Robert Frost and Randall Thompson’s Frostiana (with other rabbit trails along the way)

Introduction

This will be very long for a blog post/article but too short for a whole separate book, so note the Table of Contents box above that you can use as needed or desired. My goal here is to focus primarily on Randall Thompson’s Frostiana, looking at the circumstances of its composition and the seven poems individually that comprise it, but with plenty of info about Robert Frost the man and poet and also a bit about a couple of other composers who have set Frost’s poetry to music. An individual video is included for each song, with a full performance of the Thompson suite at the end. Other bonus videos are included!

Let me start by explaining my own history of singing music set to texts by Robert Frost.  As a member of the Cherry Creek Chorale here in the Denver area I’ve sung “The Pasture” by Z. Randall Stroope, “The Road Not Taken” and “Choose Something Like a Star” from Frostiana by Randall Thompson, and “Sleep” by Eric Whitacre, which started out its life as a setting of Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” Then, as a grand finale to all this Frost-y stuff (sorry), I’m getting to sing the entire Frostiana in May of 2022 with my group. If you’re reading this before May 6-7 2022, you can follow the link above to visit the choir’s website and attend the concert. It’s going to be g-r-e-a-t!

I don’t know of any choral pieces using Frost’s poems before Thompson’s set was commissioned by the town of Amherst MA in 1959 to celebrate their 200^th anniversary. Frost had taught on and off for decades at Amherst College, and the poet and composer had met and become friends. The town originally requested a setting of Frost’s poem “The Gift Outright,” but Thompson felt that it was inappropriate for the occasion. Numerous google hits have failed to give me any explanation as to why he felt that way; that poem celebrates the idea that the settlers belonged to America even though it required “deeds of war” for them to truly become Americans. Here are the first lines:

The land was ours before we were the land’s.
She was our land more than a hundred years
Before we were her people. She was ours
In Massachusetts, in Virginia,
But we were England’s, still colonials, . . .

Wouldn’t it have been supremely appropriate for a town in one of the original 13 colonies to use a text that honored its origins? I guess I’ll never know. Thompson is no longer living, so I can’t track him down on his website and pepper him with questions. It’s not as if Thompson disliked the poem, since he used it in the 1975 composition A Concord Cantata. Someone who read this article suggested that perhaps Thompson felt that this poem concentrates too much on the idea that you have to be an English immigrant to be an American and that he wanted something more general in scope for the occasion. Anyway, for whatever reason, the composer asked to be able to choose his own texts and ended up picking seven of Frost’s poems that celebrate the countryside and people of New England as they were at the time of the commission and not so much as they had been in earlier history. I guess he gave the town its money’s worth, as Frostiana runs to around half an hour of music. One interesting side note, from our friend Wikipedia: “As the male and female choruses rehearsed separately, Thompson structured the work so that they sang together only in three of the seven movements; each of the other four was scored for either male voices or female voices alone.” So you’ll see the swing back and forth in the voicings as you watch the performance videos.

Frost was 85 years old at the time of Frostiana’s premier, having gained great recognition and won many awards. One might say that his greatest honor was still to come, however, as he was the first poet to perform at a Presidential inauguration, thus starting a tradition that has continued on until now. He died two years later. I originally wrote this article in early 2021, with fond memories of the young poet Amanda Gorman from Joe Biden’s inauguration fresh in my mind. She just might have had some advice for Robert Frost should she be able to travel back in time: “Memorize your poem!” The famous story about Frost is that he couldn’t read his manuscript because of the bright sun. Although he was able to recite “The Gift” from memory, his reading of his new poem that he’d written specifically for the occasion, “Dedication,” had to be scrapped. (If you watch this short video of the inauguration you’ll see how discombobulated everyone was; Jackie in particular looks quite distressed. LBJ got up and tried to use his hat to shield Frost’s paper; it didn’t work. But it all turned out okay.)

