Just heard this on the Writer's Almanac. Robert Frost happens to be one of my favorite poets, so thought I'd share.
~gift horse
It was on this day in 1923 that Robert Frost's poem "Stopping By Woods On a Snowy Evening," was published in the New Republic. He'd written the poem after staying up all night working on a different poem called "New Hampshire" (1923). He said later, "I went outdoors, got out sideways and didn't disturb anybody in the house, and about nine or ten o'clock went back in and wrote ['Stopping By Woods On a Snowy Evening,'] as if I'd had an hallucination." He said that the first lines of the poem, "Whose woods these are, I think I know, / his house is in the village though," contained everything he knew about how to write.
Poem: "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," by Robert Frost, from The Poetry of Robert Frost (Henry Holt and Co.).
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.
Dear Gift Horse: I'm quite ignorant about poetry, but have
enjoyed several of Frost's poems. It surprised me to learn
that he was born in California. I just took a look at his
bio, and couldn't help wondering why he chose to go to
England - what do you thing England had to offer him?
How about culture, Bill?
Thank-you G.H. I'd never read this poem before. It's quite lovely.
Dear Capfka: I think you needed to go to England for culture more than Frost did.
Possibly. Unlike you, I'm not old enough to have met the gent to be able to decide for myself ...
I've walked in the woods and meadows which inspired Robert Frost, and I contemplated the crisp night which gave birth to Stopping by Woods. It was a stretch of the imagination, though, since I was there in July. The area is still remote and peaceful, and I was rewarded by a visit from a bluebird.
After thinking about it some more, I'm still surprised that
Frost had the courage to go to England if his only capital
was proceeds from sale of a marginal farm in New Hampshire.
England has precious and plentiful cultural resources, but I don't see how they would have been any help to him.
Hi Bill!
I'm not entirely sure why Frost went to England, but I get the feeling it was to get published. Perhaps that market was more open to him. I know he made writer contacts there who seemed to help him.
Just found this:
In 1912, at the age of 38, he sold the farm and used the proceeds to take his family to England, where he could devote himself entirely to writing. His efforts to establish himself and his work were almost immediately successful. A Boy's Will was accepted by a London publisher and brought out in 1913, followed a year later by North of Boston. Favorable reviews on both sides of the Atlantic resulted in American publication of the books by Henry Holt and Company, Frost's primary American publisher, and in the establishing of Frost's transatlantic reputation.
As part of his determined efforts on his own behalf, Frost had called on several prominent literary figures soon after his arrival in England. One of these was Ezra POUND, who wrote the first American review of Frost's verse for Harriet Munroe's Poetry magazine. (Though he disliked Pound, Frost was later instrumental in obtaining Pound's release from long confinement in a Washington, D.C., mental hospital.) Frost was more favorably impressed and more lastingly influenced by the so-called Georgian poets Lascelles Abercrombie, Rupert BROOKE, and T. E. Hulme, whose rural subjects and style were more in keeping with his own. While living near the Georgians in Gloucestershire, Frost became especially close to a brooding Welshman named Edward Thomas, whom he urged to turn from prose to poetry. Thomas did so, dedicating his first and only volume of verse to Frost before his death in World War I.
I know very little about the publishing world, especially from 1914. Maybe going to England and meeting these contacts was a good way to break into the writing world. Likely someone here knows the answer though.
Hi Sparteye!
The area is still remote and peaceful, and I was rewarded by a visit from a bluebird.
Cool! I've never been to New England. It sounds lovely and inspiring.
Dear Gift Horse: Right back to square one. He went to
England on a shoestring. How could he have counted on
acceptance there? Particularly as he was more than a bit
abrasive,and had a talent for alienating people. I'm
tempted to jest that he went to England because he had
made few friends in US.
Hey Bill!
I've honestly no idea why he really went to England on a shoestring. I have a book of his complete works, but it doesn't contain a biography. I'll keep looking around and see what I can come up with. It's a good question.
I'm sure there were many fences that needed mending...
He went to England on a shoestring.
Shoestring must have gone further in those days, wwh.
Nowadays an abrasive poet is lucky to have shoes on his feet. His verse may be freer, but the cost of travel has gone way up.
A poet's purse is seldom as good as his verse, even at the best of times.
Why did the poet cross the pond? Perhaps he crossed the pond in the hope that his absence would make hearts grow fonder.
The arts are a fickle mistress. When a poet has celebrity, the arts are doting. When not, they are mostly doubting. Talent usually has nothing to do with it.
A poet who makes it abroad can be a sensation back home even if he doesn't actually "make it" there.
