SUMMARY OF MINOR RESEARCH PROJECT

TITLE: STYLISTIC FEATURES AND COGENT SYMBOLISM IN THE POETRY OF ROBERT FROST

Dr. Pavan Kumar Barelia

VijayaRaje Govt. Girls P.G. College , Morar, Gwalior,M.P.

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CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

Robert Frost wrote his poems before scholars and readers became widely

interested in tracing themes of personal and cultural identity through an

author’s work. Nevertheless, these themes can be found in The Poetry of

Robert Frost. Examples of the theme of the struggle to find and maintain a

personal identity can be found in such early dramatic poems as “The Fear”

and “A Servant to Servants,” in which women cope with mental illness

fostered by the highly solitary lives the culture then imposed upon them; in

“The Housekeeper,” in which society’s narrowly defined expectations for

women in marriage are confronted; and in “The Self-Seeker,” in which a

man disabled in an industrial accident struggles to retain his identity as an

amateur botanist.

Other poems examining choices people make in the struggle to find a

personal identity include those in “The Hill Wife,” a group of five short poems

about a married and childless woman who simply disappears rather than

continue a grimly lonely life with her husband, and “The Road Not Taken,”

though this famous poem was originally written as a gentle satire of an

indecisive friend, the English poet Edward Thomas. His style was plain, but

his poetic structures were complex.. Monroe observes this where Frost

displays ‘character, as well as a penetrating, humorous and sympathetic

quality of genius. They face the half-glance of the world, and the huge

laughter of destiny, with pride and grit, and without egotism.’ (Harriet Monroe

62) As the latter example suggests, not all of Frost’s poems about personal

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identity are grim. Frost, in a talk he gave at the University of California,

Berkeley in 1953, for example, said that “The Silken Tent,” which describes a

woman’s mind and beauty, is about “the free spirit.” Many other poems are

about forming a personal identity that is resilient enough to allow clear

thinking, as, for example, the later poems “One Step Backward Taken,” “Take

Something Like a Star,” and “Directive.”

While the best known of Frost’s poems focus on the lives and

thoughts of rural characters on New England farms, it would be a mistake to

assume that the poet was uninterested in other cultural groups. He writes

with contempt for and insight into a murderer of a Native American in “The

Vanishing Red,” which was titled before the publication in the 1960’s of

Native American writers who would offer better ways to refer to Native

Americans. In “A Cliff Dwelling,” Frost writes of an ancient occupant of a

Pueblo Indian settlement. And in “The Ax-Helve,” he writes of a French

Canadian interested in the nature of education. In a sense this early

prediction by Robert Frost is an accurate description of the course of his

writing career: Frost’s poetry has not changed; it has simply grown stronger.

Frost’s father died of tuberculosis in 1885, leaving impoverished his wife and

two children, who were forced to return to his family in New England. To

support her young children, Mrs. Frost returned to the classroom as a

teacher, and Robert entered a formal school for the first time at the age of

twelve. Life in New England was difficult for the mother because money was

hard to come by. Robert worked summers as a farm hand, thus acquiring

through personal experience a lasting knowledge of the New England

character and way of life. During his free time he roamed the countryside

gaining first-hand familiarity with the fields, flowers, trees, and birds of the

region, all of which he later transmuted into his poetry. After marrying his

high school sweetheart, Elinor White, in 1893, and after giving up teaching

school as a means to make a living, Frost settled his family on a small plot of

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land near West Derry, New Hampshire, how’re he tool up farming, rather

unsuccessfully.

A New Englander at heart and by ancestry, Robert Frost had a personal

knowledge of the area, and he recognized that the historical background and

climatic environment of the region had helped to shape the character of its

people. So though his work is so quiet, it is not static. He pretends to step

aside, as observer, from the universal mobility. But he also makes poetry out

of that pretence. Indeed, it is the source of his laughter. (Richard Church 39).

New England has once been the center of great activity, but as the nation had

expanded to the west, the area had gradually lost its importance. Many Ney

Englanders had joined the westward movement, and the ones left are those

who are either strong and determined enough to make a living in a rugged

land or those too weak to attempt the move. The strong are stubborn or they

would long ago have given up the struggle with the land and climate, and this

obstinate perhaps proud, perhaps merely ornery, streak in the people keeps

them on their land. The farmer’s fortitude, endurance, and inner strength

enable him to accomplish his daily tasks in spite of adversity in his isolation.

For the hill farmers are often isolated. The New England winter guarantees

that. Such periods of isolation as the farmers undergo tend to make them a

reserved people, feeling no compulsion to speak unless they have something

to say.

Through his poems, Robert Frost expresses well-defined views of nature

and of the differing relationships between it and his human characters. He

sees it generally as a non-reasoning, non-feeling entity, a reflexive cycle, and

he expresses an objectively realistic view of nature as neutral and indifferent

toward man. This is the basic aspect displayed in his poems. At times,

however, he appears to portray ambivalent views of this basic concept. On

the one hand, his characters may be influenced in their response to their

surroundings by the romantic view which sees nature as a revelation of

Truth, Beauty, and Goodness. And under such influence they find what seems

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to be nature’s benevolence toward man. In such poems there is no apparent

conflict, and the atmosphere of peace, harmony, and man’s kinship with the

natural element is the source of the pleasure. On the other hand, the

characters may respond more in the naturalistic sense which views the world

of nature as a hostile, war-like environment within which there is a perpetual

struggle.

The particular aspects of nature expressed in Frost’s pomes are often

determined by the subjective responses of his characters to their

surroundings. He shows people who are emotionally strong, either within

themselves or through human ties, as feeling secure in their relationship with

a benevolent nature because they are able to accept it and its movements

without fear. Peter Viereck observes that ’he is one of the most original

writers of our time. It is the self-conscious avant-garde rebels who follow the

really rigid and tiresome conventions.’ (Peter Viereck 68) They are able to

cope with the violence that also seems a part of the natural world. Those,

however, who are alone, weak and fearful find in their environment a

reason for anxiety, and it is in their eyes that nature assumes hostile and

malevolent qualities.

Robert Frost’s first-hand knowledge of the natural elements has been the

chief source in his poems of that feeling of close relationship between his

characters and their surroundings. Though his attitude at times borders on

the romantic, it is without sentimentality; he seems simply to be aware that

any appreciation of nature’s beauty must, after all, be human. Therefore, in

his poems he observes the rural scenes through the eyes of a normally strong

individual who is able to see and to express the quintessence of his

surroundings. The subjective emotional condition of the person is a major

factor in determining what aspect of nature seems most apparent. Under

certain conditions natural phenomena or events seem to evidence a

benevolent interest on the part of a genial nature, whereas under others the

violence of natural forces suggests an undercurrent of hostility and antipathy

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toward man. Of his poems expressing this seeming benignity, one o f the

loveliest is Frost’s “Rose Pogonias, “ which describes the sense of peace and

pleasure felt by a couple who happen upon a small meadow smothered

with spring flowers.

A saturated meadow,

Sun-shaped and jewel-small,

A circle scarcely wider

Than the trees around were tall;

Where winds were quite excluded,

And the air was stifling sweet

With the breath of many flowers,--

A temple of the heat.

There we bowed us in the burning,

As the sun’s right worship is,

To pick where none could miss them

A thousand or chises;

For though the grass was scattered,

Yet every second spear

Seemed tipped with wings of color,

That tinged the atmosphere.

We raised a simple prayer

Before we left the spot,

That in the general mowing

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That place might be forgot;

Or if not all so favored,

Obtain such grace of hours,

That none should mow the grass there

While so confused with glowers.

The poem as a whole conveys a sense of nature’s genial warmth. The

meadow itself is ”sun-shaped,” a “temple in the heat,” and the sun casts its

rays directly on the backs of the flower pickers. But the sun’s heat does not

sear and hurt. Rather it is like the heaviness felt when one walks from the

shade of trees into bright sunlight. The fragrance of the flowers in the spring

sunlight is a heady perfume to the people stepping into the scene. Their

senses are overwhelmed with the bloom of the small meadow. . In After

Apple Picking ‘the dream will relive the world of effort, even to the ache of

the instep arch where the ladder rung was pressed. But is this a cause for

regret or for self-congratulation? Is it a good dream or a bad dream?’ (Robert

Penn Warren 130)

They feel the sun, inhale the “stifling sweetness,” and see the

loveliness of a sun-drenched meadow filled with flowers. The small patch is a

“temple,” a protected place where nothing disturbs the peacefulness, the

quiet of beauty. Frost heightens the atmosphere of peace, holiness, and

serenity through the use of such images as a “temple of the heat, “where the

humans “bowed” as if in “worship” of the sun and “raised a simple prayer.

“The object of their prayer is the “grace of hours” that the loveliness might

be missed b the blades of the mowers. The subjective imagery of the sun-lit

meadow in terms of temple, prayer, worship and grace reemphasizes the fact

that Frost describes nature through the eyes and senses of his characters.

The speaker recollecting the experience and describing the scene has a

religious faith so deeply ingrained that he feels a spiritual relationship with

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nature, because, in his mind, it is associated with God and is expressive of his

worship. As a result of this inner response, the natural world is to him a place

of peace. But as man familiar with the facts of farm life, he realizes that the

mowers must soon come to this spot and destroy the present scene. The

response to the loveliness of the flower-filled meadow is the desire that it be

spared by the mowers until the blooms fade. It has been a source of peace

and a symbol of the benevolence of its creator, and the speaker is reluctant

to see it destroyed. Though short, "Fire and Ice" contains a multitude of

literary devices. Seemingly simple and un-intimidating to the average reader,

they are indicative of Robert Frost's writing style. Frost is celebrated for

imbuing everyday scenes and language from New England with the universal

energy of poetry. He was so successful in doing so that he was one of the rare

poets to be celebrated during his lifetime, being awarded the Pulitzer Prize

and named the poet laureate of Vermont.

Though the poem presents "fire" and "ice" as dynamic metaphors for

"desire" and "hate," in the third line we see a very simple implied metaphor:

to taste desire.

Some say the world will end in fire,

Some say in ice.

From what I’ve tasted of desire

I hold with those who favor fire.

But if it had to perish twice,

I think I know enough of hate

To say that for destruction ice

Is also great

And would suffice.

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By suggesting desire is something that can be tasted, Frost compares desire

to food: something concrete, flavorful, and nourishing. In so doing, he reveals

more about desire: that desire, like food, is necessary for sustenance. This

heightens the ironic paradox of the poem: the thing that nourishes is the

same thing that will destroy us.

As in “Rose Pogonias “he evokes a sense of the peacefulness of the

temple in the woods, in “Mowing” Frost recreates the mood of a man

content with his work. Through a harmony of the senses, emotions, and

intellect in the act of mowing hay, the farmer achieves a communion with

nature. Yet he is aware of the latent evil underlying its beauty.

There was never a sound beside the wood but one,

And that was my long scythe whispering to the ground.

What was is it whispered? I knew not well myself;

Perhaps it was something about the heat of the sun,

Something, perhaps about the lack of sound…

And that was why it whispered and did not speak.

It was no dream of the gift of idle hours,

Or easy gold at the hand of fay or elf:

Anything more than the truth would have seemed too weak

To the earnest love that laid the swale in rows,

Not without feeble-pointed spikes of flowers

(Pale or chises), and scared a bright green snake.

The fact is the sweetest dream that labor knows.

My long scythe wishpered and left the hay to make.

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Every action, thought, and sense of the farmer combine into the

satisfaction derived from his immediate experience, through which he is

aware of a feeling of kinship with his surroundings. Everything concerning his

actions, the grass he is cutting, the trees in the nearby woods, the whisper of

the scythe, the sunlight upon his back, the snake and the flowers at his feet—

all combine to contribute to his pleasure. The farmer’s delight does not have

to depend on possible rewards for his labor; it comes from his immediate

experience: “The fact is the sweetest dream that labor knows.” He enjoys the

communion with nature that is the result of the blending of his senses,

emotions, and intellect in his work. Yet there is a suggestion still of the

ambivalence, the duality of nature, in the mention of the second the evil. The

man, through the harmony of his head and heart in an experience of the

senses, effects a sense of communion with nature, of a reconciliation of its

dual aspects, and of an over-all feeling of its beningnity.

An appropriate poem to follow a discussion of “Mowing” is one that

could be considered its companion, “The Tuft of Flowers, “although Frost did

not place them side by side in a Boy’s Will, in which both appear. The first is

concerned with the mower who enjoys both his work and his surrounding, he

Is the man making hay. “The Tuft of Flowers” speaks of the person who

follows the mower after several hours to turn the cut grass so that it may dry

more thoroughly. He finds the meadow deserted, although he looks and

listens for his predecessor. He would like to have human companionship, but

he must forego it and, instead, work physically alone. He accepts the fact that

a man must depend upon himself whether he is alone or with others. But

nature does not leave him to his solitude. A butterfly in search of a flower

directs his eye to a tuft of flower the early morning scythe had spared, and

frost explains in the closing g lines:

The mower in the dew had loved them thus,

By leaving them to flourish, not for us,

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Nor yet to draw one thought of ours to him,

But from sheer morning gladness at the brim.

The butterfly and I had lit upon,

Nevertheless, a message from the dawn,

That made me hear the wakening birds around,

And hear his long scythe whispering to the ground,

And feel a spirit kindred to my own;

So that henceforth I worked no more alone;

But glad with him, I worked as with his aid,

And weary, sought at noon with him the shade;

And dreaming, as it were, held brotherly speech

With one whose thought I had not hoped to reach.

“Men work together,” I told him from the heart,

“Whether they work together or apart.”

The raker recognizes in his fellow but absent worker a kindred spirit,

one who also finds pleasure in the natural surroundings. He does not

presume that the flowers were left for him, but he understands the gladness

that prompted the act. He identifies himself more closely with nature by

commenting that both he and the butterfly “had lit upon .. a message from

the dawn. “Through such closeness he makes contact both with the

companion worker and nature. The kindred feeling removes him from his

isolation and is the source of his understanding that “men work together….

Whether they work together or apart. “His comprehension, however, hinges

on his reactions to his surroundings. He is the man who, although lonely and

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seeking companion-ship, when he finds none, can accept his enforced

isolation philosophically.

And I must be, as he had been – alone,

“As all must be, “I said within my heart,

“Whether they work together or apart.”

Because of his inner strength and self-sufficiency he can accept nature on its

own terms as inherently friendly. Because of his perceptiveness, his attention

is attracted to the butterfly, which in turn leads him to the tuft of flowers, to

a realization, and to an inner communion with his fellow man and with

mature. He has learned that distance does not necessarily separate

companions.

“Men work together, “I told him from the heart,

“Whether they work together or apart.”

As has been noted, in “The tuft of Flowers” the broadening of the

farmer’s understanding is initiated by the chance movement of the butterfly,

drawing his attention to the flowers. Frost’s effective use of the device in this

poem—man’s understanding hinging upon a chance event within nature ---

suggests similar device in “Dust of Snow”:

The way a crow

Shook down on me

The dust of snow

From a hemlock tree

Has given my heart

A change of mood

And saved some part

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Of a day I had rued.

Frost ascribes a kindly, benevolent influence to a seemingly ordinary

event within a snow-covered country side. By accident the crow is the cause

of snow falling upon the speaker’s head. There is no logical reason why snow

sifting onto his head should effect a change of heart. He has been depressed,

perhaps because of disappointments with other people, but there is no

explanation given for his low spirits. What is important is that he is touched

by his environment and by that contact his spirits are uplifted. A seemingly

benevolent event occurs, and the man view it as an intended kindness. There

is no purposed good will in the deed, for the movement is in the nature of an

accident. The crow happens to light upon one of the branches of the

hemlock, a Christmas-type tree, or, already there, restively alters his position;

the lightly heaped snow on the tree scatters to the ground except for the

handful that settles on the poet’s head as he happens to pass at that

moment. Even such a brief contact with nature, its smallest movement in his

direction, cheers him. His spirits are uplifted. The poet’s subjective response

to the crow’s accidental movement is evidently the source of any

benevolence that he ascribes to nature.

The dominant characteristics of his work—his impeccable ear for the

rhythms of speech; his realistic handling of nature that transcends the

ordinary “love” we ascribe to poets of the outdoors; his revelation of human

character by means of dramatic events his warm philosophy that combines a

whimsical poet with a dirt farmer whose feet are not only planted on the

ground but in it—all these qualities were apparent (at least to some readers)

early in his career. And they are still there, handled with greater precision,

displaying more depth. As an example of this strengthening process, this

growth of sapling into tree, look first at the little poem, “The Pasture,” the

last stanza of which invites the reader into Frost’s A BOY’S WILL:

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But equally apparent is a greater depth of psychological complexity, a

stronger suggestion of the “death wish” that John Ciardi discusses in his

controversial analysis of “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” the more

famous lyric to which “Come In” is certainly a superb companion piece. Frost

has not changed, only grown surer; but there has been an amazing change,

down through the years, in the attitude taken toward his poems. First, his

fellow Americans could not see this most American of writers as a poet at all;

it was necessary for him to go to England to be hailed for his talent. Secondly,

when the English had pointed him out to us, we catalogued him as another

cold New England poet who saw everything in black and white. This

astonishing judgment becomes super egregious when we consider that A

BOY’S WILL contains a poem of such warm understanding as “The Tuft of

Flowers” and that NORTH OF BOSTON, his second volume, includes “The

Death of the Hired Man,” “Home Burial,” and “The Fear,” three dramatic

poems that are intensely emotional. After Frost’s reputation finally became

established, the critics forced him into a third stage of his career: he was

recognized as a major poet, but one not very interesting to talk or write

about because his poetry was thought too simple and because Frost held

aloof from the free-verse poets whose efforts, he felt, lacked discipline. Now,

at last, Frost has entered a fourth period in which his great talents are fully

recognized, and he is regarded as a poet of far more depth and subsurface

complexity than anyone had previously realized. Two of Frost’s poems that

are provocative enough to satisfy the most eager analyst are “Directive,” with

its Grail imagery, and “The Subverted Flower,” with its tantalizing

psychological horror.

But Frost will always be a poet more loved than analyzed. He expresses

himself in such an attractive way that his readers identify themselves with

the poet; they would like to be Frost. The descriptive lines one finds in “After

Apple Picking,” for example, have a perfection that seems the only, the

inevitable, way of describing the dream that the poet feels coming on. Many

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other poems by Frost contain this same perfection of word choice. “Two

Tramps in Mud Time” is so meticulously written (and yet so effortless, with its

touches of the famous Frost wit) that the reader feels surrounded by April

weather; and he clearly sees those two hulking tramps who stand around

idly, waiting for the poet to hire them to chop his wood. If Frost had limited

his poetry to descriptive and philosophical lyrics, he would still rank as a

major poet; fortunately, his poems are also full of people, characters who are

understandable and vividly real. In “The Death of the Hired Man” four people

come alive: Mary, the sympathetic wife; Warren, the practical, somewhat

cynical husband; Harold Wilson, the boy “who studied Latin like the violin

because he liked it”; and Silas, the harmlessly wastrel hired man who had

come “home” to die. Other people are scattered like old friends throughout

the poems: Magoon, the timid professor, and Lafe, the burly bill collector, in

“A Hundred Collars”; the casual witch in “The Witch of Coos”; the newlyweds

who philosophize so well in “West-Running Brook”; the old farmer in “The

Mountain” who lives at the foot of a mountain he refuses to climb simply

because he sees no practical reason for doing so; and that other dour farmer

in “Brown’s Descent” who takes a hilarious ride down a mountain on a slick

crust of snow.

There are others equally memorable, but perhaps the outstanding

character in all the poems is Frost himself. Everything he writes is warmed by

his own personality, and he emerges from his volumes as a great and

charming man who feels deeply but who never breaks the restraining tether

of good taste. Emotional but never overly sentimental, he is dramatic but

never melodramatic, conservative but not reactionary, sometimes pessimistic

but never defeated, humorous without being flippant. Trying to sum up the

beguiling effect of Frost’s outlook on life is difficult, for his writing personality

is many-sided. Certainly, he strikes the reader as a man who looks at life in a

way that is both poetic and practical. The concluding lines of “Birches”

beautifully illustrate this remarkable blend. In the poem the speaker has

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expressed a desire “to get away from earth awhile” and then come back for a

new start:

A poet must be more than a dramatist, an analyst of human emotion, a

humourist, and a philosopher: he must above all be a poet. Frost meets this

difficult test. He chooses to write in the rhythms of human speech, and by

sounding as natural as a man talking to his neighbour in simple language he

has produced some of America’s greatest poetry. His approach seems casual

and disarming, rather like that of a champion athlete who breaks records

without straining, who never tries too hard. To claim perfection for anyone—

athlete or poet—is absurd. Frost has his defects. At times he is like a kindly

teacher whose whimsicality is so sly as to be irritating, whose wisdom

sometimes descends to mere crankiness. But Frost has written magnificent

poetry—simple, sure, strong.

His first poems were published in Lawrence High’s Bulletin, and he

eventually became editor of that publication. Thus, his experience at

Lawrence helped contribute to his growing ambitions and self-confidence as

a writer. Frost’s experience working various low-paying jobs helped give him

an intimate familiarity with the lower- and lower-middle-class society which

is often the subject of his poems. His bouts with depression (including a

suicide attempt) helped make him familiar with the darker side of human

existence, which is also treated in his poems. His own frustrations in love,

especially when courting his wife Elinor, helped provide yet another subject

for some of his best-known poems.

In 1897, Frost was able to begin studying at Harvard, an experience

which also helped prepare him intellectually to become a serious poet.

However, he had to withdraw from Harvard after two years, and it was now

that he decided to become a chicken farmer, thus giving him familiarity with

rural life and with the lives of farmers – two more subjects of some of his

most significant poems. One notable poem, for instance, is titled “The

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Pasture.” Another is called “After Apple-Picking.” Another is titled “The Death

of a Hired Man,” while yet another is called “Mending Wall.” Perhaps the

most famous of these poems with rural settings and characters is “Stopping

By Woods on a Snowy Evening,” in which even the horse pulling the speaker’s

cart or sled has a significant role:

My little horse must think it queer

To stop without a farmhouse near

Between the woods and frozen lake

The darkest evening of the year.

Eventually Frost was given a larger farm by his grandfather, and, when his

grandfather died, Frost received enough of an inheritance to allow him to

devote more of his time and attention to his writing. He even combined his

interest in writing with his practical duties as a farmer by contributing articles

about chickens to poultry magazines. Later work as a teacher kept Frost in

touch, in a practical way, with the life of the mind, and eventually he and his

family were able to settle for a while in England.

During his time in London, Frost became familiar with a number of other

American writers, including the highly influential poet Ezra Pound, who

championed Frost’s first book. By the time Frost returned to the United

States in early 1915, he had begun to establish a reputation as one of

America’s most promising poets. Although the majority of Robert Frost’s

published work is poetry, it is worth noting that he published a one-act play

titled A Way Out, in 1929. By this point in his career, Frost had established

himself as a fine narrative poet capable of both monologue and dialogue

within the poetic narrative mode and with a strong visual mind capable of

creating powerful dramatic situations. Although Frost never made a serious

effort to adapt these dramatic strengths to the stage, much of his poetic

success lies with his sense of stage and dramatic persona. His only other

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literary publications include letters, particularly to his friend Louis

Untermeyer, and lectures in which he discusses in detail his own work and

poetic theory. He recorded many of his poems on records and film.

Perhaps the most successful of American poets, Robert Frost reached a

large and diversified readership almost immediately after the publication of

North of Boston. He sustained both popular and critical acclaim throughout

his entire career, which spanned fifty years and ended with his death in 1963,

shortly after the publication of his last collection, In the Clearing. He is the

only writer to have won the Pulitzer Prize in poetry four times (in 1924 for

New Hampshire, in 1931 for the first Collected Poems, in 1937 for A Further

Range, and in 1943 for A Witness Tree). He was nominated for the Nobel

Prize in 1950 on publication of the Complete Poems but did not receive it,

perhaps because the two preceding Nobel Prizes had been awarded to

Americans: T. S. Eliot in 1948 and William Faulkner in 1949. Frost earned

other awards, such as the Russell Loines Award (1931), the Gold Medal for

Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1939), the Frost

Medal from the Poetry Society of America (1941), an Academy of American

Poets Fellowship (1953), and the Bollingen Prize for Poetry (1963). He served

as the consultant in poetry (poet laureate) to the Library of Congress from

1958 to 1959 and was appointed poet laureate of Vermont in 1961.

