The Cambridge Introduction to Robert Frost
Page 26
P1: FYX/FGC
P2: FXS
9780521854115c03.xml
9780521854115
CUUK235-Faggen
July 21, 2008
9:44
Frost and believing-in
153
to intelligent design or any form of special creation by simply invoking the
language of the Book of Job, and the idea that God is always just beyond what
human consciousness can possibly comprehend:
The wave of life which is now passing over our earth is but a ripple in the
sea of life within the solar system; this sea of life is itself but as a wavelet on the ocean of eternal life throughout the universe. Inconceivable,
doubtless, are these infinities of time and space, of matter, of motion,
and of life. Inconceivable that the whole universe can be for all time the
scene of the operation of infinite personal power, omnipresent,
all-knowing. Utterly incomprehensible how Infinite Purpose can be
associated with endless material evolution. But it is no new thought, no
modern discovery, that we are thus utterly powerless to conceive or
comprehend the idea of an Infinite Being, Almighty, All-Knowing,
Omnipresent, and Eternal, of whose inscrutable purpose the material
universe is the unexplained manifestation. Science is in the presence of
the old, old mystery; the old, old questions are asked of her, “Canst thou
by searching find out God? canst thou find out the almighty unto
perfection? It is as high as heaven; what canst thou do? deeper than hell;
what canst thou know?” And science answers these questions, as they
were answered of old, – “As touching the Almighty, we cannot find Him
out.”27
Proctor’s thoughts on the limits of science in the realm of religion may indeed shed some light on the final question of “The Star-Splitter,” “how different
from the way it ever stood”?
Frost distinguished himself from most modernist poets in not taking the
view that the world was somehow worse at the dawn of the twentieth century
than it ever had been. If anything, the discoveries of science had humiliated
mankind like religion had done in centuries before, in reminding him of his
mortality and his relatively small, uncertain position in the scheme of things.
As he wrote in “The Lesson for Today,” speaking to an imagined scholastic of
the Middle Ages:
Space ails us moderns: we are sick with space.
Its contemplation makes us out as small
As a brief epidemic of microbes
That in a good glass may be seen to crawl
The patina of this the least of globes.
But have we there the advantage after all?
You were belittled into vilest worms
God hardly tolerated with his feet;
Which comes to the same thing in different terms.
We both are the belittled human race,
P1: FYX/FGC
P2: FXS
9780521854115c03.xml
9780521854115
CUUK235-Faggen
July 21, 2008
9:44
154
Works
One as compared with God and one with space.
I had thought ours the more profound disgrace;
But doubtless this was only my conceit.
The cloister and the observatory saint
Take comfort in about the same complaint.
So science and religion really meet.
But this may not have always been his position. Frost appeared to wrestle with aspects of science as an arbiter of reality since he began writing. Brought up in a tradition of reading Emerson, Swedenborg, and Wordsworth, he was inclined to
view the natural world empathetically. The sense of mutability, destruction, and flux, however, both haunted and, strangely, inspired him from the beginning.
Belief and truth
One senses early in Frost a tension between belief and truth. There is an effort to believe that may coincide with what James called “the will to believe,” the force of the will to create order or seek like response from the world around it. A great dramatic tension exists when this will to believe and when beliefs do not find themselves reciprocated or answered – perhaps not at all or perhaps not
in precisely the way that we expected to conform to our human expectations.
The conclusion of the complex narrative “The Black Cottage” has a minister
describing to a narrator, half a century after the Civil War, why he did not
change the Creed during sermons, even though he does not seem to hold it to
be true. He claims that he maintained the Creed out of sentiment for the old
woman, who also believed in Jefferson’s claim that “all men are created free
and equal.” Despite his doubt about the truths of Christianity, he imagines an arid, if not infertile, landscape where such truths might be preserved. Such a landscape might include the Lord’s nativity but would be free of conquest and
change, and he argues, in part, that change may be merely truths going “in and out of favor”:
I’m just as glad she made me keep hands off,
For, dear me, why abandon a belief
Merely because it ceases to be true.
Cling to it long enough, and not a doubt
It will turn true again, for so it goes.
Most of the change we think we see in life
Is due to truths being in and out of favor.
As I sit here, and oftentimes, I wish
I could be the monarch of a desert land
I could devote and dedicate forever
P1: FYX/FGC
P2: FXS
9780521854115c03.xml
9780521854115
CUUK235-Faggen
July 21, 2008
9:44
Frost and believing-in
155
To the truths we keep coming back and back to.
So desert it would have to be, so walled
By mountain ranges half in summer snow,
No one would covet it or think it worth
The pain of conquering to force change on.
