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Hello, this is Mark Marcus, and this is the Poetry Show. And today, a very strange contiguity, if you will, brings Morton Marcus: One of them said: These are really the thoughts of all men and all ages and lands.

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us a program of two of the greatest American poets of all They are not original with me. If they are not yours as much as mine, they are nothing or next to nothing. If they are not the riddle and the untying of the riddle, they are nothing. If

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time because it was on this day, in 1892, that the first of those they are not just as close as they are distant, they are nothing. He said:

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Have you heard that it is good to gain the day? I say it is poets I just read, Walt Whitman, died in Camden, New Jersey. And good to fall, battles are lost in the same spirit in which they are one. I beat and pound for the dead. I blow through my

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embouchure my loudest and gayest for them. Vivas to those who it was on that same day in 1874 that Robert Frost, the second have failed, and to those whose war vessel sank in the sea, and to those themselves who sank in the sea. And to all generals

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that lost engagements, and all overcome heroes, and the poet I read, was born in San Francisco, California. Today, numberless unknown heroes equal to the greatest heroes known. I'm going to read some poems by Walt Whitman, talk about him a

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Robert Frost: He said: Morton Marcus: Within me latitude widens, longitude little bit, and then the second part of the show, read some lengthens. Asia, Africa, Europe, are to the east, America is

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provided for in the west, bending the bulge of the earth poems by Robert Frost, talk about him a little bit. And it winds the hot equator, curiously north and south turn the axis-ends. Within me is the longest day, the sun wheels and

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slanting rings, it does not set for months, stretched in due seems especially relevant. At this time, once more America time within me the midnight sun just rises above the horizon and sinks again, within me zones, seas, cataracts, forests,

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looks to what its ideals are all about, and looks to who it is as volcanoes, groups, Malaysia, Polynesia, and the great West Indian Islands. an identity among the nations, and the history of the world as

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we find ourselves poised in two different areas of the globe, to And the other one said: The land was ours before we were the land's. She was our land more than a hundred years before we were her people. She was ours

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once more engage in one of the wars that Frost just mentioned. in Massachusetts, in Virginia, but we were England's, still colonials, possessing what we were still unpossessed by, possessed by what we now know more possessed. Something we

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I also want to remind you that we are still looking for people were withholding made us weak until we found out that it was ourselves we were withholding from our land of living, and forthwith found salvation and surrender. Such as we were we

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to subscribe to KUSP, we have not reached our goal of $35,000. gave ourselves outright (The deed of gift was many deeds of war) to the land vaguely realizing westward, but still And if you were not here last week, or you did not hear the

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unstoried, artless, unenhanced, such as she was, such as she would become. show last week, we certainly are looking for more subscribers to Walt Whitman was a celebrator and what he celebrated was you

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the tune of $20 for those people who have fixed incomes or our students, $30 individual, $50 a family and professional subscription, and $100 sustaining, and for the $100 you get a KUSP shirt. So I will be reminding you of that, and as

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you hear this program and if you think it bears any kind of positive reaction on your part, please do subscribe to this radio station, which is totally community run, community oriented, and in which just about everyone is a volunteer.

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So we will begin after listening to the rest of "The Plow That Broke the Plains," or at least the part of it by Virgil Thomson, with some poems by Walt Whitman. and I. He was the one who found the American identity and he

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reveled in it. We forget that during his lifetime his view of America was not accepted by anybody. In fact, nobody had ever seen a poet like Walt Whitman before in the world. He was raucous, he was reverent, he was sorrowful, he was joyous,

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and he was also mystical. He was the great celebrator of what America was, what America could become. He saw the potential of the soul that was the United States. And he did it in a way that had never been done before, he invented free verse. And he

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did it in long lines of beats that went for anywhere from seven to eleven beats to the line, and in which everythin worked in parallel structur because that's what he believed He believed that the human rac was evolving toward perfectio

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and the United States was th latest stepping stone in tha evolution. He didn't think w were the last. He didn't thin we were the epitome of the hu an race, but he did think that w were, at that point, the f rthest evolved in our ideas, w

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ich of course were democracy. He took the idea of democracy an he did two things with it: On , he began to write a poetry wh ch talked about non-poetic th ngs. Before this, poetry had ta ked mostly about the beauties of nature and had set themes th

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t it pursued. But Whitman to k poetry into the ugly pl ces, into the dark streets as ell as into the sunlit fie ds. He felt that democracy mea t that everything was equal, and therefore everything should hav equal attention, and keep th

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t in mind as I read different po ms by him. He embraced ev rybody, not just the re pectable senator, but also th thief and the killer. And he to k the idea of democracy to a ph losophical bent that has made hi work suspect in many qu

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rters, but I hope to show you to ay that he was indeed one of the rarest of all poets, and if mos of his work fails, still it f ils magnificently and what does 't fail, it works incr dibly also.

