On Depth & Robert Frost – A Review

May 27

Today I have discovered something marvelous.

Well, discovered is a strong word—it’s a poem, a famous one at that. And well, I suppose “today” isn’t the right thing to say either. Seeing as I read it about four-years ago when I was fresh out of college.

Regardless, in this moment I have found myself completely baffled by the beauty of a poem. Something I didn’t ever even notice the first time I read it. The work in question? “A Servant to Servants” by Robert Frost. Yes, that Robert Frost, the two-roads-diverged-in-a-yellow-wood-and-I guy, the poem misunderstood by English teachers and their kids across America.

Oh, don’t make that face at me. You’re telling me you didn’t know that you misunderstood the whole point to “The Road not Taken.” Okay, but we gotta do this real quick because I want to talk about “A Servant to Servants.”

So, most people read “The Road not Taken,” as a sort of praise of striking out and doing things “your own way” right? How taking a rarer path can lead to a better more satisfied life? Well. That’s really not what Frost is going for. But don’t worry you’re not the only one who got it wrong.

Robert Frost was good friends with Edward Thomas, a writer and poet of his own merit. Unfortunately, Thomas isn’t as famous for his works today as he is for his relationship with Frost. Which is sad, because a lot of his work is hauntingly beautiful (plus, he sort of kickstarted Frost’s whole career).

Frost and Thomas used to take walks together in the woods of England, and whenever they came to a fork in the road, Thomas would hem-and-haw about which path they should take. Frost felt like the paths often ended up in the exact same place, or at the very least took them on a similar trip, and would lament at how indecisive Thomas was when it came to something so pointless.

Which, to be honest, I relate to both people in this argument.

Frost and Thomas could not be more different though. When Frost decided to move his family from the U.S. to either Vancouver or England, the decision was made on a literal coin toss. Whereas Thomas couldn’t decide if he should go to therapy or not after he had already been going (and making progress) for a year.

Frost and Thomas made plans to buy farmland in the U.S. and be neighbors who lived in the woods. A dream all besties have at some point or another. The difference was, these two were serious. Frost and Thomas were debating this decision at 40 and 36 years old respectively. But before they could make a choice, news hit that England had declared War on Germany.

This affected Frost and Thomas differently. Frost decided that he should head back to the US with his family before the war came to him, and Thomas… well, he was indecisive.

It wasn’t until 1915 that either of them fully made up their minds. In the past year, Frost and Thomas’s poetic careers began to take off, making it a good time to go. But Thomas could not shake the war from his mind.

Thomas was constantly thinking about men braver than him (presumably younger too) who were fighting for his country while he wrote critiques and poetry. He still went on walks with Frost, but was becoming violent and depressed.

Frost, not fully sensing the gravity of it, decided to write Thomas a poem, called “Two Roads.” Frost called the poem a joke. It was intended for a critical eye who would look deep into its contradicting ironies and realize, “hey, wait a minute!”

Frost wanted Thomas to realize no matter which road he took, he’d always wish he took the other. Something he said to him a lot on their walks together. But, Thomas didn’t take it that way. He instead saw it as an arrow piercing his greatest insecurities.

These insecurities, it seemed, are what ended up forcing Thomas to finally make a choice. To enlist and serve, that was in 1915. Two years later, a year before the war ended, Thomas was killed in France, and Frost was heartbroken.

“Two Roads,” which is now called “The Road not Taken,” became an intense success, even outside of literary crowds. When Frost attended college lectures on it, the class took the poem very seriously and with the same emotional weight as Thomas.

Frost is one of America’s greatest poets, but he’s also one of the most misunderstood, something I can definitely attest to since I too misunderstood “The Road not Taken” and I performed it at a spoken-word poetry contest. Woops.

That of course was before I had my English degree. I could never make the same blunder after four-years of focused higher education, right?

So, when I first read North of Boston the fall after I graduated, I thought there were 4 or 5 good poems and then a lot of cloying nonsense.

I am here today to tell you I’m a fool. But, going into detail about the 18 poems in this collection isn’t my goal. Instead, I just want to spend a brief moment on “A Servant to Servants.”

Upon its release, “A Servant to Servants” didn’t receive too much critical praise. There was early recognition that it had great ideas though, namely in the line “The best way out is always through.” More attention was paid to his other works, such as “Home Burial” and “Mending Wall.”

The poem is less poetry and more short story. The entire poem is told from the perspective of an unknown housewife who is talking to what amounts to a construction worker who is camping on her front lawn. We know very little about her except that she recently moved to a lakeside cottage with her husband, Len. Together they’ve set up a small AirBNB together and are currently hosting some men working on building out the highway.

The speaker laments that she doesn’t get a break and has been through the ringer and she just wants to have some time to rest. I should also mention that she is… blessed with the gift of gab. There’s a lot that really makes this poem for me, and I highly recommend giving it the five minutes it deserves, but there is one moment I want to unpack.

It’s in the very beginning of the poem, our speaker is telling the lawnman that with all the work she has she “can’t express [her] feelings any more” (ln 7). She goes on to say:

It’s got so I don’t even know for sure

Whether I am glad, sorry, or anything.

There’s nothing but a voice-like left inside

That seems to tell me how I ought to feel,

And would feel if I wasn’t all gone wrong.

You take the lake. I look and look at it.

I see it’s a fair, pretty sheet of water.” (ln 11-17)

This concept, this being so exhausted you don’t know how to feel, being so worn out that the beautiful lake you see everyday is reduced to a pretty sheet of water, is well, it’s something amazing to see laid out so well on paper.

While discussing her mental haze, the speaker goes on to say that her husband thinks the “way out is always through,” like she’s just gotta keep pushing and pushing until she can escape it. But the speaker then says, “And I agree to that, or in so far / As that I can see no way out but through— / Leastways for me—and then they’ll be convinced” (ln 58-59).

It can be hard when you’re in a funk, and the beauty of the world has been sucked out of you, and you don’t know how to feel anything so you pretend to feel whatever it is you think you ought to. And with all that going on, the people that love you mean well when they tell you that you gotta get out. But all you can do is sit there in that muck while you’re fully aware of what “out” looks like. You know you want to get out, it’s just a question of how, but “through” isn’t much of a tutorial.

I find a lot of time in my life in a funk, where vast lakes are just pretty sheets of water, and where I don’t have the capacity for feeling anything. In the past I’ve described this as a numbness, in reality it’s the choking spiral of depression.

Sometimes the depth of the world seems impossible. Like everything is just a play façade, like the distant trees and mountains and blue sky are all just painted on. As if everything you see is knuckle-tapping hollow or crammed with Styrofoam, and that everything includes me.

In order to avoid a Frostian misunderstanding, I want to be clear. I don’t mean everything feels fake. It’s just lost its depth, its flat. I never really had the ability to put it into words. But seeing how Frost did, well. It just means a lot, I guess.

On Depth & Robert Frost – A Review

On Moving On – A Review

On Muses – A Review

Something Sorensen