Posts Tagged Frost

Mt. Baldy, Big Belt Mountains, Montana

Words, and the ideas and moods that words represent, are the tools of the writer… especially for the poet. Poetry, after all, is the art of using compressed language to express the inexpressible.

A poet then needs to be mindful of the full gamut of meanings and connotations of each word he or she chooses –of each and every word that chooses the poem– because to varying degrees all of the many denotations and connotations of a word will be carried  eventually by some reader to a poem.

Today at MontanaWriter we begin another new feature: Thesaurus Thursday. Each Thursday we will highlight a word or concept:

• word origin
• dictionary definition
• connotations
• and literary/poetical usage

This week on Thesaurus Thursday we will be examining the most Montanan of words: mountain.

Comments
A few words about the word mountain. Mt. Baldy in the Big Belt Mountains viewed from the Missouri River valley remains always my archetypal mountain. Many places in the west have views of peaks, but of places I have visited only a few places have that one predominant “mountain” that stands over all and gives definition to everything: Mt. Rainier, Mt. Hood, the Grand Tetons and Mt. Baldy. The “Tetons” like “Baldy” are actually more than one named peak but collectively are referred to as one.

Baldy remains for the most part unknown to any who have not spent time in Broadwater County. But if you have lived in the valley there, and have known the experience of one mountain always being there, always looking over you, always being a point of reference from any place you are, you begin to know the power of mountains as nature, as definer, and as symbol. Of course, gods live on mountains. Where else could gods and humans meet.

Word Origin

According to Dictionary.com the origin of the English word mountain (and the State of Montana) is:

1175–1225; Middle English mountaine  < Old French montaigne  <Vulgar Latin *montānea,
noun use of feminine of *montāneus, equivalent to Latin montān ( us ) mountainous
( mont-,  stem ofmōns  mountain + -ānus -an) + -eus  adj. suffix

Definition

The definitions for “mountain” are:

noun  1. a natural elevation of the earth’s surface rising more or less abruptly to a summit,
and attaining an altitude greater thanthat of a hill, usually greater than 2000 feet (610 meters).
2. a large mass of something resembling this, as in shape or size.
3. a huge amount: “a mountain of incoming mail.”

adjective 4. of or pertaining to mountains: mountain air. 5. living, growing, or located
in the mountains: mountain people. 6. resembling or suggesting a mountain, as in size.

Associations & Connotations

Religious and Holy Connotations

• Mount Sinai
• Mount Zion
  
• Mount of Olives
• Mount Olympus
• Mount Fuji
• Kilimanjaro
• Mount Ararat

Literary Connotations

• “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” by Ernest Hemingway
• Greek Myths and Mount Olympus
• Seven Storey Mountain by Thomas Merton
• Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann
• Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier
• The Big Rock Candy Mountain by Wallace Stegner
• Go Tell it on the Mountain by James Baldwin
• Mountain Interval by Robert Frost

Some bible verses with “mountain”

“It shall come to pass in the latter days that the mountain of the house of the LORD shall be established as the highest of the mountains, and shall be raised above the hills; and all the nations shall flow to it.” (Isaiah 2:2)

“They will neither harm nor destroy on all my holy mountain, for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the LORD as the waters cover the sea.” (Isaiah 11:9)

“Get you up to a high mountain, O Zion, herald of good tidings; lift up your voice with strength, O Jerusalem, herald of good tidings, lift it up, fear not; say to the cities of Judah, “Behold your God!” (Isaiah 40:9)

Some Poetical Lines with “mountain”

Faeries, come take me out of this dull world,
For I would ride with you upon the wind,
Run on the top of the dishevelled tide,
And dance upon the mountains like a flame.
~ ( cf. The Land of Heart’s Desire, by W.B. Yeats)

 

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

 

 O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall

Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap

May who ne’er hung there. Nor does long our small

Durance deal with that steep or deep. Here! creep,

Wretch, under a comfort serves in a whirlwind: all

Life death does end and each day dies with sleep.
~ (cf. “No Worse, There is None,” by Gerard Manley Hopkins)

 

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

 

