“And the gale’s gathering made the darkness’ blind, / Water and air one intermingled roar”

[larryhammer]

Okay, a short Poetry Monday pause from Millay sonnets for one by her contemporary:


Once by the Pacific, Robert Frost

The shattered water made a misty din.
Great waves looked over others coming in,
And thought of doing something to the shore
That water never did to land before.
The clouds were low and hairy in the skies,
Like locks blown forward in the gleam of eyes.
You could not tell, and yet it looked as if
The shore was lucky in being backed by cliff,
The cliff in being backed by continent;
It looked as if a night of dark intent
Was coming, and not only a night, an age.
Someone had better be prepared for rage.
There would be more than ocean-water broken
Before God’s last Put out the light was spoken.


NB: Frost was born in San Francisco and lived in California until he was 17.

---L.

Subject quote from The Wanderer, John Masefield.

Comments

[sovay]

There would be more than ocean-water broken
Before God’s last Put out the light was spoken.

That's very good.

(I am not so hot on the rest of this poem, except that it leads to those last lines. Is this juvenilia or was Frost just not one of Nature's sonneteers?)

[larryhammer]

It's from a 1928 collection, so probably from the mid-'20s. (But I don't think juvenilia fits anything of Frost, given A Boy's Will was published when he was 39.) The first 12 lines do feel a little, um, padded isn't quite the right word, maybe slack is it -- as if the conception isn't quite enough to fill a sonnet-sized room. He does have other quite good sonnets. Maybe he just chose the wrong form for this? -- or had some other, unapparent reason to use this anyway?

[cmcmck]

Makes you wonder where Edward Thomas might have gone had he lived.

[larryhammer]

That statement is true of just about any Frost poem written after the Great War.