Raymond Holden’s poem is beautiful on its own terms, even if its light strikes us ultimately as a reflected light, like the light of the moon on the snow.
Published:
Updated:
In any literary era, there’s only so much room to shine. Some poets will rise, beaming their light down on everyone else. Others will appear — to those of us who read them at all, a century or more later — among the shadows. An American poet publishing a north-woods-snow poem in 1920 must inevitably strike us, reading that poem in the twenty-first century, as a shadow cast by Robert Frost. Even if that poem bears no more than a passing similarity of setting to “Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening,” still we read it and think, “Oh, yeah. Frost.”
In the case of Raymond Holden (1894–1972), the connection to Frost is more than a coincidence. The two had met as neighbors at Franconia, New Hampshire, in 1915. Holden eventually bought all Frost’s land at Franconia, on Frost’s move to Vermont in 1920. These poets are writing not only about a similar landscape, but literally the same landscape, the same trees, the same snow. They would have heard the same voices, which perhaps explains why, in “Sugaring,” the exchanges among the men, tossed off so naturally in the poem’s easy blank-verse cadences, sound so familiar. They are familiar. They are the same people who populate Frost’s own more famous poems of the same period.
Yet Raymond Holden isn’t Robert Frost. He’s not even, in essentials, a copy of Frost, though his poetic style, as well as his subject here, bears Frost’s particular imprint. Holden is, at his core, a Romantic. Frost, a modern skeptic, would not go out at the end of a poem to lie in the snow, to be close to the thrumming life of the earth on the brink of springtime. Holden does. At least, he can envision a speaker who both does such a thing and is not deluded in doing it, because some good promise really lies buried there, beneath the snow. Were it not for the existence of Robert Frost, at precisely the same time and in precisely the same place, we could talk about all this without comparison. As it is, line by line, Holden’s poem is beautiful on its own terms, even if its light strikes us ultimately as a reflected light, like the light of the moon on the snow.
By GEORGE WILLIS
|
By BRADLEY CORTRIGHT
|
By A.R. HOFFMAN
Cancel anytime
By continuing you agree to our Privacy Policy and Terms of Service.
