Like many people, I associate many of the things I like with certain times of year. Most of these associations are your fairly predictable American standards; for instance, I’ll find myself craving hot dogs with the opening of baseball season, candy corn in October, meat loaf in winter. Each November, however, is when I find myself suddenly yearning after one of my few poetic associations related to the calendar – Robert Frost poetry.
It’s not completely inexplicable. However, November does seem a bit early for the man who wrote such memorable depth-of-winter classics as “Storm Warning” and “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” I believe the association for me came from a used vinyl record I picked up during my teenage years of Robert Frost reading some of his poems (I still have the record actually, though my terror of a cat chewed through the wire of our record player several years ago and it has yet to be fixed). I remember one of the first times listening to it was actually on a cold, bleary November day, and on the record, he does a very good recording of “My November Guest,” which is one of my favorite Frost poems and, to me at least, captures perfectly the essence of the month. From that point on, it seems, Frost and November have been inextricably locked in association in my mind.
The poem is short and, like much of Frost’s work, deceptively simple:
MY Sorrow, when she’s here with me,
Thinks these dark days of autumn rain
Are beautiful as days can be;
She loves the bare, the withered tree;
She walks the sodden pasture lane.
Her pleasure will not let me stay.
She talks and I am fain to list:
She’s glad the birds are gone away,
She’s glad her simple worsted gray
Is silver now with clinging mist.
The desolate, deserted trees,
The faded earth, the heavy sky,
The beauties she so truly sees,
She thinks I have no eye for these,
And vexes me for reason why.
Not yesterday I learned to know
The love of bare November days
Before the coming of the snow,
But it were vain to tell her so,
And they are better for her praise.
It’s technically an autumn poem, but it’s decidedly late autumn. Most poets traditionally set their autumn poems earlier in the season, when the trees are all lit up brightly with dying leaves, making them a perfect literary symbol. Frost’s poem takes place after that, in the “dark days of autumn rain” when the trees are already “bare.” While the poem does deal with the classic autumn theme of finding inspiration in dark times, the times are definitely darker than usual in Frost’s take. Indeed, if one were to compare it to the classics of Keats, one would find it has much more in common thematically with “Ode on Melancholy” than “To Autumn.”
I love the poem’s personification of Sorrow. An abstraction – yes – but who hasn’t known somebody like her? I grew up with girls like her. They wore thrift store clothes, they liked picnics in cemeteries, they were only happy when it rained. Like the Sorrow in the poem, they were even a little snooty and pretentious about their dark artistic tastes, thinking others had “no eye for these.” Frost’s characterization of this realistic abstraction is enough to make one wonder if she’s actually based on a real-life companion.
The opening line of the poem perfectly sets the tone for all that is to come: “My Sorrow, when she’s here with me.” The temporal element does a couple things. First, it sets up this melancholy described in the poem as a peculiarly seasonal sensation, one captured only during that gray, rainy part of late November. More importantly, it sets up the tenuousness of the speaker’s time with Sorrow. This is due not only to the natural seasonality of Sorrow just mentioned, but because Sorrow brings the speaker pleasure and thus by definition she cannot remain Sorrow. Frost is describing one of those delicate and fleeting times that is difficult to capture in words. It is perhaps because of this fleetingness that the speaker chooses not to tell Sorrow he does indeed understand the beauties she thinks he fails to see, but prefers to revel instead in her appreciation of such matters.
The tone of the poem is quintessential Robert Frost. It is a direct, matter-of-fact tone, formally structured around elegant unforced rhymes and used to communicate much loftier and complex sentiments. In this particular poem, the form really matches the subject matter, which likewise portrays a barren landscape that belies a more sublime, understated beauty.
Even living in the South, where the weather stays warm enough that November is more often than not really just the beginning of autumn (this year is a good example of that), I still know exactly the kind of cold, gray late November days Frost is describing, and I understand, too, the beauty he sees in their stark and muted scenes. For me, “My November Guest” captures all this – both the physical landscape and one’s emotional response to it – to a t. It’s just one reason that each year as the seasons start to turn from fall to winter, Robert Frost lines suddenly start popping in my head.
What a great poem.
No comments:
Post a Comment