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.  

Sugaring 
by Raymond Holden 

A man may think wild things under the moon — 
In March when there is a tapping in the pails
Hung breast-high on the maples. Though you sink 
To boot-tops only in the uncrusted snow, 
And feel last autumn’s leaves a short foot down, 
There will be one among the men you meet 
To say the snow lies six feet level there. 
“Not here!” you say; and he says, “In the woods” — 
Implying woods that he knows where to find. 
Well, such a moon may be miraculous, 
And if it has the power to make one man
Believe a common February snow
The great storm-wonder he would talk about
 For years if once he saw it, there may be 
In the same shimmering sickle over the hill 
Vision of other things for other men.
 
 .    .    .    .    .    . 

The moon again 
Playing tonight with vapors that go up 
And out into the silver. The brown sap works 
Its foamy bulk over the great log fire. 
Colors of flame light up a man, who kneels 
With sticks upon his arm, and in his face 
A grimace of resistance to the glow. 
All that is burning is not under here 
Boiling the early sap — I wonder why. 
It is as calm as a dream of paradise 
Out there among the trees, where runnels make 
The only music heard above the sway 
Of branches fingering the leaning moon. 
And yet a man must go, when the sap has thickened, 
Up and away to sleep a tired sleep, 
And dream of dripping from a rotting roof 
Back into sap that once was rid of him. 
I wonder why, I wonder why, I wonder . . .  

.    .    .    .    .    . 

Close the iron doors and let the fire die, 
And the faint night-wind blow through the broken walls. 
The sugar thickens, and the moon is gone, 
And frost threads up the singing rivulets. 
I am going up the mountain toward the stars,
But I should like to lie near earth tonight —
Earth that has borne the furious grip of winter 
And given a kind of birth to beauty at last. 
Look! — the old breath thrills through her once again 
And there will be passion soon, shaking her veins 
And driving her spirit upward till the buds 
Burst overhead, and swallows find the eaves 
Of the sugar-house untroubled by the talk 
Of men gone off with teams to mend the roads. 
I think I shall throw myself down here in the snow 
So to be very near her when she stirs.

___________________________________________ 

With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems will be typically drawn from the lesser-known portion of the history of English verse. In the coming months we will be reaching out to contemporary poets for examples of current, primarily formalist work, to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.