The Great Work of Your Life

by Stephen Cope

  4

  My friend Ethan’s early life resembled Frost’s in surprising ways. His parents owned a dairy farm in Vermont, and he grew up with the same earthbound rhythms that Frost loved so much. He often said to me, “Frost is telling me my own life.”

  Ethan was a tall, intense young man, with dark eyes and thick, tightly curled chestnut hair. He walked on the earth with an unmistakable lope, like a cougar stalking its prey. I could always spot Ethan’s distinctive walk across the busy expanse of the Amherst quads.

  I had met Ethan on our very first day at college—both of us sitting alone and forlorn at the top of what is called “Memorial Hill,” looking out over the distant Mount Holyoke Range and wondering how the heck we’d gotten ourselves in so far over our heads. We were both socially out of our element: he a farm boy from rural Vermont, me a rube from the cornfields of Ohio. We recognized in each other a kindred spirit. And over the course of those first few months of struggle we became inseparable.

  Ethan was driven to succeed. I didn’t even know what “driven” was then. I did not have that quality—nor did anyone in my family. But I knew that Ethan was unlike anyone I had ever met. He was good at whatever he put his hand to: soccer, lacrosse, baseball—a golden boy on the playing fields. Later, when I met his lovely and soft-spoken parents, I wondered where his intensity came from. Not from them. They were thrilled to have a son in college at all. Stardom was not required of him. He’d already succeeded in their eyes.

  In addition to sports, Ethan was in love with poetry. He knew from that first day on Memorial Hill that he wanted to be an English major. Ethan taught me how to read poetry in late-night sessions sprawled out in the first-floor lounge of our dorm. Sometimes we spent nights reading poetry together and critiquing it. We went for long hikes on the Holyoke Range. Ethan and I were the same age, almost exactly, but he seemed to me more like an older brother. He was much wiser than I—or so I thought then.

  Ethan introduced me to Thoreau, and we cut a day of classes in the spring to visit Walden Pond, which we approached like a trip to a great shrine. He was particularly in love with Thoreau’s insights about “the wild,” because he felt a wildness in himself that he did not understand. Even in freshman year, Ethan was thinking about becoming a writer. He spent some of his spare time working on short stories and poems, and talked to me about a novel he had cooking away in his head. He wanted to know everything about writing.

  Part of Ethan’s wildness came out on the playing fields. He was intensely competitive. I didn’t understand this side of him. Ethan would become moody around game time and afterward. He was exuberant if he won, devastated if he lost—and highly critical of his performance in either case. His moods sometimes scared me. He said his mother called them “spells.” In fact, his mother actually took me aside once and asked me if Ethan had been having “spells.” Of course I had no idea that this wildness in him would later turn in on itself—as it did on Frost, who was dogged by depression throughout his life.

  5

  With the publication of “My Butterfly,” Frost had gone public with his poetry. And he was getting a great deal of positive response. After reading “Butterfly,” a friend of Ward’s offered to be young Frost’s literary advisor. This “advisor” then proceeded to give the young Robert Frost one of the most misguided pieces of counsel ever given to a great poet. He suggested that Frost try for “a more elevated tone.” His poetry was “too close to the speaking voice,” he declared.

  Frost was incensed. The speaking voice was his direct line into truth—into the heart of poetry itself. He wanted, in fact, to write poetry that would mine precisely this rich ore of human speech. Too close to the speaking voice? It was misguided advice, yes, but the confrontation itself had a silver lining. It became the opportunity for Frost himself to understand exactly what he was doing. It was the moment when he made explicit the connection between the sounds of poetry and the sounds of ordinary speech. This discovery was one of the central epiphanies of Frost’s life, and he would later describe it as a crossroads experience.

  “Perhaps,” wrote Frost later, “when that preacher friend of Ward’s looked me up shortly after my first poem appeared in The Independent and talked to me about it, something providential was happening to me. I’m sure the old gentleman didn’t have the slightest idea he was having any effect on a very stubborn youngster who thought he knew what he knew. But something he said actually changed the whole course of my writing. It all became purposeful.”

  I once heard country-and-western singer Dolly Parton declare a stunning bit of truth: “Find out who you are,” she said, “and then do it on purpose.” This homespun proverb is a gloss on Robert Frost’s life. Find out who you are and do it on purpose.

  For the first time, Frost knew what he was after. And he began to do it on purpose. He started calling his poems “talk songs.” He discovered that the rhythm of his most authentic poetic voice came very close to prose, but “is lifted just enough so that it stays inside the boundary lines of verse.” Frost came to call his voice the “sound of sense.”

  He exulted in this discovery. “The sound of sense!” he exclaimed. “It is the … vitality of our speech. It is pure sound—pure form. One who concerns himself with it more than the subject is an artist.”

  The sound of sense! This is precisely what I had first loved in Frost’s poetry. Some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice. I loved the way the words felt in my mouth. He had captured the sounds of real life, and distilled out of them their very music. This is what Ethan meant when he said that “Frost was speaking my New England life to me.”

