Tonight we continued our conversation about sonnets at the East Greenbush Library with Kevin McCann as our fearless leader. We spent a lot of time with Shakespeare but we strayed into Keats and Elizabeth B. Browning and touched on Frost and Dante and Millay and Billy Collins.
All this talk of love and passion, time, decay, laid side by side the writing itself.
The teacher coaxes us to talk about what the poet is getting at, explains the inferences, the references, compares the structure of this poem versus that one. I sit there wondering about what it was like to write these fourteen lines, and then write another set, and another. Is there a trail of re-writing?
Shakespeare keeps repeating: the poem shall live on and make you (his lover) immortal. By these words. By my work. By this art. I allowed that this is what all artists hope, that something of them will live on after them and people will continue to respond to it.
Theme alone can steady us down. just as the first mystery was how a poem could have a tune in such a straightness as metre, so the second mystery is how a poem can have wildness and at the same time a subject that shall be fulfilled.
It should be of the pleasure of a poem itself to tell how it can. The figure a poem makes. It begins in delight and ends in wisdom. The figure is the same as for love. No one can really hold that the ecstasy should be static and stand still in one place. It begins in delight, it inclines to the impulse, it assumes direction with the first line laid down, it runs a course of lucky events, and ends in a clarification of life-not necessarily a great clarification, such as sects and cults are founded on, but in a momentary stay against confusion. It has denouement. It has an outcome that though unforeseen was predestined from the first image of the original mood-and indeed from the very mood. It is but a trick poem and no poem at all if the best of it was thought of first and saved for the last. It finds its own name as it goes and discovers the best waiting for it in some final phrase at once wise and sad-the happy-sad blend of the drinking song.
No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader. For me the initial delight is in the surprise of remembering something I didn’t know I knew. I am in a place, in a situation, as if I had materialized from cloud or risen out of the ground. There is a glad recognition of the long lost and the rest follows. Step by step the wonder of unexpected supply keeps growing.
From: The Figure a Poem Makes, by Robert Frost
