"Unharvested"

A scent of ripeness from over a wall.
And come to leave the routine road
And look for what had made me stall,
There sure enough was an apple tree
That had eased itself of its summer load,
And of all but its trivial foliage free,
Now breathed as light as a lady's fan.
For there had been an apple fall
As complete as the apple had given man.
The ground was one circle of solid red.

May something go always unharvested!
May much stay out of our stated plan,
Apples or something forgotten and left,
So smelling their sweetness would be no theft. 

Robert Frost

When I put my garden to bed last month, I left some of those small, yellow pear tomatoes on the ground.  There were more than I could use or even give away, so I left some behind, unharvested.  Perhaps some passerby would pick them up and take them home; perhaps some animal would take sustenance from them; perhaps, forgotten and left, they would decompose and make my garden plot more fertile for next year.

Robert Frost’s “Unharvested” celebrates that which goes unharvested, that which is forgotten and left, that which we might otherwise regard as failure, a “dead ambition,” a “relinquished desire” (Anonymous). And his comparison of “an apple fall” to the mythic Fall of Humankind suggests the Felix Culpa, or Fortunate Fall, of Christian theology, the idea that human failure was “fortunate” in that it brought us a Redeemer in Jesus Christ, the idea that human suffering is necessary for the achievement of human happiness, that evil can be turned to good and loss to plenitude.

If this interpretation seems to burden a simple and light-hearted poem with a heavy message, bear with me as yet more layers may be uncovered.

Let’s note first that the poem is a variation on a sonnet, fourteen lines of primarily iambic tetrameter (instead of the pentameter of a traditional sonnet), with an oddly asymmetrical rhyme scheme: abacbcdade edff, unlike any “sonnet” you would ever encounter.  Instead of the octet-sestet arrangement of a Petrarchan sonnet or the triple quatrain plus couplet structure of the Shakespearean sonnet, we have a ten-line description followed by a four-line commentary.  Perhaps it’s not a sonnet at all!  Perhaps it’s a playful variation.  Perhaps it’s an abject failure of a sonnet! Perhaps it’s a deliberate design to reinforce that theme of fortunate failure. 

Let’s note also the imagery: “scent of ripeness,” “routine road,” “apple tree,” “summer load,” “trivial foliage,” all suggesting a passerby in a natural, possibly rural, setting.  But then this tree, free of its “load,” breathes “as light as a lady’s fan.”  How does this image of cultured society fit into a nature poem?  Is it a mistake, an oversight, or is it a deliberate anomaly, meant to suggest our human world of imperfection?  

And then this “apple fall” is parenthetically, off-handedly, described as “complete as the apple had given man.”  Now that gets your attention.  We’re not just talking about a bunch of mundane apples on the mundane ground. Now we’re in the Garden of Eden with Adam and Eve and the tree of knowledge of good and evil.  And, in that context, when we read that “The ground was one circle of solid red,” it is difficult not to think of the “red” of passion, of violence, of blood. 

So the apples represent our fallen human nature, our imperfection, our capacity for wrongdoing, our unharvested goodness, our neglect and our failure.  But this human decay, if you will, is celebrated: “May something go always unharvested!”  How boring to be perfect!  “May much stay out of our stated plan....” How boring never to make a mistake!  There is something sweet in the scent of that forgotten “ripeness,” and to smell that “sweetness would be no theft,” that is, to value our failures, to see how suffering can lead to happiness, how loss can be a gift, how evil can be turned into good, is “no theft” from our human capacity for success, virtue, and betterment.

None of this is to say that we rejoice in violence, disease, cruelty, injustice, or pain, but, rather, that we celebrate the opportunities that human life affords us for redemption.

So much for the positive interpretation of Frost’s poem. But are there hidden ambiguities? 

