Robert Gibbs: “There Are Miles To Go Before We Sleep”
Sam Stein reports that at the press briefing today, Robert Gibbs refused to reveal the White House’s position on the Stupak anti-abortion amendment.
But, in the interests of taking a mental health break, I wanted to flag this particular line from Gibbs, in which he said the White House wants to let the legislative process play out:
“I wish we were having this conversation at the last part of this process but as your network and others have pointed out: There are miles to go before we sleep.”
The bit about there being “miles to go before we sleep” is an interesting choice, because that line, from the famous poem by Robert Frost, has been widely interpreted to reflect a death wish. Here’s the last stanza of “Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening”:
The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
If I recall correctly from college, the repetition of that last line, and its juxtaposition with the poet’s weariness about having “promises to keep,” has often been read as a desire to escape from worldy responsibilities and embrace oblivion and death.
The use of the line is perhaps understandable in this context, by the way, given how exhausting getting health care reform done has proven. But the fact remains: The White House still has “promises to keep.”
And now — enough about poetry. Back to politics.
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There should always be time for poetry; especially from the likes of Robert Frost.
Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening
Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.
My little horse must think it *****
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.
He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound’s the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.
The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
Liam — thoughts on that last line? That’s the interpretation I remember. You?
O Lord, what fun. The software censored:
My little horse must think it qu*eer
Liam — that’s awesome. Thanks.
its juxtaposition with the poet’s weariness about having “promises to keep,” has often been read as a desire to escape from worldy responsibilities and embrace oblivion and death.
And given that Robert Frost suffered from depression this is no surprise.
(That he suffered from depression is more clear in some of his other less famous poems, although unfortunately I can’t explicitly recall one at the moment. I know I have read some of them before and been struck by how clear that was.)
Greg,
I always took the poem to be expressing regret for having to tear one’s self away from nature and mystical beauty, in order to keep one’s nose to the grindstone.
I took the repetition of the last line as being a rueful expression of regret for how the modern world has separated us from nature.
Anyone who grew up in the silent country side, and now resides among The Madding Crowd” will recognize that sense of loss.
oddjob:
“And given that Robert Frost suffered from depression this is no surprise”
Quite. Well…under Socialist Utopiacare, he’d get some treatment and a scrip for Prozac or Elovil, and voila…
No more poetry!
“nd given that Robert Frost suffered from depression this is no surprise.”
Indeed.
But if someone isn’t using the line in the same way, then they aren’t intending to say the same thing.
Just weary miles, Greg = no death wish.
“Robert Gibbs refused to reveal the White House’s position on the Stupak anti-abortion amendment.”
Well Greg, Obama is playing it by the book. You would rather have mignight EO’s a la shrub ?
“No more poetry!”
‘ROFLMAO – Obama killed poetry.
Indeed, we don’t want our insane geniuses getting sane -we want them to suffer.
He also abused his wife.
A Wee Poem from Mr. Frost, that further reveals how much he preferred the pastoral solitude to the urban bustle. I think he was at heart a nature lover, and one should not read more into it than that.
Dust of Snow
………
The way a crow
Shook down on me
The dust of snow
From a hemlock tree
Has given my heart
A change of mood
And saved some part
Of a day I had rued.
“I think he was at heart a nature lover, and one should not read more into it than that.”
If that’s all it was about, Liam, it would quickly get boring.
I CAUGHT this morning morning’s minion, king-
dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing, 5
As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird,—the achieve of; the mastery of the thing!
Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion 10
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!
No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion.
Gerard Manley Hopkins
Is it about a hawk or is it about Christ?
Frost was a pretty simple man. He wrote mostly about what he experienced or observed.
Freud started all the modern speculation and need to uncover hiding meanings, where there are none. Now, modern poets think that is what they must provide, so they end up serving up a lot of almost incomprehensible gibberish, without any lilting rhyme,poetic meter, or sense.
Two Tramps in Mud Time
Out of the mud two strangers came
And caught me splitting wood in the yard,
And one of them put me off my aim
By hailing cheerily “Hit them hard!”
I knew pretty well why he had dropped behind
And let the other go on a way.
I knew pretty well what he had in mind:
He wanted to take my job for pay.
Good blocks of oak it was I split,
As large around as the chopping block;
And every piece I squarely hit
Fell splinterless as a cloven rock.
The blows that a life of self-control
Spares to strike for the common good,
That day, giving a loose my soul,
I spent on the unimportant wood.
The sun was warm but the wind was chill.
You know how it is with an April day
When the sun is out and the wind is still,
You’re one month on in the middle of May.
But if you so much as dare to speak,
A cloud comes over the sunlit arch,
A wind comes off a frozen peak,
And you’re two months back in the middle of March.
A bluebird comes tenderly up to alight
And turns to the wind to unruffle a plume,
His song so pitched as not to excite
A single flower as yet to bloom.
It is snowing a flake; and he half knew
Winter was only playing possum.
Except in color he isn’t blue,
But he wouldn’t advise a thing to blossom.
The water for which we may have to look
In summertime with a witching wand,
In every wheelrut’s now a brook,
In every print of a hoof a pond.
Be glad of water, but don’t forget
The lurking frost in the earth beneath
That will steal forth after the sun is set
And show on the water its crystal teeth.
The time when most I loved my task
The two must make me love it more
By coming with what they came to ask.
You’d think I never had felt before
The weight of an ax-head poised aloft,
The grip of earth on outspread feet,
The life of muscles rocking soft
And smooth and moist in vernal heat.
Out of the wood two hulking tramps
(From sleeping God knows where last night,
But not long since in the lumber camps).
They thought all chopping was theirs of right.
Men of the woods and lumberjacks,
They judged me by their appropriate tool.
Except as a fellow handled an ax
They had no way of knowing a fool.
Nothing on either side was said.
They knew they had but to stay their stay
And all their logic would fill my head:
As that I had no right to play
With what was another man’s work for gain.
My right might be love but theirs was need.
And where the two exist in twain
Theirs was the better right–agreed.
But yield who will to their separation,
My object in living is to unite
My avocation and my vocation
As my two eyes make one in sight.
Only where love and need are one,
And the work is play for mortal stakes,
Is the deed ever really done
For Heaven and the future’s sakes.
Robert Frost
I think the poet does have a wish to enshroud himself in the lovely, dark, deep woods, but he intends to keep plugging away at the wearisome responsibilities on this mortal coil.
Perhaps there is some evidence for the theory, but it seems quite a stretch to read the lines as a desire for oblivion and death. But it is consistent with the sad state of post-modern academic literary interpretation taught in colleges the past few decades.
I happen to think even Liam’s interpretation is a little too grim, but it is more in the ballpark. There is certainly something to Liam’s basic idea that the poem speaks of stopping off in the midst of the duties that organize our lives to wonder at the beauty of the natural world. But to me this reads in a more affirming and positive way, with perhaps a bit of wistfulness.
Certainly no death wish.
For the second time in a week I find myself pretty much agreeing with Liam.
Apocalyse approaching, for sure.
“Anyone who grew up in the silent country side, and now resides among The Madding Crowd” will recognize that sense of loss.”
This is true, too. One can’t ever forget a silent, snowy evening in the country.
“Now, modern poets think that is what they must provide, so they end up serving up a lot of almost incomprehensible gibberish, without any lilting rhyme,poetic meter, or sense.
”
O please.
That was a silly statement.
Unless you name the modern poet you mean, that statement doesn’t mean much.
This is as contemporary as it gets:
Death of a Naturalist
All the year the flax-dam festered in the heart
Of the townland; green and heavy headed
Flax had rotted there, weighted down by huge sods.
Daily it sweltered in the punishing sun.
Bubbles gargled delicately, bluebottles
Wove a strong gauze of sound around the smell.
