Some poems contain within them ideas / emotions / states of being that are almost impossible to articulate. You cannot help but feel that there is more going on in the words and in the silences than you could ever explain or understand. Here's something by Robert Frost, that wonderfully cunning New Englander with the death-wish woven into wreaths of autumn-gold leaves and scented grasses. i've always loved this poem, and if TS Eliot was right, and genuine poetry communicates before it is understood, then i guess this must be genuine poetry.
There is something almost Brahmsian about the depth of emotion almost straitjacketed into form.
Accompanying the poem is a commentary by Filipino-American poet Luisa Igloria.
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To EarthwardLove at the lips was touch
As sweet as I could bear;
And once that seemed too much;
I lived on air
That crossed me from sweet things,
The flow of—was it musk
From hidden grapevine springs
Downhill at dusk?
I had the swirl and ache
From sprays of honeysuckle
That when they’re gathered shake
Dew on the knuckle.
I craved strong sweets, but those
Seemed strong when I was young;
The petal of the rose
It was that stung.
Now no joy but lacks salt,
That is not dashed with pain
And weariness and fault;
I crave the stain
Of tears, the aftermark
Of almost too much love,
The sweet of bitter bark
And burning clove.
When stiff and sore and scarred
I take away my hand
From leaning on it hard
In grass and sand,
The hurt is not enough:
I long for weight and strength
To feel the earth as rough
To all my length.
(Robert Frost)
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"...Wasn’t it Mark Doty who said we should give thanks for metaphors, because they “go on ahead of us, they know before we do… [they] serve as a container for emotion and idea, a vessel that can hold what’s too slippery or charged or too difficult to touch?” In Robert Frost’s “To Earthward,” the charged and difficult subject is everything that tilts us toward the absolute and our inevitable mortality, even at the very apex of each instant of sweetness or joy. What could be more intangible and difficult to articulate? Nevertheless, the poet finds a linked series of metaphors, given not only concrete but also lyrical and metrical shape.
“To Earthward” is not a long poem—eight quatrains, no more, no less; it is as decorous in appearance as well as in cadence (I will never forget hearing Robert Pinsky incant it from memory at the opening of the Old Dominion Literary Festival in the fall of 1998 in such an electrifying way that for a moment I thought it was a poem by a more contemporary poet and not by Robert Frost). Frost finds the images and metaphors to lead the way ahead of us into the poem. The imagery in itself is not inordinately complex, and the poem’s language is never purely for embellishment. Its accessibility and directness are some of the things that help to most firmly establish the emotional tenor and outlook of the poem, from the opening quatrain’s nearly unbearable kiss that dissolves into air almost as quickly as it’s bestowed, to the scent of “musk/ From hidden grapevine springs” spilling downhill, as though it, too, was magnetized by gravity; to the succession of juxtaposed images yoking each bright experience to its opposite—both the “swirl” and the “ache” in gathering sprigs of honeysuckle, both the sweetness and the sting of the rose, the joy and salt, bark and clove, bitterness and burning.
But it is, above all, dissembling artistry— what’s done with form (the art that conceals that it is art), in harnessing the structural, rhythmical and musical qualities to echo the conceptual and emotional instances of the poem’s utterance, that make it heart-stoppingly memorable. Each quatrain’s first three lines (mostly in dactylic meter, occasionally alternating with iambs) have six syllables—a metrical and visual pun, steering the poem, and its subject, to a consideration of that final destination “earthward;” but then there is the fourth line in each stanza with four syllables, as if to introduce the effect as well as the idea of variation and surprise, despite the apparently preordained, despite the inevitability of foreknowledge.
True enough, the givens of human mortality are acknowledged by the poet; but I find further that within the formal elaboration of this idea in the poem, there is an instinctive rebelliousness that belongs wholeheartedly to the “impetuousness” of art and its declaration of fidelity to the lived instant (all that teases us with unbearable sweetness and fire). If we consider how enjambments or runovers occur most typically across lines, and perhaps less frequently between or across stanzas, the occurrence of at least two of the latter in Frost’s poem (between stanzas 1 and 2, 5 and 6, perhaps even between 7 and 8), cannot be viewed as merely accidental. Alfred Corn notes that the enjambment functions to “[summon] up the image of someone taking a long step between separate footholds…almost as though the step taken is a bit of a stretch.”
The effect of its reading then is as an elaboration of that mood we more familiarly recognize from his “Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening,” where the poet/persona considers the seductive invitation of the woods so “lovely, dark and deep” and weighs them against the catalogue of human cares and obligations. In “To Earthward,” the poet is more ripe to the aspect of what it might be “To feel the earth as rough/ To all my length,” addressing his mortality as though it were a lover he would welcome and embrace to more intensely feel the compressed sweetness, the hurt and weight and strength of all that’s brought him, most finally, to himself. But even then, he holds something back from this surrender: a human tenuousness, a stubborn attachment perhaps to what he loves and feels reluctant to leave in the world. In the end, the human imagination resists complete capitulation even at the point of failing or falling. And it is this double pull toward innate gravity and to its transcendence, this tension that rewards the reader in the recognition that besides earth, the self’s other lover is here too: “I lived on air.”
(from "Some Poems I Love Best", Luisa A. Igloria, in
7 x 10: World Poetry Choices by Seven Filipino Poets, ed. Alfred A. Yuson, Libris Books, 2003)
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