African Proverbs PSA Assignment page
Using the following:
1. Your notes from Things Fall Apart;
2. Your notes from the Icarus Girl;
3. The two readings below regarding Proverbs;
4. Any additional research you've conducted
5. Possibly pp. 505-514 in the Literature book.
Do the following:
1. Read through the proverbs getting a general idea of the idioms, sayings and proverbs.
2. Select five potential idioms, sayings and proverbs that you would like to explore more
3. For each selected item, research the meaning, source, and type of idiom, saying, or proverb (as best you can)
4. Cite all research
5. For each selected item, research the use of motif, historical context, imagery, connotation
6. Select one idiom, saying or proverb from your five researched items.
7. Plan a one - two minute storyboard that will eventually be used to create a PSA
1. Your notes from Things Fall Apart;
2. Your notes from the Icarus Girl;
3. The two readings below regarding Proverbs;
4. Any additional research you've conducted
5. Possibly pp. 505-514 in the Literature book.
Do the following:
1. Read through the proverbs getting a general idea of the idioms, sayings and proverbs.
2. Select five potential idioms, sayings and proverbs that you would like to explore more
3. For each selected item, research the meaning, source, and type of idiom, saying, or proverb (as best you can)
4. Cite all research
5. For each selected item, research the use of motif, historical context, imagery, connotation
6. Select one idiom, saying or proverb from your five researched items.
7. Plan a one - two minute storyboard that will eventually be used to create a PSA
Things Fall Apart
http://www.unilorin.edu.ng/publications/ADEDIMEJI/SEMANTICS&PRAGMATIC.htm
THE SEMANTICS AND PRAGMATICS OF NIGERIAN PROVERBS IN CHINUA ACHEBE’S THINGS FALL APART AND OLA ROTIMI’S THE GODS ARE NOT TO BLAME
Mahfouz A. Adedimeji
Department of Modern European Languages,
University of Ilorin, Ilorin
Abstract
Proverbs are wise sayings that address the heart of the discourse in any given context, truthfully and objectively. In Africa, and in Nigerian cultures especially, they are considered the reliable horses, which convey meanings to their destinations or hearts of the listeners. This study investigates aspects of the meaning of proverbs in the two works of two Nigerian authors, Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Rotimi’s The Gods Are Not To Blame. It is contended that meanings of Nigerian proverbs can be worked out within the semantic, referential, ideational, stimulus-response, realist and contextual theories. Types of meaning and proverbs are addressed and situated within the two works. It is advanced that proverbs play significant roles in clarifying, exemplifying, underscoring and influencing communication. With the broadly analysed thirty proverbs in all, the study attempts to further demonstrate the vitality of semantics and pragmatics in negotiating meaning especially in a second language context.
INTRODUCTION
Nuggets of popular wisdom abound in many African languages to accentuate and highlight discourses at given contexts. These expressions of wisdom are usually referred to as proverbs. In Africa, especially in the Nigerian context, expressions are not considered rich and intelligent except when they are duly laced with proverbs, which are many in our diversified cultures. This informs why a traditional African would constantly punctuate his speech with appropriate proverbs and aphorisms to drive his points home [Lawal, (1992) cited in Lawal, et al. (1997:637)]. The ability to sum up ideas and experiences in captivating and succinct expressions has always been considered a sign of native intelligence, linguistic competence and cultural erudition.
Thus, in projecting the Nigerianness/Africanness of their themes and cultural backgrounds, the Nigerian writers articulate the rich cultural ethos of proverbs in their creative works. Our aim in this paper is to examine practically how proverbs are employed in reinforcing meanings. Two creative works, a novel and a play text, which are classics in their own rights, written by two prominent Nigerian authors, are focused on. Fifteen proverbs from each work are presented and each proverb is broadly subjected to pragma-semantic inquiry. It is ultimately submitted that proverbs are a profound source of rhetorical power, literary effectiveness and discoursal maturity.
PROVERBS: A CONCEPTUAL REVIEW
Proverbs are common features of conversational eloquence in many African cultures, especially in Nigeria. Such “wise sayings” are usually acquired and learnt from listening to the elders’ talk. Given the vintage position that the elders occupy in various African traditions as the human repository of communal or primordial wisdom, they are the masters of eloquence, rhetorics and meaning. They are the ones who know how to impregnate short expressions with vast meanings, implicating the proverb, “it is the elder’s mouth that determines a ripe kola nut”.
Several definitions of the term “proverb” abound in literature. The central idea in the definitions is that a proverb is “an adage, saying, maxim, precept, saw or any synonym of such that expresses conventional truth”. According to Webster’s New Universal Unabridged Dictionary (1972), a proverb is a “short saying in common use expressing a well-known truth or common fact ascertained by experience”. It is our contention, based on above definitions, that a proverb is any wise saying or epigram that addresses the heart of the matter in a given context, truthfully and objectively, and is ascertained by world knowledge.
Adegbija (1988) provides insights into factors responsible for the successful decoding of meanings by investigating the utterance, “My friend, where is Anini?” made by a Nigerian military President to his Inspector General of Police. He discovers that the utterance subjects itself to five interpretations (Adegbija, 1988:153) based on thirteen different presuppositions, both semantic and pragmatic. Those presuppositions made his subjects infer ten meanings from the utterance under study, which surreptitiously appears as an innocuous utterance (Ibid:158), contextualized naturally within the semantic and pragmatic frameworks.
Lawal et al. (1997:635-652) describe the illocutionary acts performed through the use of twelve Yoruba proverbs. They analyse the linguistic, situational, psychological, social, sociological and cosmological contexts which listeners or readers have to competently deploy to interpret the proverbs. They dissect the frontiers of meanings inherent in the proverbs through the pragmatic theory, which is a theory of meaning. Pragmatics is mainly concerned with the different meanings which words, phrases and sentences can have in different contexts of use (Lawal, 1997:19).
Alabi (2000:215-230) highlights the form and functions of proverbs in five plays of Olu Obafemi. The three groups she identifies are, first, proverbs that echo existing Yoruba proverbs, which aim at freshness, reducing the boredom of encountering everyday proverbs. The second group consists of proverbs that are garnished by rhetorical elements such as unusual collocates, L1 lexemes, parallel structures, anastrophe, parenthesis and ellipsis which serve the function of engaging the minds of the audience/readers in the intellectual tasks of identifying new versus old forms of the proverbs. The last group comprises proverbs that sparkle in translation “with the vivid imagery of the L1 and its culture” which functionally provide the necessary cultural milieu for the plays she studied.
Following Lawal’s (1992) thesis that proverbs seem to contain the richest pool of pragmatic or semantic factors, the meaning mappings provided by proverbs are therefore significant for attention especially in the second language context, where the L1 ideas are transposed on the L2 codes. Though, due to the universality of human experience, proverbs exist in all languages with similarities in terms of their reliance on vivid images, domestic allusions and word play, yet they are scantily encountered in many European languages (Crystal, 1997:53). On the contrary, proverbs feature prominently in interpersonal, transactional and ideational language use in Africa. And since African writers articulate African ethos that “enable a compelling realization of African aesthetics”, Nigerian writers are wont to suffuse their committed literary enterprises with abundant proverbs as a way of underscoring cultural consciousness and evoking penetrating meanings.
THEORETICAL BACKGROUND
Language is one of the main instruments by which values, belief systems and cultural practices are communicated. Every language, asserts Goddard (1998:2), has its own culture-specific meanings, which do not translate readily into English. For this purpose, the Nigerian writers in English have to intuitively deploy theories of meaning to their rendition of Yoruba proverbs into English and have to rely on this to get their meanings communicated. As semantics is a linguistic theory concerned with the study of meaning by seeking “to convey and classify human experience through language” (Babatunde, 1999:70) and pragmatics studies the “’invisible’ meaning or how we recognize what is meant even when it isn’t actually said (or written)” (Yule, 1996a:127), the essence of the theories of meaning is to provide frameworks from which meaning can be attributed and inferred. Some of the theories of word/sentences meaning include the Referential Theory, the Ideational Theory, the Stimulus-Response Theory, the Realist Theory and the Contextual Theory.
The referential theory states that the meaning of a linguistic expression is expressed in terms of what is named, denoted and referred to by the word. Also considered as the denotation theory, it indicates that the meaning of a word or expression is the physical objectis which the word stands for.
The ideational theory, otherwise known as the psychological theory, refers to the meaning of a word being associated with the idea always associated with that word/linguistic expression. In other words, the theory states that if an occasion instantiates the occurrence of a word, the idea expressed is the meaning of that word. It is a mentalistic theory of meaning. While referential theory principally deals with denotation, the ideational theory is chiefly concerned with connotation.
The stimulus-response theory, otherwise known as behavioural theory, concentrates on what is involved in using language. According to Bloomfield [(1933) as cited in Ogunsiji (2000:47)], “the situation in which the speaker utters it and the response which it calls forth in the hearer” is the meaning of a linguistic form. The theory approaches meaning by attempting to look into the process of communication in order to explain the nature of meaning.
The realist theory of meaning, an outgrowth of the referential theory, is attributed chiefly to Plato and Aristotle. It simply states that for a word or a linguistic form to have a meaning, it must refer to some existing or subsisting entity. Therefore, words are not more than “exaggerated theory of reference” as posited by Frege. It is proposed that there is an entity above and beyond the realm of sensible entities from which all particular things derive their meanings.
The contextual theory, on the last note here, is a pragmatic theory of meaning which focuses on what the linguistic form is used for, rather than what it means (Oyeshile, 2000:176). According to Firth, who is a proponent of this theory, the most vital fact about language is its social function. Essentially, the theory maintains that at a word/sentence will be meaningful only if it is used appropriately in some actual contexts (Ogunsiji 2000:48).
Moreover, as meaning cannot be a one dimensional phenomenon, there are bound to be types of meanings. Leech (1974) identifies seven types of meaning so as to really delineate the nature of the elusive meaning. According to him, meanings are conceptual/denotative, emotional/connotative, collocative, reflected, affective, stylistic and thematic. As all these meaning types feature in proverbs, a brief discussion of them is deemed appropriate.
Denotative meaning is the literal, basic, plain or central meaning of a word. It is relatively stable and its scope is not open-ended and indeterminate. Connotative meaning, on the other hand, is the meaning people associate with words. It is the personal or cultural meaning which is open-ended and indeterminate. According to Odebunmi (2001:49), connotative meaning ultimately depends on “individual experience” and Yule (1996b:3) affirms the essence of “speaker meaning”.
While collocative (from collocation or “placing together” of words or phrases) meaning is the meaning of a linguistic form in relation to the other forms expressed with it in a given context, reflected meaning is the sense a word or sentence evokes in a multiple conceptual situation. In the words of Ogunsiji (2000:52), reflected meaning arises when one of the several meanings of a word becomes directly associated with the word to the extent that we tend to forget the other uses of the word.
Affective meaning arises when language is used to reflect the personal feelings or attitudes of the speaker to the audience. This type of meaning features at the levels of politeness, indignation and rudeness. While stylistic meaning concerns the relation of the linguistic form to social or situational circumstances like geographical location, subject-matter, medium, sex, age, etc, thematic meaning refers to the manner of organising messages in terms of ordering, focus and emphasis.
As no language is monolithic and expressions lend themselves to various meanings based on the interpretation of the listeners, stamping one specific meaning on a proverb may be erroneous. What we have, rather, are possible meaning types which cannot even all be explored. The inter-relationship and inter-dependence of meanings, occasioning overlaps, thus feature in our analysis.
DATA PRESENTATION AND ANALYSIS
The data are selected from the proverbs contained in Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe and The Gods Are Not To Blame by Ola Rotimi. These two works are committed to the Nigerian cultures, hence their significance for the purpose of this study. Things Fall Apart portrays the dynamics of social change that plagued the Iboland during the early contacts with the white men (missionaries and mercenaries) and the ensuing conflicts leading to the suicide of Okonwo, the protagonist. The Gods Are Not To Blame is also tragic, an enactment of King Odewale’s travails. The story, set in Yorubaland, thematises man’s helplessness before the gods or forces of fate and destiny as the baby doomed to be killed at infancy because of a pathetic prophecy eventually survives, living up to actually carry out the abomination of killing his father and marrying his mother.
The two works mainly highlight the significance accorded to cultural norms and nuances in the day-to-day activities of the two Nigerian settings. The proverbs are in two groups, representing the two works of Achebe and Rotimi respectively, with each group comprising fifteen proverbs, making a total of thirty. Each proverb is situated within the semantic theories that it belongs and the types of meaning that can be attributed to it. A broad analysis is subsequently undertaken with a view to interpreting or explicating the visible and the invisible sense of the proverbs.(i.e their semantics and pragmatics).
Group One Data
From Things Fall Apart
1. The sun will shine on those who stand before it shines on those who kneel under them p.6
Theory: Referential
Type: Denotative/Connotative
Analysis: The proverb makes reference to a cosmic body, the sun, with a view to evoking its sense – that those who strive and work (by remaining standing) will benefit from the fruit of their work before those who depend on them (by kneeling or deriving succour from them). While the inference of discouraging dependency can be made, the message is mainly that those who do not face the challenges of life and work assiduously defying sunshine should satisfy themselves with the crumbs that fall from the table of the hardworking ones. The proverb discourages laziness and implies the need for everyone to be hard-working.
2. If a child washed his hands, he could eat with kings.p.6
Theory: Realist
Types: Denotative, thematic
Analysis: The proverb portrays the honour and dignity attributed to cleanliness and responsibility. It thematizes hands washing, a good character training and hygienic way of eating as a sine qua non to honour. We infer that if a person does the right thing at the right time, as the proverb entails, good fortune, honour, reverence, esteem and credit will be his, just like eating together with kings. The pragmatic understanding of how really high the Nigerians rate their traditional rulers provides a further clue to the semantic import of the proverb.
3 When the moon is shining, the cripple becomes hungry for a walk. p.9.
Theory: Referential
Types: Collocative, Stylistic
Analysis: Reference is made to another cosmic body, the moon, in this proverb, as “shining” collocates with “the moon” and “cripple” collocates (metaphorically, though (cf. Ogunsiji, 2002:52) with “walk”. The sense of the proverb lies in the cause-effect theory that if motivation is given, action arises. In essence, night is conventionally taken as a period of rest but in a situation where there is moon-light, not only the able-bodied feels the need to walk or work in the night but even the cripple does. Night is implied and not stated for stylistic purposes while “hungry”, a marked word that ordinarily does not apply to “walk”, is also used for stylistic effect (cf. Alabi, 1999:173). The underlining message is that a good cause or motivation occasions a good effect or line of action.
4 A man who pays respect to the great paves the way for his own greatness p.14.
Theory: Stimulus-Response
Types: Denotative, Affective.
Analysis: There is a tact advice almost coinciding with the English proverb, “one good turn deserves another” here. If a person accords honour or reverence to the successful ones, it is likely that he is also going to be successful. In other words, the sense of the proverb is that a person who helps another man helps himself indirectly as he gets familiar with what that man engages in – and this will ultimately lead him also to greatness, directly or indirectly.
5 A toad does not run in the daytime for nothing.15
Theory: Ideational
Types: Denotative/Stylistic
Analysis: The proverb tasks our mental conception or general knowledge of the toad as a nocturnal animal. If such an animal therefore does “run” (a lexical item preferred by the author for metaphorical or stylistic effect, against the normal collocative word, “jump”) in the day, there must be something amiss. The sense of the proverb is that there is a cause for anything strange that happens; there must be a reason, at least “no smoke without fire”. A toad running in daytime is probably pursuing something or certainly something is pursuing it. It has to do with the “cause-effect” relationship.
6. An old woman is always uneasy when dry bones are mentioned in a proverb.p.15
Theory: Stimulus – Response
Types: Denotative/Thematic
Analysis: This proverb also exhibits “causes-effect” relationship as it thematises the old woman. It means that people who have negative features feel disturbed when such features are being highlighted. There is the effect or response of uneasiness with reference to the dry bones because an old woman whose dry bones are signs of impending death is always scared of death. The sense of the proverb, essentially, is that conscience worries people of negative attributes even when they are not addressed but their excesses (so to say) are being condemned.
7. The lizard that jumped from the high Iroko tree to the ground said he would praise himself if no one else did. p.16.
Theory: Referential
Types: Denotative/Connotative
Analysis: The proverb elicits the self-contentment and joy of good work. A good work, we can infer, is itself commendable whether people appreciate it or not. Reference is made to the lizard which nods after any activity it engages in, implicating its self-praise. The animal is personified for poetic effect. The English equivalent of “if you don’t blow your trumpet, nobody will blow it for you” may further illustrate the sense of the proverb – that if you do not appreciate your worth and dignify yourself, people may not bother to do it for you.
8. Eneke the bird says since men have learnt to shoot without missing, he has learnt to fly without perching. p.16.
Theory: Referential
Types: Denotative/Connotative
Analysis: Like the previous proverb, this proverb derives its message from folklore, in which human attributes are given to animals/non-human creatures. The meaning is both literal and figurative as well as multi-dimensional in scope. Changing situations give birth to innovations. If students, for example, develop novel means of cheating in the examinations, referentially, the authorities also devise ipso facto, new strategies of apprehending or detecting the cheats.
9. When a man says yes, his Chi says yes also. p. 19
Theory: Ideational
Types: Denotative/Connotative.
Analysis: The proverb aptly sums up the essence of determination and strong will, within one’s psychological context. Reference to chi, a person’s personal god in Igbo culture, is of connotative import. The message interpreted is that man must always take decisive decisions for himself and resolve to do whatever he tasks himself to do for that will always be the will of his supposed “god”. A possible English equivalent is that “heavens help those who help themselves”, and as such, man should always be responsible for all his actions.
10. A chick that will grow into a cock can be spotted the very day it hatches. p.46
Theory: Realist
Types: Denotative/Connotative.
Analysis: The proverb explores the logical sequence of things/ phenomena: that a general analysis can be made from specific traits. In the real world, from the initial stage, from countenance and appearance, one is able to identify the good, the bad and the ugly. The reference to the chick in our psyche is illustrative: the chick that will not live long will probably look frail and sickly, right from the day it is hatched. Our actions, at particular times, are indices of our character, the proverb tells us.
11. A child’s finger is not scalded by a piece of hot yam which its mother puts into its palm. p.47
Theory: Contextual
Types: Denotive/Collocative
Analysis: Given the contextual/pragmatic knowledge of a mother’s love for her child especially in the Nigerian cultures, it is implied that whatever she does, even if such superficially appears harmful, will be of benefit to the child. This is because it is presupposed that nobody loves a child better than his/her mother. Thus, the sense of the proverb, which for effect parades “child/mother”, “finger/palm”, “a piece of hot yam” etc collocates, is that love bears no harm. If there is love, there is no need for reservation in taking a beloved’s piece of advice, whether one considers it good or not, because a beloved person will not recommend a harmful antidote for whom he loves.
12 If one finger brought oil, it soiled the others. p.87.
Theory: Ideational
Types: Denotative/Connotative/Stylistic
Analysis: The proverb underlines the concept of collective responsibility: what one does implicates the involvement of the others. With tact reference to our knowledge or ideas of the world, if a finger is dipped into the oil, other fingers get smeared alongside since they are together. In other words, a shameful act by a person brings shame, odium and opprobrium to him and by extension, to his family and community. Stylistic considerations impinge on the choice of “brought” and “soiled” from the existing alternatives – which could further communicate the same idea.
13. A child cannot pay for its mother’s milk. p.117
Theory: Realist
Types: Connotative/Collocative.
Analysis: This proverb anchors an axiomatic fact: certain things are unquantifiable or priceless. No matter how much the child gives the mother later in life, such is not worth her milk, given the child at infancy. By extension, kindness, love (and such virtues) cannot be fully reciprocated, as they are inestimably valuable. Collocates like “child, mother, milk” enhance the sense of the meaning.
14. An animal rubs its aching flank against a tree, a man asks his kinsman to scratch him p.117.
Theory: Realist/Stimulus-Response
Types: Connotative/Stylistic.
Analysis: By drawing our attention to the real world of human-animal behavioural patterns, the proverb draws a line between a human being and an animal. The proverb is suggestive of the social nature of man, and the fact that “no man is an Island”. The proverb suggests that it is love that distinguishes men from animals. People who do not seek their fellow human beings’ help when in danger or difficulty are therefore animalistic. Marked word patterns like “aching”, “flank”, “kinsman”, “rubs”, “scratch”, that one would ordinarily prefer other words for, are used for stylistic purposes, engendering the connotative, figurative sense.
15. Living fire begets cold, impotent ash.p.118
Theory: Ideational
Types: Connotative/Stylistic
Analysis: The sense engendered by this epigrammatic statement is the vanity of arrogance. By creating the image/idea of fire in our mind, we are implicitly told that fire flares up in pride but its consequence is cold, impotent ash. The connotative meanings of “cold” and “impotent” are quite essential and their stylistic association with ash lends credence to the force of the meaning. Both fire and “ash” conjure in us human qualities – the fire gives birth to a cold and impotent child in ash. The sense of the proverb or its message is that people should be good and level-headed when they are opportune (to be in a position) or alive; for, when they lose such position and die, they become useless and unwanted – subsequently becoming objects of public disdain.
Group Two Data
From The Gods Are Not To Blame
16. The struggles of man begin at birth. p.1
Theory: Realist
Types: Denotative/Connotative
Analysis: This is an epigram, implicating the centrality of struggle in man’s life. Right from his first breath at birth, the proverb entails, a child struggles to live and become a (successful) man till he dies, with everyday posing its own challenges. The connotative sense derives from its being metaphorical. It is in the realm of philosophy (i.e Realist Theory) that it will be appropriately understood that not only adults struggle, a day-old baby also battles to survive.
17. The world is struggle. p.6
Theory: Realist
Types: Connotative/Stylistic
Analysis: Just like the previous proverb, this proverb in metaphoric sense equates the world with struggle. In any struggle, it takes the fittest to survive. Man should therefore be prepared, the proverb entails, to face the struggle of the world so as to be victorious in the end. The pithiness of the proverb is of stylistic import.
