The Cambridge Introduction to Robert Frost
Page 25
The intertwined impulse of spirit and matter persist inextricably bound in us at this moment. Both tales of origins remain unrecoverable and subject to belief.
In a moment of surprise, Frost concludes the poem by linking our “breath”
with God’s original impulse but our “faith” with the sun’s flame.
Frost concluded his “meditative monologue” on metaphor with a statement
about the four beliefs he found bound to his experience in poetry:
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the personal belief, which is a knowledge that you don’t want to tell
other people about because you cannot prove that you know. You are
saying nothing about it till you see. The love belief, just the same, has
that same shyness . . . And the national belief we enter into socially with
each other, all together, party of the first part, party of the second part,
we enter into that to bring the future of the country . . . And then the
literary one in every work of art, not of cunning and craft, mind you,
but of real art; that believing the thing into existence . . . And then finally the relationship we enter into with God to believe the future in – to
believe the hereafter in.
( CP, 110–111)
Frost’s use of “in” in relation to belief places the emphasis on the act of belief as a creative covenant and bridge rather than on the existence of the thing
believed, whether it be “the future” or “the hereafter.” He underscored this
sense of belief in a 1961 interview:
You believe yourself into existence. You believe your marriage into
existence, you believe in each other, you believe that it’s worthwhile
going on, or you’d commit suicide, wouldn’t you? And the ultimate one
is the belief in the future of the world. I believe the future in. It’s coming in by my believing it. You might as well call that a belief in God. This
word God is not an often-used word with me, but once in a while it
arrives there.
( I, 271)
Frost defers the sense of finality or arrival in many of his itinerant journey poems by putting himself or us on the verge of becoming lost. Such a journey
could describe a number of Frost’s most remarkable poems, not only “The
Road Not Taken,” but also “The Wood Pile,” and, late among his poems,
“Directive,” in which the narrator seems to direct or order us “back out” of
the present confusion and then “back in a time made simple.” The goal of
this “directive” would seem for us to become so lost as to restore our belief.
Yet the simplicity of past time derives oddly from “loss” and from ruins and
destruction:
Back out of all this now too much for us,
Back in a time made simple by the loss
Of detail, burned, dissolved, and broken off
Like graveyard marble sculpture in the weather,
There is a house that is no more a house
Upon a farm that is no more a farm
And in a town that is no more a town.
The road there, if you’ll let a guide direct you
Who only has at heart your getting lost,
May seem as if it should have been a quarry –
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Going back in time imaginatively to a time made simple may seem a pastoral
gesture of retreat. In Frost, however, it often signals a history of loss and decay, as it did in “Ghost House,” “The Generations of Men,” and most acutely “The
Census Taker,” in which the narrator’s finding “This house in one year fallen
to decay / Filled me with no less sorrow than the houses / Fallen to ruin in ten thousand years / Where Asia wedges Africa from Europe.” All the “melancholy
of having to count souls” where they have grown, ironically, “to none at all”
drives him to a skeptical utterance of survival: “It must be I want to go on
living.”
“Directive” leads us in “the height of adventure” where “two village cultures
faded / Into each other. Both of them are lost.” Looking deep into the past
for simplicity, one finds divergence, competition, and destruction. The poem
guides us backward through a natural history of the entire region until we
are left with nothing but what might be a “belilaced cellar hole, / Now slowly closing like a dent in dough.” Here, the shaman-like narrator has left, near the source of brook “too lofty and original to rage”:
A broken drinking goblet like the Grail
Under a spell so the wrong ones can’t find it,
So can’t get saved, as Saint Mark says they musn’t.
(I stole the goblet from the children’s playhouse.)
Here are your waters and your watering place.
Drink and be whole again beyond confusion.
