I was teaching away and as often happens, I needed to quickly pull up something on the computer to make a point, or give an example of something for the edification of my students. I needed to project Robert Frost’s “Nature’s First Green is Gold.” I just typed the first few words into to search bar and hit enter.
I immediately notices the images that the search brought up.
I couldn’t believe what I saw!
Compare that travesty to this:
Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.
Robert Frost
When he wrote it, Robert Frost composed a poem. He didn’t write a paragraph. And if he were to write a paragraph, you can be sure he wouldn’t have justified, both right and left.
You don’t get poetry?
Well, this re-presenting of Frost’s original, is analogous to any of the following: (you choose)
- Putting the front of a Volkswagon Bug on a Rolls-Royce
- Mixing a can on Sprite with a glass of Espetacle del Montsant 2017 because it’s not sweet enough
- Ordering Lobster with a side of Kraft Dinner
- Listening to your Aunt Edna doing Kareoke–Bonnie Tyler’s “Turn Around” (with your High School PE teacher doing the second voice)
- Adding a cheesy chorus to Amazing Grace–with a mixed metaphor to boot
Suffice it to say that everything in a poem contributes to its meaning. In this violent restructuring of the poem, the rhyme is lost. The correspondence of the alliteration in lines 2 and lines 7 is lost, as is the correlation between “Nature” and “Nothing”–the first words of the first and last lines. Not to mention the first words of each line (“Nature’s . . . Her . . . Her . . . But . . . So . . . Then . . . So . . . So . . . Nothing”).
And what’s the deal with the background picture? Grand mountainous cliffs that have grass on them!? That might be a poem, but it ain’t this poem! Sure it’s green. Big deal. It’s the green of the second leaf in line 5. This poem is about the “first green,” a green so fleeting it needed a profound poem to hint at its beauty and significance and value and fragility. You can’t capture that by slapping a green mountain on the background. If a picture was possible, Frost wouldn’t have needed to write the poem!
As Bugs Bunny would say: “What a maroon.”
And you shouldn’t do this to Bible verses either!