18. He who pelts another with pebbles asks for rocks in return p.7
Theory: Ideational
Types: Denotative/Collocative
Analysis: This proverb communicates a moral message, more compelling than the English equivalent “he who lives in a glass house should throw no stones”. Not only will an evil deed done be retaliated, the retaliation will be more devastating than the destruction wrought by the provocation. The proverb entails, with stylistic and collocative imports of such words like “pelt/pebbles”, “rocks/return”, that one should abstain from evil deeds so that one will not be checkmated by more severe evils – as deterrents– than the ones actually done. The “cause-effect” concept is also engendered here.
19. Sickness is like rain, does the rain fall on one roof alone? p.10.
Theory: Realist
Types: Denotative/Connotative
Analysis: This proverb rhetorically emphasises the universality of ill-health: it is among the phenomena that go round. At the denotative level, it is further interpretable to mean that given the low level of medical knowledge in traditional cultures like Yoruba, all sicknesses are assumed to be contagious. When the sick is not treated, others quickly contract the sickness or disease, like the rain that falls on the roofs of everybody. In essence, as rain does not discriminate, sickness also visits all people. The tragedy that befalls one group, we infer, will soon befall the other group –thus, no people should exult because of other people’s misfortunes.
20. It is sickness that man can cure, not death. p.12.
Theory: Realist
Types: Denotative/Thematic
Analysis: This is a philosophical, empirical truth, portraying the limitation of man’s power or ability. The meaning is lucid: man cannot cure death, even though he can cure diseases. The proverb entails resignation and surrender to what is inevitable. There is no need lamenting what is beyond one’s power; sickness that man can prevent is thus thematised.
21. To get full cured, one needs patience. p.14.
Theory: Realist
Types: Denotative/Thematic
Analysis: This is another philosophical truth. As all things, including cure for a disease – which is emphasised as a result of the universality of affliction, discomfort, sadness in one way of the other – need time to mature or secure, there is need for patience. The proverb is an indirect advice as we infer that cure or solution to all problems lies in exercising patience. “Time” it is said “is the greatest anesthesia”. According to Adedimeji (1999:9)” ---- for, whatever we feel, ---- Time turns. Time treats. Time thrills”.
22. The moon moves slowly but by daybreak, it crosses the sky. p.14.
Theory: Ideational
Types: Denotative/Connotative
Analysis: The crux of the proverb, just like the previous one, is the message of patience. The idea of the slowly-moving moon is referenced. The English equivalent could be “slow and steady wins the race”. With patience, the vast sky is “crossed” by daybreak. The moral message of patience is preached indirectly. The reference to the moon further elucidates the meaning and distills the sense deeper.
23. The secrets of a home should be known first to the head of the house p.19
Theory: Contextual
Types: Denotative/Connotative
Analysis: The proverb states the principle of administration within the family context. Information is implicitly suggested as a social function, which should be disseminated along the vertical axis. The message is that the leader or head of a household (i.e the husband) should be the first recipient of sensitive information of the home, for if such information is diffused to all and sundry, it may wreck havoc on the whole family. While home connotes “family”, “head” connotes “husband” since in the Yoruba culture, like other cultures, the husband is the leader of the family unit. Information management, we infer, is crucial even at the family level or context.
24. A cooking pot for the chameleon is a cooking pot for the lizard! p.19
Theory: Ideational
Types: Denotative/Affective
Analysis: This proverb relates by contrast to datum 4. The idea created by reference to two reptiles (chameleon and lizard) is symbolic of what befalls people of similar traits. Given the understanding of the Yoruba tradition wherein such animals are burnt and subsequently used for charms, it is inferred that one should not rejoice in the misfortune of the other as what befalls the former will soon befall the latter. The affective interpretation is determined by the exclamatory mark which could mean the speaker’s attitude to warn, denounce, scorn or emphasise. After all, “what is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander”, the cooking-pot that terminates the life of the chameleon will soon serve as the grave of the lizard too, we are told. So, what is good is good and what is bad is bad for both animals or any two individuals.
25. The horns cannot be too heavy for the head of the cow that must bear them.20
Theory: Realist
Types: Denotative/Collocative
Analysis: The proverb alludes to the horns which the cow still copes with. A philosophical/analytic proverb, it means that nature takes care of itself and providence does not burden man beyond the realm of his capacity. In other words, people of responsibilities should know how to cope with their tight schedules without fuss or complaint. The collocative importance of “horns/cow”, “heavy/head” further lends credence to the successful decoding the meaning. No situation life is unmanageable.
26. We have left our pot unwatched and our food burns. p. 21
Theory: Referential/Ideational
Types: Denotative/Connotative
Analysis: The sense of the proverb lies in lamentation occasioned by avoidable neglect. Reference is made to the pot of food, put on fire, which burns as a result of negligence. The “cause – effect” relationship is discernible at the ideational level – neglect leads to loss. The proverb entails that to keep what one has in its pure/real form, one should always “watch” or mind it, lest it is destroyed.
27. Until the rotten tooth is pulled out, the mouth must chew with caution. p.21
Theory: Referential/Realist
Types: Denotative/Collocative
Analysis: This proverb also presents a general knowledge in a philosophical garb, related to the one in datum 12 above. With collocates like “rotten/tooth” and “mouth/chew”, the proverb evokes the sense that as long as bad influences or people remain, as few as they may be, they will still constitute a hindrance to the healthy growth or development of the society. With the rotten tooth in place, the whole mouth is rendered handicapped and whenever it eats, it must be with extreme caution. In the real world, it is a practicable truism.
28 When crocodiles eat their own eggs, what will they not do to the flesh of a frog? p.24
Theory: Referential/Realist
Types: Denotative/Connotative
Analysis: The proverb points to a real fact and the underlying message is that of not being bothered by the antics of the compulsively wicked. We are rhetorically questioned that if crocodiles devour their own eggs, given the knowledge of how precious other animals keep their own eggs/off-springs, should it then surprise us if other smaller animals fall their prey? In other words, the wickedness of the wicked is often suffered by his own immediate relations before the outsiders: a person who harms himself should be excused when he harms others – he is probably insane!
29. Is it not ignorance that makes the rat attack the cat? p.28.
Theory: Referential/Realist
Types: Denotative/Collocative
Analysis: With reference to our understanding of the two animals, rat and cat, our knowledge of the world makes us agree with the force of the rhetorical proverb. It is ignorance that would make a person attack a more formidable enemy for such will be tantamount to his summary execution or punishment. The inference made is that a wise person will always avoid having any direct encounter with his powerful adversary so that the latter does not liquidate him. The reference to, and the stylo-collocative import of, “cat/rat” strengthen the sense of the proverb.
30. Take your time, child, if you rise too early, the dew of life will soak you! p.35.
Theory: Realist/Contextual
Types: Affective/Thematic
Analysis: Our last proverb is a didactic one addressed to the child. In the Yoruba culture where age is often considered a major determinant justifying or disqualifying one’s attainment, the context of the proverb is revealing. The meaning evoked is that a young person should not be too ambitious to acquire all that the elderly ones have acquired. If he is, the resultant effect is that he will be, in metaphoric sense, soaked by the dew of rising early. In other words, he will be submerged by his achievements to such extent that his lack of experience (which only comes through age) will culminate in his losing his life or achievements. The instructive theme situates the proverb within the context of advice, passed from the old to the young.
CLASSIFICATION AND APPRAISAL OF RESEARCH RESULT
As far as present writer is aware, a proper classification of proverbs is yet to emerge. The scanty scholarly works available on proverbs focus on functions, forms and the nuances of translation to the L2’s majorly English and French. The present study [(cf. Bamgbose (1968) and Ajiboye (1984) for instance, cited in Alabi (2000) and Lawal et al. (1997)] attempts to fill this vacuum. Our analysis reveals that all African proverbs, as Nigerian proverbs constitute just a microcosm of the vast pool of African proverbs, can be grouped into four major types. These are rhetorical, epistemological, didactic and philosophical/analytic proverbs. The relationship between one classification and the other(s), just like our analysis of theories and types of meaning, is not always mutually exclusive. Instances of overlaps, characteristic of language studies, often occur. For instance, an analytic proverb may also serve rhetorical and didactic function, while epistemological proverbs also serve philosophical/analytic and didactic purposes. A brief discussion of this classification or typology is as follows:
Rhetorical Proverbs: Rhetorics, according to the Aristotelian definition reformulated by George Campbell is “the faculty of discovering all the available means of persuasion” (cited in Ajadi, 1997:206). It is concerned with using language in an impressive way, especially to influence people to take a step or act in a particular manner. Rhetorical proverbs are thus those pithy sayings that are geared towards persuading or influencing people to do certain things. Proverbs such as those of data 2,3,9,16,17,21 and 30 belong to this category, including those that are captioned as rhetorical questions as we have in data 19,28 and 29. They are meant to encourage, motivate and advise people with the aim of making them adopt a world-view or act in a specific manner.
Epistemological Proverbs: These are proverbs whose origins lie in history, stories, folklore, myths, legends and other oral traditional sources. They tell a story or narrate an incident at a glance. Some epistemological proverbs require commentaries for their meanings and imports to be understood. Belonging to this category are proverbs 7,8,9,24 and 28.
Didactic proverbs: These are proverbs that teach moral lessons. They are meant to instill some moral training or discipline in the hearers, especially the children, by exhibiting virtues and extolling them and identifying vices as well as condemning them. They are teaching proverbs. Examples of these include those of data 2, 4, 12, 13, 18, 21, 22, 29 and 30. Many Nigerian proverbs, just like folk stories, serve didactic purposes.
Philosophical/Analytic proverbs: These are proverbs that are rooted in the study of the cosmos, the universe and knowledge of the world. They portray self-evident truths – observable, discernible, empirical and philosophical – that are often used as a “veritable horse by which words are conveyed” (Alabi, 2000:215) and for emphasizing words. They could serve didactic purposes too. In essence, philosophical/analytic proverbs accentuate communication through a close observation of, and allusion to, natural phenomena. Examples here include data 1, 3, 5, 6, 10, 11, 14, 15, 19 20, 22, 23, 25, 26, 27 and 28.
A wholistic appraisal of the findings above reveals that Nigerians are majorly philosophers and thinkers whose intellectual/cultural erudition manifests in the reality of their proverbs. The preponderance of philosophical/analytic proverbs which are largely situated within the realistic theory of Plato and Aristotle further justifies the fact that the Nigerian cultures and languages are rich in profound meanings – which are sourced from deep thought and scientific observation. In simple terms, most proverbs are philosophical in nature because they engage our mental faculty to examine and appreciate what exists but that we hardly take note of.
Proverbs that are situated within the framework of referential and ideational theories constitute the average as our rhetorical and didactic proverbs clearly show. This is quite normal because their chief meaning equivalents are the most basic types of meaning (i.e denotation and connotation – both of which can be taken to subsume the remaining types of meaning). It is thus basic in Nigerian cultures to make references to physical objects implicitly or explicitly as a way of further “affecting or effecting desirable action” (Lawal et al, 1997:650).
The low frequency of stimulus-response and contextual theories is also normal because the two – one behavioural the other pragmatic – fall within the mutual contextual beliefs or MCBs which are not located in the “surface structure” of proverbs (Lawal et al. 1997:650-651). In other words, the two constitute the “corresponding contexts of use” (Ibid, 650) which the language user in Nigeria naturally deploys to really appreciate the proverbs. It is the blend of the two that pragmatically underlines the effective use of the proverbs. Such theories would be of more relevance while considering cultures outside the L1 contexts languages/proverbs are culture-bound.
Table of Proverbs and Types
Proverbs Examples
Rhetorical Proverbs
2, 3, 9, 16, 17, 21, 3 and 19, 28, 30
Epistemological Proverbs
7, 8, 9, 24, 28
Philosophical/Analytic Proverbs
1, 3, 5, 6, 10, 11 14, 15 19, 20, 22, 23, 25, 26 27, 28
Didactic Proverbs
2, 4, 12, 13, 18, 21, 22, 29, 30
CONCLUSION
In Nigeria, not just “among the Ibo, the art of conversation is regarded very highly and proverbs are the palm-oil with which words are eaten” (Achebe, 1975:5). [cf. Rotimi’s (1979:35) question that “what is the matter, fellow, aren’t you a Yoruba man? Must proverbs be explained to you after they are said?”] As a result of this sheer fact, Nigerian authors like Achebe and Rotimi focused here, find it desirable and unavoidable to deploy the highly rated proverbs to the articulation of their thematic concerns. The richness of the Nigerian languages and the discoursal erudition of elders (who use proverbs most) are not diminished by the fact that the authors write in English. The Nigerianness of the expressions cast in English makes their works appealing, culturally-oriented and traditionally invaluable. Various types of proverbs serve the function of clarification, explanation, instruction, persuasion, moral lesson and emphasis in their use as foregrounded above, with their intellectual, emotional and imaginative undertones.
As the semantic discipline just, like pragmatics, in the words of Chase [as cited in Crystal (1997:397)], is mainly meant “to blow ghosts out of the picture and create a new picture as close to reality as one can get,” its theoretic framework has largely been used to “blow the ghosts out of” the meanings of the Nigerian proverbs studied here. The paper identifies semantic theories, meaning types and proverb types and functions through data presentation and analysis. It showcases how powerful ideas, illustrative references, and realistic messages are distilled through the use of proverbs in Nigeria. This study is an attempt to emphasise that communication matters a lot and that effective communication in Nigeria requires a good mastery of proverbial elements, which convey more meaning and achieve more results in the hearers’ sensibilities than ordinary everyday expressions. The dynamism of Nigerian languages, their cultural virility and linguistic potency, are underscored by showing through proverbs “how meaning is conveyed by L2”, according to Babatunde (1995:4), “within the mediating role of the first language”.
APPENDIX
Other proverbs from Things Fall Apart (1-8) and The Gods Are Not To Blame (9-52) which could be subjected to further analysis are as follows:
What do the proverbs mean? What types of proverbs are they?
1. Looking a King’s mouth, one would think he never suckled at his mother’s breast p.19.
2. A bowl of pounded yam can throw him in a wresting match. p.16.
3. As the dog said, “if I fall down for you and you fall down for me, it is play”.
4. A man who makes trouble for others is also making it for himself (said the Tortoise). p. 68.
5. If a man comes into my hut and defecates on the floor, what do I do? Do I shut my eyes? No! I take a stick and break his head. That is what a man does. p.113
6. We do not ask for wealth because he that has health and children will also have wealth. We do not pray to have money but to have more kinsmen. p.117.
7. The clan was like a lizard, if it lost its tail, it soon grew another p. 121.
8. He has put a knife on the things that held us together and we have fallen apart. p.125.
9. Not to do something is to be crippled fast. p. 6.
10. To lie down resigned to fate is madness. p. 6.
11. It is not changing into the lion that is hard, it is getting the tail of a lion. p. 7.
12. But joy has a slender body that breaks too soon. p.8.
13. When the head of a household dies, the house becomes an empty shell. p. 9.
14. When the chameleon brings forth a child, is not that child expected to dance? p. 9.
15. When rain falls on the leopard, does it wash off its spots. p.9.
16. How long must feverish birds trouble in silence before their keeper? p. 10.
17. Only a madman would go to sleep with his roof on fire. p.11.
18. The ruin of a land and its people begins in their homes. p.13.
19. The monkey learns to jump from tree to tree without failing. Keep on trying. p. 14.
20. Life is a struggle. p. 15.
21. Your words sound like fresh wine, so full of sweetness but lacking substance. p.19.
22. When trees fall on trees, first, the topmost must be removed. p.22.
23. When the frog in front falls in a pit, others behind take caution. p. 23.
24. All lizards lie prostrate: how can a man tell which lizard suffers from bellyache? p. 23.
25. A chicken eats corn, drinks water, swallows pebbles, yet she complains of having no teeth. If she adds teeth, would see eat the gold? p. 26.
26. When the elders we esteem so highly can sell their honor for devil’s money, then let pigs eat shame and men eat dung. p. 27.
27. He who drums for a sick man is himself a sick man. p. 28.
28. When the evil plotter beats his drum for the downfall of the innocent, the gods will not let that drum sound! p. 30.
29. The hyena flirts with the hen, the hen is happy, not knowing that her death has come. p. 30.
30. If you think like a tortoise, you can plot against me without my cutting you down first with my own tortoise tricks, then, fellow, madness is in your liver. p. 32.
31. If you think that you can uproot a tree that has been planted by the gods… hmm… my brother… (Gestures at his head to imply madness in the other’s). p. 32.
32. Your highness, if you think to have heavy suspicions is wisdom, then your head is not well. p.32.
33. You are a tortoise, a coward, a conniving slippery maggot! p.33.
34. Two rams cannot drink from the same bucket at the same time! p. 34.
35. The lion’s liver is vain wish for dogs. p. 37.
36. Meat that has fat will prove it by the heat of fire! p. 37.
37. An eagle does not go to the market-place unless there is something there. p. 37.
38. What is the difference between the right ear of a horse and the left ear of that same horse? Nothing. p.38.
39. The tortoise is not tall but is taller than the snail; the snail is taller than the frog; the frog is taller than the lizard; the lizard is taller than the fly; the fly is taller than the ant; the ant is turn is taller than the ground on which it walks. Everything has its own place, its own level, its standing. p.38.
40. The touch of palm oil is cool to the body. Cool me. p. 39.
41. Because the farm owner is slow to catch the thief, the thief calls the farm-owner thief! p. 46.
42. The monkey and gorilla may claim oneness but the monkey is Monkey and the gorilla, Gorilla. p. 51.
43. The mangrove tree dwells in the river, but does that make it a crocodile? p. 51.
44. Can the cockroach be innocent in a gathering of fowls? p. 53.
45. You all love me. We are all close friends. [Sneering]. Like he-goats and cocoyam! p. 53.
46. The butterfly thinks himself a bird. p. 59.
47. It is what is in the heart when there is no wine in the head, that comes out when there is wine in the head. p. 60.
48. A bush does not sway this way or that way unless there is wind.
p. 60.
49. The snail may try, but it cannot cast off its shell. p. 60.
50. The toad likes water, but not when the water is boiling. p. 60.
51. Secrets of the owl must not be known in daylight. p. 62.
52. When the wood-insect gathers sticks, on its own head it carries them. p. 72.
REFERENCES
Primary Sources
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Rotimi, O. 1979. The Gods Are Not To Blame. Ibadan: University Press Limited.
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Alabi, V.A. 1999. “Analyzing Style in English: the Case of Word Patterns, Word Choices and Graphological Devices” in Adegbija, E. (Ed.) The English Language and Literature in English: An Introductory Handbook. Ilorin: Dept. of M.E.L, Unilorin. pp. 173 – 185.
Alabi, V.A. 2000. “The Form and Functions of Proverbs in Olu Obafemi’s plays” in Oni, D. and Ododo, S.E. (Eds.) Larger than His Frame: Critical Studies & Reflections on Olu Obafemi. Lagos: CBAAC. pp. 215 – 230.
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THE SEMANTICS AND PRAGMATICS OF NIGERIAN PROVERBS IN CHINUA ACHEBE’S THINGS FALL APART AND OLA ROTIMI’S THE GODS ARE NOT TO BLAME
Mahfouz A. Adedimeji
Department of Modern European Languages,
University of Ilorin, Ilorin
Abstract
Proverbs are wise sayings that address the heart of the discourse in any given context, truthfully and objectively. In Africa, and in Nigerian cultures especially, they are considered the reliable horses, which convey meanings to their destinations or hearts of the listeners. This study investigates aspects of the meaning of proverbs in the two works of two Nigerian authors, Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Rotimi’s The Gods Are Not To Blame. It is contended that meanings of Nigerian proverbs can be worked out within the semantic, referential, ideational, stimulus-response, realist and contextual theories. Types of meaning and proverbs are addressed and situated within the two works. It is advanced that proverbs play significant roles in clarifying, exemplifying, underscoring and influencing communication. With the broadly analysed thirty proverbs in all, the study attempts to further demonstrate the vitality of semantics and pragmatics in negotiating meaning especially in a second language context.
INTRODUCTION
Nuggets of popular wisdom abound in many African languages to accentuate and highlight discourses at given contexts. These expressions of wisdom are usually referred to as proverbs. In Africa, especially in the Nigerian context, expressions are not considered rich and intelligent except when they are duly laced with proverbs, which are many in our diversified cultures. This informs why a traditional African would constantly punctuate his speech with appropriate proverbs and aphorisms to drive his points home [Lawal, (1992) cited in Lawal, et al. (1997:637)]. The ability to sum up ideas and experiences in captivating and succinct expressions has always been considered a sign of native intelligence, linguistic competence and cultural erudition.
Thus, in projecting the Nigerianness/Africanness of their themes and cultural backgrounds, the Nigerian writers articulate the rich cultural ethos of proverbs in their creative works. Our aim in this paper is to examine practically how proverbs are employed in reinforcing meanings. Two creative works, a novel and a play text, which are classics in their own rights, written by two prominent Nigerian authors, are focused on. Fifteen proverbs from each work are presented and each proverb is broadly subjected to pragma-semantic inquiry. It is ultimately submitted that proverbs are a profound source of rhetorical power, literary effectiveness and discoursal maturity.
PROVERBS: A CONCEPTUAL REVIEW
Proverbs are common features of conversational eloquence in many African cultures, especially in Nigeria. Such “wise sayings” are usually acquired and learnt from listening to the elders’ talk. Given the vintage position that the elders occupy in various African traditions as the human repository of communal or primordial wisdom, they are the masters of eloquence, rhetorics and meaning. They are the ones who know how to impregnate short expressions with vast meanings, implicating the proverb, “it is the elder’s mouth that determines a ripe kola nut”.
Several definitions of the term “proverb” abound in literature. The central idea in the definitions is that a proverb is “an adage, saying, maxim, precept, saw or any synonym of such that expresses conventional truth”. According to Webster’s New Universal Unabridged Dictionary (1972), a proverb is a “short saying in common use expressing a well-known truth or common fact ascertained by experience”. It is our contention, based on above definitions, that a proverb is any wise saying or epigram that addresses the heart of the matter in a given context, truthfully and objectively, and is ascertained by world knowledge.
