Poem of the Week 2024/43

Frost

Therefore, lest this inclement friend should maim

Your valued plants, plunge pots within a frame

Sunk deep in sand or ashes to the rim,

Warm nursery where nights and days are grim;

But in the long brown borders where the frost

May hold its mischievous and midnight play

And all the winnings of your months be lost

In one short gamble when the dice are tossed

Finally and forever in few hours,

– The chance your skill, the stake your flowers, –

Throw bracken, never sodden, light and tough

In almost weightless armfuls down, to rest

Buoyant on tender and frost-fearing plants;

Or set the wattled hurdle in a square

Protective, where the north-east wind is gruff,

As sensitive natures seek for comfort lest

Th'assault of life be more than they can bear

And find an end, not in timidity

But death's decisive certainty.

– Vita Sackville-West

There is a long history of poetry as an instructional tool, particularly for agriculture; this makes sense, as the rhythms & rhymes of poetry make it easier to memorize than prose (at least back in the time before we outsourced our memories to reference books in general & the Internet in particular), & instructions on how to grow things would be a life necessity in a time when a family's or town's survival might depend on one harvest. There is also a long history of using the garden as a metaphor for various human elements, including life in general. Sackville-West, a noted gardener as well as writer, calls on these traditions in this seasonal poem.

Even with global climate change menacing our lives & shaking up our habits & assumptions, this is the time of year when farmers & gardeners (even those who just grow a few green things in pots on the patio) have to prepare for oncoming winter. The nights, if not always the daylight hours, are colder, & the darkness lasts a bit longer each day as we gradually approach the winter solstice. The poet here offers solid advice on protecting your precious flowers, & perhaps yourself, from oncoming frost. But she doesn't see frost as an enemy; as part of the natural world & its cycle, it is what gardeners choose to deal with. So it is called a friend, though an inclement one; inclement would refer not only to the harsh weather of winter, but to the nature of frost itself: clemency is mercy, so inclement suggests there is something merciless about frost. It doesn't choose which particular plants to strike; it just strikes. Such is its nature. We all have friends (or know people) like that.

Sackville-West proceeds with some useful advice about burying the pots in a frame or box filled with sand or ashes; her language throughout is vigorous & active: plunge the pots in, sink them deep, up to the rim. She describes the effect of the frame as a warm nursery when nights & days are grim; a summation that easily extends to a view of human life: a nursery is not only a place where young plants are raised & sold, but a room in which young children are raised. When not only nights but also days are grim & cold, a retrospective look at the warm nursery we might have had as children can be a comforting memory.

The poet amps up her comparisons: the frost's mischievous and midnight play – a delightful phrase, reminiscent of Shakespeare in its yoking of two disparate but somehow harmonious modifiers, making one think of the frost as the personification Jack Frost or some other fairyland inhabitant – establishes a sort of casino in which you, the gardener, are, willing or not, one of the gamesters. Do you dare to risk your months of hard work, cultivating some rare or special (at least to you) bloom? The brown borders (that is, borders of bare earth; no summer abundance here, of either cultivated plants or weeds) give visual evidence that winter is coming. Your whole garden could, with one hard frost, turn into a bare brown plot.

She tells you how to hedge your bets: mulch, specifically a mulch of bracken (a type of fern), though not sodden; this dry mulch is light, almost airy; it is tough (it would take a longer time to decompose than more tender greens), it is buoyant. Again, the poet's language is astute and strong; you can feel the protective quality of the bracken, its resilience. You are throwing down the almost weightless armfuls (so, again, there's practical advice here: you'll need a lot of mulch); just as you plunged rather than placed the pots, so you throw down (continuing the gambling metaphor, of course) rather than place the bracken.

Or you could build a barrier using a wattled hurdle. A hurdle in this sense is a British term for a rectangular portable frame to be used as a temporary fence; the wattles would be twigs, reeds, or branches woven into a more or less solid barrier. Cover, comfort, protection from on-rushing roughness of wind & cold: here Sackville-West moves just a bit away from the garden into general observations on humanity (though her use of sensitive natures reminds us, with her astute use of natures, that humanity is, whether we admit it or not, inextricably part of the natural world). She says that these sensitive natures (as a member of the Bloomsbury circle, Sackville-West would probably be thinking of her artistic, emotionally & socially daring friendships among the cultural elite) seek comfort, not out of laziness or self-indulgence, but as a protective cloak, a way of bearing with life's hardness & cruelty, which can beat such natures down (resulting in the timidity she mentions) or even lead these natures towards suicide, as a way of seeking rest from uncertainty & hazard & finding some sort of peace in the decisive certainty, the finality, of death. A garden is not just a luxury or indulgence; it is one of those comforts that help us stave off hopelessness.

I took this poem from the anthology Garden Poems, edited by John Hollander, in the splendid Everyman's Library Pocket Poet series.