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Mar. 13th, 2011 02:20 pm"Birches" = absurdly packed. Best I can do:
1. Its reply to Shelley: Death comes to us in life, there's nothing there to seek. There is a point to leaving the world, but only to get away from its lashings and considerations for a moment. The colors are something our lives give to ice's drabness, not to eternity's radiance: eternity, producing freezing rain, is probably just a dark cloud.
2. The demiurge: Truth says it's just the weight of bad moments that bends what starts out facing heaven down toward the earth. Frost likes to think it's a boy swinging it down for the hell of it, because he's free to, and free from awareness of whether this is in the interest of the tree (precurses "The End of March" - and perhaps "Auroras"?). He once did the same thing himself, though his birches were only birches; the demiurge boy's include people.
The demiurge is a god of this world, since heaven is only a revolving door, a brief escape permitted by consciousness. The demiurge cripples consciousnesses incidentally, unconsciously; it might just be like the weather, or it might be conscious, itself (of other things), hence the source of our own consciousness as a parent, maybe our one parent, somehow like us, but is not conscious of us - see "Design."
3. Poetry: Frost wants to do it again, too, but with a difference. Passively, as a tree, he wants to touch both earth and heaven in alternation, and not be stuck facing either, so he'd like some boy to climb and swing him, but not conquer him into a bent position. Actively, as a boy, he'd like to visit heaven by climbing a tree, but only to leave the earth for just a moment, the tapering tree bending to set him back down when he gets too high. He doesn't want to just run sideways through the forest, running into its obstacles - twigs, cobwebs. How are we both trees and boys? Boys can climb and swing - as Frost once could, now wishes to. We are boys when we're empowered - in the past, imagination, maybe when writing a poem. Having a boy climb us is more like reading one: Frost's can draw the uselessly heaven-inclined down toward love. By climbing one (entering the headspace of the healthy and young?) he can leave his world of love and pain for a moment. An interchange of painless aloofness and loving involvement is the best; not Shelleyan escape into death, not being frozen to your knees by life, though Frost seems aware these are the two inevitable fates, that going back and forth is itself a daydream, not a Truth.
A poem can do something to you that the world should have but either couldn't or didn't know it should have. Or a poem is just the notion that such a thing might happen - the kind of daydream that you have while running through the woods. But the world would give us such nice daydreams, if it could or knew it should.
4. Sex: There's some impotence hints here, corroborated by some of his other poems of the WW1 period, e.g. "After Apple-Picking." I'm not usually into that kind of reading, but it seems unavoidable, and Frost really does invite you to read his poems in terms of one another. He was obviously writing out of several overlapping personal crises. If impotence wasn't one of them, it was at least enough of a fear or metaphor to pierce or worm inside his imagery.
5. The demiurge's laugh is innocent.
6. And maybe: A poem is a thought of a world where his power is wielded by consciousness like ours; a thought not always present in the verses, presumably, but implied by them - if a poem speaks of terrible, true things, it is a terror from the perspective of that world of better thought. What is sympathy but the confirmation that something better can be kept in mind, some rival truth has been veered from?
The active/passive, boy/tree interchange is astonishing. He's as obsessively into the matter/consciousness (can matter be conscious, and if so what's matter? has consciousness concocted matter, and if so what's anything? if each is a thing distinct, which flooding through the gates of which other is the stuff of our time?) questions as Kafka.
Earth is the place for love, but only the unearthly can inhabit it. How do we both stay and go? The place is right, but the time is neither right nor wrong.
1. Its reply to Shelley: Death comes to us in life, there's nothing there to seek. There is a point to leaving the world, but only to get away from its lashings and considerations for a moment. The colors are something our lives give to ice's drabness, not to eternity's radiance: eternity, producing freezing rain, is probably just a dark cloud.
2. The demiurge: Truth says it's just the weight of bad moments that bends what starts out facing heaven down toward the earth. Frost likes to think it's a boy swinging it down for the hell of it, because he's free to, and free from awareness of whether this is in the interest of the tree (precurses "The End of March" - and perhaps "Auroras"?). He once did the same thing himself, though his birches were only birches; the demiurge boy's include people.
The demiurge is a god of this world, since heaven is only a revolving door, a brief escape permitted by consciousness. The demiurge cripples consciousnesses incidentally, unconsciously; it might just be like the weather, or it might be conscious, itself (of other things), hence the source of our own consciousness as a parent, maybe our one parent, somehow like us, but is not conscious of us - see "Design."
3. Poetry: Frost wants to do it again, too, but with a difference. Passively, as a tree, he wants to touch both earth and heaven in alternation, and not be stuck facing either, so he'd like some boy to climb and swing him, but not conquer him into a bent position. Actively, as a boy, he'd like to visit heaven by climbing a tree, but only to leave the earth for just a moment, the tapering tree bending to set him back down when he gets too high. He doesn't want to just run sideways through the forest, running into its obstacles - twigs, cobwebs. How are we both trees and boys? Boys can climb and swing - as Frost once could, now wishes to. We are boys when we're empowered - in the past, imagination, maybe when writing a poem. Having a boy climb us is more like reading one: Frost's can draw the uselessly heaven-inclined down toward love. By climbing one (entering the headspace of the healthy and young?) he can leave his world of love and pain for a moment. An interchange of painless aloofness and loving involvement is the best; not Shelleyan escape into death, not being frozen to your knees by life, though Frost seems aware these are the two inevitable fates, that going back and forth is itself a daydream, not a Truth.
A poem can do something to you that the world should have but either couldn't or didn't know it should have. Or a poem is just the notion that such a thing might happen - the kind of daydream that you have while running through the woods. But the world would give us such nice daydreams, if it could or knew it should.
4. Sex: There's some impotence hints here, corroborated by some of his other poems of the WW1 period, e.g. "After Apple-Picking." I'm not usually into that kind of reading, but it seems unavoidable, and Frost really does invite you to read his poems in terms of one another. He was obviously writing out of several overlapping personal crises. If impotence wasn't one of them, it was at least enough of a fear or metaphor to pierce or worm inside his imagery.
5. The demiurge's laugh is innocent.
6. And maybe: A poem is a thought of a world where his power is wielded by consciousness like ours; a thought not always present in the verses, presumably, but implied by them - if a poem speaks of terrible, true things, it is a terror from the perspective of that world of better thought. What is sympathy but the confirmation that something better can be kept in mind, some rival truth has been veered from?
The active/passive, boy/tree interchange is astonishing. He's as obsessively into the matter/consciousness (can matter be conscious, and if so what's matter? has consciousness concocted matter, and if so what's anything? if each is a thing distinct, which flooding through the gates of which other is the stuff of our time?) questions as Kafka.
Earth is the place for love, but only the unearthly can inhabit it. How do we both stay and go? The place is right, but the time is neither right nor wrong.