For example, that sweet “scent of ripeness” will soon be a scent of rottenness.  Which is stronger?  Which lasts longer?  And what of that neglectful property owner?  What of the waste of nutritious food in a world where many go hungry?  To what extent is the idea of Felix Culpa a rationalization, an excuse to cover up, paper over, and unjustly exonerate us from our wrongdoings?  However you slice it, when I put my garden to bed last summer, I was just too lazy to clean off my plot and take those unharvested tomatoes to the nearby food shelf.

A tragic world view might suggest our positive interpretation of the poem is just Pollyannaism, that the poem illustrates our human tendency to lie to ourselves and deny the painful truth that indeed there is no redemption.  “Life’s a bitch and then you die.”  We are left with the image of that “circle of solid red,” the blood of billions who have suffered from evil at our human hands.

But surely this is way too heavy a burden for such a light and innocent poem to bear.  Perhaps Frost is just playfully making fun of our human habit of finding self-satisfying explanations for bad behavior. 

Then again, perhaps that seemingly simple poem captures the full complexity of our contradictory human drama. 

"Summer": A Meditation

Summer is an active time of year when we spend more time outside, enjoying nature, attending outdoor events, vacationing and, despite ragweed and mosquitoes, mostly reveling in the sensory pleasures of long sunny days and a green, growing world.  In mythology summer represents the prime of nature, vitality, fertility, and the fullness of life, before the decline of nature in fall and its “death” in winter.

According to this pattern I’ve been spending my summer gardening and appreciating the backyard pleasures of birds, blooms, and nature’s bounty, as one might surmise from the neglect of this blog.  In search of an appropriate reading to end this neglect, I began looking for a “summer” poem.  One interesting observation is that there seem to be more poems about the end of summer than about its full glory, perhaps because poetry is more contemplative than active, and the end of summer reminds us of the decline and fall to come, inspiring us to poetic meditation.

Amy Lowell’s 1912 meditation on summer (see previous post), however, takes us in a different direction, making the case for the indoor life of winter, of city life over “fields and woods,” of intellectual effort over sensory delights, of human interaction, art, civilization and the life of the mind.

Lowell invokes the ancient debate over rural vs. urban, body vs. mind, nature vs. the human realm of intellect, art, and society.  Of course, it’s a false dichotomy since it is no doubt natural for humans to gather in society, to think, to create artifacts, to “improve” on nature, and seek to mitigate the dark side of “tooth and claw.”  Nature is as fraught with death and danger in summer as it is with life and growth.  And, as Lowell reminds us, the world of art and civilization in winter can be full of “the pulse and throb of life.”

Curiously, though, Lowell’s poem, while it ostensibly favors the “human world,” seems to spend as much or more effort on the pleasures of nature at full bloom in summer as it does on the “labor,” “inspiration,” and “vivid life of winter months.”  The strongest images in the poem summon “the voice of waters,” “great winds,” “sunshine and flowers,” “moonlight playing,” a “sleeping lake,” “nodding ferns,” “the blue crest of the distant mountain,” and “the green crest of the hill…”  The power of the nature imagery seems to undercut the stated preference of the poem for city life and human society.

Yet the structure and style of the poem support the value of art and civilization.  Written in traditional blank verse, the poem parallels the Greek choral structure of strophe, antistrophe, and epode.  Lines 1-12 focus on those who find “inspiration” in nature and consider the city to be “a prison house.”  Line 13 makes a turn, renouncing the preference for nature but, in the same line, announcing, “I love the earth…” Lines 14-29 develop the speaker’s love of nature in lavish detail, but in line 30, again there is a turn; and the final 12 lines develop her preference for “the human world,” which is “like a lantern shining in the night/To light me to a knowledge of myself.”

The poem could be read as contradictory, perhaps unconsciously revealing a preference for nature in an argument for human society, or it could be read as representing a fragile balance between the love of both.  Despite her love of the active, outdoor life of summer, she longs for the contemplative, indoor life of winter.

So what?  Is “Summer” merely an expression of the poet’s perhaps conflicting preferences?  Or is there more to it?

