Published: June 15, 2008 11:15 pm            

The Off Season: You shall be reading this, ages and ages hence …

I realize that on a scale of 1 to 10 my concern over a line of Robert Frost’s poetry rates in negative numbers, but, to paraphrase the wise New England poet, I am taking the road “less traveled by.”

Unless you’re among my youngest readers, I imagine that it’s been a while since you’ve slumped at a high school English classroom desk and listened to a teacher carry on about Frost, the four-time Pulitzer Prize-winning poet who penned such classics as “Mending Wall,” “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” and “The Road Not Taken.” Even had you spent most of your junior year checking out the insides of your eyelids, I would say there’s a good chance you can even recognize a line or two from Frost’s work.

I won’t claim that I understand everything I’ve read by him, but I love Frost’s poetry, and I wish that more of my students did too. I taught a unit about him this past year to lukewarm reviews, but it seems as though the kids who enjoyed him really got into his rustic charm, his life lessons drawn from nature, his ability to make his poetry sound as if you are speaking with the man as he sits in a front porch rocker, a pitcher of sweet tea at his feet.

It seems as though we’ve lost a lot of respect for Frost, certainly our nation’s all-time poet laureate. To be sure, the three titles I have already mentioned are ranked among the top 20 most reprinted poems in the country every year, so some folks are still reading lines from this most contradictory, and sometimes dark, wordsmith. But state standardized tests ignore him, teachers don’t have the time to teach him, and his simple messages of self-reliance and privacy seem to be out of touch with many of us today.

That is unless you can have a party at his house. Numerous news agencies recently covered a story about the nearly 50 youngsters who broke into Frost’s summer home near Ripton, Vermont, in January for an impromptu beer party. They trashed the place, destroying dozens of items, burned furniture, vomited and urinated on carpets, and discharged fire extinguishers. Frost stayed at Homer Noble Farm during the summers between 1939 and his death in 1963, using a cabin on the property to pen many of his most famous poems; today it is owned by Middlebury College.

The intruders left behind nearly $11,000 in damage, so after the suspects were rounded up, local prosecutor John Quinn decided that not only should 28 of the offenders — all but two being teenagers — help pay for the repairs and do a little community service, they should also be forced to attend classes at the local college and listen to Frost biographer Jay Parini discuss Frost’s poetic messages.

At first, I thought that Quinn’s idea was a poor one; it’s long been understood that using basic skills like reading and writing as punishments only make offenders hate them all the more instead of nurturing a love for them. I believed that forcing Frost down these kids’ throats as part of a plea agreement might lead them into a life of book burning or graffiti painting, in iambic pentameter, of course. But that isn’t apparently true.

According to an Associated Press account, only 11 of the offenders showed up for the first session, but Parini still made it count by reading a line from “The Road Not Taken,” the opening words where Frost mentions his now-famous “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood.”

“This is where Frost is relevant,” Panini says. “This is the irony of this whole thing. You come to a path in the woods where you can say, ‘Shall I go to this party and get drunk out of my mind?’ Everything in life is choices.”

In the stories I read, the youngsters’ comments about the poetry sessions were mostly positive. One said: “After this, I’m thinking about staying out of trouble, because this is my last chance.”

So perhaps in a way that Frost could have never realized, he still is teaching young readers something, still quietly passing his message to us.

The main reason I started this column was to write about perhaps Frost’s most quoted line of poetry, one that I certainly wish more folks who decide to quote him would make certain is placed in proper context. That line is: “Good fences make good neighbors.”

Used for years in magazine articles, newspaper stories, speeches, and on-line blogs, even in reference to the apparent need we have for a massive security fence between the United States and Mexico, I’ve seen those words often misquoted.

In case it’s been years since you’ve read “Mending Wall,” let me quickly refresh you. In the poem, the narrator, whom we should always presume is Frost, meets with a neighbor in the springtime to repair a rock wall that separates their properties. As they work, Frost attempts to convince his neighbor — whom he refers to as “an old stone savage” — that the wall, at least in places, isn’t necessary.

The neighbor tells him, not once, but twice, that “good fences make good neighbors.” Frost himself was not convinced of it. He says, “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall. That wants it down …”

So, even though, as hundreds of sources tell us, Frost says the words, he didn’t believe the adage to be true at all.

I have an idea: If we want to deal out justice to folks for misquoting Robert Frost, or for throwing up on his writing table for that matter, let’s make them read poetry. But let’s make it some of the lines I wrote when I took a college poetry-writing class years ago in pursuit of my English degree.

Believe me, that would be real punishment.

You can contact Mike Lunsford at hickory913@aol.com or by regular mail C/O the Tribune-Star, PO Box 149, Terre Haute, IN 47808..

        

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