The Cambridge Introduction to Robert Frost

by ROBERT FAGGEN

  world of New England and to consider the reality of that world. The turn-of-

  the-twentieth-century New England in which Frost wrote was hardly an idyllic

  place. Beautiful though it may have been then and now, it was hardly an idyllic place for farmers, particularly independent farmers. The independent, hillside farms that characterized much of Vermont in the popular imagination declined

  to only six percent of the total state farms by 1930. In the first decades of the new century, one could commonly see abandoned farms or run-down independent

  farms near run-down communities in contrast to the growing number of farms

  that had given themselves over to larger production of meat, fruit, and vegetable agricultural operations. Scientific management of agriculture as well as such

  movements as Theodore Roosevelt’s Commission on Country Life, convened

  in 1908, attempted to restore a healthful agricultural world to a now fading and increasingly impoverished backwater New England. Further, a strong tourist

  industry developed that sold a nostalgic world “North of Boston,” and many

  living in New Hampshire and Vermont were encouraged to board people and

  keep up appearances for those visiting with high expectations. Frost living in the midst of these changes witnessed the dissonance between the way New England

  was imagined by outsiders and the way it was in its deepest recesses, filled with all manner of tensions – economic, racial, domestic. It is important to keep

  this context in mind when reading “A Servant to Servants,” “The Mountain,”

  “The Self-Seeker,” “A Hundred Collars,” “Blueberries,” “The Ax-Helve,” or

  “The Generations of Men,” where we see real rural isolation, pain, suffering,

  racial tension, and madness.

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  By 1930, Frost definitely regretted the tendency toward industrialization in

  farming and the loss of independent farms:

  We are now at a moment when we are getting too far out into the

  social-industrial and are at the point of drawing back – drawing back in

  to renew ourselves. The country life we are going back to I can’t describe

  in advance, but I am pretty sure it will not be the country life we came

  out of years ago. Farming, what survives of it, has demeaned itself in an

  attempt to imitate industrialism. It has lost its self-respect. It has wished

  itself other than what it is.

  ( I, 76)

  Frost’s pointed attack on this renewal was the ultimate lack of integrity it created within the culture. Echoing the puritanical language of Nathaniel Hawthorne,

  he stated “That is the only unpardonable sin: to wish you are something you

  are not, something other people are. It is so in the arts and in everything else”

  ( I, 76). The only psychological solution for Frost appeared to be a severe retreat.

  “I think a person has to be withdrawn into himself to gather inspiration so that he is somebody when he comes out again among folks – when he ‘comes to

  market’ with himself. He learns that he’s got to be almost wastefully alone”

  ( I, 76). The theme “waste” recurs frequently in Frost, and one should consider carefully what he means by being “wastefully alone.” Frost expresses here a

  complex version of a traditional pastoral topos of retreat. “The farm is a base of operations – a stronghold. You can withdraw into yourself there” ( I, 76).

  But Frost had a sense of limits to retreating into that stronghold. “If a man

  is wastefully alone, he should be better company when he comes out . . . The

  real thing that you do is a lonely thing. And remember the paradox that you

  become more social in order that you may become more of an individual”

  ( I, 78).

  Frost’s published poems appear to be framed by poems embodying the

  pastoral mythology of retreat. His signature poem “The Pasture,” with its

  refrain, “I shan’t be long,” prefaced his collected and complete poems. The

  phrase in that poem “and wait to watch the water clear I may” became the

  keynote for his final volume, In the Clearing (1962), as well as for an important concept in Frost’s notion of what a poem does in providing “a clarification of life but not a great clarification such as sects and cults are founded on.” The concluding poem of In the Clearing also provides a powerful image of retreat and being “wastefully alone”:

  In winter in the woods alone

  Against the trees I go.

  I mark a maple for my own

  And lay the maple low.

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  . . .

  I see for Nature no defeat

  In one tree’s overthrow

  Or for myself in my retreat

  For yet another blow.

  One might ask whether “nature” and “defeat” includes both the tree’s “over-

  throw” (battle-rich metaphors) and the speaker’s retreat from cutting down

  the maple (one kind of blow) as well as from one of life’s blows that sends him returning to the woods for yet another maple?

  Is this cutting down the maple an act of labor or one of pleasure? The

  question seems beside the point in this poem or perhaps the answer is obvious –

  it is both. In “Two Tramps in Mud Time,” one of Frost’s most famous and

  controversial poems about the relationship of labor and leisure, the narrator

  also contemplates the meaning of striking blows for pleasure with his axe. It

  is one of a number of poems that Frost wrote in the 1930s, including “Build

  Soil: A Political Pastoral,” that drew strong criticism for their apparent stance against the New Deal.

