A Further Range

by Robert Frost

Taken doubly
A lone striker or Without prejudice to industry
Two tramps in mud time or A full-time interest
The white-tailed hornet or The revision of theories
A blue ribbon at Amesbury or Small plans gratefully heard of
A drumlin woodchuck or Be sure to locate
The Gold hesperidee or How to take a loss
In time of cloudburst or The long view
A roadside stand or On being put out of our misery
Departmental or The end of my ant Jerry
The old barn at the bottom of the fogs or Class prejudice afoot
On the heart's beginning to cloud the mind or From sight to insight
The figure in the doorway or On being looked at in a train
At Woodward's gardens or Resourcefulness is more than understanding
A record stride or The United States stated
Taken singly
Lost in heaven
Desert places
Leaves compared with flowers
A leaf treader
On taking from the top to broaden the base
They were welcome to their belief
The strong are saying nothing
The master speed
Moon compasses
Neither out far nor in deep
Voice ways
Design
On a bird singing in its sleep
After-flakes
Clear & colder
Unharvested
There are roughly zones
A trial run
Not quite social
Provide provide
Ten mills
Precaution
The span of life
The Wrights' biplane
Assertive
Evil tendencies cancel
Pertinax
Waspish
One guess
The hardship of accounting
Not all there
In Divés' dive
The outlands
The vindictives: the Andes
The bearer of evil tidings: the Himalayas
Iris by night: the Malverns (but these are only hills)
Build soil
To a thinker
Afterthought: A missive missile

Genres: Poetry, Classics, 20th Century, The United States Of America, American

102 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1936

About the author

Flinty, moody, plainspoken and deep, Robert Frost was one of America's most popular 20th-century poets. Frost was farming in Derry, New Hampshire when, at the age of 38, he sold the farm, uprooted his family and moved to England, where he devoted himself to his poetry. His first two books of verse, A Boy's Will (1913) and North of Boston (1914), were immediate successes. In 1915 he returned to the United States and continued to write while living in New Hampshire and then Vermont. His pastoral images of apple trees and stone fences -- along with his solitary, man-of-few-words poetic voice -- helped define the modern image of rural New England. Frost's poems include "Mending Wall" ("Good fences make good neighbors"), "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" ("Whose woods these are I think I know"), and perhaps his most famous work, "The Road Not Taken" ("Two roads diverged in a wood, and I-- / I took the one less traveled by"). Frost was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for poetry four times: in 1924, 1931, 1937 and 1943. He also served as "Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress" from 1958-59; that position was renamed as Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry (or simply Poet Laureate) in 1986.

Frost recited his poem "The Gift Outright" at the 1961 inauguration of John F. Kennedy... Frost attended both Dartmouth College and Harvard, but did not graduate from either school... Frost preferred traditional rhyme and meter in poetry; his famous dismissal of free verse was, "I'd just as soon play tennis with the net down."

Reviews

[Julie G · Rating 3 out of 5]

This poetry collection was the greatest splurge of my “30 from the 1930s” reading project. I determined that I was going to have a first edition of Frost for this project, and I felt quite pleased with myself when I was able to purchase one.

Boy, I thought I had really accomplished something, finding a copy so quickly, but, it turns out, it was most likely available because nobody wanted it!

Robert Frost, despite being one of my all-time favorite poets, is ever so unappealing here, in the early 1930s. He's like that awful neighbor that you avoid every time you go outside, the one who tells you what to do with your leaves and whatnot.

If you don't have a neighbor like that, consider yourself blessed. If you feel left out of the experience, you could either (a) move into my neighborhood or (b) purchase this book (half-price!) from me.

It's all: waste not, want not!, the early bird gets the worm!, and a stitch in time saves nine! Oh, do shut up, will ya?

I found much of the sentiment here fairly annoying, particularly in the first section in this compilation (“Taken Doubly”). Frost comes across as frugal, preachy, and sanctimonious. (But, hey, at least he doesn't come across as racist or misogynist, like so many other male writers during this time! Let me give the poor man his due: he thought women or people of color should be raking their leaves exactly as much as the white men around them!)

