made a considerable contribution to that form. The excellence of his principle works stunningly in the rhymed tetrameters of “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy
Evening.” The iambic tetrameter lines are very clearly in place. But one would never read the lines strictly according to the meter – you simply can’t do it
without sounding spooky. In the case of the third stanza, Frost has the words
break across the feet as if to emphasize the downward movement of snow and
wind:
The only other sound’s the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.
Frost also created more complex variations in “loose iambic” meter in such
poems, for example, as “The Draft Horse,” a poem predominantly iambic but
with interesting anapestic variations. The anapestic meter combined with the
series of prepositional phrases creates a tension between the forward movement of the horse and buggy and their awkwardness and frailty:
With a lantern that wouldn’t burn
In too frail a buggy we drove
Behind too heavy a horse
Through a pitch-dark limitless grove.
P1: FYX/FGC
P2: FXS
9780521854115c03.xml
9780521854115
CUUK235-Faggen
July 21, 2008
9:44
34
Works
Frost brings anapestic meter and rhymed couplets into a different kind of play in the narrative eclogue “Blueberries.” The lightness of anapestic rhythm in this case draws us into the playful pasture scene, even though the tensions between the two narrators and the Lorens may grow less than amusing, as we shall see
later.
This is not to say that Frost does not take great risk with meters, and often
with great success. “After Apple-Picking” may be one of his greatest lyric poems, and has predominantly iambic pentameter lines. It begins, however, with an
irregular, hypermetric line, the beginning of a sentence enjambed over four
lines. He gives the feeling of uncertainty, stress, exhaustion, and swaying. When the meter settles into iambic pentameter in the fifth line, it gives that line enormous weight, a great finality enforced by the rhyming couplet:
My long two-pointed ladder’s sticking through a tree
Toward heaven still,
And there’s a barrel that I didn’t fill
Beside it, and there may be two or three
Apples I didn’t pick upon some bough.
But I am done with apple-picking now.
However iambic the first line may be, Frost knows that colloquial speech will
dictate that we read “sticking through a tree” as a single phrase, rushing into the next line “Toward heaven still.” Nevertheless, the iambic beats are still
holding the poem in check and sway and eventually giving it its underlying
vocal tension. The poem unfolds with remarkable variations in line lengths,
irregular rhymes but hovering around iambic pentameter in order to give the
poem its formal tension. Most of the following lines are pentameter but each
remarkably different in rhythm:
For I have had too much
Of apple-picking: I am overtired
Of the great harvest I myself desired.
There were ten thousand thousand fruit to touch,
Cherish in hand, lift down, and not let fall.
Frost creates a similar effect in “The Most of It,” in which three successive lines of iambic pentameter are as different rhythmically as could be:
He would cry out on life, that what it wants
Is not its own love back in copy speech
But counter-love, original response.
P1: FYX/FGC
P2: FXS
9780521854115c03.xml
9780521854115
CUUK235-Faggen
July 21, 2008
9:44
Frost’s poetics
35
The conceptually paradoxical phrases in the third of the three lines, and the
caesura separating them, contribute to the difference.
His handling of the one-sentence “Dust of Snow,” a poem predominantly in
iambic dimeter, shows skillful loosening of the meter with interesting effects.
The first stanza is almost entirely iambic but the possibility holds that “Shook down” could be a trochaic inversion, rather than a difference in rhythmic stress emphasis. The first stanza ends with the inclusion of an anapest:
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
Of a day I had rued.
The anapests in the first and final lines of the second stanza also add subtle variations to the predictable iambic rhythm. Though “rued” is stressed, its
finality has a kind of bitterness, and the lightness of the anapests may or may not work against the sense of what is evoked by the phrase “Of a day I had
rued.”
Frost also worked in a great variety of forms. He wrote blank-verse narratives that ranged from the dramatic monologue (“A Servant to Servants” and “The
Pauper Witch of Grafton”) to dialogues with third-person narrators (“Home
Burial” or “The Death of the Hired Man”) or dramatic narratives in which
the narrator may be implicated in the drama, such as “The Housekeeper” or
“The Mountain.” Among his lyrics, Frost could work deftly in short, three-
beat lines such as “Kitty-Hawk” or the hendecasyllables of “For Once, Then,
Something.”
Perhaps no form so greatly exhibited the variety of his skill as the seemingly limiting one of the sonnet.2 The sonnet usually takes the form of fourteen
lines of rhymed iambic pentameter. If the poem breaks into an octave (eight
lines) followed by a sestet, rhyming abba abba cde cde, we have a Petrarchan
sonnet. If fourteen lines, with three quatrains and a couplet, rhyming abab
cdcd efef gg, then the poem would be a Shakespearean sonnet. Of course, Frost
produced several dozen poems that appear to be sonnets and have elements
of both Petrarchan and Shakespearean sonnet forms. As one might expect, he
frustrates strict taxonomists. “Mowing,” for example, might fit both categories.
