Sought for much after that, it will be found
Either to have gone groping underground
(And taken with it all the Hyla breed
That shouted in the mist a month ago,
Like ghost of sleigh-bells in a ghost of snow) –
Or flourished and come up in jewel-weed,
Weak foliage that is blown upon and bent
Even against the way its waters went.
Its bed is left a faded paper sheet
Of dead leaves stuck together by the heat –
A brook to none but who remember long.
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This as it will be seen is other far
Than with brooks taken otherwhere in song.
We love the things we love for what they are.
The final fifteenth line, with its striking monosyllables and simplicity of diction, seems to save what has been transformed from loss. What, though, “are” the
“things” to which it refers? What kind of existence or being do they have once they exist only in memory? What other brooks “taken otherwhere in song”
does the speaker mean?
“Hyla Brook” appeared in Mountain Interval (1916). He began the book
West-Running Brook (1928), the title poem of which will be discussed in more detail later, with another powerful meditation on fluidity and transformation in nature, “Spring Pools.” The pools themselves become a figure for that reflective consciousness which comes into being temporarily in nature only to vanish
again. The pools seem like eyes which “still reflect,” in the sense of being both persistent and contemplative, but are fragile as “flowers beside them, chill and shiver” (with a superb internal rhyme). One of the striking points of the poem is the recognition of what threatens the existence of the pools and the flowers: the trees’ need of water and light:
These pools that, though in forests, still reflect
The total sky almost without defect,
And like the flowers beside them, chill and shiver,
Will like the flowers beside them soon be gone,
And yet not out by any brook or river,
But up by roots to bring dark foliage on.
The fact of competition in nature’s annual cycles destroys small and often lovely things. They are lovely to the speaker who threatens the trees and imputes
near demonic drives to their “pent-up buds” and “powers” against doing what
they cannot help doing to survive. Perhaps he feels the threatening fluidity,
ephemeral, and reflexive quality of all forms of life, “flowery waters” and “watery flowers” transformed “snows that melted only yesterday.”
“Spring Pools” brings the basic fact not only of transformation but of com-
petition into the image of nature. Our consciousness tries to resist the erosion of that competition. We would like to hold ourselves above what appears to
be the cruelty of nature. (Perhaps only we call natural processes cruel.) Frost recognized in certain respects our apartness from everything but also enjoys
poking fun at our pride in believing ourselves unique and morally superior to
the rest of nature. Frost considered the question of whether nature was non-
moral and whether we were merely projecting our consciousness onto nature
in evaluating its morality. In one interview, he takes delight in deflating the
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views that nature is any way benign or that man is any way exempt from its
cruelty:
I know [nature] isn’t kind. As Matthew Arnold said: “Nature is cruel. It’s
man that’s sick of blood.” And it doesn’t seem very sick of it. Nature is
always more or less cruel. Shall I tell you what happened on the porch of
a professor – minister he was, too? The war was going on, a beautiful
moonlit night. He was there with some boys, talking about the horrors
of war – how cruel men were to each other and how kind nature was,
what a beautiful country this was spread beneath us, you know –
moonlight on it. And just as he talked that way, in the woods –
something had got into its nest. Nature was being cruel. The woods are
killing each other anyway. That’s where the expression came from “a
place in the sun.” A tree wanting a place in the sun it can’t get. The other
trees won’t give it to it.15
Frost had a keen sense of the subtlety and universality of ecological warfare.
Perhaps because of this fundamental sense of struggle in the nature of things, he had little sense of sentimentality about history. In fact, as he wrote in his
“Letter to The Amherst Student,” he viewed it as “immodest” to regard one’s own time as worse than any other:
We have no way of knowing that this age is one of the worst in the
world’s history. Arnold claimed the honor for the age before this.
Wordsworth claimed it for the last but one. And so on back through
literature. I say they claimed the honor for their ages. They claimed it
rather for themselves. It is immodest of a man to think of himself as
going down before the worst forces ever mobilized by God.
