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America's Great Poet of Darkness: A Reconsideration of Robert Frost at 150

108 points by samclemens 3y ago

FergusArgyll 3y ago
> Frost is the darkest of poets Interesting, I always thought of him as quite optimistic. Maybe because my introduction to him was The way a crow Shook down on me The dust of snow From a hemlock tree Has given my heart A change of mood And saved some part Of a day I had rued. it goes well with Monet's The Magpie and hot coffee
- PyWoody 3y ago
  '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 knew 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 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 at 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. or 'Desert Places' Snow falling and night falling fast, oh, fast In a field I looked into going past, And the ground almost covered smooth in snow, But a few weeds and stubble showing last. The woods around it have it - it is theirs. All animals are smothered in their lairs. I am too absent-spirited to count; The loneliness includes me unawares. And lonely as it is, that loneliness Will be more lonely ere it will be less - A blanker whiteness of benighted snow With no expression, nothing to express. They cannot scare me with their empty spaces Between stars - on stars where no human race is. I have it in me so much nearer home To scare myself with my own desert places. are both pretty dark, off the top of my head. He has a number of poems that are more subtle and dig away at you in the best possible way.
  - ghaff 3y ago
    Yeah. Frost has some really dark poems. The chainsaw one is always my go-to example. I've had people basically not believe them when I've told them.
    - hermanradtke 3y ago
      > chainsaw buzz saw - blade; no chain
      - ghaff 3y ago
        The actual text makes it sound a lot more like a chainsaw than something else but I don't actually know given the period written.
        bdamm 3y ago
        The 1916 poem was based on a true story about a boy that Robert knew, who died in 1910. They did have circular-saw like machines in 1910 that were popular for cutting firewood, according to my wiki dive.
        ghaff 3y ago
        Thanks. I would have assumed cutting firewood would have involved a chainsaw but apparently not.
        wrycoder 3y ago
        Hadn’t been invented yet! No small gas engines in 1910.
        mikestew 3y ago
        It’s a fixed buzzsaw. One might be confused by the “leaped at his hand”, but Frost says in reality that “he must have given the hand”. Basically, his sister called him to supper, which apparently distracted the boy enough that he accidentally stuck his hand in the blade. A buzzsaw is in essence a large version of a table saw, and table saws eat many fingers and thumbs every year. Now imagine that the table saw blade is four feet tall.
- dev_tty01 3y ago
  Hmm. I think that can be read different ways. He had a dark foreboding for the day and the crow encounter only saved a part of the day. Rather than optimistic, it could be perceived as still able recognize a small bit of light through his darkness. That's what great about art. The perception and situation of the viewer shapes the experience.
  - FergusArgyll 3y ago
    To me, that's optimism. It's really the same feeling I get from The Magpie. It's like; There aren't many good things about the winter, it's cold, it's miserable, but look how pretty it can be sometimes
  - saltcured 3y ago
    Well, it's full of conventionally dark symbols: the crow, hemlock, and cold winter season. And the diction echoes this with words like shook, dust, and rued. Other word choices could have told a very similar story in a more cheery mood, if desired. It's also a vignette devoid of human contact, which is common to many of Frost's more introspective poems. The narrator is the main character in an empty or lonely scene, except for a brief interaction with an animal. Even the choice to say "change of mood" delays clarity until the words "save" and "rued" provide disambiguation. Yet it is also quite short, almost an epigram. So while the final message is one of positive valence, it is rooted in dark humor, almost a wink emerging from a scowl. I think this is an example where Frost is revisiting some of the ground shared with one of his early influences, Edgar Allen Poe.
