ROBERT FROST AND SCIENCE:
THE SHAPING METAPHOR OF MOTION IN THE POEMS

Dissertation for the Degree of Ph. D.
MICHIGAN STATE UNIVERSITY
‘ KATHRYN GIBBS HARRIS
1976

  
 
 

Lina R Y
Michigan State

 
  

 

This is to certify that the

thesis entitled

ROBERT FROST AND SCIENCE:
THE SHAPING METAPHOR OF MOTION IN THE POEMS

presented by

Kathryn Gibbs Harris

has been accepted towards fulfillment
of the requirements for

 

 

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Major professor

 

Date January 27, 1976

 

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ABSTRACT

ROBERT FROST AND SCIENCE:
THE SHAPING METAPHOR OF MOTION IN THE POEMS

By
Kathryn Gibbs Harris

The poems of Robert Frost have a simplicity or tone of
ordinariness that has hidden much of the intellectual strength of the
poet, especially his background in science. Although Frost's conver-
sation often hinted that he knew more about many subjects than the
poems seemed to show, most scholars have not investigated his knowledge
of science, nor have many critics asked how that knowledge may have
influenced his poems and his poetic theories.

A tracing of Frost's interest in science throughout his life-
time in his letters, conversations, biographical data, and related
literary materials, together with a look at those scientific philosophers
who most interested him, has yielded much. It has shown that Frost's
theories of creativity and his own sound-of-sense technique were in-
spired by scientific philosophy, and by his own knowledge of physical
laws. As a child, Frost learned from the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg
to revere the world of nature as a mirror of spiritual reality. Later,
this Swedenborgian influence was transferred to contemporary scientific
philosophers and to an avid interest in scientific subjects both in

and out of school.

Kathryn Gibbs Harris

In the period from about 1912 to l916, when Frost was forming
his esthetic ideas, the two scientific philosophers who most influenced
him were William James and Henri Bergson. Frost went to Harvard to
study with William James. He read James to his young family at the
Derry farm where much of his poetry was written, and he taught from two
texts of James to senior students at the Pinkerton academy. His interest
in Bergson probably grew from James' interest in the philosopher.
According to Lawrance Thompson, the poet was deeply distressed by the

opinion of a minister that Henri Bergson's book, Creative Evolution,

 

was not worth reading because Bergson must be an atheist. Because of
his Swedenborgian background Frost did not think science and religion
were essentially divided. Swedenborg, James, and Bergson had in common
extensive writings on the subject of motion. Early, Frost must have
believed poetry to flow into existence in the way that Swedenborg be-
lieved the spirit flowed into the manifest world.

Frost had also been building a practical knowledge of general
science. He had friendships throughout life with men who were either
scientists or informed amateurs in some branch of science. His school
grades and subject preferences show his interest and competence. His
aptitude allowed Frost to follow, in later years, such innovations in
science as those of Einstein in space theory, and Niels Bohr in atomic
theory. It is possible that much of Frost's interest in scientific
knowledge came from his admiration for courageous exploration of any
kind. Frost was knowledgeable in the biological sciences as well as

physics; he knew something of cell theory as well as star theory.

Kathryn Gibbs Harris

Reinforced by both James and Bergson, Frost continued to see
the importance of motion in the universe. Throughout his poems motion
figures are dominant. The double process of entropy-negentropy develops
interestingly in the poems, especially in the use of water imagery.
Motion figures of earth, air, fire, and water lead the reader to a
number of observations about the nature of motion, and show Frost's
characteristic manner of relating modern and ancient wisdom; i.e.,
while atomic physics and flight dynamics interested him, one of the
most important sources of his interest in motion was Lucretius' Q2.
Rergthatura. Moveover, Frost's interest in thought as motion led him
to study William James' concept of the stream of consciousness, and to
use it as a foundation for his theory of the creation of a poem.

It can be shown from Frost's interest in and knowledge of
science and scientific philosophy the ways science made his poems
esthetically enjoyable. Frost's method was to present common objects
from nature: animals, birds, trees, flowers, and ordinary persons--
and to present them all acting or moving in a certain way from which
he could draw an observation, usually an ironic, ambiguous, or para-
doxical one. Frost must have perceived nature this way, as a field of
components moving about in space, making a traceable track just as
stars and planets do. In this important sense, and others, his vision

was astronomical, as Randall Jarrell suggested.

ROBERT FROST AND SCIENCE:
THE SHAPING METAPHOR OF MOTION IN THE POEMS

By

Kathryn Gibbs Harris

A DISSERTATION

Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Department of English

1976

Copyright©1976 Kathryn Gibbs Harris

Patience, children, just a minute--
See the spreading circles die;
The stream and all in it
Will clear by-and-by.

Robert Louis Stevenson

This study of Robert Frost is written for Kerry.

ii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Among persons who knew Robert Frost, Mrs. Lesley Frost Ballen-
time, Mr. Alfred C. Edwards, Mr. Theodore Morrison, Mrs. Kathleen
Morrison, and especially the late Lawrance Thompson have been helpful
with their comments, and I wish to thank them. I wish to thank the
librarians at Michigan State University and at the University of Massa-
chusetts, and Winifred Sayer, Curator of the Jones Library, Amherst.

I wish to thank A. J. M. Smith for his early comments on my project,
and the late Oliver Leslie Reiser for comments on Bergson and physical
science.

I wish to thank the members of my guidance committee who have
given close and intensive criticism of my work: Roger K. Meiners,
Arthur Sherbo, and James H. Pickering, member ex officio. My disserta-
tion director. Linda W. Wagner, has given much valuable criticism and
guidance for which I thank her. I wish to thank my committee for the

example of their own criticism and scholarship.

iii

Preface

ONE.

TWO.

THREE.

FOUR.

FIVE.

SIX.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Robert Frost's Early Education in Science

"Gold Dusted All We Drank and Ate“
"Some of the Best Things We Ever Said"
"The Wood-World's Torn Despair"
"Design of Darkness to Appall:

"A Sort of Tunnel in the Frost"

(fith-J

Science as Motion in the Poems .

l. "The Great and Only Event of All History"
2. "Make the Day Seem to Us Less Brief"

Motion in the Poems: Water

1. "The Stream of Everything That Runs Away"
2. "This Backward Motion Toward the Source"
3. "Weep for What Little Things Could Make Them Glad"

Motion in the Poems: Man .

1. "We're Plainly Made to Go"

2. "Wasn't There Danger of a Turn Too Much?"
3. "Man's Ingenuity Was Good"

4. "Loosely Bound"

Motion in the Poems: Earth

"To Earthward"

"A Great Wave From It"

"The Touch of Thy Dye-Dusty Wing"
"A Mid-Wood Bird"

"Every Kind of Bloom"

“Those Dark Trees"

Qm-fiWN-d

Motion in the Poems: Fire and Air

1. "Seeds of Fire"
2. "Make It Flow"

iv

Page

37

SI

76

99

116

SEVEN. The Moving Lens

"I Cannot Rub the Strangeness From My Sight"
"We Won't Say Nothing Is Clear"

"Through the Interstices of Things Ajar"

"To Say It Was a Lens"

. The Change to Darkness in the Sky"

mth—a

EIGHT. Motes and Immensity . . . . . . . . .

"The Present is Too Much For the Senses"
"The Seeming Facts of Light“

"In a Balearic Sling"

"Beware of Coming Too Much to the Surface"

#wN-J

NINE. Clarification and Departure

T. "An Adventure by Science"
2. "A Line of Shadowy Tracks"
A

TEN. Shaping Metaphor of Motion

1. "I Wait for Form"

2. "Pythagoras' Comparison of the Universe with Number"
3. "A Better Wilderness of Logic"

4. "Nothing Gold Can Stay"

APPENDIX
BIBLIOGRAPHY

Page

125

lSl

169

180

205
212

HEADNOTE

"I pity you having to write essays where the imagination has
no chance, or next to no chance. The game is matching your author
thought for thought in any of the many possible ways. Reading then
becomes converse--give and take. It is only in conversation in which
the reader takes part addressing himself to anything at all in the
author in his subject matter or form. Just as when we talk together!
Be careful to hold up our end to do our part agreeably without too
much contradiction and mere opinionation. The best thing of all is
going each other one better piling up the ideas anecdotes incidents
like alternating hands piled upon the knee. Well its out of conversa-
tion like this with a book that you will find perhaps one idea perhaps
yours perhaps the book's that will serve for the lesser ideas to center
around. And there's your essay. Be brief at first. You have to be
honest. You dont want to make your material seem more than it is.

You wont have so much to say at first as you will have later."

--Letter from Robert Frost to Lesley Frost,
Amherst, 17 February l919

vi

PREFACE

In truth, an introduction should be superfluous if a critical
study is itself clear and well supported. However, I would like to
provide the reader with a general approach to what follows while cau-
tioning that proofs and supports of general statements are found, or
should be found, within the body of the dissertation. An almost un-
wieldy complexity arises in an examination of the relationship between
Robert Frost's poems and science. Part of the difficulty begins with
science not always knowing what it is saying, a fact that Frost took
into account. That difficulty rests upon the realization of how little
we know, even now, about nature. Further, Frost's responses to science
were limited by his own approach which he describes for us as metaphori-
cal. And a further problem in Frost studies is always his proclivity
to keep much hidden, behind "words that tease and flout," although he
does say he would like to be “not misunderstood."

Today, in 1975, there are many available sources for students
of Frost's poems. For this study I have examined letters, many books
which Frost read, records of conversation, interviews, and primary
writings; and have sought the opinions of scholars and others who knew
Frost. I have used biographical materials, especially Lawrance
Thompson's valuable notes to the two volumes of his biography, and his
interestingly arranged index. Biography helps one to see Frost's atti-

tudes toward science and gives a perspective to the march, if not the

development, of the poems. But no source has been more valuable than
the poems themselves: there clarification about the importance of
science to Frost's poetics may finally be found.

Robert Frost was an intellectual man, a man of scientific
curiosity, and his command of scientific concepts was obvious to scien-
tists with whom he spoke. Because of his early education in science
and a strong inclination to reverence and be curious about nature, his
interest in science was lifelong but it paralleled his knowledge of
history, and the classics. He was never more delighted than
when he could find an ancient analogue for some new knowledge

uncovered by science. For instance, Lucretius' Q§_Rerum Natura pro-

 

pounded questions of motion which led scientists into new fields of
physics: quantum mechanics and atomic physics. It gave Frost special
pleasure to observe that all of modern science had come from Pythagoras'
"comparison of the universe with number."

William James and Henri Bergson were the two modern scientific
philosophers who most influenced Frost's thought as he was forming his
own esthetics. Both philosophers were informed in science and wrote
extensively on the subject of motion. Frost was probably interested
in James' concept of the motions of the mind: the stream of conscious-
ness. Bergson's thesis was that man might discover the workings of
nature by intuiting nature's motions. He said that the esthetic faculty
in man enabled him to know the universe, and that a sense of moving
with the universe was necessary in order to discover anything about it.
Bergson's view was noted by many artists of the modern period and was
probably of special interest to Frost because of his own pervasive

curiosity about motion.

The movement of anything, Frost believed, is revealed by the
direction and the path that it takes. Everything is in motion; poems
are in motion as they are composed.

The figure is the same as for love. No one can
really hold that the ecstasy should be static and stand still in
one place. It begins in delight. It inclines to the impulse, it
assumes direction with the first line laid down, it runs a course
of lucky events, and ends in a clarification of life . . . . It

finds its own name as it goes and discovers the best waiting for
it in some final phrase at once wise and sad.1

Just as the first line or so of a poem may determine its shape, the
small movements in nature may indicate something about the larger shape
or the design of nature, of our existence. It is not therefore sur-
prising to find descriptions in the poems of the motions of flowers
growing, shorelines changing, mountains swinging, and the poet himself
exercising at the wood pile, swinging on birch trees, and riding or
walking everywhere in the New England countryside. When a fallen
meteor seems to come to life again in the poet's hand, the reader knows
Frost's regret for anything that has lost its individual movement and
its appointed path in life.

Even in the last poems, while Frost's concerns were primarily
with his public life, he was tying together the cords of his major
metaphorical figure--the figure of motion itself. The modern situation
was, for Frost, "an adventure by science." Thinking of the history
of the world, he saw a great migration "west-northwest" to the North
American continent where now the figure of the migration had become
clear to him. The history of scientific thought had culminated in a

technology and knowledge of the physical world beyond the accomplishments

in previous places and centuries. The problem had become how to risk
the spirit in modern technology without losing it. Frost took the
Wright brothers' successful experiments at Kitty Hawk beach as synech-
docal. It had been near Kitty Hawk that Frost experienced an important
insight or vision, a vision of the relationship between the spirit and
all material things. This was probably his insight into the motion 0f
the universe; it informs everything that he ever wrote.

Frost's poetic faith, his belief that nature somehow gave him
poems, requires the suspension of disbelief about which Coleridge and
Keats wrote. The willing suspension of disbelief yielded many good
poems for Frost. Frost had the negative capability Keats described,
but he also had much knowledge, especially from science, of the way the
world worked. His poetic belief, combined with his knowledge, gave us
a body of poems that we recognize as having wisdom. I think Frost
understood better than most writers how his own, and possibly the poems

of many other poets, actually came into being.

A poem may be worked over once it
it is in being, but it may not be worried into being. Its
most precious quality will remain its having run itself and
carried away the poet with it. Read it a hundred times: it
will forever keep its freshness as a metal keeps its fra-
grance.

Noticing the fragrance of metal is striking, as is his comparison of
the work of art with a physical phenomenon not considered poetic in
lesser poetry. Frost's involvement with science allowed him td come
closer to nature as well as to the significance of his own time, so

that he had a better command of the material of his poems. The

intention of this study is to help the reader of Frost's poems see
something of his vision of the world, i.e. his esthetic, so that en-

joyment of his poems may be somewhat enhanced.

Notes to Preface

1. Robert Frost, "The Figure a Poem Makes," Complete Poems (New York:
Holt, 1949), p. vi. Cited as Poems below.

 

2. Poems, p. viii.

ONE. Robert Frost's Early Education in Science1
T. "Gold Dusted All We Drank and Ate"

Robert Frost's early education in science and in scientific
philosophy helped him form his views, not only about science, but
about poetry and his way of life as well. Much of his education in
science was a self-education, encouraged by his earliest experiences.
Much was also accomplished in classroom work. According to high school
records and those from his Harvard period, Robert Frost was easily a
much better than average student of scientific subjects. In school he
always chose science and the classics before composition or literature
courses; he was genuinely interested in science, and in the historical
classics, but he openly disliked "English," especially the texts used.
By the time he entered high school in Lawrence, Massachusetts, he had
developed a strong curiosity about the nature of the universe and the
history of man. Yet, it is not so strange that, as a young man, Frost

had these preferences. They followed directly from the literature

7

read to him by his mother when he was a child, especially the poetry
of nature and the writings of the theologian Emanuel Swedenborg who

was considered a scientist in his day. The scientific curiosity estab-
lished in the poet's early background stayed with him throughout his
life. It perhaps became more obvious in his later poems, but it was
there in the man and in the poetry from the beginning.

During his first eleven years, Robert Frost lived in San
Francisco with his mother, father, and younger sister Jeannie. His
father's illness with consumption and alcoholism must have caused the
boy feelings of insecurity, if not terror. His mother wisely leaned
on friends and the church that seemed to her the soundest, the
Swedenborgian Church of the New Jerusalem into which her son was bap-
tized. Isabelle Moodie Frost, who had emigrated from Scotland to be-
come a schoolteacher, was evidently a person of considerable strength
and intelligence. As Robert Frost would not or could not stay in
school, she undertook the education of her children at home with the
Swedenborgian philosophy as her guide.

Swedenborg's teachings were important in two ways for Frost's
thinking. First of all, Swedenborg constantly reiterated the distinc-
tion between opposites, and at the same time stressed a necessary unity
between opposites. There were always twos of everything--the divine
and the physical, the spiritual and the material--and always an ulti—
mate harmony brewing between them. For instance, in one passage
Swedenborg considers that the opposites heat and light, or the will and
the understanding, "flow-in into" man: the heat produces love and the

light produces wisdom.2 Second, and perhaps more influential in Frost's

poetry and life, was the insistence in all of Swedenborg's writings
that all things are constantly in motion, a belief that became trans-
lated into a doctrine of action in the handbooks of the Swedenborgian
church.3

One thing Swedenborgians were clear about was that there
could be no conflict between religion and science. The divine could
manifest itself only in the physical world, and knowledge of the physi-
cal world was knowledge of God. Thus, one might say that Frost was
presented with a holistic attitude toward science and religion from
the time of his baptism. The same kind of unifying of thought and
action also dominates Frost's thought, both early and late. As he
reminisced in answer to the question whether Swedenborg had been

important in his early education:

What's my philosophy? That's hard to say. I
was brought up a Swedenborgian. I am not a Swedenborgian now.
But there's a good deal of it left in me. I am a mystic. I
believe in symbols. I believe in change and in changing
symbols.4

Frost's mother, during the San Francisco days, purposely followed
thought and with action. After reading poems to the children about
daffodils and waterfowl, she walked with them to Woodward's Gardens
where the children could directly observe varied forms of changing life.
The gardens had both a fine botanical collection and, to a bright young
boy, a memdrable zoo.

In "At Woodward's Gardens," a poem first published in T936,
Frost gives an account of a zoo visit in order to make a point about
experimental science.5 There is ambiguity in the poem, but it does

become plain that the experimenter is likely to lose his equipment if

10

he does not know what he is doing with it. The boy, having stung the
knuckles of a monkey trying to teach it the use of a magnifying glass
to focus the sun's rays, is astonished when the monkey grabs the glass
and keeps it. The narrator in the poem comments on what the monkeys

might be thinking:

Who said it mattered
What monkeys did or didn't understand?
They might not understand a burning-glass.
They might not understand the sun itself.
It's knowing what to do with thin s that counts.
TPoetry, p. 294)

Appropriate action, then, is what counts, whether in man or in monkey.
The experimental scientist might well question whether or not he knows
what to do with his equipment, the poet-narrator seems to suggest.
Much of the interest Frost came to have in science may have
begun with British and American nature poets read to him during the
San Francisco years. Mrs. Frost read aloud from Burns, Herrick,
Wordsworth, and, among the Americans, from Poe, Bryant, Emerson, and
Thoreau. She read aloud a complete children's novel, A£.ED§.§2£K.QE.
the North Wind, by the Scottish theologian and novelist, George
MacDonald. The book's young hero overcame the obstacles of poverty,
his father's illness, and even the fear of his own death with great
courage and resourcefulness. North Wind, a fantastic character, was
a personification of the mutable in nature, especially of the muta-
bility of good and evil. She was a primal force who could either sink
a ship or save it, and she taught the child hero to ride at her back,
and to be less afraid. Mrs. Frost was herself a good story teller who
made up fairy tales and recounted the lives of various heroes, includ-

ing Joan of Arc and Emanual Swedenborg.6

11

When Frost was eleven his father died, and he moved to New
England with his mother and sister where he was to make his home for
the rest of his life. At first the children were bored with small
town life and the cold winter, but snow and ice were new phenomena for
a young experimenter, and Robert Frost devised ways of discovering the
properties of water in various states. The dance and disappearance

7 and became central

of ice across an old stove delighted the children,
to Frost's theory of poetry. He alludes to it in the introduction to
his Complete Poems in what I take to be the principal statement of his
poetic intention: "The figure is the same as for love. Like a piece
of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting."8 What
Frost meant by the moving melt of the poem, and of love, is later
amplified in the context of his interest in the philosophies of William
James and Henri Bergson. The metaphor of the ice in motion illustrates

the way. Frost used what he knew of natural laws to build his meta-

phOrical language.

2. "Some of the Best Things We Ever Said"

At age twelve, Frost became active in amateur science and
liked to share his experiences with enthusiastic friends. His neighbor,
Charles Peabody, kept collections of flowers and of live and stuffed
animals. Robert Frost spent much time at the Peabody home, and by the
end of the summer of 1886 had fully established his love of shared
botanizing, and of playing out-of-door country games such as riding
birch trees. At this time he was also passionately in love with

Charles' active and attractive sister, Sabra. In his first love letters,

12

written to Sabra, we find the young poet has sent pressed leaves and
a few nuts as tokens of affection. Also in these letters, it is revealed
that Frost liked to avoid writing his assigned literary compositions.9
Reading and writing were not so attractive to the boy as the excitement
of outdoor activities with friends. In fact, it was not until he was
fourteen that he ever read a complete book on his own. This emphasis
was completely changed when, at the beginning of his sophomore year in
high school, Frost began to take books from the public library in
Lawrence, and he read books from the personal library of Carl Burrell,
an older friend at school who, like Charles Peabody, was a classmate.
But the books Frost began to read were not strictly literary.
Burrell's library contained books on scientific subjects, written by
scientific philosophers, and there was also a collection of American
humorists. From the beginning Frost balanced a serious curiosity about
the universe with "funning." He later wrote to Lawrance Thompson: "It
would be found that Grant Allen wrote a book on the Evolution of the

Idea of God. I grinned inside at the time."10 Our Place Among

 

Infinities by Richard Anthony Proctor, a noted English astronomer,

 

interested Frost when he found it in Burrell's library because he al-

11 There

ready owned a copy that had probably belonged to his father.
are essays in it on Jupiter and Saturn, and the one titled I'A Giant
Sun" includes a dramatic description of Sirius, Frost's favorite star
mentioned often in his poems, and identified finally by name in the
last book.12 Further, Proctor wrote essays about the waste or extrava-

gance in the universe, an idea Frost presented in his own way in his

final lecture given at Dartmouth College in T962.13 Proctor was an

13

early conservationist, predicting such eventualities as the general
use of solar energy.14 Frost evidently enjoyed Proctor's speculative
thought as well as the discussions on star gauging (measuring the dis-
tances to and between stars) and other such technical astronomical
information. During this period also, Frost took an astronomy hand—
book from the public library. The handbook was to instruct him in
using the newly-acquired telescope which was mounted in his own room
to aid in his self-directed study of astronomy.

The shared intellectual freedom and hilarity between Frost
and Burrell suggests the outrageous actions of Brad McLaughlin in the
poem "The Star-Splitter." Because Brad wanted a telescope and could
not afford one, he burned his house for the insurance money, and with
the town taking his part he bought a telescope and took a job at the
local railway station. But the outcome of much star-gazing was primarily
good conversation.

Bradford and I had out the telescope.
We spread our two legs as we spread its three,
Pointed 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.

(Poetry, p. 179)

Whether or not anything was learned from the stars, star-gazing had
provided a good opportunity for communication. The surrounding stars
were more than a scenic backdrop for the thoughts of the two men.
They gave direction to their thoughts.

Another tie between Frost's poems and the influence of his
friend Burrell was that the older boy was a good amateur botanist, his

special interest being orchids. Wild orchids are mentioned a number

14

of times in Frost's poems--the orchis calypso, rare in New England,
the lady slipper and ram's horn orchises of "The Self-Seeker" and the
purple-fringed orchis of "The Quest of the Purple-Fringed," first
titled "The Quest of the Orchis" in The Independent in 1901. This

 

poem conveys simply and poignantly the mystery and delight of discover-
ing a rare wild flower, but also expresses a deep melancholy. Almost
certainly written before 1897, its figurative language presents varied
motion:

Then I arose and silently wandered home,

And I for one

Said that the fall might come and whirl of leaves

For summer was done.
(Poetry, p. 343)

Perhaps in the composition of this poem, Frost was thinking of the
melancholy end of summer after his senior year when he and Elinor went
to different schools, and he and his friend Carl could not go botanizing
anymore.

High school afforded the young poet much more freedom than
many students would wish to have. In his freshman year Frost secured
his mother's permission to master one subject at a time. He chose the
following order, taking what he liked best first: geography, arith-
metic, histor --then grammar and reading. In the second year he fol-
lowed a regular program including classics and history. He did so well
that at the end of his junior year, in the spring 1891, he was able to
pass the Harvard entrance examinations in Greek, Latin, Greek history,
Roman history, algebra and geometry. He postponed the examination in

English literature although he excelled in literary-related activities.

15

He was a popular leader of his debate club. In his senior year, as
editor of the school paper, Frost wrote an essay titled "Education,
Science, and Literature,“ in which he recommended the purchase of a
telescope by the school to offset dull assignments. He proposed the
reading of The Planetary and Stellar World by Ormsby MacKnight Mitchell:
"No one, who reads at all . . . can read the introduction . . . and
refrain from reading the whole book."15

There were two valedictorians of the senior class: Elinor
Miriam White, and Robert Frost. At graduation Elinor White's address
was about the value of conversation in daily life. Frost's, highly
rhetorical speech, "A Monument to Afterthought Unveiled," was about
very nearly everything. This interesting valedictory cannot be omitted
in a consideration of Frost's science interests. It reflects Sweden-
borg's dualities and emphasis on action following thought: "Aggressive
life is two-fold: theory, practice; thought, action: and concretely,
poetry, statesmanship; philosophy, socialism--infinitely . . . . The
afterthought of one action is the forethought of the next," the young
poet wrote.16 It is also interesting to note, in view of Frost's
later role as informal poet-statesman, that he had linked poetry and
statesmanship together so early.

Also, favorite literary devices which would later become
central to his poetry appeared in "A Monument to Afterthought Unveiled."
Synecdoche and metaphor combine in this passage in which scientific
theories of the origin of life on earth are compared:

There is a space of time when meteor and raindrop

falling side by side may touch the yielding earth with equal
force. The lighter outspeeding weight may seem in a space to

16

strike with greater force. But who at last can tell which has
the greater influence on the world, the one that bore, as

scientists have said, plant life, or that which makes it live.17

Already, Frost was thinking of the origin of organic forms in terms

of velocity, gravity and relative force or energy--but he was countering
the importance of the scientists' search for origins with the gently
falling raindrop. The scientific fact is that meteor and raindrop do
fall at the same rate, so that the "lighter outspeeding weight" may

seem to strike harder. And, interestingly, all four elements of earth,
air, water and fire are present or implied. By "aggressive" Frost
meant agtiyg, as in Swedenborgian thought, rather than the passive life

of acceptance, its opposite that he was to write of in later poems.

3. "The Wood-World's Torn Despair"

When summer was over and the fall "whirl of leaves" had come,
Frost went to college, but not to Harvard as he had planned. A Dart-
mouth graduate, a young chemistry teacher at Lawrence High, arranged a
scholarship to Dartmouth for him. The teacher had noticed Frost's
ability and interest in science when the boy worked after school in the
laboratory on experiments of his own devising. Although this teacher
even gave Frost an introduction to his own fraternity, Frost soon
found that neither the horseplay of the students nor the formal classes
were helpful. In short, authoritarian haughtiness in both professors
and students made him angry. His contempt for such attitudes stayed
with him for many years, and he was reminded again of the unpleasant
Dartmouth experience when in 1921 he visited a small town where a

group of college boys were displaying bad manners.

17

They knew now that there was nothing here that they
would not some day be able to scorn. I fled them as I had fled
their like thirty years before at Dartmouth. I never could bear
the sunsuvbijches belief that they were getting anywhere when they
were getting toward their degrees or had got anywhere when they
had got them. That's not it exactly; it was more their belief
that they were leaving anybody behind who was not getting toward
their degrees. I preferred to drop out of their company and be
looked on as left behind. Of course all I had to do not to be
left behind was to have one solitary idea that I could call my own
in four years. That would be one more than they would have.‘

Such an extended expression of disdain thirty years after the Dartmouth
incident would indicate Frost's angry disappointment at the time.

