Reluctant to let go of “Reluctance”
I find I have still more to say about Frost’s poem “Reluctance.”
The theme of the poem is the difficulty of letting go, so I guess it’s fitting and proper that I’m loathe to leave it alone after posting the text of it yesterday. Those of you who read this blog regularly already know that I’m a Frost lover. And I don’t even have a lover’s quarrel with him; I just love him.
First, in case your memory needs refreshing, let’s have that poem again:
RELUCTANCE
Out through the fields and the woods
And over the walls I have wended;
I have climbed the hills of view
And looked at the world, and descended;
I have come by the highway home,
And lo, it is ended.The leaves are all dead on the ground,
Save those that the oak is keeping
To ravel them one by one
And let them go scraping and creeping
Out over the crusted snow,
When others are sleeping.And the dead leaves lie huddled and still,
No longer blown hither and thither;
The last lone aster is gone;
The flowers of the witch-hazel wither;
The heart is still aching to seek,
But the feet question ”˜Whither?’Ah, when to the heart of man
Was it ever less than a treason
To go with the drift of things,
To yield with a grace to reason,
And bow and accept the end
Of a love or a season?
Many people who read the poem (and that included me when I first read it) assume, because of the subject matter, that it’s the work of the older Frost—you know, the guy with the craggy lined face and white hair. But if you thought that, you were wrong. The poem was first published in 1913, when Frost was nearly forty, and it had to have been written when he was a much younger man, because it dates from before his marriage in 1895:
This poem also has an additional meaning that stems directly from an autobiographical event in Frost’s life. He wrote this poem while he was living with his mother and sister in Lawrence, Massachusetts, before he had convinced his future wife, Elinor, to marry him. After he was firmly rejected by her during a visit to her school in New York, Frost contemplated committing suicide and becoming a part of the “last lone aster” and “dead leaves.”
The poem is quite conventional in its construction. It rhymes, like many of Frost’s poems, and there is nothing revolutionary about it. Its appeal lies in a number of things that are characteristic of much of Frost, both early and late, including the fact that it appears instantly accessible and understandable to most people. It’s not the least bit obscure, and yet it is fresh, direct, and original in its tone, although not quite as fresh and original as some poems by Frost.
The first stanza is a simple description of the speaker’s wanderings and return. Nature appears only as a place in which the person makes his moves. But that second stanza (one of my favorites) contains Frost’s characteristic close observation of nature, and is minus the human element except for a bit of personification of nature (“sleeping”; “creeping”):
The leaves are all dead on the ground,
Save those that the oak is keeping
To ravel them one by one
And let them go scraping and creeping
Out over the crusted snow,
When others are sleeping.
Frost makes an observation of something seemingly small—the fact that not every single leaf on an oak falls in the fall, and that some last till winter and appear on the snow. The oak seems to have some sort of agency—it is keeping those last leaves, and then raveling (loosing) them carefully, one by one. Then the released leaves “go scraping and creeping.” But still, we are in the natural world here; there is no human agency. The theme of the oak’s doings with those leaves is also in keeping with the title “Reluctance,” although we probably haven’t put two and two together yet when we read that second stanza. But with the slight personification of the oak, Frost seems to be saying that the oak is reluctant to let go, too.
In the third stanza Frost unites the two worlds more explicitly—the world of nature and the world of man, or more accurately, of the heart of man. Its first four lines are devoted to nature, and then there’s an abrupt turn to human nature and its longings, and we recognize the speaker as the same person from that first stanza:
And the dead leaves lie huddled and still,
No longer blown hither and thither;
The last lone aster is gone;
The flowers of the witch-hazel wither;
The heart is still aching to seek,
But the feet question ”˜Whither?’
In the very last stanza, the fourth, Frost leaves the natural world almost entirely and talks only about people. By this time it seems quite natural for him to do so, and we don’t notice the change as anything jarring. It seems like the culmination of the thoughts and images of the rest of the poem, uniting the natural world and mankind in their mutual aching reluctance. And yet we also know—even though Frost doesn’t say it explicitly—that we must let go despite that reluctance.
Frost is sometimes thought of as a nature poet. He’s not, although he is an especially keen observer of nature and often uses it in his poetry. But he always (at least, I think it’s always) does so in the service of an observation about human beings.
Here’s a photo I took from the porch of one of Frost’s homes, a small cabin-like place in northern New Hampshire:
Nice “hills of view,” eh? This was Frost’s home long, long after the poem was written.