Few American poets have laid claim to both an enormous critical and

popular reputation. Much of Frost’s contribution to American literature came

from his ability to speak in poetic but plain language to both common people

and scholars and to observe ordinary occurrences with irony and wit. If

modern American poetry began with Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson and

evolved through Edgar Lee Masters, Robinson Jeffers, and Edwin Arlington

Robinson, Frost’s poetry is the culmination, combining all elements of poetic

craft and modern themes.

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Frost’s most important contribution may be as the model for a clearly

identifiable twentieth century American poet. Unlike the expatriate

Americans, Frost never lost touch with American persistence, folk humor,

plain speech, and attachment to the land. His pragmatic, clever intelligence

never became pedantic, never abstract, condescending, or introverted, but

remained full of mischief and horseplay. In both his poetry and his public

image, although his private life was different, Frost embodied the American

ideals of rugged gentleness, quiet reflection, and an unconquerable spirit. His

poetry is compassionate without falling into sentimentality, and positive

without being naïve.

In the poem “In Hardwood Groves,” the poet invites the reader to the

realization that all living thing must return to dust in order to dust in order to

“mount again” (line 5). People resist change especially during tribulation.

However, Frost’s work paints a picture of nature at its most beautiful to ease

the shock of suffering. Every minute of every day, the earth is continuously

changing. Whether or not that change is accepted does not signify. Frost

demonstrates how nature has been given to humanity as a respite for the

soul. His poems express not only the rejection of that solace by some, but

also the quiet rejoicing of others in the comfort of all that nature has to offer.

Nature is present in the form of bees and the sun, but while the bees looked out

with ‘fierce heads’ making the minister and the visitor start the return journey, the

sun looked fierce as it ‘blazed on the windows.’ Thus Nature here does not offer any

solace nor does it stand for an ideal like Wordsworth’s poem. The poems are

engaged in a conversation with each other, but they take different paths. Jonathan

N. Barron’s observation in his essay ‘A Tale of Two Cottages’ beautifully illustrates

this engagement between Frost and Wordsworth: Frost’s ‘Black Cottage’ takes its

structure, and even much of its diction, from Wordsworth’s ‘Ruined Cottage’…These

allusions…allow Frost to engage Wordsworth’s poem on three levels. First they

make of Wordsworth’s poem a predecessor… Second, they fore ground the idealism

latent in Wordsworth’s natural world and so better prepare readers for the

destruction of that idealism. Third, by foregrounding the conversational elements of

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the poem, these allusions present a far more skeptical, far more social Wordsworth

than is often recognized. (Wilcox and Barron, Roads Not Taken 138-139)

Robert Frost uses nature in all its forms in most of his work. The reader

can see and feel love, friendship, despair, and indecision in his poetry. To

explain the inexpressible in a way that can be understood is an unbelievable

task. This poet has done that and more. He has used mature at its softest and

most sweet smelling to its harshest extreme to provide verbiage for emotions

that at times can hardly be endured much less spoken about. Frost’s songs of

nature can typify the joy one feels at witnessing a bubbling brook, the

smooth silkiness of the sun on one’s skin, the delight in someone’s eyes to

the desolation of grief. Nature in all its glory has given wings to Frost’s pen.

Frost has been defined as a realist

And yet frost is a moralist, and not necessarily in the cant sense of the

word; his analogies are regularly pointed ones, and it would be silly to deny

that the point is frequently relevant. “In Hardwood Groves” does say

something valid, not only about mortality in general but about the myth of

progress. Often enough, that meaning is arch, pedantic, and intrusive,

redolent of the cracker barrel and the symposium in the country store. In

“The Kitchen Chimney,” Frost pleads with his house-builder to build the

chimney” clear from the ground” rather than from a shelf:

A shelfs for a clock or vase or picture,

But I don’t see why it should have to bear

A chimney that only would serve to remind me

Of castles I used to build in air.

In “Evil Tendencies Cancel,” he asks:

Will the blight end the chestnut?

The farmers rather guess not.

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It keeps smoldering at the roots

And sending up new shoots

Till another parasite

Shall come to end the blight.

“Everything is really all right,” murmurs the vindicated shade of Doctor

Pangloss. And in “Something for Hope,” we are advised that we need only let

our abandoned pasture develop a good crop of trees and then timber it off in

order to have the pasture again as good as new:

A cycle we’ll say of a hundred years.

Thus foresight does it and laissez faire,

A virtue in which we all may share

Unless a government interferes.

The style is the man. Rather say that the style is the way the man takes

himself; and to be at all charming or even bearable, the way is almost rigidly

prescribed. If it is with outer seriousness, it must be with inner humour. If it is

with outer humour, it must be with inner seriousness. Thus, the clincher

stanza of “The Kitchen Chimney” contains sufficient mildly embarrassed self-

deprecation to make it, if somewhat arch, at least legitimately amusing. Not

just to you, and the man-bear, if essentially baggy and funny, is still pathetic;

he has remote affinity with Willy Loman, in Death of Salesman, or even

perhaps with Hamlet.

And I dread the ominous stain of tar

That there always is on the papered walls,

And the smell of fire drowned in rain

That there always is when the chimney's false.

A shelf's for a clock or vase or picture,

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But I don't see why it should have to bear

A chimney that only would serve to remind me

Of castles I used to build in air.

Moreover, the Adamic poet’s venture in this context takes him to work

contra the tradition of appropriating mere myth as poetic form. He rather

works under the assumption that the intrinsic and “inherent form of

experience,” and even of language is, in fact, “the author of the myth, past

and present manifestations, and it is this form poetry seeks to release from

historical language.” Thus, the Adamic poet tends to sing the everlasting

glory of the “single self” of man which, in its uniqueness, gathers qualities of

harmony and proportion in being unitary and self-sufficient in the face of all

that smacks of the mass and its generic culture. Optimistic American poets

like Walt Whitman may, of course, imagine that the single self and the

democratic mass might produce an electrifying force if they complemented

each other fruitfully and suitably. This apart, the Adamic poet’s “sovereign

self” may contain in itself a deeper level of self-assertion which in its very

condition of isolation and separateness may develop an elementary and

realistic sense of honour just as we find, for example, in Thoreau’s self-

chosen retirement from the community to carry on a kind of experiment with

life beside Walden Pond.

With these ideas in mind a consideration of Frost’s poetry with a

knowledge of his critical canons will bear testimony, as it shall be shown in

the succeeding lines, that Frost is consistently pre-occupied with “the Adamic

Mode’ in American Poetry. A knowledge of what he has to say on poetry vis-

à-vis his own experimentation in that field will be helpful as a starting point

for our enquiry. Frost talked of “enthusiasm” in poetry, but was also one who

sincerely meant to force it through the “prism” of metaphor. But why to

objectify the idea and put it far enough away from yourself must you put it

away off in antiquity and say it in heroes and gods. Why must you every time,

I mean. All right for this poem; but why not next time say it in modern

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people. It is like diffidence, shyness, this remoteness in time and space. Get

over it and you can break in on the age with your strength and insight.

A judicious reference to Frost’s self-definition through his creative

imagination would mean, first of all, and particularly from about 1925 on, a

growing interest in establishing a certain kind of correspondence between

poetry and life. While talking of belief in God,Frost is also interested in fixing

confidence in the self-belief, the belief of love and literary belief. The ease

with which he liberated “form” from its traditional “constrictions” gives us an

impression that “form” is indeed the road to “freedom,” which, for him, is

“nothing but departure.” Thus, “the creative possibilities were staggering,”

and “what mattered, as he came more and more to extract himself from his

material, was ‘performance,’ the self-definition achieved by means of

technical mastery.”

However, Frost’s “poetic impulse” that enabled him to define himself as

an individual cannot be generalized. At other times, he begins with a sudden

through analogy, he reaches an emotionally vibrating afterglow. Something.”

Though Frost never wanted to “worry a poem into existence,” he never

forgot the value of “working out a poem” which he would have been

delighted to name as the “facility of performance in an act of clarification.

Judging Frost’s poetry in the light of the adamic poet’s emphasis on “the

operation of the creative imagination as an act of self-definition,” one is

struck by Frost’s manner of discussion on the mature of poetic creation. A

Poem is never a put-up job so to speak. It begins as a lump in the throat, a

sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness. It is never a thought to begin

with. It is at its best when it is a tantalizing vagueness. A close analysis of the

lines stated above will reveal that a poet’s creative act begins with a

tantalising perception of something, may be, “a sense of wrong,” “a

homesickness” or “a love-sickness.” The majority of the characters in Frost's

poems are isolated in one way or another. Even the characters who show no

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sign of depression or loneliness, such as the narrators in "The Sound of Trees"

or "Fire and Ice," are still presented as separated from the rest of society,

isolated because of their unique perspective. In some cases, the isolation is a

far more disparaging force. For example, in "The Lockless Door," the narrator

has remained in a "cage" of isolation for so many years that he is too terrified

to answer the door when he hears a knock. This heightened isolation keeps

the character from fulfilling his potential as an individual and ultimately

makes him a prisoner of his own making.As such, it may also be equated with

the basic style in which the Adamic poem is conceived and created-a style

that “portrays the simple, separating inwardness of man as that which at

once forms and is formed by the vision of the world in which it has its being.”

“the simple, separating inwardness” begins with a tantalising perception and

matures, while the poem is created, into a vision of the world. Concerned

with the nature of poetic communication, Frost has his most famous and

sustained metaphor for poetry carefully stated and fully developed in “The

Figure a Poem Makes.” Adam’s perception of the flora and fauna in the

Garden of Eden must have begun in delight, but surely enough it ended in

wisdom Here is Frost on what a poem must begin with, and to what a poem

should aspire:

It begins in delight and ends in wisdom. The figure is the same as for love.

No one can really hold that the ecstasy should be static and still in one place.

It begins in delight, it inclines to the impulse, it assumes direction with the

first line laid down, it runs a course of lucky events, and ends in a clarification

of life-not necessarily a great clarification, such as sects and cults are founded

on, but in a momentary stay against confusion. This is, then, Frost’s lyrical

description of the nature of poetic creation. However, he also expounds “his

almost existential concept of the way a poem transcends its original idea and

creates itself through the very struggle with the discipline of form.A poem is

the emotion of having a thought while the reader waits a little anxiously for

the success of dawn. The only discipline to begin with is the inner mood that

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at worst may give the poet a false start or two like the almost microscopic

filament of cotton that goes before the blunt thread-end and must be picked

up finest by the eye of the needle. He must be entranced to the exact

premonition.

This way in writing poetry it might seem that Frost was only conscious of

“the inner mood” that determines the creative act in any art. But his

assertion of the uncertain nature of the poet’s “creative act” is obvious when

we mark how the language which he talked about his poetry changed over

the years. When he put his emphasis on “tones,” “voice-posture” and

“metrics,” he was preoccupied with the technical aspect. Once again, when

he referred to “belied” “commitment,” “courage” and “prowess,” it was the

moral and psychological side of poetry that gave him the desired satisfaction.

Lastly, when we find him dabbling in such terms as “meaning,” “metaphor”

and “naming,” he was in poetry. This thesis does not intend to exhaust all

these three points in the form and growth of Frost’s poetry. However, a brief

discussion on all the three aspects would make us aware that Frost was

basically an Adamic poet insofar as his critical theories and their application

to his poetry were concerned. The ability to capture the sentence tones of

everyday talk, and to use them in poetry is the first qualification of a good

poet.

No one makes them or adds to them. They are always there-living in the

cave of the mouth. They are real cave things: they were before words were.

And they are as definitely things as any image of sight. The most creative

imagination is only their summoner. But summoning them is not all. They are

only lovely when thrown and drawn and displayed across spaces of the

footed line. Here the emphasis is on a sort of primitivist or, for that matter,

Adamic instinct born out of a desire for understanding the sense behind the

speaking voice and for employing it to attain poetic effects of drama.

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Words exist in the mouth not in books. You want them to change and be

different. When it comes to literature, Frost says that one should gather

one’s sentences by ear and imagine them again while writing. ‘Take, for

instance, the expression ‘oh.” The American poets use it in practically one

tone, that of grandeur.

It is in this “hearing or audial imagination” that Frost anchors his fame as

a poet. The old rhetorical tradition that emphasises “unity” and “coherence”

in grammatical sentences should be discarded, and the poet, he says, is to

recognize, and assimilate mouths of people.” Frost is insistent in asking us to

remember fact, such a poetic “stance” would exhort a reader to look for

sound. This appears to be a kind of regression to earlier psychic primitive

cultures do still practice certain signalling systems of sound which forms an

important place in the genesis and psychology of their language

development. While noting that human language as a system of

communication is to be understood in terms of “human experience” at one

end, and “the audible sound” at the other, he insists that “the best we can do

is to note the correlation between experience and sound-and try, from this,

to deduce something of the inner workings of this most enigmatic, ingenious,

flexible, productive, and elegant of all human communication systems.”

Apart from this “linguistic consideration” that reveals him as an Adamic

poet, a discussion on the moral and psychological “undercurrent” in Frost’s

poetry would also indicate an Adamically human relevance as its object is to

achieve “form” that is “true to any chance bit of true life.” Thus, his kind of

poetry becomes a yardstick for discipline that liberates itself to a broader,

more authentic Adamic freedom – “the almost incredible freedom of the soul

enslaved to the hard fats of experience.” In fact, Frost’s sense of “realism”

begins with an acceptance of the crudity of life. This is also the stepping

stone conquering new areas of innocence. Wanting the world to remain as it

was, he “wouldn’t give a cent to see the world… made better.” Behind this

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so-called orthodoxy there is that proud affirmation of the way the modern

Adam should confront the world around him:

Except as a hard place to save his soul in,

A trial ground where he can try himself

And find out whether he is any good,

It would be meaningless. It might as well

Be Heaven at once and have it over with.

Terminologically speaking these lines recognize artistic creativity as a process

of the artist’s ability to capture the meaning of life through a sense of “trial,”

being neither too romantic nor “false-realistic,” but forever trying to create

the “form” of art by means of a confrontation with the “threat” of

“formlessness.” In that “breathless swing between the subject-matter and

form” lies Frost’s moral and psychological “commitment.” The search for

Adamic innocence is obvious:

The most exciting movement in nature is not progress, advance but

expansion and contraction, the opening and shutting of the eye, the hand,

the heart, the mind. We throw our arms wide with a gesture of religion to the

universe; we close them around a person. We explore and adventure for a

while and then we draw in to consolidate our gains.

This indicates that in Frost’s opinion “poetic impulse,” among others, is a

process of “recoil” by means of which the poet gets to the “source” of his

“inspiration.” This very much corresponds with the world of Nature where all

“growth” is from the “source.” Frost, while working out the central image of

the waterspout to explain the point, expounds the intricacies of the poet’s

creative act:

No one given to looking underground in spring can have failed to notice

how a bean starts its growth from the seed. Now manner of a poet’s

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germination is less like that of a bean in the ground than of a waterspout at

sea. He has to begin as a cloud of all the other poets he ever read. That can’t

be helped. And first the cloud reaches down toward the water from above

and then the water reaches up toward the cloud from below and finally cloud

and water join together to roll as one pillar between heaven and earth. The

base of water he picks up from below is of course all the life he even lived

outside of books.

This in how the poet’s “style” begins to take shape, and as hinted in a

letter to Louis Untermeyer, it is “that which indicates how the writer takes

himself and what he is saying… it is the mind, skating circles round itself as it

moves forward.” Obviously, therefore, Frost’s emphasis is on seeing the poet

recognise his “own voice” in his poetry. Wherever and whenever its

authenticity strikes a false note, Frost is all out to criticize. On The Sale of My

Farm is one of Robert Frost's lesser known poems and was written before the

height of his fame. It is the place he and his wife most cherished. Having

farmed and later taught at a local primary school, Frost was eager to promote

his life as a poet and would leave for England sometime afterwards. There is

therefore, a theme promoting self-development and self-discovery as Frost is

moving on to something new - "Well-away and be it so." As it represents a

journey of self, the symbolism is intertwined with the theme and is to be

found in the deeper meanings of the words and phrases.

The theme of self-discovery is evident throughout and there is a tinge of

regret, a minor theme as Frost's son had died whilst they lived there and he

may be "Seeking ache of memory here." This is a lovely short poem by Robert

Frost, reflecting his love of nature and the natural world, which are, of

course, key elements in so many of his poems. This poem concerns the way

that fireflies are able to "emulate" the beauty of the stars at night and

achieve a fleeting similarity. Note how Robert Frost seems to employ a

playful tone in this poem, punning on the similarity of "start" to "star" and

ending with a rhyming couplet that is humorous and light-hearted, whilst also

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making the serious comparison of the light that fireflies emit and the celestial

light that the stars provide us with:

Achieve at times a very star-like start.

Only, of course, they can't sustain the part.

Such an approach to comparing stars and fireflies seems to show the

whimsical, playful tone that is at the heart of this excellent poem. It displays

affection for fireflies whilst at the same time commenting humorously on

how they only emulate stars partially. Robert Frost's poem "Fireflies in the

Garden" is a brief but eminently clear commentary on the limits of

symbolism. Through this metaphor, Frost is saying that although symbols are

quite effective at times, almost duplicating that which they stand for, their

impact is limited, because they attain closeness to their subject for only a

fleeting moment. Symbols cannot sustain their effectiveness for any length

of time; their lustre quickly pales in the face of the real thing.

On the other hand, the best writer for Frost is one who takes one’s own

beliefs seriously: “Belief is better than anything else, and it is best when rapt,

above paying its respects to anybody’s doubt whatsoever.” This

“commitment” does indeed smack of a deep-rooted “prowess,” the radical

tone and temper of which is Emersonian in its Adamic egocentrism. Though

Frost was prepared to accept his own age for “possibilities” it held out for

him, he was deeply committed to the poet’s task of finding a clue through his

poems to the eternal verities of life-its central ebb and flow. The Faulknerian

confusion and chaos of the world was fearlessly braved by him and his

“belief” that life is a sort of “metaphysical struggle” led him to write in 1944

that “every poem is an epitome of the great predicament: a figure of the will

braving alien entanglements.” This is how Frost succeeded in relating life to

poetry.

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The most intriguing of his critical developments does, however, lie in his

increasing fascination for such complicated questions as the “meaning of

meaning” in poetry. This gave him an opportunity for analysing the problem

of “communication” for the poet. While evaluating the poem’s effect, Frost

hints at “a two-way traffic” for both the poet and the reader between whom

the common bond is one of “recognition”-the “initial delight” of

“remembering something I didn’t know I knew.” All that Frost wanted to

keep intact was his own feelings, and by doing so to strike the same tune in

his readers. What he would keep for himself should be “the freedom of my

material-the condition of body and mind now and then to summon aptly

from the vast chaos of all I have lived through.” This may not be a very new

idea, for it smacks of Whitmanesque overtone, but all Adamic freedom, to be

sure, begins with an attempt to allow the mind the luxury of new “feats of

association.” It means that all thinking is ultimately metaphoric and through

“metaphor” a poet is invigorated to give new dimensions of meaning to old,

worn-out words and themes. This way the poet’s role is one of a namer for

whom all revelations are meaningful that ultimately shape his experience. His

experience in turn does also create its own impact of meaning. One of the

preoccupations of Frost was with “poetry as the renewal of words.” The

themes thus presented determine a meaning that often takes us to a point

where we can very well visualise the “primal innocence” of “people and

things.” Frost’s poetry becomes expansive as his native similes not only

connect “people” with “things,” but also make language a mode of

discovering channels of new freedom. In fact Frost’s for Frost goes on to

champion the cause of liberty ignoring evil though evil’s existence cannot be

lost sight of. And so, his sense of freedom tends to reach “innocence” at its

original, unspoilt source presenting life afresh. All this begins with what has

been called “the relation of naming to meaning.” What is named is, of course,

the “actual” for, as Thoreau indicated, “a true account of the actual is the

rarest poetry.

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The Creative imagination perceives knowledge of past experience as

necessarily indirect, and therefore best represented in the symbolic forms of

art. Among other reasons, this is what makes the arts of such psychological

importance to the civilized life of mankind. In poetry as an art form, symbols

result by putting things together within enduring forms. The whole complex

arsenal of symbolic tools is contained in figurative language-analogies,

parables, images, myths, comparisons, contrasts, similarities, antitheses,

ambiguities, puns, rhymes, auditory tones, irony, assonance, dissonance,

connotations, personification, alliteration, and so on, but perhaps above all in

metaphors and the forms of poetry. As has already been pointed out,

symbols are vehicles that convey knowledge and insight indirectly. Frost

often identified himself as “a confirmed symbolist.” As a poet he

acknowledged that “we like to talk in parables and in hints and in

indirections.” In a detailed examination of him as a symbolic poet, Regional

Cook concluded: “Frost is a symbolist of the physical world of space and

time.” Ultimately, by uniting the “play” or interaction of mind and matter,

symbolic knowledge and understanding includes the “natural dualism” and

conception of knowledge held in common by him and Lovejoy.

Certainly symbolism is a key element of all of Frost's poetry. In particular,

you might like to think about how he uses the natural world as key symbols in

his poems to suggest much bigger and deeper ideas about death, choices and

success. For example in "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," the woods

are described as being "lovely, dark and deep." They are clearly an attractive

place, and although tempted to stay and delight in their quietness and

beauty, the speaker "has promises to keep." Thus we could argue that

symbolically the woods represent death that the speaker does not feel able

to take up because of the responsibilities that he has. The poem contains no

unconventional syntax, that is, using words or sentence structure in unusual

ways. Nor does it have irregular spelling. The narrator of the poem does not

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address anyone overtly; instead, he seems to be thinking or reflecting on his

situation to himself.

The rhyme scheme of the poem is very regular. In each stanza the first

two and fourth lines rhyme. While the third line doesn't rhyme with any of

the lines within the stanza, it rhymes with the first, second, and fourth lines

of the following stanza. This is known as an interlocking rhyme scheme. In the

final stanza, all four lines rhyme. Rhyme schemes are expressed with letters,

and assigning letters to the lines in this poem creates a scheme of aaba bbcb

ccdc dddd.

The rhythm of the words creates a steady metrical pattern known as

iambic. In this pattern, every other syllable is stressed, beginning with the

second syllable. This poem is completely consistent in its rhythm, as you will

be able to see if you do a scansion of the poem. In a scansion, you assign

each syllable of the poem either a dot (for an unstressed syllable) or a dash

(for a stressed syllable). A scansion of this poem reveals a perfect dot-dash-

dot-dash pattern. Each line is also the same length, containing eight syllables,

or four two-syllable feet. This pattern is called iambic pentameter.

Likewise, in "After Apple-Picking," the world of work and labour is

represented in the harvest of the apple-picking. Note what the speaker says

about this work:

For I have had too much

Of apple-picking: I am overtired

Of the great harvest I myself desired.

Success, as defined in the quantity of apples, has exhausted the speaker, and

thus this poem symbolically comments on work and success. However,

perhaps in his most famous poem, the haunting necessity of taking decisions

is summarised in "The Road not Taken," where the speaker is forced to make

a decision between two paths that would lead him to different destinations.

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These paths and the choice of course symbolise the decisions that we all have

to make in life but which we are never able to undo or go back and select

another "path."

Thus through looking at these three examples of Frost's work, we can see

how his poetry operates through natural symbolism to comment upon

realities such as life, death, labour, success and decisions. While placing

himself in the same arena as Whether meaning shapes experience or

experience creates meaning, the problem of locating the innocent origin of

the meaning of a “name” is an eternal one. It is the poet who may unravel

the mystery behind the existence of a “name,” and may again view it with the

same freshness as Adam did while viewing the surrounding flora and fauna in

the Garden of Eden. All that Frost did as a poet, as he told John Freeman, was

due to what is implicit in his statement: “my theory was out of my practice.”

Not that he made a consistent attempt to theorise as Eliot or Pound did.

In fact Robert Frost belongs to a different order of belief. His “optimism”

is pagan in comparison with Eliot’s Christianity that is smeared with

pessimism. Robert Frost, unlike these two stalwarts of modern poetry,

preferred to be rooted to the American soil, and his poems published in

England smelt strongly of it. Belonging as he did to the Party of Hope, Frost,

in his pastoral poetry, balances the two opposite and opposing forces that

usually cover a major area in our literature-the force of civilization as against

man’s continual attempt to regain lost innocence in the face of its artificiality

and sophistication. This leads the critic of Frost’s poetry to believe that Frost

had enough sense of hope not to sing of the effects of time as we often find

in European Romanticism. A thematic study of Frost’s poetry will reveal as we

shall demonstrate later on in this chapter that time’s effect can be countered

by a persistent effort to recapture innocence in the context of a present

situation that may appear to be artificial and even seemingly spoilt and

confused beyond all repair. One may say that there is an echo in his poetry of

a Blakian “state of innocence set forth in symbols of pastoral life akin to

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those of the Twenty-third Psalm.” His poetry’s preoccupation is not directly

with childhood as in Vaughan, Traherne or Wordsworth, but with the

childlike vision of innocent existence.

