history possible. But all of their concern about pride of ancestry and attempt to prove priority in “Starkness” reveals the possibility of a kind of madness and degeneracy:
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“D’you know a person so related to herself
Is supposed to be mad.”
“I may be mad.”
“You look so, sitting out here in the rain
Studying genealogy with me
You never saw before. What will we come to
With all this pride of ancestry, we Yankees?
I think we’re all mad. Tell me why we’re here
Drawn into town about this cellar hole
Like wild geese on a lake before a storm?
What do we see in such a hole, I wonder.”
While she encourages him to imagine vividly their ancestors, and he claims to
hear vividly the “purer oracle” of the nearby brook in its “wild descent,” she reminds him skeptically: “‘It’s as you throw a picture on a screen: / The meaning of it all is out of you; / The voices give you what you wish to hear.’” In a flirtatious tale, the boy imagines himself as Odysseus and the girl as Nausicaa, and then
turns ventriloquist again as Granny and Grandsir Stark ordering him to build
a new home out of the ruined timbers of the past. Yet for all his imaginative
projections onto the wasteland of the cellar hole, he admits to the girl, “Don’t you think we sometimes make too much / Of the old stock? What counts is
the ideals, / And those will bear some keeping still about.” This mysterious
admission comes as a surprise because neither he nor the girl ever quite states what the ideals are or have been. We find that same intimation of stasis in
the midst of constant change in the dialogue between Joe and his wife “In the
Home Stretch.” Having moved from the city to the country and feeling that
they have also moved closer to the end of their lives, they debate what in life may be truly new. Joe’s wife provides a vision of two tracks of time: “‘It would take me forever to recite / All that’s not new in where we find ourselves.’” The dialogue itself on the verge of the ruins of a former home and an obliterated
past has become the essential life force that may bring this boy and girl back together for another day, “sometime in rain,” because it was the moody force
that brought them together, “[b]ut if we must, in sunshine.”
Frost and the poetry of nature
Because of the landscape of Frost’s poetry, some find it easy to characterize
him as a “nature poet.” Frost, aware of this epithet, was quick to challenge it.
“Some have called me a nature poet, because of the background, but I’m not a
nature poet. There’s always something else in my poetry” ( I, 114). In a letter to
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Untermeyer, Frost underscored the importance of the human in any landscape:
“Not even in the most natural of nature poetry was nature ever anything but
the background to the portrait of a lunatic, a lover, or a farmer” ( LU, 243). In the pastoral dramas Frost will depict a close ecological relationship between
man and nature.
Plant and human ecology become inextricable parts of pastoral drama in
“Blueberries.” The poem takes the form of a narrative dialogue between two
companions who seek to pick the blueberries growing in the pasture of an
absentee landlord named Patterson. (Frost changed the name, after the first
publication of the poem in North of Boston, from Mortenson, which means
“son of death.”) The anapestic meter and rhymed couplets of their dialogue
adds to our sense of their playfulness; yet the apparent innocence may mask
more complications in the ecology of pastoral life. In the beginning, we learn that blueberries are growing where there had been a fire, as though by magic.
The fire itself was the result of deforestation to make way for pasture:
“You know where they cut off the woods – let me see –
It was two years ago – or no! – can it be
No longer than that? – and the following fall
The fire ran and burned it all up but the wall.”
“Why, there hasn’t been time for the bushes to grow.
That’s always the way with the blueberries, though;
There may not have been the ghost of a sign
Of them anywhere under the shade of the pine,
But get the pine out of the way, you may burn
The pasture all over until not a fern
Or a grass-blade is left, not to mention a stick,
And presto, they’re up all around you as thick
And hard to explain as a conjuror’s trick.”
The speakers may be rather innocent but they describe a well-known ecological
phenomenon. The predominately anapestic meter of the passage underscores
the playfulness and delight that the speaker takes in finding the blueberries
growing there, inexplicable as “a conjuror’s trick.” The destruction of stronger, taller growths such as pines, allows for the possibility of certain plants, including more palatable ones, to grow that otherwise could not survive in their
shade. Further, fire enables the seeds of certain types of ground fruit to burst, particularly blueberries. What may be destructive to fern and grass actually
gives life to other plants. The “conjuror’s trick” turns out to be no trick at all but a type of ecological subversion of hierarchy or sudden reversal of fortune: one form of life’s loss becomes another’s gain.