Back to Thompson’s Frostiana. There’s a key incident from its premier that helps explain some of the fraught history of composers trying to get permission to set Frost’s poetry to music:

According to some reports, Frost was so delighted by the performance that, at the conclusion of the piece, he stood up and shouted, “Sing that again!” In fact, he was so impressed by the composition that he banned any other composers from setting his poems to music. (Robert Frost: Poems Setting Frost to Music: Randall Thompson and “Frostiana”)

Well, you may say, so what? That prohibition didn’t last beyond Frost’s death, did it? Oh yes indeed it did. I’m going to quote here from the contemporary choral composer Eric Whitacre in which he tells the story of his travails with setting Frost’s “Stopping By Woods” to music:

Robert Frost’s poetry has been under tight control from his estate since his death, and until a few years ago only Randall Thompson (Frostiana) had been given permission to set his poetry. In 1997, out of the blue, the estate released a number of titles, and at least twenty composers set and published Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening for chorus. When I looked online and saw all of these new and different settings, I naturally (and naively) assumed that it was open to anyone. Little did I know that the Robert Frost Estate had shut down ANY use of the poem just months before, ostensibly because of this plethora of new settings.

I’ve written a previous post about the piece that Whitacre wrote to replace his original setting, so be sure to read that and also to read his entire story by following the link above. But what about that original poem? Thompson liked it, Whitacre liked it, other composers liked it, and JFK himself used to end some of his speeches with the “miles to go before I sleep” line. Although “Stopping” is #6 in Thompson’s set, I’m going to start with it here since it ties in so well with the overall story of composers and their efforts to set Frost to music.

“Stopping by Woods On a Snowy Evening”

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farm -house near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sounds the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

So simple, and so lovely. The poet is going somewhere on horseback at night, during a snowstorm, but stops to watch the woods filling up with snow. You might think, Wait. How can he see this? It’s “the darkest evening of the year.” Even out in remote areas, though, with no artificial lights, a night sky glows when it snows. (I didn’t plan that little poem.) The horse is puzzled: Why are we stopping here when we haven’t gotten home yet? He shakes his head and his harness bells jingle. (Only Frost doesn’t use the word “jingle.” It’s implied.) There’s no howling wind; this isn’t a blizzard. It’s just a snowfall, with “easy wind and downy flake.” Can he hear the snow hitting the trees? No, probably not. (Another implication.) The scene is so beautiful that the poet would like to just stay looking at the scene. But he can’t. The experience is over; he has to get home, or somewhere he’s expected. Let’s not make this into something more than is meant, shall we? I don’t think there’s any death wish here. The poet doesn’t want to get drawn into those dark and deep woods to lie down and die. He just . . . needs to get going. He said he’d be such-and-such a place by such-and-such a time. He still has a ways to go. It’s cold. And that horse has enough sense to refuse any more delay, I think. We are left to assume that he slaps the reins on the horse’s neck and turns back to the road, getting to his destination without more ado. But the image lingers, in his mind and in ours.

The circumstances of Frost’s writing the poem deserve a mention:

The poem, with its moody pondering of mortality, was born in a flash of inspiration midway through Frost’s life of professional acclaim and personal loss. In the summer of 1922, the poet was struggling with a long poem at his home in Shaftsbury, Vermont. He had been working all night in the kitchen, frustrated and thwarted. He crumpled up his efforts and went out onto the porch in time to see the first glow of dawn.

Somehow, the sunrise of a dry summer morning evoked in his tired writer’s mind the evening of a snowy winter’s day. Almost a “hallucination,” he would say later. He turned back to his pen and one of the century’s great poems was born “without strain,” in Frost’s words.

“In 20 minutes, he had drafted the whole thing, Extreme, shocking simplicity, that’s where Frost was at his greatest.” (“Robert Frost wrote this masterpiece in about 20 minutes”)

Note that the above quotation sees the poem as a “moody pondering of mortality,” an assessment with which I don’t agree. But there it is.

Here’s a nice performance (and note the name of the group–“Men in Blaque”)

Bonus video: Robert Frost reads his poem, and then you get a performance of the original Whitacre setting. (You’d know it was Whitacre even if I didn’t tell you.) My preference is always for live performance videos, but the lovely landscapes were just irresistible to me, plus, of course, the fact that this is a rare find, since the Whitacre version was never widely published:

Now let’s get to the actual opening poem in the suite:

“The Road Not Taken”

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

My son the English major has pointed out that the way “The Road Not Taken” is usually interpreted is just wrong. How many posters, and e-mail sign-offs, and titles of sophomore term papers say “Take the road less traveled” or “I took the road less traveled” or “Be your own person; take the less-traveled road” or whatever? The poem is seen as a paean to independence and freedom, to being your own person. But folks, that ain’t what it says at all!

