Steeple Bush(1947)
Steeple Bush
A YOUNG BIRCH
SOMETHING FOR HOPE
ONE STEP BACKWARD TAKEN
DIRECTIVE
Too ANXIOUS FOR RIVERS
AN UNSTAMPED LETTER IN OUR RURAL LETTER BOX
To AN ANCIENT
Five Nocturnes
FIVE NOCTURNES
I. THE NIGHT LIGHT
II. WERE I IN TROUBLE
III. BRAVADO
IV. ON MAKING CERTAIN ANYTHING HAS HAPPENED
V. IN THE LONG NIGHT
A Spire and Belery
A MOOD APART
THE FEAR OF GOD
THE FEAR OF MAN
A STEEPLE ON THE HOUSE
INNATE HELIUM
THE COURAGE TO BE NEW
IOTA SUBSCRIPT
Out and Away
THE MIDDLENESS OF THE ROAD
ASTROMETAPHYSICAL
SKEPTIC
Two LEADING LIGHTS
A ROGERS GROUP
ON BEING IDOLIZED
A WISH TO COMPLY
A CLIFF DWELLING
IT BIDS PRETTY FAIR
BEYOND WORDS
A CASE FOR JEFFERSON
LUCRETIUS VERSUS THE LAKE POETS
Editorials
HAEC FABULA DOCET
ETHEREALIZING
WHY WAIT FOR SCIENCE
ANY SIZE WE PLEASE
AN IMPORTER
THE PLANNERS
No HOLY WARS FOR THEM
BURSTING RAPTURE
U. S. 1946 KINGS X
THE INGENUITIES OF DEBT
THE BROKEN DROUGHT
To THE RIGHT PERSON
An Afterword
TAKE SOMETHING LIKE A STAR(Complete Poems of Robert Frost)
FROM PLANE TO PLAN(Complete Poems of Robert Frost)
A Young Birch
The birch begins to crack its outer sheath
Of baby green and show the white beneath,
As whosoever likes the young and slight
May well have noticed. Soon entirely white
To double day and cut in half the dalk
It will stand forth, entirely white in bark,
And nothing but the top a leafy green—
The only native tree that dares to lean,
Relying on its beauty, to the air.
(Less brave perhaps than trusting are the fair.)
And someone reminiscent will recall
How once in cutting brush along the wall
He spared it from the number of the slain,
At first to be no bigger than a cane,
And then no bigger than a fishing pole,
But now at last so obvious a bole
The most efficient help you ever hired
Would know that it was there to be admired,
And zeal would not be thanked that cut it down
When you were reading books or out of town.
It was a thing of beauty and was sent
To live its life out as an ornament.
Something for Hope
At the present rate it must come to pass
And that right soon that the meadow sweet
And steeple bush not good to eat
Will have crowded out the edible grass
Then all there is to do is wait
For maple birch and spruce to push
Through meadow sweet and steeple bush
And crowd them out at a similar rate
No plow among these rocks would pay.
So busy yourself with other things
While the trees put on their wooden rings
And with long-sleeved branches hold their sway
Then cut down the trees when lumber grown,
And there’s your pristine earth all freed
From lovely blooming but wasteful weed
And ready again for the grass to own.
A cycle we’ll say of a hundred years
Thus foresight does it and laissez faire,
A virtue in which we all may share
Unless a government interferes
Patience and looking away ahead,
And leaving some things to take their course.
Hope may not nourish a cow or horse,
But spes alit agricolam ’tis said.
One Step Backward Taken
Not only sands and gravels
Were once more on their travels,
But gulping muddy gallons
Great boulders off their balance
Bumped heads together dully
And started down the gully.
Whole capes caked off in slices.
I felt my standpoint shaken
In the universal crisis
But with one step backward taken
I saved myself from going.
A world torn loose went by me.
Then the rain stopped and the blowing
And the sun came out to dry me.
Directive
Back out of all this now too much for us,
Back in a time made simple by the loss
Of detail, burned, dissolved, and broken off
Like graveyard marble sculpture in the weather,
There is a house that is no more a house
Upon a farm that is no more a farm
And in a town that is no more a town.
The road there, if you’ll let a guide direct you
Who only has at heart your getting lost,
May seem as if it should have been a quarry—
Great monolithic knees the former town
Long since gave up pretense of keeping covered.
And there’s a story in a book about it:
Besides the wear of iron wagon wheels
The ledges show lines ruled southeast northwest,
The chisel work of an enormous Glacier
That braced his feet against the Arctic Pole.
You must not mind a certain coolness from him
Still said to haunt this side of Panther Mountain,
Nor need you mind the serial ordeal
Of being watched from forty cellar holes
As if by eye pairs out of forty firkins.
As for the woods’ excitement over you
That sends light rustle rushes to their leaves,
Charge that to upstart inexperience
Where were they all not twenty years ago?
They think too much of having shaded out
A few old pecker-fretted apple trees.
Make yourself up a cheering song of how
Someone’s road home from work this once was,
Who may be just ahead of you on foot
Or creaking with a buggy load of grain
The height of the adventure is the height
Of country where two village cultures faded
Into each other. Both of them are lost
And if you’re lost enough to find yourself
By now, pull in your ladder road behind you
And put a sign up CLOSED to all but me
Then make yourself at home. The only field
Now left’s no bigger than a harness gall.
First there’s the children’s house of make believe,
Some shattered dishes underneath a pine,
The playthings in the playhouse of the children
Weep for what little things could make them glad.
Then for the house that is no more a house,
But only a belilaced cellar hole,
Now slowly closing like a dent in dough.
