Burning gold: for John Robert Ross

Style, Spring-Summer, 2006 by Donald C. Freeman

I have known Haj Ross since the summer of 1967, when he popped his head around the door of my MIT office (actually a graduate-student bullpen I shared with people, many of whom were to become leading figures in linguistics) the first day of my tenure as an NSF linguistics postdoc. He very quickly made me feel at ease--I was scared out of my wits, having never before encountered as high-powered an intellectual environment as MIT's legendary and late-lamented Building 20--and we talked early and late about linguistics, metrics, and poetry, beginning a conversation that continues well into its fourth decade.

That fall, like all MIT postdocs, I sat in on the six-hours-a-week introductory course in transformational syntax that Haj co-taught with Morris Halle. Haj, of course, lectured with no podium and no notes, fielding questions from every fast gun in town, while at the same time making even tyros like me feel that their usually naive (okay, in my case, dumb) questions were contributing something useful to the proceedings. After hours, Haj tutored me in how linguists think--I used to think that he didn't realize he was doing that, but of course he did. After I went off to UMass to get the linguistics department going there, Haj carne to deliver several brilliant papers; our correspondence waxed and waned over the years until he returned to a U.S. academic appointment at the University of North Texas, after which we resumed frequent contact and correspondence.

All of the contributors to this volume will have their own perspective on Haj's career, of course; mine is that Haj's greatest contribution has been to restore literature as a legitimate body of study for linguists and to restore language as a legitimate, indeed, a necessary, concern for scholars of literature. The fact that so few scholars of literature have taken up Haj's synthesis of language and literature does not diminish its significance. Only through the union of linguistic and literary concerns can students of literature meet the interpretive challenge laid down by a poet of whom both Haj and I remain fond, William Blake in "A Vision of the Last Judgment": (1)

   Not a line is drawn without intention ...
   As Poetry admits not a Letter that is
   Insignificant, so Painting admits not a
   Grain of Sand or a Blade of Grass
   Insignificant, much less an Insignificant Blur or Mark.

Let us pursue a Blakean--and a Rossian--analysis of a deceptively simple little poem by Robert Frost, "Nothing Gold Can Stay":

   Nature's first green is gold,
   Her hardest hue to hold.
   Her early leaf's a flower;
   But only so an hour.
   Then leaf subsides to leaf.
   So Eden sank to grief,
   So dawn goes down to day.
   Nothing gold can stay.

We might summarize the poem's sense in the following way. Its natural world appears to trace a progression along a path beginning in the false permanence of very early spring, natural flowering, the Creation, and dawn. In those states, potentiality appears to be limitless, but progress along the path of natural development leads inevitably to the bleak reality of the postlapsarian world; the natural maturity that prefigures mortality; full day, and the path's end in autumn, evening, and death. The gold of the poem's first line is a cruel hoax.

But a Haj's-eye view of this little poem would go beyond this lit-survey summary to take note of the following patterns:

1. References to sequence, often bur not always temporal sequence: "first," "early," "then," "dawn/day"; to this we might add the time reference of "an hour."

2. Verbs having to do with descent--indeed, all the poem's full lexical verbs save the last (which is negated)--have to do with descent: "subsides," "sank," "goes down."

3. Strong anaphora--backward reference--in the poem's last two couplets ("Then," "So," "So").

4. Strong suppression of verbality and agency in the poem's first two couplets. The only full verb is "is," which is then cliticized to its subject in the second couplet.

5. Patterns of alliteration in the poem's second and penultimate lines that are from the point of view of the poem's meter (iambic trimeter) identical, occurring on the strong metrical positions in each case:

Her hardest hue to hold. (2)

So dawn goes down to day. (7)

6. "Gold" appears in comment position in the poem's first sentence, and in topic position in its last sentence.

Having known Haj Ross for upwards of thirty-five years, I am certain that he would find far more patterns in this poem than I have discovered, but I will leave the pattern-finding for now and try to see how some, at least, of the patterns fit together (the ones I omit I will, in classic Haj fashion, leave to future research). In so doing, I will make use of Haj's ATS Principle, the Assumption of Total Significance--namely that all these patterns and their connections mean something and that it is the job of the analyst to find out what that something is. And so I will add some observations that aren't patterns but are, I think, nonetheless significant: