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Tag Archives: Robert Frost

Robert Frost, A Patch of Old Snow

16 Thursday Jul 2020

Posted by memoirandremains in Literature

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A Patch of Old Snow, Literature, poem, Poetry, Robert Frost

Robert Frost is a deceptive poet. His poems seem obvious and simplistic – at first blush and certainly when compared a contemporary like T.S. Eliot. But the simplicity is a trick. In this way he reminds me of St. John as opposed to St. Paul. St. John writes seeming simplicity and candor, but the sheer apparent simplicity is the means of the depth. 

To take another comparison: Shakespeare last play, The Tempest is seemingly the simplest of all his plays (except perhaps his early comedies) and yet it child like simplicity conceals its depth. Here is a seeming simple poem 

There’s a patch of old snow in a corner

That should I have guessed

Was a blow-away paper the rain

Had brought to rest.

It is speckled with grime as if 

Small print overspread it,

The news of a day I’ve forgotten—

If I ever read it.

There is a sense in the world is invisible to us. We fill in spaces, create meaning, ignore this or that. It is not that pure blank fills our mind, it is that a re-construction, a distortion or domestication takes up our mind. Thus, we see things and yet don’t. 

This poem is an invitation in the moment where something invisible becomes visible for a moment. At first read, the poem is remarkably simple: Frost notices something in a corner. It is a scrap of snow, but it really looks like some crumbled newspaper. 

But as we consider the poem there is a bit more. He didn’t actually mistake the snow for a newspaper: Rather, there seems to be a missing step in the thought: if I had not noticed it was snow, I probably would have thought it was just a newspaper. 

But there is yet another twist: Rather than merely mistaking the snow as if it were old newspaper, his contemplation actually turns the snow into newspaper:

It is speckled with grime as if 

Small print overspread it,

Thus, it is not that he mistook the snow for newspaper and then realized it was snow. Rather, he saw it was snow and then by the power of imagination transformed it into newspaper. 

So rather than being a snow which has mistaken for a newspaper and so passed by without consideration, the snow has become a newspaper in the fact of his consideration:

The news of a day I’ve forgotten

The grime in the snow is the recordation of some day. And now we come to the twist of the knife, the thing that was missed:

If I ever read it.

Thus, the patch of snow is a newspaper of some day that Frost may have actually missed. There was something which is passed, which he did not see. This patch of snow is a newspaper from that day. This also brings up another point: a thing is not comprehensible, really, until it is turned into words. You listen to music or see and painting – but to communicate what has happened, you must turn that event into words. You don’t hum the symphony, you speak of it. You don’t repaint the painting, you explain it. 

And this brings us to one more consideration here: the poem itself. 

The poet seems snow and thinks of a newspaper – a written record — from a day he had missed. He then turns that event into a written record of human words and brings us into his moment. I, by reading the poem and thinking along with him, am looking – by means of his words – at the snow, which is itself a kind of record something missed. And now, Frost’s missed day becomes my missed day. 

This sleep of mine, whatever sleep it is

22 Sunday May 2016

Posted by memoirandremains in Art, Ecclesiastes

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After Apple Picking, Death, Ecclesiastes 3, poem, Poetry, Robert Frost

Robert Frost & Ecclesiastes 3:

 Apple Picking

MY long two-pointed ladder’s sticking through a tree
Toward heaven still,

And there’s a barrel that I didn’t fill

Beside it, and there may be two or three

Apples I didn’t pick upon some bough.

But I am done with apple-picking now.

Essence of winter sleep is on the night,

The scent of apples: I am drowsing off.

I cannot rub the strangeness from my sight

I got from looking through a pane of glass

I skimmed this morning from the drinking trough

And held against the world of hoary grass.

It melted, and I let it fall and break.

But I was well

Upon my way to sleep before it fell,

And I could tell

What form my dreaming was about to take.

Magnified apples appear and disappear,

Stem end and blossom end,

And every fleck of russet showing clear.

My instep arch not only keeps the ache,

It keeps the pressure of a ladder-round.

I feel the ladder sway as the boughs bend.

And I keep hearing from the cellar bin

The rumbling sound

Of load on load of apples coming in.

For I have had too much

Of apple-picking: I am overtired

Of the great harvest I myself desired.

There were ten thousand thousand fruit to touch,

Cherish in hand, lift down, and not let fall.

For all

That struck the earth

No matter if not bruised or spiked with stubble,

Went surely to the cider-apple heap

As of no worth.

One can see what will trouble

This sleep of mine, whatever sleep it is.

Were he not gone,

The woodchuck could say whether it’s like his

Long sleep, as I describe its coming on,

Or just some human sleep.


The poem is about the approach of death: the ladder has gone through the tree points toward heaven. There is work which has not been finished. There is a strangeness he cannot shake. There is exhaustion with his work. There is a sleep coming, but he doesn’t know what it is. 

This poem was written well before Frost died. It is not really about the approach of his own death, but rather the question raised in Ecclesiastes 3:

 18 I said in my heart with regard to the children of man that God is testing them that they may see that they themselves are but beasts.