This was no playhouse but a house in earnest.
Your destination and your destiny’s
A brook that was the water of the house,
Cold as a spring as yet so near its source,
Too lofty and original to rage.
(We know the valley streams that when aroused
Will leave their tatters hung on barb and thorn.)
I have kept hidden in the instep arch
Of an old cedar at the waterside
A broken drinking goblet like the Grail
Under a spell so the wrong ones can’t find it,
So can’t get saved, as Saint Mark says they mustn’t.
(I stole the goblet from the children’s playhouse.)
Here are your waters and your watering place.
Drink and be whole again beyond confusion.
Too Anxious for Rivers
Look down the long valley and there stands a mountain
That someone has said is the end of the world.
Then what of this river that having arisen
Must find where to pour itself into and empty?
I never saw so much swift water run cloudless.
Oh, I have been often too anxious for rivers
To leave it to them to get out of their valleys.
The truth is the river flows into the canyon
Of Ceasing to Question What Doesn’t Concern Us,
As sooner or later we have to cease somewhere.
No place to get lost like too far in the distance.
It may be a mercy the dark closes round us
So broodingly soon in every direction.
The world as we know is an elephant’s howdah,
The elephant stands on the back of a turtle,
The turtle in turn on a rock in the ocean.
And how much longer a story has science
Before she must put out the light on the children
And tell them the rest of the story is dreaming?
‘You children may dream it and tell it tomorrow’
Time was we were molten, time was we were vapor.
What set us on fire and what set us revolving
Lucretius the Epicurean might tell us
’Twas something we knew all about to begin with
And needn’t have fared into space like his master
To find ’twas the effort, the essay of love.
An Unstamped Letter in our Rural Letter Box
Last night your watchdog barked all night
So once you lose and lit the light.
It wasn’t someone at your locks.
No, in your rural letter box
I leave this note without a stamp
To tell you it was just a tramp
Who used your pasture for a camp.
There pointed like the pip of spades
The young spruce made a suite of glades
So regular that in the dark
The place was like a city park.
There I elected to demur
Beneath a low-slung juniper
That like a blanket to my chin
Kept some dew out and some heat in,
Yet left me freely face to face
All night with universal space.
It may have been at two o’clock
That under me a point of rock
Developed in the grass and fern,
And as I woke afraid to turn
Or so much as uncross my feet,
Lest having wasted precious heat
I never should again be warmed,
The largest firedrop ever formed
From two stars’ having coalesced
Went streaking molten down the west.
And then your tramp astrologer
From seeing this undoubted stir
In Heaven’s firm-set firmament,
Himself had the equivalent,
Only within. Inside the brain
Two memories that long had lain,
Now quivered toward each other, lipped
Together, and together slipped,
And for a moment all was plain
That men have thought about in vain.
Please, my involuntary host,
Forgive me if I seem to boast.
’Tis possible you may have seen,
Albeit through a rusty screen,
The same sign Heaven showed your guest.
Each knows his own discernment best.
You have had your advantages.
Things must have happened to you, yes,
And have occurred to you no doubt,
If not indeed from sleeping out,
Then from the work you went about
In farming well—or pretty well.
And it is partly to compel
Myself, in forma pauperis,
To say as much I write you this.
To an Ancient
Your claims to immortality were two.
The one you made, the other one you grew.
Sorry to have no name for you but You
We never knew exactly where to look,
But found one in the delta of a brook,
One in a cavern where you used to cook
Coming on such an ancient human trace
Seems as expressive of the human race
As meeting someone living face to face.
We date you by your depth in silt and dust
Your probable brute nature is discussed.
At which point we are totally nonplussed.
You made the eolith, you grew the bone,
The second more peculiarly your own,
And likely to have been enough alone.
You make me ask if I would go to time
Would I gain anything by using rhyme?
Or aren’t the bones enough I live to lime?
Five Nocturnes
Five Nocturnes
I. The Night Light
She always had to burn a light
Beside her attic bed at night
It gave bad dreams and broken sleep,
But helped the Lord her soul to keep
Good gloom on her was thrown away.
It is on me by night or day,
Who have, as I suppose, ahead
The darkest of it still to dread.
II. Were I in Trouble
Where I could think of no thoroughfare,
Away on the mountain up far too high,
A blinding headlight shifted glare
And began to bounce down a granite stair
Like a star fresh fallen out of the sky
And I away in my opposite wood
Am touched by that unintimate light
And made feel less alone than I rightly should,
For traveler there could do me no good
Were I in trouble with night tonight.
III. Bravado
Have I not walked without an upward look
Of caution under stars that very well
Might not have missed me when they shot and fell?
It was a risk I had to take—and took.
IV. On Making Certain Anything Has Happened
I could be worse employed
Than as watcher of the void
Whose part should be to tell
What star if any fell.
Suppose some seed-pearl sun
Should be the only one,
Yet still I must report
Some cluster one star short.
I should justly hesitate
To frighten church or state
By announcing a star down
From say the Cross or Crown.
To make sure what star I missed
I should have to check on my list
Every star in sight.
It might take me all night.
V. In the Long Night
I would build my house of crystal
With a solitary friend
Where the cold cracks like a pistol
And the needle stands on end.
We would pour oil on the ingle
And for want of books recite.
We would crawl out filing single
To observe the Northern Light.
If Etookashoo and Couldlooktoo
The Esquimaux should call,
There would be fish raw and cooked too
And enough drink oil for all.
As one rankly warm insider
To another I would say,
We can rest assured on eider
There will come another day.
