April 24, 2020
Lots of birds on yesterday’s walk, searching for and bringing back nesting materials, some birds in their bright mating colors already.
I was reminded of a Robert Frost poem, The Exposed Nest, that provides for me at its core a sense of unease around unresolved moral issues.
The poet sees his young companion, perhaps his child, trying to build a shelter out of grass and ferns. It’s not just play but the desire to protect a ground-nest full of fledglings that was accidentally disturbed by someone mowing the meadow. The innocent birds are left defenseless – you do want to protect them from “too much world” (and all the danger that implies,) but the very act of building a shelter might frighten the parent bird away, leading them to abandon their brood.
“We saw the risk we took in doing good, but dared not spare to do the best we could though harm should come of it…” – all this to prove we cared. ”
There is this sense of moral obligation, but also of having to make a choice between errors of omission and error of commission. Damned if you do and damned of you don’t.
Prove that we care – to whom? To nature? The young child who needs a model? Some higher power that set moral standards? The self that has an internalized vision of what it means to be a good person?
In the poem they decide to fashion a shelter. Then all is left hanging in the air, an irritatingly incomplete gesture. The narrator doesn’t go back to check on the fledglings’ survival, he turns to other things or conveniently claims to have forgotten if they did or did not return. Clearly there is a defensiveness against accepting the outcome of one’s action, should one have made the wrong choice. We fed our pretense or our hope to be “good,” but that’s enough. Let’s not dwell on potentially dead, abandoned birds…. since we suspect that’ll be the outcome in a world that is cruel to the innocent. (The poem was written in the middle of WW I, after all.)
Uneasy parallels to our current situation as well where we have a chance to alter some that ails the world beyond pandemic: we need to make risky choices, unable to predict the outcome. In contrast to the narrator, we do have to face the results, though, unable to turn to other things since our decisions affect us all, not just some creatures we can keep out of our sight. Our choices are not just some gestures, demanded by our need to appear moral – if they are immoral choices, we will all be exposed to the harm that comes from them. And (feigned) ignorance after a bit of initial commitment stands in the way of finding solutions. If we don’t know what needs to be handled and how to fight for it, we are doomed to suffer the consequences. Mull that while trying to photograph a Northern Harrier…
The Exposed Nest
Robert Frost – 1874-1963
You were forever finding some new play.
So when I saw you down on hands and knees
In the meadow, busy with the new-cut hay,
Trying, I thought, to set it up on end,
I went to show you how to make it stay,
If that was your idea, against the breeze,
And, if you asked me, even help pretend
To make it root again and grow afresh.
But ’twas no make-believe with you to-day,
Nor was the grass itself your real concern,
Though I found your hand full of wilted fern,
Steel-bright June-grass, and blackening heads of clover.
‘Twas a nest full of young birds on the ground
The cutter-bar had just gone champing over
(Miraculously without tasting flesh)
And left defenseless to the heat and light.
You wanted to restore them to their right
Of something interposed between their sight
And too much world at once—could means be found.
The way the nest-full every time we stirred
Stood up to us as to a mother-bird
Whose coming home has been too long deferred,
Made me ask would the mother-bird return
And care for them in such a change of scene
And might our meddling make her more afraid.
That was a thing we could not wait to learn.
We saw the risk we took in doing good,
But dared not spare to do the best we could
Though harm should come of it; so built the screen
You had begun, and gave them back their shade.
All this to prove we cared. Why is there then
No more to tell? We turned to other things.
I haven’t any memory—have you?—
Of ever coming to the place again
To see if the birds lived the first night through,
And so at last to learn to use their wings.
Luckily the walk provided sights that led to more hopeful thoughts as well.
Birds that have pretty safe nests:
Fearless hares
And optimistic taggers
Here is a beautiful Sonata by Delius, composed in the same year as the poem was written. The cellist is outstanding.
Steve T.
I’m not a fan of Frost, but here is part of a poem ‘Birches’ that has remained inside me for decades:
When I see birches bend to left and right across the lines of straighter, darker trees
I liken to think some boy’s been swinging them.
But swinging doesn’t bend them down to stay, as ice storms do.
Often you must have seen them, loaded with ice a sunny winter morning after a rain.
They click upon themselves as the breeze rises,
And turn many-colored as the stir cracks and crazes their enamel.
Soon the sun’s warmth makes them shed crystal shells,
Shattering and avalanching on the snow crust,
Such heaps of broken glass to sweep away you’d think the inner dome of heaven had fallen.
They are dragged to the withered bracken by the load,
And they seem not to break,
Though once they are bowed so low for long they never right themselves.
You may see their trunks arching through the woods years after,
Trailing their leaves on the ground like girls, on hands and knees, who throw their hair, over their heads, to dry, in the sun.
The rest of the poem is about boys swinging the birches. It’s the images of this part of the poem that simply captured my heart.
Louise Palermo
Thank you for your daily love letters.
Richard
Allo Friderike! I hadn’t been familiar with this poem. I like it very much. He seems to recognize his own blitheness and regard it with a mixture of acceptance and regret. Frost does this a lot in his work, to casually observe the limits of his empathy. His late-night snowy woods-stopper pauses but a few moments to observe all the transcendent dark deepness but then quickly goes forward toward the promises he must keep.. He is a captive to his bourgeois responsibilities. Also, the self-satisfied taker of the path less traveled-by may be glad he has made a tough but retrospectively correct life-choice, but the line about knowing how way leads to way, and doubting he should ever come back, indicates a melancholy but necessary regret that he won’t revisit that magical spot of unknown opportunities. He is resigned to make one decision and then doggedly pursue it, the way good upright WASPs are supposed to. I think he is both resigned to and bemused by his own casual moral ambiguity. It is a sad but refreshing admission. We make our choices, we play our roles, he seems to be admitting; there is a pragmatism to many of our choices that is more convenient not to second-guess. So the narrator of this poem you shared — you can see him reluctantly stopping and making a show of doing the right thing, maybe to set a good example for the child — but there must be promises to keep coming up that evening and the future days, and it is easier to make a quick show of doing the right thing than actually giving a damn and coming back to check on the tender little things. It is a sad poem but it rings true of the way so many people rationalize and avoid responsibility for the consequences of their actions. Thank you for sharing. Ich hoffe, dass ihr beide diesen Einsamkeitssturm überstehen und gleichzeitig Hoffnung und geistige Gesundheit intakt halten! –Richard