The Joy of Sorrow

 

My November Guest

 

My Sorrow, when she's here with me,

Thinks these dark days of autumn rain

Are beautiful as days can be;

She loves the bare, the withered tree;

She walks the sodden pasture lane.

 

Her pleasure will not let me stay.

She talks and I am fain to list:

She's glad the birds are gone away,

She's glad her simple worsted gray

Is silver now with clinging mist.

 

The desolate, deserted trees,

The faded earth, the heavy sky,

The beauties she so truly sees,

She thinks I have no eye for these,

And vexes me for reason why.

 

Not yesterday I learned to know

The love of bare November days

Before the coming of the snow,

But it were vain to tell her so,

And they are better for her praise.

 

Robert Frost

 

Typically, our inner voices are portrayed as querulous rival lawyers in the mind’s courtroom who argue competing interests before a “higher self” adjudicator.    Frost sets his reverie not in a courtroom of bombastic bickering but rather as a quiet exchange between emotional personas on an autumn walk along a rain-soaked path.  There is no judge ensconced above the fray. In this vignette a conversation ensues between the author-self and his personified, feminine sorrow (“My Sorrow”), who speaks freely and forcefully.  The exchange is subtle and nuanced.  In the poem’s title Frost indicates that Sorrow is his Guest, which renders him, by default, the Host.  His Guest pleads with him to recognize the beauty in the gray day that so suits her character.  The Host keeps close quarter.  He hears her out in pensive reserve but is inclined to neither agree nor object.  He finally declares his long-standing affection for the stark beauty of a bleak November day, but only to the reader.  He declines to admit this to his Guest because the day’s allures, by his reckoning, are enhanced by her adulations.   Presumably, he wants her to continue to press her case. 

Frost uses images from nature as a backdrop for his poetry and he does so with an illustrative grace that reflects an inherent, deep, and inseparable union between himself and the natural world.  This milieu resonates with my bent and psyche, rendering the tales that emerge out of Frost’s poems vivid and profound.  My November Guest is set in a gray autumn day replete with bare-limbed trees, heavy skies, and soaking drizzle.  Out of this setting arises a fascinating study of internal rumination.  Who or what is the self in an internal conversation?  

The voices within our mind are our constant companions.  They are the first to greet us upon awakening and they keep us company throughout the day.  They rarely step out for long and insist upon their say with no qualms about interrupting our external conversations.  They flatter one moment and berate the next.  They accompany us to bed at night and haunt our dreams even after sleep has swept us away.   Who are we without them?  If all those voices: the bleater, the whiner, the accuser, whisperer, the rationalizer, gloater and boaster, the niggler - if all of them abandoned me, would I be left a shell?  Or is there a quiet overseeing lord or lady of the manor who listens, synthesizes, and decides?    Frost implies, in his role as Host, that there is. 

The delicious paradox of the poem arises out of the tension between joy and sorrow.  Sorrow is the guest, whom ostensibly has been invited in; most guests are.  The setting provides further evidence that she is welcome – her host does not attempt to push her away but rather ambles with her along a rain-sodden lane on an autumn day, affording her his full attention.  Frost paints eloquently and succinctly the ironic, savored joy that emerges out of sorrow, for the petulant poet is never so happy as when he is miserable.  

Other analysts of My November Guest have conjectured that Frost suffered a broken heart of some ilk in a November past.  Perhaps he did, I have no knowledge.  I suspect the month is incidental but useful in its austerity.  Frost expresses more than a biographical reminiscence.  He reveals his willingness, in times of heartbreak, to embrace Sorrow, to walk with her, remain attentive, to behold sorrowful beauty in her company, even if she imparts a lesson already learned.  Sorrow’s feminine gender at least implies a romantic relationship between Host and Guest, and intimacy is a required element for heartbreak.  The power of the broken heart has been expressed in a quote of unknown attribution (perhaps, it is said, scribed by a monk in the middle ages) …

That internal rending called a broken heart is the especial lot of all sensitive people.  No such person lives long in this world before having his or her heart broken.  And as time goes by the world sunders the broken heart into smaller and ever smaller pieces. However, these people also come to know, beyond any doubt, that the important thing is to let the world break the human heart.  For there is room in the broken heart, and only there, for all the sorrows in the world.  The broken heart, and only it, is curative, redemptive of the wasteland around.  Moreover, it is the very raw material necessary for a strange and important alchemy that has been described in the words, ‘Your sorrow shall be turned into joy.’

This “strange alchemy” is key to a joyful, fulfilling life, for sorrow is inevitable and those inner voices are a necessary enzyme to complete the transformative reaction.  The origin of these voices presents an intriguing mystery, and the challenge is determining which ones to listen to.  Does the admonisher impart the wisdom of an oracle who emerges from a sage cosmic conscience, or is it the voice of a prejudicial authority influential during one’s malleable youth?  And who, exactly, is the one doing the listening?  I choose to believe that Frost’s Guest prevailed upon him to relish the sullen beauty of a bleak November day rather than spiral into the morass of depression.  I write these final lines as I gaze out the window at a denuded landscape on a cold, gray, northern Vermont morning.  I will choose to do the same.