A Spire and Belfry
A Mood apart
Once down on my knees to growing plants
I prodded the earth with a lazy tool
In time with a medley of sotto chants,
But becoming aware of some boys from school
Who had stopped outside the fence to spy,
I stopped my song and almost heart,
For any eye is an evil eye
That looks ill on to a mood apart.
The Fear of God
If you should rise from Nowhere up to Somewhere,
From being No one up to being Someone,
Be sure to keep repeating to yourself
You owe it to an arbitrary god
Whose mercy to you rather than to others
Won’t bear too critical examination
Stay unassuming. If for lack of license
To wear the uniform of who you are,
You should be tempted to make up for it
In a subordinating look or tone
Beware of coming too much to the surface,
And using for apparel what was meant
To be the curtain of the inmost soul.
The Fear of Man
As a girl no one gallantly attends
Sets forth for home at midnight from a friend’s—
She tries to make it in one catch of breath,
And this is not because she thinks of death.
The city seems intoppling from a height,
But she can trust it not to fall tonight.
(It will be taken down before it falls.)
There scarcely is a light in all its walls
Except beside a safe inside a bank
(For which assurance Mammon is to thank).
But there are little street lights she should trust
So jewel steady in the wind and dust.
Her fear is being spoken by the rude
And having her exposure misconstrued.
May I in my brief bolt across the scene
Not be misunderstood in what I mean.
A Steeple on the House
What if it should turn out eternity
Was but the steeple on our house of life
That made our house of life a house of worship?
We do not go up there to sleep at night.
We do not go up there to live by day.
Nor need we ever go up there to live.
A spire and belfry coming on the roof
Means that a soul is coming on the flesh.
Innate Helium
Religious faith is a most filling vapor.
It swirls occluded in us under tight
Compression to uplift us out of weight—
As in those buoyant bird bones thin as paper,
To give them still more buoyancy in flight.
Some gas like helium must be innate.
The Courage to be New
I hear the world reciting
The mistakes of ancient men,
The brutality and fighting
They will never have again.
Heartbroken and disabled
In body and in mind
They renew talk of the fabled
Federation of Mankind.
But they’re blessed with the acumen
To suspect the human trait
Was not the basest human
That made them militate.
They will tell you more as soon as
You tell them what to do
With their ever breaking newness
And their courage to be new.
Iota Subscript
Seek not in me the big I capital,
Nor yet the little dotted in me seek.
If I have in me any I at all,
’Tis the iota subscript of the Greek.
So small am I as an attention beggar.
The letter you will find me subscript to
Is neither alpha, eta, nor omega,
But upsilon which is the Greek for you.
Out and Away
The Middleness of the Road
The road at the top of the rise
Seems to come to an end
And take off into the skies.
So at the distant bend
It seems to go into a wood,
The place of standing still
As long the trees have stood.
But say what Fancy will,
The mineral drops that explode
To drive my ton of car
Are limited to the road
They deal with near and far,
But have almost nothing to do
With the absolute flight and rest
The universal blue
And local green suggest.
Astrometaphysical
Lord, I have loved your sky,
Be it said against or for me,
Have loved it clear and high,
Or low and stormy;
Till I have reeled and stumbled
From looking up too much,
And fallen and been humbled
To wear a crutch.
My love for every Heaven
O’er which you, Lord, have lorded,
From number One to Seven
Should be rewarded.
It may not give me hope
That when I am translated
My scalp will in the cope
Be constellated.
But if that seems to tend
To my undue renown,
At least it ought to send
Me up, not down.
Skeptic
Far star that tickles for me my sensitive plate
And fries a couple of ebon atoms white,
I don’t believe I believe a thing you state.
I put no faith in the seeming facts of light.
I don’t believe I believe you’re the last in space,
I don’t believe you’re anywhere near the last,
I don’t believe what makes you red in the face
Is after explosion going away so fast.
The universe may or may not be very immense.
As a matter of fact there are times when I am apt
To feel it close in tight against my sense
Like a caul in which I was born and still am wrapped.
Two Leading Lights
I never happened to contrast
The two in the celestial cast
Whose prominence has been so vast.
The Sun is satisfied with days
He never has in any phase
That I have heard of shone at night.
And yet he is a power of light
And could in one burst overwhelm
And dayify the darkest realm
By right of eminent domain.
He has the greatness to refrain.
The Moon for all her light and grace
Has never learned to know her place.
The notedest astronomers
Have set the dark aside for hers.
But there are many nights though clear
She doesn’t bother to appear.
Some lunatic or lunar whim
Will bring her out diminished dim
To set herself beside the Sun
As Sheba came to Solomon.
It may be charitably guessed
Comparison is not her quest.
Some rumor of his wishing ring
That changes winter into spring
Has brought her merely visiting,
An irresponsible divinity
Presuming on her femininity.
A Rogers Group
How young and unassuming
They waited in the street,
With babies in their arms
And baggage at their feet.
A trolley car they hailed
Went by With clanging gong
Before they guessed the comer
They waited on was wrong.
And no one told them so
By way of traveler’s aid,
None was so far touched
By the Rogers Group they made.
On Being Idolized
The wave sucks back and with the last of water
It wraps a wisp of seaweed round my legs,
And with the swift rush of its sandy dregs
So undermines my barefoot stand I totter
And did I not take steps would be tipped over
Like the ideal of some mistaken lover.
A Wish To Comply
Did I see it go by,
That Millikan mote?
Well, I said that I did.
I made a good try.
But I’m no one to quote.
If I have a defect
It’s a wish to comply
And see as I’m bid.
I rather suspect
All I saw was the lid
Going over my eye.