The “broken goblet like the Grail” as well as the reference to waters has rightly seemed a send-up of the archaic yearnings of Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, and
particularly a parody of the final section of Eliot’s “The Waste Land” where the grail quest ends in a place with no water. Readers debate how to take the thrust and conclusion of this rich combination of lyric, narration, and meditation,
a work that enfolds within it so much of Frost’s earlier work. The tone of
the poem in part and whole may be hard to comprehend. How should one
take the attitude of the line “Weep for what little things would make them
glad,” referring to the children’s playhouse of make-believe? As slightly satiric comment on Yeats’s “foul rag and bone shop of the heart” of “The Circus
Animals’ Desertion”? At this moment, we may wonder whether time past can
be the source, the well of belief or only of make-believe; a revision of child-like faith or childishness. Frost knew that Saint Mark’s version of Jesus’s parable of the sower (Mark 4: 1–20), a parable of why Jesus spoke in parables, seemed
to argue that it was necessary to speak in parables to exclude certain people
from understanding and, therefore, from being saved. Was Frost poking fun
at the obscurity of Eliot’s Christian modernism? Or was he making more of a
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suggestion that one need become “as little children” in order to understand?
With what tone do we take “Here are your waters and your watering place”?
With the thrill of revelation or contempt at belief in childish romanticism?
“The Fear of God,” also in Steeple Bush, presents a baldly unpleasant view taking one’s success too personally and as the act of a merciful God:
If you should rise from Nowhere up to Somewhere,
From being No one up to being Someone,
Be sure to keep repeating to yourself
You owe it to an arbitrary god
Whose mercy to you rather than to others
Won’t bear too critical examination.
This arbitrariness, lack of mercy, and lack of oversight in human affairs has
much of the quality of divinity to
which Frost gave expression in the early poem
“Stars”:
And yet with neither love nor hate,
Those stars like some snow-white
Minerva’s snow-white marble eyes
Without the gift of sight.
Frost, even more hauntingly, personifies the stars as the material manifestation of divinity in “A Question”:
A voice said, Look me in the stars
And tell me truly, men of earth,
If all the soul-and-body-scars
Were not too much to pay for birth.
The question turns immediately into an answer about suffering and sacrifice.
Sacrifice
Frost knew that both suffering and the desire to make a worthy sacrifice could turn individuals to wild acts, some beautiful and others dangerous. “The Star-Splitter” becomes exciting because of the risk taken by farmer Brad McLaugh-
lin to answer the indifferent stars. McLaughlin has had enough with “hugger-
mugger farming” and feels just slightly unhinged at being looked in upon by the starry heavens. So, he burns down his farm. With the insurance money, he buys
a telescope to look back at the stars, “To satisfy a life-long curiosity / About our place among the infinities.” At first the narrator, one of his neighbors from the town, does not understand his motives. McLaughlin has been laboring in the
near impossible rock-strewn farmland of New England, with little opportunity
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in the future to sell it. He recognizes that the telescope becomes an instru-
ment but “less a weapon in our human fight.” Perhaps equally remarkable, the
narrator comes around to seeing that everyone in the town should have one:
“What do you want with one of those blame things?”
I asked him well beforehand. “Don’t you get one!”
“Don’t call it blamed; there isn’t anything
More blameless in the sense of being less
A weapon in our human fight,” he said.
“I’ll have one if I sell my farm to buy it.”
There where he moved the rocks to plow the ground
And plowed between the rocks he couldn’t move,
Few farms changed hands; so rather than spend years
Trying to sell his farm and then not selling,
He burned the house down for the fire insurance
And bought the telescope with what it came to.
He had been heard to say by several:
“The best thing that we’re put here for’s to see;
The strongest thing that’s given us to see with’s
A telescope. Someone in every town
Seems to me owes it to the town to keep one.
In Littleton it may as well be me.”
After such loose talk it was no surprise
When he did what he did and burned his housed down.
Both we and the narrator have been let in on this crime and this “wastefully
lonely” little madness. How mad is it? The town does forgive him, as the
narrator says later, somewhat ironically, “For to be social is to be forgiving.”
What Brad McLaughlin did had the quality of something holy: “Why not
regard it as a sacrifice, / And an old-fashioned sacrifice by fire, / Instead of a new-fashioned one at auction?” The narrator has some recognition that labor
has been given up for contemplation, and some risk taken in the process of
doing so. McLaughlin wants to find out deeper, more penetrating things than
plowing furrows hopelessly between rocks.
