A Political Discussion with Robert Frost

This is not directly a part of my current meditations on hope, but I do want to use one idea in this poem in them, and it's a fun poem. Two friends, a poet and a farmer, meet by chance and get to talking politics. Sounds like some of us here. It was originally published in 1936, so some of the political language has changed since then, but it's still recognizable.

Fair warning: This is 10 or so pages in the book, more than 2700 words, so settle in for a good read. I'll put the first stanza (if that's the right term in this case) above the fold and the rest below. Also, I did my best putting it in, but if you notice an error, please let me know in the comments.

Build Soil

A political pastoral 

Why Tityrus! But you’ve forgotten me.  

I’m Meliboeus the potato man,  

The one you had the talk with, you remember,  

Here on this very campus years ago.  

Hard times have struck me and I’m on the move.  

I’ve had to give my interval farm up  

For interest, and I’ve bought a mountain farm  

For nothing down, all-out-doors of a place,  

All woods and pasture only fit for sheep.  

But sheep is what I’m going into next.  

I’m done forever with potato crops  

At thirty cents a bushel. Give me sheep.  

I know wool’s down to seven cents a pound.  

But I don’t calculate to sell my wool.  

I didn’t my potatoes. I consumed them.  

I’ll dress up in sheep’s clothing and eat sheep.  

The Muse takes care of you. You live by writing  

Your poems on a farm and call that farming.  

Oh I don’t blame you. I say take life easy.  

I should myself, only I don’t know how.  

But have some pity on us who have to work.  

Why don’t you use your talents as a writer  

To advertise our farms to city buyers,  

Or else write something to improve food prices.  

Get in a poem toward the next election.  

Oh Meliboeus, I have half a mind  

To take a writing hand in politics.  

Before now poetry has taken notice  

Of wars, and what are wars but politics  

Transformed from chronic to acute and bloody?

I may be wrong, but, Tityrus, to me  

The times seem revolutionary bad.  

The question is whether they’ve reached a depth  

Of desperation that would warrant poetry’s  

Leaving love’s alternations, joy and grief,  

The weather’s alternations, summer and winter,  

Our age-long theme, for the uncertainty  

Of judging who is a contemporary liar— 

Who in particular, when all alike  

Get called as much in clashes of ambition.  

Life may be tragically bad, and I  

Make bold to sing it so, but do I dare  

Name names and tell you who by name is wicked?  

Whittier’s luck with Skipper Ireson awes me— 

Many men’s luck with Greatest Washington  

(Who sat for Stuart’s portrait, but who sat  

Equally for the nation’s Constitution).  

I prefer to sing safely in the realm  

Of types, composite and imagined people:  

To affirm there is such a thing as evil  

Personified, but ask to be excused  

From saying on a jury “here’s the guilty.”  

I doubt if you’re convinced the times are bad.  

I keep my eye on Congress, Meliboeus.  

They’re in the best position of us all  

To know if anything is very wrong.  

I mean they could be trusted to give the alarm  

If earth were thought about to change its axis,  

Or a star coming to dilate the sun.  

As long as lightly all their livelong sessions,  

Like a yard full of school boys out at recess  

Before their plays and games were organized,  

They yelling mix tag, hide-and-seek, hop-scotch,  

And leap frog in each other’s way—all’s well.  

Let newspapers profess to fear the worst!  

Nothing’s portentous, I am reassured. 

 

Is socialism needed, do you think?  

We have it now. For socialism is  

An element in any government.  

There’s no such thing as socialism pure— 

Except as an abstraction of the mind.  

There’s only democratic socialism,  

Monarchic socialism, oligarchic— 

The last being what they seem to have in Russia.  

You often get it most in monarchy,  

Least in democracy. In practice, pure,  

I don’t know what it would be. No one knows.  

I have no doubt like all the loves when  

Philosophized together into one— 

One sickness of the body and the soul.  

Thank God our practice holds the loves apart  

Beyond embarrassing self-consciousness  

Where natural friends are met, where dogs are kept,  

Where women pray with priests. There is no love.  