Things got slightly better in the second section (“Taken Singly”), and I did find this treasure, “Desert Places,” which was my favorite:

Snow falling and night falling fast, oh, fast
In a field I looked into going past,
And the ground almost covered smooth in snow,
But a few weeds and stubble showing last.

The woods around it have it - it is theirs.
All animals are smothered in their lairs.
I am too absent-spirited to count;
The loneliness includes me unawares.

And lonely as it is, that loneliness
Will be more lonely ere it will be less -
A blanker whiteness of benighted snow
With no expression, nothing to express.

They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between stars- on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places.

Reading through Robert Frost's collected poems can often feel like an archaeological dig: rock, rock, rock, rock, dinosaur bone!, rock. If you have only been exposed to his “greatest hits,” you may not know how much advice you get, in between, on when to add manure to your compost pile.

But, when you find that dinosaur bone. . . it's magic. He is still one of our greatest technical poets of all time.

I leave you with a “precious stone” of his, another discovery from this archaeological dig:

May something go always unharvested!

May something go always unharvested in you, my friends. Preserve some of your wild parts. The ones that belong uniquely to you.

(And rake up those fucking leaves, while you're at it! What an eyesore!)

[Ted · Rating 4 out of 5]

4 1/2 ?

It is late night and I am still losing,
But still I am steady and unaccusing.

As long as the Declaration guards
My right to be equal in number of cards,

It is nothing to me who runs the Dive.
Let's have a look at another five.

IN DIVÉS' DIVE the last of ten "mills" in the "poem" TEN MILLS








Since West-Running Brook (1928), a chronology through 1936, the year this one was published:

1928-1938 – Frost's third and final sojourn as Professor of English at Amherst College
1929 - A Way Out: A One Act Play, is published by Harbor Press
1930 – Frost's first Collected Poems published
1931 – Pulitzer Prize for Collected Poems
1934 – Death of Frost's daughter Marjorie Frost Fraser, who died as a result of puerperal fever after childbirth.
1936 – Appointed Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, Harvard.

Years of the stock market crash, and the beginning of the Great Depression. One wonders how much a Professor of Poetry in New England were affected by such events.


This collection a bit heftier than Frost's previous – 40 poems over 55 pages. Lengthening out a bit beyond those many very short verses in West-Running Brook.

In the first several poems, there was a smidgen of the religious which seemed to me a bit off-putting. Probably I'm over sensitive. For me, a little goes a long way (in the wrong direction). But there were many more surprises to come.

A Link to a rather long essay on part X of Ten Mills, "In Dives' Dive". This is the source of the opening quotation above.

https://eraofcasualfridays.net/2009/1...

The author of this perhaps overlong essay I suppose he had his reasons points out that a mill (in American currency) is one tenth of a cent. Thus the title of Ten Mills amounts to a title on One Cent - and Frost is here putting in his one cent (rather then two cents) worth.

Well, this is a nice example of the new feel of some of the poems in this volume.

This feel didn't strike me until the last few of the poems. That could indicate my inattention, or more likely my lack of poetic comprehension.

Another example of this entire newness I found was a sudden interest in history as a source of material about which to write. By history I mean, surprisingly, world history. Or maybe at least references to poets dead a very long time, longer than the history of Frost's own country. Not only history, but politics, begins nudging into Frost's poetry.

This is most strikingly illustrated in a poem called Build Soil – A political pastoral. (Which I helpfully subtitled "A comic opera".)

This ten-page poem, by far the longest in the collection, is written as a dialogue between two speakers, Meliboeus and Tityrus. Not the sort of names one runs into in New England, except perhaps in a college course.

Some needed research revealed that Tityrus was the shepherd in Virgil's Eclogues.

And Meliboeus, the shepherd dialoguing with Tityrus in the first Eclogue – which begins,

"Tityrus, lying there, under the spreading beech-tree cover,
you study the woodland Muse, on slender shepherd’s pipe."


