The best road poems selected by Dr Oliver Tearle
Roads often feature in poetry, as symbols for our lives (the
‘journey’ we are travelling on, whether on our way to something, or
heading away from it), or as markers of mankind’s interaction with
nature. Below are ten of the greatest poems about roads in all of
English literature, each of which does something rather different with
the road or track it presents to us.
John Clare, ‘On a Lane in Spring’. The
title of this poem by one of Romantic literature’s overlooked greats,
John Clare (1793-1864), says it all: Clare describes the things he sees
on a country lane during springtime, his observations tumbling out into
the poem in gleeful abandon and apparent spontaneity.
Walt Whitman, ‘Song of the Open Road’. First published in Whitman’s landmark 1856 collection Leaves of Grass,
‘Song of the Open Road’ celebrates the open road as a democratic place
bringing people together from all walks of life: the road, we might say,
is the great leveller.
A. E. Housman, ‘White in the moon the long road lies’. In
this poem, the king of lugubrious English verse writes about leaving
his beloved, with the road lying ahead of him that ‘leads me from my
love’. And although he trusts that the same road will eventually lead
him back to his love, first he must travel far, far away.
Rudyard Kipling, ‘The Way through the Woods’.
‘They shut the road through the woods / Seventy years ago. / Weather
and rain have undone it again, / And now you would never know / There
was once a road through the woods / Before they planted the trees.’ So
begins this classic Kipling poem about an abandoned road in the woods,
which turns into an almost haunted road in the final stanza, as Kipling
suggests that the road ‘remembers’ the men and horses who used to pass
through it.
Charlotte Mew, ‘The Forest Road’.
Another woodland road poem, but in this 1916 poem, Mew – a poet
associated with the ‘Georgian’ school though also sometimes seen as
proto-modernist – offers an altogether more macabre take on the road, as
the poem’s speaker imagines her lover’s corpse rotting on a hillside.
G. K. Chesterton, ‘The Rolling English Road’.
‘A merry road, a mazy road, and such as we did tread’: written in
opposition to the prohibition of alcohol, this is one of Chesterton’s
most famous poems. The poem celebrates having a few drinks and then
merrily staggering home as almost a national pastime: ‘Before the Roman
came to Rye or out to Severn strode, / The rolling English drunkard made
the rolling English road.’
Robert Frost, ‘The Road Not Taken’. Is this the most misinterpreted poem of the twentieth century?
Frost’s speaker recalls how he came to a fork in the road and opted to
pursue ‘the one less travelled by’. Yet this isn’t quite true: both
possible roads were equal, and Frost’s speaker admits that the idea that
he chose to tread a less popular path is a bit of retrospective
mythmaking. No list of great road poems could be without this.
Edward Thomas, ‘Roads’. ‘I
love roads: / The goddesses that dwell / Far along invisible / Are my
favourite gods.’ So begins this paean to roads by one of the great
English poets of the early twentieth century. The shadow of the First
World War (Thomas enlisted in 1915) can be seen in this poem, with its
reference to ‘all roads’ now leading ‘to France’.
Wilfred Owen, ‘The Roads Also’. Written for the Sitwells’ anthology Wheels
in summer 1918, ‘The Roads Also’ begins with the statement ‘The roads
also have their wistful rest’, with Owen going on to reflect on the way
the many lost lives in the war have impacted upon people back home.
Philip Larkin, ‘No Road’. A
poem called ‘No Road’ in a list of the best road poems? Well, yes,
given how Larkin uses the metaphor of the road to describe a break-up,
this is a fine example of how roads have been used (in countless songs
as well as poems) to denote the distance between two lovers (or would-be
lovers).
Continue to explore the world of poetry with these classic animal poems, these birthday poems, these classic religious poems, and these poems about Oxford.
The author of this article, Dr Oliver Tearle, is a literary
critic and lecturer in English at Loughborough University. He is the
author of, among others, The Secret Library: A Book-Lovers’ Journey Through Curiosities of History and The Great War, The Waste Land and the Modernist Long Poem.
