Then the last poem I'm going to read
is a poem just called "On the Porch at the Frost Place,
Franconia, New Hampshire."
Frost became a kind of National Park by his last years.
As you know, developed an incredibly elaborate public
persona, a kind of good-hearted all jolly white haired cracker
barrel.
And this persona had something to do with Frost
because he invented it.
It hid him from a public he feared
and whose love and approval he wanted.
But it didn't represent exactly the Frost
who wrote poems like "Desert Places" and so forth.
And the construction of this literary personality
was one of the major imaginative enterprises
of Frost's late years.
And so it's an extremely elaborate and complicated one
and one runs across it in New England
at almost every literary turn.
It turns out, for example, that there are three Frost Places.
I've now been a visitor by one circumstance or another
at all of them.
Each of them has his favorite Morris chair,
which I imagine conveyed by truck from one to the other
so that it's always there when I arrive.
Two of them have poetry trails which
are places where you can walk in the woods.
And--
[LAUGHTER]
--there'll be a plaque with the poem on it
at the appropriate place, there'll
be a birch tree or a wood pile.
The Frost place in Franconia, New Hampshire,
actually has a place in the woods.
As you come around a corner, you see
a kind of avenue between the trees extending off not--
[LAUGHTER]
And you think to yourself, oh, my god!
Here's the road not taken.
Underneath all this nonsense that Frost helped so much
to participate in are some of the great poems written
in American poetry.
And Frost seems almost to have invented
certain ideas of New England so thoroughly that one summer--
the Frost place at Franconia, New Hampshire,
is different than the others.
And it's not just a little museum,
but they actually invite a poet to come live
in it for two months in the summer and write poems there.
One summer, I was that person.
And occasionally, someone would come there on a pilgrimage
and would look around, and they say, was Frost born here?
Of course, Frost was born in San Francisco
and lived the first 10 years of his life on the West Coast.
But we don't even remember that.
The question, was Frost born here,
makes perfect sense since Frost seems
to have invented all of New England naturally.
He seems to have belonged there forever.
There were also questions like, was that Frost's cat and so
forth which--
[LAUGHTER]
But the Frost place in Franconia is where
Frost moved in his 40th year.
He tells in the poem "New Hampshire"
the circumstances of his coming to live in the house.
He admired it.
He went up to the guy who owned it and said,
I'm going to buy this house from you
and put you in the house down the road.
And the guy said, you know, the hell you are.
And Frost did it, of course.
And five years later, when he moved away,
he restored the guy to the house.
The house stayed in that family for all the intervening years
and was substantially unchanged.
It was lived in by a family who despised
most of 20th century life.
And so added almost nothing to the house.
And the house is almost exactly what
a farmhouse in that remote and comfortless part of New
Hampshire would have been like in 1920.
Frost was there as a young man at 40.
Ezra Pound knew he was good.
A couple of poets in England and a couple of friends
thought he was interesting.
But basically, he was a 40-year-old
who insisted on writing poems, had no public recognition, one
small book published.
And he dragged a large, poor, and uncomfortable family
out there with him and asked them
to live in that kind of isolation and severity
while he persisted in writing many
of the poems for which he's now famous.
That was a five year period of his life
was the most productive in which he wrote
the most of his great poems.
And so the house has a special fascination.
The famous-- the famous miserable family
life of the Frost family as well is palpable in the house.
I had visitors in the house who couldn't sleep upstairs.
I mean, people who would scoff at the notion of ghosts
and spirits but have said, I don't know what it is,
but I ain't sleeping up there.
And it's a place of, therefore, of great interest and power
to, I think, anybody interested in writing, particularly
as somebody who loves to write and who
spends a summer living in it.
And it's impossible to do that without needing
to come to some imaginative terms with it.
That's what this poem is about.
It's called "On the Porch at the Frost Place, Franconia, New
Hampshire."
"So here, the great man stood, fermenting malice and poems.
We have to be nearly as fierce against ourselves as he.
Not to misread by their disguises.
Blue in dawn haze, the tamarack across the road
is new since Frost and 30 feet tall already.
No doubt, he liked to scorch off morning fog
by simply staring through it long enough that what he saw
grew visible.
Watching the dragon come out of the notch,
his children used to call it.
And no wonder he chose a climate whose winter and house whose
isolation could be stern enough to his wrath and pity
as to make them seem survival skills he'd learned on the job,
farming 50 acres of pasture and woods.
For cash crops, he had sweat and doubt and a moralizing rage,
those staples of the barter system.
And these swift and aching summers
like the blackberries I've been poaching down
the road from the house where no one's home.
Acid at first, and each little globe of the berry too taut
and distinct from the others.
Then they swell to hold the riot of their juices.
And briefly, the fat berries are perfected food.
And then they begin to leak and blob.
And under their crescendo of sugar,
I can taste how they make it through winter.
By the time I'm back from a last six berry raid,
it's almost dusk and more and more mosquitoes
will race around my ear, their tiny engines
the speed boats of the insect world.
I won't be longer on the porch than it
takes to look out once and see what I've taught myself
in two months here to discern.
Night restoring its opacities.
Though for an instant, as intense
and evanescent as waking from a dream of eating
blackberries and almost being able to remember it,
I think I see the parts--
haze, dusk, light broken into grains,
fatigue, the mineral dark of the white mountains,
the wavering shadows steadying themselves,
separate then joined, then seamless.
The way, in fact, Frost's great poems, like all great poems,
conceal what they merely know and are predicaments.
However long it took to watch what I thought I saw,
it was dark when I was done everywhere and on the porch.
And since nothing stopped my sight, I let it go."
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you.