A Time To Talk

For a reader of the new millennium, there is something wonderfully quaint or curiously nostalgic about Frost’s short poem. In a techno-charged modern era with less in-person communication, a poem that celebrates a speaker who relishes the opportunity to have an actual face-to-face conversation adds to the poem’s sense of time and place.

Imagine in the poem if the speaker, setting down his hoe and scanning the horizon and seeing the approaching figure, had just whipped out his smartphone and sent a quick text coded in cryptic abbreviations and emojis and then just gone back to his hoe. What is gained? What is lost? What is the definition of loneliness in this new millennium when we are more connected and more alone than ever before? Those are questions raised by a poem still relevant today.

The poem celebrates the power of communication to alleviate, even for a moment, the oppressive drudgery and loneliness of everyday life. Even the horse understands the immensity offered by this accidental encounter. The horse slows to “meaning walk” (2). Of course, the word should be “meaningful”—but the adjective “meaning” freights this moment with a kind of purpose that even a dumb animal feels. The immensity of this chance encounter between friends, the chance to break through the cosmic silence and the drudgery of pretending that work provides meaning and purpose, the chance to talk, one on one, with another human being whose existence is similarly weighted down gives the poem is thematic magic. It is time for interaction, the speaker decides, boldly, defiantly, thrusting the hoe blade-end up into the ground. In Lines 4-5, he understands he will not simply wave or yell at the approaching figure. “No, not as there is time to talk” (Line 6). It is time to talk, it is time to be human.

The poem reminds a contemporary audience that language does not heal the vulnerable heart, does not bridge to others, unless it is heard. Reading is not the same as hearing; typing is not the same as talking. For a poet who delighted in the sonic play of rhythm and rhyme, Frost understood the tonic impact of hearing, not reading, words. The sounds of language, the crazy aural mosh of syllable-crisp words engaged in the impromptu act of chit chat, delights the ear because spoken words connect us to someone else.

The poem never supplies particulars—who these two are, what their backstories might be, what the content of this conversation—maybe urgent and full of consequence or maybe wonderfully trivial—but only takes us to the moment the speaker approaches that stone wall, with its forbidding sense of enclosure and separation. The poem offers the giddy moment when such boundaries, such alienation, can be even momentarily overcome. The poem ends with the tantalizing promise of a “friendly visit” (10).

The easy grace of casual talk is a collateral damage of a culture’s embrace to make communication efficient rather than immediate. Gadgets have made talking itself an end rather than a means. Although he would be stunned by a smartphone, Frost, despite living in the comparative dark ages of the early 20th century, would understand this. Born in 1874, just two years after the telephone was patented, Frost was part of a culture coming to terms with the premise of efficient communication, positioned at the dawn of an age that would lead ultimately to today’s technology. Walls have won, the poem laments to a contemporary reader—what is left then is the hoe and the unbroken horizon of endless fields upon fields.