Vesna's Reviews > Selected Poems

Frost and Dickinson are my favorite American poets. Unfortunately for Frost, his poems have been regularly and prematurely assigned in American schools and too frequently anthologized for many to dismiss him as a"famous" poet with rhymes that can appeal to adolescents. Nothing further from the truth unless he is seriously misread.

American youth have a tremendous bias regarding Frost’s poems. They’ve always been told that Frost is a poet of rural life, a kind of pastoralist. A model American. Then you show them that Frost really is an American, only of a completely different variety than they had assumed, that Frost is not a textbook poet but a phenomenon much more profound and scary.

This came from Joseph Brodsky who championed him, and he also said this:

Frost made an incredible impression on me. Only a few poets have been so cardinally distinct for me, such unique spirits. These are Frost, Tsvetaeva, Cavafy, and Auden. Of course, there are other marvelous poets as well, but for uniqueness of soul—it’s these four. This is what you look for in poetry. (In the same book of conversations, he also mentioned Rilke, Akhmatova, and Pasternak, among others, as the poets he admired, though repeatedly kept turning back to Frost.)

I would, of course, recommend the complete collection of his poems, but wanted to list this one as it has some of the most brilliant essays about his poetry from his fellow poets, Auden and Day-Lewis. It was published in 1935, attesting to the early recognition of his unique modernism that alas! somehow got lost in the later, grossly trivialized, reputation as a "textbook poet".

I keep coming back to his poems always to discover something new about the humanity and myself. There are too many favorites to quote here, but I'll select four and I'm not going to feel intimidated that these can also be found in just about any anthology of English-language poems. :-) Except for one (my all-time favorite), it was a tantalizing choice.

"Stopping by Woods" is probably my favorite and I was super excited when I dug out a rarely known fact that it was his own favorite too (he always declined to indulge in "favorite poems" publicly). Coincidently it was first published almost on this day, that is, on the day which would be tomorrow (7 March) in 1923 in The New Republic.

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound’s the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

My late autumn/early winter, right when the apple harvesting season is over, usually starts with the next poem - oh, no, it's not just a rustic seasonal poem; depending on how you read it, it can take us to some "scary" dark life/death corners of our existence - Brodsky was right.

After Apple-Picking

My long two-pointed ladder's sticking through a tree
Toward heaven still,
And there's a barrel that I didn't fill
Beside it, and there may be two or three
Apples I didn't pick upon some bough.
But I am done with apple-picking now.
Essence of winter sleep is on the night,
The scent of apples: I am drowsing off.
I cannot rub the strangeness from my sight
I got from looking through a pane of glass
I skimmed this morning from the drinking trough
And held against the world of hoary grass.
It melted, and I let it fall and break.
But I was well
Upon my way to sleep before it fell,
And I could tell
What form my dreaming was about to take.
Magnified apples appear and disappear,
Stem end and blossom end,
And every fleck of russet showing clear.
My instep arch not only keeps the ache,
It keeps the pressure of a ladder-round.
I feel the ladder sway as the boughs bend.
And I keep hearing from the cellar bin
The rumbling sound
Of load on load of apples coming in.
For I have had too much
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,
Went surely to the cider-apple heap
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.

Frost's ambivalence, akin to philosophical aphorisms that are artfully veiled under the simplicity of words, images and, yes, rhyme and rhythm, never ceases to inspire an awe in me. Like in his longish "Mending Wall" and shortish (often grossly misquoted) "Fire and Ice".

Mending Wall

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun;
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
‘Stay where you are until our backs are turned!’
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of out-door game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, ‘Good fences make good neighbors.’
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
‘Why do they make good neighbors? Isn't it
Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offense.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down.’ I could say ‘Elves’ to him,
But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather
He said it for himself. I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father's saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, ‘Good fences make good neighbors.’

Fire and Ice

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

ETA as I couldn't insert these links in the comment section.
Here is Frost reciting some of his poems:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YekEy...
Frost recites "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening":
https://vimeo.com/54226370