( CP, 114)
Frost deplored the humanist stance that distanced itself from science and
the kind of penetration into matter that science championed. This positive
attitude toward empirical observation of the world, as he said, “developed
from the ground up,” led him to embrace not only Thoreau’s Walden but Darwin’s The Voyage of the Beagle. In a letter to his Amherst colleague Theodore Beard, who had written an essay on metaphor in Darwin, Frost discussed
Darwin’s work and science in general as one of the humanities because of its
reliance on metaphor, its building of a larger picture of the world from smaller details:
Others who have known my predilection for The Voyage have given me
the first editions of it, British and American. I find it hard to decide
which to put your essay into. Even the deserving seldom get such right
(and pretty things) said of them – even after the lapse of so long a time.
Why read Carlyle for something to do when there is always The Voyage
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to read again. I must look up the spelling of Yammerscooner and
Lampalagua. We are considering one of the three best books of prose of
the nineteenth century, though I doubt if it is on Hutchins list at St.
Johns. The other two were written in America. I am away over on the
side of Darwin as you depict him. My accusation that he was only
adding to our metaphorical heritage falls to the ground when you make
me realize that he said so first himself. My accusation becomes a citation
for bravery. You make him even more what I like to think he was. These
straight-laced humanists had better be careful about whom they read
out of the party. I got a dose of them in Cincinnati last week – bush
leaguers. It takes too long to dawn on them that science is merely
one of
the Humanities.16
Frost’s interest in Darwin went beyond the epistemology of observing small
natural details from which to infer a larger picture. The tension between the
meaning of the small event and its larger implications and the place of the
human mind in interpreting “the facts” of the scene forms the background
of Frost’s sonnet “Design.” The argument from design had long been used to
prove the existence of divinity by analogy; Paul in Romans had talked of God’s two books – scripture and his creation. By the seventeenth century, there grew to be much more of an acrimonious split between those who held that one
could find divinity either in one, the book of nature, or in scripture, but not in both, and that the two could not be harmonized. In the nineteenth century,
medieval arguments from design had continued to be refined. William Paley
put forward the argument based on the analogy to a watch. If we find a watch,
looking at its intricate mechanism implies a watchmaker. If we look at wonders of creation, it implies a creator and, one would like to think, a benevolent
creator. Darwin’s way of looking at the world did extraordinary damage to the
argument from design because in the small ranges of observation it showed
more chance, blunder, and change than order.
“Design,” one of Frost’s most memorable sonnets, invokes a little drama of
someone observing a little scene in nature and trying to find some design in
it, perhaps some indication of a larger meaning. The title, too, carries with
it the suggestion of the history of the “argument from design,” namely that
the things of the earth reveal by analogy the plan of a creator. The poem,
playful and sly, appears to undermine that kind of reasoning. The first stanza has the quality of a song of innocence, particularly with its grace analogies of
“dimpled,” “dew drop,” “kite,” and “snow-white” even though the spider and
moth are “characters of death and blight” in some kind of ritual of death. The rhyming of “moth,” “froth,” and “broth” also suggest a grim blurring of the
scene and impending meal into a white whole:
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I found a dimpled spider, fat and white,
On a white heal-all, holding up a moth
Like a white piece of rigid satin cloth –
Assorted characters of death and blight
Mixed ready to begin the morning right,
Like ingredients of a witches’ broth –
A snow-drop spider, a flower like a froth,
And dead wings carried like a paper kite.
The finely crafted octave leads to a sestet in which we might expect to find a resolution, a design or, more important, evidence of a designer. Instead, we are left with a series of questions. The observer-speaker may wonder whether all
this concatenation of whiteness means something or happens to be nothing
more than a chance occurrence in a very small, isolated moment. First, what
does the mutation of the “heal-all” mean? Second, what brought all the various white characters together for the somewhat grisly ceremony:
What had that flower to do with being white,
The wayside blue and innocent heal-all?
What brought the kindred spider to that height,
Then steered the white moth thither in the night?
What but design of darkness to appall? –
If design govern in a thing so small.
The penultimate question sounds large and apocalyptic. But “appall” has no
object, and there is something slightly amusing about the fact that the etymology of the word means “to make white.” Is the horrific “design of darkness,”
then, nothing more than a tautology, deflating the implication that some evil
demiurge is at work in the world? The final line of the poem deflates the hor-
ror and suggests that whole scene may be, “a thing,” indeterminate, and too
“small” from which to draw grand emblematic or symbolic inferences.17
The concluding questions of the poem echo the questions of William Blake’s
“The Tyger”: “Tyger Tyger, burning bright, / In the forests of the night; / What immortal hand or eye, / Could frame thy fearful symmetry?” The basic problems
of theodicy lurk behind both poems: if a good God’s creation is good and
beautiful, why should there be evidence of such suffering in it? If God is all powerful, perhaps he is not good. If he is good, then he is not all powerful.
