Middlebury Magazine

  • Recent Stories
  • Menu
    • Features
    • Pursuits
    • Q&A
    • Editor’s Note
    • Old Chapel
    • Road Taken
    • Review
    • Podcasts
    • Videos
    • How Did You Get Here Series
    • About
    • Advertising
    • Contact
    • Support
    • Writers’ Guidelines
  • Search

Summer 2020 Features

Sheltering in Place with Robert Frost

In these uncertain times, a writer finds solace in poetry that terrifies her.

By Laurie Clark, MA English ’03
Illustration by Alice Lee
July 20, 2020
  • Facebook icon
  • Twitter icon
  • Email icon

I first encountered Robert Frost in northern Germany. My English teacher assigned us the task of memorizing and reciting “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” I’m not sure what a sleigh-belled horse and sweeping bank of snow were supposed to communicate to an adolescent girl who had—as of yet—never experienced the brutal chill of rural New England, but those woods—so “lovely, dark and deep”—have haunted me ever since.

As we began to hole up here in the Bay Area during the global pandemic, I found myself perplexed by the jolt of forced hibernation. We sometimes emerged, warily clad in surgical masks or bandanas, walking the streets like shell-shocked soldiers, nodding knowingly at our neighbors. The skies in March were—on the whole—a uniform gray, unusual for California. It was like our condition hovered in the sky, a mocking menace.

On a rare day when the sun poked through, I hurried to the refrigerator to rescue the languishing citrus at the bottom of the bins, hastily squeezing the life out of grapefruit, navel oranges, a lime on its last legs. Mixed with rum, they proved a swift balm to the shelter-in-place battle-weary.

More often, the sky blanketed the light, and my husband, Skip, and I trudged with our dog down by Richardson Bay. One time a fellow, cavalierly unmasked, pointed toward the city on the horizon.

“Did you see the whale?” he wanted to know.

We craned our necks and peered fruitlessly across the ocean’s stillness.

Nothing there.

Read, I told myself. Disappear into a book. The one I finished as we began to shelter in place, Olive Kitteridge, was set in Maine, its harsh landscape mirroring the ferocity of its protagonist, both emotionally distant and bursting with passion. Fire and ice, it seems. So I’m wondering why, as I searched for some kind of sense, my mind kept returning, unbidden, to New England bleakness and an old man’s poems. The truth is, the poetry that speaks to me these days provides only cold comfort. And maybe that’s as it should be.

Frost—of the stark birches and mossy stone walls—is a steady ghost who has continually marked the odd trajectory of my nomadic life.

Inexplicably, in my younger days, I chose a small liberal arts college in Maine, where I found myself puzzling over the hoary-haired Yankee bard. Later, as a student at the Bread Loaf School of English, I would even spend a night in Frost’s country home, like a spooked Goldilocks. As an English teacher myself, I would watch and re-watch a dramatic reenactment of the narrative poem “Home Burial” featuring a young Joan Allen—that pillar of stoic ice—as the grieving wife. I still see her rooted at the top of a stairwell, staring down the landing to her helpless husband as her grief cracked. She wouldn’t forgive him for the dirt that leapt up and up as he dug their child’s grave just outside the window. The rift, the ways they tried and failed to cope, walled them apart.

I prefer to think of birches in Frost’s other poem. At least there’s a boy climbing up and up those black branches. But then again, there’s that complicated image of him bending and subduing those delicate trees—the ones the poet had likened to girls shaking out their long hair. When I taught that poem, I came to realize how essential an understanding of ice storms is. The first year I worked at a small boarding school in rural Maine, a brutal ice storm knocked out the power and shut school down for two months. All the “dormies” left and a few of us teachers who had no family nearby took refuge in a girls’ dormitory temporarily transformed into a community emergency shelter with a generator. I bedded up in a narrow room with my little gray cat. When we ventured outside, it was to some foreign landscape, shattered and creaking as the sun began to melt the ice. Tree trunks were smashed in half and telephone lines slung low like limp jump ropes. Three birch trees on the edge of campus bent clear to the ground in submission, just as Frost saw them. Years later, they would rise, reaching for the sun, though never fully righting themselves. Always and forever, they remain a hunched, living memorial to dread.