Take, for example, his poem “The Pasture” that serves as a suitable

introduction to his recurring theme of innocent love which knows no death

and thrives ever-gloriously in Nature.

I'm going out to clean the pasture spring;

I'll only stop to rake the leaves away

(And wait to watch the water clear, I may):

I sha'n't be gone long.—You come too.

I'm going out to fetch the little calf

That's standing by the mother. It's so young,

It totters when she licks it with her tongue.

I sha'n't be gone long.—You come too.

However, Frost’s emphasis is not every much on inviting us to escape

from the complexities of modern life as on the cultivation of an Adamic sense

of innocence. In fact, Frost’s career as a poet shows many a time how he

oscillated, not often without reason, between his profession as a teacher on

one hand, and the self-styled, and perhaps deliberately chosen life of

“literate farmer” on the other. The farmers whom Frost describes in his

poetry have a unique perspective on the world as well as a certain sense of

honor and duty in terms of their work and their community. Frost is not

averse to examining urban life in his poetry; in "Acquainted with the Night,"

the narrator is described as being someone who lives in a large city. However,

Frost has more opportunities to find metaphysical meaning in everyday tasks

and explore the relationship between mankind and nature through the

glimpses of rural life and farming communities that he expresses in his

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poetry.  Moreover, “particularly during vacation months of seedtime, growth

and harvest,” he could manage to indulge in his intrinsic love for the life of a

farmer. A poet in residence, Frost, during his sojourn in some of the

university campuses, would seem positively averse to the very idea of getting

“comfy’ by staying indoors, and relaxing.

“The Wanderer,” a poem that anticipates Paterson is one of his earliest

endeavours in depicting the horror of his town that “bewildered” his mother.

It suggests by contrast a release of creative powers by comprehending the

natural Vis-à-vis the artificial. A searching reader will also discern its

relevance as it informs the manner of “the rebirth of a young poet: his

evolution of a new identity and his redefinition of such concepts as beauty

and the self.” Through a process of initiation carried under the supervision of

“a fierce old goddess” the “female principle” that is further explored in

Paterson-the poet’s quest for roots culminates in “a clarification of life” in a

society where our bother is “the separateness of man from one another and

from the things of their world.” She embodies “the principle of guidance”

and, in fact, plays a vital role in the manner of Eve in the Garden of Eden to

baptize the poet who, we suppose, is a confused Adam in this context whose

Whitmanesque query (“How shall I be a mirror to this modernity?”) is

answered amply by her. This section’s sentimental romanticism is balanced

by a counterthrust which comes from the “antipoetic”-the Broadway scene of

“Empty men with shell-thin bodies/Jostling close above the gutter,/Hasting-

nowhere…” This is how the dirty city’s stinking environs sicken the poet, and

he expresses his desire in prayerful terms to be liberated. Liberation would

come but through “a new marriage”:

May I be lifted still; up and out of terror, up from before the death living

around me…

Instead of fulfilling what the poet prays for, she does again, as it appears in

the fourth section of the poem, “Strike,” take the fumbling poet out into the

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streets of Paterson. The town’s lack of subtlety and delicacy is revealed

through a concatenation of images such as those of “flat skulls,” “ugly legs,”

“sagging breasts,” “protruding stomachs,” “rasping voices” and “filthy

habits,” to name only a few suggestive ones. “Abroad,” and the sections that

follow it show that the protagonist is ultimately at peace with himself and the

world around. He urges upon his towns people to act decisively, but the way

they are to do so is through a discovery and possession of their own Adamic

feelings which they have failed to tap under the impact of technocratic

industrial society:

Waken! My people, to the boughs green

With ripening fruit within you!

Waken with myriad cinquerfoil

In the waving grass of your minds!

Waken to the silent phoebe nest

Under the eaves of your spirit!

The poem ends with the fierce old goddess leading the poet to a ceremony of

baptization-a bath in the water of “The Passaic, that filthy river.” Through

filth and all, that is, through a realization of “the here and now,” the poet is

lifted, liberated:

Until time had been washed finally under,

And the river had found its level

And its last motion had ceased

And I knew all-it became me.

The poem, however, rests on a very important “feeling” which strikes the

key-note to the whole theme:

But the lifted me and the water took a new tide

36

Again into the older experiences,

And so background and forward,

It tortured itself within me….

The immediate experiences are grasped, and there is that “backward and

forward” journey for realizing the effects of Nature on one hand, and that of

civilization on the other to gain a whole, compact, and morally all-embracing

vision of life. Such a vision is possible not because Williams gives us at one

point the glimpse of “the boughs green,” and the salubrious effects of the

Jersey mountains, but because he brings in “the counterforce” and makes the

readers see the Emptiness of “Faces all knotted up like burls on oaks.” Poetry

of this type does always sizzle with, what John M. Synge has put,

“exaltation.” “The Wanderer,” having all this felt seriousness about art, is a

significant pointer to the poet’s achievement in Paterson, for there, as it is

here, Williams surrenders himself in a sort of uncompromising manner to

“feeling” as the stepping-stone to wisdom.

This is a difficult task indeed, for we who are civilized and sophisticated

tend to fail to perceive “the thingness of things.” Yet our eyes have not lost

their innocence forever: they give way to innocent perception in many a

moment of our life’s conscious and unconscious activities. In “Pastoral,” the

poet’s observation is one of “astonishment.” “The little sparrows” that “hop

ingeniously/about the pavement…,” quarrel no doubt, but there is a

definitive “interest” in them which the poet misses to find in the human

world and there suggests that, lacking as we do any definitive approach to

life, our wisdom is just an apologia for foolhardiness. Not so, of course, is the

case of “…the old man who goes about/gathering dog-lime…” He “…walks in

the gutter/without looking up/and his trend/is more majestic than/that of

the Episcopal minister/approaching the pulpit of a Sunday,” The theme is

man’s “alienation” or, for that matter, “separateness.” Man is alienated not

only from his environment as we “shut ourselves in,” but also from his fellow

37

beings, in consequence of which he has lost “the kind of innocence” as we

find, for example, in “the sparrows” and “the old man” depicted in the poem.

Williams draws our attention to the city’s pavement” and the “gutter,” but

what we call filth, dirt and squalor hide the seeds of innocence. As “These

things/astonish me beyond words,” the poet is aware that these “simple,

separate things upon which the imagination feeds have an integrity and

vitality” of their own. However, the objects seized upon by imagination do

not, as Breslin says, speak for themselves, though Williams shall attain that

“ego-shattering concentration upon physical objects,” as he matures as a

poet.

The cycle of seasons, the green vegetation of Nature and her trees,

wilderness, sea and sea-gulls, and above all “love” are the themes that crowd

these early poems. The importance lies in the sudden thematic or linguistic

twist and turn that he often gives to his poems of this period. Beneath all,

there is the poet’s “ego” that works on to catch the “loose threads”-the loss

of innocence, the presence of murder and cruelty, the deplorable lack of

liberty. And yet the poems are not romantic in the accepted sense of the

term. He gives them a local colour with a tendency to get them rooted to the

fierce “actuality” or what Ostrom says “sensuality” of American life in the

twentieth century. Through their particularities the poems reach out to strike

a note of universal emotions. The point Frost is making in "On Looking Up by

Chance at the Constellations" is that changes in the night sky happen very

infrequently, but changes on Earth are not much more frequent.

He establishes that "a long, long time" will pass between events involving

the planets, moon, sun, and stars. Because it happens so rarely, Frost

suggests we can "look elsewhere than to stars and moon and sun For the

shocks and changes we need to keep us sane." The point Frost is making in

"On Looking Up By Chance at the Constellations" is that changes in the night

sky happen very infrequently, but changes on Earth are not much more

frequent.

38

He establishes that "a long, long time" will pass between events involving

the planets, moon, sun, and stars. Because it happens so rarely, Frost

suggests we can "look elsewhere than to stars and moon and sun For the

shocks and changes we need to keep us sane." However, the changes that

happen on Earth are not predictable or easily observable, either. It is certain

that every drought will eventually be ended by rain; he considers it a sure

thing that peace in China will inevitably be ended by "strife," but these

events are not any easier to isolate and observe than the changes in the

heavens. Frost frequently refers to nature and uses parallels in the natural

world to comment on people and their activities. This is another example.

However, the changes that happen on Earth are not predictable or easily

observable, either. It is certain that every drought will eventually be ended by

rain; he considers it a sure thing that peace in China will inevitably be ended

by "strife," but these events are not any easier to isolate and observe than

the changes in the heavens. Frost frequently refers to nature and uses

parallels in the natural world to comment on people and their activities. This

is another example.

Though outwardly structured in a loose manner these poems have an

inner balance-a quality that resolves tension of opposing emotions of simple

“innocence” on one hand and complex “experience” on the other. Notice, for

example, the themes in his “Fire Spirit” and “To Wish Myself Courage.” Both

poems are thematically interconnected. The poet’s question in “Fire Spirit”

(“Where shall I turn for comfort?”) is suitably answered in “To Wish Myself

Courage.” He says that old age has its own compensation. With his wisdom,

and without “the stress of youth” he would then write a powerful “youth-

song.” He proposes the kind of predilection he shall have in selecting the

theme of the “youth-song”:

On the day when youth is no more upon me

I will write of the leaves and the moon in a tree top!

39

I will sing then the song, long in the making

When the stress of youth is put away from me.

The loss of youth is lamented upon. It’s like a fall from Paradise. However, for

Williams Paradise is not lost forever it can be regained through our ability to

perceive beauty and innocence in spite of circumstances or conditions that

may create barriers. The fertility and rebirth metaphor is invoked:

But when the spring of it is worn like the old moon

And the eaten leaves are lace upon the cold moon

And the eaten leaves are lace upon the cold earth-

Then I will rise up in my great desire-

Long at the birth- and sing me thy Youth-song!

The motive for retracing “the path” travelled by him is there in order

that, Phoenix-like, he shall almost rise from the ashes of his old age, and

recapturing youth’s beauty, and its love of life and Nature, he shall compose

his great ”youth-song.” Some of the finest lines on the theme of “innocence”

and Edenic bliss are found in “The Death of Franco of Cologne. His prophecy

of Beethoven:”

Precious children, little gambollers! “farlings”

The several opposing attitudes concerning man and nature expressed

in the poetry of Robert reflect apparent incongruities in his own life. Most

readers and critics think of frost as a poet of New England, the area he

employs most often as a background for his verse. But Robert frost was born

and lived the first eleven years of his life, 1874-1885, in California, where his

parents had settled soon after their marriage. His father, William Prescott

Frost, Jr., a native of new England, was a political radical, and his mother,

Belle Moodie Frost, was Scottish refugee teacher. Because Robert had a

tendency toward consumption, they did not send the frail young boy to

40

school, but frail or not, he was a lover of the out-of-doors. With his father,

with playmates, or alone he roamed the countryside around San Francisco,

fascinated by the great forests, the mountains, the sea, and the cliffs. Several

of his later poems are products of his imaginative interests at this early age

along the California coast.

References: 1. Lathem, Edward Connery, ed. The Poetry of Robert Frost. St.Martin’s Griffin. NYC. 1975.2. Harriet Monroe, "Robert Frost," in her Poets and Their Art (© 1926 and 1932 by Macmillan Publishing Company; reprinted by permission of the Literary Estate of Harriet Monroe), revised edition, Macmillan, 1932.3. Richard Church, "Robert Frost," in his Eight for Immortality (copyright 1941 Richard Church; reprinted by permission of Laurence Pollinger, Ltd. and the Literary Estate of Richard Church), J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd., 1941 (and reprinted by Books for Libraries Press, 1969)4. Peter Viereck, "Parnassus Divided," in The Atlantic Monthly (copyright © 1949, by The Atlantic Monthly Company, Boston, Mass.; reprinted with permission), Vol. 184, No. 4, October, 19495. Robert Penn Warren, "The Themes of Robert Frost" (1947), in his Selected Essays (copyright © 1958 by Robert Penn Warren; reprinted by permission of Random House, Inc.), Random House, 19586. Barron, N.Jonathan, ‘A Tale of Two Cottages: Frost and Wordsworth.’ Roads Not Taken: Rereading Robert Frost. Ed. Earl. J. Wilcox and Jonathan N. Barron. Columbia and London: University Of Missouri Press, 2000. p138-139. Print.7. Boroff, Marie. Language and the Poet: Verbal Artistry in Frost, Stevens, and Moore. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979. Boroff is one of the few critics to study the stylistics of Frost’s poems. His book is technical but illuminating. 8. Brower, Rueben. The Poetry of Robert Frost: Constellations of Intention. New York: Oxford University Press, 1963. A very close New Critical reading of Frost’s poems. Brower is very good on Frost’s complex poetic structures.9. 3 Lentricchia, Frank. Robert Frost: Modern Poetics and the Landscape of the Self. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1973. Lentricchia sees Frost as a modernist poet. While he is very good on seeing the difficulties in reading the poems, he seems to exaggerate the modernist dimension. 10. Lyman, John F. The Pastoral Art of Robert Frost. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1963. At times Lyman overemphasizes the pastoral element and oversimplifies some poems. Nevertheless, the book does call attention to an important element in Frost’s poetry.11. Porier, Richard. Robert Frost: The Work of Knowing. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977. One of the best general discussions of Frost’s poetry. Porier

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is especially good in linking Frost to Emerson and other nineteenth century American writers. 12. Thompson, Lawrance, and R. H. Winnick. Robert Frost: A Biography. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1981. Thompson may overestimate Frost’s dark and devious side in this excellent biography, but it is a necessary corrective to the sentimental view of Frost. It remains the standard biography of the poet.

CHAPTER II

STYLISTIC APPROACHES

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In his own writings, Frost talks about the "sound of sense," or the rhythm one

would hear when someone is speaking in the next room and one cannot

make out individual words but only the rhythms of speech. He thinks those

rhythms are not random, and that sentences that make sense have a natural

rhythmic quality, which in English is normally iambic. Robert Frost seemed to

write simple poems with simple words and simple messages. However, when

you begin to study his words, complex subtlety emerges. This line, "A poem

begins in delight but ends in wisdom" is a perfect example. This description

of poetry allows the joy in the written word and the perfect example of

saying much with a few words. The end of the line "but ends in wisdom"

illustrates the brilliant mind of Robert Frost, for he is saying that if we study a

poem, we will gain the wisdom the author intended us to get from reading

the poem. In Mikhail Bakhtin’s terms, we might see these ongoing definitional

debates in the context of the always coexistent centrifugal and centripetal forces at

play in the shaping of a modernist discourse. The centrifugal forces push to multiply,

decenter, and pluralize modernism, but, at the same time, a centripetal force urges

stability and definition. So, while there is delight and joy at the perfection of

words coming together to prompt an author's vision, wisdom is and should

be a big part of what we gain from reading poetry.

Unlike many Victorians, for whom poetry aspired to the condition of

music, Frost aimed to make his meters both regular and conversational. This

means that even when he uses a regular iambic pentameter or tetrameter

line with a regular rhyme scheme, he will use metrical variations and

enjambment to give the poem a tone of natural speech rather than

something obviously artificial. Although Frost experimented widely with

meter, he most commonly favoured lines consisting of three, four, or five

iambic feet. He wrote a number of his most famous poems, including

"Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," "The Road Not Taken," and "After

Apple Picking" fairly early on in his career. Frost is often referred to as an

American nature poet; however, the general appeal of his poetry is not found

43

merely in its nature imagery, but in its metaphorical musing on the nature of

life, death, work and happiness, and these themes are illuminated by the

detailed images he creates.

Frost came from a fairly wealthy family, but he was expected to make his

own way and work for a living. He attended Harvard briefly and also tried to

earn a living as a farmer. However, his early years did not see him established

in a steady vocation. Frost lived in a number of places, including England, and

around the New England states. His travels exposed him to many people and

sights that inspired his work. His poetry seemed to flourish best when he

settled in Vermont, but prior to that Frost was obliged to take on occasional

teaching jobs to support his family. Eventually he was able to make his living

as a poet. Frost won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry four times; this is one of the

highest accolades available to poets. Also, Frost's work has been

anthologized more often than perhaps any other American poet's. Having

one's poetry included in an anthology usually indicates that the poet's work is

considered important enough to be part of the literary canon.

Frost's work is well loved for its universal appeal and simple language that

reveals deep truths about the human condition; he could be called the most

famous American poet. No doctrine view of development, or anything

else, could ever satisfy Frost. In his notebooks, he recorded the difference

between his dualism and the two kinds of rationalism the mechanistic one

centered wholly in matter and the idealistic or spiritual one. Regarding

evolution in man as a species, he rejected both of them: Mechanism and

Idealism: What’s the difference? By any name all monisms come to the same

thing. If all is good or all is bad we were still secure in monism. But we find in

experience that there is a division between good and bad. We get both

permanently so far as we have gone.

The whole tenor of Frost’s dualistic philosophical orientation in

rejecting both forms of monism remained firmly fixed, rooted in his

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experience that good and bad, true and false, in all of their respective

complexities, were constant factors of mind or spirit and matter throughout

human history. His conception of creative evolution was deeply grounded in

his philosophical dualism, which respected matter and biology, but which

construed mind or spirit as the most vital active element in generating

changes in man as a species.

There are formal and thematic reasons why “In the Home Stretch,”

although too prolix to count among Frost’s very best work, would not look

out of place amid the many poems in North of Boston preoccupied with the

meaning of home. A dialogue in blank verse, the poem seems like a

throwback to the practices of that earlier volume. But in other less obvious

ways, “In the Home Stretch” also relates closely to the opening poems in

Mountain Interval- the tension between town and country represented by

the two bargainers in “Christmas Trees,” for example, or the still greater

tension between the house dweller and his environment in “An Old Man’s

Winter Night.” Certainly, young readers would sense the aloneness of the old

man. Although they might simply attribute this aloneness to his being by

himself, those with single grandfathers would understand the man's

loneliness. And, if they had visited this man in his solitary home, they may

have felt the echoings of sounds, experienced the darkness and need to

"scare the cellar" and make noise to ward off whatever one might imagine. In

addition, they would catch much of the auditory and visual imagery in this

poem and understand that an aged man "can't keep a house" all by himself,

literally, but they probably would not grasp that the man is dying.

That solitary old man, frightening the night as he clomped from room to

room, no longer had the wherewithal to make his house a home: he lived in

but was not a part of it. A similar “tramping” echoes through “In the Home

Stretch” as the removal men shift furniture into position, prompting the wife

to remark that “’The very tread of men/As great as t hose is shattering to the

frame/Of such a little house.’” As if to reassure the house, she tells her

45

husband that their own passage will be with “’softer steps,’” and that only

“’sudden winds’” will “’slam the doors.’” The separate attitudes of the old

man and the women to similar noises place the two poems at opposite poles:

although each is concerned with the relationship between a house and its

occupants, one describes a bare subsistence in a hostile environment, the

other a delighted confidence that paradise has been regained.

The woman’s emotional bond with the house-a bond so conspicuously

lacking in “An Old Man’s Winter Night”-creates the promise of future well-

being. Whereas “All out of doors” had looked threateningly in at the old man,

“In the Home Stretch” begins with the woman looking out the kitchen

window at her land and using her imagination to appreciate its seasonal

cycles. The ritual installation of a stove, which seems to serve as a covenant

between the house and its inhabitants (like the obviously Eucharistic

“rend[ing]” of the bread), is emblematic of a successful transition, as a home

is made not just amid but out of “the wreckage of a former home.’” The

poem’s final lines confirm the accuracy of the many earlier auguries. The fire

escapes “through crannies in the stove” to set “yellow wrigglers on the

ceiling,” but these are enlivening patterns, not the beginnings of a disastrous

conflagration. The “wrigglers” seem “As much at home as if they’d always

danced there”-an image colored by the couple’s own joyous sense of

belonging. In a skillfully crafted poem verse metrics always relates to the

development of the mood of the poem. Thus, how Frost's "Once by the

Pacific" is "set up"[sonnet]--which is "structure"--and the verse metrics

[iambic pentameter (da DA)] are purposeful and relate to mood, while mood

relates to meaning.

However, it is incorrect to say metrics or mood "signify other

meanings" because metrics, mood and meaning are not equivalent terms. It

is correct,on the other hand, to say metrics establishes mood and mood

enhances, dramatizes and elaborates upon meaning in a poem. In other

words: Meaning equates with theme and mood enhances, dramatizes,

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elaborates upon theme, while metrics establishes mood. To reiterate, theme

(meaning) and mood are not equivalent terms; they are not the same thing,

though intricately and closely related.

This clears up some of the confusion of language in your question and lays

the groundwork for exploring how metrics, mood and meaning work

together. First consider that the ocean is poetically stylized as having a

regular, pounding rhythm of incoming and outgoing waves (in reality the

rhythm of waves is actually irregular).

[1] The meter of the poem, iambic pentameter [-' / -' / -' / -' / -'] mimics this

regular action of the waves: in out-da DA, in out-da Da. [2] How the poem is

"set up" (structure) as a sonnet is with three quatrains constructed of two

couplets each, with one ending couplet to the fourteen line sonnet. The

sonnet rhyme scheme is aabb ccdd eeff gg. This rhyme scheme provides

another in-out, da DA, duple (duple: double, two) pattern in the poem. The

first is the iambs (da DA), the second, the couplet rhymes (skies/eyes, if/cliff).

[3] A duple structure can be light and gay:

• The stone

Was thrown.

It hit

The mitt.

Or a duple structure can be dark and ominous, as Frost's duple structure

sonnet is. Now we have arrived at mood.

The mood of the sonnet is dark, threatening and ominous: "Someone

had better be prepared for rage." Frost's verse metrics (iambic pentameter)

certainly establish the mood of the poem. Verse metrics is aided as well by

rhyme scheme. As a result of metrics and rhyme, the mood enhances,

dramatizes and elaborates upon the meaning of the poem, which is nicely

47

revealed in the previously quoted line: "Someone had better be prepared for

rage." In other words, the poetic persona foresees troubled times ahead.

“In the Home Stretch” stresses its suspicion of a word which was never

among Frost’s favorites: “new.” The new, for Frost, usually carries an air of

newfangledness. “It may come to the notice of posterity,” he begins an

introduction to Robinson’s King Fasper, “that this, our age, ranwild in the

quest of new ways to be new.” Robinson enjoys Frost’s praise for having

“stayed content with the old-fashioned way to be new” (BPPP, 741). That

praise intimates a credo which, “In the Home Stretch” makes clear, applies as

much to life as to art. The moon may be “new” but, as a consequence, “’Her

light won’t last us long.’” The only consolation is that over the next fortnight

the light will grow stronger as the moon grows older. The couple have left

behind the “’lighted city streets’” streets’” in favour of “’country darkness’”.,

all the same, the moon to be “’as new as we/To everything,’” but later she

radically revises that estimations:

“It would take me forever to recite

All that’s not new in where we find ourselves.

New is a word for fools in towns who think

Style upon style in dress and thought at last

Must get somewhere. I’ve heard you say as much.

No, this is no beginning.”

The association of the town with the new and the country with the old and

traditional (not to mention the paradisal or Edenic) is itself anything but new.

Frost’s allegiance to rural values, and his willingness to pick a fight with what

he perceives as the fatuity of the urban lifestyle, are still more apparent here

than they had been in “Christmas Trees.” Although the removal men are

“’Good boys’” who “’love the city,’” that preference, coupled with their own

48

disparaging comments about the country, makes them seem immature. They

are “’dark/Door-filling men’” with “’deafening boots’”; one has “’smudged,

infernal face’” (whereas Joe’s face is only “blackened”); and their “Fool-like”

japes mark them out as lacking the wisdom of those who have chosen to

escape to paradise. And paradise it is: “’apple, cherry, peach,/Pine, alder,

pasture, mowing, well, and brook.’” More than a mere inventory, the list

becomes a catalogue aria, celebrating the familiar features which Frost’s

audience encounters as he guides us through his poetic landscapes.

The sonnet form is represented in all but one of Frost’s poetry volumes.

(North of Boston, dominated by eclogues at the lyric’s expense, provides the

exception.) In Frost’s hands, the sonnet’s most immediately noticeable

characteristic is its diversity, and not just because of a range of subject

matter: the four sonnets of Mountain Interval have four different rhyme

schemes. Frost wrote of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 29, “When in disgrace with

fortune and men’s eyes,” that its author “was no doubt bent on the sonnet in

the first place from habit, and what’s the use in pretending he was a freer

agent than he had any ambition to be” (CPr,149-150). Frost’s own

experiments with a variety of rhyming patterns are one way of asserting

freedom of choice within a fixed form.