The wilderness has a mysterious tongue
Which teaches awful doubt, or faith so mild,
So solemn, so serene, that man may be
But for such faith with nature reconciled;
Thou hast a voice, great Mountain, to repeal
Large codes of fraud and woe; not understood
By all, but which the wise, and great, and good
Interpret, or make felt, or deeply feel.
~ (cf. “Mont Blanc”, by P.B. Shelley)

 

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

 

Five years have past; five summers, with the length

Of five long winters! and again I hear

These waters, rolling from their mountain-springs

With a soft inland murmur.—Once again

Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs,

That on a wild secluded scene impress

Thoughts of more deep seclusion; and connect

The landscape with the quiet of the sky.

  ~(cf. “Tintern Abbey,” by William Wordsworth)

 

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

 

And before hell mouth; dry plain

              and two mountains;

On the one mountain, a running form,

              and another

In the turn of the hill; in hard steel

The road like a slow screw’s thread,

The angle almost imperceptible,

               so that the circuit seemed hardly to rise;

And the running form, naked, Blake…
~ (cf. “Canto XVI,” by Ezra Pound)

 

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

 

 The mountain held the town as in a shadow
I saw so much before I slept there once:
I noticed that I missed stars in the west,
Where its black body cut into the sky.
Near me it seemed: I felt it like a wall
Behind which I was sheltered from a wind.
~ (cf. “The Mountain” by Robert Frost)

 

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

 

We stayed the night in the pathless gorge of Ventana Creek, up the east fork.

The rock walls and the mountain ridges hung forest on forest above our heads, maple and redwood,

Laurel, oak, madrone, up to the high and slender Santa Lucian firs that stare up the cataracts

Of slide-rock to the star-color precipices.
~(cf. “Oh Lovely Rock,” by Robinson Jeffers)

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

 

Round the cape of a sudden came the sea, 
And the sun looked over the mountain’s rim: 
And straight was a path of gold for him, 
And the need of a world of men for me. 
~ (cf. “Parting in the Morning” by Robert Browning)

 

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

 

You have built a mountain of something,

Thoughtfully pouring all your energy into this single monument,   

Whose wind is desire starching a petal,

Whose disappointment broke into a rainbow of tears.
~ (cf. “These Lacustrine Cities,” by John Ashberry) 

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(copyright © m.a.h. hinton)

After a dry winter here in the North Country, April brought the kind of moisture we have been needing. Whether it was wet enough to off-set the dry autumn and winter, I do not know. But I do know that lawns are green again, and in the shady areas of the little woods behind our neighborhood the ground is rich brown and muddy again.

The old saying came to mind often during National Poetry Month, “April showers bring May flower.” And so for the month of May, MontanaWriter will be featuring poems about flowers… and a few photos I have taken over the years of flowers and plants.

Emily Dickinson wrote a number of poems about flowers, of course. There are many I could have picked to feature here. Yet since “How Many Flowers  is the one that came first to mind, I will post it here.

I must have first read this poem sometime in my late teens in an Introduction to English Literature class or an American Literature survey class as an undergrad. I suppose I may even have read it earlier in an English text book in high school. It is that familiar to me.

But maybe it is merely her poetry that is familiar to me, her voice. It is as familiar a poetic voice as exists in the English language. The best description of Dickinson’s voice I have read comes from John Barr, President of the Poetry Foundation:

Every great poet writes in a voice that is unmistakably his or hers. When we hear the high, tragic diction of Homer or Yeats, or the urgent but colloquial voice of Dante, who speaks to us in The Inferno as if we saw him on the street just yesterday, or the boisterous, almost overly familiar diction of Walt Whitman, we don’t need to know the poet’s name to know who it is speaking. Emily Dickson’s voice is equally unmistakable. We hear it as if it is coming from the next room. It is a contemporary voice—quiet, contemplative, but also passionate. In fact, the voice is slyly provocative. It never plays into our expectations; rather, it uses the unexpected as a principal conversational tactic. The rhymes are there so we know it’s a poem, but they are there sparingly. The rhythms are there, as well, but they are not mechanical, like a metronome. Her poems wear form, but they wear it lightly. They suffer form, but are not beholden to it. ~ John Barr

Barr is right. In English, only Yeats and Whitman (and Frost, perhaps) are as instantly identifiable to our ears as Dickinson… and but neither Yeats nor Whitman is truly  beloved. They are admired, revered, respected, worshipped, studied… but not beloved. Only Frost, I think, is in the same category of Dickinson as being both instantly familiar and beloved.

