Category Archives: American Poetry

Desert Where Frost Is

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During my short stint with Poembusters, we tackled “Desert Places” by Robert Frost. It’s one of his better poems, yet I did not even know about it until this Poembusters session.
Indeed, this poem was a big inspiration when I wrote The Many Goodbyes.
Last night the sky dumped a good amount of snow on the ground, and so staying home from work because school is out can have its advantages. I decided to re-read “Desert Places”, perhaps subconsciously, because snow is a character in the poem (I had forgotten this).
For anyone who knows Frost, some basic characteristics of his poetry in general is they are nature poems written in Iambic Pentameter, often blank verse. This small poem Iambic (short LONG) Pentameter, though it is hard to tell at first. The poem throws a lot of surprise punches. Let’s start with the first verse.

Snow falling and night falling fast, oh, fast
In a field I looked into going past,
And the ground almost covered smooth in snow,
But a few weeds and stubble showing last.

The is little mystery in this stanza. The beauty in this stanza is the language. There is alliteration(falling fast field), and repetition (falling falling) (fast fast) that combine for a double punch. Frost is gently pounding away his imagery just like snow falls in a big storm. Of course, the rhyming meter helps to control the poem, the feeling he will experience in the following stanzas. The stanza uses a lot of metrical substitutions, but what you need to decide when scanning a poem for meter is what the majority of feet are within the poem as a whole; this helps to identify the substitutions.
“but a FEW WEEDS in STUBble GROWing FAST” does not show the true meter in the line. Neither does “SNOW FALling and NIGHT FALling FAST oh FAST”. But both lines end in an Iambic foot.

The woods around it have it—it is theirs.
All animals are smothered in their lairs.
I am too absent-spirited to count;
The loneliness includes me unawares.

What do the woods around the field have? This is the first punch we don’t see coming. Whatever “it” is, appears to affect the animals too — why else would they be smothered in their lairs? Snow can smother, but snow doesn’t fall in lairs. But Frost as narrator admits his absent-mindedness at what he is looking at and doesn’t see that he isn’t an observer. He isn’t in the movie theater — he is in the movie. And with this understanding, we now can understand what the “it” is — loneliness. The field feels it, the wood feels it, the animals feel it, Frost feels it.
We wait until the last line of the second verse before we get a complete line using Iambic Pentameter: “the LONEliNESS inCLUDES me UNaWARES”. This line needs a special punch, and we get it with a perfect Iambic Pentameter line.

And lonely as it is, that loneliness
Will be more lonely ere it will be less—
A blanker whiteness of benighted snow
With no expression, nothing to express.

This stanza reveals the agent of the loneliness is the snow itself. The more snow that falls, the more lonely the place will be. And just like a blank expression does not allow anything to pass like a brick wall, the snow is one big blank expression. It reminds me of a famous argument between Van Gogh and Gaughin. They were painting a landscape together, and Van Gogh saw the sky with all its lines and curves and interesting pockets of color shades. Gaughin saw the sky as flat and uninteresting, like a plank or a sheet. And so the snow is more like what Gaughin saw, an expressionless suffocating agent.
But suddenly the poem shifts, and the wide surroundings of field and woods and sky is only a microlevel of the vast world that loneliness envelopes, especially when he acknowledges that loneliness is a frightening thing, and since it exists everywhere, nowhere is safe from it. And yet, Frost would rather be scared where he lives and knows, then be out there in the unfamiliar ground of the universe along with the other lonely objects and scared still.

They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between stars—on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places.

Reconciliation for Whitman

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Here we are as a country, about to swear in the first black President of the United States. The first non-white President too, but of course the fact that he is black brings a huge significance in the history of the country. Just watch Jesse Jackson on election night, or listen to the black man who while being interviewed said “The dream has come, the dream is real.”
That Obama is also non-white is significant in the present time as well. (My wife, who is half White and half Asian Indian, affectionately calls Obama a half-breed, and talks about him as one of “us”! But I digress…) We are in an intangible and yet very real war with Islamic extremists, and that is why his being non-white is so important right now; Whitman lived in a war as well, and although slavery was not officially a reason to fight against our own countrymen, no one can deny the importance of the issue during that time.
Obama was elected as a uniter of our own country, and within this context, a forgiver as well.
Thus, I can think of no better tribute to the country, the new President, and the poets, than to analyze Whitman’s “Reconciliation”.

Word over all, beautiful as the sky,
Beautiful that war and all its acts of carnage must in time be utterly lost;
That the hands of the sisters Death and Night incessantly softly wash again, and ever again, this soil’d world;
For my enemy is dead, a man divine as myself is dead,
I look where he lies white-faced and still in the coffin — I draw near,
Bend down and touch lightly with my lips the white face in the coffin.

