6. In the Home Stretch / Mountain Interval(1916) - Robert Frost
stretch : 길, 범위, 한도
She stood against the kitchen sink, and looked
Over the sink out through a dusty window
At weeds the water from the sink made tall.
She wore her cape; her hat was in her hand.
Behind her was confusion in the room,
Of chairs turned upside down to sit like people
In other chairs, and something, come to look,
For every room a house has―parlor, bedroom,
And dining room―thrown pell-mell in the kitchen.
pell-mell : 난잡하게, 난잡한
And now and then a smudged, infernal face
infernal : 악마적인
Looked in a door behind her and addressed
Her back. She always answered without turning.
"Where will I put this walnut bureau, lady?"
"Put it on top of something that's on top
Of something else," she laughed. "Oh, put it where
You can tonight, and go. It's almost dark;
You must be getting started back to town."
Another blackened face thrust in and looked
And smiled, and when she did not turn, spoke gently,
"What are you seeing out the window, lady?"
"Never was I beladied so before.
Would evidence of having been called lady
More than so many times make me a lady
In common law, I wonder."
"But I ask,
What are you seeing out the window, lady?"
"What I'll be seeing more of in the years
To come as here I stand and go the round
Of many plates with towels many times."
"And what is that? You only put me off."
"Rank weeds that love the water from the dishpan
More than some women like the dishpan, Joe;
A little stretch of mowing field for you;
Not much of that until I come to woods
That end all. And it's scarce enough to call
A view."
"And yet you think you like it, dear?"
"That's what you're so concerned to know! You hope
I like it.―Bang goes something big away
Off there upstairs. The very tread of men
As great as those is shattering to the frame
Of such a little house. Once left alone,
You and I, dear, will go with softer steps
Up and down stairs and through the rooms, and none
But sudden winds that snatch them from our hands
Will ever slam the doors."
"I think you see
More than you like to own to out that window."
own : 인정하다, 용인하다
"No, for besides the things I tell you of,
I only see the years. They come and go
In alternation with the weeds, the field,
The wood."
"What kind of years?"
"Why, latter years―
Different from early years."
“I see them, too.
You didn't count them?"
"No, the further off
So ran together that I didn't try to.
It can scarce be that they would be in number
We'd care to know, for we are not young now.―
And bang goes something else away off there.
It sounds as if it were the men went down,
And every crash meant one less to return
To lighted city streets we, too, have known,
But now are giving up for country darkness."
"Come from that window where you see too much,
And take a livelier view of things from here.
They're going. Watch this husky swarming up
swarm : 몰려들다, 떼
Over the wheel into the sky-high seat,
Lighting his pipe now, squinting down his nose
squint : 사시, 사팔뜨기
At the flame burning downward as he sucks it."
"See how it makes his nose-side bright, a proof
How dark it's getting. Can you tell what time
It is by that? Or by the moon? The new moon!
What shoulder did I see her over? Neither.
A wire she is of silver, as new as we
To everything. Her light won't last us long.
It's something, though, to know we're going to have her
Night after night and stronger every night
To see us through our first two weeks. But, Joe,
The stove! Before they go! Knock on the window;
Ask them to help you get it on its feet.
We stand here dreaming. Hurry! Call them back!"
"They're not gone yet."
"We've got to have the stove,
Whatever else we want for. And a light.
Have we a piece of candle if the lamp
And oil are buried out of reach?
Again
The house was full of tramping, and the dark,
Door-filling men burst in and seized the stove.
A cannon-mouth-like hole was in the wall,
To which they set it true by eye; and then
Came up the jointed stovepipe in their hands,
So much too light and airy for their strength
It almost seemed to come ballooning up,
Slipping from clumsy clutches toward the ceiling.
clutch : 클러치, 쥐다, 손아귀
"A fit!" said one, and banged a stovepipe shoulder.
"It's good luck when you move in to begin
With good luck with your stovepipe. Never mind,
It's not so bad in the country, settled down,
When people're getting on in life. You'll like it."
Joe said: "You big boys ought to find a farm,
And make good farmers, and leave other fellows
The city work to do. There's not enough
For everybody as it is in there."
"God!" one said wildly, and, when no one spoke:
"Say that to Jimmy here. He needs a farm."
But Jimmy only made his jaw recede
recede : 멀어지다, 감소하다
Fool-like, and rolled his eyes as if to say
He saw himself a farmer. Then there was a French boy
Who said with seriousness that made them laugh,
"Ma friend, you ain't know what it is you're ask."
He doffed his cap and held it with both hands
doff : 벗다
Across his chest to make as 'twere a bow:
"We're giving you our chances on de farm."
And then they all turned to with deafening boots
And put each other bodily out of the house.
"Good-by to them! We puzzle them. They think―
I don't know what they think we see in what
They leave us to: that pasture slope that seems
The back some farm presents us; and your woods
To northward from your window at the sink,
Waiting to steal a step on us whenever
We drop our eyes or turn to other things,
As in the game 'ten-step' the children play."
"Good boys they seemed, and let them love the city.
All they could say was 'God!' when you proposed
Their coming out and making useful farmers."
"Did they make something lonesome go through you?
It would take more than them to sicken you―
Us of our bargain. But they left us so
As to our fate, like fools past reasoning with.
They almost shook me."
"It's all so much
What we have always wanted, I confess
Its seeming bad for a moment makes it seem
Even worse still, and so on down, down, down.
It's nothing; it's their leaving us at dusk.
I never bore it well when people went.
The first night after guests have gone, the house
Seems haunted or exposed. I always take
A personal interest in the locking up
At bedtime; but the strangeness soon wears off."
He fetched a dingy lantern from behind
dingy : 거무스름한
A door. "There's that we didn't lose! And these!"―
Some matches he unpocketed. "For food―
The meals we've had no one can take from us.
I wish that everything on earth were just
As certain as the meals we've had. I wish
The meals we haven't had were, anyway.
What have you you know where to lay your hands on?"
"The bread we bought in passing at the store.
There's butter somewhere, too."
"Let's rend the bread.
rend : 물어 뜯다
I'll light the fire for company for you;
You'll not have any other company
Till Ed begins to get out on a Sunday
To look us over and give us his idea
Of what wants pruning, shingling, breaking up.
shing : 덮기
He'll know what he would do if he were we,
And all at once. He'll plan for us and plan
To help us, but he'll take it out in planning.
Well, you can set the table with the loaf.
Let's see you find your loaf. I'll light the fire.
I like chairs occupying other chairs
Not offering a lady―"
"There again, Joe!
You're tired."
"I'm drunk-nonsensical tired out;
Don't mind a word I say. It's a day's work
To empty one house of all household goods
And fill another with 'em fifteen miles away,
Although you do no more than dump them down."
“Dumped down in paradise we are and happy."
"It's all so much what I have always wanted,
I can't believe it's what you wanted, too."
"Shouldn't you like to know?"
"I'd like to know
If it is what you wanted, then how much
You wanted it for me."
"A troubled conscience!
You don't want me to tell if I don't know."
"I don't want to find out what you can't be known.
But who first said the word to come?"
“My dear,
It's who first thought the thought. You're searching, Joe,
For things that don't exist; I mean beginnings.
Ends and beginnings―there are no such things.
There are only middles."
“What is this?"
"This life?
Our sitting here by lantern-light together
Amid the wreckage of a former home?
You won't deny the lantern isn't new.
The stove is not, and you are not to me,
Nor I to you."
"Perhaps you never were?"
"It would take me forever to recite
All that's not new in where we find ourselves.
New is a word for fools in towns who think
Style upon style in dress and thought at last
Must get somewhere. I've heard you say as much.
No, this is no beginning."
"Then an end?"
"End is a gloomy word."
“Is it too late
To drag you out for just a good-night call
On the old peach trees on the knoll, to grope
knoll: 둔덕
grope : 손으로 더듬다
By starlight in the grass for a last peach
The neighbors may not have taken as their right
When the house wasn't lived in? I've been looking:
I doubt if they have left us many grapes.
Before we set ourselves to right the house,
The first thing in the morning, out we go
To go the round of apple, cherry, peach,
Pine, alder, pasture, mowing, well, and brook.
All of a farm it is."
