More Coffee, Please

I’m taking a poetry course at Keene State right now—and they’ll be two more courses this summer. I’ve found that the best way for me to recharge my batteries is to get back into the classroom as a student, to learn something amazing and new, and to come back frothing at the mouth to share it with my kids. So it’s going to be a busy summer.

But right now, it’s just a poetry course: Robert Frost.

I’ve never particularly been a huge fan of Frost, or of his poetry. That kindly old New England gentleman thing might have fooled others, but I know old men from New Hampshire—live that long in the state, and one gets used to fighting, gets used to long seasons, all of them flawed, all of them carrying their own particular set of drawbacks.

His poetry was nice enough, I suppose. It was accessible enough as a child I felt I understood it (Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening…) and, partly for some reason I’m not sure about, I always felt like he was a contemporary poet. He felt recent (maybe because there were videos… maybe because my teachers always talked about Kennedy, and mentioned Frost at his inauguration) and so I didn’t mind him much.

But I never felt pulled to his poetry. Sure, it was nice enough, but big deal, right?

So it’s fairly interesting to re-read as an adult. There are things that I never noticed, never would have understood, at least not felt. I might—were they explained to me—have been able to understand it in my brain, but I never would have had that gut-sense emotional knowing.

WHEN the wind works against us in the dark,
And pelts with snow
The lower chamber window on the east,
And whispers with a sort of stifled bark,
The beast,
‘Come out! Come out!’–
It costs no inward struggle not to go,
Ah, no!
I count our strength,
Two and a child,
Those of us not asleep subdued to mark
How the cold creeps as the fire dies at length,–
How drifts are piled,
Dooryard and road ungraded,
Till even the comforting barn grows far away,
And my heart owns a doubt
Whether ’tis in us to arise with day
And save ourselves unaided.

I got Storm Fear, this time around. sitting at home (in March, no less!) looking at snow twirling through the trees, looking up at high ceilings and the slowly dwindling woodpile that’s keeping the stove going… yeah, I got this poem. Just a little, just enough to know what he was talking about, and with enough inkling at I could shudder at the idea of a worse night in a creaking old farmhouse without an oil burner in the basement, a phone for help, or so many other things.

That wasn’t the first time I’d read Storm Fear. I’d memorized and recited it when I was in elementary school—I’m old enough to remember when they made memory a priority in school, back before we realized that the internet on a cell-phone would make what we could store between our ears less useful than what we could discover with our thumbs—and it was a nice enough poem.

It means something entirely different as an adult. At the time, when the storm rolled in, I was the child asleep—it was my father’s fear, it was he who worried about heat, about making certain we were dug out the next morning.

Or, perhaps, Love and a Question:

A STRANGER came to the door at eve,
And he spoke the bridegroom fair.
He bore a green-white stick in his hand,
And, for all burden, care.
He asked with the eyes more than the lips
For a shelter for the night,
And he turned and looked at the road afar
Without a window light.

The bridegroom came forth into the porch
With, ‘Let us look at the sky,
And question what of the night to be,
Stranger, you and I.’
The woodbine leaves littered the yard,
The woodbine berries were blue,
Autumn, yes, winter was in the wind;
’Stranger, I wish I knew.’

Within, the bride in the dusk alone
Bent over the open fire,
Her face rose-red with the glowing coal
And the thought of the heart’s desire.

The bridegroom looked at the weary road,
Yet saw but her within,
And wished her heart in a case of gold
And pinned with a silver pin.

The bridegroom thought it little to give
A dole of bread, a purse,
A heartfelt prayer for the poor of God,
Or for the rich a curse;

But whether or not a man was asked
To mar the love of two
By harboring woe in the bridal house,
The bridegroom wished he knew.

It really doesn’t matter how many times a teacher might explain that poem, until one is married, until one is sitting in a class (or at a job, or in the yard, or away on a trip, or whatever it might be) while one’s spouse is not there because one is trying so very hard to make the world, or a task, or one’s self better—until that happens, the best teacher in the world really can’t make a child get this poem.

It’s nothing to do with intelligence. It’s everything to do with experience, with exposure, with the enrichment that comes with having another decade or more on the planet.

One of the things that’s easy to forget about our kids is how impoverished some of their lives are. If one hasn’t ever been on a plane, or hasn’t ever been out of New England, or New Hampshire… It’s a hard thing to overcome that in a class. This is the great benefit of field-trips, of events like the American Heritage Tour, like those trips to Europe—they all help share the wealth the world has to offer.¹

But the other problem is what it means as a teacher, as someone trying to share a piece of literature that discusses something beyond the ken of the students. Not all of them—I’m sure there are some who could teach me a great deal about keeping a house warm with a dwindling supply of wood—but for some, attempting to really create an understanding of something even so minor as this poem would be a stretch.

There are ways, of course—many students would have something they could relate to this, and working to help each student develop their own experience with whatever the concept is would be the first step.

Still, I wonder sometimes if we’re barking up the wrong tree. I sat in class last Wednesday and listened to a group of freshmen and sophomores who had no idea what iambic pentameter was, what a foot was, what was meant when “rhyme scheme” was mentioned—and I wonder if what they really needed when they were in high school was that technical knowledge, so that later, when they could really understand, they would have the concrete in order to be able to discuss the how the effect is achieved in more detail.²

I’m not sure. I know that, for my own self, I can figure out the meaning on my own—the technical pieces I needed a teacher. Makes me wonder.

1 Sadly, all of these are most available to the students with money—and the ones who need it most are the ones least able to take advantage. This is where those other things that the school can offer—visits by professionals in the field, speakers, and such—can have such value. ↺

2 For instance, did anyone notice the aborted, blown about the page rhyme scheme of Storm Fear? Like the poem itself ran against the storm and didn’t survive. ↺

Gregarious

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