While Frost's pastoral begins

"Why Tityrus! But you've forgotten me.
I'm Meliboeus the potato man.
The one you had the talk with, you remember,
Here on this very campus years ago."

Well, I would guess this "campus" has a collegiate reference here?


Political issues soon intrude. Meliboeus' second declaration is,

"I may be wrong, but, Tityrus, to me
The times seem revolutionary bad." (lines 31-32)

The first half of Tityrus' reply is,

"The question is whether they've reached a depth
Of desperation that would warrant poetry's
Leaving love's alternations, joy and grief,
The weather's alternations, summer and winter,
Our age-long theme, for the uncertainty
Of judging who is a contemporary liar –
Who in particular, when all alike
Get called as much in clashes of ambition." (lines 33-40)

I found much to humor me in this, though whether that was Frost's aim – uncertain I am.


Later Tityrus, replying to Meliboeus wondering about the "good of commerce", says

"To market is our destiny to go.
But much as in the end we bring for sale there,
There is still more we never bring or should bring;
More that should be kept back – the soil for instance,
In my opinion – though we both know poets
Who fall all over each other to bring soil
And even subsoil and hardpan to market" (lines 172-188)


292 lines. Amusing, enigmatic – what is this? Is Frost making a political statement about the Depression? About Roosevelt's policies therein? (He was known to not care much for Roosevelt.) Is he playing with the poetic notions that his students likely had? Maybe all these things.




Here's a couple short ones that I liked.


Not Quite Social

Some of you will be glad at what I did,
And the rest won't want to punish me too severely
For finding a thing to do that though not forbid
Yet wasn't enjoined and wasn't expected, clearly.

To punish me overcruelly wouldn't be right
For merely giving you once more gentle proof
That the city's hold on a man is no more tight
Than when its walls rose higher than any roof.

You taunt me with not being able to flee the earth.
You have me there, but loosely, as I would be held.
The way of understanding is partly mirth.
I would not be taken as ever having rebelled.

And anyone is free to condemn me to death –
If he leaves it to nature to carry out the sentence.
I shall will to the common stock of air my breath
And pay a death tax of fairly polite repentance.



Leaves Compared with Flowers

A tree's leaves may be ever so good,
So may its bark, so may its wood;
But unless you put the right thing to its root
It never will show much flower or fruit.

But I may be one who dares not care
Ever to have tree bloom or bear.
Leaves for smooth and bark for rough,
Leaves and bark may be tree enough.

Some giant trees have bloom so small
They might as well have none at all.
Late in life I have come on fern.
Now lichens are due to have their turn.

I had men tell me which in brief,
Which is fairer, flower or leaf.
They did not have the wit to say,
Leaves by night and flowers by day.

Leaves and bark, leaves and bark,
To lean against and hear in the dark.
Petals I may have once pursued.
Leaves are all my darker mood.




. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Previous review: All in a Day
Next review: The Three Astronauts Umberto Eco (!)
Older review: 2014 on Goodreads

Previous library review: West-Running Brook
Next library review: Riders of the Purple Sage

[Katrina Sark · Rating 3 out of 5]

Two Tramps in Mud Time

p.18 – But yield who will to their separation,
My object in living is to unite
My avocation and my vocation
As my two eyes make one in sight.
Only where love and need are one,
And the work is play for mortal stakes,
Is the deed ever really done
For Heaven and the future’s sake.

Lost in Heaven

p.47 – Seeing myself well lost once more, I sighed,
“Where, where in Heaven am I? but don’t tell me!”
I warned the clouds, “by opening on me wide.
Let’s let my heavenly lostness overwhelm me.”

Desert Places

p.48 – And lonely as it is that loneliness
Will be more lonely ere it will be less –
A blanker whiteness of benighted snow
With no expression, nothing to express.

They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between starts – on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places.