There were dragon-flies, spotted butterflies,
But best of all was the warm thick slobber
Of frogspawn that grew like clotted water
In the shade of the banks
. Here, every spring
I would fill jampots full of the jellied
Specks to range on the window-sills at home,
On shalves at school, and wait and watch until
The fattening dots burst into nimble-
Swimming tadpoles. Miss Walls would tell us how
The daddy frog was called a bullfrog
And how he croaked and how the mammy frog
Laid hundreds of little eggs and this was
Frogspawn. You could tell the weather by frogs too
For they were yellow in the sun and brown
In rain.
Then one hot day when fields were rank
With cowdung in the grass the angry frogs
Invaded the flax-dam; I ducked through hadges
To a coarse croaking that I had not heard
Before. The air was thick with a bass chorus.
Right down the dam gross-bellied frogs were cocked
On sods; their loose necks pulsed like snails. Some hopped:
The slap and plop were obscene threats. Some sat
Poised like mud grenades, their blunt heads farting.
I sickened, turned, and ran. The great slime kings
Were gathered there for vengeance and I knew
That if I dipped my hand the spawn would clutch it.
Seamus Heaney
Poetry is open to many interpretations, and that’s the point of it, regardless of what we were told about a given poem in high school or college. But I’m guessing Gibbs is saying how much wearying work remains, not expressing a death wish. Given all that’s gone on with this legislation, it’s more likely he has a nap wish.
Well, of course the very best, are always going to rise above the dictates of those who can’t, so they teach, and restrict. Seamus wended his way to school through the Irish countryside, and encountered much encouragement from the workers in the fields and those who filled pot holes.
He says that the rural working Irish were so fond of the written word, that they encouraged him to pursue his career. One line that they often said to the Schoolboy Seamus was: “the pen is lighter than the shovel”.
Gibbs was merely saying:
We have a lot more work to do, before we can put the bill to bed.
What Gibbs was saying every time he got asked (about 10 times) was, nice try, I am not going there.
His second favorite question of the day was, “what does the Christmas deadline mean”? That turned in to much back and forth and ended with an emphatic, the president expects to sign health care reform by the end of the year.
Raised in the country.
I walked in the snowy woods.
Snow’s gone. Climate change.
Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar and sometimes “miles to go before I sleep” just means “a lot to do before we’re done”.
I’d say you’re reading a bit much into it.
“Snow’s gone. Climate change.”
Do tell. So there won’t be any more snow. Not sure they’re buying that in Wyoming.
Good fences make good neighbors.
QB, I’m just going to pretend — for your own benefit — that you’re not that insanely stupid.
alright, no more poetry: roundup posted:
http://theplumline.whorunsgov.com/house-dems/happy-hour-roundup-small/
Clearly, Gibbs didn’t think through the implications of the Frost quote. “But I have promises to keep” has special resonance with the progressives right about now. Is Gibbs stating that the White House is finally going to deliver on those promises?
Now, modern poets think that is what they must provide, so they end up serving up a lot of almost incomprehensible gibberish, without any lilting rhyme,poetic meter, or sense.
Critics have been griping about that since Walt Whitman.
Walt is not hard to penetrate. In fact he is crystal clear.
No, but he doesn’t rhyme.
@gasman
What “promises” has Obama made on health care that he isn’t clearly attempting to deliver on?
Given the current makeup of the Congress it will be an amazing feat if healthcare legislation is passed.
Right wingers, and that includes right wing Dems, have been fighting against healthcare legislation with any despicable tactic they can think of.
The right wingers have used outright lies of the most monstrous kind, including the claims that the healthcare legislation that could save thousands of American lives will in their deceitfully wicked framing, will ‘kill grandma’.
It’s despicable lies, but the right wing’s puppetmasters, the megacorps, have a lot of money riding on the outcome.
Health costs cost Americans trillions of dollars every year. Much of those healthcare “costs” are the pilfered profits of callous corporations.
And while right wingers are helping corporate-medical-companies try to keep their obscenely profits, left-wingers are fighting to provide life-saving healthcare to the least amongst US while simultaneously lower the costs of healthcare for average Americans.
It’s a serious fight: American lives versus trillions in corporate profits.