The mongrel outline of “Meeting and Passing,” with its Italian octave of

abbaabba followed by a Shakespearean quatrain and rhyming couplet

(cdcdee), had been adopted once before by Frost, in “A Dream Pang” from A

Boy’s Will.

Your parasol

Pointed the decimal off with one deep thrust.

And all the time we talked you seemed to see

Something down there to smile at in the dust.

(Oh, it was without prejudice to me!)

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Afterward I went past what you had passed

Before we met, and you what I had passed.

Traditionally, a change in rhyme scheme might be expected to mark

the sonnet’s Volta, or turn; and like that earlier poem, “Meeting and Passing”

seems to mark one such change with a stanza break after line 8. Yet the

drama of “Meeting and Passing comes from the inability to choreograph the

couple’s movements within the larger formal choreographies of the sonnet.

Despite being intricately connected through the rhyme scheme, the octave in

which the speaker seeks unity must twice contend with the stubborn refusal

announced by a “But” which insists on division: “We met” but all mingled

were footprints; we were “less than two” but more than one. Whereas full

rhymes had thrown their disharmony into relief, the mismatch of “parasol”

with “small” introduces a discordant note in keeping with the couple’s

failures to rhyme with each other.

The “meeting” promised by the title ends after twelve lines, so that “passing”

needs to be compressed into a final couplet. As if struggling to fit everything

in, Frost could hardly make his diction less ornamental. Meeting and Passing”

manages perfectly well with monosyllables in its opening lines and its final.

The complex Latinate or semi-Latinate polysyllables-“parasol,” “decimal,”

“prejudice”- belong to the unsatisfactory meeting; at its conclusion, life

returns to a state of simplicity. There has been no world-changing revelation.

Afterward I went past what you had passed

Before we met and you what I had passed.

The sonnet form promises a self-conscious performance, aware of its status

as written artifice “The legalistic phrase “without prejudice” implies that

nothing should be read into the woman’s gestures, and that the meeting will

be allowed no bearing on future events.

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The final couplet’s plain diction makes an epigram at odds with its own

form, rejecting the fluent and the memorable in favour of basic reportage.

That ostentatious lack of ostentation is matched by the identity rhyme

“passed”/ “passed,” the drudgery of which becomes further enhanced by the

repetition with “past.” At last, the couple duplicate each other, like the

rhyme itself; walking away, they even see things from each other’s

perspective. The poem which had tried so hard for the unity of mutual

understanding seems finally to have delivered it. As Randall Jarrell maintains,

the couplet expresses “the transfiguring, almost inexpressible reaching-out of

the self to what has become closer and more personal than the self” (Jarrell

1952, 553). Yet Jarrell misses that the moment can be read as devastatingly

ironic: when together, they seem gauche, and only while apart do the couple

share experiences “more than one,” but only at the cost of providing the

most frustrating kind of union.

Frost agreed with his readership in ranking “Birches” among his strongest

poems. Selecting it as his contribution to an anthology in 1933, he justified

his choice by making reference to the poem’s “vocality and its

ulteriority” .Robert Frost's "Birches" is a poem of fifty-nine lines without any

stanza breaks, a condition that indicates the simultaneous flow of

imagination with the vision of reality. Frost's poem has as its controlling

metaphor that the real world stimulates the world of the imagination. In

order to express this controlling idea, Frost employs figurative langauge:

• In the first fifteen lines Frost uses the metaphor of a boy swinging the

limbs of the birch tree for what nature really does.

• The poet describes the tree limbs in the winter with imagery "Loaded

with ice," that cracks and "crazes their enamel." The use of the word enamel

is also metaphoric, comparing the bark to enamel.

• The snow is metaphorically compared to "broken glass" that is swept

away.

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• There is personification given to the birches that "never right

themselves" and "trailing their leaves on the ground."

• Lines 18, 19, and 20 contain a simile:

trailing their leaves on the ground

Like girls on hands and kees that throw their hair

Before them over their heads to dry in the sun.

• There is another simile in 44

And life is too much like a pathless wood

Where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs

• Personification is in line 21 as

Truth broke in

With all her matter-of-fact about the ice storm

• More imagery appears in lines 55

And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk

• Alliteration recurs throughout the poem:

Soon the sin's warmth makes them shed crystal shells (repetition of /s/

To learn about not launching out too soon. /t/

Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more /t/

That would be good both going and coming back /g/

Frost returns his metaphor of one's being a "swinger of birches" as one who

uses creative imagination.

From a poet who routinely celebrated vocality and ulteriority above almost

everything else, the description is not especially helpful, but its pointer

52

toward ulterior interpretations does offer encouragement to those many

commentators who seek to locate and explain the poem’s parabolic meaning:

perhaps “Birches” is about a loss of faith, perhaps the poem exemplifies the

power of the redemptive imagination, and so on. Robert Frost often includes

natural imagery in his poems. His intent is usually to show how closely man is

bound to the natural environment in which he lives. Other frequently studied

poems like “The Road Not Taken” and “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy

Evening” are completely constructed around images of the speakers'

immediate environment.

The first simile in the poem, “like girls on hands and knees,” comes about a

third the way through the poem:

You may see their trunks arching in the woods

Years afterwards, trailing their leaves on the ground

Like girls on hands and knees that throw their hair

Before them over their heads to dry in the sun.

Part of Frost's aim has been to show that the birches are vulnerable to the

effect “swinging” by boys. This vulnerability is emphasized by comparing

them to girls—the trees are delicate, like the girls, but also beautiful in their

way. The second simile comes about two-thirds through the poem. The poem

has evolved by this point—Frost has become more serious. In this simile, “like

a pathless wood,” Frost is saying that sometimes life becomes difficult, filled

with worries and decisions that have no clear answer:

It's when I'm weary of considerations,

And life is too much like a pathless wood

Where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs

Broken across it, and one eye is weeping

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From a twig's having lashed across it open.

He uses the simile to compare the physical pain of being cut by a twig to the

distress caused by life's cares, and goes so far as to suggest he would like to

“get away from Earth awhile.”

As Judith Oster argues, there is no shortage of metaphor, “even metaphor

within metaphor and metaphoric playing in the poem,” but Frost also

requires that we consider “the whole poem as metaphor, or, in another

word, the story-as-metaphor we term ‘parable’” from ignoring the literal in

favour of the figurative; or, just as damagingly, stressing one figurative

reading at the expense of others.

“Birches” tries its best to blur all such distinctions. Richard Poirier

pushes a crucial point just slightly too far when he states that Frost’s

“driftings from one kind of experience to another” make it possible to forget

that the birches “are bent because of ice storms and not because boys have

been swinging in them” (Poirier, 275). Early on, frost’s speaker admits that he

“like[s] to think some boy’s been swinging them,” but that actually the

birches are permanently bent only by ice storms. Later, having given himself

license to be “poetical,” Frost imagines a boy “subdue[ing] his father’s

trees/By riding them down over and over again,” and finally recognizes

himself in that boy: “So was I once myself a swinger of birches.” Imagination

creates a reality capable of replacing (not merely forgetting) that oppressively

capitalized “Truth,” and leaves the reader unsure about whether or not the

boy did bend the birches out of shape. The “matter-of-fact” which burdens

adulthood can be evaded by means of poetry: the return to childhood also

marks a return to a more intimately experienced fantasy-reality.

But even the dichotomy between the matter-of-fact and the poetical is

negated by the poem’s own practice, because the matter-of-fact turns out to

be, after all, profoundly metaphorical and allusive. Ice crystals

onomatopoeically “click upon themselves” and “turn many-colored /As the

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stir cracks and crazes their enamel”; their fall comes with another rush of

sound effects as the sun makes them “shed crystal shells / Shattering and

avalanching.” Metaphor adds layer to metaphor when they fall as “broken

glass” and it seems that “the inner dome of heaven had fallen.” The allusion

spotted by several critics is to “Adonais,” Shelley’s great elegy for Keats, in

which “Life, like a dome of many-colour’d glass, /Stains the white radiance of

Eternity,/Until Death tramples it to fragments.” (The grand diction of

Shelley’s poem is comically undercut in Frost’s by the need to tidy up the

mess afterward: “Such heaps of broken glass to sweep away.”) The birches

themselves are no less metaphorically rich and allusive. In a lovely sensuous

image, they are “Like girls on hands and knees that throw their hair / Before

them over their heads to dry in the sun.” Here, Helen Bacon has deteched an

allusion to The Bacchae by Euripides, in which can be found “the motif of the

tree bent down to earth and in some sense functioning as an intermediary

between earth and heaven” (Bacon, 84). Through metaphor and allusion,

almost everything in the poem it, or is like, another thing, with the

consequence that Truth must obey the shape-changing logic of the poetic

imagination.

Randall Jareel offers a lone voice of dissent when he complains about

“the taste of ‘Birches’ in our mouth-a taste a little brassy, a little surgary”

(Jareel 1952,538). The sugariness to which he objects must come from- if

indeed it comes from the poem and not the poem’s reception-a certain kind

of sentimentality in “Birches,” a nostalgia for childhood. That Romantic

connection between the poet’s vision and the child’s, or at least between the

child and the poet who wants to return to childhood, provides most of the

poem’s structuring topoi. Yet it is never so simple as to deserve dismissal as

“sugary.” Frost’s fully realized account of the boy’s swinging is produced

“With the same pains you use to fill a cup/ Up the brim, and even above the

brim.” That moment of fine excess describes the boy’s careful climbing, but it

also seves as Frost own modus operandi in a poem which celebrates a sense

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of liberation via poise and endeavour. “It was almost sacrilegious,” Frost told

one audience, “climbing a birch tree till it bent, till it gave and swooped to

the ground. But that’s what boys did in those days” (Parini, 22). The anecdote

might effectively stand for the skill of a poem like “Birches,” as the careful

pains of Frost’s iambic pentameter allow a sudden release which is

(paradoxically) dependent on its continuing rootedness. Like so many of

Frost’s poems, “Birches” encodes its own aesthetics.

The poem’s attraction to transcendence never once forgets that need

to remain rooted. (The previous poem in Mountain Interval is titled “Bond

and Free.”) Shelley’s “Adonais” ends with the mournful poet ready to shed

the “last clouds of cold mortality” and join “The soul of Adonais” which

“Beacons from the abode where the Eternal are.” Frost, in “Birches” as many

times elsewhere, alludes to a Romantic precursor only to reject the earlier

vidion, this time by risking one of his plainest theological observations:

“Earth’s the right place for love:/I don’t know where it’s likely to go better.”

The man who fantasizes about climbing a tree “Toward heaven” (in an echo

of “After Apple-Picking” with its ladder “sticking through a tree/ Toward

heaven still”) has no desire to arrive at that particular destination, as his

italics are designed to emphasize. This is, after all, a subject about which

misunderstanding would prove fatal. Frost’s song of the earth seeks only a

temporary (and even then, still connected) respite from the soil, a guarantee

that by “going” he will soon be “coming back.” “One could do worse than be

a swinger of birches,” transcendent yet rooted, bond and free, like a poet.

This final poem of Mountain Interval was written in 1914 for his friend, the

poet Lascelles Abercrombie. Frost claimed that the poem was the “only

one[he] wrote in England that had an English Subject” (Sergeant, “146)- the

subject being a group of elms near Abercrombie’s cottage. It was first

published as “The Sound jof Trees” in December 1914. Frost’s two minds

about the poem’s title suggest an indecision in choosing between specificity

(“The Sound of the Trees”) and universality (“The Sound of Trees”).

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Each of Frost’s first three volumes charts a journey of departure and

return through its judicious choice of opening and closing poems. A Boy’s Will

begins by fantasizing about escape (“Into My Own”), and the adventure is

eventually undertaken, only for Reluctance” to bring Frost’s persona

regretfully “by the highway home.” North of Boston in vites the reader to

accompany the poet-farmer outside (“The Pasture”), and ends in “Good

Hours” with a solitary journey back. The positioning of “The Road Not Taken”

at the start of Mountain Interval looks to augur a break from the pattern: “I

doubted if I should ever come back.” But “The Sound of the Trees” finds the

poet as rooted as ever in his “dwelling place,” seeming to describe his own

situation as he describes the trees: “They are that that talks of going/But

never gets away.”

Trees feature prominently in Frost’s work. They can be swung on (“

Birches”); bartered over (“Christmas Trees”); cut down and resurrected as

telegraph poles (“An encounter”); used for firewood (The Axe-Helve”), or

gum (“The Gum-Gatherer”), or even new human life (“Paul’s Wife”); they can

provide mysterious inspiration for children’s names (“Maple”); and, in “Tree

at My Window,” they can offer companionship and sense of shared purpose

(“Your head so much concerned with outer,/Mine with inner, weather”). That

last example comes closest to “The Sound of the Trees” in its identification of

a special relationship. No animal or flower in Frost’s work approaches the

same intimacy with humans. Trees are secret-sharers which require us to

develop “a listening air,” the implication being that as they grow “older and

wiser,” we can learn from their talk and their example.

The identification with trees is so extensive that it becomes

unconscious and physical. When he watches trees sway, Frost’s persona

admits, his feet “tug at the floor” as if rooted there, and his “head sways to

[his] shoulder.” He is enthralled to the point of hypnotic trance. However,

such slavish imitation is preceded and followed by signs of resistance. “Why

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do we wish to bear/Forever the noise of these,” the poem puzzles, with

“bear” and “noise” each carrying negative associations. “We suffer them by

the day” -“suffer,” especially after ‘bear,” meaning endure more than it

means allow. There is even an implication that trees pose a particular threat

to poetic composition because they cause us to “lose all measure of pace,”

with “measure” relating etymologically to meter and “pace” to poetic feet.

Even as the poet mimics and identifies with the trees, he appreciates the

necessity of escaping from their “noise.”

The poem ends with a resolution, albeit one couched in the vaguest of

terms:

I shall set forth for somewhere,

I shall make the reckless choice

Some day when they are in voice

And tossing so as to scare

The white clouds over them on.

I shall have less to say,

But I shall be gone.

“I shall be gone” may be a fitting way to end a volume of poetry, but words

like “somewhere” and “Some day” cast doubt on whether the ambition will

be fulfilled. As Richard Poirier states, “the reader is deceived into visions by

Frost and by his own pretense, as he lets the sentences move casually past

the subordinated, dependent, muted reservations that are being made”

(Poirier, 82). Even so, fear of the trees, and the desire to avoid them, Are

unmistakably present in that transference of terror onto the clouds. (Given

that the movement of clouds and trees has the same cause, the poet’s

imputation seems all the more revealing of his own anxieties.) Because they

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are scary, the trees provoke the clouds to move on. If only he can escape his

rootedness, they might provoke Frost’s persona to do the same; he might yet

make “the reckless choice,” like the speaker of “The Bonfire,” who urges the

children to be “’As reckless as the best of them to-night.’” Enacting that

eventuality of disappearance, the poem dwindles toward its vanishing point,

its short lines of trimester contracting first into dimeter (“I shall have less to

say” is mimetic of its own prediction) and finally challenging the reader to

find even two stresses in “But I shall be gone.” And so the trees are

vanquished. They may have plenty to say, but they can never leave. Having

stated his ambition to go, the poet has nothing more to add, and ends as if

liberated at last.

This, the final poem of A Boy’s Will, remained one of Frost’s favorites,

although he was quick to concede that it could hardly be said to herald “a

new force in literature” (SL,47). “Reluctance” marks the end of a book and a

journey. A Boy’s will had begun with a poem fantasizing about escape into

the vastness of “those dark trees.” “Reluctance” seems to remember such an

escape having taken place- “Out through the fields and the woods/And over

the walls I have wended.” But whereas the speaker of “Into My Own” had

seen no reason why he “should e’er turn back,” the circle of departure and

return now looks to be completed after all: “I have come by the highway

home/And lo, it is ended.”

Ended in one sense, because the book is now finished, but the poem

itself finds no satisfactory resolution. As a character from a later poem, “In

the Home Stretch,” puts it: End is a gloomy word.” Accordingly, Frost’s

decision to conclude A Boy’s will with a wintry admission of failure (Failure of

the poet and his protagonist alike) is offset by the poem’s refusal to “accept

the end,” and its desire for another beginning. Glancing back over the

imaginative terrain crossed by A Boy’s will, “Reluctance” also looks forward

to new prospects which the “heart is still aching to seek.” (The heart is a

hardworking organ in Frost’s early poetry: “Ghost House” had also referred

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to a “strangely aching heart.”) This contains the promise of Frost’s second

book, North of Boston, which will follow the same pattern of departure (its

opening poem, “The Pasture”) and return (its last, “Good Hours”).

Not merely because each of its last two stanzas culminates in a

question, “Reluctance” is a fundamentally perplexed poem. The aching heart

which encourages further journeying’s does not tell the feet (with a familiar

play on poetic feet) which direction they should travel or what their

destination should be. After all, the landscape, with its dead leaves, “crusted

snow” and withering flowers, mocks poetic inspiration and confirms poetic

failure, so that those “others” who “are sleeping” may prove to be acting

more sensibly. And regret is perfectly expressed in the rhythm’s dying fall

created from the alternation of masculine endings (“woods,” “views,”

“home,” and so on) and feminine rhymes (“wended” / ”descended” /

”ended”-words which themselves trace a revealing trajectory).

Nevertheless, reluctance to “accept the end” grows into resistance. The

landscape, at once “dead” and abrasive (“scraping”), demands rebuttal, and

although that rebuttal arrives in the form of a question, the question is so

loaded as to seem rhetorical:

Ah, when to the heart of man

Was it ever less than a treason

To go with the drift of things,

To go with the drift of things,

To yield with a grace to reason,

And bow and accept the end

Of a love or a season?

“Ah” is the knowing expression of one who trumps a limited with a superior

wisdom. To “go with the drift of things” may be the reasonable option, but its

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quietism offends the hearts instinct: “reason,” after all, rhymes with (and is

the large part of) “treason.” Frost would later observe that he would never

have committed himself “to the treason-reason-season rhyme-set…. If [he]

had been blasé enough to know that these three words about exhausted the

possibilities and, in fact, the inevitable rhyme with “season” does cause

difficulties. Refusing to accept “the end/ Of a love” is a different matter

altogether from refusing to accept the end of “a season.” The parallel drawn

between the human heart and the cycles of the natural word only risks

encouraging a new fatalism.

Frost once proposed that in “Reluctance,” as in “The Tuft of Flowers,”

he had explored his “position…. Between socialism and individualism. That

imposes on the poem a political dimension which the text nowhere justifies.

Better to replace those binaries with others like “Solitude” and “Society,”

because the desire to leave behind the world of men and the gradual return

to it are the volume’s most the world of men and the gradual return to it are

the volume’s most prominent themes. But “Reluctance” is a strange augury

of Frost’s later achievement, because continuing attractions of a peripatetic

solitude run counter to the inspiration which his poetry will learn to find at

home and among people. There can be few, if any, more important words in

North of Boston than “home.” The next phase of Frost’s work, “Reluctance”

does not y et seem to realize, lives most fully in the very place which the

speaker of A boy’s will commonly desires to evade.

“The Road Not Taken,” printed in italic at the start of Mountain Interval, has

probably caused more confusion, despite or because of its apparent

simplicity, than any other of Frost’s poems, Some of the author’s comments

about its making and meaning have been usefully preserved by Lawrance

Thompson (Thompson 1970,545-548). What they reveal is a poet frustrated

by readers who, interpreting the poem as the expression of a timeless human

truth, have failed to notice the author’s distanced and ironic portrayal of his

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speaker. A dramatic monologue, Frost seems to protest, has been misread as

a lyric.

That misreading, if such it is, began in April of May 1915, when Frost

sent a version of the newly finished poem, then titled “Two Roads,” to his

closest friend, the English poet Edward Thomas. Thomas’s perplexity

throughout the ensuing correspondence marks the most awkward episode in

a otherwise remarkable untroubled and mutually enriching relationship.

Perhaps hearing a distance echo of the opening of Dante’s Divine Comedy

(with its reference to journeys, paths, and forests), Thomas read the poem as

autobiographical, and solicitously expressed the hope that Frost had not

made a decision he had regretted lately. (He may have been thinking of

Frost’s decision to return to the States from England several months

previously.) By way of reply, Frost explained that his friend ”had failed to see

that the sigh [in “The Road Not Taken”] was a mock sigh, hypo-critical for the

fun of the thing. I don’t suppose I was ever sorry for anything I ever did

except by assumption to see how it would feel” (Spencer, 70). Frost had been

seeing how it would feel to be Thomas, who would often sigh during their

walks together and with that they had taken a different and better direction.

Playfully mocking a facet of his friend’s personality, Frost found it

disconcerting to be attributed with it himself by his friend; and no matter

how many times he explained his intention to audiences subsequently, even

going so far as to call “The Road Not Taken” a war poem about Thomas, the

sigh is still usually interpreted-as Thomas interpreted it-as sincere. The poem

often taken to be most representatively Frostian is, Frost insists, a teasing

portrayal of the manner of Edward Thomas.

Acknowledging in later life that his poems has sometimes meant more,

or other, than he had intended, Frost nevertheless remained firm in his

attitude that the speaker to “The Road Not Taken” should not be viewed

entirely seriously. Several textual clues support his insistence. For example,

having decided between roads, the speaker tries to persuade himself that the

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road chosen had a “better claim,/Because it was grassy and wanted wear.”

That desire to be characterized as someone who deviated from the beaten

track, who refuses to follow the herd, is immediately exposed by stubborn

facts: the roads are worn “really about the same” (an equivocation which

joins company with “as just as fair” and “perhaps the better”), and both are

covered in untrodden leaves. The final stanza, supported by the title’s

regretful focus, leaves little doubt that the speaker panders to his own sense

of melancholia. He mournfully remembers a decision taken in the past, while

acting out in the present the very grief which he imagines himself inevitably

repeating like some coursed Ancient Mariner in the future:

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I-

I took the one less travelled by,

And That has made all the difference.

From the repetition of the first-person pronoun, to the inflationary phrase

“ages and ages hence” with its hint of childish or childlike self-indulgence, to

the rhyme j”sigh”/”I,” revealing a melancholic identity, to the formal rhythms

of the final line, the anticipation of remembrance has become high-flown and

ostentatiously performative. This is a poem which eschews any opportunity

for elision: “could not,” “I should,” “I shall,” and “that has” together prove

that Frost is making no attempt to capture the rhythms of speech. It is fitting,

then, that the poem’s final word, “difference,” should be stretched beyond

natural pronunciation into three syllables through the rhyme with ”hence”

and the need for a stress on the last syllable.

Whether these factors should be sufficient to alert the more attentive

readers to Frost’s intended ironies is questionable. The speaker of “The Road

Not Taken” claims to know the “difference” between his options: but as

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Frost’s audience has mostly ignored or failed to share that knowledge, the

poem constitutes something of a crisis in his poetics. Its popularity becomes

an affront, attracting admiration for the very characteristics which the poet

had tried to mock. The strain inherent in Frost’s ambition to write for general

and learned audiences alike was already clear in another of his italicized

introductory poems, “The Pasture”: but the reception of “The Road Not

Taken” fully exposes the contradictions. Frost believed that readers had

ignored the poem’s signposts and chosen the wrong and more commonly

trodden road.

In dwelling on an exchange between two speakers, “The Mountain”

extends the model established by “Mending Wall” and “The Death of the

Hired Man.” Robert Frost's poem "Mending Wall" is told in the first person.

The narrator describes the task of maintaining a wall between the neighbor's

pine trees and his own apple orchard. The wall is difficult to maintain.

I see him there

Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top

In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.

He moves in darkness as it seems to me,

Not of woods only and the shade of trees.

He will not go behind his father's saying,

And he likes having thought of it so well

He says again, "Good fences make good neighbours."

It is a dry stone wall that partially collapses due to snow and freezing in

winter and parts sometimes get knocked down by hunters. The narrator

speculates that there is no real reason for the wall's existence, as there is

nothing to be walled in or out, and the wall is neither high nor durable.

The main irony in the poem has to do with the phrase the narrator's neighbor

repeats, "Good fences make good neighbours." On the one hand, it seems

odd, as fences separate people. The narrator speculates, though, that in the

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case of dairy farmers, a wall prevents mingling of animal herds and ensuing

disputes. The irony is that although the narrator and his neighbor have little

in common, the shared annual duty of mending the wall brings them

together, and thus maintaining good fences, does, in fact, serve to make

them good neighbors by letting them bond over this shared task.

