It keeps the pressure of a ladder-round.
I feel the ladder sway as the boughs bend.
And I keep hearing from the cellar bin
The rumbling sound
Of load on load of apples coming in.
For I have had too much
Of apple-picking: I am overtired
Of the great harvest I myself desired.
The reader can decide what the speaker means by “the great harvest,” and what
the visions of the magnified apples and the rumbling sound signify. It is by no means certain how far one should take the metaphors of the poem. The poem
itself dramatizes the state of someone who has been on the ladder “toward
heaven” too long, become “overtired” by the “harvest” he has “desired.” On
one, and only one, level, there is something of a story here of the limits of how
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far one can go into matter on the “two-pointed ladder” of metaphor before
recognizing that he has gone too far.
Though in “Education by Poetry” Frost spoke of metaphor as the first rung
on the ladder that leads to heaven, in the context of “After Apple-Picking,”
one can see how much more deeply complex the venture of saying matter in
terms of spirit and spirit and terms of matter can be. As the poem concludes,
we become aware of a world, numerous and other, that seems threatening and
beyond the speaker’s human grasp given both in the form of the apples and
then the woodchuck, already gone to hibernation:
There were ten thousand thousand fruit to touch,
Cherish in hand, lift down, and not let fall.
For all
That struck the earth,
No matter if not bruised or spiked with stubble,
Went surely to the cider-apple heap
As of no worth.
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.
We cannot even be sure by the end of the lyric when the dreaming begins,
since the speaker suggests that it was about to begin as the poem commences,
had already begun “this morning,” and is coming on at the end of the poem.
The temporal boundaries and the boundaries between sleep and dream subtly
elide. “Sleep” repeats as a cadence four times in the last five lines, rounding the lyric to a close.
What, then, does poetry and metaphor specifically do in negotiating the
realms of the material and non-material or spiritual worlds? How is meaning
of any kind achieved for Frost?
Frost made distinction between “materialism” and “materiality.” While he
rarely allowed himself flights from the latter, from rootedness in the drama of life and things of the earth, he would not quite allow himself to be classified as a “materialist.” He saw metaphor, and this is very much an inheritance of an
aspect of pragmatism, as an instrument of order against chaos:
But it is the height of poetry, the height of all thinking, the height of all
poetic thinking, that attempt to say matter in terms of spirit and spirit in
terms of matter. It is wrong to call anybody a materialist simply because
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he tries to say spirit in terms of matter, as if that were a sin. Materialism
is not the attempt to say all in terms of matter. The only materialist – be
he poet, teacher, scientist, politician, or statesman – is the man who gets
lost in his material without a gathering metaphor to throw it into shape
and order. He is the lost soul.
( CP, 107)
Frost sometimes expressed his conception of metaphor as an instrumental
ordering principle against chaos, as he did in “Letter to The Amherst Student.”
Notice his retreat, though, from the sublime language of terror into the twin-
kling language of pleasure in the small, well-made thing. He appears to enjoy the challenge of hugeness and confusion, probably underscored by such an adjec-tive as “utter.” He also enjoys digging at humanists and Platonists dissatisfied with art as less than so-called eternal forms:
The background is hugeness and confusion shading away from where we
stand into black and utter chaos; and against the background any small
man-made figure of order and concentration. What pleasanter than that
this should be so? Unless we are novelists or economists we don’t worry
about this confusion; we look out on it with an instrument or tackle it or
reduce it. It is partly because we are afraid it might prove too much for
us and our blend of democratic-republican-socialist-communist-
anarchist party. But it is more because we like it, we were born to it, born
used to it and have practical reasons for wanting it there. To me any
little form I assert upon it is velvet, as the saying is, and to be considered for how much more it is than nothing. If I were a Platonist I should
have to consider it, I suppose, for how much less it is than everything.
