The Cambridge Introduction to Robert Frost
Page 15
“Come, John,” he said, “you want to see the wheel pit?”
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Frost was depicting a brutal machinery of racial extermination while strip-
ping the whole process of any rationalizations that could make it palatable.
In light of the Miller showing John the “wheel pit,” mention of the “meal
sack” is as horrible a metaphor of the grinding waste of life and the separation of fruit and chaff as anything in Frost, including “the cider apple heap” of
“After Apple-Picking.”
Labor and beauty
Frost gives us a memorable dialogue of pastoral tension about the relationship of labor, contemplation, beauty, and equality, as well as one of his most memorable characters, Baptiste, in “The Ax-Helve.” Critics often take the poem as an ars poetica because of comments Frost made in an interview and in prose about the pleasure he takes in the crooked straightness of things. In an interview in 1916, a year before publication of the poem, Frost discussed as a metaphor for true art the beauty and power of the way Canadian woodchoppers made their
ax-handles, following the native grain of the wood:
You know the Canadian woodchoppers whittle their ax-handles,
following the curve of the grain, and they’re strong and beautiful. Art
should follow lines in nature, like the grain of an ax-handle. False art
puts curves on things that haven’t any curves.
( I, 19)
The poem itself presents a much more complex portrait of the woodchopper
Baptiste and the implications of functional art well-made according to nature.
We need to consider the narrator’s attitude toward Baptiste and the relationship between him and Baptiste, who is French Canadian. The poem explores as
much about human anxieties, about equality, race, and prowess, as it does
about aesthetics. The narrator has been caught with a faulty machine ax but
he feels both anxious about and superior to Baptiste, who seems motivated to
“get his human rating” by showing what he knows about “ax-helves”:
Baptiste knew best why I was where I was.
So long as he would leave enough unsaid,
I shouldn’t mind his being overjoyed
(If overjoyed he was) at having got me
Where I must judge if what he knew about an ax
That not everybody else knew was to count
For nothing in the measure of a neighbor.
Hard if, though cast away for life with Yankees,
A Frenchman couldn’t get his human rating!
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The narrator’s accounting of Baptiste’s motives seems at the least condescend-
ing, if not worse, and reveals some of his contempt for his French Canadian
neighbor. But he knows, or thinks he knows, that his neighbor wants him to
be recognized and treated as an equal. He, therefore, agrees to be shown how
Baptiste makes his home-made ax-helves. The narrator appears aware that he
knew very little about axes and was caught off-guard by a man of great prowess, and feels threatened by Baptiste’s abilities.
Baptiste provides, and the narrator allows, his display of home-made ax-
helves, which are most certainly displays of natural prowess and figures of
ability that can neither be taught nor, perhaps, learned:
He showed me that the lines of a good helve
Were native to the grain before the knife
Expressed them, and its curves were no false curves
Put on it from without. And there its strength lay
For the hard work. He chafed its long white body
From end to end with its rough hand shut round it.
He tried it at the eye-hole in the ax-head.
“Hahn, hahn,” he mused, “don’t need much taking down.”
Baptiste know how to make a short job long
For love of it, and yet not waste time either.
In crafting ax-helves, Baptiste displays sensuous, if not sensual pleasure, blending love and need, work and play, craft and power. And like a strong helve,
Baptiste displays qualities “native to the grain” with “no false curves.”
Indeed, the dialogue that ensues between the narrator and Baptiste, but is
only reported to us indirectly, has very much to do with “what is native to
the grain” among human beings and what truly counts for intelligence and
knowledge. For the underlying dramatic tension of the poem is really about
human equality and education:
Do you know, what we talked about was knowledge?
Baptiste on his defense about the children
He kept from school, or did his best to keep –
Whatever school and children and our doubts
Of laid-on education had to do
With the curves of his ax-helves and his having
Used these unscrupulously to bring me
To see for once the inside of his house.
