The Cambridge Introduction to Robert Frost
Page 6
but also from modernist poets, particularly Eliot and Pound, who often saw
only a divorce possible between rhythm and meter. What Frost formulated
here was an intricate entangling of rhythm and meter. Meter, of course, is the very regular alternation between stressed and unstressed syllables in a line.
Iambic pentameter, a line of five feet of unstressed/stressed pairs of syllables, was a favored, though certainly not exclusive meter in which Frost liked to
write. It should also be emphasized now that Frost introduced very skillful,
subtle variations within the regularity of a given meter without resorting to wild eccentricities. I will return to how this works in his poetry.
Frost’s interest in the “sound of sense” kept in step with the poetic revolutions of his time, particularly the desire to shed the perceived archaic literariness of Victorian and Edwardian verse. In this respect, Frost was closer than is often thought to his slightly younger contemporaries, Pound and Eliot (and somewhat ahead of them), and very much attuned to the innovations of Edwin
Arlington Robinson, who was so skillful at bringing natural syntax and diction into precisely crafted formal verse. Frost discusses the “sound of sense” and
“tones of voice” in the context of a strong interest in human intimacy, in people, and in the colloquial as the source of knowledge. Writing to Sidney Cox in 1914, Frost inveighs against modernist tendencies, symbolist and imagist: “Of course the great fight of any poet is against the people who want him to write in a special language that has gradually separated from spoken language” ( CPPP, 682).
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It needs to be stressed that Frost was most interested in the complexities of ordinary language, and those complexities, of course, must include everyday speech.
“I like the actuality of gossip the intimacy of it,” he wrote to Braithwaite in 1915.
Nothing that vital can be understood on a purely semantic or lexical level. This is one of Frost’s great insights. Frost evoked Wordsworth’s goal of summoning
experience fresh from life: “As language only exists in the mouths of men, here again Wordsworth was right in trying to reproduce in his poetry not only the
words – and in their limited range, too actually used in common speech –
but their sound” ( I, 7). One cannot separate Frost’s interest in “common speech” from aspects of his pastoral fascination with not just rural but common men and women in extraordinary situations. He took “common speech”
much farther than Wordsworth or, for that matter, almost any other poet before him, bringing as much as he could the crudity of remote New England into
poetry.
In the interview of 1915 in which he discussed Wordsworth and common
speech, Frost also emphasized two other aspects of his principle of “sound of
sense”: its primitive quality and its elusiveness that cannot be codified the way Sidney Lanier attempted in Science of English Verse. Note again Frost’s use of the word “actuality,” linking sound to action and deed:
All folk speech is musical. In primitive conditions man has not at his aid
reactions by which he can quickly and easily convey his ideas and
emotions. Consequently, he has to think more deeply to call up the
image for the communication of his meaning. It was the actuality he
sought; and thinking more deeply, not in the speculative sense of science
or scholarship, he carried out Carlyle’s assertion “that if you think deep
enough you think musically.”
Poetry has seized on this sound of speech and carried it to artificial
and meaningless lengths. We have it exemplified in Sidney Lanier’s
musical notation of verse, where all the tones of the human voice in
natural speech are entirely eliminated, leaving the sound of sense
without root in experience.
( I, 7–8)
Frost’s readings in evolutionary biology and psychology, which included
Charles Darwin, Herbert Spencer, William James, and Henri Bergson, had
all contributed to the view behind this view of the primitive origins of lan-
guage in sound and music. With this came a conception of the poet not as an
originator but as a summoner of what had been so very long in existence:
Just so many sentence sounds belong to man as just so many vocal runs
belong to one kind of bird. We come into the world with them and create
none of them. What we feel as a creation is only selection and grouping.
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We summon them from heaven knows where under excitement with the
audile imagination. And unless we are in an imaginative mood it is no
use trying to make them, they will not rise.
