Provide Provide
Robert Frost
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 simply being 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!
Me:
There seems a purposefully calculated sing song quality in “Provide Provide” that I don’t immediately get. I’m not sure “satiric” is le mot juste, maybe it is, but neither that notion nor the poem is simple minded.
R:
It's ironic advice and the nursery rhyme metre implies that it is simple-minded, but the last stanza is deeply sad and deeply true, for it is better to have bought friends than none, but it is also very very sad, even pathetic. The confident tone of the speaker who gives the advice expresses the attitude of people who have a fairly shallow view of things---that money, fame, power and being good are tickets to happiness---and that is mocked, but the last stanza is different. There Frost speaks.
Me:
Sounds good about the poem.
I’ll have a closer look at it.
I just went through it quickly.
R:
It's even more cunning that I thought. For example, using the words "witch" and "withered hag" are taken from fairy tales, but are based on the ugliness that comes with old age especially for women and especially poor women. Frost knew, even then, that the fairy tale diction covered but also expressed an ugly reality. The current way women work to counter this is the billions spent on facial things from creams to surgery. Better to go down dignified with as much youthful appearance as one can manage, than take no effort at all, which makes it clear how bad it is. I think the male equivalent is loneliness. Thus the sex trade.
Me:
It seems to me he’s saying that when you come down to it, in the end, nothing helps. I can’t see the last three lines as Frost genuinely speaking, compared to what precedes them. I see nothing dignified in having paid for friends by your side. For the appearance may be that that the person dying has friends, but s/he’ll know s/he doesn’t since s/he bought them. The last stanza seems to me the culmination of the mordant mockery of the entire poem. It seems to me the growing articulation of an, you’ll forgive me, an eschatologically nihilistic view that casts its negation back on everything that precedes it. And I just wonder whether the poem’s sing song quality expresses the childishness of thinking anything otherwise.
R:
I think he has some sympathy for our sad efforts to mitigate. If he doesn't, he should. It is a worse poem if you are right.
It is better to go down dignified with boughten friendship than none at all. It is sentimental to think that there is not some pragmatism in our choice of friends. For example, one usually chooses people who will not be dependent on one.
Me:
One argument for how I see the continued mordancy in the last stanza is that the whole poem is full of these mock absurd suggestions as to how to try to beat the hard end: die early; die in state; own the stock exchange; occupy a throne; buy friends. They’re all cut from the same mordant cloth. You could argue “boughten friends” are in the realm of possibility while the preceding suggestions are fanciful as beyond reach. But then I’d say two things: one, that that, rather, heightens the hopelessness; and two, it’s hard to imagine it being within reach to buy a retinue of friends who will lend one the final illusion of dignity. That seems fanciful too.
That in life we have a variety of reasons for our variety of friends doesn’t, I don’t think, justify reading Frost as finally genuine in the last stanza. And, in any event, in life, those varieties wouldn’t in principle include a bought and paid for “friendship.” Purchase is to friendship as purchase is to love: the former in each instance exposes the pretence of the latter. No paid for whore is any man’s lover.
R:
But the guys keep paying for companions, and the women keep getting face lifts, etc. But, as I said you may be right, but then Frost's attitude is to my mind misguided. You seem to agree with it as you understand it.
Me:
No I don’t.
I just have a view of the poem.
And I think you may be right as well.
Reasonably different readings of it about which we can reasonably disagree, both of us, as always, being reasonable.
Except I do agree beyond the poem that there’s no real dignity to be had in bought friends at any point in life. That only gets one the illusion of dignity and should be of no comfort to the payor. Don’t know what plastic surgery has to do with it. It’s in life not comparable to buying friends. In the poem it slenderly is.
R:
What do you make of the lines, "some have relied on what they knew, others on being simply true, what worked for them might work for you." Nice as those things may be, they cannot buy protection against the ravages of time?
Me:
Good that you key in on these lines. I hadn’t fixed on them. They add something to the poem’s meaning, a truly dignified way out.
I read them as they literally read: some have relied on what they knew to assuage the hardness of their end, others by simply being true, as in being honest and authentic. And, the speaker suggests, that if one tries either, it might make the end manageable.It has worked for others, after all. “Simply” here and the homely virtues of “true” and relying on what one knows all form such a pointed contrast with the inauthentic means of trying to beat time. Better to meet time than to try to beat time.
The next stanza reverts to getting beyond one’s simple virtuous, authentic self in order to beat time’s works by wanting to cling to past celebrity—“starred.” (And note the link between “starred” and “The picture pride of Hollywood.”) But that won’t do. No memory of past fame, celebrity can help, “atone,” in dealing with later disregard or staves off the difficulty, “hard,” of the end.
“atone,” with its religious connotation, suggests that there is something morally wrong in “later disregard” such that memory of past glory provides no amends. “atone” is odd here. I think it’s used by the speaker with bitter irony to suggest some have grievously mistaken their past celebrity and fame as something divine when in the end, as in life’s end and as in ultimately, it’s nothing.