"I know this much:
I'm going to put you in your bed, if first
I have to make you build it. Come, the light."
When there was no more lantern in the kitchen,
The fire got out through crannies in the stove
cranny : 틈새
And danced in yellow wrigglers on the ceiling,
wriggler : 꿈틀거리다
As much at home as if they'd always danced there.
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홈스트레치에서
그녀는 부엌 개수대에 기대어 서서,
먼지 낀 창문을 통해 개수대 너머로
개수대 물로 크게 자란 잡초들을 바라보았다.
그녀는 망토를 걸치고, 손에 모자를 들고 있었다.
그녀의 등 뒤 방은 뒤죽박죽이었고,
의자들이 다른 의자들에 거꾸로 박힌 모습이
사람들이 앉아 있는 듯했다. 어럽쇼, 부엌에는
모든 방―응접실, 침실, 식당―에 들어갈
가구들이 너저분하게 던져져 있었다.
가끔 얼룩지고, 험상궂은 얼굴의 젊은이가
그녀 등 뒤의 문을 들여다보며 등 뒤에서
말했다. 그녀는 항상 돌아보지 않고 대답했다.
"이 호두나무 화장대는 어디에 놓을까요, 마님?"
"다른 어느 물건 위에 놓인 어느 물건
위에 놓아요." 그녀는 웃었다. "아, 오늘 밤은
놓을 만한 곳이면 아무데나 놓고 가요. 날이 저물어가니,
읍내로 돌아가려면 떠날 준비를 해야 돼요."
또 다른 사람이 시커먼 얼굴을 들이밀고
살펴보며 웃었다. 그녀가 돌아보지 않자,
부드럽게 말했다. "마님, 창밖으로 뭘 보고 있어요?"
"마님이란 칭호를 듣기는 생전 처음이네요.
마님 칭호를 여러 번 들었다는
증거가 있으면 관습법상으로
마님이 되는 것인지, 모르겠군요."
"하지만 마님,
창밖으로 뭐 보고 있느냐고 묻고 있잖아요?"
"앞으로 오랫동안 여기에 서서 타월을 가지고
수많은 접시들을 닦고 또 닦으며
보고 또 볼 것들이 보이지 뭐가 보이겠어요."
"그게 무엇인데요? 무지 궁금하네요."
"여자가 개수통을 좋아하는 것보다도 개수통 물을
더 사랑하는 무성한 잡초들이 보여요, 조.
그리고 당신의 목초지도 제법 넓어 보이는데,
그건 잠깐이고 결국 숲이 보이니 모든 게 끝이군요.
경치라 부를만한 것이 별로
없어요."
"하지만 마음에 드는지요, 여보?"
"당신은 그게 알고 싶은 모양이구려! 당신은 내가
그걸 좋아하기 바라죠?―저기 이층에서
무엇인가 큰 것이 쾅 떨어지네요. 저렇게 덩치 큰
남자들이 밟기만 해도 이렇게 작은집은
기둥뿌리까지 흔들려요. 우리 단둘이 남으면,
여보, 당신과 나 더 부드러운 발걸음으로
층계를 오르내리고 방들을 드나듭시다.
그리고 갑작스런 바람이 손에서 문고리를
잡아채지 않으면 절대로 문을 꽝 닫지 맙시다."
"나는 당신이 창밖에 보인다고
말하고픈 이상의 어떤 것을 보고 있다는 생각이 드는데."
"아니에요. 내가 당신에게 말한 것 말고,
보이는 것은 세월뿐이지요.
잡초, 밭, 숲과 교대로 오가는 것은
세월이지요."
"어떤 세월 말이요?"
"저, 말년 말이죠―
초년과 다른."
"나도 말년이 보이는구려.
당신은 말년을 세어보지 않았죠?"
"아뇨, 지난 세월까지
뒤섞이는 바람에 세어보려 하지 않았어요.
우리가 알고 싶은 말년들은 숫자로 셀 것이 아니잖아요.
우리는 이제 젊지 않으니까요. 또 다른 무언가가―
저쪽에서 꽈당 떨어지네요. 사람 떨어지는 소리 같은데,
우지끈할 때 마다 한 사람씩 줄어들어서
우리 또한 알고 있는 불 켜진 도시 거리로
돌아오지 않는다는 의미로 들리네요.
우리도 지금 그곳을 버리고 어두운 시골을 찾아왔잖아요."
"너무 많은 것이 보이는 그 창문을 떠나,
이쪽으로 와서 더 활기찬 경치를 구경하구려.
그들이 가는군요. 건장한 이 젊은이가 바퀴 위로
기어올라 하늘처럼 높은 자리에 앉더니,
지금은 파이프에 불을 붙이고, 아래쪽으로 타는
불꽃을 눈을 가늘게 뜨고 콧잔등 아래로
흘겨보며 파이프 빠는 모습이나 구경하구려."
"그의 콧잔등이 훤해지는 걸 보세요.
날이 어두워지는 증거예요. 저걸 보고 몇 시인지
알 수 있어요? 또는 달을 보고요? 초승달 떴네요!
내가 어느 쪽 어깨너머로 보았던가? 아무 쪽도 아니지.
은색의 철사 같은 달인데, 우리만큼이나
모든 것이 새로운 달이죠. 저 달은 곧 사라지겠죠.
하지만, 우리가 여기 와서 첫 두 주 동안
밤마다 저 달을 보고 매일 밤 더 강한 달빛이
우리를 볼 것이란 건 의미가 있어요. 그런데, 조,
난로 있잖아! 그들이 가기 전에 놔야죠! 창문을 두들겨요.
그리고 난로를 바로 앉히게 도와 달라고 하세요.
우리가 여기 서서 꿈만 꿨네요. 빨리요! 그들을 다시 불러요!"
"그들은 아직 안 갔어요."
"다른 것은 다 없어도
난로는 있어야 해요. 불도 있어야 하고.
만약 램프와 기름이 손이 미치지 않는 곳에 묻힌 경우
양초 한 자루는 있나요?"
다시
집은 쿵쿵거리는 발소리가 가득했고, 시커멓고,
문에 꽉 차는 사람들이 몰려들어와 난로를 잡았다.
벽에는 대포 주둥이 같은 구멍이 있었고,
그들은 난로의 눈을 그 구멍에 맞췄다. 그다음
조립식 연통을 그들의 손으로 들어 올렸다.
그들이 힘을 쓰기에는 너무나 가볍게 솟아오르니
풍선이 부풀어 오르는 모습과 흡사하게,
대충 잡은 그들의 손에서 미끄러지듯이 천장을 향했다.
"딱 맞았어!" 한 사람이 말하며, 연통의 어깨를 탁 쳤다.
"이사할 때 행운이 난로 연통으로 시작하면
그것은 행운이지요. 걱정하지 마세요.
시골도 그리 나쁘지 않아요, 정착하시고,
사람들이 경기가 좋을 때는. 시골도 괜찮을 거예요."
조가 말했다. "자네들 같이 튼튼한 젊은이들은 농장을 구해서,
좋은 농부들이 되고, 도시 일은 다른 친구들에게
맡겨야 해요. 사실 말이지 도시에는
일감이 충분하지 않으니까."
"맙소사!" 한 젊은이가 거칠게 말했다. 아무도 말이 없었다.
"그런 말은 여기 지미에게 하세요. 걔는 농장이 필요하니까요."
지미는 바보처럼 그저 턱을 안쪽으로 기울이고,
자신을 농부로 생각했노라고 말하려는 듯이
눈알을 굴렸다. 그때 거기 있던 프랑스 소년이 말했다.
"친구야, 네가 무슨 부탁을 받았는지 넌 모르지."
어찌나 심각하게 말하는지 그들이 크게 웃었다.
그는 모자를 벗어 말하자면 경의를 표하듯이
두 손으로 모자를 가슴에 댔다.
“우리가 받은 농장 기회까지 너에게 다 주겠다."
그다음 그들은 모두 장화소리 요란하게 돌아서서
서로 한 덩어리가 되어 밀치듯 집밖으로 나갔다.
