F Is for Fitzgerald

Sunday Poetry XLIX -- A Frosty New Year

Sometimes good stuff can come from bad things.  For example, I’ve been sick for four days now.  Pretty crappy.  While I don’t recommend it to anyone—being sick—it has afforded me significantly more time for reading for pleasure than I generally permit myself.  The past few days it’s been poetry, specifically a collection called Six American Poets, anthologized and edited by Joel Conarroe (who, among other things, chairs the National Book Foundation).  It’s this book that introduced me to my most recent favorite poet, Wallace Stevens, and which has introduced poems by its other five poets (Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, William Carlos Williams, Robert Frost, and Langston Hughes) that I was not previously familiar with.  I want to share two of these today.

Robert Frost, for me, is the kind of writer that I really don’t want to like—rather, I want to hate him—and the further I am from my most recent read of any of his stuff, the more successful I am (unfortunately, the opposite, as we shall soon see, is also true).  So late last night, or early-early this morning, as I sat uncomfortably and picked up the above-pictured book for distraction, I was annoyed when I stumbled upon some notes from Conarroe that lauded the old country boy.  The notes drew up my curiosity—and my unrighteous indignation—and I turned to Frost’s section of the collection.  (See, here’s the thing, the very reason I so badly want to hate Frost is the same reason that I just can’t: he is so good.  Almost too good, really.)  One of the following poems is my new favorite of his, the other, not so much, though it gave me some significant cause to think, especially about stuff, particularly the apparently bad stuff, that’s happened over the last year—well, year-and-a-half or so.  I say apparently bad, because … well … you’ll see.

For the first of the two, I need to go through a typical deconstruction; however, as Conarroe does an excellent job in his notes (to which I flip duly back), I’ll simply quote him at length.

Poem first:

Design

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 frothm

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?

And Conarroe’s breakdown:

What a scary little dance of death this is!  It is, of course ostensibly nothing more significant than a couple of insects, yet in Frost’s artful handling we are exposed to a dramatic moment that suggests something ominous about the “design” of nature.  The poem is a sonnet, its first section setting up a situation and the final lines offering a comment on that situation.  (“A true sonnet,” Frost said, “goes eight lines and then takes a turn for the better or worse and goes six lines more.”)  The work itself is a “thing so small,” with its design revealed by the orderly meter and rhyme, as well as by the series of contrasts that gradually emerge—between whiteness and darkness, life and death, innocence and depravity, morning and night.  Al this in fourteen carefully plotted lines.

The situation could hardly be more ordinary: the speaker, walking along a country road, notices a spider on a flower holding a dead moth, a signed we’ve all seen.  From the beginning, though, this telling suggests that there is something more than usually unsettling about this.  For one thing, the spider is “dimpled,” “fat,” and “white,” words that taken together in this context somehow sound obscene.  The repetition of “white,” a word associated with purity, is clearly ironic, as is the reference to “satin cloth,” which suggests, among other things, a bridal gown.  Ironic too are the kite (a child’s harmless toy) and, of course, the incongruously named “heal-all,” which, usually blue, has inexplicably turned white.  There is cynicism in the phrase “mixed ready to begin the morning right,” which conjures up a homey breakfast of fresh coffee and orange juice and not a ghastly little daybreak repast.  “Froth,” suggesting foaming at the mouth, reinforces the unwholesome atmosphere.

The speaker is moved to speculate about this depraved scene—depraved, at least, in his morbid telling—asking, for example, why the usually blue “heal-all” is an albino, and hence “kindred” to the murderous spider, and what agency “steered” the moth to its seemingly predestined liaison.  The implication is that if some overriding natural design is responsible for so insignificant an event, what hope has any of us.  This fatalistic point of view may express the poet’s own sense of things during a period of personal despondency, but whether or not it does is less important than the fact that he makes us believe it does.

Whatever the possibly grim biographical implications, the poet could not resist engaging in wordplay—Frost like to make language dance to the “whack of his quip.”  I had read the poem many times before I realized that “appall” has as its root meaning the idea of “making pale.”  This related not only to the bleaching of the “blue and innocent heal-all,” which becomes implicated in the death, but also to all the other references to white (and blight) that make up the poem’s own design.  I also realized, again only after many readings, that “govern” has a secondary meaning of “steer,” which adds a final irony to the speaker’s expression of revulsion.  What, after all, has steered him to this grisly ballet? 

Pretty good, huh?  So, begrudgingly, I flipped through the Frosties for shorter pieces that I could dig into without too much commitment.  Naturally, as I’m left handed, and as I was flipping, rather than turning, the pages, I started with the very last poem of the section.  It’s fairly typical Frost: folksy, country-ish, and Yankee, and it included a piece of apparently (there’s that word again—told you we’d get back to it) random and brutal violence.

The Draft Horse

With a lantern that couldn’t burn

In too frail a buggy we drove

Behind too heavy a horse

Through a pitch-dark limitless grove.

And a man came out of the trees

And took our horse by the head

And reaching back to his ribs

Deliberately stabbed him dead.

The ponderous beast went down

With a crack of a broken shaft.

