Robert Frost, 1936

I have been one acquainted with the night.
I have walked out in rain—and back in rain.
I have outwalked the furthest city light.

I have looked down the saddest city lane.
I have passed by the watchman on his beat
And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.

I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet
When far away an interrupted cry
Came over houses from another street,

But not to call me back or say good-bye;
And further still at an unearthly height,
One luminary clock against the sky

Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right
I have been one acquainted with the night.

***

Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink
Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain;
Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink
And rise and sink and rise and sink again;
Love cannot fill the thickened lung with breath,
Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone;
Yet many a man is making friends with death
Even as I speak, for lack of love alone.
It well may be that in a difficult hour,
Pinned down by pain and moaning for release,
Or nagged by want past resolution’s power,
I might be driven to sell your love for peace,
Or trade the memory of this night for food.
It well may be. I do not think I would.

***

I, being born a woman and distressed
By all the needs and notions of my kind,
Am urged by your propinquity to find
Your person fair, and feel a certain zest
To bear your body’s weight upon my breast:
So subtly is the fume of life designed,
To clarify the pulse and cloud the mind,
And leave me once again undone, possessed.
Think not for this, however, the poor treason
Of my stout blood against my staggering brain,
I shall remember you with love, or season
My scorn with pity,—let me make it plain:
I find this frenzy insufficient reason
For conversation when we meet again.

“Freedom isn’t the same for girls…”

In an effort to get people to look
into each other’s eyes more,
and also to appease the mutes,
the government has decided
to allot each person exactly one hundred
and sixty-seven words, per day.

When the phone rings, I put it to my ear
without saying hello. In the restaurant
I point at chicken noodle soup.
I am adjusting well to the new way.

Late at night, I call my long distance lover,
proudly say, “I only used fifty-nine today.
I saved the rest for you.”

When she doesn’t respond,
I know she’s used up all her words,
so I slowly whisper, “I love you”
thirty-two and a third times.
After that, we just sit on the line
and listen to each other breathe.

So sometimes I get bored and read random things on poets.org. And I was doing that today instead of paying attention to what I ought to have been, and I came across this poem. And I hated it. It is shockingly sexist. Indeed, the sexism isn’t even covert, it’s blatant and apparent. Tracing the anti-women tropes was almost fun, except for how it was gross.

When a Woman Loves a Man
David Lehman

When she says margarita she means daiquiri.

She’s drinking girly drinks? And she wants a drink girlier than the girly one she’s already asked for? And she’s too dumb to know what she really wants? Or doesn’t even remember the name of the drink she likes? Okay.

When she says quixotic she means mercurial.

She uses words she doesn’t know the meaning of, so she must be stupid. And of course, “mercurial” describes her quite well if his assertions against her in this first stanza are true.

And when she says, “I’ll never speak to you again,”
she means, “Put your arms around me from behind
as I stand disconsolate at the window.”

Oh, those darn women, never saying what they mean. Of course, a tiny act of affection from the mister will be enough to soothe even this huge anger in the missus.

He’s supposed to know that.

Women expect men to read their minds when they don’t say what they mean. And we never say what we mean.

When a man loves a woman he is in New York and she is in Virginia

City man, country girl?

or he is in Boston, writing, and she is in New York, reading,

Men are creators, women are consumers. And there are those anti-Boston sentiments from a New Yorker.

or she is wearing a sweater and sunglasses in Balboa Park and he is raking leaves in Ithaca

Women are defined by what they wear. Men are defined by the manly things they do.

or he is driving to East Hampton and she is standing disconsolate
at the window overlooking the bay
where a regatta of many-colored sails is going on
while he is stuck in traffic on the Long Island Expressway.

Men do stuff while women wait for them to come home, and are unhappy about it.

When a woman loves a man it is one ten in the morning

The inconvenient timing of ladies’ love?

she is asleep he is watching the ball scores and eating pretzels
drinking lemonade

Ah ha! He does something stereotypical. Though why this is happening at one ten in the morning is a bit unclear.

and two hours later he wakes up and staggers into bed
where she remains asleep and very warm.

You knew it was coming: women are defined by their passive bodies.

When she says tomorrow she means in three or four weeks.

This is the long-form version of “women always take hours to get ready.” It also implies that women are unreliable and can’t complete tasks on time.

When she says, “We’re talking about me now,”
he stops talking.