"모두 잘 가요! 그들에게 우린 수수께끼야. 그렇게 생각해―
나는 그들이 우리를 맡기고 돌아간 것에서 우리가 무엇을 본다고
생각하는지 모르겠어요. 그들은 목장의 등이랄 수 있는
풀밭 등성이를 맡기고 떠났지. 그리고 개수대 창문에서
북쪽으로 보이는 당신의 숲도 맡겼는데, 그 숲은
우리가 다른 것들에 한 눈을 팔 때마다
기다렸다는 듯 우리에게로 한 걸음 몰래 다가와요.
아이들의열 발짝게임을 하는 것 같아요."
"그들은 좋은 젊은이들 같으니, 도시 좋아하게 놔둬요.
당신이 도시를 떠나 쓸모 있는 농부가 되라고
말하니까 고작 ‘맙소사’라고 대꾸하잖아요."
"그들 때문에 당신 뭐 외로운 생각 들었소?
그까짓 애들 때문에 당신과 내가 우리의 굴러온 호박에
싫증내지는 않을 거야. 그러나 그들이 우리 운명에 맡기고
우리 곁을 떠난 것은, 우리를 말이 안 통하는 바보들로 본 거야.
그들이 나를 뿌리친 셈이지."
"그것이 그야말로
우리가 늘 원했던 것이라서, 그게 잠시 나빠 보이면
더욱 나빠 보이고, 자꾸만 더 나빠 보인다는 게
솔직한 심정이네요. 하지만 아무렇지도 않아요.
그들이 땅거미 질 때 우리 곁을 떠난 것뿐이죠.
나는 사람들이 가면 언제나 그것을 잘 견디지 못해요.
손님들이 가버린 첫날밤은, 집에 귀신이 출몰하거나
찬바람이 몰아치듯 썰렁한 느낌이에요. 그래서 나는 취침 시간에 늘
관심을 갖고 직접 자물쇠를 채우지요. 괴이한 느낌은 곧 사라져요."
남편이 문 뒤에서 거무스레한 랜턴을 가져왔다.
"저건 제대로 챙겼군! 그리고 이것들도!”―
그는 주머니에서 성냥을 몇 개비 꺼냈다. “먹을 것은―
우리가 먹는 끼니만큼은 아무도 빼앗아 가지 못해.
세상 모든 것이 우리가 먹는 식사처럼
확실했으면 좋겠어. 우리가 아직 먹지 않은
식사도 확실하다면 좋겠고, 어쨌든.
당신 뭐 먹을 것 어디 나둔 것 없어요?"
"우리가 오다가 가게에서 산 빵 있어요.
어딘가에 버터도 있을 거예요."
"빵을 쪼갭시다.
당신 곁의 동반자로 내가 난롯불을 지피겠어요.
에드가 주일날에 나와서 우리 농장을 살펴보고
무엇이 가지치기, 덮개 씌우기, 해체하기가 필요한지,
그의 아이디어를 우리에게 제공할 때 까지는
당신 곁의 다른 동반자는 없을 거예요.
그 사람은 그가 우리라면 무엇을 할지 알 거에요.
그것도 한꺼번에. 그는 우리 대신 계획하고 우리를 도와줄
계획도 하겠지만, 동반자로 곁에 있는 계획은 뺄 거예요.
자, 당신 그 빵을 가지고 상을 차릴 수 있겠지요.
당신은 빵 덩어리를 찾구려. 난 난롯불을 피울 테니.
난 의자들이 다른 의자를 차지하고서
마님께 구애하지는 않으니 그게 좋아―"
"여보, 또 시작이군요!
당신 피곤하죠."
"나 곤드레만드레 녹초가 됐어요.
내가 하는 말은 신경 쓰지 말아요. 한 집의 가재도구를
모두 끌어내고 그것들을 15마일 떨어진 다른 집에
집어넣는 것은 꼬박 하루는 걸리는 일이죠.
당신은 그것들을 털썩 부리기만 하면 되지만요."
"천국에 부려졌으니 우리는 행복해요."
"그건 그야말로 내가 늘 원했던 것인데,
당신도 그걸 원했다니 믿을 수가 없구려."
"당신도 당연히 내 마음을 알고 싶죠?"
"당신이 원했던 게
그것인지, 그리고 얼마나 나를 위해서 그걸 원했는지
당연히 알고 싶죠."
"그동안 애를 태우셨군요!
당신은 내가 몰라도 모른다고 말하기를 원치 않는 거죠."
"나는 어차피 알 수 없는 것은 알려고 하지 않아요.
하지만 오자고 먼저 말한 사람은 누구죠?"
"여보,
그건 그 생각을 처음 생각한 사람이죠. 당신은
존재하지도 않는 것들을 찾고 있구려, 조.
시작들을 찾고 있다는 말이에요.
끝들과 시작들―세상에 그런 것들은 없어요.
중간들만 있지요."
"그럼 이것은 뭐요?"
"시골의 삶 말이요?
우리가 어느 옛날 집의 잔해에 둘러싸여
여기 랜턴 불 옆에 함께 앉아 있는 이곳의 삶 말인가요?
당신은 랜턴이 새 것이 아님을 부정하지 않겠지요.
난로도 새 것이 아니고, 당신도 내게 새 것이 아니고,
나도 당신께 새 것이 아니지요."
"당신은 아마 새 것인 적이 없었지?"
"우리가 현재 있는 곳에서 새 것이 아닌 것을
모두 열거하려면 끝이 없을 거예요.
새 것이란 말은 옷이든 생각이든 스타일에 스타일을 찾다보면
마침내 어딘가 종착점에 다다르고 말 것이라고 생각하는
도시의 바보들이나 쓰는 말이지요. 당신도 그런 말을 쓰더군요.
아니에요, 이것은 결단코 시작이 아니에요."
"그럼 끝인가요?"
"끝이란 말은 우울한 단어잖아요."
"내가 당신 끌고 나가서
둔덕 위의 늙은 복숭아나무들에게 잘 자라고 인사하고,
별빛으로 풀밭을 더듬어서, 이 집에 사람이 살지 않았을 때
이웃들이 자기들의 권리로 따가지 않았을지도 모르는
마지막 복숭아라도 찾기에는 너무 늦었나? 내가 그걸 살피고 있소.
그들이 많은 포도를 남기지는 않았을 것 같고요.
우리가 집을 정돈하는 일에 착수하기 전에,
아침에 맨 먼저 할 일은, 우리가 나가서
사과, 체리, 복숭아, 소나무, 오리나무,
목장, 목초지, 우물, 그리고 냇물을 둘러보는 거요
그게 농장의 전부이니까요."
"나도 이 정도는 알고 있어요.
나는 당신을 당신의 침대에 눕힐 거예요. 우선 당신
침대를 조립하구려. 어서, 불도 밝히고요."
부엌에 더 이상 랜턴 불이 켜있지 않자,
난로의 틈 사이로 난롯불이 새어나왔다.
불꽃이 노랗게 꿈틀거리며 천장에서 춤을 추었다.
항상 거기에서 춤췄던 것처럼 아주 편안하게 추었다.
-신재실 옮김-
단상(斷想): 육상경기에서 마지막 홈스트레치―직선 주로(走路―)가 있듯이 인생사에도 막바지가 있다. 부부는 도시 생활을 청산하고 시골로 이사한다. 지금 이사의 막바지다. 시골의 비워둔 집과 그 집에 딸린 농장을 아주 싸게 구입해서, 오늘 이삿짐을 풀었다. 우선 뒷방과 부엌에 가구들을 대강 들여놓고, 아내는 부엌의 개수대 앞에 섰다. 창밖을 내다본다. 개수대 물에 크게 자란 잡초들이 보인다. 그다음 목초지가 한눈에 들어온다. 그다음은 숲이다. 더 이상 아무것도 보이지 않는다. 개수대는 접시를 닦고 또 닦을 아내의 짐이고, 잡초는 그 보람이라 할 것이다. 목초지는 남편의 삶의 영역이다. 그 너머 숲은 무엇인가? 그들 모두를 기다리는 죽음을 상징한다.