Thursday the 6th of October marks National Poetry Day in the UK. This day which celebrates all things poetic was founded in 1994 by William Sieghart,
the British entrepreneur, publisher and founder of the Forward Prizes
for Poetry. 12 years on, National Poetry Day has got millions of people
across the UK reading, writing and listening to poetry. A variety of live events take place across the country, as well as different online activities. The day has a new theme each year to highlight specific poets and styles of poetry. The theme for 2016 is “messages” and the Forward Arts Foundation are asking people to #sayitwithapoem across social media. One of the biggest celebrations this year is National Poetry Day Live, a free event taking place at London’s Southbank Centre featuring Mercury winning artist and poet PJ Harvey amongst other acts.
To celebrate National Poetry Day here at Ferrovial, we have compiled some of our favourite poems that are inspired by roads. It is interesting to see how each of the poets interpret the metaphor of the road, using it in different ways to conjure different emotions. In some of the poems the symbol of the road is used to represent doubt or uncertainty, reflecting upon life’s different pathways, the fork in the road. Other poems use the image of the road to share a romanticised vision of the world, communicating the excitement and freedom of the open road.
Have a read of the poems, some of them you may know
already, some you may not, but either way we hope you enjoy them and
that it encourages you to discover more poetry this National Poetry Day!
Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road! Healthy, free, the world before me! The long brown path before me, leading wherever I choose!
Henceforth I ask not good-fortune, I am good- fortune, Henceforth I whimper no more, postpone no more, need nothing, Strong and content, I travel the open road.
The earth—that is sufficient, I do not want the constellations any nearer, I know they are very well where they are, I know they suffice for those who belong to them.
Still here I carry my old delicious burdens, I carry them, men and women—I carry them with me wherever I go, I swear it is impossible for me to get rid of them, I am filled with them, and I will fill them in return.
Roads go ever ever on, Over rock and under tree, By caves where never sun has shone, By streams that never find the sea; Over snow by winter sown, And through the merry flowers of June, Over grass and over stone, And under mountains in the moon.
Roads go ever ever on, Under cloud and under star. Yet feet that wandering have gone Turn at last to home afar. Eyes that fire and sword have seen, And horror in the halls of stone Look at last on meadows green, And trees and hills they long have known.
The Road goes ever on and on Down from the door where it began. Now far ahead the Road has gone, And I must follow, if I can, Pursuing it with eager feet, Until it joins some larger way, Where many paths and errands meet.
The Road goes ever on and on Down from the door where it began. Now far ahead the Road has gone, And I must follow, if I can, Pursuing it with weary feet, Until it joins some larger way, Where many paths and errands meet. And whither then? I cannot say.
The Road goes ever on and on Out from the door where it began. Now far ahead the Road has gone. Let others follow, if they can! Let them a journey new begin. But I at last with weary feet Will turn towards the lighted inn, My evening-rest and sleep to meet.
Still ’round the corner there may wait A new road or secret gate; And though I oft have passed them by, A day will come at last when I Shall take the hidden paths that run West of the Moon, East of the Sun.
They shut the road through the woods Seventy years ago. Weather and rain have undone it again, And now you would never know There was once a road through the woods Before they planted the trees. It is underneath the coppice and heath, And the thin anemones. Only the keeper sees That, where the ring-dove broods, And the badgers roll at ease, There was once a road through the woods.
Yet, if you enter the woods Of a summer evening late, When the night-air cools on the trout-ringed pools Where the otter whistles his mate, (They fear not men in the woods, Because they see so few.) You will hear the beat of a horse’s feet, And the swish of a skirt in the dew, Steadily cantering through The misty solitudes, As though they perfectly knew The old lost road through the woods. But there is no road through the woods.
Listen to Rudyard Kipling reading his poem “The Way Through The Woods”.
Our roof was grapes and the broad hands of the vine as we two drank in the vine-chinky shade of harvest France; and wherever the white road led we could not care, it had brought us there to the arbour built on a valley side where time, if time any more existed, was that river of so profound a current, it at once both flowed and stayed.
We two. And nothing in the whole world was lacking. It is later one realizes. I forget the exact year or what we said. But the place for a lifetime glows with noon. There are the rustic table and the benches set; beyond the river forests as soft as fallen clouds, and in our wine and eyes I remember other noons. It is a lot to say, nothing was lacking; river, sun and leaves, and I am making words to say ‘grapes’ and ‘her skin’.
