whose leaping, chattering waters are a never-failing source of coolness and shade, even in the dog days of August.

By June our brook’s run out of song and speed. As it vanishes, it evokes the past, first May and the “spring peepers” (Hylas), whose call pervades the spring nights, 

(And taken with it all the Hyla breed 
That shouted in the mist a month ago. 

The Hylas in turn evoke the more remote past of winter, 

Like ghost of sleigh-bells in a ghost of snow) – 

Or perhaps the brook has 

gone groping underground 
Or flourished and come up in jewel-weed. 

Even as the poem moves forward to July and August, the brook manifests itself as jewel-eed, which also looks to the past as it bends backward towards its source, rather than forward towards what was once the brook’s course. This image reminds us once again of the brook’s past, whereas in the present, in its summer manifestation, it exists in memory only – 

A brook to none but who remember long. 

Its appearance, however, as a 

faded paper sheet 
Of dead leaves stuck together by the heat – 

reminds us of a book. Only three poems before in the collection, in “A Patch of Old Snow,” Frost compares the snow to a “blow away paper,” that 

is speckled with grime as if 
Small print overspread it, 

a nearby reminder that Frost can see books in unexpected places. Books can be an even more effective reminder of the past than the remains of the brook. Horace’s poem, like Frost’s, plays with the theme of memory and confirm‎s his spring’s place amongst the company of renowned springs –for which he uses the adjective nobilis, derived from a root that means “to know.” This word nobilis is another indication of the presence of the Muses in his poem. The Muses are the daughters of Memory, and it is through their song that the past, which would otherwise be lost, becomes nobilis, known, renowned.

Frost’s list of evocations of the past culminates with a reminder of a “faded paper sheet.” The remains of the brook suggest a book. Through memory, the vanished brook soundlessly carries on its function of preserving and celebrating the past.

What follows echoes Horace’s claim that he has brought the august Greek goddesses to his humble farm, for Frost goes on: 

This as it will be seen is other far 
Than with brooks taken otherwhere in song. 
(CPPP, 115) 

Frost’s brook is “other far” than brooks sung about elsewhere. Horace’s spring, even as it joins the “renowned springs” of Greek literature, remains part of a far simpler Italian world. With Frost, the Muses have migrated once again from Italy to New England. Different though his short-lived brook is from Horace’s never-failing spring, it is still the poet’s source of inspiration. It too gives life through song to the otherwise vanishing past. So Frost honors his brook in a characteristically less ceremonious way with, 

We love the things we love for what they are. 

In the paradoxical Frostian world, his brook is both a New Hampshire brook that runs dry in June and a home to the Muses – an eternal source of life and inspiration.

Many critics have recognized and written feelingly about the many springs in Frost’s poems that symbolize life and creativity. But on the basis of these two very early (1914 and 1916) evocations of the Muses in association with water, it seems probable that for him, whenever watercourses represented life and creativity, they frequently, if not always, suggested the Muses –the sources of art and inspiration in both Greek and Roman literature.