( CP, 115)
The poem itself, then, became Frost’s figure or metaphor of life and love. In
his 1939 preface “The Figure a Poem Makes,” Frost adds another important
concept to the conversation: “clarification” (related to a word that he had used in the poem that prefaced all his books, “The Pasture”: “And wait to watch the water clear I may” and that he would take as the title for his last book, In the Clearing). A poem ends “in a clarification of life . . . not necessarily a great clarification . . . but in a momentary stay against confusion”:
The figure a poem makes. 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 stand 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.
( CP, 131–132)
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Some of Frost’s poems appear to be metaphors or to focus on metaphors,
others take on more the quality of synecdoche. Taken in the context of other
poems they have an ulteriority and suggest bigger things than at first they
may seem to do. “The Rose Family,” for example, begins with a play on a line
from Gertrude Stein, “a rose is a rose is a rose,” and the realist notion from Shakespeare that “a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” But as Frost’s poem goes, matters of analogy become more complex:
The rose is a rose,
And was always a rose.
But the theory now goes
That the apple’s a rose,
&nbs
p; And the pear is, and so’s
The plum, I suppose.
The dear only knows
What will next prove a rose.
You, of course, are a rose –
But were always a rose.
Frost’s knowledge of botany and taxonomy tells him (and us) that not only
by analogy but by biological descent, the apple is a member of the rose family and so are other fruit. The tree of knowledge is a shadowy figure in the poem
growing in uncertain directions and making eternal correspondences unstable.
Against this, the poet asserts to his beloved “You, of course, are a rose – / But were always a rose.”
The problem of analogy appeared to have been troubling Frost by the 1920s.
“The Door in the Dark,” another poem in West-Running Brook, also focuses on the problem rift between the mind and the world in making analogies:
In going from room to room in the dark,
I reached out blindly to save my face,
But neglected, however lightly, to lace
My fingers and close my arms in an arc.
A slim door got in past my guard,
And hit me a blow in the head so hard
I had my native simile jarred.
So people and things don’t pair any more
With what they used to pair with before.
This highly skeptical little drama of trying to make analogies by going blindly around in the dark also resonates with the title poem, “West-Running Brook,”
in which a couple who seem to be lost first attempt to locate themselves and,
in the process, name a brook. But the naming process may be entirely circular.
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We may ask what really prompts the woman to ask the initial question “where
is north?” More important, with what real certainty does Fred answer the
question and claim the brook runs west? She then names brooks, and we get a
parenthetical comment from the narrator that “men call it” by that name today.
But is that any indication that the brook actually runs west?
“Fred, where is north?”
“North? North is there, my love.
The brook runs west.”
“West-running Brook then call it.”
(West-running Brook men call it to this day.)
“What does it think it’s doing running west
When all the other country brooks flow east
To reach the ocean? It must be the brook
Can trust itself to go by contraries
The way I can with you – and you with me –
Because we’re – we’re – I don’t know what we are.
What are we?”
The naming process sets a profound dialogue in motion about contraries; about
contraries between Fred and his love. Their correspondence with each other
may be as delicate, tentative, and shifting as language’s shifting representation of an already fluid reality. The poem begins and ends with a dialogue again
about naming, reminding each other that so much of what is real may be what
is said to be real.
Pastoral
Frost’s work plays in and out of ancient literary traditions in subtle ways. He wrote poems distinctly in the pastoral and georgic mode, and it is useful to
recognize some of these traditions at work in his poetry. His dialogue with
the tradition became but one way of creating meaning.6 Discussions of pas-
toral literature usually focus on classical origins in the Hellenistic era and the Sicilian poet Theocritus, who drew on the folk traditions of Sicilian shepherds.
Centuries later, the Roman poet Virgil developed the tradition of Theocritus
and also of Bion and wrote his Eclogues, ten beautifully crafted poems on rustic and bucolic subjects, including the competition of shepherds, the loss, and
love. There has been much detailed scholarly discussion about what consti-
tutes the essence of pastoral. One important element has been the presence
of shepherds or rustic figures. Perhaps more important has been the idea of a
locus amoenus or “beautiful place,” often an idealized pasture or garden set in
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contrast to the sophistication or corruption of the city. It should of course be understood that any such conception almost always implies an existing sense
of estrangement or loss and a gentrified person’s fascination with return to
a state of relative simplicity or, perhaps, innocence. For the Greeks, this state was known as Arcadia and governed by the god Pan. In the Judeo-Christian
tradition, representations alternate among Eden, the pasture, and versions of
purifying desert and wilderness.