그들이 밝은 도시를 버리고 어두운 시골로 이사한 이유는 무엇인가? 이삿짐을 운반한 도시의 소년들은 도무지 이해할 수 없다. 남편 조는 말한다."자네들 같이 튼튼한 젊은이들은 농장을 구해서, 좋은 농부들이 되고, 도시 일은 다른 친구들에게 맡겨야 해요. 사실 말이지 도시에는 일감이 충분하지 않으니까." 하지만 조의 이런 의견에 도시의 소년들은 “말이 안 통하는 바보”취급을 하듯이 고작 ‘맙소사’라고 대꾸하고는, 운명에 맡긴다는 듯이 부부의 손을 뿌리치고 떠난다. 그러나 도시의 눈부신 불빛에 현혹되어 외형적 발전이“마침내 어딘가 종착점에 다다르고 말 것이라고 생각하는 도시의 바보들”이 진짜 바보 아닐까?
이들 부부는 인생의 홈스트레치에 있다. 삶의 결승점을 앞두고 인생의 패러다임을 직선 코스로 바꾸고자 시골로의 이사를 결행한 것이다. 이들은 자신들이 바보처럼 운명에 맡겨진 사실을 잘 의식하고 있다. 창밖으로 보이는 것은 단순히 잡초와 목초지와 숲이 아니다. 남편은 말한다, "나는 당신이 창밖에 보인다고 말하고픈 이상의 어떤 것을 보고 있다는 생각이 드는데." 아내는 대답한다, "아니에요. 내가 당신에게 말한 것 말고, 보이는 것은 세월뿐이지요. 잡초, 밭, 숲과 교대로 오가는 것은 세월이지요." 이들은 초년을 한참 지나 말년에 접어들었다. 저만치 죽음이 보인다. 어두운 시골은 불 켜진 도시보다 죽음과의 거리가 더 가까운 것 같다. 그렇다면 그들이 찾아온 것은 죽음인가? 앞이 불안하고 불확실하다. 미래의 세월이 밝지만은 않다.
그러기에 남편은 아내에게 이렇게 말한다, "너무 많은 것이 보이는 그 창문을 떠나, 이쪽으로 와서 더 활기찬 경치를 구경하구려.” 활기찬 미래를 보자! 마차에 뛰어올라 파이프에 불을 붙이는 젊은이도 보이고, 때마침 떠오르는 초승달도 보인다. 새 출발이다. 달은 점점 더 둥글어지고 더 강한 빛을 발할 것이다. 이들의 시골 생활도 둥근 보름달처럼 성장하리라. 이사한 집 벽의 “대포 주둥이 같은 구멍”과 쓰다가 가져온 난로의 “눈”이 딱 들어맞는다. 이것은 행운의 징조가 아닌가? 남편은 아내를 위해 난롯불을 밝히고, 아내는 남편을 위해 잠자리를 살핀다. 그들에게 시골 생활의 요령을 가르쳐줄 친절한 이웃도 곧 올 것이다. 밝은 미래가 점쳐지는 대목이다.
난롯불을 피웠으니 이제 빵을 쪼갠다. 남편은 말한다,“우리가 먹는 끼니만큼은 아무도 빼앗아 가지 못해. 세상 모든 것이 우리가 먹는 식사처럼 확실했으면 좋겠어. 우리가 아직 먹지 않은 식사도 확실하다면 좋겠고, 어쨌든. 당신 뭐 먹을 것 어디 나둔 것 없어요?" 이들 부부에게 적어도 한 가지는 확실하다. 이들은 과거에도 하루 세끼를 함께 했고, 앞으로도 그럴 것이 확실하다. 죽음이 이들을 갈라놓을 때까지 아무도 이들의 끼니를 빼앗지는 못하리라. 끼니는 이들의 관계를 지속적인 것으로 만들 확실한 고리다. 똑같이 시골을 좋아하고, 서로 신뢰하고, 끼니로 다져진 관계이기에 이들은 고독하지만 외롭지 않다.
아내는 말한다. 이렇게 새로운 "천국에 부려졌으니 우리는 행복해요." 남편은 맞장구친다, "그건 그야말로 내가 늘 원했던 것인데, 당신도 그걸 원했다니 믿을 수가 없구려." 이들은 에덴으로 돌아온 아담과 이브다. 남편은 새로운 에덴을 시작한 것은 자신인 것처럼 은근히 뽐낸다. 그들이 이곳으로 이사한 것은 서로의 소망 때문인가? 아니면 단순히 상대방의 비위를 맞추기 위한 것인가? 이런 물음에 아내는 시작과 끝은 없으며 중간이 있을 뿐이라는 철학적 성찰에 다다른다. 그들의 별개의 소망이 필연적 타협으로 저절로 하나가 되었기에 오늘의 “천국”에 다다른 것일 뿐, 그 시작을 딱히 점찍을 수 없다. 또한 인생은 무한히 계속되는 것이기에 끝이란 것도 없다. 우리는 끝없는 연속의 일부를 사는 것이다. 그러기에 인생은 영원한 “중간”인 것이다.
세상에 새 것이란 없다. 남편 조는 말한다, "당신도 아마 새 것인 적이 없었지?" 결혼이란 것은 하늘에서 이루어지고 땅에서 연속되는 것이기 때문에 남자도 여자도 이미 새 것이 아니다. 땅에는 새 것이 없다. 이들의 시골 생활도 결단코 시작이 아니다. "그럼 끝인가?" "끝이란 말은 우울한 단어다." 인생은 시작도 끝도 아니고 연속이다.
시골집의 첫날밤이 깊어가면서 “난로의 틈 사이로 난롯불이 새어나왔다. 불꽃이 노랗게 꿈틀거리며 천장에서 춤을 추었다. 항상 거기에서 춤췄던 것처럼 아주 편안하게 추었다.”이들의 시골 생활도 곧 난롯불의 불꽃처럼 아주 편안하게 춤을 추리라.
-신재실 씀-
출처 : http://blog.naver.com/PostList.nhn?from=postList&blogId=js9660&categoryNo=31¤tPage=57
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“In the Home Stretch” (1916)
“In the Home Stretch” was first collected in Moun
tain Interval but had been previously published in
the July 1916 issue of Century Magazine. The title is
a pun on the situation in which the couple finds
themselves. They are in the home stretch, so to
speak, of their lives. At the same time, the poem
centers on the notion of home and the upheaval
that moving inevitably causes. Predictably, the
transition becomes a source for reflection on what
the past has brought and what the future might
bring.
The poem opens with the image of one not at
home in her home: a woman dressed for the out
doors rather than the indoors, standing in the
kitchen of her new home and looking out the win
dow at what she describes as a dilapidated view.
The confusion in her home is caused by the movers
who stack furniture haphazardly atop other furni
ture but also by the confusion she feels is caused by
a change in surroundings. This new home is iso
lated; the city folk have, as is typical, retired to the
country, to a home some 15 miles outside of town
that was a “bargain.” The movers address the
woman formally, and she makes fun of being called
“lady” so many times, as she was never so “belad
ied” before. There is a certain formality in the
address that is unfamiliar to her. She humorously
wonders if so many “ladies” will make her a true
lady by “common law.” The discomfort of her situa
tion causes her to make light of it and be playful.
The woman is not happy with the move, though
she is unwilling to admit to as much, and this is a
slight source of tension for the couple. Like many of
Frost’s other dialogues, such as “Home Burial,” this
poem is primarily concerned with tone and what is
expressed through language but without words.
The woman views the weeds in the yard as
happy; they seem to flourish on dishpan water. She,
however, imagines her life passing before her as she
washes dish after dish, and the weeds inevitably
growing far more happily than she. In conversation
with her husband Joe, she reflects on her own mor
tality as the years will come and go in this house.
Joe persists in asking if she likes the house, but she
manages to avoid a response. Instead she talks
about how they will treat the house, which is better
than the movers have; they agree that they are past
slamming doors and that at the very least they will
tread more softly.
The couple has physically moved from the city to
the country but has also moved in age from the
early to the latter years, and they avoid counting
how many years they have left. The country is not
idyllic, they have not retained the optimism of
youth; instead it represents “darkness.” The window
acts as a looking glass into the future and the
unknown, so Joe encourages his wife to move from
the window where she “see[s] too much.” He wants
her to look at the “livelier view”—the men leaving.