Adegbija (1988) provides insights into factors responsible for the successful decoding of meanings by investigating the utterance, “My friend, where is Anini?” made by a Nigerian military President to his Inspector General of Police. He discovers that the utterance subjects itself to five interpretations (Adegbija, 1988:153) based on thirteen different presuppositions, both semantic and pragmatic. Those presuppositions made his subjects infer ten meanings from the utterance under study, which surreptitiously appears as an innocuous utterance (Ibid:158), contextualized naturally within the semantic and pragmatic frameworks.
Lawal et al. (1997:635-652) describe the illocutionary acts performed through the use of twelve Yoruba proverbs. They analyse the linguistic, situational, psychological, social, sociological and cosmological contexts which listeners or readers have to competently deploy to interpret the proverbs. They dissect the frontiers of meanings inherent in the proverbs through the pragmatic theory, which is a theory of meaning. Pragmatics is mainly concerned with the different meanings which words, phrases and sentences can have in different contexts of use (Lawal, 1997:19).
Alabi (2000:215-230) highlights the form and functions of proverbs in five plays of Olu Obafemi. The three groups she identifies are, first, proverbs that echo existing Yoruba proverbs, which aim at freshness, reducing the boredom of encountering everyday proverbs. The second group consists of proverbs that are garnished by rhetorical elements such as unusual collocates, L1 lexemes, parallel structures, anastrophe, parenthesis and ellipsis which serve the function of engaging the minds of the audience/readers in the intellectual tasks of identifying new versus old forms of the proverbs. The last group comprises proverbs that sparkle in translation “with the vivid imagery of the L1 and its culture” which functionally provide the necessary cultural milieu for the plays she studied.
Following Lawal’s (1992) thesis that proverbs seem to contain the richest pool of pragmatic or semantic factors, the meaning mappings provided by proverbs are therefore significant for attention especially in the second language context, where the L1 ideas are transposed on the L2 codes. Though, due to the universality of human experience, proverbs exist in all languages with similarities in terms of their reliance on vivid images, domestic allusions and word play, yet they are scantily encountered in many European languages (Crystal, 1997:53). On the contrary, proverbs feature prominently in interpersonal, transactional and ideational language use in Africa. And since African writers articulate African ethos that “enable a compelling realization of African aesthetics”, Nigerian writers are wont to suffuse their committed literary enterprises with abundant proverbs as a way of underscoring cultural consciousness and evoking penetrating meanings.
THEORETICAL BACKGROUND
Language is one of the main instruments by which values, belief systems and cultural practices are communicated. Every language, asserts Goddard (1998:2), has its own culture-specific meanings, which do not translate readily into English. For this purpose, the Nigerian writers in English have to intuitively deploy theories of meaning to their rendition of Yoruba proverbs into English and have to rely on this to get their meanings communicated. As semantics is a linguistic theory concerned with the study of meaning by seeking “to convey and classify human experience through language” (Babatunde, 1999:70) and pragmatics studies the “’invisible’ meaning or how we recognize what is meant even when it isn’t actually said (or written)” (Yule, 1996a:127), the essence of the theories of meaning is to provide frameworks from which meaning can be attributed and inferred. Some of the theories of word/sentences meaning include the Referential Theory, the Ideational Theory, the Stimulus-Response Theory, the Realist Theory and the Contextual Theory.
The referential theory states that the meaning of a linguistic expression is expressed in terms of what is named, denoted and referred to by the word. Also considered as the denotation theory, it indicates that the meaning of a word or expression is the physical objectis which the word stands for.
The ideational theory, otherwise known as the psychological theory, refers to the meaning of a word being associated with the idea always associated with that word/linguistic expression. In other words, the theory states that if an occasion instantiates the occurrence of a word, the idea expressed is the meaning of that word. It is a mentalistic theory of meaning. While referential theory principally deals with denotation, the ideational theory is chiefly concerned with connotation.
The stimulus-response theory, otherwise known as behavioural theory, concentrates on what is involved in using language. According to Bloomfield [(1933) as cited in Ogunsiji (2000:47)], “the situation in which the speaker utters it and the response which it calls forth in the hearer” is the meaning of a linguistic form. The theory approaches meaning by attempting to look into the process of communication in order to explain the nature of meaning.
The realist theory of meaning, an outgrowth of the referential theory, is attributed chiefly to Plato and Aristotle. It simply states that for a word or a linguistic form to have a meaning, it must refer to some existing or subsisting entity. Therefore, words are not more than “exaggerated theory of reference” as posited by Frege. It is proposed that there is an entity above and beyond the realm of sensible entities from which all particular things derive their meanings.
The contextual theory, on the last note here, is a pragmatic theory of meaning which focuses on what the linguistic form is used for, rather than what it means (Oyeshile, 2000:176). According to Firth, who is a proponent of this theory, the most vital fact about language is its social function. Essentially, the theory maintains that at a word/sentence will be meaningful only if it is used appropriately in some actual contexts (Ogunsiji 2000:48).
Moreover, as meaning cannot be a one dimensional phenomenon, there are bound to be types of meanings. Leech (1974) identifies seven types of meaning so as to really delineate the nature of the elusive meaning. According to him, meanings are conceptual/denotative, emotional/connotative, collocative, reflected, affective, stylistic and thematic. As all these meaning types feature in proverbs, a brief discussion of them is deemed appropriate.
Denotative meaning is the literal, basic, plain or central meaning of a word. It is relatively stable and its scope is not open-ended and indeterminate. Connotative meaning, on the other hand, is the meaning people associate with words. It is the personal or cultural meaning which is open-ended and indeterminate. According to Odebunmi (2001:49), connotative meaning ultimately depends on “individual experience” and Yule (1996b:3) affirms the essence of “speaker meaning”.
While collocative (from collocation or “placing together” of words or phrases) meaning is the meaning of a linguistic form in relation to the other forms expressed with it in a given context, reflected meaning is the sense a word or sentence evokes in a multiple conceptual situation. In the words of Ogunsiji (2000:52), reflected meaning arises when one of the several meanings of a word becomes directly associated with the word to the extent that we tend to forget the other uses of the word.
Affective meaning arises when language is used to reflect the personal feelings or attitudes of the speaker to the audience. This type of meaning features at the levels of politeness, indignation and rudeness. While stylistic meaning concerns the relation of the linguistic form to social or situational circumstances like geographical location, subject-matter, medium, sex, age, etc, thematic meaning refers to the manner of organising messages in terms of ordering, focus and emphasis.
As no language is monolithic and expressions lend themselves to various meanings based on the interpretation of the listeners, stamping one specific meaning on a proverb may be erroneous. What we have, rather, are possible meaning types which cannot even all be explored. The inter-relationship and inter-dependence of meanings, occasioning overlaps, thus feature in our analysis.
DATA PRESENTATION AND ANALYSIS
The data are selected from the proverbs contained in Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe and The Gods Are Not To Blame by Ola Rotimi. These two works are committed to the Nigerian cultures, hence their significance for the purpose of this study. Things Fall Apart portrays the dynamics of social change that plagued the Iboland during the early contacts with the white men (missionaries and mercenaries) and the ensuing conflicts leading to the suicide of Okonwo, the protagonist. The Gods Are Not To Blame is also tragic, an enactment of King Odewale’s travails. The story, set in Yorubaland, thematises man’s helplessness before the gods or forces of fate and destiny as the baby doomed to be killed at infancy because of a pathetic prophecy eventually survives, living up to actually carry out the abomination of killing his father and marrying his mother.
The two works mainly highlight the significance accorded to cultural norms and nuances in the day-to-day activities of the two Nigerian settings. The proverbs are in two groups, representing the two works of Achebe and Rotimi respectively, with each group comprising fifteen proverbs, making a total of thirty. Each proverb is situated within the semantic theories that it belongs and the types of meaning that can be attributed to it. A broad analysis is subsequently undertaken with a view to interpreting or explicating the visible and the invisible sense of the proverbs.(i.e their semantics and pragmatics).
Group One Data
From Things Fall Apart
1. The sun will shine on those who stand before it shines on those who kneel under them p.6
Theory: Referential
Type: Denotative/Connotative
Analysis: The proverb makes reference to a cosmic body, the sun, with a view to evoking its sense – that those who strive and work (by remaining standing) will benefit from the fruit of their work before those who depend on them (by kneeling or deriving succour from them). While the inference of discouraging dependency can be made, the message is mainly that those who do not face the challenges of life and work assiduously defying sunshine should satisfy themselves with the crumbs that fall from the table of the hardworking ones. The proverb discourages laziness and implies the need for everyone to be hard-working.
2. If a child washed his hands, he could eat with kings.p.6
Theory: Realist
Types: Denotative, thematic
Analysis: The proverb portrays the honour and dignity attributed to cleanliness and responsibility. It thematizes hands washing, a good character training and hygienic way of eating as a sine qua non to honour. We infer that if a person does the right thing at the right time, as the proverb entails, good fortune, honour, reverence, esteem and credit will be his, just like eating together with kings. The pragmatic understanding of how really high the Nigerians rate their traditional rulers provides a further clue to the semantic import of the proverb.
3 When the moon is shining, the cripple becomes hungry for a walk. p.9.
Theory: Referential
Types: Collocative, Stylistic
Analysis: Reference is made to another cosmic body, the moon, in this proverb, as “shining” collocates with “the moon” and “cripple” collocates (metaphorically, though (cf. Ogunsiji, 2002:52) with “walk”. The sense of the proverb lies in the cause-effect theory that if motivation is given, action arises. In essence, night is conventionally taken as a period of rest but in a situation where there is moon-light, not only the able-bodied feels the need to walk or work in the night but even the cripple does. Night is implied and not stated for stylistic purposes while “hungry”, a marked word that ordinarily does not apply to “walk”, is also used for stylistic effect (cf. Alabi, 1999:173). The underlining message is that a good cause or motivation occasions a good effect or line of action.
4 A man who pays respect to the great paves the way for his own greatness p.14.
Theory: Stimulus-Response
Types: Denotative, Affective.
Analysis: There is a tact advice almost coinciding with the English proverb, “one good turn deserves another” here. If a person accords honour or reverence to the successful ones, it is likely that he is also going to be successful. In other words, the sense of the proverb is that a person who helps another man helps himself indirectly as he gets familiar with what that man engages in – and this will ultimately lead him also to greatness, directly or indirectly.
5 A toad does not run in the daytime for nothing.15
Theory: Ideational
Types: Denotative/Stylistic
Analysis: The proverb tasks our mental conception or general knowledge of the toad as a nocturnal animal. If such an animal therefore does “run” (a lexical item preferred by the author for metaphorical or stylistic effect, against the normal collocative word, “jump”) in the day, there must be something amiss. The sense of the proverb is that there is a cause for anything strange that happens; there must be a reason, at least “no smoke without fire”. A toad running in daytime is probably pursuing something or certainly something is pursuing it. It has to do with the “cause-effect” relationship.
6. An old woman is always uneasy when dry bones are mentioned in a proverb.p.15
Theory: Stimulus – Response
Types: Denotative/Thematic
Analysis: This proverb also exhibits “causes-effect” relationship as it thematises the old woman. It means that people who have negative features feel disturbed when such features are being highlighted. There is the effect or response of uneasiness with reference to the dry bones because an old woman whose dry bones are signs of impending death is always scared of death. The sense of the proverb, essentially, is that conscience worries people of negative attributes even when they are not addressed but their excesses (so to say) are being condemned.
7. The lizard that jumped from the high Iroko tree to the ground said he would praise himself if no one else did. p.16.
Theory: Referential
Types: Denotative/Connotative
Analysis: The proverb elicits the self-contentment and joy of good work. A good work, we can infer, is itself commendable whether people appreciate it or not. Reference is made to the lizard which nods after any activity it engages in, implicating its self-praise. The animal is personified for poetic effect. The English equivalent of “if you don’t blow your trumpet, nobody will blow it for you” may further illustrate the sense of the proverb – that if you do not appreciate your worth and dignify yourself, people may not bother to do it for you.
8. Eneke the bird says since men have learnt to shoot without missing, he has learnt to fly without perching. p.16.
Theory: Referential
Types: Denotative/Connotative
Analysis: Like the previous proverb, this proverb derives its message from folklore, in which human attributes are given to animals/non-human creatures. The meaning is both literal and figurative as well as multi-dimensional in scope. Changing situations give birth to innovations. If students, for example, develop novel means of cheating in the examinations, referentially, the authorities also devise ipso facto, new strategies of apprehending or detecting the cheats.
9. When a man says yes, his Chi says yes also. p. 19
Theory: Ideational
Types: Denotative/Connotative.
Analysis: The proverb aptly sums up the essence of determination and strong will, within one’s psychological context. Reference to chi, a person’s personal god in Igbo culture, is of connotative import. The message interpreted is that man must always take decisive decisions for himself and resolve to do whatever he tasks himself to do for that will always be the will of his supposed “god”. A possible English equivalent is that “heavens help those who help themselves”, and as such, man should always be responsible for all his actions.
10. A chick that will grow into a cock can be spotted the very day it hatches. p.46
Theory: Realist
Types: Denotative/Connotative.
Analysis: The proverb explores the logical sequence of things/ phenomena: that a general analysis can be made from specific traits. In the real world, from the initial stage, from countenance and appearance, one is able to identify the good, the bad and the ugly. The reference to the chick in our psyche is illustrative: the chick that will not live long will probably look frail and sickly, right from the day it is hatched. Our actions, at particular times, are indices of our character, the proverb tells us.
11. A child’s finger is not scalded by a piece of hot yam which its mother puts into its palm. p.47
Theory: Contextual
Types: Denotive/Collocative
Analysis: Given the contextual/pragmatic knowledge of a mother’s love for her child especially in the Nigerian cultures, it is implied that whatever she does, even if such superficially appears harmful, will be of benefit to the child. This is because it is presupposed that nobody loves a child better than his/her mother. Thus, the sense of the proverb, which for effect parades “child/mother”, “finger/palm”, “a piece of hot yam” etc collocates, is that love bears no harm. If there is love, there is no need for reservation in taking a beloved’s piece of advice, whether one considers it good or not, because a beloved person will not recommend a harmful antidote for whom he loves.
12 If one finger brought oil, it soiled the others. p.87.
Theory: Ideational
Types: Denotative/Connotative/Stylistic
Analysis: The proverb underlines the concept of collective responsibility: what one does implicates the involvement of the others. With tact reference to our knowledge or ideas of the world, if a finger is dipped into the oil, other fingers get smeared alongside since they are together. In other words, a shameful act by a person brings shame, odium and opprobrium to him and by extension, to his family and community. Stylistic considerations impinge on the choice of “brought” and “soiled” from the existing alternatives – which could further communicate the same idea.
13. A child cannot pay for its mother’s milk. p.117
Theory: Realist
Types: Connotative/Collocative.
Analysis: This proverb anchors an axiomatic fact: certain things are unquantifiable or priceless. No matter how much the child gives the mother later in life, such is not worth her milk, given the child at infancy. By extension, kindness, love (and such virtues) cannot be fully reciprocated, as they are inestimably valuable. Collocates like “child, mother, milk” enhance the sense of the meaning.
14. An animal rubs its aching flank against a tree, a man asks his kinsman to scratch him p.117.
Theory: Realist/Stimulus-Response
Types: Connotative/Stylistic.
Analysis: By drawing our attention to the real world of human-animal behavioural patterns, the proverb draws a line between a human being and an animal. The proverb is suggestive of the social nature of man, and the fact that “no man is an Island”. The proverb suggests that it is love that distinguishes men from animals. People who do not seek their fellow human beings’ help when in danger or difficulty are therefore animalistic. Marked word patterns like “aching”, “flank”, “kinsman”, “rubs”, “scratch”, that one would ordinarily prefer other words for, are used for stylistic purposes, engendering the connotative, figurative sense.
15. Living fire begets cold, impotent ash.p.118
Theory: Ideational
Types: Connotative/Stylistic
Analysis: The sense engendered by this epigrammatic statement is the vanity of arrogance. By creating the image/idea of fire in our mind, we are implicitly told that fire flares up in pride but its consequence is cold, impotent ash. The connotative meanings of “cold” and “impotent” are quite essential and their stylistic association with ash lends credence to the force of the meaning. Both fire and “ash” conjure in us human qualities – the fire gives birth to a cold and impotent child in ash. The sense of the proverb or its message is that people should be good and level-headed when they are opportune (to be in a position) or alive; for, when they lose such position and die, they become useless and unwanted – subsequently becoming objects of public disdain.
Group Two Data
From The Gods Are Not To Blame
16. The struggles of man begin at birth. p.1
Theory: Realist
Types: Denotative/Connotative
Analysis: This is an epigram, implicating the centrality of struggle in man’s life. Right from his first breath at birth, the proverb entails, a child struggles to live and become a (successful) man till he dies, with everyday posing its own challenges. The connotative sense derives from its being metaphorical. It is in the realm of philosophy (i.e Realist Theory) that it will be appropriately understood that not only adults struggle, a day-old baby also battles to survive.
17. The world is struggle. p.6
Theory: Realist
Types: Connotative/Stylistic
Analysis: Just like the previous proverb, this proverb in metaphoric sense equates the world with struggle. In any struggle, it takes the fittest to survive. Man should therefore be prepared, the proverb entails, to face the struggle of the world so as to be victorious in the end. The pithiness of the proverb is of stylistic import.
18. He who pelts another with pebbles asks for rocks in return p.7
Theory: Ideational
Types: Denotative/Collocative
Analysis: This proverb communicates a moral message, more compelling than the English equivalent “he who lives in a glass house should throw no stones”. Not only will an evil deed done be retaliated, the retaliation will be more devastating than the destruction wrought by the provocation. The proverb entails, with stylistic and collocative imports of such words like “pelt/pebbles”, “rocks/return”, that one should abstain from evil deeds so that one will not be checkmated by more severe evils – as deterrents– than the ones actually done. The “cause-effect” concept is also engendered here.
19. Sickness is like rain, does the rain fall on one roof alone? p.10.
Theory: Realist
Types: Denotative/Connotative
Analysis: This proverb rhetorically emphasises the universality of ill-health: it is among the phenomena that go round. At the denotative level, it is further interpretable to mean that given the low level of medical knowledge in traditional cultures like Yoruba, all sicknesses are assumed to be contagious. When the sick is not treated, others quickly contract the sickness or disease, like the rain that falls on the roofs of everybody. In essence, as rain does not discriminate, sickness also visits all people. The tragedy that befalls one group, we infer, will soon befall the other group –thus, no people should exult because of other people’s misfortunes.
20. It is sickness that man can cure, not death. p.12.
Theory: Realist
Types: Denotative/Thematic
Analysis: This is a philosophical, empirical truth, portraying the limitation of man’s power or ability. The meaning is lucid: man cannot cure death, even though he can cure diseases. The proverb entails resignation and surrender to what is inevitable. There is no need lamenting what is beyond one’s power; sickness that man can prevent is thus thematised.
21. To get full cured, one needs patience. p.14.
Theory: Realist
Types: Denotative/Thematic
Analysis: This is another philosophical truth. As all things, including cure for a disease – which is emphasised as a result of the universality of affliction, discomfort, sadness in one way of the other – need time to mature or secure, there is need for patience. The proverb is an indirect advice as we infer that cure or solution to all problems lies in exercising patience. “Time” it is said “is the greatest anesthesia”. According to Adedimeji (1999:9)” ---- for, whatever we feel, ---- Time turns. Time treats. Time thrills”.
22. The moon moves slowly but by daybreak, it crosses the sky. p.14.
Theory: Ideational
Types: Denotative/Connotative
Analysis: The crux of the proverb, just like the previous one, is the message of patience. The idea of the slowly-moving moon is referenced. The English equivalent could be “slow and steady wins the race”. With patience, the vast sky is “crossed” by daybreak. The moral message of patience is preached indirectly. The reference to the moon further elucidates the meaning and distills the sense deeper.
23. The secrets of a home should be known first to the head of the house p.19
Theory: Contextual
Types: Denotative/Connotative
Analysis: The proverb states the principle of administration within the family context. Information is implicitly suggested as a social function, which should be disseminated along the vertical axis. The message is that the leader or head of a household (i.e the husband) should be the first recipient of sensitive information of the home, for if such information is diffused to all and sundry, it may wreck havoc on the whole family. While home connotes “family”, “head” connotes “husband” since in the Yoruba culture, like other cultures, the husband is the leader of the family unit. Information management, we infer, is crucial even at the family level or context.
24. A cooking pot for the chameleon is a cooking pot for the lizard! p.19
Theory: Ideational
Types: Denotative/Affective
Analysis: This proverb relates by contrast to datum 4. The idea created by reference to two reptiles (chameleon and lizard) is symbolic of what befalls people of similar traits. Given the understanding of the Yoruba tradition wherein such animals are burnt and subsequently used for charms, it is inferred that one should not rejoice in the misfortune of the other as what befalls the former will soon befall the latter. The affective interpretation is determined by the exclamatory mark which could mean the speaker’s attitude to warn, denounce, scorn or emphasise. After all, “what is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander”, the cooking-pot that terminates the life of the chameleon will soon serve as the grave of the lizard too, we are told. So, what is good is good and what is bad is bad for both animals or any two individuals.
25. The horns cannot be too heavy for the head of the cow that must bear them.20
Theory: Realist
Types: Denotative/Collocative
Analysis: The proverb alludes to the horns which the cow still copes with. A philosophical/analytic proverb, it means that nature takes care of itself and providence does not burden man beyond the realm of his capacity. In other words, people of responsibilities should know how to cope with their tight schedules without fuss or complaint. The collocative importance of “horns/cow”, “heavy/head” further lends credence to the successful decoding the meaning. No situation life is unmanageable.
26. We have left our pot unwatched and our food burns. p. 21
Theory: Referential/Ideational
Types: Denotative/Connotative
Analysis: The sense of the proverb lies in lamentation occasioned by avoidable neglect. Reference is made to the pot of food, put on fire, which burns as a result of negligence. The “cause – effect” relationship is discernible at the ideational level – neglect leads to loss. The proverb entails that to keep what one has in its pure/real form, one should always “watch” or mind it, lest it is destroyed.
27. Until the rotten tooth is pulled out, the mouth must chew with caution. p.21
Theory: Referential/Realist
Types: Denotative/Collocative
Analysis: This proverb also presents a general knowledge in a philosophical garb, related to the one in datum 12 above. With collocates like “rotten/tooth” and “mouth/chew”, the proverb evokes the sense that as long as bad influences or people remain, as few as they may be, they will still constitute a hindrance to the healthy growth or development of the society. With the rotten tooth in place, the whole mouth is rendered handicapped and whenever it eats, it must be with extreme caution. In the real world, it is a practicable truism.
28 When crocodiles eat their own eggs, what will they not do to the flesh of a frog? p.24
Theory: Referential/Realist
Types: Denotative/Connotative
Analysis: The proverb points to a real fact and the underlying message is that of not being bothered by the antics of the compulsively wicked. We are rhetorically questioned that if crocodiles devour their own eggs, given the knowledge of how precious other animals keep their own eggs/off-springs, should it then surprise us if other smaller animals fall their prey? In other words, the wickedness of the wicked is often suffered by his own immediate relations before the outsiders: a person who harms himself should be excused when he harms others – he is probably insane!
29. Is it not ignorance that makes the rat attack the cat? p.28.
Theory: Referential/Realist
Types: Denotative/Collocative
Analysis: With reference to our understanding of the two animals, rat and cat, our knowledge of the world makes us agree with the force of the rhetorical proverb. It is ignorance that would make a person attack a more formidable enemy for such will be tantamount to his summary execution or punishment. The inference made is that a wise person will always avoid having any direct encounter with his powerful adversary so that the latter does not liquidate him. The reference to, and the stylo-collocative import of, “cat/rat” strengthen the sense of the proverb.
30. Take your time, child, if you rise too early, the dew of life will soak you! p.35.
Theory: Realist/Contextual
Types: Affective/Thematic
Analysis: Our last proverb is a didactic one addressed to the child. In the Yoruba culture where age is often considered a major determinant justifying or disqualifying one’s attainment, the context of the proverb is revealing. The meaning evoked is that a young person should not be too ambitious to acquire all that the elderly ones have acquired. If he is, the resultant effect is that he will be, in metaphoric sense, soaked by the dew of rising early. In other words, he will be submerged by his achievements to such extent that his lack of experience (which only comes through age) will culminate in his losing his life or achievements. The instructive theme situates the proverb within the context of advice, passed from the old to the young.
CLASSIFICATION AND APPRAISAL OF RESEARCH RESULT
As far as present writer is aware, a proper classification of proverbs is yet to emerge. The scanty scholarly works available on proverbs focus on functions, forms and the nuances of translation to the L2’s majorly English and French. The present study [(cf. Bamgbose (1968) and Ajiboye (1984) for instance, cited in Alabi (2000) and Lawal et al. (1997)] attempts to fill this vacuum. Our analysis reveals that all African proverbs, as Nigerian proverbs constitute just a microcosm of the vast pool of African proverbs, can be grouped into four major types. These are rhetorical, epistemological, didactic and philosophical/analytic proverbs. The relationship between one classification and the other(s), just like our analysis of theories and types of meaning, is not always mutually exclusive. Instances of overlaps, characteristic of language studies, often occur. For instance, an analytic proverb may also serve rhetorical and didactic function, while epistemological proverbs also serve philosophical/analytic and didactic purposes. A brief discussion of this classification or typology is as follows:
Rhetorical Proverbs: Rhetorics, according to the Aristotelian definition reformulated by George Campbell is “the faculty of discovering all the available means of persuasion” (cited in Ajadi, 1997:206). It is concerned with using language in an impressive way, especially to influence people to take a step or act in a particular manner. Rhetorical proverbs are thus those pithy sayings that are geared towards persuading or influencing people to do certain things. Proverbs such as those of data 2,3,9,16,17,21 and 30 belong to this category, including those that are captioned as rhetorical questions as we have in data 19,28 and 29. They are meant to encourage, motivate and advise people with the aim of making them adopt a world-view or act in a specific manner.
Epistemological Proverbs: These are proverbs whose origins lie in history, stories, folklore, myths, legends and other oral traditional sources. They tell a story or narrate an incident at a glance. Some epistemological proverbs require commentaries for their meanings and imports to be understood. Belonging to this category are proverbs 7,8,9,24 and 28.
Didactic proverbs: These are proverbs that teach moral lessons. They are meant to instill some moral training or discipline in the hearers, especially the children, by exhibiting virtues and extolling them and identifying vices as well as condemning them. They are teaching proverbs. Examples of these include those of data 2, 4, 12, 13, 18, 21, 22, 29 and 30. Many Nigerian proverbs, just like folk stories, serve didactic purposes.
Philosophical/Analytic proverbs: These are proverbs that are rooted in the study of the cosmos, the universe and knowledge of the world. They portray self-evident truths – observable, discernible, empirical and philosophical – that are often used as a “veritable horse by which words are conveyed” (Alabi, 2000:215) and for emphasizing words. They could serve didactic purposes too. In essence, philosophical/analytic proverbs accentuate communication through a close observation of, and allusion to, natural phenomena. Examples here include data 1, 3, 5, 6, 10, 11, 14, 15, 19 20, 22, 23, 25, 26, 27 and 28.
A wholistic appraisal of the findings above reveals that Nigerians are majorly philosophers and thinkers whose intellectual/cultural erudition manifests in the reality of their proverbs. The preponderance of philosophical/analytic proverbs which are largely situated within the realistic theory of Plato and Aristotle further justifies the fact that the Nigerian cultures and languages are rich in profound meanings – which are sourced from deep thought and scientific observation. In simple terms, most proverbs are philosophical in nature because they engage our mental faculty to examine and appreciate what exists but that we hardly take note of.
Proverbs that are situated within the framework of referential and ideational theories constitute the average as our rhetorical and didactic proverbs clearly show. This is quite normal because their chief meaning equivalents are the most basic types of meaning (i.e denotation and connotation – both of which can be taken to subsume the remaining types of meaning). It is thus basic in Nigerian cultures to make references to physical objects implicitly or explicitly as a way of further “affecting or effecting desirable action” (Lawal et al, 1997:650).
The low frequency of stimulus-response and contextual theories is also normal because the two – one behavioural the other pragmatic – fall within the mutual contextual beliefs or MCBs which are not located in the “surface structure” of proverbs (Lawal et al. 1997:650-651). In other words, the two constitute the “corresponding contexts of use” (Ibid, 650) which the language user in Nigeria naturally deploys to really appreciate the proverbs. It is the blend of the two that pragmatically underlines the effective use of the proverbs. Such theories would be of more relevance while considering cultures outside the L1 contexts languages/proverbs are culture-bound.
Table of Proverbs and Types
Proverbs Examples
Rhetorical Proverbs
2, 3, 9, 16, 17, 21, 3 and 19, 28, 30
Epistemological Proverbs
7, 8, 9, 24, 28
Philosophical/Analytic Proverbs
1, 3, 5, 6, 10, 11 14, 15 19, 20, 22, 23, 25, 26 27, 28
Didactic Proverbs
2, 4, 12, 13, 18, 21, 22, 29, 30
CONCLUSION
In Nigeria, not just “among the Ibo, the art of conversation is regarded very highly and proverbs are the palm-oil with which words are eaten” (Achebe, 1975:5). [cf. Rotimi’s (1979:35) question that “what is the matter, fellow, aren’t you a Yoruba man? Must proverbs be explained to you after they are said?”] As a result of this sheer fact, Nigerian authors like Achebe and Rotimi focused here, find it desirable and unavoidable to deploy the highly rated proverbs to the articulation of their thematic concerns. The richness of the Nigerian languages and the discoursal erudition of elders (who use proverbs most) are not diminished by the fact that the authors write in English. The Nigerianness of the expressions cast in English makes their works appealing, culturally-oriented and traditionally invaluable. Various types of proverbs serve the function of clarification, explanation, instruction, persuasion, moral lesson and emphasis in their use as foregrounded above, with their intellectual, emotional and imaginative undertones.
As the semantic discipline just, like pragmatics, in the words of Chase [as cited in Crystal (1997:397)], is mainly meant “to blow ghosts out of the picture and create a new picture as close to reality as one can get,” its theoretic framework has largely been used to “blow the ghosts out of” the meanings of the Nigerian proverbs studied here. The paper identifies semantic theories, meaning types and proverb types and functions through data presentation and analysis. It showcases how powerful ideas, illustrative references, and realistic messages are distilled through the use of proverbs in Nigeria. This study is an attempt to emphasise that communication matters a lot and that effective communication in Nigeria requires a good mastery of proverbial elements, which convey more meaning and achieve more results in the hearers’ sensibilities than ordinary everyday expressions. The dynamism of Nigerian languages, their cultural virility and linguistic potency, are underscored by showing through proverbs “how meaning is conveyed by L2”, according to Babatunde (1995:4), “within the mediating role of the first language”.
APPENDIX
Other proverbs from Things Fall Apart (1-8) and The Gods Are Not To Blame (9-52) which could be subjected to further analysis are as follows:
What do the proverbs mean? What types of proverbs are they?
1. Looking a King’s mouth, one would think he never suckled at his mother’s breast p.19.
2. A bowl of pounded yam can throw him in a wresting match. p.16.
3. As the dog said, “if I fall down for you and you fall down for me, it is play”.
4. A man who makes trouble for others is also making it for himself (said the Tortoise). p. 68.
5. If a man comes into my hut and defecates on the floor, what do I do? Do I shut my eyes? No! I take a stick and break his head. That is what a man does. p.113
6. We do not ask for wealth because he that has health and children will also have wealth. We do not pray to have money but to have more kinsmen. p.117.
7. The clan was like a lizard, if it lost its tail, it soon grew another p. 121.
8. He has put a knife on the things that held us together and we have fallen apart. p.125.
9. Not to do something is to be crippled fast. p. 6.
10. To lie down resigned to fate is madness. p. 6.
11. It is not changing into the lion that is hard, it is getting the tail of a lion. p. 7.
12. But joy has a slender body that breaks too soon. p.8.
13. When the head of a household dies, the house becomes an empty shell. p. 9.
14. When the chameleon brings forth a child, is not that child expected to dance? p. 9.
15. When rain falls on the leopard, does it wash off its spots. p.9.
16. How long must feverish birds trouble in silence before their keeper? p. 10.
17. Only a madman would go to sleep with his roof on fire. p.11.
18. The ruin of a land and its people begins in their homes. p.13.
19. The monkey learns to jump from tree to tree without failing. Keep on trying. p. 14.
20. Life is a struggle. p. 15.
21. Your words sound like fresh wine, so full of sweetness but lacking substance. p.19.
22. When trees fall on trees, first, the topmost must be removed. p.22.
23. When the frog in front falls in a pit, others behind take caution. p. 23.
24. All lizards lie prostrate: how can a man tell which lizard suffers from bellyache? p. 23.
25. A chicken eats corn, drinks water, swallows pebbles, yet she complains of having no teeth. If she adds teeth, would see eat the gold? p. 26.
26. When the elders we esteem so highly can sell their honor for devil’s money, then let pigs eat shame and men eat dung. p. 27.
27. He who drums for a sick man is himself a sick man. p. 28.
28. When the evil plotter beats his drum for the downfall of the innocent, the gods will not let that drum sound! p. 30.
29. The hyena flirts with the hen, the hen is happy, not knowing that her death has come. p. 30.
30. If you think like a tortoise, you can plot against me without my cutting you down first with my own tortoise tricks, then, fellow, madness is in your liver. p. 32.
31. If you think that you can uproot a tree that has been planted by the gods… hmm… my brother… (Gestures at his head to imply madness in the other’s). p. 32.
32. Your highness, if you think to have heavy suspicions is wisdom, then your head is not well. p.32.
33. You are a tortoise, a coward, a conniving slippery maggot! p.33.
34. Two rams cannot drink from the same bucket at the same time! p. 34.
35. The lion’s liver is vain wish for dogs. p. 37.
36. Meat that has fat will prove it by the heat of fire! p. 37.
37. An eagle does not go to the market-place unless there is something there. p. 37.
38. What is the difference between the right ear of a horse and the left ear of that same horse? Nothing. p.38.
39. The tortoise is not tall but is taller than the snail; the snail is taller than the frog; the frog is taller than the lizard; the lizard is taller than the fly; the fly is taller than the ant; the ant is turn is taller than the ground on which it walks. Everything has its own place, its own level, its standing. p.38.
40. The touch of palm oil is cool to the body. Cool me. p. 39.
41. Because the farm owner is slow to catch the thief, the thief calls the farm-owner thief! p. 46.
42. The monkey and gorilla may claim oneness but the monkey is Monkey and the gorilla, Gorilla. p. 51.
43. The mangrove tree dwells in the river, but does that make it a crocodile? p. 51.
44. Can the cockroach be innocent in a gathering of fowls? p. 53.
45. You all love me. We are all close friends. [Sneering]. Like he-goats and cocoyam! p. 53.
46. The butterfly thinks himself a bird. p. 59.
47. It is what is in the heart when there is no wine in the head, that comes out when there is wine in the head. p. 60.
48. A bush does not sway this way or that way unless there is wind.
p. 60.
49. The snail may try, but it cannot cast off its shell. p. 60.
50. The toad likes water, but not when the water is boiling. p. 60.
51. Secrets of the owl must not be known in daylight. p. 62.
52. When the wood-insect gathers sticks, on its own head it carries them. p. 72.
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Babatunde, S.T. 1995. “An Introduction to Meaning in English as a Second Language”. Unpublished Manuscript. Dept of M.E.L., Unilorin.
Babatubde, S.T. 1999. “Towards Defining the Scope of Meaning in ESL in Nigeria” in Adegbija, E. (Ed.) The English Language and Literature in English. Ilorin: Dept of M.E.L., Unilorin. pp. 70-80.
Crystal, D. 1997. The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Goddard, C. 1998. Semantic Analysis. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Lawal, R.A. 1997. “Semiotic Perspectives on the Place of Linguistic Competence in a Theory of Literary Competence” in Lawal, A (ed.) Stylistics in Theory and Practice. Ilorin: Paragon Books. pp. 11 – 24.
Lawal, R.A. et al. 1997. “A Pragmatic Study of Selected Pairs of Yoruba Proverbs”. Journal of Pragmatics 27. pp. 635 – 652.
Leech, G.N. 1974. Semantics. England: Penguin Books.
Odebunmi, A. 2001. The English Word and Meaning. Ogbomoso: Critical Sphere.
Ogunsiji, A. 2000. “Introductory Semantics” in Babajide, A.O. (Ed.) Studies in English Language. Ibadan: Enicrownfit Publishers. pp.43 – 59.
Oyeshile, O.A. 2000. “Philosophy and Language: the Nature of the Philosopher’s Interest in Language” in Babajide, A.O. (Ed.) Studies in English Language. Ibadan: Enicrownfit Publishers. pp. 168 – 181.
The Oxford English Dictionary. 1982. 2nd ed. Vol. XII. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Webster’s New Universal Unabridged Dictionary. 1972. Deluxe/2nd ed. New York: Dorst and Baber.
Yule, G. 1996a. A Study of Language. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Yule, G. 1996b. Pragmatics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
African Proverbs PSA
Proverbs are an very important part of African oral culture, and therefore prominent in Things Fall Apart. Here are few sample proverbs and some questions. Proverbs are the glue that binds the whole book together, and their significance often spreads above and beyond their original context.
- p. 19. "A man who pays respect to the great paves the way for his own greatness." Okonkwo explaining why he has come to Nwakibie. How does this sound in retrospect to Okonkwo's downfall? - p. 21. "An old woman is always uneasy when dry bones are mentioned in a proverb." Okonkwo remembering his own father. In context of a joke about someone who refused to honor his fathers shrine with a fowl. Is there any fear in Okonkwo? Does he ignore his own proverbs? - p. 21. "The lizard that jumped from the high iroko tree to the ground said he would praise himself if no one else did." – Okonkwo, explaining his capacity for hard work before Nwakibie, his sons and neighbors. What is the role of honor and praise in this novel? Is this a good or bad feature of a culture? - p. 26. "Those whose palm-kernels were cracked for them by a benevolent spirit should not forget to be humble." - Okonkwo's arrogance in calling Osugo a "woman" at the meeting of the people. Is Okonkwo himself humble? Who is the most humble character in the book? What relationship does humble have with femininity and death? - p.67. "The Earth cannot punish me for obeying her messenger." "A child’s fingers are not scalded by a piece of hot yam which its mother puts into its palm. Okonkwo's role in Ikemefuna’s death. What role does guilt and punishment play in this story? Can you relate this to Okonkwo's later crimes also?
- p. 125. "As the elders said, if one finger brought oil it soiled the others." Obierika’s mourning over Okonkwo's exile, but his rationale that one could not ignore offenses against the earth. How does this relate to Okonkwo's own family situation? To Africa and Europe as a whole? - p. 151. "Living fire begets cold, impotent ash." Okonkwo's analysis of the conversion of his "degenerate and effeminate" son, Nwoye. In final analysis, is there any irony in this quote? What does this say about Ibo civilization? - p. 185. "A man danced so the drums were beaten for him." Rev. Smith’s intransigence and hostility towards anything traditional. What does this say about cause and effect? Who is the cause or effect of the story - Okonkwo or the colonizers? - p. 203. "Whenever you see a toad jumping in broad daylight, then you know that something is after its life." Said at the meeting of Umuohia after the imprisonment of the six elders. Who is doing the metaphorical jumping in this quote? - p. 204. "Eneke the bird was asked why he was always on the wing and he replied: "Men have learned to shoot without missing their mark and I have learned to fly without perching on a twig." How does this relate ot Okonkwo's life? Is there any problematic assumptions in this proverb?
Genres and Genre Transformation
Genre
The study of literary genre, or any genre for that matter, is not an exact science. Some works blend the elements of many genres, and any single work can fall into several genres: Romeo and Juliet is a drama, a tragedy, an Elizabethan play etc. So the notion of genre, as with any artistic interpretation, is open to discussion; each work may possess characteristics of which the author or artist is not even aware. Because of the interpretive nature of literary genre, there is no complete and final list available (though a good list of literary genres is available at Wikipedia). Nonetheless, in the state of Illinois where I teach, students are frequently evaluated on their ability to identify the genre of a text on state assessments. So it is important for me to provide students with the necessary training to consistently identify the literary genre of a text. The best way that I have found to do this is as follows:
1. Teach Main Genres and Sub-Genres: Students must understand that one work may fall into several categories, thus they must learn what are considered the main genres of writing- fiction, nonfiction, poetry, drama, and folklore. Though folklore is actually a sub-genre of fiction, I teach it as a main genre because it is so thoroughly tested in Illinois that it requires a subdivision from the genre of fiction. Students must also learn the subgenres of each main genre. Some of the subgenre terms that we study, like fantasy and realistic fiction, will not appear on the ISAT as defined by the assessment frameworks glossary, but we study them any way as those terms are required for practical application of this skill. Admittedly, my focus on the genres of poetry and drama could be expanded, but as these subgenres do not appear on our state test, our study of them is less than thorough.
Genre Worksheets Genre Worksheet - Read the descriptions of the texts. Look for details that reveal the genre. Write the genre and subgenre on the lines and write a sentence explaining your answer.
Genre Worksheet RTF
Genre Worksheet PDF
Preview Genre Worksheet in Your Web Browser
Genre Worksheet 2 - Choose the genre and subgenre in which the story most likely belongs. Then explain how you got your answer.
Genre Worksheet 2 RTF
Genre Worksheet 2 PDF
Preview Genre Worksheet 2 in Your Web Browser
Genre and Author’s Purpose Worksheet - Read the descriptions of the texts and determine the genre and subgenre. Then write a sentence explaining your answer. You will also identify the author’s purpose.
Genre and Author’s Purpose Worksheet RTF
Genre and Author’s Purpose Worksheet PDF
Preview Genre and Author’s Purpose Worksheet in Your Web Browser
Identifying Genre Worksheet - Read the titles and descriptions of the stories. Identify the genre and subgenre using the word bank. Some items may repeat.
Identifying Genre Worksheet RTF
Identifying Genre Worksheet PDF
Preview Identifying Genre Worksheet in Your Web Browser
Genre Activities Genre Lesson - Slide show lesson on genre and subgenre. Includes a review activity after the lesson.
Genre Lesson PowerPoint
Preview Genre Lesson in Your Web Browser
Create A Genre Crossword Puzzle - Create a crossword puzzle with clues for the following 20 genre related terms. File includes directions, rubric, crossword grid and clue sheet.
Create A Genre Crossword Puzzle RTF
Create A Genre Crossword Puzzle PDF
Preview Create A Genre Crossword Puzzle in Your Web Browser
Genre Newspaper Project – Create a newspaper with eight articles written in different genres and subgenres: nonfiction, historical fiction, science fiction, realistic fiction, poetry, fairytale, fable, tall tale, myth, drama, biography, autobiography, and informational writing.
Genre Newspaper Project RTF
Genre Newspaper Project PDF
Preview Genre Newspaper Project in Your Web Browser
Genre Review - Students examine books in small groups and discuss the genre and subgenres of each text. After coming to a consensus, students write their answers down on this sheet. You provide your own texts.
Genre Review RTF
Genre Review PDF
Preview Genre Review in Your Web Browser
Genre Movie Posters - Students will create three movie posters. Each poster will feature a movie from a different subgenre. They can be real movies or imagined, but each must include the following:
Genre Movie Posters RTF
Genre Movie Posters PDF
Preview Genre Movie Posters in Your Web Browser
Genre Quiz - Match the definitions to the terms and answer multiple choice questions. Available in two different test forms to help you prevent student cheating.
Genre Quiz Form A – RTF
Genre Quiz Form B – RTF
Genre Quiz Form A – PDF
Genre Quiz Form B – PDF
Preview Genre Quiz Form A in Your Web Browser
Preview Genre Quiz Form B in Your Web Browser
Genre Practice 1 - A warm-up PowerPoint review where students identify the genre and subgenre of 5 stories.
Genre Practice 1 PowerPoint
Preview Genre Practice 1 in Your Web Browser
Genre Practice 2 - PowerPoint warm up review where students identify the genre and subgenre of 5 stories.
Genre Practice 2 PowerPoint
Preview Genre Practice 2 in Your Web Browser
Looking For More Reading Worksheets?
