Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, COBWEB COLLEGE; AN ANTINOMIAN PARABLE ... FOR ROBERT FRIST, by KENNETH LESLIE


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

COBWEB COLLEGE; AN ANTINOMIAN PARABLE ... FOR ROBERT FRIST, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: A batch of freshman came to cobweb college
Last Line: "better than day they know the day!"
Subject(s): Frost, Robert (1874-1963); Poetry & Poets; Universities & Colleges


An Antinomian Parable written for Robert Frost

A batch of freshmen came to Cobweb College;
the Spider looked them over, frowned and said,
"These boys are ghosts of boys, cracked wide with knowledge,
their dreams dried out and left the dreamers dead.
There's not a meal among them, no illusion
to sharpen up my tooth on, no romance
for me to ridicule to red confusion,
no creed on which to slake my poison lance.
I've drawn their blood too many generations
and spoiled the breed. Their fathers, when I wrapped them
in causal web and silken strong equations,
would lunge and writhe, grimacing when I snapped them
with categoried claws. These modern schools
condition them until they yearn to yield;
their wills are like the blown pigskin that drools
November muck around a soggy field.
They murmur, 'Say, Professor, skip the prodding,
just dish it out, the ifs, the ands, the buts!
who'd question fifty million miles of wadding
engendered through the ages in your guts?
Welcome the warm cocoon of cosy thought
through which we gain the world but lose surprise!
we'll answer by your book, old man, but not
pretend amazement,'
thus the pampered flies
and those who hope for pampering .... the rest
nursing a schoolboy grudge within the core
of mangy-bearded justice are at best
a thin and scanty ration for my store."

So modernly at his wits' end to find
food for his pattern-maw: as when old cries
were battle banners for the foolish blind;
or wisdom knelt before the prattling wise;
or doddering knights clanked forth as to a feast
and opened old wounds for an empty tomb
while on their heads the stupefying East
poured her unholy oil to their sure doom;
or as when that rough sheepherd whose wild head
ached noisily pulled from the pasture mire
her heavy brogues and herded kings instead
and burned two kingdoms in her fagots' fire;
or as when hare-brained Shelley turned the tack,
unwigged the judge, lifted the felon bard
out of his cage onto the judge's sack
and placed the moral guardian under guard;
('twas Shelley solved it) he would find a poet
and pen him just beyond the edge of knowledge
(tether him well but never let him know it)
to be a milch-fly for old Cobweb College.
"Come, then, quaint poet, feed them hints of God
my hounds of two-plus-two-are-four will chew!
Cast over them your old divining rod
and draw their deep springs to my sultry view!"
Thus came the Ageless One to Cobweb College
and said,
"It is incumbent upon me
to be the thing that I was dreamed to be;
the word I say and live will not divide;
it must be born complete."
His voice cross-grained,
he said it sitting on a class-room table,
not lotus-seated but legs swinging free,
a very Yankee Buddha (if a Buddha),
leaving it once to look abstractedly
out of the open window at the sky,
smiling to welcome in the coming storm,
the quick low murmur and the sudden dark,
his voice the thunder's texture and his hands
its muscled wind, veined lightning. The storm broke.
"Lately we hear much talk about selection.
I'll dip some random uses of that word
out of the pot where words boil up in deeds:
'What is your selection for the Derby?'
'The new headmaster is a good selection.'
'Out of these evils I select the least.'
'The most important thing you learn at college
is how to live your life selectively,
to recognize the seal of excellence,
the caste-mark of those persons one should know,
the hallmark of those books that one should read.'
Easy to note the part selection plays;
yet here's the antiphon, the song's recoil:
(what we forget is that it works two ways)
the seed is chosen by and chooses soil.
Not difficult to choose things ready made
and marked with price-tags, plainly stamped and signed
or guaranteed by cliques and claques of critics;
but making things is more than choosing things.
It is the hardened artery of the soul
that delves in objets d'art, jostling the good
and bad of artists' and no-artists' leavings
conducted by a melancholy dealer
who wears upon his one and only eye
a disc of gold and rubs his hands to hear
the dry voice of a dowager exlaim:

'What a pretty crucifix,
Only seventeen and six!
Just the thing I want to fill
that bit of wall-space. ... what a thrill!'

Here is a simple parable of life:
The bark upon a tree is wood; it peels
year after year while holding to its form,
its form tradition, and its peeling off
the yielding of tradition to the sap
of new creation. ... so we have the tree.
Now teach the bark its business with steel bands
and twist those bands until they choke the sap ....
steel bands for the pharisee, for him
no living tree but stark unbending branches
on which to nail the Life that loves through death. ...
steel bands for the graceless scholar; he
tallies three kinds of grace, A, B, and C,
snuffing the living flame with adjectives
saying 'how quaint, how quite Wordsworthian!'
The slowed-up poetry of speculation,
the Martha role of keeping things in order,
the retail merchant sorting and arranging
the world's goods on his hierarchic shelves ....
there is a deeper thing on which these bud,
a passion that is too much in the blood,
too moving in the marrow of the loin,
too much the chosen itself to mould a coin
whose metal face would blind the human face
and shut it from the inner holy place.
Rather than moulds invisible in the air
into which petals pour selective milk
I seem to sense a partnered agony
of creature and creator in the rose,
and in each act of mine there dwells a host
of that same pair, a host with the strange power
of swinging wide the door for them to enter
or slamming it against them, I that host."
There was a frantic scurrying in their minds,
a rush to find appropriate pigeonholes
for all this tangle; nothing seemed to fit.
The Spider sidled in with a quick squeak
and a suggestion born of sudden fear
that rather than a lecture once a week
a better plan would be one once a year.

The Ageless One heard (not the interjection)
the scurrying to and fro within their minds;
yet he went on in that most sublime faith
that ever life goes seeking for its own
leaving the indexed husks. ... here in this very room
might brood a boy with hunger strong enough
to smell the truth. Now there began to sprout
in Doctor Spider's brain a horrible doubt ....
What gender was this animal? What ilk?
Gin for his tender babes if this was milk!
"The hundredth sheep was not a select sheep,
but just a sheep that happened to be lost.
Mary would have loved her Son as much
had he been but the unrepentant thief.
Do lovers tally points of excellence
as if they were self-breeding animals?
(I speak of breeding; it involves selection.)
You may breed long legs thus, even long heads,
but love is neither bred nor educated.
Love knows no grammar, yet the stiffest lock,
the dullest door, may open to his knock.
Tradition, once as subtle as the film
that wraps unfelt the living nerve and vein,
begins to choke the vein and lull the nerve
to liking it; the film is wire now
and coalesces to a band of steel
so that a good professor is a blacksmith
or combination smith and spi—. ..."
The Spider
dwindled with a squeak until his gown
seemed hung in mid-air on a wire hanger,
his mortar sagged upon a shrunken peg.
The storm had passed beyond the folded hills,
only its curious echo in this room,
this man's rough voice its far threat of thunder.

"From soil somehow the poet's word
and from that word the spreading tree
where swells all fruit, sings every bird,
whose strong trunk is philosophy,
whose branches thrust in legal maze,
whose leaves are myriad windows green
sifting the one to many ways,
tinting the unseen to the seen.
Your teachers list the birds and fruit,
the trunk and branches of the tree;
but they forget about the root,
because the root they cannot see.
Yet have the roots a ray to find
their road between the stones and clay;
like Raftery, the singing blind,
better than day they know the day!"





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