Robert Frost's "The Pasture," a Mayor on Trial, a Boy Fishing

Rt. 4, north of Bucyrus, Ohio

near Corydon, Indiana

Here is a small, fairly well known Robert Frost poem, “The Pasture.” The key to its success, if there is success, is that curious, unexpected refrain, “You come too.” Is that or anything else in the poem sufficient for putting it in the company of Frost’s best known work? We don't know the response of the invited one (wife? child? friend?), and I think that creates a surprising amount of tension. Has the speaker been turned down quite a bit prior to this event? It all seems casual, but maybe a good bit is at stake. What a lot of relationship Frost has worked into half a line that seems about as simple as it can be. 

Yet I wonder: will this physically small poem fit into the pantheon of Frost's most admired works? My jury is out.

The Pasture by Robert Frost : The Poetry Foundation

The Judge, Kent Lake, Michigan, Sept. 16, 2012

Addison Oaks County Park, near Romeo, Michigan, September 30, 2012

Speaking of juries, one of the jurors seated for the trial of ex-mayor Kwame Kilpatrick has been dismissed for repeatedly falling asleep during the proceedings—and this in the first week of a trial predicted to last four months. Of course, it’s comic at first. And after the lawyers’ wrangling about venue and a racially appropriate group of twelve, plus alternates, it was tempting to think, “After all that, you give us a narcoleptic!”  One more slap in the face of Detroit, which has no more cheeks to turn.

Then came two important bits of info:  the sleeper is a white woman who’s been working the night shift for some time; her body could not adapt to the demands of a new clock. So even in an urban circus, there was a call for pathos, it seemed to me.

Addison Oaks, Michigan, 9.30.12

And that brought me back to the kindness or affection—or the gentle something—in Frost’s small poem and the fishing boy in my photo. That cast was a lefty backhand, by the way, very smooth, perfect form. 

I hope that Detroit juror can keep her identity secret. There are many ways to be embarrassed, not to mention being overworked (see Frost’s “After Apple Picking,” which I posted and we discussed about a year ago:  http://banjo52.blogspot.com/search?q=after+apple+picking ). There ought to be  many ways to be kind, to say "You come too," even for politicians. 

The Pasture by Robert Frost : The Poetry Foundation

Robert Frost, "After Apple Picking." November Continues.

After Apple Picking by Robert Frost : The Poetry Foundation [poem] : Find Poems and Poets. Discover Poetry.

Here’s a classic, as well as a quiet Sunday evening and November poem (or literally, October, I suppose). In the language of our time, we might also see it as metaphorical talk about retirement in addition to the approach of old age and death. The speaker's long, careful work has been finished—it had to be, for more would be all “ache” and might supplant the somber, dignified sense of completion he feels.

When a poem seems as natural, approachable and likable as the Tufted Titmouse to the left, we need to ask how it got that way. We need to make a conscious effort to notice any parts or features we especially like. So if you feel like it, please comment on any images, phrasings or ideas you find striking or unusually appealing.

The following three and half lines ring true for me in describing a kind of work that matters to the speaker, maybe a career as opposed to a job.

. . . I am overtired
Of the great harvest I myself desired.
There were ten thousand thousand fruit to touch,
Cherish in hand, lift down, and not let fall.

Is it far-fetched or corny to see those lines as an apt analogy to a teaching career? If students are not delicate apples who (think they) will be tossed onto the cider heap of inferiority if teachers mishandle them, then I have badly misconstrued much of the enterprise.

Mind you, the delicate fruit doesn't have to be students. How about photographs or other works of art, pieces of writing, an attorney's clients, a doctor's patients, a carpenter's pieces, a mechanic's restored machines, one's own children, old or current loves? Haven't most of us carried one or another kind of fruit and felt forced to be careful with it? Maybe this is my favorite idea in the poem: the effort was worth it, but from it we can feel overtired, even though it's the harvest we desired.

As a final note, here is Frost sounding entirely casual and conversational again, for example: "and not let fall." There must be other, but more formal ways to say that, but Frost wants to sound as if he's chatting over a New England stone fence. So we need to notice the poem's rhyme and meter (on a third reading, if not the first). Monday's assignment, therefore, is a five-page paper on the ways Frost's poetic devices affect the poem as a whole, the good, the bad, and the ugly. Of course, your choosing to accept the mission doesn't mean I'm going to read it . . . .

If you focus on the bad and the ugly, you might wonder, with me, whether the woodchuck at the end is just a too-folksy way to avoid saying "death." I'm not being coy; my jury really is still out, has been for decades, on a whole host of things.

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