This sense of outrage, together with the fact that Elinor
was away at another school, caused Frost to leave the campus without
a word before the end of the first term. But before he came to that
decision, some of his solitary pursuits were of interest. He took
long walks in the woods, about which the other boys taunted him, and
he cherished a newly-discovered book of lyrics, Palgrave's Eglgen_
Treasury 9f_Songs and Lyrics. Browsing in the Dartmouth library, he
discovered The Independent, a New York periodical with a name he
especially liked. Library and woods gave him time to reflect and re-
solve what to do. After a visit with Carl Burrell at the Thanksgiving
recess, he returned for his belongings and departed.

Although financially meagre years were ahead, so was the
formative period of Frost's poetry. For a while he did odd jobs of
journalism and teaching, and when Elinor graduated from college and
returned to Lawrence, Massachusetts, they were married. They taught
in Frost's mother's private school, and moved to the Derry farm after
several more temporary residences. But in the summer of 1896 there
was time for botanizing and hiking around the New Hampshire hills.

Frost wrote to Susan Hayes Ward, poetry editor of The Independent:

18

Remember me to Miss Hetta please. Tell her that I am
botanizing will I hill 1. You make the laws and an enthusiast
here is found to enforce them. I am overwhelmed with books on
the subject. Mrs. W. S. Dana and I dont know who all!19

Susan Ward had kept the young poet's hopes alive by publishing first

"My Butterfly," and other early poems from time to time, and apparently,
by encouraging his botany excursions. The American-Canadian poet

Bliss Carman had liked "My Butterfly" when Susan Ward showed it to

him, so that it was not difficult for her to convince her stern co-
editor brother, William Hayes Ward, to publish it. Pleased about his
marriage and newborn son, Elliott, Frost determined to go after all

to Harvard, where William James was Professor of Philosophy.

He began to prepare to pass entrance examinations a second
time. What he had read of James must have motivated him strongly be-
cause he passed everything and was admitted without condition. The
examination subjects were significant: Greek, Latin, ancient history,
English, French, and the physical sciences including astronomy and
physics. But when he entered Harvard in the fall of 1897, he found
that William James was on a leave of absence; later he was to remark

that the teacher who influenced him the most was not there.20

4. "Design of Darkness to Appall"

There was an extraordinary similarity in the early educations
of Robert Frost and William James. James' father was a Swedenborgian
in philosophy and an exponent of Darwinism. He knew many people in
the group around Emerson. William and his brother Henry engaged in

debates at home on advanced topics and studied and read whatever they

19

liked. Like Frost, William James hated the routine of schools and
colleges, and he championed the idea of free intelligent choice. His
reason for living in the United States was that he believed the schools
allowed more opportunities for choice and independent thought. His
psychology text, which became widely used in universities, was the
one Frost studied at Harvard and later used in his own teaching.

In James' psychology, Frost was able to find an exposition
of the nature of thought, or of mental processes, that corresponded
with what he had already guessed from his Swedenborgian background.2]

And in James' psychological study of religion, The Varieties ijReli-

 

gious Experience, he was able to see that religions may have value for
individuals in a pragmatic sense, totally apart from any metaphysical

22 That is, one could decide whether to believe in life or

system.
not, and by constructive effort, cause what is believed to more or
less come true. I think Frost probably structured his life in a simi-
lar way, following some of the clues in the numerous chapters on habit
in James' Principles of Psychology, but more interesting for this
consideration of Frost's esthetics, is James' description of mental
movements such as this one that must have fascinated Frost:
As a snowflake crystal caught in the warm hand is no

longer a crystal but a drop, so instead of catching the feeling

. . . we find that we have caught some substantive thing. The

attempt at analysis is in fact like seizing a spinning top to

catch its motion, or trying to turn up the gas quickly enough to
see how the darkness looks.23

James stressed the difficulty of tracking mental phenomena, distinguish-

ing between the partial and the whole. Recalling whole figures was

20

not easy. Further, the series of thoughts could not be understood
apart from their moving nature. It was their characteristic to be
jg E21191: to be a stream of consciousness.
While Frost worked hard on psychology at Harvard (although
he did not approve of Santayana's interpretation of James), he was
appreciative of lectures on historical geology. He disliked a rhetoric
text in an English class because it contained nothing new. But he did
well and completed courses, withdrawing toward the end of his second
year because of inadequate finances and possible tuberculosis. This
time he received a complimentary letter from the Dean granting a
"detur" in the unfinished work. A first daughter, Lesley, was born
about a month after his return to Lawrence, and Elliott died of cholera
that July. The move to Derry was made the following October, and Belle
Moodie Frost died in November. With the publication of "The Quest
of the Orchis" in June, 1901, Frost had published only six poems in a
national magazine, and one in a city newspaper, but his resolution
to be recognized as a poet was firmly set.24
At the little farm near Derry, Carl Burrell came to help
out for a while, and left Frost relatively free to conduct his poet's
laboratory. He spent much time finding and transplanting wild flowers,
going for walks with the children, and supervising the family's educa-
tion. Believing in practical experience along with learning, when the
family visited New York city, he took his two children (another son,
Carol was born in 1902) to the zoo and aquarium. Although the aquarium
was closed, the zoo impressed Lesley who wrote: "I remember a few

animals: the elephant, the badgers (the badgers were fighting all the

21

time over peanuts the people threw to them.) the giraffe, the tiger,
the hippopotamus, thats about all I guess."25
Lesley's childhood journals show that the children's study
of nature was conducted so as to combine activities on the farm with
lessons and assignments. Her knowledge of flowers, stars, and natural
processes outdistanced her spelling ability, yet the overall form of
her journal entries is impressive. In spring, at age seven, she
writes of the cherry trees in the orchard:
. . the trees are just louded with blossoms, the bees come
and take the honey and while they are getting it the pollin
from the stamins get on his wings and work into the pistal and
it goes down through the pistal into the seedpod and if it is
too cold for the bees we won't have any fruit the seedpod won't

grow bigger without the pollin and won't grow into a cherry with-
out pollin.26

Clearly the process had been explained and reiterated. Frost was
giving his children the sort of education he himself had received from
his mother in the San Francisco years. He also read aloud to the
children from all sorts of books.

Lesley particularly remembered being read to from William
James. She recalled that the children were taught "all the constella-
tions," and called out of bed at all hours of the night to see them,
winter and summer.27 She was read to until she was fifteen, even
though she had begun writing at age four. Her father's intention was
to stretch the imagination as prelude to more strictly intellectual
discussions.

Papa and I make beleave we can see people on mars, and
children and houses and everything ells on the earth. We say

22

these things when we go after the cow at night, we say we will
know more than the astronomers do with tellicopes . . . and when
we go in we are interrested in taulking about mars and teliscops
and things.28

In this entry, Lesley was eight, and could see exactly how she was
being taught. Learning moved from wild fantasy to the wisdom of facts,
and all was reinforced by the journal essays in which the child learned
to write.

Until 1911, Frost had been teaching nearby at the Pinkerton
Academy, a private high school, but when he had an opportunity to
teach psychology at Plymouth Normal School, a public high school, he
sold the farm. He was then at last able to use texts by William James.

In a course for seniors he used Talks tg_Teachers‘gn.Psychology, and

 

an abridged edition of the Principles: Psychology, The Briefer Course,
in his psychology class. His daughters Irma and Marjorie had been
born at Derry, but after the sixth child, Elinor Bettina, died two
days following her birth, he decided to sell the Derry farm. Frost
taught in Plymouth for one year, sold the farm, and determined to take
his family to England.

An interesting encounter occurred when Frost had visited
the Wards in New York in 19ll. Frost had just read the first English
translation of Henri Bergson's Creative Evolution, and was very excited
about it. But Ward declared that Bergson could not be worth reading
because he was an atheist. This argument, according to Thompson, pre-
cipitated the composition of "In White," the first draft of “Design."
Obviously, there is also some Dickinsonian influence in the poem.

(Frost had given Elinor a copy of Emily Dickinson's poems in 1892).

23

The draft title, the rhetoric, the close meticulous observation of
details in nature, the turns of wit, are all Dickinsonian. And Frost's
own background in natural science, especially physics and astronomy,
acted forcefully upon this fine lyric. The slow funereal movement of
the lines fits the situation beautifully; the workings of nature were
slow, but terrifyingly inevitable.

I found a dimpled spider, fat and white

On a white heal-all, holding up a moth

Like a white piece of rigid satin cloth--

A snow-drop spider, a flower like froth,

And dead wings carried like a paper kite.
(Poetry, p. 302)

Emily Dickinson's "papa above" was not so terrifying as this grand
design whose implied author plays with the world as if it were a paper
kite. The poem expresses terror and awe somewhat beyond the usual
metaphysical jest.

Randall Jarrell was the first to notice the astronomical
tone of the poem, and to suggest that there is much more science in
Frost's poetry than one would expect. Writing about "Design," he
commented,

I have given this statement of "what the poem says"--
it says much more--an exaggeratedly physical, scientific form

because both a metaphorically and literally astronomical view of
things is so common, and so unremarked-on in Frost.29

Several others have remarked on the subject in response to Jarrell,
but very few have even mentioned the possibility that Frost's allusions

in the poems to stars or flowers (or to the Doppler effect, geodes,

24

velocity, relativity, mathematics, and so on) could have any basis in
his own knowledge of science.30 Generally, this predominant aspect of
the poetry is still ignored, as is Frost's science-oriented interest
in motion.

The motion Bergson describes, what Faulkner meant too when
he said that life is change, endures and eventually permits the evolu-
tion of consciousness. The artist's intuition, therefore, is natural,
And Bergson's precise meaning of intuition is basic to Frost's esthetics.
In Bergson's own words:

But it is to the very inwardness of life that intuition
leads us--by intuition I mean instinct that has become disinterested,
self-conscious, capable of reflecting upon its object and enlarging
it indefinitely.

That an effort of this kind is not impossible is proved
by the existence in man of an aesthetic faculty along with normal
perception. Our eye preceives the features of the living being,
merely as assembled, not as mutually organized. The intention of
life, the simple movement that runs along the lines, that binds

them together and gives them significance, escapes it. This in-
tention is just what the artist tries to regain.31

In fDesign" which surely has as its background a perceived universal
system of quantum mechanics and randomness, as Jarrell noted, the

poet's intention is to intuit the very intention of the universe.

Frost does this by observing the miniature interrelated movements of
flower, spider, and dead moth. The artist, similarly, tries to regain
the elusive intention, and finds that nature's statements are elusive
and highly ambiguous. Frost asks why this usually blue flower is white,
how the spider knows to get there, how the moth arrives at night to
both flower and spider? These phenomena are ominously mixed. They

are a "witches' brew." The most striking fact is that they are all

25

white--buy why?, the poem asks. The ambiguous answer is, "What but
design of darkness to appall?/If design goven in a thing so small."
Henri Bergson had been interested in esthetics very early in

his career. When he was nineteen he translated De Rerum Natura, the

 

long philosophical poem by the Roman poet Lucretius. He also wrote an
involved foreward essay and a summary of the poem which were published

31a The theme of

together with his translation and the Latin original.
the poem was mutability of forms, and the intention was to comfort
mankind with the thought that no form can last forever. That is, the
concept of personal immortality was impossible to Lucretius, and he
believed that religions caused much suffering by holding out false
hopes-~and fears, about the afterlife. Bergson admired Lucretius'
caring spirit, as well as the Epicurean stoic philosophy it was based
upon.

Frost did read Qe_Rerum Natura, possibly in high school, and

32 In at

certainly later, possibly in Bergson's bi-lingual edition.
least two poems he mentions Lucretius by name. Frost's "Lucretius
Versus the Lake Poets" is a minor jest poem aimed at an academic lec-
ture in which it was evidently claimed that in one of Landor's poems
"nature" meant "pretty scenery." Frost knew his Romantics better than
that, and knew they took nature seriously. The lecturer had made a
large, memorialized mistake. But in "T00 Anxious for Rivers" Frost

gives a more serious tribute to Lucretius. Origins and large movements

are treated, bringing to mind the Roman poet:

26

Time was we were molten, time was we were vapor.
What set us on fire and what set us revolving,
Lucretius the Epicurean might tell us

'Twas something we knew all about to begin with
And needn't have fared into space like his master
To find 'twas the effort, the essay of love.

(Poetry, p. 380)

This is a good description of Bergson's elan vital, using one of

 

James' and Bergson's favorite words, "effort.” There is a nice play
between "fire" and "love" and "Epicurean," the latter word most likely
placed to mislead the casual reader from discovering the poem's
sources, epicurean as a popular word having very little to do with the
stoic philosophy of Epicurus. The idea of the whole poem is that the
poet had sometimes been too anxious for streams to become rivers, too
ready to speed up the natural course of things. All things have their
proper motions within the total scheme of nature--this is the Lucretian

doctrine expressed in modern terms by Bergson.

5. "A Sort of Tunnel in the Frost"

With his interest in James and Bergson. it is not surprising
that when Frost got to London he looked up T. E. Hulme, translator and
interpreter of Bergson. Frost sought out Hulme through F. S. Flint
who arranged a meeting.33 Bergson had helped Hulme get back into
Cambridge after Hulme had made some departures in order to pursue the
study of languages on the continent. Hulme had now become a key figure
among all the new geniuses gathered in London, giving salon entertain-
ments each Tuesday evening. The meeting between Flint, Hulme, and
Frost did take place, and Frost was immediately invited to the next

Tuesday salon. Evidently Hulme was an entertaining host, if one liked

27

"racy" stories, and Frost did. He wrote to a friend back home that he
liked Hulme for his defense of British coarseness, and for some of the
hilarious stories he told. Yet he reassured his New England friend
that Hulme was not a profligate, nor was Frost losing his innocence:
"Hulme is not immoral in thought or action. Plain-speaking is part of
the conservatism he affects and preaches."34
Elaine Barry has observed that what Frost wanted to discuss
with Hulme was probably his "sound of sense" theory--to get Hulme's
views on it. But what she does not notice is the scientific and philo-
sophical background of both men. By the sound of sense Frost had in
mind what Bergson meant by intuition, what James meant by motion, and
what Swedenborg meant by the constant in-flow of the spiritual into
the physical. By sound of sense he meant to convey his own understand-
ing of the "vibrant atom-whirling, star-seething quantum or micro-
mechanics world," as Frost's friend Wade Van Dore has described it.35
Frost's theory meant that the way the words were arranged in a sentence
would present the intuited "sense," and that the "sense" could indeed
by caught and held and transmitted by the diction of his own vital
"sensed" sentences crossing traditional metrical forms. He would
choose the most familiar forms as the best: blank verse, sonnet,
ballad, and a few variations. This is the reason Frost did not use
free verse as the Imagists and others had started to do. He believed
that in free verse the meaning would just flow away. He wanted his
poems to have recognizable "body" or "form." He wanted to lodge them

and make them stay. Perhaps free verse was a temporary phenomenon.

Meter and form could act to hold slippery things fast.

28

James had written that in ordinary communication "we find we
have caught some substantive thing, usually the last word we were pro-
nouncing, statically taken, and with its function, tendency, and par-

36 But, if the ice

ticular meaning in the sentence quite evaporated."
moves fairly skipping across the old wood stove, and is suddenly gone
as the hilarity of the children becomes wisdom--that is a sense of
things worth saving. How can one catch the poignancy of life or make
anything stay? For Frost the answer was the poem, but as he said,
along with James, you have to know the difficulty of it. He wrote to
Sidney Cox that Edward Thomas had planned to write a whole book on his
"sound of sense" idea of the sentence and what that would mean for
literary criticism: "the sentence sound opposing the sense of the
words as in irony . . . till I establish the distinction between the

"37

grammatical sentence and the vital sentence. What was this but the

Bergsonian elan vital, the Jamesean sense of duration, a captured part

 

of the stream of consciousness? A thought intuited, or a series of
thoughts intuited, might “oppose" the grammatical sentence and the
metrics, especially if rendered in ordinary speech rythmns.

T. E. Hulme, whose "Complete Poetical Works" were published
at the back of Ezra Pound's Ripostes, was killed in World War I, but
his influence on modern artistic thinking had been great. Frost gave
credit to Pound for initiating the Imagist movement, but credited
Hulme with naming it: "I believe our friend T. E. Hulme coined the
name. An Imagist is simply one who insists on clearer sharper less

38

muddled half realized images . . . In an essay on Bergson, Hulme

29

uses the terms “tunnel" and "direction" importantly. I think, for
Frost's poetic theory and for the poems that were to come later. His
subject here is the evolution of conscious life:

One can get a picture of the course of evolution in this
way: it is as if a current of consciousness flowed down into a
tunnel, and making efforts to advance on every side, digs galler-
ies, most of which are stopped by a rock which is too hard, but
which in one direction at least has broken through the rock and
back into life again once more.

This direction is the line of evolution resulting in
man.39 '

Thus, with imagistic metaphorical language, T. E. Hulme interpreted
Bergson for the artists and writers around London and Paris before
World War I.
In February 1915, the Frosts took their children home to New
England, settling on a farm in New Hampshire until his appointment to
the Amherst faculty in 1917. Frost's first two volumes of poems had
been published in London, and an arrangement had been made with Henry
Holt and Company to publish them in the United States. His poems
were selling well both at home and abroad, in spite of the war, and
general recognition had arrived. Egetgy_published a new poem, "Snows"
as its prize poem of the year 1916. In it the character Meserve, as
if alluding to Hulme's description of evolution culminating in man,
exclaims:
There where
There is a sort of tunnel in the frost—-
More like a tunnel than a hole--way down
At the far end of it you see a stir

And quiver like the frayed edge of the drift
Blown in the wind. I like thatbal like that.

(Poetry. PP. 149, 159)

30

And, much later on, as if to take up the Bergsonian emphasis on direc-
tion as pointed out by Hulme, Frost wrote in his superb poem, "Directive,"
Your destination and your destiny's
A brook that was the water of the house,
Cold as a spring as yet so near its source,
Too lofty and original to rage.

(We know the valley streams that when aroused
Will leave their tatters hung on barb and thorn.)

(Poetry, pp. 378, 379)

The direction, in this poem, is toward a belief in life in spite of
destruction and the fragmented nature of symbols. Frost's direction,
his "tunnel through the frost" came from a very close awareness of our
involvement with nature, and also from modern science and scientific
philosophers who helped him guess nature's ways.

The first time Frost's use of natural law as metaphor was
noted in print was in an anonymous review in which attention was called
to the final line of "The Wood-Pile." The line states the second law
of thermodynamics: "With the slow smokeless burning of decay." That
review--and Frost liked it--was brought to him by another botanizing
friend, John W. Haines.40 Frost realized then what he was doing in

the line, for later he commented on it to F. Cudworth Flint:

There is something in the German notion of Din an Sich.
I remember a queer mixture of wonder and satisfaction w en the
phrase came out in 'The Wood-Pile' about 'the slow smokeless burn-
ing of decay', that's right, you know; that's what is really is.
It's better than a lesson. Isn't that the weakness of personify-
ing things in nature? We are really disregarding the Thing Itself
and making it masquerade in false clothing.41

If it is correct to say that Frost intended to achieve naturalness in
every way, that is, to live as much as possible in harmony with nature

as he understood its laws, then his poetry is surely in the mainstream

31

of American literature in that sense. When both science and poetry
attempt to comprehend nature, they come close to their mutual source
and the raging of opposition ceases. Frost dealt constantly with the
opposites, or the seeming opposites, in his poetry and in his life.
His manner in the poems was itself metaphorical for the naturalness
and simplicity he wanted to express, and the rejection of personifica-
tion was indicative of his style.

It is appropriate that Frost was interested in scientific
discoveries and their implications because in our time the knowledge
explosion has arrived primarily through science. The scientific em-
phasis in Frost's poetry became most obvious in the final volume, In
the Clearing. The headnote poem to the volume restates Frost's approach
to knowledge of the material world in simple rhymed trimeter verse:
"We may take the view/That its derring-do/Thought of in the large/Is
one mighty charge/On our human part/Of the soul's ethereal/Into the
material.“ (Poetry, p. 436)42 Swedenborgian spiritual inflow had
reappeared, but this time with the large Jamesean difference that it
is a view one may_take. Much of Frost's impetus to learn science must
have come from Swedenborg, yet his own explorations and experiments
led him to modify Swedenborgian doctrine with more modern philosophy.
One might accurately say that in Frost, nature became poetry through
science.

It was perhaps easier for Frost to find his direction as a
poet because of the intellectual freedom he had enjoyed as a child.

He chose his subjects and combined them in his own way, sharing the

excitement of exploration in new ideas with friends. He had learned

32

to choose. He was friendly and “funning” by temperament, but his

sense of humor always shielded significance. His remark that Scientific

 

American was his favorite literary journal, often made in academic
settings, was no mere wit for the moment. Frost did indeed get litera-
ture out of such sources. As one writer commented, remembering his
friendship with Frost: "One of the periodicals he read oftenest and

with most enjoyment was the Scientific American. Indeed it was never

 

safe to assume that one knew the limits of Frost's knowledge and ex-
perience."

In fact, much of the effect of the mystical in the poems
was achieved through the poet's knowledge of science. Acquaintance
with natural processes through scientific knowledge allowed Frost to
see farther into the nature of things than he might have otherwise.
As Elizabeth Isaacs noticed, Frost's interest in new scientific develop-
ments caused others to think of him as a sort of prophet or seer.43
He could talk with men of science about their subjects, and he liked
to ask them about the meaning of recent work in their particular fields
of research. Because he did not often reveal his early schooling in
science, scientists were often amazed by his intelligent comments and
questions. For instance, Jonas Salk, the medical biologist, commented
in 1956 after a discussion of diseases with Frost: "How can one man

44 But Frost

know so much about a subject of which he knows nothing?"
had become the sort of mystic who believed in "change and in changing

symbols" drawn from the knowledge of his time.

10.

11.
12.

13.

33

Notes to Chapter One

Kathryn Gibbs Harris, "Robert Frost's Early Education in Science,"
The South Carolina Review 7, No. 1, (Nov., 1974), 13-33° Chapter
One is a revision of this article.

Emanuel Swedenborg, The Nature Lf the Intercourse Between the Soul
and the Body (New York: General Convention of the New Jerusalem
ChurEhTin the United States of America, 1965),p . iii.

 

Julian K. Smith and William F. Wunsch, compilers, The Gist Lf
Swedenborg(Philadelphia: Lippincott,1920), p. 81.

Rose C. Feld, "Robert Frost Relieves his Mind," New York Times
Book Review, 21 October, 1923, p. 2.

 

 

Robert Frost, The Poetry Lf Robert Frost, ed. Edward Connery
Lathem (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1969), pp. 293, 294.
Cited as Poetry hereafter;to be distinguished from the 1949
edition designated as Poems.

 

 

Arnold E. Grade, "A Chronicle of Robert Frost's Early Reading,
1874- 1899, " Bulletin Lf the New York Public Library, 72 (1968),
pp. 611- 628. This list is ‘conservative, noting only obviously
evidenced books and school assignments. Hereafter as Grade,
"Chronicle."

 

Lawrance Thompson, Robert Frost: The Early Years 1974-1915
(New York: Holt, 1966), p. 55. C1ted as Thompson, EarLy Years
hereafter.

 

"The Figure a Poem Makes," Poems, p. viii.

Selected Letters of Robert Frost, Lawrence Thompson, ed. (New
York: Holt, 1964): 17, Cited as Selected Letters hereafter.

 

Letter 12 June, 1948 to Lawrence Thompson, Selected Letters, p.
530.

 

Thompson, Early Years, p. 501.

Richard Anthony Proctor, Our Place Among Infinities: To Which are
Added Essays Ln Astrology and the Jewish Sabbath (New York. R.—

 

 

 

Worthington, Publishers, 1880). First edition, London, 1875.
Frost identifies Sirius in "One More Brevity." (Poetry, p. 419).

Robert Frost, "On Extravagance: A Talk, " Robert Frost: Poetry
and Prose, selected and edited by Edward Connery Lathem and
Lawrance Thompson (New York: Holt, 1972), pp. 447- 457. Cited as
Poetry and Prose hereafter. Also see Proctor, "Seeming Wastes in
Nature,‘ Infinities, pp. 35- 44.

 

14.
15.
16.
17.
18.

19.

20.

21.

22.

23.

24.

25.

26.
27.

34

Proctor, Infinities, p. 27.

 

Grade, "Chronicle," p. 620, item 43.
Thompson, EarLy Years, p. 130.
Thompson, Early Years, p. 131.

Letter, 15 Apr., 1921 to Louis Untermeyer, Selected Letters,
p. 267.

 

Letter 15 Aug., 1896 to Susan Hayes Ward, Selected Letters, p. 28.
The botany handbook Frost cites is: Frances Theodbra Parsons
(Mrs. W. S. Dana), A Guide to the Names, Haunts, and Habits of
Our Common Wild Flowers. See Grade, "Chronicle," p. 626. "fifia

I dont know who all" suggests there were numerous other books on
the subject read by Frost at the time.

 

 

"Education by Presence," Poetry and Prose, 300-304. Interview
first in The Christian Science Monitor, Dec. 24,1925 by Janet
Mabie. Also see Robert Frost. AJLiving Voice, ed. Reginald Cook.
". . the teacher I never had was William James," p. 144.

Harry Gates Townsend, Philosophical Ideas in the United States
(New York: The American Book Company, 1934),W apt. 9, “Psycho—
logical Empiricism and Spiritual Pluralism," 131- 156.

 

William James, Varieties Lf Religjous E_perience, A Stud in Human
Nature: Being the Gifford lectures on natural religio eTivered

at Edinburgh in 1901- 1902 (New York: Longmans Green and Co. ,

1902). .

William James, The Principles Lf Psychology, authorized edition
(New York: Henry Holt, 1892) Vol. ,p. 244. This edition con-
tains the two volumes bound together. James himself revised the
Principles into a shorter version, Psychology: The Briefer Course,
possibly the edition Frost used for his students. Many Editions
edited and abridged by others ensued.

I recommend the chronology by Thompson in Selected Letters,
xlvii to 1xiv.

 

Lesley Frost Ballentine, New Hampshire's Child: The Derry Journals

 

of Lesley Frost, (facsim. ) ed. Lawrance Thompson and Arnold Grade

(Albany, N. Y.. State University of New York Press, 1969) Book VI

1908-1909, journal page 38.
Lesley Frost, Book III 1905-1907, journal page 26.

Lesley Frost Ballentine, Introduction, n. pag.

28.
29.

30.

31.

31a.

32.

33.

34.

35.

36.
37.
38.
39.

35

Lesley Frost, Book IV 1906-1907, journal pages 82, 83.

Randall Jarrell, "To the Laodiceans," in Poetry and the Agg_by
Randall Jarrell (New York: Knopf, l953), 49.

 

Please see Kathryn Gibbs Harris, "Robert Frost's Early Education
in Science," The South Carolina Review, 7 No. 1 (Nov., 1974), l3-
33, p. 25, n. 32 for a list of those who have mentioned Frost in
relation to science. They are principally Reginald Cook, Eliza-
beth Isaacs, Randall Jarrell, Wade Van Dore, and Hyatt H. Waggoner.

Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, authorized translation by
Arthur Mitchell (New York: Modern Library, l944), pp. 176, 177.
Also, the translator's note reads: "In the writing of this trans-
lation of Professor Bergson's most important work, I was helped

by the friendly interest of Professor William James . ~,- . It
was his intention, had he lived to see the completion of this
translation, himself to introduce it to English readers in a
prefatory note."

Henri Bergson, The Philosophy of Poetry: The Genius of Lucretius
(New York: Philosophical Library, l959), edited and translated
by Wade Baskin. Preface by Baskin, pp. 3, 4.

 

Family Letters of Robert and Elinor Frost, ed. Arnold Grade
(Albany, N. Y.: SUNY Press, 1972), pp. l77-180. RF to Lesley,
late winter 1935: "It was in my head all the summer I was in
California reading Lucretius De Rerum Natura." Hereafter, Family

 

Letters.

Robert Frost on Writing, edited with introductory essay by Elaine
Barry, New Brunswick, N. J.: Rutgets University Press, l973),
p. l8.

Letter, 23 Feb., l9l4, to Ernest L. Silver, Selected Letters, p.
ll7.

 

Wade Van Dore, "In Robert Frost's Rubbers," Michigan Quarterly
Review, ll, No. 2 (l973), p. 124. Mr. Van Dore is an amateur
scientist and outdoorsman. He worked for Frost on his farms as
Burrell had done.

 

James, Principles, p. 244.

 

Thompson, Early Years, p. 453.

 

Family Letters, p. l62.

T. E. Hulme, Speculations: Essays on Humanism and the Philosophy
of Art, ed. Herbert Read, foreword by Jacob Epstein‘TNew York:
Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1924) pp. 210, 211. Read notes Ezra
Pound's publication of the five poems by Hulme as "Complete

 

 

40.

41.

42.

43.
44.

45.

36

Poetical Works of T. E. Hulme," in Pound's Ri ostes. He reports
that two books translated by Hulme were also published during his
lifetime: Bergson's Introduction to Metaphysics, and Sorel's
Reflections 9Q_Violence to which he wrote a critical introduction.
This selection of Hulme's writings includes material from Hulme's
M55. and notebooks, essays on humanism, a theory of modern art,
Romanticism and Classicism, Bergson's theory of art, on a theory
of intensive manifolds, and an interpretation of Bergson's philos-
ophy. Notes called "Cinders,“ notes on Sorel, and a plan for a
book are added in an appendix, along with the poems. Hulme, like
Hemingway, did not like humanism.

 

Letter, c. 1 July, 1914 to John W. Haines, pp. 127, 128. Selected
Letters, 128, 129. Thompson notes (p. 127) that on each of two

visits back to England, Frost visited Haines. As this letter

indicates, Frost liked Haines' casual manner, asking him "over
here to spraw1--not call." He cherished their botany explorations
in England" by the light of a match in your English winter twi-
light and for the evenings by your books of all the poets,” as he
wrote later to Haines (p. 205). Haines was a barrister, as well
as amateur botanist and poet.

F. Cudworth Flint, "A Few Touches of Frost," The Southern Review,
2, No. 4, New series (October, 1966), 830-838. Note, p. 835.

 

Also see Robert Frost, In the Clearing (New York: Holt, 1962).
Headnote page, n. pag.

Flint, "Touches of Frost," p. 833.

Elizabeth Isaacs, An Introduction to Robert Frost (Denver: Allan
Swallow, 1962), p. 159.

 

Anon. “Wise Man,“ Colliers, 27 Apr. 1956, p. 42.

TWO. Science as Motion in the Poems

l. "The Great and Only Event of All History"

When Robert Frost said that the great and only event of all

1 he meant that the

history was "science plunging deeper into matter,"
knowledge explosion in our time outdistanced any in remembered experi-
ence. We have learned archeologically from the earth and astronomi-
cally from the skies: we have seen farther into the structure of matter
than the human eye can see, by the instruments and ingenuities of
science. New knowledge always always seems more than can be grasped

at first, but the present extensiveness of scientific knowledge is
overwhelming. Yet, as in Frost's early years, change remains; the
most certain thing in the universe is change itself. William James
and Henri Bergson in their philosophies, and Charles Darwin in the

biological sciences, all emphasized change in the universe. Natural

laws were in fact descriptions of processes, of changes. Entropy, the

37

38

second law of thermodynamics, is, for instance, the tendency in nature
for all things to return to waste, to run down; i.e., decay. The op-
posite process, negentropy, is its counterpart: life taking on form
and differentiating, culminating in the organism known as man. Because
these large processes are known to exist universally they can be termed
scientific or natural laws. (We use the term "law" for scientific
theory, following Descarte's usage.) Any particular entity or organism
is itself a process or group of processes, and is often so viewed by the
scientific eye. For the purpose of this study of Frost's poems, I will
consider therefore science from the point of view of the study of
motion and of the relationships between motions. Change, as Eddington
often observed, is always relative.
One physical scientist who sees the universe entirely as
motion has expressed the general view this way:
All is slower or faster motion, from visible motion to
invisible molecular and atomic motion, and all is transition from
one kind of motion into another. In the transformation of kinetic

into caloric energy we have an example of such a transition from
visible, i.e. slow motion, into invisible, i.e. rapid motion.2

This is a description of the process of digesting food, common to all
animals, and is similar to the process of thermodynamical entropy-
negentropy which is taking place everywhere, whether wood burns in a
fireplace or is left in the field to decay as in Frost's poem, "The
Wood-Pile." Negentropy is most obviously dominant in the motion of
early growth of organisms, however. We have all seen films in which
the motions of plant growth are telescoped in time from several weeks
to a few cinematic minutes. Bean sprouts dance up out of the soil,

"shouldering the earth crumbs," as Frost wrote, and flowers quake and

39

hesitate in their tropism toward the sun. They are stronger, for the
moment, than all the opposing entropic strength of the universe.

As even more an amateur astronomer than botanist and general
biologist, Frost studied and thought about the motions of the stars
and planets, and of their universe. Stars to him were wonderful in-
dividual entities, always symbolic of the separate and distinct indi-
vidual, and it was not natural to him that they should lose their
movement or direction and be used for any purpose but their own. In
"A Star in a Stoneboat" he expresses this feeling by investing a fallen
meteor with some of its lost motion. He says the meteor had been a
world of its own like ours, with poles, and needed only "a spin/To
show its worldly nature and begin/To chafe and shuffle in my calloused
palm/And run off in strange tangents with my arm." (Egetry, p. 174)

The fallen star is to be carted off in a stoneboat sledge to become

part of a wall among fieldstones. There is some humor in the poet's
fanciful exaggeration, and yet the principal effect of the poem
is the revelation of something of the mystery of motion itself as it
applies, perhaps, to the individual human life.

Frost was certainly not the only modern poet to notice the
arrival of an age of science. The predominance of science in the
early twentieth century was taken into account in various ways my major
poets other than Frost, notably by Ezra Pound. In his g_§_g 9: Reading
which helped to educate young poets and artists toward discovering
their own esthetic principles, Pound insisted that the way to learn to
read poems was simply to read hundreds of them and compare them, just

as the researcher in the biological sciences will compare hundreds of

40

slides under the microscope. Indeed there was much talk generally at
the time Frost and Pound met in London about the relationship between
science and the arts. One proponent of assimilating scientific know-

ledge into the arts was Aldous Huxley who wrote in his book Literature

 

and Science of Pound's early Cantos:

I admire the poem, but wish that its author, 1] miglior
fabbro and consummate purifier of the words of the tribe, might have
used his talents to transfigure some of the findings of modern
science, thus making it possible for this new raw material to take

its place, along with the traditional subject matters of poetry,
in a work of the highest literary art.3

While Huxley's observation may be unfair in the sense that Pound's in-
tention need not have been the one he suggests, and Pound might still
have claimed there was sufficient science in the Cantos, Huxley's
comment is interesting as general criticism of the literature of the
time. Why should new scientific knowledge not turn up more generally
in poetry? Yet Huxley's view seems not to have been taken up by many
other critics. Even Frost did not draw upon science as a direct critical
statement until his later talks, and in his last poems, although he
was using the new "raw material" all along.

Writing to his daughter Lesley in 1935 about the Imagist
movement in poetry, Frost noted that it lacked the two kinds of images
he had the most of in his own poems, those of sound and of motion:
"Strange with all their modernity and psychology they didn't have more
to say about ear images and other images--even kinesthetic."4 But at
the same time he does give credit to Ezra Pound as a contributor and
initiator of a better style in modern poetry. His comment interest-

ingly plays upon the words "mover” and "movement:"

41

Ezra Pound was Prime Mover in the Movement and must
always have the credit for what's in it. . . . Pound began to
talk very early about rhythm alone without meter . . . . He was
the first Imagist too.5

The idea of "rhythm alone" must have interested Frost in connection
with his own sound of sense voice rhythms. Of course, these comments
tell us more about Frost's thinking than they present the situation of
the early Imagists with fairness. After all, Pound's early departure
from Imagism was in order to found the new Vorticism movement, or the
"movement of movement" as Roger Meiners terms it. [personal communi-
cation] And it cannot be said that Pound founded the Imagists on the
basis of his work alone, nor that sound imagery was lacking in the
early poems of H. D. Motion figures, however, in the sense that Frost
understood them, as well as a continuity by way of connectives in a

poem, were certainly entirely lacking in The Waste Land in its pastiche

 

or collage style, as well as in Pound's Cantos, The influence of the
Japanese haiku required the reader to supply the mystical motion be-
tween the particular instance and the general truth, and therefore
also contributed to the impression of lack of movement in the Imagist
poem. But the Imagists were always busy in other forms, and H. D.'s
poetic novels, and even later poetic criticism, Aldington's novels and
translations, Amy Lowell's polyphonic prose, all contained interesting
forms of movement. Much early Imagist verse gave the impression of
being static, however, because of its tenet to present, not explain,
and because of the oriental influences of haiku and Chinese ideogram

Pound was beginning to explore.

42

What Frost wanted was that the sense of the movement present
in the poet when he writes the poem can be perceived directly by the
reader. He thought of the process of creativity as a continuous motion
that created again the emotion of the poet for the reader, drawing the
poem's figure, so to speak. "No tears in the writer, no tears in the
reader. No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader. For
me the initial delight is in the surprise of remembering something I
didn't know I knew . . . . It can never lose its sense of a meaning
that once unfolded by surprise as it went."7 Frost refers here to the
psychological figure that wells up into consciousness from feeling
states. William James believed that motor activity was closely related
to the stream of consciousness, that we are able to know processes
around us and their relationships because of our awareness of our own
bodily movements. That is, we do not think with a static brain, but
with our whole physical being. In this connection it is easy to see
why Frost's view of the poem conflicted with, say, The Waste Land,
in which the reader has to supply the connectives, and can do so
properly only after considerable reference work. On the other hand,
Frost enjoyed explaining the processes of nature, or presenting them
as metaphorical, in simple or seemingly simple terms. Even in letters
to his own family the descriptions of scientific theories are simply
and aptly done.

In many such letters, Frost mentions scientists he knew or
knew of, as he describes their theories. Three letters to his grandson

Prescott show his interest in sharing science with the family. Shortly

43

after the death of Elinor Frost in 1938, he wrote to Prescott encourag-
ing him to get his short wave radio set working again, saying that
Elinor had said she never knew a boy or girl she liked better.
We'll keep such things locked in our hearts when we
write . . . we'll speak of the ordinary things that happen to us

and occur to us in our everyday gife. Tell me especially about
any ideas you have in mechanics.

The next year, from Boston, Frost writes to Prescott a careful descrip-
tion of phases of the moon, explaining eclipses and the proof that the
earth is round by its curved shadow on the moon. The letter is illus-
trated with drawings of the moon's phases. And, in 1941 Prescott
received a letter from Frost describing Millikan's ray theory, Bohr's
atom, with allusions to the "exploding" universe (i.e. expanding) and
to the usefulness of the Doppler effect in astronomy. This letter
concludes: "I'll send along the Technology Reviews when I have got
my capacity out of them," another indication of the probability of
Frost's additional readings in science being much wider than scholars
have recorded.8a
A letter to Frost's son Carol, Prescott's father, is about
Einstein, and especially interesting in its scientific commentary.
Carol, in November, 1931, was living in California, and had evidently
written his parents about the mountain clinbing he was doing there.
Climbing was often a family venture for the Frosts. But mountains
made Frost think of science.
I'm reminded of your mountains almost every day by some-
thing in the New York Times about the doings in astronomy at Mount

Wilson. That is one of the most exciting places in the world just
now. Einstein is going back there to work on his theories of the

44

universe. He says gravitation and acceleration (speeding up) are
the same thing. You can see how gravitation and acceleration may
be closely connected by the way you feel heavier when an elevator
speeds up with you.9

This simplification of Einstein's relativity theory as it applies to
gravitation makes the theory seem perfectly obvious. It was not, of
course, obvious to scientists prior to Einstein. It might be noticed,
too, that Frost's manner of explaining it is to cast the concept into
moving processes whereas Einstein's original mathematical explanation
was necessarily abstract, and would seem to have nothing to do with
motion except inferentially.

In an undated letter about 1950, Frost writes to Lesley al-
luding to cyclotrons. But in this letter he is using science to make
a point about poetry. He refers to "the realm where in the cyclotrons
nothing is perceptibly becoming something.9a He is explaining how the
lyric impulse cannot remain pure but must take on form or "burden."
"Nothing," he says of poetry, "can be done with nothing. Nothing but
weight can put on weightiness. The moist diaphenous wings carry a
burden pollen from flower to flower. No song without a burden." The
poem moves from the ethereal to the substantial, he writes, and com-
pares his concept of the creation of a poem with the creation of matter,
so to speak, within the cyclotrons. The physical world is important;
the forms of poems are important.

In the family letters several more scientists who were family
friends are mentioned by familiar names. One is "Toggles" Thompson,
a chemistry professor, another is "Davy" Todd, director of the Observa-
tory at Amherst College for a time while the Frosts lived in Amherst.

Another was Elmer Hjort, a professor of physics who lived on a farm in

45

Florida where Frost had lived, and where the children were going to

live or visit.9b Frost wrote to both Carol's wife Lillian, and to
Lesley, that the Hjorts were "the kind you'll like."10 Further, the
Frost family had kept up correspondence with the Haines family in
England with whom they had become friends when Haines and Frost went
botanizing together, and with Edward Thomas and others. Frost's choices
of friends for himself and even for his family seemed to lean away from
the literary circles and toward science, a departure from the usual

path for poets at the time.

2. "Make the Day Seem to Us Less Brief"

Frost's poetry expresses the wish throughout to have life
continue, to have it last. In "One Step Backward Taken" he describes
the movement by which he avoided being swept away by an avalanche, and
in "A Drumlin Woodchuck" he describes a similar self-protective motion
in animals, comparing the motion metaphorically to his own self-

protective actions, and the survival impulse in man generally:

All we who prefer to live
Have a little whistle we give,
And flash, at the least alarm
We dive down under the farm.

If I can with confidence say
That still for another day,

Or even another year,

I will be there for you, my dear,

It will be because, though small

As measured against the All

I have been so instincitively thorough
About my crevice and burrow.

(Poetry, p. 282)

46

There is humor in the comparison of woodchucks and men, but for all its
irony, a fundamental fact has been revealed. Woodchucks and other wild
animals do use their burrows or nests to avoid destruction. In a sense,
man sees his own wisdom in the behavior of less complicated creatures.
Perhaps poets, as a group, are in as much jeopardy as woodchucks are.
Although Frost's was primarily an outgoing life after he received recog-
nition for his poetry, his home was always of considerable importance
to him, chiefly as a refuge, as he says in this poem.

In the early years of his marriage at the Derry farm, Frost
did much of his formative writing, and his experience during the time
he lived there informed much of his later poetry. In a 1952 letter to
Robert Chase he explained that poetry had gotten him almost all the
money he made, either directly or indirectly, and he acknowledged his

debt to the Derry years.

You might be interested to know that during my ten years in
Derry the first five of them farming altogether and the last five
mostly teaching but still farming a little, I wrote more than half
of my first book and much more than half of my second and even
guite a little of my third, though they were not published till
ater.

I might say the core of all my writing was probably the five
free years I had there on the farm . . . .1

The Derry years had allowed time for meditation, and for the expression
of love in many lyrics, the most passionate of which is the musical "A
Line Storm Song" in which the movement of the storm is felt by all the
surrounding life of the woods and farm. The poem extends the imagina-
tion back into prehistory when the sea "left the shells/Before the age

of the ferm."

47

The birds have less to say for themselves
In the wood-world's torn despair

Than now these numberless years the elves,
Although they are no less there:

All song of the woods is crushed like some
Wild, easily shattered rose.

Come, be my love in the wet woods. come
Where the boughs rain when it blows.

(Poetry, p. 26)

The motion of the poem is successful in imitation of the storm's
sound, and also of the storm of feeling in the voice of the poem's
speaker.

Another lyric from the Derry years directly expresses the
profound wish Frost had to hold, to keep back, the immediate moment of
spring. The poem says in the form of a prayer that the poet would have
his family be happy in the simple movements of nature around themselves
in the spring.

Oh, give us pleasure in the flowers today;
And give us not to think so far away

As the uncertain harvest; keep us here

All simply in the springing of the year.

And make us happy in the darting bird

That suddenly above the bees is heard,

The meteor that thrusts in with needle bill,
And off a blossom in mid-air stands still.

For this is love and nothing else is love . . . .
("A Prayer in Spring," oetry, p. 12)

That is, by being in close touch with the movements of nature, the

poet and his wife and their children are part of the Bergsonian duration
of all things in nature; by experiencing this sense of duration they are
kept, not in the spring season, but in the sense of springing itself--
in the moving process that is love, "and nothing else is love." Frost

saw love as not a certain phenomenon of life followed by death, nor as

48

an ideal, but as a constantly changing, moving process. While love is
like the springing of the year, however, the harvest is uncertain and
will have its characteristic motion too. Without the motion figures
of the poem, the sense of what Frost believed love to be could not be
related nearly so effectively. The last line quoted above seems
puzzling without this Bergsonian emphasis.

Many of Frost's poems have a mathematical-geometrical tone
that comes from their motion figures. In such poems life events are
described as bodies moving relationally through space. "Meeting and
Passing," for instance, has the abstract mathematical "tracking" quality
that is sometimes described as Frost's matter-of-fact tone. The flat-
ness of the diction, however, is not all of the poem's technique.
Figures of two persons simply move toward each other, meet, and pass by.
The pure motion involved is stressed. The space-oriented conceptual
diction concludes: "Afterward I went past what you had passed/Before
we met, and you what I had passed." The personae of the poem move as
though they were planets. The inevitability of psychological reality
is described in physical astronomical terms.

Similarly, the excellent sonnet, "A Soldier," describes the
death of a soldier in battle and concludes that while "missiles always
make too short an arc," (that is, they had not been able to reach
outer space as yet), the "obstacle that checked/And tripped the body,
shot the spirit onIFurther than target ever showed or shone.“ "Meeting
and Passing" describes love; "A Soldier" describes death. Both poems
are effective: the simplicity of the diction and of the figures give

the poems what mathematicians term "elegance." There is a sense of

49

nothing extra, nothing unnecessary in them. It might be noted that
because the motion figures extend throughout each poem, there is a
single shaping metaphor for each poem, rather than a grouping of motion
figures as we find in many others. This type of figure, drawn from the
poet's sense of space geometry, was one of the kinds of motion that

interested him. It first appeared in Mountain Interval, 1916, but

 

Frost had been using motion figures from the start.
From childhood Frost's donnée was the mystique of nature.

As he wrote in A_Bgy's Will in the highly autobiographical poem "In A

 

Vale,"

When I was young, we dwelt in a vale
By a misty fen that rang all night,

Ana this it is I know so well
Why the flower has odor, the bird has song.
You have only to ask me and I can tell.

No, not vainly there did I dwell,
Nor vainly listen all the night long.

(Poetry, p. 15)

This quotation gives the beginning and the end of the poem. Its center

is an allegory of the voices of nature, explaining the ways of nature
to the boy. These were the rhythms Frost heard and went on to seek in
philosophers of science and in knowledge of science. The movements of
the earth, stars, birds and flowers determined the rhythms of even the
human voices of the poems. Frost's poetry is perhaps consequently, al-
most entirely free of influence from the other arts of his time: from
painting, music, dance, and sculpture. His esthetic of motion was

drawn from nature with the help of science.

8a.

9a.
9b.

10.
11.

50

Notes to Chapter Two

Isaacs, Introduction 59 RE , p. 159.

 

Constantine Brunner, Science, Spirit and Superstition (London:
Allen & Unwin, 1968), p. 141.

 

Aldous Huxley, Literature and Science (New York: Harper and Row,
1963), p. 102.

Family Letters, p. 162.
Family Letters, pp. 160-162.
Poems, p. viii.

Family Letters, p. 198 and p. 228. See Grade's note, p. 229 on
Bohr and Millikan.

Family Letters, p. 142.
Family Letters, p. 260.

 

Family Letters, p. 93.

 

 

Family Letters, p. 148.
Family Letters, p. 179.
Family Letters, p. 245.

 

Letter, 4 March, 1952 to Robert Chase, Selected Letters, p. 552.

THREE. Motion in the Poems: Water
1. "The Stream of Everything that Runs Away"

One of the largest motions of the universe that interested
Frost was the double process of entropy-negentropy. Between Eddington
and Robert A. Millikan, a physicist, an argument had ensued whether the
universe was primarily either entropy or negentropy.1 Frost had read
Eddington first, and his own attitudes and knowledge inclined toward
Eddington's belief in "the running down of the universe," or entropy.
Yet something was to be said for Millikan's belief that the universe
was primarily "winding up," which he based on his work with cosmic
rays.2 He did not coin the term negentropy, a new word established
by the physicist Leon Brillouin who related information theory to the
second law of thermodynamics in 1964; nor was Frost aware of a word
for the process opposite to entropy.3 Nevertheless, it is the double
process described by Frost in "West-Running Brook" which is not only

Bergsonian, but takes both sides of the cosmological controversy over

entropy into account. The poem is describing existence:

[:1

52

It has this throwing backward on itself

So that the fall of most of it is always
Raising a little, sending up a little.

Our life runs down in sending up the clock.
The brook runs down in sending up our life.
The sun runs down in sending up the brook.
And there is something sending up the sun.

(m. pp. 259,260)

The second law of thermodynamics that says that by the measurement of
of a certain loss of heat during work we can tell that the universe is
running down, or tending toward a thermodynamical equilibrium, means
that only by an enormous process of loss does any particular organism
come into being. Heat loss can be measured in the laboratory, but much
more work in both theory and experimentation is now going on, and the
matter is far from settled.

Eddington's arguments for the power and inevitability of
entropy fitted well with Frost's darkest feelings about mutability in
life. Eddington believed that the universe must be understood to have
a definite life span.

I would feel more content that the universe should ac—
complish some great scheme of evolution, and, having achieved
whatever may be achieved, lapse back into chaotic changelessness,
than that its purpose be banalized by continual repetition.4

For Frost, too, this situation was not cause for total nihilism. One
might according to William James, choose to believe whatever one liked,
and live fully by making efforts toward an unverifiable goal; one's
thoughts and actions might be directed in order to accomplish some
worthwhile aim regardless of cosmologies. Further, according to
Bergson, the artist may touch the heart of the universe with his intui-

tion, momentarily transcending the entropic undertow of the universe;

he might live, in that sense, in a state of duration which was for

53

Bergson the only possible immortality. It is impossible to say how
far Frost was drawn toward this latter point in Bergson's philosophy,
but it is possible to say that he was drawn to the problem of time in
both James and Bergson. There is no way to comprehend time except
through motion.

James' metaphorical phrase "stream of consciousness" must
have struck deep into Frost's imagination: the mind is a stream, the
universe is a stream. Time is the "stream of everything that runs
away" because each thing in the universe moves entropically at its own
rate toward death and disintegration. The process by which a thing
has been created or integrated, and is being renewed, seems small in
comparison with the apparent rush of time. In the poems, water in its
various forms represents entropic movements in nature. The particular
form of water-~a well or brook--may be synechdoctal for the larger
symbolic metaphor of motion itself. Perhaps Frost did not formulate
this structure precisely and consciously before the poems "came out,"
but he was aware of synechdoche as a poetic device. As he wrote to
his grandaughter in 1951, " . . . Madrid would serve well enough as

)"5 Water

part for the whole of Spain. (Figure known as Synechdoche.
appears in all forms in the poetry, whether as ice, rain, snow, rivers,
brooks, oceans, pools, fountains, well water, mist, clouds, or mud.
In each case the figure Frost uses is a particular instance of the
double entropic principle.

Since negentropy is simply the building up process or the

opposite of entropy, it is likely that Frost thought of it as he did

of other seeming opposites in nature--as the obverse side of the same

54

thing, or the other extreme of the same process. Entropy and negen-
tropy may be considered as descriptions of matter in its various stages.
But the beginnings of the negentropic process have not yet been demon-
strated in a laboratory. The "nothing becoming something" that Frost
referred to in cyclotrons is not a sufficient test, nor is the chemical
formation of organic cellular material. Energy loss is measurable to
prove entropy, but what can be measured to prove negentropy? And even
if Millikan was right about the cosmic rays' origin in outer space,
Eddington was perhaps right in seeing the "birth cry" of the distant
rays as very small in comparison with the extravagant entropic activi-
ties evident and observable everywhere in the universe. Frost must
have puzzled over this question of the fate of the universe again and
again. The poems reveal the essential death-in-life situation of en-
tropy many times, and always effectively. Further, there is a progres-
sion in the conceptual complexity of these metaphors in the poems.

In "A Hillside Thaw," (New Hampshire, 1923) Frost begins by
describing the sense of irony one feels in trying to understand the
movements in nature. How can we think we know nature if we do not see
how it changes just by a change in temperature?

To think to know the country and not know

The hillside on the day the sun lets go
Ten million silver lizards out of snow!

(Poetry, p. 237)

The appearance is beautiful, but while the scene is esthetically pleas-
ing,'what is really going on is mysterious. The motion is so rapid it
is difficult to comprehend.

As often as I've seen it done before
I can't pretend to tell the way it's done.

(Poetry, p. 237)

55

The poet-speaker cannot explain the natural process (he pretends), nor
can he "stop the wet stampede," even when he tries by throwing himself
“wet-elbowed and wet-kneed/In front of twenty others' wriggling speed."
During the poem, time has been passing with the sun's descent. What
the poet says he was unable to do, the moon does. Actually, the drop
in temperature chills and stops the "lizards" as the moon makes the
effect visible.

The moon was waiting for her chill effect.

I looked at nine: the swarm was turned to rock

In every lifelike posture of the swarm,

Transfixed on mountain slopes almost erect.

Across each other side by side they lay.

The spell that so could hold them as they were

Was wrought through trees without a breath of storm

To make a leaf, if there had been one, stir.

It was the moon's: she held them until day,

One lizard at the end of every ray.
The thought of my attempting such a stay!