Point of View Worksheets
Story Structure Worksheets
All Reading Worksheets
The study of literary genre, or any genre for that matter, is not an exact science. Some works blend the elements of many genres, and any single work can fall into several genres: Romeo and Juliet is a drama, a tragedy, an Elizabethan play etc. So the notion of genre, as with any artistic interpretation, is open to discussion; each work may possess characteristics of which the author or artist is not even aware. Because of the interpretive nature of literary genre, there is no complete and final list available (though a good list of literary genres is available at Wikipedia). Nonetheless, in the state of Illinois where I teach, students are frequently evaluated on their ability to identify the genre of a text on state assessments. So it is important for me to provide students with the necessary training to consistently identify the literary genre of a text. The best way that I have found to do this is as follows:
1. Teach Main Genres and Sub-Genres: Students must understand that one work may fall into several categories, thus they must learn what are considered the main genres of writing- fiction, nonfiction, poetry, drama, and folklore. Though folklore is actually a sub-genre of fiction, I teach it as a main genre because it is so thoroughly tested in Illinois that it requires a subdivision from the genre of fiction. Students must also learn the subgenres of each main genre. Some of the subgenre terms that we study, like fantasy and realistic fiction, will not appear on the ISAT as defined by the assessment frameworks glossary, but we study them any way as those terms are required for practical application of this skill. Admittedly, my focus on the genres of poetry and drama could be expanded, but as these subgenres do not appear on our state test, our study of them is less than thorough.
- Fiction: writing that is a product of the imagination.
- Historical Fiction: based on or around a person or event from history.
- Science Fiction: dealing with aliens, the future, or advanced technology.
- Fantasy: containing monsters, magic, or other supernatural elements.
- Realistic Fiction: a story that could have happened, but didn’t.
- Nonfiction: writing that is true or factual.
- Informational Writing: writing that provides information on a topic.
- Persuasive Writing: writing that attempts to influence the reader.
- Autobiography: the story of one’s life told by oneself.
- Biography: the story of someone’s life told by someone else.
- Drama: writing that appears as a play or script.
- Comedy: has a happy ending.
- Tragedy: ends in death and sadness.
- Poetry: writing that is concerned with the beauty of language
- Folklore: stories that were handed down through the oral tradition.
- Fairy Tale: a story with magic, monsters, and/or talking animals.
- Fable: a very short story, usually with talking animals and has a moral.
- Myth: has gods or goddesses and often accounts for the creation of something.
- Legend: a story based on something that might have once been real, but has since become exaggerated beyond the realm of nonfiction.
- Tall Tale: stories usually set in the American frontier where the main character has exaggerated strengths, skills, or size. The tone of the author is humorous.
Genre Worksheets Genre Worksheet - Read the descriptions of the texts. Look for details that reveal the genre. Write the genre and subgenre on the lines and write a sentence explaining your answer.
Genre Worksheet RTF
Genre Worksheet PDF
Preview Genre Worksheet in Your Web Browser
Genre Worksheet 2 - Choose the genre and subgenre in which the story most likely belongs. Then explain how you got your answer.
Genre Worksheet 2 RTF
Genre Worksheet 2 PDF
Preview Genre Worksheet 2 in Your Web Browser
Genre and Author’s Purpose Worksheet - Read the descriptions of the texts and determine the genre and subgenre. Then write a sentence explaining your answer. You will also identify the author’s purpose.
Genre and Author’s Purpose Worksheet RTF
Genre and Author’s Purpose Worksheet PDF
Preview Genre and Author’s Purpose Worksheet in Your Web Browser
Identifying Genre Worksheet - Read the titles and descriptions of the stories. Identify the genre and subgenre using the word bank. Some items may repeat.
Identifying Genre Worksheet RTF
Identifying Genre Worksheet PDF
Preview Identifying Genre Worksheet in Your Web Browser
Genre Activities Genre Lesson - Slide show lesson on genre and subgenre. Includes a review activity after the lesson.
Genre Lesson PowerPoint
Preview Genre Lesson in Your Web Browser
Create A Genre Crossword Puzzle - Create a crossword puzzle with clues for the following 20 genre related terms. File includes directions, rubric, crossword grid and clue sheet.
Create A Genre Crossword Puzzle RTF
Create A Genre Crossword Puzzle PDF
Preview Create A Genre Crossword Puzzle in Your Web Browser
Genre Newspaper Project – Create a newspaper with eight articles written in different genres and subgenres: nonfiction, historical fiction, science fiction, realistic fiction, poetry, fairytale, fable, tall tale, myth, drama, biography, autobiography, and informational writing.
Genre Newspaper Project RTF
Genre Newspaper Project PDF
Preview Genre Newspaper Project in Your Web Browser
Genre Review - Students examine books in small groups and discuss the genre and subgenres of each text. After coming to a consensus, students write their answers down on this sheet. You provide your own texts.
Genre Review RTF
Genre Review PDF
Preview Genre Review in Your Web Browser
Genre Movie Posters - Students will create three movie posters. Each poster will feature a movie from a different subgenre. They can be real movies or imagined, but each must include the following:
Genre Movie Posters RTF
Genre Movie Posters PDF
Preview Genre Movie Posters in Your Web Browser
Genre Quiz - Match the definitions to the terms and answer multiple choice questions. Available in two different test forms to help you prevent student cheating.
Genre Quiz Form A – RTF
Genre Quiz Form B – RTF
Genre Quiz Form A – PDF
Genre Quiz Form B – PDF
Preview Genre Quiz Form A in Your Web Browser
Preview Genre Quiz Form B in Your Web Browser
Genre Practice 1 - A warm-up PowerPoint review where students identify the genre and subgenre of 5 stories.
Genre Practice 1 PowerPoint
Preview Genre Practice 1 in Your Web Browser
Genre Practice 2 - PowerPoint warm up review where students identify the genre and subgenre of 5 stories.
Genre Practice 2 PowerPoint
Preview Genre Practice 2 in Your Web Browser
Looking For More Reading Worksheets?
Point of View Worksheets
Story Structure Worksheets
All Reading Worksheets
Genre Transformation in Robert Frost
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 marked 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.
Robert Frost
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 marked 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.
Robert Frost
crossing_paths_text.pdf | |
File Size: | 161 kb |
File Type: |
Tonal Activity
What: Poetry Out Loud Poetry Recitation Contest
Where: Tallwood High School… and beyond!
Why: POL was created in 2006 by the National Endowment for the Arts and The Poetry Foundation to increase awareness in the art of performing poetry, with substantial cash prizes being awarded to the winners and schools of the winners.
How: Choose a poem from the 600 poems on www.poetryoutloud.org. Learn about the poem, memorize the poem, and present it in class. One winner and one alternate from each class will be chosen to represent us at the THS Preliminaries (see dates below.) In an NDOW-type setting, the students in every English block will recite their poems, and two block winners will be chosen. These 16 students will advance to the THS Finals, where one Tallwood winner (and one alternate) will be chosen to represent THS at the Regional (and hopefully state, then national) Poetry Out Loud Competition! Will YOU be our Tallwood winner??
DETAILS:
All-Tallwood Preliminaries: Dec 7 &10 in Schola
(during English class blocks)
All-Tallwood Finals: Dec. 10 after school
Regional Finals: January 28, 2012 in Norfolk
State Finals: March 14, 2012 in Richmond
Nationals: April 28-30, 2013 in Washington D.C.
Winners:
1st Place $20,000
2nd Place$10,000
3rd Place: $5,000
Poetry Out Loud Details
Day 1
Introduction to POL assignment & contest
In-class: Run through contest features and website
HW: Select 5 Poems from website
Have selected poems available for practice in class.
Day 2
In-class: Partner work; present to table and offer advice and marking up of the text.
HW: Completely memorize and POLISH your poem!
Day 3
Presentations! Recite your poem to the class. Tweak with Tone Map Activity. Continue to work with a partner based upon the rubric.
FAQs
How do I choose a poem?
Poems are listed on the POL website. You can search by title, author, or year. There is a “random poem” button, and also an under-25-lines section. J Look up at least 10 and choose one that speaks to you! Ask people you know what their favorite poems are and look those up!
How is this graded?
In English class, you will receive a grade for your poetry recitation IN CLASS. We will be using the Poetry Out Loud rubric and accuracy chart.
Do I have to dress up?
Poetry Out Loud rules say that no costumes can be worn. However, it is always a good idea to look professional (at the very least, presentable) when you know you have to speak in front of a group. Most importantly, be comfortable. For the class representatives, it is a good idea to look your best.
What are some qualities of a strong recitation?
The competitor appears at ease and comfortable with the audience. He or she engages the audience through physical presence (including appropriate body language), confidence, and eye contact, without appearing artificial. All qualities of the contestants’ s physical presence work together to the benefit of the poem.
*If you are chosen as our class winner, know that if you advance, you must have 2 poems prepared by the Dec. 10th THS finals. The reason for this is in case of a tie for the block champion. (You only need to work on one poem now. If you are our class champion, by that time you will have lots of good ideas from your classmates!)
*If you are seriously considering pursuing POL and want to WIN, keep this in mind:
“At the state and national finals, students must have 3 poems prepared. One must be 25 lines or fewer, and 1 must be written before the 20th century. The same poem may be used to meet both criteria, and may be the student’s third poem.”
Total: ________ (maximum of 36 points)
Accuracy Judge’s Score: ________ (maximum of 8 points)
FINAL SCORE: ________ (maximum of 44 points)
Poetry Out Loud Social Context & Tone Activity: Day 2
Title of Poem: ________________________________________________________Year:________
Author: _________________________________________Birth/death date: ___________________
1. Autobiographical info about the author:
2. In what year and country was this poem written? What was going on in history there/then?
3. Who is the SPEAKER of the poem? (name, age, gender, social class, time period, view of world, etc.)
4. What TOPICS are addressed or mentioned in the poem?
5. What is the meaning of the TITLE?
6. What is the THEME or MESSAGE of this poem?
The Plan:
-Read Quietly the Poem, Read Quietly the Poem, Read Quietly the Poem-, Read Quietly the Poem, Read Quietly the Poem
-Highlight/Circle Tones from the Tone List below that are featured in the poem
-Mark the Tone Shifts in the Poem
-Label the Tones in the Poem (this is the Tone Map)
-Reread Poem with emphasis on the Tone Map
-Practice, using slight variations on the interpretations.
The Tone List (Be Sure to Look up any word you are unfamiliar with)
The Tone List
abashed
abrasive
abusive
acquiescent
accepting
acerbic
admiring
adoring
affectionate
aghast
allusive
amused
angry
anxious
apologetic
apprehensive
approving
arch
ardent
argumentative
audacious
awe-struck
bantering
begrudging
bemused
benevolent
biting
bitter
blithe
boastful
bored
brisk
bristling
brusque
calm
candid
caressing
caustic
cavalier
childish
child-like
clipped
cold
complimentary
condescending
confident
confused
coy
contemptuous
conversational
critical
curt
cutting
cynical
defamatory
denunciatory
despairing
detached
devil-may-care
didactic
disbelieving
discouraged
disdainful
disparaging
disrespectful
distracted
doubtful
dramatic
dreamy
dry
ecstatic
entranced
enthusiastic
eulogistic
exhilarated
exultant
facetious
fanciful
fearful
flippant
fond
forceful
frightened
frivolous
ghoulish
giddy
gleeful
glum
grim
guarded
guilty
happy
harsh
haughty
heavy-hearted
hollow
horrified
humorous
hypercritical
indifferent
indignant
indulgent
ironic
irreverent
joking
joyful
languorous
languid
laudatory
light-hearted
lingering
loving
marveling
melancholy
mistrustful
mocking
mysterious
naïve
neutral
nostalgic
objective
peaceful
pessimistic
pitiful
playful
poignant
pragmatic
proud
provocative
questioning
rallying
reflective
reminiscing
reproachful
resigned
respectful
restrained
reticent
reverent
rueful
sad
sarcastic
sardonic
satirical
satisfied
seductive
self-critical
self-dramatizing
self-justifying
self-mocking
self-pitying
self-satisfied
sentimental
serious
severe
sharp
shocked
silly
sly
smug
solemn
somber
stern
straightforward
stentorian
strident
stunned
subdued
swaggering
sweet
sympathetic
taunting
tense
thoughtful
threatening
tired
touchy
trenchant
uncertain
understated
upset
urgent
vexed
vibrant
wary
whimsical
withering
wry
zealous
Where: Tallwood High School… and beyond!
Why: POL was created in 2006 by the National Endowment for the Arts and The Poetry Foundation to increase awareness in the art of performing poetry, with substantial cash prizes being awarded to the winners and schools of the winners.
How: Choose a poem from the 600 poems on www.poetryoutloud.org. Learn about the poem, memorize the poem, and present it in class. One winner and one alternate from each class will be chosen to represent us at the THS Preliminaries (see dates below.) In an NDOW-type setting, the students in every English block will recite their poems, and two block winners will be chosen. These 16 students will advance to the THS Finals, where one Tallwood winner (and one alternate) will be chosen to represent THS at the Regional (and hopefully state, then national) Poetry Out Loud Competition! Will YOU be our Tallwood winner??
DETAILS:
All-Tallwood Preliminaries: Dec 7 &10 in Schola
(during English class blocks)
All-Tallwood Finals: Dec. 10 after school
Regional Finals: January 28, 2012 in Norfolk
State Finals: March 14, 2012 in Richmond
Nationals: April 28-30, 2013 in Washington D.C.
Winners:
1st Place $20,000
2nd Place$10,000
3rd Place: $5,000
Poetry Out Loud Details
Day 1
Introduction to POL assignment & contest
In-class: Run through contest features and website
HW: Select 5 Poems from website
Have selected poems available for practice in class.
Day 2
In-class: Partner work; present to table and offer advice and marking up of the text.
HW: Completely memorize and POLISH your poem!
Day 3
Presentations! Recite your poem to the class. Tweak with Tone Map Activity. Continue to work with a partner based upon the rubric.
FAQs
How do I choose a poem?
Poems are listed on the POL website. You can search by title, author, or year. There is a “random poem” button, and also an under-25-lines section. J Look up at least 10 and choose one that speaks to you! Ask people you know what their favorite poems are and look those up!
How is this graded?
In English class, you will receive a grade for your poetry recitation IN CLASS. We will be using the Poetry Out Loud rubric and accuracy chart.
Do I have to dress up?
Poetry Out Loud rules say that no costumes can be worn. However, it is always a good idea to look professional (at the very least, presentable) when you know you have to speak in front of a group. Most importantly, be comfortable. For the class representatives, it is a good idea to look your best.
What are some qualities of a strong recitation?
The competitor appears at ease and comfortable with the audience. He or she engages the audience through physical presence (including appropriate body language), confidence, and eye contact, without appearing artificial. All qualities of the contestants’ s physical presence work together to the benefit of the poem.
*If you are chosen as our class winner, know that if you advance, you must have 2 poems prepared by the Dec. 10th THS finals. The reason for this is in case of a tie for the block champion. (You only need to work on one poem now. If you are our class champion, by that time you will have lots of good ideas from your classmates!)
*If you are seriously considering pursuing POL and want to WIN, keep this in mind:
“At the state and national finals, students must have 3 poems prepared. One must be 25 lines or fewer, and 1 must be written before the 20th century. The same poem may be used to meet both criteria, and may be the student’s third poem.”
Total: ________ (maximum of 36 points)
Accuracy Judge’s Score: ________ (maximum of 8 points)
FINAL SCORE: ________ (maximum of 44 points)
Poetry Out Loud Social Context & Tone Activity: Day 2
Title of Poem: ________________________________________________________Year:________
Author: _________________________________________Birth/death date: ___________________
1. Autobiographical info about the author:
2. In what year and country was this poem written? What was going on in history there/then?
3. Who is the SPEAKER of the poem? (name, age, gender, social class, time period, view of world, etc.)
4. What TOPICS are addressed or mentioned in the poem?
5. What is the meaning of the TITLE?
6. What is the THEME or MESSAGE of this poem?
The Plan:
-Read Quietly the Poem, Read Quietly the Poem, Read Quietly the Poem-, Read Quietly the Poem, Read Quietly the Poem
-Highlight/Circle Tones from the Tone List below that are featured in the poem
-Mark the Tone Shifts in the Poem
-Label the Tones in the Poem (this is the Tone Map)
-Reread Poem with emphasis on the Tone Map
-Practice, using slight variations on the interpretations.
The Tone List (Be Sure to Look up any word you are unfamiliar with)
The Tone List
abashed
abrasive
abusive
acquiescent
accepting
acerbic
admiring
adoring
affectionate
aghast
allusive
amused
angry
anxious
apologetic
apprehensive
approving
arch
ardent
argumentative
audacious
awe-struck
bantering
begrudging
bemused
benevolent
biting
bitter
blithe
boastful
bored
brisk
bristling
brusque
calm
candid
caressing
caustic
cavalier
childish
child-like
clipped
cold
complimentary
condescending
confident
confused
coy
contemptuous
conversational
critical
curt
cutting
cynical
defamatory
denunciatory
despairing
detached
devil-may-care
didactic
disbelieving
discouraged
disdainful
disparaging
disrespectful
distracted
doubtful
dramatic
dreamy
dry
ecstatic
entranced
enthusiastic
eulogistic
exhilarated
exultant
facetious
fanciful
fearful
flippant
fond
forceful
frightened
frivolous
ghoulish
giddy
gleeful
glum
grim
guarded
guilty
happy
harsh
haughty
heavy-hearted
hollow
horrified
humorous
hypercritical
indifferent
indignant
indulgent
ironic
irreverent
joking
joyful
languorous
languid
laudatory
light-hearted
lingering
loving
marveling
melancholy
mistrustful
mocking
mysterious
naïve
neutral
nostalgic
objective
peaceful
pessimistic
pitiful
playful
poignant
pragmatic
proud
provocative
questioning
rallying
reflective
reminiscing
reproachful
resigned
respectful
restrained
reticent
reverent
rueful
sad
sarcastic
sardonic
satirical
satisfied
seductive
self-critical
self-dramatizing
self-justifying
self-mocking
self-pitying
self-satisfied
sentimental
serious
severe
sharp
shocked
silly
sly
smug
solemn
somber
stern
straightforward
stentorian
strident
stunned
subdued
swaggering
sweet
sympathetic
taunting
tense
thoughtful
threatening
tired
touchy
trenchant
uncertain
understated
upset
urgent
vexed
vibrant
wary
whimsical
withering
wry
zealous
Additiona Reading: The Road Travels Many Genres
Robert Frost & The New England Renaissance
by George Monteiro
Due to the brevity of this essay, no search tips nor PDF are provided.
A discussion of Frost's poem "The Road Not Taken," with references to Emerson, Dickinson, Dante, Longfellow. Also mentioned, Frost's "The Draft Horse," and "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening."
CHAPTER FIVE Roads and Paths When a man thinks happily; he finds no foot-track in the field he traverses.
--Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Quotation and Originality" (1859) "THE ROAD NOT TAKEN" can be read against a literary and pictorial tradition that might be called "The Choice of the Two Paths," reaching not only back to the Gospels and beyond them to the Greeks but to ancient English verse as well. (1) In Reson and Sensuallyte, for example, John Lydgate explains how he dreamt that Dame Nature had offered him the choice between the Road of Reason and the Road of Sensuality. In art the same choice was often represented by the letter "Y; " with the trunk of the letter representing the careless years of childhood and the two paths branching off at the age when the child is expected to exercise discretion. In one design the "Two Paths" are shown in great detail. "On one side a thin line of pious folk ascend a hill past several churches and chapels, and so skyward to the Heavenly City where an angel stands proffering a crown. On the other side a crowd of men and women are engaged in feasting, music, love-making, and other carnal pleasures while close behind them yawns the flaming mouth of hell in which sinners are writhing. But hope is held out for the worldly; for some avoid hell and having passed through a dark forest come to the rude huts of Humility and Repentance." (2) Embedded in this quotation is a direct reference to the opening of Dante's Inferno: Midway upon the journey of our life
I found myself within a forest dark,
For the straightforward pathway had been lost. Ah me! how hard a thing it is to say
What was the forest savage, rough, and stern, Which in the very thought renews the fear.
So bitter is it, death is little more. (3)
From the beginning, when it appeared as the first poem in Mountain Interval (1916), many readers have overstated the importance of "The Road Not Taken" to Frost's work. Alexander Meiklejohn, president of Amherst College, did so when, announcing the appointment of the poet to the school's faculty; he recited it to a college assembly. 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. (4)
"The Choice of Two Paths" is suggested in Frost's decision to make his two roads not very much different from one another, for passing over one of them had the effect of wearing them "really about the same." This is a far cry from, say; the description of the "two waies" offered in the seventeenth century by Henry Crosse: Two waies are proposed and laide open to all, the one inviting to vertue, the other alluring to vice; the first is combersome, intricate, untraded, overgrowne, and many obstacles to dismay the passenger; the other plaine, even beaten, overshadowed with boughes, tapistried with flowers, and many objects to feed the eye; now a man that lookes but only to the outward shewe, will easily tread the broadest pathe, but if hee perceive that this smooth and even way leads to a neast of Scorpions: or a litter of Beares, he will rather take the other though it be rugged and unpleasant, than hazard himselfe in so great a daunger. (5) Frost seems to have deliberately chosen the word "roads" rather than "waies" or "paths" or even "pathways." In fact, on one occasion when he was asked to recite his famous poem, "Two paths diverged in a yellow wood," Frost reacted with such feeling- "Two roads! " - that the transcription of his reply made it necessary both to italicize the word "roads" and to follow it with an exclamation point. Frost recited the poem all right, but, as his friend remembered, "he didn't let me get away with 'two paths!' " (6)
Convinced that the poem was deeply personal and directly self-revelatory; Frost's readers have insisted on tracing the poem to one or the other of two facts of Frost's life when he was in his late thirties. (At the beginning of the Inferno Dante is thirty-five, "midway on the road of life," notes Charles Eliot Norton.) (7) The first of these, an event, took place in the winter of 1911-1912 in the woods of Plymouth, New Hampshire, while the second, a general observation and a concomitant attitude, grew out of his long walks in England with Edward Thomas, his newfound Welsh-English poet-friend, in 1914.