When I have returned to Frost’s “Birches” in my work with different groups of students, I knew the ones in New England understood the ice-coated imagery of cracking and crazing in ways that merely baffled, or worse, bored some of my northern California scholars. But a Maine student, a boy in the throes of grief for a father he had lost too young, at least granted Frost his weight. We hadn’t always had an easy time of it in English class, but at the end of that school year, the boy left me a scribbled note of thanks. To close, he quoted back to me the final swaggering line of the Frost poem I had introduced him to: “One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.” Indeed.

Undeniable now is our unity, a shared glimpse with the poet—however brief or long—of an unspeakable void. In the Bay Area of California, we have been six feet apart since St. Patrick’s Day. As a country, we are smack-dab in the heart of this global health crisis. On Easter Sunday as we approached twilight, the death toll in America stood at 22,020. In the days since, the toll has risen—up and up. The breathtaking figure of 200,000 looms.

So, Skip will hook our aging pup, Jasper Johns, to his faded red leash. Perhaps there will be a breaching whale or at least a periscoping sea lion down by the boardwalk on the edge of our wilderness by the bay. Our brown dog will urge us there past the clinging bougainvillea, the rusted mailbox, the house where they took down the tree whose red roots had invaded the basement. There’s an odd vacancy there now. We will hustle past the bungalow. For Easter, the occupant placed on her stoop baskets brimming with candy-filled plastic eggs alongside Lysol wipes. The curious would find a note stressing the household was illness free—so please take one.

And I will feel the ocean, like a damp finger on my cheek, as I inhale my own warm breath circulating behind a mask. And when I get caught, lost in thought as I often am these days as we head into summer, my dog will give a little tug on the end of the leash, like so many sleigh bells ringing across a great empty expanse, tethered, as we are, to hope for dear life.

Laurie Clark is a writer living in Sausalito, California, who taught English in high schools for over 20 years in New England, the Midwest, and the South, and on the West Coast. She is a graduate of the Bread Loaf School of English.

 

 

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.

Recent Stories

Features

The Road(s)

A little over a year ago, a writing student headed south to Florida for no other reason than J-Term was forced to go remote. She soon found herself reporting on an environmental justice battle that was roiling the state.

By Alexandra Burns '21.5
Illustrations by Yevgenia Nayberg
March 2, 2022

Reverberations

A transcontinental move, a career discovered, a landmark speech studied and translated—and an identity reshaped.

By Clara Clymer, MA Translation '22
Illustration by Anna Gusella
March 2, 2022

Cult Fiction

With absurdist, yet endearing dramedies dominating popular culture, a couple of recent Midd grads have added a new title to the canon with the wonderful Youtube series The Deli People.

By Sara Thurber Marshall
Photographs courtesy of L.T. Stenello Productions
February 4, 2022
Abstract illustration of a person with correspondence letters floating in the wind surrounding them.

Dear Friends . . .

On writing through grief.

By Bianca Giaever ’12.5
Illustration by Nicole Xu. Photographs by Paul Dahm
May 11, 2021

Dispatches

Sonic Art

What began as an attempt by Matthew Evan Taylor to collaborate with fellow musicians during the isolation of the pandemic ended up being a yearlong project that culminated in an evening performance at the Met.

By Sara Thurber Marshall
Photograph by Josiah Bania
April 15, 2022

Poetry, In Exile

After fleeing civil unrest in her native Venezuela, a Middlebury Institute graduate student turned to poetry to help make sense of it all.

By Jessie Raymond '90
Illustrations by Anonymous
January 21, 2022

Inside the Ant Chamber

A visit to a Bi Hall lab affords an up-close encounter with an extremely social cohort of insects.

By Jessie Raymond '90
Photograph by Clint Penick
November 12, 2021

Twenty Minutes, Twenty Years

Reflections on 9/11 as a New Yorker and Muslim American.

By Daleelah Saleh '23
Illustration by Davide Bonazzi
September 23, 2021

It’s in the Wash

Moyara Ruehsen separates fact from creative fiction in the world of criminal finance.

By Jessie Raymond '90
Photograph by Elena Zhukova
September 9, 2021

From Stage to Screen

Doug Anderson has plenty of experience directing opera. But with his latest production, he faced new and unusual challenges.

By Sara Thurber Marshall
Photograph by Erica Furgiuele
September 2, 2021

Film Feast

The seventh season of the Middlebury New Filmmakers Festival includes films from talented members of the Middlebury College community.

