Look, I know everyone’s got way too much junk mail clogging their inboxes. Far be it from me to suggest adding to the daily wafts of e-ffluvia. I must unsubscribe to about five unwanted e-mail lists a day, and I still have enough spam to see me through to spring.
But here’s one daily e-mail I always look forward to (along with the 5-string banjo list, and Scuttlebutt, about boats getting thrashed in mid-ocean): it’s a poem-a-day sent out by About.com and chosen by Simran Khurana. Who is she? Does she actually exist? Here’s a photo of her from the site:
I’m am crazy about her. It’s like poetic philocaption. I just love that she sends me poetry—really good poetry!—every day. And she will send it to you, too!
It’s classic stuff: Yeats, Frost, Stevenson, Dickinson—all public domain, of course, and all worth a look. I’m constantly surprised to find a classic poem that I really didn’t know that well or that I hadn’t thought of in a long time.
Here is Frost’s “The Lockless Door,” which Simran sent me last week. It’s a killer. Anyone want to venture a guess as to what’s going on in this poem? I’ve got some ideas, but, man, this thing is mysterious. It just keeps opening up.
The Lockless Door
It went many years,
But at last came a knock,
And I thought of the door
With no lock to lock.
I blew out the light,
I tip-toed the floor,
And raised both hands
In prayer to the door.
But the knock came again
My window was wide;
I climbed on the sill
And descended outside.
Back over the sill
I bade a "Come in"
To whoever the knock
At the door may have been.
So at a knock
I emptied my cage
To hide in the world
And alter with age.
The last two lines have me completely flummoxed. Here's someone who lives in a place with a door with no lock, presumably waiting (implied by the "it went many years / but at last") so anyone can enter. When someone wants to, though, he runs and hides. But what does he mean by "alter with age"? Please weigh in!
Posted by: Stacey | February 19, 2009 at 01:41 PM
This poem provoked a lively dinner discussion and someone proposed that the visitor is the "real self" of the narrator. I still can't quite get my mind around the last two lines though. Is the visitor age? I note that the poem follows the same structure Frost used for "Come In," another poem about escaping from something (death, old age).
Posted by: Stacey | February 20, 2009 at 11:59 AM
Hi Stacey,
Yeah, I'm not sure about those last lines either. I was reading around in the Thompson biography last night and came across some background on "The Lockless Door." Thomson doesn't really explain it, but he does shed some interesting light. I think I'll post about it later today. So glad it caught your fancy! Mine too!
Posted by: David | February 20, 2009 at 12:07 PM
I'm wondering if the key isn't in the first stanza, not the last. Is the speaker reflecting "ages and ages hence"; that is, "It" isn't the time preceding the first knock, but the time after a primal incident long ago before a second knock (in the present) starts up in him a revery about that past experience. The door is the charged totem or fetish--I think of the monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey--he prays in fear in front of it, after all--but the "knock" takes our vision off it. In fact, it replaces our visual image of the door with an aural image of the sound of the knock. The vast majority of images in poems are visual; the other four senses get shorter shrift. So when that knock happens, it stuns; it's not unlike the knocking at the gate in Macbeth: it brings feelings from the other world, the unnatural one where murder and psychic obliteration can occur. The fear that courses through the being that then escapes is akin to a primal fear of obliteration that, say, a bird, a canary, feels as it leaves its cage and escapes through a window. Like the canary, the poet's soul, psychic being, mental state, whatever, hides in plain sight in the world, but is never seen; and it alters with age, as the speaker, ages hence, is commenting on, still with a shiver for that lockless door. Or not.
Posted by: jim cummins | February 20, 2009 at 06:54 PM