Difficulty Essay: “October” by Robert Frost

Before reading the poem, I looked at the shape of the words on the page. The lines looked like one large block of text, all about the same length, except for line 17. So, as I read the poem, I kept in mind that a shift of some sort could occur somewhere near that line. During my first read, I had difficulty deciphering the century-old, ultra-proper manner of speaking – writing, in this case – that Frost used throughout the poem. It felt like the words were out of order, and I had to put them back in order to understand the meaning of the line. For example, Frost writes, “Tomorrow’s wind, if it be wild, / Should waste them all” (3-4). If I were to re-write this in a modern style, which is more palatable for me, I would say, “If tomorrow’s wind is wild, it will waste them all.” The “them” that Frost is referring to are the leaves mentioned in the second line. After I translated, so to speak, the lines into my own manner of speech, I understood that Frost was saying that the wind will cause the leaves to fall off the trees. However, the dated speech mannerisms were definitely commonplace at the time, and I find that they add to the whimsy of the poem.

Now that I had mastered Frost’s manner of speech and could adeptly translate his lines into ones I could better understand, I looked at the plot of the poem to attempt to understand what Frost was saying. I noticed a heavy emphasis on nature throughout the poem, including falling leaves, the call of crows, and the setting sun. This imagery allowed the reader to better visualize the scene being set in the poem. Falling leaves are a pretty obvious choice to include in a poem about the month of October, because of course there are leaves falling in the autumn months. Crows also make sense to me because I associate crows with spookiness and therefore Halloween. However, I think Frost intended a different interpretation of the crows because he writes, “The crows above the forest call; / Tomorrow they may form and go” (5-6). Line 6 points to the crows migrating south for the winter, forming the “V” flight arrangement characteristic of traveling birds as they do so. As for the sunset, this was a little more ambiguous in my mind because sunsets are pretty similar in every season. Yet, the lines “Begin the hours of this day slow. / Make the day seem to us less brief” (8-9) describes days getting shorter as the winter approaches. I struggled to connect the leaves, crows, and sun, but then I realized that time was something they all had in common. Leaves only fall in the autumn, a specific time of year, similar to crows migrating south as the weather gets colder. Finally, the sun begins to rise later and set earlier in the fall as well, suggesting the passage of time. So, I came to the conclusion that in the literal sense, the poem was describing a day in October, from the slow sunrise, to the falling leaves and calling crows, and finally ending with a slow sunset.

There were a couple lines of the poem that didn’t exactly fit with this conclusion at first glance. I was very confused by “Hearts not averse to being beguiled, / Beguile us in the way you know” (lines 10-11) when I first read them, not understanding why matters of the heart had suddenly been brought up. To work through this, I looked at the literal meaning of the words, most significantly, beguiled – to enchant or charm in a somewhat deceptive way. These two lines then made a lot more sense, as the speaker is asking October, the epitome of fall, to enchant his or her heart with the beauty of the fall, which is kind of deceptive because fall is a transient natural state; it doesn’t last for very long. Additionally, the line “One from our trees, one far away” (line 14) was difficult to understand because the speaker was describing leaves falling in the morning and midday in the previous two lines, but this line was talking about “our trees” and trees far away. Perhaps the speaker meant that in the morning and midday, one leaf should fall from a tree in the speaker’s line of sight, and one leaf should fall from a tree far away. This extremely gradual change in the landscape could demonstrate that the speaker is uncomfortable with the passage of time and the thought of October ending. Finally, in the last four lines, after describing the sun setting, Frost all of a sudden brings up grapes and basically says that the grapes are going to die in the pending cold months. After spending so much of the poem on such classically fall-like ideas, the inclusion of the grapes, a sweet and lively fruit, perplexed me. Yet, as I thought back on the rest of the poem, I noticed that the tone was almost somber because of the punctuation. The first 16 lines of the poem are all punctuated with a comma, semicolon, or period, which give the lines a blunt ending and dulling any rhythm produced by rhyming words. However, in line 17, the words are punctuated by an exclamation mark, indicating a shift to a more lively subject – the grapes. The grapes seem to be a memory of warmer, happier times, like the summer. By writing “Slow, slow!” (17), Frost makes it seem as though the speaker doesn’t want those times to pass, doesn’t want the colder months to arrive. Yet, Frost also shows carelessness of nature for external wishes, writing “Whose clustered fruit must else be lost—” (20). This demonstrates that the grapes hanging from the vine must die at some point.

After deciphering the literal meaning of the poem, I felt that there was a deeper meaning to derive from the text. I noticed a very whimsical and delicate tone, with words like “ripened”, “beguiled”, “mist”, “enchant”, and “amethyst”. I didn’t really understand how these words connected to the death that October brings to nature, but the contrast evokes a sense of wonderment about the changing nature. Speaking of nature, I of course had noticed its prevalence throughout the poem, but I didn’t know how that related to the genre of the poem. Then, I thought about the time period in which Frost wrote this poem, the Romantic era. Since many pieces of art were focused on nature during this era, it makes sense that Frost would write a poem so focused on nature – a genre I now know is considered pastoral. The choice to write a poem about October through a nature lens gives it a focus on time, and including lines about the life cycle of leaves and grapes points to an overarching meaning about the brevity of life. Thus, this poem serves two purposes, at least for me: first, it accurately captures the melancholy feeling of an October morning, and second, it describes how nature demonstrates that life is a fleeting, temporary state that can end as quickly as a leaf falls to the ground, or as slowly as the sun setting on a fall day.