The River Houses

Click to: riverhouses.org/2020-frost

Our River Houses poetry calendar for 2020–2021 brings together fifty literary friends we’ll be getting to know over the course of the homeschool year, and we invite you and your students to join us! Our poem for this third week of September, for mowing season and the Monarch butterfly migration, is Robert Frost’s “The Tuft of Flowers.”

Frost is a wonderful poet for younger people because many of his poems have a regular structure and use direct language. “The Tuft of Flowers” is a poem about mowing a field, and its characters are two farmhands and a butterfly. The first farmhand is the narrator; the second farmhand is “off stage” and never appears, although we learn something about him by seeing the work he has done; and the butterfly — the butterfly is the character that brings the two farmhands together.

The Tuft of Flowers

I went to turn the grass once after one
Who mowed it in the dew before the sun.

The dew was gone that made his blade so keen
Before I came to view the levelled scene.

I looked for him behind an isle of trees;
I listened for his whetstone on the breeze.

But he had gone his way, the grass all mown,
And I must be, as he had been, — alone,

“As all must be,” I said within my heart,
“Whether they work together or apart.”

But as I said it, swift there passed me by
On noiseless wing a ’wildered butterfly,

Seeking with memories grown dim o’er night
Some resting flower of yesterday’s delight.

And once I marked his flight go round and round,
As where some flower lay withering on the ground.

And then he flew as far as eye could see,
And then on tremulous wing came back to me.

I thought of questions that have no reply,
And would have turned to toss the grass to dry;

But he turned first, and led my eye to look
At a tall tuft of flowers beside a brook,

A leaping tongue of bloom the scythe had spared
Beside a reedy brook the scythe had bared.

I left my place to know them by their name,
Finding them butterfly weed when I came.

The mower in the dew had loved them thus,
By leaving them to flourish, not for us,

Nor yet to draw one thought of ours to him,
But from sheer morning gladness at the brim.

The butterfly and I had lit upon,
Nevertheless, a message from the dawn,

That made me hear the wakening birds around,
And hear his long scythe whispering to the ground,

And feel a spirit kindred to my own;
So that henceforth I worked no more alone;

But glad with him, I worked as with his aid,
And weary, sought at noon with him the shade;

And dreaming, as it were, held brotherly speech
With one whose thought I had not hoped to reach.

“Men work together,” I told him from the heart,
“Whether they work together or apart.”

Frost is always a careful observer, and his details are precise. Have your students ever seen someone mow a field with a scythe? The video below illustrates the process very well. The man in this scene is performing the first step, which the poem’s “off-stage” character performed at dawn before the narrator arrived: he is cutting the grass and leaving it in rows. Either he or someone else will come back later to turn the rows over so the cut grass will dry and not rot:

“I listened for his whetstone on the breeze,” says Frost. Skip ahead in the video to the 2:25 mark and you’ll hear exactly what that sounded like (along with some “wakening birds around”).

“I left my place to know them [the flowers] by their name, / Finding them butterfly weed when I came.” Is “butterfly weed” an imaginary invention? Not at all. Asclepias tuberosa (butterfly weed) is a common field-flower of the northeastern United States that is particularly attractive to butterflies.

One reason Frost’s poems are especially great for teachers is that they often provide clear and simple examples of specific literary techniques and structures, examples that you can share with your students. “The Tuft of Flowers,” for instance, is an entire poem composed of couplets – rhymed pairs. That’s a basic term every beginning literature student should know:

A leaping tongue of bloom the scythe had spared
Beside a reedy brook the scythe had bared.

Entire poems in couplets are not too common; more often couplets are used at the conclusion of a poem or a scene in a verse play as a kind of poetical period. Shakespeare often ends his scenes with couplets, as he does just before the Battle of Agincourt in Henry V:

Now, soldiers, march away,
And how Thou pleasest, God, dispose the day.

It’s mid-September, and summer is now grading into autumn. In many parts of the United States the Monarch butterfly migration is underway — I’ve seen at least a dozen in the last couple of days. Perhaps you can find a few Monarchs in an open field near you this week and trace the paths they take on tremulous wing. Who knows where they may lead you. 🦋

What wonderful words and poetical productions will you be studying in your homeschool this Cygnus Term? 😊

❡ Making a new friend: When you introduce your students to a new poem, especially one in a traditional form, take your time, and don’t worry about “getting” everything right away. A good poem is a friend for life, and as with any friend, it takes several meetings to get acquainted. Before you even start to think about meaning, take a look at the poem’s structure. How many lines does it have? Are the lines grouped into stanzas? How many lines in each stanza? How many syllables in each line? Many traditional poems are highly structured and fit together in an almost mathematical way, which you can discover by counting. Do the lines rhyme? What is the rhyme-scheme (ABAB, AABA, ABCD, or something else)? By uncovering these details of structure your students will come to appreciate good poems as carefully crafted pieces of literary labor. 🖋

❡ Whether they work together or apart: If a special line or turn of phrase happens to strike you in one of our weekly poems, just copy it onto your homeschool bulletin board for a few days and invite your students to speak it aloud — that’s all it takes to begin a new poetical friendship and learn a few lovely words that will stay with you for life. 😊

❡ Looking in the lexicon: There’s some wonderful vocabulary in this week’s poem to look up in your family dictionary (riverhouses.org/books): whetstone, tremulous, scythe, [be]wildered. Send your students to the dictionary also for any poetical terminology they encounter: stanza, couplet, quatrain, sonnet, pentameter, hexameter, iambic, dactylic, and more — wonderful words, every one! 🔎

❡ Literary lives: The website of the Poetry Foundation includes biographical notes and examples of the work of many important poets (including Robert Frost) that are suitable for high school students and homeschool teachers. 🖋

❡ Here, said the year: This post is one of our regular homeschool poems-of-the-week. Add your name to our River Houses mailing list (riverhouses.org/newsletter) to get posts like these delivered right to your mailbox, and print your own River Houses Poetry Calendar (riverhouses.org/calendars) to follow along with us as we visit fifty of our favorite friends over the course of the year. 📖

Click to: riverhouses.org/2020-jennings

What defines the seasons? Is it a change in temperature? Migrating birds? The position of the sun in the sky? An evocation in the air?