However, for the first time in the book the conversation takes place

between strangers. Frost’s comment that in North of Bostan he dropped

below even Wordsworth’s level of diction proves that Wordsworth’s example

was prominent in his mind. “The Mountain” is the most Wordsworthian

poem in North of Boston, not just in its everyday diction and blank verse, but

also in characterization. The slow-moving farmer who describes the locality is

a direct descendant of Wordsworth’s old Cumberland beggar and especially

his leach-gatherer, figures whose intimacy with their environment grants

them an intuitive wisdom. (Significantly for so watery a poem as Frost’s, the

leech gatherer’s voice is “like a stream.”) Frost interrogates this tradition

even as he inherits it: “The Mountain” explores the limitations as well as the

depths of the farmer’s knowledge, and explores, ultimately, the nature of

knowledge itself.

The mountain’s overwhelming physicality “takes all the room.” This

seems borne out rhythmically: five of the seven lines containing the

“mountain,” including the poem’s opening line, have an extra syllable; and in

three of those cases, where the word occurs at the end of a line, its trochaic

beat ensures a feminine ending which necessarily disrupts the iambic

pentameter. (Here and elsewhere in North of Boston, and more strictly in a

later poem like “For Once, Then, Something,” the meter is hendecasyllabic, as

derived from Frost’s study of Catullus.) But for all its inescapable bulk, the

mountain generates errors and uncertainties. The common view that the

brook is warm in winter and cold in summer is true only in relative terms. The

farmer admits to not knowing whether the mountains wooded “Clear to the

top.” There may be a spring on the summit, or a little way down-“I guess

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there’s no doubt,” the farmer states, doubtfully. Even the name of the

mountain remains mysterious: “We call it Hor: I don’t know if that’s right.

Unlike “The Death of the Hired Man,” “The Mountain” has no third-

person voice; the descriptive passages are the work of the traveller recording

the context in which his conversation with the farmer took place, and

therefore they lack any authority to solve the poem’s mysteries. One effect is

to emphasize differences in the diction of the two men. Although his

contribution to the dialogue consists mostly of short questions, the traveller

elsewhere indulges in over-elaborate rhetorical constructions. Even the

opening line- “The mountain held the town as in a shadow”-sounds

unnaturally fussy, and it is soon followed by an inversion (“Near me it

seemed”), the most rhythmically leaden of clauses (“Behind which I was

sheltered from a wind”), and an archaic adverb (“When I walked forth. One

of the great sights going’”; “Twouldn’t seem real to climb for climbing it’” (a

sentence immediately and verbosely translated by the traveller: “’ I shouldn’t

climb it if I didn’t want to-./ Not for the sake of climbing’”). Frost explained to

Amy Lowell that in North of Boston he hadn’t “put dialect into the mouths of

his people because not one of them, not one, spoke dialect.” But there are

other ways of marking differences in speech. The farmer’s is the colloquial

language of a man who believes that “’all the fun’s in how you say a thing’”;

the traveler’s is finicky, correct, and lifeless.

Appropriately for so puzzled and misconstruing a poem, “The

Mountain” itself belongs among the most misconstrued of Frost’s works, as

apparent in critics’ assumption that he “brook” and the “spring” are

synonymous. Lentricchia, arguing that “the farmer has never seem the

brook,” concludes that the farmer enjoys “an anarchic moment of

imagination” as he describes in such poetic detail what the brook must look

like. But not only has the farmer seen the brook, he has even gone trout-

fishing in it. It is the brook’s source, rumoured to be a spring at or near the

mountaintop, which has not been seen by him or by anyone he has spoken

66

to. The mountain never gives up that secret. Although it can be driven round,

even a man who has spent his life underneath it has only heard rumours that

people have been to the top.

Mountain springs are traditionally associated with poetic inspiration-

Mount Helicon held two springs sacred to the Muses. The farmer is unable or

unwilling to climb the mountain and check this myth of origins. (The name

Hor is itself originating-its biblical namesake is the “mountain of mountains.”)

It is sufficient, for him, to fish in the brook and to turn it into poetry; and to

make joes to strangers about his own and the mountain’s origins. Frost even

smuggles his own signature into description of the brook’s glorious powers:

One of the great sights going is to see

It steam in winter like an ox’s breath,

Until the bushes all along its banks

Are inch-deep with the frosty spines and bristles-

This frostiness is more than a tricksy way for Frost to semaphore his presence

(as he doesn’t’ quite in “Mending Wall”) on the slopes of inspiration. Walls

are generally built to protect and secure. They are there to either keep out

what is bad or unwanted, or to keep in what is valuable and important.

Ironically, though, it seems that the wall between the speaker and his

neighbor serves no purpose. The speaker states in lines 22 to 23:

It comes to little more:

There where it is we do not need the wall....

The speaker is clearly aware of the fact that they do not need the wall. He

emphasizes this:

He is all pine and I am apple orchard.

My apple trees will never get across

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And eat the cones under his pines....

The speaker considers it absurd that his apple trees would ever cross over

into his neighbour’s property and feed on "the cones under his pines." He

also muses that

Before I built a wall I'd ask to know

What I was walling in or walling out,

And to whom I was like to give offence.

It seems however, that his neighbour does not share his sentiment and

stubbornly refuses to acknowledge the speaker's entirely logical argument.

Even though the speaker has obviously stated that the wall would only have

served a purpose if they had cows, his neighbour is determined to maintain

the barrier. This creates further irony since the two neighbours, it seems,

regularly go about fixing whatever damage—from natural or other causes—

the wall has suffered when there is actually no need to do so.

This act of neighbourliness introduces more irony because the one

thing that literally keeps them apart is also that which brings them together.

They are involved in a joint act when fixing the damage. The speaker seems

somewhat resentful about his neighbour’s obviously obstinate stance:

He will not go behind his father's saying,

And he likes having thought of it so well

He says again, "Good fences make good neighbours."

It appears as if the neighbour is a staunch believer in his father's principle of

"Good fences make good neighbours." The speaker adopts a cynical tone in

this regard and sees the neighbour’s insistence as something uncivilized,

somewhat aggressive and sinister. He mentions:

I see him there

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Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top

In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.

He moves in darkness as it seems to me,

Not of woods only and the shade of trees.

The speaker seems to believe that the neighbour has a less friendly ulterior

motive for retaining and maintaining the wall. This is, in itself, also ironic, for

in the speaker's eyes, there is nothing good in maintaining a useless partition

when, if they are such good neighbours, they don't need to be separated at

all. Among other things, “The Mountain” here concerns itself with the

ancillary business (a business so prominently ancillary as almost to be

primary) of creating a parable of its own making. Whereas the spring of “The

Pasture” could be cleaned, in “The Mountain” the poet who fishes poetry’s

brook can only tell stories about the mysterious Origins of his power; and

although ”The Mountain” culminates in “moving” (yet another feminine

ending), that movement takes a different direction from the unknown,

unknowable source.

Nothing in North of Boston, or in Frost’s earlier work, prepares the

reader for the surprise of “After Apple-Picking.” So often memorized and

anthologized, its has helped fulfil its author’s ambition to “lodge a few poems

where they will be hard to get rid of” (GPP,744). Frost himself recognized its

strange separateness: “But one poem in the book [North of Boston] will

intone and that is ‘After Apple-Picking.’ The rest talk” . The difference is

partly generic, as the lyric voice is allowed rare and full expression amid the

dialogues and dramatic monologues which otherwise dominate the volume.

There is also a freedom from blank verse: Frost temporarily puts to one side

his ambition to record the rhythms of natural speech.

Although “After Apple-Picking” is not the only poem in North of Boston

to rhyme, its metrical irregularities set it conspicuously apart. The meter

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remains predominantly iambic throughout, but this poem of blurred

distinctions is suitably fluid in both rhyme and line length. Rhymes can be

adjacent or separated by as many as seven lines; lines range from two

syllables to twelve. Reuben Brower’s detailed analysis maps the ways in

which the poem “comes to the reader through sentences filled with

incantatory repetitions and rhymes and in waves of sound linked by likeness

of pattern.” and he demonstrates that these repetitions and rhymes are

never allowed to settle into anything approaching a predictable pattern.

Although such formal experiments make the poem seem like a wild

holiday from North of Boston’s usual practices, it is not entirely oblivious to

its position within larger structure. North of Boston begins in the “spring

mending-time” of “Mending Wall,” and ends with the “frozen swamp” of

“The Wood-Pile” and the “winter evening walk” of “Good Hours.” The

autumnal mood of “After Apple-Picking” fits this chronology of seasonal

change. It appears just more than halfway through the volume, immediately

after the blueberries’ summer harvest and the windy nights which so worried

the speaker of “A Servant to Servants,” but preceding the dark advance of

cloud in “The Code” and the constant rainfall reported in “The Generations of

Men.”

“After Apple-Picking” is, therefore, concerned with climatic transitions

from summer to fall and from fall to winter. It is also concerned with other

kinds of transition, such as the shifts from past to present and from the

physical labour of waking hours to the promise of sleep. These transitions are

never simple: far from bringing rest, sleep may turn out to be “trouble[d]” by

the daytime’s activities; so blurred have boundaries become between sleep

and wake that it is impossible to distinguish them. The great poet of sleep

(and to autumn), John Keats, had wondered in “Ode to a Nightingale”

whether he had just experienced “a vision, or a waking dream,” and

concluded in further uncertainty: “do I wake or sleep?” Keats gives voice to a

question which Frost’s persona might equally ask himself.

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As if to illustrate the point, for all its dreamy peculiarities of focus

“After Apple-Picking” is intensely physical, retaining and reliving the ache on

the instep arch. Ironically, the poem’s feast of the sense. The experience of

picking is its own mixed blessing, as it can lead to an unpalatable surfeit: “I

am overtried/Of the great harvest I myself desired.” “Overtired” evokes

boredom as well as exhaustion, implying that the persona has not been

careful in what he wished for. “I am done with apple-picking now”-an

expression tonally distinct from merely reporting that the apple picking is

done-conveys something less than enthusiasm for the business undertaken.

The promise of “heaven” in the poem’s opening lines has remained

unfulfilled: the only legacy of the apple picking is a troubled and aching sleep.

The word “sleep” occurs seven times, and its fourfold repetition in the

last five lines bolsters the authority of the poem’s final word:

One can see what will trouble

This sleep of mine, whatever sleep it is.

Were he not gone,

The woodchuck could say whether it’s like his

Long sleep, as I describe its coming on,

Or Just some human sleep.

Commentators have referred to this “long sleep” as the big sleep, the sleep

of death, but it is explicitly hibernation as experienced by the woodchuck-

hence the contrast with “just some human sleep.” John Hollander has shown

how the line break in frost’s couplet “But I was well/Upon my way to sleep

before it fell” insists on the desirability of this impending state: to be on the

way to sleep is to be “well.” In waking, the protagonist had experienced a

“strangeness” of “sight” after looking through ice. Unsure whether he is

already sleeping or about to sleep, and with (bizarrely, as if Alice-like dream

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logic has taken over) just the absent woodchuck able to clarify the nature of

his sleep, the protagonist has moved from the vertical aspirations of the

opening lines to the imminent prospect of a respite which is, if not

necessarily recuperative, at least safely earthbound.

“After Apple-picking” had marked a brief departure, but “The Code”

returns to North of Boston’s familiar territory of (characteristically lopsided)

dialogue in blank verse, even down to the hendecasyllabic Frostian line: “

Darkly advanced with a perpetual dagger”; “’Don’t let it bother you. You’ve

found out something’”; “Nothing! They listened for him. Not a rustle.’” Each

opening with a trochaic foot, these examples bring together Frost’s two most

common strategies for varying the iambic meter. Giving an account of North

of Boston’s versification in 1914, he explained that “there are the very

regular pre-established accent and measure of blank verse; and there are the

very irregular accent and measure of speaking intonation. I am never more

pleased than when I can get these into strained relation” (CPP, 680); or as he

put it more aphoristically elsewhere, “Poetry plays the rhythms of dramatic

speech on the grid of meter” (CPP, 809). In this respect, Frost is the twentieth

century’s most profound heir to Shakespeare: the tension between blank

verse and the speaking voice is as much the poem’s drama as the events

which the poem happens to describe.

Like “The Mountain” and “Home Burial,” “The Code” begins by setting

the scene before any dialogue takes place. The opening passage establishes a

clear stylistic distinction between the narrator’s overblown metaphor (“a

perpetual dagger/Flickering across its bosom”) and the homelier vocabulary

of the farmhand whose metaphors allude to biscuits, spiders, and rats. On

the rare occasion when the farmhand does employ an obscure word

(“bulling”), he stops to explain it before proceeding with his story. Yet that

generous accommodation is part of a more sinister strategy. The farmhand

comes across as a sympathetic figure, who takes the farmer and the reader

into his confidence; and yet he tells a story of attempted murder, weakly

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justified by a sense of dislike for his victim and a callously literal

interpretation of an unfortunate comment. Frost’s challenge is to avoid

prompting the reader to any moral judgment against his behaviour.

Frost originally published the poem under the title “The Code-

Heroics,” which made the farmhand easier to denounce. “Heroics” claims too

much, seems too obviously ironic. By removing the clue, Frost also removes

any sign of dissent. Even the narrator implies approval of the farmhand’s

actions. The farmhand tells his tale, after all, to a “town-bred farmer,” and

the narrator’s barb immediately marks the farmer as an alien and an

interloper who can never hope to share or break the “code.” When Lionel

Trilling, speaking at the dinner to celebrate Frost’s eighty-fifth birthday, felt

himself to be incongruous as “a man of the city” (Trilling, 155), he might have

been reacting to the kind of prejudice capable of turning the adjective “town-

bred” into an insult. James, the offended farmhand, is dismissed as “one big

fool’” for marching home without a word, but the extent of his foolishness is

measured by his failure to take into account the farmer’s own foolishness.

The farmhand who stays does so only because he makes allowance for the

town-bred farmer’s ignorance: “But I know you don’t understand our ways.’”

To criticize those ways is to condemn oneself to exclusion from the natural

life of the land.

In “The Code” as in “Home Burial,” the way that a thing is said can have

disastrous consequences. Despite all the pressures on him to consent, the

farmer does muster some oppositions: “You took an awkward way.’” That

phrase remembers the farmhand’s accusation that the farmer fails to

“’understand our ways’”; the way of the farmhand will not be followed by the

farmer, who remains critically distant. As the misunderstood “boss” who has

just heard of another boss’s fortunate escape, he has good reason to feed

vulnerable. And yet “awkward” is the most delicate of euphemisms, enacting

an unwillingness to deplore too openly what he has just heard. Even the

farmer’s limited dissent is overruled when Frost gives the authority of the

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final line to the farmhand, who reports his victim accepts the rightness of his

fate, then how is the town-bred farmer to object? Trilling caused controversy

when he called Frost a “terrifying Poet” who had conceived a “terrifying

universe”; he alluded to two poems, “Design” and “Neither Out Far Nor In

Deep,” which linger on a cosmic viciousness and a cosmic emptiness,

respectively. “The Code” may have little to say about the universe, but in its

more intimate earthly way it is at least as terrifying. It tempts the reader with

the all-too human inclination to overlook the murderous failings of those

whose approval we seek.

References:

1. Brower RA. The Poetry of Robert Frost, New York, Oxford University Press,

1963.

2. Jarrell Randall. Poetry and the Age, New York, Vintage Books, 1962. 4

3. Bakhtin, Mikhail. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Ed. Michael Holquist.

Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: U of Texas P, 1982.

4. Beach, Christopher. The Cambridge Introduction to Twentieth-Century

American Poetry. New York: Cambridge UP, 2003.

5. Berman, Jessica. Modernist Fiction: Cosmopolitanism and the Politics of

Community. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007.

6. Booth, Harold J., and Nigel Rigby, eds. Modernism and Empire: Writing and

British Coloniality 1890-1940. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2000.

7. Esty, Jed. A Shrinking Island: Modernism and National Culture in England.

Princeton: Princeton UP, 2003.

8. Foucault, Michel. “Of Other Spaces.” Diacritics 16.1 (1986): 22-27.

9. Caughie, Pamela, ed. Disciplining Modernism. Basingstoke: Palgrave

Macmillan, 2009.

10. Childs, Peter. Modernism. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge, 2008.

11. Coyle, Michael. “With a Plural Vengeance: Modernism as (Flaming) Brand.”

Modernist Cultures 1.1 (2005): 15-21.

12. Cuddy-Keane, Melba, Adam Hammond, and Alexandra Peat. Modernism:

Keywords. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2014.

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CHAPTER III

COGENT SYMBOLISM

Symbolism is a key element of all of Frost's poetry. In particular, you might

like to think about how he uses the natural world as key symbols in his poems

to suggest much bigger and deeper ideas about death, choices and success.

For example in "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," the woods are

described as being "lovely, dark and deep." They are clearly an attractive

place, and although tempted to stay and delight in their quietness and

beauty, the speaker "has promises to keep." Thus we could argue that

symbolically the woods represent death that the speaker does not feel able

to take up because of the responsibilities that he has. Likewise, in "After

Apple-Picking," the world of work and labour is represented in the harvest of

the apple-picking. Note what the speaker says about this work:

For I have had too much

Of apple-picking: I am overtired

Of the great harvest I myself desired.

Success, as defined in the quantity of apples, has exhausted the speaker, and

thus this poem symbolically comments on work and success. However,

perhaps in his most famous poem, the haunting necessity of taking decisions

is summarised in "The Road not Taken," where the speaker is forced to make

a decision between two paths that would lead him to different destinations.

These paths and the choice of course symbolise the decisions that we all have

to make in life but which we are never able to undo or go back and select

another "path." Thus through looking at these three examples of Frost's

work, we can see how his poetry operates through natural symbolism to

comment upon realities such as life, death, labour, success and decisions.

Only in so far as New England is not entirely unlike other regions and Yankees are

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not entirely inhuman, and in so far as poetry of marked excellence appeals to every

one, can Frost claim to write for "the world in general."( Whipple 94)

Frost admits that he was not the most successful farmer and was perhaps

somewhat reluctant in his efforts so "I...wish him all the gain/ I required of

them in vain." Even if his farming was not his greatest achievement he loves

the farm and will have to "unlearn to love" the home, the "Barn, and shed,

with rat and mouse" as he leaves to chase his dream of becoming a well-

known writer and poet. Frost however, lets the reader know that "It shall be

no trespassing / If I come again.." as he intends to revisit the farm - perhaps

when he is a renowned writer and he can reflect and will know that it was

worth it. Metaphorically, the "grey disguise of years" combines both the

journey - therefore the self-discovery - and the symbolism as he will be old

(and grey).

The theme of self-discovery is evident throughout and there is a tinge of

regret, a minor theme as Frost's son had died whilst they lived there and he

may be "Seeking ache of memory here." In the opening scene (“A fair oasis

in the purest desert”), Job and his wife, Thyatira, awake to find God caught in

the branches of the Burning Bush (the Christmas Tree), which ironically, gives

not a light of Old Testament revelation, but “a strange light” of New

Testament Christianity, of spirit entangled in matter, or religion organized

and refined by art, so that “the Tree is troubled” by God’s being “caught in

the branches.” Job’s parody of Yeats’s rhetoric in “Sailing to Byzantium” and

through a probable allusion to T.S. Eliot’s “Sweeney Among the

Nightingales”:

The ornaments the artificers

Made for the Emperor Alexius,

The Star of Bethlehem, the pomegranates,

The birds, seem all on fire with Paradise.

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And hark, the gold enamelled nightingales

Are singing.

In A Masque of Mercy, Frost again criticized Yeats through a long speech by

paul, condemning Yeats for having

Once charged the Nazarene with having brought

A darkness out of Asia that had crossed

Old Attic grace and Spartan discipline

With violence.

It is obvious from the very beginning of the symbol that Frost’s method

involves an ironical, mocking, comic treatment of the serious and tragic

theme of job’s suffering of injustice. Throughout the masque the whimsical

situational comedy, the witty quips, playful puns, and double engenders,

indulged in by job, his wife, and even by God, underscore Frost mock-serious

treatment of the biblical characters, who think and talk like modern

Americans and give an externally light tone to the serious internal discourse

at the heart of the theme. Frost's benign calm, the comic mask of a whittling

rustic, is designed for gazing—without dizziness—into a tragic abyss of desperation.

(Viereck: 67)

Three of the many features that are often present in Robert Frost's poems

are a) a simple rhyme scheme, b) everyday language, c) multiple symbolic

meanings. For example, take the opening stanza from Frost's most famous

poem "The Road Not Taken":

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could

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To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Through this metaphor, Frost is saying that although symbols are quite

effective at times, almost duplicating that which they stand for, their impact

is limited, because they attain closeness to their subject for only a fleeting

moment. Symbols cannot sustain their effectiveness for any length of time;

their lustre quickly pales in the face of the real thing. Also, the idea of a

diverging road is also a symbol that, for some, raises a certain level of

anxiety. This image requires choice and when people make choices, it's very

possible that they might make the wrong ones. This is possibly a reason why

the "one traveler" was sorry he "could not travel both" and hesitated looking

"as far as he could" to see where the road might lead. While the above

reading suggests struggle and anxiety, another reading of the same stanza

could suggest possibility and enablement.

The traveller has a choice in life, which is a good thing. How many people in

the world are set on a path and required to follow that path to the end? The

"yellow wood" could symbolize the fact that autumn, while it might lead to

the softness of winter, really just indicates the fact that one part of a human

must die in order to give birth to another, perhaps stronger person. These

are just two examples of how something that seems so simple, is not. This is

the beauty of Frost. He does not show off, nor does he attempt to be

ambiguous or ambiguous. He creates powerful images that allows the reader

a myriad of ways of interpretation.

There are many things in both the manner and the matter of Frost’s

masque deliberately calculated to raise the temperature of sincere and

conventional religious believers who are hopelessly humourless and, even

more, that of sincere and militantly devout agnostics or freethinking atheists

who have an undoubting confidence in man’s self-sufficient reason.

Unfortunately for Frost, his comic and satirical technique has been the chief

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source of misunderstanding of his masques. This poem is full of natural

imagery, which Frost uses to describe the cow's behavior. For example,

Her face is flecked with pomace and she drools

A cider syrup. Having tasted fruit,

She scores a pasture withering to the root.

She runs from tree to tree where lie and sweeten

The windfalls spiked with stubble and worm-eaten. (4–8)

These lines also include a subtle Biblical allusion, as does the title, with its

reference to "Apple Time." The cow has "tasted fruit," as Eve did in the Bible.

The poem depicts the cow as experiencing a kind of freedom as a result of

"having tasted fruit," as the cow "runs from tree to tree." More imagery

follows in the final lines, and the tone changes significantly with the last line

of the poem: "Her udder shrivels and the milk goes dry" (11). While the cow

had previously enjoyed freedom, she now experiences loss. Fall, or apple

time, is symbolically associated with decay and death, as summer fades

gradually to winter. Here, the cow's fertility and productivity are drying up,

signalling the end of her adventures.

Too many readers have ignored Frost’s dictum that in good writing “the way

of understanding is partly mirth,” and that when writing “is with outer

humour, it must be with inner seriousness The terrible tragedies that

overwhelmed his family-the early deaths of his parents and several of his

children, the mental affliction of his sister, the suicide of his son Carol, and

other sorrows that pursued him into late life- were enough to make him the

modern living embodiment of job. On August 9, 1947, when his daughter

Irma was about to be confined in a mental institution, Frost wrote to Louis

Untermeyer: “Cast your eye back over my family luck and perhaps you will

wonder if I haven’t had pretty near enough.” Then he added: “That is for the

angels to say.”

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“The Road Not Taken” is an excellent example of what Frost meant by “the

pleasure of ulteriority” in his poetry. That is, the poem offers an entertaining

double perspective on the theme of making choices, with one perspective

fairly obvious and the other subtler. Both poems, like so much of Frost’s

work, are rich in nature imagery. However, ‘The Road Not Taken’ paints a

definite picture of a traveller passing through a wood, whereas the second

poem refers to nature in more general terms rather than using a specific

setting. Both poems however contain references to leaves; the ‘yellow wood’

of ‘The Road Not Taken’ immediately makes us think of autumn. Similarly, in

‘Nothing Gold Can Stay’, we are presented with imagery of fading flowers and

‘leaf subsiding to leaf’. Frost's poem is profound in how it shows existence as

something that is mutable. The only permanent element in consciousness is

that there is change.

There is something profound in this. Frost is able to offer a glimpse

into this condition of being through a few lines that stick in the mind's eye.

For example, "Her hardest hue to hold" in reference to the opening image of

"Nature's first green is to gold." The idea that beauty, the morning pristine

vision, is something that is "hardest to hold" even for the natural world is

quite profound. Frost seeks to bring out in the opening two lines that even

nature cannot hold on to that which seems perfectly beautiful. The most

tender and wonderful moments in our being are transitory ones. The

happiness we experience in these instances are "the hardest hue to hold."

