I like to think of moments when everything changed.
A writer sits at his desk, nibbling his pen, pondering his next word. He is tired, grungy, grumpy perhaps, it is late, his words are sticking, let’s get this damn thing done! Writing’s only fun looking back. That may be true of anything hard. Doing it, you’re just doing it, pitting yourself against the task, hoping for the best, in the throes – curious word, throes: related to throes with a w? He must look it up.
Maybe quit for the night, return to it fresh in the morning. Then:
To be, or not to be, that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles
And by opposing end them.
He scratches the rest of the young man’s moan in a hurry, rereads it with a small smile. Not half bad. Different, he thinks. Better? Has he read its like before? Marlowe made magic, surely, but not this.
That speech, composed in 1599, when its author was feeling blue, changed everything. Words could say things they’d never said – whoa! And he, Shakespeare, had written these words – he checks his quill and parchment to be sure – yes, it must have been he, he’s alone in the room.
Robert Frost was alone too, in a room not far from Shakespeare’s, nibbling his pen, in 1913. Nearing forty, his first book of poems, just out, had been praised by some of the best. It was a slim volume, he was proud of it, but forty! He wanted to be a poet, needed to be, but did poetry need him? Was he a teacher who wrote poetry “on the side” or the other way around?
He’d come to England to find out. He hied from New England, but England was where serious poets hung out. He’d been thinking his pretty rhymed verse – and it could be very pretty – wasn’t right for now. He didn’t know the first World War was around the corner, but you could sniff the apprehension, couldn’t you, like smoke beneath the door. Vers libre, free verse, was the vogue, but that wasn’t for him, he needed order, poetry was for that, wasn’t it, to impose order, as a snowstorm does on a jagged forest. To his pals back home he’d been writing of “the sounds of sense with all their irregularity of accent across the regular beat of the metre” – but what might that mean? Iambic pentameter? Could be, but not Shakespeare’s iambic pentameter. Then:
Mary sat musing on the lamp-flame at the table
Waiting for Warren. When she heard his step,
She ran on tip-toe down the darkened passage
To meet him in the doorway with the news
And put him on his guard. ‘Silas is back.’
So commences, for my money, the most vivid short story in our language, which happens to be written in verse, but a verse so plain and unassertive you hardly know it’s there. Not an English sound, but American somehow.
It may not have happened that way. Could be “Mending Wall” or another of the poems in North of Boston was his breakthrough moment, not “The Death of the Hired Man”. But something like this happened – that awed a-hah alone – wife and kids asleep in the next room, the wind, the dread – something new – and everything changed.
Makers make for such moments, that magical a-hah when they feel a conduit, born for this, sent even. It does not happen often, may not ever, but it might, it might.