Have you ever known an old man living alone in a house? I have. Old Mr. Pullman lived on the other side of my Uncle Frank and Aunt Irene when I was a boy, and on this side lived my grandmother and grandfather. They’d known old Joe for fifty years. I don’t think Joe was ever married. His house was sided with asphalt shingles — but so were a lot of houses still, in those days. But he didn’t keep them up. His backyard was a small wilderness, while the backyard of my grandfather and my Uncle Frank was organized in terraces, with four-foot high stone retaining walls, four levels up the hill to the top, where they kept chickens in a coop. On each terrace, my grandfather planted something different: tomatoes, beans, green vegetables, plum trees, a grapevine, and so on. Old Joe once kept a pig in his back yard, but I don’t think that that lasted very long. He was a nice man — used to play rummy with my mother when she was a kid. I remember him as having two or three teeth in his head, but he was always smiling. He was Italian, too, as everybody on our dead-end street was — the spelling “Pullman” was what the immigration people at Ellis Island came up with, for Palamone or Polemani or something. When Joe died, the house came down too, and now you’d never suspect that anybody ever lived on that spot.
I’ve often said that if it weren’t for Debra, I’d be living under a bridge somewhere. That’s because a man works for his family, either the family he has or the family he plans on having. Otherwise, there seems to be little point in it. Since he can put up with living on the edge between utter poverty and civilization, it’s where he may well end up, and not be too broken up about it, either. I’m sure our readers can think of examples from their own experience, too. And that brings us to our Poem of the Week, by the greatest of all American poets, Robert Frost, a man who had winter in his name and a wintry tenderness in his soul. It’s about an old man living alone, apparently in the middle of nowhere.
I don’t mean to be sentimental about the old man, and Frost was no sentimentalist, either. And it isn’t the most comfortable thing in the world right now, to write about loneliness. I used to tell my students that, for all that I could tell, there was no word in Middle English to describe that feeling. Why should there be? There were words for all other kinds of woe, but not for that one. My guess is that the feeling was unknown. You had your family, your parish, your neighbors, the other men in your guild if you belonged to one, the other sharecroppers on the manor — basically, you weren’t alone, because you couldn’t be. When you spend most of your time outdoors, too, as people did then, especially during the period of continental warming for three hundred years of good harvests (roughly 1000-1300), you’re not hidden away, and a lot of the work to be done couldn’t be managed by a single man here and a single man there.
But one of the odd results of the industrial revolution is that it made it possible to survive all by yourself, and not in the woods or under a bridge, and that means that many people do so. Not well — but they do. And so we have an old man in a New England winter, alone in his house. It’s not clear whether he has electricity at all. Probably not; he carries a small lamp about with him, probably an oil-lamp. But he has glass windows, and no doubt he has plenty of cans of food in the pantry or the cellar, and if he wants he can get loaves of bread from the general store, or dried beans and peas, or tinned meat.
Now, when it comes to precisely describing the details of physical labor, no English poet comes close to Robert Frost, whether it’s baling hay, or picking apples, or working at a grindstone, or milling wood, mowing grass, mending a stone wall, cording wood, even digging a grave. Yet in this poem, set in winter, he gives us an old man who has plenty of work to do, but doesn’t do any of it that we hear of right now. It’s as if Frost is keeping a tactful distance from the very character he himself has invented. We aren’t privy to the old man’s feelings. We aren’t told why he went down into the room full of barrels, and even he can’t remember at first — and hasn’t that happened to you, too, that you go somewhere in the house and then you say, “What am I doing here?” The sounds, too — outdoors they roar or they crack, they’re the wind in the trees or the branches in the cold, but indoors it’s only the clomp-clomp of the man’s feet on the stairs or the floor, like somebody “beating on a box.”
What’s to keep? The snow on the roof, the icicles hanging from the eaves; and the old man leaves them to the moon to see to. He falls asleep before the hearth. What does he need? Is it a woman he needs? Frost doesn’t say so, but I think it’s implicit. He’s just “one aged man — one man,” one, not two, and man, man without woman and so without someone to work for, and someone to keep his house. Alone, he can’t do it, or won’t even try very hard, won’t have the heart for it; and the same for the farm and for the countryside.
The poem is gentle and honest. Can people in our time understand it? I think so — but I don’t know if Frost ever suspected that a time would come when such people living alone would number in the many millions, both men and women, and not only the aged, either.
All out-of-doors looked darkly in at him Through the thin frost, almost in separate stars, That gathers on the pane in empty rooms. What kept his eyes from giving back the gaze Was the lamp tilted near them in his hand. What kept him from remembering what it was That brought him to that creaking room was age. He stood with barrels round him — at a loss. And having scared the cellar under him In clomping there, he scared it once again In clomping off — and scared the outer night, Which has its sounds, familiar, like the roar Of trees and crack of branches, common things, But nothing so like beating on a box. A light he was to no one but himself Where now he sat, concerned with he knew what, A quiet light, and then not even that. He consigned to the moon — such as she was, So late-arising — to the broken moon, As better than the sun in any case For such a charge, his snow upon the roof, His icicles along the wall to keep; And slept. The log that shifted with a jolt Once in the stove, disturbed him and he shifted, And eased his heavy breathing, but still slept. One aged man — one man — can’t keep a house, A farm, a countryside, or if he can, It's thus he does it of a winter night.
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