TO A YOUNG WRETCH
(Boethian)
As gay for you to take your father’s ax
As take his gun – rod – to go hunting – fishing.
You nick my spruce until its fiber cracks,
It gives up standing straight and goes down swishing.
You link arm in its arm and you lean
Across the light snow homeward smelling green.
I could have bought you just as good a tree
To frizzle resin in a candle flame,
And what a saving it would have meant to me.
But tree by charity is not the same
As tree by enterprise and expedition.
I must not spoil your Christmas with contrition.
It is your Christmases against my woods.
But even where, thus, opposing interests kill,
They are to be thought of as opposing goods
Oftener than as conflicting good and evil;
Which makes the war god seem no special dunce
For always fighting on both sides at once.
And though in tinsel chain and popcorn rope
My tree, a captive in your window bay,
Has lost its footing on my mountain slope
And lost the stars of heaven, may, oh, may
The symbol star it lifts against your ceiling
Help me accept its fate with Christmas feeling.
And here, to bookend “Christmas Trees”, as it were, is Robert Frost’s commentary on a tree that was cut down. This poem was sent out as his Christmas greeting to his friends in 1937, and was included in A Witness Tree, published in 1942.
The subtitle “Boethian” refers to the Roman philosopher Boethius and his belief that humans often fail to recognize evil as part of a divine whole; we see only the immediate occurrence, and not its part in the greater scheme of things. In this instance, Frost relates the immediate evil – the cutting down of the tree – to the greater thing, that of the celebration of the Christmas festival.
Leaves & Pages 
Oh, wonderful, wonderful. So glad you found the poem and evidently liked it too. My newspaper used to run it each Christmas Eve on the editorial page but never included the reference to Boethian. That deepens and clarifies the meaning of the poem. Thank you so much.
You are most welcome. Great excuse to delve into the Frost anthology; I spent a long time reading bits and pieces. I don’t think the man ever wrote a bad poem… And I had never heard the term “Boethian” before, so that was an educational moment for me as well. Makes perfect sense, doesn’t it?
This poem is so beautiful that I cried when I read it.
I just heard the story of that poem. Robert Frost’s next door neighbor in Shaftsbury Vt. had a 10 yr old son ,Fred. One snowy night Fred took his axe and chopped down one of Frost’s favorite trees. Frost looked out his window the next morning and saw the stump. He followed the boy’s tracks in the snow to the house next door and there was his tree, decorated for Christmas in the bay window.
And what a grand response this poem is, isn’t it? Thank you for that, Barrie.