I hope you feel lucky that you are being saved the pain of my puns as I refrain from them while I go through the Dymock poets. They wouldn't seem apt somehow.
Robert Frost was an American, who moved to England for a long stay at the age of 38 in 1912. He had not been published for long and so new opportunities arose across the sea. Edward Thomas, who will be the final poet I study in the group, became one of his closest friends, with poems written for him, especially after his traumatic death. Before that, though, he stayed with Abercrombie at one point, when he wrote the following poem:
Robert Frost was an American, who moved to England for a long stay at the age of 38 in 1912. He had not been published for long and so new opportunities arose across the sea. Edward Thomas, who will be the final poet I study in the group, became one of his closest friends, with poems written for him, especially after his traumatic death. Before that, though, he stayed with Abercrombie at one point, when he wrote the following poem:
The Sound of Trees
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I wonder about the trees.
Why do we wish to bear
Forever the noise of these
More than another noise
So close to our dwelling place?
We suffer them by the day
Till we lose all measure of pace,
And fixity in our joys,
And acquire a listening air.
They are that that talks of going
But never gets away;
And that talks no less for knowing,
As it grows wiser and older,
That now it means to stay.
My feet tug at the floor
And my head sways to my shoulder
Sometimes when I watch trees sway,
From the window or the door.
I shall set forth for somewhere,
I shall make the reckless choice
Some day when they are in voice
And tossing so as to scare
The white clouds over them on.
I shall have less to say,
But I shall be gone.
To me, it seems, Frost's travelling nature impresses upon this poem. He perhaps recognises in the trees the wish to get 'going', but the inertia causing him to 'never [get] away'. This is just one of the things that the trees make him 'wonder'; what would it be like to never move? Yes, you might grow 'wiser', but would you be happier for it? Perhaps there is a suggestion that if you fall too deeply in love with one place, or one part of nature, you might never want to leave, which is why he suddenly breaks from the reverie into, 'I shall set forth for somewhere'.
Having taken this approach to the poem, the final line now has a different meaning to when I first read it. Then, I took it as an acknowledgement of human mortality, particularly short in comparison to that of trees, or nature itself. Now I see it more as the promise that he shall not become like a tree entirely, as although he will 'have less to say', like the trees, he will not remain where he perhaps is happy, but will move on again, 'gone' to even better things. For if you never try other places, you will never know where you belong, nor can you be truly grateful for something you have not had the chance to miss.
Having taken this approach to the poem, the final line now has a different meaning to when I first read it. Then, I took it as an acknowledgement of human mortality, particularly short in comparison to that of trees, or nature itself. Now I see it more as the promise that he shall not become like a tree entirely, as although he will 'have less to say', like the trees, he will not remain where he perhaps is happy, but will move on again, 'gone' to even better things. For if you never try other places, you will never know where you belong, nor can you be truly grateful for something you have not had the chance to miss.
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