Scattered oases where men dwelt, but mostly
Sand dunes held loosely in tamarisk
Blown over and over themselves in idleness.
Sand grains should sugar in the natal dew
The babe born to the desert, the sand storm
Retard mid-waste my cowering caravans –
“There are bees in this wall.” He struck the clapboards,
Fierce heads looked out; small bodies pivoted.
We rose to go. Sunset blazed on the windows.
The bees in the walls of the decaying cottage come as an interruption to the preserve of truth envisioned by the minister. They represent a “fierce” monarchy of their own, different and indifferent to the human world, highly organized, and a truth about power that disrupts and undermines any unchanging idealized
world or one without hierarchy and struggle.28
“Birches” provides a rich metaphor of play but also of striving toward an
ureachable ideal, separated from belief by truth. At first the speaker envisions the birch trees as personified dead souls, bent low and beaten from ice storms.
Ice storms become an irreducible truth that prevents his imagining the trees
and the playful process of bending and mastering nature to his will:
But I was going to say when Truth broke in
With all her matter-of-fact about the ice-storm
I should prefer to have some boy bend them
As he went out and in to fetch the cows –
Some boy too far from town to learn baseball,
Whose only play wa
s what he found himself,
Summer or winter, and could play alone.
He would only like to go “[ t] toward heaven” because “earth’s the right place for love,” or, perhaps, the only place for love, some truth about the immensity of the universe having the ultimate say in belief.
This immense tension between belief and truth is everywhere in Frost’s work.
It does not mean that he insists that he knows what truth is but it does make one cautious about calling Frost a nihilist – if, by nihilist, one would mean that there is nothing beyond what the mind projects and nothing is either true or false.
“The Most of It” provides a typically surprising instance of Frost presenting a
P1: FYX/FGC
P2: FXS
9780521854115c03.xml
9780521854115
CUUK235-Faggen
July 21, 2008
9:44
156
Works
character in search of love and response beyond himself. The “he” of the poem
has been described as both Adamic and Narcissus-like. In some ways, he may
be both and something more. His desire for what seems the paradoxical idea of
“counter-love, original response,” is met with an “embodiment” that appears
“as a great buck.”
In Frostian terms, that may indeed not be so bad. In a remarkable passage
in his notebooks that seems to echo both “The Most of It” and the language of
Thoreau’s The Maine Woods, and its call for “contact, contact,” Frost envisions life as a continual flux of sorrows. Those sorrows and the flux give a sense of certainty, however terrible, outside the self:
Here where we are life wells up as a strong spring perpetually piling
water on water with the dancing high lights from upon it. But it flows
away on all sides as into a marsh of its own making. It flows away into
poverty into insanity into crime . . .
. . . Dark darker darkest
Dark as it is that there are these sorrows and darker still that we can
do so little to get rid of them the darkest is still to come. The darkest is
that perhaps we ought not to want to get rid of them. They be the
fulfillment of exertion. What life craves most is signs of life. A cat can
entertain itself only briefly with a block of wood. It can deceive itself
longer with a spool or ball. But give it a mouse for consummation.
Response response. The certainty of a source outside of self – whether
love or hate fierceness or fear.
( N, 327–328)
The importance of a certainty of a source outside the self helps us, then, to
understand why Frost’s dialogues remain some of his most powerful works.
“West-Running Brook” not only provides the figure of life as water flowing away but, more important, it provides the figure of a man and a woman responding to each other and defining between them who and where they are. Fred views the
wave from the standpoint of eternity, a Platonic stance “ever since rivers were made in heaven.” His wife or lover views the wave personally and mystically as
“an annunciation.” Their dialogue about origins proceeds by contraries from
and to the source; but the parenthetical intrusion of the narrator provides yet a third plane of regard on the brook.
“Why, my dear,
That wave’s been standing off this jut of shore –”
(The black stream, catching on a sunken rock,
Flung backward on itself in one white wave,
And the white water rode the black forever,
Not gaining but not losing, like a bird
P1: FYX/FGC
P2: FXS
9780521854115c03.xml
9780521854115
CUUK235-Faggen
July 21, 2008
9:44
Frost and believing-in
157
White feathers from the struggle of whose breast
Flecked the dark stream and flecked the darker pool
In a white scarf against the far shore alders.)
“That wave’s been standing off this jut of shore
Ever since rivers, I was going to say,
Were made in heaven. It wasn’t waved to us.”
“It wasn’t, yet it was. If not to you,
It was to me – in an annunciation.”