In Robert Frost: The Thal by Existence, Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant locates in one of Frost's letters the source for "The Road Not Taken." To Susan Hayes Ward the poet wrote on February 10, 1912: Two lonely cross-roads that themselves cross each other I have walked several times this winter without meeting or overtaking so much as a single person on foot or on runners. The practically unbroken condition of both for several days after a snow or a blow proves that neither is much travelled. Judge then how surprised I was the other evening as I came down one to see a man, who to my own unfamiliar eyes and in the dusk looked for all the world like myself, coming down the other, his approach to the point where our paths must intersect being so timed that unless one of us pulled up we must inevitably collide. I felt as if I was going to meet my own image in a slanting mirror. Or say I felt as we slowly converged on the same point with the same noiseless yet laborious stride as if we were two images about to float together with the uncrossing of someone's eyes. I verily expected to take up or absorb this other self and feel the stronger by the addition for the three-mile journey home. But I didn't go forward to the touch. I stood still in wonderment and let him pass by; and that, too, with the fatal omission of not trying to find out by a comparison of lives and immediate and remote interests what could have brought us by crossing paths to the same point in a wilderness at the same moment of nightfall. Some purpose I doubt not, if we could but have made out. I like a coincidence almost as well as an incongruity. (8) This portentous account of meeting " another " self (but not encountering that self directly and therefore not coming to terms with it) would eventually result in a poem quite different from "The Road Not Taken " and one that Frost would not publish for decades. Elizabeth Sergeant ties the moment with Frost's decision to go off at this time to some place where he could devote more time to poetry. He had also, she implies, filed away his dream for future poetic use.
That poetic use would occur three years later. In 1914 Frost arrived in England for what he then thought would be an extended sabbatical leave from farming in New Hampshire. By all the signs he was ready to settle down for a long stay. Settling in Gloucestershire, he soon became a close friend of Edward Thomas. Later, when readers persisted in misreading "The Road Not Taken, " Frost insisted that his poem had been intended as a sly jest at the expense of his friend and fellow poet. For Thomas had invariably fussed over irrevocable choices of the most minor sort made on daily walks with Frost in 1914, shortly before the writing of the poem. Later Frost insisted that in his case the line " And that has made all the difference" - taken straight - was all wrong. "Of course, it hasn't, " he persisted, "it's just a poem, you know. (9) In 1915, moreover, his sole intention was to twit Thomas. Living in Gloucestershire, writes Lawrance Thompson, Frost had frequently taken long countryside walks with Thomas. Repeatedly Thomas would choose a route which might enable him to show his American friend a rare plant or a special vista; but it often happened that before the end of such a walk Thomas would regret the choice he had made and would sigh over what he might have shown Frost if they had taken a "better" direction. More than once, on such occasions, the New Englander had teased his Welsh-English friend for those wasted regrets. ...Frost found something quaintly romantic in sighing over what might have been. Such a course of action was a road never taken by Frost, a road he had been taught to avoid. (10) If we are to believe Frost and his biographer, "The Road Not Taken" was intended to serve as Frost's gentle jest at Thomas's expense. But the poem might have had other targets. One such target was a text by another poet who in a different sense might also be considered a "friend": Henry Wadsworth Longfellow; whose poem, "My Lost Youth," had provided Frost with A Boy's Will, the title he chose for his first book.
"The Road Not Taken" can be placed against a passage in Longfellow's notebooks: "Round about what is, lies a whole mysterious world of might be ,-- a psychological romance of possibilities and things that do not happen. By going out a few minutes sooner or later, by stopping to speak with a friend at a corner, by meeting this man or that, or by turning down this street instead of the other, we may let slip some great occasion of good, or avoid some impending evil, by which the whole current of our lives would have been changed. There is no possible solution to the dark enigma but the one word, 'Providence.' "(11)
Longfellow's tone in this passage is sober, even somber, and anticipates the same qualities in Edward Thomas, as Frost so clearly perceived. Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant had insisted that Frost's dream encounter with his other self at a crossroads in the woods had a "subterranean connection" with the whole of "The Road Not Taken," especially with the poem's last lines: 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. Undoubtedly. But whereas Longfellow had invoked Providence to account for acts performed and actions not taken, Frost calls attention only to the role of human choice. A second target was the notion that "whatever choice we make, we make at our peril." The words just quoted are Fitz-James Stephen's, but it is more important that Frost encountered them in William James's essay "The Will to Believe. " In fact, James concludes his final paragraph on the topic: "We stand on a mountain pass in the midst of whirling snow and blinding mist, through which we get glimpses now and then of paths which may be deceptive. If we take the wrong road we shall be dashed to pieces. We do not certainly know whether there is any right one. What must we do? 'Be strong and of a good courage.' Act for the best, hope for the best, and take what comes. ...If death ends all, we cannot meet death better. " (12) The danger inherent in decision, in this brave passage quoted with clear-cut approval by the teacher Frost "never had," does not play a part in "The Road Not Taken. " Frost the "leaf-treader" will have none of it, though he will not refuse to make a choice. Nothing will happen to him through default. Nor, argues the poet, is it likely that anyone will melodramatically be dashed to pieces.
It is useful to see Frost's projected sigh as a nudging criticism of Thomas's characteristic regrets, to note that Frost's poem takes a sly poke at Longfellow's more generalized awe before the notion of what might have happened had it not been for the inexorable workings of Providence, and to see "The Road Not Taken" as a bravura tossing off of Fitz-James Stephen's mountainous and meteorological scenario. We can also project the poem against a poem by Emily Dickinson that Frost had encountered twenty years earlier in Poems, Second Series (1891). Our journey had advanced; Our feet were almost come
To that odd fork in Being's road, Eternity by term. Our pace took sudden awe, Our feet reluctant led.
Before were cities, but between, The forest of the dead.
Retreat was out of hope, -- Behind, a sealed route, Eternity's white flag before, And God at every gate. (13) Dickinson's poem is straightforwardly and orthodoxically religious. But it can be seen that beyond the "journey" metaphor Dickinson's poem employs diction - "road" and "forest" - that recalls "The Choice of the Two Paths" trope, the opening lines of the Inferno, and Frost's secular poem "The Road Not Taken."
The "dark forest" in the tradition of "The Choice of the Two Paths" and the "forest dark" of Longfellow's translation of the Inferno also foreshadow the imagery of the famous Frost poem published in New Hampshire (1923), the last stanza of which begins: "The woods are lovely, dark and deep. " (14) In spurning the word "forest" for "woods," a term that is perhaps more appropriate for New England, Frost was, whether he knew it or not, following Charles Eliot Norton, whose translation of the Inferno reads "dark wood" and who glosses the opening of Dante's poem: "The dark wood is the forest of the world of sense, 'the erroneous wood of this life' ..., that is, the wood in which man loses his way." (15) In "the darkest evening of the year, the New England poet finds himself standing before a scene he finds attractive enough to make him linger. Frost's poem employs, significantly, the present tense. Dante's poem (through Longfellow) employs the past tense. It is as if Frost were casually remembering some familiar engraving that hung on a schoolroom wall in Lawrence as he was growing up in the 1880s, and the poet slides into the picture. He enters, so to speak, the mind of the figure who speaks the poem, a figure whose body is slowly turned into the scene, head fully away from the foreground, bulking small, holding the reins steadily and loosely. The horse and team are planted, though poised to move. And so begins the poet's dramatization of this rural and parochial tableau. "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." And then, having entered the human being, he witnesses the natural drift of that human being's thoughts to the brain of his "little horse," who thinks it " queer" that the rider has decided to stop here. And then, in an equally easy transition, the teamster returns to himself, remembering that he has promises to keep and miles to go before he sleeps. Duties, responsibilities - many must have them we think, as echolalia closes the poem, all other thoughts already turning away from the illustration on the schoolroom wall. And even as the "little horse" has been rid of the man's intrusion, so too must the rider's mind be freed of the poet's incursion. The poet's last line resonates, dismissing the reader from his, the poet's, dreamy mind and that mind's preoccupations, and returning to the poet's inside reading of the still-life drama that goes on forever within its frame hanging on the classroom wall.
The ways in which Frost's poem "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" converses with Longfellow's translation of Dante are evident from other shared echoes and images. The Inferno continues: I cannot well repeat how there I entered,
So full was I of slumber at the moment In which I had abandoned the true way: But after I had reached a mountain's foot,
At that point where the valley terminated, Which had with consternation pierced my heart,
Upward I looked, and I beheld its shoulders, Vested already with that planet's rays
Which leadeth others right by every road. Then was the fear a little quieted
That in my heart's lake had endured throughout That night, which I had passed so piteously: (16) What Frost "fetched" here (as in "The Road Not Taken") were the motifs of risk and decision characterizing both "The Choice of the Two Paths" and Dante's Inferno.
"The Draft Horse," a poem published at the end of Frost's life in his final volume, In the Clearing (1962 ), reminds us curiously of Frost's anecdote in 1912 about recognizing "another" self and not encountering that self and also of the poem "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening." In addition it is reminiscent of "The Road Not Taken." In each case - anecdote, autumnal poem, and winter poem - the poet must make a choice. Will he " go forward to the touch," or will he "stand still in wonderment and let him pass by" in the anecdote? He will choose the "road less traveled by" (but he will leave the other for a later passing, though he probably will not return to it). He will not succumb to the aesthetic (and perhaps psychological) attractions of the woods, which are "lovely, dark and deep," but will go forth to keep his promises - of both kinds (as Frost explained): "those that I myself make for myself and those that my ancestors made for me, known as the social contract." (17) With a lantern that wouldn't burn In too frail a buggy we drove Behind too heavy a horse
Through a pitch-dark limitless grove.
And a man came out of the trees And took our horse by the head And reaching back to his ribs Deliberately stabbed him dead.
The ponderous beast went down With a crack of a broken shaft.
And the night drew through the trees In one long invidious draft.
The most unquestioning pair That ever accepted fate
And the least disposed to ascribe Any more than we had to to hate,
We assumed that the man himself Or someone he had to obey Wanted us to get down
And walk the rest of the way. (18) The "little horse" of the earlier poem is replaced by "the too-heavy horse" of the later one. The "woods" have now been replaced by "a pitch-dark limitless grove." The hint in "grove" is one of sacrificial rites and ordered violence. The "sweep of easy wind and downy flake" of "Stopping by Woods" is echoed more ominously in "The Draft Horse" in that after "the ponderous beast went down" "the night drew through the trees / In one long invidious draft." The man was alone; here he is part of an "unquestioning pair." "Stopping by Woods" was given in the first person. "The Draft Horse," like the beginning of the Inferno, takes place in the past. There is resolution in the former - even if it evinces some fatigue; in the later it is resignation. At the time of the poem and in an earlier day, the loss of a man's horse may be as great a loss as that of one's life - probably because its loss would often lead to the death of the horse's owner. And for the poet the assassination has no rhyme or reason that he will discern. He knows only that the man " came out of the trees" (compare the intruders in "Two Tramps in Mud Time" or the neighbor in "Mending Wall" who resembles" an old-stone savage armed"). Insofar as the poet knows, this act involves motiveless malevolence less than unmalevolent motive - if there is a motive. In the Inferno, the beast that threatens the poet's pathway gives way to the poet - "Not man; man once I was," he says - who will guide him. Frost's couple have the misfortune to encounter not a guide but an assassin. "A man feared that he might find an assassin; / Another that he might find a victim," wrote Stephen Crane. "One was more wise than the other." (19) It is not too far-fetched, I think, to see the equanimity of the poet at the end of "The Draft Horse" as a response to the anecdote, many years earlier, when the poet avoided meeting his "other" self, thereby committing the "fatal omission" of not trying to find out what "purpose. ..if we could but have made out" there was in the near-encounter. It is chilling to read the poem against its Frostian antecedents. Yet, as Keeper prefers in A Masque of Mercy (1947) - in words out of another context which might better fit the romantic poet of "The Wood-Pile"-"I say I'd rather be lost in the woods / Than found in church." (20) NOTES 5. ROADS AND PATHS
1. See Samuel C. Chew, The Pilgrimage of Life (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1962), pp. 175-81.
2. Ibid., p. 178.
3. The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri, trans. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1895), p. 3.
4. "The Road Not Taken," in Complete Poems, 1949, p. 131. 5. Chew, Pilgrimage of Life, pp. 180-81.
6. Quoted in Philip L. Gerber, "Remembering Robert Frost: An Interview with William Jewell," New England Quarterly 59 (March 1986) :21.
7. The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri, trans. Charles Eliot Norton, rev. ed., vol. 1: Hell (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1903), p. 1.
8. Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant, Robert Frost: The Trial by Existence, (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1960) pp. 87-88.
9. Gerber, "Remembering Robert Frost," p. 21. 10. Selected Letters of Robert Frost, ed. Lawrance Thompson (New York: Holt Rinehart and Winston, 1964) p. xiv.
11. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Drift-Wood, in Outre-Mer and Drift-Wood (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1886), pp. 405-6.
12. William James, "The Will to Believe," in Pragmatism and Other Essays, introduced by Joseph L. Blau (New York: Washington Square Press, 1963), p. 213.
13. Poems (1890-1896) by Emily Dickinson, p. 364.
14. "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," in Complete Poems, 1949, p. 275.
15. Norton, Divine Comedy; p. 1.
16. Longfellow, Divine Comedy; p. 3. In "conversation" Frost occasionally referred to the Inferno; see Cook, "Frost in Context," in Frost: Centennial Essays III, ed by Jac Tharpe (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1978) pp. 134, 138.
17. Quoted in Reginald Cook, Robert Frost: A Living Voice, (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1974) p. 81.
18. "The Draft Horse," in In the Clearing, p. 60.
19. Stephen Crane, The Black Riders and Other Lines (Boston: Copeland and Day, 1895), p. 62.
20. A Masque of Mercy; in Complete Poems, 1949, p. 632.
by George Monteiro
- Published by The University Press of Kentucky Lexington, Kentucky 40508 (176 pgs) Copyright 1988 by The University Press of Kentucky pages 44 through 53 reproduced here by permission of the publisher. All rights reserved by UPK.
Due to the brevity of this essay, no search tips nor PDF are provided.
A discussion of Frost's poem "The Road Not Taken," with references to Emerson, Dickinson, Dante, Longfellow. Also mentioned, Frost's "The Draft Horse," and "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening."
CHAPTER FIVE Roads and Paths When a man thinks happily; he finds no foot-track in the field he traverses.
--Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Quotation and Originality" (1859) "THE ROAD NOT TAKEN" can be read against a literary and pictorial tradition that might be called "The Choice of the Two Paths," reaching not only back to the Gospels and beyond them to the Greeks but to ancient English verse as well. (1) In Reson and Sensuallyte, for example, John Lydgate explains how he dreamt that Dame Nature had offered him the choice between the Road of Reason and the Road of Sensuality. In art the same choice was often represented by the letter "Y; " with the trunk of the letter representing the careless years of childhood and the two paths branching off at the age when the child is expected to exercise discretion. In one design the "Two Paths" are shown in great detail. "On one side a thin line of pious folk ascend a hill past several churches and chapels, and so skyward to the Heavenly City where an angel stands proffering a crown. On the other side a crowd of men and women are engaged in feasting, music, love-making, and other carnal pleasures while close behind them yawns the flaming mouth of hell in which sinners are writhing. But hope is held out for the worldly; for some avoid hell and having passed through a dark forest come to the rude huts of Humility and Repentance." (2) Embedded in this quotation is a direct reference to the opening of Dante's Inferno: Midway upon the journey of our life
I found myself within a forest dark,
For the straightforward pathway had been lost. Ah me! how hard a thing it is to say
What was the forest savage, rough, and stern, Which in the very thought renews the fear.
So bitter is it, death is little more. (3)
From the beginning, when it appeared as the first poem in Mountain Interval (1916), many readers have overstated the importance of "The Road Not Taken" to Frost's work. Alexander Meiklejohn, president of Amherst College, did so when, announcing the appointment of the poet to the school's faculty; he recited it to a college assembly. 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. (4)
"The Choice of Two Paths" is suggested in Frost's decision to make his two roads not very much different from one another, for passing over one of them had the effect of wearing them "really about the same." This is a far cry from, say; the description of the "two waies" offered in the seventeenth century by Henry Crosse: Two waies are proposed and laide open to all, the one inviting to vertue, the other alluring to vice; the first is combersome, intricate, untraded, overgrowne, and many obstacles to dismay the passenger; the other plaine, even beaten, overshadowed with boughes, tapistried with flowers, and many objects to feed the eye; now a man that lookes but only to the outward shewe, will easily tread the broadest pathe, but if hee perceive that this smooth and even way leads to a neast of Scorpions: or a litter of Beares, he will rather take the other though it be rugged and unpleasant, than hazard himselfe in so great a daunger. (5) Frost seems to have deliberately chosen the word "roads" rather than "waies" or "paths" or even "pathways." In fact, on one occasion when he was asked to recite his famous poem, "Two paths diverged in a yellow wood," Frost reacted with such feeling- "Two roads! " - that the transcription of his reply made it necessary both to italicize the word "roads" and to follow it with an exclamation point. Frost recited the poem all right, but, as his friend remembered, "he didn't let me get away with 'two paths!' " (6)
Convinced that the poem was deeply personal and directly self-revelatory; Frost's readers have insisted on tracing the poem to one or the other of two facts of Frost's life when he was in his late thirties. (At the beginning of the Inferno Dante is thirty-five, "midway on the road of life," notes Charles Eliot Norton.) (7) The first of these, an event, took place in the winter of 1911-1912 in the woods of Plymouth, New Hampshire, while the second, a general observation and a concomitant attitude, grew out of his long walks in England with Edward Thomas, his newfound Welsh-English poet-friend, in 1914.
In Robert Frost: The Thal by Existence, Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant locates in one of Frost's letters the source for "The Road Not Taken." To Susan Hayes Ward the poet wrote on February 10, 1912: Two lonely cross-roads that themselves cross each other I have walked several times this winter without meeting or overtaking so much as a single person on foot or on runners. The practically unbroken condition of both for several days after a snow or a blow proves that neither is much travelled. Judge then how surprised I was the other evening as I came down one to see a man, who to my own unfamiliar eyes and in the dusk looked for all the world like myself, coming down the other, his approach to the point where our paths must intersect being so timed that unless one of us pulled up we must inevitably collide. I felt as if I was going to meet my own image in a slanting mirror. Or say I felt as we slowly converged on the same point with the same noiseless yet laborious stride as if we were two images about to float together with the uncrossing of someone's eyes. I verily expected to take up or absorb this other self and feel the stronger by the addition for the three-mile journey home. But I didn't go forward to the touch. I stood still in wonderment and let him pass by; and that, too, with the fatal omission of not trying to find out by a comparison of lives and immediate and remote interests what could have brought us by crossing paths to the same point in a wilderness at the same moment of nightfall. Some purpose I doubt not, if we could but have made out. I like a coincidence almost as well as an incongruity. (8) This portentous account of meeting " another " self (but not encountering that self directly and therefore not coming to terms with it) would eventually result in a poem quite different from "The Road Not Taken " and one that Frost would not publish for decades. Elizabeth Sergeant ties the moment with Frost's decision to go off at this time to some place where he could devote more time to poetry. He had also, she implies, filed away his dream for future poetic use.
That poetic use would occur three years later. In 1914 Frost arrived in England for what he then thought would be an extended sabbatical leave from farming in New Hampshire. By all the signs he was ready to settle down for a long stay. Settling in Gloucestershire, he soon became a close friend of Edward Thomas. Later, when readers persisted in misreading "The Road Not Taken, " Frost insisted that his poem had been intended as a sly jest at the expense of his friend and fellow poet. For Thomas had invariably fussed over irrevocable choices of the most minor sort made on daily walks with Frost in 1914, shortly before the writing of the poem. Later Frost insisted that in his case the line " And that has made all the difference" - taken straight - was all wrong. "Of course, it hasn't, " he persisted, "it's just a poem, you know. (9) In 1915, moreover, his sole intention was to twit Thomas. Living in Gloucestershire, writes Lawrance Thompson, Frost had frequently taken long countryside walks with Thomas. Repeatedly Thomas would choose a route which might enable him to show his American friend a rare plant or a special vista; but it often happened that before the end of such a walk Thomas would regret the choice he had made and would sigh over what he might have shown Frost if they had taken a "better" direction. More than once, on such occasions, the New Englander had teased his Welsh-English friend for those wasted regrets. ...Frost found something quaintly romantic in sighing over what might have been. Such a course of action was a road never taken by Frost, a road he had been taught to avoid. (10) If we are to believe Frost and his biographer, "The Road Not Taken" was intended to serve as Frost's gentle jest at Thomas's expense. But the poem might have had other targets. One such target was a text by another poet who in a different sense might also be considered a "friend": Henry Wadsworth Longfellow; whose poem, "My Lost Youth," had provided Frost with A Boy's Will, the title he chose for his first book.
"The Road Not Taken" can be placed against a passage in Longfellow's notebooks: "Round about what is, lies a whole mysterious world of might be ,-- a psychological romance of possibilities and things that do not happen. By going out a few minutes sooner or later, by stopping to speak with a friend at a corner, by meeting this man or that, or by turning down this street instead of the other, we may let slip some great occasion of good, or avoid some impending evil, by which the whole current of our lives would have been changed. There is no possible solution to the dark enigma but the one word, 'Providence.' "(11)
Longfellow's tone in this passage is sober, even somber, and anticipates the same qualities in Edward Thomas, as Frost so clearly perceived. Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant had insisted that Frost's dream encounter with his other self at a crossroads in the woods had a "subterranean connection" with the whole of "The Road Not Taken," especially with the poem's last lines: 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. Undoubtedly. But whereas Longfellow had invoked Providence to account for acts performed and actions not taken, Frost calls attention only to the role of human choice. A second target was the notion that "whatever choice we make, we make at our peril." The words just quoted are Fitz-James Stephen's, but it is more important that Frost encountered them in William James's essay "The Will to Believe. " In fact, James concludes his final paragraph on the topic: "We stand on a mountain pass in the midst of whirling snow and blinding mist, through which we get glimpses now and then of paths which may be deceptive. If we take the wrong road we shall be dashed to pieces. We do not certainly know whether there is any right one. What must we do? 'Be strong and of a good courage.' Act for the best, hope for the best, and take what comes. ...If death ends all, we cannot meet death better. " (12) The danger inherent in decision, in this brave passage quoted with clear-cut approval by the teacher Frost "never had," does not play a part in "The Road Not Taken. " Frost the "leaf-treader" will have none of it, though he will not refuse to make a choice. Nothing will happen to him through default. Nor, argues the poet, is it likely that anyone will melodramatically be dashed to pieces.
