There are roughly zones | plates 01, 02

Two new etchings are being worked to illustrate a poem by Robert Frost, There are roughly zones.

We sit indoors and talk of the cold outside.

And every gust that gathers strength and heaves

Is a threat to the house. But the house has long been tried.

We think of the tree. If it never again has leaves,

We’ll know, we say, that this was the night it died.

It is very far north, we admit, to have brought the peach.

What comes over a man, is it soul or mind

That to no limits and bounds he can stay confined?

You would say his ambition was to extend the reach

Clear to the Arctic of every living kind.

Why is his nature forever so hard to teach

That though there is no fixed line between wrong and right,

There are roughly zones whose laws must be obeyed.

There is nothing much we can do for the tree tonight.

But we can’t help feeling more than a little betrayed

That the northwest wind should rise to such a height

Just when the cold went down so many below.

The tree has no leaves and may never have them again.

We must wait till some months hence in the spring to know.

But if it is destined never again to grow,

It can blame this limitless trait in the hearts of men.

Stuart Manins notes:

It has 21 lines with no breaks, but a rhyming scheme of ababa, cddcdc, efefe,gkggk indicates four blocks of thought: a storm threatening a house and a tree; human nature which transplants a peach tree in the Arctic; some moral reflection on the nature of right and wrong; and the potential to survive what appears catastrophic.
As in Hebrew poetry, the punch line is in the middle, “Why is his nature forever so hard to teach”

Note: After the sequence (pages 1-7) was completed, it illustrated my interpretation of the poem. I then made a video with assistance from two friends. We then dedicated it to Helen Clark, and the members and work of the World Health Organization Covid Review Panel. Robert Frost died in 1963 so his work is in the public domain in New Zealand, but copyright on his poetry published after 1923 extends until 2058 in the USA.

From the printmaking perspective

There are two plates needed to make the sequence. They are copper plates, and were electro-etched in CuSO₄, which is a non-toxic process, and inked with Akua soy based inks, again, non-toxic.

This new sequence builds on prior ideas—O Christ who holds the open gate, and Lightfall— done with plexiplate and zinc plate, acid etched. They similarly explored the geometry of the Islamic arch used so extensively in Gothic church architecture.

At this point, however, I'm not happy with geometry of the design, nor with all the textures and their placement. So I'm going to to do two new etchings to correct and improve the prints. It will open up many possibilities for the interplay of foreground and background images.

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