I honestly think
All I saw was a wink.
A Cliff Dwelling
There sandy seems the golden sky
And golden seems the sandy plain.
No habitation meets the eye
Unless in the horizon rim,
Some halfway up the limestone wall,
That spot of black is not a stain
Or shadow, but a cavern hole,
Where someone used to climb and crawl
To rest from his besetting fears.
I see the callus on his sole
The disappearing last of him
And of his race starvation slim,
Oh, years ago—ten thousand years.
It Bids Pretty Fair
The play seems out for an almost infinite run
Don’t mind a little thing like the actors fighting
The only thing I worry about is the sun
We’ll be all right if nothing goes wrong with the lighting.
Beyond Words
That row of icicles along the gutter
Feels like my armory of hate;
And you, you…you, you utter…
You wait!
A Case for Jefferson
Harrison loves my country too,
But wants it all made over new.
He’s Freudian Viennese by night.
By day he’s Marxian Muscovite.
It isn’t because he’s Russian Jew.
He’s Puritan Yankee through and through.
He dotes on Saturday pork and beans.
But his mind is hardly out of his teens
With him the love of country means
Blowing it all to smithereens
And having it all made over new.
Lucretius versus the Lake Poets
‘Nature I loved, and next to Nature, Art.’
Dean, adult education may seem silly.
What of it though? I got some willy-nilly
The other evening at your college deanery.
And grateful for it (Let’s not be facetious!)
For I thought Epicurus and Lucretius
By Nature meant the Whole Goddam Machinery.
But you say that in college nomenclature
The only meaning possible for Nature
In Landor’s quatrain would be Pretty Scenery.
Which makes opposing it to Art absurd
I grant you—If you’re sure about the word.
God bless the Dean and make his deanship plenary.
Editorials
Haec Fabula Docet
A Blindman by the name of La Fontaine,
Relying on himself and on his cane,
Came tap-tap-tapping down the village street,
The apogee of human blind conceit.
Now just ahead of him was seen to yawn
A trench where water pipes were laying on.
The Blindman might have found it with his ferrule,
But someone over anxious at his peril
Not only warned him with a loud command,
But ran against him with a staying hand
Enraged at what he could but think officious,
The Blindman missed him with a blow so vicious
He gave his own poor iliac a wrench
And plunged himself head foremost in the trench:
Where with a glee no less for being grim
The workmen all turned to and buried him.
Moral
The moral is it hardly need be shown,
All those who try to go it sole alone,
Too proud to be beholden for relief,
Are absolutely sure to come to grief.
Etherealizing
A theory if you hold it hard enough
And long enough gets rated as a creed:
Such as that flesh is something we can slough
So that the mind can be entirely freed
Then when the arms and legs have atrophied,
And brain is all that’s left of mortal stuff,
We can lie on the beach with the seaweed
And take our dally tide baths smooth and rough.
There once we lay as blobs of jellyfish
At evolution’s opposite extreme.
But now as blobs of brain we’ll lie and dream,
With only one vestigial creature wish.
Oh, may the tide be soon enough at high
To keep our abstract verse from being dry.
Why Wait for Science
Sarcastic Science she would like to know,
In her complacent ministry of fear,
How we propose to get away from here
When she has made things so we have to go
Or be wiped out. Will she be asked to show
Us how by rocket we may hope to steer
To some star off there say a half light-year
Through temperature of absolute zeró?
Why wait for Science to supply the how
When any amateur can tell it now?
The way to go away should be the same
As fifty million years ago we came—
If anyone remembers how that was.
I have a theory, but it hardly does.
Any Size We Please
No one was looking at his lonely case,
So like a half-mad outpost sentinel,
Indulging an absurd dramatic spell,
Albeit not without some shame of face,
He stretched his arms out to the dark of space
And held them absolutely parallel
In infinite appeal. Then saying, ‘Hell’
He drew them in for warmth of self-embrace.
He thought if he could have his space all curved
Wrapped in around itself and self-befriended,
His science needn’t get him so unnerved.
He had been too all out, too much extended.
He slapped his breast to verify his purse
And hugged himself for all his universe.
An Importer
Mrs. Someone’s been to Asia.
What she brought back would amaze ye.
Bamboos, ivories, jades, and lacquers,
Devil-scaring firecrackers,
Recipes for tea with butter,
Sacred rigmaroles to mutter,
Subterfuge for saving faces,
A developed taste in vases,
Arguments too stale to mention
’Gainst American invention,
Most of all the mass production
Destined to prove our destruction.
What are telephones, skyscrapers,
Safety razors, Sunday papers,
But the silliest evasion
Of the truths we owe an Asian?
But the best of her exhibit
Was a prayer machine from Tibet
That by brook power in the garden
Kept repeating Pardon, pardon;
And as picturesque machinery
Beat a sundial in the scenery—
The most primitive of engines
Mass producing with a vengeance.
Teach those Asians mass production?
Teach your grandmother egg suction.
The Planners
If anything should put an end to This,
I’m thinking the unborn would never miss
What they had never had of vital bliss
No burst of nuclear phenomenon
That put an end to what was going on
Could make much difference to the dead and gone.
Only a few of those even in whose day
It happened would have very much to say.
And anyone might ask them who were they.
Who would they be? The guild of social planners
With the intention blazoned on their banners
Of getting one more chance to change our manners?
These anyway might think it was important
That human history should not be shortened.
No Holy Wars for Them
States strong enough to do good are but few.
Their number would seem limited to three.
Good is a thing that they the great can do,
But puny little states can only be.