So let’s parse this out. The speaker in the poem (who isn’t necessarily the same person as the poet himself) is out for a walk in the woods. He gets to a fork in the road and has to decide which direction to take. He regrets that he can’t take both of them and still remain one traveler; in other words, he’d like to travel both at once but knows he can’t. So he stands there for awhile trying to decide between them. The first bends “in the undergrowth” so that he can’t see all that far as he peers down it; the other is somewhat grassier, showing that fewer people have gone that way. But here’s the important phrase: “though as for that the passing there had worn them really about the same.” When it comes right down to it, the roads don’t have much of a difference between them. He has to make a choice and there isn’t a great deal to go on. So, almost at random, he picks the slightly-less-traveled way, hoping that maybe some day he’ll be able to come back and explore the other branch but “knowing how way leads on to way” he doubts that will ever happen. And indeed he doesn’t ever come back, it seems. Instead, he tells us with a sigh, taking that less-traveled road made all the difference. Is it a sad sigh or a contented one? We don’t know. Is the difference his choice made good or bad? We don’t know. And what’s all this about “ages and ages hence”? People don’t live for ages and ages. So is he postulating some sort of existence after death when he can look back on his life and evaluate it? Maybe. We don’t know. He doesn’t tell us. There’s clearly symbolism going on here, but Frost doesn’t explain it. He wants us to come up with our own interpretations.

One couplet that gets hardly any attention is my favorite part:

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.

Frost must be envisioning an autumn day (since it’s a “yellow wood”), with fallen leaves spread over a perhaps muddy path so that any footsteps would show up as black. No one has walked on either path for quite some time and so the leaves are undisturbed. Notice how he’s emphasizing the two paths’ similarities, not their differences. He can’t even say, “Oh look–someone has already gone down this path, so I’ll take the other.” It’s an almost eerie scene, with no other people or creatures, perhaps a breeze slightly ruffling the leaves, and no clue about where to go.

For my own take, I would say that I love thinking about how one small action could have made “all the difference,” especially in great historical events. Think about how different US history would have been if someone involved with JFK’s trip to Dallas in 1963 had decided on a different route, one that didn’t go by the Texas School Book Depository. Or if Lee Harvey Oswald had happened not to bother reading the newspaper showing that route. Or, on a more personal note, if you had decided to go to a party and there you’d met your future spouse. Now there would be people alive in the world who wouldn’t be here if you hadn’t done that; there would be different people, because you probably would have married someone else. And those different people would have different descendants. Isn’t that just the coolest thing to think about? Well, I used to teach history and love studying such things, so I’m fascinated. And don’t you think that the poem is a lot more interesting than your high-school English teacher made it out to be? (I can make fun of high-school English teachers since I was one myself for many years.)

Here’s a good performance with crystal-clear words. Not a live performance video, unfortunately, but good all the same:

And here’s a great video explaining how the poem has been misinterpreted, with some historical background that I didn’t have when I wrote my original post. It’s fascinating!

On to the second poem in the set:

“The Pasture”

I’m going out to clean the pasture spring;
I’ll only stop to rake the leaves away
(And wait to watch the water clear, I may):
I shan’t be gone long.
You come too.

I’m going out to fetch the little calf
That’s standing by the mother.
It’s so young,
It totters when she licks it with her tongue.
I shan’t be gone long.
You come too.

One of the composers who took advantage of the 1997 release of Frost poems was J. Randall Stroope, whose own version of “The Pasture” shows a copyright date of around that time. His setting is one part of three in Where the Earth Meets the Sky, in which he showcases three different strands of America’s heritage: Frost, thought of as the quintessential New England WASP, Langston Hughes, one of America’s premier Black poets, and an anonymous text from the Mohawk tribe.