Here’s a wonderful poem for homeschool high-schoolers (and for mom and dad, too) that considers how the seasons arrive and what defines them. It’s from British poet Elizabeth Jennings (1926–2001), and it’s our poem-of-the-week for the second week of September — a perfect poem for the start of the new school year.

Song at the Beginning of Autumn

Now watch this autumn that arrives
In smells. All looks like summer still;
Colours are quite unchanged, the air
On green and white serenely thrives.
Heavy the trees with growth and full
The fields. Flowers flourish everywhere.

Proust who collected time within
A child’s cake would understand
The ambiguity of this —
Summer still raging while a thin
Column of smoke stirs from the land
Proving that autumn gropes for us.

But every season is a kind
Of rich nostalgia. We give names —
Autumn and summer, winter, spring —
As though to unfasten from the mind
Our moods and give them outward forms.
We want the certain, solid thing.

But I am carried back against
My will into a childhood where
Autumn is bonfires, marbles, smoke;
I lean against my window fenced
From evocations in the air.
When I said autumn, autumn broke.

When you introduce your students to a new poem, especially one like this that is in a traditional form, take your time, and don’t worry about “getting” everything right away. A good poem is a friend for life, and as with any friend, it takes time to get acquainted.

Before you even start worrying about meaning, take a look at the poem’s structure. How many lines does it have? Are the lines grouped into stanzas? How many lines in each stanza? How many syllables in each line? Many traditional poems are highly structured and fit together in an almost mathematical way, which you can discover by counting. Do the lines rhyme? What is the rhyme-scheme? By uncovering these details of structure your students will come to appreciate good poems as carefully crafted pieces of literary labor.

“Song at the Beginning of Autumn” is a very precisely structured poem. If you count, you’ll find that every line has exactly eight syllables. (That pattern tells you that “flowers” should be pronounced here as something close to a one-syllable word: “flowrs” not “flow-ers.”) Do the lines have a rhyming pattern? They do. The lines of the first stanza end with arrives–still–air and thrives–full–where. We’ll call that ABC ABC, and if you check all the other stanzas you’ll find they’re exactly the same: ABC ABC.

If you try to read this poem aloud you’ll discover that it has a kind of prose-y feel — it doesn’t seem very “poetical” at first. What creates that sensation? The prose-y feel comes from Jennings’ deliberate use of enjambment — a wonderful literary word for your students to learn that refers to the mismatch between the line breaks of the poem and the natural grammatical pauses in the poem’s underlying sentences.

The opposite of enjambed verse is end-stopped verse, in which the line-ends correspond to natural grammatical breaks: “Whose woods these are I think I know (pause). / His house is in the village though (pause); / He will not see me stopping here / To watch his woods fill up with snow (pause).” That’s Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods,” a heavily end-stopped poem with a sing-song-y feel.

Contrast that with Jennings, with natural grammatical pauses added: “Now watch this autumn that arrives / In smells (pause). All looks like summer still (pause); / Colours are quite unchanged (pause), the air / On green and white serenely thrives (pause). / Heavy the trees with growth and full / The fields (pause). Flowers flourish everywhere (pause).” In her case, many of the natural grammatical pauses don’t coincide with the line-ends — that’s enjambment, and that’s what creates the prose-y feel of the poem.

What wonderful words and poetical productions will you be studying in your homeschool this Cygnus Term? 😊

❡ Looking in the lexicon: You can ask your students some good vocabulary-related questions this week in the context of this poem — send them to your family dictionary (riverhouses.org/books) for answers. Who is Proust? What’s the difference between “colours” and “colors”? What’s the origin of the word “nostalgia”? (And how is it related to the word “analgesic”?) How is the word “broke” being used here? (Hint: it’s intransitive definition #13.) (Wait, are you saying there are thirteen different definitions of “break/broke”? Actually, there are a lot more — look in the lexicon!) 🔎

❡ When I said autumn, autumn broke:: If a special line or turn of phrase happens to strike you in one of our weekly poems, just copy it onto your homeschool bulletin board for a few days and invite your students to speak it aloud — that’s all it takes to begin a new poetical friendship and learn a few lovely words that will stay with you for life. 😊

❡ Literary lives: If you want to learn more about Elizabeth Jennings, “one of the most popular, prolific, and widely anthologized lyric poets of the late twentieth century,” see if you local library can borrow this new biography for you: Elizabeth Jennings: The Inward War (Oxford University Press, 2018). 🖋

❡ Here, said the year: This post is one of our regular homeschool poems-of-the-week. Add your name to our River Houses mailing list (riverhouses.org/newsletter) to get posts like these delivered right to your mailbox, and print your own River Houses Poetry Calendar (riverhouses.org/calendars) to follow along with us as we visit fifty of our favorite friends over the course of the year. 📖