A few options are possible. She may be asserting that the conversation has covertly changed from a conversation about ‘us’ to a critique of ‘her,’ and by stating it she is attempting to oppose it. Alternately, the narrator of the poem is accusing women of talking about themselves too much. And he has nothing to stay about ‘her,’ despite this being a love poem.

Her best friend comes over and says,
“Did somebody die?”

Again, twofold. One, women detect changes in mood rapidly (because we’re all about feelings). Two, the narrator is hating on the ‘sisterhood’ of women who defend each other. Those women and their friends, they always gang up on you.

When a woman loves a man, they have gone
to swim naked in the stream

If she loves him, she’ll get naked in public with him.

on a glorious July day
with the sound of the waterfall like a chuckle

Yes, someone is certainly laughing.

of water rushing over smooth rocks,
and there is nothing alien in the universe.

I mean, I think I see here the idea of things not seeming so far away and foreign, or that maybe, somehow, men and women might not seem alien to each other. But even using ‘alien’ in this poem, with its heavy relationship context, just brings up the old men-are-from-Mars-women-are-from-Venus trope. The situation here, naked swimming, isn’t about the kind of unity found in deep conversations, it’s about the oxytocin-swapping snuggly-feel-goodiness of a pleasant shared experience, which doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with actual compatibility or happiness.

Ripe apples fall about them.
What else can they do but eat?

‘Sup, allusion to Eve, the quintessential bad woman.

When he says, “Ours is a transitional era,”
“that’s very original of you,” she replies,
dry as the martini he is sipping.

Women are insulting shrews. Even when he says something worth insulting.

They fight all the time
It’s fun
What do I owe you?
Let’s start with an apology
Ok, I’m sorry, you dickhead.
A sign is held up saying “Laughter.”
It’s a silent picture.

Domestic arguments are funny because of reasons. #trufax

“I’ve been fucked without a kiss,” she says,
“and you can quote me on that,”
which sounds great in an English accent.

The content of what you say is not important, the sexiness of how you say it is important.

One year they broke up seven times and threatened to do it another nine times.

WELL THEN WHY ARE YOU STILL TOGETHER?

When a woman loves a man, she wants him to meet her at the airport in a foreign country with a jeep.

Men do exotic things and women show up to hang out with them.

When a man loves a woman he’s there. He doesn’t complain that
she’s two hours late
and there’s nothing in the refrigerator.

Women should provide food, and men who don’t complain about women not providing food or not having impeccable timing and control of airline schedules are saints.

When a woman loves a man, she wants to stay awake.
She’s like a child crying
at nightfall because she didn’t want the day to end.

Women like to spend time with men! But they’re childish, you know.

When a man loves a woman, he watches her sleep, thinking:
as midnight to the moon is sleep to the beloved.

Men don’t like to spend time with women, they just like to look at them. If midnight = where the moon best fits, then sleeping = where women best fit. So basically, ladies, shut up and hold still so we can stare at you without you staring back. This is what it takes to be loved.

A thousand fireflies wink at him.
The frogs sound like the string section
of the orchestra warming up.
The stars dangle down like earrings the shape of grapes.

P.S. Here are some nice romantish images so you can tell I really love her no matter how much we fight.

I apologize for trolling this poem the flip tone of my analysis. My husband sometimes has a hard time reading feminist writing, because the writing can be very dismissive of attempts at alternate claims. But sometimes there’s really nothing else to do. I’m disappointed that poets.org has posted this poem, because some kid who doesn’t know better is going to see this poem and think it might actually be good. Part of me would like to imagine that Lehman doesn’t mean it, that these images are so clichéd that they’re meant to be ironic. But the irony seems so bitter it must go around the corner and be earnest again. So, if I do take this poem seriously, I’m confronted with the horrifying idea that a man (or every man) thinks that all of the stereotypes about women are true, and that in order to con this man into loving me (“When a Woman Loves a Man”), I’ve got to embody those stereotypes. Of course, embodying those stereotypes will also make this man resent me. So what’s the point? Let’s just not be in love at all.

Part of the point of the movement is not to have a single set of demands, partly to accomodate a variety of worldviews and issues, and partly because a lot of the economic stuff is very high-level and hard to understand. And, of course, there are some people who aren’t informed, and if you only listen to mainstream media or skim, you might not see the bigger issues (a lot of mainstream media coverage intentionally doesn’t interview the most informed people). Not every person participating in the Occupy movement is going to agree with all of what I think, but the spirit of the movement has to do with restructuring our economy so that wealth actually reaches the people, rather than being concentrated in the hands of the very, very few.

