Poetry Friday XIV - the stoic shrug
Today I thought I'd write about the poet Robert Frost. I have a book of his poetry, and in the introduction by Ian Hamilton it says that an "important ingredient of Frost's charm - [is] his use of the aphorism, and in particular the aphorism that speaks of a resigned cheerfulness, or a cheerful resignation. Frost is a master of the stoic shrug, the rugged settling for what there is, however less than perfect. Behind this resignation there are in fact deep areas of fear and despair, but only intermittently are these allowed to show through. Frost uses his social manner, his maintaining of a brave face, as a defence against the real meanings of many of his more popular, calender-bound aphorisms." I like the phrase "a stoic shrug". I think it's a grand thing. Those people capable of the stoic shrug are often perceived to be people of lesser feelings, which is a very great misconception, when the reality is that they are those of the true nobility and understanding to behave so. As a result I think they are perhaps the more readily abused and overlooked, while the more fragile, volatile (egg-shell) people take a greater portion of care and consideration. But, that in itself is just one of those many facts of life that requires a stoic shrug, along with the fact that the world belongs to the confident and assertive, with or without any real merit, and a good many others. And so here is one of those stoic shrugs:
If one by one we counted people out
For the least sin, it wouldn't take us long
To get so we had no one left to live with.
For to be social is to be forgiving.
From The Star-Splitter, Robert Frost
I really like the poem Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening, which makes me think of many evenings spent clearing wildlife traps (I'd trudge through the woodlands loaded with gear, occasionally pausing to admire the night, yet knowing I had to press on as there was far to go and many creatures waiting for me). But here is another, lesser known poem I like:
The Oven Bird
There is a singer everyone has heard,
Loud, a mid-summer and a mid-wood bird,
Who makes the solid tree trunks sound again.
He says that leaves are old and that for flowers
Mid-summer is to spring as one to ten.
He says the early petal-fall is past,
When pear and cherry bloom went down in showers
On sunny days a moment overcast;
And comes that othere fall we name the fall.
He says the highway dust is over all.
The bird would cease and be as other birds
But that he knows in singing not to sing.
The question that he frames in all but words
Is what to make of a diminished thing.
Robert Frost