I
I was going back through my complete edition of Robert Frost’s poems for the first time in a few years and came across one with the curious title of “A Fountain, a Bottle, A Donkey’s Ears, and some Books.” It tells in blank verse of a hike (the early items in the title are names of features in the landscape) that leads to the long-abandoned house of a deceased woman, Clara Robinson, who had been a minor poet. She had published (probably self-published) a volume of her verse, an unsold box of which was spilling out into the attic, mostly now ruined, stained and bloated by intruding snow and rain. The speaker picks up a relatively undamaged copy and takes it home with him.
All the way home I kept remembering
The small book in my pocket. It was there.
The poetess had sighed, I knew, in heaven,
At having eased her heart of one more copy.1
Boom!
Only a fellow poet could have known, and only a good fellow poet found the words for, what that seemingly chance discovery would have meant to Clara Weaver Robinson could she have known about it — what maybe it did mean to her if she was saved and if the saved in heaven can spare a thought from the glory of that place for current doings on earth. “Having eased her heart of one more copy.” Yes.
As a fellow poet myself, I understand. It is not just a matter of wanting your ego stroked (though none of us is pure enough to be completely free of that need). Your very heart’s blood was the ink in which those poems were written, after all.
Alexander Pope’s literary ideal was the creation of a moment when the reader will find something that “oft was thought, but ne’er so well expressed.” He wanted to create “Something, whose truth convinced at sight we find, / That gives us back the image of our mind.”2 That is a part of the truth about poetry, but there is more. Sometimes it gives us something that we have not in fact often thought of, or thought of at all, but would have if we had possessed the sense and the vocabulary to do so. Once the poet has given us those gifts, we will think of it often from now on.
This is why good poets in general and Robert Frost in particular are indispensable to me. I will never forget the moment when I first sat with Frost in the woods on a snowy evening and said to myself, “Finally! Here is someone who understands.” I know that if Clara Robinson could have read Frost’s line about her book’s finding a new reader, she would have said exactly the same thing. One never recovers from such moments. “You can find no scar / But internal difference / Where the meanings are,” said Emily Dickinson.3 And finding the perfect form for the perfect words can sometimes let a Miss Emily channel the impact of such “heavenly hurt” to us even more potently than that certain slant of light on that winter afternoon did originally for her so long ago.
The ability finally to express what we have always thought; the ability finally to think (and feel) what we can now express: These are gifts greater than which few can be conceived. Mr. Pope, Mr. Frost, Miss Dickinson — thank you. Miss Clara — I found you on Google and just ordered your book, some copies of which still exist, through Interlibrary Loan.
Let your heart be eased once more.
II
In due course, that glorious, too-little-appreciated institution, Interlibrary Loan, brought Miss Clara’s book halfway across the country to my little college library, which handed it to me. It was full of surprises. They come in a foreword and introduction by Clara’s son Ernest, who edited the collection, and a biographical sketch by her daughter Marjory.
The Clara Weaver Robinson of history (1854-1905) shared with the Clara Robinson of Frost’s poem only her name and the fact that she was a poet. Whether Frost simply did not bother with the actual facts about her, or whether he deliberately created a character loosely based on but radically different from the actual woman, we will never know. But the friend who takes the speaker in Frost’s poem to her abandoned house tells him she was an invalid, “shut in for life.” In fact, that was only true of her final years. She had a full and active life first: She was a professor of Latin at St. Lawrence University, played the organ in the Unitarian church, and had four and raised three children (one died in infancy).
Her “book of verses” is not described very accurately either.
You must have heard of Clara Robinson,
The poetess who wrote the book of verses
And had it published. It was all about
The posies on her inner windowsill
And the birds on her outer windowsill
And how she tended both.4
Clara did write some poems about flowers and birds, but the windowsill never makes a single appearance in her book. All the natural scenes are well out of doors, away from the house, typically pictured as being visited on hikes or boat trips.