I read Reluctance for the first time in your previous thread. It’s profoundly beautiful.
Thank you, Neo for your insights. It’s a beautiful poem.
Please don’t let go of Reluctance; There’s a lot to be said about it.
I don’t know about women, but most men judge their worth by what they can do. Personally, I was always a builder. Ever since childhood, I sought to create things and make things. I learned to cook at an early age because I just liked creating something out of nothing. I built a transistor radio at age 11.
My wife was pretty much the same way; She learned to cook, sew, knit, etc. at a young age. She enjoyed helping me build things, which was no doubt one of the reasons I was attracted to her.
After we grew up, she and I have built two beautiful houses by ourselves. I’m not talking about “supervising”, because we dug the footings, poured the concrete, framed the walls, did all the plumbing and electrical…all the way up to the roofing. I have a great memory of my wife up on the roof mopping asphalt roofing with our 1 y.o. son in his baby walker. It was a low-slope roof and she had the walker tied off with a rope to the framing so he could swing back and forth – he loved it! But I digress…
All our lives we’ve built things but, darn it, we’re getting too darn old to do that stuff any more. My wife has two knee replacements and shoulder surgery – probably from helping me lift the 250 lb. logs on our latest home. She’s plum worn out, but I’m still trying to pretend.
I guess I’m having difficulty transitioning from a Maker to a Taker. At least we have lots of photos!
Thanks for deconstructing the poem, Neo. Since poetry is hard for me – I suspect I resist interpreting the hidden or subtle meanings in the poet’s rhymes. Too much of straight line thinker and resistant to letting feelings interfere with my thoughts. An ISTJ personality type, (6% of the population.) too practical and interested in straight forward writing with no hidden/shaded meanings.
I did intuit from the words that Frost was quite old at the time of writing. Interesting to know the truth. Unrequited love can be quite a downer.
The shifting from nature to the human point of view is something I would never have thought about, though the picture of the barren winter woods was perceived.
I learned something today – about poetry, about Robert Frost, and about myself. Thanks.
Neo:
Thank you for the analysis of the poem!
Can you now tackle “what Ralston McTodd means when he invites us to look “across the pale parabola of joy”. ” P.G. Wodehouse (beats politics) 🙂
J.J.:
Glad you liked it!
Some of the interpretation stuff is quite subtle, and requires time and close study. Most people aren’t all that interested, although I find it very rewarding, like studying a puzzle.
But a person can most definitely read a poem and get the effect of much of what the poet has put into it without that reader being consciously aware of any of it.
snopercod:
Wow! I’m in awe!
… [the poem] appears instantly accessible and understandable to most people. It’s not the least bit obscure, and yet it is fresh, direct, and original in its tone…
I think I’ve read that the literary left detests Frost, partly because his conventional, “accessible” poetry is not sufficiently “innovative,” subversive and obscure; and partly because many themes he expresses run against the grain of leftist ideology. Or maybe it’s because a poem like “Reluctance” is so apolitical, evoking a universal experience rather than the particular viewpoint of some favored group in the left’s coalition — or ideological axe-grinding.
Neo:
If I am correct about this, do you think your love of Frost’s poetry was a harbinger of your “political change” away from the left?
I’ve been to Frost’s place in NH. It occurred to me that it was a terrific place to see New England nature. Beats other kinds of nature. Driving through FL, looking off into the woods, I think of thorny vines, chiggers, and snakes. Georgia…ditto. Wyoming–wind-blown dust in my teeth and…you should turn over the rock you’re about to sit on, just like in Alabama.
But nature’s nature and living there would be a help for a writer of nature who didn’t want to put his audience in mind of ticks, chiggers, snakes and leeches.
OTOH, a garden and a wood lot with varied trees would be more than sufficient.
New England nature is comfy, even if it’s a blizzard, because, in New England, there’s always a farm house over the hill with windows lit and wood smoke blowing toward you.
I don’t think Frost would have done what he did with his references to nature in Quitman County, Alabama. I hated that place. Like biological warfare had taken over the place. Vines like steel cables and trees ten feet high coming out of the ground with a single tug. Six kinds of bugs and you left the C rations you didn’t want in a pile for the locals. Some of whom followed the machine gun teams to pick up the brass and sell it.
No, New England nature was part of the Frost thing, not “nature”.
I am always reluctant to “interpret” a poem, since nobody’s view of the thing can be tested against reality and I’m right and you’re different, but right as well, and so who’s to say?
I have a different perspective.
