In our Craft Capsules series, authors reveal the personal and particular ways they approach the art of writing. This is no. 244.
In the last Craft Capsule, I wrote about the practice of coding painful memories in poetry. Robert Frost is another excellent example of this coding. Some of you may know a lot about Frost’s life, but I was stunned to find out how little I knew. Frost suffered a lifetime of loss. His father died when he was eleven and his mother and firstborn son both died when he was twenty-six years old. At twenty, he had to commit his younger sister to a mental hospital where she died within a decade. He ultimately lost all but two of his six children, including one son who died by suicide.
On his eightieth birthday he was asked, “In all your years and all your travels, what do you think is the most important thing you’ve learned about life?” His answer was: “In three words I can sum up everything I know about life: It goes on.”
Frost suffered from depression, but he did go on. He showed little of his grief directly in his work, but knowing what he experienced, it’s clear how much of it he transformed into art. His poem “Home Burial” is an example. Written in the third person and seemingly a portrait of New England rural life, it brutally captures in dialogue the rift between a husband and wife after the death of their infant child. Although Frost and his wife may not have had this particular dialogue or even this particular conflict, we feel that he knows whereof he speaks.
The poem is also a brilliant illustration of how you can use dialogue as a strategy for presenting a narrative. Both husband and wife speak in the poem, and our hearts go out to both of them—the wife who is devastated by her child’s death and the husband who tries to understand and convince her to moderate her grief and go on living. But she will have none of it.
This short section in which the wife speaks about the husband coming inside after digging their baby’s grave demonstrates how Frost captures the distance between them. The wife is furious at her husband. He is, by turns, imploring and frustrated—and by the end of the poem, furious as well.
[‘]You could sit there with the stains on your shoes
Of the fresh earth from your own baby’s grave
…
‘I can repeat the very words you were saying:
“Three foggy mornings and one rainy day
Will rot the best birch fence a man can build.”
Think of it, talk like that at such a time!
What had how long it takes a birch to rot
To do with what was in the darkened parlor?[’]
Her incomprehension of how her husband can go on—and her fury at him—is wrestled into the containment of iambic pentameter. The emotion is explosive, but the lines are orderly. And look at the structure of those last two lines:
What had how long it takes a birch to rot
To do with what was in the darkened parlor?
Twelve monosyllabic words that are extraordinarily common become almost as convoluted as this couple’s communication. Try reading this aloud. What had how long and to do with what was. These are awkward constructions delivered with a staccato stabbing. And although these words do make sense and are grammatically correct, they convey a feeling of stuttering and incoherence: What had how...with what was. That tangle of w’s and h’s. And then ending that line with two two-syllable words, both words having the stress on the first syllable so we go down and then down again—darkened parlor. Mournful not only in its meaning, but also in its falling sound. A formidable poem!
At a celebration for Frost’s eighty-fifth birthday, the literary critic Lionel Trilling said that Frost is a “terrifying poet.” There are many ways to interpret what Trilling meant, but I think Frost is terrifying in his accuracy. How he cuts right into the truth of grief, how it feels, what it does to us. The novelist Graham Greene said, “There is a splinter of ice in the heart of a writer.” You feel that when you read “Home Burial.” There is so much heat between these characters that Frost offers us with the cool precision of a surgeon.
So read “Home Burial.” And read it aloud. As I always say, read it to a family member or a friend or just read it to your goldfish, or a tree, or a photo. You learn so much by reading aloud.
And try writing your own poem that hinges on dialogue. What do the people in the poem say? What don’t they say? How does their conversation address and avoid their grief?
Ellen Bass’s most recent collection, Indigo, was published by Copper Canyon Press in 2020. Among her other poetry books are Like a Beggar (Copper Canyon, 2014), The Human Line (Copper Canyon, 2007), and Mules of Love (BOA Editions, 2002). Her poems appear frequently in the New Yorker, the American Poetry Review, and many other journals. Among her awards are fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and four Pushcart Prizes. A Chancellor Emerita of the Academy of American Poets, Bass founded poetry workshops at Salinas Valley State Prison and jails in Santa Cruz, California, and teaches in the MFA writing program at Pacific University. This Craft Capsule is adapted from her online Living Room Craft Talks. To learn more visit ellenbass.com.
image credit: Moriah Wolfe
