Half of the outdoor work, though as for that,
He’d say she does it more because she likes it.
You see our pretty things are all outdoors.
Our hens and cows and pigs are always better
Than folks like us have any business with.
Farmers around twice as well off as we
Haven’t as good.
What turns out to be particularly good about John may also be particularly
odd about him or at least different: as a hen farmer, he has a fascination with breeding beautiful birds for show. Frost, for a number of years a hen-man
himself, was thoroughly familiar with hen-breeders and wrote stories about
them for poultry magazines. But one senses that he was also aware of the
peculiarity of people obsessed with prize-winning chickens, just as he must
have been amused with the kind of self-obsession of the “Broken One” and
his fascination with rare orchids. The way the mother describes John, there’s
something almost effeminate in his attention to the birds, even though Estelle shares the interest:
“One thing you can’t help liking about John,
He’s fond of nice things – too fond, some would say.
But Estelle don’t complain: she’s like him there.
She wants our hens to be the best there are.
You never saw this room before a show,
Full of lank, shivery, half-drowned birds
In separate coops, having their plumage done.
The smell of the wet feathers in the heat!
You spoke of John’s not being safe to stay with.
You don’t know what a gentle lot we are:
We wouldn’t hurt a hen! You ought to see us
Moving a flock of hens from place to place.
We’re not allowed to take them upside down,
All we can hold together by the legs.
Two at a time’s the rule, one on each arm,
No matter how far and how many times
We have to go.”
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“You mean that’s John’s idea.”
“And we live up to it; or I don’t know
What childishness he wouldn’t give way to.
He manages to keep the upper hand
On his own farm. He’s boss. But as to hens:
We fence our flowers in and the hens range.
Nothing’s too good for them.”
With his one interjection, the neighbor-narrator has enabled the mother to
reveal that John drives both her and Estelle somewhat crazy over the hens,
which are treated with the most precious care. Just a bit later, we learn that John paid fifty dollars (quite a sum for the time) for a specially bred cock. The mother cannot or, perhaps, will not answer the neighbor’s question when he
asks about Estelle:
“What’s the real trouble? What will satisfy her?”
“It’s as I say: she’s turned from him, that’s all.”
The fascination with beauty in hens may have nothing to do with domestic
science or what it takes to keep a house or satisfy sexually his common-law
wife. The first decades of the twentieth century saw the rise of one of the
most pernicious developments of nineteenth-century biology: eugenics. Some,
including Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton, thought that the principle of natural selection, based on an analogy of animal breeding, could be applied back to
human society. Through principles of artificial breeding, one could, it was
thought, produce an improved race. In “A Blue Ribbon at Amesbury,” Frost
satirizes both the ambitions of hen breeders and, by analogy, the insanity of
eugenics. Both envision a kind of perfection and utopia, failing to take account of human and creaturely limitation:
Such a fine pullet ought to go
All coiffured to a winter show,
And be exhibited, and win.
The answer is this one has been –
And come with all her honors home.
Her golden leg, her coral comb,
Her fluff of plumage, white as chalk,
Her style, were all the fancy’s talk.
Having been successful at the show, the bird must return to being ordinary
or “common” with the rest of the flock, something that may make her a bit
uncomfortable:
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Here common with the flock again,
At home in her abiding pen,
She lingers feeding at the trough,
The last to let night drive her off.
Her breeder exhibits even more agitation, if not madness, since he desires
something beyond the dusty life of caring for chickens in the pen. That breeds in him eugenic fantasies and “half a mind” to start a race:
The one who gave her ankle-band,
Her keeper, empty pail in hand,
He lingers too, averse to slight
His chores for all the wintry night . . .
He meditates the breeder’s art.
He has half a mind to start,
With her for Mother Eve, a race
That shall all living things displace.
Frost’s poultry stories reveal the successes and failures of breeding both for the beauty of the bird and also for egg productivity. In the second case, there were often grotesque catastrophes.
John’s hen fascination made him a failure as a housekeeper. He drove his
own housekeeper and common-law wife away. Though as the poem unfolds,
the mother reveals that she too may well have been a pernicious presence in
the relationship. She could barely move within the house and, in truth, did
not seem to get along well with John at all. The mother appears to be the true housekeeper, controlling both John and her daughter. The final mystery of the
poem remains unsettled. The mother reveals to the neighbor that Estelle did
not just run off but married someone else. But there is some uncertainty about what the neighbor already does or does not know about Estelle, as well as the
mother’s true attitude toward what her daughter has done:
“I mean she’s married – married someone else.”