The style and structure, as well as the stated preference for art and civilization over nature suggest a classic, somewhat aristocratic, certainly upper class, perhaps elitist, perspective.  Some readers may even hear a quasi-imperialistic message of Western dominance.  Others will note how, if there is such a message, it is clearly undercut by the honorific tone in the nature imagery, with its implicit celebration of the romantic, the democratic, and all that is wild and uncultivated. 

Contemporary readers may well note that nature is gendered as “she,” a traditional way of associating women with the body, as opposed to the mind.  Some may even speculate on the possibility of a subliminal message of conflicted sexuality.

Mythologically, the poem invokes the universal contrast between youth and age, life and death, body and mind, nature and art.

However you choose to read it, Amy Lowell’s “Summer” is more than simple self-expression.  It is more like self-reflection or an extended meditation, in which the speaker develops a complex identity with a complex relationship to her world.

And with that, I return to the pleasures of my summer, with greater anticipation of and appreciation for the pleasures of winter to come.

"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.

    

It’s amazing how you can read something multiple times, then come back to it and discover something new.  I’ve often read Robert Frost’s “Desert Places” and admired it for the way it moves from an ordinary winter scene to the vastness of outer space to the familiarity of inner space.  Recently I studied it more closely and found more to appreciate. 

First, let’s note that this “nature” poem is not of the uplifting or sentimental variety.  Instead we get a stark image of human isolation and loneliness in the midst of a desolate scene in which nature is blank and expressionless.  It is striking that this northern winter image is compared to a southern “desert,” but this is but one in a series of striking contrasts.

We have white “snow” and dark “night,” both “falling fast”; “smooth” snow cover with “weeds and stubble” poking through; natural desolation and human “loneliness”; “blanker whiteness” and “benighted snow”; earthly isolation and the emptiness “between stars”; external and internal absence.  The contrasts create a psychic drama as the speaker realizes, not only his own insignificance in the vastness of nature, but also that of the human species on its lonely planet.

This existential image of human isolation is conveyed in Frost’s characteristically familiar style.  The predominately iambic meter, interlocking rhyme scheme, plain diction, sentence fragments, and use of dashes, all make the poem sound conversational, while the occasional irregularity of rhythm, reversal of word order and the use of words like “absent-spirited” and “benighted” offer a slight elevation of style.  The whole is rendered as an ordinary experience that is accompanied by an extra-ordinary shock of recognition.

The winter scene is personified as lonely in stanza two but realistically depicted in stanza three as inanimate, having “nothing to express.”  The emptiness “between planets” is associated with the emptiness of a “desert,” as both of those images, like the winter scene itself, serve as metaphors for psychic absence.  Ironically, this message of disconnection is belied by the speaker’s ability to identify with the external world and the reader’s ability to identify with the speaker. 

A poem about disconnection relies on connecting with disconnection.  The comparative devices of personification and metaphor are used to create a sense of isolation and contrast.  Earthly winter, the human individual, unearthly space, and the earthly desert are all connected by their shared disconnection.  At the heart of human experience is this unavoidable contradiction between alienation (absence) and interconnected relationship (presence).  We are connected in our isolation.

From a socio/political perspective the poem serves to elevate individualism over collectivism, yet it could be read as disrupting this false binary, suggesting that our ability to identify with and relate to what is external to us transcends our isolation and makes social relationships possible, indeed, perhaps redemptive.  As Bertrand Russell wrote, “In human relations one should penetrate to the core of loneliness in each person and speak to that” (Autobiography Vol 1, pp. 219-221).

Viewed from a mythic perspective, the poem may suggest the Fall, death, loss, even apocalypse, but again, as spring is foreshadowed in the winter solstice, so redemption, rebirth, recovery, and resurrection are foreshadowed in the mythic cycle of eternal return. 

