BOOKISHGAL

It began with a weekly program I saw on PBS in the 1970s, called “Anyone for Tennyson?” featuring the First Poetry Quartet.

The first show I saw was partway through when I turned on the TV, but as I watched a man standing underneath a tree reciting a poem about birches, somehow I couldn’t take my eyes (or ears) off him:

So was I once myself a swinger of birches.
And so I dream of going back to be.
It’s when I’m weary of considerations,
And life is too much like a pathless wood
Where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs
Broken across it, and one eye is weeping
From a twig’s having lashed across it open.
I’d like to get away from earth awhile
And then come back to it and begin over.
May no fate wilfully misunderstand me
And half grant what I wish and snatch me away
Not to return. Earth’s the right place for love:
I don’t know where it’s likely to go better.
I’d like to go by climbing a birch tree~
And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk
Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more,
But dipped its top and set me down again.
That would be good both going and coming back.
One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.

I was enthralled. I’d never seen or heard anyone recite poetry so matter-of-factly, so realistically, so naturally. And I kept on watching and listening.

There were two men and two women, walking through the most lovely country scenery, often pausing or posing to recite a poem that seemed to fit the place. “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,” began one man, standing by a low wall of stones:

That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it
And spills the upper boulder in the sun,
And make gaps even two can pass abreast.

He went on to speak of two neighbours meeting on either side of the wall on a regular basis, to repair it with new stones. The poet tried to persuade his neighbour that perhaps they didn’t need the wall, since neither of them had animals that needed to be kept from the other neighbour’s land.

He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, “Good fences make good neighbors.”

It wasn’t until the program was over that I discovered that these poets were speaking the words of Robert Frost. Until then, I had only heard the name, maybe as a young student or somehow in passing. I’d never had much interest in poetry, although by then I had likely discovered John Donne in the library as I skipped phys. ed. But this poetry, spoken by those four people in the very New England lands that Frost had written about, absolutely enchanted me.

As far as I remember, I bought my first book of Frost poetry almost immediately. (It was later that I bought his complete works.) My lovely little anthology, bought in the early 70s without any ISBN, has been read and read. Robert Frost is one of my two favourite poets because of how matter-of-factly he can describe human thoughts and relationships, how he can turn the ordinary, small moments of regular life into something exquisitely beautiful.

I love the moments where Frost describes something simple, like this encounter between a man in the woods and a little bird, and makes it so real, and simple, and perfect:

A small bird flew before me. He was careful

To put a tree between us when he lighted,

And say no word to tell me who he was

Who was so foolish as to think what he thought.

He thought that I was after him for a feather –

The white one in his tail; like one who takes

Everything said as personal to himself.

One flight out sideways would have undeceived him.

And then there was a pile of wood for which

I forgot him and let his little fear

Carry him off the way I might have gone,

Without so much as wishing him good-night.

He went behind it to make his last stand.

But of course, the most famous poem, the one everyone loves, the one everyone quotes (and the First Poetry Quartet did it too, that very first time), is the one that still gives me goosebumps. It’s the one I memorized, and the one I still quote on a snowy winter evening when I’m coming home late, and looking at the almost-empty streets and the fuzzy snowy sky and stars. Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening:

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.

This may perhaps be my most beloved treasure without an ISBN.

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