So, not all Occupiers agree, but my important thoughts are:

- Strengthen anti-trust laws so that companies have a harder time buying each other out, and we have more competition (good visual)

- Fix the tax code so that millionaires+ are paying their fair share. In 1951, the top tax bracket paid 91% income taxes, and there were many more tax brackets. Now the top tax bracket only pays 35% income taxes, and there are only 6 tax brackets, the low point of the highest tax bracket being $380,000. LeBron James and LeBron James’ *dentist* are in the same tax bracket (great explanation of tax brackets, from whence I stole the LeBron comparison). I believe we need to add more tax brackets beyond the current ones so that those people who have benefitted from society contribute back to society. This would also eliminate/modify the Alternative Minimum Tax.

- Connected with the bullet before this, I support something like the proposed Warren Buffet tax, which would tax capital gains at a higher rate for those people (primarily the phenomenally rich) who make most of their money not as income but as interest on capital or investments. A lot of bankers/businesspeople who are paid bonuses in stocks make a great deal of money trading/investing/etc. those stocks, and because the money from that and interest is taxed as capital gains instead of income, they avoid paying the level of taxes that would be paid if that money were income instead.

- Instituting some kind of tax and/or limitations on financial transactions that are ultimately detrimental to the market overall, like shorting (‘borrowing’ stock, selling it to someone, then waiting for the stock’s value to fall so you can buy it back and ‘return’ it) and some hedge fund practices. I’m not an economist, but there have been a lot of conversations about the dangerous practices that caused the economic problems of late, and I support restricting/eliminating those (this is an old-ish This American Life show about shorting that’s really good). Some restrictions on short selling were imposed in 2008, but they don’t go far enough (in my non-economist opinion).

- Increase import taxes on goods produced overseas, even if they were produced by an American company (such as Apple, which despite being an ‘American’ company sells iPhones etc. that were assembled/manufactured in China). With increased globalization we have sent away the ‘low-paying’ manufacturing jobs that were, when they originally began, not low-paying at all. When Ford cars were first manufactured, assembly workers could save up for a few months and afford to buy the cars they manufactured (unlike today, when car loans typically take years to pay off). Now, assembly-type jobs are done overseas and the workers are often not paid enough to be in the class of consumers who are buying the objects they manufacture. Returning manufacturing to the United States will reduce the environmental impact of massive transportation of goods and will provide more jobs for Americans. Some will argue that this may result in the price of consumer goods going up, but if laws are structured well, ideally it will cut more into the pay of top executives and the cash reserves of the companies.

- Continue working on the healthcare issues. All Americans should have access to healthcare, but we also need to work to modify our healthcare system so that waste is eliminated without reducing the quality of care. Opinions vary on how to do this; I like the idea of increased contact via nurses etc. that is advocated by Atul Gawande in this New Yorker article.

- Student loans, particularly privately-funded student loans, can be cripplingly expensive, and many colleges in the U.S. aren’t providing the value of education being paid for (for-profit colleges aimed at ‘working adults’ have been in the news lately, but they’re not the only ones). Reducing the costs of higher education and helping relieve student loan debt are important to many Occupiers, especially those who graduated with one or more degrees and still cannot find employment at an appropriate level.

- Increase unionization. I’m in a union job and I’d hate to not be in one, but as America has grown over the past century, business has done a great job of making unions look bad. Like your five-day work week, your eight hour day? Thank the unions of the early 1900s. But as we’ve moved toward a more white-collar workforce, white-collar workers have not unionized (teachers being the most clear exception to this, and, of course, many businessy types might argue we’re not really white collar anyway…). This means that businesses have been able to take away healthcare and other benefits and increase pay for the top executives while pay for the average employee has remained static. Unionization will allow workers to have a greater say in what they get paid and how they plan for retirement. Pensions may not be sustainable as our workforce lives longer and longer after retirement, but unions can push for matched funding for 401ks and other ways to ensure that workers are able to retire with a reliable income. Unionization also helps decrease pay disparity based on gender and race. I can look at our published union pay scale and know how much everyone around me makes, and why (years of education and years of experience). In jobs where pay is not discussed, women and minorities may be paid less than their fellow workers and not know it, even if they’re doing the same job. Unions push for pay scales to be made public, and that is essential if we are ever to achieve true equality in the workplace.

