The Cambridge Introduction to Robert Frost
Page 22
nature. There can be little question that Darwin made analogy literal and
homologous by suggesting that we were similar to but actually the same as
other creatures, different in degree only. The grounding, then, for our ideals of perfection becomes as shifting as the phenomenon we choose to observe:
. . . As long on earth
As our comparisons were stoutly upward
With gods and angels, we were men at least,
But little lower than the gods and angels.
But once comparisons were yielded downward,
Once we began to see our images
Reflected in the mud and even dust,
’Twas disillusion upon disillusion.
We were lost piecemeal to the animals,
Like people thrown out to delay the wolves.
Nothing but fallibility was left us,
And this day’s work made even that seem doubtful.
The final twenty-one lines may be simply the disillusioned torrent of the somewhat foolish narrator. They also encapsulate a particular problem in intellectual and poetic history about taking the comparison between man and other creatures too far. It becomes both a moral problem, for what, if anything, should
insect societies tell us about how we ought to live, as well as an epistemological problem. We cannot help but make downward comparisons but there must be some judgment about how to make them. The final line of the poem can be
taken as a reversal of the assertion in the previous line that “Nothing but fallibility was left us.” As a thorough skeptic, the narrator must doubt even that assertion, as he does in the final line.
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Frost’s view that the tones of speech existed before words makes several of
his other poems about birds, in addition to “The Need of Being Versed in
Country Things,” particularly poignant. “On a Bird Singing in Its Sleep,” “The Oven Bird,” and “Never Again Would Birds’ Song Be the Same,” all explore
the proximity of meaning of creaturely sound to the meanings we wish or
hope to hear. Frost paired “On a Bird Singing in Its Sleep” with “Design” in
A Further Range (1936). The octave of this sonnet makes observations about a bird singing at night but saves for the sixth, seventh, and eighth lines the reason for concern: its singing could put it in danger of predators:
A bird half wakened in the lunar noon
Sang halfway through its little inborn tune.
Partly because it sang but once all night
And that from no especial bush’s height;
Partly because it sang ventriloquist
And had the inspiration to desist
Almost before the prick of hostile ears,
It ventured less in peril than appears.
The sense of the bird’s unconscious behavior suggested by “half wakened” and
“inborn” stand in contrast to its strategic and willful behavior suggested by
“ventriloquist” and “inspiration to desist.” Nevertheless, hostile ears have been alerted to its presence. In the concluding sestet the poet-speaker, feeling kinship to the bird, seems to believe that the behavior of the bird “singing out of sleep and dream” must not threaten its survival or it would not already have survived so long on earth:
It could not have come down to us so far
Through the interstices of things ajar
On the long bead chain of repeated birth
To be a bird while we are men on earth
If singing out of sleep and dream that way
Had made it much more easily a prey.
The phrases, “interstices of things ajar,” “bead chain of repeated birth,” as well as “while we are men on earth,” suggest a mystical way of looking at the problem of ecological niches, evolutionary descent, and the interconnectedness of life.
Both “The Oven Bird” and “Never Again Would Birds’ Song Be the Same”
dramatize Frost’s fascination with the primordial relationship of sound to
meaning. Both sonnets are also remarkable studies of origins and attempts
to recover loss. Both “indoor” and “outdoor” schooling come into play in
Frost’s choice of the oven bird as a symbolic warbler.19 The North American
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oven bird sings at dusk, and its remarkable tune – “teacher, teacher, teacher”–
must have struck Frost for its suggestiveness. This is a different species from the South American oven bird that Frost noted in one of his favorite books,
Darwin’s The Voyage of the Beagle. This oven bird builds its nest, which looks very much like a large oven with a door, on the ground. The nest also has a
front and inner chamber, very much like a human house. Darwin thought the
bird might provide some clue about the relationship of all creatures.20 As in the case of “the White-Tailed Hornet,” Frost was quite willing to conflate species for poetic purposes. He probably does so here as he fashions a sonnet about a
universal singer, announced boldly in the sestet:
There is a singer everyone has heard,
Loud, a mid-summer and mid-wood bird,
Who makes the solid tree trunks sound again.
He says that leaves are old and that for flowers
Mid-summer is to spring as one to ten.