All of this may seem to take us far afield from the original poem, but, as we connect with that poem about loneliness, we transcend our individualism; as we identify with human emptiness, we transcend our isolation.

  

Walt Whitman

Along with Emily Dickinson Walt Whitman was the most experimental and technically innovative American poet of the 19^th century (see blog post Sept. 20, 2009).  While Dickinson disrupted conventional metrics, rhyme, punctuation, capitalization, and grammar, Whitman basically threw conventional poetic meter out the window and invented a whole new form—free verse.

Many readers think free verse is verse that doesn’t rhyme, or they get it confused with “blank verse.”  Blank verse is actually unrhymed iambic pentameter.  Shakespeare used it a lot.  Free verse may or may not rhyme, but it is completely free of meter that can be scanned, counted, and labeled as iambic, trochaic, anapestic, or dactylic.  Whitman created a completely new way of achieving rhythmic effects in poetry.  He actually used grammar instead of the stressed and unstressed syllable patterns used in the conventional poetry of his time.

In 1855 he published Leaves of Grass and revolutionized the writing of poetry, dispensing with rhyme, as well as meter and regular verse forms.  Yet his poetry still had rhythm, as well as other sound effects, such as assonance, consonance, and alliteration.  What was revolutionary was his use of parallelism or repetition of grammatical structures to create rhythm.

It sounds so tame, but readers and critics alike were shocked, saying that his sprawling lines bore no resemblance to anything recognizable as poetry.  Ironically, later critics have traced Whitman’s use of parallelism to the Bible, a text that those shocked readers would probably have been very familiar with.  But in those days Biblical “prose,” no matter how rhythmic, was not considered to be in the same category as “poetry.”

Lest anyone think Whitman’s innovation was a matter of chance or accident, the opening poem in Leaves of Grass reveals Whitman’s consciousness, whether his use of parallelism was Biblically-based or not, that he was doing something different, new, and “modern.”

One’s-Self I Sing

One’s-Self I sing, a simple separate person,

Yet utter the word Democratic, the word En-Masse.

Of physiology from top to toe I sing,

Not physiognomy alone nor brain alone is worthy for the Muse, I say the Form complete is worthier far,
The Female equally with the Male I sing.

Of Life immense in passion, pulse, and power,

Cheerful, for freest action form’d under the laws divine,
The Modern Man I sing.

The kernel structure of the poem is the inverted sentence “_________I sing,” which is repeated four times, establishing a pattern, not of meter, but of grammar.  Each separate sentence features its own extension or modification, thus creating grammatical variety, as well as repetition. 

The content of the poem asserts the modern ideas of individualism and democracy and expands those ideas to include the equality of body and “brain” and of male and female.  While individualism and democracy were well established values in 1855, the elevation of the body and of women was highly controversial, even more so when associated with “laws divine.”  Whitman uses a revolutionary poetic form to reinforce revolutionary ideas.  And he reveals his conscious intention in his final line, “The Modern Man I sing.”

If Dickinson challenged conventional views of reality (see blog post Sept. 19, 2009), Whitman challenged conventional values, especially when it came to gender and sexuality.  Not only did he assert the equality of the sexes, he celebrated the human body as much as he did nature and openly expressed both heterosexual and homosexual attraction, attachment, and desire.

While Dickinson could barely get published, Whitman’s published poems were reviled, not only as unpoetic but as obscene.  Both were too far ahead of their time to be fully appreciated in their lifetimes, but, together, they have exerted more influence on modern poetry than any other pair, and they did it by writing poetry as it had never been written before.

The Technical Appreciation of Poetry, For Example in Frost's "Design"

The last post and the Sept. 20, 2009, one on Emily Dickinson address the technical side of poetry in terms of versification, metrics, imagery, expectation, and surprise. It is tempting to choose a complex poem to illustrate all the different ways that word choice, sentence structure, imagery, figurative language and even punctuation are used by poets as rich resources of expression and suggestion. Instead I’ll choose a “simple one” to show a few examples.