  Much of the criticism directed against Frost came from his lack of political

  activism and his obvious irritation with much of the New Deal. For those whose sympathies became directed toward the plight of the poor and, from the poor,

  toward socialism, Frost appeared in his poetry and in his other statements to

  be indifferent, if not cruel. Frost certainly was not a political activist, and his attitude toward the New Deal seemed to stem from a variety of attitudes about

  human history and human nature. First, he thought it arrogant to assume that

  any age was the worst in human history, something he articulated strongly in

  the “Letter to The Amherst Student ” (1935). Second, he refused to regard the poor as an oppressed group morally superior to the rich. His temperament was

  to distrust, if not hate, all classes and to be contemptuous of all forms of power taken to extremes:

  The New Deal has so dealt as to demonstrate incontrovertably that the

  rich are all bad. I have lived with the poor and know that they are greedy

  and dishonest – in a word bad. Take my word for it . . . So much for the

  upper and the lower end. Both the upper and lower class are bad. There

  is left the middle class to consider. But the middle class is the

  bourgeoisie, our favorite black beast, that has been tried and found out

  by all the literature of the last fifty years. Communists and all the

  intelligentsia are agreed that the middle class is bad. Both ends then and

  the middle – they are all bad. We are arrived at a conclusio
n that means

  nothing. When all is bad it makes no difference whether it is called good

  or bad. Be it all called good and lets start over.

  ( N, 47)

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  Frost could not see any merit to the notion of dialectical materialism or of

  progress, given his assumption of the inherent badness of all classes, including the oppressed. In another notebook entry he wrote, “Don’t talk to me about

  getting rid of poverty. All principles are bad except as they are checked in about mid career by contrary principles” ( N, 35). This kind of thinking produced such editorial poems in A Witness Tree as “An Equalizer” and “A Semi-Revolution.”

  Frost’s objection to the attempts of cosmic justice were that they might, of

  course, create injustice: “Handicapping needed if the human race is to be a

  race of justice and mercy. Mercy to the weak is handicapping the strong” ( N, 485). In a 1937 address, Poverty and Poetry, Frost asked the question “What is the relationship between poverty and poetry?” He used the Bible, specifically

  the New Testament, for an answer. Frost always regarded the New Testament

  as a book focused on both mercy and the poor. But in this instance, he referred to something Jesus says in Matthew and elsewhere, “The poor you will always

  have with you but you will not always have me,” as an argument against too

  much focus on the poor and poverty in poetry:

  But what is the relation of poverty and poetry? I know once in

  self-defense I did come near to swearing. It says in the Bible, you think –

  I don’t – it says in the Bible that you always have the poor with you. That

  isn’t what it says. It says, “For Christ’s sake, forget the poor some of the

  time.” There are many beautiful things in the world besides poverty. I

  have praised poverty and spoken of its beauty and its use for the arts, but

  there are other things.

  ( CPPP, 761)

  The poems of A Further Range, particularly “Two Tramps in Mud Time,” “A Lone Striker,” and “A Roadside Stand,” and “Provide, Provide,” appear to

  address most directly the ethos of the New Deal but some of them have been

  read with little subtlety and often with too much focus on political context. The speaker of “Two Tramps in Mud Time” has been all-too readily identified with

  Frost because of the strength of his rhetoric and the memorable summation

  uniting vocation and avocation by which he hopes to live:

  But yield who will to their separation,

  My object in living is to unite

  My avocation and my vocation

  As my two eyes make one in sight.

  Only where love and need are one,

  And the work is play for mortal stakes,

  Is the deed ever really done

  For Heaven and the future’s sakes.

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  The problem of uniting work and play, labor and otium, has always been one of the great challenges of pastoral thought and human life. What readers and critics seemed to find objectionable is the speaker’s attitude toward the two tramps

  and their need to work for pay. The entire poem, however, is about balance,

  between seasons and between men and between “love” and “need.” He admits

  that theirs “was the better right.” The fact that he has to admit this may trouble some, especially in an era when so many suffered from unemployment. Frost

  does not give us an uncomplicated speaker untroubled by irony. The speaker

  somewhat condescendingly presumes to know what the two tramps are all

  about but assumes that they don’t know his motives. Does he know himself

  that well? We find him splitting wood as a kind of ethical activity of “self-

  control” but the purpose remains ambiguous:

  Good blocks of oak it was I split,

  As large around as the chopping block;

  And every piece I squarely hit

  Fell splinterless as cloven rock.

