Tuesday

28 March 2011

— more fog, more serious fog

Good Morning All,

The next and final day on Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening, the kids come in with their usual clatter and laughter. They see the poem is still up on the board. I try to read their faces. Some seem to be giving it a wary glance. Some look as though they'd even prefer a couple of grammar drills. But—since they have rubbed shoulders with this poem and figured out what it means, since they own it--a goodly number look interested, as if wondering what I may have up my sleeve this time.

Once they were more or less settled, I’d tell them the poem would be worth five extra credit points on the midyear exam in December if they can memorize it and copy it out correctly. I'd add that Andreas Frisch, one of my memorable students from the early 1990s responded to that invitation with, “I’m not going to do it.” I assured him he was under no obligation to do so. He said, “Good, because I am not going to do it.”

“So, you mentioned,” I said, “but just out of curiosity, why not?”

“Because I am not going to do it, that’s why,” he said, “because it’s stupid. Why would I want to memorize a poem?”

“Hell, I don’t know,” I said. “You might be up in an elevator somewhere when the cable snaps, and you might need some small item of beauty to distract you on your way down.”

“Great, guess what? Now I’m not going to do it, for sure.”

Of course he did do it, as we all knew he would, and did not miss so much as a comma. When I passed the exams back in January and congratulated him, a couple of boys jovially punched him in the arms. “Yeah,” he said, "well, I decided to do it because it was so stupid.”

“Okay, ten more minutes on this poem, tops,” I said. "We need to answer the question as to why this poem consistently lands in the top five of the most beloved poems in the English language, including in England where Frost is competing with some very, heavy hitters, Shakespeare and Yeats and Hardy and all the rest. I’ll grant you the music is really pleasing, but do you think the beauty/duty theme is enough to rate it so high? That’s not exactly a new idea, after all.

“Are you asking us what else it means?” asked a student.

“Not necessarily,” I said. “Another poet, a fellow named Archibald MacLeish, said ‘a poem should not mean but be.’ It doesn’t have to mean anything more than a red wheelbarrow in a farm yard or an autumn leaf floating on black brook water." 

I'd tell them about a time at one of Frost's public readings someone’s asking him what the poem he’d just read really meant. Frost leaned forward over the podium and half whispered conspiratorially, “You want to know what this poem really means? I’ll tell you what this poem really means.” And then, as people leaned forward, he read the poem again.

I’d suggest we recap where we were. Here’s this guy all alone in the cold dark woods. He feels so alone he’s putting words in his horse’s mouth. And his horse asks him twice what’s going on here? What’s wrong? This is queer; this is a mistake. Those words, of course, are really his own worries. Yet we get the feeling he’d like to stay right there and let the snow fall on him and everything else. “The woods are lovely,” he says, “dark and deep.” And then comes this huge But and he reminds himself he has promises to keep, obligations presumably to others, and he even feels the necessity to repeat that thought emphatically. 

Since, I’d said, you can always depend upon a poem being about what it says its about, we are course actually talking about a guy on a horse in a snowfall in a wood, but what if we are talking about not only that? What if the man, the wood, the horse, the snow are all working on some other level, some metaphoric or symbolic level, and the man is having some sort of coded conversation with himself?

The class usually began to get preternaturally quiet then, and I knew that at least two or three kids, those perhaps more alive than the others to the intricacies of language, had already jumped ahead to where we were headed.

“Like what?” someone would ask. 

“You tell me,” I’d say, “but what do you make of that dark and deep. If I gave you just those three words all by themselves and asked you to free associate, what would come to mind?”

Someone would say ocean; someone else would mention the night sky. But sooner than later, someone would say, usually with some reluctance, “Well, a hole in the ground, like—I don’t know--a grave, or something.”

After that, usually within a minute or two, I could depend on one or two of my students saying something to the effect, “Oh, come on, Mr. Pierce, don’t wreck this poem by saying it’s some jerk having a secret conversation with himself about committing suicide.”

To which I would respond that I was not saying it was, nor saying it wasn’t, but only saying there seemed to be enough in the poem to suggest that might be happening. I’d add that if they remembered what we’d said yesterday about the music, about its sounding like a lullaby, like someone singing himself to sleep, that would seem to support such an interpretation. Not to mention Lena’s saying that the music made you feel peaceful, almost too peaceful, since people who have seriously attempted suicide, but not succeeded, have said that once you make the decision a mood of serenity and peace can descend upon you.

Some of the kids, needless to say, were not buying it, and I could see in their eyes they were looking for the arguments in opposition. That, certainly, was fine with me. Others, however, their eyes were … well, as usual, this took longer than expected. I hereby solemnly promise on my battered copy of North of Boston we’ll wind this up on the morrow!

Go Well and Stay Well,

Bhekaron