Stroope and Thompson are/were both pretty heavy hitters in the American choral music scene, and I think it’s interesting that they both chose to put this brief gem to music. It’s not one of Frost’s most famous poems, but they both recognized its quality. Since I’m not trying to impale a fragile butterfly with a pin, I’ll just say that it’s an invitation to the reader, or to Frost’s guest, to come along with him on two small errands around the farm: clearing out the spring and fetching a newborn calf, both actions taking place in the pasture. (Why is he “fetching” the calf? I guess he’s bringing it into the barn for the night. The mother would follow along behind. Since “it’s so young,” it can’t walk yet.) Everyone’s probably done this type of thing with a guest in the house: “I need to go do such-and-such—why don’t you come along?” There’s no need to dig out some meaning-of-life stratum here, just a recognition of these two small images of life on a farm. (As I explain later, Frost did indeed run a working farm for almost a decade as an adult, although he wasn’t terribly successful at this endeavor.) The beauty of the poem is that you’re free to imagine the scenes as you wish. I see them as drenched in sunshine, since the calf would not have been born outside unless it was warm. And the whole “you come too” invitation is very Whitmanesque: “Come travel with me.”

Here’s an excellent performance by a small group:

And here’s Z. Randall Stroope’s setting, which I’ve sung before with a much-loved conductor, so it has great associations for me even without the quality of the piece, which is also great.

Now on to the next selection, a shimmering evocation of twilight and a thrush song:

“Come In”

As I came to the edge of the woods,
Thrush music — hark!
Now if it was dusk outside,
Inside it was dark.

Too dark in the woods for a bird
By sleight of wing
To better its perch for the night,
Though it still could sing.

The last of the light of the sun
That had died in the west
Still lived for one song more
In a thrush’s breast.

Far in the pillared dark
Thrush music went —
Almost like a call to come in
To the dark and lament.

But no, I was out for stars;
I would not come in.
I meant not even if asked;
And I hadn’t been.

Thompson’s music for this setting is appropriately mysterious and dissonant in places, to match the lovely text. I guess I’m prejudiced, as twilight has always been my favorite part of the day (just as fall is my favorite time of year). The speaker is out walking at dusk and gets to the edge of the woods. While there’s still some light out in the open, the woods are dark. And there’s a thrush—nothing exotic, not a nightingale—singing in the darkness. The bird can’t see well enough to change its position in the dark, but it can still sing one last song. The music comes from deep within the “pillared dark”—a great image of the darkened trees—almost like an invitation to the listener: “Come in and sing with me.” Frost sees the bird’s song as a “lament,” but for what? The end of the day? Darkness and death? I’m not sure. But whatever it is, the poet is “out for the stars” and will not come in, even if asked. And he hasn’t been asked. The bird isn’t singing for him; it’s singing for itself. Do you see an echo of “Stopping By Woods” here? I do. This time it’s not the beauty of a snowstorm but that of the bird’s song that calls to Frost, that lures him. And in both poems he resists the lure. Perhaps that’s why Thompson chose them?

Here’s the only live performance video I saw online for just this piece. Some sound issues, but the actual performance is great:

I didn’t like this next poem much at first but changed my mind somewhat, as you’ll see:

“The Telephone”

“When I was just as far as I could walk
From here to-day,
There was an hour
All still
When leaning with my head against a flower
I heard you talk.
Don’t say I didn’t, for I heard you say –
You spoke from that flower on the window sill –
Do you remember what it was you said?”

“First tell me what it was you thought you heard.”

“Having found the flower and driven a bee away,
I leaned my head,
And holding by the stalk,
I listened and I thought I caught the word-
What was it? Did you call me by my name?
Or did you say-
Someone said ‘Come’ – I heard it as I bowed.”

“I may have thought as much, but not aloud.”

“Well, so I came.”

The poet has been on a long walk and is now explaining what happened. He’d gone “as far as I could walk from here to-day,” so in other words he’d walked as far as he could go and still get back home by dark or by dinner or whatever.  There was, he says, an “hour/All still/When leaning with my head against a flower/I heard you talk.” He’d driven off a bee and held the flower by the stalk, listening, and thought that he heard something that his addressee said “from that flower on the window sill.” She (I think it must be a she, and probably the speaker’s wife—it has that flavor) is not to be charmed into saying something encouraging: “First tell me what it was you thought you heard.” Well, the poet says, I just caught a word. Maybe it was my name. Maybe it was the word “come.” Hmmm, she says. Maybe I thought that, but I didn’t say it out loud. He’ll take it! “Well, so I came.”