(Poetry. pp. 237, 238)

Here the moon's witchery stands, ironicallys, for the imagination of
the poet. He can make the processes of nature stay only by "capturing"
them in the poem-~freezing them momentarily, just as the moon seems to
do at night when the temperature drops. There is nothing explicit in
the poem about a change of temperature, it is implied by the disap-
pearance of the sun, and by the times mentioned after sunset. Here,
it is the sun's warmth that ironically represents the thermodynamical
running down of the universe while the cooling and slowing rivulets
are made to stay in the form of ice. Ice often means death in Frost's
poems, but here it is a temporary and desirable condition. The total
irony of the poem brings out the poet's familiar outcry: how absurd

it is to try to keep anything, expecially the beautiful.

56

"Spring Pools," the first poem in West-Running Brook, 1928,
is rendered in two iambic pentameter sestets with regular rhyme. In
the first sestet, the poet declares that the pools and the flowers be-

side them will soon be gone.

And yet not out by any brook or river,
But up by roots to bring dark foliage on.

(Poetry, p. 245)

The growth of trees requires so much water that the pools will be ex-
hausted; then the flowers will no longer have a water source. Further,
the last line of the poem refers again to the water source, this time
as a source for the pools themselves in early spring. There is the
movement in time, and the movement of the life source, water, as the
pools and flowers become, in a sense, the foliage of the dark woods in

summer.

The trees that have it in their pent-up buds

To darken nature and be summer woods--

Let them think twice before they use their powers
To blot out and drink up and sweep away

These flowery waters and these watery flowers
From snow that melted only yesterday.

(Poetry, p. 245)

Not only does the last line intensify the swiftness of the movement

of life through the flowers, but the third from last line with its
three active verb phrases in a row, all slightly pejorative, indicates
the poet's anger toward the swift passage of time, a sort of mock anger

toward the trees which are made to seem ominously tyrannical.

57

2. "This Backward Motion Toward the Source"

If negentropy cannot be tested in a simple laboratory experi-
ment, what is it, anyway? Following Teilhard de Chardin, the mathe-
matician-philosopher Beatrice Bruteau explains the double process this
way:

Entropy is the measure of a movement to take things apart
until they are reduced to a sim le multiplicity of identical units
which are merely helpless. Negentropy. or life, is connected with
the movement to build up more and more complex unities which inte-
grate diverse multiplicities in which the differentiation of the
constituient elements is enhanced. And as the complexity increases,
the ability of the organized being to promote still further com-
plexification, organization, and therefore unit increases immensely.

The history of the world is the history o¥ the progress of
negentropy, with entropic by-products, so to speak. According to
Teilhard, the organization or complexity of a being corresponds to
a certain degree of interiority, and the two increase together.

But at the point where the organization, or interiority, becomes
reflexive-—that is, the being knows that it knows and starts organ-
izing its organizing--it somehow transcends and escapes the entropic
undertow.6

Frost's revelation of the dual entropy-negentropy process in his poems
does not have the evolutionary hopefulness Dr. Bruteau describes. Al-
though he expresses a kind of hopefulness in the face of it, he stresses
the dark outcome no matter what progress life's complexification has
made for a time toward unity.

Oliver L. Reiser, another scientific philosopher, has called
negentropy the cosmic imagination, the principle in the universe that
organizes itself from the unmanifest so that new forms emerge. "The
'spirit in the machine' in man and in the cosmos," Reiser wrote,

"transcends the second law of thermodynamics."7

Along with hopeful
scientists such as Millikan, Bruteau and Reiser leave the question of

the end of the universe open because of unknowns not yet accounted for.

58

Perhaps "The Census-Taker" shows Frost's sense of irony as well as
any other poem that seems to comment on the situation of probable en-
tropic dominance. He says in it that although souls may "shrink to
none at all,"he wants life to go on living. (Epgtry, p. 176) The
resonance in the ambiguity of that disparate juxtaposition of seeming
opposites will not let the reader reach a conclusion. Frost's thoughts
on entropy partly account for the terrible ironic distance between his
belief, on the one hand, and the "heartless outer black" of his poetry
on the other.

The idea of a source or origin of life is an inseparable
part of the negentropy question. Frost has two quest poems in which
the origin or source is a form of water: "The Mountain," from Nprgh
pf Bpgtpp, 1914, and "A Fountain, A Bottle, A Donkey's Ears, and Some
Books," from New Hampshire, 1924. These poems are both about journeys
in which something is discovered, but not what the poet set out to
find. They call to mind the analogue of William James' view that
religious belief may be held for the beneficial effects along the way,
whether or not it may be found true or discoverable as existent. In
"The Mountain" the source-water figure is the "spring,/Right on the
summit, almost like a fountain," while in "A Fountain," the goal is
a Mormon baptismal font and spring, a historical landmark the poet has
heard is located in the area. Each poem includes a reluctant guide
who has never been to the goal the poet is interested in. "I'd take
you, but I'm bound the other way," the guide in "The Mountain" explains.

But especially the idea of a spiritual journey is closely

related in Frost's poems to natural processes so that, as Sister

59

Bernetta Quinn expressed it in a discussion of "Nothing Gold Can Stay,"

the reader experiences a "symbolic landscape.“8

In "The Mountain,"
Frost's sense of spatial kinesthetic form makes his initial description
of the landscape seem the surreal simplistic forms remembered from a

dream.

I noticed that I missed stars in the west,
Where its black body cut into the sky.
Near me it seemed: I felt it like a wall
Behind which I was sheltered from a wind.

(Poetry, p.40)

The next morning when the poet-narrator goes for a walk toward the
mountain, a river and the fields it runs through provide a description

of entropic undertow.

The river at the time was fallen away,

And made a widespread brawl on cobblestones;

But the signs showed what it had done in spring:
Good grassland gullied out, and in the grass
Ridges of sand, and driftwood stripped of bark.

(Poetry, p. 40)

Although often life-supporting, water can also become destructive.
To introduce the man with whom he will discuss the mountains
and its spring, Frost uses the humor of slow motion. The slowness is

in contrast to his own agile morning pace.

I crossed the river and swung round the mountain.
And there I met a man who moved so slow

With white-faced oxen, in a heavy cart,

It seemed no harm to stop him altogether.

(Poetry, p. 41)

The two men exchange pleasantries and some information while the poet
wonders about climbing the mountain and, noticing a dry ravine at its

base, inquires whether that is a pathway up.

60

Now, although the guide had bragged about the reputed spring
at the top of the mountain, his evasions begin. Once a man had climbed
the mountain, he says, but when the climber was asked about the spring

he merely told about another form of water somewhere else:

"He said there was a lake
Somewhere in Ireland on a mountain top."

"But a lake's different. What about the spring?"
"He never got up high enough to see.

That's why I don't advise your trying this side.
He tried this side."

(Poetry, p. 41)

But in spite of the fact that the guide himself has never been up the
mountain, he can describe the spring, or beginning of the brook at the
mountaintop as if he had been there. Now the poet wants to climb the
mountain, imagining how the view would be from "great granite terraces."

The guide had boasted,

"There's a brook

That starts up on it somewhere--I've heard say
Right on the top, tip-top--a curious thing

But what would interest you about the brook,

It's always cold in summer, warm in winter.

One of the great sights going is to see

It steam in winter like an ox's breath,

Until the bushes all along its banks

Are inch-deep with the frosty spines and bristles--
You know the kind. Then let the sun shine on it!"

(Poetry, p. 42)

This is the life-source, the Bergsonian elan vital at its imagined
P0int of origin.

A little later in the discussion the man admits that he
SUPposes the water does not change, but "all the fun's in how you say

aWiring." This water of changeless temperature makes a new metaphorical

61

symbol for the possible escape from entropic change. As the conversa-
tion is over, Frost lets the man and his oxen make the final figure of

the poem:

He drew the oxen toward him with light touches
Of his slim goad on nose and offside flank,
Gave them their marching orders and was moving.

(Poetry, p. 44)

The effect is of motion continuing offstage as the scene closes, and
suggests the implied continuing action of an open-ended novel.

In "A Fountain," the guide insists on showing the poet
tourist attractions as they walk over the countryside. The donkey's
ears are two avalanches down the side of a mountain, the bottle is a
vegetation stain on the top of a cliff, ”a likeness to surprise the
thrilly tourist;" but the Mormon baptismal font, the poet's goal, is
nowhere to be found. "I want my fountain," the poet persists. At
last, the two arrive at an abandoned house where an invalid woman poet
once lived. The house is empty except for a few boxes of her book of

poems in the attic.

A whole edition in a packing case

That, overflowing like a horn of plenty,

Or like the poetess's heart of love,

Had spilled them near the window, toward the light
Where driven rain had wet and swollen them.

(Poetry, p. 216)

The box of books has become a substitute fountain, spilling toward the
light. After the poet and his guide read something in the books, and

a few more motion figures are presented--one of a book sailing through
the window, "only to tumble like a stricken bird," while "the attic
wasps went missing by like bullets,"3-they start home. Like a symbolic

fountain, the poet says, the books would suffice "for the time being."

62

In contrast, one of Frost's finest short lyrics is "Dust of
Snow." Here, too, water symbolism is at work. The movement of a bird
sends down snow like a happy message, lifting the poet's spirits on an

otherwise gloomy day.

The way a crow
Shook down on me
The dust of snow
From a hemlock tree
Has given my heart
A change of mood

And saved some part
Of a day I had rued.

(Poetry, p. 221)

Frost's attentiveness to the motions of nature (here in the sense of
out-of-doors, as well as laws of nature), has here revealed his view
of the way nature communicates. Nature is a huge mime show or ballet:
the message is in the movement of its dance. The crow, busy about its
own activities, or possibly in the act of landing on a branch above
the poet's head, has shaken snow onto the unsuspecting poet. But the
poem's diction suggests that the action was purposeful. It was the
unstated "way" the crow performed the action; it energizes the poet,
it cheers him up. The fact that the motion is suggested and not closely
described gives the poetic power that comes from ambiguity. But the
point of the crow's action is that it is followed by a psychological
action in the poet: a "change of mood." It is clearly a kind of
Inessage sent and received. The poet's mental motions imitate nature's.
But the reader needs to be cautious here and elsewhere about
Frost's symbols. They are not always consistent, but are, as he said,

"changing." While snow dust symbolized a cheerful message in "Dust of

63

Snow," and ice symbolized beauty in "A Hillside Thaw," ice symbolizes
hate in "Fire and Ice." Further, ice is symbolic of a terrible beauty
in "Birches," while in "Two Tramps in Mud-Time" water is a good thing
but “lurking frost" will "show on the water its crystal teeth."
(Egggry, p. 276) Such seeming inconsistencies explore the ambiguities
or alternatives of the poet's subjects, and are therefore changing
symbols. As in entropy-negentropy, the stream of existence may take
many forms, and the poet's only obligation is to reveal it in some way.
Each poem, however, will have its inner consistency, and the critic's
task is to find the way toward clarification that the poet took; for
example, the brook figure changes interestingly, and is indeed central
to Frost's poems. A tracing of it will show how Frost's water sym-
bolism changes as he describes entropy-negentropy progressively more
fully. I will therefore discuss the four most prominent examples of
the brook figure, in order of their publication.

The brook of "Hyla Brook" was located on the Derry farm, and

meant much to the poet and his family.9

It appears in a fifteen line
sonnet which varies only slightly in rhyme scheme. Here are little
frogs, the "hyla breed" who make the brook lively with song in spring,
until it sinks underground for the summer season. The hyla have an
interesting etymology. The Greek word hyle means matter: a hylicist
is therefore a materialist.10 Frost had named the brook himself.
When the hyla have run “out of song and speed," the brook has either
gone below ground,

(And taken with it all the Hyla breed

That shouted in the mist a month ago.

Like ghost of sleigh bells in a ghost of snow)--

Or flourished and come up in jewelweed,

Weak foliage that is blown upon and bent
Even against the way its waters went.

(Poetry, p. 119)

64

In this poem, the poet's memory keeps the lively flow of the brook
water in mind. The snow and wind add to the melancholy tone of loss
through time. All that remains is an imprint in the earth symbolic of
of the poet's memory.

Its bed is left a faded paper sheet

Of dead leaves stuck together by the heat--
A brook to none but who remember long.

(Poetry, p. 119)

Possibly this is also a reference to the Derry brook as source for the
early poems, suggested by "paper sheet." Even this static figure is
described by the active phrase, "stuck together." Earth's old enemy,
the thermodynamical process of entropy, has stuck the leaves together:
"by the heat." The poem concludes with the ironic affirmation that
the poet loves the brook nevertheless, because "we love the things we
love for what they are.“

In "A Brook in the City" the water serves man better above
ground than in the “fetid darkness still to live and run," functioning
as a sewer. Once it was a brook by a country house that is now inside

the city. The poet wonders about the brook

That held the house as in an elbow-crook?

I ask as one who knew the brook, its strength
And impulse, having dipped a finger length

And made it leap my knuckle, having tossed

A flower to try its currents where they crossed.

(Poetry, p. 231)

The brook's cross currents fit the larger symbol, and the little leap
of water will become, in "West-Running Brook" a wave, off a "jut of

shore."

65

Many scholars have commented favorably on "West-Running

Brook." and several have cited its scientific possibilities.10

Thompson sees that the brook refers to the Bergsonian elap vital, and

 

so does Hyatt Waggoner, but reads the poem without religious overtones.
I think there are a number of reasons why the poem is effective. First,
it is an immediate and intimate poem, taking place between members of

a family who know each other very well: .gp tais philiais, as W. K.

 

Wimsatt renders the phrase from Aristotle's Poetics.]] This gives the
conversation between husband and wife a poignancy not felt in some of

the other dialog poems between the poet and strangers--in contrast to

the villager and the poet in "The Mountain," for instance. In this

poem the third character is in a sense the brook itself.

As you and I are married to each other,

We'll both be married to the brook. We'll build
Our bridge across it, and the bridge shall be
Our arm thrown over it asleep beside it.

(Poetry, p. 258)

The poet-speaker's intention is not only to fulfill his love
through marriage, but to establish his marriage in its relationship to
the phenomena of nature symbolized by the brook. The marriage rela-
tionship paradoxically becomes more intimate because of the sanction
of the brook. The device of conversation gives Frost an excellent
chance to explore his water symbol as he could not do in the earlier
brook figures. The long, sustained neditative stretches of speech
are in the varied iambic I'voice ways" we think of as the typical Frost
line. There is an unknown speaker, besides, who appears in parentheses.

The speaker states in a vital but grammatically incomplete sentence:

66

(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

White feathers from the struggle of whose breast
Flecked the dark stream, and flecked the darker pool
Below the point, and were at last driven wrinkled

In a white scarf against the far-shore alders.)

(Poetry, p. 258)

Yet the woman in the poem is given most of the lines to speak, and says,
for one thing, that she thinks the wave is a signal to her.

The poet-husband had stated earlier that the opposing direc-
tion of the brook was like the way they trusted each other to "go by
contraries," and the woman takes up this idea in order to speak of the
distant origin of man.

"Speaking of contraries, see how the brook
In that white wave runs counter to itself.

It is from that in water we were from
Long, long before we were from any creature.

(Poetry, p. 259)

Eddington's argument against a repetitive universe appears
next. Existence, the woman says, is not like a toy dancer, "forever

in one place," but moves in time and space:

It seriously, sadly, runs away

To fill the abyss's void with emptiness.
It flows beside us in this water brook
But it flows over us. It flows between us
To separate us for a panic moment.

It flows between us, over us, and with us.

(Poetry, p. 259)

Embracing the brook, then, means that in the sense of its flow "315p
us," as Frost underlines the connective word to indicate its centrality,
the couple is in a state of duration that Bergson says is entered by
way of the esthetic faculty. Duration is this elusive feeling of moving

with the universe, but existence is much more:

67

And it is time, strength, tone, light, life, and love--
And even substance lapsing unsubstantial;
The universal cataract of death . . .

(Poetry, p. 259)

Again, it is the movement of these large concepts such as time and
strength, here said to be in a "universal cataract," that is emphasized.
Frost describes the integral movement of life and death as
not only a tunneling and swerving into the right path for the develop-
ment of the consciousness of man, but as "some strange resistance in
itself,/Not just a swerving, but a throwing back," and because of this
opposition of direction in nature:
the fall of most of it is always
Raising a little, sending up a little.
Our life runs down in sending up the clock.
The brook runs down in sending up our life.

The sun runs down in sending up the brook.
And there is something sending up the sun.

(Poetry. pp. 259, 260)

Here is another sense, perhaps, in which Frost's poetry may be said to
be dramatic. That is, it reflects a large conflict of opposites in
existence: an astronomical sense of the dramatic, too. But Frost
wanted to come to a resolution of such large oppositions. This passage
has indicated clearly, I believe, the centrality of his vision of
motion. The contrary motion, the rebellion against the cataract of
death, is the meaning of man.

It is this backward motion toward the source.

Against the stream, that most we see ourselves in,

The tribute of the current to the source.

It is from this in nature we are from.
It is most us.

(Poetry, p. 260)

The woman concludes her speech. Frost's interest in the backward step

is justified. The point is the extraordinary accomplishment of nature

68

that man is, and the extraordinary privilege of being alive in such a
form. Frost was to write later in further irony, "Nature within her
inmost self divides." (Epgtry, p. 468) He could have been referring to
binary fission as easily as entropy-negentropy. But both division

and integration are moving processes symbolized by the brook. Yet
"West-Running Brook“ with.all its excellence is not quite Frost's
culminating expression of the brook figure. His best and final ex-
pression of it was to appear in "Directive," first published in 1946;

and in the volume of poems Steeple Bush, 1947.

3. "Weep for What Little Things Could Make Them Glad"

Elinor White Frost had died in 1938. "Directive" is at once
a ceremonial farewell to her, and Frost's largest statement of poetic
belief. By the time of the poem's first appearance in the Virginia
Quarterly Review, World War II had brought a general sense of loss and
confusion in the United States. The explosion of atomic bombs at the
end of the war stunned the world. The opening lines of the poem seem
to refer to that recent destruction, and react to the fact that the
knowledge and technology of science had been in its service. In an
extraordinary opening line Frost brilliantly relates the confused
feelings of the time, identifying destruction with the forward cataract

of entroPY. and life with the rebellious retreat.

Back out of all this now too much for us,

Back in a time made simple by the loss

0f detail, burned, dissolved, and broken off
Like graveyard marble sculpture in the weather.

(Poetry, p. 377)

69

The controlling movement of the poem will be the poet's walk, a pil-
grimage backward in tribute to the source, the healing power of the
Hyla brook symbol. Time has sculptured the figures of the graveyard
stones. The poet leaves the graveyard to move through the landscape
at a sedate walking pace. We go with him to see "a house that is no
more a house/Upon a farm that is no more a farm." (Eggtry, p. 377)
The goal is the brook, but the poem will not tell us until we arrive.

As we follow the poet's somber path, a geological figure
presents further time-sculpturing. It is the "chisel work of an enor-
mous Glacier/That braced his feet against the Arctic Pole." Walking,
the reader must not mind being watched from abandoned cellar holes by
the eyes of "firkins," little woodland animals, nor be afraid of the
rustle of leaves in the trees. The poet suggests we make up a song to
cheer ourselves--but to whom else is the poem addressed? To the
grandchildren the book is dedicated to, and to Elinor, probably. He
comments that guides always intend to get people lost, and says if
"you" are lost enough by now (the "you" of the poems is probably al-
ways Elinor):

pull in your ladder road behind you

And put a sign up CLOSED to all but me.
Then make yourself at home.

(Poetry, p. 378)

Two villages had faded into each other in the past; now both are gone.
Everything about the landscape has been sculptured by time. The sense
of the creatures of nature watching and potentially encroaching sug-

gests the ominous changes in everything the poet sees.

70

Other entropic changes have happened nearer to the house
that is no more a house. Its field has become smaller, and the child-

ren's playhouse, the "house of make-believe" is now

Some shattered dishes underneath a pine,
The playthings in the playhouse of the children.
Weep for what little things could make them glad.

(Poetry, p. 378)

"Back" is the direction of the directive the poet gives: back to
childhood, back to the children's innocent make-believe, back to tears,
a water symbol, a healing symbol. The direction of the self must be
inward, not forward and outward. And then the poem says to weep for

the house that is

only a belilaced cellar hole,
Now slowly closing like a dent in dough..
This was no playhouse but a house in earnest.

(Poetry, p. 378)

But the figure more important even than the house is Hyla brook:

Your destination and your destiny's .

A brook that was the water of the house,
Cold as a spring as yet so near its source,
Too lofty and original to rage.

(Poetry, p. 378)

The spiritual strength represented by the brook steadies the emotional
raging against the destructive forces, so that for Frost, as in the
Christian symbol of baptism, there is healing power against the en-
tropic directions: "We know the valley streams that when aroused/Will
leave their tatters hung on barb and thorn." And we recall the valley
river at the foot of the mountain in the first instance of the water-

brook figure here discussed.

71

But the problem of wholeness or healing in a universe that is
not a closed, repetitive system, and in which everything must end in-
complete, must be "broken off," or fragmented, is stated in the poem
solved in a surprisingly existential way. While Frost alludes to the
best known symbols of his culture such as are found in the Christian
Communion and Baptism sacraments, and in the Old Testament Psalms of
David, the figurative presentation of these symbols emphasizes that
they, too, have undergone change. Figuratively, these culminating
symbols of the poem remind the reader of the weather-sculptured grave-
stones and the earth changes effected by the glacier that is curiously

capitalized (Glacier) at the beginning of the poem.

I have kept hidden in the instep arch

Of an old cedar at the waterside

A broken drinking goblet like the Grail

Under a spell so the wrong ones can't find it,

50 can't get saved, as Saint Mark says they mustn'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.

(Poetry, p. 379)

The cedar tree alludes to the Lebanon cedars, and to the biblical tree
of life representing the house of Israel, God's chosen people. The
Grail, the Host of the Christian Communion, completes the continuity
of the Hebraic-Christian tradition as in the larger diffused popular
allegiances of our culture. Frost uses these symbols as referents for
the spiritual or psychological reality he wishes to represent. One
might digress to notice that in Jessie L. Weston's famous study of the
legends of the Holy Grail, a spell (protection from the fearsome black

hand) is always placed on the Grail so that only the worthy or chosen

72

knight may find it.12 The old legends of the grail add to the quest
dimension of this poem, too. The poem calls the legends "playthings
in the playhouse of the children." (Epgtry, p. 378)

Quest becomes hide-and-seek as the poet pretends in his
diction and attitudes to be a child, a child playing at let's-pretend.
The "can't get saved" phrase that troubles readers of the poem is ap-
propriate within the context. The actions of the whole passage have
become childlike. A broken glass is hidden, put under s pell, an
authority figure says the wrong ones "mustn't" find it, the glass had
been stolen from a playhouse--hardly the behavior of adults. This
remarkable passage evokes a return to childlike belief and second
innocence, the path backward that would bring spiritual healing, the
path given as a directive.

The poem's inner coherence is kept, not only by an easy
movement from figure to figure, but by the fact that the walk ends in
attaining the long searched-for goal. In earlier quest poems, the
poet stressed the fact that he could not reach the goal. In his essay,
"The Constant Symbol," published the October before the first publica-
tion of "Directive," Frost wrote,

Every single poem written regular is a symbol small or
great of the way the will has to pitch into commitments deeper
and deeper to a rounded conclusion and then be judged for whether
any original intention it had has been strongly spent or weakly
lost; be it in art, politics, school, church, business, love, or
ggggzgggagiaiahplggg g; work or in a career. Strongly spent is
Frost spent and directed his own life with the kind of conscious choices

recommended by William James. The word "directive" which means alter-

ing the direction of other forces but not initiating them, is a good

73

word to describe James' concept of the will. "Directive" copes with
the redirection of feelings, attitudes, passions, towards a clarifica-
tion rather than a confusion.

Through the poem, because of his belief in the close relation
between nature and the poem and psychology as in Bergson, Frost could
himself gain clarification.

Poetics . . . becomes a vital source for theoretical
psychology rather than a minor part of it. Bergson's work is
concerned with this same process [an inner coherence of images]
as the unifying theme of human consciousness. 4

Indeed, nature imagery often gives the poems of Frost their communi-
cating value to the reader. Water was an especially useful changing
symbol for Frost's complex expression of spiritual reality mirrored

in nature, at once a terrible and a healing knowledge.

Framing "Directive" on either side in Frost's 1947 volume
are two more poems with water figures which, although neither has the
splendid resonance of the better poem, support it as a tryptych. "One
Step Backward Taken" simply states that if the poet had not stepped
back in time he would have been swept away with "gulping muddy gallons"
on a storm's avalanche. Presenting a water figure in another situa-
tion, "Too Anxious for Rivers," a poem ending with a tribute to Lucretius,
says of a river: "I never saw so much swift water run cloudless."
Here, after listing some old myths about existence, Frost voices di-
rectly the new general concern about atomic destruction.

And how much longer a story has science

Before she must put out the light on the children
And tell them the rest of the story is dreaming?

(Poetry, p. 379)

74

Science, who has parented our culture by telling her story, has control
of the light switch: we are the innocent children, science is the
knowledgeable adult. The redirection of destructive forces, now sci-
ence's largest problem, however, was the same problem that Frost, and
William James, considered central to psychology: the redirection of
psychic forces, the redirection of energy. The problem of atomic
energy in the twentieth century paralleled the problem for human

energies.

10.

11.

12.

13.
14.

75

Notes to Chapter Three

Sir Arthur Eddington, The Expanding Universe (Ann Arbor: Univer-
sity of Mi. Press, 1958): p. 75.

Asimov's Bipgraphical Encyclopedia of Science and Technology, New
rev. ed. (New York: Doubleday, 1972), pp. 540, 541.

Leon Brillouin, Scientific Uncertainty and Information (New York:

Academic Press, 1964), pp. 8-14. See aT§5 his Science and Inform-

ation Theory (New York: Academic Press, 1956), pp. I52:_153, I60.
61.

Eddington, The Nature pf_th§_Physical World (Ann Arbor: U. of Mi.
Press, 1963):_p. 86.

Family Letters, p. 264.

Letter from Dr. Beatrice Bruteau, Winston-Salem, North Carolina,
Apr. 26, 1970 to the author.

Oliver Leslie Reiser, ng_1nte ration of Human Knowledge (Boston:
Porter Sargent, 1958), p. |5|

"Symbolic Landsca e in Frost's 'Nothing Gold Can Stay,'" English
Journal 55, (1966), pp. 621-24..

Thompson, Early Years, p. 301. Thompson, Robert Frost: The Years
pf Triumph 1915-1938 (N. Y.: Holt, 1970) p. 495. Cited as
Triumph hereafter.

Hyla, Gk. wood or forest. A tree-frog or toad, U. S. hyla pick-
eringi. A variant of hyle (hylae) Gk. matter, material, substance,
Hylic: material, hylicist: materialist. (O. E. D.)

W. K. Wimsatt, Hateful Contraries (Lexington:_ University_of Ky.
Press, 1965), p. 78. "fig tais philiais eggenetai tg_pathe; The
tragic incidents take place within the context of family relation-
ships." Wimsatt does not render quote into Greek characters.

Jessie L. Weston, From Ritual tg_Romance (New York: Doubleday,
1957), pp. 76-78 and 175-181.

Selected Prose, p. 24.
Vsevoled Setchkarev, "Modern Poetics," Encyclppedia pj_Poetry and

Poetics ed. Alex Preminger (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton
University Press, 1965), p. 519.