Snubbing the arts is often the best way to win them over. [Which may explain why Frost came back over ... and the arts are the better for it in spite of their fickle ways.]
Prophets are not without honor save in their own country,
but I never heard that said of poets.
Bill, Frost is certainly not the only person who has packed up his things and moved to some foreign place, different country, different state, different city to find his fortune.
Believers believe, with every fibre they believe. Some of them make it, others don't. He was lucky enough to have made it.
BIT OF AN EDIT BEFORE ANYBODY COMMENTS... Yes I wrote he was LUCKY enough to have made it, and I know some people will scoff at the use of lucky because they believe that hard work is the only way a person can gain success, but I know great believers who've worked extremely hard, yet amounted to nothing. So I believe hard work is not all you need to achieve success. There is a whole mix of things that make you successful and I do believe that a bit of luck tacked on to all those things can will make a hell of a difference.
Too bad we know so little about why Frost left Dartmouth and
Harvard. And so little about his intellectual efforts during
his ten years of operating the farm.
Prophets are not without honor save in their own country, but I never heard that said of poets.
There is more money in being a prophet than a poet, wwh, and the country pays more honor to profits than to poets.
The same holds true of unprofitable prophets.
Scientology has proved that there is money in establishing
a phony religion.
the country pays more honor to profits
For those who also speak French, please excuse the repetition.
Scientology has proved that there is money in establishing a phony religion.Phony or not, the bottom line is profit.
I recite this poem often to my kids. It's the first poem that each of them committed to memory.
Slightly ironical: I never liked the poem birches when I was a kid, though when I was very young I used to get in trouble for doing that thing - and now I'm too afraid of heights and too heavy to attempt it. Finally, I appreciate the poem.
k
Opinions differ, but I find Randall Thompson's setting of this poem in his Frostiana to be nothing short of exquisite.
Last line of Frost's poem "Birches":
One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.
I can remember swinging birches, but my kids never got to do it. The once prevalent birches are now few and puny
because of leaf miner disease. I am fortunate to have had
much of the best of two worlds. I had hundreds of acres of
woods I could roam in with complete freedom. Before my kids
were old enough to go into the woods, the goddam drug dealers had forced police to put all woods off limit to anybody.
Kids today can have no idea what Frost was talking about.
Nostalgia can be bittersweet.
Hi Bill!
You wrote:
I had hundreds of acres of
woods I could roam in with complete freedom.
How lovely! I grew up on an 800 acre farm in the Ozark Mountains. It was a beautiful childhood that taught me the value of nature and conservation. Maybe this is why I've always enjoyed Frost's poetry. He deals with so much that I grew up exploring; though his experiences with wood and animals were in New England.
It's a little more difficult to teach my son the value of ecology on a suburban lot, but I'm giving it my best shot.
It's a little more difficult to teach my son the value of ecology on a suburban lotYou can teach him a lot more on a lot less than 800 acres, gift horse.
Less is more, especially in the environmental movement.
i grew up in the bronx, (right next to the park that houses the small cottage that EAPoe rented when he lived in the bronx.
about half the park was paved over. the other half trees and straggly grass.
the area, (near Fordham Road and the Grand Councorse), was very urban. Fordham was a stop on Metro north, an express stop on 2 subways, the terminus for several bus lines.
i was also less than a mile (as the crow fly's) from the Bronx botanical gardens. i grew up in on the 5th floor of a 5 floor walk up. i could look out windows, and see a panarama of NY metro area (front windows gave a view of GW bridge to NJ, back windows let me see the East river bridges, (Whitestone & Throgg's Neck)
but i had primal forest too, and water falls, and the bronx zoo, for much of my childhood was total free. i had green houses, and orchids, and rock gardens. city scapes often a wonderful environment. (i spent the first earth day at Br. Botanical gardens helping to do a spring clean up)
my kids grew up in a more suburban area, (still inside NYC) and we assisted researchers from Woods Hole by collecting, they tagged and took blood samples from horse shoe crabs.) we pick wild strawberrys, raspberries and mullberries, in a city parks. we kept a compost pile, and i always could find the egg mass of the prey mantis, and we would watch them emerge.
every environment has riches, there is beauty in trees, but also in bridges and wonder works of engineering. grapho, you are right, even small things, can make a very big difference. the bronx botanical gardens has a scant 40 acres or so of ancient hemlocks, (virgin forest) but it was forest enough.
even small things, can make a very big difference
Yes, de Troy. Let us celebrate "small things which make a big difference" ... like the Bronx Zoo, a nearly miraculous oasis, which I have visited myself.
Too often we make a big thing out of a lot of things which make no difference at all.