In the beginning was The Word, and The Word was God. God also begins this poem, and lives in the beautiful, vast sky. God is beautiful, and is also a reflection of what lies beneath, even if it is war. But lines two and three is telling us that war and everything evil that comes with it must be forgotten (“utterly lost”) and forgiven (“softly washed again, and ever again”), including the cold slow lonely nights. The world is not just physically soiled of dead bodies, it is emotionally soiled. People are mad, angry, tired, beaten, exhausted.
But then the poem turns, and narrows the war to two men, the killer and the killed. The killer looks at the dead man’s face and remembers that this is war, only war; remove war and you have two normal loving countrymen. This enemy is only an ideological enemy, not a personal one (and if he were, would it matter?). He forgives the man he fought — and loves him too.
This poem is a poem of love and hope, not hate and despair; it is written by the father of American poetry, who loved humanity in all its faults. I have a feeling this love for humanity is not lost on the 44th President of the United States.

Shell for Adair

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Virginia Hamilton Adair wrote poetry all her life, and published in a few journals early in her career, but did not publish again until her first book of poetry at the age of eighty-three, called Ants on the Melon.

“The Shell” epitomizes Adair’s writing style like few of her poems do. Adair enjoyed rhyme schemes, but refused to stick to them for the sole purpose of the rhyme’s formality; however, she also refused to drift too far off from the scheme in question.

The end words in “The Shell” are as follows:
stanza one: land, sea, sand, moss
stanza two: toss, swell, gloss, shell
stanza three: fault, dispair, salt, sea
stanza four: air, hand, sand, rare

As you can see, and if you take each stanza separately, the rhyme schemes are:
stanza one: abax
stanza two: abab
stanza three: abax
stanza four: abba

One can see where Adair employed a general rhyme, but there is no pattern. The first and third stanzas are alike, but the second and fourth are not. One expects the same rhyme pattern in each quatrain of a poem, or alternating patterns at best. Neither is true here, but she refuses to give up on the rhyme; it helps control the poem.

If you look at the rhyme scheme in the poem as a whole however, it becomes far more textured and interesting, unpatterned and yet very connected:
abaccdcdefebfggf

One reads the poem with such familiarity of sounds the broken scheme is completely lost; indeed, the pattern as a whole is so rich and powerful the poem both demands its attention and never calls attention to it.

However, Adair isn’t done. She uses internal rhymes, word repitition, and other techniques within the lines themselves, it makes the reader think Adair was drunk with sounds. I count twenty words in the poem that drip with an “l” sound, not all alliteration.
But the alliteration in the first stanza alone must be brought to attention — living, land, land, lying, littered, [c]lotted.

Stanza One:

On the desolate border between the living land
and the land entombed under the sea
the littered and soaking sand
strewn with wrecked wood and clotted moss

She alliterates throughout her poem (eg. “strangely spiraled” in stanza two) but there are other nuggets, such as her word repetition of toss/toss that begins stanza two:

which the waves continually toss,
toss, and then regather into the foam and swell

Notice we have gone a full stanza and a half without knowing fully what she is referring to. One sentence spans two stanzas, and the subject and verb of the sentence does not come until line three of the third stanza, the direct object comes at the end of the stanza:

I saw, shapely and thin, with delicate gloss
and strangely spiraled, a wan shell.

It reminds me of some languages where the sentence structure is something other than subject–>verb–>direct object, such as Hindi, and yet, the poem is not awkward to the English-speaking ear, it is suspenseful.
And so now that we know what the poet is speaking about, it is time to zero in on the subject with vivid description in stanza three:

A shell delicate and turned without fault [notice the shell//a shell word repetition!]
pale, icy, thin as dispair
washed in the dead bitterness of salt

and here comes an internal rhyme, just like the second “toss” adds another internal rhyme to “gloss” in the previous stanza, and ties the stanza with stanza four:

It was born in the sea//torn from the sea into the air

The wan shell is not a dull subject, either. It is not only “strangely spiraled”, not only “delicate and turned without fault/pale, icy, thin as dispair”, but the final three lines of the poem ends with the epiphany that it is a superior object:

Some other may lift it from the sand;
I do not dare. Never have these hot hands
held a substance so desolate and so rare.

So, with all this going on, you may want to watch — or listen — to me recite this poem. The audio is off by a second or so, so you may prefer to close your eyes and listen. I don’t do anything dramatic with my facial expressions anyway. There is a reason why I don’t read my poetry at poetry readings!
http://www.youtube.com/v/B4OFY2Kevuc&hl=en&fs=1