The Cambridge Introduction to Robert Frost
Page 24
him as a symbol of the waste we share in – participate in. Pour it on the
ground and you’ve wasted it; pour it into yourself and you’ve doubly
wasted it. But all in the cause of generosity and relaxation of self
interest.
( CP, 207)
This version of waste as sacrifice and its vision of the god of waste seems far less humane than the one offered previously. It does not suggest a finality to human consciousness without a final destiny for humanity or individual human lives.
In his comments on “The Future of Man,” Frost was particularly attentive
to other scientists and with social scientists who entertained strong hopes for human progress. He had in mind the early discussions about genetics and
the possibilities of improvements in genetics, precursors of what we now call
the human genome project. He still had a strong memory of the eugenics
movement as it had developed in turn-of-the-century Vermont but also the
horror it had become in mid-century Germany. His satiric tone was also aimed
at Marxism, whose utopianism he also found inhuman, because it failed to
allow for individual responsibility even in failure.
The heroic sense of pilgrimage and risk is a crucial part of the mythology of
Frost’s poetry and has extended to the idea readers have of his life. “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” and “The Road Not Taken” have an indelible
place among the pantheon of those lyrics of heroic endurance, even if their
subtlety and ironies are, more often than not, completely glossed over. One of the less known but important early poems in which Frost explores the soul’s
descent into matter and the ultimate questions of human responsibility, choice and destiny is “The Trial by Existence.” Helen Bacon has shown the extent to
which Frost based the poem on Plato’s myth of “Er,” a man who comes back
to life after having died in battle. Er reports to the living of the souls who, after rewards and punishments in the next world, gather for rebirth where
they will select the life they will live in their transmigration to another body.
Frost’s recasting of this story turns the classical heaven into a version of the Judeo-Christian God. But there is no final resting of the soul in heaven, only
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the choice of life, which yet “admits no memory of choice.” Somehow, we are
responsible for our fate:
But always God speaks at the end:
“One thought in agony of strife
The bravest would have by for friend,
The memory that he chose the life;
But the pure fate to which you go
Admits no memory of choice,
Or the woe were not earthly woe
To which you give the assenting voice.”
Frost’s God emphasizes “earthly woe,” and with it the elimination of certainty and pride but not, perhaps, of responsibility. The next and, penultimate stanza, builds on the idea that all choices are the same and, perhaps, more important, an ongoing mystic link between spirit and matter “until death come” (though
nothing is promised of what may come after):
And so the choice must be again,
But the last choice is still the same;
And the awe passes wonder then,
And a hush falls for all acclaim.
And God has taken a flower of gold
And broken it, and used therefrom
The mystic link to bind and hold
Spirit and matter till death come.
What, then, does the poem conclude about the soul’s destiny? It ends leaving
it “crushed and mystified”:
’Tis of the essence of life here,
Though we choose greatly, still to lack
The lasting memory at all clear,
That life has for us on the wrack
Nothing but what we somehow chose;
Thus are we wholly stripped of pride
In the pain that has but one close,
Bearing it crushed and mystified.
This may be a painful conclusion for a poem that began by echoing an ancient
myth about heroic souls. Frost’s conception of the heroic remained rather
tough, demanding an almost unbearable degree of uncertainty about the fate
of the spirit and a willingness to accept material existence and suffering, and a sense of responsibility for one’s own predicament no matter how fated.
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“The Road Not Taken” remains the most famous and most quoted of Frost’s
poems that present his complex and subtle mythology of apparently heroic
choice in the midst of uncertainty and doubt. After all, the title could refer to the road not taken by most individuals as well as the speaker’s regrets for the road he, after all, did not take. The final lines of the poem are frequently quoted in affirmation without recognition of their temporal relation to the rest of the poem – from an imagined future looking back into the past and not
the present. It evokes, though does not rely, upon older mythologies of heroic figures at moments of terrible decision, including Oedipus at the crossroads
and Dante entering an obscure wood before entering hell:
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same, . . .
