Robert Frost. Long-time readers/listeners here will know I love to sing Frost’s early poems as part of this Project. We’ll get back to Frost, but another thing long-timers here know: for me, roundabout is the best mental journey — and there will be a piece of music at the end as we rest from our walk.
Ok, let’s stroll.
It’s a famous midcentury half-hour black & white TV episode. So famous that you don’t have to have seen it to know the recognition scene near the end of its story that has become a modern myth that SF and Fantasy fans like to point out their stories aspire to. Given that, I’m going to assume no one will need a spoiler alert for this 1962 Twilight Zone episode called “To Serve Man.”
The format’s so brief, the story must be told rapidly. We’re told that a race of other-planetary beings have landed on Earth. With retrospectable irony, their leader is described as “Christopher Columbus from another galaxy.” They go about setting things here in benign order with advanced technology. They leave behind a book in their language that seems to be a guide to the extraterrestrials’ efforts. Partway in, Earth’s code-breakers have deciphered the book’s title: To Serve Man. And they seem to be doing just that: ending hunger, gently enforcing world peace, taking selected humans on spaceship rides to their home planet.
Many of you are now speaking — telepathically or aloud — to a device’s screen what is urgently delivered to the story’s human hero once the humans can decrypt more of the book than just the title: “It’s a cookbook!”
I’ve written here often about something I call The Book of Nature. Though not an exclusive American idea, I connect it with the 19th century American “New Thought” movement called Transcendentalism. The Transcendentalists believed that a true scripture of the universe’s higher power was transcribed in nature. By contemplating nature big to small one could discern the highest truths. Our contemporaries who are “spiritual but not (sectarian) religious” may hold to this as a core belief, but it’s likely that every denomination of religious belief can incorporate this too — after all, if The Creator made this, their authorship means there is plausibly something there to be read.
Now we can get back to Robert Frost. Frost no doubt knew Transcendentalist thought, but unlike his fellow great American poet, Emily Dickinson, Frost didn’t hold with its doctrines.* Yes, Frost wrote seemingly “En plein air” about nature often. His early poems, some of the ones I like best, are suffused with the landscape and particulars of New England nature. Did he see a supreme being’s handwriting there?
If so, Frost would be critical of The SB’s penmanship.
Chord sheet so that you can sing this one yourself.
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If we look at this example, “Stars” from Frost’s first book of poems, A Boy’s Will, what do we “read” from nature’s book? The stars come out at night. What is their nature?** “Countless(ly),” we can’t even get the basic stats correct. Oh wait, Frost can see a primary Roman goddess in there: Minerva, the goddess of wisdom and strategy. No, he reconsiders: it’s a statue of Minerva he sees in the stars, a human-made simulacrum — and her marble eyes are the form of sight organs without any such function. So should we look lower down at our earthly landscape?*** Snow covers it profoundly, drifting “as tall as trees” and so obscuring even the ground-level facts. Wind is blowing — the choreographer of this landscape — yet, this dance doesn’t tell a story, it obscures it, though here at last Frost reads a message. That wind, that obscuring snow, is “our fate.” In the most mysterious part of the poem, the second stanza, we cannot see where we’ve walked or where to guide our steps. The gothic part of my nature reads Frost’s “place of rest invisible at dawn” as death. I read the image in this stanza that in such deep and overblown snow, one cannot even see the walk fate will not reveal to a farmhouse graveyard.
Nature acts “with neither love nor hate.” Robert Frost has decrypted The Book of Nature — and all the pages are blank.
Here’s that song at the end of our mental walk where I set Frost’s poem to music with acoustic guitar. You can hear it with the audio player gadget below, or with this backup highlighted link if that gadget is not shown.
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*Frost’s friend and fellow poet Edward Thomas was an exquisite nature poet of his British Isles countryside. In regards The Book of Nature, he’s between Frost and Dickinson for he has a horticulturalist’s specific eye like Dickinson — and his consistent naming of natural details and seeing them as readable symbols indicates he finds them plausibly capable of guidance.
** Astrologers, Biblical Magi, and classical constellation dots-connectors of course are reading that sky in clear text.
***In a changeup meant to fool this writer and singer, my specific winter this year has been oddly empty of any expected Northland winter symbolism. We’ve had next to no snow, only a week or so of bitter sub-zero cold, and I look out today on a sunny brown yard over which squirrels are carelessly playing tag and tree as we rise to our predicted afternoon high of (in Minnesota! In January!) of 55 degrees F.
I’ve been riding my summer bicycle with its summer tires most every day this “winter,” where that bike normally stays hung up high in the back of my shed. Spring in Minnesota is famously snowy, my winter bike with studded knobby tires cannot be put out of the way. Perhaps as long as I leave it by the door we may continue to have a mild winter.