Now I have to admit that when I first started thinking about this poem it impressed me as being rather silly. Of course the speaker didn’t mean that he literally heard her speaking through a flower. Of course not. But that image seemed rather . . . twee. (Great word, that, meaning approximately the same thing as “cutesy.”) I mean to say, Robert Frost isn’t exactly the person you think of as an example of whimsy, leaning his head against a flower even metaphorically. Right? But I did run across an idea online that was pretty good: that the speaker and his wife had had a quarrel, and that’s why he went on such a long walk. The little story about hearing her through a flower is simply the pretext for his return. When he gets back home he needs to give her a route to acknowledging that she wanted him to come back. I can see her, standing in the farmhouse kitchen, wearing an apron, arms crossed and her back to him, with a reluctant smile on her face as she listens to his corny little story. I don’t think there’s a big tender scene after the end of the poem; she probably just says, “Well, then, sit down and I’ll get you some dinner” or something like that.

The assistant director of my own choir, the Cherry Creek Chorale, William White, sees the woman’s attitude as more passive-aggressive than I do in my analysis above. He says, “The more I think about it, the passive-aggressive feeling that I noted may be in Thompson’s setting of the text (the direction for Soprano/Alto to be seated; the change in tonality when the Sopranos and Altos enter; their lack of motion and move to a 3/4 time signature compared to the Tenor/Bass verse feels terse; the dramatic shifts in dynamics/articulations in the Tenor/Bass parts). It just makes me feel as if something has gone awry between the two parties.” So I think that the woman/wife was receptive to the husband’s return and at least willing to cut him some slack; White thinks, hmmm, maybe not. And it’s fair to say that 1) the poem doesn’t tell us how the scene ended, and 2) the musical setting of the text is Thompson’s, not Frost’s. In other words, what we’re hearing in the music, as opposed to the words, is not necessarily what Frost meant. And, as you’ll read in the “wrap-up” section below, Thompson was in Switzerland when writing the music, and with his tight deadline it would have been extremely unlikely for him to consult with Frost over the mood and meanings of the poems. (I guess they could have chatted over the telephone, in a nice ironic twist! But transatlantic telephone rates were very high, so I doubt that much if any of that sort of thing occurred.)

While it’s sometimes dangerous to draw parallels between a writer’s own life and his work, in the case of this poem I do see a possible source of inspiration in Frost’s own marriage. His wife, Elinor Miriam White, seems to have been 1) pretty strong-minded and 2) an inspiration for much of his poetry. I got rather tickled to read their love story. They were co-valedictorians of their high school class in Lawrence, Massachusetts, and then Elinor went on to college. So did Frost, but he lasted at Dartmouth for all of two months before he dropped out to take a series of low-paying jobs. At age 20 he sold his first poem for $15 (hey, that’s about $450 in today’s money) and on the strength of that accomplishment he proposed marriage. No, thank you, at least not for now, said Elinor. I want to finish college. And she did so, then married him once she had her diploma in hand. Her life as Frost’s spouse was pretty far removed from being a bed of roses, but she did get to see his success as a poet before her death in 1938. At one point early on in their marriage they were living on a farm that Frost’s grandfather had purchased for them, and Frost was getting up early to write before doing his farm chores. I don’t know why Frost’s grandfather thought that this gift of a farm was a good idea, as Frost had no agricultural background. We think of him as a farmer/rural kinda guy because so many of his poems are set in the countryside and indeed take place in the context of farming (see “The Pasture,” above), but in reality Frost was born in a city and lived in cities until this unexpected gift. (I’d like to find out more about the grandfather’s motivation.) Wikipedia says that “Ultimately his farming proved unsuccessful.” What a wealth of heartache and struggle is implied by those words! While eventually Frost bought a farm which today is a museum, in reality he made his living for the rest of his life teaching and writing. For the most part that farm he purchased was used as a summer home.

