In locating himself within the context of other moderns, Frost enjoyed calling himself a “Synecdochist.” “I prefer the synecdoche in poetry – that figure
of speech in which we use the part for the whole.” In the context of Pound
and others he said, perhaps somewhat facetiously, “I started calling myself
a Synecdochist when others called themselves Imagists or Vorticists. Always,
always a larger significance. A little thing touches a larger thing.”4 The last phrase illuminates best why Frost liked the term because it reveals his interest in observing traits and in moving from the low down and the little thing to see its connectedness to, the way it “touches,” a larger thing. This should definitely not be taken to mean that poetic figures are simply emblems or symbols of
spiritual facts, as has often been a mistake of critics too ready to associate Frost simply with dicta of Emerson’s early essay “Nature.”
Of “Mowing,” one of the most compelling poems of A Boy’s Will and one of Frost’s most beguiling sonnets, one could ask how do the facts become figures?
What thing is being said in terms of another? The central figure is the labor of the mower as well as the sound created by his scythe. That activity seems as
much a mystery for interpretation to him as it may be for the reader:
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There was never a sound beside the wood but one,
And that was my long scythe whispering to the ground.
What was it 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.
The octave of this somewhat modified Petrarchan sonnet poses the problem of
the meaning of the scythe’s sound. The instrument of his labor takes on a life of its own in the sound it makes. One might be tempted to answer too readily,
as some critics have, that the answer may be poetry itself. The scythe becomes a figure for the pen or the instrument that interacts with the world by whispering but leaving ultimate meaning ulterior and open-ended.
Such a reading would not readily be able to account for this repeated empha-
sis on the preverbal, the “whispered,” in response to the conditions of the
“heat.” There are facts here, as Frost said in comments quoted earlier, that
come from “out in,” from the drama of the will “braving alien entanglements,”
and not simply from the imagination imposing itself on the world. Whatever
the “something” is
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 orchises), and scared a bright green snake.
The narrator-mower reflects on many things that he observed and yet does
not quite state explicitly how they all touch upon each other. Frost published a couplet in In the Clearing, his last book, that could be instructive about how to consider “facts” that appear in his poems: “It takes all sorts of in and outdoor schooling / To get adapted to my kind of fooling.” Outdoor schooling,
of the kind Frost had as a farmer, would tell a reader that flowers, however
beautiful, are weeds to farmers, and the ones that grow back after each mowing are generally more persistent. Greenness usually keeps snakes camouflaged
from predators but here it does little good. What do all these facts have to
do with each other? What kinds of associations do we have with the scythe?
How does the tone seem to work in relation to the meter of some of the
lines?
The sonnet concludes with one of Frost’s stunning aphoristic utterances
followed by a beautiful dramatic coda:
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The fact is the sweetest dream that labor knows.
My long scythe whispered and left the hay to make.
The aphorism appears to posit an analogy and paradox: the fact is the sweetest dream, something uncovered, strangely, that “labor knows.” What this means
requires deeper consideration and, I don’t think, can readily be taken in reverse to mean that dreams have the status of facts. The laborer has cut the hay
in windrows and left it “to make,” a farm term that means to dry, but also
a word that forms the root meaning of poesis, poetry, “making.” In some respects, his role may be to create sound and for others to make something of its meaning.
“Mowing” can be read as a metaphor but also by analogy to other poems.
The last phrase, “and left the hay to make,” almost suggests that the mow is left to be made something of, to be completed at another time, after the whispering sound of the scythe. Despite the apparent finish of the sonnet form, Frost did not regard the poem as a final act nor the interpretation of a poem as a closed procedure. To read Frost, and probably any other poet, is to become entangled
among the poems, and to read them in light of each other. Each poem, in Frost’s view, bore a metaphoric relation to another. There was no steady progressive
way to read the poems as a narrative development. As he wrote in a short
preface “The Prerequisites”:
A poem is best read in the light of all the other poems ever written. We
read A the better to read B (we have to start somewhere; we may get very
little out of A). We read B the better to read C, C the better to read D, D
the better to go back and get something more out of A. Progress is not
the aim, but circulation. The thing is to get among the poems where they
hold each other apart in their place as the stars do.
