Natalie’s Blog

One of the Frost poems I got really into was “Two Tramps in Mud Time.”  The idea of uniting vocation with avocation is something that plagues/captivates me regularly.  This poem urges me to continue evaluating that, particularly in the last four lines:

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.

If we take seriously the notion that everyone’s career should be what he/she really loves, then we would almost definitely have to sacrifice services we take for granted.  (Off the top of my head, those services, or generally undesirable career tracks I can think of, might include housekeeping or funeral arranging.)  I don’t at all want to be utilitarian and suggest that some people have to do the grunt work while others get the white collar careers, because I believe that everyone should do exactly what makes her/him come to life.  Additionally, I believe that if we lived in a perfect world where everyone did what he/she is most passionate about, we would function as a community with more harmony.

I think Frost really strikes out against utilitarianism when he uses the phrase “common good” in the midst of lines 13-16, and that makes him a little more accessible to me:

The blows that a life of self-control
Spares to strike for the common good,
That day, giving a loose to my soul,
I spent on the unimportant wood.

But I don’t see the utopia where everyone does what they want emerging in our world anytime soon.  I suppose what attracts me to this poem is that I’m hoping to find something in it that shows he isn’t oversimplifying the complications of reconciling human desires and human necessities to form human purpose.  Perhaps the simplicity of his example of men in the woods away from capitalism and even family (at least in the context of this poem) is telling of how much unnecessary confusion Frost believes we bring to this conflict.  But if that isn’t what he’s doing, I think I’m once again at a loss with Frost to really believe he isn’t that grandfather/Hallmark card figure.