Here’s a very early poem by Robert Frost: “The Tuft of Flowers.”
And by “very early” I mean very; Frost was probably about 22 when he wrote it (1896 or 1897). You can tell it’s early if you know anything about Frost’s poetry. It doesn’t even sound like him—except when it does. He hadn’t come into his mature voice yet, and about two-thirds of the poem sounds as though it could have been written by any flowery (pun intended) poet, with its “o’er” and its ” ‘wildered” (for “bewildered”) and its dawn, and its happy message of human brotherhood.
Very different from the darker, sparer Frost of later years.
And yet it’s still Frost. You can recognize his voice, with a sudden startle, in lines such as “sheer morning gladness at the brim,” and the final aphorism “Men work together…Whether they work together or apart.'” And you can definitely recognize the hint of darkness in the earlier “And I must be, as he had been – alone.” The poem’s uplifting message goes from the bleak “we are all alone” to “we just think we’re alone; but we’re actually together.”
Contrast this to a later poem (published in 1920 when Frost was in his mid-forties, although some think it was actually composed in 1916) that dwells on the “alone” rather than the “together” part, “An Old Man’s Winter Night.” I cannot read it without a shiver.
The language is Frost as we came to know him: plain in cadence yet complex in thought and image. There is nothing obviously or conventionally “poetic” about it, but it is a masterful, beautiful, haunting, chilling poem. It’s not about flowers and growth; it’s about cold and decline. And yet, and yet right at the end, the poet steps back and says “This, too, is life; this, too, is a man who is only connected to the world of others by the most tenuous of threads—his essential humanity. And yet he is still connected.”
Here they are. The first is a nice poem. The second is a masterpiece.
THE TUFT OF FLOWERS
I went to turn the grass once after one
Who mowed it in the dew before the sun.
The dew was gone that made his blade so keen
Before I came to view the levelled scene.
I looked for him behind an isle of trees;
I listened for his whetstone on the breeze.
But he had gone his way, the grass all mown,
And I must be, as he had been, – alone,
”˜As all must be,’ I said within my heart,
”˜Whether they work together or apart.’
But as I said it, swift there passed me by
On noiseless wing a ‘wildered butterfly,
Seeking with memories grown dim o’er night
Some resting flower of yesterday’s delight.
And once I marked his flight go round and round,
As where some flower lay withering on the ground.
And then he flew as far as eye could see,
And then on tremulous wing came back to me.
I thought of questions that have no reply,
And would have turned to toss the grass to dry;
But he turned first, and led my eye to look
At a tall tuft of flowers beside a brook,
A leaping tongue of bloom the scythe had spared
Beside a reedy brook the scythe had bared.
I left my place to know them by their name,
Finding them butterfly weed when I came.
The mower in the dew had loved them thus,
By leaving them to flourish, not for us,
Nor yet to draw one thought of ours to him.
But from sheer morning gladness at the brim.
The butterfly and I had lit upon,
Nevertheless, a message from the dawn,
That made me hear the wakening birds around,
And hear his long scythe whispering to the ground,
And feel a spirit kindred to my own;
So that henceforth I worked no more alone;
But glad with him, I worked as with his aid,
And weary, sought at noon with him the shade;
And dreaming, as it were, held brotherly speech
With one whose thought I had not hoped to reach.
“‘Men work together,’ I told him from the heart,
‘Whether they work together or apart.’”
AN OLD MAN’S WINTER NIGHT
All out of doors looked darkly in at him
Through the thin frost, almost in separate stars,
That gathers on the pane in empty rooms.
What kept his eyes from giving back the gaze
Was the lamp tilted near them in his hand.
What kept him from remembering what it was
That brought him to that creaking room was age.
He stood with barrels round him – at a loss.
And having scared the cellar under him
In clomping there, he scared it once again
In clomping off; – and scared the outer night,
Which has its sounds, familiar, like the roar
Of trees and crack of branches, common things,
But nothing so like beating on a box.
A light he was to no one but himself
Where now he sat, concerned with he knew what,
A quiet light, and then not even that.
He consigned to the moon, such as she was,
So late-arising, to the broken moon
As better than the sun in any case
For such a charge, his snow upon the roof,
His icicles along the wall to keep;
And slept. The log that shifted with a jolt
Once in the stove, disturbed him and he shifted,
And eased his heavy breathing, but still slept.
One aged man – one man – can’t fill a house,
A farm, a countryside, or if he can,
It’s thus he does it of a winter night.
