“Again” at the end of the first line indicates that this kind of frightening accident has happened before.
Humans are completely absent from this poem except as memories or ele-
gies to what they used to control. In this case, the barn only remains left “to bear forsaken the place’s name.” The barn opened for the horses, once the
domesticated creatures of farm labor, and now only a memory:
No more it opened with all one end
For teams that came by the stony road
To drum on the floor with scurrying hoofs
And brush the mow with the summer load.
Birds now occupy the barn and the property. The narrator allows himself
to project for a moment human sadness into their murmurs. He puns on
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“dwelling”; what the birds do literally in the old barn, we do in emotional futile attachment, as we once did in the home itself:
The birds that came to it through the air
At broken windows flew out and in,
Their murmur more like the sigh we sigh
From too much dwelling on what has been.
The next stanza allows some retreat from that emotional investment in the
birds’ putative sadness. Nature goes on in renewal. The pump, which once
had the function of extracting water for human beings, now serves a different
function for the birds. The fence wire, once used as a barrier, ironically, does little other than give the birds a place to perch:
Yet for them the lilac renewed its leaf,
And the aged elm, though touched with fire;
And the dry pump flung up an awkward arm;
And the fence post carried a strand of wire.
The final stanza finally denies the projection of human pathos onto non-human
nature while at the same time suggesting another projection to the birds’ song, if a projection at all “rejoicing.” At this final moment, a powerful syntactic twist holds back the final punch – how much one needs to be “versed in country
things” not to believe that nature shares our sadness:
For them there was really nothing sad.
But though they rejoiced in the nest they kept,
One had to be versed in country things
Not to believe the phoebes wept.
The choice of “versed” still indicates that “country things” may never be quite certain and always the matter of interpretation and of lore. Be that as may be, the speaker has saved the specific name of these birds for the final line. Phoebes are voracious ant and insect hunters. They engage in remarkable acrobatic
feats in their pursuit of their prey. Moreover, they are staunchly territorial birds. Indeed, the observation that they have staked out a new nest which they seem to keep and that they seem to rejoice much more than weep would be
the conclusion of a good ornithologist and observer of nature. This is a poem
about the indifference of nature to human sentiment, in fact to sentiment in
general in the pursuit of survival.
Frost always thought that “waste” presented itself as an essential fact of
natural process. Not only did he not lament it, he appeared as time went on
both to accept and even to insist on its virtues. In “Pod of the Milkweed,”
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the drab flower attracts pollinating butterflies. In true Darwinian fashion, the beautiful butterflies turn into pugnacious fighters, struggling with each other: Its flowers’ distilled honey is so sweet
It makes the butterflies intemperate.
There is no slumber in its juice for them.
One knocks another off from where he clings.
They knock the dyestuff off each others’ wings –
With thirst on hunger to the point of lust.
They raise in their intemperance a cloud
Of mingled butterfly and flower dust
That hangs perceptibly above the scene.
The sustenance provided by the flower to the butterflies and the fight of the
butterflies have no purpose other than reproduction, presumably both for
the butterflies and for the milkweed. The process, however, comes at terrible
expense. The speaker acknowledges this near the conclusion of the poem:
But waste was of the essence of the scheme.
And all the good they did for man or god
To all those flowers they passionately trod
Was leave as their posterity one pod
With an inheritance of restless dream.
We might wonder at this point whether the pod will be of the milkweed or
of the butterflies, which may be no more than instruments of the milkweed’s
purposes. It may be strange to consider “waste” as the “essence of [a] scheme”; the line suggests both cruelty and randomness as well as the possibility of some kind of vaguely discernable design.
Frost became more vocal about waste as a principle of life in the years
after World War I. He wrote to Untermeyer in 1931: “We were brought up on
principles of saving everything, ourselves included. The war taught us a new
gospel. My next book is to be called The Right to Waste. The Right? The duty,
the obligation, to waste everything, time, material, and the man . . .” ( LU, 209).