19 For what happens to the children of man and what happens to the beasts is the same; as one dies, so dies the other. They all have the same breath, and man has no advantage over the beasts, for all is vanity.

20 All go to one place. All are from the dust, and to dust all return.

21 Who knows whether the spirit of man goes upward and the spirit of the beast goes down into the earth?

22 So I saw that there is nothing better than that a man should rejoice in his work, for that is his lot. Who can bring him to see what will be after him? http://esv.to/Eccles3.18-22

Fireflies in the Garden

03 Thursday Mar 2016

Posted by memoirandremains in Uncategorized

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Fireflies in the Garden, poem, Poetry, Robert Frost

Here come real stars to fill the upper skies, And here on earth come emulating flies, That though they never equal stars in size, (And they were never really stars at heart) Achieve at times a very star-like start. Only, of course, they can’t sustain the part.

  

“Everyone knows Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken”—and almost everyone gets it wrong.”

26 Tuesday Jan 2016

Posted by memoirandremains in Literature, Uncategorized

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Interpretation, poem, Poetry, Robert Frost, The Road Not Taken

But is this view of “The Road Not Taken” and its creator entirely accurate? Poems, after all, aren’t arguments—they are to be interpreted, not proven, and that process of interpretation admits a range of possibilities, some supported by diction, some by tone, some by quirks of form and structure. Certainly it’s wrong to say that “The Road Not Taken” is a straightforward and sentimental celebration of individualism: this interpretation is contradicted by the poem’s own lines.

The Most Misread Poem in America

Once by the Pacific

08 Sunday Feb 2015

Posted by memoirandremains in Literature

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Pacific, poem, Poet, Poetry, Robert Frost

2015-02-06 09.48.23

The shattered water made a misty din.
Great waves looked over others coming in,
And thought of doing something to the shore
That water never did to land before.
The clouds were low and hairy in the skies,
Like locks blown forward in the gleam of eyes.
You could not tell, and yet it looked as if
The shore was lucky in being backed by cliff,
The cliff in being backed by continent;
It looked as if a night of dark intent
Was coming, and not only a night, an age.
Someone had better be prepared for rage.
There would be more than ocean-water broken
Before God’s last Put out the Light was spoken.

Robert Frost

A Late Walk

18 Thursday Sep 2014

Posted by memoirandremains in Literature, Robert Frost

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A Late Walk, poem, Poetry, Robert Frost

WHEN I go up through the mowing field,
The headless aftermath,
Smooth-laid like thatch with the heavy dew,
Half closes the garden path.
And when I come to the garden ground,
The whir of sober birds
Up from the tangle of withered weeds
Is sadder than any words.
A tree beside the wall stands bare,
But a leaf that lingered brown,
Disturbed, I doubt not, by my thought,
Comes softly rattling down.
I end not far from my going forth
By picking the faded blue
Of the last remaining aster flower
To carry again to you.

Robert Frost. “A Boy’s Will.”

robert_frost04

Winter Poems

10 Wednesday Apr 2013

Posted by memoirandremains in Literature

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Poetry, Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens

Sometimes you can see things more clearly by holding up one to spark off the other. Both of winter, both of seeing.

Robert Frost, Stars

HOW countlessly they congregate
O’er our tumultuous snow,
Which flows in shapes as tall as trees
When wintry winds do blow!—
As if with keenness for our fate,
Our faltering few steps on
To white rest, and a place of rest
Invisible at dawn,—
And yet with neither love nor hate,
Those stars like some snow-white
Minerva’s snow-white marble eyes
Without the gift of sight.

Wallace Stevens, The Snowman

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

The Crisis of Word and Truth

17 Thursday Jan 2013

Posted by memoirandremains in Apologetics, Carl F Henry, Genesis, John

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Apologetics, Carl F Henry, Derrida, Genealogy of Morals, Genesis, God Revelation and Authority, John, Literature, Logos, Nietzsche, Of Grmmatology, Poetry, Robert Frost, Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening, truth, Word

The Crisis of Word and Truth

NO FACT OF CONTEMPORARY Western life is more evident than its growing distrust of final truth and its implacable questioning of any sure word.[1]

The first essay in Henry’s six volumes, God Revelation and Authority is “The Crisis of Word and Truth”. He notes the conflict between two worldviews: The God of revelation who speaks versus a meaningless and incoherent “word”. The sound of words has remained and human beings still function and interact, but Word as a primary and stable truth – the Logos of God – that has come under attack.[2]

He wrote this essay without a discussion of deconstruction (my college copy of Spivak’s English version of Of Grammatology is dated 1974, 1976; the first printing of Henry’s essays are dated 1976) or the (for obvious reasons) the Internet. Thus, his discussions of both distance between meaning and words, as well as the ubiquity of media, not only remain true but have actually become more certain.

On one hand we have the Word of God. Christianity posits Spirit and Word as the primary constitutes of existence. First, God is spirit (John 4:24). As the Westminster Shorter Catechism has it:

Q: What is God?

A: God is a Spirit, infinite, eternal, and unchangeable, in his being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness, and truth.

