(HOST) The current census has reminded commentator and Vermont Humanities Council executive director Peter Gilbert of a poignant autumnal poem by Robert Frost entitled "The Census-Taker," which speaks to the sad state of northern New England roughly a hundred years ago.
(GILBERT) Most of Robert Frost’s poems have to do with people, often people in nature. But one deals explicitly with the startling absence of people.
"The Census-Taker" is one of a number of Frost poems about abandoned houses in northern New England. There were lots of them in the early 1900s, when Frost lived and wrote in New Hampshire and Vermont. Farmers left the region in large numbers, and their houses fell into disrepair. Loggers clear-cut huge areas, then just abandoned their bunk houses to move on. For example, New Hampshire’s massive Pemigewasset Wilderness, where I was hiking recently, was once clear-cut; the logging roads and railway beds are still visible.
Frost was never actually a census-taker, but in the poem the narrator tells how he went one evening to an old lumber camp’s tar-paper shack,
[quote] 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.
Did you notice how "one" keeps repeating – "one room, one window, one door, The only dwelling…" But soon "one" drops to "none." The census-taker went, he says,
To count the people in it and found none,
None in the hundred miles, none in the house,
…
I found no people that dared show themselves,
None not in hiding from the outward eye.
The area had been decimated for miles, every tree gone, and only the stumps remaining. No women ever lived there, with their promise of perpetuating the species.
The door of the house kept slamming in the wind – nine times as the narrator approached, and he imagined that it was nine rude men entering the house, each slamming the door behind him. But he acknowledges that that’s dreamy, unofficial census-taking.
Entering the house, he asks,
Where was my supper? Where was anyone’s?
No lamp was lit. Nothing was on the table.
The stove was cold – the stove was off the chimney –
And down by one side where it lacked a leg.
The men were not eating, with their elbows on the table, and not sleeping in their bunks. Not knowing what else to do, the narrator pronounces a kind of reverse marriage ceremony, calling out that anyone lurking there should "Break silence now or be forever silent."
The abandoned and ruined house fills him with a deep sorrow, and the poem ends with him saying,
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.
These days we see photos of once grand houses now derelict in Detroit and other places decimated by today’s changing economy. The poem’s narrator suggests that we have an inherent desire to see people continue to live and thrive, an innate sense of empathy, perhaps due to an unconscious sense that we are not unlike those who failed to thrive.