The longing for a past which may have never existed and therefore is itself
part of a powerfully imagined present can be the source of great art. The tension between the remnants of the past and our imagination of them gives power
to pastoral art. One of the dramatic motifs of pastoral literature has been
described as “escape,” or the desire to escape the boundaries of the corrupt
or civilized world and enter or return to the world of innocence in the locus amoenus. However, one can regard the movement synchronically as “escape” or, perhaps, as “retreat,” the latter implying a return to the life of the country from the life of the city or one of sophistication. (One meaning of “sophistication”
is adulteration, so return to the country can be associated with purity as well as simplicity.)
Perhaps an even more troubling question evoked by pastoral art becomes
the possibility of attaining, achieving, or maintaining innocence at all. What does the natural, devoid of the corruptions of civilization, hold? It became a more intense hope of some thinkers after Rousseau that man could be liber-ated from the bonds and corruptions of civilization and delivered back to the
purity of the natural. To what extent, however, can nature be said to be either pure or liberating? Wordsworth came to believe, following Marvell’s transcendent vision of a “green thought in a green shade” of “The Garden,” in a deep
consonance between the mind of man and the natural world:
Speaking of nothing more than what we are –
How exquisitely the individual Mind
(And the progressive powers perhaps no less
Of the whole species) to the external world
Is fitted; and how exquisitely too –
Theme this little heard of among men –
The external world is fitted to the mind;
And the creation (by no lower name
Can it be called) which they with blended might
Accomplish.
Frost lived in and confronted the complexities of the post-Darwinian world.
Man’s “mind” had been created from the rest of nature and, as part of it, may
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possess an uncertain ability in deciphering the world. The delicate, reciprocal relationship between mind and nature in Frost becomes beautifully dramatized
in “Tree at My Window.” The tree comes to the speaker’s attention from outside but also holds the possibi
lity of becoming a “window tree,” a portal to seeing.
Yet not “all” its “tongues talking aloud / Could be profound.” Yet both the
mind’s inner world of dreams and the tree’s outer world obey conditions of
existence, “weather”:
That day she put our heads together,
Fate had her imagination about her,
Your head so much concerned with outer,
Mine with inner, weather.
What can we know of nature and of the country? Is nature itself inherently
innocent or a blank upon which we project our wishes and fantasies? To what
extent is nature a creation of civilization, an externalization of man, depen-
dent upon human projections and the inscription of human language? Frost
appeared to explore such problems in many of his poems, both narratives and
lyrics.
From the outset, Frost’s poetry plays with the conventions and questions of
pastoral in profound and interesting ways. “Into My Own” and “Ghost House,”
the first two poems of A Boy’s Will, raise the pastoral themes of retreat and locus amoenus but in peculiar ways that add to the tradition. In “Into My Own,” the speaker expresses only his wish to “steal away, / Fearless of ever finding open land, / Or highway where the slow wheel pours the sand.” The wilderness of
the forest fascinates him but he also appears as much interested in threatening or at least wondering whether those who love him would seek him. And he
concludes by suggesting if not a return, an experience that would leave him
unchanged:
I do not see why I should e’er turn back,
Or those should not set forth upon my track
To overtake me, who should miss me here
And long to know if still I held them dear.
They would not find me changed from him they knew –
Only more sure of all I thought was true.
“Ghost House,” the poem that follows “Into My Own,” meditates upon a
landscape of extinction. It is a keynote poem in the book and for Frost’s work generally because what it describes so haunts his work. The speaker has situated himself in the cellar of a vanished house: it and the farm of which it was once a part are now part of a wilderness that has grown back. He describes the fences
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in the first line of the second stanza as “ruined” but characterizes the now
overgrown footpath as “healed”:
The Cambridge Introduction to Robert Frost Page 9