Nature and Culture in the Northern Forest: Region, Heritage, and Environment in the Rural Northeast

Robert Frost in the Fields and Nils-Aslak Valkeap

A s a teacher of poetry, I am often confounded by the difficulties faced by emerging readers as they sort out the literal and symbolic meanings of a poem. New readers of poetry seem ready to leap to symbolic interpretations but often just plain miss the real, tangible things that give those symbols their life—literally. The overwhelming emphasis on alienation in modern Western literature and on fragmentation in postmodern Western literature seems to have widened the divide between an object, its metonymic association, and the metaphor based on those constructions,1 a divide that is particularly manifest in poetry, the most humane of intellectual endeavors. An example of how this fragmentation of meaning plays out may be found in a simple classroom discussion of Robert Frost, a mainstay of college literature anthologies. With traditional students, I have had to go to great lengths to help them understand the actual and literal meanings of the poems, which they typically conclude are high-flung symbolic statements. Instead of nature, they read Nature; instead of reality, they Robert Frost in the Fields and Nils-Aslak Valkeapää at the Treeline Ecological Knowledge and Academic Learning at the Northern Forest Edge kathleeN osgood daNa 62 • teaChiNg aNd learNiNg read Reality. Most students simply do not know the stuff of life from north of Boston that Frost knew through hard work on his hardscrabble farms.2 Of course, some of this confusion on the part of young readers is due to their emergence as critical readers, but much of it is due to their actual ignorance of the poet’s everyday reality, the ache of muscles used hard, the killing frost of autumn, the grim isolation of a country setting. For instance, in “Into My Own,” the poem that opens A Boy’s Will (1913), Frost writes about escaping into “those dark trees.” For him the forest is a source of danger and temptation and renewal. Even students who are not outdoorsmen appreciate the notions of escape and renewal, but students who have spent time in the woods know the subtleties of the actual darkness in woods—dependent on time of day or year, tree species, altitude, available water, and more—subtleties that add depth and meaning to the qualities of flight into dark woods. More problems of interpretation come later for traditional students when we look at the particulars of the poem. In the second stanza of this sonnet, Frost is at his very best, using the actual nature of the New England agrarian tradition to describe the physical reality of such escape: I should not be withheld but that some day Into their vastness I should steal away, Fearless of ever finding open land, Or highway where the slow wheel pours the sand.3 Rather than reading “open land” as an actual landscape of open pastures and meadows and hayfields beckoning at the forest edge, students typically see only the symbolic Reality of open space, in contrast to the symbolic darkness of the forest. And “the slow wheel” that “pours the sand” is not also an actual buggy wheel rolling over a sandy road leading homeward perhaps, but rather some symbolic representation of a human lifespan. So, while the basic symbolic meaning of the poem seems accessible to even the novice literary scholar, the actual physical and experiential sensation of open land and slow wheel have not been part of their suburban upbringings and, thus, are absent from their catalogue of experience and understanding. A reader unfamiliar with the realities of New England farming leaps to the Reality of the poem, unfamiliar with the “need of being versed in country things.”4 My students at Sterling College and the Center for Northern Studies come versed in country robert Frost aNd Nils-aslak valkeapää • 63 things, and that knowledge makes all the difference for teaching poetry of the North. wheN you sit in the reading room of Brown Library at Sterling College in Craftsbury Common, Vermont, you look west out over the college farm with its pastures. Like a postcard beckoning one to Vermont, these green pastures and hayfields, with their usually tranquil animals and seemingly pristine farm buildings seem comfortingly familiar, if somewhat old-fashioned. If you look beyond the Sterling College farm to the hardwoods of the Northern Forest, you will notice sugarbushes, flaring scarlet in the fall but laced with sap lines in the spring to bring in the...