- imjonse 3y ago
  More than optimistic, I found it funny. Then I realized I misread crow as cow.
- ajkjk 3y ago
  I dunno anything about poetry but the meter of that poem bugs me. Why not "from hemlock tree"? there are like random extra syllables.
  - browningstreet 3y ago
    > The way a crow > Shook down on me > The dust of snow > From a hemlock tree a.. on.. of.. a Also, it's all colloquial, "From hemlock tree" isn't how we speak.
  - Jtsummers 3y ago
    It's 4/4/4/6 syllables and ABAB rhyming. The second verse, first line, is 4 syllables if you pronounce "given" more as "g'ven", smashing the g into the v.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - ksenzee 3y ago
    Poetry in English is usually less about syllables and more about stressed syllables.
- Amorymeltzer 3y ago
  To put a title to it, that's Dust of Snow
- temp0826 3y ago
  Considering symbolism of hemlock and of the crow? It's hard to say at one glance, it could be taken with some heck of a lot darker implications. Then again, "rued" may have an extra meaning too (rue = ruta graveolens = "herb of grace"). Great poem nonetheless :).
- alephknoll 3y ago
  > Maybe because my introduction to him was Would've thought most would view it as dark and melancholy and resigned. You get optimism from those lines? Do you feel the following is optimistic? '... The woods are lovely, dark and deep, But I have promises to keep, And miles to go before I sleep, And miles to go before I sleep.' In some sense, I guess it can be viewed as optimistic. In the way 'death cures all' can be viewed as optimistic. Just never thought of it that way. Interesting.
- QuercusMax 3y ago
  One of my favorites is Birches. He does talk about wanting to leave the earth and then come back. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44260/birches https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44260/birches
- rrrrrrrrrrrryan 3y ago
  Frost's poetry is famously ambiguous. Even his most famous poem, which people usually assume is about the positive attributes of a life of nonconformity, can be read from the opposite perspective: > Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— > I took the one less traveled by, > And that has made all the difference Note he doesn't state whether the difference was positive or negative. We put ourselves into the poetry, and much of his work can indeed be quite dark when read from a certain place.
  - pmoriarty 3y ago
    > Note he doesn't state whether the difference was positive or negative. But if taken (as it usually is) as a metaphor of life's choices, in this case his life choices made him Robert Frost, the famous, incredibly successful poet -- so it's implied that in his case taking road less traveled by was positive. Now, if the subject of the poem was some anonymous nobody, then maybe the poem would be more ambiguous.
greenie_beans 3y ago
i enjoyed this, learning more about him and thinking about his writing in this way. i've been getting into frost after moving to new england.
ksenzee 3y ago
> two parallel but separate levels: one, the corncob bard of Yankee wisdom who appears on t-shirts and mugs: the other, the critic’s darling who is “bleak, dark, complex, and manipulative.” This is the genius of Frost. You can read Fire and Ice in elementary school, when you're just figuring out what a poet is, and you get it. Then you can read him again in college and see a whole new level underneath what you thought you understood. Both levels are there on purpose. Both are valid.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
ghaff 3y ago
It's interesting how the meaning of "The Road Not Taken" seems to have widely(?) come to have been differently interpreted over the years. I had a long-ago English professor talk about that and I think it was a fairly non-mainstream optinion at the time. (He taught an American literature in the 20s course in the 80s.) It seems to be sort of the standard interpretation today--perhaps the view of Frost generally has shifted.
- rwbt 3y ago
