Robert Frost: A Lover's Quarrel with the World Part 1 Robert Frost: A Lover's Quarrel with the World Part 2
Thanks, Joe. That was a very well done presentation. Mr. Frost still seems mischievous, but now I think in the good way.
From "Birches" LINK I'd like to get away from earth awhile And then come back to it and begin over. May no fate willfully 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. Robert Frost
Bill, this there is a funny story in video #2 in the original post (at the 7:05 mark). It concerns Frost's poem, Dust of Snow The way a crow Shook down on me The dust of snow From a hemlock tree Has given my heart A change of mood And saved some part Of a day I had rued. A critic remarks, "A very sinister poem." And goes on to explain to Mr. Frost why.
I did go back and listened to both of them again. The first time with my computer speakers and I couldn't make heads or tails of what was being said but when I listened with my head phones and could understand what was being said, and could up the volume more. It was funny and entertaining. I may have to change my favorite poet from Cummings to Frost. Thanks. I most often don't listen to videos because I can hear them but can't often under- stand what is being spoken, and for that apologies to Joe Riley.
I seldom watch long videos but I did watch these. I'm glad I did. They were worth the time to watch. As I watched them, I couldn't help but notice how much he reminded me of our dear friend, @Bill Boggs.
Robert Frost wrote poetry for and about the ordinary man. "ROBERT FROST COULDN’T FIGURE OUT what the fuss was all about. All he had done was write a nice, little, lyrical poem about stopping by the woods on a snowy evening, and now critics the world over were trying to dig beneath the layers of his words to find the deep, hidden, symbolic meanings he had placed there". "Then one amongst them came up with a brilliant idea. Why not ask Robert Frost himself what he meant"? "He sat down with the poet and said, “Sir, what great, hidden, symbolic meaning did you have behind the repetition of the last two lines: miles to go before I sleep and miles to go before I sleep. Mr. John Ciardi believes you are writing about death.” "Frost smiled and answered, “Well, I suppose people think I lie awake nights worrying about what people like Ciardi of the Saturday Review writes and publishes about me. Now Ciardi is making Stopping by the Woods a death poem. Well, it would be like this if it were. I’d say, ’This is all very lovely, but I must be getting on to heaven.’” “Then what are you writing about?” Frost shrugged and said, “What I’m saying is: ‘It’s all very nice, but I must be getting along, getting home.” “Then why did you repeat the two final lines?” “What repeating the third line does is save me from a third line promising another stanza,” Frost said. “This was the only logical way to end it.” Besides, he said, he couldn’t think of anything else to rhyme. He would later explain: “I was simply riding along on my horse one day and stopped by the woods … on a snowy evening. I went home and worked all night on my poem entitled New Hampshire. I went outside to look at the sun the next morning, and the poem just came to me. I always thought it was the product of autointoxication from tiredness.”
"Robert Frost had attended Dartmouth and Harvard but never earned a degree. He had to work instead. He delivered newspapers, served as a cobbler, and worked in a factory as an arc light carbon filament changer. But in his heart, he knew he was a poet, always saying, “I had to write poetry. I had a lover’s quarrel with the world.” Of his profession, he has left us these thoughts: A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom. A poem begins with a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness. Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words. I have never started a poem yet whose end I knew. Writing a poem is discovering. A poet never takes notes. You never take notes in a love affair. Poets are like baseball pitchers. Both have their moments. The intervals are the tough things. To be a poet is a condition, not a profession. Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat. Poetry is what gets lost in translation. Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down. Style is that which indicates how the writer takes himself and what he is saying. It is the mind skating circles around itself as it moves forward. "Robert Frost was a master. The poet/critic Randall Jarrell once wrote of him: “No other poet has written so well about the actions of ordinary men; his wonderful dramatic monologues or dramatic scenes come out of a knowledge of people that few poets have had, and they are written in a verse that uses, sometimes, with absolute mastery, the rhythms of actual speech.”
“I had a lover’s quarrel with the world,” is a line penned by American poet, Robert Frost. Frost died in 1963, when he was 88 years old. But he wrote his epitaph more than two decades before that, in a poem titled “The Lesson for Today.” Frost first unveiled and recited the poem on June 20, 1941, at an event celebrating the anniversary of Harvard University’s Phi Beta Kappa Society. In 1942, it was published in the book A Witness Tree, a collection of his poetry. “The Lesson for Today” is not one of Frost’s more accessible poems. It’s an imaginary discussion in verse with the Medieval scholar Alcuin of York and it includes a number of obscure literary and historical references. (The kinds of references people like Harvard Phi Beta Kappa graduates might know.) But the last line of the last verse of the poem became one of Frost’s most famous: “I hold your doctrine of Memento Mori And were an epitaph to be my story, I’d have a short one ready for my own. I would have written of me on my stone: I had a lover’s quarrel with the world.” It’s unclear whether Frost truly planned for that last line to be his real epitaph when he wrote it.The full text for the poem can be found here.
Brief history lesson The Silken Tent She is as in a field a silken tent At midday when the sunny summer breeze Has dried the dew and all its ropes relent, So that in guys it gently sways at ease, And its supporting central cedar pole, That is its pinnacle to heavenward And signifies the sureness of the soul, Seems to owe naught to any single cord, But strictly held by none, is loosely bound By countless silken ties of love and thought To every thing on earth the compass round, And only by one’s going slightly taut In the capriciousness of summer air Is of the slightest bondage made aware. Robert Frost