( CP, 174)
“Mowing,” for example, can be read in light of Andrew Marvell’s “mower”
poems or Wordsworth’s “The Solitary Reaper,” and Edwin Arlington Robin-
son’s “The Sheaves.” But it can also be read in light of Frost’s own poems
including “The Tuft of Flowers,” and “The Last Mowing,” because they play
with the figure of mowing. Those poems lead to other poems that may lead
back to “Mowing.” One aspect of “Mowing” that may resonate with a number
of other Frost poems is labor, waste, and technology as well as sound. The figure of the mower could be seen as a figure of that which cuts down things which
have no particular use, a grim reaper. That may be somewhat different from
the figure of the maker of sound.
How far does one take the metaphor? How much larger a thing does it
suggest? Frost was particularly sensitive to this question. In 1935, he gave a talk
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to Amherst alumni in which he addressed the importance of poetry by pointing
out that all discourse, not only poetry, was made of metaphor:
I have wanted in late years to go further and further in making metaphor
the whole of thinking. I find someone now and then to agree with me
that all thinking, excep
t mathematical thinking, is metaphorical, or all
thinking except scientific thinking. The mathematical might be difficult
for me to bring in, but the scientific is easy enough.
Once on a time all the Greeks were busy telling each other what the All
was – or was like unto. All was three elements, air, earth, and water (we
once thought it was ninety elements; now we think it is only one). All
was substance, said another. All was change, said a third. But best and
most fruitful was Pythagoras’ comparison of the universe with number.
Number of what? Number of feet, pounds, and seconds was the answer,
and we had science and all that has followed in science. The metaphor
has held and held, breaking down only when it came to the spiritual and
psychological or the out of the way places of the physical.
( CP, 104)
Frost, on the basis of the universality of metaphor in thought, makes all forms of knowledge a subspecies of poetry. But he always recognized that metaphor had
limitations and that it did not encompass the whole of reality. “Metaphor may
not be far but it is our farthest forth” ( N, 29), he wrote in an early notebook.
Metaphors, like all constructs and all living organisms, break down:
What I am pointing out is that unless you are at home in the metaphor,
unless you have had your proper poetical education in the metaphor,
you are not safe anywhere. Because you are not at ease with figurative
values: you don’t know the metaphor in its strength and its weakness.
You don’t know how far you may expect to ride it and when it may break down with you. You are not safe in science; you are not safe in history . . .
All metaphor breaks down somewhere. That is the beauty of it. It is
touch and go with the metaphor, and until you have lived with it long
enough you don’t know when it is going. You don’t know how much
you can get out of it and when it will cease to yield. It is a very living
thing. It is as life itself.
( CP, 106–107) [emphasis mine]
Of course, Frost knew as well as anyone that his discussion of metaphor could
not, and perhaps should not, escape metaphor. His own principle of the limits
of metaphor may be suggested in some of the poetry. Consider, the metaphor of
“riding” in this passage from “Birches,” in which the boy “subdued his father’s trees / By riding them down over and over again / Until he took the stiffness out of them, / And not one but hung limp, not one was left / For him to conquer.”
While it would be too reductive to call “Birches” a poem about metaphor, it
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certainly provokes certain very profound questions about analogy, especially
in light of other comments Frost makes on the subject. The first part of the
poem envisions trees as personified, trees as people, who have succumbed to
life. The second part of the poem imagines the birches as the plaything of a
boy. The sense of analogy or metaphor has changed. The boy must also learn
how to play with these “living things,” how to “ride them.”
The way the boy learns to climb the tree demands skill and art to avoid
driving the tree to the ground, as though a figure itself for taking something too far:
He learned all there was
To learn about not launching out too soon
And so not carrying the tree away
Clear to the ground. He always kept his poise
To the top branches, climbing carefully
With the same pains you use to fill a cup
Up to the brim, and even above the brim.
Then he flung outward, feet first, with a swish,
Kicking his way down through the air to the ground.