What would St. Louis be without its arch?
What would Vancouver be without Stanley Park, or Manhattan without Central Park.
Certainly, these Parks are a small thing within the totality of their urban mass, but those urban areas are almost unthinkable without those Parks, at least unthinkable as leading centres of civilization.
"And the time of the singing of birds is come," from Henry Purcell's setting of My Beloved Spake: The Song of Solomon
I can't find the text on-line, just vendors of the music.
Dear Faldage: Thanks for posting that. I am sufficiently
moved by it that I forbear to ask any of the questions it
prompts.
Great link to Song of Soloman, Faldage.
I sang the Song of Soloman with a madrigal for my music teacher's wedding years ago. It really was lovely music and the words were rather suggestive. Good stuff.
My beloved is mine, and I am his: he feedeth among the lilies.
Many waters cannot quench love...
Ahhh...
You can teach him a lot more on a lot less than 800 acres, gift horse.
True. As a matter of fact, we planted several dozen milkweed plants this year and had all sorts of Monarch butterfly activity in our garden. We collected a Monarch chrysalis recently, put it in a butterfly cage, and are waiting for it to emerge. My son loves to release the butterflies back into the garden.
My son loves to release the butterflies back into the garden. Sounds like your son might enjoy these websites, Gift Horse:
http://www.learner.org/jnorth/http://www.smm.org/sln/monarchs/tf/otherlinks.html
G.H., is milk-weed that plant that has a long stalk and these almond shaped buds at the top, about four inches long, that if you open-up have a whole pile of soft downy fluff inside?
G.H., is milk-weed that plant that has a long stalk and these almond shaped buds at the top, about four inches long, that if you open-up have a whole pile of soft downy fluff inside?I think I've read that there are 200 kinds of milkweed species worldwide. I've planted Asclepias Tuberosa.
http://www.prairiefrontier.com/pages/natvpics/nativec2.htmlIt has orange flowers and the seed pods have down inside, yes. When they open the seeds fly away on their own individual down.
http://www.wildflowersbyluann.com/newsite/learning/seeds/full/milkweed.jpg
Sounds like your son might enjoy these websites, Gift Horse:
Thanks! Those are cool sites, grapho.
Hmmm, definitely not the plant I was thinking of. The one I'm thinking of has the pods hanging on like corn cobs on their stalk.
I'll go look in my plant books, see if I can spot it. For some reason I think it was also called a milkweed.
The one I'm thinking of has the pods hanging on like corn cobs on their stalk. My plant gets hard, canoe-shaped pods that are filled with down & seeds. I think most milkweed have pods like that actually.
Edit: I just found a photo that might help. See bottom of page at this link.
http://kikki.celtic-twilight.com/perennial/asclepias_tuberosa.htm
Well, I found it, it is a variety of milkweed that we have up here. It is the Asclepias syriaca L. Seemed to coincidental that I'd remember that name, but the pictures you had didn't look exactly like our version.
Oh, I found it in a book called "The Magic and Medicine of Plants" which I recommend highly.
It has a picture and an illustration of each plant, a description of how it was used in the past and current knowledge on plant. In addition to its habitat, range, identification info, and its uses.
It is very interesting, and because of the exactitude of descriptions, you can't go wrong when you find the plant in the field - this to the great chagrin of my Hubby who groans whenever I eat some plant I've just found in a field or in the woods (A great believer in grocery stores, Hubby is.)
Oh, I found it in a book called "The Magic and Medicine of Plants" which I recommend highly.Oh, that sounds good. I'll have to check it out and see if I can get it on half.com or something. I'm a bit of an amateur botanist. I almost majored in botany actually, but was dissuaded by a certain college professor who didn't believe girls belonged in that department. But that's another story.
I just looked up Asclepias syriaca L. and I see that it's called "common milkweed". The leaves are broader than on the plants in my garden. And the pods seem to hang on a lot more prominently as well. Seems well endowed for sure.
http://wisplants.uwsp.edu/scripts/detail.asp?SpCode=ASCSYRDo you have this species in your garden, belMarduk? If you'd be interested in the species I have here, I'd be happy to mail some seeds to you. (Though is that allowed between here and Québec?)
I almost majored in botany actually, but was dissuaded by a certain college professor who didn't believe girls belonged in that department.
I guess he figured you didn't have the anatomy for it. Go figure.
Allo GF
I don't have any Milkweed in my garden. I haven't seen any in years. At one point, they were considered common weeds, and now, can hardly be found in the city or adjacent area. A shame really, I like rustic plants.
