Poetry and Poetics–Lit 204

Despite our efforts to accumulate wealth and power, make genuine friendships, and generally live the grand life we want, Frost confronts the inevitability of death and questions the fundamental questions about the way we live our lives through allusions and irony. He begins the poem talking about a woman he describes as a witch, who was one the beauty Abishad, which is a reference to a beautiful maiden brought to warm King David. Despite once being a Hollywood star, being at the top of the world, she now washes steps with a pail and rag. This demonstrates the downfall of those that are great, how unexpected and inevitable it is. After talking about one example of how one has fallen from grace, the speaker turns the situation to the reader saying how “you” might doubt the likelihood of this happening and “you” should make up “your” mind. I wondered who Frost’s audience may be when writing this. He seems critical about the way humans may want to live materialistically, because it will all be lost in the end. He ironically says if you are predestined to die anyway, why not die earlier to avoid the pain and suffering? In the next line, he then suggests that we can’t choose if we die, but we can decide the “state” in which we die, which implies that we still have some power in how we choose to life our life, and the meaning of it all. He further uses irony to make his point in the last stanza when he says it’s better to go down with purchased friendships, rather than genuine ones or none at all, to avoid getting hurt. Frost uses caesura in only one instance, the last line: “Than none at all. Provide, provide!” which creates an even greater emphasis on the title and his overall message. The inevitability of death is all the more reason we must provide ourselves with a life that is meaningful even in the face of death, and that choice is ours to make. 

Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” contains a particular moment, as it describes the act of stopping in the middle of a journey in the woods at night. There’s a transitivity to it–the speaker has no ownership of the area, describing how the woods belong to a man living in the village, and the speaker has “miles to go before I sleep” (l. 15), implying that this is a momentary stop in a long journey. The poem treads the line between a stream of consciousness and a narrative. The first two stanzas take place singularly in the speaker’s mind: he seems to think on what’s going on around him and what his horse may be thinking. However, in the third stanza, outside events intercede: the horse shakes his bells, jolting the speaker out of his reverie and into reality before he manages to focus on the task ahead. It’s as if the woods at night put a spell on him; he stops “to watch his woods fill up with snow” (l. 2), the night of the winter solstice, and this combination of seemingly irrational behavior mixed with the significance of the night gives a sense of magic to the dramatic situation. This is further seen in the first line of the last paragraph, where the speaker says “The woods are lovely, dark and deep”: the grammar of the phrase implies that the woods are lovely because they are dark and deep, terms that would not be seen immediately as lovely traits. Additionally, the form of the poem adds to this ethereal sense. The poem is written in iambic tetrameter, and has an AABABBCBCCDCDDDD rhyme scheme. This consistent meter and rhyme scheme that reaches across stanzas serves to blend the poem together, making it hazier and dreamy. 

Robert Frost’s poem “Design” opens with an octave describing the scene of a white spider, on a white mint plant, devouring a white moth. There are a multitude of things I found interesting in this poem.

• Repeatedly describing the characters in the scene as being a pure white, especially the spider as being a “snow-drop” white, intentionally misleads the reader into the idea that the characters of this scene represent innocence. Line 4, “Assorted characters of death and blight” and Line 8 “What had that flower to do with being white,” point out that the characters of this scene are deceptively not innocent, the characters of the scene are all assorted in a way that brings about “death” and “blight“, and that the mint plant being white does nothing to affect the innocence of these characters.

• The poem “Design” implies that the characters of the poem are intentionally and malevolently “designed” in such a way to bring about death and blight. Its interesting that it does so by repeatedly asking questions about the nature of this design in the second stance. Lines 11 to 14 best show this “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.”

• The final stance of the poem, which ask important questions about the nature of creation, reminds me a lot of William Blake’s “Tyger Tyger”. However, I think, that “Tyger Tyger” concedes by accepting that god creates both good and evil. “Design” just says that god, or whoever the creator is, is responsible for the “design of darkness.”