Dickinson does the small poem better than anyone in English. It is a kind of American haiku. It is language and image and meaning and rhythm as compressed as they can be compressed.

On the first day of May, Dickinson seems like just the thing.

Enjoy!

How Many Flowers Fail in Wood
How many Flowers fail in Wood —
Or perish from the Hill —
Without the privilege to know
That they are Beautiful —

How many cast a nameless Pod
Upon the nearest Breeze —
Unconscious of the Scarlet Freight —
It bear to Other Eyes —

Listening with a pencil and my ear, these are the lines I marked:

How many Flowers fail in Wood —
Or perish from the Hill —
Without the privilege to know
That they are Beautiful —

As is always the case with a small poem, it is difficult to pick just a few lines to highlight. Yet I choose this first stanza for its familiarity, its tonal-definition, and its beauty. They are quintessential Dickinson lines: the alliteration of “flowers” and “fail”, and “that” and “they”; the vowel pairings of “how” and “flower”, and  ”fail” and “hill”; the complimentarianism of “perish” and “privilege”. All of that culminating in what seems to me to be the most Dickinsonian of all words, “Beautiful.”

(copyright © m.a.h. hinton)

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bark writing (copyright © m.a.h. hinton)

A snowless winter in the North Country has meant brown and barren yards. Not the most beautiful or poetic of vistas… yet with the exception of nordic skiers, who is really going to complain about a mild winter. Certainly not the birds.

Most winters, my feeders see steady action from cardinals and blue jays. This year they have been quite scare. Ground feeding is a easy thing when there is no snow to get in the way.

Crows though have been quite noticeable… not at my feeders, but around the neighborhood and yard. Small family groupings moving around, walking and squawking, playing as only crows do. I have always loved crows, and after reading  Crow by Boria Sax, I love their presence even more.

In honor of the under-appreciated crow and crow family, MontanaWriter will be featuring a small selection of poems over the next few weeks featuring the Corvus, beginning with this Robert Frost favorite.

“Dust of Snow” is a staple of literature classes. One of those poems that English teachers love to “unpack.” A short poem pregnant with multi-layerd meanings, with chances to show off your critical dexterity:  ”hemlock” and Socrates… “hemlock” and Shakespeare… “dust” and death… “rued” and death… black of crow and white of snow…. Few who have spent much time in a classroom have managed to carry this poem away un-sullied.

And yet is is a wonderful poem for all the reasons that the usual analysis completely misses. Easily memorized and fun to recite, it is one of those poems that comes naturally unbidden anytime we see a crow in the winter-time. It is as near a perfect poem as any Frost ever wrote… as any American poet ever wrote.

Enjoy!

Mood is important in poetry. It is the kernel at the center of all poems… especially a short one like this. Success is a short poem depends on getting the mood/emotion exactly right with just a few words and phrases. This is the challenge of haiku and of shorter works like this one.

Now listen to Robert Frost reading these lines: link to Frost reading this poem.

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Winter Woods (copyright © m.a.h. hinton)

Winter has come to the North Country. Last year by this time we were already buried under snow and had much more still to come. This year there has been just two dustings, but the extended cold stayed away long enough that only the second dusting remains… a few inches of frozen-white that crunches beneath our feet.

Frost is a rural poet and a Northern poet. He is a poet of trees and winter, of the four seasons.

Having lived all my but 5 years of my life in lands of four seasons, I wonder sometimes how Frost plays in those places where snow is a rarity, where seasons are merely approximated. Surely something almost-vital is lost, like when I read Derek Walcott.

On a cold December day, Frost seems like just the thing.

Enjoy!

Looking for a Sunset Bird in Winter
The west was getting out of gold,
The breath of air had died of cold,
When shoeing home across the white,
I thought I saw a bird alight.

