Robert Frost, New Hampshire (1923)

I'm giddy with delight! this collection is so good. Charming and graceful, and funny and poignant, and just. so good. ♥

It's available at Project Gutenberg, the whole and lovely thing (dedicated "To Vermont and Michigan"), though I read it in a Vintage Classics paperback edition. New Hampshire's delightful conceit of a structure is indicated in the collection's subtitle, "A Poem with Notes and Grace Notes." The long poem "New Hampshire" opens the book and is annotated! with footnotes directing the reader to respective poems in the following "Notes" section. The book's third and last part comprises the promised "Grace Notes," which include three of Frost's most famous poems--"Fire and Ice," "Nothing Gold Can Stay," and "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening"--and the last of which, and of the book, "The Need of Being Versed in Country Things," is set in italics--why? In summation? In conclusion? In farewell?

At any rate, it might be "New Hampshire" I love the most of all the poems in New Hampshire. Here's the first page of it, as laid out in my paperback, three stanzas and a footnote:

I met a lady from the South who said
(You won’t believe she said it, but she said it):
“None of my family ever worked, or had
A thing to sell.” I don’t suppose the work
Much matters. You may work for all of me.
I’ve seen the time I’ve had to work myself.
The having anything to sell 1 is what
Is the disgrace in man or state or nation.

I met a traveller from Arkansas
Who boasted of his state as beautiful
For diamonds and apples. “Diamonds
And apples in commercial quantities?”
I asked him, on my guard. “Oh yes,” he answered,
Off his. The time was evening in the Pullman.
“I see the porter’s made your bed,” I told him.

I met a Californian who would
Talk California — a state so blessed,
He said, in climate none had ever died there
A natural death, and Vigilance Committees
Had had to organize to stock the graveyards
And vindicate the state’s humanity.
“Just the way Steffanson runs on,” I murmured,
“About the British Arctic. That’s what comes
Of being in the market with a climate.”

1 Cf. page 37, "The Axe-helve."

For the record, nobody sells anything in "The Axe-helve," rather something is given away. But here, having quoted the above I really should quote the next two stanzas too, they all five make a unit:

I met a poet from another state,
A zealot full of fluid inspiration,
Who in the name of fluid inspiration,
But in the best style of bad salesmanship,
Angrily tried to make me write a protest
(In verse I think) against the Volstead Act.
He didn’t even offer me a drink
Until I asked for one to steady him.
This is called having an idea to sell.

It could never have happened in New Hampshire.

Nothing needs to be said, really, does it? You just want to keep reading. Though I'm glad I looked up the Volstead Act. Anyway, I called this collection charming and graceful but as these stanzas attest to those aren't the right words, they're too delicate. They're precious, even, which I didn't know those words could ever be, to me, till I read this book. What have you done, Robert Frost?

Relatedly, I should admit that when I first started reading I felt a little put out because left out. I mean, New Hampshire, can you get any whiter, plus farms and birdsong and the rest, and knowing this tree from that one and loving the outdoors, are not part of my experience. I don't even love the blue sky. But yup, they drew me in, the poems, and rid me of my pesky ego. That's always the loveliest feeling, and lovelier to me than the bluest blue sky.

Also relatedly--well, sort of, if you replace What have you done, Robert Frost? (to me) with Sorry for what we've done (me included) to you! Heaven save Frost from high school English already--from questions like what does this poem mean, what do the woods symbolize. I don't think I've ever seen poems that call out more to be read for just what they say. I have a note on this, it reads: "p72 – all the meaning is all the face – so in the face of allegorizers and their worse." Page 72 is the last page of "A Fountain, a Bottle, a Donkey’s Ears and Some Books," but the conviction my note articulated had been building for a while. Page 72 is just when I wrote it down.

Page 73, though. "I Will Sing You One-O" starts on page 73, and it almost allegorizes itself. It's the last of the "Notes" but isn't referenced in any of the long poem's footnotes. Turning to fancy, inasmuch as it does, "I Will Sing You One-O" sets up the fancies, when they are fancies, in the "Grace Notes" that follow. Yet the tenth of these Grace Notes is "For Once, Then, Something." Let me quote it in full:

FOR ONCE, THEN, SOMETHING

Others taunt me with having knelt at well-curbs
Always wrong to the light, so never seeing
Deeper down in the well than where the water
Gives me back in a shining surface picture
Me myself in the summer heaven godlike
Looking out of a wreath of fern and cloud puffs.
Once, when trying with chin against a well-curb,
I discerned, as I thought, beyond the picture,
Through the picture, a something white, uncertain,
Something more of the depths — and then I lost it.
Water came to rebuke the too clear water.
One drop fell from a fern, and lo, a ripple
Shook whatever it was lay there at bottom,
Blurred it, blotted it out. What was that whiteness?
Truth? A pebble of quartz? For once, then, something.

That's a pretty clear statement against looking for allegory. You have to accept this poem as being in part such a statement in order for that word "Truth?" not to strike you as all, even ruinously, wrong.