“Oho, oho!”
“You don’t believe me.”
“Yes, I do,
Only too well. I knew there must be something!
So that was what was back. She’s bad, that’s all!”
“Bad to get married when she had the chance?”
“Nonsense! See what she’s done! But who, but who –”
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“Who’d marry her straight out of such a mess?
Say it right out – no matter for her mother.
The man was found. I’d better name no names.
John himself won’t imagine who he is.”
“Then it’s all up. I think I’ll get away.
You’ll be expecting John. I pity Estelle;
I suppose she deserves some pity, too.
You ought to have the kitchen to yourself
To break it to him. You may have the job.”
This is a wonderfully crafted mutual fishing expedition: the mother
tries to see what the neighbor knows and the neighbor tries to see what the mother knows.
One wonders what’s behind the neighbor’s saying “Then it’s all up. I think I’ll get away.” Has he run off with Estelle? Or been involved in the “mess,” perhaps a pregnancy? All of these possibilities make the dialogue between the mother
and the neighbor much more suggestive, particularly for what she has been
trying to reveal about herself and her daughter’s past. When John suddenly
arrives he says perhaps joking but perhaps menacingly, to the narrator: “‘How
are you, neighbor? Just the man I’m after. / Isn’t it Hell . . .’” “The Housekeeper”
presents a complex study of several characters finding farm life and the pursuit of beautiful things anything but an harmonious existence.
Women, nature, and home
Some of Frost’s most compelling narrative and lyric poems dramatize women
on the border of nature and wildness, including “Paul’s Wife,” “Wild Grapes,”
“The Witch of Coos,” “The Pauper Witch of Grafton,” “Maple,” “The Hill
Wife,” and “A Servant to Servants.” No simple paradigm runs through all these
poems, and it should be obvious from reading them that more often than not
Frost gives women in his poetry enormous vocal presence and power: they speak
for themselves. Few modern poets give women as much vocal prominence as
Frost in lyrics, dramatic narratives, and dramatic monologues in which we
find the speakers struggling against the entanglements of social and sexual
domination for their own voice and sanity.
“Paul’s Wife,” one of the most spectacularly strange narratives of New Hampshire, adds a new dimension to the legend of Paul Bunyan. Despite his great prowess and skills, Frost’s Paul is unusually susceptible to being teased by his fellow lumberjacks about his wife or his lack of one. Sexual competition and
jealousy among the lumbermen proves to be a great driving force among them,
and a far greater weakness in Paul than any popular legend about his strength
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would have indicated. Paul must have a wife suited to his greatness, and he
creates one – Pygmalion-like – from the pith of a pine log that has been sub-
merged in water. The woman that arises from the log astounds him, a full-blown goddess, to whom the great hero seems utterly beholden and enchanted. She
becomes his unworldly spiritual possession, away from the lumbermen, who
follow them and taunt them in “a brute tribute of respect to beauty.” Their
shouts destroy her as she “went out like a firefly, and that was all.” Paul refused to let his spiritual and erotic world have anything to do with the world as we know it:
Paul was what’s called a terrible possessor.
Owning a wife with him meant owning her.
She wasn’t anybody else’s business,
Either to praise her, or so much as name her,
And he’d thank people not to think of her.
Murphy’s idea was that a man like Paul
Wouldn’t be spoken to about a wife
In any way the world knew how to speak.
Paul “the terrible possessor” appears an idealist in the extreme in his idea of his wife, one who cannot possibly live in the world or live with someone in
the world because of the terror and fear of his wife being anything other than his private dream. An heroic lumberjack, on the matter of his wife he won’t
be spoken to about a wife “in the way the world” knew. Frost once described Platonism in terms of marriage as
one who believes what we have here is an imperfect copy of what is in
heaven. The woman you have is an imperfect copy of some woman in
heaven or in someone else’s bed . . . I am philosophically opposed to
having one Iseult for my vocation and another for my avocation . . . A
truly gallant Platonist will remain a bachelor . . . from unwillingness to
reduce any woman to the condition of being used without being
idolized.
