posted February 02, 2015 08:10 PM            

One thing has a shelving bank,
Another a rotting plank,
To give it cozier skies
And make up for its lack of size.

My own strategic retreat
Is where two rocks almost meet,
And still more secure and snug,
A two-door burrow I dug.

With those in mind at my back
I can sit forth exposed to attack
As one who shrewdly pretends
That he and the world are friends.

All we who prefer to live
Have a little whistle we give.
And flash, at the least alarm
We dive down under the farm.

We allow some time for guile
And don't come out for a while
Either to eat or drink.
We take occasion to think.

And if after the hunt goes past
And the double-barrelled blast
(Like war and pestilence
And the loss of common sense),

If I can with confidence say
That still for another day,
Or even another year,
I will be there for you, my dear,

It will be because, though small
As measured against the All,
I have been so instinctively thorough
About my crevice and burrow.

posted February 03, 2015 01:07 AM            

I read an article in Harvard Magazine, titled Extracting the Woodchuck: Robert Frost’s “doubleness,” revealed in his letters—and poems that maybe you'd like too. Here's an excerpt:

quote:

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On a thousand podiums, Frost helped to create the image of a homespun American sage, reading his poems and delivering himself of crafty jokes and wise sayings. You can see this performance in action in The Collected Prose of Robert Frost, a volume in the continuing Harvard University Press (HUP) edition of Frost’s complete work. Once he became famous, Frost did not write much prose, and many of the items in the book are lectures or occasional remarks. But one exception is a baseball article published in Sports Illustrated, a description of the All-Star Game that Frost attended in 1956:

Americans would rather watch a game than play a game. Statement true or false? Why, as to these thousands here today to watch the game and not play it, probably not one man-jack but has himself played the game in his athletic years and got himself so full of bodily memories of the experience (what we farmers used to call kinesthetic images) that he can hardly sit still. We didn’t burst into cheers immediately, but an exclamation swept the crowd as if we felt it all over in our muscles when Boyer at third made the two impossible catches, one a stab at a grounder and the other a leap at a line drive that may have saved the day for the National League.

Here is the poet as common man, immersing himself in the crowd—note that inclusive “we”—and reveling in the American pastime. (Just try to imagine T.S. Eliot, A.B. 1910, A.M. ’11, Litt.D. ’47, writing about, or even attending, the All-Star Game.) Yet as always with Frost, this folksy statement contains a little sting in the tail, an escape hatch. When he writes about “what we farmers used to call kinesthetic images,” he means us to register the contrast between the technical word and the presumed simplicity of the countryside. Frost, though he may have run a farm, is clearly more than a farmer; he is, just below the surface, a freethinker, an intellectual. That is why reading him rightly means being alert to Frost’s sly subversions of his own image. He hid himself in his legend in just the same way that the animal hides in his poem “A Drumlin Woodchuck”:

My own strategic retreat
Is where two rocks almost meet,
And still more secure and snug,
A two-door burrow I dug.

With those in mind at my back
I can sit forth exposed to attack,
As one who shrewdly pretends
That he and the world are friends.

(Reprinted by arrangement with Henry Holt and Company, LLC. All rights reserved.)

To coax the poet out of his retreat takes tact and caution; it means reading him not as a prosecutor but as an interpreter. That is why HUP’s new edition of Frost’s letters, edited by Donald Sheehy, Mark Richardson, and Robert Faggen, Ph.D. ’88, is so valuable. Collections of Frost’s letters to individual correspondents have been published in the past, but this edition—projected to fill three volumes—is the first to give us the complete letters in chronological order, including hundreds never available before. Like the previous volumes in the press’s pioneering Frost edition—the Collected Prose and the enigmatic but revealing Notebooks—The Letters of Robert Frost helps readers cut through biographical opinion, pro or con, and form their own theories about who Frost was and what drove him. And the first volume, covering the years 1886 to 1920, to be published this February, is likely to be the most revealing of all, because it covers the crucial first half of Frost’s long life—the years in which he transformed himself from an unknown New Hampshire farmer and schoolteacher into America’s leading poet.

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