  The blows that a life of self-control

  Spares to strike for the common good

  That day, giving a loose to my soul,

  I spent on the unimportant wood.

  We might ask what does the speaker really think is best for “the common good” –

  striking blows or sparing to strike them? Why? Is it because all human action

  is ultimately suspect, possibly violent? His chopping the wood as he does may

  be a way of displacing such violence. At this moment, “mud time,” he tells us

  “Be glad of water, but don’t forget / The lurking frost in the earth beneath /

  That will steal forth after the sun is set / And show on the water its crystal teeth.”

  In “A Roadside Stand,” a tonally complex poem, the problem of poverty in

  the New Deal appears from the side of the country poor and an observer. The

  “roadside stand” is both a fruit and vegetable stand ignored by city drivers and a figure of a last “stand” against absolute poverty doomed to failure. An extremely dark stanza describes the beneficent plans to bring these impoverished poor

  into the city according to a welfare plan, as merely “calculated to soothe

  them out of their wits,” presumably by destroying their impetus to work and

  think:

  It is in the news that all these pitiful kin

  Are to be bought out and mercifully gathered in

  To live in villages next to the theater and store

  Where they won’t have to think for themselves any more;

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  While greedy good-doers, beneficent beasts of prey,

  Swarm over their lives enforcing benefits

  That are calculated to soothe them out of their wits,

  And by teaching them how to sleep the sleep all day,

  Destroy their sleeping at night the ancient way.

  As cruel as the narrator sounds, he concludes the poem with a cruel cancel-

  lation of both the country-folk’s pain and then his own cruelty, which he has

  recognized as nearly insane:

  I can’t help owning the great relief it would be

  To put these people at one stroke out of their pain.

  And then next day as I come back into the sane,

  I wonder how I should like you to come to me

  And offer to put me gently out of my pain.

  Frost had little sympathy for, and deep suspicions of, the enforced ideals of the New Deal. But he also thought about the problem of human suffering from

  a broad historical perspective and with a strong sense of the limitations and

  irony of his own perspective.

  The poignancy of “A Roadside Stand” or “Two Tramps in Mud Time” fore-

  grounds an important aspect of the pastoral in Frost that can be illuminated by William Empson’s definition of the mode: “the process of putting the complex

  into the simple.”8 Empson’s view of the pastoral had little to do with landscape and more to do with social amelioration and politics, observing that “the essential trick of the old pastoral, which was felt to imply a bea
utiful relationship between rich and poor, was to make simple people express strong feelings (felt as the most universal subject, something fundamentally true about everybody)

  in learned and fashionable language.” By this analysis, Frost would hardly be

  “old pastoral.” The characters of Frost’s narratives are rarely simple. One could hardly call their language learned or fashionable but it often rises to extraordinary eloquence. It may be that we expect them to be simple or straightforward.

  Frost himself had a genius for fooling people in his work with the appearance

  of both approachability and simplicity. Whether it be the speaker of “Mending

  Wall,” the farmer of “The Mountain,” Lafe of “A Hundred Collars,” Baptiste

  of “The Ax-Helve,” or the old woman of “The Witch of Coos,” Frost’s “rus-

  tics” beguile and often baffle their interlocutors. They rise to sharp levels of eloquence and insight which often makes fools of their citified interlocutors.

  But simple they are not. Frost appears to enjoy the pleasure of how those often taken not to mean much can subvert or undermine the unsuspecting and the

  witless, no matter what their level of education. The expectation of a beautiful relationship that the speaker hopes for in “The Tuft of Flowers” may be found

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  almost nowhere else in Frost. Almost all other relationships suffer severely

  from tentativeness, volatility, potential violence, and threat. The possibility of retreat and return to simplicity, consonance with a humanly comprehensible

  nature, consonance with a fellow humanity, and peace within and without

  the home all give way in Frost to the subversion and instability of hierarchy, and perpetual loss and struggle to restore order, and an implacable sense of

  human loneliness in a universe that resists our attempts to project our ideals upon it.

  “Men work together”

  Though A Boy’s Will, Frost’s first book, consisted primarily of short lyrics, North of Boston, his second, developed the complexities of the pastoral in narrative poems of remarkable variety, tonal range, dramatic compression,

  and psychological depth. As he composed North of Boston, Frost revealed to F. S. Flint his concern with generic variety within the pastoral mode:

  You may infer from a list of my subjects how I have tried to get variety in