But this view is not the more lively; instead, it
inspires panic. They are unprepared for the dark
ness, and no romanticism about telling the time by
the moon will abate it. While the new moon will see
them through their first weeks in their new home,
without comforts such as the stove or a mere match
and a candle they will be somehow unprotected and
all the more vulnerable in their new surroundings.
The country life is contrasted significantly with city
life, and while country folk may be able to tell time
by the moon, this city couple wonders if they will
be able to do the same. Fear causes them to
engage hurriedly the movers in uprighting the
stove and getting it fired up before their depar
ture. Again the couple’s apprehension causes
them to seek comfort in strange ways; they say it
is good luck that the stove fits snugly into the
wall on the first try. Joe tells the movers to leave
the city work for people who can do nothing else,
since he believes they look like they could be
good farmers. There is a suggestion that Joe has
somehow been forced into farming, perhaps a
subtle allusion to Frost’s own experiences. The
French boy says the movers are giving their
chances at farming to Joe and his wife.
Joe fears what he has been “left to” on the farm.
There is a description of the game “ten step” that
children play, which is suggestive of “green light,
red light,” in which the players take steps forward
and backward in the attempt to reach some goal.
The farm is something to be feared, something that
can “steal a step” on them when they avert their
eyes even for a moment. The vulnerability the cou
ple feels lies not only in their arrival in a new home
but in their seeming apprehension at trying a whole
new way of making a living. Frost takes up the sub
ject of the city versus the country in other poems as
well, such as “The Code,” “Christmas Trees,” and
“An Unstamped Letter in our Rural Letter Box.”
The husband and wife feel left to their “fate,”
somehow abandoned in the wilderness. They are
shaken by the sudden reality of their situation.
They feel lonesome, even as two. “It’s all so much,”
she expresses; it is an overwhelming feeling. Bad for
a moment seems worse than ever, and isolation
leads to discomfort and fear. They begin to speak of
things taken away, of what cannot be taken, of
what security comes from, such as the meals they
have already eaten in their lives. There is a return
to the basics such as food and light. And “dumped
down in paradise we are and happy,” one says. Soon
the simplicity of the situation is equated with bibli
cal beginnings. Nature is a paradise, yet, just as in
Adam and Eve’s Garden of Eden, danger lies within
it. And soon begins the debate over whose idea it
was to move.
There is a play on language here when the wife
begins to point out that there are no such things as
endings and beginnings; instead, “There are only
middles.” It seems that they are not in the home
stretch after all; they are just somewhere in the
journey. They begin to wonder if anything is ever
new, if even they were ever new to each other.
“End is a gloomy word,” so they relive what it is to
find a home. The home is filled with all that is not
new: their relationship to each other, their belong
ings. All that is new are the walls that protect them,
and this offers the comfort that until this moment
was elusive. There is a pleasant view of the farm at
the end, causing the poem to end on a positive
note. The couple will sleep in their own beds
tonight, albeit in a different place, and they will be
themselves, will be “as much at home as if they’d
always danced there”—just like the light from the
stove that dances in “yellow wrigglers on the ceil
ing.” There is a precious chance to reestablish and
create a new life.
There is an analogy between the house and the
life they find themselves in, an analogy between the
house and starting over. It is about re-creating
meaning and value, about beginning all over again
without there ever having really been an end. They
can create order out of chaos, out of the furniture
that is haphazardly stacked. The analogy lies in our
relation to this planet and the value we must create
from scratch out of the chaos of our universe.
The poem raises questions of what it means to
be home and what it means to be uprooted and
replanted. The weeds will thrive on dishpan water,
and so will the couple if that is what farming brings.
All life is transitory and temporary in some sense,
but there is that which can remain, such as our
ideas and our relationships. Although transplanted,
the couple will continue on, the jarring transition
but a blip on the screen. Frost’s famous line from
“Death of the Hired Man,” “Home is the place
where, when you have to go there, / They have to
take you in” also raises questions of what is home.
Home is something much more intangible than the
arrangement of a table and chairs.
This narrative does not focus on the conflict
between a couple as in Frost’s best-known narra
tives, such as the previously mentioned “Home
Burial” and “Death of the Hired Man,” but
instead on an outer conflict that the couple must
and can satisfactorily face together. See HOME,
THEME OF.
FURTHER READING
Abel, Darrel. “Frost’s ‘In the Home Stretch,’ ” Explica
tor 45, no. 2 (Winter 1987): 37–39.
Wakefield, Richard. “Robert Frost’s ‘In the Home
Stretch’: The Renewal of New England,” Robert
Frost Review (Fall 1999): 45–61.
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Quotes of Robert Frost ★
“It is far better for a man to go wrong in freedom than to go right in chains.”
“My sorrow, when she’s here with me,
Thinks these dark days of autumn rain
Are beautiful as days can be.”
“The figure a poem makes. It begins in delight and ends in wisdom. –”
“RANGE-FINDING The battle rent a cobweb diamond-strung And cut a flower beside a ground bird’s nest Before it stained a single human breast. The stricken flower bent double and so hung. And still the bird revisited her young. A butterfly its fall had dispossessed A moment sought in air his flower of rest, Then lightly stooped to it and fluttering clung. On the bare upland pasture there had spread O’ernight ’twixt mullein stalks a wheel of thread And straining cables wet with silver dew. A sudden passing bullet shook it dry. The indwelling spider ran to greet the fly, But finding nothing, sullenly withdrew.”
“My woods...the young fir balsams like a place
Where houses all are churches and have spires.”
“What is this?
This life?
Our sitting here by lanternlight together
Amid the wreckage of a former home?
You won't deny the lantern isn't new.
The stove is not, and you are not to me,
Nor I to you.”
“why abandon a belief
Merely because it ceases to be true.”
“I shall be telling this with a sigh somewhere ages and ages hence. Two roads diverged in a wood, and I, I took the one less traveled by, and that had made all the difference.”
“My definition of literature would be just this: words that have become deeds.”
“I sha'n't catch up in this world, anyway. I'd rather you'd not go unless you must.”
“I have a mind myself and recognize
Mind when I meet with it in any guise.”
“THE PASTURE I’m going out to clean the pasture spring; I’ll only stop to rake the leaves away (And wait to watch the water clear, I may): I sha’n’t be gone long. – You come too. I’m going out to fetch the little calf That’s standing by the mother. It’s so young, It totters when she licks it with her tongue. I sha’n’t be gone long. – You come too.”
“Who would you be, I wonder, by those marks If I had moths to friend as I have flowers?”
“He is all pine and I am apple orchard.”
“BEECH
Where my imaginary line
Bends square in woods an iron spine
And pile of real rocks have been founded.
And off this corner in the wild,
Where these are driven in and piled,
One tree, by being deeply wounded,
Has been impressed as Witness Tree
And made commit to memory
My proof of being not unbounded.
Thus truth’s established and borne out,
Though circumstanced with dark and doubt
Though by a world of doubt surrounded.”
“He never got up high enough to see.
That's why I don't advise your trying this side.
He tried this side. I've always meant to go
And look myself, but you know how it is:
It doesn't seem so much to climb a mountain
You've worked around the foot of all your life.”
“Dos caminos se bifurcaban en un bosque y yo...Yo tomé el menos transitado,y eso hizo toda la diferencia.”
“But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep.”
“Though we choose greatly, still to lack The lasting memory at all clear, That life has for us on the wrack Nothing but what we somehow chose; Thus are we wholly stripped of pride In the pain that has but one close, Bearing it crushed and mystified.”
“And on the worn book of old-golden
I brought not here to read, it seems, but hold
And freshen in this air of withering sweetness;”
“All thought is a feat of association.”
“I may have wept that any should have died
Or missed their chance, or not have been their best,
Or been their riches, fame, or love denied;
On me as much as any is the jest.
I take my incompleteness with the rest.
God bless himself can no one else be blessed
I hold your doctrine of Memento Mori.
And were an epitaph to be my story
I'd have a short one ready for my own.
I would have written of me on my stone:
I had a lover's quarrel with the world.”
“You don't have to deserve your mother's love. You have to deserve your father's.”
“Out, Out
The buzz saw snarled and rattled in the yard
And made dust and dropped stove-length sticks of wood,
Sweet-scented stuff when the breeze drew across it.
