352
FRANK BIDAR;T
about half the poems in the book. This is the original opening of
"Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening":
Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house
is
in the village though;
Lathem adds a comma after "village." Suddenly "though" seems stuck
on for the rhyme. More important, he has destroyed the slightly trance–
like, lulled movement of the whole poem: in the original,
none
of the
lines have a midline pause except "The woods are lovely, dark and
deep." Lathem breaks up the latter even more ( "The woods are lovely,
dark, and deep"). "Dark and deep" in Frost's version becomes almost
a single quality; with a kind of simple elegance, the phrase suggests the
mystery beneath this "loveliness." For Lathem, the woods are more flatly
three different things: lovely, dark, deep.
"To Earthward" is Lathem's nadir. In the early stanzas the poet
has discussed the unmixed "sweet things" that once gave joy. Here is
the original version of what follows, lines 17-19:
Now no joy but lacks salt
That is not dashed with pain
And weariness and fault;
Now joy without "pain/ And weariness" is not strong enough, fails to
reach him, "lacks salt." Later he says: "I crave the stain/ Of tears .../
The sweet of bitter bark." Lathem adds a comma to the end of line 17,
and by doing so reverses the meaning of all three lines:
Now no joy but lacks salt,
That is not dashed with pain
And weariness and fault;
Suddenly "is" becomes parallel to "lacks," and the lines say that
every
joy "lacks salt,"
every
joy is "dashed with pain." This is not only wrong,
but self-contradictory: if every joy
«lacks
salt" it cannot also be "dashed
with pain." In any case, in the name of "textual clarity," Lathem has
ruined a crucial stanza.
Frost's punctuation, like Wordsworth's, is often spare, but when he
approaches common speech, is at times surprisingly intricate. This is the
end of "Home Burial"; husband and wife have been bitterly arguing.
'You -
oh, you think the talk is all. I must go–
Somewhere out of this house. How can I make you
-'
