Frost: ‘The Black Cottage’

 Robert Frost’s “The Black Cottage” is one of the treasures of American literature. It’s an account of a  conversation on a walk.

The poet and a minister go see the cottage of a woman who died and whose sons left it as it was, promising to come back to summer in the old home place. The old woman’s husband died 50 years ago in the Civil War. She would tell people the war was not about the union or slavery but about the “principle that all men are created free and equal.” 

            That’s a hard mystery of Jefferson’s.

            What did he mean? Of course the easy way

            Is to decide it simply isn’t true.

            It may not be. I heard a fellow say so.

            But never mind, the Welshman got it planted

            Where it will trouble us a thousand years.

            Each age will have to reconsider it.

 

The old woman believed in the principle that all men are created free and equal though she’d seen few black people and no people labeled with other colors. The minister recalled how he had once been tempted to make a small change in the creed — the part about how Christ “descended into Hades” seemed a bit much — but could not with the old woman watching.

 

            For, dear me, why abandon a belief

            Merely because it ceases to be true.

            Cling to it long enough, and not a doubt,

            It will turn true again, for so it goes.

 

The minister sees change as truths going in and out of favor. He confesses he sometimes would like to be a desert monarch — a desert being a place no one wants to conquer to force change upon, a place like the deserted cottage.

It’s a strange and wonderful poem. I catch only parts of it, but I’m pretty sure it’s Frost’s best.

• Source: The Voice That is Great Within Us: American Poetry of the Twentieth Century, edited by Hayden Carruth; New York: Bantam Classics, 1983, pp. 5-8.