And being good for these means standing by
To watch a war in nominal alliance,
And when it’s over watch the world’s supply
Get parceled out among the winning giants.
God, have you taken cognizance of this?
And what on this is your divine position?
That nations like the Cuban and the Swiss
Can never hope to wage a Global Mission.
No Holy Wars for them The most the small
Can ever give us is a nuisance brawl.
Bursting Rapture
I went to the physician to complain,
The time had been when anyone could turn
To farming for a simple way to earn,
But now ’twas there as elsewhere, any gain
Was made by getting science on the brain,
There was so much more every day to learn,
The discipline of farming was so stern,
It seemed as if I couldn’t stand the strain.
But the physician’s answer was ‘There, there,
What you complain of all the nations share.
Their effort is a mounting ecstasy
That when it gets too exquisite to bear
Will find relief in one burst. You shall see
That’s what a certain bomb was sent to be.’
U. S. 1946 King’s X
Having invented a new Holocaust,
And been the first with it to win a war,
How they make haste to cry with fingers crossed,
King’s X—no fairs to use it any more!
The Ingenuities of Debt
These I assume were words so deeply meant
They cut themselves in stone for permanent
Like trouble in the brow above the eyes.
‘Take Care to Sell Your Horse before He Dies
The Art of Life Is Passing Losses on.’
The city saying it was Ctesiphon,
Which may a little while by war and trade
Have kept from being caught with the decayed,
Infirm, worn-out, and broken on its hands,
But judging by what little of it stands,
Not even the ingenuities of debt
Could save it from its losses being met
Sand has been thrusting in the square of door
Across the tessellation of the floor,
And only rests, a serpent on its chin,
Content with contemplating, taking in,
Till it can muster breath inside a hall
To rear against the inscription on the wall.
The Broken Drought
The prophet of disaster ceased to shout.
Something was going right outside the hall.
A rain though stingy had begun to fall
That rather hurt his theory of the drought
And all the great convention was about
A cheer went up that shook the mottoed wall.
He did as Shakespeare says, you may recall,
Good orators will do when they are out.
Yet in his heart he was unshaken sure
The drought was one no spit of rain could cure.
It was the drought of deserts. Earth would soon
Be uninhabitable as the moon.
What for that matter had it ever been?
Who advised man to come and live therein?
To the Right Person
In the one state of ours that is a shire,
There is a District Schoolhouse I admire
As much as anything for situation.
There are few institutions standing higher
This side the Rockies in my estimation—
Two thousand feet above the ocean level.
It has two entries for coeducation.
But there’s a tight shut look to either door
And to the windows of its fenestration,
As if to say mere learning was the devil
And this school wasn’t keeping any more
Unless for penitents who took their seat
Upon its doorsteps as at mercy’s feet
To make up for a lack of meditation.
An Afterword
Take Something Like a Star
O Star (the fairest one in sight),
We grant your loftiness the right
To some obscurity of cloud—
It will not do to say of night,
Since dark is what brings out your light.
Some mystery becomes the proud.
But to be wholly taciturn
In your reserve is not allowed.
Say something to us we can learn
By heart and when alone repeat.
Say something! And it says, ‘I burn.’
But say with what degree of heat.
Talk Fahrenheit, talk Centigrade.
Use language we can comprehend.
Tell us what elements you blend.
It gives us strangely little aid,
But does tell something in the end.
And steadfast as Keats’ Eremite,
Not even stooping from its sphere,
It asks a little of us here.
It asks of us a certain height,
So when at times the mob is swayed
To carry praise or blame too far,
We may take something like a star
To stay our minds on and be staid.
Closed For Good
Much as I own I owe
The passers of the past
Because their to and fro
Has cut this road to last,
I owe them more today
Because they’ve gone away
And come not back with steed
And chariot to chide
My slowness with their speed
And scare me to one side.
They have found other scenes
For haste and other means
They leave the road to me
To walk in saying naught
Perhaps but to a tree
Inaudibly in thought,
‘From you the road receives
A priming coat of leaves.’
‘And soon for lack of sun,
The prospects are in white
It will be further done,
But with a coat so light
The shape of leaves will show
Beneath the brush of snow.’
And so on into winter
Till even I have ceased
To come as a foot printer,
And only some slight beast
So mousy or so foxy
Shall print there as my proxy.
From Plane to Plane
Neither of them was better than the other.
They both were hired. And though Pike had the advantage
Of having hoed and mowed for fifty years,
Dick had of being fresh and full of college.
So if they fought about equality
It was on an equality they fought.
‘Your trouble is not sticking to the subject,’
Pike said with temper. And Dick longed to say,
‘Your trouble is bucolic lack of logic,’
But all he did say was, ‘What is the subject?’
‘It’s whether these professions really work.
Now take the Doctor—’
They were giving corn
A final going over with the hoe
Before they turned from everything to hay.
The wavy upflung pennons of the corn
Were loose all round their legs—you couldn’t say
How many thousand of them in an acre.
Every time Dick or Pike looked up, the Doctor
With one foot on the dashboard of his buggy
Was still in sight like someone to depend on.
Nowhere but on the Bradford Interval
By the Connecticut could anyone
Have stayed in sight so long as an example.
‘Taking his own sweet time as if to show
He don’t mind having lost a case,’ Pike said,
And when he caught Dick looking once too often,
‘Hoeing’s too much like work for Dick,’ he added.
‘Dick wishes he could swap jobs with the Doctor.
Let’s holler and ask him if he won’t prescribe
For all humanity a complete rest
From all this wagery. But what’s the use
Of asking any sympathy of him?
