The Vanishing Red, by Robert Frost

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

The Vanishing Red

He is said to have been the last Red man
In Acton. And the Miller is said to have laughed--
If you like to call such a sound a laugh.
But he gave no one else a laugher's license.
For he turned suddenly grave as if to say,
'Whose business,--if I take it on myself,
Whose business--but why talk round the barn?--
When it's just that I hold with getting a thing done with.'
You can't get back and see it as he saw it.
It's too long a story to go into now.
You'd have to have been there and lived it.
They you wouldn't have looked on it as just a matter
Of who began it between the two races.

Some guttural exclamation of surprise
The Red man gave in poking about the mill
Over the great big thumping shuffling millstone
Disgusted the Miller physically as coming
From one who had no right to be heard from.
'Come, John,' he said, 'you want to see the wheel-pit?'

He took him down below a cramping rafter,
And showed him, through a manhole in the floor,
The water in desperate straits like frantic fish,
Salmon and sturgeon, lashing with their tails.
The he shut down the trap door with a ring in it
That jangled even above the general noise,
And came upstairs alone--and gave that laugh,
And said something to a man with a meal-sack
That the man with the meal-sack didn't catch--then.
Oh, yes, he showed John the wheel-pit all right.

~by Robert Frost

Comments

[with-rainfall.livejournal.com]

What is this poem about? Who is the 'Red man'? It reminds me of Venn the reddleman from The Return of the Native. :)

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

It's about a murder, actually. In America, the Indians (Native Americans) used to be referred to as "Redskins" or, more politely, "Red Men". Of course they're not really red, any more than Chinese people are really yellow, but they tan a more coppery color than most Europeans; hence the name.

In the poem, John is the last 'Red Man' left in town, and the Miller "showed him the wheel-pit, all right" by pushing him into it. The title of the poem is ironic: "The Vanishing Red" was a phrase used early in the last century by writers of romantic nostalgia who mourned the loss of the wild, free, mostly-fictional Indian lifestyle described by the romantic writers of the previous century, such as James Fenimore Cooper, but in Frost's poem the Red Man literally vanishes.

[with-rainfall.livejournal.com]

Okay, it makes much more sense now! Thanks for the explanation. :)