Poetry of The Open Road
by Tamara Broberg
"Oh public road ... You express me better than I express myself." - Walt Whitman, "Song of the Open Road"
In a mobile society, roads have a special meaning to us. They take us
to and from work and school. They take us to visit friends and
relatives. They symbolize rites of passage - birth of a child, first
date, senior prom, wedding, and even death. There is almost always a
road associated with every place we go and every important event in our
lives. Yet, often roads are minor details in our memories of important
moments. Because roads are everywhere, we often forget them. Poets have long recognized the parallels between roads and life.
Often, the references to roads in poetry are metaphorical. They make us
think of our lives and how we have lived them. Some poets portray roads
as the conventional path followed by everyone. Because of this,
following a road is like following someone else's way, not one that you
have chosen. In the poem "The Road Not Taken," Robert Frost compares
choosing the road less traveled with choosing the path in life less
traveled. This, he contends, has made his life better:
I shall be telling this with a sigh Somewhere ages and ages hence: Two roads diverged in a wood and I -- I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.
"The Calf Path," written in 1895 by Sam Walter Foss, was a
popular humorous poem during the early days of the good roads movement.
In it, Foss describes how a crooked path originally carved by a calf
walking home developed into a major road traveled by hundreds of
thousands of people. The poem becomes a moral statement that says:
For men are prone to go it blind Along the calf paths of the mind, And work away from sun to sun To do what other men have done. They follow in the beaten track; And in, and out, and forth, and back.
Other poets portray roads as a source of freedom. While the Frost
poem has a tone of quiet reflection and the Foss poem one of humor, the
Walt Whitman poem "Song of the Open Road" is light-hearted and evokes a
sense of exhilaration brought on by exploring life on the open road:
Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road, Healthy, free, the world before me, The long brown path before me leading wherever I choose.
The "road of life" is a metaphor that almost everyone has heard, and
one that is frequently used by poets. In "Road Life," Reg Saner uses a
cross-country road trip with his family and the people he encounters
while traveling to show his progress through life. Saner sums up his
nostalgic feelings about life on the road and life in general in the
final stanza of the poem:
How do you love them, these touches only the road could imagine! Because the road still tells a good story about small figures pretty much like yours charging against the horizon. And tells how, against astonishing odds often including themselves, most people get where they're going. Even in the hurtle and chinook of the vast swashbuckling diesels you hear it. And, during hushes between, in these small secrets traded by birds.
While
early Americans explored roads on foot and on horseback, modern
Americans are equipped with the automobile, which is meant to help us
get from here to there even faster. Sometimes, however, so many cars
choke our roads that it is impossible to get anywhere. In "Traffic,"
Stephen Dobyns describes being stuck in traffic as being "jammed
together with my enemies, people no better than chunks of wood,
impediments to my dinner, as I was an impediment to theirs." These lines
reflect the feelings of many Americans, who are often rushed to get
things done and don't like anything to get in their way. As roads became more and more important to the American way of life,
the need for a limited-access highway system became more necessary. The
development of the interstate system and other highways made it even
easier to "wander." The whole basis of American life has been to "move
on" and "discover." Interstate highways made it possible for us to get
from here to there even faster by taking away the restrictions - stop
signs, traffic lights, and intersecting traffic. As American cities
developed, roads became less of a mystery and a path of discovery and
more of a representation of escaping the hassles of modern day living.
This idea can be seen in the Tony Hoagland poem, "Perpetual Motion":
Do you hear me, do you feel me moving through? With my foot upon the gas, between the future and the past, I am here -- here where the desire to vanish is stronger than the desire to appear.
James Griffin, a writer in the Federal Highway Administration's
Office of Motor Carriers, wrote a poem entitled "Interstate." Griffin
sees the interstate as a connector of cities, joined by barren
landscapes in between:
Between the passions of cities and pale towns lie unrequited distances empty stretches of unnamed landscape curving and lifting in a sleep of light where the soul travels far out into wide fields and wilderness.
These unrequited distances hold a sense of mystery and even fear of the unknown. Yet, one can still see the sense of discovery. Highways and roads have become the subject of many a modern day poem. In fact, an entire book of poetry entitled Drive, They Said
- edited by Kurt Brown and published by Milkweed Editions in 1994 -
contains poems about Americans, their cars, and the roads they drive.