We are compelled to see that what nature has to endure, we do too. Frost's

poem does not make the reader entirely sad about being in the world, but

rather forces one to accept that we must treasure our happiness, and not

take it for granted as it can leave as easy as it arrives.

The succeeding images do much to bring this picture of being into focus.

"Eden" sinking to "grief" is another such image that forces the reader to

understand the transitory nature in being in the world. The idyllic garden is

one that is in passing. Even the creation of the divine, the realm where all is

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good and right, sinks according to the weight of time. Frost's poem is a

reminder that our lives are lived from the hopeful joyful experience of one

instant that passes to another lying in wait. We swing from vine to vine of

happiness moment to another moment of joy. The idea that "nothing gold

can stay" reminds us of just as the condition of nature and the creation of the

divine, we, too, are bound to only enjoy what we can when we can. It is not

permanent. Our happiness is elusive as it passes our grasp and Frost's poem

is a reminder to revel in it because "nothing gold can stay."

Nature is used as a metaphor in both poems for the passing of time and

the dwindling away of possibilities in human life. 'The Road Not Taken' is

concerned more with the choices one has to make in life and how, once set

upon one’s course, one cannot return to an earlier time and sense of

possibility. Having settled on one road, the speaker tries to tell himself that

he will re-visit the other road in future. However, he continues:

Yet, knowing how way leads on to way,

I doubted if I should ever come back.

The speaker realises, then, that once set on his path, he is unlikely ever to

have the opportunity to undo his choice; he cannot turn the clock back. He

knows, too, that he will very probably regret his choice in future, he will look

back to it ‘with a sigh’, but he won’t be able to change it. ‘The Road Not

Taken’ is quite expansive and somewhat ponderous in tone as the speaker

reflects on his choices. The other poem is noticeably more concise and blunt

in manner, stating things baldly rather than dwelling on them. This poem is

concerned more with images of youth and fertility than the first poem. In

essence, though, the theme is the same: that the ‘gold’ of possibility and of

life itself, cannot remain; youth must wear away and ultimately die, and life's

potential is eventually exhausted.

So Eden sank to grief,

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So dawn goes down to day.

Here and unlike ‘The Road Not Taken’ the poem employs a familiar bit of

religious imagery with the reference to ‘Eden’, denoting the fall from primal

innocence and joy into ‘grief’; the ‘dawn’ of youthful promise gives way to

the ‘day’ of harsh adult realities.

Although dealing with broadly the same theme and using similar nature

imagery, the two poems are different in approach and tone. ‘The Road Not

Taken’ casts a speaker who muses on the course of his life and mourns lost

opportunities; ‘Nothing Gold Can Stay’ simply states that all human potential

is destined to fade away. Although on this level this poem is quite matter-of-

fact in tone, the imagery it employs of fading gold and waning dawn arguably

creates a more powerful overall sense of melancholy than the relatively

prosaic, conversational style of 'The Road Not Taken'.

Considered through the perspective of the speaker himself, “The Road

Not Taken” is an entirely serious, even a sad poem. It expresses both the

turmoil of making a choice and the depressing expectation that the choice he

makes between seemingly equal options will turn out for the worse—is in

fact going to make an even greater difference for the worse than seems

possible when he makes the choice. Considered from Frost’s view, on the

other hand, “The Road Not Taken” is a hilarious satire of the speaker’s

portentous habits of mind. Frost’s 1931 essay “Education by Poetry” offers

further clarification on this point. In it, he wrote that people need to

understand that all metaphors are human constructs that “break down at

some point”; people need to “know [a] metaphor in its strength and its

weakness[h]ow far [one] may expect to ride it and when it may break down.”

From this outlook, the main problem of the speaker in “The Road Not Taken”

is that he tries to ride his metaphor too far and too hard. Although he sees it

break down early in the poem (in that he actually cannot see any real

difference between the two roads), the speaker persists in thinking that the

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road is “less traveled” in some way that he cannot see and that this

difference will lead to dire consequences later on.

One other common interpretation of the poem deserves brief

consideration: the view that the poem is a celebration of nonconformity, an

exhortation to the reader to take the road “less traveled.” In this

interpretation, the title is seen as referring to the road that the speaker does

take (which is “the road not taken” by most other people), and the speaker is

seen as ultimately exultant that he took the road “less traveled,” because it

“has made all the difference” in enhancing his life. To consider the validity of

this interpretation, one must put aside Frost’s stated intentions for the poem

—an act that many critics consider sometimes justified because an author’s

intentions cannot be seen as fully controlling the impression made by a

literary work. Aside from the issue of Frost’s intentions, however, this

interpretation still conflicts with many salient details in the poem. One

problem with this view is that the speaker can hardly be praised as a strong

eccentric if in the middle of the poem he can see little difference between

the paths, let alone vigorously choose the road “less travelled.” Another

problem is that he imagines telling his story in the future with a “sigh,” an

unlikely gesture for a vital champion of eccentricity. It might be best to begin

with a famous poem, The Road Not Taken." The entire poem is a metaphor

for the decision we make in life which, while they may not seem all that

important in the moment, may determine the rest of our lives ... and they are

decisions that we can never go back and "remake." In the beginning of the

poem we are presented with two roads that diverge in a yellow wood. I'm

not sure why the woods were "yellow," but it has always suggested Fall to me

and that the decider is not a young person... which may make the decision all

the more important because there is less time to alter the ramifications of

each decision. And the location of the decision (he's not deciding between

options on a superhighway) is a metaphor for the uncertainty of life (think

Young Goodman Brown or The Devil and Tom Walker to point out just two

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stories where the woods function in this way). With no real clues about

which way to go (they are worn about the same --- no help there), the

traveller makes a physical/metaphorical decision --- to take one path, live it

out, and later tell the story how this decision has made all the difference ...

both in the trip and in his/her life.

In 1935, Frost wrote on the subject of style that “style is the way man

takes himself. If it is with outer seriousness, it must be with inner humour. If

it is with outer humour, it must be with inner seriousness. Neither one alone

without the other under it will do.” “The Road Not Taken” is a notable

example of Frost’s own sophisticated style, of his ability to create ironic

interplay between outer seriousness and inner humour. Yet the humour of

the poem also has its own serious side. This humour conveys more than

merely the ridicule found in parody: It also expresses an implied corrective to

the condition that it mocks. This condition is that the speaker sees the course

and tone of his life as determined by forces beyond his range of vision and

control. Frost implies that if the speaker were able to see himself with some

humour, and if he were able to take more responsibility for his choices and

attitude, he might find that he himself could make “all the difference” in his

own life. Robert Frost's "The Runaway" is a short poem that describes the

specific scene of a young horse being first exposed to snow. The horse

appears to be running away because he is afraid. The two speakers in the

poem who encounter the colt judge the colt's owner for not taking better

care of him.

Frost describes the speaker's and his companion's ("We") encounter with the

colt using simple diction, dialogue, and imagery. The poem begins,

Once when the snow of the year was beginning to fall,

We stopped by a mountain pasture to say "Whose colt?"

A little Morgan had one forefoot on the wall,

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The other curled at his breast. He dipped his head

And snorted at us. And then he had to bolt.

We heard the miniature thunder where he fled,

And we saw him, or thought we saw him, dim and grey,

Like a shadow against the curtain of falling flakes. (1–8)

The two speakers are walking along when they see the colt and ask whose it

is. The horse's actions are then described in detail. He is acting erratically and

attempting to escape. Eventually, "he had to bolt." That verb "had to"

indicates that the colt is acting out of necessity. His flight creates "miniature

thunder," and the speaker describes the colt using a simile: "Like a shadow."

The horse stands out in the landscape, making him seem even more out of

place. The "thunder" adds more sensory detail to the scene and suggests the

colt's speed, which also indicates how afraid he is.

The poem continues,

"I think the little fellow's afraid of the snow.

He isn't winter-broken. It isn't play

With the little fellow at all. He's running away.

I doubt if even his mother could tell him, 'Sakes,

It's only weather.' He'd think she didn't know!

Where is his mother? He can't be out alone."

And now he comes again with a clatter of stone

And mounts the wall again with whited eyes

And all his tail that isn't hair up straight.

He shudders his coat as if to throw off flies.

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"Whoever it is that leaves him out so late,

When other creatures have gone to stall and bin,

Ought to be told to come and take him in." (9–21)

The speaker includes dialogue between himself and his friend as they

consider why the young horse is acting so strangely. They infer that the horse

isn't being playful; instead, "He's running away." The speaker doesn't even

believe the colt's "mother could tell him" that he's worried only about a

natural phenomena. This leads the two to wonder where the mother is and

why the horse is out alone. More imagery describes the colt's crazed

behaviour. The colt has "whited eyes" that reflect fear, and "He shudders."

The colt is obviously not one with the environment around him. The final

thought of the poem is a simple one: that the colt's owner should put the colt

in the stable with all of the other horses. The poem allows Frost to reflect on

the strange behavior of the colt and also to ponder the relationship between

humans and nature, both the animal world and the environment in which we

all live.

Frost’s implicit religious faith included both evil and good, and

therefore both the tragic and comic sense toward life. This belief required

him to assume a God-like, cosmic, stoical detachment toward all of life, even

in matters in which he was most personally involved and intensely

committed, so that he could grasp the tragic as tragic but also in terms of the

comic, and understand sorrow in terms of laughter and irony. In this way of

taking himself Frost was unique. Louis Untermeyer wrote of this trait in Frost:

“His was a high stoicism which could mask unhappiness in playfulness, which

could even delight in darkness.” Frost was “one who could tease and be

tortured, renounce and be reconciled.” Certainly, Frost never lost his balance

between the tragic and the comic. Although the theme of his masque is

centered in the serious tragedy and unhappiness of Job, Frost’s method is

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playful, like the casual, bantering, whimsical, frolicsome, tongue-in-cheek

teasing of one who has a lover’s quarrel with the world.

His symbol is ironical in tone, with levity-gravity and light-sombre qualities

that at once intensify God’s arbitrary injustice to job and balance it off with

the perverse relief of laughter. To frost, God is a comic wit who cares for

man, at once detached and concerned. He is not only the source of revelation

but also the master of revels. This poem, about an encounter with a peasant

over an ax-helve (or handle), is written in a prosaic style, as if it is a plain

narrative account of a conversation and a visit. At the same time, however,

the poem uses literary devices to signal that it is, indeed, a poem. One would

be the use of the archaic, Middle English term for handle: helve. This jars

readers out of the ordinary and leads us to expect an unusual encounter.

The poem also uses alliteration. Alliteration is repeating the same consonant

at the beginning of different words placed closed together. This creates a

sense of rhythm, as in "forth" and "favor." When all my strength put forth

was in his favor....

The poem uses dialect to show class and education differences. Baptiste, who

criticizes the narrator's axe handle, has less formal education than the

narrator, as we can hear when Baptiste says,

“You give her 'one good crack, she's snap raght off.

Den where's your hax-ead flying t'rough de hair?”

However, Baptiste is clearly much wiser about practical objects, such as axes,

than the narrator. The poem also uses simile, which is comparing two

dissimilar things using "like" or "as." Here, Frost uses both "as" and "like" to

describe how slender and flexible Baptiste likes his helve:

He liked to have it slender as a whipstock,

Free from the least knot, equal to the strain

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Of bending like a sword across the knee.

The poem also uses personification, likening the ax-helve to a woman with a

"chin" who "cock[s] her head:"

Thick hand made light of, steel-blue chin drawn down

And in a little—a French touch in that.

Baptiste drew back and squinted at it, pleased:

“See how she's cock her head!”

In "The Road Not Taken," the leaves trodden underfoot would be there

in any season, not just autumn, since it is in a forest. I had always thought the

story was about a critical choice made during one's youth, with the road

evidently symbolising one's life and the fork in the road, a moment of

decision. The lines "I shall be telling this with a sigh, Somewhere ages and

ages hence" implies the speaker is middle-aged and not yet old, with some

time yet to go within an ordinary lifespan. However, the first answer posted

here makes sense, too, and I must reconsider my initial interpretation of the

poem. Ambiguity, I suppose, is part of the beauty of poetical expression!

A more valid criticism of Frost’s use of comedy in the masque is that it

is not always well integrated with the dialogue and dramatic action of the

serious theme. This is partly the result of Frost’s indiscriminate mixing of

things sacrilege against the religious sensibility of Christians and Jews. Even

here a distinction needs to be made. Frost’s comedy is not directed against

traditional religious orthodoxy regarding the justice or mercy of God, but

against the conventional social respectability of devout but humourless

prudes. But it is even more sharply directed against antireligious or

nonreligious rationalists. Those readers whose rigid religious faith does not

permit spoofing, bantering, and raillery between man and God fail to

understand that it is the very intimacy of Job and his wife with God that

allows them such liberties in speech.Their dialogue is like gossip, like gossip,

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like the fierce spontaneous give-and-take of domestic quarrel, where an

assumed and intense love allows for great liberties in the expression of

resentments or demands. There is nothing unctuous or reserved about the

faith of Job and his wife. If God is a real person, He should be spoken to as a

real person, not as a remote and bloodless abstraction. "Desert Places," the

symbolism used seems to be that of nature, specifically snow, to represent a

separateness or loneliness as the world becomes covered, blanketing not

only what is seen, but what is heard as well, giving one the sense of being

isolated or cut off from the world.

As the snow falls quickly, so does the night, adding to a sense of isolation.

The snow is all-encompassing, much as loneliness is: the poem reflects that it

covers the last vestiges of growth in the fields, and even the lairs where

animals sleep or hibernate. Frost indicates that it will get worse before it gets

better:

And lonely as it is that loneliness

Will be more lonely ere it will be less--

The snow represents not only loneliness, but later in the poem it seems to

also symbolize the inability of one to communicate because of that

loneliness.

With no expression, nothing to express.

However, whereas Frost comments on the snow and how it represents

loneliness, he (sadly) holds the "trump" (winning) card. He explains that no

matter what kind of loneliness snow may present, he can beat even that. He

is not frightened by the aloneness he feels surrounded by snow, or the

emptiness of the sky and stars, where no human companionship can be

found. Nature cannot scare him with its quiet snow or quiet night: Frost

admits that he is already frightened by the "desert places" that live within

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him every day; by comparison to those places, the world of snow is no match

for his reality.

I have it in me so much nearer home

To scare myself with my own desert places.

The whole question in comic relief is whether it fulfils its dramatic

purpose artistically. Since most of the comedy is provided by Thyatira, Job’s

shrewd and sharp-tongued wife,in her remarks to job, God, and Satan, an

examination of her function in the play will clarify Frost’s skill in comedy.

Clearly, Job’s wife is a blood descendant of Mother Eve, by way of the shrew

in medieval and Tudor drama. She is proud to acknowledge that the Witch of

Endor was a friend of hers. She has the advanced and militant social

consciousness of a pre-World War I Bloomer girl or a women’s Liberation

advocate. In the modern setting of Frost’s masque, job’s wife is an

emancipated and sophisticated American woman, the prototype of the most

ardent member of the league of Women Voters. But she is also a tangled

skein of contradictions. She is convinced that God (being male) has it in for

women, and asks Him if it stands to reason (her reason, not God’s). One

example of a literary device in "The Pasture" is anthimeria, or the use of a

word as a different part of speech than its normal usage. This literary device

is utilized in the first line of the poem:

I'm going out to clean the pasture spring

This is an example of anthimeria because Frost is using "pasture," normally a

noun, as an adjective modifying the noun "spring." Frost additionally uses

alliteration, or the repetition of beginning sounds, in the following line:

(And wait to watch the water clear, I may)

Finally, the poem contains one example of repetition as a literary device.

Each of the two stanzas ends with the same line, which is the following:

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I sha'n't be gone long. You come too.

There is overwhelming evidence in Frost’s poetry, prose, and

conversations that he was convinced that man’s knowledge and

understanding of basic beliefs derive largely from memory and retrospection.

His mother’s religious teaching probably was the earliest source of his views

on knowledge and beliefs in religion and aesthetics, which were subsequently

extended into other subjects. Lovejoy’s The Revolt Against Dualism merely

confirmed many of the poet’s long-held convictions about knowledge and

placed them within the historical and philosophical context of the conflicting

theories that prevailed from the time of Descartes to the modern era.

Lovejoy’s thesis about the “common sense” conception of knowledge as

memory, which culminated in what he called “natural dualism,” was

congenial to Frost. Sidney Cox recorded that more than a decade before the

poet read Lovejoy, his own brand of dualism was based upon “common

sense” and a rejection of monism: “He won’t give up common sense.” He

further noted that Frost’s memory of the great diversity of things in nature

and of events in history prevented him from accepting any simple monistic

view of reality: “The man who remembers, Robert said, can’t name one

equivalent for all…. He insists, repeatedly, that we cannot harmonize all of

reality .” To Frost, as to Lovejoy, common sense, memory retrospection, and

the rich diversity of experience are all intertwined within natural dualism.

These provide a conception of the world far removed from the doubt, sub

consciousness, and rationalism in the pseudo-dualism of Descartes. Frost’s

theory of knowledge permeates all of his thinking about human nature in its

relationship with every important subject. Perhaps the greatest current need

of scholarship on the poet is a book-length study of his conception of

knowledge as revealed in his art and philosophy. Here it will only be possible

to cite a few examples of how his view of knowledge is the antithesis of

Descartes theory and method. Frost's conception of man's relation to an

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unpredictable universe is one which should especially appeal to men in the

twentieth century (Sampley 287)

Perhaps the earliest important example in Frost’s poetry of the

metaphysical foundations of his views on knowledge is in “The Trial by

Existence” (1913). This poem is a metaphysical fable, probably based upon

the myth of Er in Plato’s Republic, but with the addition of the theme and

spirit employed by William James in The Will to Believe. In Frost’s poem,

man’s knowledge of his previous life in a transcendent realm is forgotten,

lodged in his subconscious mind, y et interwoven with free will, determinism,

courage, faith, and revelation as basic traits in the earthly intellectual life of

human nature. The oneness of transcendence is contrasted with the

multifariousness of things on earth. The poem depicts the courageous choice

of souls in heaven who willingly journey to earth to be born and to endure

their trial by existence, with all of its joys and sorrows. “The fathering of the

souls for birth” is hushed in forgetfulness; otherwise. “the woe were not

earthly woe/ To which you give the assenting voice.” A residual power of

recollection is implanted in the bravest souls, so that a remembrance of their

divine origins, as creatures with souls, makes them aware of how spirit is

linked to matter: “The mystic link to bind and hold/Spirit to matter till death

come.” The spirit of remembrance in “The Trial by Existence” permeates

many of Frost’s other poems, especially the monologues and dialogues, but

perhaps nowhere more poignantly than in the pathos and dialogues, but

perhaps nowhere more poignantly than in the pathos of “The Lovely Shall be

Choosers,” a poem on the tragic life of the poet’s mother.

Frost’s perception of knowledge as recollection is identical to the

approach employed by Wordsworth in “Ode on Intimations of Immortality

from Recollections of Early Childhood.” The most famous lines in that poem

perfectly anticipate Frost’s plot in “The Trial by Existence”:

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting;

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The soul that rises with us, our life’s star,

Hath had elsewhere its sitting,

And cometh from afar;

Not in entire forgetfulness,

And not in utter nakedness,

But trailing clouds of glory do we come

From God, who is our home:

Every point that Lovely made about knowledge as memory and retrospection

is found very clearly in Frost’s religious beliefs and in his aesthetics, including

the Augustinian Principal that men must first believe in something in order to

understand it, because belief as habit normally precedes and outruns any

direct knowledge through immediate empirical evidence.

Frost was wholly repelled by Descartes’ principle and method that total

initial doubt was the best way to establish any indisputable truth acceptable

to hypothetical universal reason.

Clearly, to Frost memory and retrospection of past experience create

prejudgment based upon normative moral principles and habits on mind and

feeling that have become beliefs “as unquestionable as the axioms of

geometry.” By “prejudice,” Frost did not mean any pejorative understanding

of that word; he meant that the moral virtues should precede and not be

separated from the intellectual virtues. Thus understood, prejudice is so

deeply imbedded in both the subconscious and conscious mind that it

functions as habit, an unvoiced premise in response to every new experience.

Prejudice is part of every person’s entailed cultural inheritance.

Unquestionably he believed in a God of some sort, but what sort it would be hard to

say (Morrison 179) In sharp contrast with Lawrance Thompson’s interpretation

on Frost’s “prejudice” as pejorative, Sidney Cox perceived the psychological

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complexities in prejudices about human nature. In his commentary on Frost’s

poem “The Vanishing Red,” he noted how easily it could be misinterpreted as

showing the powt’s supposed lack of sympathy toward the fate of the

American Indians, because of the “quiet way of surpassing the prejudices

that we all get to thinking of as boldly free from prejudice.”

A variation on the dame theme regarding prejudice is in Frost’s poem

“The Black Cottage,” in which he touched upon the relationship between

cause it ceases to be true. / Cling to it long enough, and not a doubt/It Will

turn true again, for so it goes. / Most of the change we think we see in life / Is

due to truths being in and out of favour.” In a letter to Louis Untermeyer

(May 3, 1926), he alluded to this passage and spoke of the “truths that we

keep coming back and bac to.” Undoubtedly, he had in mind the three or

four beliefs that he held to be as unquestionable as the axioms of geometry.

Frost never identified these basic beliefs, but probably they would include

the Ten Commandments; the common-sense belief that the universe

continues to exist even when no one perceives it, as during sleep; that all

men are morally equal in the sight of God as their creator and that they

therefore should be treated equally before the law; that man’s life on earth is

often filled with unmerited tragedy; and that the “two-endedness of things,”

as in dualism, persists throughout human history. in the narrative poems is

either slightness of subject or a flat and uninteresting apprehension of the subject;

the result in the symbolic lyrics is a disturbing dislocation between the descriptive

surface, which is frequently lovely, and the ultimate meaning, which is usually

sentimental and unacceptable (Yvor Winters 75)

To Frost, beliefs may be firmly held, but they need something like a

witness tree that marks the boundaries of truths lodged in memory. In the

emblematic poem “Beech,” which provides a guide to readers of A Witness

Tree, he connected memory as knowledge with concrete reality in order to

show how boundaries establish truths and overcome Cartesian doubts:

Once tree, by being deeply wounded,

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Has been impressed as Witness Tree

And made commit to memory

My proof of being not unbounded.

Thus truth’s established and borne out,

Though circumstanced with dark and doubt-

Though by a world of doubt surrounded.

It is clear that Frost appeals tomorrow as containing a containing a

world of knowledge beyond the agnostic world of rational doubt. Where

Descartes made doubt the best starting point in the pursuit of truth, Frost

placed memory, reflection, and belief: “Belief is better than anything else,”

he wrote, “and it is best when rapt, above paying its respects to anybody’s

doubt.” Not only is belief prior and superior to knowledge acquired through

direct empirical experience, but such knowledge itself needs to be tested by

the norms of memory. As Frost said in “A Concept Self-Conceived,” “Great is

the reassurance of recall.” Similarly, in “At Woodward Gardens” he wrote:

“The already known had once more been confirmed.” So too in “Misgiving”

he spoke of being free to pursue “knowledge beyond the bounds of life,”

which combines empiricism with knowledge rooted in memory,

retrospection, and the creative imagination. In particular, whenever time and

space are factors in any poem by Frost, readers who understand his

conception of knowledge as memory have an added dimension of critical

understanding. To Frost, the mindless world, despite its laws and patterns of cause

and effect, lacks completeness. "There Are Roughly Zones," the title of a poem says,

but understanding man is created so that he may try to make the world complete

(Marion Montgomery 143)

Frost ‘s theory of knowledge as memory clearly placed an enormous

stress upon the past as experience. He emphasized this point strikingly in

“Carpe Diem”:

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But bid life seize the present?

It lives less in the present

Than in the future always,

And less in both together

Than in the past.

The hierarchy of man’s concerns within time reverses Descartes’ conception

of knowledge as conscious self-awareness in the present. Except for persons

who live largely on a nonhuman animal level, by their immediate senses and

without moral imagination, even the long, long thoughts of youth are more

concerned with the future than with the present. Aesthetic and moral

imagination and the “correspondence” which occurs between individuals in

their emotional rapport are far more vital to him than the senses and

abstract reason. The most perfect example of this aspect of Frost’s

conception of knowledge is in “All Revelation

Frost’s theory of knowledge as memory and retrospection is clearly

evident in his method of composition. As Reginald Cook observed: “He draws

his knowledge instinctively from its roots.” Moreover, later he made it clear

that the poet’s roots are not merely on the level of direct and immediate

sense experiences; “his world of reality is not a transcription of things directly

observed; it is an imaginative transmutation.” Needless to say,

“transmutation” occurs out of a world remembered; the creative imagination

“makes play” with things already known and brings into existence a poem

with a fresh revelation and renewed understanding of some enduring truth.