And from there those that lifted eyes could count
Five mountain ranges one behind the other
Under the sunset far into Vermont.
And the saw snarled and rattled, snarled and rattled,
As it ran light, or had to bear a load.
And nothing happened: day was all but done.
Call it a day, I wish they might have said
To please the boy by giving him the half hour
That a boy counts so much when saved from work.
His sister stood beside him in her apron
To tell them ‘Supper.’ At the word, the saw,
As if to prove saws know what supper meant,
Leaped out at the boy’s hand, or seemed to leap—
He must have given the hand. However it was,
Neither refused the meeting. But the hand!
The boy’s first outcry was a rueful laugh,
As he swung toward them holding up the hand
Half in appeal, but half as if to keep
The life from spilling. Then the boy saw all—
Since he was old enough to know, big boy
Doing a man’s work, though a child at heart—
He saw all was spoiled. ‘Don’t let him cut my hand off—
The doctor, when he comes. Don’t let him, sister!’
So. But the hand was gone already.
The doctor put him in the dark of ether.
He lay and puffed his lips out with his breath.
And then—the watcher at his pulse took fright.
No one believed. They listened to his heart.
Little—less—nothing!—and that ended it.
No more to build on there. And they, since they
Were not the one dead, turned to their affairs.”
“But all We did that day was mingle great and small Footprints in summer dust as if we drew The figure of our being less than two But more than one as yet.”
“To the Thawing Wind"
Come with rain, O loud Southwester!
Bring the singer, bring the nester;
Give the buried flower a dream;
Make the settled snow-bank steam;
Find the brown beneath the white;
But whate'er you do to-night,
Bathe my window, make it flow,
Melt it as the ice will go;
Melt the glass and leave the sticks
Like a hermit's crucifix;
Burst into my narrow stall;
Swing the picture on the wall;
Run the rattling pages o'er;
Scatter poems on the floor;
Turn the poet out of door.”
“We go to school to learn what books to read for the rest of our lives.”
“We’re talking about common liberty that sets us free to do things and make a personality of our nationality. I am an internationalist in the same way as I am an interpersonalist. I don’t care about spending much time with people who have no definite personality. I’m that kind of an equalitarian. I like to mix with my equals--people who have as much personality as I have. And I want my country to be of a smart nationality that will be felt by all the other nationalities so that there can be a real internationalism. Not a conglomeration...not cornmeal mush of the world.”
“Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.”
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Rediscover Robert Frost
What distinguishes poetry from prose is a mystery best revealed by reading, but the rocky boundaries between those forms was carefully surveyed by our own most famous poet: Robert Frost
October 16, 2019
Editor’s note: Throughout this story you’ll see illustrations inspired by Robert Frost and his poetry. These illustrations were created by students in Associate Professor Ryan O’Rourke’s Community Illustration Studio at the Institute of Art and Design at New England College. This is our third collaboration with O’Rourke’s students, and you can learn more about this
One hundred years ago (next year) Robert Frost left New Hampshire.
With characteristic flourish, he told a friend he was abandoning Franconia, where he had lived since 1915, because it was too cold for his beloved apple trees. The Franconia years correspond to a trough in the poet’s career, whose initial crest, between 1913 and 1916, had seen the rapid-fire output of three books containing some of his best and best-known poems. The three succeeding years saw only six of his poems appear in print. Now in his late 40s, Frost worried that he had aged out of the poetic sensibility, or that his literary gift was somehow ineradicable from his old farm in Derry, long since sold.
In the three years after he left New Hampshire, however, he published 37 new poems, a streak that culminated in the release of a fourth book entitled, with a backward glance, “New Hampshire.” It was the first book consisting primarily of material he’d composed since becoming a professional poet, and it led off with a sprawling and obscure title monologue professing to be about the place he loved most. But by then, as the poem itself announces, he was living in Vermont.
Less than two years after his relocation, the Vermont State League of Women’s Clubs named Frost its state’s poet laureate. The assessment that appeared in The New York Times might well have been filed by a skeptical New Hampshire onlooker:
“If one of our States is to have a poet laureate, a natural expectation is that he would be a native, or, at the very least, a long-time resident of that State. It is more than a little curious, and an incitement to considerable thought, therefore, that the Vermont State League of Women’s Clubs, in annual convention this week, selected ROBERT FROST to be Vermont’s official representative of the Muses.”
There’s a tradition of teasing between Vermont and New Hampshire, and although most of it stems from differences that emerged after Frost’s time, the famously mischievous poet was fond of rivalries and would likely approve. But New Hampshire can no more claim Robert Frost (which it does) than he could claim to speak for New Hampshire (which he did). For one thing, Frost scarcely distinguished between New Hampshire and Vermont: “Anything I say about New Hampshire / Will serve almost as well about Vermont, / Excepting that they differ in their mountains.” They were both his beloved “North of Boston” country — a felicitous phrase he nabbed from the city real estate listings. More importantly, the New Hampshire of Frost’s poetry is not a geographical but an imaginary state, a transcendent place the poet inhabited when he was at work.
A signed first edition of Frost’s Pulitzer Prize-winning literary tribute to our state can be bought for around $1,000, but the real value is contained in Frost’s enduring words from those early years — and “New Hampshire” is now in the public domain. Some of Frost’s most beloved poems appear in “New Hampshire,” including many of those quoted in this article.
“I think there are two kinds of local feeling in poetry,” Frost’s frenemy T.S. Eliot once said. “There is one kind which makes that poetry only accessible to people who’ve had the same background, to whom it means a great deal. And there is another kind which can go with universality: the relation of Dante to Florence, of Shakespeare to Warwickshire, of Goethe to the Rhineland, the relation of Robert Frost to New England.” The imaginary yawn between the real Frost and the real New Hampshire is the stage on which Frost’s poetry becomes universal.
It’s in his first three books — “A Boy’s Will “(1913), “North of Boston” (1914), and “Mountain Interval” (1916) — that this space is initially given its working form. Biographically speaking, it is fair to regard 1900 to 1920, the long season of that gem-studded trilogy, as Robert Frost’s New Hampshire phase — even as we recognize that two and a half crucial years were spent in England, and that his New Hampshire ties reach back much further.
For Frost, New Hampshire, and Derry especially, was a touchstone, almost a talisman. “To a large extent the terrain of my poetry is the Derry landscape, the Derry farm,” he wrote to a friend decades later. “Poems growing out of this, though composite, were built on incidents and are therefore autobiographical. There was something about the experience at Derry which stayed in my mind, and was tapped for poetry in the years that came after.” When he tried later to make poetry out of the real Robert Frost touching real places, the result was often failure.
The best poems in those first three books were drafted on the farm in Derry between 1900 and 1910 (a few even earlier). Frost’s ability to extract universal poetry from specific places and concrete episodes is nowhere as consistently strong as in these books. His major themes first shine through here, sometimes already in well-developed form: meaning as a product of a precisely tuned tension between two opposing forces; the need to impose form to be able to recognize meaning in a basically confusing universe; and the idea of moving forward by looking backward.
The farm in Derry was essentially a bribe paid by Frost’s grandfather, who hoped his 26-year-old grandson would put away his dreams of being a poet and earn his keep, even if it only meant raising chickens. Frost always worked hard to look like an idler. He relished a pose, especially when it made him seem less than he was: “It takes tremendous nerve to be willing to look as if you don’t know what you’re doing,” he once said, “when in fact you’re a master of the activity in question.” But it was obvious from early days that he was no slouch. He’d been valedictorian of his high school class, despite a heavy classical curriculum, and all his life he kept the habit of studying and composing late into the night. To be sure, he cherished his idle time and regarded it as indispensable to good writing. Nevertheless, he made the farm go as well as necessary for a few years, then distinguished himself sufficiently in teaching to earn an invitation to instruct at the Normal School in Plymouth.
After an unfulfilling year there, however, and feeling the itch of ambition, Frost and his wife, Elinor, decided to leave New England for a time, in hopes that a change of scene might catalyze his poetic career. They considered Vancouver and New York City but finally settled on England, a decision for which Frost had one of his picturesque standard explanations. They chose England, he liked to say, because Elinor had wanted to “live under thatch.” Whether or not it was the thatch, England proved the incubator Frost needed to hatch his first three books of New Hampshire poems.
