Provide, Provide
The witch that came (the withered hag)
To wash the steps with pail and rag,
Was once the beauty Abishag,
The picture pride of Hollywood.
Too many fall from great and good
For you to doubt the likelihood.
Die early and avoid the fate,
Or if predestined to die late,
Make up your mind to die in state.
Make the whole stock exchange your own!
If need be occupy a throne,
Where nobody can call you crone.
Some have relied on what they knew;
Others on being simply true.
What worked for them might work for you.
No memory of having starred
Atones for later disregard,
Or keeps the end from being hard.
Better to go down dignified
With boughten friendship at your side
Than none at all. Provide, provide!
– Robert Frost
Is this a comic poem, or a tragic one? On the one hand, the sharp & steady rhyming is a style we tend to associate, in English-language verse, with cleverness & wit. There's an epigrammatic worldly wisdom here. & there is the colorful & striking opening warning: a glamorous movie queen, now a decrepit old charwoman! Shades of Norma Desmond, the delusional has-been star of that acerbic tragicomedy, Sunset Boulevard.
But on the other hand, the view of life here is unrelentingly cynical & bleak: can anyone read the words Better to go down dignified / With boughten friendship at your side without a little heartbreak? The poem seems to exclude the possibility of friendship that isn't boughten. The use of the unusual dialect word helps emphasize the thought. When I did some quick research on boughten, I found this usage note from Merriam-Webster: The adjective 'boughten' means "the opposite of homemade," or "bought." It can also suggest that something that should have been freely given was paid for, as in "a boughten endorsement." So the sadness is underlined: friendship, something that should have been freely & mutually given, must be purchased. One thinks of old novels & movies with imperious dowagers & their humble, & humbly paid, companions. Friendship, love, family, faith, society: none of them come through in the absence of cash.
Abishag as a Hollywood star's name is meant to suggest the vanished days of silent cinema, when they were still seen as a quaint & extravagant & somewhat ludicrous interlude (before the distance of time & the increased availability of the actual films led to the period's reassessment). It's the very early days of Hollywood that are evoked, when Griffith was filming Judith of Bethulia & Theda Bara was the reigning vamp. Abishag here is not even a real queen, but one invented by a Hollywood studio, destined to reign only as long as her pictures made the studio money. Abishag is undoubtedly not her real name (Theda Bara was Theodosia Goodman from Cincinnati); we never find out her real name, which clearly is no longer important to the world. (There are, or recently were, attempts to reclaim terms like witch & crone & reframe them as powerful titles for wise & experienced older women; their usage in this poem predates these efforts.)
But there also is an Abishag in the Bible: in the First Book of Kings, first chapter, we are told that Abishag the Shunammite was brought to King David as, basically, a bedwarmer for the aged & enfeebled king, who could not get warm. We are told that David, presumably impotent through age, did not have sex with her. Nonetheless, as she was considered a concubine of the great king, she became a passive player in the struggle for succession, as Adonijah, brother of Solomon, asks to marry her (which would implicitly make Adonijah, if not king, then close to it). Solomon sees the threat, has his brother killed, & we hear no more of Abishag. It turns out the original Abishag's moment of glory was as fleeting & frail as her movie-star namesake's.
Between the rise & fall of Abishag & the grim picture of boughten friendship, the speaker expands & explores possible ways of escaping this harsh reality: only there really is no escape. The most hopeful suggestion is to die early, & it's made in a flip sort of way, not as a serious argument urging suicide. Or perhaps you are predestined to die late. Predestined is an interesting word here, a theologically freighted word; it conjures up salvation or damnation by an arbitrary God, one regardless of good works (see Saint Paul's Epistle to the Ephesians). This is one of several Biblical/theological echoes that remind us that although Frost was born in San Francisco, he spent much of his life in New England, & assumed the flinty persona of an old-school New England farmer.
More advice follows, equally high-flown & not really useful: make yourself master of the stock market! Ascend a throne! Abishag, both Biblical & cinematic, tell us how difficult it is to attain & retain any sort of throne. As for the stock market, it is significant that the money-making method the poet cites is one of the least stable (the memory of the great crash of 1929 haunted several generations), & one that, at the time, would have been inaccessible to most citizens. This sort of thing is typical of the advice most people give, in that it's not really practical, or even possible, for most people (after all, there can only be one person on a throne at a time, & only so many thrones are available). In this world, even sound advice is uncertain, illusory, almost mocking in its ease of presentation & its difficulty of attainment.
Even the consolations of memory are denied us. The hard end is upon us. Recalling our past glories does not atone (another theologically loaded term; there are theological echoes throughout this poem, but no presence of God or any other spiritual force) for the disregard coming our way (we may remember, but others do not; the world is fickle & constantly moving on). We are admonished to provide, provide for ourselves, presumably by laying up what money we can: a thrifty & scrimping (& so perhaps also a narrow & joyless) life. It's an amusing but also harsh twist on the familiar poetic adjurations to gather rosebuds while we may or to seize the day. So is this a comic poem, or a tragic one? I can't answer my own question, rather than to say it contains both perspectives. At least the poem, unlike life as presented in the poem, offers us more than one possibility.
I took this poem from the Library of America edition of Robert Frost: Collected Poems, Prose, & Plays, edited by Richard Poirier & Mark Richardson.
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