The book is comprised of poetry written by various American poets. The
poems by Reg Saner, Stephen Dobyns, and Tony Hoagland mentioned above
can be found in this work. While some poets are inspired by roads, others are inspired by the
sights they see while traveling on them. One poet, A.R. Ammons, was
moved to write a book of poetry entitled Garbage while driving down I-95 in Florida, where he spotted a smoldering pile of the stuff. In Garbage
- a work that won both the Bobbitt Prize and National Book Award for
Poetry - Ammons makes general observations about life and the way we
live it. As Walt Whitman wrote in "Song of the Open Road":
Henceforth I whimper no more, postpone no more, need nothing, Done with indoor complaints, libraries, querulous criticisms, Strong and content I travel the open road.
This excerpt shows how roads have come to symbolize the thing that we
as a nation value the most - our freedom. As evidenced by the many
poems named above, roads have different meanings to different people -
some good, some bad. One thing, however, is certain; roads will continue
to be a major part of our lives and will continue to symbolize the
essence of our culture. Tamara Broberg is a writer in the Office of the Associate Administrator for Program Development.
Edward Thomas, Robert Frost and the road to war
When Thomas and Frost met in London in 1913, neither had yet made his
name as a poet. They became close, and each was vital to the other's
success. But then Frost wrote 'The Road Not Taken', which was to drive
Thomas off to war
Matthew Hollis
Edward Thomas and Robert Frost ... so close was their friendship that
they had planned to live side by side in America. Photographs: Cotswolds
Photo Library/Alamy. Digital Image by David McCoy for GNM Imaging
Edward Thomas and Robert Frost
were sitting on an orchard stile near Little Iddens, Frost's cottage in
Gloucestershire, in 1914, when word arrived that Britain had declared
war on Germany. The two men wondered idly whether they might be able to
hear the guns from their corner of the county. They had no idea of the
way in which this war would come between them. In six months, Frost
would flee England for the safety of New Hampshire; he would take
Thomas's son with him in the expectation that the rest of the Thomas
family would follow. So close was the friendship that had developed between them that Thomas and Frost
planned to live side by side in America, writing, teaching, farming.
But Thomas was a man plagued by indecision, and could not readily choose
between a life with Frost and the pull of the fighting in France. War
seemed such an unlikely outcome for him. He was an anti-nationalist, who
despised the jingoism and racism that the press was stoking; he refused
to hate Germans or grow "hot" with patriotic love for Englishmen, and
once said that his real countrymen were the birds. But this friendship –
the most important of either man's life – would falter at a key moment,
and Thomas would go to war.
Thomas
was 36 that summer of 1914, Frost was 40; neither man had yet made his
name as a poet. Thomas had published two dozen prose books and written
almost 2,000 reviews, but he had still to write his first poem. He
worked exhaustedly, hurriedly, "burning my candle at 3 ends", he told
Frost, to meet the deadlines of London's literary editors; he felt
convinced that he amounted to little more than a hack. He was crippled
by a depression that had afflicted him since university. His moods had
become so desperate that on the day he was introduced to Frost, he
carried in his pocket a purchase that he ominously referred to as his
"Saviour": probably poison, possibly a pistol, but certainly something
with which he intended to harm himself. At such periods of despair Thomas would lash out at his family,
humiliating his wife, Helen, and provoking his three children to tears.
He despised himself for the pain he inflicted on them and would leave
home, sometimes for months on end, to spare them further agony. "Our
life together never was, as it were, on the level – " Helen reflected
candidly after his death, "it was either great heights or great depths."
But Edward's heights were not Helen's, and his depths were altogether
deeper. He sought professional help at a time when little was available,
and was fortunate to come under the supervision of a pioneering young
doctor, a future pupil of Carl Jung's, who attempted to treat him using a
talking cure. The clinical sessions had been progressing for a year
when Thomas abruptly turned his back on them. Yet he continued to look
to others to help wrench him from his despondency, believing that a
rescuer would one day emerge. "I feel sure that my salvation depends on a
person," he once prophesised, "and that person cannot be Helen because
she has come to resemble me too much." Such a figure would indeed arrive
to help him in his distress – Robert Frost.
Frost
had moved his family to England in 1912 in a bid to relaunch a stalled
literary career. Then in his late 30s and a father of four, he had
managed to publish only a handful of poems in America's literary
magazines. He had not been sure whether to relocate his family to London
or to Vancouver, so while his wife did the ironing, he had taken a
nickel from his pocket and flipped it. It was heads, which meant London,
and two weeks later the entire family was steaming across the Atlantic. He found a publisher in London for his poems soon enough (partly
subsidised by himself), though few critics gave his work a second look.