Note that this performance is by the same group as “The Pasture” above, although now with the men’s and women’s voices:

On to a not-very-well-known Frost poem, at least in my mind:

“A Girl’s Garden”

A neighbor of mine in the village
Likes to tell how one spring
When she was a girl on the farm, she did
A childlike thing.

One day she asked her father
To give her a garden plot
To plant and tend and reap herself,
And he said, “Why not?”

In casting about for a corner
He thought of an idle bit
Of walled-off ground where a shop had stood,
And he said, “Just it.”

And he said, “That ought to make you
An ideal one-girl farm,
And give you a chance to put some strength
On your slim-jim arm.”

It was not enough of a garden,
Her father said, to plough;
So she had to work it all by hand,
But she don’t mind now.

She wheeled the dung in the wheelbarrow
Along a stretch of road;
But she always ran away and left
Her not-nice load.

And hid from anyone passing.
And then she begged the seed.
She says she thinks she planted one
Of all things but weed.

A hill each of potatoes,
Radishes, lettuce, peas,
Tomatoes, beets, beans, pumpkins, corn,
And even fruit trees

And yes, she has long mistrusted
That a cider apple tree
In bearing there to-day is hers,
Or at least may be.

Her crop was a miscellany
When all was said and done,
A little bit of everything,
A great deal of none.

Now when she sees in the village
How village things go,
Just when it seems to come in right,
She says, “I know!

It’s as when I was a farmer–“
Oh, never by way of advice!
And she never sins by telling the tale
To the same person twice.

This delightful narrative poem can be read on at least a couple of levels, as is the case with all true poetry. Thompson gave it a bouncy, folksong vibe in his setting, which may or may not be appropriate depending on how you interpret the story. One of Frost’s neighbors in the village says that she did “a childlike thing” when she was a girl on the farm, asking her father for a little plot of land that she could turn into her own garden. Her father looked around and decided that he had an unused bit where “a shop had stood.” (A “shop”? In a farmer’s field? I’m not sure what that means.) Anyway, he told her it was just the right size for her and would give her a chance to build up some physical strength since she’d have to do all the work by hand. She used a wheelbarrow to bring manure to her garden and ran away in embarrassment if anyone was going to pass her and her “not-nice load” on the road. She had to “beg” the seed, and she didn’t know what she was doing at all, so she just planted one of everything, even fruit trees, and therefore didn’t get much of anything. (Although she has her suspicions that an apple tree growing on that plot today is one she planted.) Now that she’s an adult living in the village she sees her neighbors doing things that seem promising at first and remind her of the garden—“I know!/It’s as when I was a farmer—” But she doesn’t frame her reminiscences as advice, and she’s careful never to tell her story twice to the same person.

You could gain quite a few lessons—or, I should probably say, “lessons”—from this little story. Speaking as someone who still hovers over her grown son and did so even more as he was younger, I admire the farmer and his hands-off approach to his daughter’s project. He gives her absolutely nothing except the piece of land itself—no plowing, no fertilizer, no seeds. She has to get everything herself. And here’s the thing that stands out to me as a parent: There’s no risk to any of this for the girl. She’s not going to go hungry if her garden fails. She’s not running any machinery but just a wheelbarrow and a shovel. If she’s disappointed at the results she’ll learn something, and if she’s successful she’ll learn something. You’re supposed to let your kids experience this type of moderated risk, but boy, is it hard! Maybe it’s easier if you’re a farmer and so busy that you can’t take the time to stand over your kid as she’s planting the seeds all wrong.

And the result? The girl, now a woman, is empathetic and self-deprecating. She sounds totally charming. I have a feeling that her neighbors do ask her for advice but that she doesn’t offer it. Speaking as the Queen of Unsolicited Advice, I need to follow her example!

