A new-to-me Robert Frost poem

My online Yale course on modern poetry continues. Over the weekend, I listened to the two lectures on Robert Frost and learned about a poem of his I wasn't at all familiar with. It is very different from the more familiar "The Road Not Taken" and "Mending Wall." The poem is called "Home Burial," and it's mostly dialogue between a husband and wife who have buried a child. Although really they're having a fight. It's emotional and intense. Some of it just gives me the chills.

It's a long poem, and I won't copy it all here, but you can read it online via this link.

I'll just note that the spacing of the words on the page is important to reading it, and the above link is better than most others on the Internet. But it does differ a little bit from my copy of the poem in the Norton Anthology. (Anthology of American Literature Volume 2 Fifth Edition in my case -- old! -- not the new Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry that's on my Amazon wish list.) Point being if you have a Norton you might want to read "Home Burial" out of the Norton.

Alright, so our Yale teacher Langdon Hammer has this to say about "Home Burial":

The woman, the mother, wishes to--can't help herself from trying to hold on to the dead child, and she's caught looking behind her as if towards the past, which is also, frankly, a wish to escape her husband who is a frightening force, to escape his will, I think. His will, his force – these are his ways, his resources for responding to death. ...

Well, "Home Burial" is a poem about the limits of work, the inability of the worker to bring a knowable world, a safe world, into being. There is in Frost no God, no transcendental source of guidance or consolation, nothing out there in the world but the material conditions of our circumstances. Over and over again in Frost poems, you see speakers, you see the poet himself, wanting to know; and wanting to know means pressing towards some revelation, towards some sense of the meaning of things, a search for some kind of presence behind the way things are.

The Yale online people are so wonderful, they have posted the transcript of Hammer's lecture online so you can read it all for yourself if you like. I myself prefer to listen to the lectures on my iPod because Langdon Hammer has this wonderfully sonorous voice and his manner is the perfect combination of learned and diffident. Next up: World War I and Imagism.

Yeats and the Wandering Aengus

My life is full of things poetical lately. My car pool partner moved away, so to make the commute go faster, I've been searching out audio educational material. Open Yale Courses offers an online class in Modern Poetry, and I started listening to the lectures on Irish poet William Butler Yeats.
Yale has a pretty impressive set-up, and it's free and on the open Web. You can download video or audio of the lecture along with worksheets and other ancilliary materials. I like it better than the ubiquitous, proprietary, complicated Blackboard, which is the educational software of choice at University of South Florida (where I'm in library school), and many other places.

The first Yeats lecture discussed the poem "The Song of Wandering Aengus," (1899) a new poem to me. Here it is in its entirety.

I WENT out to the hazel wood,
Because a fire was in my head,
And cut and peeled a hazel wand,
And hooked a berry to a thread;
And when white moths were on the wing,
And moth-like stars were flickering out,
I dropped the berry in a stream
And caught a little silver trout.

When I had laid it on the floor
I went to blow the fire a-flame,
But something rustled on the floor,
And someone called me by my name:
It had become a glimmering girl
With apple blossom in her hair
Who called me by my name and ran
And faded through the brightening air.

Though I am old with wandering
Through hollow lands and hilly lands,
I will find out where she has gone,
And kiss her lips and take her hands;
And walk among long dappled grass,
And pluck till time and times are done,
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.

The teacher of the Yale course, the marvelously named Langdon Hammer, says this is an example of the early Yeats, and we will see Yeats move toward a different aesthetic as we go forward. So this is all very interesting to me. Make no mistake, I think "Wandering Aengus" is a marvelous poem, whether it's modern, romantic or whatever. I find Yeats fascinating.

I strongly suspect Yeat's Aengus is of Dun Aengus of the Aran Islands, a site we visited on our trip to Ireland last year. "Dun" means "Fort", so Dun Aengus is the Fort of Aengus. It's an ancient cliffside fort that looks out over the Atlantic Ocean. It's kind of hard to show from our photos, but look at this one below. People are lying on their bellies looking over the edge of the cliff because it's just too scary to walk up to the edge. There's no fence or anything to keep you from plunging over the side to your death. This photo was taken by me in August 2007.



I'll have some more thoughts on poetry in upcoming posts ...