#38: Robert Frost Had the Right Idea.
Unfortunately, it just doesn't always work out that way.
From: “The Death of a hired hand.” Robert Frost, North of Boston, First Edition 1915. Courtesy of Dartmouth College Rauner Special Collections Library.
When I see someone living on the street, especially if they appear to be in their 20s or 30s, I often wonder why their friends and family don’t help them. I mean like where the hell are mom and dad?
I know that reflects an embarrassingly paternalistic and privileged perspective—I’m admitting my reaction, not defending it.
Asking people about their family and friends is now right up there with, “You have a place to sleep tonight?” “Do you have an ID?” and “You using much?” in my list of Top 5 conversational “icebreakers” with new friends on the street.
The fact that a person’s support network has frayed or broken down completely is usually attributed to things like compassion fatigue, tough love, disapproval of life choices, and/or selfishness. But behind those catch-all phrases are, as always, real people with complex lives and individual experiences.
I no longer wonder where their family and friends are. In most cases I know. Here are some examples of the kind of things people are up against when asking friends and family for help…and their families are up against when deciding what to do in response:
You go back home and tell your parent(s) that you and your partner are having a baby, and you really need help. But your parents are already taking care of one or more of your children and they are emotionally and financially spent.
You have a sibling or other close relative who’s usually there for you, but now can’t help because their partner is really sick and their two kids are living with them, all in a one-bedroom apartment.
You have a close friend who’s helped in the past but now suspects you’ve stopped going to treatment and doesn’t want their money used to buy drugs.
You just moved to town from another part of the country—for, say, a job and/or a relationship that has, since, ended badly. Now you’re alone. 3000 miles away from friends and family. A phone call away, maybe. But you don’t have a phone. And, after a while, the folks back home aren’t necessarily going to pick up anyway.
You’ve had your three strikes, and you are out. Your family has tried and tried and tried to help. They’ve set you up in one apartment after another. Given you food money week after week when you’ve shown up on their doorstep. They’ve even paid for some courses or career training to get you on a path, any path, to self sufficiency—only to see you return to the street as broken, needy, and perhaps addicted as ever.
You track down a relative who is willing to help but when they hear about the seriously “not nice” people whom you owe money to, don’t feel safe getting involved.
Your parents are just mean, don’t give a damn, feel like you brought this on yourself and it’s not their problem.
Your family has always judged you and you have too much pride to “grovel”.
What would Robert Frost Say?
I’ve always had an embarrassingly superficial and uninformed attitude towards Robert Frost’s poetry—that it’s commonplace, platitudinous, prosaic—even though I haven’t read enough of it to justify having an opinion in the first place.
So, I’d always considered the line: ‘‘Home is the place where, when you have to go there, They have to take you in.’” to be just another well-worn trope. Hell, I didn’t even know the title of the poem it came from. But, since I wanted to use it in this essay, I figured I better do my due diligence.
When I actually read “The Death of a Hired Hand” I was surprised to discover that it’s a compelling story with a message that’s far more subtle than that standalone line would suggest.1 It’s also a very realistic portrayal of attitudes and emotions I, and I’m sure others, may experience when trying to figure out whether and how to help others. It also makes it poignantly clear that there’s a lot more to home than simply shelter.
Because, for starters, it’s not the hired hand’s family that is deciding whether to take him in. It’s the couple he’s worked for. The poem takes the meaning of “homelessness” to another level:
It begins with a farmer named Warren coming home and his wife Mary telling him that their old ne’er-do-well hired-hand Silas has returned. She urges her husband to be kind. Warren will have nothing of it. Silas is unreliable, he argues, and always breaks his promises. The last time they’d seen him was when he walked off the job during the busy haying season.
“I’m done,” Warren says.
Part of a moon was falling down the west,
Dragging the whole sky with it to the hills.
Its light poured softly in her lap. She saw it
And spread her apron to it. She put out her hand
Among the harp-like morning-glory strings,
Taut with the dew from garden bed to eaves,
As if she played unheard some tenderness
That wrought on him beside her in the night.
‘Warren,’ she said, ‘he has come home to die:
You needn’t be afraid he’ll leave you this time.’
Warren doesn’t seem all that moved by the fact Silas is dying and kind of rolls his eyes at the idea of their house being his home. But Mary stands her ground. “It all depends on what you mean by home,” she argues before lowering the famous boom…
‘‘Home is the place where, when you have to go there,
They have to take you in.’
Then, she takes it a step further:
‘I should have called it
Something you somehow haven’t to deserve.’
Links:
Read the complete poem.
Listen to Frost read it.
Postscript: Warren doesn’t completely give up after Mary re-defines the word “home.” He points out that Silas’s brother is a bank director who lives just “thirteen little miles” away. But Mary explains that even though Silas considers himself worthless, “he won’t be made ashamed to please his brother.” (See last bullet point above.)
BTW: The meaning of Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” is equally ambiguous. An article in The Paris Review, called it, “the most misread poem in America.”https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2015/09/11/the-most-misread-poem-in-america/
"Death of the Hired Man" is a great poem. My mother, who would be 104 were she still alive, introduced me to it many years ago. I carried the story in my head all my life. But it was only after I had been working with people like Silas for many years that I actually reread it. The line about home has always been close to my consciousness, but the line that jumped off the page when I reread the poem maybe a decade ago was this: "And nothing to look backward to with pride,
And nothing to look forward to with hope . . ." That nails it. If we don't focus on that, we get nowhere with the people we are trying to help change their lives.
Great re -read! Thanks David! Check out Jay Parini’s excellent Robert Frost: A Life, p. 172 for an observation on Mary’s portrayal as evidence of Frost’s empathy for “women’s ways of knowing.”