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November 02, 2007
“Ten Thousand Thousand Fruit to Touch:” Poetry Friday
My instep arch not only keeps the ache,
It keeps the pressure of a ladder-round.
I feel the ladder sway as the boughs bend.
-from “After Apple-Picking” by Robert Frost
I’ve always felt that memorizing a poem is like giving myself a gift. When I find myself unhinged or away from my usual distractions and entertainments, I can repeat poems to myself and spend a little time contemplating something big. Robert Frost’s “After Apple-Picking” is one of the longest poems I’ve memorized. Memorizing Frost’s meter and rhyme schemes isn’t hard—I must know a dozen of his poems—but this one’s more challenging because Frost mixes things up more than he does in other poems. I have always loved “I am drowsing off” at the end of the eighth line, a break in the rhyme scheme that signals a break in reality, a shift from something straightforward to something otherworldly, where all those “magnified apples appear and disappear” in one of the most surreal passages Frost ever wrote. The three lines I quote above bring the whole thing back to earth, where we find the narrator tired but, I think, comfortable. Who hasn’t felt that way at the end of a day? I remember studying this poem in high school as a meditation on death, which it certainly is, but isn’t it more? It’s about how overwhelming life can be, about the complicated and ever-shifting relationship between what we want and what we have—the mystery of life, yes, but also the mystery of our own selves.
Brian helped me memorize this poem years ago. He’d feed me lines as I stumbled along; I find it more difficult to memorize poems without his help. I spend a lot of time with this one in the fall, when I am baking pies or raking leaves or driving across the city on a day that is sunny and crisp—a day like today. With a death in the extended family this past week and Lucas’s eighth birthday tomorrow, I am meditating, too. Life is overwhelming and it is hard and it is good.
Maybe I just need more coffee.
[For more meditation, see the round-up over at Mentor Texts.]
Posted by adrienne at November 2, 2007 12:25 PM
Comments
Cheers to you, Adrienne, on your memorization and Lucas's birthday and the need for more caffeine (*hoists mug of tea in air*). I like that poem, too, although I went with a different Frost poem today - "Nothing Gold Can Stay."
So many of his poems ask "what to make of a diminished thing", n'est-ce pas?
Posted by: Kelly Fineman at November 2, 2007 01:16 PM
I find myself memorizing poems for reasons I don't understand, but this is the best one I've heard yet: because it's giving myself a gift. Thanks for the definition, and I love this one, too!
Posted by: TadMack at November 2, 2007 02:07 PM
I used to love memorizing poetry, especially Shakespeare. And now...I don't. But I will. I like your challenge the best of all the reading/writing/living challenges I've heard about lately. (I know, you didn't directly issue a challenge, but I heard one!) So I'm going to find one of the poems I've copied out into my poetry journal and copy it into my head this month, a little at a time.
Poke me about it, Adrienne, please.
Posted by: Sara at November 2, 2007 03:47 PM
I posted about this same poem a couple of weeks ago. I'm so glad to hear you gave yourself this gift. Nice to hear your thoughts.
Posted by: Jama Rattigan at November 2, 2007 04:49 PM
hey, Adrienne. Memorizing poems is such a good idea; I haven't done it since high school. I might have to remedy that. I'll start small.
Many happy returns of the day to Lucas. Junior just turned 8 last week. 8 is good.
Posted by: Susan at November 2, 2007 09:20 PM
A poem that makes sense to those other than the author! What a concept. And a gift to one's self indeed.
Posted by: chuck at November 2, 2007 10:25 PM
So much to respond to!
Sara, You copy poems into a poetry journal??? So do I! I was so excited to see that someone else does the same thing.
Sara and Susan, You're inspiring me to want to memorize a poem this month, too. I might memorize Wallace Stevens' "The Snowman." I can remember the first line, and I've always wanted to learn the rest.
Susan, Happy birthday to Junior!
Kelly, You are so right about Frost's themes. I read that big ol' three-volume biography of him by Lawrance Thompson a few years back, and it seems to me that Frost might have been on of those souls who is generally dissatisfied. "Nothing Gold Can Stay" is a good poem, by the by, although I'd be hard-pressed to find a Frost poem I don't like.
Jama, I've been off Poetry Friday for a few weeks, so I've been missing all kinds of wonderful. I'm glad to be getting back in the loop.
Chuck, Uh, oh. You won't like that the next poem I intend to memorize is a Stevens. It's one of his that makes sense, though.
Posted by: adrienne at November 3, 2007 09:48 AM
Ooh, I want to memorize a poem too! Thanks for the inspiration, and for once again reminding me how much I love Robert Frost. Dissatisfied, indeed, but at least he was eloquent about it.
Posted by: eisha at November 3, 2007 12:39 PM
Hmmm...you've given me an idea. We are doing Poetry Friday in my classroom this year. Just spending the last half hour of Friday reading and sharing poetry. (Talk about a gift to oneself!!!) Maybe next week I'll recite a poem for the kids and then invite/challenge them to memorize a poem. Yeah! That's what I'm going to do!
Posted by: Mary Lee at November 4, 2007 06:14 AM
Just to keep myself honest, I'm going on the record to say that the poem I'm memorizing is Gerard Manley Hopkins' God's Grandeur. Because I want to be able to say that "ah! bright wings" at the end.
Posted by: Sara at November 6, 2007 09:08 AM
Excellent!
I am going to try to memorize "The Snow Man" by Wallace Stevens. It's pretty short, but oh, so good:
http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15745
Also seasonal.
Posted by: adrienne at November 6, 2007 09:40 AM