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So what I would like to do is begin with a poem that I have just lost but will find again. I'd like to begin with I think one of the most beautifully modulated poems I've ever heard, this is all one sentence, and it is a great rapture to spring.

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And since the sun is just laying its honeyed rays all over Santa Cruz today, let me read you the beginning of one of the great poems of beginning and it is: OUT OF THE CRADLE ENDLESSLY ROCKING, but my favorite part of

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this long poem is the first thirty lines and I think they are just wonderful. The subject of the sentence does not come until the last line of the poem and here's how it sounds -- but notice the rapture, notice the joy, notice the mystical

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connection here. Out of the cradle endlessly rocking, out of the mockingbird's throat, the musical shuttle, out of the ninth-month midnight, over the sterile sands and the fields

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beyond, where the child leaving his bed wandered alone, bareheaded, barefoot, down from the showered halo, up from the mystic play of shadows twining and twisting as if they were alive, out from the patches of briers and blackberries, from

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the memories of the bird that chanted to me, from your memories sad brother, from the fitful risings and fallings I heard, from under that yellow half-moon late-risen and swollen as if with tears, from those beginning notes of yearning and

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love there in the mist, from the thousand responses of my heart never to cease, from the myriad tence-aroused words, from the word stronger and more delicious than any, from such as now they start the scene revisiting, as a flock, twittering, rising, or

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overhead passing, born hither, ere all eludes me, hurriedly, a man, yet by these tears a little boy again, throwing myself on the sand, confronting the waves, I, chanter of pains and joys, uniter of here and hereafter, taking all hints to use them,

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but swiftly leaping beyond them, a reminiscence sing. Most of Whitman's great poems are in, "Song to Myself," and the song to myself has magical wonderful moments in it that I just have to read you to tell you about. I know some of you

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know a lot of this and those who don't know it will learn it for the first time. Whitman's collected works are in one huge book of poems, which are really composed of many books of poems, and the book of poems is called, "Leaves of Grass." Let me just

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give you some idea of what he could do. Here is one of the most perfect short poems in the language, and it gives you a sense of what America was in the 19th century. It is the sense that in many places we can still see in California, and that is

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the land, the peace of living on the land, because though he wrote of cities and the hustle-bustle of cities, and even a war, which he was a nurse during the Civil War and was right on the battlefields, he also knew that the peace of the

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country -- the growing, the agricultural life of the country -- which, as I sit here, is collapsing everywhere around us. As we begin to lose the farms that are the backbone of this country, the small family farms, that seemed to be vanishing into

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nowhere without us being able to do anything about it and which I urge all you people to take some interest in. This is happening right in our back door in Watsonville. He could write such a wonderful sense of that life as this wonderful picture that

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is done in foreground, middle ground, and background almost like a painting, much like a haiku. The big doors of the country barn stand open and ready, the dried grass of the harvest time loads the slow-drawn wagon, the

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clear light plays on the brown gray and green intertinged, the armfuls are packed to the sagging mow. I am there, I help, I came stretched atop of the load, I felt its soft jolts, one leg reclined on the other, I jump from the crossbeams and

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seize the clover and timothy, and roll head over heels and tangle my hair full of wisps. There is another short poem which I will try to find a few here if I can, and it looks like I can't, which is an equally

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wonderful picture of that same- well, I can't find it. Anyway, he also could write about the city and here is a short section. I read from the section number twelve of, "Song to Myself," in which he's celebrating America, celebrating

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his body. And what is wonderful when he is good, and there are a lot of poems he writes that are bathos and pose and don't work, but when he is good, there are wonderful lines that spring out at you because of the absolute correct choice of words and let

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me, therefore, read one of these. What he would do is write long poems and then he would also present you with wonderfully long catalogs of pictures that work against or with each other, that balance each other out. Here's from:

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NUMBER EIGHT OF SONG TO MYSELF The little one sleeps in its cradle, I lift the gauze and look a long time, and silently brush away flies with my hand. The youngster and the red-faced girl turn aside up the bushy

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hill, I peeringly view them from the top. The suicide sprawls on the bloody floor of the bedroom, I witness the corpse with its dabbled hair, I note where the pistol has fallen. [Commentary] Now that's all one stanza and it seems to me --

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well, it's actually two stanzas -- it seems to me that that is a wonderful sense of a life of hopes and loves that have come to naught. Starting with a child in the cradle, you make the connection between the youngster and the red-faced girl,

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obviously two lovers walking up a hillside, and then suddenly, as if moving against that upward sense of life, we have the suicide on the bloody fourth floor of his bedroom, and we have the loss of life. Now as you know, Whitman was very

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optimistic, but he also embodied both the positive and the negative aspects of life. This, "Section Number Eight of Song to Myself," continues: The blab of the pave, tires of carts, sluff of boots-soles,

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talk of the promenaders, the heavy omnibus, the driver with his interrogating thumb, the clank of the shod horses on the granite floor, the snow-sleighs, clinking, shouted jokes, pelts of snow-balls, the hurrahs for popular favorites, the fury of

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roused mobs, the flap of the curtained litter, a sick man inside born to the hospital, the meeting of enemies, the sudden oath, the blows and fall, the excited crowd, the policeman with his star quickly working his passage to the center.

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That is, what I mean by giving you images which had not been seen before. What I'm looking for is a small section, which- well, here's one of my favorite long sections of these groups of images. It is a wonderful section which is:

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NUMBER FIFTEEN, and just listen to these wonderful images that just keep marching down the page, again life in America: The pure contralto sings in the organ loft, the carpenter dresses his plank, the tongue of his foreplane whistles its wild

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ascending lisp, the married and unmarried children ride home to their Thanksgiving dinner, the sea pilot seizes the king-pin, he heaves down with a strong arm. The mate stands braced in the whale-boat, lance and harpoo are ready, the duck-shoote

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walks by silent and cautiou stretches, the deacons ar ordained with crossed hands a the altar, the spinning-gir retreats and advances to the hu of the big wheel, the farme stops by the bars as he walks o a first-day loafe and looks a

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oats and rye. The lunatic i carried at last to the asylum, confirmed case, (He will neve sleep anymore as he did in th cot in his mother's bedroom) th jour printer with gray head an gaunt jaws works at his case, h turns his quid of tobacco whil

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his eyes blurr with manuscript [Commentary] And he goes all the way down and he records different things, and he comes to this wonderful, again, opposing or parallel structure of images. And this shows how he

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could work with non-poetic images and look at the world in both its ugliness and its beauty. The bride unrumples her white dress, the minute-hand of the clock moves slowly. The opium-eater reclines with a

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rigid head and just opened lips, the prostitute draggles her shawl, her bonnet bobs on her tipsy and pimpled neck, the crowd laugh at her blackguard oaths, the men jeer and wink to each other (Miserable! I do not laugh at your oaths nor jeer

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you) the President holding a cabinet council is surrounded by the great Secretaries, on the piazza walk three matrons stately and friendly with twined arms. Well, he is a poet sometimes who absolutely astonishes us with

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what we do not expect. And what I would like to read you is one of those moments when he gets quiet and observes, and his insight and his sensitivity is so wonderful. This is, if you want to go find yourself after the program is over, or even

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now, this is, "The Eleventh Poem of Song to Myself," and what it is about is about a woman, a spinster, looking out a window at twenty-eight men bathing naked in a river. And what happens in this poem, the treatment is so modern, is so

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sensitive that I will let it speak for itself which it should. But also I love the apotheosis in this, the change from the scene to a mythicizing of the scene. NUMBER ELEVEN OF SONG TO MYSELF by Walt Whitman

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Twenty-eight young men bathed by the shore, twenty-eight young men and all so friendly; twenty-eight years of womanly life and all so lonesome. She owns the fine house by the rise of the bank, she hides handsome and richly drest aft the blinds

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of the window. Which of the young men does she like the best? Ah the homeliest of them is beautiful to her. Where are you off to, lady? for I see you, you splash in the water there, yet stay stock still in your room. Dancing and laughing along

