Her early leaf’s a flower, but only so an hour. –Robert Frost, Nothing Gold Can Stay
I’ve always been an avid reader of fiction and drama but have struggled a bit with poetry. Seems counterintuitive for a photographer, right? There’s an obvious affinity between photographs and poems. And in a way I do “get” poems–but I really have to work hard to go beyond a quick, intuitive grasp of their meaning, every single time. I need a teacher who can be my guide. In high school and in college, I had classes that unlocked poetry for me in the moment (the way I had one semester of drawing during which I actually could draw!) and that have stayed with me over the years. This winter and spring, I’ve been carrying one of those classes with me on my photo walks. Modern American Poetry, which I took one spring at Middlebury, was one of those illuminating courses that stretched my brain until it hurt and opened me up to new ways of thinking. It was also the only class I ever took that required me to memorize lines of poetry: on our final exam, we had to be able to quote from the poems we’d studied and to show that we had learned the words by heart. After complaining at an epic level, I memorized poems, some of which have never left me.
It was the middle of May; Vermont was hot by then, and my friends and I were studying, sprawled in a top-floor lounge where we waited to pick our dorm rooms for the next year. Room draw, with its lottery numbers and air of destiny, was cheerful but nerve-wracking, heightening my sense of urgency as I memorized “Fire and Ice” and “The Anecdote of the Jar.” There’s no drama like college drama. I came away from room draw with a single in my first-choice dorm, and I did just fine on that poetry exam.
The bough of summer and the winter branch.
These are the measures destined for her soul.
–Wallace Stevens, Sunday Morning
Could I “explain” those poems to you now? No–and I wouldn’t want to try. Poems and photographs don’t hold up well under clumsy dissection. It takes a really gifted teacher to show you how to crack open a poem and see its essence, even for a moment–the way a skilled director and ensemble of actors can illuminate a play and bring its intricacies to the surface in the living moment, in real time. But if you’re lucky, and if you had to memorize, the lines you remember will float to the surface when you need them.
The angel flew round with the clouds,
And the clouds flew round and the clouds flew round
And the clouds flew round with the clouds.
–Wallace Stevens, The Pleasures of Merely Circulating
Along with a few poems, a phrase from my lit-major days has always stuck with me–I’ve always loved the concept of the “pathetic fallacy.” Especially when life’s unpredictable and the world feels full of drama, we’re tempted to attribute human feelings and intentions to the natural world around us. As a photographer, I know at least some of my own patterns: my images are full of intertwining vines, trees that support each other’s branches, new growth surging out of the dried-up leftovers of winter. This year’s beautiful spring is not the first spring I’ve photographed on Red Hill. February and April both began with double rainbows appearing at the foot of my property; it doesn’t mean my fortunes are changing. But these things are beautiful in and of themselves. That is their meaning.
But though they rejoiced in the nest they kept,
One had to be versed in country things
Not to believe the phoebes wept.
–Robert Frost, The Need of Being Versed in Country Things
Being home most of the time has given me a slower, richer, deeper view of my surroundings. From my kitchen window, I’ve seen a pair of little gray birds perching on a paradise tree at the edge of the driveway. I’ve always hated that tree–it’s invasive and spindly and should have been cut down ages ago–but now I see its value as a safety zone for these songbirds. Today I got a good enough picture through the window to identify the species: Eastern Phoebe. And immediately I remembered a Robert Frost poem that talks about phoebes swooping in and out of a burned-down house. One of my phoebes is in the center picture above, and the memory sparked this post. We gaze at the flowering trees, the migrating songbirds, the illuminated clouds in the sky, the double rainbows, and it’s our nature to make them into metaphors. These days, though, maybe one last word from Frost is more helpful than the innocent phoebe or the dogwood blossoms. In a 1954 interview, after being asked the most important thing he’d learned about life, Frost said this:
“In three words, I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life. It goes on.
In all the confusions of today, with all our troubles . . . with politicians and people slinging the word fear around, all of us become discouraged . . . tempted to say this is the end, the finish.
But life — it goes on. It always has. It always will. Don’t forget that.“
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2018/04/01/life-goes/
The view from Red Hill 
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