He says the early petal-fall is past
When pear and cherry bloom went down in showers
On sunny days a moment overcast;
This bird has much to say, and speaks to and through the poet unselfconsciously.
There is a strong insistence that the tone of the birds’ song speaks perfectly to this midsummer moment that dissolves into fall. With the season, the sonnet
turns at the sestet, and we learn that the bird has a gnomic adjustment to the situation:
And comes that other fall we name the fall.
He says the highway dust is over all.
The bird would cease and be as other birds
But that he knows in singing not to sing.
The question that he frames in all but words
Is what to make of a diminished thing.
The first line stresses that the “other fall” happens to be one that “we name.”
All other seasons could be noted for something falling. This midsummer bird
has a way of coping with the difficult situation of dust and heat. The bird has a consciousness and knowledge similar in kind to ours. The bird frames the
question “in all but words,” indicating that words are but a minor addition to the power of sound that comes from deep in nature but to which we feel a clear bond.
Yet that bond seems connected to a mutual understanding of sadness and
diminishment.21 Diminishment, one might ask, of what? The expectations of
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love appear to be high in “Never Again Would Birds’ Song Be the Same,” so
the feelings of loss are of equal magnitude. What has happened in this poem
appears to be a great change in expectations about what nature means or, at
least, how we experience and hear it. In this sonnet, the speaker describes a
character, an Adamic figure, who has dramatic expectations of t
he meaning of
the birds’ song:
He would declare and could himself believe
That the birds there in all the garden round
From having heard the daylong voice of Eve
Had added to their own an oversound,
Her tone of meaning but without the words.
So great is this Adam’s love for Eve that he attributes what he hears in nature to the very influence of her tone of voice. Mankind here influences the creaturely world rather than the creaturely world influencing man. As the sonnet
continues, however, qualifications arise:
Admittedly an eloquence so soft
Could only have had an influence on birds
When call or laughter carried it aloft.
Be that as may be, she was in their song.
Moreover her voice upon their voices crossed
Had now persisted in the woods so long
That probably it never would be lost.
“Call or laughter” may have something to do with sexual play, and perhaps that may account for some sense of why the scene of the poem has moved from the
“garden” to the “woods,” where human and other creatures persist in a world
in which all voices upon each other are “crossed.”
There has been something of a temptation (a loaded word in this case)
to interpret both sonnets theologically, as allegories of one kind or another
about the Fall. While one cannot exclude that interpretation, another way to
look at them is in terms of psychological recognition that the world has not
changed but that our particularly human perceptions of it do. Consciousness
may alter, affected by breakthroughs and contact unexpectedly from otherness.
The world may change but so may our recognition of it, perhaps as a result
of our experiences, including being wounded in love. The sonnet concludes
with two of the most memorable lines in Frost: “Never again would birds’ song
be the same. / And to do that to birds was why she came.” The penultimate
line has the sense and weight of loss. The final line may be harder to interpret.
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Does “to do that” have the force of a something done deliberately, perhaps even maliciously? Is there a sexual pun in the conclusion?
“The Most of It” may be one of Frost’s most powerful sonic utterances in
addition to being a baffling study of the human relationship to nature. No
reader should forget that its speaker describes a character, a “he,” who makes a supposition about his relationship to the universe. His agony is depicted
in two dramatic sentences broken evenly into four lines each. This mysteri-
ous Narcissus-Adamic figure desires something that seems paradoxical, both
“counter-love” as well as “original-response”:
He thought he kept the universe alone;
For all the voice in answer he could wake
Was but the mocking echo of his own
From some tree-hidden cliff across the lake.
Some morning from the boulder-broken beach
He would cry out on life, that what it wants
Is not its own love back in copy speech,
But counter-love, original response.
At this moment in the lyric, “it” appears to be life but becomes more mysterious as it finds “embodiment” in the stunning one-sentence torrent that comes, just perhaps, in response:
And nothing ever came of what he cried
Unless it was the embodiment that crashed
In the cliff’s talus on the other side,
And then in the far distant water splashed,
But after a time allowed for it to swim,
Instead of proving human when it neared
And someone else additional to him,
As a great buck it powerfully appeared,
Pushing the crumpled water up ahead,
And landed pouring like a waterfall,
And stumbled through the rocks with horny tread,
And forced the underbrush – and that was all.