  It is probably the most misunderstood poem of all time! There's no going back now though.
  - ghaff 3y ago
    Probably depends on the audience. Readers of the New Yorker or who have taken courses from Ivy League English professors are probably different from the random person on the street (who is even vaguely familiar with the poem).
  - Amorymeltzer 3y ago
    Number two is probably Frost's Mending Wall and "Good fences make good neighbors."
    - smueller1234 3y ago
      "Before I built a wall I’d ask to know What I was walling in or walling out, And to whom I was like to give offense." Only poem I can cite by heart a quarter of a century after spending time with it in school.
Amorymeltzer 3y ago
A couple of years ago I read through his complete works. Highly recommend doing so, but I will say that, unlike with many (most?) other poets, I found that the Robert Frost poems you already know--Mending Wall, The Road Not Taken, Fire and Ice, Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening--are indeed his best. There are plenty of other good ones and some truly great lines as well, but it was oddly reassuring to find out.
wigster 3y ago
[flagged]
olvy0 3y ago
I really enjoyed that essay. The last paragraph seems to sum up my view of the world. In school when learning Stopping By Woods I'm pretty sure the death/suicide interpretation was mentioned by my teacher, and seemed pretty obvious to me even before she mentioned it.
velcrovan 3y ago
Underappreciated, I think: The Tuft of Flowers https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44275/the-tuft-of-flowers https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44275/the-tuft-of-flo...
- madmountaingoat 3y ago
  While there's certainly darkness here it clearly shows Frost was not all doom and gloom. Even a very cynical reading would be hard pressed to discount the positivity of the small act and the feelings of connection it engendered.
antiterra 3y ago
I think “Nothing Gold Can Stay” fits the mold. It’s a heartbreaking poem of beautiful construction and depth that is dismissed because it has been heavily cited by popular culture. It doesn’t help that what it has to say, at first glance, appears to be cut short by its title: Nature's first green is gold, Her hardest hue to hold. Her early leaf's a flower; But only so an hour. Then leaf subsides to leaf. So Eden sank to grief, So dawn goes down to day. Nothing gold can stay. Early versions of the poem show meandering sequential steps of revision that suddenly give way to a less intuitive flourish that anchors it. This contains the best description of the revisions I have found online- https://poemshape.wordpress.com/2011/01/09/the-making-of-robert-frosts-nothing-gold-can-stay/ https://poemshape.wordpress.com/2011/01/09/the-making-of-rob...
isolatedsystem 3y ago
A poet never takes notes. You never take notes in a love affair. Frost is incomparable.
jaybrendansmith 3y ago
When thinking of Frost's darkness, this poem springs to mind as bleak: I found a dimpled spider, fat and white, On a white heal-all, holding up a moth Like a white piece of rigid satin cloth-- Assorted characters of death and blight Mixed ready to begin the morning right, Like the ingredients of a witches' broth-- A snow-drop spider, a flower like a froth, And dead wings carried like a paper kite. What had that flower to do with being white, The wayside blue and innocent heal-all? What brought the kindred spider to that height, Then steered the white moth thither in the night? What but design of darkness to appall?-- If design govern in a thing so small.
sammnaser 3y ago
Who is the audience for this article? Anyone who has read Frost's body of work understands there is a plaintive, wistful, and dark nature to his poetry. The article even goes so far as to invoke the classic high-school, "guys, The Road Less Traveled might actually be a sad poem!" discussion as though it's an interesting or novel point and not the whole reason that one gets taught so widely. Seems like the author is arguing with an imaginary, naive general public here, which I don't think is useful or interesting. I have to say this is a pretty embarrassing attempt at analyzing Frost.

