Friday, March 31, 2023

Everyman Poetry

Because I thought of Frost's "Stopping By Woods" WRT women writers, noting that the narrator could easily be female, as indeed it could be someone of any race I pushed it further.  We can all zip ourselves into that one. There is admittedly some difference because of our expectations of the time period. Why would a black woman be out late with a horse cart in New Hampshire a century ago? It would distract us from the poem, thinking that there must be something else up that we are missing. Yet a black woman might zip herself into the narrator's head as she reads and have much the same experience as anyone else. It's an easy identification. Nor does the poem change much if Frost assigned the property to a woman...no wait, that does change it a lot, of a man contemplating a woman's forest.  Never mind. the narrator can be Everyman, but the locale and time is so specific that other deviations from Generic Person for the Setting will make it a different poem.

His other poems mostly do the same. The narrator of Christmas Trees, or The Road Not Taken could be easily imagined as many things other than a white male of productive age. Fire and Ice might change a bit in meaning if we thought the narrator a woman, but I don't think racial differences would matter much. Mending Wall could theoretically have a female narrator - this would be a farm wife after all, not a woman from the city - but somehow it doesn't quite work, and Two Tramps In Mud Time would have all sorts of extra meanings of them expecting her to give up her work for them to do instead, and her reaction to that. Interesting meanings, perhaps, but definitely different.

I have no inclination to consider the other poets. Not my remit. It does have a flavor of Borges asking us to imagine what Don Quixote, word for identical word, would mean if it had been written in the 20th C.

2 comments:

james said...

OK, I will.
Sea Fever: it might change a bit if the narrator were a woman. Some of us can get into the narrator's head, even if the lifestyle doesn't tempt us.

The Bells: I'm not sure this works with a female narrator. Some would say it's awkward with a male one...

The Hollow Men: The images seem all wrong for a female narrator.

JMSmith said...

I can't imagine the narrator of Frost's poems being anyone radically different than Frost. If it were narrated by a female, I would give key words (e.g. lovely) a somewhat different meaning. Masculine love is different than feminine love, so the word "lovely" has a different meaning when spoken by a man and a woman. I also not sure that the poem would be credible if it were spoken by a person from another culture. There are foreign poems that I can read, understand, even admire; but they remain alien and do not move my soul.