giving birth, bestowed the highly suggestive name upon her. Her father becomes
P1: FYX/FGC
P2: FXS
9780521854115c03.xml
9780521854115
CUUK235-Faggen
July 21, 2008
9:44
96
Works
dangerously suggestive and evasive in telling her the story of her naming and
inspires his daughter’s own search for self-understanding and self-revelation
in her mother’s intent:
“I don’t know what she wanted it to mean,
But it seems like some word she left to bid you
Be a good girl – be like a maple tree.
How like a maple tree’s for us to guess.
Or for a little girl to guess sometime.
Not now – at least I shouldn’t try too hard now.
By and by I will tell you all I know
About the different trees, and something, too,
About your mother that perhaps may help.”
Dangerous self-arousing words to sow.
The self-arousal here creates a life-determining drama: the search for the meaning of her name paradoxically governs her life’s course. Strangely enough, it
leads her away from the country to the city, where her strength and power
become severely limited in the life as a secretary taking “shorthand” in an
office:
So she looked for herself, as everyone
Looks for himself, more or less outwardly.
And her self-seeking, fitful though it was,
May still have been what led her on to read,
And think a little, and get some city schooling.
She learned shorthand, whatever shorthand may
Have had to do with it – she sometimes wondered
So, till she found herself in a strange place
For the name Maple to have brought her to,
Taking dictation on a paper pad,
And in the pauses when she raised her eyes
Watching out of a nineteenth story window
An airship laboring with unship-like motion
And a vague all-disturbing roar above the river
Beyond the highest city built with hands.
Maple’s “self-seeking” has ripped her as far as possible from her mystery
and from nature, and imprisoned her in an alienated world of technology
in which she is reduced to language and naming in a male world of dictation
and shorthand. A man in her office oddly divines her mystery, saying to her
that she reminds him of a maple tree, even though he thinks her true name is
“Mabel” and not “Maple.” Their marriage makes him part of the odyssey of her
self-discovery.
P1: FYX/FGC
P2: FXS
9780521854115c03.xml
9780521854115
CUUK235-Faggen
July 21, 2008
9:44
Women, nature, and home
97
Maple’s husband suggests that her father may have held the key to the mystery
of her name but may also not have told her everything about the story of her naming:
“And then it may have been
Something a father couldn’t tell a daughter
As well as could a mother. And again
It may been their one lapse into fancy
’Twould be too bad to make him sorry for
By bringing it up when he was too old.”
Perhaps these are dangerous words for the husband to sow. Maple had remem-
bered a maple leaf bookmark in the family Bible marking something about
“wave offerings.” Critics have noted that in the book of Numbers, wave offer-
ings are associated with women discharging penalties for sexual infidelities.
Has something gone on between the father and mother that only the mother
could have told her daughter?
When at the end of the poem Maple contemplates maple trees at various
seasons, we wonder what, figuratively, she may be seeing herself in:
They kept their thoughts away from when the maples
Stood uniform in buckets, and the steam
Of sap and snow rolled off the sugar house.
When they made her related to the maples,
It was the tree the autumn fire ran through
And swept of leathern leaves, but left the bark
Unscorched, unblackened, even, by any smoke.
They always took their holidays in autumn.
Once they came on a maple in a glade,
Standing alone with smooth arms lifted up,
And every leaf of foliage she’d worn
Laid scarlet and pale pink about her feet.
But its age kept them from considering this one.
Twenty-five years ago at Maple’s naming
It could hardly have been a two-leaved seedling
The next cow might have licked up out at pasture.
Could it have been another maple like it?
They hovered for a moment near discovery,
Figurative enough to see the symbol,
But lacking faith in anything to mean
The same at different times to different people.
The images of maples are, perhaps, suggestive of many different things, some
of them erotic and others, perhaps, more disturbing. But Maple’s ability to find
P1: FYX/FGC
P2: FXS
9780521854115c03.xml
9780521854115
CUUK235-Faggen
July 21, 2008
9:44
98
Works
symbolic significance between herself and nature has, somehow, been fractured
by time and life’s unruliness as well as a lack of mystical faith.
