Moses Creek may be off the beaten path, but it’s no stranger to famous people. Moses himself has knocked on our door, and so have Socrates and Plato, the Apostle Paul, Virgil, Shakespeare, Milton and Keats. 

Fellow American Robert Frost is another visitor, and I love to listen to him recite his poetry, though I’ve learned not to take him at face value. His poems often say one thing but mean something else. Or, as he once put it in a lecture called “Education by Poetry”: “People say, ‘Why don’t you say what you mean?’ We never do that, do we, being all of us too much poets. We like to talk in parables and in hints and in indirections.” 

Just yesterday, for instance, I heard Frost call in from the back door. He was going to the pasture, and he invited me to join him. I thought he meant the neighbor’s pasture, because we are all woods. “I’ll be right there,” I said, reaching for my hat. Then I saw by the look on his face that he didn’t mean a pasture up Moses Creek, he meant “The Pasture,” the little eight-line poem he stipulated was to come first in every edition of his complete works.  

Frost handed me “The Poetry of Robert Frost,” and there the poem was on page one, centered and italicized for emphasis. And on the opposite page, facing it, was a photograph of Frost himself as a white-haired old man. He’s dressed casually, and he’s leaning at ease against a low rock wall with one of his big hands resting familiarly on a capstone rock he probably stacked there himself. Behind him is a pasture, but he’s not looking at it. Rather, he’s looking sideways across the page toward “The Pasture,” as if encouraging me to follow his gaze. So I did. It’s just a little hop, skip and jump of a poem in two stanzas:

THE PASTURE

I’m going out to clean the pasture spring;
I’ll only stop to rake the leaves away
(And wait to watch the water clear, I may);
I shan’t be gone long. — You come too.

I’m going out to fetch the little calf
That’s standing by the mother. It’s so young
It totters when she licks it with her tongue.
I shan’t be gone long. — You come too. 

I read poetry about every day, and years back I got a degree in English Lit with an eye to teaching it. So right away, “The Pasture” hinted to me that it is in the tradition of “pastoral” poetry — short, lyrical poems about shepherds and cowherds following their animals while singing happily, there on a hillside where the grass is always greener. Frost’s poem called to mind the reveries I think all of us have at times of walking in such a bucolic place.  

And there’s Frost holding out his hand! “— You come too.” Unlike going into the neighbor’s pasture, I won’t even have to watch out for cowpies.

But I ended up stepping in something like a cowpie after all. Frost says he’s going out to clean his pasture spring; he’ll “rake the leaves away.” Now, if you’ve ever cleaned out a spring, you know it’s one thing to enjoy the sight of the pool’s still, clear water, but it’s another thing entirely to see what happens when you rake it. Soggy, rotten leaves, dark muck and all kinds of squiggly things boil to the surface. Dead stuff too. There’s the tail of a frog-eaten salamander; there’s the pale guts of a snake-chomped frog. You can’t see an inch down into the witch’s brew.

And it will take a while for the water to clear again. But Frost isn’t going to wait. Or as he puts it teasingly: “And wait to watch the water clear, I may.” Which means, of course, he may not wait. And it’s likely he won’t: “I’ll only stop to . . .  I shan’t be gone long.” Frost is making a quick trip out, rake in hand, and when he comes back he’ll leave stirred-up water behind.

It’s also likely that Frost’s pasture spring is meant to remind us of the sacred springs that poets over the ages have gone to for inspiration. The Greek poets had their Hippocrene spring. The Old Testament Psalmist sings: “The Lord maketh me to lie down in green pastures. He leadeth me beside the still waters; he restoreth my soul.” “But Frost is more like the angel of the Bethesda spring in the Gospel of John, who comes to “trouble the water.”

In the poem’s second stanza, Frost paints the peaceful scene of a tottering calf and the mother licking it. But Frost himself isn’t going to enjoy the sight: “I’m going out to fetch the little calf.” “To fetch” means to go get something and bring it back, the way country folk used to “fetch” water. Frost aims to take the calf away from its mother. Why does he want to do that? The two were doing just fine together. Frost had a milk cow on his farm. Does he take the calf to keep the mother’s milk flowing for his own use or to sell? That’s standard dairy practice. Or does he have veal in mind?

Whatever Frost’s reason for going, one thing is certain; as soon as he puts his hands on the little one, it’ll cry for its mother. And when he carries it off, the mother will follow, bellowing pitifully. You don’t have to see it to know what’s happening. Becky and I know every time our neighbor takes a calf from his pasture. The cow’s bawls fill the valley.

By chance, Frost had no sooner finished reciting his poem to me when who, to my wondering eyes, should appear but Henry David Thoreau! He had his journal, and he read to us his entry from July 21, 1851. It was about a long dream he had of walking an old, abandoned road through countryside so full of beauty and promise that it was “where your head is more in heaven than your feet are on earth.” That is, until he’s met by “the omnipresent butcher with his calf cart — followed by a distracted & anxious cow.” I saw Frost smile at that.

In “The Pasture,” Frost beckons us with reminders of a better world. And I think it’s important to keep our eyes on that Promised Land. Or, as Thoreau says: “If you have built castles in the air, that is where they should be.” But behind the poem’s glimpses of paradise, there appears a muddied spring, a distraught cow and calf.  

“So, what’s the point?” I asked. As usual, Frost simply closed his book and left. But since “The Pasture” is the gate he points us through to the rest of his poetry, with its “parables and hints and indirections,” with its “saying one thing and meaning another,” here’s my take: If you open the gate and enter, by all means enjoy his poems about mending walls and splitting oak and picking apples and walking in a yellow wood. Just remember to watch your step.

That’s part of education by poetry.

(Burt and Becky Kornegay live in Jackson County.)