BREAKING: The lovely shall be choosers, Frost said!

WEDNESDAY, MARCH 28, 2018

Vladimir Putin interfered, as did Clifford and Flowers: All the talk about the "silencing" of Stephanie Clifford has had us thinking about The Lovely Shall Be Choosers.

It's one of Frost's most unusual poems. Frost apparently acknowledged, along the way, that the poem was about the difficult, disappointing life of his mother, Isabelle Moodie Frost, who hailed from Lawrence, Mass.

We believe we first got that idea, long ago, from a major book about Frost by Lawrance Thompson. Diane Hulett explained it like this:

HULETT: The melancholy poem questions whether the stages or "joys" in women's lives may really be nothing more than punishment for loving and serving others...

The poem depicts control of a woman's life by the superior Voice and attendant Voices, who devise a series of seven "joys" that "let her choose" but eventually result in the Voices' triumph at the expense of the woman's self-definition. The seven "joys" coincide roughly with the traditional events in a woman's life. Each "joy" is actually a secret sorrow because the woman must sublimate her desires to fulfill her role as wife and mother. At each stage, the woman "almost speaks," but time and fate prevent communication. The conspiracy between the Voice and the Voices to silence women might be read as any of a variety of forces that affect women...

The actual poem is here. Way back in 1955, Nitchie and Werner elaborated on some of the "joys" the mournful poem describes:

NITCHIE AND WERNER: Her first joy is an unalloyed one in a marriage she believes to be something special, not an ordinary wedding. But she soon finds that her husband is unworthy. Her second joy is that for a time she can conceal her disillusionment and grief from others. Her third joy is that when she can no longer do so—probably the man deserts her—she has so lost touch with her former friends that they barely notice her grief...

And so on, moving on from there.

Frost was born in 1874. This would have been the life of a woman who lived a long time ago.

Concerning the "silencing," we generally wish that someone had paid Stephanie Clifford plenty of money and had successfully "silenced" her about her exciting past alleged f**king.

As of 2011, there was no conceivable reason for her to try to sell her story about allegedly f**king Donald J. Trump. At that time, before any alleged physical threat had allegedly occurred, she was willing to bring a lot of embarrassment and pain to others, including to a 5-year-old child, for the asking price of $15,000.

This is the person we're now being asked to lionize, to see as a feminist hero. We'd be inclined to see her as someone who might need some help, as so many of us the humans do.

By the fall of 2016, Clifford was trying to inject herself into—you might even say "interfere with"—a presidential election. Back in 1992, Gennifer Flowers had done the same thing, hijacking the 1992 primary race with a thrilling, dramatic story about her torrid love affair with Bill Clinton, a thrilling story which was almost surely invented, bogus, false.

Flowers scored well over $500,000 for the thrilling story she told, almost knocking Clinton out of the race in the process. By 1999, she was selling brain-damaged stories about all the people the Clintons had murdered, having written about what an ugly scut the big fat first lady was.

This is who Flowers was. Along the way, idiocrats like Frank Rich had decided to lionize her for her amazing truthfulness. By 1998, almost all the upper-end children were reciting this pitiful line.

Do we live in an idiocracy? When we lionize hustlers like Flowers and Clifford, it's hard to see why a person would ask.

Putin actively interfered. So did Flowers, then Clifford.