Robert Frost (1874–1963) established himself in his long career as the representative poet of rural New England and its folksy wisdom. The one poem of his to appear in the pages of the TLS, however, ranges to the outer edges of civilization, to Easter Island in the Pacific, and one of the colossal stone heads carved or raised there by islanders in the remote past. Beyond the laconic remark in the subtitle, it is difficult to say how much, if at all, Frost intended his poem to comment on Christian religion. But the editors of the TLS saw fit to publish the poem in the run-up to Easter 1954; and so in 2008 do we.

The Bad Island – Easter
(Perhaps so called because it may have risen once)

That primitive head
So ambitiously vast
Yet so rude in its art
Is as easily read
For the woes of the past
As a clinical chart.
For one thing alone
The success of the lip
So scornfully curled
Has that tonnage of stone
Been brought in a ship
Half way round the world.

They were days on that stone.
They gave it the wedge
Till it flaked from the ledge.
Then they gave it a face.
Then with tackle unknown
They stood it in place
On a cliff for a throne.
They gave it a face
Of what was it? Scorn
Of themselves as a race
For having been born?
And then having first
Been cajoled and coerced
Into being be-ruled?
By what stratagem
Was their cyclical throng
So cozened and fooled
And jollied along?
Were they told they were free
And persuaded to see
Something in it for them?
Well they flourished and waxed
By executive guile,
By fraud and by force,
Or so for a while;
Until overtaxed
In nerve and resource
They started to wane,
They emptied the aisle
Except for a few
That can but be described
As a vile residue,
And a garrulous too.
They were punished and bribed;
All was in vain.
Nothing would do.
Some mistake had been made
No book can explain,
Some change in the law
That nobody saw
Except as a gain.
But one thing is sure
Whatever kultur
They were made to parade,
What heights of altrur–
Ian thought to attain,
Not a trace of it’s left
But the gospel of sharing,
And that had decayed
Into a belief
In being a thief
And persisting in theft
With cynical daring.

ROBERT FROST (1954)

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