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the beach came the twenty-ninth bather, the rest did not see her, but she saw them and loved them. The beards of the young men glistened with wet, it ran from their long hair, little streams passed over their bodies. An unseen hand also

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passed over their bodies, it descended tremblingly from their temples and ribs. Young men float on their backs, their wide bellies bulge to the sun, they do not ask who seizes fast to them, they do not know who puffs and declines with pendant and

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bending arch, they do not think whom they souse with spray. And at other times he says: I have said that the soul is not more than the body, and I have said that the body is no more than the soul, and nothing, not

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God, is greater to one than one's self is, whoever walks a furlong without sympathy, walks to his own funeral dressed in his shroud. And I am looking for the pages I marked. Here's one of my

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favorite little sections of his. This is also from, "Song to Myself," and it is the beginning of: THE THIRTY-SECOND SONG, and he ruminatively says: I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid

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and self-contained, I stand and look at them long and long. They do not sweat and whine about their condition, they do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins, they do not make me sick discussing their duty to God, not one is dissatisfied,

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not one is demented with a mania of owning things, not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago, not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth. And where he got the overall title from, "The Leaves of

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Grass," is from the famous: SECTION NUMBER SIX A child said, what is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands; how could I answer the child? I do not know what it is

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any more than he. I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven. Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord, a scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropt, bearing the owner's name someway in the

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corners that we may see and remark, and say whose? Or I guess the grass is itself a child, the produced babe of the vegetation. Or I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic, and it means, sprouting alike and broad zones and narrow zones, growing

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among black folks as among white, Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff, I give them the same, I receive them the same. And now, the grass seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves.

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And that section goes on. He also wrote a wonderful book called, "Drum Taps," which is part of, "Leaves of Grass," and a book of prose, a short book of prose called, "Specimen Days." Both of those are among the most powerful war poems ever written.

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And of course, they're written about the American Civil War. But he could write poems that would absolutely astonish you. And let me read one here, this is not by a 20th century surrealist poet, not by Pablo Neruda who uses so much of the

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catalogs and lists of Whitman, but Walt Whitman writing in 1870 and it is: THE WORLD BELOW THE BRINE, or what the world is like beneath the sea and it is absolutely magical.

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The world below the brine, forests at the bottom of the sea, the branches and leaves, sea-lettuce, vast lichens, strange flowers and seeds, a thick tangle, openings, and pink turf, different colors, pale gray and green, purple, white,

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and gold, the play of light through the water, dumb swimmers there among the rocks, coral, gluten, grass, rushes, and the aliment of the swimmers, sluggish existences grazing there suspended, or slowly crawling close to the bottom,

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the sperm-whale at the surface blowing air and spray, or disporting with his flukes, the leaden-eyed shark, the walrus, the turtle, the hairy sea-leopard, and the stingray, passions there, wars, pursuits, tribes, sight in those

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ocean-depths, breathing that thick-breathing air, as so many do, the change thence to the sight here, and to the subtle air breathed by beings like us who walk this sphere, the change onward from ours to that of beings who walk other spheres.

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There is so much I could read about Whitman, I see that a half hour has gone already. I will end with a poem that was written and then revised eleven years before his death. And as I said, we are reading this because this is the anniversary in 1892,

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which, if I do my math quickly the ninety-third anniversary of the death of Walt Whitman today. And here is what he says in one of his beautiful poems when he can realize with a minutiae the imagery that absolutely traces the most minute of things, when

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he is a poet at his best, looking at a noiseless patient spider. Robert Frost: A NOISELESS PATIENT SPIDER Morton Marcus: I marked where on a little promontory it stood

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isolated, marked how to explore the vacant vast surrounding, it launched forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself, ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them. And you oh my soul where you stand, surrounded, detached, in

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measureless oceans of space, ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them, till the bridge you will need be formed, till the ductile anchor hold, till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, oh my soul.

