La Fraisne - Analysis

A man trying to resign from being human

The poem reads like a confession from someone who has decided that ordinary social life is not merely painful, but misguided. The speaker begins with a résumé of public identity: a gaunt, grave councillor, wise and very old, then a reputedly strong young man at sword-play. Each role is presented as something he has deliberately quit: he has put aside this folly again and again. The central claim the poem keeps pressing is that what most people call sanity—duty, rivalry, romance, remembering—has become, for him, a kind of burdened costume, the cold / That old age weareth for a cloak, and he is choosing another allegiance entirely.

Woodland refuge as a rebuke to social “old ways”

His escape is not into abstraction but into a very specific place: ’mid the boles of the ash wood, under an oak that Spread his leaves over me. The images make him seem half-hidden, almost re-wombed by trees. Nature isn’t just scenery here; it becomes an alternative law. He explicitly rejects the yoke / Of the old ways of men, and the word yoke makes human custom feel like forced labor. Even his new happiness is framed as a better-fitting outfit: he is gay / In another fashion that more suiteth me. The tone in these passages is quietly triumphant—like someone breathing freely after years of social constriction.

The “bride” who is a tree, then a pool

The poem’s strangest, richest move is the speaker’s marriage. By the still pool of Mar-nan-otha, he finds a bride / That was a dog-wood tree. She called me from mine old ways and hushed my rancour of council, replacing civic bitterness with a simpler devotion: praise / Naught but the wind. What’s striking is how the bride shifts shape: later he says, my bride / Is a pool of the wood. This isn’t sloppy so much as revealing—his beloved is not a single body but a whole mode of being: still water, leaves, wind. The love he claims from this bride is also pointedly non-human, sweeter than the love of women / That plague and burn and drive one away. Whatever happened with human love, he believes nature’s love won’t abandon him, accuse him, or demand performance.

Gladness that sounds like a defense

He keeps insisting on one word: glad, even Very glad. Yet the insistence creates a tension the poem never resolves: he says he has seen the sorrow of men and therefore is glad, but that logic feels brittle, like a shield. He also declares he has put aside all folly and all grief, staging a small ritual of disposal—I wrapped my tears in an ellum leaf / And left them under a stone. It’s a vivid image of repression made pastoral: grief packaged, hidden, weighted down. The repeated refrain that men say that I am mad suggests he knows how his transformation reads from the outside; he tries to convert that accusation into proof that he has escaped a collective delusion.

The return of the woman he “forgets”

The poem turns sharply when memory breaks through the pastoral certainty. The voice becomes halting and fragmentary: Once there was a woman . . . then . . . but I forget, then I do not remember…... The ellipses enact what he claims to prefer—I do not like to remember things any more—but they also betray that something remains lodged in him. He admits, barely, I think she hurt me once. Against all the earlier confidence about throwing folly aside, this stammering is the poem’s emotional proof that he can’t simply will pain into nature and have it disappear. Even his hope—I hope she will not come again—sounds less like serenity than fear of recurrence.

Aloneness as sanctuary, aloneness as symptom

In the closing lines he retreats to the smallest, safest pleasure: one little band of winds in the ash trees, repeating we are quite alone. The tone is tender, almost childlike, and that tenderness is moving because it’s so hard-won. But the poem also leaves a question hanging in the air: if the speaker’s bride is wind and pool and leaf, is this a mystical marriage—or a strategy to make loneliness feel chosen rather than endured? His final aloneness can be read as peace, yet the earlier fragments of hurt keep faintly insisting that the woods may be both refuge and hiding place.