I don’t know why this video is so dark, but the performance can’t be faulted–it’s much faster than the other individual videos I found, which fits Thompson’s intent, I think:

Here’s where “Stopping By Woods” comes in Thompson’s sequence, and then he ends with this poem set not on the farm or village but up in the heavens, with some challenging ideas:

“Choose Something Like a Star”

O Star (the fairest one in sight),
We grant your loftiness the right
To some obscurity of cloud —
It will not do to say of night,
Since dark is what brings out your light.
Some mystery becomes the proud.
But to be wholly taciturn
In your reserve is not allowed.
Say something to us we can learn
By heart and when alone repeat.
Say something! And it says, ‘I burn.’
But say with what degree of heat.
Talk Fahrenheit, talk Centigrade.
Use language we can comprehend.
Tell us what elements you blend.

It gives us strangely little aid,
But does tell something in the end.
And steadfast as Keats’ Eremite,
Not even stooping from its sphere,
It asks a little of us here.
It asks of us a certain height,
So when at times the mob is swayed
To carry praise or blame too far,
We may choose something like a star
To stay our minds on and be staid.

Let me reiterate what I’ve said before: tearing a poem apart to analyze it may leave you with a dead, dismembered poem. ‘Oh, is that all it means?’ you may ask yourself. Or, ‘Oh, is that what it means? Well, I guess I was wrong about it.’ But if the meaning of a poem (or any other piece of art you can mention) can be boiled down to a verbal explanation, then there was no point in producing the work of art. There always has to be more to the piece than that. Your emotional response to a great painting, for instance, isn’t something that you can necessarily put into words. Knowing the different wavelengths of light that make up the colors the artist used isn’t going to get you very far. Much better to just stand there and enjoy the picture.

So all of these notes are simply an attempt to explain what the lyrics of our pieces actually say, with, perhaps some excursions into what they mean. And not much at all about what the words should mean to you. Just to be clear: there are three levels of analysis for any given set of words:

1. What does it say? That is, what is the actual sense of the words? Are there definitions that need to be ferreted out for obscure words, or explanations for obscure allusions?

2. What does it mean? That is, what is the seeming intent behind the words? If I say, “Boy, am I hot!” do I mean, “Boy, is my temperature up!” or do I mean “Boy, am I angry!”? Or do I mean, “Boy, do I wish someone would turn on the air conditioning!”?

3. What does it mean to me? Here’s where your emotional response comes in. If you grew up on a ranch in Montana and are therefore well acquainted with the night sky, your mental images of all these lyrics about stars are going to be very different from those of someone who has never been out of the city. Your associations and emotions will be much at odds, but neither will be wrong. They’ll just be . . . different.

Now we can proceed to eviscerate Frost’s poem “Choose Something Like a Star.” No, no, I didn’t mean that! Now we can explain Frost’s poem, at least to some extent, in the interests of understanding the words we’re singing or hearing.

The poem falls obviously into two main parts as I’ve divided it above. The first, ending with the line “tell us what elements you blend” is addressed to the star itself, “the fairest one in sight.” That lofty, mysterious thing that is sometimes obscured by clouds but only revealed by the darkness—surely it has something to say to us mortals! It can’t be wholly “taciturn,” that is, silent. Surely it can tell us a secret or two about the universe, something we can hang onto! And what is the star’s answer? “I burn.” That’s it. None of the poet’s entreaties to get more information are answered. You can suppose that there’s a pause after the line asking about the elements. Silence.

So the second section of the poem concerns the poet’s reactions to the star’s lack of reaction, if that makes sense. The star doesn’t give us much help, which is puzzling, but it does say something “in the end,” after the poet has thought about it. We’d better stop here and define this “Keats’ Eremite” reference before going any further. Frost is referring to a poem by John Keats, “Bright Star, were I as steadfast as thou art,” in which Keats refers to a star as an “eremite,” that is, a hermit. The imagery is pretty clear: hermits were people who went off by themselves and had nothing to do with the world; the original meaning (from the Greek, no less) is actually of a desert or desolate place. Stars are completely above earthly concerns and out in the wasteland of space. They never come down to earth.

Okay. So what does the star tell the poet in the end? That he (and we) need “a certain height.” We need to (in today’s wording) get over ourselves. We need to rise above the mob with its partisanship and extremes. (Hmmm.) We need something fixed, something like a star, to stay our minds on, to hang our hats on, and (therefore) to be “staid.” I’m sure Frost was perfectly aware of the modern spelling of “stayed.” “Staid” is listed as an archaic form of “stayed.” But it also means, in modern English, “settled and sedate, fixed and permanent, not capricious or flighty.” So, as we stay our minds on what is fixed and unchangeable, something like a star, we are staid.

