[1535] The Line-Gang

Guest poem submitted by Yashashree Kulkarni, <kulkarni@>:

Here come the line-gang pioneering by,
They throw a forest down less cut than broken.
They plant dead trees for living, and the dead
They string together with a living thread.
They string an instrument against the sky
Wherein words whether beaten out or spoken
Will run as hushed as when they were a thought
But in no hush they string it: they go past
With shouts afar to pull the cable taught,
To hold it hard until they make it fast,
To ease away -- they have it. With a laugh,
An oath of towns that set the wild at naught
They bring the telephone and telegraph.

	-- Robert Frost

I came across this poem while browsing through a collection of Frost's poems
on the internet. What facinated me most about this poem is how Frost manages
to move back and forth, so effortlessly, between seemingly disjoint worlds -
the forest, the activities of the linemen, the world that'll come to exist
in the live wires and even the thoughts living in our brains as electrical
signals - and 'strings them together with a living thread', the poem.

Yashashree Kulkarni.

[this poem is archived, accessible and awaiting your comments at]
http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minstrels/poems/1535.html
To subscribe, send a blank mail to <minstrels-subscribe@>.


Yahoo! Groups Links

<*> To visit your group on the web, go to:
    http://groups.yahoo.com/group/minstrels/

<*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
    minstrels-unsubscribe@

    http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/

From: "Mallika Chellappa" <mchellappa@>

<P>=0A  Amazing poes, thirteen lines with enough rhyme to <BR>=0Ahave
been a sonnet if he had wanted to add that extra<BR>=0Aline. <BR>=0A<BR>=0AFrost's poems are full of imagery; so are<BR>=0AWordsworth's, and now I wonder if both<BR>=0Alaboured equally hard to achieve that, or<BR>=0Awas it effortless?<BR>=0A<BR>=0AMallika=0A</P>=0A=0A=0A<br><br>=0A<A target""_blank" HREF""http://clients.rediff.com/signature/track_sig.asp"><IMG SRC""inbox.htm@">http://ads.rediff.com/RealMedia/ads/adstream_nx.cgi/www.rediffmail.com/inbox.htm@Bottom" BORDER"0 VSPACE"0 HSPACE"0></a>=0A

From: "Catherine Pegg" <theamazingcatherine@>

This, with all its contrasts and contradictions, actually reminds me a lot 
of some of the riddles from the Exeter Book.

Compare:

Wherein words whether beaten out or spoken
Will run as hushed as when they were a thought
But in no hush they string it

with:

My house is not quiet     I am not loud ...

(from The Fish)

I don't think that Frost had this in mind.  It's just something that I 
noticed.

Cat

_________________________________________________________________
Listen to music online with the Xtra Broadband Channel  
http://xtra.co.nz/broadband