Meeting and Passing

Hart Crane to William Wright, 1919:

Oh, by the way, I met Robert Frost's daughter at a theatre party the other evening, and had the pleasure of taking the very interesting and handsome young lady back to her Columbia dormitory. I am hoping to see more of her at a near date, as she is worth looking at.

[Lesley Frost Ballantine, in her one Google image, looks remarkably like her father.]

(no subject)

Closed for Good [1st version], Frost

They come not back with steed
And chariot to chide
My slowness with their speed
And scare me to one side.
They have found other scenes
For haste and other means.

They leave the road to me
To walk in saying naught
Perhaps but to a tree
Inaudibly in thought,
"From you the road receives
A priming coat of leaves.

"And soon for lack of sun,
The prospects are in white
It will be further done,
But with a coat so light
The shape of leaves will show
Beneath the spread of snow."

And so on into winter
Till even I have ceased
To come as a foot printer,
And only some slight beast
So mousy or so foxy
Shall print there as my proxy.



Just to explain what this means to me--something I should probably start doing if I want anyone to read random quotes and poems: This is a weirdly overdetermined influence story, where the world is losing both speed and temperature. The charioteers came in Spring and Summer, Frost walks in the Autumn and perhaps predicts his own influence on those who come with the first snowfall, who will see his leaves but not the road, and after them the dwellers in Winter will see nothing but the snow, and wander without purpose or sense there ever was one. But the proxy conclusion, once you've winced at Frost's characteristically kicking sand back into whatever profundities he's just achieved, is interesting: the field mice and foxes are his brethren and continuation. Though perhaps he means actual animals rather than benighted visionaries, the poetry of the natural world going on though the human shop is closed. Was it vain of Frost to think something ended with him, or merely accurate? Frost added a stanza at both ends for a later version, good lines but softening the harsher core by further modesty and praise of the path-breaking questers. If you do accept the myth it's very moving, the Last Man theme added to those of the Birds and the Tower. Like steps down to the sea:

And so it was I entered the broken world
To trace the visionary company of love, its voice
An instant in the wind (I know not whither hurled)
But not for long to hold each desperate choice.

Not hear? When noise was everywhere! it tolled
Increasing like a bell. Names in my ears
Of all the lost adventurers, my peers -
How such a one was strong, and such was bold,
And such was fortunate, yet each of old
Lost, lost! one moment knelled the woe of years.
There they stood, ranged along the hillsides, met
To view the last of me, a living frame
For one more picture! In a sheet of flame
I saw them and I knew them all.

They sang, but had nor human tunes nor words,
Though all was done in common as before;
They had changed their throats and had the throats of birds.

Though the great song return no more
There's keen delight in what we have:
The rattle of pebbles on the shore
Under the receding wave.

And so on into winter
Till even I have ceased...