Pretty cool, huh? And surprisingly timely. I ran across a quotation from Frost himself in a talk he gave at Dartmouth College about “extravagance” in which he talks a little about this poem, although I don’t have the context of the entire speech:

By that star I mean the Arabian Nights or Catullus or something in the Bible or something way off or something way off in the woods, and when I’ve made a mistake in my vote. (We were talking about that today. How many times we voted this way and that by mistake.)

Just fascinating to get a glimpse into the poet’s mind. But if that meaning doesn’t quite square with your own impressions (and it really doesn’t too much with mine), feel free to ignore it and go with your gut. I’m going to keep an image of a literal, bright star up in the heavens as I listen to this lovely piece.

This performance is worth listening to on a number of levels. Listen especially for the high notes from the sopranos and the boisterous applause at the end:

A Wrap-Up, Of Sorts

Here’s a good summation of Thompson’s music as a whole for this suite, from the same excellent source I quoted earlier:

Thompson made a palpable effort to match his music to Frost’s poetry, particularly in terms of the themes of everyday life, rural tradition, and nature that Frost highlights in his work. As a result, “Frostiana” has the same appealing, colloquial elements found in Frost’s poetry but with the additional layer of musical language. For example, “A Girl’s Garden” and “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” both have folksy melodies, while “Come In” features (in orchestrated form) a flute solo that imitates the sound of a thrush.

This layering effect of musical meaning over poetic meaning is particularly clear in the final movement of the piece, “Choose Something Like a Star.” In the opening and closing sections, the sopranos sing the text “O star” on a high D and hold the note for several measures while the rest of the choice continues with the text of the poem. By placing the held soprano line high above the other voices, Thompson creates a musical image of the distant star that reassures mankind.

One final item here, a purely speculative one, has to do with the choice and the order of the pieces. As I said earlier, Thompson isn’t around for me to badger with questions, and I haven’t been able to find anything online about these issues. Why these particular poems, in this particular order? Nobody seems to know. Maybe Thompson himself wouldn’t be able to give any kind of definitive answer. It’s like asking a novelist where he gets his plots. One little nugget that I did run across said that Thompson wrote the whole set in about three weeks, from June 15 to July 7, 1959, while he was in Switzerland. It was performed in October of that year, with Thompson directing. (Fun fact: Thompson’s most famous piece, “Alleluia,” was composed in four days.) All of the poems except for “Choose Something Like a Star” are from one book of Frost’s poems, You Come Too. I do wonder: was that the only book Thompson had with him, thus limiting his choice to those poems? I wish I had access to the letters back and forth documenting the commission and its progress, but I don’t, and who knows if they even exist any more? So I’ll have to leave it there.

Frostiana is still performed quite frequently, and deservedly so. Here’s my pick for a performance of the entire work. My preference is always for live videos rather than just recordings, and this one impressed me very much. It’s not perfect–the video is a bit blurry and the camera gets tilted a few times, and there are a few wrong notes here and there. But it’s just great. I felt that the tempi were right on the nose and that the singers and instrumentalists were very much attuned to the meanings in the texts and the music. The professional recordings may be more note-perfect, but since I belong to a community volunteer choir myself I feel very much at home with this group. Plus, and here’s the cool thing: Thompson worked with a community choir as opposed to a professional one for the premier of the work, the Bicentennial Singers of Amherst. So this performance should be very close to what Frost heard, with the exception that Thompson didn’t add the orchestration until after Frost’s death. (Most performances just use piano for the accompaniment, which is perfectly okay–but the instrumentalists do a fine job here and really add to its beauty.) The video has nice little breaks at the end of each section and a subtitle. Here are the beginning times for the pieces after #1–“The Pasture”–5:57; “Come In”-8:54; “The Telephone”–13:46; “A Girl’s Garden”–16:40; “Stopping by Woods”–20:10; “Choose”–24:45.