In attempting to make his decision, his “choice,” the speaker finds little difference and very little in the way of originality – both had been worn well
before him. He possesses really little in the way of a priori judgment or knowledge. He uses the verb “take” to assess the roads, and it is the same verb used colloquially for the road actually chosen; “take” suggests less of a “choice” as rational decision than something seized upon. Later Frost would vary the title of a poem “Choose Something Like a Star” to “Take Something Like a Star,” so
the difference between the two verbs meant something to him. What appeared
to be choice or selection turned out to be less rational than we would like it to be, stripping the outcome of some of the bravado we would arrogate to
ourselves.
The irony about that bounded sense of choice contributes much to the
strangeness of the conclusion of the poem, a strangeness often overlooked in
the way the poem has been quoted as a statement of unqualified triumph. The
penultimate stanza expresses the regret that haunts the whole poem, particu-
larly the title, for what might have been, and the way each change irrevocably alters the traveler and what came before. The ultimate stanza may cause the
reader to wonder why “a sigh”? Where would one be “ages and ages hence”?
The stanza begins with the speaker stating that he “shall be telling this”; it is a
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projection, not a certainty in the present. There may be much, too, in the pause after the third line:
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I –
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
We might ask from the perspective of the present, “what difference” or, from the perspective of the future, what does the speaker really know of the difference?
Has his “difference” really something to do with his foresight, insight, and has it made him somehow better than others?
The idea of an itinerant, spiritual pilgrimage has it roots in Bunyan. An
important American antecedent for Frost would have been Thoreau’s essay
“Walking,” in which the very idea of movement west in the wilderness guided
by nature became a new form of salvation. In Thoreau’s words, “in wildness is
the salvation of the world.” Yet Thoreau believed that nature somehow could
become an adequate guide to our choices:
What is it that makes it so hard sometimes to determine whither we will
walk? I believe there is a subtle magnetism in Nature, which if we
unconsciously yield to it, will direct us aright. It is not indifferent to us
which way we walk. There is a right way, but we are very liable from
heedlessness and stupidity to take the wrong one. We would fain take
that walk, never yet taken by us through the actual world, which is
perfectly symbolical of the path which we love to travel in the interior
and ideal world, and sometimes, no doubt, we find it difficult to choose
our direction, because it does not yet distinctly exist in our idea.24
From where do we derive this “subtle magnetism of Nature”? Frost admired
greatly Thoreau’s writing, and Walden, especially. He could, however, be a bit wry when considering the implications of Thoreau’s emphasis on the particularity of nature and upon finding an Adamic language of nature by which to
recover a perfect and perhaps divine reality.
Great Frost poems, “Into My Own,” “The Demiurge’s Laugh,” “The Wood
Pile,” and “Directive,” play on the myth of the “itinerant” errand into the
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wilderness, risking getting lost in the material world, perhaps in search of
the wildness that Thoreau viewed as salvation. One can readily think of the
terrifying “Desert Places,” whose speaker appears threatened by the imminent
annihilation and loneliness of winter around him. The whole poem may be a
reaction to Pascal’s meditation that “The eternal silence of those infinite places fills me with dread.” But whereas Pascal’s fear inspired him with faith, Frost’s moves him differently:
Snow falling and night falling fast, oh, fast
In a field I looked into going past,
And the ground almost covered smooth in snow,
But a few weeds and stubble showing last.
The woods around it have it – it is theirs.
All animals are smothered in their lairs.
I am too absent-spirited to count;
The loneliness includes me unawares.
The speaker intensifies the loneliness so much that he seems to own it as a
prophet would. The first lines of the final stanza form a defiant refusal to
succumb to the fear of the vastness of interstellar space, a refusal affirmed –
and oddly undercut – in the final two lines. Instead the speaker presents us
with a deeper ability to scare himself “nearer home,” in himself and from
unspecified threats of isolation and extinction. The woods “have it – it is theirs,”
whatever “it” may be, possession or self-possession. The other animals, like the woodchuck in “After Apple-Picking,” have gone to safety, while this human
creature suffers an exposed isolation. The feminine rhyme of “spaces” and
“race is,” by suggesting the pun “races,” underscores the uncertainty of human life in the universe and the fragility of its survival on this planet:
And lonely as it is that loneliness
Will be more lonely ere it will be less –
A blanker whiteness of benighted snow
With no expression, nothing to express.
