by Elinor and some other women with whom he was staying. He did not
publish the poem until the 1920s but the enormity of the speaker’s loneliness
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and the terrifying imagery suggests great loss and portends worse things to
come:
Where had I heard this wind before
Change like this to a deeper roar?
What would it take my standing there for,
Holding open a restive door,
Looking down hill to a frothy shore?
Summer was past and day was past.
Somber clouds in the west were massed.
Out in the porch’s sagging floor,
Leaves got up in a coil and hissed,
Blindly struck at my knee and missed.
Something sinister in the tone
Told me my secret must be known:
Word I was in the house alone
Somehow must have gotten abroad,
Word I was in my life alone,
Word I had no one left but God.
The final lines “Word I was in my life alone / Word I had no one left but
God” may strike less as statements of faith than as utterances of loneliness and slightly chilling expressions of fear of that being the case. The figure of the great wind in the context of total loss may also evoke the specter of Job and
the showing of God from the whirlwind. This would not be a mere random
association given, as we shall see, The Masque of Reason. If Frost might tend to be drawn to that particular book of the Bible, what does it say about him and his poetry?
Poetry should not be viewed as encapsulated religion or, more specifically,
packaged theology. However many commentators have examined Dante’s debt
to Aquinas, Dante still remains true to his own way, his own symbolic vision
for attaining the stars (and each part of The Divine Comedy ends with that word), and one that cannot simply be translated back into a theology. Unlike
Frost, however, Dante wrote at a time in which while there was, of course, great political strife, a Christian and largely Catholic worldview dominated religion and theology. After Dante, Milton’s poetic rendering of the fall in Paradise Lost deeply influenced and also threatened “to ruin the sacred truths” “to fable and old song.”
In the transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth century, it has been
the challenges to traditions of faith, including almost all forms of Christianity, that has often preoccupied poets as they have drawn upon religious themes.
From the late Victorians to the early moderns – Tennyson, Arnold, Browning,
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Melville, Hardy – the redemptive power of art in the face of diminished or
unsatisfying religious faith has been a persistent theme. More important, poetry may provide a language for contradictions and tensions made too simple by
the answers of theologians. The twentieth-century Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz
put the predicament very succinctly:
What is deepest and most deeply felt in life, the transitoriness of human
beings, illness, death, the vanity of opinions, convictions, cannot be
expressed in the language of theology, which for centuries has responded
by turning out perfectly rounded balls, easy to roll but impenetrable.
Twentieth century poetry, or what is most essential in it, gathers data on
the ultimate in the human condition and elaborates, to handle the data,
a language which may or may not be used by theology.22
Frost, as has been discussed, developed a particular sense of metaphor for
his poetry, and it appears to have been developed in response less to politics than to both faith and science, in our time both deeply related to each other.
He was born after the American Civil War, had his education, and published
his two greatest books before World War I. What Frost witnessed and what
both inspired and seemed somewhat to threaten him as a human being and
as a poet was science, which he sometimes called “the great event of history”
( I, 189). If Frost explored and welcomed spiritual tensions as part of poetry,
“Where Poetry is Poised – on the brink of spiritual disaster,” he wrote in his
“notebooks” ( N, 654).
A great deal, though certainly not quite all, of Frost’s poetry, including those poems that seem to have apparently religious themes, might make more sense
if read in light of his lifelong preoccupation with the relationship, though some might regard it as a conflict, between science and faith in the modern world.
Frost critics are generally now in agreement that science was an enormous pre-
occupation of Frost’s, even if they disagree ultimately on how he saw poetry’s cultural relationship to it.23 Without question, science has enjoyed the prestige in our culture once accorded to religion and theology in the middle ages
(science, of course, meant something different at that time from what it does
now). Unlike almost all of his modernist counterparts, Frost sought rather to
engage science directly in poetry and poetics, and he manifested his admira-
tion for science in almost every aspect of his work. When one says “science,”
there is always the question of precisely what one means by the word: Science
as empirical investigation and then speculative theory; science as technology
in peace and war; science as the pursuit of understanding independent from
dogma. Frost was pleased to embrace with qualification all these aspects of
science:
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[Science] is not all. But it is much. It comes into our lives as domestic
science for our hold on the planet, into our deaths with its deadly
weapons, bombs and airplanes, for war, and into our souls as pure
science for nothing but glory; in which last respect it may be likened
unto pure poetry and mysticism. It is man’s greatest enterprise. It is the
charge of the ethereal into the material. It is our Substantiation of our
meaning. It can’t go too far or too deep for me. Still it is not a law unto
itself.