In summer when I passed the place
I had to stop and lift my face;
A bird with an angelic gift
Was singing in it sweet and swift.

No bird was singing in it now.
A single leaf was on a bough,
And that was all there was to see
In going twice around the tree.

From my advantage on a hill
I judged that such a crystal chill
Was only adding frost to snow
As gilt to gold that wouldn’t show.

A brush had left a crooked stroke
Of what was either cloud or smoke
From north to south across the blue;
A piercing little star was through.

Listening with a pencil and my ear, these are the lines I marked:

 A brush had left a crooked stroke
Of what was either cloud or smoke
From north to south across the blue;
A piercing little star was through.

In the right hands, rhyme can create great, memorable lines. In the wrong hands, it creates the worst poetry possible… and frequently does. In the hands of Frost… rhyme reached its American zenith. Frost is a rhymer by nature. It was in his bones. He did it so well that no American afterwards will really be able to do it again.

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This is the fourth book review in the series “Poets on Poetry.” Reviews of books in this series can be found at “Poets on Poetry.”

Robert Frost is the most American of all American poets. He is American in subject, sound, and sensibility. It is his great strength and his greatest weakness. While Whitman’s propheticness transcended his American-ness, Frost can make no such claim to a transcendent universality. In the end he remains Poet Americanus.

That is what makes this volume of essays by three great, non-American poets, so interesting. For American poets, Frost resides in our very bones, like the sounds of  rivers, and highways, and wind in trees, and the voices of American birds and American words spoken in coffee shops and local bars and across fences at harvest time.

Joseph Brodsky, Seamus Heaney, and Derek Walcott are three of the finest contemporary world poets. The essays that form Homage to Robert Frost have their root in a seminar that was done on Frost at College International de Philosophie in Paris. In Paris – the most self-consciously unAmerican of all cities – three non-American poets discussed Frost and his poetry. The result is wonderful.

While American readers and poets always approach Frost from the inside… Brodsky, Heaney, and Walcott, by necessity, come to Frost from without. This enables them to hear him in a way an American reader cannot. This, ultimately, is the greatest value of Homage to Robert Frost.

According to my usual note on the inside front cover of the book, I first read Homage to Robert Frost in late fall of 1996. In the fall of 1996, we were no longer living in our little house in St. Paul but would have just moved into suburban Bloomington. I would still have been freelancing as a writer and editor of training materials and bible studies. During the days I would have been doing the at-home dad thing, and on some evenings I would have been working at a telemarketing job. I would have been reading Homage to Robert Frost during toddler nap times and while sitting in a cube waiting for inbound-sales calls to come in. As I have said elsewhere, the words of Brodsky, Heany and Walcott – and the the lines of Robert Frost – would have been helping me to keep my sanity, as poetry has always done for me.

Opening now the book, I read some lines I underlined and highlighted 15 years ago.

“When a European conceives of confronting nature, he walks out of his cottage or a little inn, filled with either friends or family, and goes for an evening stroll. If he encounters a tree, it’s a tree made familiar by history, to which its’ been a witness. This or that king sat underneath it, lay down this or that law – something of that sort. A tree stands there rustling, as it were, with allusions. Pleased and somewhat pensive, our man, refreshed bu unchanged by that encounter, returns to his in or cottage, finds his friends and family absolutely intact, and proceeds to have a good, merry time. Wheras when an American walks out of his house and encounters a tree it is a meeting of equals. Man and tree face each other in their respective primal power, free of references: neither has a past, and as to whose future is greater, it is a toss-up…. Our man returns to his cabin in a state of bewilderment, to say the least, if not in actual shock.” (cf. Brodsky’s essay “On Grief and Reason” paraphrasing Auden’s essay on Frost)

“With few exceptions, American poetry is essentially Virgilian, which is to say contemplative.” (cf. Brodsky’s essay “On Grief and Reason”)

“Frost believed… that individual venture and vision arose as a creative defense against emptiness, and that it was therefore possible that a relapse into emptiness would be the ultimate destiny of consciousness.” (cf. Heaney’s essay “Above the Brim”)

“Why is the favorite figure of American patriotism not paternal but avuncular? Because uncles are wiser than fathers.” (cf. Walcott’s essay “Road Taken”)

