ROBERT FROST By AMY LOWELL With the publication of "North of Boston" [1914], Mr. Frost's reputation was suddenly made. There was hardly a dissenting voice as to its merits. A paper usually so hostile to American verse as "The Times" wrote: "Poetry burns up out of it, as when a faint wind breathes upon smouldering embers." A beautiful and accurate characterization, for, through the homely, quiet words rises a faint pungency, the very aroma of poesy floating thinly up into the air. New England made articulate "North of Boston" is a "book of people," as Mr. Frost has said in his dedication. It is a volume of stories; long, interesting stories of those New Hampshire folk dwelling between the two poles of Mr. Frost's "few hundred miles." There is no whisper of English influence in this poetry, it is the very nostalgia of his New England hills. The speech is New England, except in one particular which I shall mention later, although the poet eschews dialect. His eyes may see the soft rounded English country, with its stiles and tufted trees, but the lines etched upon his heart are the articulate outlines of rock and hemlock, the angular sharpness of stone walls and white clapboarded houses against a hard blue sky. A little poem in italics serves as motto to the volume, and may very well serve as motto to all Mr. Frost's work. For here in a few words is an upland pasture with the farmer These selections from "Robert Frost" in Tendencies in Modern American Poetry by Amy Lowell are used by permission of and by special arrangement with Houghton Mifflin Company, the authorized publishers. To Mr. Frost personally I am indebted for the right to reprint the poetic passages. Through the many poems collected in Men, Women and Ghosts, Sword Blades and Poppy Seed, Can Grande's Castle and other volumes, Miss Lowell is doubtless the most widely known practicer of the new manner in American poetry. In criticism she has published also Six French Poets. With Florence Ayscough, she has lately published Fir-Flower Tablets, a collection of ancient Chinese poetry in English form. On her Imagist side Miss Lowell has been influenced by the Japanese idylls known as tanko and hokku. Vividness and variety characterize her work throughout. at work in it, and here is that tenderness, that love of place and people which marks all that this poet does : THE PASTURE I'm going out to clean the pasture spring; I'm going out to fetch the little calf All the sadder, "North of Boston" is a very sad book. perhaps, because the poet is at no pains to make it so. He is holding no brief for or against the state of things he portrays, he is too much a part of it himself to exhibit it as an illustration of anything. He writes of it because it is his, his to love and present. Yet, in spite of its author's sympathetic touch, the book reveals a disease which is eating into the vitals of our New England life, at least in its rural communities. The dwindling of New England What is there in the hard, vigorous climate of these states which plants the seeds of degeneration? Is the violence and ugliness of their religious belief the cause of these twisted and tortured lives? Have the sane, full-blooded men all been drafted away to the cities, or the West, leaving behind only feeble remainders of a once fine stock? The question again demands an answer after the reading of Mr. Frost's book. Other countries can rear a sturdy peasantry which maintains itself for generations, heavy and slow, perhaps, but strong and self-replenishing; and this for a length of time beside which our New England civilization is as nothing. We are often told that the telephone has done much to decrease insanity in the farming districts, and doubtless it is true. New England Winters are long and isolating. But what about Russian Winters, Polish, Swedish, Norwegian? After all, the telephone is a very modern invention, and these countries have been producing a hardy peasantry for hundreds of years. It is said that the country people of these nations are less highly organized, less well educated, than are New Englanders, and so better able to stand the loneliness of long Winters. But this does not explain the great numbers of people, sprung from old New England stock, but not themselves living in remote country places, who go insane. It is a question for the psychiatrist to answer, and it would be interesting to ask it with "North of Boston" Poetic realism as a text-book to go by. Mr. Frost has reproduced both people and scenery with a vividness which is extraordinary. Here are the huge hills, undraped by any sympathetic legend, felt as things hard and unyielding, almost sinister, not exactly feared, but regarded as in some sort influences nevertheless. Here are great stretches of blueberry pasture lying in the sun; and again, Autumn orchards cracking with fruit which it is almost too much trouble to gather. Heavy thunder-storms drench the lonely roads and spatter on the walls of farmhouses rotting in abandonment; and the modern New England town, with narrow frame houses, visited by drummers alone, is painted in all its ugliness. For Mr. Frost's is not the kindly New England of Whittier, nor the humorous and sensible one of Lowell; it is a latter-day New England, where a civilization is decaying to give place to another and very different one. Mr. Frost does not deal with the changed population, with the Canadians and Finns who are taking up the deserted farms. His people are left-overs of the old stock, morbid, pursued by phantoms, slowly sinking to insanity. In "The Black Cottage," we have the pathos of the abandoned house, after the death of the stern, narrow-minded woman who had lived in it. In "A Servant to Servants," we have a woman already insane once and drifting there again, with the consciousness that her drab, monotonous life is bringing it upon her. "Home Burial" gives the morbidness of death in these remote places—a woman unable to take up her life again after her only child has died. The charming idyll, "After Apple-picking," is dusted over with something uncanny, and "The Fear" is a horrible revelation of those undercurrents which go on as much in the country as in the city, and with anxiety eating away whatever satisfaction the following of desire might have brought. There is very much the same theme in "The Housekeeper," while "The Generations of Men" shows that foolish pride in a useless race which is so strange a characteristic of these people. It is all here-the book is an epitome of a decaying New England. As though The poet Mr. Frost writes almost as a man under a spell. he were the mouthpiece of something beyond himself, only conscious of the necessity of stating what is in him. There is throughout the entire book an undercurrent of his own lines: I am overtired Of the great harvest I myself desired. Still he must gather it; it is what he is here to do. The whole of the poem from which that quotation is taken, "After Applepicking," is mystical with this sense of an unsought burden imposed. AFTER APPLE-PICKING My long two-pointed ladder's sticking through a tree And there's a barrel that I didn't fill Beside it, and there may be two or three I skimmed this morning from the drinking trough It melted, and I let it fall and break. But I was well Upon my way to sleep before it fell, What form my dreaming was about to take. And every fleck of russet showing clear. Of load on load of apples coming in. 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, 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. Is it not true that he cannot tell "what form his dreaming is about to take"? I have said that Mr. Frost is an intuitive poet. This poem shows his sense of intuition becoming almost conscious. Truly the mysticism in "After Apple-picking" "burns up The poet's out of the poem," for, on the surface, it is one quality of the most beautifully clear that Mr. Frost has done. The two-pointed ladder sticking through the trees is exceedingly clean and bright as a picture, indeed the whole of the description is excellent. Here, too, we have those touches so simple, so true, so original, which give Mr. Frost's work such a rare distinction. For instance: My instep arch not only keeps the ache, It keeps the pressure of a ladder-round. Such passages are scattered through all the poems in "North of Boston." Sometimes they are purely beautiful, as in this, from "The Death of the Hired Man": "I'll sit and see if that small sailing cloud It hit the moon. Then there were three there, making a dim row, Sometimes they are beautiful because of their absolute fidelity to fact, as in the lines about the ladder I have just quoted, or these from "The Woodpile": It was a cord of maple, cut and split And piled-and measured, four by four by eight. And not another like it could I see. No runner tracks in this year's snow looped near it. Or even last year's or the year's before. The wood was grey and the bark warping off it And the pile somewhat sunken. Clematis Had wound strings round and round it like a bundle. |