But Edward Thomas did. Where other reviewers mistook Frost's verse as
simplistic, Thomas was moved to announce his 1914 volume North of Boston as
"one of the most revolutionary books of modern times". Thomas was a
fearless and influential critic, described by the Times as "the man with
the keys to the Paradise of English Poetry". He had been quick to
identify the brilliance of a young American in London called Ezra Pound,
and instrumental in shaping the early reception of Walter de la Mare,
WH Davies and many others besides; and he was quite undaunted in taking
to task the literary giants of the day if they fell below the mark, be
they Thomas Hardy, Rudyard Kipling or WB Yeats. When Thomas praised Frost, therefore, people began to take note.
North of Boston was a revolutionary work all right.
In a mere 18 poems, it demonstrated the qualities that Frost and Thomas
had – quite independently – come to believe were essential to the making
of good verse. For both men, the engine of poetry was not rhyme or even
form but rhythm, and the organ by which it communicated was the
listening ear as opposed to the reading eye. For Thomas and Frost that
entailed a fidelity to the phrase rather than to the metrical foot, to
the rhythms of speech rather than those of poetic conventions, to what
Frost liked to call "cadence". If you have ever listened to voices
through a closed door, Frost reasoned, you will have noticed how it can
be possible to understand the general meaning of a conversation even
when the specific words are muffled. This is because the tones and
sentences with which we speak are coded with sonic meaning, a "sound of
sense". It is through this sense, unlocked by the rhythms of the
speaking voice, that poetry communicates most profoundly: "A man will
not easily write better than he speaks when some matter has touched him
deeply," Thomas wrote. Neither Frost nor Thomas claimed to be the first to think about
poetry this way, but their views certainly set them apart from their
contemporaries, who were in furious competition in the charged
atmosphere of the years before the war. Strikers, unionists,
suffragettes, Irish republicans and the unemployed were just some of the
rebellious groups that England strove to tame in 1914, and might very
well have failed to suppress had war not broken out. The young poets
emerging at the same time were, in their own way, also in revolt against
the decrepitude of Victorian Britain. The centre of their activities
was the newly opened Poetry Bookshop in Bloomsbury, from where two rival anthologies were produced: the manicured but popular Georgian Poetry, compiled by the secretary to the first lord of the Admiralty, Edward Marsh, and the radically experimental Des Imagistes,
edited by Ezra Pound. It took no time at all for these parties to
quarrel: so exasperating and offensive did Pound find Georgian verse
that he challenged one of its protagonists to a duel. Thomas
and Frost ploughed their own furrow. Whenever Thomas visited Frost in
1914, they would walk out together on the fields of Gloucestershire;
wherever they walked, they moved in an instinctive sympathy. Frost
called these their "talks–walking": and in them, their conversations
ranged over marriage and friendship, wildlife, poetry and the war.
Sometimes there was no talk and a silence gathered about them; but often
at a gate or stile it started up again or was prompted by the meeting
of a stranger in the lanes – a word or two and they were off again. They
went without a map, setting their course by the sun or by the distant
arc of May Hill crowning the view to the south; at dusk, the towering
elms and Lombardy poplars or the light of a part-glimpsed cottage saw
them home. "He gave me standing as a poet," Frost said of Thomas, "he more than
anyone else." But Frost would more than repay the favour that summer,
recognizing an innate poetry within Thomas's prose writings, and
imploring his friend to look back at his topographic books and "write
them in verse form in exactly the same cadence". Thomas would do just
that, and with his friend's encouragement, started down a path that
would take him away from the "hack" work from which he earned his
living. Jack Haines was a poet and solicitor living nearby in 1914 and
was one of the few people who witnessed the transition at first hand.
