Robert Frost: B Sides

So here we are post-Memorial Day. I usually love this holiday – purely for selfish reasons, of course. I have a thing for three-day weekends. Of course, while most people spent their Memorial Day weekends camping or picnicking, I came down with the @#$%ing swine flu. So I whiled away the hours this weekend with a season and a half of Arrested Development, a few hours of Doctor Who, The Bourne Identity, the musical commentary to Doctor Horrible’s Sing-along Blog, three hours of Okami, and four hours of Final Fantasy IX. And I drank more Nyquil than water. A weekend well-spent.

Seriously, I probably would’ve felt more fulfilled at work.

Anyway, I did spend a bit of time this past weekend looking over a book I bought a few years back of the complete poetry of Robert Frost. Now, I love Robert Frost. I personally consider him to be one of the best poets of the English language, right up there with E. E. Cummings and George Luca… okay, I can’t even FINISH that joke without tasting gun oil in my mouth.

I’d encourage all young poets to grab the complete collected poetry of one of their idols. I have one for both Frost and Cummings. The REASON I recommend this to aspiring writers is that a lot of those “other poems” the literary greats wrote kinda suck. Cummings, of course, is dense and confusing when he’s ON his game, so there’s no real way for me to identify his bad poetry without a scalpel and a complete medical encyclopedia to identify all the little icky parts. So I’m gonna pick on Frost.

When Frost writes a good poem, he changes the world. Seriously, I heard Robert Frost poems quoted in X-Men cartoons when I was growing up – that’s how pervasive he is. Even some of his poems that AREN’T “Whose woods these are I think I know” and “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood” are pure genius. Take a gander at this verse he wrote about being idolized. The title’s not very clever, but beyond that… well, if you’d look like I told you to, I wouldn’t have to summarize the whole poem for you:

ON BEING IDOLIZED

The wave sucks back and with the last of water
It wraps a wisp of seaweed round my legs,
And with the swift rush of its sandy dregs
So undermines my barefoot stand I totter,
And did I not take steps would be tipped over
Like the ideal of some mistaken lover.

Now I have to do some explaining anyway, just to show you why I think it’s clever. I hope you don’t think I’m talking down to you: I actually share my opinion about poetry to get a bit of validation for my interpretations (bloggers don’t get As from their poetry professors). To me, the whole poem demonstrates Frost’s ability to be self-effacing and humble in the face of praise, not to mention there’s a bit of Zen-like wisdom. That line about the mistaken lover is something like that metaphor about the fly who can’t feel the vibrations of the temple bell… Hmm, I might have made that up. I’ll blame the Nyquil.

Here’s another lesser-known Frost poem, this one a bit cutesy:

THE ROSE FAMILY

The rose is a rose,
And was always a rose.
But the theory now goes
That the apple’s a rose,
And the pear is, and so’s
The plum, I suppose.
The dear only knows
What will next prove a rose.
You, of course, are a rose –
But were always a rose.

See, the repeated “rose” rhyme, to me, is very clever. But it’s clever like Dr. Seuss, not like the Magna Charta. Still, there’s something undeniably charming about that last couplet. I imagine most girls would love to be told they are a rose in such a playful yet sly manner (and if I’d ever actually SAID something like that, maybe I wouldn’t have to hypothesize).

Now for one more. Let me warn you: this one’s a doozy.

QUANDARY

Never have I been sad or glad
That there was such a thing as bad.
There had to be, I understood,
For there to have been any good.
It was by having been contrasted
That good and bad so long have lasted.
That’s why discrimination reigns.
That’s why we need a lot of brains
If only to discriminate
‘Twixt what to love and what to hate.
To quote the oracle of Delphi,
Love thou thy neighbor as thyself, aye,
And hate him as thyself thou hatest.
There quandary is at its greatest.
We learned from the forbidden fruit
For brains there is no substitute.
“Unless it’s sweetbreads,” you suggest
With innuendo I detest.
You drive me to confess in ink:
Once I was fool enough to think
That brains and sweetbreads were the same,
Till I was caught and put to shame,
First by a butcher, then a cook,
Then by a scientific book.
But ‘twas by making sweetbreads do
I passed with such a high I.Q.

I’ll concede that rhyming “Oracle of Delphi” with “as thyself, aye,” IS clever – but it’s the type of clever I wouldn’t even attribute to Dr. Seuss. It’s “Weird Al” clever – funny, and obviously thought-out, but gimmicky.

And WHAT is going on in this poem? It’s stream-of-consciousness, almost, in that the stream starts at one point and ends somewhere completely different. The only thing the destination has in common with the origin is the path by which we arrived there. We start off with some philosophical musing on the nature of good and evil, the needs for opposites, and a particularly intriguing idea that good and evil only continue to exist BECAUSE we continue to distinguish between them.

Where does Frost go from there? He starts talking about brains and… sweetbreads? Seriously, sweetbreads? I’m not sure WHAT Frost gets from referring to offal in this poem… although it DOES prompt a confession of my own. I used to think “sweetbreads” were the same thing as “Rocky Mountain Oysters.” For the record, they’re not.

To me, the poem feels unfinished, like there’s still something that’s supposed to follow the line about I.Q. But maybe there’s not – maybe he MEANT to leave us hanging. Or maybe…

Nah, you know what? Forget it. I don’t DO “stream-of-consciousness” unless it’s in a strict blog format. So screw you, Robert Frost. Screw you.

P.S.: Still love “Mending Wall.”