Forgive me, those of you in "weather". Under weather. Riding out weather.
Here is a poem much on my mind. It has traveled beside me for over a week...leashed (or perhaps, unleashed and dislodged from memory) by the Sandy of my west coast imagination, and now, today, stirred up again with the east coast storm warnings all over the news, in this funny well-publicized country of news cycles and imaginings.
There is probably a small image of this poem inside every cell in my body. I memorized it at 12 years old. Sixteen lines. Fewer end-rhyme sounds than one's average sonnet. (There are four in here...though some would say six, since two are debate-worthy, are slant.) All the lines are in falling meters: trochees, dactyls.
As for the sounds: so many W's. A beautiful haunting wind-like mouthful of lament.
Bereft
Where had I heard this wind before
Change like this to a deeper roar?
What would it take my standing there for,
Holding open a restive door,
Looking down hill to a frothy shore?
Summer was past and the day was past.
Sombre clouds in the west were massed.
Out on the porch's sagging floor,
Leaves got up in a coil and hissed,
Blindly struck at my knee and missed.
Something sinister in the tone
Told me my secret must be known:
Word I was in the house alone
Somehow must have gotten abroad,
Word I was in my life alone,
Word I had no one left but God.
Change like this to a deeper roar?
What would it take my standing there for,
Holding open a restive door,
Looking down hill to a frothy shore?
Summer was past and the day was past.
Sombre clouds in the west were massed.
Out on the porch's sagging floor,
Leaves got up in a coil and hissed,
Blindly struck at my knee and missed.
Something sinister in the tone
Told me my secret must be known:
Word I was in the house alone
Somehow must have gotten abroad,
Word I was in my life alone,
Word I had no one left but God.
Robert Frost
I love how the "or" rhyme (door, floor, before) goes on for the first five lines...the tension the reader feels as one's ears anticipatorily try to abandon the sound at the normal stanza intervals for a couplet or a quatrain, but no, our author keeps going...three times, four times, five! Incredible.
I love "past", "massed", "hissed", "missed", with yet a sixth "or" rhyme thrown in between the pair of couplets, the jangly couplets that don't quite belong to one another, but nevertheless sound and feel fresh, as they try to create a little stir of exterior argument to the poem's primal rhetorical blow.
And then "tone", "known", "alone", "alone" comes...chiming hollow-voiced like a church bell, the "alone" repeated, so primal, so lost.
"Word"..."Word" the final two lines begin, as if the wind itself were infused with broken messages, as if language itself speaks of its own inability to redeem the sorrow of the poet, or me. This anaphora glues together a couplet whose ends don't even rhyme: "alone" and "God". Instead, "God" is part of an off-rhyme with "abroad". Our closure (on "God") is no closure...no click of end-sound against end-sound, but we know we've landed as close to closure as we are going to get.
A helpful anonymous person on Yahoo! Answers points me toward Jay Parini's really excellent Frost biography, Robert Frost: A Life (a book I read about two years ago, and would recommend) and tells me that this poem was written in 1893, which would put it concurrent with Frost's early work, three years after his first published poem and while he was still dancing into and out of college. This surprises me, enjoying it as I do in the volume in which it was published, West-Running Brook, in 1928. Itched by the fact, I take my early edition of West-Running Brook down from the shelf to look, and in fact, the poem bears a note on the Title page ("Bereft. As of about 1893"), a note I never noticed before.
Where have I heard this wind before?
I can't tell you that. But I think it was born inside me. And storms--not my own--but yours, you of the East Coast--have called it up!
Sometimes I have an odd kind of guilt for experiencing my own feelings of so-called empathy. My son's foray into philosophy opened our household up to ideas such as "speaking for others"--an unmitigatedly bad thing once one has thought about it. One must try to keep track of what one doesn't know (mustn't one?).
So forgive me for reciting "Bereft" for you. It is myself that I indict, isn't it? after all.
