Robert Frost

I’ve always revered the poems of Robert Frost (1874-1963) because they are both accessible and deep, so I hope his ghost looks kindly on my fault-finding today. He wrote poetry well into his eighties, after all, so it is perhaps inevitable that his work would peter out toward the end. By the age of 80, we all lose a few brain cells. I sometimes think, though, that he got stuck in his own persona as that crusty New England philosopher-farmer. His last poems might have been greater if he had found more inspiration in his current circumstances; by this time he lived much of the year in Florida and had weathered a lot of familial anguish. That he ignored all that seems to me a lack of nerve.

Many of the poems from Frost’s final decade-and-a-half lack ambition: one finds slight themes and rather too much jokiness. He also wrote some finger-waving political poems which seem less committed than grumpy. “No Holy Wars for Them” is in the latter category; if any evidence is needed that poets aren’t necessarily prophets, this one will serve. “Winter in the Woods” is a weak-tea rehash of earlier, stronger work; one could almost call it self-plagiarization. I find the final two lines very hard to parse.

No Holy Wars for Them

States strong enough to do good are but few,
Their number would seem limited to three,
Good is a thing that they, the great, can do,
But puny little states can only be.
And being good for these means standing by
To watch a war in nominal alliance,
And when it’s over watch the world’s supply
Get parceled out among the winning giants.
God, have You taken cognizance of this?
And what on this is Your divine position?
That nations like the Cuban and the Swiss
Can never hope to wage a Global Mission.
No Holy Wars for them. The most the small
Can ever give us is a nuisance brawl.


[In Winter in the Woods…]

In winter in the woods alone
Against the trees I go.
I mark a maple for my own
And lay the maple low.

At four o-clock I shoulder ax,
And in the afterglow
I link a line of shadowy tracks
Across the tinted snow.

I see for Nature no defeat
In one tree’s overthrow
Or for myself in my retreat
For yet another blow.

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