By the poem’s conclusion, there is some suggestion in this figure of transcen-
dence, of climbing upward, of being “carried across,” which, of course, is what the very term metaphor, means. Again, the speaker resists going beyond the
world:
Earth’s the right place for love:
I don’t know where it’s likely to go better.
I’d like to go by climbing a birch tree,
And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk
Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more,
But dipped its top and set me down again.
That would be good both going and coming back.
One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.
A great deal could be said of Frost’s very suggestive use of the word “go” here, or the interplay of black and white, and the phrase “snow-white” to describe
the trunk, or the almost magical way the tree seems to act in setting the boy
down. Other smaller metaphors within the poem suggest more; he rides his
“father’s trees”; the reference to Shelley’s “Adonais” when he says “such heaps of broken glass you’d think the inner dome of Heav’n had fallen.” The modest
satisfaction in the tone of the final line and the immense suffering that seems to have inspired so much of its vision cannot be ignored. “Earth’s the right
place for love / I don’t know where it’s likely to go better,” seem spoken by
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someone who may have indeed wished at some point to find a better place.
Frost, however, allows the central figure of the poem to become a metaphor of
metaphors, that pushes us not only to contemplate the work itself but beyond
it into different realms of thought.
In a reading to students at Yale University in 1961, Frost said that poetry
“moves us to a higher plane of regard” but he was careful to emphasize that
this did not mean “a higher plane.”5 In emphasizing the role of metaphor
in education, Frost clearly recognized the tendency to move from analogy to
transcendence, from saying one thing in terms of another, to saying the spiritual in term of the material. In “Education by Poetry,” this becomes one of the most complex and vexing aspects of Frost’s thinking about metaphor:
We still ask boys in college to think, as in the nineties, but we seldom tell
them what thinking means; we seldom tell them it is just putting this
and that together; it is just saying one thing in terms of another. To tell
them is to set their feet on the first rung of a ladder the top of which
sticks through the sky.
Greatest of all attempts to say one thing in terms of another is the
philosophical attempt to say matter in terms of spirit, or spirit in terms
of matter, to make the final unity. That is the greatest attempt that ever
failed. We stop just short there.
( CP, 107)
Frost’s tossed-in analogy about the ladder cannot help but evoke the image of
one his finest lyrics, “After Apple-Picking.” Perhaps he mentioned it provoca-
tively to send readers back to the poem. The poem in both tone and form
suggests so much that it would be impossible here to consider the full range of its ulteriority. Nevertheless, it begins with the sure voice of the speaker invoking the ladder against the tree. We could, then, considering “The Prerequisites,�
�
read this earlier poem very well in light of the later poem “Birches” – the human figure ascending the swaying tree. Unlike “Birches,” the means of ascent here is a ladder, a common farm tool. It resonates with the tools in other Frost poems, scythes, grindstones, ax-helves, walls, as metaphors of technology and control at once consonant and in some discord with nature:
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.
Frost breaks the exquisite rhythms of the first sentence over five lines of varying lengths, intensifying the effect of a ladder swaying with the tree. The sixth line, a
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complete sentence unto itself, falls into pentameter and underscores the finality it states. The weight of that line suggests that a great deal more is at stake here than a day in the orchard, though Frost would be the last person to deprecate
the labor in its own literal vitality.
The imagery of the poem is, of course, suggestive – picking fruit from the tree and then the ache of the instep arch accompanied by a vision evoke Adam and
Jacob wrestling with angels. A number of images may be suggestive of biblical
passages. But we might also wonder whether that means carrying the analogy
of the poem too far into the realm of allegory. It may be in dialogue with such images but creating its own vision in its own world, one of labor, and dream,
and waste:
Essence of winter sleep is on the night,
The scent of apples: I am drowsing off.
I cannot rub the strangeness from my sight
I got from looking through a pane of glass
I skimmed this morning through the drinking trough
And held against the world of hoary grass.
It melted, and I let it fall and break.
But I was well
Upon my way to sleep before it fell,
And I could tell
What form my dreaming was about to take.
Magnified apples appear and disappear,
Stem end and blossom end,
And every fleck of russet showing clear.
My instep arch not only keeps the ache,
The Cambridge Introduction to Robert Frost Page 8