Light On Dark Water

Nobody could keep up with all the declared National or International Such-And-Such Days, or Weeks, or Months. But I happened to notice this one, and I took "book" quite literally: as referring not to the content of a book, the words and the ideas or stories or pictures and whatever else may be the abstract thing that is "the book" as distinct from any physical thing that incarnates the book, but an actual material object. 

(Pedantically, I don't say "physical or electronic," because the workings of the latter are just as physical as paper, though they are invisible. This gets in my way sometimes when I want to differentiate with a word or maybe two a paper from an electronic book, or a CD or LP from an MP3.)

Love of the physical book is the reason I'm currently reading this one:

I haven't had it for very long and have already forgotten where I got it. Perhaps at an open-air used-book stall in D.C. the last time I was there; at any rate it was either cheap or free. And I did not need it. I've had a copy of Frost's complete poetry, published after his death and so including In the Clearing, which was his last book, published when he was eighty-eight, for many years and could have read these poems at any time. In fact I have never done much more than scratch the surface of his work, knowing a dozen or two of his best poems very well and hundreds of others not at all. 

But I started reading this one a week or so ago because I wanted to handle the book itself. I think I can say with some confidence that this would be a very bad place to begin one's reading of Frost. It is not, so far, a very good book. It's an odd one, or at least it contains a lot of poems that strike me as very odd, and not so very good. There is, for instance, a poem called "Kitty Hawk" which is fifteen pages of irregularly rhymed three-beat lines, which I have to say was a bit of a trial, and which left me a bit puzzled. The puzzlement may have more to do with the fact that I was reading it in bed and started falling asleep partway through my first reading than with the poem itself (which I did finish the next night), but I'm not much inclined to put more effort into it.

I've read most of it now, and there are a few gems, including one you may remember (I do) from the classroom, "In A Glass of Cider." But on the whole there's just not much here of what makes Frost so highly and rightly regarded. (See this entry at Poems Ancient and Modern for an instance of just how technically skilled he could be while maintaining a very American conversational voice.)

Some great part of my enjoyment of the book is the sort of physical book it is, I mean even apart from its physicality. It's not that I'm any sort of collector or connoisseur–a slightly embarrassing number of my books are library discards, and look it. But I have a particular weakness for books that were published between, say, 1920 and 1960 (1962 in this case): books that constituted adult reading when I was a child and adolescent. And the physical condition of the book doesn't really matter that much. The attraction is a form of nostalgia, containing, I suppose, the memory of something which at the time represented to me maturity and intelligence, a world of which I wanted to be a part. I'm fairly sure I didn't think any such thing at the age of fifteen or so, but it was present as a vague sense of wanting to be a substantial sort of person. To be a grown-up. There's an ideal which seems pretty close to vanishing from our culture. And maybe that knowledge, too, figures into the nostalgia.

And then there are the closing lines of the poem Frost wrote for John F. Kennedy's inauguration, greeting

A golden age of poetry and power
Of which this noonday's the beginning hour.

Frost did not live to see the savage response of history to that hope, though he did live a few months past Kennedy's assassination, which was a pretty good first serving of what was to come.