In his notebooks, Frost could sound even more poignant and illiberal about
the necessity of waste:
The philosopher says dismiss the idea of purpose. And in the same
breath he speaks as if the purpose of everything was our purpose to
come out on a mountain top level of peace and equality. He thinks we
have something in us that won’t be gotten the better of by our needs and
greeds. He assumes we have no need of strengthening ourselves in
human rivalry to hold our own against nature. Our dissatisfaction with
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we know not what enemy be the evolutionary thing in our bones – a
strain – blind
He who stays out of waste and lives to save
His home his money or his very life
Who does not join in the unselfish waste
Of everything who pays not daily tribute
To the eternal rubbish refuse heap of God
Better beware he will be held a cheat
( N, 280)
“The Bonfire,” becomes a metaphor of the great refuse heap, a ruck of brush
that a laborer-father tells his children they should set on fire to scare themselves in preparation for war. When Frost published “The Bonfire” in 1916, the United States had not entered the Great War, but the Zeppelin bombing of England and
the sinking of the Lusitania had occurred. So when the children assert “‘Oh,
war’s not for children – it’s for men,’” the father’s demonic response, derived in part from his memory of the power of a bonfire of his own making that had
nearly gone out of control, grimly asserts the need for the ritual preparation, which includes children:
“ . . . Haven’t you heard, though,
About the ships where war has found them out
> At sea, about the towns where war has come
Through opening clouds at night with droning speed
Further o’erhead than all but stars and angels,–
And children in the ships and in the towns?
Haven’t you heard what we have lived to learn?
Nothing so new – something we had forgotten:
War is for everyone, for children too.
I wasn’t going to tell you and I mustn’t.
The best way is to come up the hill with me
And have our fire and laugh and be afraid.”
“For” in the phrase has the force of meaning both “to preserve” and “appropri-
ate” for the participation of children. War and its waste become more encom-
passing and universal.
Frost’s sense of the universality of “wanton waste in peace and war,” as he
called it in “Pod of the Milkweed,” in knowledge of the ways of both human
and non-human nature, inspired Frost to write as complex a sonnet as “Range-
Finding,” one of a number of war poems written and published around the
time of World War I. The human world of battle recedes into the background
and becomes part of the general ecology of nature. Remarkably, Frost rather
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unselfconsciously invests the non-human world with a sense of life and emo-
tional struggle. We see “a stricken flower” and the “dispossessed” butterfly:
The battle rent a cobweb diamond-strung
And cut a flower beside a ground bird’s nest
Before it stained a single human breast.
The stricken flower bent double and so hung.
And still the bird revisited her young.
A butterfly its fall had dispossessed
A moment sought in air his flower of rest,
Then lightly stooped to it and fluttering clung.
The poem concludes with a beautiful description and strange trick of per-
spective. A spider had restrung its web, its “cables” or technology, of death
and entrapment. Yet another bullet merely touching it, fools the spider into
thinking it had caught a fly. Perhaps the bullet was “range-finding,” too, but the shooters do not recognize the smaller range of life. But the poem acknowledges a strange interconnectedness of life, sometimes struggling to reproduce, sometimes predatory. From the spider’s range of perspective, not finding a fly signifies “nothing.” He allows the spider, who “sullenly withdrew,” the emotion of disappointment:
On the bare upland pasture there had spread
O’ernight ’twixt mullein stalks a wheel of thread
And straining cables wet with silver dew.
A sudden passing bullet shook it dry.
The indwelling spider ran to greet the fly,
But finding nothing, sullenly withdrew.
It would be difficult to put a name on what motivates the spider, and the speaker writes about it, the way Darwin wrote about insects, without any self-conscious sense of anthropomorphic emotional projection.
Frost could also write poems in which scientific theories, conjectures, or
other intellectual presumptions had gone too far, leaving man, ironically, in
a hopeless skeptical position. Perhaps the most challenging and intriguing
of these, “The White-Tailed Hornet,” subtitled “or the revision of theories,”
reveals a narrator melding an ideal divine perfection with animal or insect
instinct, a process of “downward comparison” that does not hold in observation and reveals his own folly. The speaker, who should not be too hastily identified with Frost himself, readily assumes that a hornet (“White-Tailed Hornets” do
not actually exist – like a white whale, it may be a mythic phantom) has perfect control of his behavior based on instinct. The opening lines reveal the speaker’s
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striking and somewhat repetitious analogies for the hornet (“like a bullet,”
“like the pupil of a pointed gun,” “more unerring than a bullet”), all of which are decidedly anthropomorphic:
The white-tailed hornet lives in a balloon
That floats against the ceiling of the woodshed.
