Some American Poetry

After my quadrennial Winter Olympics marathon, I had some reading to catch up on. And now I have some blogging to catch up on.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve read (among other things) some poetry by Carl Sandburg and some by Robert Frost. In each case, I bought an anthology of a few hundred pages and read most of the book. Carl Sandburg’s wasn’t what I thought it was going to be, and maybe because I felt rushed, I didn’t give myself the time fully to enjoy it for what it was. It was mostly free verse, and after having studied and worked to understand meter, I was at sea again. So much attention directed itself at the lines of varying length and at trying to confirm that there really, truly was no hidden meter, there wasn’t always enough left attention for assimilating the meaning of the text. But I did get the drift. The poems had a lot of praise for manual laborers (who can never have enough light shining on their dignity), for industrial advances (which haven’t always proven to be, shall we say, unalloyed blessings), and for the way the prairie land of Illinois shapes the lives of people living there (I’ll take his word for it). It didn’t grab me like the poetry of, say, William Cowper and William Cullen Bryant did. (Those two came up in earlier years of my project of planned reading.) But I definitely have a clearer picture of Sandburg as a whole now, where previously I really only knew the poet as the guy who wrote a poem about fog and little cat feet.

Robert Frost’s poetry sank in more easily, perhaps because he often wrote in iambic pentameter. But there were some surprises. From the little bits of Frost that I had read in anthologies or that I had heard quoted, I had previously thought of him as a nature poet. But most of the poems in the collection I read were narratives – or at least I should say that most of the pages are devoted to longer narrative poems rather than the one-pagers that might or might not be about nature. Another surprise: the narrative poems are full of dialog, with people speaking so plainly, the pentameter can barely be heard:

Our hens and cows and pigs are always better
Than folks like us have any business with.
Farmers around twice as well off as we
Haven’t as good. They don’t go with the farm.

Admittedly, the meter jumps out in that first line with the hens and cows and pigs getting naturally accented. But I needed the context for the last two lines, which I would say are typical.

It’s easy to understand why a poet would get known for one type of poem more than another more abundant type if the scarcer type is typically shorter: they’re easier to quote and anthologize. And I guess I’ll carry on with the skewing by giving more space to a shorter poem. Here’s one I found especially pretty:

Spring Pools

These pools that, though in forests, still reflect
The total sky almost without defect,
And like the flowers beside them, chill and shiver,
Will like the flowers beside them soon be gone,
And yet not out by any brook or river,
But up by roots to bring dark foliage on.
The trees that have it in their pent-up buds
To darken nature and be summer woods---
Let them think twice before they use their powers
To blot out and drink up and sweep away
These flowery waters and these watery flowers
From snow that melted only yesterday.

I have to say first that I know from the meter “flowers” needs to be pronounced “flours,” which sounds more elegant to me somehow. (Knowledge of meter makes a difference!) I like the casual rhyme scheme: the rhymes come sometimes one line after another (reflect/defect) and sometimes in alternation (shiver/gone/river/on). That changing pace seems to suit the walk of a contemplative man through the winter woods. The poem has no elevated vocabulary as a poem from a century earlier would have had. But in the context, common words seem to take up meaning into the very shapes of the sounds. “Chill” and “shiver” sound cold with their sibilants and short “i” sounds. (Say “shiver” and “river” and tell me the first one doesn’t sound colder.) And while all of the first lines portray a picture in whites and lights colors, doesn’t line 6 suddenly sound darker with its “oo” and long “o” sounds? I think Frost, despite his name and the topic of his most famous poem, would be happy in summer woods as well. But I like his warning to the trees to think twice. Don’t be hasty, as Treebeard would say. Let these fresh pools and the delicate flowers beside them, in them, and under them have their day and show us their picture. Plus, I like any celebration of life and color during winter instead of portraying it in the old, tired way as dead and gray.

I guess that’s part of why I watch the Winter Olympics every four years.