  Frost discovered that his vocation was to artfully bring the sounds of everyday speech into poetry. He wanted to catch the humanness of speech in his poetic net. He became fascinated with the tension between the classical forms of poetry and the vernacular performance of speech. Where do the stresses normally fall in speech? He began to experiment with pulling the speech slightly toward the form, and the form slightly toward the speech.

  Now Frost was “onto his bone,” as Thoreau would say. He knew that this was a task big enough for a lifetime. He knew that he would be chewing on it for the rest of his career. Bury it, circle ’round it, unearth it, bury it again!

  6

  When I arrived back at Amherst after a junior year in South America, something in Ethan had changed. He had abruptly taken up a premed course of study (in preparation for a medical career), and had unaccountably ditched his previous major in English literature. What the hell? How and when did this happen?

  Ethan didn’t want to talk with me about it. “You were in South America,” he complained. “How was I going to talk with you?”

  “You didn’t think about maybe writing me a letter?” I retorted, hurt.

  Ethan couldn’t explain it to me. I saw later that he couldn’t even explain it to himself. He was articulate about absolutely everything else. Why not about this? This need to become a doctor seemed to emerge from some other part of his personality. Perhaps it was related to what happened to him on the playing fields? That competitive part of his spirit—that wildness that I never really understood?

  That fall, Ethan and I went on a four-day hiking trip to Vermont. We stayed for a night at his family’s farm. Ethan was more remote on this trip than he had been before. His mind seemed to be elsewhere. Had something happened while I was away? He denied that it had. We sat up late into the night staring into the fire.

  In the middle of the night, Ethan woke me up. He was sitting on the side of my bed, sobbing. He tried to talk, but couldn’t. “I just can’t, can’t …,” he would begin, and then the sobbing would erupt from deep in his gut. Finally it ebbed.

  We sat by the window and talked for most of the rest of the night. We took a walk around the farm as the sun was coming up over the yellowing Vermont woods. He felt split, he said. Split right down the middle. He talked of his love of English, his
desire to write poetry, to write prose. To live the life of a writer.

  “But it’s an impoverished life, Steve. My family, my parents, my sister. I can’t let them down. I have to take care of them and I can’t take care of them properly if I go down this ruinous course. I cannot do this to them.”

  Ethan had worked it all out in his mind while I was away. He would become a doctor. He would make plenty of money, and lift his family out of the relative poverty in which they lived. He could help his little sister go to college.

  The full story began to spill out: While I was away, Ethan discovered that his father had mortgaged the farm in order to send him to college. As a result of the bumpy economy, the farm was now in serious financial peril—the same farm that had been in the family for four generations. That piece of land was all that was standing between Ethan’s family and desolation. They could lose it—because of him.

  Ethan and I didn’t have the word dharma then. But we did have the word “duty.” Close enough. As Ethan saw it, he had a duty. I understood this. It felt like a noble act, and seemed to involve a kind of self-sacrifice I could not even imagine making. We rationalized this together: Medicine would give him an outlet for his brilliant mind, his competitive spirit. And he could write on the weekends, or in the early mornings.

  7

  By his late twenties, Frost was perfectly aware of his genius, of his lifework, and of the task ahead of him. But he also knew that the systematic cultivation of poetic genius is a high-wire act of human endeavor. He had already announced to his grandfather—who was pushing him to relinquish poetry as a career—that it would take him twenty years to come into his full power as a poet. Frost understood that the poet’s chief job is to create the right conditions for the blossoming of The Gift. He understood that he needed a chrysalis—a quiet, contemplative life—with plenty of leisure for writing, reading, thinking, contemplating. He intuited that he needed a life set close to nature—nature, which had always been his muse. Frost was intuitively aware of an important principle: In the cultivation of dharma, there is nothing more important than understanding what conditions are needed, and relentlessly creating them.

  Frost next made one of the most pivotal decisions of his life: He decided to become a farmer. He bought a farm in Derry, New Hampshire. To his family and friends this seemed a surprising move. But it turned out to be a brilliant one.

  Jay Parini, one of Frost’s most important biographers, describes the farm that would be Frost’s poetic chrysalis: “From all sides of the house the view was appealing. Beyond a rolling hayfield to the east, one saw a large woodlot, composed mostly of maple, oak, and beech. On the south side a stand of alders concealed a west-running brook fed by a pasture spring. A cranberry bog lay nearby. Patches of raspberries and blackberries grew beside the barn, where a sizable vegetable garden could also be found, its contents ready for harvest. There was plenty of space where one might build chicken coops on the north side, beyond the barn.”

  This would be Frost’s laboratory. He would spend the next decade quietly raising poultry in Derry, surrounding himself with the sources of his inspiration by day, and writing poetry in the kitchen every night while the rest of the family slept. “This was a time,” said Frost later, “when my eyes and ears were open, very open.”

  Those who did not understand the genius of Frost’s choice to raise poultry found him an inept farmer. Much has been made, too, by Frost biographers of his reputed “laziness.” This shows a stunning lack of understanding of Frost’s choice. As Robert Penn Warren has observed, “It was a necessary laziness. It was the way his mind, his imagination, worked; he needed all that time, the spaciousness, the ease of getting from day to day. Poems could root in those spaces. In his case, they did.”

