There are more things than well-made that a poem can be — but as someone who’s worked to make their own poems work, I can use that experience to admire what Robert Frost does in today’s piece.

“Pea Brush”  is a rhymed iambic poem, based on four-foot lines, but it throws in enough variation that it never seems like it’s limping along in its gait. The rhymes aren’t fancy, and at least for me, they quietly chime along in the background without calling attention to themselves. This is prosody that isn’t bragging or showing off. It was easy to sing in my rough-hewn manner for the most part,*  but if I was to reformat it into blocks as if it was prose, it wouldn’t seem all that strange either. Indeed, as I performed it, I wanted to stress its conversational quality.

If you’d like to follow along, here’s a link to the text of Frost’s poem used for my performance.

I myself haven’t had a garden in decades, but one friend of the blog Paul Deaton covers their kitchen garden regularly at his blog, and alternative Parlando voice and keyboardist Dave Moore has a garden that we talk about sometimes. I could imagine reading the first-layer plot of this poem as a post Paul might make. “I’ve arranged with a neighbor to use the small limbs from some birch trees he’s clearing as poles for some of my climbing garden plants. When I went to pick them up on Sunday, I noticed bent-over wildflowers** blooming under the brush pile. My reuse of the felled branches will help my pea vines and give the wildflowers room to grow.”

Besides this clear plot line, there are fine clear images in the poem’s story: the smell of sap still in the air from the just-cut trees, the pause in the frog’s song, the near-like to a baby’s grip of an adult’s finger to the tendrils of a climbing plant on garden stakes.

 Wishing good luck to all the gardeners reading this.

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Below this surface, what is the poem trying to convey? The poem’s speaker (as a character perhaps a more prosaic farmer than the poet and indifferent farmer that Frost was) just notes the practicality of the arrangement — free garden stakes — while letting us in on the blooming of May flowers and the promise of harvest aided by this arrangement. Frost the poet has written this well-made play, painted this scenery, blocked and directed its performance. The play portrays the give and take of humankind in nature. We’ll grow (and consume) the peas with their infant tendrils. Neighbor John has amputated the treescape for his own agricultural designs. These are planned acts of life and death. The episode of the frogs has them portraying those things outside our plans, their Sunday-service silence to hide from a two-footed demigod that might come to capture them to a final silence.

I’ll note too the poem’s ending “had to come” interjection breaking the meter to make a final statement of the budding wildflowers that couldn’t wait for humans to make their plans.

I had to make do with a single hour to get this musical performance down today, and I chose to grab an acoustic guitar to get this accomplished. The results felt right enough to produce this new piece that you can hear with the graphical audio player below. No player?  This highlighted link is an alternative that will open a new tab with its own audio player.

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*The line “The same as you seize cat’s-cradle strings” is a bit of a tongue-twister. And while I get Frost’s image clearly in that line’s stanza, the syntax is a little disordered I think.

**Frost names his wildflowers as trillium. I don’t know if Frost was the exact botanist that his friend Edward Thomas or his great New England predecessor Emily Dickinson were. Neither am I, but I’m often open to researching specifics like this in poems. I find that one of the species of trillium that grows in Frost’s New England is the Nodding Trillium, a variation that grows crooked stems naturally, not because a brush pile has altered its growth.