(HOST) It’s wedding season in Vermont, and commentator and executive director of the Vermont Humanities Council Peter Gilbert has these thoughts.
(GILBERT) You’ve seen them, too, as you drive around Vermont these days – crisp white tents set up in a field or on a lawn, gleaming in the summer sun. They may have one or more center poles pushing up taut from below. The rented white folding chairs and perhaps caterers’ trucks confirm that all this activity is for a wedding – and not something more prosaic, like an auction or big tent sale of overstock inventory.
No, gleaming white tents and celebrations of love — they seem to go together.
One of the most exquisitely beautiful poems that Robert Frost ever wrote is called "The Silken Tent." And I think of it when I see one of those white wedding tents out in the middle of a field – even though they’re canvas and not silk. Middlebury College English professor, Frost biographer, and fellow VPR commentator Jay Parini considers "The Silken Tent" one of the finest sonnets written in English in the twentieth century. No question about it.
Normally, readers of the poem don’t notice that the poem is one long sentence, but they may feel it — how the poem is "of a piece." And that’s appropriate to the poem’s meaning. It’s also one extended metaphor, or conceit. The narrator describes how the woman he loves is like a silken tent. He describes how the guy lines that hold the tent all the way around are real but almost unfelt, except when a little breeze pulls one rope slightly taut for a moment, and on the opposite side the ropes go a little slack – just like the bonds in a perfect marriage, just as between husband and wife there is subtle – often unconscious — give and take.
Here’s the poem:
She is as in a field a silken tent
At midday when a sunny summer breeze
Has dried the dew and all its ropes relent,
So that in guys it gently sways at ease,
And its supporting central cedar pole,
That is its pinnacle to heavenward
And signifies the sureness of the soul,
Seems to owe naught to any single cord,
But strictly held by none, is loosely bound
By countless silken ties of love and thought
To everything on earth the compass round,
And only by one’s going slightly taut
In the capriciousness of summer air
Is of the slightest bondage made aware.
And so my hope for all newlyweds this summer – indeed, all couples – is for them to be, as Frost writes, "…loosely bound by countless silken ties of love and thought," not only between themselves, but, as he writes, "…to everything on earth the compass round."