“The Oven Bird” has a particularly strange rhyme scheme (aa bcb dcd ee fgfg),
but Frost’s subtle variation may well underscore that the bird knows “in singing
P1: FYX/FGC
P2: FXS
9780521854115c03.xml
9780521854115
CUUK235-Faggen
July 21, 2008
9:44
36
Works
not to sing.” “Hyla Brook,” the preceding poem, appears to be a sonnet except
that it has fifteen rather than fourteen lines, and the fifteenth line seems to leap the boundaries of the observable when it asserts “We love the things we love
for what they are.” One of Frost’s most stunning achievements in the sonnet
form may be “Acquainted with the Night,” in part because the rhyme scheme is
terza rima, difficult in English. The separation of the tercets distracts the reader from seeing immediately that the poem is a sonnet, a song of wandering that
recalls Dante but seems devoid of love and goal.
Poetry and metaphor
Though in his letters he was forceful about his formal interests, Frost rarely discussed his thematic interests in any explicit way. At best, he talked around them. In his lectures, essays, and prefaces of the 1920s and 1930s, Frost discussed his interest in metaphor and figurative language. In these discussions, he comes
closest to accounting for the way a poem comes into being and for
the relationship between the form and themes of his poems. In probing the
nature of metaphor, Frost made highly provocative and insightful claims about
the nature of figurative language and, ultimately, about poetry itself.
Frost made a strong and unapologetic case for the importance of metaphor in
poetry. One of his most concise statements appeared in the essay “The Constant Symbol,” published in The Atlantic in 1946:
. . . there are many other things I have found myself saying about poetry,
but the chiefest of these is that it is metaphor, saying one thing and
meaning another, saying one thing in terms of another, the pleasure of
ulteriority. Poetry is simply made of metaphor. So also is philosophy –
and science, too, for that matter, if it will take the soft impeachment
from a friend. Every poem is a new metaphor inside or it is nothing.
And there is a sense in which all poems are the same old metaphor
always.
( CP, 147)
Frost gives summary here to many things that he had been saying for a number
of years. In defining metaphor in a clear and straightforward way, “saying one thing in terms of another,” Frost also allows in qualification the possibility of irony, “saying one thing and meaning another.” This recalls his discussion of
the potential irony created in the tension between the semantic meaning of a
sentence and the tone with which it might be spoken. The main point thrust is
that the poem provides “the pleasure of ulteriority,” and in reading the poem it is the work of the reader to know just how ulterior things are. What, precisely, is being said in terms of something else? Can that something be stated at all in
P1: FYX/FGC
P2: FXS
9780521854115c03.xml
9780521854115
CUUK235-Faggen
July 21, 2008
9:44
Frost’s poetics
37
other terms? Frost once said, “I like to say, guardedly, that I could define poetry this way: It is that which is lost out of both prose and verse in translation”
( CPPP, 856).
Frost also significantly aligns poetry with other fields of knowledge – phi-
losophy and science – on the basis of their common reliance upon metaphor.
This represents the summation of a discussion that Frost himself had been
having, but it had been part of a debate within western culture for hundreds
of years ever since Plato in Book V of The Republic declared poets to be mere imitators of eternal forms. When Frost gave his remarkable talk “Education
by Poetry,” which is primarily education by metaphor, he was writing his own
twentieth-century apology for poetry.
Perhaps most intriguing, Frost asserts that every poem “is a new metaphor
inside” and then appears, perhaps, to contradict this by saying that “all poems are the same old metaphor always.” What metaphor would that be? “The
Constant Symbol” provides something of an answer, a mythos that merits
consideration at least in the context of Frost’s poems. What he says is both
about the making of poems and about living:
Every single poem written regular is a symbol small or great of the way
the will has to pitch into commitments deep and deeper to a rounded
conclusion and then be judged for whether any original intention it had
has been strongly spent or weakly lost; be it in art, politics, school,
church, business, love or marriage – in a piece of work or in a career.
Strongly spent is synonymous with kept.