They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between stars – on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places.
Being lost, annihilated, and far from home are notorious threats in Frost
as we know in so many poems, including some of his dramatic pastorals,
“Snow,” “The Death of the Hired Man,” as well as best-known lyrics, including
“Acquainted with the Night,” and “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.”
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These last two have an interesting resonance with Dante’s infernal journey;
“Acquainted with the Night” is written in terza rima, a rare verse form in English but the verse form of Dante’s Commedia. Unlike Dante’s poem, the speaker does not journey in one direction but walks “out and back,” with no
final goal. The speaker of “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” expresses
some fear because he knows the woods do not belong to him, “he will not mind
me stopping here to watch his woods fill up with snow.” We also learn, though, that he is “between the woods and frozen lake,” the zone where Dante’s journey in Inferno started and finished.
Metaphor or simply form becomes the instrument by which the soul
approaches and saves itself from becoming lost in matter. “There is noth-
ing quite so composing as composition. Putting anything in order a house
a business a poem gives a sense of sharing the mastery of the universe”
( N, 281). He defends himself against materiality, if not materialism, by extolling the shaping power of metaphor in “Education by Poetry,” where he talks about
the precarious balance between spirit and matter. “Greatest of all attempts to say one thing in terms of another is the philosophical attempt to say matter in terms of spirit, or spirit in terms of matter, to make the final unity. That is the greatest attempt that ever failed. We stop just short there” ( CP, 107).
What does Frost mean by “spirit”? An eternal emanation from heaven? Or
simply what the word means from its root, “breath”? Frost appears to take
different positions in different poems. We can remember the early poem “Pan
with Us,” in which magical pipes of the Greek god “kept less of power to
stir” “[t]han the merest aimless breath of air.” “The Aim Was Song” appears
to present man as the physical force that gives order to the aimless wind.
The repetition of wind in the last stanza – “The wind the wind had meant
to be –” raises the question of whether
man is merely an instrument of a
prior aim, if not a higher aim – if the wind could possibly “see” such a
thing:
Before man came to blow it right
The wind once blew itself untaught,
And did its loudest day and night
In any rough place where it caught.
Man came to tell it what was wrong:
It hadn’t found the place to blow;
It blew too hard – the aim was song.
And listen – how it ought to go!
He took a little in his mouth,
And held it long enough for north
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To be converted into south,
And then by measure blew it forth.
By measure. It was word and note,
The wind the wind had meant to be –
A little through the lips and throat.
The aim was song – the wind could see.
This poem tends to deflate the idea of inspiration, spirit as some kind of mysterious force coming from within. Instead, the man as human body serves as
vessel for literal wind coming from without.
“Sitting by a Bush in Broad Sunlight” measures the crisis in faith created by
modern empiricism and science. The speaker sits unmoved by light:
When I spread out my hand here today,
I catch no more than a ray
To feel of between thumb and fingers;
No lasting effect of it lingers.
Light in the modern view would be viewed in the scientific sense as a ray,
something “physical,” to be “caught” with the opposable “thumb” by which
we are defined as hominids.
The account of God speaking to Moses from the burning bush as well as
the evolutionary accounts of life’s beginnings both seem too distant to be
believed and too disparate to be reconciled with our contemporary yearnings
for divinity. Yet the speaker attempts to do that, insisting that the divine speaking to us persists in our “breath”:
God once declared he was true
And then took the veil and withdrew,
And remember how final a hush
Then descended of old on the bush.
God once spoke to people by name.
The sun once imparted its flame.
One impulse persists as our breath;
The other persists as our faith.