Moon Compasses

p.55 – I stole forth dimly in the dripping pause
Between two downpours to see what there was.
And a masked moon had spread down compass rays
To a cone mountain in the midnight haze,
As if the final estimate were hers
And as it measured in her calipers,
The mountain stood exalted in its place.
So love will take between the hands a face…

[Lisajean · Rating 3 out of 5]

Cities bad; nature good. Money bad; trees good. People bad; land good. I get it. This is not Frost at his most subtle.

[Illiterate · Rating 5 out of 5]

Themes: we are animals not angels (yes); so we suit rural seclusion not urban crowds (maybe).

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

Robert Frost's collection of poems entitled A Further Range was published in 1936 by Henry Holt and Company of New York. The volume was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1937 for poetry.

This collection of Frost poems, unlike some of his earlier publications, had no popular verses that have survived the ages such as Mending Wall, Birches, or The Road not Taken, other than, possibly, Desert Places:

"They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between stars--on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places."

The poetry in this book could be read repeatedly and something new would be found. This, in my opinion, is what makes poetry great. Mr. Frost's collection was divided into six parts, namely:

1) Taken Doubly
2) Taken Singly
3) Ten Mills
4) The Outlands
5) Build Soil
6) Afterthought

Each of these parts emphasizes certain themes which the reader should interpret privately while reading, but some of the more evident themes are the interrelationship we have with one another (Taken Doubly), and the isolation and individual relationship we have with God (Taken Singly). Some sections are much more political (Build Soil), while others talk about the communicative perceptions we experience with others due to distance, whether it be the lapse of time (See "A Missive Missile"), or simply the span of miles. For example, how do we interpret a "figure in the doorway" that we observe from a train?

I find it difficult to right a worthy review of a Pulitzer Prize winning collection of poems, but suffice it to say that the more I read these poems the more they help me reflect about who I am and my status in the fusion of society and God's universe.

"Where, where in Heaven am I? But don't tell me!"
I warned the clouds, "by opening on me wide.
Let's let my heavenly lostness overwhelm me."

Maybe that's the point. There's too many people telling us how to act, how to think, how to live, what to buy, and how to be. Many do this in the name of "soothing us out of {our{ wits, and by teaching {us} to sleep the sleep" (the slippery slope of collectivism), rather than allowing us to think for ourselves and find our own identity and destiny.

If you want a collection of poetry that will allow you to individually think and open your own mind about the world around you and within you, this is the collection.

[Phillip Marsh · Rating 5 out of 5]

Favourites:

•A Lone Striker
•Two Tramps in Mud Time
•Departmental
•On the Heart’s Beginning to Cloud the Mind
•The Figure in the Doorway
•Desert Places
•Neither Far Out Nor In Deep
•Afterflakes
•There are Roughly Zones
•Missive Missiles

[Daniel Kleven · Rating 5 out of 5]

Winner of the 1937 Pulitzer for poetry

[Craig Werner · Rating 4 out of 5]

Frost at the top of his net-less game. While there are still a scattering of poems where I wish he didn't feel beholden to rhyming couplets, the base level of the poems in his sixth collection, originally published in 1936, is higher than in any other with the possible exception of North of Boston, the book in which he found his deceptively straight-forward vernacular voice.

The five stars, which I'd been reserving for Frost's best collection (his overall work is definitely five star), is largely in recognition of two of my very favorites: "Desert Places" and "Design," both of which render the stereotype of RF as avuncular country philosopher meaningless. Frost at his best is as frightening as Beckett: looking into a universe where the only meanings are ones we contrive and where the contriving entity is, at the very best, untrustworthy. It's not an original insight on my part, but I think that Frost's obsession with craft reflects a desire to find *something* to hold on to.

The list of excellent poems in this volume is long: Two Tramps in Mudtime, The White-Tailed Hornet, A Drumlin Woodchuck, In Time of Cloudburst, A Roadside Stand, Moon Compasses, Niether Out Far Nor in Deep, On a Bird Singing in Its Sleep, Afterflakes, There Are Roughy Zones (maybe the third of the Desert Places, Design triptych), Provide Provide (which has lost some of its power for me as a result of overuse), The Vindictive, The Bearer of Evil Tidings and A Missive Missile. I'm not sure it works, but "Build Soil" serves nicely as an introduction to Frost's political philosophy, which boils down to a distrust of all institutions and a strong preference for solitude.