( CP, 147)
Much can, and has been, said about the economic metaphors and implications
of the concluding aphorism. It dovetails with his sense of the necessity of waste and the necessity of taking great risk. The sense of ethical commitment, the
way one has acted, has more to do with the worthiness and integrity of the
enterprise than its outcome. In some way, all enterprises in Frost’s world can be viewed as failures: “Failure is failure but success is failure,” Paul says in A Masque of Mercy, probably giving voice to Frost’s sense of the psychology of religion. Frost uses shifts from “metaphor” in the previous paragraph to
“symbol” here but the essential subject matter remains the same: a story of the will taking risks. A paragraph later he writes, “Every poem is an epitome of the great predicament; a figure of the will braving alien entanglements” ( CP, 148).
In this instance, “epitome” serves Frost’s purposes instead of “metaphor” or
“symbol.”
In what ways does this mythos serve to illuminate the nearly five decades of
work that Frost had by then written? What does it say about Frost’s concept of metaphor? In what ways is such a statement also conditioned by his dialogue
P1: FYX/FGC
P2: FXS
9780521854115c03.xml
9780521854115
CUUK235-Faggen
July 21, 2008
9:44
38
Works
with the cultural prestige of philosophy and, especially, science? Looking at a few poems from various moments in Frost’s life may illuminate some of the
pleasures in ulteriority that developed into the larger sense of predicament he expressed in “The Constant Symbol.”
Frost’s thinking about metaphor and his approach to the subject matter of
his poetry reaches back to the debate between Plato and his disciple Aristotle over the nature of eternal forms and their realization on earth. Whereas Plato saw everything on earth, and certainly all artists’ representations, as merely imperfect copies of eternal types in heaven, Aristotle saw the study of forms
in nature as emanations in a continuum from the eternal. Frost saw this as
the beginning not only of science but related to Aristotle’s appreciation of
mimesis, the art of representation and of form in his treatise the Poetics. Perhaps more significant is the connection Frost makes between this form of observing
“traits” in nature, the romantic poetry of Wordsworth, and the development
of modern science, something that historians of modern science such as Alfred
North Whitehead also made in his Science in the Modern World. The tendency, as Frost describes it, is a movement into matter, and then up, “down up,” “out in”:
Ever since I began to see the relation of Aristotle to Plato I have had a
growing suspicion that it is even worse than Aristotle when he we must
reject not only the a priori but equally the a posteriori: what comes up is
as important as what comes down. Plato would have it that nothing
down here below but is an imperfect copy of the ideal idea above.
Aristotle broke that when he turned to study nature with the same
respect reverence piety that he used in thinking the thoughts Plato
believed nature derived from. One day in my reading it was revealed to
me that what Wordsworth meant by “days bound each to each by
natural piety”3 was by nature piety. In a loose way he had been taken (by
me perhaps by nobody else) as meaning a religious piety that was
natural for all of us to feel. He was talking an Aristotelian philosophy
contrary to the Platonic. Maybe Rousseau set him in the right way. But
Aristotle should have set us all long ago. I have a growing suspicion that
might line me up in disloyalty to the humanists that nothing comes
down from above but what has so long since come up from below that
we have forgotten its origin
. All is observation of nature (human nature
included) consciously or unconsciously made by our eyes and minds
developed from the ground up. We notice traits of nature – thats all we
do. The so called nature poet so tiresome to some toils not neither does
he spin like a natural scientist but it is to the natural scientist he is
nearest of kin in his fresh noticing of the details that prove he has “been
there” as the expression is (low down). Little to choose he finds
P1: FYX/FGC
P2: FXS
9780521854115c03.xml
9780521854115
CUUK235-Faggen
July 21, 2008
9:44
Frost’s poetics
39
background nature (rocks and trees and wild animals) and foreground
nature the portrait of a man neither laughing nor weeping but with
features qualified by having laughed and wept: The proud humanists
would be right if they said they held themselves above the part of nature
not yet human. Or nearer right, when they put on airs of disdain for the
praise of out doors that without exclamation of wonderful and beautiful
pays tribute by reporting details not previously mentioned. Thats nature
poetry and nature science. You have to be careful with the word natural –
with all words in fact. You have to play the words close to the realities.
And the realities are from below upward and from outside inward. There
is such a reservoir such a stock pile accumulated above to do our
thinking from that it gives the illusion of always having been up there of
itself absolutely. My growing suspicion is that practically all is from
down up and from out in. The great difference to discriminate between
is the old and seasoned harvest or vintage and the new harvest or vintage
and the new harvest green from the garden before it has time to wilt
spoil and ferment into inspiration that has no flavor of its derivation.
( N, 493–495)
The “low down” facts of nature, then, whatever great importance they may
have to Frost as the basis of metaphor, are the things from which one derives
ulteriority. This would not be the only time that Frost expressed contempt
for proud humanists who felt themselves above the complexities of nature,
observation, and science.
The Cambridge Introduction to Robert Frost Page 7