FOUR. Motion in the Poems: Man

1. "We're Plainly Made to Go"

William James wrote three books on psychology. having spent
the first part of his career as a medical student and naturalist, and

the later years as a philosopher.1

In his chapters on habit, in the
best known of his three psychological works, The Pripgiples gj_Psychol-
.pgy, and in his revision of it, Psychology, The Briefer Course, he
stresses the importance of muscular activity in the prompting of
thoughts. In his treatment of emotion, instinct, and will, his approach
is to show the relation of these three experiences to muscular activity.
Further, thoughts and feelings produce movements in the body, and these
muscular responses involve the total organism. As he wrote,
Using sweeping terms and ignoring exceptions, we might say
that everylpossible feelinghproduces a movement, and that the

movemefit is amovement 6fithe entire organism, and 5? each and
ggl itslparts.l

76

77

James also made observations about the relation between feelings and
language. In his chapter on stream of consciousness where he is dis-
tinguishing between substantive and transitive states of mind, he
reaches into theory of language and logic to write: "We ought to say

a feeling of 259, a feeling of if, a feeling of 9g}, and a feeling of
py, quite as readily as we say a feeling of ply; or a feeling of _c__o__l__<1."3
In his poetry Frost goes one step further, perhaps, than James who

says that consciousness flows. Frost shows that human thought is
motion in the sense that by their movements both animals and natural
laws communicate to us or have messages. This is not to go so far as
present day brain wave theory which is now measurable in the laboratory
in various states of consciousness; James' physiological knowledge,
however, must have impressed Frost who was predisposed to include it

in any consideration of man's psychological nature because of Sweden-
borg's extensive work in anatomy, and because of Swedenborg's tenet
that action and thought were inseparable. Walking, as is everywhere a
symbolic act in the poems, was also Frost's favorite activity. Al-
though Frost never walked the great distances Coleridge and Wordsworth
did, nor reached their alpine heights, he knew what to make of the
Green and White mountains of New England. James called this tendency

toward movement in man the will. Today we would probably call it

energy.

In A_Masgueugtheason, 1945, the character Job makes some
Jamesean comments on man in motion. Frost has him compare man to an

automobile.

78

There's will as motor and there's will as brakes.
Reason is, I suppose, the steering gear.

The will as brakes can't stop the will as motor
For very long. We're plainly made to go.

We're going anyway and may as well

Have some say as to where we're headed for;

Just as we will be talking anyway

And may as well throw in a little sense.

(POEtr29 pp. 48], 482)

There is an abundance of human figures in the poems symbolizing motion
as man's principal characteristic. These characters usually do have
some say about where they are going. and when they speak the poet lets
them "throw in a little sense."

In general, there are three groups of human figures in
Frost's poems, 1) men who represent some human trait by their motions,
2) men who are performing a certain kind of work, often with a symbolic
tool such as ax or hoe, and 3) children at play. The women figures are
subsidiary, except for the witches who are some of Frost's best char-
acterizations. Frost's women such as the wife in "West-Running Brook"
often speak well, but they seldom, except as witches, do anything self-
directed. The reasons for this, I think, are two. First, Frost was
simply not an androgenous poet, and it was therefore not natural to
him' to project kinesthetically the movements of women. Second, he
was satirizing his own Puritan tradition in which there are no im-
portant women except witches (their counterpart, saints, were not
imported from Europe). One writer has even suggested that witches

symbolize Frost's demonic imagination.4

But Job's wife, in A Masgue
pf_Reason, explains for us why Frost seemed so fond of witches, and

one recalls that Frost's mother liked to tell her children the story

79

of Joan of Arc, burned at the stake like the New England witches were.
Job's wife puts a question to God:
I have a protest to lodge with You.
I want to ask You if it stands to reason

That women prophets should be burned as witches,
Whereas men prophets are received with honor.

(Poetry, p. 476)

God replies, “You're not a witch?" Women are treated sympathetically
in Robert Frost's poetry, and their views are presented sympathetically;
but Frost's poetry is not the place to look for empathic treatment of
the gestures, movements, or attitudes of women. For this reason,
women are not amenable to treatment here as a well-rounded group of
motion figures.

The motion figures of men, as we noticed in "The Mountain,"
often lend themselves to comic treatment. In the light verse poem
"To a Thinker,“ the man's thinking is characterized by the motion of
shifting from side to side on his buttocks. The joke is that his kind

of thought lacks direction or purpose:

Suppose you've no direction in you
I don't see but you must continue
To use the gift you do possess

And sway with reason more or less.

(Poetry, p. 326)

Bergson wrote on the subject of laughter that comedy occurred when the
movement was inappropriate to the object and its situation; motion
either too slow or too fast could provoke laughter.5 Probably one
could call "Brown's Descent" something more than a light verse poem,

although it is uproariously funny in its effect to many readers.

80

In "Brown's Descent" a much slower pace would have taken the
farmer down the mountain with less risk. But exaggerated pace adds to
the excitement and fun, beginning with the absurd accident of falling
off the mountain in the first place. If the reader wishes to add theo-
logical background to this, the fortunate fall will do to increase the
mock heroics and outrageousness of the situation. Brown lived on a
"lofty" farm, so that the people below could see his lantern clearly
when he did his evening chores in winter at "half-past three." Because
the time is stated, we know this is to be a fall through time as well
as through space, an entropic situation, a thermodynamical problem:

And many must have seen him make
His wild descent from there one night,

'Cross lots, 'cross walls, 'cross everything,
Describing rings of lantern-light.

(Poetry, p. 137)

The wind picks him up by his clothes and he is gone. The ballad form
is used to good advantage here, the shorter quatrain in basic iambic
tetramenter moving along rapidly with endangered Brown. The lantern
does not go out.

Sometimes he came with arms outspread
Like wings, revolving in the scene
Upon his longer axis, and

With no small dignity of mien.

(Poetry, p. 138)

Brown holds on to the lantern no matter what happens, battling the
forces of wind and gravitation until finally he was

Incredulous of his own bad luck.

And then becoming reconciled

To everything, he gave it up

And came down like a coasting child.

(£03m. pp. 138, 139)

81

His childlike trust allows Brown to become one with duration which
somehow protects him, and he reaches the bottom of the mountain un-
harmed.

But innocence is not Brown's only heroic quality. Finding
himself at the bottom of the mountain instead of where he was before,
he wastes no time putting himself again in motion to go around it.

He bowed with grace to natural law,

And then went round it on his feet,
After the manner of our stock . .

(Poetry, p. 139)

Brown may be the best of Frost's mock-heroic figures, his action being
even more fully presented than that of Brad in "The Star-Splitter."
From Mountain Interval, 1916, "Brown's Descent" sets the strength of
the ordinary man against the overwhelming forces of nature. Brown
passes the terrible test of existence by recognizing his relationship
to nature, his place in the scheme of things, with everyone's applause.
Earlier, in North of Boston, 1914, both "Mending Wall" and
"After Apple Picking" contained memorable motion figures of men. The
neighbor in "Mending Wall is viewed as he moves toward the wall:
I see him there,
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.

He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.

(Poetry, p. 34)

This figure moves at the right slow pace for his task as the pace of
the poem moves, and he represents something of man's historical devel-
opment. What is meant in part is that man keeps much of the custom

established in him from long experience of his primitive environment,

82

from the "old-stone" age. This may be also true in present social
relationships so that we often "keep the wall between us as we go."
In "After Apple-Picking" the principal figure is the poet
himself who, as he begins to fall asleep, recalls in stream of con-
sciousness fashion the muscular stimulation of the day's activities.
My instep arch not only keeps the ache,

It keeps the pressure of the ladder-round.
I feel the ladder sway as the boughs bend.

(teem. p. 68)
The pressure and sway determines the form the dream will take, the
poet realizes. He then dreams about the apple harvest. Instead of
dreaming of a wish unfulfilled, such as an apple he did not eat, he
dreams that he has harvested too many apples: "1 am overtired/Of the
great harvest I myself desired." What troubles his sleep is that some
apples fell and went to the cider heap. The sound and visual imagery
of the dream are both characterized by motion: the apples swim into
view and rumble down into the bin as the dream takes over the motion
that had belonged to the poet during the day.

In the earliest poems, the figure of Pan in "Pan With Us,"
and of Sorrow in "My November Guest" are interesting because Frost
dropped personification of gods, goddesses, and feelings after his
first two books. (Eggtry, pp. 6, 7 and 23, 24) Instead, he generalized
his poem characters to have them represent some human quality such as

courage or ingenuity by their movements.

83

In this connection we may look again more closely at the
sonnet, "A Soldier," wherein the motion of falling in battle is de-
scribed by the soldier, metaphorically as a lance, to represent the
human characteristic of courage.

He is that fallen lance that lies as hurled,

That lies unlifted now, come dew, come rust,
But still lies pointed as it plowed the dust.

(Poetry, p. 261)
The figure's direction is clear. It did not depart from its path.
Since its fall, the direction of the lance has become unalterable.
Frost compares the lance with science's attempt to reach beyond the
earth's orbit, outer space not being reached by the time this poem was
written.
Our missiles always make too short an arc.

They fall, they rip the grass, they intersect
The curve of earth, and striking, break their own . . .

(Poetry, p. 261)

The poem goes on to say that we do not know very much about the phe-

nomenon of death, or of this Soldier's death.

But this we know, the obstacle that checked
And tripped the body, shot the spirit on
Further than target ever showed or shone.

(Basia. pp. 261, 262)

84

The poem is not a discussion of the merits of battle, but a tribute to
the extraordinary difference between the state of life, what Dickinson
called the "distance on the look of death"--and the end of life which

is death. In "The Cosmic Loneliness of Robert Frost," Howard Mumford
Jones quotes this entire poem and cites the line "They make us cringe
for metal-point on Stone," commenting, "The scientific figure, the
accuracy of the metaphor about metal-point on stone, the sense of the
high idealism and the ignoble fact of war, the truth that man is trapped
within the curve of earth," all point to an idealism in Frost's

thought.7

Yet whatever idealism may be found in the poem is treated
ironically. The force of the poem is its dark truth, and all we know

of the soldier's spirit, his ability to move, is that it is gone.

2. "Wasn't There Danger of a Turn Too Much?"

As man goes about his tasks in the world, he uses certain
characteristic tools in order to get the work done, and to earn his
living. The technological instruments of Frost's poems are often very
simple. The scythe, the ax, the hoe, the grindstone (a tool for
sharpening up other tools), and the telescope and microscope are favor-
ite tools of the poems. The poet takes up the instrumental worth of
factories in several poems, and of advances in instruments of communi-
cation: mills and telephones. What is going on technologically in
our society is very well synechdoctally represented by the symbolic
tools Frost selected.

First, the scythe has reference to its common emblematic

meaning, time. In "Mowing," the only sound is a whispering that comes

85

from the motion of the scythe along the ground. I'The fact is the
sweetest dream that labor knows," the observation made by the poet-
speaker, does not say what the long scythe is whispering. The poem
never does tell us although it speculates about the scythe's message.
By the last line the scythe's task is done, and the next task, making
the hay, remains. Clues given to what the scythe says are 1) it is
not "easy gold," 2) it may be the "heat of the sun," and 3) it may be
the "lack of sound.‘I At least we may draw from the motion of the
scythe that it is a harvester, and from its common symbolic meaning
that it has to do with time. The poem is merely suggestive, but
knowing Frost's concern with thermodynamics, might it not have been an
early attempt to describe entropy, the law tested by the amount of
heat lost in time by work tending toward eventual equilibrium? But,
perhaps, this may be forcing the analogy in a poem that simply suggests
the sensations of mowing in the heat of the day.

"The Grindstone" also contains a scythe, and appears about a
decade later than "Mowing." The poet wanted it included in the Qxfgrg_
Anthology pf American Literature because, he insisted, it was "a favor-
ite child of mine and to me an image of the mighty world! You know,"
he wrote to Norman Holmes Pearson, "that Herschel had a grindstone
theory of the universe."8 Actually, as Pearson points out, Simon New-
comb's grindstone theory was more notable; and when traced back among
astronomers it is found to originate with Decartes.9 But it was, with
its tenet that friction made things better, a rather generally accept-
able nineteenth century myth about the origin of the universe. Frost

is using it here to represent a psychological phenomenon, simply taking

86

the popular grindstone theory as a given, or a starting point. The
dominant attitude of the poem is grimness, "bitter" is the term Frost
uses for the childhood remembrance he describes.

The grindstone is a cumbersone and awkward tool because while
someone is turning the wheel to get up speed, the person sharpening
the blade necessarily slows it down, making it more difficult for the

wheel-turner to produce motion.

Having a wheel and four legs of its own

Has never availed the cumbersome grindstone
To get it anywhere that I can see.

These hands helped it go, and even race;

Not all the motion, though, they ever lent
Not all the miles it may have thought it went,
Have got it one step from the starting place.
It stands beside the same old apple tree.

(Poetry. pp. 188, 189)

The grindstone sits out in the snow when all the other farm machinery
has been taken indoors. Then comes the childhood incident, and the

motion figures soar.

One summer day, all day I drove it hard,
And someone mounted on it rode it hard,
And he and I between us ground a blade.

I gave it the preliminary spin,
And poured on water (tears it might have been);
And when it almost gaily jumped and flowed,

A Father-Time-like man got on and rode,
Armed with a scythe and spectacles that glowed.

(Poetry p. 189)

The lenses of the spectacles of Father Time are glowing from the lost
heat energy of entropic waste; his weapon is the terrible scythe of
time. But it is the grindstone itself (the grindstone theory?) that
is the enemy of the boy, and he thinks of it as coming to life like

87

the Cartesian blocks of matter which were worn by friction into a
nearly spheroid shape:
much use for years
Had gradually worn it an oblate

Spheroid that kicked and struggled in its gait,
Appearing to return me hate for hate . . .

(POEtrIZ, PP. 189, .190)

The poet recalls that he really did not care much for the man who was
grinding the scythe's blade: in fact, when the man slipped (time
seemed to move less rapidly) he "laughed inside" and cranked faster
although the instrument seemed to be glued.

The boy of the poem would be glad of anything that would
halt "what evidently nothing could conclude." But after the man tries
the blade and disinterestedly decides it needs a further turn, Frost
draws his conclusion that there comes a time to let things be as they
are.

Wasn't there danger of a turn too much?

Mightn't we make it worse instead of better?

I was for leaving something to the whetter.

What if it wasn't all it should be? I'd
Be satisfied if he'd be satisfied.

(Poetry, p. 191)

A somewhat cumbersome rhyme scheme emphasizes the awkwardness of the
grindstone (the earth, too, is shaped as an oblate spheroid) yet the
poem, depending as it does upon the kinesthetic imagery of the grind-
stone, is indeed successful. The outrageous humor of this attack upon
the Cartesian theory of the origin of matter is in part ironic. The
grindstone is clearly on "all fours," and cannot even manage to get
into the barn with the other farm machinery. And yet it (the theory)

must have exerted a powerful influence upon the young boy's life.

88

That the "mighty world" must waste so much energy in the making of
anything was a terrible fact, and later on a scientific fact, to Robert
Frost.
Frost wrote a number of poems about the ax. The first one
in the poems was made by Baptiste, a French-Canadian woodsman who
wanted to keep his children at home for their education. His children
should be schooled in the same manner that he carved an ax-handle, with
the bend of the grain natural to them, in order to preserve their
identities and strength for the later tasks of adult life. This is
the matter at issue in the long narrative poem, "The Ax-Helve."
Although the awkward rendering of Baptiste's speech somewhat
dates the poem, it shows a quality of neighborliness and concern for
ethnic identity somewhat in advance of the present. It is coherent
with Frost's plea for separate and distinct expressions of the human
personality. But the story is Baptiste's, and he teaches the poet a
lesson. The ax the poet has been using will not do, is not proper for

the task of splitting wood.

"Made on machine," he said, plowing the grain
With a thick thumbnail to show how it ran
Across the handle's long-drawn serpentine,
Like the two strokes across a dollar sign.

(Poetry, p. 186)

The handle would break easily because not carved along the wood grain,
so while the poet visits, Baptiste carves a new ax handle:

He showed me that the lines of a good helve
Were native to the grain before the knife
Expressed them, and its curves were no false curves
Put on it from without.
(Poetry, p. 187)

89

The "lines" are there in nature to begin with, the poet needs only to
see where they are.

While Baptiste carves and talks, and the poet watches and
listens, a subordinant motion figure appears. It is Mrs. Baptiste who
describes, or makes a figure, of the motions of the earth in the solar

system with her rocking chair.

Mrs. Baptiste came in and rocked a chair

That had as many motions as the world:

One back and forward, in and out of shadow,
That got her nowhere; one more gradual,
Sideways, that would have run her on the stove
In time, had she not realized her danger

And caught herself up bodily, chair and all,
And set herself back where she started from.

(Poetry. PP. 186, 187)

She knows to stop before falling into the sun. But the unifying figure
of the poem comes at the end when the good ax is presented to the poet.
Baptiste had been talking about knowledge. He stands the ax up on the

base of its helve:

Erect, but not without its waves, as when
The snake stood up for evil in the Garden--

And of Baptiste, in comparison with the ax itself, the poem says:

steel-blue chin drawn down
And in a little--a French touch in that.
Baptiste drew back and squinted at it, pleased:
"See how she's cock her head."
(Poetry, p. 188)

The comparison of ax and body attitude of the man is a further indica-
tion of Frost's vision of the necessary unity of action between man,
machine, and nature. Later, referring to the poem, Frost commented

on the nature of art as he perceived it:

90

You know the Canadian woodchoppers whittle their ax-
handles, following the curve of the grain, and they're strong
and beautiful. Art should follow lines in nature, like the grain
of an ax-handle. False art puts curves on things that haven't
any curves.10

It might be noted that "The Ax-Helve" appears just before "The Grind-
stone" in the 1923 volume, following Frost's tendency to group poems
with similar symbolism.

The star-splitter telescope is a tool hopefully designed to
increase man's knowledge, but as the story of Brad McLaughlin's risk-
taking behavior unfolds, it becomes apparent that even the telescope
will not reveal very much to him. A motion figure opens the poem: it
is the movement of the constellation Orion, somewhat personified:

"You know Orion always comes up sideways.

Throwing a leg up over our fence of mountains.

And rising on his hands, he looks in on me
Busy outdoors by lantern-light . . .

(Poetry, p. 176)

The landscape comes alive with other motion figures as "a gust flings

a handful/Of waste leaves at my smoky lantern chimney," and further
difficulties taunt Brad into changing his life style. His new jOb has
definite hours, and he now has time for star-gazing. A motion figure
of water (a good omen this time) toward the end of the poem foreshadows
the poem's outcome.

I recollect a night of broken clouds

And underfoot snow melted down to ice,

And melting further in the wind to mud.
Bradford and I had out the telescope.

We spread our two legs as we spread its three.
Pointed 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.

(Poetry, p. 179)

91

As a tool, the telescope ought to be of some use "if splitting stars/
'Sa thing to be compared with splitting wood," the poet says. Wood
is here symbolic for the material work, as it was in "The Ax-Helve."
Men may share an admiration for meaningful work done by

other men. The gum gatherer has a solitary life most of the time, but
in the poem named after his occupation the poet walks beside him,
drawing energy from the man's easy pace.

There overtook me and drew me in

To his downhill, early-morning stride,

And set me five miles on my road

Better than if he had had me ride,

A man with a swinging bag for load
And half the bag wound round his hand.

(Poetry, p. 140)

Just as a heavier planet will carry its smaller satelite planet along,
the poet moves along with the man. The water symbol runs through the
poem here and there as the two men walk beside an unspecified body of
water.

It is soon discovered that the man comes from "higher up in
the pass/Where the grist of the new-beginning brooks/Is blocks off the
mountain mass." The man's work is to gather gum from the mountain

spruce, and take it to market. The poet tells him that his

is a pleasant life
To set your breast to the bark of trees
That all your days are dim beneath,
And reaching up with a little knife,
To loose the resin and take it down
And bring it to market when you please.

(Poetry, p. 141)

The knife, mentioned almost incidentally, is a tool used here in an

original natural occupation. And, although the days of the gum

92

gatherer are "dim" he inspires the poet in a way that cannot be found
in more brilliant intellectual companions. It is another instance of
Frost's neighborliness, noted by an early critic: "His forward path
lies through his everyday relations with the person who is nearest him,

and through everyday labors."]]

3. "Man's Ingenuity Was Good"

When work is institutionalized, there are likely to be prob-
lems. Frost's life of self employment as farmer and poet was essen-
tially independent. But when still a boy, he had to work in several
mills to earn a living. "A Lone Striker" describes this remembered
experience. The motion figures in it ask what the "modern speed" con-
tributes to the lives of the workers. The mill bell swings, and the
mill itself is felt to shake, as inside wool dust floats in the air,
and wool yarn spins from spool to spool while the deft fingers of the

spinner keeps it from breaking.

Among the harplike spread of strings.

She caught the pieces end to end

With a touch that never missed,

Not so much tied them as made them blend.
Man's ingenuity was good.

He saw it plainly where he stood.

Yet found it easy to resist.

(Poetry, p. 274)

The boy leaves the mill, deciding that "He never would assume that
he'd/Be any institution's need." As it was not his work, the poet
went his way. If they needed him they'd know where to search.

But, unlike the boy, the men of the line gang move as one

figure. "Here comes the line-gang pioneering by," the poet warns.

93

As they put up telephone poles and wires, they destroy much of the
forest. Furthermore, they are a loud lot.

They string an instrument against the sky

Wherein words whether beaten-out or spoken

Will run as hushed as when they were a thought.

But in no hush they string it; they go past
With shouts afar to pull the cable taut

(Poetry, p. 141)

This image of stringing an instrument is remarkably similar to that

of the spinner of wool thread in the mill poem. Ingenuity of mass-
produced cloth and of mass media may be good, but the poet as he goes
into his poems sees his path diverging in another direction. While
industry goes pioneering ahead he will go back in history, back to the
imagination and fancy of childhood, back to the earth's geological
past, for the subject matter of his poems. He remembered his departure

from the woolen mill as a significant departure for his poetry.

4. "Loosely Bound"

Because muscular activity is especially enjoyed by children,
motion figures abound in the Frost poems which emphasize children.
Three good examples are "Birches," 1916, "Wild Grapes," 1923, and "The
Silken Tent," 1942. The first two from early volumes are long nar-
ratives, but the third is a sonnet. The central figure of "Birches"
is a boy, of "Wild Grapes" a girl, and of "The Silken Tent," an adoles-
cent girl. In "Birches" the trees bent down by ice storms are shown
imagistically "like girls on hands and knees that throw their hair/

Before them over their heads to dry in the sun." (Poetry, p. 121)

94

Yet the most effective motion figure of the poem is the boy
riding the trees down, who "always kept his poise/To the top branches,
climbing carefully." (Eggtry, p. 122) There is a sense of freedom
seldom the same again in adulthood: "Then he flung outward feet first
with a swish/Kicking his way down through the air to the ground."
There is a Jamesean touch in the final lines.

I'd like to go by climbing a birch tree,

And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk
Toward heaven . . .

(Poetry, p. 122)

That the "toward" is italicised for emphasis brings to mind James'
insistence upon "a feeling of tgygrg," so to speak--a feeling state in
the relational words or connectives. According to James, one might
climb toward a belief whether or not the belief was true: toward any
mountaintop, any goal whatever--it was the journey that counted.

In "Wild Grapes“ a very young girl becomes the speaker of
the poem. Too young for climbing trees, she is caught up into a tree
her brother bends down for her. Up in the air, she is afraid to let
go although hat and shoes drop off one by one. Her brother observes
that now she knows how it must feel to be a bunch of grapes, and
finally manages to bend the tree back down. The child says,

the world came revolving back to me,

I know I looked long at my curled-up fingers
Before I straightened them and brushed the bark off.

(Poetry. pp. 198, 199)

As in this passage, throughout the poem one feels the muscular tension
in lines such as "My small wrists stretching till they showed the banjo

strings." The kinesthetic figure of grasping and letting go is the

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metaphor, probably, of the illness of Frost's younger sister, Jeannie,

characterized by a terrible fear of parental loss, according to Frost's

biographer, Lawrance Thompson.12

"The Silken Tent" is a single sentence and a single metaphor

of a young girl on the verge of womanhood. I quote it fully here be-

d

cause it seems to me one of Frost's finest accomplishments.

She is as in a field a silken tent

At midday when a sunny summer breeze

Has dried the dew and all its ropes relent,
So that in guys it gently sways at ease,
And its supporting cedar pole,

That is its pinnacle to heavenward

And signifies the sureness of the soul,
Seems to owe naught to any single cord

But strictly held by none, is loosely bound
By countless silken ties of love and thought
To everything on earth the compass round,
And only by one's going slightly taut

In the capriciousness of summer air

Is of the slightest bondage made aware.

(Poetry. pp. 331, 332)

In the adult world of work the bonds are similar. "Men work together"
had the elusive meaning that the pervasive laws of nature are always
at work in and around us in the same way. The material world is every-
where subject to the same physical laws, to the same statistical ran-
dom count of quantum mechanics. As physicist David Bohm explains this
universal unity:

Quantum concepts imply that the world
acts like a single indivisible unit, in which even the "intrinsic"
nature of each part (wave or particle) depends to some degree on
its relationship to its surroundings. 3

And that is what is going on in "The Silken Tent" as poem and as meta-

phor. The world, just as the girl, is "in a field:" bound by count-

less ties. The tent figure is symbolic for our relationship to nature's

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larger design. One of the reasons for the sense of magnificence we
experience from this poem is that, like the girl, we are on a threshold
of knowledge, and have only had glimpses of, or experienced the slight

tug of. that curious bondage.

97

Notes to Chapter Four

William James, Psychology: The Briefer Course, ed. Gordon Allport
(New York: Harper & Row, 1960), Intro.. pp xiii-xxiii. Varieties
pf Religious Experience is noted here p. 53, n. 23.

James, Psycholpgy: The Briefer Course, p. 237.
James, Psychology:_ The Briefer Course, p. 29.

J. Dennis Huston, "'The Wonder of Unexpected Supply:' Robert
Frost and a Poetry Beyond Confusion," The Centennial Review, 13:3
(1969), p. 322. ”The importance of the demonic is predominantly
metaphorical: it provides man with a way of describing the energy
that his imagination imparts to the world."

 

Henri Bergson, Lau hter (1911; rpt. New York, Macmillan, 1924)
auth. trans. Clou esley Brereton and Fred Rothwell. "Movements,"
pp. 29-36.

Quoted in Donald Bartlett, "Two Recollections of Frost," 192.
Southern Review, 2:4, New series (1966), p. 845.

Howard Mumford Jones, "The Cosmic Loneliness of Robert Frost,"
in Belief and Disbelief jg American Literature by Howard Mumford
Jones (Chicago: U. of Chicago Press, 1967), p. 142.

Letter from Norman Holmes Pearson, Dec. 23, 1974 to the author.
"He [Frost] certainly paid attention to science, and when I

edited the Oxford Antholo of American Literature, he was anxious
to have me include 'The Grinagtone.'" Pearson also mentions

Simon Newcomb, an American-Canadian mathematician astronomer who
wrote popular astronomy essays and maintained that heavy materials
would not fly. Newcomb constructed planetary tables and was an
authority on the moon's motion.

