POETICA : 7                             

Poem of the Week

Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening

By Robert Frost

[1874-1963]

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village, though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

Theme

Poetry and Image –II

Robert Frost’s fanous poem is like a milestone in many ways. It points both backwards and forwards. And that is how T.S. Eliot defined tradition and individual talent in literature. No poem or work of art can be totally disconnected with the past literary tradition. Similarly, too, it cannot but be different from the past tradition. Civilization itself is a continuum as Eliot says:

Time present and time past

Are both perhaps present in time future,

And time future contained in time past…

 

Let us look at Frost’s poem as both relating to the past as well as existing in the present, and pointing to the future, too. ‘Miles to go’ is an unmistakable indicator of the future, just as the ‘woods’ and the ‘lake’ are of the past, the ‘house’, the‘village’ and the ‘horse’ of the present, and the ‘snow’  as a symbol of the continuum of time. Surprisingly, all this presence of past, present and future in a single moment of time are suggested by images – woods, lake, house, village, horse, and more. And most symbolical of these images are the ‘woods’, the ‘frozen lake’ and the ‘snow’. It is an eloquent scene pictured before our eyes, with the sudden tinkle of the horse’s ‘harness bells’ sounding like a camera shutter. There is a complete story told in an enchanting picture. It’s one single poetic image created out of a kaleidoscope of images with their own cohesion and harmony, echoing deep symbolic meanings about life.

 

In the tradition of English poetry, the poem combines the best of the past – rhyme, metre, stanza form and all other poetic devices.This poem could have been written by Blake, and yet it has all the ‘todayness’ of modern poetry. In fact, tradition and individual talent merge to perfection in Frost’s poem. Compare it with Blake’s poem ‘The Sick Rose’:

The Sick Rose

O Rose thou art sick.

The invisible worm,

That flies in the night

In the howling storm:

 

Has found out thy bed

Of crimson joy:

And his dark secret love

Does thy life destroy.

 

Looking at both poems we notice striking similarities. The imagery is most familiar and common. The beauty of both poems lies in their pristine simplicity. Both are deeply symbolical about life, with a message that is as intrinsic to life as it is profound and infinite. Imagery and symbolism – the fundamental elements of poetry - are best to be understood by reading such poems -  written almost 120 years apart. Poetry, indeed, transcends the boundaries of time.

 

By now, it’s clear that poetry is all about ‘word-music’, imagery and symbolism. Modernist and post-modernist poetry has differed from traditional classical or romantic poetry only in its drive for experimentation and newness. It is keen to set aside all or most of the traditional poetic embellishments as encumbrances, and make it more and more akin to modern consciousness – particularly, a world beset with international conflicts, excessive consumption of technology leading to worrisome dehumanization, environmental crises, and so forth. The world has grown smaller and more precarious. Life has marched far ahead of a monarchical dispensation of tyranny to the freedom of equality as an individual under democracy. Poetry, like the world itself, is facing an existential crisis and looking for a way ahead from that precipice.. The cohesion of life seems to be breaking into disintegration and despair with its impact on the very idea of poetry. All experimentation, hesitancy and sense of insecurity in art and literature during the past century has been a result of this constant quest for order and harmony in life.

 

What is significant, however, is the perennially visible silver lining to the cloud that poetry always reflects. Also, all the traditional values of poetry including its musicality and symbolism are still palpable in poetry being written all around in the world. Another positive feature is the democratization of poetry – with poetry being written more and more by the common man wearing no laurels on their forehead – and by the largest number of people in the world. In the fifties of the last century the percentage of people writing poetry was much less in number, or at least much less in visibility. Today, thanks to social media and self-publication, there are millions of people writing and publishing poetry. The more pressure of emotions, the more crises in life, the greater the need for expression; in fact, poetry has always been a safety valve for the pressure of emotions – and that is what characterizes modern life in our world.

 

Trying to engage with poetry today – by reading and writing it – we need also to understand what poetry is, how it has borne the burden of human life since it began - both lamenting life’s agonies and exulting in life’s delights, how it has changed its forms and moulds across the centuries, with the concurrent evolution of language, how it has always brought some resolution of conflicts. And one way of understanding the nature of poetry is to read and write poetry. Reading poetry, at least from the Romantics onwards, will tell us what we can take or leave from it; but before that what we are taking and what to leave behind.

 

So far in the last six episodes we have seen the magic of poetry, the story that each poem contains, the utility of punctuation and other syntactical markers, the use of rhymes in poetry; and we are presently looking at the role of imagery and the significance of symbolism in poetry.

We have seen how poetry can still be musical even without the use of patterned end rhymes. We have also seen how lineation – breaking lines at particular points – is another way of adumbrating natural speech rhythm (the line-lengths                                           adding to the ease of recitation - another way in which the poet can make the rhythm palpable and personal.). We have also dwelt on the image as the central element – the spine – of the poem, carrying the main burden of the theme, weaving the inner structure of the symbolical meaning ( as in Williams’ or Galassi or the two poems with their foregrounded symbolism.

 

Symbolism has gone to great depths in modernist poetry and the thickened symbolism of Eliot owes a lot to the French symbolist poets like Stephen Mallarme and Paul Valery which renders it worthy of very complex and scholarly critical analyses. But when we read later poets – and Williams and Galassi or Frost are very good examples – we find symbolism more subtly evocative than in Eliot where image and symbol – often with abstruse references to earlier poets or texts - are identified into a complex, impenetratable metaphor. Technical terms like – image, symbol, metaphor are defined well in books of prosody, but in simple definition, an image is a picturization of an experience through a familiar object ( ‘mulch’ in Galassi’s poem of the rot in life); a metaphor is the transference of an idea in an object (‘green bottle’in Williams’ poem of the complex nature of modern life with its glitter as well as its brittleness); and a symbol as a one thing suggestive of a  deep, complex idea ( as the ‘frozen’ lake of inertia). An image is the first step, the metaphor, the second, and the symbol is the top step of the stairs, as it were. In other words, it begins with an image and ends with a symbol at the top of the poetic experience.

 

At this point we must stop – we the commoners of poetry-writing. The whole rich universe of symbolic experience in a vast stretch of traditional and modern poetry becomes visible to us only at the end of the journey of poetry when we are able to faintly visualize it, but become somehow unable to explain it, as if in its trance.

 

© Dr BSM Murty                              

Photos: Courtesy Google

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27 Dec’ 20  Sun