The dialogue of home
The uncertainty and sadness behind the domestic story of Maple’s name under-
lies almost all of Frost’s dramas of “home.” Home remained one of Frost’s most important figures: “All science is domestic science, our domestication on and
our hold on the planet” ( N, 656). Frost ripped open the home and allowed women and men not only to speak but allowed their words to act on each other’s deeds. At his best, Frost allows us to see the psychological forces at work behind the sayings of his men and women as they struggle to maintain power
and fragile domestic order. Elinor and Robert Frost were co-valedictorians
at their Lawrence High School graduation, and Elinor’s address was entitled
“Conversation as a Force in Life.” It might as well have been the keynote for
much of Frost’s most powerful poetry. “The Fear,” “The Death of the Hired
Man,” “Home Burial,” “A Servant to Servants,” “West-Running Brook,” and
“In the Home Stretch” allow dialogue in general, and the dialogue between men
and women in particular, to unfold without resolution of the question of what
it means to be human. These poems show Frost at his dramatic best, allowing
his characters to reveal themselves and each other. More important, the poems
become ongoing philosophical dramas about the boundaries of home and what
it means to be human.
“Home Burial” may be one of Frost’s most intimate and disturbing poems.
Rarely had anyone before explored the extremely delicate mood inside a mar-
riage after the death of a child. Certainly Frost knew something of it, having lost his son Elliot to cholera at the age of three. As we enter the scene of this poem, which includes the dialogue of Amy and her unnamed husband as well
as the narrator’s commentary, we do not know for certain how long the child
has been dead and how long the couple have argued. More uncertainti
es arise
in the course of a poem that tends to arouse a reader’s willingness to make
ethical judgments about how to grieve and how to treat others in the face of
tragedy.
One of the demands the poem makes upon us almost from line to line is a
need to decide not only what Amy and her husband say to each other but what
their words do to each other. One common strand of interpretation holds that the couple misunderstand each other. Others hold that they understand each
other very well, and that the death of the child has only opened deeper fissures in the marriage and questions of power, which the dialogue exposes. The first
P1: FYX/FGC
P2: FXS
9780521854115c03.xml
9780521854115
CUUK235-Faggen
July 21, 2008
9:44
The dialogue of home
99
encounter of the poem represents a complex dance of movements and words
which can appear at various moments both caring and hurtful.
He saw her from the bottom of the stairs
Before she saw him. She was starting down,
Looking back over her shoulder at some fear.
She took a doubtful step and then undid it
To raise herself and look again. He spoke
Advancing toward her: “What is it you see
From up there always – for I want to know.”
She turned and sank upon her skirts at that,
And her face changed from terrified to dull.
He said to gain time: “What is it you see,”
Mounting until she cowered under him.
“I will find out now – you must tell me, dear.”
She, in her place, refused him any help
With the least stiffening of her neck and silence.
She let him look, sure that he wouldn’t see,
Blind creature; and awhile he didn’t see.
But at last he murmured, “Oh,” and again, “Oh.”
The narrator makes it clear that Amy (we have not yet learned her name) fears
something before she encounters her husband, from what she has been seeing.
She also willfully refuses her husband any help in understanding what troubles her, what she sees. Her husband veers within a sentence between inquiring and demanding. We are given by the narrator to see that she regards him as
contemptuously incapable, a “blind creature.”
The challenge of Amy to her husband begins a drama about whether he
knows how to speak. Amy wishes, if not demands to make him conform to
her sense and sensibility of what it means to grieve. What he says in response remains open to considerable interpretation:
“What is it – what?” she said.
“Just that I see.”
“You don’t,” she challenged. “Tell me what it is.”
“The wonder is I didn’t see at once.
I never noticed it from here before.
I must be wonted to it – that’s the reason.
The little graveyard where my people are!
So small the window frames the whole of it.
Not so much larger than a bedroom, is it?
There are three stones of slate and one of marble,
P1: FYX/FGC
P2: FXS
9780521854115c03.xml
9780521854115
CUUK235-Faggen
July 21, 2008
9:44
100
Works
Broad-shouldered little slabs there in the sunlight
On the sidehill. We haven’t to mind those.
But I understand: it is not the stones,
But the child’s mound –”
“Don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t,” she cried.
Does Amy’s pained interruption of her husband’s description of the view from
the window come precisely as a response to his speaking of “the child’s mound,”
the way he speaks about it, or the accumulation of what he has already said
about the graveyard? One might imagine that for Amy the reference to “my
people,” the analogy between the graveyard and the bedroom, the description
of the slabs as “broad-shouldered,” all might have had a chilling or disturbing effect on her before mention of “the child’s mound.” Later she will accuse
him of not knowing how to speak. (“‘A man can’t speak of his own child
that’s dead.’/ ‘You can’t because you don’t know how to speak.’”) The poem’s
drama focuses around the great dramatic tension between words, deeds, and
their interpretation. Does Amy misunderstand her husband? Does her husband
misunderstand her or understand her all too well?
