Sunday, February 03, 2008
Opinion, Stephanie Ramage

What 50 Said

Robert Frost knew how it was to be young and full of fire...

By Stephanie Ramage

Robert Frost knew how it was to be young and full of fire and he knew about the loneliness of adulthood that drives one out into the cold night, to walk with only the biting wind and the frozen, distant stars for company; he knew the feeling of standing solidly on the earth in middle age, when one realizes finally that all the stinking trouble one has been through was the result of a choice that, even despite all the nastiness, was probably, in the end, the right choice to have made.

And so it was with a special heartbreak that I read of how, a couple of weeks ago, about 50 underage drinkers broke into a Vermont farmhouse where Frost once spun his spells. They vomited and spat all over its interior, breaking windows and burning furnishings. Later, upon arrest, one of them asked a police sergeant if he could have his mug shot to post on his MySpace page.

In that corner of our lives occupied by literature, music and art, we can find some small comfort for our sorrows, because these are the things that remind us of our shared humanity. To surrender such holy ground is to give up on being able to act with dignity and compassion. My feeble words fail me. So here are some from a better mind and heart:

Birches

When I see birches bend to left and right
Across the lines of straighter darker trees,
I like to think some boy’s been swinging them.
But swinging doesn’t bend them down to stay.
Ice-storms do that. Often you must have seen them
Loaded with ice a sunny winter morning
After a rain. They click upon themselves
As the breeze rises, and turn many-coloured
As the stir cracks and crazes their enamel.
Soon the sun’s warmth makes them shed crystal shells
Shattering and avalanching on the snow-crust
Such heaps of broken glass to sweep away
You’d think the inner dome of heaven had fallen.
They are dragged to the withered bracken by the load,
And they seem not to break; though once they are bowed
So low for long, they never right themselves:
You may see their trunks arching in the woods
Years afterwards, trailing their leaves on the ground,
Like girls on hands and knees that throw their hair
Before them over their heads to dry in the sun.
But I was going to say when Truth broke in
With all her matter-of-fact about the ice-storm,
I should prefer to have some boy bend them
As he went out and in to fetch the cows--
Some boy too far from town to learn baseball,
Whose only play was what he found himself,
Summer or winter, and could play alone.
One by one he subdued his father’s trees
By riding them down over and over again
Until he took the stiffness out of them,
And not one but hung limp, not one was left
For him to conquer. He learned all there was
To learn about not launching out too soon
And so not carrying the tree away
Clear to the ground. He always kept his poise
To the top branches, climbing carefully
With the same pains you use to fill a cup
Up to the brim, and even above the brim.
Then he flung outward, feet first, with a swish,
Kicking his way down through the air to the ground.
So was I once myself a swinger of birches.
And so I dream of going back to be.
It’s when I’m weary of considerations,
And life is too much like a pathless wood
Where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs
Broken across it, and one eye is weeping
From a twig’s having lashed across it open.
I’d like to get away from earth awhile
And then come back to it and begin over.
May no fate willfully misunderstand me
And half grant what I wish and snatch me away
Not to return. Earth’s the right place for love:
I don’t know where it’s likely to go better.
I’d like to go by climbing a birch tree~
And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk
Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more,
But dipped its top and set me down again.
That would be good both going and coming back.
One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.

Stephanie Ramage is news editor of The Sunday Paper.