- Probably this isn’t an issue for most Occupiers, but it is for me: reduce/eliminate funding for charter schools, which are inherently divisive in communities that need uniting. Charter schools pull students from the public school base, taking the tax money from the state away from the public school that student otherwise would have attended. But, more importantly, they pull the students who have parents able to access the complex charter school application process. Not all parents have the time or skills to apply to charter schools. By pulling those parents away from public schools and into charter schools, you empty the public schools of strong parent advocates, practically guaranteeing that the public schools will fail. Furthermore, charter schools often reject or fail students who require Special Education or who do not have English as their first language. This leaves the most struggling students in public school, with no role models for high achievement. Public schools can be successful when parents are involved and there are many types of students, but that can’t happen when we’re funding divisive charter schools, which don’t necessarily achieve higher scores than public schools, and which often have high staff turnover (and sometimes high student turnover as well). Examining the members of the boards of charter schools is also a bit spooky; one can never be sure if the businesspeople involved actually give a shit about students, or they’re interested in making their property values go up. And, of course, there is the issue of money to be made from textbooks, standardized tests, etc (suspicious much?).

As I’ve said, horizontally-organized Occupy Wall Street is not necessarily going to support all of the propositions I’ve listed here. However, none of these issues have been adequately addressed by our existing political parties and governmental bodies. I don’t think there’s any way to get the business interests and their politician bedfellows to give a shit about us except to occupy. So this is what I’m occupying for. I hope you’ll join me.

The girl who mounted in the omnibus
The rainy day, and paid a penny fare
Who answered my appreciative stare
With that averted look without surprise
Which only the experienced can wear
A girl with reddish hair and faint blue eyes

An almost denizen of Leicester Square.
We could not have had her in the box with us
She would not have known how to sit, or what to wear
Yet if I close my eyes I see her moving
With loosened hair about her chamber
With naked feet passing across the skies

She would have been most crudely ill at ease
She would not have known how to sit, or what to wear
Nor, when the lights went out and the horn began
Have leaned as you did, your elbow on my knees
To prod impetuously with your fan
The smiling stripling with the pink soaped face
Who had your opera-glasses in his care.

          She is as in a field a silken tent
          At midday when a sunny summer breeze
          Has dried the dew and all its ropes relent,
          So that in guys it gently sways at ease,
5         And its supporting central cedar pole,
          That is its pinnacle to heavenward
          And signifies the sureness of the soul,
          Seems to owe naught to any single cord,
          But strictly held by none, is loosely bound
10       By countless silken ties of love and thought
          To everything on earth the compass round,
          And only by one’s going slightly taut
          In the capriciousness of summer air
          Is of the slightest bondage made aware.

How dreadful, Mr. Frost.

Maybe it’s just me, but I can’t read this poem and not focus on the concept of bondage. The extended metaphor is, obviously, that the “She” is somehow like a tent. The tent has a central pole, as well as guys tying it to the ground. The pole is generally upright, but a breeze makes it aware of the guys as one tightens to prevent it from falling due to the wind. Of course, we can make all sorts of jokes about poles and bondage and what they represent, but let’s not. The pole, if it is the “pinnacle to heavenward” and the “sureness of the soul,” must be the woman. The guys are “countless silken ties of love and thought.” Described as relating to “love and thought,” these connections to the earth may seem positive in some way. Family, relationships, good common sense, etc. But they are “ties.” They bind her not only to joyful things, but “everything on earth the compass round.” She isn’t usually “aware” of them, until one goes “slightly taut.” Not that this demand is important; it comes about from the “capriciousness” of the air. It’s as if everything is going well, and then that one day someone asks her for something trivial, and she realizes she’s trapped. Perhaps “love” binds her to her children. The “thought” of finances might be frightening to a woman in 1939. This lovely summer day is ruined because of the realization that she is bound, however loosely or by however soft a tie. I don’t see a silken tent anymore, I see a woman with a hundred little hands reaching up out of the ground, grasping fistfuls of her skirt. She’s not walking anywhere or doing anything. Of course not. Not to malign the fabulous Mr. Frost, but he is a man. How does he see this woman? The poem doesn’t seem nearly as dark as my reading on the surface. Is he picturing his wife, glad to have commitments to her family? Is this the male gaze imagining the woman content to be gazed-upon and grabbed for? Is he admiring her ability to remain upright? I don’t know. But this poem makes me itchy under my skin. Have fun with it, y’all. I’ll be running away to London now.