115“strangeness from my sight”
Robert Frost and the Fun in How You Say a Thing
o forth, under the open sky, and list / To
Nature ’s teachings.” Though the advice and the meter fit, Robert Frost (1874–
1963) could never have penned this, with its clichés and archaic “list” for “lis-
ten.” William Cullen Bryant, the popular nineteenth-century poet and journal-
ist, was musing on mortality and coined this antidote that Frost ’s mother, herself
a mystically inclined poet, would quote at home. She also recited Bryant ’s “To
a Waterfowl” so often that one day at thirteen, cutting leather in a shoemaker’s
shed, Robbie found he could say the whole poem by heart. When Frost later
went forth under the open sky, Nature ’s teachings caught his eye and ear, but
in quite another idiom:
Speaking of contraries, see how the brook
In that white wave runs counter to itself.
It is from that in water we were from
Long, long before we were from any creature.How he arrived at shaping such sentences shows American poetry evolving
into twentieth-century speech.
Born in San Francisco when Emerson and Whitman were flourishing, Frost
lived to speak a poem at John F. Kennedy’s 1961 inaugural. This homespun poet,
however, had uneven beginnings. While his mother lavished attention, his father
was given to unstable employment, political adventuring, gambling, drinking,
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