Fall is the harbinger of winter and out of winter’s death like embrace spring arises. So too with letting things go.
It seems to me that our heads and hearts can hold dear only so much and if we cannot release, we have no room to embrace the new.
Nor is the new optional, younger generations without which humanity cannot survive, are dependent upon the old making room for them.
Re: ‘reluctance’… “the difficulty of letting go and the sadness over the passing of time” not to presume but that sounds like regrets. Regrets are about mistakes but mistakes are simply lessons waiting to be learned.
“You’re not the only one who’s made mistakes
But they’re the only thing that you can truly call your own” Billy Joel, “You’re Only Human”
How can we be sad over passing time if we are anticipating the new that time is bringing closer?
Even a contented life needs the spice that anticipation brings.
Discovery is about delighting in the finding of something worthwhile but new.
When one connection leads to another in a chain of discovery we are fully immersed in “the undiscovered country”.
Geoffrey Britain:
No, it’s not a synonym for regrets.
Regrets can be part of it, of course. But not necessarily part of it at all.
It is nostalgia, remembrance of things past, tempis fugit, The oak doesn’t have regrets, but it is reluctant.
Here’s what strikes me:
Out through the fields and the woods
And over the walls I have wended;
I have climbed the hills of view
And looked at the world, and descended;
I have come by the highway home,
He took a long wandering time through most of the stanza, through fields and woods and over walls and hills to get to the high point — and then zipped back home by the highway in one line. I don’t know what that means, except that it seems that he wasn’t reluctant to get home — a contrast to the rest of the poem.
Richard Aubrey:
By the way, Frost had several different houses in New Hampshire. He moved quite a bit. The one in the photo is in far northern NH, in the mountains, and not very close to other houses at all. His home in Derry is much closer to civilization. Which one did you visit?
Frost’s nature in New England isn’t always so very comfy in his poems. See this, this, and this.
The literary critic Lionel Trilling didn’t call Frost “a terrifying poet” for nothing.
The Other Gary:
Oooo, what an excellent question!!
I loved Frost long before my political change, and I tend to think I loved him for esthetics, for the poetry. And yet we are all wholes, not parts, and I suppose something about me that made me gravitate to the right politically also made me love Frost (whose politics, by the way, were idiosyncratic, but most definitely not leftist). I very much enjoy formal poetry, for example, and that is sort of conservative.
Later on I learned much more about Frost’s thought and politics and was amazed at the depth and breadth of his knowledge and wisdom. You are correct about the reasons the left hated him. They hated his rhymes, his persona, and the fact that he didn’t write in conventional political terms about the suffering miners and farmers and proletariat. He also spoke quite explicitly against the left.
Take a look, for example, at this little ditty from Frost
neo
I was born in Springfield, MA, and lived in Norwich, CT.
Frost did not have his characters scratching themselves until they bled after a metaphorical wandering in the fields. They weren’t watching for alligators or cottonmouths. They weren’t getting paranoid about that “thing” just down their collar
The woods on a snowy evening. He had a sleigh, a horse, a place to go where he would be, if not welcome, in out of the cold. Presumably a heavy coat. He was living in a New England wall calendar.
He didn’t live in, and wasn’t metaphoring a Jack London/Robert Service “nature”.
As to “terrifying”, I suspect the reference was to Frost’s meanings, not his descriptions of swinging birches.
The place I visited was not too far from Lincoln, NH.
Richard Aubrey:
Sounds like you went to the house in the photo. It’s about 20 minutes from Lincoln.
I didn’t mean to suggest for a moment that nature itself is as tough in New England as in some of those other places—although let me just say that, without that winter coat (or even with it), a night of exposure to a blizzard could easily kill you. I was speaking of the way Frost sometimes uses nature to express something that isn’t the least bit “comfy” and is in fact disquieting and often bordering on “terrifying.” For example, that poem I linked to in my comment to you, “Desert Places,” uses light snow in a field, and stars, to accomplish this. It’s not the landscape itself; it’s what it conjures up for him. That New England calendar looks cozy, but Frost often sees something quite different in it.
Here is another one like that. And I would say that this poem is an embodiment of the “terrifying” aspect of Frost’s contemplation of nature.
“and that was all”The bull moose killed him.
Thing about stopping by the woods is that Frost doesn’t say he’s cold, or even apprehensive about the situation. He’s comfortable. Even has bells on the harness. Everything’s really, really neat. The reader gets that. Except in his own heart. So that’s a contrast.