It is useful to see Frost's projected sigh as a nudging criticism of Thomas's characteristic regrets, to note that Frost's poem takes a sly poke at Longfellow's more generalized awe before the notion of what might have happened had it not been for the inexorable workings of Providence, and to see "The Road Not Taken" as a bravura tossing off of Fitz-James Stephen's mountainous and meteorological scenario. We can also project the poem against a poem by Emily Dickinson that Frost had encountered twenty years earlier in Poems, Second Series (1891). Our journey had advanced; Our feet were almost come
To that odd fork in Being's road, Eternity by term. Our pace took sudden awe, Our feet reluctant led.
Before were cities, but between, The forest of the dead.
Retreat was out of hope, -- Behind, a sealed route, Eternity's white flag before, And God at every gate. (13) Dickinson's poem is straightforwardly and orthodoxically religious. But it can be seen that beyond the "journey" metaphor Dickinson's poem employs diction - "road" and "forest" - that recalls "The Choice of the Two Paths" trope, the opening lines of the Inferno, and Frost's secular poem "The Road Not Taken."
The "dark forest" in the tradition of "The Choice of the Two Paths" and the "forest dark" of Longfellow's translation of the Inferno also foreshadow the imagery of the famous Frost poem published in New Hampshire (1923), the last stanza of which begins: "The woods are lovely, dark and deep. " (14) In spurning the word "forest" for "woods," a term that is perhaps more appropriate for New England, Frost was, whether he knew it or not, following Charles Eliot Norton, whose translation of the Inferno reads "dark wood" and who glosses the opening of Dante's poem: "The dark wood is the forest of the world of sense, 'the erroneous wood of this life' ..., that is, the wood in which man loses his way." (15) In "the darkest evening of the year, the New England poet finds himself standing before a scene he finds attractive enough to make him linger. Frost's poem employs, significantly, the present tense. Dante's poem (through Longfellow) employs the past tense. It is as if Frost were casually remembering some familiar engraving that hung on a schoolroom wall in Lawrence as he was growing up in the 1880s, and the poet slides into the picture. He enters, so to speak, the mind of the figure who speaks the poem, a figure whose body is slowly turned into the scene, head fully away from the foreground, bulking small, holding the reins steadily and loosely. The horse and team are planted, though poised to move. And so begins the poet's dramatization of this rural and parochial tableau. "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." And then, having entered the human being, he witnesses the natural drift of that human being's thoughts to the brain of his "little horse," who thinks it " queer" that the rider has decided to stop here. And then, in an equally easy transition, the teamster returns to himself, remembering that he has promises to keep and miles to go before he sleeps. Duties, responsibilities - many must have them we think, as echolalia closes the poem, all other thoughts already turning away from the illustration on the schoolroom wall. And even as the "little horse" has been rid of the man's intrusion, so too must the rider's mind be freed of the poet's incursion. The poet's last line resonates, dismissing the reader from his, the poet's, dreamy mind and that mind's preoccupations, and returning to the poet's inside reading of the still-life drama that goes on forever within its frame hanging on the classroom wall.
The ways in which Frost's poem "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" converses with Longfellow's translation of Dante are evident from other shared echoes and images. The Inferno continues: I cannot well repeat how there I entered,
So full was I of slumber at the moment In which I had abandoned the true way: But after I had reached a mountain's foot,
At that point where the valley terminated, Which had with consternation pierced my heart,
Upward I looked, and I beheld its shoulders, Vested already with that planet's rays
Which leadeth others right by every road. Then was the fear a little quieted
That in my heart's lake had endured throughout That night, which I had passed so piteously: (16) What Frost "fetched" here (as in "The Road Not Taken") were the motifs of risk and decision characterizing both "The Choice of the Two Paths" and Dante's Inferno.
"The Draft Horse," a poem published at the end of Frost's life in his final volume, In the Clearing (1962 ), reminds us curiously of Frost's anecdote in 1912 about recognizing "another" self and not encountering that self and also of the poem "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening." In addition it is reminiscent of "The Road Not Taken." In each case - anecdote, autumnal poem, and winter poem - the poet must make a choice. Will he " go forward to the touch," or will he "stand still in wonderment and let him pass by" in the anecdote? He will choose the "road less traveled by" (but he will leave the other for a later passing, though he probably will not return to it). He will not succumb to the aesthetic (and perhaps psychological) attractions of the woods, which are "lovely, dark and deep," but will go forth to keep his promises - of both kinds (as Frost explained): "those that I myself make for myself and those that my ancestors made for me, known as the social contract." (17) With a lantern that wouldn't burn In too frail a buggy we drove Behind too heavy a horse
Through a pitch-dark limitless grove.
And a man came out of the trees And took our horse by the head And reaching back to his ribs Deliberately stabbed him dead.
The ponderous beast went down With a crack of a broken shaft.
And the night drew through the trees In one long invidious draft.
The most unquestioning pair That ever accepted fate
And the least disposed to ascribe Any more than we had to to hate,
We assumed that the man himself Or someone he had to obey Wanted us to get down
And walk the rest of the way. (18) The "little horse" of the earlier poem is replaced by "the too-heavy horse" of the later one. The "woods" have now been replaced by "a pitch-dark limitless grove." The hint in "grove" is one of sacrificial rites and ordered violence. The "sweep of easy wind and downy flake" of "Stopping by Woods" is echoed more ominously in "The Draft Horse" in that after "the ponderous beast went down" "the night drew through the trees / In one long invidious draft." The man was alone; here he is part of an "unquestioning pair." "Stopping by Woods" was given in the first person. "The Draft Horse," like the beginning of the Inferno, takes place in the past. There is resolution in the former - even if it evinces some fatigue; in the later it is resignation. At the time of the poem and in an earlier day, the loss of a man's horse may be as great a loss as that of one's life - probably because its loss would often lead to the death of the horse's owner. And for the poet the assassination has no rhyme or reason that he will discern. He knows only that the man " came out of the trees" (compare the intruders in "Two Tramps in Mud Time" or the neighbor in "Mending Wall" who resembles" an old-stone savage armed"). Insofar as the poet knows, this act involves motiveless malevolence less than unmalevolent motive - if there is a motive. In the Inferno, the beast that threatens the poet's pathway gives way to the poet - "Not man; man once I was," he says - who will guide him. Frost's couple have the misfortune to encounter not a guide but an assassin. "A man feared that he might find an assassin; / Another that he might find a victim," wrote Stephen Crane. "One was more wise than the other." (19) It is not too far-fetched, I think, to see the equanimity of the poet at the end of "The Draft Horse" as a response to the anecdote, many years earlier, when the poet avoided meeting his "other" self, thereby committing the "fatal omission" of not trying to find out what "purpose. ..if we could but have made out" there was in the near-encounter. It is chilling to read the poem against its Frostian antecedents. Yet, as Keeper prefers in A Masque of Mercy (1947) - in words out of another context which might better fit the romantic poet of "The Wood-Pile"-"I say I'd rather be lost in the woods / Than found in church." (20) NOTES 5. ROADS AND PATHS
1. See Samuel C. Chew, The Pilgrimage of Life (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1962), pp. 175-81.
2. Ibid., p. 178.
3. The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri, trans. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1895), p. 3.
4. "The Road Not Taken," in Complete Poems, 1949, p. 131. 5. Chew, Pilgrimage of Life, pp. 180-81.
6. Quoted in Philip L. Gerber, "Remembering Robert Frost: An Interview with William Jewell," New England Quarterly 59 (March 1986) :21.
7. The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri, trans. Charles Eliot Norton, rev. ed., vol. 1: Hell (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1903), p. 1.
8. Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant, Robert Frost: The Trial by Existence, (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1960) pp. 87-88.
9. Gerber, "Remembering Robert Frost," p. 21. 10. Selected Letters of Robert Frost, ed. Lawrance Thompson (New York: Holt Rinehart and Winston, 1964) p. xiv.
11. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Drift-Wood, in Outre-Mer and Drift-Wood (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1886), pp. 405-6.
12. William James, "The Will to Believe," in Pragmatism and Other Essays, introduced by Joseph L. Blau (New York: Washington Square Press, 1963), p. 213.
13. Poems (1890-1896) by Emily Dickinson, p. 364.
14. "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," in Complete Poems, 1949, p. 275.
15. Norton, Divine Comedy; p. 1.
16. Longfellow, Divine Comedy; p. 3. In "conversation" Frost occasionally referred to the Inferno; see Cook, "Frost in Context," in Frost: Centennial Essays III, ed by Jac Tharpe (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1978) pp. 134, 138.
17. Quoted in Reginald Cook, Robert Frost: A Living Voice, (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1974) p. 81.
18. "The Draft Horse," in In the Clearing, p. 60.
19. Stephen Crane, The Black Riders and Other Lines (Boston: Copeland and Day, 1895), p. 62.
20. A Masque of Mercy; in Complete Poems, 1949, p. 632.
Considering the Work of Others in Robert Frost's Road Not Taken
Robert Frost & The New England Renaissance
by George Monteiro
Due to the brevity of this essay, no search tips nor PDF are provided.
A discussion of Frost's poem "The Road Not Taken," with references to Emerson, Dickinson, Dante, Longfellow. Also mentioned, Frost's "The Draft Horse," and "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening."
CHAPTER FIVE Roads and Paths When a man thinks happily; he finds no foot-track in the field he traverses.
--Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Quotation and Originality" (1859) "THE ROAD NOT TAKEN" can be read against a literary and pictorial tradition that might be called "The Choice of the Two Paths," reaching not only back to the Gospels and beyond them to the Greeks but to ancient English verse as well. (1) In Reson and Sensuallyte, for example, John Lydgate explains how he dreamt that Dame Nature had offered him the choice between the Road of Reason and the Road of Sensuality. In art the same choice was often represented by the letter "Y; " with the trunk of the letter representing the careless years of childhood and the two paths branching off at the age when the child is expected to exercise discretion. In one design the "Two Paths" are shown in great detail. "On one side a thin line of pious folk ascend a hill past several churches and chapels, and so skyward to the Heavenly City where an angel stands proffering a crown. On the other side a crowd of men and women are engaged in feasting, music, love-making, and other carnal pleasures while close behind them yawns the flaming mouth of hell in which sinners are writhing. But hope is held out for the worldly; for some avoid hell and having passed through a dark forest come to the rude huts of Humility and Repentance." (2) Embedded in this quotation is a direct reference to the opening of Dante's Inferno: Midway upon the journey of our life
I found myself within a forest dark,
For the straightforward pathway had been lost. Ah me! how hard a thing it is to say
What was the forest savage, rough, and stern, Which in the very thought renews the fear.
So bitter is it, death is little more. (3)
From the beginning, when it appeared as the first poem in Mountain Interval (1916), many readers have overstated the importance of "The Road Not Taken" to Frost's work. Alexander Meiklejohn, president of Amherst College, did so when, announcing the appointment of the poet to the school's faculty; he recited it to a college assembly. 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. (4)
"The Choice of Two Paths" is suggested in Frost's decision to make his two roads not very much different from one another, for passing over one of them had the effect of wearing them "really about the same." This is a far cry from, say; the description of the "two waies" offered in the seventeenth century by Henry Crosse: Two waies are proposed and laide open to all, the one inviting to vertue, the other alluring to vice; the first is combersome, intricate, untraded, overgrowne, and many obstacles to dismay the passenger; the other plaine, even beaten, overshadowed with boughes, tapistried with flowers, and many objects to feed the eye; now a man that lookes but only to the outward shewe, will easily tread the broadest pathe, but if hee perceive that this smooth and even way leads to a neast of Scorpions: or a litter of Beares, he will rather take the other though it be rugged and unpleasant, than hazard himselfe in so great a daunger. (5) Frost seems to have deliberately chosen the word "roads" rather than "waies" or "paths" or even "pathways." In fact, on one occasion when he was asked to recite his famous poem, "Two paths diverged in a yellow wood," Frost reacted with such feeling- "Two roads! " - that the transcription of his reply made it necessary both to italicize the word "roads" and to follow it with an exclamation point. Frost recited the poem all right, but, as his friend remembered, "he didn't let me get away with 'two paths!' " (6)
Convinced that the poem was deeply personal and directly self-revelatory; Frost's readers have insisted on tracing the poem to one or the other of two facts of Frost's life when he was in his late thirties. (At the beginning of the Inferno Dante is thirty-five, "midway on the road of life," notes Charles Eliot Norton.) (7) The first of these, an event, took place in the winter of 1911-1912 in the woods of Plymouth, New Hampshire, while the second, a general observation and a concomitant attitude, grew out of his long walks in England with Edward Thomas, his newfound Welsh-English poet-friend, in 1914.
In Robert Frost: The Thal by Existence, Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant locates in one of Frost's letters the source for "The Road Not Taken." To Susan Hayes Ward the poet wrote on February 10, 1912: Two lonely cross-roads that themselves cross each other I have walked several times this winter without meeting or overtaking so much as a single person on foot or on runners. The practically unbroken condition of both for several days after a snow or a blow proves that neither is much travelled. Judge then how surprised I was the other evening as I came down one to see a man, who to my own unfamiliar eyes and in the dusk looked for all the world like myself, coming down the other, his approach to the point where our paths must intersect being so timed that unless one of us pulled up we must inevitably collide. I felt as if I was going to meet my own image in a slanting mirror. Or say I felt as we slowly converged on the same point with the same noiseless yet laborious stride as if we were two images about to float together with the uncrossing of someone's eyes. I verily expected to take up or absorb this other self and feel the stronger by the addition for the three-mile journey home. But I didn't go forward to the touch. I stood still in wonderment and let him pass by; and that, too, with the fatal omission of not trying to find out by a comparison of lives and immediate and remote interests what could have brought us by crossing paths to the same point in a wilderness at the same moment of nightfall. Some purpose I doubt not, if we could but have made out. I like a coincidence almost as well as an incongruity. (8) This portentous account of meeting " another " self (but not encountering that self directly and therefore not coming to terms with it) would eventually result in a poem quite different from "The Road Not Taken " and one that Frost would not publish for decades. Elizabeth Sergeant ties the moment with Frost's decision to go off at this time to some place where he could devote more time to poetry. He had also, she implies, filed away his dream for future poetic use.
That poetic use would occur three years later. In 1914 Frost arrived in England for what he then thought would be an extended sabbatical leave from farming in New Hampshire. By all the signs he was ready to settle down for a long stay. Settling in Gloucestershire, he soon became a close friend of Edward Thomas. Later, when readers persisted in misreading "The Road Not Taken, " Frost insisted that his poem had been intended as a sly jest at the expense of his friend and fellow poet. For Thomas had invariably fussed over irrevocable choices of the most minor sort made on daily walks with Frost in 1914, shortly before the writing of the poem. Later Frost insisted that in his case the line " And that has made all the difference" - taken straight - was all wrong. "Of course, it hasn't, " he persisted, "it's just a poem, you know. (9) In 1915, moreover, his sole intention was to twit Thomas. Living in Gloucestershire, writes Lawrance Thompson, Frost had frequently taken long countryside walks with Thomas. Repeatedly Thomas would choose a route which might enable him to show his American friend a rare plant or a special vista; but it often happened that before the end of such a walk Thomas would regret the choice he had made and would sigh over what he might have shown Frost if they had taken a "better" direction. More than once, on such occasions, the New Englander had teased his Welsh-English friend for those wasted regrets. ...Frost found something quaintly romantic in sighing over what might have been. Such a course of action was a road never taken by Frost, a road he had been taught to avoid. (10) If we are to believe Frost and his biographer, "The Road Not Taken" was intended to serve as Frost's gentle jest at Thomas's expense. But the poem might have had other targets. One such target was a text by another poet who in a different sense might also be considered a "friend": Henry Wadsworth Longfellow; whose poem, "My Lost Youth," had provided Frost with A Boy's Will, the title he chose for his first book.
"The Road Not Taken" can be placed against a passage in Longfellow's notebooks: "Round about what is, lies a whole mysterious world of might be ,-- a psychological romance of possibilities and things that do not happen. By going out a few minutes sooner or later, by stopping to speak with a friend at a corner, by meeting this man or that, or by turning down this street instead of the other, we may let slip some great occasion of good, or avoid some impending evil, by which the whole current of our lives would have been changed. There is no possible solution to the dark enigma but the one word, 'Providence.' "(11)
Longfellow's tone in this passage is sober, even somber, and anticipates the same qualities in Edward Thomas, as Frost so clearly perceived. Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant had insisted that Frost's dream encounter with his other self at a crossroads in the woods had a "subterranean connection" with the whole of "The Road Not Taken," especially with the poem's last lines: 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. Undoubtedly. But whereas Longfellow had invoked Providence to account for acts performed and actions not taken, Frost calls attention only to the role of human choice. A second target was the notion that "whatever choice we make, we make at our peril." The words just quoted are Fitz-James Stephen's, but it is more important that Frost encountered them in William James's essay "The Will to Believe. " In fact, James concludes his final paragraph on the topic: "We stand on a mountain pass in the midst of whirling snow and blinding mist, through which we get glimpses now and then of paths which may be deceptive. If we take the wrong road we shall be dashed to pieces. We do not certainly know whether there is any right one. What must we do? 'Be strong and of a good courage.' Act for the best, hope for the best, and take what comes. ...If death ends all, we cannot meet death better. " (12) The danger inherent in decision, in this brave passage quoted with clear-cut approval by the teacher Frost "never had," does not play a part in "The Road Not Taken. " Frost the "leaf-treader" will have none of it, though he will not refuse to make a choice. Nothing will happen to him through default. Nor, argues the poet, is it likely that anyone will melodramatically be dashed to pieces.
It is useful to see Frost's projected sigh as a nudging criticism of Thomas's characteristic regrets, to note that Frost's poem takes a sly poke at Longfellow's more generalized awe before the notion of what might have happened had it not been for the inexorable workings of Providence, and to see "The Road Not Taken" as a bravura tossing off of Fitz-James Stephen's mountainous and meteorological scenario. We can also project the poem against a poem by Emily Dickinson that Frost had encountered twenty years earlier in Poems, Second Series (1891). Our journey had advanced; Our feet were almost come
To that odd fork in Being's road, Eternity by term. Our pace took sudden awe, Our feet reluctant led.
Before were cities, but between, The forest of the dead.
Retreat was out of hope, -- Behind, a sealed route, Eternity's white flag before, And God at every gate. (13) Dickinson's poem is straightforwardly and orthodoxically religious. But it can be seen that beyond the "journey" metaphor Dickinson's poem employs diction - "road" and "forest" - that recalls "The Choice of the Two Paths" trope, the opening lines of the Inferno, and Frost's secular poem "The Road Not Taken."
The "dark forest" in the tradition of "The Choice of the Two Paths" and the "forest dark" of Longfellow's translation of the Inferno also foreshadow the imagery of the famous Frost poem published in New Hampshire (1923), the last stanza of which begins: "The woods are lovely, dark and deep. " (14) In spurning the word "forest" for "woods," a term that is perhaps more appropriate for New England, Frost was, whether he knew it or not, following Charles Eliot Norton, whose translation of the Inferno reads "dark wood" and who glosses the opening of Dante's poem: "The dark wood is the forest of the world of sense, 'the erroneous wood of this life' ..., that is, the wood in which man loses his way." (15) In "the darkest evening of the year, the New England poet finds himself standing before a scene he finds attractive enough to make him linger. Frost's poem employs, significantly, the present tense. Dante's poem (through Longfellow) employs the past tense. It is as if Frost were casually remembering some familiar engraving that hung on a schoolroom wall in Lawrence as he was growing up in the 1880s, and the poet slides into the picture. He enters, so to speak, the mind of the figure who speaks the poem, a figure whose body is slowly turned into the scene, head fully away from the foreground, bulking small, holding the reins steadily and loosely. The horse and team are planted, though poised to move. And so begins the poet's dramatization of this rural and parochial tableau. "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." And then, having entered the human being, he witnesses the natural drift of that human being's thoughts to the brain of his "little horse," who thinks it " queer" that the rider has decided to stop here. And then, in an equally easy transition, the teamster returns to himself, remembering that he has promises to keep and miles to go before he sleeps. Duties, responsibilities - many must have them we think, as echolalia closes the poem, all other thoughts already turning away from the illustration on the schoolroom wall. And even as the "little horse" has been rid of the man's intrusion, so too must the rider's mind be freed of the poet's incursion. The poet's last line resonates, dismissing the reader from his, the poet's, dreamy mind and that mind's preoccupations, and returning to the poet's inside reading of the still-life drama that goes on forever within its frame hanging on the classroom wall.
The ways in which Frost's poem "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" converses with Longfellow's translation of Dante are evident from other shared echoes and images. The Inferno continues: I cannot well repeat how there I entered,
So full was I of slumber at the moment In which I had abandoned the true way: But after I had reached a mountain's foot,
At that point where the valley terminated, Which had with consternation pierced my heart,
Upward I looked, and I beheld its shoulders, Vested already with that planet's rays
Which leadeth others right by every road. Then was the fear a little quieted
That in my heart's lake had endured throughout That night, which I had passed so piteously: (16) What Frost "fetched" here (as in "The Road Not Taken") were the motifs of risk and decision characterizing both "The Choice of the Two Paths" and Dante's Inferno.
"The Draft Horse," a poem published at the end of Frost's life in his final volume, In the Clearing (1962 ), reminds us curiously of Frost's anecdote in 1912 about recognizing "another" self and not encountering that self and also of the poem "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening." In addition it is reminiscent of "The Road Not Taken." In each case - anecdote, autumnal poem, and winter poem - the poet must make a choice. Will he " go forward to the touch," or will he "stand still in wonderment and let him pass by" in the anecdote? He will choose the "road less traveled by" (but he will leave the other for a later passing, though he probably will not return to it). He will not succumb to the aesthetic (and perhaps psychological) attractions of the woods, which are "lovely, dark and deep," but will go forth to keep his promises - of both kinds (as Frost explained): "those that I myself make for myself and those that my ancestors made for me, known as the social contract." (17) With a lantern that wouldn't burn In too frail a buggy we drove Behind too heavy a horse
Through a pitch-dark limitless grove.