108 points by samclemens 3y ago

> Frost is the darkest of poets Interesting, I always thought of him as quite optimistic. Maybe because my introduction to him was The way a crow Shook down on me The dust of snow From a hemlock tree Has given my heart A change of mood And saved some part Of a day I had rued. it goes well with Monet's The Magpie and hot coffee

PyWoody 3y ago
'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 knew 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 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 at 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. or 'Desert Places' Snow falling and night falling fast, oh, fast In a field I looked into going past, And the ground almost covered smooth in snow, But a few weeds and stubble showing last. The woods around it have it - it is theirs. All animals are smothered in their lairs. I am too absent-spirited to count; The loneliness includes me unawares. And lonely as it is, that loneliness Will be more lonely ere it will be less - A blanker whiteness of benighted snow With no expression, nothing to express. They cannot scare me with their empty spaces Between stars - on stars where no human race is. I have it in me so much nearer home To scare myself with my own desert places. are both pretty dark, off the top of my head. He has a number of poems that are more subtle and dig away at you in the best possible way.
- ghaff 3y ago
  Yeah. Frost has some really dark poems. The chainsaw one is always my go-to example. I've had people basically not believe them when I've told them.
  - hermanradtke 3y ago
    > chainsaw buzz saw - blade; no chain
    - ghaff 3y ago
      The actual text makes it sound a lot more like a chainsaw than something else but I don't actually know given the period written.
      - bdamm 3y ago
        The 1916 poem was based on a true story about a boy that Robert knew, who died in 1910. They did have circular-saw like machines in 1910 that were popular for cutting firewood, according to my wiki dive.
        ghaff 3y ago
        Thanks. I would have assumed cutting firewood would have involved a chainsaw but apparently not.
        wrycoder 3y ago
        Hadn’t been invented yet! No small gas engines in 1910.
      - mikestew 3y ago
        It’s a fixed buzzsaw. One might be confused by the “leaped at his hand”, but Frost says in reality that “he must have given the hand”. Basically, his sister called him to supper, which apparently distracted the boy enough that he accidentally stuck his hand in the blade. A buzzsaw is in essence a large version of a table saw, and table saws eat many fingers and thumbs every year. Now imagine that the table saw blade is four feet tall.
dev_tty01 3y ago
Hmm. I think that can be read different ways. He had a dark foreboding for the day and the crow encounter only saved a part of the day. Rather than optimistic, it could be perceived as still able recognize a small bit of light through his darkness. That's what great about art. The perception and situation of the viewer shapes the experience.
- FergusArgyll 3y ago
  To me, that's optimism. It's really the same feeling I get from The Magpie. It's like; There aren't many good things about the winter, it's cold, it's miserable, but look how pretty it can be sometimes
- saltcured 3y ago
  Well, it's full of conventionally dark symbols: the crow, hemlock, and cold winter season. And the diction echoes this with words like shook, dust, and rued. Other word choices could have told a very similar story in a more cheery mood, if desired. It's also a vignette devoid of human contact, which is common to many of Frost's more introspective poems. The narrator is the main character in an empty or lonely scene, except for a brief interaction with an animal. Even the choice to say "change of mood" delays clarity until the words "save" and "rued" provide disambiguation. Yet it is also quite short, almost an epigram. So while the final message is one of positive valence, it is rooted in dark humor, almost a wink emerging from a scowl. I think this is an example where Frost is revisiting some of the ground shared with one of his early influences, Edgar Allen Poe.
imjonse 3y ago
More than optimistic, I found it funny. Then I realized I misread crow as cow.
ajkjk 3y ago
I dunno anything about poetry but the meter of that poem bugs me. Why not "from hemlock tree"? there are like random extra syllables.
- browningstreet 3y ago
  > The way a crow > Shook down on me > The dust of snow > From a hemlock tree a.. on.. of.. a Also, it's all colloquial, "From hemlock tree" isn't how we speak.
- Jtsummers 3y ago
  It's 4/4/4/6 syllables and ABAB rhyming. The second verse, first line, is 4 syllables if you pronounce "given" more as "g'ven", smashing the g into the v.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- ksenzee 3y ago
  Poetry in English is usually less about syllables and more about stressed syllables.
Amorymeltzer 3y ago
To put a title to it, that's Dust of Snow
temp0826 3y ago
Considering symbolism of hemlock and of the crow? It's hard to say at one glance, it could be taken with some heck of a lot darker implications. Then again, "rued" may have an extra meaning too (rue = ruta graveolens = "herb of grace"). Great poem nonetheless :).
alephknoll 3y ago
> Maybe because my introduction to him was Would've thought most would view it as dark and melancholy and resigned. You get optimism from those lines? Do you feel the following is optimistic? '... The woods are lovely, dark and deep, But I have promises to keep, And miles to go before I sleep, And miles to go before I sleep.' In some sense, I guess it can be viewed as optimistic. In the way 'death cures all' can be viewed as optimistic. Just never thought of it that way. Interesting.
QuercusMax 3y ago
One of my favorites is Birches. He does talk about wanting to leave the earth and then come back. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44260/birches https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44260/birches
rrrrrrrrrrrryan 3y ago
Frost's poetry is famously ambiguous. Even his most famous poem, which people usually assume is about the positive attributes of a life of nonconformity, can be read from the opposite perspective: > Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— > I took the one less traveled by, > And that has made all the difference Note he doesn't state whether the difference was positive or negative. We put ourselves into the poetry, and much of his work can indeed be quite dark when read from a certain place.
- pmoriarty 3y ago
  > Note he doesn't state whether the difference was positive or negative. But if taken (as it usually is) as a metaphor of life's choices, in this case his life choices made him Robert Frost, the famous, incredibly successful poet -- so it's implied that in his case taking road less traveled by was positive. Now, if the subject of the poem was some anonymous nobody, then maybe the poem would be more ambiguous.

greenie_beans 3y ago

i enjoyed this, learning more about him and thinking about his writing in this way. i've been getting into frost after moving to new england.