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 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.
(“Design” by Robert Frost)

Before analyzing the color symbolism, metaphors, and nature imagery, it is worth noting how the poem begins in a familiar, almost offhand, voice, “I found,” suggesting a casual encounter on a roadside walk. Yet the language becomes increasingly formal as the poem goes on until we get to words like “kindred” and “thither” in the last few lines. Is this merely accidental or does the shift in level of language parallel the shift from casual observation to philosophical speculation in the content of the poem? And, if the latter, is it merely an unconscious fitting of language to thought or is it part of the intentional crafting of the poem? Regardless of how we answer this question, it is remarkable how word choice can create different expressive voices appropriate to what is being said.

Similarly, the sentence structure grows increasingly complex as each stanza develops. The first three lines, though tightly structured, constitute a relatively straightforward statement. But the sentence continues piling on appositives and modifiers until it becomes densely complex.

Of the three questions in the second stanza, the second is the most straightforward grammatically but uses the most formal language. The first question separates the appositive from its antecedent noun (“flower”), creating a jarring effect grammatically that parallels the seeming contradiction of describing a flower as both white and blue at the same time. The third question uses “appall” as an intransitive verb, an unconventional, if not obscure, expression, which sounds almost archaic, once again using language that reinforces ancient philosophical questions about chance and fate and longstanding religious questions about the moral goodness of nature, including human nature. Do we live in a purposeful universe of “design” or do we live in a random world of accident and chance? And, if it is orderly and purposeful, what does it mean if death and suffering are built into the design? The unstated question is “What kind of designer would design such a world 'to appall'?"

The dashes create an informal, conversational effect, but the tightly structured, highly composed sentences contradict that style, sounding more educated, formal, and complex. The tension of opposites again parallels the juxtaposition of casual observer and philosophical thinker or serious moralist.

Other examples of opposition include the irony of “assorted characters of death and blight” being “mixed ready to begin the morning, right” (emphasis added) and the white imagery in contrast with “a witches’ broth” and “dead wings.”

White is a conventional symbol of purity and innocence (at least in Western European based culture), but in this poem the white spider, flower, and moth represent “death and blight.” As Melville reminds us in “The Whiteness of the Whale” chapter of Moby Dick, white can just as easily be associated with the pallor of sickness and death or the burial shroud as with purity and innocence or the wedding gown.

“What had that flower to do with being white…?” is a question with multiple meanings. The heal-all is typically blue but occasionally white. Consider the coincidence of the rare white heal-all serving as the stage for the white spider’s predatory attack on the white moth. Is it mere chance or part of the orderly design and purpose of nature? If the latter, it is a “design of darkness” serving to “appall” our naïve sense of God’s goodness and nature’s innocence. How innocent is innocence if “death and blight” are integral to its nature? The color symbolism of white, blue, and “darkness” in their varying relationships is what gives those questions their poetic power.

Another irony is the heal-all, a flower known in folk culture for its healing power, serving as a natural death bed for the moth.

In addition to irony and symbolism, metaphor abounds. Three are obvious similes: the moth being held up “…like a piece of rigid satin cloth,” the “assorted characters…like the ingredients of a witches’ broth,” and the “dead wings carried like a paper kite.” Lest these comparisons be thought frivolous poetic flourishes, consider the association of “rigid” with death, of a satin cloth with a death shroud, of witches with evil (a more cultural than natural comparison), of a kite with playfulness (ironically contrasting with the “dead wings”). Other metaphors include the moth being “steered” and “design” governing “in a thing so small,” metaphors which suggest a hidden power with a dark purpose.

Finally, we are led by almost every technical device available to the poet to conclude that this seemingly simple poem is a dark allegory of Mother Nature who brings both life and death, of “original sin,” and of innocence that cannot be separated from evil. And if the inseparability of good and evil “govern in a thing so small,” what are the implications for human nature and for the universe at large?