"It was towards the end of this same year that Thomas first began to
write poetry himself," Haines recorded, "and he did so certainly on the
indirect, and I believe on the direct, suggestion of Frost, who thought
that verse might prove that perfect mode of self-expression which Thomas
had perhaps never previously found." The poems came quickly, "in a hurry and a whirl": 75 in the first six
months alone. He revised very little, explaining that the poetry
neither asked for nor received much correction on paper. Often he went
back to his prose to find his poem. Sometimes his source was a notebook
that he kept on his walks, at other times his published books; and
though the gap between his initial notes and a verse draft could be many
months, once he began on the poem itself he usually completed it in a
single day. But poetry was not the only thing waking in Thomas in those summer
months as the war began. Late in August, walking with Frost through the
afternoon into the night, Thomas jotted in his notebook: a sky of dark rough horizontal masses in N.W. with a 1/3 moon
bright and almost orange low down clear of cloud and I thought of men
east-ward seeing it at the same moment. It seems foolish to have loved
England up to now without knowing it could perhaps be ravaged and I
could and perhaps would do nothing to prevent it. The war was three weeks old, and for the first time Thomas had
imagined his countrymen fighting abroad, under the same moon as he. He
was indifferent to the politics of the conflict, but he had begun to
weigh up the worth of the land beneath his feet and the way of life that
it supported. What would he do, if called on, to protect it, he asked
himself. Would he do anything at all?
For a year, Thomas would question himself this way. It would take two incidents with Frost to help him to find his answer. In late November 1914, Thomas and Frost were strolling in the woods
behind Frost's cottage when they were intercepted by the local
gamekeeper, who challenged their presence and told the men bluntly to
clear out. As a resident, Frost believed he was entitled to roam
wherever he wished, and he told the keeper as much. The keeper was
unimpressed and some sharp words were exchanged, and when the poets
emerged on to the road they were challenged once more. Tempers flared
and the keeper called Frost "a damned cottager" before raising his
shotgun at the two men. Incensed, Frost was on the verge of striking the
man, but hesitated when he saw Thomas back off. Heated words continued
to be had, with the adversaries goading each other before then finally
parting, the poets talking heatedly of the incident as they walked. Thomas said that the keeper's aggression was unacceptable and that
something should be done about it. Frost's ire peaked as he listened to
Thomas: something would indeed be done and done right now, and if Thomas
wanted to follow him he could see it being done. The men turned back,
Frost angrily, Thomas hesitantly, but the gamekeeper was no longer on
the road. His temper wild, Frost insisted on tracking the man down,
which they did, to a small cottage at the edge of a coppice. Frost beat
on the door, and left the startled keeper in no doubt as to what would
befall him were he ever to threaten him again or bar access to the
preserve. Frost repeated his warning for good measure, turned on his
heels and prepared to leave. What happened next would be a defining
moment in Frost and Thomas's friendship, and would plague Thomas to his
dying days. The keeper, recovering his wits, reached above the door for his
shotgun and came outside, this time heading straight for Thomas who,
until then, had not been his primary target. The gun was raised again;
instinctively Thomas backed off once more, and the gamekeeper forced the
men off his property and back on to the path, where they retreated
under the keeper's watchful aim. Frost contented himself with the thought that he had given a good
account of himself; but not Thomas, who wished that his mettle had not
been tested in the presence of his friend. He felt sure that he had
shown himself to be cowardly and suspected Frost of thinking the same.
Not once but twice had he failed to hold his ground, while his friend
had no difficulty standing his. His courage had been found wanting, at a
time when friends such as Rupert Brooke had found it in themselves to
face genuine danger overseas. The encounter would leave Thomas haunted, to relive the moment again
and again. In his verse and in his letters to Frost – in the week when
he left for France, even in the week of his death – he recalled the
feeling of fear and cowardice he had experienced in that stand-off with
the gamekeeper. He felt mocked by events and possibly even by the most
important friend he had ever made, and he vowed that he would never
again let himself be faced down. When the moment came he would hold his
nerve and face the gunmen. "That's why he went to war," said Frost
later.
But
it would take one further episode in Thomas's friendship with Frost to
push him to war; and it would turn on a work of Frost's that has become America's best-loved poem. In the early summer of 1915, six months after the row with the
gamekeeper, Thomas had still to take his fateful decision to enlist.
Zeppelins had brought the war emphatically to London, but Thomas's eyes
were on New Hampshire, to where Frost had returned earlier that year.
Thomas prepared his mother for the news that he might emigrate, and told
Frost he seemed certain to join him: "I am thinking about America as my
only chance (apart from Paradise)." But Thomas's prevarication got the
better of him once more, and though conscription had yet to be
introduced, he told Frost of the equal pull of the war in France.
