Frost and Snow

Of our great American poets, Robert Frost was the one who was held up to me as a young person on the edge of adolescence as the ideal, as the paragon, as the American poet par excellence. Walt Whitman was deemed too much—and in more or less every way—for adolescents, not to mention pre-adolescents, to digest. (In that, our English teachers were probably more right than even they knew.) William Cullen Bryant and his enormous and magnificent oeuvre was unstudied and unnoticed, his very name left unmentioned other than with reference to the high school in Astoria named after him. The other greats I later came to know and respect—and foremost among them James Russell Lowell and Henry Longfellow—were mostly skipped past as well. But Frost—he was the one we all watched at President Kennedy’s inauguration in 1960 (I was in second grade, but remember this clearly) declaiming “The Gift Outright” from memory when the glare of the bright sunlight made it impossible for him to read the poem he had written especially for the occasion. He, we were told, was to poetry what JFK was to politics: the apotheosis of his profession, the one to whom all others in the game were inevitably to be compared and no less inevitably to be found wanting.

I mention Frost today because a poem of his came right back to me the other day when we experienced the first winter storm of any consequence we’ve had in several years. As the snow fell and only the contours of what lay beneath the blanket of white remained visible, I felt a surge of…of what? Not exactly nostalgia. Melancholy, even less so. But a kind of wistfulness that I hadn’t felt in a while, a sense that the universe was speaking through the storm and reminding me—or rather, all of us—that all the many, many things in the world that appear to divide us—the number of cars we own or the size of our homes, but also less tangible things like the number of diplomas hanging on our walls or the size of our stock portfolios—that all of those things are purely cosmetic in nature, all details that together constitute the outer shell that, at least most of the time, prevents us from looking at our neighbors and friends, and at each other, carefully, respectfully, and thoughtfully. As the snow fell, the world became quiet. At a certain point, the light began to fade. The air all around, chilly already, became even colder. And still the snow fell, covering the earth with a white blanket of peacefulness and serenity. Joan and I put on our winter boots and went for a walk around the neighborhood. We walked for half an hour and didn’t see a living soul. We might as well have been on the moon. Except that the moon is covered in space dust and grey rock, and Reed Drive was covered, at least for a while, with the whitest of snow.

And then Frost came to call. I expected him, of course. (Whitman, at least with respect to myself, is a purely summertime visitor. Bryant, if he comes at all, shows up in the fall. The others, I hardly ever see at all these days.) But when Frost appeared in the cold air to speak into my ear so that I alone would hear, he surprised me. I was expecting, of course, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” which I actually know by heart. “Whose woods these are I think I know / His house is in the village though / He will not see me stopping here / To watch his woods fill up with snow.” That was the expected whisper, the predictable message. You all know the rest—the horse thinks its queer to stop without a farmhouse near, then “gives his harness bells as shake / To ask if there is some mistake.” And then, the real point—or what I expected to be the real point: “The only other sound’s the sweep / Of easy wind and downy flake.”  And there Joan and I were watching the snow fall on Reed Drive and the world really was silent except, as Frost knew would be the case, for the soft whoosh of the wind and the imperceptible, non-sound of new snow falling on already fallen snow. So that was the expected message. But poets, or at least great ones, more or less never deliver the expected message.

Do school children still learn those words by heart in sixth grade? Probably not. But why am I even writing about that poem when Frost was in an entirely different mood and whispered into my ear a poem I once also knew by heart, although I only learned it later on in tenth or eleventh grade. “Desert Places” is a great poem, one of Frost’s best. Written in 1933 and published in 1934, then eventually included in his 1936 collection A Further Range,” there was a time when “Desert Places” was known to all Americans, or at least those who had lately been in tenth or eleventh grade. I learned it then, have occasionally returned to it over the years, but was completely unready to hear the great man himself declaiming it—to me alone, apparently—from his spectral perch just overhead in the white sky.

I should have known better: we were in much the same place when he stopped by to watch the snow fall on Long Island as he must have been when he wrote the poem in the first place. “Snow falling and night falling fast, oh fast / In a field I looked into going past, / And the ground almost covered smooth in snow/ But a few weeds and stubble showing last.” That was just where we both were as the white blanket fell on the world silently, obscuring all we have wrought in this place other than the occasional bush or blinking electric Santa. And that man-in-the-moon (or rather, man-alone-on-the-moon) sense of the world falling away that I felt was surely the poet’s as well.

“The woods around it have it—it is theirs. / All animals are smothered in their lairs. / I am too absent-spirited to count; / The loneliness includes me unawares.”

I’ve written so often to you all about that concept of loneliness and the subtle way it differs from aloneness, solitude, and seclusion. And I’ve mentioned repeatedly in these letters my great admiration for Admiral Byrd’s 1938 book, Alone, in which he wrote openly—and, I think, inspiringly and beautifully—about his experiences living entirely on his own for five months in a one-room shack in Antarctica. There is something threatening but also comforting, he wrote, about being that alone And so did the combination of frozen whiteness, solitude, and almost complete quiet remind me, yet again, that loneliness is something to be cherished when it occasionally comes to call and neither feared nor reviled. I have no specific desire to live on my own for months on end in a hut in Antarctica. But I also know that loneliness—as specifically distinct from mere aloneness—is the only reliable context for true spiritual and intellectual growth I think I have ever really known.

And that snow-inspired message was the poet’s to his readers in general…and the other night to me personally as well. “And lonely as it is, that loneliness, / Will be more lonely ere it will be less— / A blanker whiteness of benighted snow / With no expression, nothing to express. // They cannot scare me with their empty spaces / Between stars—where no human race is. / I have it in me so much nearer home / To scare myself with my own desert places.”

That was where I briefly was the other evening: in my own desert space, in my own wilderness, alone (but also with Joan by my side in a street lined with houses filled with people and with Robert Frost’s beneficent ghost hovering somewhere overhead), not scared by the experience but elevated by it, almost approaching some momentary version of sanctification, of ennoblement, of sublime privacy. And all this on a snowy evening before the neighbors began shoveling their driveways or the sidewalks in front of their homes, before we lit our Chanukah candles, before we fried our latkes or gave our granddaughters their last presents. That was all still before us as we walked in the snow, and a pleasure it all was to contemplate. But before we returned home there was this long moment of almost otherworldly aloneness in a street “almost covered smooth in snow” when a familiar ghost came to call, to share a moment, and to remind me that, for all loneliness may well be the context for all real emotional or spiritual growth, I’m also beyond fortunate not to be alone at all in the world except when I wish to be.