Enlightenment, then Laundry
Fallacy though it may be to imagine the narrator of a verse as equivalent with the poet, it’s impossible not to imagine the words of Robert Frost read in that clipped Yankee-via-San-Francisco accent of his, to intuit the blistering cold of a New Hampshire morning or the blinding whiteness of the snow-covered Franconia Range, the damp exertion of sweat under a flannel collar and muddy boots trudging across yellow and brown leaves slick with early morning ice. Frost is forever a poet of loose coffee grounds dumped into boiling water and intricate blue and red quilts, of wooden spoons hanging from hooks next to gas stoves and of curved glass hurricane lamps, of creaking wooden floorboards and doors swollen with summer’s humidity. Visiting his white clapboard, gable-peeked farmstead in Derry, New Hampshire, and perambulating in the golden woods of sugar maple and red oak and it’s hard not to romanticize the old man, eyeing him along the rough granite stone wall that he mended every spring, the famous structure whereby “Good fences make good neighbors,” which he wrote about in his 1914 collection North of Boston. The poet was always fixing things—mending, building, working. Our greatest singer of chores.
He’s at it again in his poem “Two Tramps in Mud Time,” which he wrote around 1934, five years into the Great Depression. In a cold New England field our narrator is chopping wood when he is approached by two hungry vagrants looking for paid labor. There’s something vaguely ominous about the unemployed lumberjacks, as “one of them put me off my aim/By hailing cheerily ‘Hit them hard!'” I envision the startled narrator wobbling a bit, axe stuck in aborted oak atop a chopping block. “I knew pretty well what he had in mind:/he wanted to take my job for pay.” What eventually follows is a digressive, ethical rumination, one that seems entirely foreign at a time when the gig economy has become ubiquitous. “The time when most I loved my task/The two must make me love it more/By coming with what they came to ask.” Propriety and dignity is such that the tramps won’t accept mere charity, but Frost’s enjoyment of his housework prevents him from parting with the chopping of timber. “I had no right to play/With what was another man’s work for gain./My right might be love but theirs was need,” says the narrator. Ambiguous as to what he does, if the desperate men convince him of the necessity of their task, as indeed Frost knows that their continued presence will eventually move him to turn over the axe. Yet in the chore, here amongst the warm sun and the chill wind, his “object in living is to unite/My avocation and my vocation… where love and need are one.” Frost really liked housework.