"Frankly I do not want to go," he said of the fighting, "but hardly a
day passes without my thinking I should. With no call, the problem is
endless." But the problem was not endless as Thomas thought, for a poem of
Frost's had arrived by post that would dramatically force Thomas's hand:
a poem called "Two Roads", soon to be rechristened "The Road Not
Taken". It finished: I shall be telling this with a sigh Somewhere ages and ages hence: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I – I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference. Noble, charismatic, wise: in the years since its composition, "The
Road Not Taken" has been understood by some as an emblem of individual
choice and self-reliance, a moral tale in which the traveller takes
responsibility for – and so effects – his own destiny. But it was never
intended to be read in this way by Frost, who was well aware of the
playful ironies contained within it, and would warn audiences: "You have
to be careful of that one; it's a tricky poem – very tricky." Frost knew that reading the poem as a straight morality tale ought to
pose a number of difficulties. For one: how can we evaluate the outcome
of the road not taken? For another: had the poet chosen the road more
travelled by then that, logically, could also have made all the
difference. And in case the subtlety was missed, Frost set traps in the
poem intended to explode a more earnest reading. The two paths, he
wrote, had been worn "really about the same", and "equally lay / In
leaves no step had trodden black", showing the reader that neither road
was more or less travelled, and that choices may in some sense be equal. But the poem carried a more personal message. Many were the walks
when Thomas would guide Frost on the promise of rare wild flowers or
birds' eggs, only to end in self-reproach when the path he chose
revealed no such wonders. Amused at Thomas's inability to satisfy
himself, Frost chided him, "No matter which road you take, you'll always
sigh, and wish you'd taken another." To
Thomas, it was not the least bit funny. It pricked at his confidence,
at his sense of his own fraudulence, reminding him he was neither a true
writer nor a true naturalist, cowardly in his lack of direction. And
now the one man who understood his indecisiveness the most astutely – in
particular, towards the war – appeared to be mocking him for it. Thomas responded angrily. He did not subscribe to models of
self-determination, or the belief that the spirit could triumph over
adversity; some things seemed to him ingrained, inevitable. How
free-spirited his friend seemed in comparison. This American who sailed
for England on a long-shot, knowing no one and without a place to go,
rode his literary fortunes and won his prize, then set sail again to
make himself a new home. None of this was Thomas. "It isn't in me," he
pleaded. Frost insisted that Thomas was overreacting, and told his friend that
he had failed to see that "the sigh was a mock sigh, hypocritical for
the fun of the thing". But Thomas saw no such fun, and said so bluntly,
adding that he doubted anyone would see the fun of the thing without
Frost to guide them personally. Frost, in fact, had already discovered
as much on reading the poem before a college audience, where it was
"taken pretty seriously", he admitted, despite "doing my best to make it
obvious by my manner that I was fooling . . . Mea culpa." "The Road Not Taken" did not send Thomas to war, but it was the last
and pivotal moment in a sequence of events that had brought him to an
irreversible decision. He broke the news to Frost. "Last week I had
screwed myself up to the point of believing I should come out to America
& lecture if anyone wanted me to. But I have altered my mind. I am
going to enlist on Wednesday if the doctor will pass me." In walking with Frost, he had written of the urgent need to protect –
and if necessary, to fight for – the life and the landscape around him.
"Something, I felt, had to be done before I could look again composedly
at English landscape," he explained, though he had struggled for some
time to see what it was that might be done. Finally, he understood.
Thomas was passed fit by the doctor, and the same week, in July 1915, he
sat down to lunch with a friend and informed her that he had enlisted
in the Artists Rifles, and that he was glad; he did not know why, but he
was glad. "I had known that the struggle going on in his spirit would end like this," his wife wrote. Thomas brought a unique eye to the English landscape at a moment when
it was facing irreversible change. His work seems distinctly modern in
its recognition of the interdependence of human beings and the natural
world, more closely attuned to our own ecological age than that of the
first world war. Though few of his poems were published in his lifetime, his admirers
have been many: WH Auden, Cecil Day-Lewis, Dylan Thomas, Philip Larkin,
Ted Hughes, Andrew Motion and Michael Longley among them. But perhaps no
poet ever valued him more highly than Robert Frost: "We were greater
friends than almost any two ever were practicing the same art," he
remarked. A war, a gamekeeper and a road not taken came between them,
but by then they had altered one another's lives irrevocably. Thomas
pulled his friend's work from obscurity into a clearing, from which the
American would go on to sell a million poetry books in his lifetime.