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You're listening to Aaron Copland's "Appalachian Spring" in the background, this is the Poetry Show. I want to remind you that our subscription drive here at KUSP is still on, and the donations are $20 for those people on fixed incomes and

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students, $30 for individuals, $50 for family and professionals, $100 for sustaining, in which you get a KUSP shirt. Please, please subscribe. The station needs the money, we operate on a totally volunteer basis. This is your

00:33:45.380 - 00:34:00.770

station, though we have donations from local businesses, this is mostly funded by you. And we want to thank all of those people who have subscribed already. I want to thank particularly the seven people who have subscribed to the show

00:34:00.770 - 00:34:20.210

last week, we do really appreciate and do really need your subscriptions if KUSP is to continue. Today, we are doing a two-part show because today is the day that Robert Frost was born in 1874, and as you know from the last part of the show

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if you were listening, the day that Walt Whitman died in 1892. Most people do not know, actually, that Frost was born in San Francisco, California. And I would like to read a poem by him, a very early poem, in which he recalls the Pacific. Everyone

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always thinks that he was an old farmer from New England. Well, it's not true. He didn't even see New England, in fact, until he was ten years old. Anyway, here's a memory in the form of a sonnet of of the Pacific and when he lived in California.

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It's called: ONCE BY THE PACIFIC The shattered water made a misty din. Great waves looked over others coming in, and thought of doing something to the shore

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that water never did to land before. The clouds were low and hairy in the skies, like locks blown forward, and the gleam of eyes. You could not tell, and yet it looked as if the shore was lucky and being backed by a cliff, the cliff in being backed

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by continent; it looked as if a night of dark intent was coming, and not only a night, an age. Someone had better be prepared for rage. There would be more than ocean-water broken before God's last "Put out the light" was spoken.

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And I should say a few words about Robert Frost, we can really do it very quickly. What are his themes? His themes are: isolation, man alone in the country, man alone in the universe, extinction that is the end of what man creates and how

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it does not last, and also man's limitation, his limitations in what he dreams up for himself and at the same time, his limitations as to what he can actually accomplish in this universe, or more, what he can know. And I will get to one of

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my favorite poems by him shortly. What I'd like to do is read some very short well-known poems by him to begin with to give you again the sense of this great poet because in recent years, Robert Frost has been greatly maligned. Parts of a

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biography on his life have told us that he was not a very nice human being, but I think that of the great poets we talk about in the 20th century, the Ezra Pounds, the T.S. Eliots, even one of my favorites, William Carlos Williams, when we talk

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about the great poets of America in the 20th century, still, in this year of 1986, Robert Frost stands at the head of that line. And it is not only because of his beautiful descriptions of country life and the landscape, but it is because he also is

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interested in people, and I will get into that in a second. We don't think of him as a poet of people, but he did write character sketches endlessly, and they are very, very moving pictures of life in the country and the dottiness it makes you,

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at the same time the way it does not give you the great answers or the great romantic visions of life. Unlike Whitman, Frost's voice is slow and thoughtful, weighing each word; he is cautious. He is a New England farmer, now that is not his real

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voice, remember, it is a persona he adopts in these poems. So let's certainly read the most famous Frost poem, a beautiful picture. Notice again, the reason I want to read these is that every word is just so perfectly chosen yet seems so

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simple, seems so right. And that is: STOPPING BY WOODS ON A SNOWY EVENING, and it sounds like this: Whose woods these are I think I know. His house is in the

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village though; he will not see me stopping here to watch his woods fill up with snow. My little horse must think it queer to stop without a farmhouse near between the woods and frozen lake the darkest evening of the year. He gives his harness bells

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a shake to ask if there is some mistake. The only other sound's the sweep of easy wind and downy flake. The woods are lovely, dark and deep, but I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep, and miles to go before I sleep.

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And here's another similar poem, a wonderful poem called: DESERT PLACES Snow falling and night falling fast, oh, fast in a field I looked into going past, and the ground almost covered smooth in

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snow, but a few weeds and stubble showing last. The woods around it have it -- it is theirs. All animals are smothered in their lairs. I am too absent-spirited to count; the loneliness includes me unawares. And lonely as it is,

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that loneliness will be more lonely ere it will be less -- a blanker whiteness of benighted snow with no expression, nothing to express. They cannot scare me with their empty spaces between stars -- on stars where no human race is. I have it in me so much

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nearer home to scare myself with my own desert places. Well, there is a touching on several themes, and that is the theme of isolation, the theme of man's limitation and of his essential loneliness. And Frost says that he cannot be

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frightened by the great loneliness of the universe, that close to him there is this loneliness, there is this loneliness in the immediate world of the neighborhood. Now there is one poem that Frost has written, which talks about this.