( SL, 140)
A year later, Frost wrote to Walter Prichard Eaton that his particular interest in “sentence” tones ran against the grain of what was generally considered
“poetical,” and probably “beautiful,” and also against the grain of modern
ideas of originality. The tones are “real cave things,” prior to words, in the cave of the mouth and in the caves of our primitive ancestors:
I am only interesting to myself for having ventured to try to make poetry
out of tones that if you can judge from the practice of other poets are not
usually regarded as poetical. You can get enough of those sentence tones
that suggest grandeur and sweetness everywhere in poetry. What bothers
people in my blank verse is that I have tried to see what I could do with
boasting tones and quizzical tones and shrugging tones (for there are
such) and forty eleven other tones. All I care a cent for is to catch
sentence tones that havent been brought to book. I dont say to make
them, mind you, but to catch them. No one makes 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.
( CPPP, 690–691)
Once summoned, how did he capture these tones and get them onto the
page? “It is one thing to hear the tones in the mind’s ear. Another to give them accurately at the mouth. Still another to implicate them in sentences and fasten them to the page. The second is the actor’s gift. The third is the writer’s”
( N, 645). Frost believed, as he wrote to Sydney Cox, that this could be accomplished only within the context of metrical verse: “They [sentence sounds] are only lovely when thrown and drawn and displayed across the spaces of the
footed line. Everyone knows that except a free-verster” ( CPPP, 691). Frost’s dislike of free verse had very much to with what he considered its inability “to catch” the fundamental sentence sounds or speech rhythms. In a 1914 letter
to John Cournos, Frost defined his versification as breaking rhythm across
established meter:
It is as simple as this: there are the very regular preestablished 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. I like to drag and break the
intonation
across the metre as waves first comb and then break
stumbling on the shingle.
( CCCP, 680)
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Frost’s interest in writing metered verse had very little to do with a conservative cast of mind. In fact, like many of his contemporaries, he was responding to a great deal of the ferment in both anthropology and science that suggested new, primordial roots of human consciousness and language. But Frost’s view
that the tones of human speech were not “original” and ultimately limited in
number was to some extent not congenial to certain concepts of far-flung orig-
inality. Frost enjoyed a subtle play and tension of voice against the regularity of meter. Meter remained part of the artist’s apparatus of order against the
complex variety of life.
Frost wrote in his 1939 preface “The Figure a Poem Makes”:
All that can be done with words is soon told. So with also meters –
particularly in our language where there are virtually but two, strict
iambic and loose iambic. The ancients with many were still poor if they
depended on meters for all tune. It is painful to watch our
sprung-rhythmists straining at the point of omitting one short from a
foot for relief from monotony. The possibilities for tune from the
dramatic tones of meaning struck across the rigidity of a limited meter
are endless.
( CP, 131)
“Strict and loose iambic” became Frost’s essential theory of meter. But it should be kept in mind that while Frost introduces interesting variations into strict iambic meters, one should not go too far interpreting how loose he can become
or to confuse rhythmic stress with metric variation.1
There is tremendous tonal variety among Frost’s poems, a fact easy to over-
look if one focuses on only a few well-known lyrics or even if one has heard
those lyrics frequently without careful attention to the subtlety of their craft.
Some of the confusion about Frost’s concept of “the sound of sense” and its
embodiment in his poetry comes from recognizing that while the colloquial
and dialogue are an essential part of his poetry, it is not always perfectly clear from the poems themselves what the tones of voice should be at any given
moment.
The tendency for some readers of the poems becomes to scan the lines of
the poems according to their interpretations of the speech rhythms rather than according to the regularity of an expected iambic meter. This is not to say
that Frost did not vary the iambic line: he most certainly did. He said that
there are really only two meters in English, “strict iambic and loose iambic.”
Frost, along with every other major modern poet, strove to break the bonds
of writing predictable verse stuffed with tortured syntax into fixed forms and sing-song meters. In order to do this, he decided not to go the route of free verse and decided to work within the possibilities of syllabic-stress verse and iambic
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meters. For him, this created wonderful possibilities of dramatic tension: a line set to an underlying meter but the expectations of its spoken rhythms pulling
in a slightly or possibly completely different direction, creating the possibility of irony. “In fact a good sentence does double duty: it conveys one meaning
with words and syntax another by the tone of voice it indicates. In irony the
words may say one thing, the tone of voice the opposite” ( N, 645).
