Edgar Lee Masters
"Elsa Wertman"
This poem tells an interesting story. A girl (also the speaker) was seduced by her married employer and births his child. His wife was not angry with the girl and said she:
"...would not make trouble for me,
And, being childless, would adopt it."
Mrs. Greene, the bosses wife, is kind to the speaker and creates the impression that she is with child herself. The boy grows up presumably not knowing who his true mother is. The people of the town do not know either. The boy becomes an orator at pollitical rallies which his biological mother attends. She cries and "sitters-by" think that she is crying;
"At the eloquence of Hamiltion Greene -
That was not it.
No! I wanted to say:
That's my son! That's my son!"
This poem speaks of small town culture. One of secrets and scandal. The poem is without rhymes and the language is simple and concise. It is not filled with adjectives and simply tells the story of the speaker's plight.
"Hamilton Greene"
This poem is a companion to the previous poem, in a way. The speaker is Hamilton Greene, as mentioned above. He describes his parents as having been "Of valiant and honorable blood both." He tells the audience that he has been "Judge, member of Congress, leader in the State" and that he served the people well. As in "Elsa Wertman," the language is concise and matter-of-fact without much embellishment. The poem is most interesting when read as a companion to "Elsa Wertman," for Hamiltion knows not that she is his biological mother. He does not seem to know that his father has been less honorable than Hamilton might have believed and that Mrs. Greene is not his biological mother. One wonders what might happen to his political career if the small town secrets were ever revealed.
Edwin Arlington Robinson
"Reuben Bright"
This poem is very similar to those of Edgar Lee Masters. It recounts a small town tragedy. Unlike those of Masters, this poem is written in third person and has a rhyming scheme. The scheme is unusual in the sense that it is somewhat irregular;
A
B
B
A
A
B
B
A
A
B
A
B
C
C
With regard to the content of the poem, many questions remain unanswered. The character Reuben Bright has lost his wife to death and has closed his butcher shop as a result. The audience is not informed as to how his wife died or what he did with his life after her death. Therefore, we must assume that Robinson omitted this information intentionally. The point is that Reuben Bright has had to cope with great loss in his own way and within the prying view of onlookers.
Robert Frost
"Mending Wall"
In "Mending Wall," Frost questions the value and necessity of fences between neighbors. He begins the poem by describing an incomprehensible force (perhaps nature itself) that does not care for walls and that places gaps in them through which we can pass through. He contrasts this with men, which he calls hunters. Frost goes on to detail the ways in which hunters hail from a different set of motives than nature. Then he offers a personal anecdote. He has a fence-loving neighbor and each year, the two retrace the property boundaries as a ritual or "another kind of outdoor game." The speaker explains to the audience that;
"He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apples will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him."
Twice the speaker tells us that his neighbor prescribes to the old adage that;
"Good fences make good neighbors."
Robert Frost was deeply enamored of the natural world and I feel that this naturalism shows through in his writing style. It is humble, straight-forward, romantic on the fringes, and "woody" for lack of a better adjective. "Mending Wall" is about isolation and the contrast between those who seek and enforce it and those who would prefer to live without fences. Frost implies that nature itself takes on the latter perspective.
"After Apple-Picking"
This poem is a reflection on the speaker's relationship to his task of picking apples. He describes the great care required by the task in handling the apples into the bucket so that they do not hit the ground.
"For all
That struck the earth,
No matter if not bruised or spiked with stubble,
Went surely to the cider-apple heap
As of no worth."
The poet speaks of dreaming and describes his day of apple-picking with an ethereal and dream-like quality. In particular, he describes looking at the grass through a dripping-wet pane of glass and the experiences of his day are blended with his dream life so that it becomes difficult to distinguish between them. The last ten lines are particularly telling as to the intention of the poet in speaking. Following lines 32-36 (quoted above), the poet says:
"One can see what will trouble
This sleep of mine, whatever sleep it is.
Were he not gone,
The woodchuck could say whether it's like his
Long sleep, as I describe its coming on,
Or just some human sleep."
These final lines are cryptic. One interpretation can be made by comparing the last lines of E.A. Poe's "A Dream Within a Dream," in which Poe says:
"And I hold within my hands
Grains of the golden sand-
How few! Yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep - while I weap!
O God! Can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?"
It is difficult to say exactly what the two poets wanted to save from the injustices of the cedar-apple bin and the "pitiless wave" respectively, but I believe it was the same impulse in both instances that the poets attempted to express; the inner conflict created by the human impulse towards preservation and meticulous care (order) contrasted with the natural forces of destruction and displacement (chaos).
"The Wood Pile"
"The Wood Pile" describes an experience the speaker had in the wintertime woods. Frost describes the scene in his typical language; simple, humble, and subtly tinged with emotion. As we read or hear the poem, the mind's eye follows the eyes of the poet in his memory as they move from the snow on the ground, to the woods, to a shy bird on a branch, to a wood pile, and finally to the clematis vines around the wood. As the speaker moves his focus through the sites of the wintered forest, he produces two main ideas which seem very separate and only akin in their contemporaneity; the paranoid shyness of the bird and the site of the gray wood pile which sat;
"To warm the frozen swamp as best it could
With the smokeless burning of decay."
As usual, Frost's language is languid and dream-like. It is reminiscent of the experience it so often speaks of; the slow-paced reverie of absorbing and contemplating nature.
"Birches"
This poem is whimsical and somewhat faster in pace than Frost's poems covered thus far. Frost begin by describing the frozen branches of birch trees and the effects of the ice on the trees and on the ground. The entirety of the poem revolves around the fascination of the speaker with the ability of the branches to bend. This type of fixation with the miraculous properties and sights of the natural world is easily understood by children and several times Frost says that he'd "like to think that some boy" is swinging, climbing, or bending down on the branches. My interpretation of this particular poem is that it is in fact about the human fascination with the natural world and especially that of children.
"For Once, Then, Something"
In this poem, the speaker tells of peering down into a well and seeing his own reflection along with glimpses of:
"...a something white, uncertain,
Something more of the depths - and then I lost it."
The well keeps a secret and the poet leers deeper to see beyond his reflection and to ascertain the mystery but in vain. The well's hidden "something" remains a secret;
"What was that whiteness?
Truth? A pebble of quartz? For once, then, something."
Yet again, the language is that of story-telling; without embellishment and dreamlike.
"Desert Places"
"Desert Places" consists of four stanzas of four lines each. There is a rhyming scheme of:
A
A
B
A.
This scheme is consistent throughout. Frost describes the lonely effect of beholding the winter wilderness covered in snow. The animals are "smothered in their lairs." This poem is not a reflection of the nature of loneliness but of a fear on the part of the speaker of a lack of feeling whatsoever. This is evidenced in lines 7-8 as follows:
"I am too absent-spirited to count;
The loneliness includes me unawares."
This theme is especially evident in the last stanza;
"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."
Being that the speaker describes himself as "absent-spirited" and fears his own "desert places" can be interpreted as indicating that isolation has not led the speaker to loneliness but has made him numb to it.
"Design"
Frost vividly describes a "dimpled spider, fat and white," as it perches on a flower while holding a dead moth. His description is full of startling simile such as "dead wings carried like a paper kite." He describes the spider, flower, and moth as a triad of "Assorted characters of death and blight,".
The second of the two stanzas is the poets interpretation of the sight. What is implied therein is that these three entities came together as the result of a great design; the triad was meant to be. This poem speaks of the perfection of natural beauty and its ability to confound human onlookers into awe and inspiration. Events outside the human realm seem to function according to a cosmic scheme.
"Directive"
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