Sir William Herschel 1738-1822, astronomer, constructed his own
telescopes, mapped the skies, discovered Uranus, concluding that
the whole solar system moves in space. His son Sir John Herschel
1792-1871 was first to measure the bright stars with precision.
He wrote a translation of the Illiad and is buried in Westminster
Abbey. Sir William was known as an unusual perfectionist in the
grinding of his own telescope lenses, and so was his sister,
Caroline, who was the first woman astronomer. By Herschel, Frost
may have meant either Caroline or Sir William because of their
nearly eccentric trait of lens grinding. The grindstone theory,
itself however, trails its way from Descartes through Newcomb, not
from Newton through the Herschels.

10.

11.

12.

13.

98

Quoted in The Public Ledger, Phila., Apr. 4, 1916, Rpt. in Inter-
views with Robert Frost, ed. Edward Connery Lathem (New York:
Holt, 1966), p.419. Designated Interviews hereafter.

G. R. Elliot, "The Neighborliness of Robert Frost," The Nation,
109, (Dec. 6, 1919), p. 713.

 

Letter from Jeannie Frost to Robert Frost, c. Sept. 1925,
Selected Letters, 318-322, and Thompson's notations.

David Bohm, Quantum Theory_(Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice
Hall. 1951), p. 14?

FIVE. Motion in the Poems: Earth

1. "To Earthward"

Frost liked combining an ancient concept like the four ele-
ments of earth, air, fire, and water with modern ideas. The poems
refer often to one or to a combination of the traditional elements. at
times treated as metaphorical symbols. Water, as we have already seen,
is important in Frost's poetry, easily lending itself to various ana-
logues. It appears as a motion figure, changing its rate of speed,
and in other ways revealing the mercurial nature of the imagination
as well as the fluidity of matter. In later chapters we will consider
the imagery of fire and air, but the second most frequently treated
element in Frost's poems is earth. Within this element are included
all the creatures of earth in addition to man, as well as rocks, soil,
mountains, and other geological phenomena. Categories of flora and

fauna found in the poems are animals, insects, birds, flowers, leaves,

99

100

and trees. They often appear symbolically in these groupings, perhaps
showing a characteristic of the organism itself, or representing some
human characteristic in either a satiric or a tragic mode. Each figure
within the poem shows Frost's close attention to the organism's move-
ment. One gets a sense of the scientist's close observations, espe-
cially in the loving attention Frost gives to wild flowers and in his
close scrutiny of insect behavior.

The contours of and the behavior of the earth's crust re-
ceives much attention in Frost's poems. There are numerous references
to geological and archeological events: avalanches, glacial effects,
artifacts found in caves, rock fissures, and shoreline changes. We
have noted the glacial effect in "Directive" that added to the poem's
somber tone. Frost plainly loved the earth. His expression toward
the soil itself is passionate, reminding one of passages in the novels
of D. H. Lawrence and of the symbolic paintings of Gauguin and VanGogh.

When stiff and sore and scarred,
I take away my hand

From leaning on it hard

In grass and sand.

The hurt is not enough:

I long for weight and strength
To feel the earth as rough

To all my length. 1
(Poetry, p. 227)

To those who find Frost's poems mere abstract philosophical wisdom, I
would recommend this poem, "To Earthward," with all its sensual earth
and flower imagery: rose petals stinging--the swirl and ache of honey-

suckle sprays.

101

2. "A Great Wave From It"

An almost primitive atavistic feeling appears in a number of
poems about wild and domestic animals. Two of the best of these poems
are "Two Look at Two“ (1928), and "The Draft Horse," (1962). It is
interesting to compare the two because the first shows a young couple,
together in the woods, in a happy experience of discovering wild deer.
The second presents an elderly couple who witness the unprovoked murder
of their horse by a man who comes out of a nearby woods and returns to
it. In the first, young married lovers are walking up a mountain.

They might have gone farther, but it is getting late and the way back
is dangerous. When they come to an old stone fence they are reminded

of the time, and the danger.

They stood facing this,

Spending what onward impulse they still had

In one last look the way they must not go,

On up the failing path, where, if a stone

Or earthslide moved at night, it moved itself;

No footstep moved it. "This is all,‘I they sighed,
Good-night to woods.

(Poetry, p. 229)

There is an attitude of expectant mystery from the mention of earth
moving around by itself, although such soil movements are not in any
way supernatural. Such movements in nature, however, are not easily
perceived.

The two have climbed almost too far because their love has
made them forget how late it is. As they stand at the old wall, a
doe looks directly at them. "She saw them in their field, they her

in hers," suggests two differing dimensions of perception. The doe

102

sighs and moves on. Soon a buck deer arrives around the same spruce

tree. He lifts his head
As if to ask, "Why don't you make some motion?

0r give some sign of life? Because you can't.
I doubt if you're as living as you look."

(Poetry, p. 230)

The response the deer expects is motion. Since the couple makes no
move, the deer are neither frightened nor attracted, and simply move

away. But the Couple could not move, they were under a spell.

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.

Love of the earth, then, is returned, but obliquely and at times when
it is not expected. The animals of the poems are earth's messengers;
here they simply acknowledge the couple's presence. But, the animals'
presence and inquiring looks makes "a great wave" go over them. Like
radio or radar or light waves, it is a non-verbal message. The indefi-
nite "it" of the poem is especially effective, and appears again in a
poem on the same subject, "The Most of It," in which a woodsman is
confronted with a buck deer in the same manner.

"The Draft Horse" tells in ballad form that two people are rid-
ing at night in a cart behind a farm horse. A man comes suddenly out of
"the trees" and stabs the horse dead. Then the action of the horse
falling is followed by a terrible motion of "the night" as it seems
to draw breath through the trees where the man had come from.

The ponderous beast went down

With a crack of a broken shaft.

And the night drew through the trees
In one long invidious draft.

(Poetry, p. 444)

103

It is as if something in "the night" of nature had envied the couple
their draft horse, and had wanted them to walk the rest of the way
home, the poem tells us. The incident, supported by the motion figures
of the heavy falling horse, the wind drawn through the trees as breath
is sucked in by the jealous villain, and the couple walking home, is
surely metaphorical for the existence of evil in the universe. It is
no wonder a drumlin woodchuck needs to be thorough about his crevice

and burrow.

3. “The Touch of Thy Dye-Dusty Wing"

When Frost compares fireflies to stars the moral is that
although small insects may emulate stars, "they can't sustain the part.”
In a number of poems such as that one, insects provide light entertain-
ment and an opportunity for Frost to present some of his beliefs. In
"A Considerable Speck," for instance, he states outright in a comic
tone that the movements of a mite across a page are mind itself:

It paused as with suspicion of my pen,

And then came racing wildly on again

To where my manuscript was not yet dry;

Then paused again and either drank or smelt--

With loathing, for again it turned to fly.
Plainly with an intelligence I dealt.

(Poetry, p. 357)

One may imagine William James enjoying that bit of satiric fanciful-
ness. But "Departmental," about ants doing their assigned jobs;
"Waspish," about egotistical antics; and other such light poems should
not lead the reader to think that none of Frost's insect figures is to
be taken seriously. His first nationally-published poem, "My Butterfly,"

(1894-1913) is elegiac, as is the much later "To a Moth Seen in Winter,"

104

and the two may be interestingly compared. Both poems were written
for the poet's wife.
In "My Butterfly" two phrases in typically Frost diction are
"Its two banks have not shut upon the river," and "For thou art dead,
I said,/And the strange birds say," despite archaisms. A Shelleyan
rapture of the power of nature calls out the motion figures:
Surging, the grasses dizzied me of thought,

The breeze three odors brought,
And a gem-flower waved in a wand!

(Poetry, p. 29)

The poet's first sight of the butterfly is described by its motion

which is later contrasted with the stillness of the butterfly wing

found with "the withered leaves/Under the eaves." It makes its entrance.
In airy dalliance,
Precipitate in love,

Tossed, tangled, whirled and whirled above,
Like a limp-rose-wreath in a fairy dance.

(Poetry, p. 28)

The fragility of young love that had moved the poet with the "touch of
thy dye-dusty wing" suggested later the touch of despair in autumn
leaves, and still later the winter moth alighting on his hand, then
flying to its death in snow.

It is "that old incurable untimeliness,/Only begetter of all
the ills that are" that makes the gap of communication between poet
and moth so great. He is not able to help the moth. It has its time
and fate, just as the poet has his.

Go till you wet your pinions and are quenched.

You must be made more simply wise than I
To know the hand I stretc impulsively

Across the gulf of well-nigh everything
May reach you, but cannot touch your fate.

(mm. pp. 356. 357)

105

This somber poem will suggest yet another earlier butterfly poem to the
Frost reader, "Blue-Butterfly Day" (1923) in which migrating butterflies
have stopped to rest:

But these are flowers that fly and all but sing:

And now from having ridden out desire

They lie closed over in the wind and cling
Where wheels have freshly sliced the April mire.

(Poetry, p. 225)

The closeness of these winged insects to the earth is again emphasized
by the motion imagery. Wheelruts seem to underline the poem's point.
Frost's butterflies and moths dance perilously and heroically above
their common destiny. His comic insects, mock-heroic, reveal the human

scene.

4. "A Mid-Wood Bird"

A metaphor of birds in "Our Singing Strength" is strikingly
close to that of Frost's butterflies.

The road had become a channel of running flocks

Of glossy birds like ripples over rocks.

I drove them underfoot in bits of flight

That kept the ground, almost disputing right

Of way with me from apathy of wing,.
A talking twitter all they had to sing,

(Poetry, p. 240)

The birds become a brook channel of the earth when they are tired.
These weary birds' talking twitter brings to mind one of Frost's most
famous birds, "The Oven Bird," often taken to represent the poet's own
peculiar voice. His song is described as loud and resonant: "He
makes the solid tree trunks sound again." His is not an especially
pleasant tune to hear, he is “Loud, a mid-summer and a mid-wood bird."

What he says suggests what the song might sound like:

106

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;

And comes that other fall we name the fall.

He says the highway dust is over all.

(Poetry. PP. 119, 120)

Remembering the showers of blossoms in spring reminds the bird of dust
settling on the highway--a melancholy association, probably expressed
in a quarrelsome, rasping, tuneless tone. As one writer noted, the
bird can "frame questions about the nature of things, even to quarrel
with a world that is not nearer to the heart's desire. He can sing
without singing; he can protest with earnestness and verve the passing

of things."1

But it would be misleading to say that any one bird
represents Frost's voice more than another. In earlier poems birds

had joyous songs, associated with young love. In the later "Acceptance"
the birds sing or say very little.

Moreover, one might compare "The Valley's Singing Day" with
the later "Never Again Would Birds' Song Be the Same," as we have
compared butterfly with moth, deer with draft horse. In the first
poem, the poet is still asleep when "You had awakened under the morning
star/The first songbird that awakened all the rest." (ngtry, p. 235)
The dawn had begun to free the "pent-up music of overnight," and the
poet says that “you" had started the “valley's singing day." If the
poet takes his inspiration from the birds, they take theirs from "you."
But in "Never Again Would Birds' Song Be the Same," the poet says that
he imagined he heard in the birds' voices "her tone of meaning but

without the words," and that "only an eloquence so soft" could have

any effect upon birds.

107

Moreover her voice upon their voices crossed
Had now persisted in the woods so long
That probably it never would be lost.

(Poetry, p. 339)

What starts the birdsong in the first poem and what modified the bird-
song in the second was the "daylong voice of Eve." We may be certain
Frost intended both poems as tributes to his wife. If we may take
birds to be symbolic of the lyric voice, Frost gives credit for
the tone of his poetry to Elinor Frost, and to her for its early im-
petus as well.2
Another turn to the puzzle of what nature says to man is

given in two more bird metaphors: one of phoebes nesting in an aban-
doned barn in spring, and another of a bird singing a tune in its
sleep. In "The Need for Being Versed in Country Things," although a
deserted farm is described, motion figures abound. The chimney of the
house is pictured as "a pistil after the petals go." The barn might
have burned "had it been the will of the wind:" it no longer let in
teams of horses with “scurrying hoofs," nor did the wagon "brush the
mow_with the summer load." Phoebes are flying in and out of the barn
windows now, performing their spring task of nesting. The farm is
very much alive for them.

Yet for them the lilac renewed its leaf,

And the aged elm, though touched with fire;

And the dry pump flung up an awkward arm;

And the fence post carried a strand of wire.

For them there was really,nothing sad.
(Poetry p. 242)

Again, the tree "touched with fire" suggests thermodynamical decay.
But in the midst of the scene of loss the birds perform their seasonal

activities--for them it is a beginning. It is spring.

nu
, ..

108

A poem with reference to the effects of evolution is "On a

Bird Singing in Its Sleep." The poem follows "Design" in the 1936
volume. The design of nature has conditioned the behavior of the bird
over the centuries, the poet muses. The bird sings, in the middle of
the night "his little inborn tune." He sings only once, and from a
low bush; he sings a brief tune, and not an innovative one, either--his
tune is "ventriloquist." Yet,

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.

(Poetry. PP. 302, 303)

A combination of the bird's wisdom of modesty, then, along with some
9

possible'luck in its travel through the interstices of material re-

peated birth, has let the small song survive. There is something in

nature's design that has protected the increment of song.

5. "Every Kind of Bloom"

Flowers are not less frequent than animals, insects, birds
or trees: they are probably the most frequent and varied natural
forms in Frost's poems. They are abundant early in the poems and ex-
tend throughout, and their symbolism is complex. As Frost wrote in

A qu's Will:

 

The fed had every kind of bloom,

And for every kind there was a face,
And a voice that has sounded in my room
Across the sill from the outer gloom.

("In a Vale," oetry, p. 15)

109

Probably "The Tuft of Flowers" and "Putting in the Seed" will be suf-
ficient examples to show the close association of flowers with the
earth, their curious communicating power, and the vulnerable joy they
symbolize in the poems.
"The Tuft of Flowers“ happened to secure Frost his first
teaching position, he later told a critic:
Mr. Merriam said if I would read a poem to his
Men's League banquet it might prove all that was needed to win me
a place on the Pinkerton faculty. I told him I would never dare
read in public, but I would give him a poem to read and sit beside
him when he stood up to read it. The poem was A Tuft of Flowers,
that sounds as if it might have been composed on purpose for such

a fraternal occasion. It wasn't, but it happened to fit. It was
a success and started me off on my more serious teacher's life.3

The famous lines of the poem,'"Men work together,‘ I told him from the
heart/'Whether they work together or apart'" indeed had more signifi—
cance for Frost than the mens' league's purposes. The "leaping tongue
of bloom" spared by the scythe has much similarity of meaning to the
song of the bird singing in its sleep. The tongue of bloom is the
true speaker of the poem, and is synechcoctal for lyric voice, or per-
haps for poets. It speaks first to the mower who spares it, and then
to the hay maker poet who notices its survival. Because men follow
the design, the laws of nature, and those laws operate in them as well,
they necessarily work together. Sparing the tongue of bloom is part
of nature's plan. While Mr. Merriam read the poem, Frost sat as
quietly as a tuft of flowers. Fortunately, his employment allowed

him to go on writing in his germinal poetic period at Derry farm while
teaching Jamsean psychology and other things at the Pinkerton Academy

nearby.

110

"Putting in the Seed" shows something of the joy and close-
ness to the earth communicated by flowers. A less-known, but fine
sonnet, it moves steadily toward a motion figure of emotional affect.
The poet declares that he has

a springtime passion for the earth.

How love burns through the Putting in the Seed

On through the watching for that early birth

When, just as the soil tarnishes with weed,

The sturdy seedling with arched body comes
Shouldering its way and shedding the earth crumbs.

(Poetry, p. 124)

As in this figure, flowers are often shown to be extraordinarily active.
For instance, in "The Flower Boat" their magic sets the retired fisher-
man's boat rocking again:

At anchor she rides the sunny sod.

As full to the gunnel of flowers growing

As ever she turned her home with cod
From Georges Bank when winds were blowing.

(Poetry, p. 262)

The "Elysian freight" of the boat allows Frost to express his atavistic
delight in investing an inanimate object with movement, a delight
founded in the fact of physical science that everything is moving in

its own way although we cannot always see the motion.

6. "Leaves Are All My Darker Mood"

In contrast to the joyous symbolism of the flowers, leaves
are usually associated with dark portents, with sadness, autumn, and
death. They are often ominous, as in "A Leaf-Treader."

,All summer long they were overhead, more lifted up than I.
To come to their final places in earth they had to pass me by.
All summer long I thought I heard them threatening under their
. breath.
And when they came it seemed with a will to carry me with
them to death.

(Poetry, p. 297)

111

And in one poem Frost contrasts flowers and with leaves explicitly. He
tells us that his interest is no longer in flowers, but in leaves,
that "leaves and bark may be tree enough."

Leaves and bark, leaves and bark,

To lean against and hear in the dark.

Petals I may have once pursued.
Leaves are all my darker mood.

(Poetry, p. 297)

The somber tone is similar to the two poems on either side of it in
the 1936 volume of poems, "A Leaf-Treader" and "Desert Places."

But the most somber fact of all about the leaves is that they
will lose their colors, becoming the same indistinct color, and will
no longer have their individual shapes as they take on the shape and
hue of the earth. The metaphor describes again the final thermodynami-
cal equilibrium, or a prelude to it. In groves of hardwood trees

They fall from giving shade above,

To make one texture of faded brown
And fit the earth like a leather glove.

(Poetry. PD. 25, 26)

Having lost their distinct and separate forms, the leaves no longer

have movement of their own and have become one with the earth.

7. "Those Dark Trees"

Of his early poem, "The Demiurge's Laugh." Frost glossed in

the first edition of A Boy's Will that it was "about science." In

 

Greek, demiurge means the maker of the world in Platonic philosophy,
and a subordinant creator, associated with the creation of evil in the
Gnostic sense. The first line has the phrase "far in the sameness of

the wood," undoubtedly referring to Frost's preference for distinct

112

and separate trees over the woods' sameness. The demiurge of the poem
laughs as if he "utterly doesn't care," and the poem ends with the
otherwise cryptic conclusion: "Thereafter I sat me against a tree."
Did the poet see something in science, a tendency toward abstract de-
personalization ultimately dangerous to life, a "sameness," that he
wished to criticise? I think so, if we grant that the sameness and
depersonalization may be found in other areas of human activity as well.
Trees and woods represent the strange material world, and

also sometimes the unconscious mind, grounded in the material world in
the psychologies of William James and Carl G. Jung and others. What
the woods and trees mean in the poems is harder to sort out than the
other natural symbols, therefore. They say something about motion too,
of course. The tree that expresses "outer weather" in "Tree at My
Window" is "taken and tossed:" the swaying trees in "The Sound of
Trees" make the poet's head sway to his shoulder and his feet tug at
the floor. In the very last poem of the last book, Frost takes action
against a particular tree, probably a symbolic act.

In winter in the woods alone

Against the trees I go.

I mark a maple for my own
And lay the maple low.

(Poetry, p. 470)

The poem draws the conclusion that nature is not defeated by the fell-
ing of one tree, nor is the poet defeated by "yet another blow." Some-
times, then, the trees or woods represent enemies (suggested by
Macbeth?)—-a possible encroaching danger.

Trees as metaphorical for the material of nature appear in

both "The Wood-Pile" and in the woodchopping scene of "Two Tramps in

113

Mud-Time." But who can say exactly what is represented by "those dark
trees" in the first poem of A Boy's Will-~"Into My Own,"

One of my wishes is that those dark trees,

50 old and firm they scarcely show the breeze

Were not. as 'twere, the merest mask of gloom,
But stretched away unto the edge of doom.

Poetry, p. 5)

And the same suggestive but indefinite quality haunts the yellow wood
of "The Road Not Taken," the snow-filled woods of "Stopping by Woods
on a Snowy Evening," and the "pillared dark" of "Come In." The poet
does not enter the woods because he was not actually invited, and be-
cause he was "out for stars." (Epgggy, p. 334)

Far in the pillared dark

Thrush music went--

Almost like a call to come in
To the dark and lament.

(Poetry, p. 334)

Trees may be ominous, too, because of their relative relation to time.
Man's life is usually shorter than the trees' lives, so that they
stand in a memorial monumental (pillared) relation to man. Nature has
its ominous aspect because the material world is entropic-~to go into
the woods, into the spirit of the material world is analogous to enter-
ing a state of gloom or grief. The poet did not go into the snowy
woods because he had promises to keep, he did not go into the woods of
"Come In" partly because he had not been invited, and partly because
the thrush music seemed an invitation to the dark and to grieving.
Psychological and physical levels of the symbolism are both involved
in Frost's woods. .

At the Derry farm where Frost early worked out much of this

symbolism, the children were being educated at home by their parents

114

who were both licensed as schoolteachers. Lesley Frost remembers the
manner of that education. While her mother taught the "organized"
subjects, her father "took on botany and astronomy."4 The farm was a
learning laboratory where the children became acquainted with the

field and wood flowers, and with the stars, "naming the constellations
at all hours of the night.“ Flowers were found and transplanted nearer
to the house. It was a relatively happy time for the young family.

But the song of the oven bird was heard from the center of the dark
woods, and beyond the farm was the highway where the slow wheel poured

the sand.

115

Notes to Chapter Five

William R. Osborne, "Frost's EThe Oven Bird,'" The Explicator
26:6 (Feb., 1968), item 47.

Poetr , 338, 339. "Never Again Would Birds' Song Be the Same."
See letter to Louis Untermeyer, 4 Oct., 1937 in Selected Letters,
p. 450: "She has been the unspoken half of everything I ever
wrote and both halves of many a thing from My November Guest down
to the last two stanzas of Two Tramps in Mud Time--as you may have
divined."

Letter to Robert Chase, 4 Mar., 1952 in Selected Letters. p. 551.

Lesley Frost, "Robert Frost Remembered," The American Way (Mar.,
1974). p. 15.

SIX. Motion in the Poems: Fire and Air

1. "Seeds of Fire“

In Robert Frost's essay "Education by Poetry,“ which was
first a talk to students at Amherst College, he made some interesting
references to the four traditional elements, in the manner of his "kind
of fooling." (Poetry, p. 470)

Once on a time all the Greeks were busy telling each

other what the ALL was--or was like unto. All was three

elements; air, earth, and water (we once thought it was

ninety elements; now we think it is only one).
No student attempted to correct Frost that there were thought to be
four elements instead of three, pointing out as one could have, that
the predominance of the Greek myth of Prometheus, the fire bringer,
would surely indicate fire should be included in the Greek four.

Therefore Frost was free to present a further hint about fire by way

of a metaphor from Homer's Odyssey.

116

117

There is a better metaphor in the same book. In the end

Odysseus comes ashore and crawls up the beach to spend the night

under a double olive tree, and it says, as in a lonely farmhouse

where it is hard to start the fire again if it goes out they

cover the seeds with ashes to preserve it for the night, so

Odysseus covered himself with the leaves around him and went to

sleep. There you have something that gives you character, some-

thing of Odysseus himself. "Seeds of fire.“ So Odysseus

covered the sesds of fire in himself. You get the greatness

of his nature.
Frost's coy inexactitude in naming the "three" ancient elements prepared
the way for someone to notice the fourth. But here he is also playing
with the idea of inexactitude. Metaphor was not the same thing as exac-
titude.3 That is, modern metaphorical symbolism carries volatile sug-
gestion but cannot be counted on to fit into a closed logical system as
systematic philosophical symbolism may have done in the past. Every
close reader of poetry knows that it is next to impossible, for instance,
to fully understand the poet's original intention--and yet that is
what we attempt to know.

In Frost's poems some of the motions of fire are visible, as
in I'The Bonfire," and some are invisible, as in the thermodynamically
decaying~woodpile. As have the other elements, fire has many forms.

It is warmth, heat, smoke, flame, and sparks. It is the stars, strangely
but closely associated with flowers. It moves much faster than any of
the other elements, can be more rapidly destructive, and is therefore
more fearsome. In "The Bonfire" the poet discusses these characteris-
tics of fire with his children.

'Oh, let's go up the hill and scare ourselves,

As reckless as the best of them tonight,

By setting fire to all the brush we piled
With pitchy hands to wait for rain or snow.
Oh, let's not wait for rain to make it safe.‘

(Poetry, p. 129)

118

This long narrative has a story within a story as well. The children
are surprised that fire could scare their father, so he tells them a
story of how he once burned a field and the fire almost got away. The
story includes information about how to put out a fire, and many motion
figures of the dangerous fire such as:

'and before it burns out
It will have roared first and mixed sparks with stars,
And sweeping round it with a flaming sword,
Made the dim trees stand back. . .'

(Poetry, p. 130)

He tells them there would be good reason for him to be scared, alluding
to Joan of Arc and heretics and witches going up in flames. In the
manner of ghost story telling the poet says:

'Why wouldn't it scare me to have a fire
Begin in smudge with ropey smoke, and know
That still, if I repent, I may recall it,
But in a moment not: a little spurt

Of burning fatness, and then nothing but
The fire itself can put it out, and that
By burning out. . .'

(Eggtry, p. 130)
Fire is certainly universally feared by animals, and is a symbol of
fear, of how to cope with fear, in the poem. In an unusual italicized
line, the poet tells the children:

'Wgr is for everyone, £9: children too.

I wasfiTt going to tell you and I mustn't.
The best way is to come uphill with me

And have our fire and laugh and be afraid.'

(Poetry, p. 133)

"The Bonfire," therefore, may be thought of as a post-World War I poem

 

(1916). Later, shorter, but far more frightening figures of fire are

combined with other images in post-World War II poems such as "Our Doom

119

to Bloom," and "Bursting Rapture'l which followed science's discovery
of atomic power.

In "Evening in a Sugar Orchard,“ (1923) however, there is
nothing frightening about the carefully tended fire. There is no risk
of fire; the poet's attitude is calm, contemplative. And yet, the poet
wants the fireman in the sugarhouse to "give the fire another stoke" to
see the lively sparks fly up, making a figure against the evening sky.

The sparks made no attempt to be the moon.
They were content to figure in the trees

As Leo, Orion, and the Pleiades.
And that was what the boughs were full of soon.

(Egggry, p. 234)
The poem says that like the constellations we visualize in the sky, any
natural phenomena are seen as configurations by man. This esthetic
"figuring" is our clue to nature's actual designs, our bridge into the
physical quantum world. The sparks (of the imagination?) are not the
moon itself, they are not the stars, but they introduce the stars to us.
In his metaphoric thought in the poems, Frost is always keenly
aware of the relation of one symbol to another based in nature's eco-
logical dependencies. For instance, the closeness of entropic burning
to flowers is given in the figure of the parasitic clematis vine that
binds the decaying woodpile. When a field is burned, it is freed for
the wildflowers, the fireweed for instance, to spring up without having
to share space with grasses or crops. In "A Star in a Stoneboat" we
find,
from having been star-shot
The very nature of the soil was hot
And burning to yield flowers instead of grain,

Flowers fanned and not put out by all the rain
Poured on them by his prayers in vain.

(Poetry, p. 173)

120

The flowers, the next wildest thing to fire in their motions in the
poems, move across the burning soil. Not even the wind and rain will
put them out.

"Fire and Ice" by its title points rather obviously to Frost's
schema of the four elements. Although the poem discusses an either-or
argument as to whether the world will end in one way or the other, the
title is "Fire gpg_1ce," not fire pr_ice. Here Frost takes astronomical
speculations into the emotional realm again: fire is equated with
desire, and ice with hate. "Ice" happens to conveniently and ironically
rhyme with "twice," and "suffice." Extremes of heat and cold are
equally destructive in the galaxy and in people, the poem says.