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This ecological principle sets the figurative background for the tensions
between the speakers and the Lorens, the family that lives in the pasture. The blueberries take their color and taste from the soil, their “‘blue’s but a mist from the breath of the wind, / A tarnish that goes at a touch of the hand, / And less than the tan with which pickers are tanned.’” One senses, at this point,
that blueberries are metaphors for whatever manages to thrive or struggle
unexpectedly, up from the “soot.” Differences in skin color – perhaps among
blueberries or humans – may be only superficial.
The speakers wonder whether they have the right to these berries in Patter-
son’s pasture. Patterson walled in the pasture two years ago. One of the narrators hopes that Patterson doesn’t care as much for gathering the valuable berries in his pasture as a ground robin might: “‘He may and not care and so leave the
chewink / To gather them for him – you know what he is. / He won’t make
the fact that they’re rightfully his / An excuse for keeping us other folk out.’”
But Patterson may be less of a problem than the Lorens. We learn when they
encounter Loren and his children that they store up on wild berries, and that
the berries have become an important source of food and income:
“He seems to be thrifty; and hasn’t he need,
With the mouths of all those young Lorens to feed?
He has brought them all up on wild berries, they s
ay,
Like birds. They store a great many away.
They eat them the year round, and those they don’t eat
They sell in the store and buy shoes for their feet.”
It certainly sounds as if the Lorens have made much of the economy of wild
berries. So much so, that one wonders about how the fire got started. One of
the speakers reflects pleasantly, if somewhat naively about this seemingly life of leisure “‘. . . It’s a nice way to live, / Just taking what nature is willing to give,
/ Not forcing her hand with harrow and plow.’”
This lovely vision of country life appears as na¨ıve about human relations
as it is about the struggle among species of flora and fauna for survival. The Lorens appear to know where all kinds of wild berries grow. When one of the
speakers approaches Mr. Loren about where to find berries, he receives a polite but clearly sardonic pun about “berrying” by way of warning:
“There had been some berries – but those were all gone.
He didn’t say where they had been. He went on:
‘I’m sure – I’m sure‘ – as polite as could be.
He spoke to his wife in the door, ‘Let me see,
Mame, we don’t know any good berrying place?’
It was all he could do to keep a straight face.”
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Who really possesses what grows wild? The Lorens have an interest in keeping
the berries to themselves. But the narrators have other ideas:
“If he thinks all the fruit that grows wild is for him,
He’ll find he’s mistaken. See here, for a whim,
We’ll pick in the Pattersons’ pasture this year.
We’ll go in the morning, that is, if it’s clear,
And the sun shines out warm: the vines must be wet.”
In their adventure in the pasture, they also drive a bird from its nest. In “Blueberries,” many indeed appeared threatened within the “walled” pasture of the
Pattersons, alternately attracted by the ineluctable beauty of fruit and the need to survive. The poem concludes with one of the narrators describing the fruit
in both sensuous and pernicious terms: “‘You ought to have seen how it looked
in the rain, / The fruit mixed with water in layers of leaves, / Like two kind of jewels, a vision for thieves.’” The old meaning of “paradise” comes to mind, a
“walled-in” garden or pasture and the idea of unavoidable strife within paradise may come to mind as well.
In the “Letter to the Amherst Student,” Frost described the background as
“hugeness and confusion.” In his notebooks, as we have seen, he describes
nature as “chaos.” In the poetry Frost creates a drama between human and non-
human nature. In other words, there is always the question of the perception of non-human nature, whether of other creatures or of the landscape and matter.
We see that sense of “hugeness” as a temptation of the thrush’s music and
the “pillared dark” for the speaker in “Come in,” for example, a temptation
from which he retreats and for which he recognizes he has not been called.
It should be very clear from what Frost said about his empirical tendencies,
allying him with Aristotle more than Plato, that he had a natural scientist’s
interest for noticing things in specific detail and in the way they interact with one another. When Wallace Stevens wrote in “The Snow Man” that “to have
a mind of winter” one should write of “[n]othing that is not there and the
nothing that is,” he asserts the nothingness as an essential basis of reality.
