Poetry Analysis; “October” by Robert Frost

Here is this lovely, relatively well-known poem from Robert Frost, “October,” perfect for this month of foliage.  First the poem, and I’ve included line numbers and segmented the poem into sections with lines.  I’ve also listed the rhyme scheme over to the right.

 

October

By Robert Frost

 

1 O hushed October morning mild,                            A

2 Thy leaves have ripened to the fall;                         B

3 Tomorrow’s wind, if it be wild,                               A

4 Should waste them all.                                             B

5 The crows above the forest call;                              B

6 Tomorrow they may form and go.                           C

7 O hushed October morning mild,                            A

8 Begin the hours of this day slow.                            C

9 Make the day seem to us less brief.                         D

10 Hearts not averse to being beguiled,                      A        

11 Beguile us in the way you know.                           C

12 Release one leaf at break of day;                           E

13 At noon release another leaf;                                 D

14 One from our trees, one far away.                         E

15 Retard the sun with gentle mist;                            F

16 Enchant the land with amethyst.                           F

17 Slow, slow!                                                            C

18 For the grapes’ sake, if they were all,                    B        

19 Whose leaves already are burnt with frost,            G                    

20 Whose clustered fruit must else be lost—             G        

21 For the grapes’ sake along the wall.                       B        

 

 

There is no mysterious theme to the poem.  It is what it seems, first and primary a meditation on the beautiful October foliage: “Enchant the land with amenthyst” (l. 16). One subtle theme is the slow movement of time, and the ever coming death that the change symbolizes: “Tomorrow’s wind, if it be wild/Should waste them all” (3-4).  The poem is so static, it feels like a picture, but there is subtle movement.  The crows come and go (5-6) and the leaves fall ever so sporadically and one at a time over the course of a morning (12-24).  But the time is ever creeping slow: “Slow, slow!/For the grapes’ sake, if they were all” (17-18). 

What really intrigued me though was the form of the poem.  Does it have form?  It feels like it does.  The first quatrain (lines 1-4) has an ABAB rhyme scheme.  That anticipates form.  But the second quatrain (5-8) has a BCAC rhyme scheme, which does not follow the first quatrain.  The B rhyme harkens back to the first quatrain; a third rhyme, “C,” is introduced, and quatrain closes with to the very first “A” rhyme.  That does interlock, however asymmetrically. 

But what about the next quatrain?  If there were a third quatrain, the rhyme scheme would be DACE, which would not be a quatrain.  In fact, the syntax has it that a full period ends after three lines, and the following three lines is also a complete sentence.  Two three line groupings of a developed thought forms a sestet, six lines with an interlocking rhyme scheme.  If those six lines were a sestet, it would have the rhyme scheme of DACEDE.  The A and C echo back to the preceding two quatrains, the D and the E introduces new rhymes and interlock within the sestet with two E’s toward the end progressing the poem forward.  Again asymmetrical but the result is a static feel while moving the poem slowly forward. 

But wait, isn’t two quatrains followed by a sestet an Italian sonnet?  Yes, but a sonnet requires an iambic pentameter line, that is, ten syllables which consist of five two-syllable feet.  But all the poem’s lines are iambic tetrameter (eight syllables of four two-syllable feet) with two notable exceptions.  I’ll get to the exceptions in a bit.  So the first fourteen lines approximate a sonnet but it’s definitely not a sonnet.  

The following two lines (15-16) is a pure couplet of FF with no echo of the F rhyme anywhere else in the poem.  They don’t echo back and they don’t return.  The 17^th line is made up of two single-syllable words, “Slow, slow.”  Actually it’s one single-syllable word repeated.  And finally the last four lines return to a quatrain, only this time it is not an asymmetrical quatrain but a very symmetrical BGGB.  The internal rhyme of GG also does not echo anywhere else in the poem but the B sound which frames the quatrain harkens back to the first quatrain, which I think remarkably ties the poem together.

So what about the two non-conforming lines?  Line four is a four syllable iambic line (diameter), which is half the poem’s tetrameter lines.  To have just one diameter line in the midst of the tetrameter scheme is very odd, and again asymmetrical.  Because of its curtness, the line gives extra power to the death motif, “Should waste them all.”  The other non-conforming, “slow, slow,” isn’t even iambic.  It’s a spondee, two stressed syllables, and it gives extra power to the creeping temporal movement of the poem, reflecting the slow falling of the leaves.

Other observations I would like to point out.  (1) Lines one and seven repeat.  (2) All line ending words are single syllable except for amethyst.  (3) One word that ends a line is “frost,” the poet’s last name.  I’m not sure what to make of that last observation, but it is curious. 

So what are we to make of all this?  Opening asymmetrical quatrains but a closing symmetrical quatrain.  An asymmetrical sestet which with the quatrains ahead of it echoes an Italian sonnet, but a sonnet of improper line length.  Two lines that don’t follow the metrical scheme surrounded by 19 lines that do.  It is a poem that gives the appearance of fixed form but is highly non-conforming and, to repeat what I think is the most important observation of the poem’s form, asymmetrical. 