From what I've tasted of desire

I hold with those who favor fire.
But if I had to perish twice,

I think I know enough of hate

To say that for destruction ice

Is also great
And would suffice.

(Poetry, p. 220)

As Lawrance Thompson pointed out in his pilot study fire apg Egg, Frost
often presents revelations through ironic balance, using opposites
importantly in this difficult procedure. Irony radiates from the middle
line of this poem, "But if I had to perish twice,“ and of course the
alternatives of either the earth cooling down into another ice age, or
colliding with the sun, is scarcely relevant to either poet or audience
who will perish long before either of these eventualities. Perhaps it
is also suggested that in former ages men imitated the elements in

expressing their feelings, to a degree.

121

In "Take Something Like a Star" we find Frost's favorite
star, Sirius, symbolic for the stoical sense of balance he admires.
The poet questions it. What is its language, if any?

Say something! And it says, 'I burn.‘
But say with what degree of heat.
Talk Farenheit, talk Centigrade.

Use language we can comprehend.

Tell us what elements you blend.

It gives us strangely little aid,
But does tell us something in the end.

(Poetry, p. 403)
Although the star has not said anything except that it burns, the fact

of its position and motion in the sky communicates an attitude to the
poet. The star's motion is steady; it keeps in its own orbit. A man
should not be swayed from his own chosen path by "praise or blame“ or

anything else too far in one direction or another from his course.

2. "Make It Flow”

The element or air is not only shown as wind and breezes, but
sometimes as mixtures like smoke and mist as in “A Cabin in the Clear-
ing" (1962) and in "Atmosphere," (1928) subtitled "Inscription for a
Garden Wall." In the latter poem, all elements participate to enhance
the air, to synthesize it into a natural combination.

Winds blow the open grassy places bleak
But where this old wall burns a sunny cheek,
They eddy over it too toppling weak

To blow the earth or anything self-clear;
Moisture and color and odor thicken here.

(Poetry, p. 246)

And in a light verse poem air becomes vapor or gas, representing spir-
itual uplift. "Innate Helium" says, "Religious faith is a most filling

vapor.“ Then the motion figures explain:

122

It swirls occluded in us under tight
Compression to uplift us out of weight--

As in those buoyant bird bones thin as paper,
To give them still more buoyancy in flight.

(Poetry, pp. 386, 387)
It is possible that Frost also had the test balloons of Robert Millikan

in mind here. Millikan believed that his detection of cosmic rays from
outer space had some bearing upon religious faith because they might
indicate that the universe was being created from beyond its immediate
range. However that may be related, the poem's figure of hollow bird
bones is one precise result of Frost's interest in flight dynamics, and
presents the feeling of spiritual buoyancy he is, in part, satirizing.
A spring wind is addressed in "To the Thawing Wind.“ It is

a southwest wind, and the poet asks it to melt the snow and steam the
snowbank during the day.

But whate'er you do tonight,

Bathe my window, make it flow,

Melt it as the ice will go;

Melt the glass and leave the sticks

Like a hennit's crucifix;
Burst into my narrow stall. . .

(Poetry, p. 11)

The wind is invited to blow the picture from the wall, scatter poems,
and whisk the poet outdoors into nature at night, and is symbolic of
that flow of nature Frost wants most in his poems. The rigid window-
glass must melt in order to move with the flow.

As in Lucretius' poem, Frost has made all the elements of
nature flow, and has brought this vision of reality into the most inti-

mate 1ove lyric:

123

All song of the woods is crushed like some
Wild, easily shattered rose.

Come, be my love in the wet woods, come,
Where the boughs rain when it blows.

(Poetry, p. 26)

The obvious intimate Freudian symbolism of this passage in "A Line-Storm
Song“ may not be attributed to an influence of Freud upon Frost, but to
Frost's intuitive perception of the power of such symbols of passionate
love. It is, I think, especially interesting to notice that the wild
rose is shattered, the woods are wet, and the boughs rain under the
influence of the wind. It is the motion of the storm figure in which
the rose, the trees and the boughs appear and have their principal
effectiveness. "To the Thawing Wind," however, shows that the same
attitude of movement exists in the poet's relation to nature. The

glass is melted so that the poet's vision may move with the movements

of the thawing wind.

«DOOM

124

Notes to Chapter Six

"Education by Poetry," Selected Prose, p. 37.

 

"Education by Poetry," Selected Prose, p. 42.

 

"Education by Poetry," Selected Prose, p. 35.

Thompson, Fire app lgg, p. 170.

SEVEN. The Moving Lens

1. "I Cannot Rub the Strangeness From My Sight“

The total structure of Frost's poems (the meaning, form,
and esthetic intention of the poet which includes his donnée in the
standard Richardian definition of structure), shows, I think, that the
largest implicit shaping metaphor of the poems is motion itself. There
are, moreover, many subordinant metaphors of motion to be found within
the larger one which are part of it and support it. Attitudes resulting
from Frost's interest in motion are of utmost importance to the poems'
structure. One attitude that Frost held in the poems was that nature
is indeed strange, that it seems strange to us. It is impossible to
be exact about nature, as we might like to be, first because there is
not much one can know, and second and specifically, the physical law
of indeterminancy rules that we cannot even locate a particle in space

and time with certainty. This uncertain character that nature has,

125

126

from our point of view, makes it seem universally strange. Werner
Heisenberg formulated the uncertainty or indeterminancy (science like
the rest of us often has several terms for the same phenomenon) prin-
ciple in physics in 1927, and it was immediately established, although
not without initial objection from Einstein which was refuted by Niels
Bohr and others.

Speaking to students at Amherst in the fall of 1930, Frost
explained the uncertainty principle in science in relation to metaphor:

The other day we had a visitor here, a noted scientist,

whose latest word to the world has been that the more accu-

rately you know where a thing is, the less accurately you

are able to state how fast it is moving. You can see why

that would be so. . . . In carrying numbers into the realm

of space and at the same time into the realm of time you 1

are mixing metaphors, that is all, and you are in trouble.
Frost is equating metaphor with dimensions or reference frames, an
interesting comparison which has to do with his objection to the idea
of exactitude. In his own teaching, he told the Amherst group, he
graded a student on the "closeness" he may have come to understanding,
say, Keats: "I think a man might make twenty fool remarks if he made
one good one some time in the year. His mark would depend on that good
mark."

Frost felt strongly about the probable awkwardness involved
in the search for knowledge, and was especially annoyed by a pretense
of knowledge in academic circles. He considered the popular myth that
science was exact especially bothersome. Later, he told a friend,

I was talking to a college president the other day, and

I inquired, "What is the difference between science and poetry?"
'In the first place,‘ the college president replied, 'science

is exact.‘ 'If that's what you're going to say about it, I'll
go home.‘2

127

Frost's retort contains more than the humor of situation. He saw science
at its best as a great adventure that had nothing to do with popular
cliches. As late as 1961 he told an interviewer that he was very much
interested in science: "I like anything that penetrates the mysteries.
And if it penetrates straight to hell, then that's all right, too."3
Evidently the poet's rebellious attitude in defense of knowledge of
nature stayed with him to the last. What he had learned in his own
educational struggle with schools (which always had reference to his
mother's struggle to survive in the communities in which she taught)
colored his quarrel against conformism and pointed him toward an adven-
turous attitude toward knowledge. The first was static; the second
moved more naturally with life.

The poet in Frost's poems is identified often with a micro-
scope or telescope in motion through nature. One gets the sense of a
lens-eye moving through the countryside observing, measuring, adjusting
to various angles to get a better view. The imaginative lens of the
poet can move time and space around at will--can telescope time or
extend it in order to show how changes occur, much in the way film
frames can be slowed or speeded up so that motion is made visible.

The sense of the poet as lens, then, runs through the poems,
especially in those which deal with strangeness in nature, with inner
spaces, and with things in motion in relation with each other. We will
look at the way this image works. Frost sometimes mentions the micro-
scope and telescope directly, but often his language merely suggests a
lens, as does the moon in the water in "The Freedom of the Moon," both

the ice and the dome of heaven called "glass" in "Birches," and the

128

tunnel in the frost that Meserve sees through the window in “Snow."

Our human feelings, Frost seems to say, are subordinant to laws of
nature such as time with its inseparable companion entropy. Although
"grief may have thought it was grief," it was really the entropic pass-
ing of time that changed the young man's hair from raven color to white.
As Frost's imaginative lens moves, the common physical facts of the
universe take on a strange perspective, as if seen in a shadowy, wavy
mirror. This is how Frost approached the twentieth century question

of reality and appearances.

One of the most effective lens figures is seen in "After
Apple-Picking," as, in the transition from the day's work, the poet's
mind moves toward sleep and dream. The dream begins before he falls
asleep:

Essence of winter sleep is on the night,

The scent of apples: I am drowsing off.

I cannot rub the strangeness from my sight

I got from looking through a pane of glass

I skimmed this morning from the drinking trough

And held against the world of hoary grass.
It melted, and I let it fall and break.

(Poetry, p. 68)

The poet does not use "ice" but "pane of glass" in substitution: a pur-
poseful device he often uses to indicate that a metaphor is at work.
It is not the dream that is strange, it is the closer look at the physi-
cal world through the lens of ice that seems strange. When the ice
melts, however, he is free to flow into the realm of the dream, another
natural realm of strangeness.

In "Birches," an incomplete sound-of-sense sentence near the
end tells the motivation for that poem, and presents a broken-lens

image of a lashed eye:

129

It's when I'm weary of considerations,

And life is too much like a pathless wood

Where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs
Broken across it, and one eye is weeping

From a twig's having lashed across it open.

(Egetry, p. 122)

In "Birches" the lashed eye, the heaps of broken glass left by the ice
storm, the fallen "inner dome" of heaven, the "snow-white trunk/Igggrg_
heaven," the cup filled up "to the brim, and even above the brim,“ all
suggest a telescopic lens or mirror of nature. The poet's own observa-
tions in the poem are interrupted with much appropriateness by "Truth"
who "broke in/With all her matter of fact about the ice storm."

It was noted earlier that Meserve had observed a "stir" and
"quiver" at the far end of the tunnel in the frost in "Snow." But
earlier in the poem as he looked through the window he saw a strange
beast huddled against the window pane. He says of the snow:

It looks as if
Some pallid thing had squashed its features flat

And its eyes shut with overeagerness. . . .

Or broken its white neck of mushroom stuff
Short off and died against the windowpane.

(Poetry, p. 148)

Meserve's imagination frightens his listeners somewhat, and brings
readers to think of similar oddities in the rabbit hole and looking

glass worlds of Alice ip Wonderland, one of Frost's favorite books.

 

But the monstrous pallid thing Meserve sees has a similar curious
counterpart in "For Once, Then, Something.“ Both figures, the first
thing seen when looking through the lens, obstruct the view of the
truth, or are mere shadows on the wall as in Plato's famous cave meta-

phor of reality.

130

When the poet stares into a well, he sees a Greek or Roman
heroic figure, possibly a Narcissus, crowned with wreaths of fern and
cloud--it is himself. This ideal fellow is in a sense as monstrous as
the mushroom monster of "Snow." What the poem describes, however, is
a problem encountered by anyone who looks into a microscope. If the
light slants the wrong way one either sees nothing or his own eye. The
criticism against the poet as lens-observer has been that he spends too
much time looking into wells which show him only his own image. He
stands accused of anthropomorphism. No matter how he seeks truth, he
sees his own ideal image.

Others taunt me with having knelt at well-curbs

Always wrong to the light, so never seeing

Deeper down in the well than where the water

Gives me back in a shining surface picture

Myself in the summer heaven, godlike
Looking out of a wreath of fern and cloud puffs.

(Egetry, p. 225)
There is much difficulty in getting beyond his own glorified image, the
poet finds. It is necessary for the angle of light to change in order
to shine deeper into the pool. The poet's long habit of gazing, how-
ever, is not entirely in vain.
Once, when trying with chin against a well-curb,
iscerned, as I thought, beyond the picture,

Through the picture, a something white, uncertain,
Something more of the depths--and then I lost it.

(Poetry, p. 225)

Appearances in nature, even through microscope and telescope, are pat-
terned images. Beyond the patterns or figures mysterious physical laws
lurk and evade the expectations of the mind. In certain learned ways,
we~expect to see ourselves and the scenery around us, so that even with

SCience as our lens, when we try to see something of the truth the

131

results are few. This poem, "For Once, Then, Something," first in

Harper's in 1920, is the initial poem to extend a lens metaphor through-

out. Earlier poems included the metaphor in brief, subordinant passages.
Scientists and scientific philosophers themselves insist upon

an attitude of uncertainty, and often express the sense of strangeness

in the universe. In a recent address, the physicist John Archibald r:

Wheeler quoted Niels Bohr's criticism of a newly-proposed theory. "It's

not crazy enough to be correct!" exclaimed Bohr. Wheeler stresses the

 

emerging concept in physics that the universe is highly participatory,

‘ J'J'V “In---
J.

as hinted by quantum theory and the indeterminancy principle, and that
man's own imagination is of utmost importance in the understanding of
this concept.4 The scientific philOSOpher Oliver Reiser, too, places
emphasis on the function of imagination in the universe. Not unlike
Bergson, he says that the creative mind is everywhere, not only in man,
and that its function is the means of transportation or transposition
from the unmanifest to the manifest (material) world. Reiser's philos-
ophy describes in scientific and other terms how all of this takes
place, and calls the universal imaginative principle the cosmic lens.5
The idea of God as a lens was first Newton's, a belief stated in his
study of optics, and possibly would not have been foreign to Frost
through Shelley's knowledge of Newton, if not his own direct reading.
But perhaps the gathering metaphor of the lens is not as crazy as it
seems at first if we admit that science must be open to all sorts of
possibilities now, not bounded by our customary habits of mind.

While trying to see, as if through a lens, or as if he is the

lens, there is jeopardy for the poet as he grows older. The boy's elan

‘

132

yjtgl_permits him to fill the cup of life to the brim in true Keatsean
fashion with full negative capability (poetic faith) and even above the
brim. The boy sails out into life, feet kicking through the air, not
knowing or caring about danger, his disbelief suspended. Keats' willing
suspension of disbelief is very much like Frost's adoption of William
James' “will to believe." But as the adult man goes through the path-
less wood (life), he finds his vision altered by the cobwebs and twigs,
and his full childhood faith is endangered. He sees that beauty is
brief and illusory. He feels nostalgia, and would rather go back to
be a swinger of birches than to see clearly the terrible actual destruc-
tiveness of nature, especially its tendency toward sameness, indistinct-
ness, toward the pathless wood.

But the poems eventually say that, just as Meserve does in
"Snow," the modern man with his sensibilities modified by what he sees
must also suspend his disbelief and go out into the snowstorm just
because of his delight in something like a mere "stir" and "quiver" at
the far end of the lens. The sense of strangeness and mystery becomes
larger, not smaller, as the man grows in knowledge. Large areas of
unexplored territory were opened by scientific discoveries in Frost's
time, and as early as 1925 he noted some of them.

Think of the great abysses opened up by our study of the

3331').-nlhllldé’feil‘iri232216.3"3u3"2§§331i2519.232”:1.1239"

In spite of the small amount of knowledge a man might gain during his
lifetime, then, he might still share the great adventure. The prereq-

uisite of an attitude of humility toward knowledge, however, was an

133

important part of Frost's astronomical sense of things. uHumility,"

as T. S. Eliot observed in Ihg Four Quartets, “is endless."

2. "We Won't Say Nothing is Clear"

In "Voice Ways," the antagonist, speaking of the clearing
after a rain, contradicts the poet's insistence upon uncertainty. The
poem gives a figure of the landscape telescoped toward the foreground:

The mountains are brought up near,

The stars are brought out bright.

Your old sweet-cynical strain

Would come in like you here:

'So we won't say nothing is clear.'

(Poetry. PP. 301, 302)

The speaker is responding also to the Jamsean attitude toward truth
that must have interested Frost. James wrote a book about truth, but
in this passage I think he captures his attitude succinctly:

Realities in themselves can be there fgr_anyone, whether

pragmatist or anti-pragmatist, only by being believed; they

are believed only by their notions appearing true; and their

notions appear true only because they work satisfactorily.

Satisfactorily, moreover, for the particular thinker's pur-7

pose. There is no idea which is ppg_true idea of anything.
Although the poet cannot tell whether it may be truth or a pebble of
quartz at the bottom of a well, the speaker in "Voice Ways" wants to
insist that some things are clear after all. The clarity is the clarity
of appearances of the immediate moment, however, and is subject to
weather changes, as the poem indicates. The poem shows that the lens
"my be momentarily improved so that there is, by way of greater resolu-
tion, a much clearer scene with a sharper focus and higher visibility.

The universal relativism suggested by quantum physics never-

theless does not rule out that in nature there are "roughly zones" to

134

be observed, another poem says. If we care at all about the earth and
its animals and trees we need to consider their capabilities beyond
their natural habitats. In "There Are Roughly Zones" a couple sits
discussing the fate of a fruit tree they have transplanted from a warm
climate to their cold northern zone. Such transplanting, the narrator
says, is like rules in human relations. Still, man often goes against
his sense of zones.
Why is his nature forever so hard to teach

That though there is no fixed line between wrong and right,
There are roughly zones whose laws must be obeyed?

(Poetry, p. 305)

The poet muses that if in spring the tree does not survive, "It can

blame this limitless trait in the hearts of men." Experimentation and

adventure are good, as long as nature's general rules are not violated.

If the laws of the zones are not observed, there will be inevitable
consequences.

Yet there is a momentary sense of certainty of the landscape
in "Voice Ways," as in "Moon Compasses" the scientific figure gives a
sense of certainty and assurance in the moment of happiness reflected

in the face of the loved one. Calipers are measuring instruments,

useful in measuring cones and spheres, invented by the Greek astronomer

Callipus who had proposed a calendar to allow the full moon to appear
on the same day in each month. In the poem, the poet goes outdoors
between two downpours of rain,

And a masked moon had spread down compass rays

To a cone mountain in the midnight haze,

As if the final estimate were hers;

And as it measured in her calipers,

The mountain stood exalted in its place,

50 love will take between the hands a face.
(Poetry. pp. 300, 301)

”'11

it

 

135

The final estimate of love may not be understood until later on, but
at the moment there is a brilliant certainty. Frost expressed the
irony between eventuality and felt certainty also in lectures and
letters as being fundamental to life: "The love belief, just the same,
has that same shyness. It knows it cannot tell; only the outcome can
tell."8 Yet the love belief in Frost has an inner Jamesean stubborn-
ness along with the shyness, the will guiding habit, strongly spending
the self, to make it come out right.
It is impossible to avoid the fact that in "Neither Out Far

Nor In Deep" Frost was satirizing the general ignorance of mankind.
He so bitterly despised the claim to more knowledge than was possible,
and the approach to knowledge with robot-like conformity, that he could
not disguise his hauteur, even in this closely-organized poem. The
poem contains a lens figure within a lens figure, and the imagery is
misleadingly pleasant. The first thing we note about the people of the
poem is their general lack of independent thought or behavior.

The people along the sand

All turn and look one way.

They turn their backs on the land.
They look at the sea all day.

(Poetry, p. 301)

These matter-of-fact statements lull the reader into a pleasant sense
of the sea shore scene. Finally a ship comes by for the people to see.
As long as it takes to pass
A ship keeps raising its hull;

The wetter ground like glass
Reflects a standing gull.

(Poetry, p. 301)

The sea itself is a lens, as is the ship's wetter which reflects back

the unenlightening image of a standing sea bird. The wetter is the

136

part of the ship's hull designed to divide the water, making it easier
for the ship to pass.

The people continue stupidly looking into the sea's mirror
which is always the same. Further, they have turned their backs on the
more varied and distinct land where more might be discovered.

The land may vary more;
But wherever the truth may be--

The water comes ashore,
And the people look at the sea.

(Eggtry, p. 301)

Frost does not have much fondness for the sea as a metaphor. Here it
is symbolic for the "sameness of the wood" or lack of distinct forms.
Frost is plainly annoyed with the people for not being drawn to more
variety. In reading a group of poems in connection with some remarks
about science at a Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, Frost said after
reading this poem, "That's about the telescope and the microscope.
You didn't know till I told you, did you."9

But to conclude this discussion of Frost's insistence that
we (science) could not know very much yet should not be discouraged in
our attempts toward knowledge (truth), it is interesting to note that
Einstein had written an extensive explanation of his theories and the

10

historical background of them for Scientific American in 1950. The

 

three poems just discussed, "Neither Out Far Nor In Deep,“ "Voice Ways,”

and "Moon Compasses" were all published in A Further Rangg, 1936.

 

Further, Frost had written in a letter to his grandson inquiring, I'Tell
me especially any ideas you have in mechanics" in the summer of 1936.
That is, Frost's uses of science in his poems did not wait upon articles

in Scientific American, nor popular knowledge of science--he was usually

137

ahead of it, at least for purposes of poetic metaphor. The attitude
of waiting until everybody agreed on a theory, then accepting it as
all the knowledge there is, was stultifying both to science and to
poetry. Nobody could know everything, and so should not be afraid to
make mistakes in the search. As Frost expressed the view:

I am so sure it is not given to man to be omniscient. There

will always be something left to know, something left to

excite the imagination of the pget and those attuned to the

great world in which they live.
Measuring and counting, for instance, Frost knew were merely part of
man's technology. They are tools, not truth systems. It is as impos-
sible for science to claim to know truth as for anyone, as James wrote,

to describe the absolute. Such claims are as foolish as staring all

day at the reflection of a seagull, Frost believed.

3. "Through the Interstices of Things Ajar"

In Eddington's essays on gravitation, he describes the way
the motion of molecules in matter keep things in their places. He
emphasized the spaces between molecules in even the most solid-looking
materials.

When we stand on the ground the molecules of the ground
support us by hammering on the soles of our boots with force
equivalent to some ten stone weight. But for thja we should
sink through the interstices of the stone floor.

Frost liked the word "interstices" well enough to place it in the poem
"On A Bird Singing in its Sleep," and we also have it recorded in his
conversation. When he was discussing synechdoctal symbols, the test

tube representing science and the cross representing religion, someone

asked, "But where does poetry come in?"

138

"It's on the loose. Poetry is out having fun. It's
interstitial!" was Frost's answer. If poetry is interstitial, and
birds' song evolves through the interstices of things ajar, then poetry
belongs in the same realm as evolution, just on the other side of
material events, or within the crevices of matter, I'on the loose" in
space. Reginald Cook interpreted Frost's sense of interstitial as
poetry existing within the very tissues of life. I would agree, with
the further meaning, in the strictest biological sense of between the
cells, and in the physics sense of between the molecules and atoms.

Even in atomic physics, the Bohr atom was an imaginative visualization
for activities or effects which cannot be seen. Frost was always inter-
ested in the difference between existence and non-existence, and what
science could say about it. Frost probably visualized the space between
cells as a sort of corridor through which present forms arrived and
through which future life evolves, although he did not think of the
universe as continuing forever nor of any form, including man, as exist-
ing forever.13 Frost combined his Bergsonian sense of the tunnel of
evolutionary consciousness with what he knew of the spaces within and
outside of matter, so to speak, and decided that the free in-between
characteristic of space was a good place for poetry to "be."

Space, of course, is also astronomical. In “Desert Places,"
Frost thought of the unknown areas of the psyche or soul as comparable
to the distances of outer space. The human psyche is more frightening,
therefore, than the spaces beyond stars, and he uses both landscape
and celestial figures to describe the sense of it. The snowy field he

looks into going past seems lonely: "A blanker whiteness of benighted

139

snow/With no expression, nothing to express." (Poetry, p. 296) The
scene reminds us again of Sister Bernetta's concept of the symbolic

landscape in modern poems. Further, "they" are not able to frighten
the poet by talking of the possibility of man's cosmic isolation.

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.

As in "Neither Out Far Nor In Deep," the "they" of the poem are in for
the poet's aggressive, adverse bravado. These sorts of ignoramuses
have very little sense of the present moment, and apparently an insuf-
ficient view of man's psyche. Although looking out far they have not
seen in deep. Scientists? Theologians? Humanists? We would not know
unless the poet told us, and it does not matter to the sense of the
poem. "They" are us.

Both in mind and body man is a creature of spaces, of dis-
tances, of blank unknown areas, just as in nature he perceives those
areas. One thing we all have in common is our material structure which
is similar to the structure of the physical world. The difficult poem,
"The Old Barn at the Bottom of the F095," is about man's common structure,
although it seems at first glance to be metaphorical for socio-political
commentary. Frost's sense of the interstitial is presented as a tramp
tells the poet of a particular barn both had slept in at some time.

Our details agreed.
We said Well twice to what we had in common,
The old barn at the bottom of the fogs.
Its only windows were the crevices
All up and down it. So that waking there
Next morning to the light of day was more

Like waking in a cage of silver bars.
(Poetry, p. 290)

140

The barn is the human body with its interstitial cell structure. The
light shines through the Wordsworthian prison bars, but with a differ-
ence: the bars are the interstices. The poem goes on to make much of
the poles or proplocks which shut the barn doors from the outside, and
other details of the men's separate journeys.

But "Afterflakes" gives perhaps the best metaphor of space
within matter of any in the poems. The poet looks at his shadow on
the snow, "In the thick of a teeming snowfall," and then turns to look
"back up at the sky" because that is where "we still look to ask the
why/Of everything below." (Poetry, p. 303) That is, science is now
(unserving outer space for answers, just as religion or astrology had
pictured the skies as heaven all along. The snowfall is "thick," sug-
gesting material, and "teeming," or full of matter in motion. The
shadow on the ground is a reflection of the self and appears to be even
darker than the snowstorm.

If I shed such a darkness,

If the reason was in me,

That shadow of mine should show in form
Against the shapeless shadow of storm,

How swarthy I must be.
(Poetry, p. 303)

Since the shadow looks dark on the ground, perhaps he is looking at it

against the wrong background, and had better look up against the sky

instead.

I turned and looked back upward.
The whole sky was blue;
And the thick flakes floating at a pause
Were but frost knots on an airy gauze,
With the sun shining through.

(Poetry, p. 303)

141

"Thick flakes floating at a pause" seems to me an excellent phrase for
representing physical matter, and a purposeful one, not just designed
to rhyme "pause" with "gauze." The pun on "frost“ may spoil the poem
for some, but as it ties the two metaphors together, definitely repre-
sents the poet himself, and is sufficiently subtle (as was Meserve's

tunnel in the frost) I find that it does not disturb the poem's flow. :-_
"Afterflakes," not a well known poem, benefits from a scientific inter- I

pretation even more than "Design" has from Jarrell's insightful criti- l

 

cism because it is less accessible without it. Through the lens of _
science the poem's metaphor becomes available. Without that, the poem _ ’

is a photographic description or a comment on good and evil in the self.

