Why garden? Why poeticize?
Robert Frost and his much younger contemporary, Mary Oliver, both distinguished themselves as poets of nature, and also as poets whose audiences have far exceeded college classrooms and highbrow bookstores. This 1993 essay compares two of their best-known poems, Frost’s “Mending Wall” and Oliver’s “Writing Poems.”
Gardening, human beings govern nature with art. Human art mediates between the gardener and nature. Poetry mediates among the poet, nature, and readers.
Robert Frost knows this. His neighbor tells him, “Good fences make good neighbors.” It is Frost’s neighbor’s father’s saying, a specimen of traditional or folk wisdom. “He will not go behind his father’s saying,” Frost says of him, who repeats himself, and his father. Were Frost’s neighbor a scientist, he would study cloning, an art of exact replication. Frost’s neighbor’s soul finds its deepest satisfaction in remembering. Memory can have the drawback of mischaracterization. Frost’s neighbor calls a wall a fence, and pronounces it good.
Frost’s deepest satisfaction lies elsewhere. Frost wants the exact word, the one that fits the nature of the thing. Frost wants to go behind the sayings of the father. Frost knows of something older than fathers, and the conventions or traditions of fathers. Nature is older than the oldest human father, even older than the oldest remembered human father.
“Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.” Nature is what doesn’t love a wall. Nature in its entropy acts beyond human seeing and hearing, undoing the work of even the most vigilant and industrious men. Nature is somewhat mysterious, and behind it might be some greater mystery.
Nature’s entropy does not so threaten human works as to force men into a grim struggle for survival. Mending walls is “just another kind of outdoor game.” Together, men and nature play the outdoor version of Penelope’s indoor game of weaving and unweaving. But in Frost’s outdoor game there are no threatening suitors, no need for a rescuing hero.
Frost wants to know, Why play? He wants to know the reason for the game—what he’s walling in or out, and whether someone will take offense at his handiwork. His neighbor, “like an old-stone savage armed,” divides the world into his own and yours, us and them. He respects ancient divisions of politics and property. Frost is not so respectful, seeing the nature shared by all.
A poem, as much an artifact as a wall, another sort of line built on another form of sand, traditionally marking out the wisdom of fathers, limning the spiritedness of political men. In the Iliad the Muse sings of the high-hearted rage of Achilles, indignant at an instance of unjust, conventional rule in a war sparked by erotic disappointment, that is, by both the frustration of erotic nature and an affront to convention. Is there also something that doesn’t love a poem?
As a poet, Frost must wonder at the playful entropy of nature. Will it undo his artifacts? He approaches nature lightly, shrewdly, circumlocutiously, even as he questions human artifice and convention. He takes care not to question too blatantly. He lets his neighbor have the last word, lest a good neighbor become a savage and not merely resemble one, on occasion. The poet-gamesman plays the game in order to moderate the latent savagery of the convention—therefore ordinary, therefore natural—man.
Mary Oliver takes a less prudent tone. She does not question convention. She dismisses it in two sentences, each a kind of negative command. “You do not have to be good” and “You do not have to walk on your knees” are thou-shalt-nots disputing efforts founded on another set of thou-shalt-nots. Eros replaces spiritedness or thumos, and does so directly, without conventional guides. Let “the soft animal of your body love what it loves”; “the world offers itself to your imagination” as a complaisant lover does. You are part of “the family of things,” a nature unmediated by the wisdom of fathers. This unusual family has no parents, only siblings. It is as pliable to desires as one’s imaginings are. Olivier assumes imaginings to be benign. She does not see that if all things constitute a family, all corporeal eroticism is incest. Or if she does, she regards that as just another taboo to be negated.
Oliver’s optimism comes from her replacement of Frost’s natural law, the Second Law of Thermodynamics, the law of dissociation, with the law of love, the law of association. Bees go to rhododendron flowers in Eros’ “invisible line”; “otherwise death is everywhere.” It’s as if she’s taken Neoplatonism and made it corporeal, in the way Marx took Hegel’s dialectic and made it material. Her problem is even more acute than Marx’s, and idealism of corporeality being even less plausible than a materialist dialectic.
The bees are like poets, Oliver supposes; they appear in a poem titled “Writing Poems.” Oliver wants poetry to be natural or erotic, not a wall against death but a beeline or a lifeline through it.
Of these two poets, Frost is older, tougher, probably wiser. He knows that poems are artifacts, no matter how natural the impulse urging poets on. If nature is the deepest human satisfaction, and human beings can apprehend nature directly, what need is there for poems? Oliver’s left hand does not know what her writing hand is doing.
Oliver wants to say, nature associates as well as it dissociates, lives as a precondition of dying. Poems are on the side of spontaneous life, the eros that always says yes. But she says this in a poem, not in a spontaneous outpouring. Idealism of the body leads to a didacticism of the erotic.
The canny gamesman Frost smiles at Oliver, the earnest erotic. Eroticism is no substitute for moralism, he tells her; trying to make it that will only confuse the poet. Poetry must never go in a beeline. A one-liner isn’t a poem, and one-line poems teach aphoristically, with an indirectness resembling the dialogues composed by Plato, the wisest erotic. A poet who tries to make a poem go in a beeline will remove the reasons for poetry’s existence.
This is also why gardeners exclude most animals from gardens. This goes for animal bodies soft and hard. Who rules? If not human beings, then it’s no longer a garden. (A garden governed by God would be another matter, and is another story.)
The question, then, is: On what terms will human beings, whether poets or gardeners, govern nature?
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