There’s only love of men and women, love  

Of children, love of friends, of men, of God: 

Divine love, human love, parental love,  

Roughly discriminated for the rough.

  

Poetry, itself once more, is back in love. 

 

Pardon the analogy, my Meliboeus,  

For sweeping me away. Let’s see, where was I?

  

But don’t you think more should be socialized  

Than is? 

 

  What should you mean by socialized? 

 

Made good for everyone—things like inventions—  

Made so we all should get the good of them—  

All, not just great exploiting businesses.  

We sometimes only get the bad of them.  

In your sense of the word ambition has  

Been socialized—the first propensity  

To be attempted. Greed may well come next.  

But the worst one of all to leave uncurbed,  

Unsocialized, is ingenuity:  

Which for no sordid self-aggrandizement,  

For nothing but its own blind satisfaction  

(In this it is as much like hate as love)  

Works in the dark as much against as for us.  

Even while we talk some chemist at Columbia  

Is stealthily contriving wool from jute  

That when let loose upon the grazing world  

Will put ten thousand farmers out of sheep.  

Everyone asks for freedom for himself,  

The man free love, the businessman free trade,  

The writer and talker free speech and free press.  

Political ambition has been taught,  

By being punished back, it is not free:  

It must at some point gracefully refrain.  

Greed has been taught a little abnegation  

And shall be more before we’re done with it.  

It is just fool enough to think itself  

Self-taught. But our brute snarling and lashing taught it.  

None shall be as ambitious as he can.  

None should be as ingenious as he could,  

Not if I had my say. Bounds should be set  

To ingenuity for being so cruel  

In bringing change unheralded on the unready. 

 

I elect you to put the curb on it. 

 

Were I dictator, I’ll tell you what I’d do.  

What should you do?  

  I’d let things take their course  

And then I’d claim the credit for the outcome.

  

You’d make a sort of safety-first dictator.  

Don’t let the things I say against myself  

Betray you into taking sides against me,  

Or it might get you into trouble with me.  

I’m not afraid to prophesy the future,  

And be judged by the outcome, Meliboeus.  

Listen and I will take my dearest risk.  

We’re always too much out or too much in.  

At present from a cosmical dilation  

We’re so much out that the odds are against  

Our ever getting inside in again.  

But inside in is where we’ve got to get.  

My friends all know I’m interpersonal.  

But long before I’m interpersonal  

Away ‘way down inside I’m personal.  

Just so before we’re international  

We’re national and act as nationals.  

The colors are kept unmixed on the palette,  

Or better on dish plates all around the room,  

So the effect when they are mixed on canvas  

May seem almost exclusively designed.  

Some minds are so confounded intermental  

They remind me of pictures on a palette:  

“Look at what happened. Surely some god pinxit.  

Come look at my significant mud pie.”  

It’s hard to tell which is the worse abhorrence  

Whether it’s persons pied or nations pied.  

Don’t let me seem to say the exchange, the encounter,  

May not be the important thing at last.  

It well may be. We meet—I don’t say when— 

But must bring to the meeting the maturest,  

The longest-saved-up, raciest, localest  

We have strength of reserve in us to bring. 

 

Tityrus, sometimes I’m perplexed myself  

To find the good of commerce. Why should I  

Have to sell you my apples and buy yours?  

It can’t be just to give the robber a chance  

To catch them and take toll of them in transit.  

Too mean a thought to get much comfort out of.  

I figure that like any bandying  

Of words or toys, it ministers to health.  

It very likely quickens and refines us.

  

To market ’tis our destiny to go.  

But much as in the end we bring for sale there  

There is still more we never bring or should bring;  

More that should be kept back—the soil for instance,  

In my opinion—though we both know poets  

Who fall all over each other to bring soil  

And even subsoil and hardpan to market.  

To sell the hay off, let alone the soil,  

Is an unpardonable sin in farming.  

The moral is, make a late start to market.  

Let me preach to you, will you Meliboeus?

  

Preach on. I thought you were already preaching.  

But preach and see if I can tell the difference.  

Needless to say to you, my argument  

Is not to lure the city to the country.  