“Frost is an autocratic poet rather than a democratic poet.” (cf. Walcott’s essay “Road Taken”)

“… Yeats told Pound that A Boy’s Will was “the best poetry written in America for a long time.’ The judgement seems right.” (cf. Walcott’s essay “Road Taken”)

“For interior recitation, usually of complete poems, not only of lines or stanzas, Frost and Yeats, for their rhythms and design, are the most memorable poets of the century.” (cf. Walcott’s essay “Road Taken”)

“The poem does not obey linear time; it is, by its beligerance or its surrender, the enemy of time; and it is, when it is true, time’s conqueror, not time’s servant.” (cf. Walcott’s essay “Road Taken”)

As so often happens, Frost’s stature in American literature has diminished over time. It is more a “taking for granted” I think than a re-assessment. It is easy to take Frost for granted in the same way that it is easy to take for granted Louis Armstrong or Duke Ellington. Sometimes it takes outsiders to remind us of what is most essential and best about America. Homage to Robert Frost accomplishes this beautifully,

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T. S. Eliot reading

One the many things I have collected over the years is quotes about poetry and poets. For years, I used to keep and record my favorite quotes about poetry in a leather-bound journal that I received as a gift. Now I keep and record them electronically. It is much easier to do it that way, though admittedly much less… romantic….

On the last “hump-day” in the longest February in memory, here are just a few of my favorites. I hope you find a few you like and maybe a few new ones for your own collection.

Quotes on Poetry and Poets

Out of the quarrel with others we make rhetoric; out of the quarrel with ourselves we make poetry.  ~W.B. Yeats

Poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted.  ~Percy Bysshe Shelley

Poetry should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance.  ~John Keats

Poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with truth.  ~Samuel Johnson

Poetry is what gets lost in translation.  ~Robert Frost

Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.  ~T.S. Eliot

Poetry is life distilled.  ~Gwendolyn Brooks

I’ve written some poetry I don’t understand myself.  ~Carl Sandburg

There’s no money in poetry, but then there’s no poetry in money, either.
~Robert Graves

Poetry is not a civilizer, rather the reverse, for great poetry appeals to the most primitive instincts.  ~Robinson Jeffers

A poet looks at the world the way a man looks at a woman.  ~Wallace Stevens

A poem is never finished, only abandoned.  ~Paul Valéry

It is a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practicing it.  ~W.H. Auden

What is a Professor of Poetry?  How can poetry be professed?  ~W.H. Auden

To have great poets there must be great audiences too.  ~Walt Whitman

The true poet is all the time a visionary and whether with friends or not, as much alone as a man on his death bed.  ~W.B. Yeats

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Robert Frost, that most American of poets, is famous for saying of free verse poetry that it is “like playing tennis without a net.”

As a poet who writes almost exclusively in free verse, I suppose I should take exception. I do not. I understand his point, though I do not accept his analogy. Like many analogies (maybe all) Frost’s poet/tennis comparison is more sleight of hand than pulling aside a veil.

His famous Yankee ear lets him write in a way that traditional and non-traditional rhyme-forms fit best. It is a gift he maximizes as well as any in the 20th Century. Since Frost was a tennis player, a better analogy may have been: writing free verse for Frost would be the same as asking him to play baseball… or basketball… any  sport that he was not so gifted at.

All poets naturally move in a direction that emphasizes their strengths and hides their deficiencies. This is in part what poets mean when they say “finding their voice.” Frost is very aware of his own strengths as a poet… as well as his limitations.

“Dust of Snow” is familiar to anyone who ever took English 101. It is one of those poems that bad English teachers use to display a reading a poem in a way that emphasizes the poetics of hidden meaning,  loaded-language, and literary detective work above all else. For that reason, its true beauty is obscured more often than not for most “well-educated” readers.

“Dust of Snow” is a poem that should be savored above all for its for its language and mood. It is a perfect poem for a November day.

Dust of Snow

The way a crow
Shook down on me
The dust of snow
From a hemlock tree
Has given my heart
A change of mood
And saved some part
Of a day I had rued.

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