ksenzee 3y ago

> two parallel but separate levels: one, the corncob bard of Yankee wisdom who appears on t-shirts and mugs: the other, the critic’s darling who is “bleak, dark, complex, and manipulative.” This is the genius of Frost. You can read Fire and Ice in elementary school, when you're just figuring out what a poet is, and you get it. Then you can read him again in college and see a whole new level underneath what you thought you understood. Both levels are there on purpose. Both are valid.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

ghaff 3y ago

It's interesting how the meaning of "The Road Not Taken" seems to have widely(?) come to have been differently interpreted over the years. I had a long-ago English professor talk about that and I think it was a fairly non-mainstream optinion at the time. (He taught an American literature in the 20s course in the 80s.) It seems to be sort of the standard interpretation today--perhaps the view of Frost generally has shifted.

rwbt 3y ago
It is probably the most misunderstood poem of all time! There's no going back now though.
- ghaff 3y ago
  Probably depends on the audience. Readers of the New Yorker or who have taken courses from Ivy League English professors are probably different from the random person on the street (who is even vaguely familiar with the poem).
- Amorymeltzer 3y ago
  Number two is probably Frost's Mending Wall and "Good fences make good neighbors."
  - smueller1234 3y ago
    "Before I built a wall I’d ask to know What I was walling in or walling out, And to whom I was like to give offense." Only poem I can cite by heart a quarter of a century after spending time with it in school.

Amorymeltzer 3y ago

A couple of years ago I read through his complete works. Highly recommend doing so, but I will say that, unlike with many (most?) other poets, I found that the Robert Frost poems you already know--Mending Wall, The Road Not Taken, Fire and Ice, Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening--are indeed his best. There are plenty of other good ones and some truly great lines as well, but it was oddly reassuring to find out.

wigster 3y ago

[flagged]

olvy0 3y ago

I really enjoyed that essay. The last paragraph seems to sum up my view of the world. In school when learning Stopping By Woods I'm pretty sure the death/suicide interpretation was mentioned by my teacher, and seemed pretty obvious to me even before she mentioned it.

velcrovan 3y ago

Underappreciated, I think: The Tuft of Flowers https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44275/the-tuft-of-flowers https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44275/the-tuft-of-flo...

madmountaingoat 3y ago
While there's certainly darkness here it clearly shows Frost was not all doom and gloom. Even a very cynical reading would be hard pressed to discount the positivity of the small act and the feelings of connection it engendered.

antiterra 3y ago

I think “Nothing Gold Can Stay” fits the mold. It’s a heartbreaking poem of beautiful construction and depth that is dismissed because it has been heavily cited by popular culture. It doesn’t help that what it has to say, at first glance, appears to be cut short by its title: Nature's first green is gold, Her hardest hue to hold. Her early leaf's a flower; But only so an hour. Then leaf subsides to leaf. So Eden sank to grief, So dawn goes down to day. Nothing gold can stay. Early versions of the poem show meandering sequential steps of revision that suddenly give way to a less intuitive flourish that anchors it. This contains the best description of the revisions I have found online- https://poemshape.wordpress.com/2011/01/09/the-making-of-robert-frosts-nothing-gold-can-stay/ https://poemshape.wordpress.com/2011/01/09/the-making-of-rob...

isolatedsystem 3y ago

A poet never takes notes. You never take notes in a love affair. Frost is incomparable.

jaybrendansmith 3y ago

When thinking of Frost's darkness, this poem springs to mind as bleak: I found a dimpled spider, fat and white, On a white heal-all, holding up a moth Like a white piece of rigid satin cloth-- Assorted characters of death and blight Mixed ready to begin the morning right, Like the ingredients of a witches' broth-- A snow-drop spider, a flower like a froth, And dead wings carried like a paper kite. What had that flower to do with being white, The wayside blue and innocent heal-all? What brought the kindred spider to that height, Then steered the white moth thither in the night? What but design of darkness to appall?-- If design govern in a thing so small.

sammnaser 3y ago

Who is the audience for this article? Anyone who has read Frost's body of work understands there is a plaintive, wistful, and dark nature to his poetry. The article even goes so far as to invoke the classic high-school, "guys, The Road Less Traveled might actually be a sad poem!" discussion as though it's an interesting or novel point and not the whole reason that one gets taught so widely. Seems like the author is arguing with an imaginary, naive general public here, which I don't think is useful or interesting. I have to say this is a pretty embarrassing attempt at analyzing Frost.