Ax-helves are the tools, if not the weapons and the metaphors, for the drama of human equality. In the early part of the twentieth century, there was enormous controversy about the influx of French Canadians into New England and their
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refusal to assimilate into American schools and speak English. French Canadi-
ans had protested violently in Canada about being forced to speak English in
schools. Questions were developing about the isolation and independence of
French Canadian immigrant communities in New England at the turn of the
twentieth century. An article in The New York Times in 1901 stated “A constant increase of its French Canadian population is becoming a matter of vital interest in New England. It is yet uncertain whether it should be regarded as a menace
or promise of good for the future.” The author added, “This tendency [of the
French Canadians] to confine themselves to the society of their own country-
men very much retards the Americanization of the French. Neither business,
convenience, nor pleasure urges the emigrant to the difficult task of learning the English language and he is usually content to leave that to his children.”13
Surely Baptiste and the narrator recognize that the questions here are deeper
than the contemporary political controversy. The question of “false curves” on ax-helves becomes a figure for “laid-on” education in schools. What, if anything, can be taught in schools? Are we, in fact, defined by our innate abilities and nature? And by whose authority and to what knowledge must we submit
to become part of a culture?
The poem concludes with a dramatic focus on a “present” moment, as
Baptiste finishes an ax-helve. The difference in the way the two men regard
the image says much about how they regard each other and themselves. The
narrator imposes upon the helve an almost allegorical vision of Old Testament
evil. Perhaps, more insidiously, he regards the tool, or weapon, as analogous to the man who made it. Baptiste, whose very name suggests both a martyr who
was beheaded and a French Canadian figure of coura
ge – a “batiste” – sees the
helve as feminine and seductive:
But now he brushed the shavings from his knee
And stood the ax there on its horse’s hoof,
Erect, but not without its waves, as when
The snake stood up for evil in the Garden,–
Top-heavy with a heaviness his short,
Thick hand made light of, steel-blue chin drawn down
And in a little – a French touch in that.
Baptiste drew back and squinted at it, pleased:
“See how she’s cock her head!”
Baptiste’s love of the well-made helve or his anxiousness to earn his human
rating has produced an erotic creation that somehow brings men mysteriously
together. It becomes the focal point at which we become human, “stand up,”
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become “erect,” use tools, potentially as weapons as well as ways of creating
order and, as Frost would say, “braving alien entanglements.”
Baptiste takes pleasure in his workmanship. Utility and beauty, work and play
unite in his craft. Yet within the drama of the poem, the helves take on different possibilities of meaning: a tool that could at any moment become a weapon,
a metaphor about education, a figure of native intelligence, an instrument
by which to lure and to communicate. Frost’s dialogue and dramatic narra-
tives demand serious questioning of the idea of pursuit of beauty for its own
sake.
Several remarkable dramatic poems appear to put characters in severely
challenged positions in their attempts to pursue visions of beauty or aesthetic perfection. In “The Self-Seeker” Frost presents us with one of the most complex of his characters. Biographers have long noted that Frost based him on his friend Carl Burrell, whose legs were severely injured in a box factory accident. Burrell also taught and discussed with Frost many aspects of contemporary botany,
biology, and astronomy. A dialogue largely between the injured man, known
as the “Broken One,” and his friend Willis, the poem begins just before the
arrival of a lawyer who will settle insurance claims with the broken one for his injuries. He’s also going to sell his company and the surrounding land, with its beautiful flora, particularly its orchids:
“I’m going to sell my soul, or rather, feet.
Five hundred dollars for the pair, you know.”
“With you the feet have nearly been the soul;
And if you’re going to sell them to the devil,
I want to see you do it. When’s he coming?”
The pun that both the self-seeker and especially Willis make on soul and feet
point in a half-joking, half-serious way to an underlying theme in the poem:
the extent to which the demands of the material world ultimately entangle the
will and the soul. We learn that the Broken One had loved to walk for miles
pursuing many varieties of beautiful and rare wild orchids. What no doubt
Carl Burrell and Frost knew about orchids was how their beauty in actuality
was a type of machinery for procreation and survival.
When the Broken One describes his accident, he concedes to the power of
the mill’s machinery, particularly the wheel belt, which takes on the symbolic figure of the ourobouros, or the snake with its tail in its mouth, a symbol of the reconciliation of opposites and of eternity. For the Broken One, the mill’s buzzing machinery means both life and death, something Willis cannot seem
to accept:
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“They say some time was wasted on the belt –
Old streak of leather – doesn’t love me much
Because I make him spit fire at my knuckles,
The way Ben Franklin used to make the kite-string.
That must be it. Some days he won’t stay on.
That day a woman couldn’t coax him off.