By Sara Thurber Marshall
Photo by Mia Fichman ’19
August 19, 2021

Rock On

NASA has grand plans to collect rock samples on Mars and eventually return the material to Earth. And Drew Gorin '16 is part of a team tasked with figuring out where to collect the bounty.

By Andrew Cassel
Illustration by James Yang
July 15, 2021

A Close Study

How an art history course dedicated to an 11th-century masterpiece concluded with an unusual assignment.

By Jessie Raymond '90
Photograph by Andrew Cassel
June 30, 2021
View All

Pursuits

Public Defender

On becoming one of the country's foremost cybersecurity experts.

By Jessie Raymond '90
Illustration by Neil Webb
April 14, 2022

Q&A

The Making of a Teacher

Hebrew Professor Michal Strier reflects on her life an education—in Israel and the States—a journey that led the Language School instructor to the undergraduate College for the first time this year.

By Jessie Raymond '90
Photograph by Paul Dahm
May 19, 2022

Editor’s Note

A Brilliant Fogg

Saying goodbye to a dear colleague and friend.

By Matt Jennings
Illustration by Jody Hewgill
February 25, 2020

Old Chapel

Wired for Service

Examining the myriad ways Middlebury students and alumni continue to engage in an enduring tradition: giving back to others.

By Laurie L. Patton
Illustration by Montse Bernal
November 11, 2021

Road Taken

What to Wear Now

Through accrued life experiences, a writer discovers that a common question has become a statement of identity.

By Samantha Hubbard Shanley ’99
Illustration by Naomi Clarke
March 11, 2021

Quotation

A summer immersed in a language can do wonders, as veterans of Middlebury College’s famous language-learning program can attest. The lockdown is clearly going to amount to the equivalent of about two summers, and there are mini-Middleburys happening in millions of houses worldwide.”

—John McWhorter, writing “The Coronavirus Generation Will Use Language Differently” in the Atlantic.

Podcasts

Alone Together, Ep. 9 with Jessica St. Clair ’98 and Dan O’Brien ’96

Dan O'Brien ’96, a playwright and poet, and Jessica St. Clair ’98, a comedian and writer, join President Patton for our final check in with the community during COVID-19 self-isolation. Dan and Jessica are a true power couple in the arts that met in a Middlebury improv group. They discuss Dan's magazine essay "Life Shrinks: Lessons from Chemo Quarantine," how reopening the country feels a lot like remission, and how their art is evolving to reflect the pandemic.

By Middlebury Magazine Staff
June 15, 2020

Alone Together, Ep. 8 with Dick Clay, Covid-19 Survivor

In this episode, Dick Clay, a student at the Bread Loaf School of English, shares his story of recovering from COVID-19. Dick discusses when the seriousness of the virus hit him, the "wilderness path to recovery," and how he will process this experience through writing.

By Middlebury Magazine Staff
June 8, 2020

Alone Together, Ep. 7 with Jodie Keith and Jacque Bergevin, Essential Workers

In this episode, we hear from Jodie Keith and Jacque Bergevin, who have been working with custodial services to keep our Vermont campus safe and clean. Jodie and Jacque share what campus has been like since the students left: what it's like to schedule hourly sanitation of buildings, how every day feels like an empty Saturday morning, and that the infamous Middlebury squirrels have lost a bit of weight.

By Middlebury Magazine Staff
Photography by Bob Handelman
June 1, 2020

Review

Editors’ Picks for March and April

By Middlebury Magazine Staff
April 4, 2022

How Did You Get Here?

Megan Job

By Alexandra Burns '21
February 15, 2021

Leif Taranta

By Alexandra Burns '21
February 15, 2021

Mikayla Haefele

By Alexandra Burns '21
February 15, 2021

Videos

Pomp and Unusual Circumstances

As viewed from above.

By Chris Spencer
June 1, 2021

Davis the Owl Returns Home

Having recovered from life-threatening injuries, a beautiful winged creature is released to its natural habitat.

By Andrew Cassell
April 22, 2021

In the Blink of an Eye

Gone in less than a minute—the middle of June 2019 to the middle of June 2020, as viewed from the rooftop of the Mittelman Observatory.

By Middlebury Magazine Staff
Video by Jonathan Kemp/Mittelman Observatory
June 10, 2020
Middlebury College
  • Alumni
  • Newsroom
  • Contact Us
  • icon-instagram

The views presented are not necessarily those of the editors or the official policies of the College.

© 2022 Middlebury College Publications.