( CP, 209)
Frost held an early fascination with the literature of exploration. Among his
favorite books, as I mentioned earlier, were works about scientific exploration, botany, and astronomy (“About one-tenth of my poems are astronomical; and
I’ve had a glass a good deal of the time” I, 189). More to the point were the figures he used to talk about poetry: “Every poem is a voyage of discovery. I
go in to see if I can get out, like you go to the North Pole” ( I, 188). That sense of discovery and exploration, along with other aspects of science – the making of hypotheses, the creation and use of technology, the willingness to abandon
idols of the mind and religious dogma, the fascination with the material world –
are all very much a positive part of Frost’s imaginative métier.
A fundamental mythology appears to govern Frost’s poetry from his earliest
work in A Boy�
�s Will through his last In the Clearing (and even his last published poem, “The Prophets Really Prophesy as Mystics, the Commentators Merely
by Statistics”): it is what he called “plunge of mind, the spirit in the material universe.” For Frost, this was the governing story not only of science but also of poetry and western religion. As a story, it was for the poet to describe, not the scientist. However, it was a vision that Frost had developed not in opposition to science but with poetry in a relation closer to what Whitman had called
“the tuft and final applause of science.” Frost avoided the nineteenth-century division of poetry into a form of mysticism or a form of pure aestheticism.
Journeys into matter
It would be too easy to say that Frost had found a simple reconciliation between science, religion, and poetry. Science had become deeply troubling to many in
Frost’s youth because it shattered cherished notions of divine human origins.
Social Darwinist claims for the possibility of human progress aside, for those, like Frost, who had grown up reading Emerson or Thoreau and having some
mystical sense in the power of nature to reveal spiritual mysteries or to affirm the divine in man, Darwin did much to undermine such a view. Nevertheless,
the material world had a great fascination for Frost and at various points in his youth he may have been more or less troubled by his own seeking of divinity
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within it. Frost subtitled “The Demiurge’s Laugh,” from A Boy’s Will, “About Science.” In antiquity and then in some forms of heretical Christianity, the
demiurge was the sublunary god who created the world. In Gnosticism, the
“true” Christian was completely elsewhere than earth. Some, including for
example Herman Melville, saw the condition of modern science as a rebirth of
the Gnostic predicament. Science had created a world of material knowledge
devoid of divinity; God was elsewhere:
It was far in the sameness of the wood:
I was running with joy on the Demon’s trail,
Though I knew what I hunted was no true god.
It was just as the light was beginning to fail
That I suddenly heard – all I needed to hear:
It has lasted me many and many a year.
The sound was behind me instead of before,
A sleepy sound, but mocking half,
As of one who utterly couldn’t care.
The Demon arose from his wallow to laugh,
Brushing the dirt from his eye as he went;
And well I knew what the Demon meant.
We do not know for certain whether the speaker in being “on the Demon’s
trail” pursues the Demon or is on the trail created by the Demon. In either
case, he soon learns that he has been fooled, because whatever he has been
pursuing in the “sameness” does not lie in front of him but really “behind”
him, as though figuratively indifferent to his goals, “mocking half.” If this seeker has been pursuing some ultimate, transcendent knowledge through nature, the Demon sitting in a wallow, with dirt in his eyes, would be indifferent to that obscure goal. The initial wild joy turns into a more contemplative awareness
of limitations, as the speaker sits, suggestively, under a tree after hearing the laugh:
I shall not forget how his laugh rang out.
I felt as a fool to have been so caught,
And checked my steps to make pretense
It was something among the leaves I sought
(Though doubtful whether he stayed to see).
Thereafter I sat me under a tree.
A powerful sense of irony arrests the consciousness that seeks ultimate truth
in matter. Consider what he said years later: “I’m lost in my admiration for
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science . . . It can’t go too far or too deep for me.” But he added, “If it penetrates straight to hell, then that’s all right, too” ( I, 266).
