Poetry

A WITNESS TREE--Robert Frost--Holt ($2).

Like an ancient Vermont maple putting forth its leaf in due season, 67-year-old New England Poet Robert Frost this April brought out his seventh book of poems, his first new book in six years. During those years he lost his son (his youngest daughter died in 1935, his wife in 1938); yet the only lines in his book that refer to personal loss read as follows:

I could give all to Time except--except What I myself have held. But why declare The things forbidden that while the Customs slept I have crossed to Safety with? For I am There, And what I would not part with I have kept.

Witness Tree is a testimony and a revelation of what Frost has managed to keep, through the happy and tragic years of his life. On the plus side is his passion for the passion that makes flowers bloom, trees scrape stars, and some people love each other. In his latest book, as in his first, Frost still goes for this heavenward earth-love as a horse goes for oats--see parts of his Come In, for instance. When he goes limpingly, as he does on many pages of his book, it is less because of his age than because he has come more & more to favor his worst poetical fault--his rascally independence, based on preternatural selfesteem. When full of this--and he is only occasionally entirely free of it--Frost writes like a wise man ensconced in a pickle jar.

But the plus outweighs the minus in A Witness Tree, and Frost remains in this book a first-rate poet and a natural American. How timely a thing this is, readers of Frost's unexampled historical poem, The Gift Outright, will quickly discern:-

The land was ours before we were the land's. She was our land more than a hundred years Before we were her people. She was ours In Massachusetts, in Virginia, But we were England's, still colonials, Possessing what we still were unpossessed by, Possessed by what we now no more possessed. Something we were withholding made us weak Until we found it was ourselves We were withholding from our land of living, And forthwith found salvation in surrender. Such as we were we gave ourselves outright ,

(The deed of gift was many deeds of war) To the land vaguely realizing westward, But still unstoried, artless, unenhanced, Such as she was, such as she would become. Whatever America becomes, she will bear, to her lasting beautification, the pioneer trace of Robert Frost.

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