What, though, of “our place among the infinities”? The phrase itself Frost
acknowledged came from a book that he cherished as a young man – Our
Place Among the Infinities by the distinguished nineteenth-century English astronomer Richard A. Proctor. “One of the earliest books I hovered over,
hung around, was called Our Place Among the Infinities,” Frost recalled in his Paris Review interview ( I, 231). Proctor described in evolutionary terms the material origins of the planet and the galaxies. The earth itself and all plants and animals had been formed from gases and matter from other parts of the
universe (Pierre Laplace’s nebular theory) formed over millions and millions
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of years. The universe was not a closed system but infinitely open to change,
waste, and dissolution according to fixed laws:
Let it suffice that we recognise as one of the earliest stages of our earth’s
history, her condition as a rotating mass of glowing vapour, capturing
then as now, but far more actively then than now, masses of matter
which approached near enough, and growing by these continual
indraughts from without. From the very beginning, as it would seem,
the earth grew in this way. The firm earth on which we live represents an
aggregation of matter not from one portion of space, but from all space.
All that is upon and within the earth, all vegetable forms and all animal
forms, our bodies, our brains, are formed of materials which have been
drawn in from those depths of space surrounding us on all sides. This
hand that I am now raising contains particles . . . drawn in towards the
earth by processes continuing millions of millions of ages, until after
multitudinous changes the chapter of accidents has so combined them,
and so distributed them in plants and animals, that after coming to form
portions of my food they are here present before you . . . is not the
thought itself striking and suggestive, that not only the earth on which
we now move, but everything we see and touch, and every particle in
body and brain, has sped during countless ages through the immensity
of space?25
This would appear to be an absolutely material description of the world, one
in which every form would have had a prior existence not as a soul but in the
indestructible transformations of matter over vast periods of time. The passage helps in providing a context for what happens to both Brad McLaughlin and the
narrator of “The Star-Splitter” as they look through the telescope, bought for six hundred dollars with the insurance money from the burning of Brad’s farm.
What is “our place among the infinities”? The telescope is christened the “star-splitter” because it sees binary stars, or twin-stars, perhaps a metaphor for the way matter does not exist in isolation but constantly changes and transforms
itself. The analogies the narrator uses about “quicksilver” and “mud,” as well as their leisure talk instead of “splitting wood,” all suggest a pleasure in the transformation in matter and a delight in “waste”:
He got a good glass for six hundred dollars.
His new job gave him leisure for star-gazing.
Often he bid me come and have a look
Up the brass barrel, velvet black inside,
At a star quaking up the other end.
I recollect a night of broken clouds
And underfoot snow melted down to ice,
And melting further in the wind to mud.
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Bradford and I had out the telescope.
We spread our two legs as we spread its three,
Pointing our thoughts the way we pointed it,
And standing at our leisure till the day broke,
Said some of the best things we ever said.
That telescope was christened the Star-splitter,
Because it didn’t do a thing but split
A star in two or three the way you split
A globule of quicksilver in your hand
With one stroke of your finger in the middle.
It’s a star-splitter if there ever was one
And ought to do some good if splitting stars
’Sa thing to be compared with splitting wood.
Whatever they see or don’t see, binary stars or parallax, the community activity, the binding activity of Brad and his neighbor, becomes more important than
ascertaining what we can or cannot know about the infinite. The final questions appear to confirm nothing more than the uncertain:
We’ve looked and looked, but after all where are we?
Do we know any better where we are,
And how it stands between the night tonight
And a man with a smoky lantern chimney?
How different from the way it ever stood?
Despite our desire to be relieved from hopeless labor long enough to reflect,
what in the end do we learn about our place? Proctor suggests that we were not in a position to know much about the very beginning of things in the universe; when we look in a telescope the question of where we are becomes inextricably
bound to when we came to be. The limits of our knowledge of the evolution
of the universe are analogous to the limits of our knowledge of the evolution
of life on the planet:
I think we arrive here at a point where speculation helps us as little as it
does in attempting to trace the evolution of living creatures across the
gap which separates the earliest forms of life from the beginning itself of
life upon the earth. Since we cannot hope to determine the real
beginning of the earth’s history, we need not at present attempt to pass
back beyond the earliest stage of which we have any clear information.26
This shows a scientist who believes in science also showing the limits of
science. Frost understood well that the best scientists did not claim that science explained everything. Nor, for that matter, did all versions of religion. Proctor defended the possibility that the vast, seemingly impersonal universe uncovered by science could also be governed by a deity. He did so not by appealing