While Frost never quite shed faith in spirit, he always envisioned it incarnated in matter. From “The Trial by Existence,” “Sitting by a Bush in Broad Sunlight,”
“The Aim Was Song,” to “Kitty Hawk,” his three-beat, semi-autobiographical
poem from In the Clearing, Frost admires penetration of mind and spirit into matter as a virtue. In fact, he links matter and spirit, science and faith, without any certainty about their eventual separation. Frost plays with the phrase “that fall / From the apple tree,” because “from” could mean “because of” or “out
of,” suggesting the debate about human origins:
Pulpiteers will censure
Our instinctive venture
Into what they call
The material
When we took that fall
From the apple tree.
But God’s own descent
Into flesh was meant
As a demonstration
That the supreme merit
Lay in risking spirit
In substantiation.
Westerners inherit
A design for living
Deeper into matter –
Not without due patter
Of a great misgiving.
All the science zest
To materialize
By on-penetration
Into earth and skies
(Don’t forget the latter
Is but further matter)
Has been West Northwest.
Science had in a number of ways penetrated dangerously into the material.
The study of the Book of Nature in addition to the Bible had been given
in scripture itself. Not until the Renaissance did the study of nature come
into conflict with what was given in scripture. Francis Bacon compromised
by suggesting in The Advancement of Learning that in both “books” God’s hand could be found. The question of whether the compromise could be held
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at all became particularly strained in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century as the world of Genesis and evolutionary geology drew farther and
farther apart. Frost himself appeared deeply concerned about the question
of the relationship of science and faith, though his thinking about the two
sometimes changed and was contradictory. Rather than deny, distance himself,
or despair over Darwinism, for example, he appeared to embrace its challenges
and uncertainties. Writing in his notebooks, Frost emphasized a refusal to
despair over the end of special creation, even suggesting a form of immanent
teleology. He goes on to suggest that what appears in nature to be waste is really only nature’s form of sacrifice:
When the fact of Evolution came up to shake the church’s certainties
about creation and the date of it 4004 BC, I bade myself be not
discouraged. The old idea we were asked to give up was God made man
out of mud at one stroke. I saw that the new idea would have to be that
God made man out of prepared mud that he had taken his time about
working up gradation. I was not much put out or off my own thinking.
There
was as much of a God in it as ever.
When the waste of codfish eggs to produce one codfish seem too
disillusioning for young Bostonians to bear and stay even Unitarians, I
would have come to their rescue, if they would have listened to me, with
the suggestion that the death of all those eggs was necessary to make the
ocean a froth fit for the one codfish to live in. But I would go further
today in standing my ground. There is no waste, and all that looks like
waste is some form of sacrifice, like tithes to the Lord, absolute Sabbath.
Keeping (throwing the day away entirely), and flowing out a libation on
the ground or fire. It is once wasted on the ground. It is twice wasted
down the gullet of the worshipper. Then it not only washes the liquor
but it also wastes the man.
( N, 522–523)
Frost could sound much less optimistic about the relationship of waste to
sacrifice in other published prose and poems. Consider, for example, this essay on “The Future of Man,” presented by Frost at a panel in 1959, celebrating the centenary of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. He speaks of Darwin’s tree of life and the human tree of life as the Norse tree Yggdrasil with roots above and below the ground. Frost considers our consciousness as “terminal,” and the
god of waste as indifferent to us:
I take it that evolution comes under the head of growth. Only it has a
strange illusory way of making you think it goes on forever. But all
growth is limited – the tree of life is limited like a maple tree or an oak
tree – they all have a certain height, and they all have a certain
life-length. And our tree, the tree Yggdrasil, has reached its growth. It
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doesn’t have to fall down because it’s stopped growing. It will go on
blossoming and having its seasons – I’d give it another hundred or two
hundred million years. Make that anything you please . . .
. . . There’s nothing coming beyond us. The tree Yggdrasil has reached
its growth.
Then I want to say another thing about the god who provides the
great issues. He’s a god of waste, magnificent waste. And waste is another
name for generosity of not always being intent on our own advantage,
nor too importunate even for a better world. We pour out libation to
The Cambridge Introduction to Robert Frost Page 23