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In all of these poems, especially ones in which we have either the speaker or we have characters, they go out and they ask an answer of God, or they ask an answer of nature: Who am I? What am I doing here? What does this all mean? And there is

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one wonderful poem that a lot of people don't know by Frost called, "The Most Of It." And in this one, we have a man going out, crying out for the meaning of life, all right. What's going on? What am I here for? And nature, or does it, gives him a

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very strange answer. And this is another aspect of Frost, he is wry, and he is ironic, and yet at the same time he is very sensitive because he too, suffers as all his characters do. The poem is called:

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THE MOST OF IT He thought he kept the universe alone; for all the voice in answer he could wake was about the mocking echo of his own from some tree-hidden cliff across the lake. Some morning from the

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boulder-broken beach he would cry out on life, that what it wants is not its own love back and copy speech, but counter-love, original response. Nothing ever came of what he cried unless it was the embodiment that crashed in the

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cliff's talus on the other side, and then in the far distant water splashed, but after a time allowed for it to swim, instead of proving human when it neared and someone else additional to him, as a great buck it powerfully appeared, pushing the

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crumpled water up ahead, and landed pouring like a waterfall, and stumbled through the rocks with horny tread, and forced the underbrush -- and that was all. Well, he finds in nature things to ruminate on and things that

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he knows are trying to tell him something as in that last poem -- was it an answer from nature, was it an answer from God, or was a just a coincidence? At the one time when he asks about life, the character is greeted by this great tumult on the

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opposite shore of a lake. And then, as it swims to his side and then bolts past him, it reveals itself as a huge buck, a very ironic answer to the great romantic call of meaning. But as you also know, Frost could be very humorous, and here is one

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of my favorite humorous Frost poems done again in couplets because he was a very, very precise traditional poet using closed metrics and rhyme; in fact, he wrote a lot of sonnets. This is called, "Departmental," and what I think is so wonderful

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about it is he has observed, he has looked at the life of ants, A-N-T-S, and if you are going to be a poet, if you get joy out of poetry you're just going to be a reader of it. One of the things that you delight in, one of the things as a poet you will want

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to teach yourself if you are going to be one, is to look carefully and particularly at the world around you, the small sections of it as well as the large. And here is Frost looking very carefully and very ironically, in a poem called:

00:44:24.160 - 00:44:43.780

DEPARTMENTAL An ant on the tablecloth ran into a dormant moth of many times his size. He showed not the least surprise. His business wasn't with such. He gave it scarcely a touch, and was off on

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his duty run. Yet if he encountered one of the hive's enquiry squad whose work is to find out God and the nature of time and space, he would put them on to the case. Ants are a curious race; one crossing with hurried tread the body of one of

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their dead isn't given a moment's arrest -- seems not even impressed. But he no doubt reports to any with whom he crosses antennae, and they no doubt report to the higher-up at court. Then word goes forth in Formic: "Death's come to Jerry

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McCormic, our selfless forager Jerry. Will the special Janizary whose office it is to bury the dead of the commissary go bring him home to his people. Lay him in state on a sepal. Wrap him for shroud in a petal. Embalm him with ichor of nettle. This

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is the word of your Queen." And presently on the scene appears a solemn mortician; and taking formal position, with feelers commonly atwiddle, seizes the dead by the middle, and heaving him high in the air, carries him out of there. No one stands

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round to stare. It is nobody else's affair it couldn't be called ungentle, but how thoroughly departmental. And yet at the same time, Frost can write a poem, which is such a stunningly brutal picture of the universe which he sees in,

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again, a moth, and this time a spider because it was the dead moth that began the poem as Frost observed him in the last poem we read, "Departmental." Here is his sonnet, believe it or not, notice how little this sounds like a sonnet. He is such

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a master of form. His famous sonnet, "Design," in which he is talking about the design, the heartless design of the universe, but again looking at minutia, looking at a spider. DESIGN

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I found a dimpled spider, fat and white, on a white heal-all, holding up a moth like a white piece of rigid satin cloth -- assorted characters of death and blight mixed ready to begin the morning right, like the ingredients of a witches' broth

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-- a snow-drop spider, a flower like a froth, and dead wings carried like a paper kite. What had that flower to do with being white, the wayside blue and innocent heal-all? What brought the kindred spider to that height, then steered the white

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moth thither in the night? What but design of darkness to appall? If design govern and a thing so small. Let's listen to Robert Frost now read from his own poems and see the voice that he used. And this is a famous Frost poem called:

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THE ROAD NOT TAKEN, the voice of Robert Frost: Robert Frost: Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and sorry I could not travel both and be one traveler, long I stood and looked down one as far as I could to where it bent in the

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undergrowth; then took the other, as justice as fair, and having perhaps the better claim, because it was grassy and wanted wear; though as for the passing there had worn them really about the same, and both that morning equally lay in leaves no step

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had trodden black. Oh, I kept the first for another day! Yet knowing how way leads on to way, I doubted if I should ever come back. I shall be telling this with a sigh somewhere ages and ages hence: two roads diverged in a wood, and I -- took the one

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less traveled by, and that has made all the difference. Morton Marcus: That was Robert Frost and he was reading, "Two Roads Diverged in a Yellow Wood," and you can hear the craggy persona that he gets into the sound of his voice. We have

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been listening to a program, or I have been presenting a program and you have been listening to it, in which we heard some poems and very few, unfortunately by Walt Whitman and Robert Frost. Whitman, who died on this day in 1892 in Camden, New Jersey, and

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Frost, who was born on this day in 1874, in San Francisco, California. I want to end with a long, maybe one of the saddest of all Frost poems, especially in context to what is happening in the country today. And before I do, I would like to tell you

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once more, that this program has been presented by KUSP which is looking for your subscription: $20 for fixed income and student groups, $30 for individuals, $50 for family and professionals, and $100 sustaining, and you get a shirt with $100 sustaining

00:51:00.380 - 00:51:20.840

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00:51:21.320 - 00:51:38.840

obvious gifts of appreciation in subscriptions from out there; you make the station possible. As I said, I want to end this program by reading a poem by Frost called, "Directive." We don't think of this poem when we think of Robert Frost's poetry

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unless we read a lot of it. It is a poem about extinction, it is a poem about loss. And as the Midwest becomes one darkened farmhouse after another, acre upon acre, mile after mile, as the small farm towns of Iowa and Nebraska vanish into the past

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and an American way of life, which is really our backbone, vanishes into the past because of interest rates, because of whatever the administration is doing to make the farmers' lot an impossible one, that is the small family farmer. I want to

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read a poem that almost prophecies that, and that is Robert Frost's: DIRECTIVE, to end this program. Back out of all this now too much for us, back in a time made

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simple by the loss of detail, burned, dissolved, and broken off like graveyard marble sculpture in the weather, there is a house that is no more a house, upon a farm that is no more a farm, and in a town that is no more a town. The road

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there, if you'll let a guide direct you who only has at heart your getting lost, may seem as if should- it should have been a quarry -- great monolithic knees the former town long since gave up pretense of keeping covered. And there's a story in a book

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about it: Besides the wear of iron wagon wheels the ledges show lines ruled southeast-northwest. The chisel work of an enormous glacier that braced his feet against the Arctic Pole. You must not mind a certain coolness from him still

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said to haunt this side of Panther Mountain. Nor need you mind the serial ordeal of being watched from forty cellar holes as if by eye pairs out of forty firkins. As for the woods' excitement over you that sends light rustle rushes to their

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leaves, charge that to upstart inexperience. Where were they all not twenty years ago? They think too much of having shaded out a few old pecker-fretted apple trees. Make yourself up a cheering song of how someone's road home from work this once

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was, who may be just ahead of you on foot or creaking with a buggy load of grain. The height of the adventure is the height of country where two village cultures faded into each other. Both of them are lost. And if you're lost enough to find

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yourself by now, pull in your ladder road behind you and put a sign up closed to all but me. Then make yourself a home. The only field now left's no bigger than a harness gall. First there's the children's house of make-believe, some shattered

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dishes underneath a pine, the playthings in the playhouse of the children. Weep for what little things could make them glad. Then for the house that is no more a house, but only a belilaced cellar hole, now slowly closing like a dent in

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dough. This was no play house but a house in earnest. Your destination and your destiny's a brook that was the water of the house, cold as a spring as yet so near its source, too lofty and original to rage. (We know the valley streams that were

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aroused will leave their tatters hung on barb and thorn). I have kept hidden in the instep arch of an old cedar at the waterside a broken drinking goblet like the Grail under a spell so the wrong ones can't find it, so can't get saved, as Saint Mark

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says they mustn't. (I stole the goblet from the children's playhouse). Here are your waters and your watering place. Drink and be whole again beyond confusion.