The Line-Gang
Here come the line-gang pioneering by,
They throw a forest down less cut than broken.
They plant dead trees for living, and the dead
They string together with a living thread.
They string an instrument against the sky
Wherein words whether beaten out or spoken
Will run as hushed as when they were a thought
But in no hush they string it: they go past
With shouts afar to pull the cable taught,
To hold it hard until they make it fast,
To ease away -- they have it. With a laugh,
An oath of towns that set the wild at naught
They bring the telephone and telegraph.
Commentary
I came across this poem while browsing through a collection of Frost’s poems on the internet. What facinated me most about this poem is how Frost manages to move back and forth, so effortlessly, between seemingly disjoint worlds - the forest, the activities of the linemen, the world that’ll come to exist in the live wires and even the thoughts living in our brains as electrical signals - and ‘strings them together with a living thread’, the poem.
— Yashashree Kulkarni
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From the Wondering Minstrels mailing list, 1999–2008.
Mallika Chellappa · 17 August 2004
Amazing poes, thirteen lines with enough rhyme to have been a sonnet if he had wanted to add that extra line.
Frost’s poems are full of imagery; so are
Wordsworth’s, and now I wonder if both
laboured equally hard to achieve that, or
was it effortless?
Mallika
Catherine Pegg · 21 August 2004
This, with all its contrasts and contradictions, actually reminds me a lot of some of the riddles from the Exeter Book.
Compare:
Wherein words whether beaten out or spoken
Will run as hushed as when they were a thought But in no hush they string it
with:
My house is not quiet I am not loud …
(from The Fish)
I don’t think that Frost had this in mind. It’s just something that I noticed.
Cat