And the night drew through the trees

In one long invidious draft.

The most unquestioning pair

That ever accepted fate

And the least disposed to ascribe

Any more than we had to to hate,

We assumed that the man himself

Or someone he had to obey

Wanted us to get down

And walk the rest of the way.

I don’t want to beat home the point of this one.  Like I said before, it’s not my favorite, nor do I think in any way does it even compete with the best, of Frost’s stuff.  But it made me think.  And it’s still making me think.  Here’s the basics of it, I guess: a couple years ago I lost my job.  It felt a little bit like that great ponderous horse pulling along my family and me had been killed.  Well, we’ve done a lot of walking since the death of our beast, and I’m sure glad we’re where we are now, rather than where we were before its end.

Happy New Year – may you be granted some piece of perspective.

Sunday Poetry XXXVI -- Textbook Poetry 3.7

Section VII wore me out.  I was interested for the first six poems, as all were about birds, and I thought perhaps an interesting and perhaps poetic motif might emerge.  Nope.  Just six excellent poems on birds and then – pff! – hodge-podge, and, as hodge-podge goes, bland.  Oh well.  Not bothering with the last poem of the book.  It annoyed me, and it’s long.  Instead three bird poems, all new to me and all quite enjoyable.  (Corbies are crows or ravens, by the way.)

An Approach to Literature

Brooks, Purser, Warren

1952

The Twa Corbies

Anonymous

As I was walking all alane,
I heard twa corbies makin a mane;
The tane unto the ither say,
"Whar sall we gang and dine the-day?"

"In ahint yon auld fail dyke,
I wot there lies a new slain knight;
And nane do ken that he lies there,
But his hawk, his hound an his lady fair."

"His hound is tae the huntin gane,
His hawk tae fetch the wild-fowl hame, 
His lady's tain anither mate,
So we may mak oor dinner swate."

"Ye'll sit on his white hause-bane,
And I'll pike oot his bonny blue een;
Wi ae lock o his gowden hair 
We'll theek oor nest whan it grows bare."

"Mony a one for him makes mane,
But nane sall ken whar he is gane;
Oer his white banes, whan they are bare,
The wind sall blaw for evermair."

The Oven Bird

Robert Frost

There is a singer everyone has heard,
Loud, a mid-summer and a mid-wood bird,
Who makes the solid tree trunks sound again.
He says that leaves are old and that for flowers
Mid-summer is to spring as one to ten.
He says the early petal-fall is past
When pear and cherry bloom went down in showers
On sunny days a moment overcast;
And comes that other fall we name the fall.
He says the highway dust is over all.
The bird would cease and be as other birds
But that he knows in singing not to sing.
The question that he frames in all but words
Is what to make of a diminished thing. 

Gulls

William Carlos Williams

My townspeople, beyond in the great world,
Are many with whom it were far more
Profitable for me to live than here with you.
These whirr about me calling, calling!
And for my own part I answer them loud as I can,
But they, being free pass!
I remain! Therefore, listen!
For you will not soon have another singer

First I say this: You have seen
The strange birds, have you not, that sometimes
Rest upon our river in winter?
Let them cause you to think well then of the storms
That drive many to shelter. These things
Do not happen without reason.

And next thing I say is this:
I saw an eagle once circling against the clouds
Over one of our principal churches
Easter, it was a beautiful day!
Three gulls came from above the river
And crossed slowly seaward!
Oh, I know you have your own hymns, I have heard them
And because I knew they invoked some great protector
I could not be angry with you, no matter
How much they outraged true music

You see, it is not necessary for us to leap at each other,
And, as I told you, in the end
The gulls moved seaward very quietly.

Sunday Poetry XXVII -- TEXTBOOK POETRY 1

No matter the anthologies, not matter the publishers or editors, secondary ed. literature textbooks / anthologies pretty much always house the same short stories, novel excerpts, and plays as any other.  The pieces may get readjusted for grade level or shift focuses or be used in different contexts, and maybe something will get taken out--at least temporarily--or another author might get added, but but by and large this prosy stuff doesn't really change.  The poetry, on the other hand, shifts dramatically.  Over the next several weeks, I'm going to dig through the eight or nine secondary ed. lit. texts I've got on my shelves.  I'll open and close with the first and last poems printed in the each and fill the middle, hopefully, with a handful of poems I don't already know or that otherwise interest me.

ELEMENTS OF LITERATURE, first course

Holt, Rinehart, and Winston

1989

The Clouds Pass

Richard Garcia

The clouds pass in a blue sky

Too white to be true

Before winter sets in

The trees are spending all their money

I lie in gold

Above a green valley

Gold falls on my chest

I am a rich man.

The Tom-Cat

Don Marquis

At midnight in the alley

      A Tom-Cat comes to wail,

And he chants the hate of a million years

      As he swings his snaky tail.

Malevolent, Bony, brindled,

      Tiger and devil and bard,

His eyes are coals from the middle of Hell

      And his heart is black and hard.

He twists and crouches and capers

      And bares his curved sharp claws,

And he sings to the stars of the jungle nights

      Ere cities were, or laws.

