Sam Reads Poetry

THE CENSUS-TAKER

I came an errand one cloud-blowing evening
To a slab-built, black-paper-covered house
Of one room and one window and one door,
The only dwelling in a waste cut over
A hundred square miles round it in the mountains:				5
And that not dwelt in now by men or women.
(It never had been dwelt in, though, by women,
So what is this I make a sorrow of?)
I came as census taker to the waste
To count the people in it and found none,					       10
None in the hundred miles, none in the house,
Where I came last with some hope, but not much
After hours’ overlooking from the cliffs
An emptiness flayed to the very stone.
I found no people that dared show themselves,			         	15
None not in hiding from the outward eye.
The time was autumn, but how anyone
Could tell the time of year when every tree
That could have dropped a leaf was down itself
And nothing but the stump of it was left						        20
Now bringing out its rings in sugar of pitch;
And every tree up stood a rotting trunk
Without a single leaf to spend on autumn,
Or branch to whistle after what was spent.
Perhaps the wind the more without the help				        	25
Of breathing trees said something of the time
Of year or day the way it swung a door
Forever off the latch, as if rude men
Passed in and slammed it shut each one behind him
For the next one to open for himself.						         30
I counted nine I had no right to count
(But this was dreamy unofficial counting)
Before I made the tenth across the threshold. 
Where was my supper? Where was anyone’s?
No lamp was lit. Nothing was on the table.					        35
The stove was cold—the stove was off the chimney—
And down by one side where it lacked a leg.
The people that had loudly passed the door
Were people to the ear but not the eye.
They were not on the table with their elbows.					40
They were not sleeping in the shelves of bunks.
I saw no men there and no bones of men there.
I armed myself against such bones as might be
With the pitch-blackened stub of an ax-handle
I picked up off the straw-dust covered floor.					        45
Not bones, but the ill-fitted window rattled.
The door was still because I held it shut
While I thought what to do that could be done—
About the house—about the people not there.
This house in one year fallen to decay						          50
Filled me with no less sorrow than the houses
Fallen to ruin in ten thousands years
Where Asia wedges Africa from Europe.
Nothing was left to do that I could see
Unless to find that there was no one there					         55
And declare to the cliffs too far for echo,
‘The place is desert and let whoso lurks
In silence, if in this he is aggrieved,
Break silence now or be forever silent.
Let him say why it should not be declared so.’					 60
The melancholy of having to count souls
Where they grow fewer and fewer every year
Is extreme where they shrink to none at all.
It must be I want life to go on living.



Robert Frost

Why I like it:

I like this poem because I like a long walk, and I like a game to play along the way (something to count, for example). Better yet, a good excuse for needing to go. I think that’s what Frost did here. Called it “an errand”.

The speaker appoints himself “census-taker to the waste”. That is, someone sent to count people where there are none. And yet, he’s prodigiously good at it. He finds “none not in hiding”. The double negative actually places people in the poem. By not finding them, he finds them hiding.

From there, he turns to the season, as if looking for an excuse for their absence. Instead, running with a complaint about the trees, he finds more people. Apparently, you talk about trees long enough and it’s hard not to give them commerce, and a song: “a single leaf to spend on autumn, / Or a branch to whistle after what was spent.” 

In one interview, Frost is asked how he takes to being called a nature poet, to which he says that he only every wrote 2 poems without people in them. This is what he’s talking about. The idea of autumn as something to be spent on is beautiful. There’s a lovely echo of the older meaning of the word “spent” in that phrase too: exhausted. 

And of course, it’s beautiful to think of a tree as being whimsical, and spending a leaf here and there in the autumn, as though it’s getting something back, and then whistling in contentment with its purchase. But of course, we’re able to conceptualize that only because we’re really thinking about the presence of people, which is what the census taker finds in the absence of trees.

The wind itself isn’t safe from personification, and “perhaps […] the more without the help / Of breathing trees” says something. Here the speaker imagines “rude men” passing through the door and slamming it behind them. It’s lovely how Frost lets his lines, which, for the rest of the poem, fairly consistently end in punctuation, here run (or enjamb) into each other. Lines 25-30 contain only one comma, and that is buried in the middle of a line, so that there is a kind of perpetual motion like “a door / Forever off the latch”, swinging from one side of the page to the other. Compare that to the speed of lines 34-36, which are more heavily punctuated, as the speaker looks around the room, observing its emptiness piece by piece. 

The speaker valiantly goes 3 lines with this emptiness before he finds another personality: the stove was “down by one side where it lacked a leg” — or am I doing the peopling here? I guess legs don’t have to belong to people. (Though I have to note that a few poems later in the book, the four legs on the “The Grindstone” are remarkable in that they haven’t walked off into the barn.) But it’s people at the start of the next line: “people to the ear but not the eye”. So partial people is what this poem is full of. I’m reminded of Marianne Moore’s “imaginary gardens with real toads in them” — here, with Frost, maybe it’s real gardens with imaginary toads in them. Or imaginary gardens and he can’t find the toads. I don’t know.

Frost was writing at a time when people were moving from the countryside into the cities, and there seems to be a question about what’s left behind here: “what to do that could be done— / about the house—about the people not there.” He answers that question for himself: “Nothing was left to do that I could see” besides declare “to the cliffs too far to echo”… — and here, I have to note that it seems very like Frost to look past a bush he knows (or pretends) somebody’s hiding in and declare to the rocks beyond it (which are too far to hear him anyway) that it seems there’s no one there. He likes games, and I think he’d rather that they go on being played. It seems that even the continent of Asia, which gets roped in to this one, is playing at some kind of game, or work, as it “wedges Africa from Europe”. 

It’s not until the tail end of the penultimate line that we get an unmitigated “none at all” to the question of how many people there are to count. It comes like an “ok, I give up!” at the end of a game of hide-and-go-seek. 

“Life” is a funny word to be in that last line, when what he’s been looking for is more specifically human life. He is in the middle of a clear-cut forest, so there’s some sense in it, but I think “life” here is not taken to include mosses and insects and mushrooms, which must have been present. The lack of trees is notable because we’re so used to peopling them. I think the “life” Frost is talking about is the corner of it where we play our games. The loneliness at the end of this poem reminds me of an interview that Jorie Graham gave, where she asks if you were to stand looking out over the ocean, knowing that all the fish are gone, would that really be living? There’s a form of that question in this poem. We know that life will outlast us, and there might be comfort in that, but “The Census-Taker” is a poem to remind us how little comfort that might be.

Bibliography:

Frost, Robert. “The Census-Taker.” Collected Poems of Robert Frost. Holt, Reinhart and Winston, 1949.