When Amy taunts her husband by asserting that he does not know how to
speak, she recollects the moment when she saw him digging the child’s grave.
Her accusation of his insensitivity stems from the fact of the eagerness with
which he went about the task and her recollection of his actions. The fact that he did dig his own child’s grave and his “talk about everyday concerns”
in themselves strike her, at least in this moment, as incomprehensibly insen-
sitive behavior. One wonders whether there may be an essential divide here
between masculine and feminine sensibilities or, perhaps, between country
and city sensibilities. Another possibility may rest in the fact that Amy seeks any way to remind her husband of his inarticulateness and less than human
sensibility:
“If you had any feelings, you that dug
With your own hand – how could you? – his little grave;
I saw you from that very window there,
Making the gravel leap and leap in air,
Leap up, like that, like that, and land so lightly
And roll back down the mound beside the hole.
I thought, Who is that man? I didn’t know you.
And I crept down the stairs and up the stairs
To look again, and still your spade kept lifting.
Then you came in. I heard your rumbling voice
Out in the kitchen, and I don’t know why,
P1: FYX/FGC
P2: FXS
9780521854115c03.xml
9780521854115
CUUK235-Faggen
July 21, 2008
9:44
The dialogue of home
101
But I went near to see with my own eyes.
You could sit there with the stains on your shoes
Of the fresh earth from your own baby’s grave
And talk about your everyday concerns.
You had stood the spade up against the wall
Outside there in the entry, for I saw it.”
“I shall laugh the worst laugh I ever laughed.
I’m cursed. God, if I don’t believe I’m cursed.”
Amy recounts her own dramatically astonished reaction to her husband’s dig-
ging as well as the “stains on his shoes,” which becomes almost miasma on his
soul.
When Amy reports what her husband did say, we are left in an interesting
interpretive quandary. She appears to take his words as no more than a country saying about the weather, and her husband says nothing to dispossess her of
her interpretation or lack of it. But surely “Three foggy mornings and one rainy day / Will rot the best birch fence a man could build” may be his way of talking figuratively about his child but also about what the child meant in the marriage.
Amy may or may not understand his way of talking about serious matters or
just how articulate he can be:
“I can repeat the very words you were saying.
‘Three foggy mornings and one rainy day
Think of it, talk like that at such a time!
What had how long it takes a birch to rot
To do with what was in the darkened parlor.”
The child helped create a barrier that enclosed the family and constituted home; it also provided a fence that brought husband and wife together but now does
not exist.
Though her husband treats Amy with exasperation and condescension, she
clearly refuses him any help in “how to speak.” She insists not only that he does not care but that as a husband, a man, and also as another human being he
must be incapable of caring and grieving sufficiently to qualify to her standards as human:
“You couldn’t care! The nearest friends can go
With anyone to death, comes so far short
They might as well not try to go at all.
No, from the time one is sick to death,
One is alone, and he dies more alone.
P1: FYX/FGC
P2: FXS
9780521854115c03.xml
9780521854115
CUUK235-Faggen
July 21, 2008
9:44
102
Works
Friends make pretense of following to the grave,
But before one is in it, their minds are turned
And making the best of their way back to life
And living people, and things they understand.
But the world’s evil. I won’t have grief so
If I can change it. Oh, I won’t, I won’t!”
Amy asserts a fundamental difference between herself and others, including
her husband, in their approach to the dying and grief. Nothing is far enough,
and all language suffers from being mere rhetoric in the worst sense – pretense.
Uncertainty and potential violence erupts at the end when Amy threatens
to leave the home and her husband threatens to bring her “back by force –
I will –”
The mysterious forces that bind and threaten to destroy marriages in Frost’s
dramatic poems come from within the men and women, though other forces
intrude sometimes as figures of projection, sometimes as direct threats. As early as “Love and a Question” from A Boy’s Will, the question of what the presence of a stranger and poverty can do to a young fragile marriage emerges: “But
whether or not a man was asked / To mar the love of two / By harboring woe in
the bridal house, / The bridegroom wished he knew.” Frost develops the idea of the extent of human sympathy within the home and beyond it in “The Death
of the Hired Man.”
The Cambridge Introduction to Robert Frost Page 17