So, embedded in all the mordancy is the possibility of a way out, of a way of being able better to meet one’s end, by relying on what one knows, with “knew” charged with positive meaning, or by simply being true.
The reversion applies to those who won’t follow the ways suggested in the fifth stanza. And in the last stanza, buying friends as the means to an illusion of a final dignity at life’s end is a final icily bitter swipe at those who would forgo either relying on what they know or simply being true.
So, then, it’s in the fifth stanza where the speaker is most genuine and straightforward, not mockingly absurd, blackly comic or mordant.
What do you think?
R:
Sort of. Yes, those are virtues, but the word "worked" implies that the person reading the lines will be good in hopes that it will "work" to mitigate the possible awful end. Neither knowledge nor having been good will "work." Those are virtues that are, as they say, their own reward.
And I have had the experience of people resenting needing my help.
So, I'll say that advice is no better than the others.
However, I now think the force of the poem is greater if one sees it your way. It is directed at people with a rosy view of life, and he doesn't want to leave any escape hatches. If people try those things out of desperation, they have already learned the lesson the poem teaches rosy-viewed silly people. So one can sympathize with them outside the poem, as it were.
Me:
You make a good point about the reader being advised as to what has “worked,” with emphasis on “worked.”
So, with that in mind, things do get more complex.
Presumably, the successful exemplars of relying on what one knows or simply being true weren’t being instrumental; it seems they came to what they did naturally. But, even with them, there’s a contrast between those who “relied on what they knew,” with “relied,” which can be read in two ways, lightly intimating a means to an end, and those who “simply” were true, ie, were just this way, without such intimation, without relying on anything for anything.
And, as you note, the advisees, all readers, are being introduced to how to get right in order better to meet our/their ends.
But, in disagreement with your view that this advice is no better than the others, I ask, so what if “worked” suggests some instrumentality, some means to an end? The point, I’ll repeat, isn’t beating time; it’s meeting time.
There’s no shame in getting good advice and trying to get it inside oneself. “Worked” suggests the possibility of success in following the advice. And in following it, one will differentiate oneself from those who seek false or artificial means of beating down the hardness of their ends and in that are subject to the speaker’s ridicule and mock and mocking advice. But there exists no ridicule or mockery in the fifth stanza as I now read it, thanks in part to what you‘ve highlighted.
R:
We disagree about "work." It's as sceptical of the rosy view as the others. Here is a paraphrase. "You people with a rosy view, you think what goes around will come around, which is dumb, but people have tried it and maybe it worked for them so maybe it will work for you." To believe those things will work means that people would have great incentives to be good from an instrumental view. But one is as likely to profit from being worse than most people as better than most. (Being stupidly bad is another matter.)
Me:
We do disagree about it. The very meaning of the poem belies any notion of “one likely to profit from being worse...” And I can’t see stanza 5 having anything to do with a “rosy view.” There are no rosy views, just hard ends and for most the illusions that precede them. The way to be is to be simply true and or to rely on what one knows. We’re left to fill in the content of “true” and “knew.”
A clue to that content comes from what is put against them in the poem—the ridiculous, the fake, the false, the meaningless, the “boughten,” the unreal. In contrast to all that unreality, “worked” is a humble, prosaic notion that is consistent with knowing true things and simply being true, I continue to argue.
They are both a good way to live and provide the possibility of better meeting the inexorably sad facts of life’s end.
R:
The poem is then an expression of the most commonplace humanism. Power and money and celebrity are false gods, but goodness and honesty are true gods and will save you. There is a Frost who was perfectly capable of saying such things. I've mentioned Jarrell's essay "The Other Frost" before. It is about such poems as "Provide, Provide." Here is the phrase in which he labels the attitude of the poem: "unsparingly truthful:" ie there are no remedies. None. One may have been wise to be good and true, but it does not protect against the miseries of aging.
I was wrong to give us an out, I think you are too.
Me:
I was wrong when I said there’s an out.
Rather, there’s a better way than others to meet one’s end.
“Out” wasn’t a slip of the tongue.
It reflects an undeveloped view of the poem.
I think thanks to this exchange my view is now more developed.
A more prosaic sense of what’s possible in meeting the end is what’s possible, can work, and I sense the content of “true” and “knew” includes some coming to terms before the fact with what the end brings.
So it’s not protection as a shield warding some thing off; it’s rather a right way of seeing and being that eases the end’s reality some. That would seem to fit within Randall Jarrell’s notion of “unsparingly truthful,” which need not consign one to 0 but misery.
R:
I think Frost shares your view and mine that knowing and being true are superior to the other stuff, but I think he thinks and I know I think that neither helps to ward off the misery of old age. (Not of course that it always is miserable, but it can always be what what ends up with).
In any case we are both now certified to teach the poem.
Me:
I’ve enjoyed this ego-less exchange.
It’s been a lot of fun.
R:
Yup, me too.