Frost, in turn, released the poet within Thomas, and would even find a
publisher for his verse in the United States. That book would carry a
dedication that Thomas had scribbled on the eve of sailing for France:
"To Robert Frost". Frost responded in kind, writing: "Edward Thomas was
the only brother I ever had." At twilight when walking, or at the parting of ways with a friend,
Thomas could feel great sadness that his journey must come to an end: Things will happen which will trample and pierce, but I shall go on,
something that is here and there like the wind, something unconquerable,
something not to be separated from the dark earth and the light sky, a
strong citizen of infinity and eternity. He was killed on the first day of the battle of Arras, Easter 1917;
he had survived little more than two months in France. Yet his personal
war was never with a military opponent: it had been with his ravaging
depression and with his struggle to find a literary expression through
poetry that was worthy of his talents. And on the latter, at least, he
won his battle.
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Poetry on the Road 2010
Medium: Print Year: 2010 Client: Poetry on the Road Team: Friederike Lambers, Boris Müller, Florian Pfeffer
Poetry on the Road
is an international literature festival which is held every year in
Bremen, Germany. From 2002 — 2013, I was commissioned to design a visual
theme for the festival. While the theme itself was changing, the
underlying idea for the visuals was always the same: All graphics were
generated by a computer program that turned texts into images. So every
image is the direct representation of a specific text. The design and
the development process were a collaboration with the design agency one/one.
The metaphoric theme of the 2010 Poetry on the Road visual is a mad
origami master. Every poem is represented as a data sculpture made from
virtual paper. So this year, we don't have a single key visual but a
sequence of individual graphics that represent a single poem. This is
also reflected on the design level – a number of poster variations were
produced for the festival.
The concept in a nutshell: a long paper strip that is folded in an
extremely complex manner. Every ridge represents a word. Depending on
the length and frequency of the word, the form of the ridge changes. The
virtual paper is then folded between the ridges. So the defining visual
element are actually not the words – but the space between words. The
results are complex forms – based on a long and complex process!
https://esono.com
Poetry from the book “ Bajel Último and Other Works”, Colección Betania de Poesía
directed by Felipe Lázaro, Madrid, Spain.1989
Translation by Author & Publisher Ernesto Escudero
IRREPARABLE
ByAntonio Giraudier
There are people who they wander more or less well,apparently,
and they have a fury and sadism inside.Those people "pour" those furies
and sadism's on victims that they find propitious, let's say, and ...
they feel that away great satisfaction in addition to feeling very intelligent and with much respect
for themselves for these dumping.This, very big mistake, will come outing a thousand ways,
but unfortunately they have already left many victim sin the road.
Victims and situations
mainly irreparable.
Incredible the game of confusion and chance.
Love and charity, as if they were drowned, defeated. Without resurfacing.
HAVANA
The memory of that swaying, that shaking of the body and mind. So special, colored, in memory,
with light pinks, light blues, brown colors, breezes
and with the dry sound of the drums that, now,
moisten the eyes, distant, with longing ...
Fromthe book Broken Clouds , Poetry Collection of Lighthouse Publisher Press
directed by Ernesto Escudero
ROAD OF TRANSIT
By Ernesto Escudero
I have seen the pallor of the sick before dying
And when the dead man hold sighs after sighs,
Like I'm alive
Claiming forgiveness
On his deathbed.
I have seen the torrential, avalanche of water and snow.
and The Great War, The Waste Land and the Modernist Long Poem.
While
early Americans explored roads on foot and on horseback, modern
Americans are equipped with the automobile, which is meant to help us
get from here to there even faster. Sometimes, however, so many cars
choke our roads that it is impossible to get anywhere. In "Traffic,"
Stephen Dobyns describes being stuck in traffic as being "jammed
together with my enemies, people no better than chunks of wood,
impediments to my dinner, as I was an impediment to theirs." These lines
reflect the feelings of many Americans, who are often rushed to get
things done and don't like anything to get in their way.
Edward Thomas and Robert Frost ... so close was their friendship that
they had planned to live side by side in America. Photographs: Cotswolds
Photo Library/Alamy. Digital Image by David McCoy for GNM Imaging
Photo Mathew Waring
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