The exit he comes out at like a bullet
Is like the pupil of a pointed gun.
And having power to change his aim in flight,
He comes out more unerring than a bullet.
Verse could be written on the certainty
With which he penetrates my best defense
Of whirling hands and arms about the head
To stab me in the sneeze-nerve of a nostril.
Such is the instinct of it I allow.
The power of instinct here appears to be everything we would ordinarily ascribe to a creature that does not err, whether from “power to change” or inherited
“certainty.” What is amusing, if not ironic, is the way the narrator states that
“verse could be written” about this certainty, almost as if he would write a paean to nature. He seems not to realize that the “verse” is his own analogy-making, the ascription of his ideals of perfection, associated with the elusive concept of instinct, to the insect hornet. In this little comic moment, we learn that the hornet may be interested in those “sneeze-nerves” because hornets look to such openings as places to lay eggs.
The speaker, though, doesn’t understand this fact about hornets. Instead, he
sees or rather tries to deny that he was attempting to steal the hornet’s nest.
These nests were often taken and used as decorations in people’s homes. At this moment, the speaker may be finding himself more dangerously close to being
comprehended by the hornet and wishes to retract the allowance of perfection
he had granted to the insect. As a human, he insists that the hornet “recognize in me the exception / I like to think I am in everything”:
Yet how about the insect certainty
That in the neighborhood of home and children
Is such an execrable judge of motives
As not to recognize in me the exception
I like to think I am in everything –
One who would never hang above a bookcase
His Japanese crepe-paper globe for trophy?
He stung me first and stung me afterward.
He rolled me off the field head over heels,
And would not listen to my explanations.
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The comedy continues as the speaker hopes to find the hornet’s instincts,
whatever that may mean, working infallibly at his house. There the hornet will not recognize him as an enemy, and focus with unerring precision, “hawking
for flies.” (In an interesting essay on this poem, B. J. Sokol has pointed out that this phrase betrays a joke at the heart of the poem. There is no white-tailed
hornet in North America but there is a white-tailed hawk and a white-headed
hornet. Sokol suggests that Frost is deliberately mixing the terms. Perhaps this is part of a Frost fable of the phantom-elusiveness of “instinct” and the totality of “nature.”)18 Soon enough, our speaker finds the hornet, again, less than
ins
tinctively perfect when it comes to hunting.
I watched him where he swooped, he pounced, he struck;
But what he found he had was just a nailhead.
He struck a second time. Another nailhead.
“Those are just nailheads. Those are fastened down.”
Then disconcerted and not unannoyed,
He swooped and struck a little huckleberry
The way a player curls around a football.
“Wrong shape, wrong color, and wrong scent,” I said.
The huckleberry rolled him on his head.
When the hornet actually misses a fly instead of something that just looked like a fly, then the speaker becomes “dangerously skeptic.” But this is at the same time almost amusing because he was willing to see the hornet figuratively as
a poet, and a poet who makes faulty analogies and seems to have ultimately a
poor grasp of the real:
At last it was a fly. He shot and missed;
And the fly circled round him in derision.
But for the fly he might have made me think
He had been at his poetry, comparing
Nailhead with fly and fly with huckleberry:
How like a fly, how very like a fly.
But the real fly he missed would never do;
The missed fly made me dangerously skeptic.
The poem concludes with a remarkable meditation on the effect of “downward
comparisons,” something that had been going on in poetry for several hundred
years, even before the Romantic revolution. We project our analogies onto the
natural world whose creatures we imbue with an ideal of perfection that is all our own:
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Won’t this whole instinct matter bear revision?
Won’t almost any theory bear revision?
To err is human, not to, animal.
Or so we pay the compliment to instinct,
Only too liberal of our compliment
That really takes away instead of gives.
Our worship, humor, conscientiousness
Went long since to the dogs under the table.
And served us right for having instituted
Downward comparisons . . .
Emerson and Thoreau had both been willing to see divine qualities in nature.
Emerson regarded nature as “a symbol of the spirit.” In Walden, we find Thoreau seeking to obtain a new, unmediated Adamic language rooted in the facts of
The Cambridge Introduction to Robert Frost Page 21