Oh. And the book did not even exist for the speaker in Frost’s poem to find. Clara’s son, Ernest Leffert Robinson, says that his mother’s poems were typed up by a friend in 1897, and “the poems remained in a bookcase drawer until my sister, Marjory, and I got them out” in 1959, when they published their mother’s translation of Antigone.5 Clara’s original poems were not published until 1970. Frost died in 1963. His poem was published first in The Bookman and then in his collection New Hampshire in 1923.6 The book Frost imagines being found in the abandoned house would not actually exist for another forty-seven years after he imagined finding it. Frost’s wife, Elinor, had been a student at St. Lawrence, which might explain how Frost knew of Robinson’s existence in 1923, eighteen years after her death.7 But Ernest Robinson gives no indication that her poems had been published in book form before 1970. Neither did Clara Robinson live in a remote house that could have been found abandoned on a hike out in the woods. She and her husband lived in town, in Canton, New York, where he was a local lawyer.
What?
What I discovered is not news: Scholarship has known that Robinson “may be based on Frost’s imaginative reconstruction of the life and work of a real woman.”8 But this is usually mentioned in passing by people who seem strangely uninterested in who Clara really was. Frost’s insight about the relationship of poets to their work that I described in part I would have been true and powerful had he simply made Clara up out of whole cloth, created a fictional character for the sake of his poem. And that is, for all practical purposes, what he apparently did — almost. Why he gave her the name of an actual poet from roughly the right time and place and then pretty much made her up anyway, why he gave Clara her proper name but nothing of her proper description or life or work, is a question to which he would probably have responded as he did when he was asked what the promises were that the man who stopped in the snowy wood had to keep before he slept: “If I had wanted you to know, I would have told you.”9
We can guess that maybe making Robinson an invalid whose poetry was her only connection to the world outside her windowsill serves dramatically to intensify the imagined easing of her heart, even in heaven, at having the hiker in Frost’s poem find a copy. It might not be a bad guess, and finding out about the real Clara Robinson and the striking contrast between her real persona and its portrayal has value if it helps us to make it. But any poet who has ever been in suspense about the public’s response to his work (or whether it will respond at all) will feel no real need for that embellishment. Frost’s line that I celebrated in part I retains its value and its impact either way, as I was saying before Truth broke in with all its matter of fact about the real Clara. We must remember that a poem is a dramatic performance, not a historical treatise. Nevertheless, whatever we think of Frost’s treatment of her, Clara Weaver Robinson deserves to be remembered for who she actually was: a real person and not just as a footnote to an interesting poem by America’s greatest poet.
Robinson was a remarkable person who lived a full life, as we have seen. She earned a master’s degree when it was not common for women to receive that kind of education and was proficient enough a classicist to translate a Greek tragedy and to serve as a professor of Latin on the university level. And she was a skilled versifier, which itself is no mean accomplishment. That a very minor poet could have such skill tells us something about how far we ourselves have fallen.
Unfortunately, that is the best we can say about Robinson as a poet. I doubt it would ease her heart to hear me say it, but her imagery is conventional, trite, and predictable. No natural scene is actually realized in its concrete individuality. Rather, catalogs of natural objects typical of Romantic or Victorian poetic diction are simply arranged in pleasing metrical lines. Here is a typical example.
To My Boat, The “Naiad”
Oh my dear little boat, we are lightly afloat
On the clear winding stream to the woodbird’s sweet note.
Lightly part the blue waters beneath the blue sky
Oh! Who is so blithe as my Naiad and I.10
Despite not having complete poetic talent, Clara Weaver Robinson’s gifts to the world were not inconsiderable: a well-lived life, children clearly devoted to her memory, a book of verse that sheds light on the poetic culture of late Nineteenth-Century America, and the inspiration for an arresting poem by Robert Frost. But she had one more gift for us that may be the greatest of all, one I was not expecting but which was dumped into my lap when I actually found the book that Frost only imagined finding. And that was her other daughter, Ethel.
III
When Ernest Leffert Robinson had his mother’s poems printed in 1970 in a limited edition of 300 copies, he included essentially a second volume, though published under one cover with continuous pagination: Sonnets and Other Verses by Ethel Robinson Murphy, with a biographical sketch by Ethel’s daughter Mary Murphy. Clara’s daughter, Ernest’s sister, had followed in her mother’s poetic footsteps — and traveled far beyond any place where her mother’s steps had been able to go. Ethel was the real thing. She had all of Clara’s metrical skill and added to it an eye for the particularities of nature and a mind which thought long and fruitfully about their meaning. To read her poems is to be invited to look with fresh eyes and an open mind yourself.