• Take everything I say in this final bullet point with multiple grains of salt. The poem “Design” and the poem “The Second Coming” by Yeats were both published post-WW1, and both seem to share some sort of pessimism about the world. “The Second Coming” does so in describing a vision of a bleak possibly-apocalyptic future for humanity, “Design” does so in saying that the world was designed in a malevolent way. It isn’t completely unreasonable to say that the events of WW1 had some sort of influence on the ideas of these poems. “Design” and “Tyger Tyger” also remind me of Gnosticism, or one of the core ideas, that the world is inherently flawed and made by a flawed creator. This probably is less so with “Tyger Tyger” with William Blake being a super devoted Christian (Gnosticism is a heretical ideology).

These are my thoughts (which I hope are coherent) on Robert Frost’s poem “Design”. I would like to explore more post-WW1, post-WW2, and Gnostic art and poetry in the future.

I haven’t met many people who agree with me, but I love November, with all of its bluster and early-winter sunsets, its long quiet nights. The year is winding to a close, and the days start to feel closer to some sort of homecoming, to reuniting with loved ones and to resting at the end of a long day. The year has grown older, and I think somehow November is the month where I feel closest to all of the versions of myself that I’ve been before. Another eleven months older, another year gone by, and I’m looking once again to return to the same warm feeling of security that I reached for at eight years old. 

At the same time, November brings a hollow ache; a month of yearning for something that may not even exist anymore, amongst deep chill and five o’clock darkness. In “Sailing to Byzantium,” Yeats writes “Consume my heart away; sick with desire / And fastened to a dying animal / It knows not what it is; and gather me / Into the artifice of eternity” (21-24). My old, dying heart doesn’t know what it is anymore, attached to the blind and mortal vehicle of my body. Aged, it doesn’t know what it is anymore. 

To throw away the shackles of old age, and claim eternity would be to sacrifice your heart. The pain of feeling – of longing unfulfilled – seems like it may prove fatal in the end. For the speaker, does eternity mean the inability to grow old, or does it refer to their wish for a lasting legacy? Either way, this idea of unending time is an “artifice;” to relinquish any mortality for the sake of eternity is a deception in itself. What does eternity mean without a heart?

The poem begins with the words “That is no country for old men” (1). My old heart doesn’t know what it is anymore; it doesn’t belong in this country any longer. The old doesn’t belong, but it is filled with the tenderness of having lived– something that is directly antithetical to the cold illusion of forever. To know that we are growing older is to feel most strongly the fatigue in our hearts and the fragility of our bones, but the sharpest shards of emotion are still proof of life.

While this poem is short, I think the use of language adds multiple meanings and possible interpretations which make it super interesting to dissect. From the title, and the footnote in the Norton Anthology, that the poem was inspired by a time the author was at a metro station in Paris. I found the word choice in “these faces” particularly intriguing. The footnote states that the poem was written six months after Pound was in Paris at this station, yet the word choice of “these” makes the poem feel present and engages the audience; the poem makes the audience feel like they are looking at the faces with Pound. In this way, I feel like Pound is trying to imply that anyone can be like him or be a face in the crowd and this crowd is more symbolic of a larger human condition.

I also found “apparition” really interesting as an adjective in this context. Apparition associates ghost-like images with the faces  and introduces death as a theme to consider in the poem. Pound is essentially looking at a large group of living, moving people and seeing a bunch of ghosts. I wonder if Pound was trying to make an ironic statement here about society, or perhaps just making an unlikely comparison to highlight the remarkableness of the faces in the crowd. 

The second line of the poem uses strong imagery. I think the placement of the ceasura also plays a very important role here. The pause it creates when read and spoken makes “wet” and “black” both very distinct. In this way, I think the punctuation separates the expressions and emphasizes them so the reader can really create an image in their head before understanding the picture Pound is trying to paint. My struggle with this poem was finding the connection between the two lines.  I considered the fact that Pound could be comparing the two images; faces in a dark, dirty metro resemble wilted petals on a dark black bough. Maybe the connection highlights a connection between the natural and human life given the stark contrast between the both images. I also considered that maybe the poem isn’t really intended to mean anything at all rather a stream of images that come to the author’s mind. Pound could be remembering certain things and this crowd and bough are just two images that came to him, hence the fact it was written six months after. The use of “apparition” in this case could signify a distance Pound feels from the crowd given his imagination or the fact that he probably cannot remember the faces in that crowd, so they appear empty (or ghostly).