Last winter, a friend in Portland sent me an ad for something called the “Screw Shoe,” a bizarre piece of Yankee ingenuity which she figured would allow me to continue my much-needed daily exercise.
Helpfully, she added: “Made for running on ice but walking will suffice.”
I credited her for the clever reference to one of Robert Frost’s most enigmatic poems, but she was surprised by the “happy coincidence,” claiming that she takes “no credit for anything, only cash.”
A day later, the title of that very poem appeared on my screen:
Coincidence? I took it as a command from above. Staged as dinner theater at the Clay Hill Farm just south of Ogunquit, Maine, it conveniently plays about halfway between here and the home of my Maniac friend, and so we converged to catch it.
For me, maybe it was a command from above. Every fall, Kirk Simpson plays the title role of the Renaissance Faire where I am a loyal subject. Before the performance of Fire and Ice, I made the mistake of introducing him as King Richard, a no-no when an actor is in another character, but Kirk’s admonition was mild. My friend was both stunned and amused by the act of shaking hands with royalty.
Next moment it was all Robert Frost who took the center of the dining room, and we were alternately moved and amused by what we learned of personal triumphs and tragedies that shaped Frost’s poems in ways we never knew.
Though a it’s a one-man show, Simpson establishes Frost’s wife, Elinor, as a palpable character offstage behind a closed door that she and her doctor prefer he not enter. She suffered depression and died of breast cancer and heart disease in 1938, 25 years before he passed at the age of 88. Throughout the play, Frost interrupts his reminiscences and poems to knock on the door and holler a few inquiries through it. As we learn more of family tragedies, we increasingly wonder if Elinor would not (rather than could not) respond to him.
Among the poems delivered in Fire and Ice is “The Lockless Door,” a poem rarely, if ever, included in school texts. As Frost’s commentary on the dueling nature of opportunity vs. fear, it takes on new meaning before the door to bed-ridden Elinor’s room:
It went many years,
But at last came a knock,
And I thought of the door
With no lock to lock.I blew out the light,
I tip-toed the floor,
And raised both hands
In prayer to the door.But the knock came again
My window was wide;
I climbed on the sill
And descended outside.Back over the sill
I bade a “Come in”
To whoever the knock
At the door may have been.So at a knock
I emptied my cage
To hide in the world
And alter with age.
Echoes of Edgar Allen Poe and a forecast of Maya Angelou aside, Frost had good reasons to “hide in the world” that were achingly recounted in the narrative we heard. In addition to Elinor’s were the deaths of four of their six children, one just days after birth, another at age eight, another at 29 from a “perpetual fever after childbirth,” and the fourth of suicide at 38.
Another lesser known Frost poem, “‘Out, Out–‘,” describes the death of a child so hauntingly yet so dispassionately–a difficult mix well made by Simpson–that you might wonder if the poetry was an expression of what Frost felt or a shield against it. Following the accidental cut of a chain-saw into a boy’s hand:
The doctor put him in the dark of ether.
He lay and puffed his lips out with his breath.
And then—the watcher at his pulse took fright.
No one believed. They listened at his heart.
Little—less—nothing!—and that ended it.
No more to build on there. And they, since they
Were not the one dead, turned to their affairs.
In Clay Hill’s dining room, no fork or spoon stirred as Simpson served those lines, one of several passages where you would have heard a pin fall through the air before the drop. Poems so acquainted with the night are offset by the rhyme and whimsy for which Frost is best known, characteristics that lace author June August’s text, summed up by Frost’s description of public appearances and readings as “barding around.”
Frost’s triumphs such as “The Road Not Taken,” “Swinging on Birches,” and “Mending Wall” are nicely blended with hidden chestnuts the way rock-and-roll bands in concert mix their greatest hits with obscure, quirky cuts from their albums. The effect is rewarding whether you’re a devout fan or a casual listener.
Those in the latter category are surprised to learn that he didn’t gain recognition until he left America to live ten years in England. My friend noted that it happened “without any connections or friends or sponsors. Just on merit–which is something we Americans think we coined.”
Like me, she wondered about the effect of the regional accent, the difference that a soft rather than a hard R makes in lines such as “My little horse must think it queer/ To stop without a farmhouse near.” As a narrator, Frost debunks this issue, reminding us that he lived the first ten years of his life in San Francisco. But in his recitation of “Stopping by Woods,” the last words in both lines sounded musical with two syllables.
Another highlight was Simpson’s reenactment of Frost’s appearance at John Kennedy’s inauguration in 1961. Most descriptions tell us simply that he could not read the poem he wrote for the occasion due to the glare of the sun, that he put it aside and recited, instead, his 1941 classic, “The Gift Outright.” What we saw were the attempts to read the intended poem, and we heard the opening lines interspersed with wisecracks at his own inability to read them:
Summoning artists to participate
In the august occasions of the state
Seems something artists ought to celebrate.
Today is for my cause a day of days.
Frost was the first poet to read at an inauguration, news to my friend who was reminded of Amanda Gordon. That’s no mere coincidence. Soon into Gordon’s “The Hill We Climb” is a passage:
And yet the dawn is ours
before we knew it,
somehow we do it.
Somehow we’ve weathered and witnessed
a nation that isn’t broken
but simply unfinished.
What my friend heard was an echo of that as soon as Simpson began “The Gift Outright”: The land was ours before we were the land’s
But that’s as far as either of us wanted to go with making comparisons to today and politics. As she put it, “It was nice just to be immersed in something of another time, when the poetry, like the world, was a lot simpler.”
No doubt, that’s why Frost’s poetry endures. And we can thank the Yankee ingenuity produced at Clay Hill Farm for helping to keep it that way.
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https://www.clayhillfarm.com/
My own “re-enactments” of Robert Frost range from a New Hampshire apple orchard to a South Dakota classroom as far back as the early-80s. Here’s what I had to say in September, 2015:
Mouth of the River 