Frost’s poetry may often express skepticism about what we project onto nature
and about the centrality of the human mind in the world. But there always
seems to be some apprehension or attempt to apprehend something as the basis for the way the world operates, sometimes consonant with what we think and
sometimes beyond what we think. That something in Frost, however elusive, always amounts to more than nothing. Frost’s “For Once, Then, Something”
exemplifies the precariousness of the problem. He wrote the poem in a classical meter, phalaecean, named after a Greek epigrammatic poet, hendecasyllables
(a trochee, a dactyl, followed by three more trochees) as if to emphasize the
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firm cultural framing of the well into which he peers. At first, the speaker
seems mocked for finding himself reflected, Narcissus-like, in the well; the
surface “Gives me back in a shining surface picture / Me myself in the summer
heaven godlike / Looking out of a wreath of fern and cloud-puffs.” But “[o]nce]”
he thought he penetrated “the picture” and saw something “white,” evoking
perhaps the ungraspable phantom in Melville’s reinterpretation of Ovid in the
first chapter of Moby-Dick, “something more of the depths.” That turned out to be fleeting because:
Water came to rebuke the too clear water.
One drop fell from a fern, and lo, a ripple
Shook whatever it was lay there at the bottom,
Blurred it, blotted it out. What was that whiteness?
Truth? A pebble of quartz? For once, then, something.
There may be considerable self-mockery in the notion that the whiteness may
be “Truth” (even though Frost echoes an old Greek saying that truth can
be found at the bottom of a well). The “then” in the title and final phrase
could suggest both time past and also an emphatic sense that “something,”
not “nothing,” exists beyond our limited perceptions. As we have seen and
will see in other poems, “Mending Wall,” “Design,” “The Oven Bird,” “The
Need of Being Versed in Country Things,” the word “something,” or “thing”
in Frost becomes a signifier for irreducible yet still not quite graspable pragma or fact. The flux and fluidity of the natural world, for which the water and
the simple are metaphors, indicate the difficulty of perceiving phenomena in
anything but a momentary way. The ferns, probably of the polyploidy variety, grow on rocks and threaten the integrity of the well-curb or human order itself.
The very concepts of surface and depth, which have long been important in
distinguishing aspects of human thought, may themselves be only metaphoric
constructs or the metaphors may aptly describe, within limits, the pursuit of
the real.
Frost’s poetry does draw analogies between the mind of man and the rest
of the creaturely world and animate world. What do our emotions and our
perceptions have to do with those of the rest of the animal and insect kingdom?
Do we have a tendency to project or humanize where the rest of the creaturely
world is somehow indifferent? What place, if any, does “mind” have in nature?
These were not new philosophical questions when Frost began writing. In “A
Considerable Speck,” the narrator observes of the nearly microscopic mite that crosses his paper, “Plainly with an intelligence I dealt. / It seemed too tiny to have room for feet, / Yet must have had a set of them complete / To express
how much it didn’t want to die.” The extended downward
sympathy toward
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this one small creature stands in contrast to the “tenderer-than-thou / Collectivistic regimenting love / With which the modern world is being swept.” The
poems become subtle meditations on the relationship between man and the
rest of the creaturely world, and tend to challenge the romantic tendency to
use nature in purely symbolic and emblematic ways. But they also have addi-
tional philosophical, if not political, edge to them. Several of Frost’s later animal poems do become parabolic in their strategies: “The Bear,” “The Egg and the
Machine” (from West-Running Brook), “A Drumlin Woodchuck,” “Depart-
mental,” “At Woodward’s Gardens,” and, as we shall see, “The White-Tailed
Hornet” (from a Further Range). All of these poems tend to satirize through
“downward comparisons” between man and other creatures the presumptions,
regimentations, and dissatisfactions of the human intellect while also empha-
sizing the fluid line between man and the rest of the creaturely world. These
poems raise challenging questions about the line between our instincts and our intellects.
Fluidity, transience, and metamorphosis in nature haunt some of Frost’s
most memorable poems. “Hyla Brook,” an unorthodox sonnet of fifteen lines,
follows a brook named for the small peeper frogs that inhabit its banks. (Frost also evokes Virgil’s account in “Eclogue VI” of the spring where Hylas was
left, as well as Darwin’s discussion of Hyla frogs in chapter 2 of The Voyage of the Beagle, one of Frost’s favorite books). By summer both the brook and the peepers for which it was named have disappeared. Yet the speaker invokes,
parenthetically, the memory of their sound in winter and in human terms:
“Like ghost of sleigh-bells in a ghost of snow.” The brook’s metamorphosis
has occurred in a seed-producing plant. In the final analogies of the poem,
leaves and paper sheets, the speaker suggests that the brook may survive only
as a palimpsest of human memories, a brook only in memory, faded in natural
history:
By June our brook’s run out of song and speed.
The Cambridge Introduction to Robert Frost Page 19