A Visit to the Robert Frost Stone House Museum
A few days ago my husband and I visited one of the three Robert Frost homes http://www.frostfriends.org open to the public, this one just north of Bennington, Vermont, where the poet is buried. Here’s a view of the house though I couldn't fit in the birches, which of all the trees Frost wrote about I think he treated the most tenderly. He said, “I never go down the shoreline to New York without watching the birch trees to see if they live up to what I say about them in my poems.”
The walls are stone and plaster, the floors wide pine planks. There’s some original furniture,and the windows are tall and narrow with views toward fledging apple orchards. The Friends are trying to buy back some surrounding farmland and plant trees that Frost and his son, Carol, grew: MacIntosh, Northern Spy, Golden Delicious, and Red Astrachan. One room had a display of woodcuts by J. J. Lankes and another was devoted to family photos and brief histories, a bit rosier than the Frost bios I’ve read -no family dramas with, for instance, guns --and which we get a hint of in the words Frost chose for his gravestone: I had a lover’s quarrel with the world. How much love, and how much quarrel depends on the beholder. Darkness pervades many poems and most readers feel a chill in the last lines of “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” The former dining room is dedicated to the poem, which Frost wrote there one hot June 1922 morning. Here’s a copy of the original manuscript.
And the lilac bush that cast shadows that morning is still there, though only surrounding asters are now in bloom.
Visiting made me want to read more of Frost’s thoughts on writing as well as his poems. He believed that children who missed Mother Goose would never be predisposed to poetry. He said that it didn’t take a long time to write his poems, “but it takes a long time to live them,” and part of his depression may have come from the many years he wrote before he felt his work was appreciated: his first poem was published at nineteen, but it was another twenty years before he published a book. He was, of course, an advocate for rhyme and meter and wrote of his poetry as a commitment to convention, or “a series of reckless commitments:” once a line was put down, he had to follow that meter and look for repeated sounds. He wanted to compose “one or two poems that would be hard to get rid of.” Most would agree he did.
For more Poetry Friday posts, please visit: http://karenedmisten.blogspot.com/2010/09/poetry-friday-im-hosting-and-apparently.html