He’s on his rounds with his tail in his mouth
Snatched right and left across the silver pulleys.
Everything goes the same without me there.
You can hear the small buzz saws whine, the big saw
Caterwaul to the hills around the village
As they both bite the wood. It’s all our music.
One ought to be a good villager to like it.
No doubt it has a prosperous sound,
And it’s our life.”
“Yes, when it’s not our death.”
“You make it sound as if it wasn’t so
With everything. What we live by we die by.”
Willis’s outrage at the Broken One’s selling the mill is directed most at the loss of the wild flowers in the area: “‘But your flowers, man, you’re selling out your flowers.’” The Broken One insists that he’s not selling them because unlike
some fanciers of rare orchids, they meant much more to him than money:
“Money can’t pay me for the loss of them.” He has great pride, though, in the
book he was writing about “the flora of the valley” and the “friends it might
bring me,” such as the great naturalist John Burroughs, to whom he wrote
about the discovery far north of the orchid Cyprepedium regina.
The Broken One had always been more obsessed with his orchids and the
flora of the valley than with the mill. Before the accident he had enlisted a
little girl, Anne, who may be Willis’s daughter, to go searching for orchids
on his behalf. She appears by his bed after the lawyer has arrived, having
picked some orchids for him. But this produces some agitation between Anne
and her mentor. She brought the Broken One a Ram’s Horn orchid but
when he asks her “‘Were there no others,’” she replies “‘There were four or
five. / I knew you wouldn’t let me pick them all.’” The Broken One points
out that Anne had learned her lessons about plant ecology but seems to
be more concerned that she may have picked something that was precious
to him. When he asks her “‘Where is it now, the Yellow Lady’s Slipper?’”
Anne’s response reveals her contempt for his self-seeking obsession with rare
beauty:
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“Well, wait – it’s common – it’s too common.”
“Common?
The Purple Lady’s Slipper’s commoner.”
“I didn’t bring a Purple Lady’s Slipper.
To You – to you I mean – they’re both too common.”
The lawyer gave a laugh among his papers
As if with some idea that she had scored.
The Broken One tries to justify what he has done by reminding in an ironic
comment on his own fate: “‘I’ve broken Anne of gathering bouquets. / It’s
not fair to the child. It can’t be helped though: / Pressed into service means pressed out of shape.’” The Broken One has himself broken a child of gathering orchids on a principle of service. He now wants her to serve as his legs to seek out orchids and leave them alone. She no doubt used to press flowers into a book.
His interest is in making a book
for the friends it will bring him. The machinery that broke his legs also presses people; it may be part of the machinery that
produces ecological change, mutation, and survival in orchids. Self-seeking by nature, the Broken One has uncovered a terrible principle of mutability that
makes his own pursuit of beauty nearly untenable.
The Broken One appears in every respect an impotent figure seeking to assert
control where he has none. Obsessed with orchids, he appears to have no sense
of how the world works, despite the wisdom of his utterances. Orchids, one of
the most sexually successful forms in the botanic kingdom, will persist much
better than this bipedal, whose feet are compared, ironically, to the regenerating points of starfish. He himself remains impotent (for which broken feet may be
a metaphor) and only seems capable of controlling a young girl.
“The Housekeeper” presents another tragic drama of misplaced obsession
with beauty at the expense of the demands of keeping the home and the more
pressing needs of existence. The complexity of this dramatic narrative stems, in part, not only from the strange mother of the common-law wife housekeeper,
who speaks most of it, but also from the mysterious role of the narrator. The
mother tells us and the narrator that Estelle, her daughter, has run off from John, the man for whom she was housekeeper and common-law wife. The mother’s
story appears only partly humorous but becomes much more poignant and
bitter near the end, when John appears. And his relationship to the narrator
may be more questionable than one first assumed.
The mother paints a humorous but disturbing portrait of John as an incom-
petent farmer but she appears relatively forgiving. Somehow John has provided
for her and her daughter fairly well, even though Estelle does both the house-
work and half of the outdoor work:
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I guess Estelle and I have filled the purse.
’Twas we let him have money, not he us.
John’s a bad farmer. I’m not blaming him.
Take it year in, and year out, he doesn’t make much.
We came here for a home for me, you know,
Estelle to do the housework for the board
Of both of us. But look how it turns out:
She seems to have the housework, and besides