“Oh, if you take it off to lady-land,
As’t were the country of the Amazons
We men must see you to the confines of
And leave you there, ourselves forbid to enter,–
It is your brook! I have no more to say.”
“Yes, you have, too. Go on. You thought of something.”
The sexual and erotic dialogue drives the philosophical drama of creation in
the poem. Truth stands external to the beliefs expressed by the two players.
Perhaps the ultimate demand for response comes in A Masque of Reason,
Frost’s addendum to the Book of Job. Job demands of God a reason ultimately
for the suffering he was once put through in the original story. Job still insists on a reason in order to maintain belief:
You’d be the last to want me to believe
All Your effects were lucky blunders.
That would be unbelief and atheism.
The artist in me cries out for design.
Such devilish ingenuity of torture
Did seem unlike You, and I tried to think
The reason might have been some other person’s.
But there is nothing You are not behind.
Almost comically, God does what he did in the Hebrew Bible – refuse to give
Job a reason. But it is Job’s wife, named significantly Thyatira for one of the wayward cities in the Book of Revelation, who helps push the dialogue and
God to something of dark revelation. She quotes Job as asking whether there
can really be any form of spiritual salvation on earth:
For instance, is there such a thing as Progress?
Job says there’s no such thing as Earth’s becoming
An easier place for man to save his soul in.
Except as a hard place to save his soul in,
A trial ground where he can try himself
P1: FYX/FGC
P2: FXS
9780521854115c03.xml
9780521854115
CUUK235-Faggen
July 21, 2008
9:44
158
Works
And find out whether he is any good,
It would be meaningless. It might as well
Be Heaven at once and have it over with.
As though ventriloquist, this seems to be one of the most Frostian comments
in the poem, quite similar to the outlook in the notebook entry “Dark, Darker, Darkest”: difficulty from a definite source outside the self gives life definition and meaning. She also expresses the strong anti-utopian psychology, the welcoming of difficulty and challenge that came to mark Frost’s sense of poetic
vocation from “The Trial by Existence.” At this moment, we learn the most
human and, also, terrible admission from God: That he tortured Job because
he was simply “showing off to the devil.” The revelation produces a resignation in Job that knowledge of the reasons he sought was not more “but less than he
can understand.”
If Frost could not ultimately reconcile truth with belief, he may have been left with what he called “phrases of salvation,” as he called them in his notebooks:
“So I have found that for my own survival I had to have phrases of salvation if I was to keep anything worth keeping” ( N, 523). Yet, alluding to Pilate’s question before Jesus (and Bacon’s echo of it), Frost allowed himself the possibility of pursuing and uttering truth, however el
usive:
Truth, what is truth? said Pilate; and we know not and no search can
make us know, said someone else. But I said can’t we know? We can
know well enough to go on with being tried every day in our courage to
tell it. What is truth? Truth is that that takes fresh courage to tell it. It
takes all our best skill too.
( N, 523)
This does quite seem to mean that for Frost the challenge of difficulty or skill in language had become the only indicator of reality or of truth. In an early
notebook Frost wrote “metaphor is our furthest forth.” Much of the later poetry and, indeed, both masques try to embrace the contradictions in his thought in
terse, dark sayings.
Justice, mercy, and passionate preference
A Masque of Mercy identifies the contradiction between justice and mercy, though it ultimately seems to hover around the idea that courage in action,
without any certainty of salvation, is the only possible ethical standard. Frost has been called and was said to call himself “an Old Testament Christian.” This, again, is one of those tricky contradictions. In his discussions in the 1940s with Rabbi Victor Reichert, Frost asserted that there was no teaching in the New
Testament that was not also in the Old Testament. We can see just how tricky
P1: FYX/FGC
P2: FXS
9780521854115c03.xml
9780521854115
CUUK235-Faggen
July 21, 2008
9:44
Frost and believing-in
159
Frost was about the matter in a recounting he gave of his conversation with
Reichert in the essay “On Extravagance.” He refers to the fact that the moral
command “You shall love your neighbor as yourself” is both in the Hebrew Bible (Leviticus) and the New Testament. Frost adds his own dark spin, though, on
its full meaning in the context of his understanding of human nature:
For instance, somebody says to me – a great friend – says, “Everything’s
in the Old testament that you find the New.” You can tell who he was
probably by his saying that.
And I said, “What is the height of it?”
“Well,” he said, “love your neighbor as yourself.”
I said, “Yeah, that’s in both of them.” Then, just to tease him, I said,
“But it isn’t good enough.”
He said, “What’s the matter with it?”
“And hate your neighbor as you hate yourself.”