Here is s typical example, on the death of President Franklin D. Roosevelt:
Tributes
A hundred varied programs filled the air,
Each paying tribute to a well-loved name.
Descriptions, music, talks, and drama came
As homage from the people everywhere,
Who felt in deep pervading grief a share.
Both symphonies and ballads showed the same
Intent. There followed one memorial game,
And reading from the Book of Common Prayer.
While cars were leaving Georgia’s ruddy loam
The children who had known their leader’s trial
In rows along a wide veranda sat.
A negro played in sorrow, “Going Home,”
On his accordion. Then I turned my dial
And wished that I could hear a “Fireside Chat.”11
The death of Franklin D. Roosevelt was a day that riveted the attention of a nation in one deeply shared experience. Those of us still living who can remember the assassination of President Kennedy, or for a still later generation the terrorist attacks of 9/11, can relate to the intensity of that kind of rarely experienced unity of consciousness. I can remember as a boy driving past Warm Springs, Georgia, where Roosevelt had the “Little White House,” and being captivated by the emotion in the voice of my father — who was no fan of FDR politically — as he was led to reminisce about Roosevelt’s passing and what it had meant to the nation. Ethel’s poetic skill lets us — people of another time — relive that day and recapture something of what it must have been like for those who were there.
Murphy pictures the speaker in the poem flipping around the dial of her radio (it was too early for TV) and finding a different response to Roosevelt’s passing on every channel — different but unified as expressions of the same grief. The variety and the universality of the responses build up all through the sonnet until the turn in the last line. To have read history is to know what the Fireside Chats meant to America in the dark days of the Second World War; it is to have read about how that voice united a nation much as Churchill’s did in Britain. To read the poem is to feel it, as the brevity of life and the finality of death hit in the realization that no matter how many channels we turn to, there will never be another Fireside Chat — yet that is the only thing that could really console us in this moment. Universality becomes sharply concrete and personal in a climax that is carefully prepared for and built up to. Yes, the reader realizes: That is exactly right. That is what one would be feeling were one there.
Ethel Robinson Murphy was a good poet, but not a great one. The poem has a payload of felt meaning to deliver and delivers it. But on the way to that delivery, it drops a different kind of bomb. “Ruddy loam” for red Georgia clay is an unassimilated plug of Eighteenth-Century poetic diction intruding into an otherwise skillful Twentieth-Century performance. This is not Wordsworth’s man (or woman) talking to men in the language of men. Not one single man or woman of the mid-Twentieth Century would naturally have called Georgia clay that. This is someone a little too desperate to make a rhyme-scheme work. We forgive the flaw because of the value in the poem, but we know it is an act of forgiveness that a Wordsworth, a Keats, or even a Frost would not have needed from us. A real poet, but only a good one, not a great one — we have to be honest about it. But good poets are great gifts that should not be forgotten.
Ethel’s parents had been Unitarians, and the spirituality in Clara’s poems was conventional and generic, as one would expect from one who has to stop short of saying that Jesus actually deserves our worship as God. But somewhere along the line Ethel encountered the supernatural Christ and became an orthodox Christian, a believing Episcopalian. Her daughter Mary recalls that her mother “was philosophical and deeply religious, as many of her poems indicate.”12 She records an incident that casts an interesting light on Ethel’s personality. After Mary had her own place, her mother on a visit asked her, “Where is your Greek Testament?” Mary comments,
That question epitomizes several aspects of her character. One, the fact that she was sufficiently interested in some philosophical or religious question to do some research on it; two, the fact that she was going to the Greek text for a more exact meaning than an English translation might give; and three, the assumption that, naturally, I would have a Greek Testament. I’m afraid I wasn’t able to provide the Testament, but I’ve always remembered the question.13
This was a woman who had a bachelor’s degree and taught high school and kindergarten and was a homemaker! Yet in those days a bachelor’s degree might well convey the ability to read Greek, and Ethel’s own mother had been able to translate classical Greek. Mary’s portrait of her mother’s deep religious and intellectual life is borne out by the poems. I close with one that illustrates that side of her,
Mirrored Light
When golden dapple sprinkles summer’s jade
With disks across the lawn where branches sift
Unclouded radiance from above, a light
Defines an imaged circle in the shade.