To Frost, the setting of a dramatic situation in a poem was among the things

rooted in memory: “I often start from some remembered spot.” More

generally, Frost held that all poetry begins with geography, a sense of place

and a sense of time. But in all of the elements in a poem, the composition is

in large part an “unconscious activity,” in which intuitive insight draws

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knowledge from memory to the conscious level. As Frost put it: “I summon

something I almost didn’t know I had.” In “The Figure a Poem Makes,” he

expressly identified memory as the origin of his poem: “For me the initial

delight is in the surprise of remembering something I didn’t know I knew. But

it is a good poem, to my mind quite genuine, and its meanings and feelings, larger

than any stated in the poem, do emerge indirectly but unmistakably from the

arrangements of images, rhythms, sounds, and syntax; we all know this, and Frost

knew it too (Hayden Carruth 38) I am in a place, in a situation, as if I had

materialized from a cloud or risen out of the ground. There is a glad

recognition of the long lost and the rest follows.”

What applies to the poet in the act of composition also applies to the

reader afterwards: poetry is understood as “making play of things we poets

can trust you largely to know.” In writing a poem, “the logic is backward, in

retrospect”; reading it draws upon indirect knowledge remembered to form

a new revelation of knowledge remembered. Frost often told his audiences

during a poetry reading that they should not look for something wholly new,

but only for something they knew but had forgotten. Similarly, Cook recorded

that through symbols and metaphors, the poet wrote about “things we trust

you already know.” Between the poet and his reader a “correspondence” is

created, because of their shared “common sense” knowledge in memory and

retrospection, a world far removed from the doubts, scepticism, and rational

logic of Descartes.

Although the main purpose of Lovejoy’s The Revolt Against Dualism

was to describe and describe and analyse the philosophical and scientific

conflicts over dualism and the two forms of monism, from Descartes to well

into the twentieth century, his book was also an excellent transition for Frost

to Einstein’s celebrated theory of relativity and the concept of an open-

ended theory run intermittently like a golden thread of unity through

Lovejoy’s study. His description of Einstein’s theory provides the basis for his

comparisons between the scientist and his predecessors and contemporaries

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in science and philosophy, and for how his theory functions in an open-ended

universe. Emily Dickinson’s poetry also analyses Frost’s philosophy and

functions of poety as observed by Monteiro for whom Emily Dickinson's poetry

was useful to Frost in various ways. It constituted a source for congenial images and

themes (George Monteiro 380)

The theory by its implications, though not by its initial postulates, transfers

space, time and motion from the physical to the mental world, and by doing

so excludes the supposition that the physical world may “be interpreted by

analogy with visual sense and their relations to our visual fields.” The theory

is supposed to achieve this result by showing that the positions, velocities

and shapes of perceived objects, and the dates of perceived events or the

duration of processes, are “relative to the standpoint of observers.”

Throughout his book, Lovejoy described how Einstein differed both in the

methodology of his science and in his philosophical orientation from such

contemporaries as Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell, among

many other scientists and philosophers.

Although the modern “cosmology of Einstein” was shared by his

materialist monist contemporaries in science, Lovejoy noted that unlike many

of them, “so far as philosophers are concerned, the general result of the

work of Einstein is simply a vindication of dualism.” According to Lovejoy,

Einstein was a natural dualist in his philosophy because his theory of

knowledge transcended the empirical assumptions and methods of his

predecessors and contemporaries. Many of his fellow scientists were still

rooted in the empirical-rational tradition of Descartes, Look, and the

Enlightenment conception of knowledge, and in the Euclidean geometry of

Newton’s philosophiae Naturalis principia Mathematica (1687), which

Einstein found inadequate for the study of curve-space in the universe. His

theory was not the culmination the scientific tradition of Descartes and

Newton, as so many of his scientific contemporaries believed. The question

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doesn't indicate what kind of analysis should be done and to what extent. I

like analyzing a poem's rhyme scheme, rhythm, and meter, so I'll do that with

this Frost poem.

Let's start with the consistent part of the poem. It is written in AABBCCDD

etc. rhyme scheme. This means that each pair of lines rhymes with each

other. A pair of rhymed lines of poetry is called a couplet, so Frost uses

couplets in this poem; however, his couplet style is not consistent. Often,

couplets will be lines of the same meter. Frost does that in this poem, but he

also has couplets in which one line is 11-12 syllables and the other line has a

different syllable count.

At the other agreeing with another Greek

Which may be thought, but only so to speak.

Oddly, there is a couplet that visually doesn't look like it rhymes at all.

With lifted snout and eyes (if any) shut

(He almost looks religious but he's not),

A reader could slightly change the pronunciation of "not," and the rhyme

would work, and an audience would still know what is being said.

As for the rhythm, the poem is written in the iambic foot. That's not

surprising. It's a common rhythm for a lot of poets. That means the words in

each line of the poem flow with an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed

syllable.

Her next step rocks a boulder on the wall

If the line contains 5 iambic units, then the line is written in a very traditional

iambic pentameter. Frost uses this common meter in the poem; however, he

definitely doesn't stick with it. There are lines of the poem that contain 11

and even 12 syllables.

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The bear puts both arms around the tree above her

And draws it down as if it were a lover

On the contrary, Lovejoy showed, Einstein’s theory was the negation of

Cartesian science and methodology; it replaced the cosmology of Newton

and the great chain of being of the Enlightenment with a new conception of

the universe. To come full circle with Reginald Cook’s profound observation

that Frost’s poetry “leads away from the Great Chain of Being to and exercise

of options in an open-ended universe.” It is necessary to understand Frost’s

own original responses to and uses of Einstein’s theory, in addition to but

also quite apart from what he may have learned from Lovejoy. That is the

purpose of the discussion that immediately follows.

Poetry in the modern world, as in the ancient and medieval ears, is

largely concerned with revealing God, and nature to the human race. A

finished poem is capable of revealing the deepest insights into the meaning

and value of the universe and ourselves. The poems are written for the most

part in blank verse, blank verse which does not hesitate to leave out a syllable or put

one in, whenever it feels like it. To the classicist such liberties would be

unendurable. But the method has its advantages. It suggests the hardness and

roughness of New England granite (Amy Lowell 20). As revelation, a finished

poem is so rooted in objective reality that It becomes a new thing, capable of

appealing to our senses, our minds, our imaginations and emotions: in short,

to our total nature. The revelation is not merely of knowledge, but of love: it

involves not recognition only, but response, beginning in ecstatic pleasure

and ending in calm wisdom. Between a good poem and a responsive reader

there is instant rapport, pure simpatico. That is what makes poetry at once

undefinable and unmistakable. The value of poetry is what makes poetry at

once undefinable and unmistakable. The value of poetry is like the value of a

state of grace-an end in itself. Poetry for its own sake implies that our love of

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it should be audacious and intrinsic, unmixed by motives of practical utility or

the dilettantish knowledge of the culture-vulture.

Poetry as revelation achieves its ends in as great a variety of ways as

religion, history, or science. If God writes straight with crooked lines, the poet

by indirections finds directions out. One basic way to all poetry is through

metaphors which include the whole of reality, in which a part suggests the

whole. The opening quatrain of William Blake’s “Auguries of Innocence”

contains about the best statement I know of how this basic method of poetry

works:

To see the world in a grain of sand

And a heaven in a wild flower,

Hold infinity in the palm of your hand

And eternity in an hour.

Until we understand that the revelations of poetry are at least as significant

as those of science and history, and quite of an order with the revelations of

religion, we shall not do justice to the role or importance of poetry in the

modern world. There are multiple examples of figurative language found in

Robert Frost's poem "The Pasture." The first use of figurative language

appears in his use of repetition in the poem. Repetition is when a poet

repeats a word, phrase, or line throughout a poem. Repetition is seen when

Frost repeats the following:

1. "I shan't be gone long--you come too."

2. Repetition of "I" or derivatives of it throughout the poem.

Another example of figurative language is seen in line three. Here, alliteration

is used. Alliteration is the repetition of a consonant sound within a line of

poetry. In the poem, Frost repeats the "w" sound.

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And wait to watch the water clear, I may. One last example of figurative

language is seen in line seven. Here, Frost uses assonance. Assonance is the

repetition of a vowel sound. IN line seven, the "i" sound is repeated in the

words "it" (used twice) and "licks." Assonance is also seen in lines four and

eight ("I shan't be gone long--you come too") when the "o" of "gone" and

"long" are repeated.

Sir Philip Sidney, in his Defense of Poetry (1595), understood its nature

and importance and distinguished poetry sharply from philosophy and

history. Philosophy, wrote Sidney, is strong in Principles but weak in

illustrative examples; history is strong in the concrete examples of human

behaviour but contains in itself no principles for judging men. But poetry, at

its best, is strong both in principles and examples, and it has the further great

advantage of being cast in a permanent and unforgettable form. At its worst

[Mr. Frost's indirectness] is a mannerism, a tour de force of syntax; it puzzles with

mere obscurity. At its best it is poetry of the subtlest sort, because it carries the

conviction that there was no other way to communicate the reticence inherent both

in the subject and in the poet ( At its worst [Mr. Frost's indirectness] is a mannerism,

a tour de force of syntax; it puzzles with mere obscurity. At its best it is poetry of the

subtlest sort, because it carries the conviction that there was no other way to

communicate the reticence inherent both in the subject and in the poet (Mark Van

Doren 61). I would refine upon Sidney’s argument as it applies to science,

whereas on a particular point of nature, to reveal its laws and operations;

poetry is the sun that shines on all alike, unleashing man’s imagination upon

the whole creation. That is why it is a mistake to read poetry merely for

knowledge, apart from living it.

Like religion and science, poetry depends on faith and belief in its

revelations. We must indeed make “a willing suspension of disbelief” if we

are to understand the illusions of reality created by the poet. As in religion,

we must believe in poetry in order to understand it, and not make our

understanding the measure of our belief. Once we as readers make this act of

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faith, we shall see that the poet has created in his poem a great clarification

of life. Poetry, like science, is a way for men to conquer time and space, to

draw out the future by believing it into existence, by stretching the

lengthened shadow of a man from the beginning of time into eternity.

The ordered beauty of the universe and man, and all that it disordered

and tragic is part of the province of poetry, Man is the chief recipient of

Divine creation, and man alone gives meaning to created things. As man

existed originally as an idea conceived by God, the universe and everything in

it also exists in a meaningful from only to the extent that men grasp its truths

through the revelations of religion and science and perceive its forms

through poetry, incarnate them in bodies of knowledge or of poems, and

transmit them to posterity. In science, the richest accumulation of ages is the

laws of physical nature man has discovered and preserved. In poetry our

inherited wealth is in the figures of speech, aphorisms and metaphors,

contained in literary traditions.

All honour belongs to those who perfect our forms of revelation-

whether theologians, historians, scientists, or poets. The processes of

revelation have been with man from the beginning and seem destined to

continue till time has stopped. Yet certain mysteries always remain. But it is

the glory of human nature that the great mystery of the unknown is

constantly being penetrated by life in its most advanced forms. And the

further we go into the still unknown the less we can claim for ourselves as

individuals. Whatever we contribute belongs to the race. No individual can

claim a personal ownership in the revelations of religion, science, or poetry.

And it is because each of us benefits from all that our inheritance has given

us, from each past probe and revelation, that we pay homage to poetry and

honour our poets.

A careful rereading of Frost’s essay “Education by Poetry” (1930) first

made me aware that his dualism and the metaphorical language by which the

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“play” of the creative mind perceives and mediates between apparently polar

opposites never attempts to find or create a final or absolute unity between

the dualistic opposites of spirit and matter. Frost’s first warning or precaution

was cantered not in dualism as such, but in the nature of metaphorical

thinking, when he noted that “all metaphor breaks down somewhere.” Just

as metaphors have a breaking point, so too the claims for complete

supremacy of either of the elements in a dualistic conflict have a breaking

point. A recognition of this fact precludes moral prudence from assuming

that one element can or should be triumphant over its antagonist.

In describing a simple act of nature, the mundane, or the heartfelt grief of

people, Robert Frost displays an insight into the sometimes-simple instances

in our lives that when brought together constitute our very lives. One aspect

of life that touches everyone is death, whether it is the loss of a friend,

neighbour, or loved one. Some of Frost’s most beautiful work displays this

stark reality of life. In all of Frost’s works, the reader sees summarized in

verse a depth and level of human emotion that is not easily discerned by the

eye, but rather felt and nurtured in the heart, Robert Frost uses nature at its

most beautiful to explain life at its harshest.

In “After Apple-picking,” the reader comes to know an old man who

worked harvesting apples his entire life. In the smell of the apple blossoms

and the beauty of the russet colour of the apple, the reader realizes the old

man’s love of his apple orchard. His death is coming slowly and peacefully to

him, allowing him time to see and hear his life once again, but much more

acutely. He hears the rumbling of apples in the cider bin and feels the rung of

the ladder on the arch of his foot. The harvester’s senses have become

heightened to ordinary, daily activities. The reader can feel the bone-weary

ache of tiredness and the quiet acceptance of endless sleep. By letting the

reader feel the old man being lulled into death through the use of the senses,

the poet subtly interweaves into the reader’s consciousness the hold that the

land has had on this farmer; “Essence of winter sleep is on the night/ The

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scent of apples: I am drowsing off” (7-8). In the final four lines of the poem,

the old man knows that if the woodchuck were still around it could define the

nature of the sleep. By using the senses of smell, tough, and even sight, Frost

lets nature ease the old man into rest.

The stark simplicity in the poem “The Death of the Hired Man” gives

dignity to the old man, Silas, who has nothing material to show for his life. He

does, however have the love and affection of a couple, warren and Mary.

Silas could build a load of hay and could find water with a divining rod. He has

come “home” to die. He talks of clearing the pasture and ditching the

meadow for the couple. In the act of working the land and doing it well, the

land gives Silas values to his life. He dies alone with thoughts of working the

land in his head

In “Home Burial,” we experience the aftermath of death of a beloved

child and quite possibly the death of the marriage. The poem’s setting is only

a small portion of a house containing the staircase and the area leading to

the front door. At the top of the staircase, there is a window that looks out

upon a small family cemetery. We meet the wife and mother at the top of

this stairway and the husband/father at the bottom. She is quite clearly upset

and the husband asks why. When he reaches the top of the stairs and looks

out, he finally understands. He grew up here, and like everyone else, tends to

not see details that he has always known. His wife sees this as coldness

because he buried their child in this cemetery. The story progresses and he

pleads with her to talk to him, to not seek consolation from others, but to

turn to him. She cannot, for all she can see and h ear is what she seems to be

callousness on his part.

The poet expresses such deep emotions in this work. The reader feels the

anguish of the mother as well as that of the husband; therein lies the

problem. The woman can only function and feel as a mother and not a wife

while the man is still a husband even though he is a father who strongly feels

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the loss of his child. The mother sees the spade lifting, and hears the gravel

pelting the ground while her little boy lay in the “darkened parlour” (line

100). She feels hurt and betrayal that her husband comes in from digging the

grave and talks of such mundane matters as a fence. Her grief blinds her to

the reality that people deal with grief in different ways and that dealing with

mindless, routine chores often helps to block out the unthinkable. The

husband shows his grief in the physical action of digging the grave and

burying his child. I think lines 92 and 93, “Three foggy mornings and one rainy

day/ Will rot the best birch fence a man can build” is this father’s anxiety

concerning laying to rest his little one in the cold, wet earth. As a man of the

soil, he knows how quickly things rot and return to the earth continuing and

thus perpetuating life’s cycle. Quite possibly this thought wears on him, and

by stabbing at the earth in the act of digging the grave, he is giving vent to

the horrible mind-numbing grief of returning his precious child to the earth

(“Home Bmial”).

Knowing that men and women deal with every emotion differently, it would

seem that dealing with grief differently would not come as a surprise, but it

does. I think the biggest difference comes from the very physical fact that the

woman carries the child in her womb and bonds with that child even before

he is born. She knows that child and very child, of course, is different. When

my son, Stephen, was stillborn, I was inconsolable as was my husband. Life

goes on, however, and my husband was back at work while I was still home

recuperating from birth. Death is such a heavy burden and to lose a child is

the worst burden of all. I could still feel my child squirm and kick and jump in

surprise. I would wake in the night anticipating movement. I would start to

talk to him before I remembered, and meanwhile life went on. There is an

incredible difference in the sensibilities of men and women. My affinity with

the poem “Home Burial” stems from not only the death of a child, but also

from looking for solace in the land. I love gardening. Feeling the soil sift

through my fingers and smelling the pungent odour of the earth is balm for

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the spirit. Seeing the buds of spring and feeling the hot sun of summer on my

skin aided the healing process. Over the years, tears and rain have watered

my garden while shovelling and anger have tilled the soil. Knowing that earth

returns to earth is somehow a comfort and affords anyone the opportunity to

listen to nature. When I listen closely, I hear the soft sigh of the wind, the

buzzing of bees, the rustling of grasses, and the slow healing of my soul. At

the end of the symbol, Frost wrote: “Here endeth chapter forty-three of job.”

This is Frost’s bland and ironic way of saying that no one can understand his

masque without a complete knowledge of the Book of job, and also, in light

of his theme, that his masque is a prophetic-like satire on modern man’s

excessive confidence in his own reason. On The Sale of My Farm is one of

Robert Frost's lesser known poems and was written before the height of his

fame. It is the place he and his wife most cherished. Having farmed and later

taught at a local primary school, Frost was eager to promote his life as a poet

and would leave for England sometime afterwards. There is therefore, a

theme promoting self-development and self-discovery as Frost is moving on

to something new - "Well-away and be it so." As it represents a journey of

self, the symbolism is intertwined with the theme and is to be found in the

deeper meanings of the words and phrases.

References:

1. T. K. Whipple, "Robert Frost," in his Spokesmen: Modern Writers and

American Life (copyright—1928—by D. Appleton and Company), Appleton, 1928,

p.94

2. Peter Viereck, "Parnassus Divided," in The Atlantic Monthly (copyright ©

1949, by The Atlantic Monthly Company, Boston, Mass.; reprinted with permission),

Vol. 184, No. 4, October, 1949, pp. 67

3. James M. Cox, "Robert Frost and the Edge of the Clearing," in The Virginia

Quarterly Review (copyright, 1959, by The Virginia Quarterly Review, The University

of Virginia), Vol. 35, No. 1 (Winter, 1959), pp. 73.

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4. Arthur M. Sampley, "The Myth and the Quest: The Stature of Robert Frost," in

South Atlantic Quarterly (© 1971 by the Duke University Press), Summer, 1971, p.

287

5. Theodore Morrison, "Frost: Country Poet and Cosmopolitan Poet" (© 1970 by

Yale University; reprinted by permission of the editors), in Yale Review, Winter,

1970, p. 179

6. Yvor Winters, "Robert Frost: Or, the Spiritual Drifter as Poet," in his The

Function of Criticism: Problems and Exercises (© 1957 by Yvor Winters; reprinted by

permission of The Swallow Press, Chicago), Alan Swallow, 1957 (and reprinted in

Robert Frost: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by James M. Cox, Prentice-Hall,

Inc., 1962, p 75).

7. Marion Montgomery, "Robert Frost and His Use of Barriers: Man vs. Nature

Toward God," in South Atlantic Quarterly (reprinted by permission of the Publisher;

copyright 1958 by Duke University Press, Durham, North Carolina), Summer, 1958

(and reprinted in Robert Frost: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by James M.

Cox, Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1962, p 143).

8. Hayden Carruth, "Robert Frost," in Parnassus: Poetry in Review (copyright ©

by Poetry in Review Foundation), Spring-Summer, 1975, p 38.

9. George Monteiro, "Emily Dickinson and Robert Frost" (© by George

Monteiro), in Prairie Schooner, Winter, 1977–78, p 380 .

10. Amy Lowell, in The New Republic (reprinted by permission of The New

Republic; © 1915 The New Republic, Inc.), February 20, 1915 (and reprinted in

Robert Frost: The Critical Reception, edited by Linda W. Wagner, Burt Franklin & Co.,

Inc., 1977), p 20.

11. Mark Van Doren, in The Nation (copyright 1923 The Nation Associates),

December 19, 1923 (and reprinted in Robert Frost: The Critical Reception, edited by

Linda W. Wagner, Burt Franklin & Co., Inc., 1977),

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CHAPTER IV

CONCLUSION

Along with the poems that portray a sense of friendliness on nature’s part,

Robert Frost also presents the natural world as harsh, hostile, and often

violent. He finds the most obvious examples of this aspect in the severe New

England winter, when the wind beats against anything in its way, shrieking an

almost animal-like wail, and the snow buries all that cannot dig out from

under it. Frost notes its fearful beauty, and he takes advantage of the beauty,

power, and treachery of the winter to provide a background for his

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characters and their responses. In two such poems he portrays the fierceness

of nature and the reactions to it of two different men. In the first, “Wilful

Homing,” the protagonist seems a strong, self-confident man:

He peers out shrewdly into the thick and swift.

Since he means to come to a door he will come to a door …..

He describes in the second, “Storm Fear,” a man who is not so sure of

himself,

And my heart owns a doubt

Whether its in us to arise with day

And save ourselves unaided.

To these two individuals, the cold of a winter night means different

things. Again, ii is the human reaction to acts of nature that conveys to the

reader the poet’s impression of nature. No matter what aspect of its several

faces Frost chooses to present, the element of human response is the

determining factor for identifying the element of human response is the

determining factor for identifying the particular countenance.

Despite the viciousness of winter’s force depicted in “wilful Homing,”

the man survives. His obstinacy, strength, and endurance determine his

obstinacy, strength, and endurance determine his success.

It is getting dark and time he drew to a house,

But the blizzard blinds him to any house ahead.

The storm gets down his neck in an icy souse

That sucks his breath like a wicked cat in bed.

The snow blows on him and off him, exerting force

Downward to make him sit astride a drift,

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Imprint a saddle and calmly consider a course.

He peers out shrewdly into the thick and swift.

Since he means to come a door he will come to a door,

Although so compromised of aim and rate

He may fumble wide of the knob a yard or more,

And to those concerned he may seem a little late.

There is a suggestion of active antagonism, that the storm intends to

destroy the lone human being who dares the icy expanse. The blizzard has an

animal-like quality; it is “like a wicked cat.” But the protagonist is not one to

be overcome, and the fact that he can “sit astride a drift,/ imprint a saddle

and calmly consider a course,” softens the sense of fierceness that could be

expressed in a description of such a storm. Because he is not intimidated by

the blizzard, he does not find its violence overpowering.

Although the weather in “willful Homing” is described as bestial and

violent, it does not produce such a feeling of horror as does the more

stealthy, hostile cold of the winter storm in “Storm Fear”:

When the wind works against thus in the dark,

And pelts with snow

The lower chamber window on the east,

And whispers with a sort of stifled bark,

The beast,

“Come out! Come out!”—

It costs no inward struggle not to go,

Ah, no!

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I count our strength,

Two and a child,

Those of us not asleep subdued to mark

How the cold creeps as the fire dies at length,--

How drifts are piled,

Dooryard and road ungraded,

Till even the comforting barn grows far away,

And my heart owns a doubt

Whether ‘tis in us to arise with day

And save ourselves unaided.

Here, as in the previous poem, Frost notes the blizzard’s beast-like qualities

as it attempts to subdue the isolated farm family. The animal aspects of the

elements, however, are more heavily emphasized: the wind “whispers with a

sort of stifled bark,/ The beast, “and the cold “Creeps as the fire dies at

length.” In both verses the wind and snow fiercely pelt the humans, but this

time they are protected by the shelter of their home. In these lines the threat

takes on a more malevolent tone because there is a suggestion that the

family might not be able to survive without outside help. The storm isolates

the house, cuts it off from even the comfort of the warm, domestic animals in

the barn a short distance away. The two adults have not the strength to

marshal their courage. Instead of looking within themselves for sustenance

as the lone man does in “wilful Homing,” they depend upon contact with

civilization. Their weakness lends force to the storm and the observer senses

the danger in its malevolence.

Robert Frost portrays the seeming malevolence of man’s

surrounding in poems with backgrounds other than a violent blizzard. He

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imparts an illusion of malignancy within a basically calm autumn scene in

“Bereft.”

Where had I heard this wind before

Change like this to a deeper roar?

What would it take my standing there for,

Holding open a restive door,

Looking down hill to a frothy shore?