( SL, 462)
Paul has hopelessly divided his vocation and avocation. The wildness here
may well be more on the part of Paul and the other lumbermen and less on
the dreamlike wife who emerges from pine and lumber. In “Wild Grapes,” a
“little boyish girl” narrator becomes associated with wildness but in another
sense she, like Paul, could also be said to be something of an uncompromising
idealist.
“Wild Grapes” also presents a complex mythology of the feminine relation-
ship with nature. In this lyric, which was a complement to “Birches,” a girl
recollects a traumatic childhood experience of nearly being carried away by
a birch tree. Beginning with the title, the poem is replete with gnomic and
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suggestive references to biblical, classical (Bacchus, Dionysus, and Orpheus), and scientific literature, which all become stories whirling around her defiance and her desire for independence.14 The title refers not only the wild grapes
that were growing in an unexpected place but also the wayward children of
God prophesied by Isaiah in his parable of the vineyard: “My well beloved hath planted a vineyard in a very fruitful hill: and he fenced it, and gathered out the stones thereof, and planted it with the choicest vine, and built a tower in the midst of it, and also made a winepress therein: and he looked that it should
bring forth grapes, and it brought forth wild grapes.” The narrator begins her story with a wry wink to a passage in Luke 6:44 that says only certain fruit can be gathered from certain trees: “For every tree is known by his own fruit. For of thorns men do not gather figs, nor of a bramble bush do they gather grapes.”
She, however, had become, like the grapes, a wild anomaly. She appears delib-
erately to chafe at the codes and expectations of those around her, including
her brother. She tells us, as well, that she grew “to be a little boyish girl,” and resistant to the control of her brother:
What tree may not the fig be gathered from?
The grape may not be gathered from the birch?
It’s all you know the grape, or know the birch.
As a girl gathered from the birch myself
Equally with my weight in grapes, one autumn,
I ought to know what tree the grape is fruit of.
I was born, I suppose, like anyone,
And grew to be a little boyish girl
My brother could not always leave at home.
But her experience that day would lead to a trauma and, yet, a new beginning.
Her life would be in a positive sense “a waste,” indifferent to the demands
around her:
But that beginning was wiped out in fear
The day I swung suspended with the grapes,
And was come after like Eurydice
And brought down safely from the upper regions;
And the life I live now’s an extra life
I can waste as I please on whom I please.
So if you see me celebrate two birthdays,
And give myself out as two different ages,
One of them five years younger than I look –
She recounts the story, virtually a fable of temptation,
of her brother leading her to a glade and offering her some grapes from a branch. But she becomes
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caught in the branch and cannot and will not let go. “The tree had me,” she
said. She refuses despite the imperatives of survival and of her brother to “let go.” And she ignores her brother’s literal demand that she be less of a girl and
“weigh more.” She insists, instead, on the heart before the mind:
My brother had been nearer right before.
I had not taken the first step in knowledge;
I had not learned to let go with the hands,
As still I have not learned to with the heart,
And have no wish to with the heart – nor need,
That I can see. The mind – is not the heart.
I may yet live, as I know others live,
To wish in vain to let go with the mind –
Of cares, at night, to sleep; but nothing tells me
That I need to let go with the heart.
We sense the same refusal “to let go with the heart” in the short lyric “The
Rose Family,” despite the encroachments of “theories” and complexities of
taxonomies of naming on the mind. The narrator laments the fact that science
has shown that the rose, associated with love and with femininity, is quite
literally descended from the apple and related to other fruit. The ghostly figure of the tree life haunts the poem. Knowledge tends to undermine the poetic
fictions we would like to hold eternally in our minds:
The rose is a rose,
And was always a rose.
But the theory now goes
That the apple’s a rose,
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.
The narrator lovingly bestows the essence of “rose” upon the one to whom he
addresses the poem, even though he recognizes that the poets he has quoted on
roses – Edmund Waller, Shakespeare, Gertrude Stein – no longer hold against
the unruly facts about nature.
Frost allows the mystery of naming to govern the story of a girl’s and then a
woman’s life in “Maple.” Working against the traditional myth of the Adamic
namer, we learn from her father that her mother, before her death soon after
The Cambridge Introduction to Robert Frost Page 16