I haven't named Frost's irony, but you can see it in what I've quoted. "The Need of Being Versed in Country Things" ends with such irony, and I think this irony might be the point of the italics I mentioned above.

THE NEED OF BEING VERSED IN COUNTRY THINGS

The house had gone to bring again
To the midnight sky a sunset glow.
Now the chimney was all of the house that stood,
Like a pistil after the petals go.

The barn opposed across the way,
That would have joined the house in flame
Had it been the will of the wind, was left
To bear forsaken the place’s name.

No more it opened with all one end
For teams that came by the stony road
To drum on the floor with scurrying hoofs
And brush the mow with the summer load.

The birds that came to it through the air
At broken windows flew out and in,
Their murmur more like the sigh we sigh
From too much dwelling on what has been.

Yet for them the lilac renewed its leaf,
And the aged elm, though touched with fire;
And the dry pump flung up an awkward arm;
And the fence post carried a strand of wire.

For them there was really nothing sad.
But though they rejoiced in the nest they kept,
One had to be versed in country things
Not to believe the phoebes wept.

Not to believe the phoebes wept. Not! It's as if the whole poem is italicized so as not to pander to the reader by italicizing just the word Not. It is only those people not versed in country things who commit the pathetic fallacy, who attribute sorrow to the birds. Those who are versed in country things know better than to imagine nature weeps for the burnt wreck of a burnt house. Thus the italics are summative too, and conclusive, and a farewell, as well.

Elizabeth Bishop, Questions of Travel (1965)

Poetry Foundation has the first and last poems in this collection: "Arrival in Santos" opens part one of book's two (I read an ebook), "Brazil," and "Visits to St. Elizabeths" closes part two, "Elsewhere." The poems are really great. They're also really different. Overall "Brazil" and "Elsewhere" feel very different, and the poems within "Elsewhere" feel quite different from each other too. "Elsewhere" actually opens with a short story, between which and the amazing "Sestina" I do see a connection. Anyway, these seeming seams are all cleverly accommodated by the book's organizing conceit ("Elsewhere" might be anywhere, and be different anywheres), so all is well. Poetry Foundation also has "The Armadillo" ("for Robert Lowell") from "Brazil," but I'll focus in this post on the bookending poems.

"Arrival in Santos" asks the first of the book's questions of travel, two poems before the title poem appears and asks a bunch more. The port of Santos, the first glimpse of Brazil, is unimpressive, and the unimpressed poet asks:

... Oh, tourist,
is this how this country is going to answer you

and your immodest demands for a different world,
and a better life, and complete comprehension
of both at last, and immediately,
after eighteen days of suspension?

She asks the question wryly, a bit abashed at feeling unimpressed, and she asks it of herself--specifically of herself in her capacity as a tourist, taking care to make a distinction between the tourist in her and the real person who wouldn't have had such embarrassingly "immodest" expectations of the coast. The question is also carefully not directed right at Brazil. Asking it directly of Brazil would be both presumptuous and antagonistic, and she's feeling too un-surefooted to dare to appear to be either. Anyway, she has the sense of proportion and the sense of humor to know that the trouble here rests in her the tourist, not in Brazil the country. And the trouble once acknowledged and laughed at is gotten over. So when she sees the "strange and brilliant rag" blowing in the wind she can say to herself,

... So that's the flag. I never saw it before.
I somehow never thought of there being a flag,

but of course there was, all along. And coins, I presume,
and paper money; they remain to be seen. ...

If the ironic tone she adopts in these lines reveals a sense of superiority, it isn't over the flag or the money or the country but over the "tourist" she was a stanza ago. She knows better now--but how will she be tripped up next? That, like the coins and paper money, remains to be seen.

Which is all to say, I feel like Bishop the poet is always open to the possibility of being tripped up, and that's where her irony, which every reader notes, lies. I feel like she's not ever in this moment, but always waiting for the next one because she wants to be ready for it. The last line and a half of "Arrival at Santos"--

... We leave Santos at once;
we are driving to the interior.

--is pitch-perfect. The punctilious semicolon just kills me.

In "Visits to St. Elizabeths" the seeming gimmick isn't a gimmick, it's essential. Each stanza break is a furlough between visits; each visit adds a line, because it adds an observation, to the stanza before it; each adjective before the "man / that lies in the house of Bedlam" is different because the man is a different kind of crazy each visit or because it's a different man each visit. But are you compartmentalizing your visits this way just to survive witnessing insanity?

I should say! The paragraph above describes the reading it does because it wasn't till I clicked on the link to the poem, while previewing this post right before writing the bulk of paragraph, to check if the link worked that I saw the plural in "Visits." I'd been reading it up till then as "Visit"! The 's' changed everything and I chucked everything I had been going to say. If a semicolon can be punctilious, so can an 's' change more than just the word it's attached to. It can change a whole paragraph--and more!