Today’s Poem: Hyla Brook

Robert Frost’s brook, loved for what it is

A dry summer meadow at the Frost Farm, Derry, New Hampshire (Wikimedia Commons)

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Hyla Brook 

by Robert Frost 

By June our brook’s run out of song and speed. 
Sought for much after that, it will be found 
Either to have gone groping underground 
(And taken with it all the Hyla breed 
That shouted in the mist a month ago, 
Like ghost of sleigh-bells in a ghost of snow) — 
Or flourished and come up in jewel-weed, 
Weak foliage that is blown upon and bent 
Even against the way its waters went. 
Its bed is left a faded paper sheet 
Of dead leaves stuck together by the heat — 
A brook to none but who remember long. 
This as it will be seen is other far 
Than with brooks taken otherwhere in song. 
We love the things we love for what they are. 

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As early as 1914, with the publication of North of Boston, when he was 40, Robert Frost (1874–1963) — whose 1917 “For Once, Then, Something” appeared at Poems Ancient and Modern on March 12 — was beginning to write what in hindsight we think of as quintessentially “Robert Frost poems.” He was developing that voice that could speak easily of natural beauty, but never without acknowledging the dark seam that runs through that beauty like a dried-up brook.

“Mending Wall” is a North of Boston poem. So is “The Death of the Hired Man.” The 1916 volume Mountain Interval, meanwhile, following fast on the heels of the previous book, continued to reflect the poet’s voice as it matured and more fully realized itself.  

Robert Frost, sometime in the 1910s (Wikimedia Commons)

Today’s Poem, “Hyla Brook,” is a Mountain Interval poem. It keeps company with such more widely anthologized selections as “Birches,” “The Road Not Taken,” and the terrifying “Out, Out — ,” whose tragedy introduces most starkly the bleak seam that cuts through the New England beauty: a grief casting its shadow on the pastoral sunshine.

“Hyla Brook” is almost a sonnet, fifteen pentameter lines instead of fourteen. Its intricate rhyme scheme, abbaccaddeefgfg, departs from the Petrarchan mode after the first quatrain but returns to something like a variation on the sestet at the end. Although, in the beguiling music of the first line, we hear the brook’s “song and speed,” what transpires is that “the brook’s run out of” those things. The frog species that gives it its name has evaporated with the spring mist. The brook itself has ceased to be a brook at all. “We love the things we love for what they are,” even in their inevitable decline, because to invoke them as they are is to evoke, also inevitably, what they have been and are no longer.

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