days until I return home
Grrrrr.....my Internet connection has been down since Friday night. I found this out right after driving home Friday with a headful of things I wanted to write here, only to find my (corporate account?s) userid and password aren?t being recognized. Neither my company's admin team or the ISP seem to have any idea why.
The things I?m most looking farward to resuming on Friday night are living with my husband and rowing, in that order and with a wide gap in priority between. I had decided on Friday that I wanted to spend some of the rest of the week considering marriage and disscussing some of the writings on marriage (and maybe some on rowing) that ring true to me. And so, to combine the subjects:
THE MASTER SPEED
Robert Frost
No speed of wind or water rushing by
But you have speed far greater. You can climb
Back up a stream of radiance to the sky,
And back through history up the steam of time.
And you were given this swiftness, not for haste,
Nor chiefly that you may go where you will,
But in the rush of everything to waste,
That you may have the power of standing still-
Off any still or moving thing you say.
Two such as you with master speed
Cannot be parted nor be swept away
From one another once you are agreed
That life is only life forevermore
Together wing to wing and oar to oar.
I'm going to be most unimaginative here, and mostly write about that last line, the one everyone else quotes. I will just note first, though, that the earlier part reminds me of some of Henry Vaughan's poems ("I saw Eternity the other night, like a great ring of pure and endless light.") Interesting that to Vaughan, it seems to be a transcendent God, or at least a Prime Mover, that brings the speaker outside time and wordly motion, whereas for Frost the cause is love. It is left to the reader to draw conclusions about whether the two are one, whether this is a sign of the degeneration of modern writers or whether the two poets just think differently.
In that phrase, "wing to wing", I suspect that Frost, a farmer, was thinking of geese flying in formation. To me, though, the phrase suggests an aerobatic team such as the Blue Angels, Thunderbirds, Snowbirds, Red Barons. The planes fly wingtip to wingtip sometimes, separated only by inches, then may angle away to do loops and rolls independently. Sometimes the planes will mirror each others' motion in different directions, sometimes one or two planes will take center stages wile the others lurk in the background. I think this analogy to marriage may be better even than Frost intended.
The "oar to oar" phrase, though, is problematical. Generally, in a rowing shell, the aim is to keep the oars in perfect rhythm, but never "together" in the sense of close to each other. (Clashing oars with your teammates is a Bad Thing). The only time I can think of when oar blades would come together, in any sort of boat, is during a race, which seems inappropriate for the sense of the poem. Another possibility is that Frost was thinking of oar handles, not bades. The handles do come together on each stroke in either a rowing shell or a simple rowboat. One oar rowing by itself can only send the boat in aimless circles; it takes both to go in a straight line or in any sort of controlled motion.
Despite the above paragraphs, though, it is the poem as a whole, not just unison of the last line, that to me fits the experience of marriage -- that ability to stand back, and watch the world, and analyze it together.
Posted by dichroic at March 25, 2001 03:31 PM