Summer was past and day was past.

Somber clouds in the west were massed.

Out in the porch’s sagging floor,

Leaves got up in a coil and hissed,

Blindly struck at my knee and missed.

Something sinister in the tone

Told me my secret must be known:

Word I was in the house alone

Somehow must have gotten abroad,

Word I was in my life alone,

Word I had no one left but God.

The gusting wind takes on a sinister tone and the darkening sky is

ominous to the man who is alone possibly for the first time in such a

complete way. Frost is known as a metricist. Frost said, "I would sooner write

free verse as play tennis with the net down."

He also said, "There are only two meters: strict and loose iambic."

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The following chart shows the types of iambic meter her wrote:

There is an indentation given the he has recently lost a loved one, probably

his wife, and he cannot adjust to his aloneness. His isolation weakens him

emotionally, and he fears even the ordinary movements of nature. The

house, a shore dwelling, is probably the family summer home. now the lonely

survivor has returned to the scene of earlier happiness, but in his aloneness

and weakness, he reads sinister overtones into nature’s ordinary autumnal

movements. He sees it as an aggressive, evil force, the “deepening roar” of

the wind assuming a degrading tone to his ear. The leaves stirred by the

gusty wind accept serpent-like form, hiss and strike at him but miss. He sees

himself surrounded by the evil and violence in nature. But, although

depressed and lonely, the man does not despair; he is inwardly strong.

According to John Lynen in The Pastoral Art of Robert Frost, the fact that the

speaker can mirror in the landscape the full extent of his loneliness attests to

his capacity for courage. Once the raw wounds of his loss have healed over,

he will be able to face life and nature without the fearfulness of which he is

now the victim. The hint of this hope is in the last line, “Word I had no one

left but God.” God does not seem to give much comfort at this point, but the

fact that the lonely, sorrowing man even remembers Him indicates that the

help will eventually reach him. Once the initial shock of his solitariness wears

away, the lone man will no longer see nature in its present threatening light.

Many of Frost’s poems thus show that the ambivalence of nature lies in

the subjective views of human observers. Some feel a sense of friendliness

with their surroundings and are able to meet with courage and fortitude the

occasional austerity and violence found therein. Most others, however, find

that nature is unbiased and indifferent toward them. The extent of Frost’s

consuming interest in the interrelationship of man and nature is reflected in

the fact that the majority of his poems portray people, some strong and

some weak, in an immediate relationship with the surroundings upon which

their existence depends.

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Frost had often witnessed the dynamic forces of nature at work in his

New England where, as families moved away, the wild-flowers, woods, and

vines repossessed the fields and yards. Perhaps “ghost House” is such an

abandoned farm. The poet’s memories still dwell in the house he knows well,

although nothing but the cellar walls remain, in the first four verses he shows

that nature cannot completely reclaim the dwelling as long as it exists in a

man’s memory, but it has physically covered over the traces of human

existence. He suggests the oncoming encroachment of nature in his

description, in the fourth verse, of the forewarning the whippoorwill gives of

his arrival.

I dwell in a lonely house I know

That vanished many a summer ago,

And left no trace but the cellar walls,

And a cellar in which the daylight falls,

And the purple-stemmed wild raspberries grow.

O’er ruined fences the grapevines shield

The woods come back to the mowing field;

The orchard tree has grown one copse

Of new wood and old where the woodpecker chops;

The footpath down to the well is healed.

I dwell with a strangely aching heart

In that vanished abode there far apart

On that disused and forgotten road

That has no dust-bath now for the toad.

Night comes; the black bats tumble and dart;

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The poet experiences a feeling of sorrow that the couple who worked

out their lives on this farm have had the evidences of their labour covered so

quickly. In the closing lines of the poem, he mourns that there is so little left

to tell of the close life the farm couple had, their companionship continuing

even into the grave. Nature is insensitive to the love, joy, and sorrow that

went into the making of this home, and, once the family is buried and unable

to halt its daily inroads, nature quickly retakes its own. The ravages of time

topple the house, leaving but an open cellar which the wild vines soon cover.

The road, no longer used, is overgrown by the grass, flowers, and trees. The

irresistible forces of nature reabsorb what man had cleared and heal over all

his traces. Everything the couple toiled so long and hard to produce is fallen

into decay, reabsorbed, and transmuted.

In a variation of the theme, frost shows the creatures of the wild to be

as indifferent to human failures and grief as are the inanimate surroundings.

As the underbrush and the elements indifferently overrun and obliterate the

deserted farmhouse in “Ghost House,” so also the birds and vegetation In

“The Need of Being Versed in country Things” take over the abandoned barn

with no concern for the loss and tragedy of the people who had constructed

it. Fire had destroyed the house, leaving only the chimney standing. A wind

shift had saved the barn from the same fate, and it was left to decay.

The birds that came to it through the air

At broken windows flew out and in,

There murmur more like the sigh we sigh

From too much dwelling on what has been.

Yet for them the lilac renewed its leaf,

And the aged elm, though touched with fire;

And the dry pump flung up an awkward arm;

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And the fence post carried a strand of wire.

For them there was really nothing sad.

But though they rejoiced in the nest they kept,

Once had to be versed in country things

Not to believe the phoebes wept.

The poet sees the farm abandoned after a fire, deserted by a family not

strong enough to reopen the battle with their surroundings. All that

remained of t heir toil and hopes, they had left to inevitable decay. The elm

tree, however, “though touched with fire,” grows again each spring as the

lilac blooms. The birds accept the empty barn for their own. The inexorable

cycle of the wilderness continues, ignoring the vestiges of human, thinking

life. The lilac and the elm, drawn into the domestic circle through the family’s

enjoyment of their beauty, continue to quicken each spring with no thought

for the absent people. The poet expresses wryly what he knows from

experience—that nature does not weep for man’s failures. Only people who

have lived in the country can understand.

In portraying the indifference and lack of response of the natural world

toward mankind, Frost may use either a narrow farmland scene or the

expanses of the universe. The universe is incapable of concern,

understanding, or sympathy for humanity. The brief poem, “Stars,” thus

describes the stars clustering far above the earth as though they have an

interest in man’s welfare; but well does Frost realize that the stars are blind

to the fate of humanity.

How countlessly they congregate

O’er our tumultuous snow,

Which flows in shapes as tal as trees

When wintry winds do blow!—

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As if with keenness for our fate,

Our faltering few steps on

To white rest, and a place of rest

Invisible at dawn, --

And yet with neither love nor hate,

Those stars like some snow-white

Minerva’s snow-white marble eyes

Without the gift of sight.

Frost describes the stare hovering over the earth as though, interested in

human fate, Minerva, protectress of civilized life, they want to provide

guidance in the struggle against the violence of a “tumultuous “ snow storm

that threatens engulfment. Seemingly they watch over the few steps the

individual takes across the snow-covered ground toward his home and

nightly rest. But on a higher plane, they also seem to observe the “faltering”

steps of humanity as it treads its way from birth to death, the white rest. The

speaker, however, knows the truth and accepts it; the stars are like a snow-

white stone Minerva whose sightless marble eyes look on with “neither love

nor hate. They are neutral in that outcome of the struggle has no meaning to

them. No plight of man can evoke their sympathy.

In “Come in,” another poem with a woodland background, frost again

portrays nature’s disinterest in man. He describes the thrush’s song and the

seeming invitation it carries upon the still air.

Far in the pillared dark

Thrush music went –

Almost like a call to come in

To the dark and lament.

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But no, I was out for stars:

I would not come in.

I meant not even if asked,

And I hadn’t been.

As in “Stars,” the poet indicates that nature’s attitude, at first, seems

almost to be one of interest in human experience. But in both poems he

consciously stops himself short of the romantic view of nature. In “Come in”

he describes the call of the bird as emitting from a “pillared dark,” a place for

lament. The gloominess of the woods makes it easier for him to overcome

the temptation to enter the forest; he does not intend to change his route

which leads to enjoyment of light and space, but no invitation has been

given. He accepts what there is to accept and does not pretend to see what is

not there.

In an extension of this view, not only does nature seem not to reach

out to humans, but I t definitely ignores one who attempts to make it take

notice of him. This aspect of its “active” indifference Frost expresses well in

“On Going Unnoticed”:

As vain to raise a voice as a sigh

In the tumult of free leaves on high.

What are you in the shadow of trees

Engaged up thee with the light and breeze?

Less than the coral-root you know

That is content with the daylight low,

And has no leaves at all of its own;

Whose spotted flowers hang meanly down.

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You grasp the bark by a rugged pleat,

And look up small from the forest’s feet.

The only leaf it drops goes wide,

Your name not written on either side.

You linger your little hour and are gone,

And still the woods sweep leafily on,

Not even missing the coral-root flower

You took as a trophy of the hour.

Of just what concern, he asks, does a man think that he, a lowly earth

bound creature, is to a tall, kingly tree whose leaves are so high above the

earth? He is of no more value than the mean coral-root flower, and he is no

more missed when he leaves than is the small flower he takes with him. The

woods do not need him; they are self-sufficient, and in their stately

independence they ignore the insignificant human who pulls at their trunks.

Each generation of man lingers its “little hour” and passes from this life. The

woods remain, unconcerned.

Though man may be forever unnoticed by nature, he continues to

crave a response whether from nature or other humans. if without human

companionship, he attempts to evoke the response from his environment,

but the surroundings have no interest in man’s need, as Frost demonstrates

in”The Most of It”:

He thought he kept the universe alone;

For all the voice in answer he could wake

Was but the mocking echo of his own

From some tree-hidden cliff across the lake.

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Some morning from the boulder-broken beach

He would cry out on life, that what it wants

Is not its own love back in copy speech,

But counter-love, original response.

And nothing ever came of what he cried

Unless it was the embodiment that crashed

in the cliff’s talus on the other side,

and then in the far distant water splashed.

But after a time allowed for it to swim,

Instead of proving human when it neared

And someone else additional to him,

As a great buck it powerfully appeared,

Pushing the crumpled water up ahead,

And landed pouring like a waterfall,

And stumbled through the rocks with horny tread,

And forced the underbrush—and that was all.

The lone man’s cry brings forth no direct reply from nature. It does not

comprehend his need, for it cannot. There is no reaction on its part. Only his

own voice carries across the lake and reverberates from the cliff. At the

sound of the splash in the water in the distance, he waits expectantly, only to

have his hopes dashed when a great buck steps ashore rather than the

human he had hoped for. The solitary man has not comfort of a realistic echo

of his own voice, but he finds it necessary to struggle for an original response

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from somewhere, because as an emotional-rational being he needs an

acknowledgement of his existence.

Nature’s indifference is experienced not only by human beings,

according to Frost, but by the creatures of the wild as well. Struggles

between various creations no more evoke a response from those not directly

involved than do struggles between humans, and results which on a human

scale would be tragic are ignored on the natural scale. He presents a rather

stark picture in “Rang-finding”:

The battle rent a cobweb diamond-strung

And cut a flower beside a ground bird’s nest

Before it stained a single human breast.

The stricken flower bent double and so hung.

And still the bird revisited her young.

A butterfly its fall had dispossessed

A moment sought in air his flower of rest,

Then lightly stooped to it and fluttering clung.

On the bare upland pasture there had spread

O’ernight ‘twixt mullein stalks a wheel of thread

And straining cables wet with silver dew.

A sudden passing bullet shook it dry.

The indwelling spider ran to greet the fly,

But finding nothing, sullenly withdrew.

Subtly satirical of human civilization in comparison with the natural

state, Frost combines in this poem the ambivalent elements of nature—

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beauty, violence, and indifference. There is, of course, the man-made

violence, the bullet that tore the cobweb and injured the flower; but

offsetting the violence there are expreased the beauty of the flower, the

poise and balance of the butterfly, and the care of the mother bird for her

young. On the other hand, there is the potential violence of the spider

running to “greet the fly.” Encompassing the attributes of violence and

beauty, however, is the overriding sense of organic indifference. The torn

cobweb, the result of the spider’s toil, and the broken flower, both tragic in

their implications if viewed with a sympathetic human heart, are not

mourned for within nature. The bird, so instinctively careful for her little

ones, is indifferent to the ills of her fellow creations. The butterfly, who was

in such close contact with the flower at the time it was stricken, does not

flutter back to it to offer comfort; it stoops to it to resume its place of rest. It

is insensitive to the hurt done to the bloom. The rage of the battle arouses

the spider, who emerges to take its enemy but, finding nothing of interest to

him, “sullenly” withdraws. The main characteristics of these elements of

nature are an instinctive response to what concerns their own individual

existence and a complete indifference toward all that goes on around the, yet

does not pertain to them. This indifference on such a small scale can take on

gigantic proportions when turned toward man who, for the most part, feels

the need of a response of some sort.

Because nature’s creatures are governed by instinct, they do not

struggle to rearrange their environment nor worry about the future as

humans do. Comes their way as an element of that general indifference man

recognizes in them. Because of this disinterested acceptance, the bird,

spider, and butterfly of “Range-Finding” continue to live without any

emotional reaction to the tragedies that occur around them. They accept the

inevitable as do the birds Frost describes in “Acceptance”;

When the spent sun throws up its rays on cloud

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And goes down burning into the gulf below,

No voice in nature is heard to cry aloud

At what has happened. Birds, at least, must know

It is the change to darkness in the sky.

Murmuring something quiet in her breast,

One bird begins to close a faded eye;

Or overtaken too far from his nest,

Hurrying low above the grove, some waif

Swoops just in time to his remembered tree.

At most he thinks or twitters softly, “Safe!

Now let the night be dark for all of me.

Let the night be too dark for me to see

Into the future. Let what will be, be.”

Robert Frost’ closeness to nature and his love and understanding of it form

the underlying elements of his descriptions of settings. Whether he portrays

the sympathetic benignity, the antipathetic violence, or the passive

indifference of the nature he knows, his words give proof of the genuine

respect he bears for it. He feels keenly that men may know a sure and steady

contentment through activities which place them in abrupt contact with their

environment, if they are strong enough to accept also the harshness that is

an inherent part of it. The seeming malevolence, or violence, found in the

nature of every region, frost also respects. But here, too, the person’s

attitude, his reaction, determines his reward in the experience. Frost’s view is

that, for the most part, it is up to man to make the relationship assume the

direction he prefers. For the strong there is benevolence in the association,

and the violence of nature does not overwhelm. For the weak, however,

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there is no sympathy or understanding, and the natural forces become

destructive. Man is the determining factor in the relationship. He is the

central and primary element in Robert Frost’s poetry.

For many of Frost’s characters, the pleasure derived from life is linked

to the enjoyment of work within their surroundings. They are strong bodily

and sure of themselves emotionally, and their labour is a source of carnal and

intellectual fulfilment. For them it is the link between themselves and nature,

as it is for the field-worker of “Mowing” who derives contentment from his

“scythe whispering to the ground,” the “heat of the sun” upon his back, the

“feeble-pointed spikes of flowers” falling beneath his blade, and the “bright

green snake” frightened by his movements. The quiet peace he feels is

spoken of by the “whispering scythe,” the “lack of sound.” He works with

“the earnest love that laid the swale in rows. “His work is his satisfaction and

in that is his pleasure and contentment: “The fact is the sweetest dream that

labour knows.”

In the poem “The pasture,”used as an introduction to several of his

collections of poetry, Frost offers to all his readers, through a farmer’s

words to a young woman, perhaps, an invitation to join him in the enjoyment

of the beauty of the pasture and spring.

I’m going out to clean the pasture spring;

I’ll only stop to rake the leaves away

(And wait to watch the water clear, I may)

I sha’n’t be gone long.—you come too.

I’m going out to fetch the little calf

That’s standing by the mother. It’s so young

It totters when she licks it with her tongue.

I sha’n’t be gone long.—you come too.

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The farmer is sensitive enough to see the clear beauty of his work and the

pleasure that can come of it. He is content in his labor, and through his

enjoyment he comes to see his surroundings through understanding eyes.

He is aware of the loveliness of the spring, and his insight opens the way to

a sharing of the fair charm of the country scene. He is the one who takes

heed of the clarity of the spring water freed of autumn and winter l eaves

and the appealing helplessness of the new-born calf sheltered by its mother.

In the pleasure his labor brings, his ordinary chores tale on special meaning.

His tasks are performed with confidence because he knows what must be

done for the good of his farm as a whole, and he is not afraid to act a s

necessary. He is an active, happy partner in his relationship with nature.

The husband in “putting in the Seed “ is another person who finds

work within his environment a source of pleasure;

You come ton fetch me from my work tonight

When supper’s on the table, and we’ll see

If I can leave off burying the white

Soft petals fallen from the apple tree

(Soft petals, yes , but not so barren quite,

Mingled with these, smooth bean and wrinkled pea;)

And go along with you ere you lose sight

Of what you came for and become like me,

Slave to a springtime passion for the earth.

How Love burns through the putting in the Seed

On through the watching for that early birth

When, just as the soil tarnished with weed,

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The sturdy seedling with arched body comes

Shouldering its way and shedding the earth crumbs.

Within this poem Frost expresses the union of husband and wife and the love

of the two for the wonders of nature. The love of the humans for each other

is reflected in their mutual reply to nature and to the planting of seeds and

their subsequent growth. The man knows that he becomes so engrossed in

his task that supper can be forgotten, but he also knows that his wife shares

his “springtime passion for the earth,” and that unless he responds quickly to

her call for supper, she too will “lose sight/Of what (she) came for . . .. “The

husband is matter-of-fact about his love of planting and growing things, and

through his words. Frost suggests that the communion achieved with nature

and the reassurance derived form that union are a image of the love that

flows between the husband from his wife, that their response to their

surroundings is enhanced by their love. In this poem as in “The pasture,” the

man is in command of the circumstances, but only up to a point in this

instance. He is the planter, burying the seeds as he desires, but from that

point the rest is up to nature, for the production of this man’s garden is a

partnership. Man plants; nature gives growth. Together they produce a crop.

Through this relationship between the man and his surrounding elements

and between him and his wife he finds contentment, pleasure, and love.

A second relationship between the characters in Frost’s poems and

their environment is the love or close companionship of two people which

brightens their outlook on life and allows them to see and meet nature as a

friend. They do not fear the barren woods of autumn nor the indifferent

nature that dried their well. Rather, they accept the drywell as an excuse to

frolic across the fields to seek water from a nearby brook. Together they see

a fair autumn evening, and from their mutual happiness there is an almost

singing quality in their response to “The barren boughs without leaves, they

play games with the moon, enjoying their closeness and fun.

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But once within the wood, we paused

Like gnomes that hid us from the moon,

Ready to run to hiding new

With laughter when she found us soon.

Together, two people in love are strong and secure; and their surrounding do

not frighten them. The two young people in “Going for Water” enjoy such a

union, and its intensity colors everything they see and do. Because of their

love for each other and their joy in being together, their response to the

world around them is on same level. And in their eyes the natural world is a

good place to be. The same can be said of the newly-married couple in

“West-Running Brook.” They too are secure in their environment holds no

fear for them. Even the odd quirk of the “west-running brook” is looked on

with awe and affection rather than with superstitious fear. Their mutual love

and contentment reflect from and encompass their surroundings.

We’ve said we two. Let’s change that to we three.

As you and I are married to each other,

We’ll both be married to the brook. We’ll build

Our bridge across I t, and the bridge shall be

Our arm thrown over it asleep beside it.

They are at peace in their closeness and in their mutual security can see

friendliness in the elements around them. In expanding their union to make a

partner of the contrary brook that is a part of their land, they express

acceptance and love on their part for everything that is connected in any way

with their marriage. Their joy marks their attitude, and they derive pleasure

from nature. Their wholeness is a part of their feeling for their environment.

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Although there is no dialogue between the two, human understanding

and love again form the bond between a couple and their brook in “Hyla

Brook.”

By June our brook’s run out of song and speed

Sought for much after that, it will be found

Either to have gone groping underground

(And taken with it all the Hyla breed

That shouted in the mist a month ago,

Like ghost of sleigh-bells in a ghost of snow) –

Or flourished and come up in jewel-weed,

Weak foliage that is blown upon and bent

Even against the way its waters went.

Its bed is left a faded paper sheet

Of dead leaves stuck together by the heat –

A brook to none but who remember long.

This as it will be seen is other far

Than with brooks taken other where in song.

In a soliloquy the narrator implies the bond between him and his wife. He is

so attuned to the union between the two that he instinctively speaks of “we

instead of “I.” He thinks in terms of “two” as “one. “for he has the deep

understanding that goes with love through the years—the knowledge that

“We love the things we love for what they are, “both human and otherwise.

And within that love is a clear comprehension of the not-quite-so-pleasant

along with the good. Thus the couple, in the union of “we,” can remember

the loveliness of t he brook that shouted of the winter snow when there is

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no longer beauty in the dried-up creek-bed filled with “weak foliage” and the

“faded paper sheet/Of dead leaves stuck together by the heat--. “No, Hyla

Brook in summer is not the kind that songs are sung of. To the casual

observer it is one to be over-looked. But to the couple who remember the

early loveliness and the place it has in their bond, it is worth the affection

they have for it. They love it for what it was and will be as they love each

other for what each is. Their feeling for the creek is a reflection of their own

human love.

The young man in “waiting,” who rests among the haycocks in the late

evening to compose lines for his absent loved one, is enfolded by a sense of

companionship as is the couple in “Hyla Brook” although he is physically

alone.

I dream upon the opposing lights of the hour,

Preventing shadow until the moon prevail;

I dream upon the nighthawks peopling heaven,

Each circling each with vague unearthly cry,

Or plunging headlong with fierce twang afar;

And on the bat’s mute antics, who would seem

Dimly to have made out my secret place,

Only to lose it when he pirouettes,

And seeks it endlessly with purblind haste;

On the last swallow’s sweep; and on the rasp

In the abyss of odor and rustle at my back,

That, silenced by my advent, finds once more,

After an interval, his instrument,

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And tries once—twice—and thrice if I be there;

And on the worn book of old-golden song

I brought not here to read, it seems, but hold

And freshen in this air of withering sweetness;

But on the memory of one absent most,

For whom these lines when they shall greet her eye.

In the glow of human love, the resting lover observes his situation, and

although the stubble and mown grass are withering, the hawks utter and

“unearthly cry,” plunging “headlong with fierce twang afar, “and the usually

repellent bats fly abut, the man does not find gloom about him. Rather, the

air is of “withering sweetness,” and he “dreams upon the nighthawks

peopling heaven” and observes the “pirouettes” of the bats. He has a sense

of relationship with the creatures around him, for he supposes that bat seeks

out his hidden seat and that “the rasp/In the abyss of odor and rustle at his

back, “tries” his instrument” to see if the man is there. The natural light at

that time of day—the glow of the setting sun—does not allow shadows to

settle before the brightness of the moon prevails. The scene is set with

glowing colors, and the man, solitary yet warmed by love, enjoy the elements

of nature. The open air is uplifting for him; it even freshens the “old-golden

songs” within his book. United in memory with his beloved, he is at peace,

and the love he feels, like the setting sun’s light, tints the overall view he has

of his surroundings.

In poem after poem, Frost speaks of this feeling between humans that so

includes them that it affects their reply to the world around them. He

expresses the epitome of such relationship within nature in “Two Look at

Two,” in which he describes the chance meeting of a human couple with an

animal pair on a wooded mountainside. The young people, in their love for

each other and their mutual enjoyment of the out-of-doors, are reluctant to

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quit their evening walk as darkness nears. But realizing the danger of the

mountain at night, they halt at a “tumbled wall/with barbed-wire binding.”

And so they stand before this barrier looking upward to “the way they must

not go,” in one attempt to steal the last bit of pleasure from excursion.

Bibliography

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Faggen, Robert. Robert Frost and the Challenge of Darwin. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997. With copious evidence amassed for his argument, Faggen depicts Robert Frost as a poet of the first order and among the most challenging of the moderns.

Gerber, Philip L. Robert Frost. Rev. ed. Boston: Twayne, 1982. Begins with an objective biographical overview and follows with substantial chapters on technique, themes, theories, and accomplishments. Includes chronology, extensive notes and references, select bibliography, and index.

Lathem, Edward Connery. Robert Frost: A Biography. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1981. Condenses the three-volume “authorized” biography by Lawrance Roger Thompson into one volume, intended for the general reader. A meticulously researched and minutely recorded study of Frost, which many reviewers have judged personally biased. Solid on facts, this volume contains judgments which must be used with caution. It has no notes and a limited bibliography.

Meyers, Jeffrey. Robert Frost: A Biography. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1996. Shapes a long life into a vivacious character study based on the conflicts that seemed to drive Frost as well as do him damage. Includes bibliographical references and index.

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