Two of the most celebrated lyrics in “A Boy’s Will,” Frost’s first book, can be read as expressions of a tension that marked his life in Derry, between hard work and studied idleness, and, more generally, as an instance of the way Frost used tension to illuminate reality. “Mowing,” arguably Frost’s finest achievement, is a tightly controlled sonnet and near-perfect expression of his notion, derived from Thoreau, of fact as the purest stuff of poetry. The poem centers on a scythe whispering as it cuts hay. Like the scythe, the poem whispers. On a ground level, the narrator exhibits an intimacy with toil, where there is no surplus of mental energy for imagination, and all one can dream of are concrete facts. To such an absorbed mind, the mere sound of the scythe has a sweetness to it, which Frost gives us in susurrant strings of sibilant syllables. On another level, we can take “fact” in its historical sense — an achievement, a deed — and understand the poem itself as the realization of a sweet dream resulting from the poet’s mental labor. The fact of the whispering scythe transcends its purpose to become the fact of a whispering-scythe-shaped poem.
If “Mowing” is poetry of fact, “The Tuft of Flowers” is poetry of fancy. Strikingly, the setting is the same (although the “The Tuft of Flowers,” written years earlier, attaches to a Windham farm on which Frost briefly worked), but here “the long scythe whispering to the ground,” a repeated scrap of verse that unmistakably links the two poems, is a product of the narrator’s imagination. He has slept later than the mower and come to turn the cut hay so it can dry in the afternoon sun. It’s reasonable to think of the two characters as facets of the poet’s divided self. But the narrator in the second poem is easily distracted from his work when his eyes fix on a passing butterfly, which eventually steers his gaze toward a tuft of flowers. He imagines that the mower, in a moment of elation, left the flowers standing, never knowing that his gesture would produce an overpowering feeling of kinship in someone else. This coming together of the poems might seem an accident, but we can be sure it is not.
Robert Frost’s shorter works are among the best-known poems in English, widely misquoted and crassly misunderstood, which are both marks of popularity. “Mending Wall,” which appears early in “North of Boston,” has suffered particularly on this account. The enthusiasm it engenders can even blind readers to the basic laws of grammar. On a visit to the Robert Frost Farm State Historic Site in Derry, I was told by an employee, “On your walk around the farm, you’ll go past the actual mending wall!” I nearly said, “What’s a mending wall?”
“Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,” the poem begins. The anarchic line crumbles as it leaves the mouth, like the boulders spilt in the sun, itself a manifestation of the entropic “something” that undermines the wall. This unknown force is neither good nor bad; it is simply the order, or disorder, of things. At the same time, there is an opposite something that doesn’t hate a wall — something that compels the narrator to call on his neighbor over the hill and let him know it’s mending time.
The poet and critic Louis Untermeyer, one of Frost’s closest friends, said that Frost rejected psychological or political readings of this poem and with it aimed to do nothing more than shed light on a contradiction. The narrator is cognizant of both a tendency toward unreason and chaos in the universe and of a tendency in humankind to lay dividing lines, sometimes equally irrational, over the chaos. What he apparently longs for — and does not get, unless in the poem itself — is an imposition of reason, form, on top of the disarray: “Before I built a wall I’d ask to know / What I was walling in or walling out …” It’s worth noting that the poem is not about building a wall but about repairing one. The operation must be repeated year in and year out, never the same way.
While “A Boy’s Will” had been almost all highly readable short lyrics, “North of Boston” consisted chiefly of trundling and sometimes tedious narrative dramas and monologues that ran for pages. Edward Thomas, a friend of Frost’s in England, wrote, “These poems are revolutionary, because they lack the exaggeration of rhetoric, and even at first sight appear to lack the poetic intensity of which rhetoric is an imitation.” This might mean they hardly seem like poems. Frost insisted, however, that they were more than prose in meter, as some critics suggested. For one thing, the poems do not tell stories so much as show slices of life. For another, they are indeed in verse — a loose and unglamorous iambic pentameter, but verse all the same. Frost described his prosodic method as taking the speech of common people and “breaking” it over metrical lines. The subtle rhythmic outcome, more than any plot, carries us forward and draws us into the crucial moment, which, in “North of Boston,” is often tense and haunted.
These are not accessible poems — à la Billy Collins or Mary Oliver — even though instances of Frost’s affecting lyricism occur in their lines. They are best read alone, by dim light, with cricket song on the night, or a February wind lashing the clapboards. You read them over and over, waiting.
Mary sat musing on the lamp-flame at the table,
Waiting for Warren. When she heard his step,
She ran on tiptoe down the darkened passage
To meet him in the doorway with the news …
Then, if the quietly building music hasn’t already done it, dazzling passages like this one suddenly overwhelm you:
Part of a moon was falling down the west,
Dragging the whole sky with it to the hills.
Its light poured softly in her lap. She saw it
And spread her apron to it. She put out her hand
Among the harp-like morning glory strings,
Taut with the dew from garden bed to eaves,
As if she played unheard some tenderness
That wrought on him beside her in the night.
In among the demanding narratives of “North of Boston” is “After Apple-Picking,” a polished gem. It’s an uncharacteristic poem, which Amy Lowell called a “charming idyll … dusted over with something uncanny.” To capture in words, as it does, a moment so delicate and fleeting must have required tremendous discipline. The reader feels the fatigue brought on by not just days but a whole season of hard work and feels the slipping into unconsciousness that the poem evokes. Images cascade in a controlled and elegant stream until finally everything comes unraveled in sleep. Frost’s good poems are usually bulwarks of form against an onslaught of entropy, disciplined “stays against confusion.” This poem, paradoxically, uses its very form to trace the reversion to disorder.
Shortly before graduating from Lawrence High School, in Massachusetts, Frost wrote an essay for the school newspaper in which he divided people into three categories. There were enemies of tradition, who rejected custom outright. Then came followers, who uncritically embraced it, like the neighbor in “Mending Wall” that “will not go behind his father’s saying.” Lastly, there were the rethinkers, whose ranks Frost aspired to join. Rethinkers were free to follow old ways as long as they didn’t “conflict with the broader habits of life gained by wanderers among ideas.” Poet and Frost biographer Jay Parini calls this quintessentially Frostian attitude “rugged traditionalism.”
As he matured, Frost came to believe that the other major poets of his generation, the modernists, sought novelty for its own sake. In his own verse, he preferred what he once called “the old-fashioned way to be new.” This quest took many forms, but figuratively it was akin to repairing a stone wall: one reassessed in springtime the confusion wrought by winter and fit the same stones back together in a way better suited to subtle changes in circumstance, conscious all along of what one was including and excluding. The same old wall is forever new.
Over his long career, Frost frequently revisited themes, relying on his trademark device of tension to draw a taut line between past and future that, when touched just so, made the present ring like a harmonic. Sometimes a phrase from an old poem recurs in a new one, as if to hold the gains made in the earlier poem before exceeding them, the way a deliberate stair-climber does, lifting his second foot to the same tread as the first, for stability, before taking each new rise.
In his notebook while he was in England, Frost scribbled an observation: “Curl most significant thing in nature. Things return upon themselves.” A stream in Derry called Hyla Brook occasioned a brilliant quasi-sonnet, which excels for showing rather than saying something about this truth. While the brook must by definition flow forward, when visited in summer, there’s much about it that reaches back, in space, in time, and in memory. With its dried-up bottom foliage bent upstream by the wind and its absentee frogs, it is “a brook to none but who remember long.” In a much later narrative poem, harking back to another brook on his Derry property, Frost explicitly introduced the much-quoted phrase “going by contraries.” A husband and wife stand transfixed by the backward curve of wavelets in the flow. “The tribute of the current to the source,” the husband calls it, adding that, “It is from this in nature we are from.”
In this context, the early poem “Reluctance” becomes a key to Frost’s entire oeuvre. The title is disorienting, because the poem seems to be about longing, until we remember that Frost was a good Latinist and surely knew that reluctari means “to struggle against.” It closes with this wistful sestet:
Ah, when to the heart of man
Was it ever less than a treason
To go with the drift of things,
To yield with a grace to reason,
And bow and accept the end
Of a love or a season?
