Source of book: I own this
It is always so refreshing to return to Robert Frost, my lifelong favorite poet. New Hampshire is the fourth collection in my Library of America hardback Collected Poems. My wife gave this to me either before or soon after we married, and it was my first LoA book.
Previous posts about Robert Frost:
This collection is a good bit like Mountain Interval in that it has a combination of short poems in specific poetic forms, interspersed with longer narratives in blank verse. This makes for a bit of a dilemma for this blogger. So many of the blank verse narratives are wonderful, but they are too long to reasonably quote. To me, they are somewhere on the continuum between vignettes and short stories, and are every bit as compelling. Frost writes with such a delightful nuance, humanity, compassion, and insight. Had he chosen to write prose stories, he could have been a master, I suspect. But in poetic form, they are simply gorgeous. The best I can do is mention a few, and quote some particularly outstanding lines.
Starting off with the title poem, “New Hampshire,” which is both a paean to that state and a surprisingly deep reflection on the ill of commercialization which seems to have infected much of our country, Frost tells both a story and a philosophy.
The having anything to sell is what
Is the disgrace in man or state or nation.
To Frost, that is what is (nearly) unique about New Hampshire - the state isn’t trying to sell you something. While I prickle at his jab about California, he is right, to be honest. California embodies the “we have something to sell you: our perfect climate, our beaches, our movies” and so on. The Golden State, like Florida, has always been about marketing.
Frost eventually has to concede, though, that New Hampshire and Vermont are both kind of like that, and he ends with:
It’s restful to arrive at a decision,
And restful just to think about New Hampshire.
At present I am living in Vermont.
That’s typical Frost humor, to be sure. A bit wry, a bit tongue-in-cheek, and very dry.
There are a bunch more of these narrative poems, about topics such as a census taker, a man who gives up farming to stare at the sky with a telescope, a girl named Maple (NOT Mable) who discovers a new way of understanding her identity, a French-Canadian immigrant who hand-crafts axe handles, a sensitive man who is teased about his wife, two boys picking wild grapes, the dilemma of where to bury one’s wife when each of you has been married three times, witches, an abandoned house containing a printing of books by the previous occupant, and so on.
I should quote a marvelous line from “Two Witches.”
Right’s right, and the temptation to do right
When I can hurt someone by doing it
Has always been too much for me, it has.
That’s a deliciously poisonous statement right there, and far too true as well.
And this one from “A Fountain, a Bottle, a Donkey’s Ears and Some Books”:
We struck a road I didn’t recognize,
But welcomed for the chance to lave my shoes
In dust once more.
That is definitely me. The whole poem is a delightful adventure.
There are also quite a number of memorable short poems in this collection, many of them well known. Here are my favorites - although honestly I could have quoted any of them. New Hampshire is a strong collection, with few weak poems in it.
Fire and Ice
Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
Once again, underestimate Frost at your own risk. He is not a “safe” or “nice” poet like some think, based on the few “safe” poems taught in school. (Although the decline of poetry in high school English courses is really sad.) Many, like the one above, are prophetic, in the old sense, that of speaking truth - unutterable truth sometimes - in the language of poetry and metaphor. (That’s one reason the loss of poetry in our culture is such a worrisome loss. We lose the ability to understand truth on a less literal yet deeper and richer level.)
Back to this poem, I love the personification of passion (fire) and hate (ice). I think it gets at why things like racism and hate are misunderstood in our nation. Racism isn’t some fiery dislike or rage most of the time. It is an icy cold indifference to suffering, to inequality, to the structures that determine our opportunities. Fire destroys quickly, but its effects are evanescent. Ice, on the other hand, grinds mountains to powder and shapes landscapes for millions of years. The cold indifference of hate is indeed great and its effects lasting.
This next poem was one I remember deeply affecting me as a child. I can’t entirely explain how or why, but it was one of the reasons I became a poetry lover.
Dust of Snow
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.
Where to start with this one? Frost uses a super simple form. ABAB, with two feet per line, a combination of iambs and anapests. He also chooses to omit all adjectives and adverbs, making the poem spare and stark.
And then, what of the imagery? While those of us who care about plants know that a hemlock tree is not the hemlock plant used to poison Socrates, this is certainly an intentional allusion. So, you have a crow (a symbol of death), hemlock (likewise), and a dusting of cold, lifeless snow. How do these symbols and their meaning to the narrator change his mood for the better? And in that last word, both a plant (rue) and its meaning of regret? That’s interesting. Is it the reminder of his mortality that makes him feel better? Perhaps he wishes to seize the day now. Or, perhaps, whatever he has regretted about the day seems insignificant in light of the brevity of life. Somehow, however, a viscerally unpleasant experience (getting snow down one’s neck) and a reminder of death makes things better. As I said, I likely had no conscious understanding of all this when I was age 10 or so, but it spoke to me somehow.
Another one in this collection is a complicated, paradoxical, philosophical musing.
Nothing Gold Can Stay
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.
Another short, simple poem. But so very fascinating. By “gold,” Frost must certainly mean the New England sort, rather than the Western sort - we have gold on (and in) our hills much of the year. And no, despite what people from greener climes claim, it isn’t brown - it is definitely gold.
But Frost was a New Englander, and things aren’t gold for very long. Just in spring and fall, and briefly.
The most interesting part of this poem to me is the idea that going from buds to full leaves is comparable to The Fall - a loss of Eden. The metaphor works. Our state of innocence (that early leaf as a flower) cannot last. We change, we grow, we learn, and we understand sorrow and grief. It is beautiful and achingly sad.
Back in high school, I memorized two Frost poems. “The Road Less Travelled” was one, of course - that’s a staple of English Lit, as well as one of the most misunderstood Frost poems. The other was “Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening.” I won’t quote it here, but did want to mention that when my wife and I were dating, we used to take walks in the snowy woods near where her parents lived. And I quoted it to her one time. She’s not particularly into poetry, but she took note, and eventually gave me my Frost collection as a token of her affection for me, poetry and all.
I’ll end with a poem that is not as well known, but that I discovered this reading.
Misgiving
All crying, 'We will go with you, O Wind!'
The foliage follow him, leaf and stem;
But a sleep oppresses them as they go,
And they end by bidding him stay with them.
Since ever they flung abroad in spring
The leaves had promised themselves this flight,
Who now would fain seek sheltering wall,
Or thicket, or hollow place for the night.
And now they answer his summoning blast
With an ever vaguer and vaguer stir,
Or at utmost a little reluctant whirl
That drops them no further than where they were.
I only hope that when I am free
As they are free to go in quest
Of the knowledge beyond the bounds of life
It may not seem better to me to rest.
Oh man, this one spoke to my experience the last several years. So many people I know (of my parents age in particular, but not exclusively) seem to have stopped growing and learning at some point in their lives. Some, for example, seem to have discovered Ayn Rand and Republican politics in their teens or twenties, and have been impervious to reality ever since. Others ossified in the early 40s, and seem to have gone backwards in spiritual growth from there, becoming increasingly racist and unempathetic as they have aged. I literally had a conversation about this with a younger relative, and we both expressed a hope that we can avoid the “Boomer” fate of becoming increasingly set in our ideological ways as we age - that we can still remain open minded and flexible and compassionate as we grow old.
Frost uses leaves in the wind as a perfect metaphor for this. Having longed for freedom, they choose to rest as close to where they started as possible. That last stanza is just fantastic. I too hope that since I am indeed free to go in quest of the knowledge beyond the bounds of life, that I do not decide just to rest where I am.
I very much enjoyed reading this collection, and can recommend it along with Frost’s poetry in general.
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