Maggie's Farm

We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.

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Saturday, October 23. 2010

Saturday Verse: Robert Frost

An Old Man's Winter Night


All out of doors looked darkly in at him
Through the thin frost, almost in separate stars,
That gathers on the pane in empty rooms.
What kept his eyes from giving back the gaze
Was the lamp tilted near them in his hand.
What kept him from remembering what it was
That brought him to that creaking room was age.
He stood with barrels round him -- at a loss.
And having scared the cellar under him
In clomping there, he scared it once again
In clomping off; -- and scared the outer night,
Which has its sounds, familiar, like the roar
Of trees and crack of branches, common things,
But nothing so like beating on a box.
A light he was to no one but himself
Where now he sat, concerned with he knew what,
A quiet light, and then not even that.
He consigned to the moon, such as she was,
So late-arising, to the broken moon
As better than the sun in any case
For such a charge, his snow upon the roof,
His icicles along the wall to keep;
And slept. The log that shifted with a jolt
Once in the stove, disturbed him and he shifted,
And eased his heavy breathing, but still slept.
One aged man -- one man -- can't keep a house,
A farm, a countryside, or if he can,
It's thus he does it of a winter night.

Posted by Bird Dog in Saturday Verse at 05:13 | Comments (20) | Trackbacks (0)

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I think we're all solitary dying old men who may or may not know it. We bear witness to incomplete understanding, except that we are and then perhaps are not. But only perhaps, for we don't even know this.
#1 broken moon devotee on 2006-12-30 10:43 (Reply)
If someone were to design the perfect great old yankee poet of elegy and winter, the result would look like, sound like, and be named, Robert Frost.
#2 Buddy Larsen on 2006-12-30 13:55 (Reply)
"Too bad that all the people who really know how to run the country are busy driving taxi cabs and cutting hair"

George Burns
#3 habu1 on 2006-12-30 15:37 (Reply)
Great quote. Will use it. I met Frost as a young lad, at his neice's house in CT, at Christmastime.

I knew who he was, because we had the great LP of his reading The Death of the Hired Man, Birches, etc. I still have that LP, but you can hear those readings online now.
#4 bird dog on 2006-12-30 15:50 (Reply)
I guess it must be a 33 RPM. I, being a front-boomer, can remember the 78 rpm. Ted Williams. It's said, had such eyes, he could read the spinning fine print on a 78 rpm record.

Anyhoo, imho --another great yankee modernist poet--tho he's not a pure New England Yankee, but a Pennsylvania/New York variety--is Wallace Stevens. I ran across his startling "Of Mere Being", and then looked him up and learned that his best work was done after age 50. So I became a dual fan; for the work, and for the backstory. Also, his wife posed for a favorite coin, the "Mercury Dime" --so, I'm a triple fan.
#5 Buddy Larsen on 2006-12-30 16:19 (Reply)
Even tho I've read it a gazillion times, "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" would be an appreciated Saturday Verse.

Maybe it would even cause snow!
#6 John J. Coupal on 2006-12-30 16:23 (Reply)
Hey, y'all mature men be skirting the issues Frost raises. Just saying---
#7 Anonymous on 2006-12-30 16:55 (Reply)
Anon, in the immortal words of Country Joe & the Fish, "whoopee, we all gonna die!"
#8 Buddy Larsen on 2006-12-30 17:35 (Reply)
'Xactly.
#9 Anonymous on 2006-12-30 18:09 (Reply)
anon, but the last three lines--he's old and all alone, but yet still he tries to maintain the artifacts of his life, even into the winter night.

Given the parameters of nature, is this not a message of defiance, rather than acquiescence?

Of insisting that the grim reaper be respectful?
#10 Buddy Larsen on 2006-12-30 18:36 (Reply)
"One aged man -- one man -- can't keep a house,
A farm, a countryside, or if he can,
It's thus he does it of a winter night. "

Buddy,

Good question, but I’m not thinking so. Maybe it would be a message of vanity and futility were he to try, but is the old man really trying? None of us can keep anything mortal, to include ourselves; we cannot maintain nor oversee the future of anything. Frost’s old man seems less predisposed to keeping an illusion of permanent life fixtures than he is to letting them pass- at the most they be as a dream upon his sleep to come.

All due respect to the grim reaper.
#11 Anon on 2006-12-30 19:13 (Reply)
beautifully asked, anon, whether or not one agrees with the interpretation.

That "futility" part is a head-scratcher best answered (imho) in the Ecclesiastes "Vanity of vanities" passage, in the line before "the sun also rises", where one generation passes and another takes its place, and the earth goes on forever. "Futility" IOW is a vain, man-centric concept, with no relation to the world of nature other than that man himself is part of it.
#12 Buddy Larsen on 2006-12-30 20:06 (Reply)
i'm thinking 'bout it...
#13 Anon on 2006-12-30 22:14 (Reply)
me, too!
#14 Buddy Larsen on 2006-12-31 05:44 (Reply)
O, can’t do this justice, Buddy (who must be long gone by now-- from this thread, that is!), but have to say that I really, really like this poem, and it especially resonates this rainy winter day over here. I may have Frost’s intentions all wrong, but am not getting out of the piece your wonderful point about earth going on forever in terms of succeeding generations of people. Rather, it says to me that each of us is a solitary soul, despite our possessions and busyness of life, despite our making babies and investing in an earthly future, and that we each, all alone, are to rejoin a truth and permanence, maybe the truth of permanence, upon our passing. Nothing startling, but it’s so right to me, and Frost tells it as a story of an old man about to leave behind or about to be separated from what separates us all from that larger existence, from what we all build, nurture and maintain in life as our bulwark against the unknown and oblivion, that of home and mortal shell.

Love those celestial eyes at the start and how the man-made lamplight in the old man’s hand only keeps him from seeing and connecting to the eternal sight or knowing beyond him, since nothing we manufacture can actually illuminate the vastness, only distort or obscure it to give us temporary comfort. His age and degraded acumen make him forgetful of his task, which is really not so important, anymore. The old man’s "clomping" is like a last unwitting act of proving his mortal weight, done so less out of defiance than out of some kind of weak denial of what was pending and affirmation that he was still alive. “But nothing so like beating on a box,” the loud sounds of his footfall are like a last ceremonial gesture of being human before consigning to the night and broken moon, “such as she was.”

Ah, everyone is saved by my having to take kid somewhere, so I won’t finish, but we can’t hold onto what we have and pursue, onto the extensions of self and our mortal industry and our bodies and mortality, at least in this poem :) . We must consign or have it be taken, anyway. “(O)ne man-- can’t keep a house.”
#15 Anon on 2006-12-31 11:36 (Reply)
Jeez--anon--you a pretty fair analysicist. i re-read in your light and it is much more of death. In fact, the part where the log shifts, and he never awakens, reads as if he is already at that moment gone, and the world he so loved has become the dream.
#16 Buddy Larsen on 2006-12-31 16:52 (Reply)
That sounds right about the ending and good wrap-up :)
#17 Anon on 2006-12-31 17:16 (Reply)
:-) enjoyed--
#18 Buddy Larsen on 2006-12-31 17:53 (Reply)
Buddy and Anon, nothing gold can stay. No?
#19 Jephnol (Link) on 2010-10-23 10:49 (Reply)
I always read this as the passing of the farming culture and the permanence or persistence of nature, as so much of his work was.
#20 lenf on 2010-10-23 16:19 (Reply)

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