“The Oven Bird,” titular character in another Mountain Interval poem, asks what we are “to make of a diminished thing.” How, in other words, do we go on once freshness has been lost? Frost’s answer, elsewhere, is that restoring a thing to beauty, or whatever virtuous quality is fading, is a matter of finding the right form. And a form that invariably pleases is the circularly proceeding one he finds in flowing water. Frost is enamored of transit back and forth through time and space — back and forth but, like curlicues or waves, always a little more forth than back. In “Birches” this transit happens vertically, from Earth “toward heaven.” The poet approaches ecstasy as he describes a boy climbing a birch tree along a route that might just offer passage to “the inner dome of heaven.” Identifying with the boy, the voice of the poet says, “I’d like to get away from earth awhile / And then come back to it and begin over.” The boy’s flight back to Earth is as exhilarating as his ascent has been, and we can imagine that after each new landing he’s primed to climb again, always a little higher.
When Frost began writing poems, abandoned farmhouses had become hackneyed shorthand for the decay of rural New England. He took this old-fashioned symbol and breathed new life into it. The move was doubly significant, because not only was he recharging a tired trope, but his chosen image, of an empty house being reoccupied with new life, reflected the process itself. Forsaken farmsteads appear sporadically in Frost’s poetry, and one such is at the center of another poem in “Mountain Interval.” Its title, “In the Home Stretch,” relies on a racing pun that jibes questionably with the poem’s tone, but it is effective. The scene is of an older couple moving into an abandoned country house. The image of circling a track to come “home,” an action that happens repeatedly before the arrival that counts, lends itself well to the subject matter. The phrase “home stretch,” as opposed to just “home,” also hints at a prolonged striving that will perhaps never quite get where it’s going, like the heavenward reach in “Birches” and “After Apple-Picking.” Once the couple’s possessions are unceremoniously piled into the house, husband asks wife which of them first had the idea of moving into the new-old house. “You’re searching …/,” the wife replies, “For things that don’t exist.” She enlarges on this a few lines later:
It would take me forever to recite
All that’s not new in where we find ourselves.
New is a word for fools in towns who think
Style upon style in dress and thought at last
Must get somewhere.
The scene unfolds against a backdrop of fruit trees, symbols of seasonal renewal, and finally gives way to sleepiness after a long day’s work. The couple retires to bed, but not before lighting the wood stove, which furnishes a vestal image of continuity, splicing the domestic episode into the flux of time.
When there was no more lantern in the kitchen,
The fire got out through the crannies in the stove
And danced in yellow wrigglers on the ceiling,
As much at home as if they’d always danced there.
That so many of Frost’s strongest poems appear in his first three books gave rise to what some critics call “the Derry myth”— the idea that the poems have some necessary connection with a real place, the idea that without the Derry farm there would have been no poet. Every New Englander who loves Robert Frost, present author included, is convinced that he is so touched by a given poem because he knows just the spot where it must have been composed. Part of Frost’s skill, according to John Lynen, author of “The Pastoral Art of Robert Frost,” was to make us think of him as a realist poet when in fact the New England he depicts relies on a careful selection of symbols, which he used so ably and consistently over many years that he created a mythical world. The Derry years were significant in offering up the symbols, which Frost exploited with the sensitivity of a young man.
A change came when he returned to New Hampshire from England and discovered that he could, perhaps had to, step away from the reality behind the symbols. The step was a small leap of faith, but whenever he took it the symbols would function on their own. “New Hampshire” inaugurated the phase in which Frost honed the use of this hoard of symbols and language into something like a science of poetry. It worked. The book won him his first Pulitzer Prize.
As poetry, critics generally revile the book’s title poem. Jeffrey Meyers calls it “rambling, sententious and irritating” and “Frost’s first major failure,” while for John Kemp, it was “an excruciatingly ostentatious and affected attempt on Frost’s part to come to terms with his adopted regional personality.” Some give it a pass as a tortured attempt to work out the relationship between the universal and the local in literary art. One way to grapple with what this means, as non-critics, is to consider the irony in the circumstances of the poem’s origin. Just a few weeks after Frost was named Vermont poet laureate by the League of Women’s Clubs, he stayed up all night writing a poem that seemed sincerely to make the childish claim that New Hampshire was the best state in the Union. The disjunctive effect was compounded by the fact that, come the dawn light of that mid-summer day, Frost dashed off a second poem, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” about standing in a snow squall on a winter’s night. These poems were patently not occasioned by the poet’s immediate surroundings, even if we feel they must have been when we read them.
In “New Hampshire,” the narrator shamelessly plays the regional partisan, but, as Frost well knew, to tie oneself so fast to a place is a surefire way to sink one’s reputation as a serious poet. It’s not that one is forbidden to feel that way, sometimes, but to put it in a poem is something else. Nevertheless, we see him spend page after page affecting his surly Yankee pose and then, finally, in a moment of clarity lasting exactly three lines, giving up on it:
It’s restful to arrive at a decision,
And restful just to think about New Hampshire.
At present I am living in Vermont.
He isn’t quite prepared to make the claim he appears to be making after all. These final lines are a twinkle in the poet’s eye after he’s spent 400 lines making every reader who’s not from New Hampshire see red. (One of the poem’s strengths is that it probably voices a real struggle inside Frost, because the pose of authentic Yankee, silly as it may seem, gave him confidence, and to give it up, even though he would reach for this crutch again and again, must have cost him something.)
We can clearly see the tension between particular and universal if we read “New Hampshire” and “Stopping by Woods” as they were written, back to back, imagining the two poems fused together as two moments of a single outsized Petrarchan sonnet — a form which, readers may recall from school, relies on a linguistic turn to pivot from a first part to a second, in which clarity or resolution is provided. If we imagine things this way, the last three lines of “New Hampshire” (quoted earlier) mark the turn. In “Stopping by Woods,” analogous to the concluding sestet, we see the poet come into his own as a figure that everyone, and not just granite-bound curmudgeons, can identify with. This is driven home forcefully, just as in an actual 14-line sonnet, by the final couplet, which Vladimir Nabokov described as “that prodigious and poignant end — two closing lines identical in every syllable, but one personal and physical, and the other metaphysical and universal.”
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
The single resultant poem becomes a compact cipher to the poetic struggles and victory of Robert Frost.
On its own, “Stopping by Woods,” so expertly economical, is regarded by many as Frost’s masterpiece. He called it his “best bid for remembrance,” and John Ciardi said it was “one of the master lyrics of the English language.” It points the direction ahead for Frost’s worthiest writing and exhibits those elements of his poetics that he had begun to develop in his first three books: creative tension as a mirror of existential tension, the production of meaning by the laying down of form, and — considering, in addition to his “promises to keep,” that three of the poem’s 15 distinctive lines are near quotations from older poets — a reliance on the past in taking on the future.
When Frost left New Hampshire in 1920 he was afraid the muses had forsaken him. He had fashioned a poetic world in his first three books, but even as he worked on the third he felt his powers waning: what to make of a diminished thing? Frost himself was the first victim of the Derry myth. “New Hampshire” signaled that he would be able to overcome his doubts about having spent all his poetic energy in an initial burst of publication and channel the very specifically inspired strength of those first three books into something more universal and reusable. This may be the secret to the unusual creative vigor he was able to maintain throughout his career.
When it first appeared, “New Hampshire” might have been an homage or a farewell. In another light, perhaps it was as an attempt to put his poetics into focus — less a mirror held up to a real place than a lens that enabled him to see what others could not. By stepping away from the physical New Hampshire, even if it only meant crossing the Connecticut River, he was able to occupy a New Hampshire of the mind, the home of his distinctive voice, more fully.
It is partly the fact that Frost did not stay in New Hampshire that makes him the preeminent poet of New Hampshire. The poem called “New Hampshire” reveals the desire that is always with him — of which “The Road Not Taken” is the paragon — to have his cake and eat it too. He could not travel both roads and be one traveler, although by going to Vermont he came awfully close. The “Road Not Taken” is better literature because, toy as it may with reconciliation, it is ultimately more honest in acknowledging the melancholy of impossibility.