Here is what I think it means.  The asymmetrical form reflects the subject.  If you look at a wooded area in autumn, you see many colors of turning leaves, and they give the appearance of rhythmic form, but they are asymmetrically aligned.  It’s not that every other tree is yellow or that yellows and reds are in fixed repetition.  Two yellows may come at once but reds and browns alternate afterward.  It gives the appearance of harmony when you look at it as wide tapestry but it does not have a periodic cadence.  It seems balanced but it’s asymmetric!  Indeed it is harmonic but not in fixed repetition.  This is what Frost is capturing aesthetically, the woods in October.  That is the craft of a fine artist!

The pictures of the foliage are from the Staten Island Greenbelt, which is a conserved park.  I posted on a Father’sDay hike Matthew and I took in 2020.  It was spring time then.  It’s been a beautiful fall here this year.  Enjoy.

Poem: Nothing Gold Can Stay by Robert Frost

I’m not the only one that analyzes poems on the internet.  I came across an analysis by Anna O’Neil at the website Aleteia of this nice little Robert Frost poem, “Nothing Gold Can Stay.”

Nothing Gold Can Stay

 By Robert Frost

Nature’s first green is gold,

Her hardest hue to hold.

Her early leaf’s a flower;

But only so an hour.

Then leaf subsides to leaf.

So Eden sank to grief,

So dawn goes down to day.

Nothing gold can stay.

You could look at this poem from several angles.  Wikipedia mentions the analyses from a sound perspective, especially the alliteration within the poem.  Notice how the second and seventh lines both are loaded with alliterated words, and so have a mirror effect to the poem.  Notice how each of the lines have six syllables except the last, which has five.  Notice how each line, short as they are, is a sentence.  The sixth and seventh lines are separated by a comma, but they are each self-contained clauses. 

You could also look at the poem from its structural design.  The poem seems to divide in two.  The first four lines form an exposition, and the last four a narrative.   

Anna O’Neil focuses on the poem’s meaning, especially as the poem jumps from leaf to Eden to dawn.  She has a really good understanding of the line, “So dawn goes down to day.”  The poem’s meaning rests on it, and I’m not going to steal her brilliance.  You’ll have to go over to read it.  

 In prose writing those unprepared jumps (leaf to Eden to dawn) would be considered “choppy” writing, and therefore bad prose, but in poetry those leaps are called compression, and provide a charge to the poem, and therefore good poetry. 

One thing that isn’t mentioned that I noticed is how much power the word “so” has in the poem.  The entire poem is sixty words and “so” turns up three times, twice at the beginning of a line, lines that are sequential: “So Eden sank to grief,/So dawn goes down to day.”  Those two lines that begin with so, the only two that have a comma between them and so form a compound sentence are the two lines that compress the narrative and enlarge the poem’s meaning.  They are the most important lines of the poem.  But also the two so’s there establishes sequential links.  “So” is an adverb that means “for this or that reason; hence; therefore.”  “Then” in the preceding line acts in the same way.  Causal links are established that form the basis of a mythic concept, and indirectly alluding to the causal links from Edenic fall.

But now look at the other line with “so.”  “But only so an hour.”  At first I thought that was a typo.  The natural way to phrase that line would be, “but only for an hour.”  I searched around and all the postings of the poem have it, and in a recorded version (which I embed below) of Frost reading the poem himself, he does use so.  That is how Frost wrote it.  Why “so” as a word choice there?  Well, it does echo the word that will come in the important sixth and seventh lines.  But “so” here is an adjective, meaning “true as stated or reported; conforming with reality or the fact.”  It emphasizes the transient nature of the situation.  It’s only true for that moment.  It most certainly is the better word choice.

It’s a lovely little poem and like so many of Frost’s poems the simplicity is only on the surface; there is much depth within.  Here is Frost himself reading the poem.

Literature in the News: Robert Frost’s Poem, “The Road Not Taken”

In this past Sunday’s NY Post I was shocked to find an article on Robert Frost’s well-known poem, “The Road Not Taken.”  It wasn’t in the book review or entertainment section where something literary might happen to be published.  It was in the main news section, and the news worthy issue was a newly published book of literary criticism that overturns the conventional reading of the poem.  From the news article:  

It is the most famous poem in American literature, a staple of pop songs, newspaper columnists and valedictorian speeches….

Everyone can quote those final two lines. But everyone, writes David Orr in his new book “The Road Not Taken” (Penguin Press), gets the meaning wrong.

The poem is praised as an ode of individuality, to not follow the pack even though the path may be more difficult.

First off, it is not the most famous poem of American literature.  Let’s make that clear up front.  I don’t know where the author of the article gets that from.  Certainly there are poems by Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Edgar Allen Poe, e.e cummings, John Crow Ransom, Langston Hughes, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, T. S. Eliot, and so on that are more famous.  There are poems by Robert Frost himself that are more famous, such as “Stopping by the Woods.”  “The Road Not Taken” is often read in American schools and perhaps most Americans of some education and desire to read poetry have read it.  I certainly have and I have to say I think that wherever I was required to read this poem I was taught the conventional view that it is a poem about individuality.  Here’s the poem in its entirety.