Beast from the world primevil,

      He and his leaping clan,

When the blotched red moon leers over the roofs,

      Gives voice to their scorn of man.

He will lie on a rug tomorrow

      And lick his silky fur,

And veil the brute in his yellow eyes

      And play he’s tame, and purr.

But at midnight in the alley

      He will crouch again and wail,

And beat the time for his demon’s song

      With the swing of his demon’s tail.

The Shepherd’s Hut

Andrew Young

The smear of blue peat smoke

That staggered on the wind and broke,

The only sign of life,

Where was the shepherd’s wife,

Who left those flapping clothes to dry,

Taking no thoughts for her family?

For, as they bellied out

And limbs took shape and waved about,

I thought, She little knows

That ghosts are trying on her children’s clothes.

A Word

Emily Dickinson

A word is dead

When it is said,

      Some say.

I say it just

Begins to live

      That day.

The Objection to Being Stepped On

Robert Frost

At the end of the row

I stepped on the toe

Of an unemployed hoe.

It rose in offense

And struck me a blow

In the seat of my sense.

It wasn’t to blame

But I called it a name.

And I must say it dealt

Me a blow that I felt

Like malice prepense.

You may call me a fool,

but was there a rule

The weapon should be

Turned into a tool?

And what do we see?

The first tool I step on

Turned into a weapon.

Sunday Poetry IX -- FROSTED BELLS for NEW YEAR'S

Usually I find back stories for things like this a drag, but today I'm doing it anyway, because the connection doesn't make any sense without the context.

Usually sometime Saturday night (especially now that church time has been moved up to nine), I start thinking about what I might do for Sunday Poetry.  Considering the time of year, both for earth's tilt and our current spot in the calendar, the weather--frigidly cold and snowy--and the New Year circled me mind.  Here in Utah right now, while not setting any records, it is frigidly cold.  The effect of this icy average is augmented by the general emotional impression left by what the recent cold snap's abrupt arrival did to the heavy slush fall from the day before followed by a dry powdery snow then a partial melt-off and finally another wicked freeze last night.

Walking across the church parking lot this morning was dangerous!

The coldest poem I know is "Out, Out -" by the late and way great Robert Frost (who, for some reason--and corroborated by appearances--resides on a particular shelf in my mind right next door to Cormac McArthy

)

(Do you know which one is which?)

Read this poem, and tell me it doesn't just make you shiver, shiver in horrific chill, sure, but as surely shiver in synesthetic frigidity (yes, synesthesia again: one of the greatest abilities of great writing):

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 it meant 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!

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. 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 a 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.

Okay, so for the season that seems really negative, and, well, I guess it is.  *not a non-sequitur:*  If you read this blog and have at least followed the Sunday Poetry entries, you should remember last week's interesting parallel between two pieces by Poe--the story, "The Black Cat," and the poem, "The Bells."  Well, this week's pair of pieces are not parallel; I believe they're perpendicular.  "Out, Out -" doesn't seem in any way to celebrate the birth of the new year, at least inasmuch as the holiday is indeed about rebirth and the New and all that mushy stuff.  But remember, as one year is born, so one dies, and should we not walk away from it perhaps even without looking back over our shoulder?

Anyway, I don't know how the connection was made--what or which synaptic firing caught this other one in the cross--but next I thought of Alfred, Lord Tennyson's "Ring Out, Wild Bells," which is all about the temporal crux of New Year's:

Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,
The flying cloud, the frosty light;

The year is dying in the night;

Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.

Ring out the old, ring in the new,

Ring, happy bells, across the snow:

The year is going, let him go;

Ring out the false, ring in the true.

Ring out the grief that saps the mind,

For those that here we see no more,

Ring out the feud of rich and poor,

Ring in redress to all mankind.

Ring out a slowly dying cause,

And ancient forms of party strife;

Ring in the nobler modes of life,

With sweeter manners, purer laws.

Ring out the want, the care, the sin,

The faithless coldness of the times;

Ring out, ring out thy mournful rhymes,

But ring the fuller minstrel in.

Ring out false pride in place and blood,

The civic slander and the spite;

Ring in the love of truth and right,

Ring in the common love of good.

Ring out old shapes of foul disease,

Ring out the narrowing lust of gold;

Ring out the thousand wars of old,

Ring in the thousand years of peace.

Ring in the valiant man and free,

The larger heart, the kindlier hand;

Ring out the darkness of the land,

Ring in the Christ that is to be.

It's the ringing of the bells--the tonal tintinnabulation, that, while in Poe is a tocsin of doom, in Tynneson verily sparkles--that brings the warm fuzzies so associated with New Year's.  But look more closely: inasmuch as "The Bells" and "The Black Cat" --ostensibly so totally different--tell the same story and are quite parallel, so too are both of these poems, "Out, Out -" and "Ring Out, Wild Bells," converge at the same point: New Year's, though clearly from two different directions.

More interestingly still (at least for a great geek like me) is the haunting melody ascribed to the latter of the two, by Crawford Gates.  For me, artistically speaking rather than temporally, at least for the moment, this, by the meeting of tone and lyric, is where the two poems by Frost and Tennyson meet:

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