John 1:1 famously explains “The Word was God.” The knowledge of God comes about because God speaks. Nothing would exist apart from the Speaking God: “God said, Let there be light” (Genesis 1:3). The material world of images comes after the Spirit and Word.[3] The world itself exists, because the Word of God upholds it, continually (John 1:3; Colossians 1:15-17; Hebrews 1:3).

On the other hand stands the cacophony of media. Now, Henry does not denigrate or despise the media because it is media. Rather the trouble lies in what it does. It has taken the pre-existing problem of meaning and world (which human beings attempt to escape; Romans 1:18). However, it has “indubitably widened and compounded the crisis of word and truth” (18).

Henry notes the common criticism that the nature of the media is such that it does not respond to matters of significance with significant attention.  He quotes Malcolm Muggeridge, “’the fact that the medium has no message. In the last resort, the media have nothing to say ….’” (18).

The media portray matters for the purpose of gaining attention and thus,

Final truth, changeless good, and the one true and living God are by default largely programed out of the real world. Despite occasional ethical commentary and some special coverage of religious events and moral issues, the media tend more to accommodate than to critique the theological and ethical ambiguities of our time. Their main devotion to what gratifies the viewing and reading audiences plays no small part in eclipsing God and fixed moral principles from contemporary life (18-19).

The barrage of immediate gratification removes the sense of shame and horror that should accompany the sight of such.  Public degradation engenders sports, not shame and sorrow. He again Muggeridge on the matter of “’accustoming us to the gradual deterioration of our values’” (19). While every age has thought itself (at least by some) to be the depths of depravity, it goes without saying that much which would have been unthinkable at the time of the essay would be unremarkable in public media today.[4]

Should I read this morning’s news, I would learn of extraordinary acts of pain and sorrow throughout the world. My view of the matter would be incessant, vivid, personal – and yet, there would be (and is) not easy matter of involvement. Thus, I come to human suffering (and glory) as peeping Tom. I cannot form an appropriate moral response – I cannot really do much. Hucksters will try to take my money. Politicians will use words to gain some immediate attention (and most often do nothing remotely useful).

This process affects human beings spiritually. It is a direct affront to the proclamation of God’s truth. It is an affront to the bare concept of “truth” – which ultimately lies with the primal temptation wherein the Serpent questions, word and meaning and logic:

4 But the serpent said to the woman, “You will not surely die. 5 For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” Genesis 3:4–5 (ESV)

While individual actors seek to turn truth word to manipulation and sales-pitch for personal gain (I pity the poor soul who takes political rhetoric at face value, much like one how gives a scorpion a ride[5]), the ultimate object is spiritual: it is an attack upon the very concept of revelation by God in Word – which is the heart of Christianity.

Some may think that little loss. However, the basis of Christian revelation is also the basis of what it is to be human:[6]

To strip words of any necessary or legitimate role as a revelatory resource denies not only the intelligibility of revelation, but also the very rationality of human existence. Nonverbal experience cannot supply today’s generation with fruitful alternatives to the spiritual emptiness of the times; the cavernous silence of a speechless world echoes not a single syllable of hope. To deverbalize an already depersonalized society is all the more to dehumanize it.

How can one engage in either true personal interaction or societal and corporate interaction when words are stripped of stability, and promise of its hold? Robert Frost ends his wonderful poem, “Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening” with marvelous point,

            But I have promises to keep ….

What human interaction can there be without promise? Yes, human beings can live and breathe and die. Yes, by sheer force and violence a political entity can force itself along. But what humanity remains? What truth or beauty, what love or charm remain?

Henry ends with the proposition that it is the duty of the Christian to not succumb to the spirit of this age, but rather proclaim the “divine invasion” of the Logos, the truth of God, the prophetic Word.

Robert Frost reading, “Stopping by the Woods”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hfOxdZfo0gs

 


[1] Carl Ferdinand Howard Henry, vol. 1, God, Revelation, and Authority (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 1999), 16-17.

[2] Although not discussed in this essay, Nietzsche’s arguments in Genealogy of Morals would certainly have an interesting bearing upon the point.

[3] This does require any Gnostic “fall” into matter. The physical world was created “very good.” The distress of the physical derives from sin (Romans 8:20). The redemption of humanity is not out of the physical world into a purely “spiritual” existence, as if the trouble were physicality. Rather, the redemption is to a resurrection, to a New Heavens and New Earth (1 Cor. 15:42-49; Rev. 21 & 22). Thus, Christianity differs strongly from either a Gnostic spite of the physical or a materialist’s denial of the spiritual.

[4] Some may point to matters of “racism” [I have word in quotations, because as a Christian, I must consider the matter of “races” itself suspect and repellant; there is a single human race; there are various cultural structures which people create, but these have no ground separate grounds of human value and being] as an area of advancement.  However, polite society has in some instances moved around certain discourse markers, the same nonsensical “racial” beliefs still exist. I remember being perplexed as a child that somehow George Washington Carver did not “belong” to me – even though he was a an American (as I was) and Christian (as was I) and a Scientist (which I longed to be), but that his skin color put him into a different and alien category – why is that primary to anything?

[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scorpion_and_the_Frog

[6] As a Christian, I think it obvious that the correlative lies in the fundamental truth of the Christian claim.

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