Robert Frost: Poetry All Around Us
Unitarian Coastal Fellowship
© Rev. Sally B. White
May 3, 2015
1
Robert Frost: Poetry All Around Us. Sometimes it takes a poet to help us
see that beauty and truth, wonder and pain – all of life – can be glimpsed in
the most ordinary and familiar of everyday experiences. Such a poet is
Robert Frost. This morning let us turn our ears to Frost's poetry, and our
spirits to the web of all existence.
Readings:
Robert Frost published very little prose. But in 1939, he wrote an essay
called “The Figure a Poem Makes” as a preface to a volume of his collected
poems. Our first reading comes from that essay:
A poem… “begins in
delight, and ends in wisdom. … The figure is the same as for love. It begins
in delight, it inclines to the impulse, it assumes direction with the first line
laid down, it runs a course of lucky events, and ends in a clarification of life
– not necessarily a great clarification, such as sects and cults are founded
on, but in a momentary stay against confusion.” [http://www.mrbauld.com/frostfig.html]
Frost often used “The Pasture” to open his readings, and as an invitation
into his poetry:
I’m going out to clean the pasture spring;
I’ll only stop to rake the leaves away
(And wait to watch the water clear, I may):
I shan’t be gone long. – You come too.
I’m going out to fetch the little calf
That’s standing by the mother. It’s so young
It totters when she licks it with her tongue.
I shan’t be gone long. – You come too.
Robert Frost: Poetry All Around Us
Unitarian Coastal Fellowship
© Rev. Sally B. White
May 3, 2015
2
Sermon:
Sometimes there’s a poem that catches you. It distills an image, a feeling, an
experience. When you hear the poem, or read it, it puts you right there. If
you re-read it, it can take you back there again. And so I have a good few
books of poetry in my library – bought because of a poem or two. Kept
because sometimes I want to go back to that distilled image, that feeling, that
moment when I first heard it.
But for me, Robert Frost is different. For me, The Poetry of Robert Frost is
a book that stays close to hand. A book that I go back to often, not so much
because it takes me away (takes me back there) but more because it brings
me home. Frost’s poems ground me in the real world – and then suggest
heights, depths, connections, implications that enlarge and enrich the way I
understand the world and my place in it. He serves as a mirror, to reflect
upon what is. A microscope, to bring into view what I might not otherwise
notice. A telescope, to expand my horizon to the stars, and beyond. All this
not only with visual images rendered in words, but also with speech that
rings true with the rhythms of real speech, real people, real life.
The poetry, as it moves from delight to wisdom, is deceptively simple.
Deceptive because Frost cultivated the image of the New England farmer
who just happened to capture the essence of the land and the people. In
truth, under the homespun exterior was a sophisticated appreciation of Greek
and Latin and Shakespearean and modern English poetry and drama. And
Robert Frost: Poetry All Around Us
Unitarian Coastal Fellowship
© Rev. Sally B. White
May 3, 2015
3
under the plain speech and the homely metaphors is the careful discipline of
form and meter and rhyme schemes of classical poetry. And in the care he
took with the writing, with the movement toward wisdom, he never lost
sight of the delight, and thus the poems become an experience shared by
writer and reader, however much time and distance may lay between them.
“No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader,” he wrote. No surprise for the
writer, no surprise for the reader. For me,” he wrote, “the initial delight is in
the surprise of remembering something I didn’t know I knew. … There is a
glad recognition of the long lost and the rest follows.”
[http://www.mrbauld.com/frostfig.html] For me, as reader, Frost so often evokes
the same initial delight, the same surprise of remembering, of recognizing,
and at the same time seeing anew – or for the first time.
So, wanting to share my favorite poet with you on this springtime Sunday
morning, I’ve selected some of my favorite poems – and added a few words
of reflection, to invite you in. We shan’t be gone long. – You come too.
I love the way that Frost the poet notices, and notes, the little things. And
then connects them to something bigger. Here, it’s a patch of old snow…
There’s a patch of old snow in a corner,
That I should have guessed
Was a blow-away paper the rain
Had brought to rest.