These questions become related to the design argument, if we look at nature as in any way providing evidence for the presence of divinity or for man to find a connection between himself and divinity.
What kind of “design” would Frost let himself see in nature? The poem itself,
as many have said, may be a “design,” “a momentary stay against confusion
imposed upon a chaotic scene. Nature might allow a moth a certain color to
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protect itself from predators, yet here it has been caught by a spider. Mutations, whether by a “heal-all” or a moth, may not always work and produce waste
in a process of trial and error as species struggle to leave progeny. The sense of “waste” haunted Frost in human and non-human nature. His poems often
explored the limits of both sympathy and empathy about the fact of waste.
Frost dramatizes the extent and limit of human sympathy to the creaturely
world poignantly in “To a Moth Seen in Winter.” Though it would be unlikely
that this was a winter moth, it has made the flight, “the venture of eternity,”
between the wood where it was hatched and the wood where presumably it will
mate or lay its eggs. Yet, here is a moth, replete with colorings to lure a mate and to camouflage and protect it from predators hopelessly seeking a mate in
the wrong season. Its entire evolutionary structure has become meaningless
yet it has somehow driven itself out of season. A “gloveless” human hand,
not protected itself except for a few moments from the cold, offers a warm,
momentary haven for the moth:
Here’s first a gloveless hand warm from my pocket,
A perch and resting place ’twixt wood and wood,
Bright-black-eyed silvery creature, brushed with brown,
The wings not folded in repose, but spread.
(Who would you be, I wonder, by those marks
If I had moths to friend as I have flowers?)
The moth takes flight to “seek the love of kind,” and “eternity,” “spending”
its energy in flight, though that very movement warms it in winter. Some
impulse or instinct drives the moth despite the hostility and impossibility of the situation. The speaker recognizes, however, that though what he pities
in the moth is something human, “untimeliness,” his pity cannot reach, nor
save the moth. He has much to do to save his own life. We sense this not only in the immediate, literal sense of how much he can withstand being out in the cold but also in some larger, unspecified sense in the world where others are dying: And what I pity in you is something human,
The old incurable untimeliness,
Only begetter of all ills th
at are.
But go. You are right. My pity cannot help.
Go till you wet your pinions and are quenched.
You must be made more simply wise than I
To know the hand I stretched impulsively
Across the gulf of well nigh everything
May reach to you, but cannot touch your fate.
I cannot touch your fate, much less can save,
Who am tasked to save my own a little while.
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It may be worth noting that Frost dated the poem “circa 1900,” the year his son Elliot died of cholera. The feeling of being unable to save his own three-year-old son may have, in part, inspired this meditation on the fragility of all life and the limits of what one can do for the sick and dying, through its ascription of human “untimeliness” in the moth, and the recognition of the futility of pity.
Frost finally published the poem in A Witness Tree (1942), giving the poem added historical freshness by the context of the war.
What can one, then, learn from a poetical education in nature? That may
be partly the suggestion of the title “The Need of Being Versed in Country
Things,” a poem as much about unlearning our assumptions about nature as
confirming them. What, after all, are “country things”? The title subtly evokes Hamlet’s rejoinder to Ophelia about “country matters,” a euphemism for sex
or fornication. What would that have to do with a poem about a burned-out
farm now inhabited by small birds?
The poem begins with language suggestive of purpose and design. Yet the
very idea that a burning house had brought sunset color to the sky seems a
parody of the idea of design. The irony deepens with the fact that only the
chimney remains after the fire:
The house had gone to bring again
To the midnight sky a summer glow.
Now the chimney was all of the house that stood,
Like a pistil after the petals go.
The analogy of the chimney to a pistil without its petals also indicates the
position of the human in the biological scheme: bereft of a home or nest,
humans are incapable of attracting and keeping family and, therefore, breeding as any other members of the biological world (the feminine reproductive part
of the flower remains without the parts necessary for attracting pollinators).
The Cambridge Introduction to Robert Frost Page 20