And a man came out of the trees And took our horse by the head And reaching back to his ribs Deliberately stabbed him dead.
The ponderous beast went down With a crack of a broken shaft.
And the night drew through the trees In one long invidious draft.
The most unquestioning pair That ever accepted fate
And the least disposed to ascribe Any more than we had to to hate,
We assumed that the man himself Or someone he had to obey Wanted us to get down
And walk the rest of the way. (18) The "little horse" of the earlier poem is replaced by "the too-heavy horse" of the later one. The "woods" have now been replaced by "a pitch-dark limitless grove." The hint in "grove" is one of sacrificial rites and ordered violence. The "sweep of easy wind and downy flake" of "Stopping by Woods" is echoed more ominously in "The Draft Horse" in that after "the ponderous beast went down" "the night drew through the trees / In one long invidious draft." The man was alone; here he is part of an "unquestioning pair." "Stopping by Woods" was given in the first person. "The Draft Horse," like the beginning of the Inferno, takes place in the past. There is resolution in the former - even if it evinces some fatigue; in the later it is resignation. At the time of the poem and in an earlier day, the loss of a man's horse may be as great a loss as that of one's life - probably because its loss would often lead to the death of the horse's owner. And for the poet the assassination has no rhyme or reason that he will discern. He knows only that the man " came out of the trees" (compare the intruders in "Two Tramps in Mud Time" or the neighbor in "Mending Wall" who resembles" an old-stone savage armed"). Insofar as the poet knows, this act involves motiveless malevolence less than unmalevolent motive - if there is a motive. In the Inferno, the beast that threatens the poet's pathway gives way to the poet - "Not man; man once I was," he says - who will guide him. Frost's couple have the misfortune to encounter not a guide but an assassin. "A man feared that he might find an assassin; / Another that he might find a victim," wrote Stephen Crane. "One was more wise than the other." (19) It is not too far-fetched, I think, to see the equanimity of the poet at the end of "The Draft Horse" as a response to the anecdote, many years earlier, when the poet avoided meeting his "other" self, thereby committing the "fatal omission" of not trying to find out what "purpose. ..if we could but have made out" there was in the near-encounter. It is chilling to read the poem against its Frostian antecedents. Yet, as Keeper prefers in A Masque of Mercy (1947) - in words out of another context which might better fit the romantic poet of "The Wood-Pile"-"I say I'd rather be lost in the woods / Than found in church." (20) NOTES 5. ROADS AND PATHS
1. See Samuel C. Chew, The Pilgrimage of Life (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1962), pp. 175-81.
2. Ibid., p. 178.
3. The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri, trans. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1895), p. 3.
4. "The Road Not Taken," in Complete Poems, 1949, p. 131. 5. Chew, Pilgrimage of Life, pp. 180-81.
6. Quoted in Philip L. Gerber, "Remembering Robert Frost: An Interview with William Jewell," New England Quarterly 59 (March 1986) :21.
7. The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri, trans. Charles Eliot Norton, rev. ed., vol. 1: Hell (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1903), p. 1.
8. Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant, Robert Frost: The Trial by Existence, (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1960) pp. 87-88.
9. Gerber, "Remembering Robert Frost," p. 21. 10. Selected Letters of Robert Frost, ed. Lawrance Thompson (New York: Holt Rinehart and Winston, 1964) p. xiv.
11. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Drift-Wood, in Outre-Mer and Drift-Wood (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1886), pp. 405-6.
12. William James, "The Will to Believe," in Pragmatism and Other Essays, introduced by Joseph L. Blau (New York: Washington Square Press, 1963), p. 213.
13. Poems (1890-1896) by Emily Dickinson, p. 364.
14. "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," in Complete Poems, 1949, p. 275.
15. Norton, Divine Comedy; p. 1.
16. Longfellow, Divine Comedy; p. 3. In "conversation" Frost occasionally referred to the Inferno; see Cook, "Frost in Context," in Frost: Centennial Essays III, ed by Jac Tharpe (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1978) pp. 134, 138.
17. Quoted in Reginald Cook, Robert Frost: A Living Voice, (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1974) p. 81.
18. "The Draft Horse," in In the Clearing, p. 60.
19. Stephen Crane, The Black Riders and Other Lines (Boston: Copeland and Day, 1895), p. 62.
20. A Masque of Mercy; in Complete Poems, 1949, p. 632.
by George Monteiro
- Published by The University Press of Kentucky Lexington, Kentucky 40508 (176 pgs) Copyright 1988 by The University Press of Kentucky pages 44 through 53 reproduced here by permission of the publisher. All rights reserved by UPK.
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A discussion of Frost's poem "The Road Not Taken," with references to Emerson, Dickinson, Dante, Longfellow. Also mentioned, Frost's "The Draft Horse," and "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening."
CHAPTER FIVE Roads and Paths When a man thinks happily; he finds no foot-track in the field he traverses.
--Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Quotation and Originality" (1859) "THE ROAD NOT TAKEN" can be read against a literary and pictorial tradition that might be called "The Choice of the Two Paths," reaching not only back to the Gospels and beyond them to the Greeks but to ancient English verse as well. (1) In Reson and Sensuallyte, for example, John Lydgate explains how he dreamt that Dame Nature had offered him the choice between the Road of Reason and the Road of Sensuality. In art the same choice was often represented by the letter "Y; " with the trunk of the letter representing the careless years of childhood and the two paths branching off at the age when the child is expected to exercise discretion. In one design the "Two Paths" are shown in great detail. "On one side a thin line of pious folk ascend a hill past several churches and chapels, and so skyward to the Heavenly City where an angel stands proffering a crown. On the other side a crowd of men and women are engaged in feasting, music, love-making, and other carnal pleasures while close behind them yawns the flaming mouth of hell in which sinners are writhing. But hope is held out for the worldly; for some avoid hell and having passed through a dark forest come to the rude huts of Humility and Repentance." (2) Embedded in this quotation is a direct reference to the opening of Dante's Inferno: Midway upon the journey of our life
I found myself within a forest dark,
For the straightforward pathway had been lost. Ah me! how hard a thing it is to say
What was the forest savage, rough, and stern, Which in the very thought renews the fear.
So bitter is it, death is little more. (3)
From the beginning, when it appeared as the first poem in Mountain Interval (1916), many readers have overstated the importance of "The Road Not Taken" to Frost's work. Alexander Meiklejohn, president of Amherst College, did so when, announcing the appointment of the poet to the school's faculty; he recited it to a college assembly. 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. (4)
"The Choice of Two Paths" is suggested in Frost's decision to make his two roads not very much different from one another, for passing over one of them had the effect of wearing them "really about the same." This is a far cry from, say; the description of the "two waies" offered in the seventeenth century by Henry Crosse: Two waies are proposed and laide open to all, the one inviting to vertue, the other alluring to vice; the first is combersome, intricate, untraded, overgrowne, and many obstacles to dismay the passenger; the other plaine, even beaten, overshadowed with boughes, tapistried with flowers, and many objects to feed the eye; now a man that lookes but only to the outward shewe, will easily tread the broadest pathe, but if hee perceive that this smooth and even way leads to a neast of Scorpions: or a litter of Beares, he will rather take the other though it be rugged and unpleasant, than hazard himselfe in so great a daunger. (5) Frost seems to have deliberately chosen the word "roads" rather than "waies" or "paths" or even "pathways." In fact, on one occasion when he was asked to recite his famous poem, "Two paths diverged in a yellow wood," Frost reacted with such feeling- "Two roads! " - that the transcription of his reply made it necessary both to italicize the word "roads" and to follow it with an exclamation point. Frost recited the poem all right, but, as his friend remembered, "he didn't let me get away with 'two paths!' " (6)
Convinced that the poem was deeply personal and directly self-revelatory; Frost's readers have insisted on tracing the poem to one or the other of two facts of Frost's life when he was in his late thirties. (At the beginning of the Inferno Dante is thirty-five, "midway on the road of life," notes Charles Eliot Norton.) (7) The first of these, an event, took place in the winter of 1911-1912 in the woods of Plymouth, New Hampshire, while the second, a general observation and a concomitant attitude, grew out of his long walks in England with Edward Thomas, his newfound Welsh-English poet-friend, in 1914.
In Robert Frost: The Thal by Existence, Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant locates in one of Frost's letters the source for "The Road Not Taken." To Susan Hayes Ward the poet wrote on February 10, 1912: Two lonely cross-roads that themselves cross each other I have walked several times this winter without meeting or overtaking so much as a single person on foot or on runners. The practically unbroken condition of both for several days after a snow or a blow proves that neither is much travelled. Judge then how surprised I was the other evening as I came down one to see a man, who to my own unfamiliar eyes and in the dusk looked for all the world like myself, coming down the other, his approach to the point where our paths must intersect being so timed that unless one of us pulled up we must inevitably collide. I felt as if I was going to meet my own image in a slanting mirror. Or say I felt as we slowly converged on the same point with the same noiseless yet laborious stride as if we were two images about to float together with the uncrossing of someone's eyes. I verily expected to take up or absorb this other self and feel the stronger by the addition for the three-mile journey home. But I didn't go forward to the touch. I stood still in wonderment and let him pass by; and that, too, with the fatal omission of not trying to find out by a comparison of lives and immediate and remote interests what could have brought us by crossing paths to the same point in a wilderness at the same moment of nightfall. Some purpose I doubt not, if we could but have made out. I like a coincidence almost as well as an incongruity. (8) This portentous account of meeting " another " self (but not encountering that self directly and therefore not coming to terms with it) would eventually result in a poem quite different from "The Road Not Taken " and one that Frost would not publish for decades. Elizabeth Sergeant ties the moment with Frost's decision to go off at this time to some place where he could devote more time to poetry. He had also, she implies, filed away his dream for future poetic use.
That poetic use would occur three years later. In 1914 Frost arrived in England for what he then thought would be an extended sabbatical leave from farming in New Hampshire. By all the signs he was ready to settle down for a long stay. Settling in Gloucestershire, he soon became a close friend of Edward Thomas. Later, when readers persisted in misreading "The Road Not Taken, " Frost insisted that his poem had been intended as a sly jest at the expense of his friend and fellow poet. For Thomas had invariably fussed over irrevocable choices of the most minor sort made on daily walks with Frost in 1914, shortly before the writing of the poem. Later Frost insisted that in his case the line " And that has made all the difference" - taken straight - was all wrong. "Of course, it hasn't, " he persisted, "it's just a poem, you know. (9) In 1915, moreover, his sole intention was to twit Thomas. Living in Gloucestershire, writes Lawrance Thompson, Frost had frequently taken long countryside walks with Thomas. Repeatedly Thomas would choose a route which might enable him to show his American friend a rare plant or a special vista; but it often happened that before the end of such a walk Thomas would regret the choice he had made and would sigh over what he might have shown Frost if they had taken a "better" direction. More than once, on such occasions, the New Englander had teased his Welsh-English friend for those wasted regrets. ...Frost found something quaintly romantic in sighing over what might have been. Such a course of action was a road never taken by Frost, a road he had been taught to avoid. (10) If we are to believe Frost and his biographer, "The Road Not Taken" was intended to serve as Frost's gentle jest at Thomas's expense. But the poem might have had other targets. One such target was a text by another poet who in a different sense might also be considered a "friend": Henry Wadsworth Longfellow; whose poem, "My Lost Youth," had provided Frost with A Boy's Will, the title he chose for his first book.
"The Road Not Taken" can be placed against a passage in Longfellow's notebooks: "Round about what is, lies a whole mysterious world of might be ,-- a psychological romance of possibilities and things that do not happen. By going out a few minutes sooner or later, by stopping to speak with a friend at a corner, by meeting this man or that, or by turning down this street instead of the other, we may let slip some great occasion of good, or avoid some impending evil, by which the whole current of our lives would have been changed. There is no possible solution to the dark enigma but the one word, 'Providence.' "(11)
Longfellow's tone in this passage is sober, even somber, and anticipates the same qualities in Edward Thomas, as Frost so clearly perceived. Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant had insisted that Frost's dream encounter with his other self at a crossroads in the woods had a "subterranean connection" with the whole of "The Road Not Taken," especially with the poem's last lines: 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. Undoubtedly. But whereas Longfellow had invoked Providence to account for acts performed and actions not taken, Frost calls attention only to the role of human choice. A second target was the notion that "whatever choice we make, we make at our peril." The words just quoted are Fitz-James Stephen's, but it is more important that Frost encountered them in William James's essay "The Will to Believe. " In fact, James concludes his final paragraph on the topic: "We stand on a mountain pass in the midst of whirling snow and blinding mist, through which we get glimpses now and then of paths which may be deceptive. If we take the wrong road we shall be dashed to pieces. We do not certainly know whether there is any right one. What must we do? 'Be strong and of a good courage.' Act for the best, hope for the best, and take what comes. ...If death ends all, we cannot meet death better. " (12) The danger inherent in decision, in this brave passage quoted with clear-cut approval by the teacher Frost "never had," does not play a part in "The Road Not Taken. " Frost the "leaf-treader" will have none of it, though he will not refuse to make a choice. Nothing will happen to him through default. Nor, argues the poet, is it likely that anyone will melodramatically be dashed to pieces.
It is useful to see Frost's projected sigh as a nudging criticism of Thomas's characteristic regrets, to note that Frost's poem takes a sly poke at Longfellow's more generalized awe before the notion of what might have happened had it not been for the inexorable workings of Providence, and to see "The Road Not Taken" as a bravura tossing off of Fitz-James Stephen's mountainous and meteorological scenario. We can also project the poem against a poem by Emily Dickinson that Frost had encountered twenty years earlier in Poems, Second Series (1891). Our journey had advanced; Our feet were almost come
To that odd fork in Being's road, Eternity by term. Our pace took sudden awe, Our feet reluctant led.
Before were cities, but between, The forest of the dead.
Retreat was out of hope, -- Behind, a sealed route, Eternity's white flag before, And God at every gate. (13) Dickinson's poem is straightforwardly and orthodoxically religious. But it can be seen that beyond the "journey" metaphor Dickinson's poem employs diction - "road" and "forest" - that recalls "The Choice of the Two Paths" trope, the opening lines of the Inferno, and Frost's secular poem "The Road Not Taken."
The "dark forest" in the tradition of "The Choice of the Two Paths" and the "forest dark" of Longfellow's translation of the Inferno also foreshadow the imagery of the famous Frost poem published in New Hampshire (1923), the last stanza of which begins: "The woods are lovely, dark and deep. " (14) In spurning the word "forest" for "woods," a term that is perhaps more appropriate for New England, Frost was, whether he knew it or not, following Charles Eliot Norton, whose translation of the Inferno reads "dark wood" and who glosses the opening of Dante's poem: "The dark wood is the forest of the world of sense, 'the erroneous wood of this life' ..., that is, the wood in which man loses his way." (15) In "the darkest evening of the year, the New England poet finds himself standing before a scene he finds attractive enough to make him linger. Frost's poem employs, significantly, the present tense. Dante's poem (through Longfellow) employs the past tense. It is as if Frost were casually remembering some familiar engraving that hung on a schoolroom wall in Lawrence as he was growing up in the 1880s, and the poet slides into the picture. He enters, so to speak, the mind of the figure who speaks the poem, a figure whose body is slowly turned into the scene, head fully away from the foreground, bulking small, holding the reins steadily and loosely. The horse and team are planted, though poised to move. And so begins the poet's dramatization of this rural and parochial tableau. "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." And then, having entered the human being, he witnesses the natural drift of that human being's thoughts to the brain of his "little horse," who thinks it " queer" that the rider has decided to stop here. And then, in an equally easy transition, the teamster returns to himself, remembering that he has promises to keep and miles to go before he sleeps. Duties, responsibilities - many must have them we think, as echolalia closes the poem, all other thoughts already turning away from the illustration on the schoolroom wall. And even as the "little horse" has been rid of the man's intrusion, so too must the rider's mind be freed of the poet's incursion. The poet's last line resonates, dismissing the reader from his, the poet's, dreamy mind and that mind's preoccupations, and returning to the poet's inside reading of the still-life drama that goes on forever within its frame hanging on the classroom wall.
The ways in which Frost's poem "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" converses with Longfellow's translation of Dante are evident from other shared echoes and images. The Inferno continues: I cannot well repeat how there I entered,
So full was I of slumber at the moment In which I had abandoned the true way: But after I had reached a mountain's foot,
At that point where the valley terminated, Which had with consternation pierced my heart,
Upward I looked, and I beheld its shoulders, Vested already with that planet's rays
Which leadeth others right by every road. Then was the fear a little quieted
That in my heart's lake had endured throughout That night, which I had passed so piteously: (16) What Frost "fetched" here (as in "The Road Not Taken") were the motifs of risk and decision characterizing both "The Choice of the Two Paths" and Dante's Inferno.
"The Draft Horse," a poem published at the end of Frost's life in his final volume, In the Clearing (1962 ), reminds us curiously of Frost's anecdote in 1912 about recognizing "another" self and not encountering that self and also of the poem "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening." In addition it is reminiscent of "The Road Not Taken." In each case - anecdote, autumnal poem, and winter poem - the poet must make a choice. Will he " go forward to the touch," or will he "stand still in wonderment and let him pass by" in the anecdote? He will choose the "road less traveled by" (but he will leave the other for a later passing, though he probably will not return to it). He will not succumb to the aesthetic (and perhaps psychological) attractions of the woods, which are "lovely, dark and deep," but will go forth to keep his promises - of both kinds (as Frost explained): "those that I myself make for myself and those that my ancestors made for me, known as the social contract." (17) With a lantern that wouldn't burn In too frail a buggy we drove Behind too heavy a horse
Through a pitch-dark limitless grove.
And a man came out of the trees And took our horse by the head And reaching back to his ribs Deliberately stabbed him dead.
The ponderous beast went down With a crack of a broken shaft.
And the night drew through the trees In one long invidious draft.
The most unquestioning pair That ever accepted fate
And the least disposed to ascribe Any more than we had to to hate,
We assumed that the man himself Or someone he had to obey Wanted us to get down
And walk the rest of the way. (18) The "little horse" of the earlier poem is replaced by "the too-heavy horse" of the later one. The "woods" have now been replaced by "a pitch-dark limitless grove." The hint in "grove" is one of sacrificial rites and ordered violence. The "sweep of easy wind and downy flake" of "Stopping by Woods" is echoed more ominously in "The Draft Horse" in that after "the ponderous beast went down" "the night drew through the trees / In one long invidious draft." The man was alone; here he is part of an "unquestioning pair." "Stopping by Woods" was given in the first person. "The Draft Horse," like the beginning of the Inferno, takes place in the past. There is resolution in the former - even if it evinces some fatigue; in the later it is resignation. At the time of the poem and in an earlier day, the loss of a man's horse may be as great a loss as that of one's life - probably because its loss would often lead to the death of the horse's owner. And for the poet the assassination has no rhyme or reason that he will discern. He knows only that the man " came out of the trees" (compare the intruders in "Two Tramps in Mud Time" or the neighbor in "Mending Wall" who resembles" an old-stone savage armed"). Insofar as the poet knows, this act involves motiveless malevolence less than unmalevolent motive - if there is a motive. In the Inferno, the beast that threatens the poet's pathway gives way to the poet - "Not man; man once I was," he says - who will guide him. Frost's couple have the misfortune to encounter not a guide but an assassin. "A man feared that he might find an assassin; / Another that he might find a victim," wrote Stephen Crane. "One was more wise than the other." (19) It is not too far-fetched, I think, to see the equanimity of the poet at the end of "The Draft Horse" as a response to the anecdote, many years earlier, when the poet avoided meeting his "other" self, thereby committing the "fatal omission" of not trying to find out what "purpose. ..if we could but have made out" there was in the near-encounter. It is chilling to read the poem against its Frostian antecedents. Yet, as Keeper prefers in A Masque of Mercy (1947) - in words out of another context which might better fit the romantic poet of "The Wood-Pile"-"I say I'd rather be lost in the woods / Than found in church." (20) NOTES 5. ROADS AND PATHS
1. See Samuel C. Chew, The Pilgrimage of Life (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1962), pp. 175-81.
2. Ibid., p. 178.
3. The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri, trans. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1895), p. 3.
4. "The Road Not Taken," in Complete Poems, 1949, p. 131. 5. Chew, Pilgrimage of Life, pp. 180-81.
6. Quoted in Philip L. Gerber, "Remembering Robert Frost: An Interview with William Jewell," New England Quarterly 59 (March 1986) :21.
7. The Divine Comedy of Dante Alighieri, trans. Charles Eliot Norton, rev. ed., vol. 1: Hell (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1903), p. 1.
8. Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant, Robert Frost: The Trial by Existence, (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1960) pp. 87-88.
9. Gerber, "Remembering Robert Frost," p. 21. 10. Selected Letters of Robert Frost, ed. Lawrance Thompson (New York: Holt Rinehart and Winston, 1964) p. xiv.
11. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Drift-Wood, in Outre-Mer and Drift-Wood (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1886), pp. 405-6.
12. William James, "The Will to Believe," in Pragmatism and Other Essays, introduced by Joseph L. Blau (New York: Washington Square Press, 1963), p. 213.
13. Poems (1890-1896) by Emily Dickinson, p. 364.
14. "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," in Complete Poems, 1949, p. 275.
15. Norton, Divine Comedy; p. 1.
16. Longfellow, Divine Comedy; p. 3. In "conversation" Frost occasionally referred to the Inferno; see Cook, "Frost in Context," in Frost: Centennial Essays III, ed by Jac Tharpe (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1978) pp. 134, 138.
17. Quoted in Reginald Cook, Robert Frost: A Living Voice, (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1974) p. 81.
18. "The Draft Horse," in In the Clearing, p. 60.
19. Stephen Crane, The Black Riders and Other Lines (Boston: Copeland and Day, 1895), p. 62.
20. A Masque of Mercy; in Complete Poems, 1949, p. 632.