Smelling burning leaves in the autumn, contemplating, say, Hallowe’en or Thanksgiving is different from smelling swamp rot and trying to recall if you took your malaria pill and whether that would help with dengue fever.
My point is that Frost’s nature is attractive. People pay money for moonlit sleigh rides. He has to work to put menace or despair into it. It isn’t trying to kill him, as with London or Service. It isn’t giving him jungle rot in the crotch and armpits. There are no leeches searching him while he’s anxiously trying to do something vital.
So, to conclude, Frost’s poems sell on one level, I submit, because of the cozy, comfy nature he details.
It’s one thing, as a boy, to be a swinger of birches. But that kid may have known another kid who got killed by the bull in the pasture. Frost only talks about the birches.
Then you get into the poetical meanings, which is different.
Take out the nature and you’d have no clue who the poet was.
I’m more of a Dylan Thomas kind of guy…
Richard Aubrey Says:
October 7th, 2016 at 5:09 pm
Kudzu.
Vines like steel cables . . . kudzu
Appreciate the reply, Neo.
I loved Frost long before my political change…
I was almost certain of this, hence my question about whether it foreshadowed your political change.
… and I tend to think I loved him for esthetics, for the poetry. And yet we are all wholes, not parts, and I suppose something about me that made me gravitate to the right politically also made me love Frost…
My theory is that artistic preferences and political inclinations are both outgrowths of some deep aspects of one’s personality (at least for those who consciously choose their politics rather than just follow the promptings of the MSM, popular culture, the “educational” system and others trying to herd everyone to the left).*
Thus, those with a certain “personality style” will tend to like certain works of art — specific novels, poems, films, music, painting, dance, photography, TV shows, etc — and usually prefer the political right. Others with a different personality style will tend to like very different artistic creations, and lean to the political left. By “personality style,” I mean a broad category of personalities with some vague resemblance based on a core of similar foundational traits.
One could probably make a questionnaire listing just 2 or 3 dozen works of art, asking how the person feels about each — eg “Like it,” “Dislike it,” “No Strong Feeling” — and predict much about the person’s politics based on his or her responses.
—————-
* Of the two, I think artistic tastes are more fundamental in the sense of being more closely and reliably bound to basic personality traits.
The Other Gary wrote:
That’s very true, and there’s a fundamental reason for it. Each of us prefer movies which reinforce our metaphysical view of the world. The right sees the world around us as real and knowable and manageable while the left sees the world as Plato did, where our lives are merely “reflections on a cave wall”, impervious to human understanding.
I was discussing certain movies with a friend, and told him that I thought movies – and all kinds of art – should be uplifting. I detest “modern” art (soup cans are art?), and I don’t care for jazz (too jumbled). I believe art should portray mankind at its finest, not at its worst. As Ayn Rand wrote in The Romantic Manifesto, the function of art is to answer these questions for us:
Your artistic preferences are a touchstone to your soul.
Francesca
I first ran into kudzu in Mississippi. The joke was, sort of a joke, don’t park your car overnight near kudzu. From a distance, it looks as if hills and telephone poles have been covered with Irish green shaving cream.
I crawled around under it and discovered the stem/root systems are a foot or more apart, thus making its purpose of stopping erosion meaningless.
I was in Holly Springs a few years ago and found they have a kudzu festival. Got to laugh, I guess. How’d you like to be chosen Miss Kudzu?
Still, kudzu doesn’t have thorns, nor does it string itself between trees at knee or face level–nasty in the dark and it’s tough to keep tactically quiet when people are swearing.
Hiked around Lincoln, NH in April of last year. Much the most pleasant hiking I’ve done, nature-wise. Having been assured the bears were still hibernating, we went up and down and around. Great time.
Hence my point that Frost’s New England nature is comfy and, whether he meant to do it or not, makes his poetry more acceptable than if he’d chosen…someplace else.
snopercod wrote:
Each of us prefer movies which reinforce our metaphysical view of the world.
Yes, I believe that’s true. Which is why knowing what movies someone likes tells you a lot about them.
Your artistic preferences are a touchstone to your soul.
This is similar to the previous quote, and again I agree. Thus, a person’s artistic predilections will give you a good idea which way their politics run.
Thus, a person’s artistic predilections will give you a good idea which way their politics run.
Not necessarily. A person that wants to reform or change human nature, could join two broad mainstream factions. The Christians waiting for Rapture or something of that kind, vs the Leftists who are making a Utopia on Earth.
Beauty and Politics are related, at least in philosophy, but both are determined by epistemology and metaphysics.