This “nothing” turns out to be quite a something, even though whatever “it” is, it is not human and mysteriously an “embodiment” that appeared “as a great buck.” The force of this single sentence dwarfs and humiliates the grandiosity of the character who thought he kept the universe alone. It has much of the effect of God’s revelation to Job out of the whirlwind; God reveals absolutely nothing human in creation and his theophany culminates in images of behemoth and
leviathan, all powerful and suggestively sexual and masculine. The anaphora
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with which the last three lines build comes to a crashing conclusion with the
final phrase in which “all” could be taken to mean everything or very little.
“The Most of It” deserves to be read in the context of the poems that follow
it in A Witness Tree: “Never Again Would Birds’ Song Be the Same” and “The Subverted Flower.” There is some suggestion here of a narrative, however dark, of what happens when love’s cries are answered. But from the standpoint of
man’s relationship to the natural world, “The Most of It” gives the impression of man belittled and bewildered in any search for recognizable response in nature.
It would be wrong, however, to view “The Most of It” as being Frost’s final
word on the subject. “Two Look at Two,” published earlier in New Hampshire, would give at least a somewhat different impression of Frost’s vision of man’s relationship to the rest of the creaturely world. The word “love” begins and
ends this short, blank-verse narrative. A couple have been wandering at dusk
up a mountainside path but there is both some trepidation and lack of impulse
in their ability to carry further on. As the couple think, in language similar to
“The Most of It,” that they have reached an end, they encounter a doe. The
language allows a remarkable proximity of both fields of perception, “across
the wall” or boundaries of otherness, underscored in the intricately crossed
line “She saw them in their field, they her in hers”:
“ . . . This is all,” they sighed,
“Good-night to woods.” But not so; there was more.
A doe from round a spruce stood looking at them
Across the wall, as near the wall as they.
She saw them in their field, they her in hers.
The difficulty of seeing what stood still,
Like some up-ended boulder split in two,
Was in her clouded eyes: they saw no fear there.
She seemed to think that two thus they were safe.
Then, as if they were something that, though strange,
She could not trouble her mind with too long,
She sighed and passed unscared along the wall.
“This, then, is all. What more is there to ask?”
Of course, there is more. After the doe, “an antlered buck of lusty nostril”
appears and seems in gesture to ask the couple “‘Why don’t you make some
motion? / Or give some sign of life? Because you can’t. / I doubt if you’re as living as you look.’” The buck then passes “unscared,” a word repeated, as if to emphasize that the couple must be just that. In this poem there has been a rather powerful level of communication
between the doe and buck and the couple,
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relatively untroubled by problems of analogy, perhaps because the vision was
“unlooked for”:
“This must be all.” It was all. Still they stood,
A great wave from it going over them,
As if the earth in one unlooked-for favor
Had made them certain earth returned their love.
Whatever the strength of the couple’s “love,” the word that frames the poem,
the experience enabled them to feel some mutual, if very momentary creaturely
bond with earth – even if slightly threatening – not in the least present in “The Most of It.”
Frost and believing-in
It may be inevitable to want to talk about religion in Frost’s poetry since the figures of traditional and mostly western faith – “God,” “spirit,” “heaven” –
appear with more than just passing mention in a number of the poems. Did
Frost hold any known religious convictions or adhere to any definable religion?
No. He once spoke of his religious convictions as something to be inferred from his words and deeds:
If you would have out the way a man feels about God, watch his life, hear
his words. Place a coin, with its denomination unknown, under paper
and you can tell its mark by rubbing a pencil over the paper. From all the
individual rises and valleys your answer will come out.
( I, 149)
It may be a great deal to ask of a reader and biographer to follow Frost’s
metaphor in order to grasp how he felt about God and the nature of his belief.
The complexity and contradictory nature of the poetry, as well as his talks and other comments, make it more than a little difficult to make simple, comprehensive, or satisfying statements. Certain kinds of contradictions, metaphors, and mythologies do recur in his work and suggest a mind in which poetry is
ceaselessly in pursuit of ultimate mysteries on the edge of faith, science, and philosophy.
In the same 1955 interview in which Frost made the analogy about tracing
the coin, the interviewer asked him specifically about the pointed reference to God at the conclusion to his poem “Bereft.” Frost has told biographers that
the poem originated as early as the summer of 1893, after he was left alone