That class of people don’t know what work is—
More than they know what courage is that claim
The moral kind’s as brave as facing bullets.’
Dick told him to be fairer to the Doctor:
‘He looks to me like going home successful,
Full of success, with that foot on the dashboard,
As a small self-conferred reward of virtue
I get you when you hoe out to the river,
Then pick your hoe up, maybe shoulder it,
And take your walk of recreation back
To curry favor with the dirt some more.
Isn’t it pretty much the same idea?
You said yourself you weren’t avoiding work.
You’d bet you got more work done in a day,
Or at least in a lifetime, by that method.’
‘I wouldn’t hoe both ways for anybody!’
‘And right you are. You do the way we do
In reading, don’t you, Bill?—at every line end
Pick up our eyes and carry them back idle
Across the page to where we started from.
The other way of reading back and forth,
Known as boustrophedon, was found too awkward.’
Pike grunted rather grimly with misgiving
At being thus expounded to himself
And made of by a boy; then having reached
The river bank, quit work defiantly,
As if he didn’t care who understood him,
And started his march back again discoursing.
‘A man has got to keep his extrication.
The important thing is not to get bogged down
In what he has to do to earn a living.
What’s more, I hate to keep afflicting weeds.
I like to give my enemies a truce.’
‘Be careful how you use your influence.
If I decided to become a doctor,
You’d be to blame for furnishing the reasons’
‘I thought you meant to be an Indian Chief—
You said the second coming of Tecumseh.
Remember how you envied General Sherman
William Tecumseh Sherman. Why Tecumseh?
(He tried to imitate Dick’s tone of voice.)
You wished your middle name had been Tecumseh.’
‘I think I’ll change my mind.’
‘You’re saying that
To bother me by siding with the Doctor.
You’ve got no social conscience as they say,
Or you’d feel differently about the classes.
You can’t claim you’re a social visionary.’
‘I’m saying it to argue his idea’s
The same as your idea, only more so.
And I suspect it may be more and more so
The further up the scale of work you go.
You could do worse than boost me up to see.’
‘It isn’t just the same, and some day, schoolboy,
I’ll show you why it isn’t—not today
Today I want to talk about the sun.
May as expected was a disappointment,
And June was not much better, cold and rainy.
The sun then had his longest day in heaven,
But no one from the feeling would have guessed
His presence was particularly there
He only stayed to set the summer on fire,
Then fled for fear of getting stuck in lava
In case the rocks should melt and run again.
Everyone has to keep his extrication.’
‘That’s what the Doctor’s doing, keeping his.
That’s what I have to do in school, keep mine
From knowing more than I know how to think With.
You see it in yourself and in the sun,
Yet you refuse to see it in the Doctor.’
‘All right, let’s harmonize about the Doctor.
He may be some good in a manner of speaking.
I own he does look busy when the sun
Is in the sign of Sickness in the winter
And everybody’s being sick for Christmas.
Then’s when his Morgan lights out throwing snowballs
Behind her at the dashboard of his pung.’
‘But Cygnus isn’t in the Zodiac,’
Dick longed to say, but wasn’t sure enough
Of his astronomy. (He’d have to take
A half course in it next year.) And besides,
Why give the controversy a relapse?
They were both bent on scuffling up
Alluvium so pure that when a blade
To their surprise rang once on stone all day
Each tried to be the first at getting in
A superstitious cry for farmers’ luck—
A rivalry that made them both feel kinder.
And so to let Pike seem to have the palm
With grace and not too formal a surrender
Dick said, ‘You’ve been a lesson in work wisdom
To work with, Bill. But you won’t have my thanks.
I like to think the sun’s like you in that—
Since you bring up the subject of the sun.
This would be my interpretation of him.
He bestows summer on us and escapes
Before our realizing what we have
To thank him for. He doesn’t want our thanks.
He likes to turn his back on gratitude
And avoid being worshiped as a god
Our worship was a thing he had too much of
In the old days in Persia and Peru.
Shall I go on or have I said enough—
To convey my respect for your position?’
‘I guess so,’ Pike said, innocent of Milton.
‘That’s where I reckon Santa Claus comes in—
To be our parents’ pseudonymity
In Christmas giving, so they can escape
The thanks and let him catch it as a scapegoat.
And even he, you’ll notice, dodges off
Up chimney to avoid the worst of it.
We all know his address, Mount Hecla, Iceland.
So anyone can write to him who has to,
Though they do say he doesn’t open letters.
A Santa Claus was needed. And there is one.’
‘So I have heard and do in part believe it,’
Dick said to old Pike, innocent of Shakespeare.
----------
----------
#
Steeple Bush was published in late May, and the reviews
appeared throughout the summer. Like most writers, Frost
dreaded the reviews; even the good ones made him anxious and
unhappy. “They always get it wrong,” he once told an interviewer.
Intuitively, he understood that critics would be looking for signs
of diminishment. Indeed, the signs were there; only a few of the
poems in this collection were equal to his best work. The title
refers to a plant (also called hardhack) that grew profusely
around the farm in Ripton. The volume was dedicated to Frost’s
six grandchildren: Prescott, John (Jacky), Elinor, Lesley Lee,
Robin, and Harold.
The shrewdest review was written by Randall Jarrell, the
most gifted poet-critic of his generation of American poets.18
Jarrell began with a lengthy, admiring account of “Directive,”
concluding, “There are weak places in the poem, but these are
nothing beside so much longing, tenderness, and passive sadness,
Frost’s understanding that each life is tragic because it wears
away into the death that it at last half welcomes—that even its
salvation, far back at the cold root of things, is make-believe,
drunk from a child’s broken and stolen goblet hidden among the
ruins of the lost cultures. Much of the strangeness of the poem
is far under the surface, or else so much on the surface, in the
subtlest of details (how many readers will connect the ‘serial
ordeal’ of the eye pairs with the poem’s Grail-parody?), that one
slides under it unnoticing. There are no notes in the back about
this Grail.” The last quip, of course, refers to the footnotes
appended to Eliot’s Grail poem, The Waste Land. Jarrell also
noted that “there is nothing else in Steeple Bush like ‘Directive.’”
The one other poem of some importance, in his view, was “The
Ingenuities of Debt,” which he praised for its “dry
mercilessness.”
Jarrell’s opinion was shared by many readers, although Frost
had by now built up such a layer of goodwill among critics that he
was generally praised. As Gladys Campbell observed in Poetry,
“The time is long past for casual contemporary evaluation [of
Frost].… Through textbooks and anthologies some of his poems
are so well-known to schoolboys that they are amazed to find
that Frost is a living poet. He belongs with Tennyson,
Wordsworth, Longfellow—all those who are to be read before
examinations.”19
While Steeple Bush is not quite equal to its major
predecessors, it has its own peculiar radiance and affect. The
first section is “Steeple Bush,” and contains seven poems,
including “Directive,” which overpowers the volume as a whole. It
would be hard for a poem of this distinction not to overpower its
neighbors in a slim volume. The other groupings are “Five
Nocturnes,” “A Spire and a Belfry,” “Out and Away,” and
“Editorials.” Overall, the poems play to each other beautifully,
amplifying a theme sounded early, in “Something for Hope,”
where the poet puts the steeple bush before the reader, a
“lovely blooming” that has very little to say for itself apart from
this beauty. It cannot be eaten, it crowds out other plants, and
even the most resolute gardener will have difficulty getting rid
of it. Frost suggests that the cycles of nature will naturally shift
the local flora in
A cycle we’ll say of a hundred years.
Thus foresight does it and laissez faire,
A virtue in which we all may share
Unless a government interferes.
With the accumulated wisdom of seven decades, Frost urges
“Patience and looking away ahead, / And leaving some things to
take their course.”
The second section seems lighter in tone, but there is gravity
here as well. Frost writes about terror (of the dark, of death),
about putting false hope in the comfort of distant lights; “The
Night Light” is a compressed and memorable lyric (it was actually
written in September 1928—while Frost was visiting England):20
She always had to burn a light
Beside her attic bed at night.
It gave bad dreams and broken sleep,
But helped the Lord her soul to keep.
Good gloom on her was thrown away.
It is on me by night or day,
Who have, as I suppose, ahead
The darkest of it still to dread.
A cluster of poems follows that contains one rarely noted but
quite remarkable poem, “The Fear of God,” which might be taken
as Frost’s look backward on his own career:
If you should rise from Nowhere up to Somewhere,
From being No one up to being Someone,
Be sure to keep repeating to yourself
You owe it to an arbitrary god
Whose mercy to you rather than to others
Won’t bear too critical examination.
The poem goes on to urge the reader: “Stay unassuming.” He
regards “the uniform of who you are” as “the curtain of the
inmost soul.”
The poems here repeatedly insist on humility, and the poet
responds to the bleakness of the universe with a rueful shake of
the head. This mode of wisdom-giving continues in “Out and
Away,” the third grouping, which opens with another strong
poem, “The Middleness of the Road.” The ease of phrasing and
the light, running quality of the lines are stunning. The poet
begins with an image of finitude that, mysteriously, beckons
toward but cannot approach infinity:
The road at the top of the rise
Seems to come to an end
And take off into the skies.
Quickly, the poem becomes a meditation on “near and far,” on the
present life in the body, and the spiritual realm embodied in the
“universal blue” of the sky. The human mind (represented here as
Fancy) cannot take satisfaction in the comforts of what lies
near, nor can it leap into transcendence. That is, it cannot
consort comfortably with “absolute flight and rest.” Before a
reading of this poem, Frost once said that “you can only go so
far, which is what being human means. We’re human. We’re not
immortal. At least not yet.”21
The final section, gathered under the title “Editorials,” is full
of the usual resentment against government planners “With the
intention blazoned on their banners / Of getting one more
chance to change our manners” (“The Planners”). He believes that
“States strong enough to do good are few” (“No Holy Wars for
Them”). Even doomsayers are chided in “The Broken Drought.”
These poems, which would have fit nicely in A Further Range,
represent an extension of the tonalities of that collection.
“The Ingenuities of Debt,” that piece of “dry mercilessness”
praised by Randall Jarrell, fits in perfectly with the poems in
this section, but it was actually written on the Derry farm some
five decades earlier. Typically, it lingered in Frost’s folder of
unfinished poems for many years. The poem was unfinished
largely because it turns on his inventing an ancient inscription
from a long-destroyed city in the Middle East, and Frost had
trouble getting a good enough line to fit here. It obviously took
forty years to find it: “TAKE CARE TO SELL YOUR HORSE BEFORE HE DIES
/ THE ART OF LIFE IS PASSING LOSSES ON.” Once again, the mere
presence of a poem written so long before its publication argues
against applying any traditional notion of poetic development to
Frost. As a poet, he was born whole: fingernails, hair, teeth,
everything in place. He didn’t “grow” but changed, evolving by
extension and amplification.