Finally, I absolutely love "Iris By Night," a descriptive poem I don't remember having read before.

[Timothy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Favorites:

Desert Places
Neither Out Far Not In Deep
On A Bird Singing In It’s Sleep
The Vindictives
The Bearer Of Evil Tidings
Iris By Night

Thoughts:

Not my favorite Frost collection so far, though the sense of personal loss and loneliness behind the words seem deeper than his previous poetry ... the lack of my usual fifth star mostly due to my negative reaction to Build Soil and the large amount of space in this collection it takes up ... 10 out of 60 pages for this? ... not that I object to the message or messages in general but it hardly seems like art at all when placed beside the 50 other poems ... and not helped that this is followed by To A Thinker and A Missive Missile which close the collection - so the whole thing kind of ends with a relatively lengthy sententious thud

[Kelly · Rating 4 out of 5]

Slow start to this collection, but the character and nature sketches of the mid to second half were excellent. I particularly liked "The Gold Hesperidee" (on growing apples and sinful pride),"They Were Welcome to Their Belief" (on aging and hair turning white), "Afterflakes" (on sunshine in the snow), "Provide, Provide" (on celebrity women aging), and "The Bearer of Evil Tidings" (on making decisions... felt like part 2 of "The Road Not Traveled"). The "Ten Mills" were also witty, entertaining, and a different style as was the political dialogue between politician and farmer in "Build Soil: A political pastoral."

"The sun was warm but the wind was chill.
You know how it is with an April day
When the sun is out and the wind is still,
You're one month on in the middle of May.
But if you so much as dare to speak,
A cloud comes over the sunlit arch,
A wind comes off a frozen peak,
And you're two months back in the middle of March."
-Two Tramps in Mud Time

"It's knowing what to do with things that counts."
-At Woodward's Gardens

"I never dared be radical when young
For fear it would make me conservative when old."
-Ten Mills: I. Precaution

[Descending Angel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Highlights ~ "A lone striker" "Two tramps in mud time" "The white-tailed hornet" "In time of cloudburst" "Desert places" "Moon compasses" "The vindictives" "The bearer of evil tidings" and "Iris by night".

[Gareth Williams · Rating 4 out of 5]

Frost as a mature poet seems to constrain himself more, producing pithy, concise poems more often - which are my preference.
I was particularly intrigued by The Master Speed although it comprises only fourteen lines of accessible language. Why not see what you make of it?

[Jimmy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Other than the famous ones, not much to enjoy.

[Maddy · Rating 3 out of 5]

I picked up A Further Range from my library. It would count for my “F” entry on my A-Z classics challenge for this year. I’m already more than half way done. I have nine books left (two of which I’m in the middle of reading right now) for the challenge.

Poetry is always hard to rate for me unless you absolutely can’t connect to it or it’s really badly written. Frost isn’t the easiest for me to connect with; the first half of this book was about farm life in New England. I don’t live on a farm, I never did either so this didn’t speak to me on a deep level but I still found some merit in it. I better enjoyed his short poems in the “Ten Mills” and the longer political debate between the poet and the farmer near the end of the story. Some of what was said was scarily still relevant even though this was written in the 1930s.

I liked some of the lines and honestly some of the poems worked better than others. Frost has some skillful craft here. He generally follows an alternating rhyme scheme but not every time. This was one of four poetry collections that Robert Frost won the Pulitzer Prize for and some of his skill is obvious in this volume.

I rated this 3.5 stars! Though Frost has the skill, I found some of the subjects of the poems either unrelatable or a little dull. If you like American folk poetry and 20th century literature, you’ll probably enjoy this collection of poetry.

[Michael Arnold · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very good collection.