Frost’s theory of “the sound of sense” becomes relational in the practice
of the poems. Whether in short lyrics, dramatic or blank-verse poems, Frost
attempted to create bodies of sound in which the fundamental components –
sentences – varied in tone one from the other but always dramatically. The limits of iambic meter, and often of the pentameter line, enabled him to create remarkable variations. While it is fundamentally impossible to determine precisely the tone demanded of any given line, Frost was certainly able to give a strong sense of the difference of one line from another – indeed, that a different tone was at least at work. It’s not hard to notice the slight metrical variations in the following lines from “Birches.” Slight though they are, the effect on the rhythm and, therefore, the tone of the lines is likely to be considerable:
Then he flung outward, feet first, with a swish,
Kicking his way down through the air to the ground.
So was I once myself a swinger of birches.
And so I dream of going back to be.
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
From a twig’s having lashed across it open.
Frost carefully enjambs one sentence over four lines, intensifying the sense
of “pathless” wandering. Trochaic inversions also slow down the pace of the
iambic pentameter, underscoring the resistance of the woods. But all the lines work within the range of blank verse, and it is that form and underlying metric that gives the variations so much dramatic power.
An equally great, and better-known, example of this kind of flexibility occurs in the beginning of “Mending Wall,” also in blank verse. Some have argued that Frost mimes the disordered quality of the wall in the opening lines with not
only an initial trochaic substitution for an iamb but with additional spondees and pyrrhic substitutions. Many try to scan the opening lines with all manner of pyrrhics or spondees. The initial trochaic substitution aside (“Something,” of course, is trochaic, and so is “under” in the second line), the lines remain
regularly blank verse: unrhymed iambic pentameter. The reader hears the
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difference in relative stress pulling against that in the rhythm. The breaks in the feet of the second and third lines, the words being completed in the following feet, suggest falling rhythms. But the essential iambic meter is there all the way through. Frost ingeniously plays with different sentences across this basic grid, in a way that encourages, if not forces, attention to the rhythms of the voice.
You cannot comfortably read the lines as strictly iambic:
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun;
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
Bu they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean . . .
Frost skillfully keeps the tonal drama in tension with the meter in his narrative dramatic poems.
Frost contributed to the confusion about the interpretation of how his
prosody works by some of his own comments. For example, he defined a sen-
tence as “a sound in itself on which other sounds called words may be strung.”
For any writer,
this can be a useful way to think about the unit of a sentence.
Frost imagined the tonal shape or posture of a sentence without the words. And occasionally in a lecture he would actually state what those tones were to him, as he did in a 1915 talk to students ( CPPP, 687–689). But one should never confuse tonal interpretation or voice stress with metrical scansion. What cannot
be overemphasized is the way the regularity of the meter in Frost often works
against what must be the rhythms and stresses of speech. But those rhythmic
stresses and the ultimate tonal interpretation of any phrase or sentence may be left open to interpretation.
Another known instance of readers confusing rhythm and meter in Frost
occurs in the opening line of the lyric “Desert Places,” which has often been
scanned as a spondee, pyrrhic, iamb, and limping spondee: “Snow falling and
night falling fast, oh, fast.” That would be imposing rhythmic stresses, stresses of speech, on the very regular iambic pentameter meter. The tension between
the two gives the line its power.
“In the Home Stretch” provides a powerful dialogue, really a series of ques-
tions and answers, within the confines of “loose iambic” between husband
and wife about beginnings and ends, new and old in life. Pentameter lines are
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broken between them as the conversation builds to the wife’s lyric and metri-
cally regular expression of recurrence:
“What is this?”
“This life?
Our sitting here by lantern light together
Amid the wreckage of a former home?
You won’t deny the lantern isn’t new.
The stove is not, and you are not to me,
Nor I to you.”
“Perhaps you never were?”
“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.”
“Then an end?”
“End is a gloomy word.”
Frost works in many other meters and forms than blank verse, even though he