Robert Frost: Poetry All Around Us
Unitarian Coastal Fellowship
© Rev. Sally B. White
May 3, 2015
4
It is speckled with grime as if
Some small print overspread it,
The news of a day I’ve forgotten –
If I ever read it.
Looks, at a glance, like an old newspaper. On second thought…the snow,
the grime, the grass beneath, the very earth the grass is rooted in – doesn’t
each of these carry the essence, the imprint, the news of the day – of the
days – when they were laid down?
Here it’s a 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 leveled 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 bewildered butterfly,
Seeking with memories grown dim o’er night
Robert Frost: Poetry All Around Us
Unitarian Coastal Fellowship
© Rev. Sally B. White
May 3, 2015
5
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.
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 kindred spirit 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
Robert Frost: Poetry All Around Us
Unitarian Coastal Fellowship
© Rev. Sally B. White
May 3, 2015
6
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.”
A tall tuft of flowers, spared by the early morning mower. Resting flowers
for the butterfly bewildered by the new-mown field. A link, message, a
connection between the mower and the turner. And the message – and the
butterfly – a move him from an existential loneliness to a sense of kinship.
Alone, as all must be. And yet. And yet. “Men work together, whether they
work together or apart.”
The poet looks, and sees what is there, and shows it to us that we may – as
Kalidasa, too, invites us, “look to this day! For it is life, the very life of life.”
And then the poet looks deeper… This is “For Once, Then, Something.”
Others taunt me with having knelt at well-curbs
Always wrong to the light, so never seeing
Deeper down in the well than where the water
Gives me back in a shining surface picture
Me myself in the summer heaven, godlike,
Looking out of a wreath of fern and cloud puffs.
Once, when trying with chin against a well-curb,
I discerned, as I thought, beyond the picture,
Through the picture, a something white, uncertain,
Something more of the depths – and then I lost it.
Water came to rebuke the too clear water.
One drop fell from a fern, and lo, a ripple
Shook whatever it was lay there at bottom,
Blurred it, blotted it out. What was that whiteness?
Robert Frost: Poetry All Around Us
Unitarian Coastal Fellowship
© Rev. Sally B. White
May 3, 2015
7
Truth? A pebble of quartz? For once, then, something.
What was that whiteness? Truth? Quartz? Ah, the delight stirs the soul, but
the wisdom is elusive. And easily challenged: “Others taunt me…” And
yet, isn’t that the truth of life? And, since it’s church, isn’t that also the truth
of religion? We strain to see beyond the picture, through the picture. To get
a glimpse, for once, of …something.
And if we see it – what then? Perhaps it beckons to us, invites us …
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth’
Then took the other, as just as fair
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear
Though as for that, the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
Robert Frost: Poetry All Around Us
Unitarian Coastal Fellowship
© Rev. Sally B. White
May 3, 2015
8
The poet invites us…not so much to follow, as to look. This poem holds us
at the fork, the place where two roads diverge. In my reading, it invites me
to look at each fork, each place where the road appears to branch, as a place
of choice. A place to stop; to stand long and look, though my vision be
imperfect, rippled, distorted. And then to choose, for that is life. One foot
in front of the other (old rivals of sagging leather, who once kept surpassing
each other…). Knowing whatever choice I make, it will make all the
difference.
And the stopping? That, too, is life.
Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.
My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.
He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound’s the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.
The woods are lovely, dark, and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
Robert Frost: Poetry All Around Us
Unitarian Coastal Fellowship
© Rev. Sally B. White
May 3, 2015
9
There are poems in Frost, as there are times in our lives, when fearful things
await the traveler. In this one, there is loveliness, and loneliness, and
darkness to contemplate. The woods fill up with snow…the promise of
springtime moisture to the farmer; the possibility of danger for the traveler
and his horse. And both are woven into the web of human society – the
same web that holds us and never lets us go, even when we stop for an hour
to worship. Even when we stop to look beyond, through the picture. To
look long, to where the road curves. To look deep, into the dark woods. For
we have promises to keep. And miles to go before we sleep.
Take a moment now, in stillness, in silence, in worship, to look deeply. To
listen for the echoes of all we have heard and felt this morning, spoken and
unspoken.
The bell will lead us into silence, and music will lead us out.
Bell
Silence
Music
May it be so.