Today’s Poem: Sugaring

Raymond Holden in Robert Frost’s woods

Boiling maple syrup (Wikimedia Commons)

In any literary era, there’s only so much room. Some poets will rise to the top, to shine their light down on everyone else. Others will appear to us as shadows in that light. So much in this world amounts to an accident of time and place, of coincidence. An American poet publishing a New Hampshire snow poem in 1920, for example, will inevitably, if unfairly, strike us, reading that poem in 2024, as a shadow of Robert Frost (1874–1963). A 1920 New Hampshire snow poem not written by Robert Frost — no matter how fine a poem it might be on its own merits — is bound to suffer a little by the comparison we can’t force ourselves not to make.

In the case of Raymond Holden (1894–1972), overlap with Frost, twenty years his senior, is more than a passing coincidence. The two had met in Franconia, New Hampshire, in 1915, and in 1920, when Frost moved from New Hampshire to Vermont, Holden bought his land. These poets are writing not only about a similar landscape, but about literally the same landscape: the same trees, the same snow. They would have heard the same voices, which perhaps explains why, in Holden’s 1920 New Hampshire poem, “Sugaring,” the exchanges among the men, tossed off so naturally in the poem’s easy blank-verse cadences, sound so familiar. They are familiar. They are the same people, literally the same people, who populate Frost’s own poems of the 1910s.  

Yet “Sugaring,” published the same year that the 26-year-old Holden acquired Frost’s farmland and woods, is manifestly not a Robert Frost poem. A younger man’s work, it’s not the sort of poem Frost had been writing even at the start of his career. The poems of Frost’s 1913 A Boy’s Will and the next year’s North of Boston evoke similar natural scenes and call up similar human voices. But the universe and the humans who inhabit it are strikingly different from the universe, natural and human, that Holden envisions. 

Crescent moon (Wikimedia Commons)

In Frost’s “Rose Pogonias,” for example, a strolling couple fancifully wish that a field of wildflowers could remain unmown. But immediately they modify their wish. It’s too much to ask that the field remain untouched. The most they can hope for is that the mowers will wait a little while, long enough for the flowers to bloom and die. Humans might live in concert with the natural world, but the harmony is fleeting, and the natural state of things is to be at odds. A man might acknowledge and love the beauty of a field, then lay waste to it with the scythe himself. In Frost’s vision, this is the way things are. If nature seems kind, if other people seem kind, look out. The universe may offer you flowers, but it may also snatch away your firstborn child. 

Holden’s blank-verse “Sugaring,” again, is not this kind of poem. Even as a younger man, Frost — drawing from the deep well of the classical tradition — is a skeptic, whose longing for the world to be as beautiful as it seems does not ever quite seduce him. By contrast, the young Holden, a Romantic, is seduced. A Frost speaker would not go out at the end of a poem to lie in the snow, to be close to the thrumming life of the earth on the brink of springtime. He might be tempted to do such a thing — the woods are “lovely, dark and deep,” after all — but their allure is deadly, and the Frost speaker knows it. Holden’s speaker, however, flirts with the idea of lying down to sleep in the snowy woods, with no notion that in doing so he flirts with death.  For this speaker, the promise of new life really does seem to lie beneath the snow. Even when men, like the world, lie down to sleep, that life continues. The drip of thawing ice from the sugar house roof enters the earth to rise again as sap the next year.

The moon, meanwhile, really does seem to have the power to transfigure things, or at least to make people believe that the things of this world are transfigured. If the countryman in the long first stanza believes in error that the snow is deeper than it is, that it is in fact a legendary snow, so what? This is simply one of the “miracles” that the sugaring moon has wrought: not that anything is objectively true, but that everything is mysterious and beautiful. Holden’s speaker never doubts or mistrusts that surface of moonlight, which renders everything “calm as a dream of paradise.” At this epiphany, a Frost speaker would say, “But of course it’s only a dream. Maybe there’s a paradise, but we’d only glimpse it at the corners of our vision. Never fully.” 

But this is not a Frost poem. Holden’s speaker never doubts that the things he says are so, perhaps because in this poem, whether things are true or not is beside the point. His stance is one not of interrogation, but of wonder. He may “wonder why” things appear the way they do,  but he never wonders whether the appearances are true. He merely says that in the miraculous moonlight, “there may be . . . / Visions of other things for other men.” We might be seduced, ourselves, by the undeniable loveliness of this whole scene, with the sap running, the winter giving way to spring, and the moon’s silver, ambiguous light washing over everything. 

Or we might not be seduced by it. And if we’re not, is it because we can’t read this poem without thinking of Frost, or is the problem something in, or lacking in, the poem itself? On the one hand, were it not for the existence of Robert Frost, at the same time and in precisely the same place, we could talk about Holden’s poem without comparison. But on the other hand, even without Frost, we might still find the poem wanting, just a little, on its own terms: invested in its striking particulars, but not pressing hard enough on any surface. As it is, line by line, Holden’s poem remains beautiful in those particulars, even if its light is ultimately a lesser, more ambiguous light, like the light of the moon on the snow.

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 Sugaring

by Raymond Holden 

A man may think wild things under the moon —
In March when there is a tapping in the pails
Hung breast-high on the maples. Though you sink
To boot-tops only in the uncrusted snow,
And feel last autumn’s leaves a short foot down, 
There will be one among the men you meet
To say the snow lies six feet level there. 
“Not here!” you say; and he says, “In the woods” —
Implying woods that he knows where to find. 
Well, such a moon may be miraculous,
And if it has the power to make one man
Believe a common February snow
The great storm-wonder he would talk about
For years if once he saw it, there may be
In the same shimmering sickle over the hill
Visions of other things for other men. 

The moon again
Playing tonight with vapors that go up
And out into the silver. The brown sap works
Its foamy bulk over the great log fire.
Colors of flame light up a man, who kneels
With sticks upon his arm, and in his face
A grimace of resistance to the glow. 
All that is burning is not under here
Boiling the early sap — I wonder why.
It is as calm as a dream of paradise
Out there among the trees, where runnels make
The only music heard above the sway
Of branches fingering the leaning moon.
And yet a man must go, when sap has thickened,
Up and away to sleep a tired sleep,
And dream of dripping from a rotting roof
Back into sap that once was rid of him. 
I wonder why, I wonder why, I wonder . . . 

Close the iron doors and let the fire die,
And the faint night-wind blow through the broken walls.
The sugar thickens, and the moon is gone,
And frost threads up the singing rivulets.
I am going up the mountain toward the stars,
But I should like to lie near earth tonight —
Earth that has borne the furious grip of winter
And given a kind of birth to beauty at last. 
Look! — the old breath thrills through her once again
And there will be passion soon, shaking her veins
And driving her spirit upward till the buds
Burst overhead, and swallows find the eaves
Of the sugar-house untroubled by the talk
Of men gone off with teams to mend the roads.
I think I shall throw myself down here in the snow
So to be very near her when she stirs.  

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