We stand beneath the glowing beams, afraid
Of blinding rays, but though we dare not lift
Our eyes, in miniature and like a gift,
The sun’s own shape below us lies, inlaid.
As when the solar likeness falls, minute
And muted, formed by interlacing trees,
Until our vision bears the tranquil light,
So God’s almighty power was made to suit
The human comprehension, and one sees
In Christ, a mirror focused for our sight.14
The Italian sonnet was Murphy’s favorite form. In the octave here she does not simply catalog features of the natural world; she observes them and describes what she observed in ways that can allow her readers to see things they might otherwise have missed. The sun’s disk that we could not have seen directly is revealed to us as its light is filtered through a lattice of limbs to form images on the floor of the lawn. Then the sextet meditates on this intricately described phenomenon with confidence that the world of matter and energy, having been made by the great Creator, can serve as a natural suggestive iconography of spiritual truth — the same faith that grounded the great spiritual poetry of a Donne or a Herbert. The Incarnation, the Doctrine of Accommodation, and Murphy’s personal Faith flow through the limbs of the trees and the lines of the poem to meet in the last line in an insight that seems both surprising and inevitable. As Christ is the mirror that lets us see the invisible God, so the poem mirrors that truth about Christ and what we owe to Him.
Again, Murphy is a good poet — she delivers the genuine payload — but not a great one. There is no clunker like “ruddy loam” here, but the syntax is a bit too labored. A fully skillful sonneteer (Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Keats, even Frost, many of whose poems are actually disguised sonnets) will write sentences that flow naturally or even conversationally, even as they map onto the sonnet form without treating it like a Procrustean bed. Our poet cannot quite reach to that level. Nevertheless, Ethel Robinson Murphy is a rich resource of thoughtful poetry and Christian devotion who has lain buried in obscurity up to now.
Murphy published several of her poems in various little-known magazines, lived the quiet life of a wife and mother, and then disappeared from history. I — and in all probability you — would never have known she existed had Robert Frost not memorialized her mother into an unrecognizable form, sending me off on a literary sleuthing adventure that turned the daughter up by sheer accident, as it would seem. I too wanted to ease Clara’s heart of one more copy (and actually did so, if such easing is possible after a poet’s death, while Frost only imagined doing it). I discovered in the process that Clara deserved to be known as more than a footnote to Frost, and Ethel deserves to be known as a poet still worth reading. Serendipitously, more hearts got eased in the bargain than I had counted on.
Let the world’s reacquaintance with these two fascinating people begin!
Notes:
1 Edward Connery Lathem, ed., The Poetry of Robert Frost (New York: Holt, Rhinehart, and Wilson, 1969), 217.
2 John Butt, ed., The Poems of Alexander Pope: A One-Volume Edition of the Twickenham Text with Selected Annotations (New Haven: Yale Univ. Pr., 1963), 153.
3 Thomas H. Johnson, ed., The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson (New York: Little, Brown, 1961), 118.
4 Lathem, op cit., 215.
5 Ernest Leffert Robinson, ed., Poems by Clara Weaver Robinson; Sonnets and Other Verses by Ethel Robinson Murphy (Schenectady: Riedinger & Riedinger, 1970), xi.
6 Lathem, op cit., 548.
7 Marit J. MacArthur, The American Landscape in the Poetry of Frost, Bishop, and Arbery (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2008, 55.
8 Karem Kilcup, Robert Frost and Feminine Literary Tradition (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1998), 288, n42.
9 Robert Frost, “An Evening with Robert Frost,” recorded 1956 (Madison: Audio Forum).
10 Robinson, op cit., 5.
11 Ibid., 139.
12 Ibid., 69.
13 Ibid., 72.
14 Ibid., 158.