  Frost’s gift burst quietly forth during his eleven years in Derry. It was the most sustained period of creativity and generativity in his long life. From the farm he would take many treasures: a close connection with the earth, with the touch and feel and smell of nature, and with the conversation of the plainspoken men and women who surrounded him in an agricultural life. He would draw on this material for the rest of his career.

  “It all started in Derry,” Frost said. “The whole thing.” He had—at some considerable risk—created precisely the right conditions for his dharma. He had taken a risk: He had trusted The Gift.

  8

  Two years after we graduated from Amherst, I visited Ethan in Boston. He was at the end of his second year of medical school—living in a little apartment near the campus, with his new wife, Betts. I had not met Betts until the wedding—a grand affair that took place at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Boston. She was blonde, well-spoken, elegant in every way. And with a toughness that matched Ethan’s. I liked her instantly. I thought it was probably a good match in many ways, because she could stand up to Ethan’s wildness. But I soon discovered that she didn’t like me. She was anxious that Ethan’s literary friend would pull him away from his determination to become a great doctor.

  Ethan and I had a wonderful visit, though. He talked excitedly about medicine, and he and I looked together into the future as we had so often at Amherst. I could see him making the best of his situation. But we were both nostalgic for college times. He now talked about his love of poetry as naïve, and though he appreciated that aspect of himself, he thought it was best left behind in favor of “really growing up.” I swallowed hard at this. Really?

  Over the next decade, I watched as Ethan’s medical career unfolded brilliantly. Within five years or so had already begun to make a name for himself in New York, where he had settled after his residency.

  Medicine was for Ethan rather akin to the playing fields of college. I could see the competitive, aggressive streak in him coming forward. When I visited Betts and him in their new duplex in Manhattan, I could see a burgeoning concern for money and status. She talked excitedly about her seven-series BMW, their membership in a posh club. She was a shameless name-dropper. I looked at Ethan. Not a trace of embarrassment.

  Meanwhile, I had begun to establish myself in Boston. I went to graduate school. I found a partner and I settled down. We bought a house. Ethan and I slowly drifted apart—into very different worlds. I observed to myself from time to time: It is interesting to see the effects of choices as they play themselves out over the long trajectory of life.

  9

  Frost’s decision to buy the farm in Derry was one of a series of decisions that moved him closer to a full commitment to poetry. The farm was a deeper step in, and he would draw on its inspiration for the rest of his life. But there were more steps to come.

  If you bring forth what is within you, it will save you. Frost knew that his calling was going to require more of him. He had not yet fully committed his life to poetry. He was still farming. But too, during the Derry years he had become seriously involved in teaching. He had, at Derry, a busy, complex, and full life.

  As Frost brought forth more and more of what was within him, he felt increasingly split. Was he a farmer? A teacher? A poet? He felt a crossroads coming. He knew that if he was going to bring forth what was deepest within him, he would have to commit to it completely. He would have to “try himself,” as he said.

  At the end of the decade at Derry, now a fully formed poet in command of his voice, he had one more step to take. He would have to take the leap. He would have to declare himself a poet—both to the world and to himself. He would have to explicitly commit his life to poetry—to give everything he had.

  “No man can know what power he can rightly call his own unless he presses a little,” he wrote. It was time to press.

  10

  Frost and his wife Elinor would now make a stunning choice. They would sell the farm and move to England, where Robert could devote himself entirely to his poetry. This was not an easy choice. In retrospect, of course, it looks obvious. But in the moment, it was not obvious at all. It was a leap off a cliff. />
  Frost was aware that these kinds of choices meant cutting off other options. He named his great poem “The Road Not Taken,” precisely because of his awareness of the possibilities lost when one chooses. Frost was properly fascinated with the process of choice. If one looks closely at “The Road Not Taken,” one discovers the many ambiguities written there about choice. The “two roads” are, after all, not that very different. “Both that morning equally lay in leaves no step had trodden black,” he writes. The signs were vague, indistinct. How to choose?

  What Frost makes clear in his poem is that the act of choosing is the most important thing. The act of moving forward is what matters. He might have chosen either teaching or poetry. But he had to choose one or the other. He looked long down each path. He understood the loss involved—the cutting off of possibilities. He saw clearly that options once discarded are usually gone forever. Way leads on to way.

  But Krishsna writes: Concerning one’s dharma, one should not vacillate!

  Frost was now determined to give himself fully to poetry—to live, as he said, “a life that followed poetically.” What followed was an explosion of creativity. Having made his decision, Frost was increasingly on fire with poetry. He would publish his first two books in England—to considerable acclaim—and would return to America several years later a famous poet.

  Thoreau, of course, had had an almost identical experience. As soon as he made a commitment to his authentic voice, as soon as he moved back to his axis mundi, to Concord, to his immovable spot, his voice gained an energy, a clarity, and a power that it had never had. The choice itself had unleashed something altogether new. Actions taken in support of dharma change the self. The act of commitment itself calls forth an unseen dharma power.