Let those possess the land and only those,  

Who love it with a love so strong and stupid  

That they may be abused and taken advantage of  

And made fun of by business, law and art;  

They still hang on. That so much of the earth’s  

Unoccupied need not make us uneasy.  

We don’t pretend to complete occupancy.  

The world’s one globe, human society  

Another softer globe that slightly flattened  

Rests on the world, and clinging slowly rolls.  

We have our own round shape to keep unbroken.  

The world’s size has no more to do with us  

Than has the universe’s. We are balls,  

We are round from the same source of roundness.  

We are both round because the mind is round,  

Because all reasoning is in a circle.  

At least that’s why the universe is round.  

If what you’re preaching is a line of conduct,  

Just what am I supposed to do about it?  

Reason in circles?  

  No, refuse to be  

Seduced back to the land by any claim  

The land may seem to have on man to use it.  

Let none assume to till the land but farmers.  

I only speak to you as one of them.  

You shall go to your run-out mountain farm,  

Poor castaway of commerce, and so live  

That none shall ever see you come to market—  

Not for a long, long time. Plant, breed, produce,  

But what you raise or grow, why feed it out,  

Eat it or plow it under where it stands  

To build the soil. For what is more accursed  

Than an impoverished soil, pale and metallic?  

What cries more to our kind for sympathy?  

I’ll make a compact with you, Meliboeus,  

To match you deed for deed and plan for plan.  

Friends crowd around me with their five-year plans  

That Soviet Russia has made fashionable.  

You come to me and I’ll unfold to you  

A five-year plan I call so, not because  

It takes ten years or so to carry out,  

Rather because it took five years at least  

To think it out. Come close, let us conspire—  

In self-restraint, if in restraint of trade.  

You will go to your run-out mountain farm  

And do what I command you. I take care  

To command only what you meant to do  

Anyway. That is my style of dictator.  

Build soil. Turn the farm in upon itself  

Until it can contain itself no more,  

But sweating-full, drips wine and oil a little.  

I will go to my run-out social mind  

And be as unsocial with it as I can.  

The thought I have, and my first impulse is  

To take to market— I will turn it under.  

The thought from that thought—I will turn it under.  

And so on to the limit of my nature.  

We are too much out, and if we won’t draw in  

We shall be driven in. I was brought up  

A state-rights free-trade Democrat. What’s that?  

An inconsistency. The state shall be  

Laws to itself, it seems, and yet have no  

Control of what it sells or what it buys.  

Suppose someone comes near me who in rate  

Of speech and thinking is so much my better  

I am imposed on, silenced and discouraged.  

Do I submit to being supplied by him  

As the more economical producer,  

More wonderful, more beautiful producer?  

No. I unostentatiously move off  

Far enough for my thought-flow to resume.  

Thought product and food product are to me  

Nothing compared to the producing of them.  

I sent you once a song with the refrain: 

 

   Let me be the one  

   To do what is done—  

My share at least lest I be empty-idle.  

Keep off each other and keep each other off.  

You see the beauty of my proposal is  

It needn’t wait on general revolution.  

I bid you to a one-man revolution—  

The only revolution that is coming.  

We’re too unseparate out among each other—  

With goods to sell and notions to impart.  

A youngster comes to me with half a quatrain  

To ask me if I think it worth the pains  

Of working out the rest, the other half.  

I am brought guaranteed young prattle poems  

Made publicly in school, above suspicion  

Of plagiarism and help of cheating parents.  

We congregate embracing from distrust  

As much as love, and too close in to strike  

And be so very striking. Steal away,  

The song says. Steal away and stay away.  

Don’t join too many gangs. Join few if any.  

Join the United States and join the family— 

But not much in between unless a college.  

Is it a bargain, Shepherd Meliboeus? 

 

Probably, but you’re far too fast and strong  

For my mind to keep working in your presence.  

I can tell better after I get home,  

Better a month from now when cutting posts  

Or mending fence it all comes back to me  

What I was thinking when you interrupted  

My life-train logic. I agree with you  

We’re too unseparate. And going home  

From company means coming to our senses.