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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.

first lines of My November Guest




Frost, ca. 1910


This was Robert Frost's first published collection. In 1913 he and his family were living in the U.K., where the slim volume was first published.

Frost was almost forty years old in 1913. I found it curious that a middle-aged man would give this title to his first collection of poetry. And it really is "about" a young man, or a "youth" in this gloss that Frost wrote for the first poem, "Into My Own":

The youth is persuaded that he will be rather more than less himself for having forsworn the world.
One of my wishes is that those dark trees,
So old and firm they scarcely show the breeze,
Were not, as 'twere, the merest mask of gloom,
But stretched away unto the edge of doom.

I should not be withheld but that some day
Into their vastness I should steal away,
Fearless of ever finding open land.
Or highway where the slow wheel pours the sand.

I do not see why I should e'er turn back,
Or those should not set forth upon my track
To overtake me, who should miss me here
And long to know if still I held them dear.

They would not find me changed from him they knew -
Only more sure of all I thought was true.Presumably many of these poems went back several years, to a time when the poet really was a younger man.


my discovery

I was somewhat hesitant to embark on this long, complete collection of the eleven volumes that Frost published in his long life - from this one, to In the Clearing, published almost fifty years later. After reading the poetry of Anna Akhmatova, Wallace Stevens, and Arthur Rimbaud I was prepared for something completely different, something much tamer, something perhaps even boring by comparison. But I found the resolve for at least the attempt, recalling a recent review of Frost by my GR friend Dolors.

Tame? Well perhaps tamer, yes. But boring? My god, no. As I read through these poems, I was frankly shocked by what I (ignorantly, perhaps) viewed as their "modernist" style and voice. The thought occurred that they could have been styled after Virginia Woolf - except Woolf was not known for poetry, and Frost's writing would likely have come first anyway.

Here's a poem that reminded me, a bit, of the modernist Wallace Stevens. (But Stevens seldom, if ever, intrudes into his poems with an "I".)MOWING

There was never a sound beside the wood but one,
And that was my long scythe whispering to the ground.
What was it it whispered? I knew not well myself;
Perhaps it was something about the heat of the sun,
Something, perhaps, about the lack of sound -
And that was why it whispered and did not speak.
It was no dream of the gift of idle hours,
Or easy gold at the hand of fey or elf:
Anything more than the truth would have seemed too weak
To the earnest love that laid the swale in rows,
Not without feeble-pointed spikes of flowers
(Pale orchises), and scared a bright green snake.
The fact is the sweetest dream that labor knows -
My long scythe whispered and left the hay to make.

But aside from the voice, and the style, there is…


… the lilt

In several of the poems, there is what seemed to me an Irish, or Scottish, lilt to the rhythm of the lines.

The rest of the review will be poetic. Thankfully not by me, but by Frost, and a couple others.


I. My Heart's in the Highlands *
Farewell to the Highlands, farewell to the North,
The birth-place of Valour, the country of Worth;
Wherever I wander, wherever I rove,
The hills of the Highlands for ever I love.

My heart's in the Highlands, my heart is not here;
My heart's in the Highlands a-chasing the deer;
A-chasing the wild-deer, and following the roe,
My heart's in the Highlands wherever I go.

Farewell to the mountains high covered with snow;
Farewell to the straths and green valleys below;
Farewell to the forests and wild-hanging woods;
Farewell to the torrents and loud-pouring floods.

My heart's in the Highlands, my heart is not here;
My heart's in the Highlands a-chasing the deer;
A-chasing the wild-deer, and following the roe,
My heart's in the Highlands wherever I go.
II. Love and a Question **
A Stranger came to the door at eve,
And he spoke the bridegroom fair.
He bore a green-white stick in his hand,
And, for all burden, care.
He asked with the eyes more than the lips
For a shelter for the night,
And he turned and looked at the road afar
Without a window light.

The bridegroom came forth into the porch
With, "Let us look at the sky,
And question what of the night to be,
Stranger, you and I."
The woodbine leaves littered the yard,
The woodbine berries were blue,
Autumn, yes, winter was in the wind;
"Stranger, I wish I knew."

Within, the bride in the dusk alone
Bent over the open fire,
Her face rose-red with the glowing coal
And the thought of the heart's desire.
The bridegroom looked at the weary road,
Yet saw but her within,
And wished her heart in a case of gold
And pinned with a silver pin.

The bridegroom thought it little to give
A dole of bread, a purse,
A heartfelt prayer for the poor of God,
Or for the rich a curse;
But whether or not a man was asked
To mar the love of two
By harboring woe in the bridal house,
The bridegroom wished he knew.
III. The Border Loving ***
The wan water runs fast between us,
It runs between my love and me,
Since the fairy woman has made him a fairy
And sat her down upon his knee.

Eden Water flows cold between us
And west of Eden the Solway tide,
But the fairy woman she came from Ireland
And my love stayed on the further side;
My love lies snug in Carlisle Castle
With the changeling woman for year-long bride.

Waters of Tweed are deep between us,
Fierce and steep the unridden fells;
But the fairy woman watches the swallows
And tastes the clover and hears the bells,
And my love watches and hears and follows.
IV. A Line-Storm Song **
The line-storm clouds fly tattered and swift.
The road is forlorn all day,
Where a myriad snowy quartz-stones lift,
And the hoofprints vanish away.
The roadside flowers, too wet for the bee,
Expend their bloom in vain.
Come over the hills and far with me,
And be my love in the rain.

The birds have less to say for themselves
In the wood-world's torn despair
Than now these numberless years the elves,
Although they are no less there:
All song of the woods is crushed like some
Wild, easily shattered rose.
Come, be my love in the wet woods, come,
Where the boughs rain when it blows.

There is the gale to urge behind
And bruit our singing down,
And the shallow waters aflutter with wind
From which to gather your gown.
What matter if we go clear to the west,
And come not through dry-shod?
For wilding brooch, shall wet your breast
The rain-fresh goldenrod.

Oh, never this whelming east wind swells
But it seems like the sea's return
To the ancient lands where it left the shells
Before the age of the fern;
And it seems like the time when, after doubt,
Our love came back amain.
Oh, come forth into the storm and rout
And be my love in the rain.
V. Mairi Maclean and the Fairy Man (last part) ***
Oh maybe 'tis my rock
And maybe 'tis my reel,
And whiles it is the cradle
And whiles it is the creel.

Oh maybe 'tis the meal ark
That stands beside the wall,
And maybe 'tis the weaving,
And I'll being seeing to all.

And maybe 'tis the pot,
And maybe 'tis the pan.
But I can write songs as good
As the songs of the fairy man!
VI. Reluctance **
Out through the fields and the woods
And over the walls I have wended;
I have climbed the hills of view
And looked at the world, and descended;
I have come by the highway home,
And lo, it is ended.

The leaves are all dead on the ground,
Save those that the oak is keeping
To ravel them one by one
And let them go scraping and creeping
Out over the crusted snow,
When others are sleeping.

And the dead leaves lie huddled and still.
No longer blown hither and thither;
The last lone aster is gone;
The flowers of the witch hazel whither;
The heart is still aching to seek,
But the feet question "Whither"?

Ah, when to the heart of man
Was it ever less than a treason
To go with the drift of things,
To yield with a grace to reason,
And bow and accept the end
Of a love or a season?


* Robert Burns
** Robert Frost
*** Naomi Mitchison (contained in The Fourth Pig)



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