I'd be really interested to see if your variety would grow in my garden since this is a different zone. You're an angel to offer. I'll send you my addy by PM.
(Though is that allowed between here and Québec?)
if your variety would grow in my garden
oy... I'm probably the only one, but it seems to me that there's a reason that some things shouldn't be shared...
oy... I'm probably the only one, but it seems to me that there's a reason that some things shouldn't be shared...I do agree with you. We have lots of invasive plants here in Florida that do not belong here. It's a big problem.
Don't know if this will put your mind at ease, etaoin, but, according to my plant books,
Asclepias tuberosa is actually native to North America from Canada to Florida. So, I won't be sending anything to the Great North that isn't already there.
It's here in a list of plants native to Canada:
http://www.trca.on.ca/events/take_action/default.asp?load=native_plantsI'd be happy to send some to you, too.
Great belMarduk! Consider it sent.
to send some to you, too.oh, no, thanks. I got plenty of milkweed here in my own yard already...
we have on occasion, fried up the buds in a bit of butter, before the leaves start to spread. quite good...
and thanks for setting my mind at ease...
With all of this talk of milk weed, it got me to thinking and remembering. When I was growing up, we used to go out and collect all of the pods we could find; which was a lot of fun, especially considering how sticky we got and how long we were allowed to stay out searching for these sticky surprises that would explode sometimes in our hands. Anyway, I digress. As I was saying, I was remembering that we would collect these pods and then we would dry the "fluff" if you will or "silks" in these wire mesh drying racks, once the fibers and seeds were dry then we would gather them up and then fill pillows and blankets or re stuff the saddles for the horses if they were in need of this treatment. They were surprisingly soft and comfortable. I even recall a time where we tried mixing the silk fibers with wool from the sheep, very interesting combination.
I find myself curious to know if anyone else has had this experience and if so, would you happen to know the boiling recipe for the pods so that they are not poisonous?
Thanks for the memories.
Rev. Alimae
oh yes--a recipe.
only milkweed- still considered a weed, is getting rarer and rarer here in the NY area, and i suppose i shouldn't be collecting them to eat. chicory and thistle survive.. chicory thrives in NYC-it is the most common 'road side' plant along the edges of highways.
i have collected daylily flower buds to eat, but they are so cheap in the chinese grocery (1lb of dried flower buds are just $1!) that its hardly worth the effort to collect them. --and common daylilies are so pretty. (but my garder was filled with fancy hybrid types mostly!) the common ones had a spot in the back by the compost heap.
Oooo, I used to have daylilies in my back yard before I moved. The buds were quite tasty steamed (again, eaten to the chagrin of Hubby who thinks one shouldn't eat the decor
)
I think I shall plant some here.
Hi Alimae
The book, Magic and Medicine of Plants, states that the young shoots, flowers and pods may be used as vegetables, but they must be boiled in three or four different batches of water to remove toxic substances and make them safe to eat. The cooking water should be thrown away.
It also mentions that Milkweed was once cultivated for the silky down from its giant seedpods, which was used to stuff beds, pillows, and - during World War II - life jackets.
Prophets are not without honor save in their own country,but I never heard that said of poets.
Could it be that prophets are regarded as nothing more than misty-eyed visionaries, like poets, until their 'prophecies' crystalize into reality?
Could it be that prophets are regarded as nothing more than misty-eyed visionaries, like poets, until their 'prophecies' crystalize into reality?
More likely 'people don't honor those who criticize them.' Of course, Jona wasn't honored and he was in a foriegn country.
Hi Bill!
You'd asked why Frost moved to England. Well, today happens to be Frost's Birthday. And I just heard this on the Writer's Almanac. It may answer a few questions at least:
It's the birthday of Robert Frost, born in San Francisco, California (1874). Although he's remembered as a New England poet, he didn't move east until he was eleven, when his father died. His mother supported the family by teaching school. He dropped out of college, married, moved to a farm in New Hampshire, and held a series of odd jobs, writing the whole time. He estimated that his income from poetry amounted to ten dollars a year, and his family was destitute. Then it occurred to him to sell the farm and move to England, where prices were still low after the war. There, his poetry began to receive real attention. He published his first collection, A Boy's Will (1913), to great acclaim when he was thirty-nine, and the following year North of Boston (1914) got even better reviews.
bel, you should see the milkweed in Puerto Rico. It thinks it's a tree there! You whack it back and that just gets it's dander up and it comes roaring back. The pods are huge, too. They are the size of your larger avocados or your smaller grapefruits, whichever is easier for you to imagine. The blossoms are large as well. Each floweret is the size of a phlox blossom and are a creamy white with purple accents. Amazing pesty things!