In his collected edition of 1949, Frost appended three poems
to Steeple Bush, one of them being “Choose Something Like a
Star,” which first appeared in a selection of his work made by
Louis Untermeyer in 1943. This extraordinary poem—another
peak of this period—is written in a measured, four-beat cadence;
the opening recalls Keats’s famous “Bright Star,” which Frost
alludes to directly in line 18. By inviting comparison with a famous
predecessor, Frost takes a certain risk, but the poem can
withstand such scrutiny. The poet addresses the star, which he
once told an audience at Bread Loaf was meant to represent
“something far away, like a star or an ancient poet.”22 Frost once
again adopts the mask of wisdom, suggesting to readers that
they (as he presumably has) look beyond whatever is around
them to something more permanent, even exalted. The poem ends
on a note also heard in Emerson’s “Self-Reliance”:
So when at times the mob is swayed
To carry praise or blame too far,
We may choose something like a star
To stay our minds on and be staid.
The wordplay on “stay” and “staid” is suggestive—one fastens on
to a distant object of veneration, risks becoming “staid” (boring,
old-fashioned) in order to be “stayed” (rooted, attached). “We
may take something like a star, or a poem, or God, to stay our
minds on, and be staid,” Frost commented.23 One of the poets he
would himself read for this purpose, as he noted, was Catullus—
the ancient lyricist of love.
#
Frost spent a quiet summer in Ripton, waiting for the reviews of
Steeple Bush. “He was like most poets,” Richard Eberhart says,
“fretting over the response of critics. The more well known he
became, the worse it seemed if someone didn’t like him.” As it
were, most of the reviews were celebratory—even those that
found some falling off in this collection. The harshest response
came in Time, where the anonymous reviewer said, “Frost is the
dean of living U.S. poets by virtue of both age and achievement.
At 72, the four-time Pulitzer Prize–winner has lost little of his
craftsmanship and none of his crackling vigor. But what was once
only granitic Yankee individualism in his work has hardened into
bitter and often uninspired Tory social commentary. The 43
poems of Steeple Bush do nothing to enlarge his greatness and
not one of them could begin to displace the best of his Collected
Poems.” 24 Given that the book contains “Directive,” one has to
wonder about this reviewer.
Frost reacted badly to the response in Time, as any sensitive
poet would; but there was enough respect, even adulation,
available in other publications to make up for this slight. Writing
in the Saturday Review, for example, Leonard Bacon extolled
“the bewildering beauty” of the book, finding “sharp imagery”
and “savage satire” in the poems. “There is no falling off,” he
declared.25 In the Atlantic Monthly, Donald A. Stauffer
suggested that Frost’s poems were “not so much simple as
elemental.” Stauffer was among the earliest critics to recognize
the darker aspect of his vision: “Frost is uncompromisingly aware
of an agonizing universe, and creates apocalyptic twentieth
century visions no less grim than Hardy, Yeats, Eliot, and
Auden.”26 This line of criticism would be amplified in the next
decade by Randall Jarrell and Lionel Trilling—both of whom
focused on the tragic sides of Frost almost too intensely.
Frost was, by now, well beyond the harm of reviewers, having
ripened into an American institution. More remarkably, he was
still writing poems of lasting value at an age when most lyric
poets are long past the point of meaningful productivity. In this,
he stands beside his great contemporaries Yeats and Stevens,
who also managed to find a voice and stance in their later years
that allowed them to continue writing poems equal to or better
than their earlier work.
from "Robert Frost : A Life - Jay Parini"
-----------
A source of anxiety for Frost that spring and on into the summer was associated with the publication on May twenty-eighth of Steeple Bush, his firs 1 : collection of new lyrics since A Witness Tree in 1942. Good as he felt the poems in the new book to be, he knew that the critics, and readers in general, would be on the lookout for signs that he was now past his poetic prime—too old to turn out verse that invited comparison with his best work.
He had tried in Steeple Bush to branch out in new directions, taking more direct cognizance, than in previous collections, of the issues affecting the contemporary world. The final grouping of six poems, for example, was called "Editorials" and contained several poems that referred in some way to that new subject for treatment in poetry, the atomic bomb. When read sequentially, however, the poems of Steeple Bush contributed to a thematic whole dominated not by secular, but by spiritual concerns.
Frost's anxieties continued to 벗mount until, by mid-June, he was nearly sick with worry. Knowing how Frost went into a tailspin at the least hint of an unfavorable notice, Kay protected him by screening reviews, reading to him the best ones and reporting (sometimes with selective discrimination) on most of the rest. Inevitably, there were times, however, when even Kay's best efforts were insufficient to protect her employer from emotional knocks at the hands of reviewers.
The review of Steeple Bush in Time magazine was not kind. Kay decided it would not do to let him see it. It was, she told Frost, a typical "smart-alecky" Time review; he had best leave it alone. He agreed. Later that afternoon, however, out he went and bought a copy of Time.
"Robert Lee Frost," he read, "is the dean of living U.S. poets by virtue of both age and achievement. At 72, the four-time Pulitzer Prizewinner has lost little of his craftsmanship and none of his crackling vigor. But what was once only granitic Yankee individualism in his work has hardened into bitter and often uninspired Tory social commentary. The 43 poems of Steeple Bush do nothing to enlarge his greatness and no one of them could begin to displace the best of his Collected Poems. ..."
In Ripton, a few days later, Frost began to complain of pains in his wrists and chest. One afternoon Mrs. Morrison came up to his cabin and found him on the floor, in front of the fireplace. His head was resting on his arms, and these were draped across the seat of his Morris chair. When she went over to speak to him, he winced, and said, "Don't touch me." Where does it hurt? she demanded. "In my heart."
from "Robert Frost A One Volume Edition of the Authorised Biography - Thompson Lawrance Roger"