 

The Road Not Taken

By Robert Frost

 

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth; 

Then took the other, as just as fair,

And having perhaps the better claim,

Because it was grassy and wanted wear;

Though as for that the passing there

Had worn them really about the same, 

And both that morning equally lay

In leaves no step had trodden black.

Oh, I kept the first for another day!

Yet knowing how way leads on to way,

I doubted if I should ever come back. 

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I--

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference. 

The conventional reading of the poem would be that the narrator chose a road—symbolic for our life journey—less traveled, meaning his mode of life was more original, more individualistic, and in the end was gratified.  I can tell you that when I read the poem I envision the narrator to be Frost himself and I conjecture that the road taken was a life of a poet, which does not provide much financial wealth, does have a life of fulfillment.   

However, there is a bit of external information that sheds light on the poem.  The narrator is not supposed to be Frost but a friend of Frost, a English poet named Edward Thomas.  The news article goes on to say: 

In 1912, Frost was nearly 40 and frustrated by his lack of success in the United States. After Thomas praised his work in London, the two became friends, and Frost visited him in Gloucestershire. They often took walks in the woods, and Frost was amused that Thomas always said another path might have been better. “Frost equated [it] with the romantic predisposition for ‘crying over what might have been,’ ” Orr writes, quoting Frost biographer Lawrance Thompson. 

Frost thought his friend “would take the poem as a gentle joke and protest, ‘Stop teasing me,’ ” Thompson writes. 

He didn’t. Like readers today, Thomas was confused by it and maybe even thought he was being lampooned. 

One Edward Thomas biographer suggested that “The Road Not Taken” goaded the British poet, who was indecisive about joining the army. 

So the poem then according to David Orr is a satiric treatment of Edward Thomas’ indecisiveness.  The poem does not end on a sense of satisfactory pride but on a sigh of regret.   

The article says that Thomas was confused by it, and I can understand why.  Before I get to that, let me support Orr’s reading by saying that Robert Frost was not a Romantic poet, so it is very much with the body of his work that this poem goes against a Romantic tradition of idealizing individualism.  Frost should be read as a modernist poet with modernist themes, especially of the darkness that is emphasized in the modernist understanding of human nature.  While in theme he is closer to Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, his form and style tend to be those established during 19^th century.  So while he explores themes of pessimism and alienation, the language and forms are from a different era, which contrasts in a way that is dissonant.   

For instance, Frost’s poem “Mending Wall” while in the form of a Wordsworthian blank verse monologue such as “TinternAbbey” the poem is about how nature fights humanity, and how the darkness in humanity requires that fences be built.  Or while Frost’s poem “Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening” has the feel of an idealized landscape say of Percy Shelly, it’s actually about the underlying death that is in all living things.  Or while Frost’s sonnet “Once by the Pacific” echoes John Keats’ sonnet “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer,” Frost’s characterization of the Pacific Ocean is of a destructive force coming from God’s outrage instead of Keats’ wonder and awe the Pacific inspires. 

This disconnect between Frost’s modernist thought and his Romantic era forms has led him to not be rated in the upper regime of modernist poets.  Scholars downgrade him (I hate such rating systems) because he failed to articulate his themes in newer, more appropriate form.  Is that fair?  This article has made me realize how unfair that is and how wrong.   

Orr writes that “The Road Not Taken” is “a thoroughly American poem. The ideas that [it] holds in tension — the notion of choice, the possibility of self-deception — are concepts that define . . . the United States.” 

Whether the theme of self-deception defines the United States or not may be arguable (this poem is not even about an American) but the theme of self-deception is clearly a modernist one, and I think a profound one, aesthetically expressed through the style and form.  The narrator feels that his choice was one of individuality when in fact it was purely arbitrary.  It reminds me of how a young person claims individuality through their rebellious clothing and haircuts, when in fact all their peers have the same clothing and haircuts.  There isn’t any real individuality there, just a difference.  The form of the poem leads you to think this is a Romantic poem of individualistic expression, but it isn’t, bringing to the fore the narrator’s self-deception.   

So how is a reader supposed to see this theme of self-deception?  This is what I think confused Edward Thomas.  The poem reads as a poem of individuality.  Here’s where a literary critic can help and guide the reader, or by reading enough Frost poetry you can come to the conclusion yourself.  The constant disconnect between theme and form in Frost’s poetry is intentional and aesthetically supports his modernism.  It takes placing this poem within the context of Frost’s life work to see the irony.  Orr identifies that disconnect as by holding things in tension.  Yes, I would agree but I would go beyond that and say it creates a false foundation, a shaky foundation, where what you think is solid ground is actually illusionary.  As a result of understanding this, Robert Frost’s poetry has grown in my eyes.   

It’s great to hear a poem read out loud, and while you can find on youtube Robert Frost reading the poem himself, I particularly liked the way this reader read it.  Hope you enjoy it.