4. "To Say It Was a Lens"

The poems have many, not always obvious, figures of a duality
of sight. "My two eyes make one in sight," and "My two-pointed ladder
toward the sky," suggest the dual vision that pervades the poems: the
constant awareness of opposites. But if one thinks of the total human
body as itself a lens observing the world, the eyes are one in sight
and it is possible to follow Eddington's wit on the subject:

Our bodies are to be regarded as scientific instruments

used to survey the world . . . it is preferable to avoid a
hammering on one's body when it is being used as a channel
of scientific knowledge . . . Let us take a leap over a14
precipice so that we may contemplate Nature undisturbed.
Leap or not, it is impossible to get away from the hammering of matter
because motion and force are the very essence of matter or life. The

molecules will not stop hammering, and if the hammering did not go on

there would be no gravitation, no movement. Without movement there

142

can be no attraction and repulsion. The lens of science must move
too--it is the law. Jumping over a cliff will not violate the unalter-
able laws of motion with its characteristic gravitational behavior.

The numerous angles of Frost's lens on the world, his ambigu-
ities, may annoy some, but it is certainly an approach coherent with
the relativistic nature of the universe. If Frost had explained out-
right that the way to write poems was to be in motion and constantly
observant of the motions of the world, it would not have helped readers
with his poems, he thought. As the narrator says of the boy at the zoo:

Words are no good: to say it was a lens

For gathering solar rays would not have helped.
But let him show them how the weapon worked.

(Poetry, p. 293)

This, then, is how it works in one poem, "On the Heart's Beginning to
Cloud the Mind." The observer-lens is travelling by train.

Something I saw or thought I saw

In the desert at midnight in Utah,

Looking out of my lower berth
At moonlit sky and moonlit earth.

(Poetry, p. 290)

Light is present for purposes of observation. The poet sees a distant
farmhouse with its late light and muses about the lives of the people
on the farm. Some farm lights have gone out earlier, he thinks, and
are therefore "lost to me in my surface flight." But the light of the
little farm flickers, and he compares it to a flower. "It would flutter
and fall in half an hour/Like the last petal off a flower."

Its flickering may be due, however, to the interposing trees.
Certainly the lights suggest stars, and the poet's flight in the train,
defined as "surface" flight, is compared to travel in outer space by

telescope. The poem then concludes with the image of the lens:

 

143

This I saw when waking late

Going by at a railroad rate,

Looking through wreaths of engine smoke
Far into the lives of other folk.

(Poetry, p. 292)

As in "For Once, Then, Something" the indefinite word "something" appears
to indicate how doubtful what we see really is. What do we see through
wreaths of engine smoke, in the bottom of a well, at the far end of a
snow drift, out any window? Through our space probes, in our moving
scanning electron microscopes, within cyclotrons, what are we observing?

In "A Passing Glimpse," from West-Running Brook, 1928, the

 

subject is the rate of speed of the observer.

Wur
i'

I often see flowers from a passing car

That are gone before I can tell what they are.
I want to get out of the train and go back

To see what they are beside the track.

(Poetry, p. 248)

The poet names over some of the flowers he could not have seen. But,
what if it was a flower he had never seen before or a flower noone had
ever seen?

Was something brushed across my mind
That no one on earth will ever find?

Perhaps it was not a flower at all. He draws the ambiguous moral that
heaven gives glimpses only to those who are not in a position to see
closely. There is the sense that the mysterious something undefined

has its value, too.

5. "The Change to Darkness in the Sky"

"And, of course, everything is moving,"15 as Frost observed
in a central lecture. The sky that looked sunshiny in the morning

darkens at night. The wedding couple who can climb "back up a stream

144

of radiance to the sky" will move at a slower pace in later life. The
early imagination of the poet, symbolized by the moon in an early poem
sees the moon later as an ominous timepiece. Metaphors of time's slow
geological changes come, in the later poems, to symbolize a "lack of
joy or grief." In youth the poet had boasted of the moon:

I put it shining anywhere I please.

By walking slowly on some evening later

I've pulled it from a crate of crooked trees,

And brought it over glossy water, greater,

And dropped it in, and seen the image wallow,
The color run, all sorts of wonder follow.

(Poetry, p. 245)
The poet could move his lens at will, focus it as he pleased. He drew
it through the material world of the trees, enlarged it by reflection
and set it in motion. Later, at a slower pace, looking down "the sad-
dest city lane" Frost's imagination took a darker view of things, repre-
sented at a slower pace.

In "Acquainted With the Night," "I Could Give All to Time,“
and "Acceptance," we read Frost's later, hesitating tone of tragedy.
The poet as lens is present in each of these. "Acquainted With the
Night" is interesting to compare with "The Freedom of the Moon" because
both contain moons and because walking is used metaphorically in both
poems. In the later poem walking symbolizes metrics and time and is
interrupted by a cry that is itself interrupted.

I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet

When far away an interrupted cry

Came over houses from another street,

And not to call me back or say good-by;

And further still at an unearthly height

One luminary clock against the sky

Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.
I have been one acquainted with the night.

(Poetry, p. 255)

 

145

The poem is one of Frost's best descriptions of the inevitability and
relativity of time, and the time of the poem is astronomical and
quantum-oriented. Wallace Martin has noted the scientific dimension

of this poem. He came to the "purely textual conclusion that the 'time'
involved need not refer to earthly clocks. (Scientists refer to plane-

tary and molecular clocks as well.)"16

Indeed they do, and since
Martin noticed this fact in his explication, to biological clocks,
environmental clocks, organic clocks, and so on.

The poem says that in spite of all our time-keeping devices
we cannot tell exactly when, or exactly where, the interrupted cry in
the night (death) is going to take place. Frost said,

Everything is an event now. Another metaphor. A thing,

they say, is an event. Do you believe it? Not quite. I
gplleyfiigg zit512255v22t5¥$nt. But I like the comparison
Frost's use of the term "event" here refers to physics, of course. In
physics, clocks are measuring devices which attempt to place an l'event"
or particle in space and in time. In order to see what Frost had in
mind about the event of the cry in the night, I wish to describe one
of these physical clocks.

A physical clock may be set up in a "given inertial reference
frame," looking much like the scaffolding of a building. At each inter-
section the scientists affix little mirrors or timers which will regis-
ter the event when it appears. The clocks are calibrated, synchronized
by bouncing flashes of light between them. Each flash or tick of the

mirror-clocks is counted for the time it takes light to travel around

the frame, and adjusted to one meter of time. The event is discovered

 

146

in its path by three coordinates indicating its space position and the
fourth indicating its time position (the fourth being the clock-flash
nearest the event-particle). In physics the scientist and his clock
framework together are termed the observer, and they must move to keep
the event within the field of vision.18 Possibly Frost wanted to insist
that a particle was not an event until it had occurred, or come into a
situation or scene with another particle. But surely the interrupted
cry in the night of the poem is an event. The time-keeping of the
sound of feet stops. The moon is merely a time-keeper, reflecting light
like the little mirrors in the physical reference frame.
There are several excellent geological motion figures in “I

Could Give All to Time." Time is telescoped in order to make its effects
visible; it is speeded up.

To time it never seems that he is brave

To set himself against the peaks of snow

To lay them level with the running wave,
Nor is he overjoyed when they lie low.

(Poetry, p. 334)

Water is brought from mountain top to ocean level. The length of time
it takes is perhaps not more than a year, the time summer mountain snow
may take to melt and flow into the sea. The next stanza says that more
than water is changing--the whole mountains are moving into the sea:

What now is inland shall be ocean isle,

Then eddies playing round a sunken reef

Like the curl at the corner of a smile;

And I could share Time's lack of joy or grief
At such a planetary change of style.

(Poetry, p. 335)

The comparison of the human smile with the long period of time it takes

earth to alter its surface impression brings nature's immensity close.

 

147

What is a smile or a frown in comparison to the long buckling and
creasing of the earth's crust of rock and soil, to the sea's erosion
of the land, the poem asks. But the poet says he will not part with
certain things he has crossed "to safety with." He says he will not
part with the things he has kept: "What I myself have held," that is,
his beliefs.

Of these three excellent poems about time, the best-ordered
is "Acceptance." The only variations in its Shakesperean sonnet form
are the sentence lengths which either contain a caesura, or run on into
the next quatrain because of the motion figure. The poem begins at
sunset.

When the spent sun throws up its rays on cloud

And goes down burning into the gulf below,

No voice in nature is heard to cry aloud

At what has happened. Birds, at least, must know
It is a change to darkness in the sky.

(Egggry, p. 249)
The motion of the light is first up on to the cloud, then down into the
water or perhaps the "gulf" of night. The abrupt difference is called
simply "a change to darkness," and the birds nor any other voice in
nature protest it. The next motion figure is of a bird closing its eye:

Murmuring something quiet in her breast
One bird begins to close a faded eye.

Or overtaken too far from his nest,
Hurrying low above the grove, some waif
Swoops just in time to his remembered tree.

(Poetry, p. 249)

This second bird has arrived just in time for the ironic future. But
he does not sing against the darkness either.

At most he thinks or twitters softly, 'Safe!
Now let the night be dark for all of me.

 

148

Let the night be too dark for me to see
Into the future. Let what will be, be.‘

(Poetry, p. 249)

In the earliest printed version of the poem, Frost designated these
individual birds with the pronoun "its"--but in subsequent versions he
improved the poem by naming them "his" and "her" which allows the reader
to more closely identify with the attitude of the birds.

Science has been used to good advantage in the poems discussed
in this chapter. The metaphor of the moving lens extends throughout
the poems, and is closely associated with mirror and shadow symbolism
throughout, as in "Afterflakes" and in the reflection of the moon in
the water in "The Freedom of the Moon." To move with Frost's imagina-
tion is to travel through the interstices of the material world, and
to see the shadow of the self in that large mirror.19 But whether from
the Swedenborgian philoSOphy, Jamesean psychology, from the oriental-
influenced Transcendentalists, or from his own glimpses in telescopes
and microscopes, or all of these--Frost saw reality's strange shadow

in the moving, mutable forms of nature.

 

10.

11.
12.

13.
14.

149

Notes to Chapter Seven

"Education by Poetry," Selected Prose, p. 37.

 

Reginald L. Cook, Ihg Dimensions pf Robert Frost, p. 184.

Report by Thomas Wolfe, Washington Post, May 2, 1961 in Interviews,
p. 266.

 

John Archibald Wheeler, "From Relativity to Mutability," Revista gg
Fisica 23 (1974), p. 52.

Oliver Leslie Reiser, [he Integration 9f Human Knowledge (Boston:
Porter Sargent, 1958), pp. 34, 51.

 

 

Report by Allen Schoenfield, Ihg Detroit News, October 11, 1925 in
Interviews, p. 64.

 

William James, The Meanin pf Truth (Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press,-T97O , first edition 1909, p. 240.

"Education by Poetry," Selected Prose, p. 46.

 

Robert Frost: A Living Voice, ed. and intro. by Reginald Cook
(Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1975), see "An Inter-
est in Science," pp. 175-184. This book is a collection of readings
and talks given at the Bread Loaf Writers' Conferences by Frost.
The poems read were: "All Revelation," "The Wood-Pile," "One More
Brevity," "A Soldier," "Design," "Triple Bronze," "The Black Cot-
tage," "The Witch of Coo's," "Neither Out Far Nor In Deep," "The
Oven Bird," "An Old Man's Winter Night,” "Happiness Makes Up in
Height," "Tree at my Window," "The Most of It," "The Objection to
Being Stepped On," and "The Road Not Taken" (pp. 175-184). Frost
said, "People misunderstand me sometimes; they think I'm anti-
scientist" (p. 178).

 

 

Albert Einstein, "On the Generalized Theory of Gravitation: An
Account of the Newly Published Extension of the General Theory of
Relativity Against its Historical and Philosophical Background,"
Scientific American 182: 4 (April, 1950), pp. 13-17.

Interviews, p. 64.

Sir Arthur Eddington, Ihg Nature pf thg Ph sical World (1958; report
Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, l963l, p. l13.

“Wise Man," Colliers (April 27, 1956), p. 42.
Eddington, Physical World, p. 113.

 

15.
16.

17.
18.

19.

150

Selected Prose, p. 38.

Wallace Martin, "Frost's 'Acquainted With the Night,'“ The Expli-
cator 26:8 (April, 1968), item 4.

Selected Prose, p. 38.

 

Edwin F. Taylor and John Archibald Wheeler, S acetime Ph sics
(San Francisco and London: W. H. Freeman, 19 e Coordinates
of an Event," pp. 17-22.

On Jungian shadow-mirror imagery see Kathryn Gibbs Gibbons, “Quen-
tin's Shadow," Literature and Psychology 12:1, pp. 16-24; and
Lawrance Thompson, “Mirror—Adalogues in The Soundggg thg Fury,"
English Institute Essays (1954), pp. 84-106.

 

EIGHT. Motes and Immensity

1. "The Present Is Too Much for the Senses“

In the later poems, those published in A Witness Tree, 1942,
and in Steeple Bush, 1947, direct references to science increase. There
are nine poems commenting on the modern scientific situation. Several
of these concern geometry and mathematics, sixteen poems are either
about geology or astronomy or a combination of the two including botany,
and one poem is about what we now call ecology. Four or five concern
relativity theory. Frost had moved into a new period of his life, his
wife having died in 1938. Subsequent to that major loss in his life
was the generally unsettling climate of World War II. And Thompson
records many other personal losses and stresses the poet had suffered
up to this time.

But in spite of these drawbacks, Robert Frost was becoming

an American institution. He had received the Pulitzer prize for A_

151

152

Further Range in 1937, and numerous other awards including L. H. D.

 

degrees from three universities in 1936, membership in the American
Philosophical Society in 1937, and the Gold Medal for Poetry from the
National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1939. By the fall of 1943,
after many other awards and degrees, he was given an indefinitely renew-
able appointment as George Ticknor Fellow in the Humanities at Dartmouth
College where he would stay in residence until 1949. A Witness Tree
received a Pulitzer Prize in 1943. Yet this was only the beginning of
accolades, as the man who was too terrified to read his early poem, "A
Tuft of Flowers," to a small town men's club in New England gave read-
ings and talks to charmed audiences in colleges and universities
throughout the United States. Shortly he would be making a further

step into renown as poet-statesman.

There was no mistaking a change in the poetry beginning with
the 1936 volume. Helen Vendler has pointed out that pejorative reviews
of A Further Range by F. O. Matthiessen and Newton Arvin may not have
been entirely due to their political chip-on-the-shoulder attitudes.1
But what adverse critics did not allow, I think, was Frost's basic
change in life style at this time, nor did they recognize the larger
matter of audience that Frost was always so much aware of. Some dif-
ferences which begin to appear in the later poetry are l) a more direct
expression of personal likes and dislikes, 2) an even greater simplifi-
cation of poem and stanza form to accommodate satire, commentary or
lyric, and 3) more light verse written in a folksy mode. (Certainly
these changes were partly due to the emphasis Frost now placed on his

public career, but I think it is interesting to notice that although

153

they were fewer, some of Frost's best single poems are to be found in
the two later books, and in the last book.

But science is not always presented in the folksy satirical
manner of the later poems so annoying to the high-toned ear. In "Time
Out" two or three motion figures are interlaced to compare the slope
of a book, the slope of a mountainside, and the inclination of the head
of a person reading. On the side of a mountain, a man could read:

The flowers fading on the seed to come;
But the thing was the slope it gave his head:
The same for reading as it was for thought,

So different from the hard and level stare
Of enemies defied and battles fought.

(2043121. p. 356)

The effect of simplicity and compression in "flowers fading on the seed
to come" is produced, again, by the telescoping of time, and is a
figure that moves effortlessly within the larger figure of inclination
of mountain, book, and head of the man. This is an interesting figure,
too, for the problem of negentropy: the increment carrying over from
flower to seed being the elusive negentropic factor determining order
and complexification. In the poem there is a brief listing of flowers:

"dwarf cornel, goldthread, and Maianthemum." Again it is nature's

 

picture book the poet advises that we study, as he had recommended the
history book of the trilobite fossils in the rocks of Hyla brook.

In the important poem "All Revelation," Frost uses a metaphor
of childbirth to represent imaginative vision. In the first stanza, a
head "thrusts in as for the view," although where it comes from and
where it is going, "By what Cyb'laean avenue," is not known, and neither
do we know what "can of its coming come." The figure of this round,

nmying head persists through the poem, and together with its questions

154

is called in stanza two: "Strange apparition of the mind." Cyb'laen
curiously refers to the mother of gods in Greek and Roman lore who
"presided over mountain fastnesses and fortified places."2 Cybele was
a sort of mother nature figure.

The additional questions of the second stanza are where the
child will go and what it will leave behind. A geode figure is then
presented as symbolic for the human head. Its inner crust is entered
to suggest comparison with the advent of human consciousness. The
geode, a common perfectly round stone, has a hollow center with an
inner crust of crystal formations, or an inner dome. These crystals
form in various colors and reflect light well. A geode is strong and
more difficult to break than other stones because of its roundness and
hollow center.

But the impervious geode
Was entered, and its inner crust
Of crystals with a ray cathode

At every point and facet glowed
In answer to the mental thrust.

(Poetry, p. 332)

The poem does not say that a cathode ray entered the geode, it says
that the geode when open glows at every point and facet of its inner
crust of crystals, reflecting the light from the cathode ray. The
figure compares the power of the geological formation of the geode with
the evolution of human consciousness. The suggestion is that the human
head contains great powers of inner reflection (and a tough, fortressed
outer crust or skull) and possibly alludes to similarities in crystal
structure development to development in organic cell structure. The
final stanza describes the principal activity of the human eye-brain

child.

155

Eyes seeking the response of eyes

Bring out the stars, bring out the flowers,
Thus concentrating earth and skies

50 none need be afraid of size.

All revelation has been ours.

(Egetry, pp. 332, 333)
Existence is a conversation between man and nature in which the human
eye or lens brings out stars and flowers, seeing them in perspective.
That is, our physical vision impression changes the sizes of things so
that they do not overwhelm us. Seeing things in depth perspective,
arranged, they are in relation with each other and with man the observer.
Stars and flowers are put in scale with man.

Because vision is shared with other persons, "eyes sought the
response of eyes," the revelation of sight has more meaning. The whole
poem expresses a curious interaction of reflections in nature, and
between people. The scientist and theologian Teilhard de Chardin, whose
first discipline was geological archeology, expressed the reflection-
interaction process in nature this way. He comes close to what Frost
says in "All Revelation."

L'amour sous toutes ses nuances, n'est rein autre chose,

ni rein moins, que la trace plus ou moins directe marquee au
coeur de l'element par Convergence psychique sur soimeme de
l'Univers.
This movement of the universe inward upon itself, as in the brain's
development by creasing, or the human embryo's infolding definition,
or the eye's ability to differentiate and to share with other eyes the
sense of inward illumination that is the experience of love, both sci-
entist and poet have sensed and described.

Indeed there seems to be no lack of major lyrics in these two

later books of poems, especially of those using scientific figures

156

metaphorically. Another mathematical-astronomical figure appears even
in the poem's title, in "Happiness Makes Up in Height for What it Lacks
in Length.“ It seems as if a giant caliper sweeps across the earth as
the sun rises and sets in the poem.

When starting clear at dawn

The day swept clearly on

To finish clear at eve.

I verily believe

My fair impression may

Be all from that one day

No shadow crossed but ours

As through its blazing flowers

We went from house to wood
For change of solitude.

(Poetry, p. 333)
The day, measured by the height of the sun, has given the poet a "last-

ing sense of so much warmth and light." The flowers are the day's
flowers, not the field's, as the poem transfers an essentially special
figure (field) into a time figure (the day from dawn to eve) so that
time itself is kept by the "fair impression." The couple does not move
through space, they move from solitude to solitude in the same steady
state. They change their environment (from house to wood) but do not
move because of any impetus from it or attraction toward it. The sun
moves a much greater distance than they do. Theirs is the only shadow,
as if they are the shadow-measurer of a giant sun dial across the day.
The happiness of that day is as great as the distance from the earth
to the sun and therefore, mathematically, encompasses more than all the
days of the couple.

But in the poem "Carpe Diem“ the lovers are now older, and
overwhelmed with the plethora of experience around them. To them the

present moment is not as important.

157

But bid life seize the present?
It lives less in the present
Than in the future always,

And less in both together

Than in the past. The present
Is too much for the senses,

Too crowding, too confusing--
To present to imagine.

(Poetry. Pp. 335, 336)

Just as William James had said that it is almost impossible to capture
the moment of the present as it is speeding away, this couple had sensed
the difficulty of realizing their present moment. Further, the modern
and especially the contemporary periods of the twentieth century are
crowded full of so many new areas of conscious awareness, it is nearly
impossible to make sense of anything. Linda Wagner cites Theophile
Gautier who stated the problem well, I think for any age: "To be of
one's own time--nothing seems easier and nothing is more difficult.

One can go straight through one's age without seeing it, and this is
what has happened to many eminent minds." We may still be too close

to the modern period to see how well Frost saw it, but on this point

of the sense of the overcrowded consciousness, many are agreed in retro-
spect. Frost's involvement with science was certainly an important

part of the meaning of his own time, and many of his insights do extend
even to the present in that subject. I think it was partly because of
the confusions of his time, the sense of crowding, the sense of "too
much," that Frost used simple forms and a simplified diction that he
allowed to become, perhaps, too simple in the last poems. He almost
moves into the existential realm of Samuel Beckett's last work, except

that he must keep his American rural stance. However that may be,

158

Frost wrote his poems to be read by an audience he knew, and some of

the lyric power of Hyla brook had gone underground.

2. "The Seeming Facts of Light"

If Frost had not been a good self-satirist, one poem directly
about relativity theory and therefore about Einstein whom Frost admired,
would seem in poor taste. The poet imagines in "Any Size We Please"
that spacetime curvature was envisioned by a scientist who, feeling
lonely, stretched his arms out

to the dark of space,

And held them absolutely parallel

In infinite appeal. Then saying, 'Hell,'

He drew them in for warmth of self-embrace

He thought if he could have his space all curved,

Wrapped in around itself and self-befriended,

His science needn't get him so unnerved.
He had been too all out, too much extended.

(Egetry, p. 396)
But only several poems earlier, in "Skeptic," Frost places himself in
exactly the same situation, by saying that however immense the universe
may be, he sometimes feels it very cloSe and limited. "Skeptic,“ more-
over, contains a knowledgeable reference to the Doppler effect, or "red
shift" in astronomy, and also to the common laboratory physical problems
still derived from this not fully explained effect.
First of all, the poet's skepticism begins with a reference
to atoms being changed in color from black to white.
Far star that tickles my sensitive plate
And fries a couple of ebon atoms white,

I don't believe a thing you state.
I put no faith in the seeming facts of light.

(Poetry, p. 389)

159

This is not Frost's best poetry, but it is good science. A man named
Huggins used the Doppler principle to show that the star Sirius, Frost's
favorite, was receding from the solar system at a velocity of twenty-
,nine miles per second. This measurement was disputed as it did not
tally with Einstein's model of the universe. But in 1929 Edwin Hubble
confirmed that the universe was indeed expanding. He observed a con-
stant rate of speed at which all galaxies are departing from our own.
Earlier it was observed that patterns of spectral lines from stars
showed the kind of atoms they contained. This was shown in the labora-
tory by exciting atoms to emit light. Measuring the light from the
"fried atoms" gives the proper period of light in the spectral line.
A comparison of starlight and its laboratory counterpart then yields
the velocity of recession of the star being observed and tested. In
present physics this expansion of the universe suggested by the Doppler
effect, the shift from the violet to the red side of the spectrum, is
still technically hypothetical. There is no way to explain why the
galaxies would be receding; possibly there was a giant explosion at the
beginning. Frost continues to address Sirius, the “far star:"

I don't believe I believe you're the last in space

I don't believe you're anywhere near the last,

I don't believe what makes you red in the face
Is after explosion going away so fast.

(Poetry, p. 389)

So in this poem, as in "A Wish to Comply" Frost turns satirical wit
against modern astronomical physics, possibly the most sacredly revered

branch of science, revealing its own fundamental uncertainty.

160

Frost takes Einstein's part in the final quatrain of "Skeptic,"
saying that he himself often feels the universe is somehow limited,
bounded, and not as immense as the expansion theory might suggest.

The universe may or may not be very immense.

As a matter of fact there are times when I am apt

To feel it close in tight against my sense
Like a caul in which I was born and still am wrapped.

(Poetry. pp. 389, 390)
This suggests that the mind of man is yet like that of an unborn child.
There is much compression of knowledge in this poem, perhaps more than
the lyric form will allow in the diction of the first two quatrains,
yet the tone becomes more reflective in the last stanza.
Millikan's work was noted earlier in connection with entropy.

He received a Nobel prize in 1923 for measuring the charge on an elec-
tron and thereby showing its weight. Frost mentions this part of
Millikan's work in "A Wish to Comply," satirizing the fact that no one
can actually see the electron "mote" of energy.

Did I see it go by?

That Millikan mote?

Well, I said that I did.

I made a good try.

But I'm no one to quote.

ltis a wish to comply

And see as I'm bid.

I rather suspect

All I saw was the lid

Going over my eye.

I honestly think
All I saw was a wink.

(Poetry, pp. 391, 392)

This doggerel verse is similar in form to the much longer "Kitty Hawk“
poem of the final volume in which Frost also presents science commentary.

The satire here, however, must not lead us to think that the poet was

161

giving up his faith in the physical world. He is just having fun with
science again, and with the attitude of compliance he eschewed.

Two more brief examples will indicate Frost's increasingly
outright explanatory style. In "The Middleness of the Road," a geo-
metrical observation serves to compare the car with a terrestrial and
an astronomical sense of things. The car sometimes seems to go off
into the sky, or curve into the woods as it follows the road. But the
mechanical movement, although it copes with "near and far," in a sense,
has

almost nothing to do
With the absolute flight and rest

The universal blue
And local green suggest.

(Poetry, p. 388)

And in "The Lesson for Today" while expressing his dislike for ''social
planners" he explains why:

They've tried to grasp with too much social fact
Too large a situation.

(Poetry, p. 351)

The larger situation is what has made people confused, and has often
shattered our confidence. Scientific knowledge is impossible to grasp:

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.

(Poetry, p. 352)

Our relationship to the rest of the universe is simply overwhelming.
Nor can philosophers help any:

They are philosophers, and from old habit
They end up in the universal Whole
As unoriginal as any rabbit.

(Poetry, p. 354)

162

The truth of our time, Frost says in this poem, must be faced as the
reality of fragmentation. Regardless of what "science and invention"
may be able to do, man's time is limited. He must face "broken-off
careers;" and even "The earth itself is liable to the fate/Of meaning-
lessly being broken off." (Agepgy, p. 355) The lesson to be learned

comes more from the nature of the universe than from planners' remedies.

3. "In a Balearic Sling"

A Balearic sling is not an instrument for scientific measure-
ment, it is a sling shot, apparently used by natives of an island in
'the Majorica and Minorca islands of the Mediterranean. But the sling
shot is used in an astronomical figure in "A Loose Mountain," subtitled
"Telescopic." The poem says of the star-shower Leonid that is is "no
doubt" aimed at rebellious earth for having "taken artificial light/
Against the ancient sovereignty of night.“ The star-shower never
reaches the earth but is a hint to us that the "loose" mountain nearby
is something the "Outer Black" has kept in reserve for throwing at us,
as if from a sling shot.

The loose mountain lately seen to glint
In sunlight near us in momentous swing
Is something in a Balearic sling

The heartless and enormous Outer Black
Is still withholding in the Zodiac. . .

(Poetry, p. 361)

The figure is kinesthetically effective. The reader feels the heavi-
ness and sway of the mountain. Here Frost has combined geology and

astronomy, and a bit of anthropology, in one poem.

163

For archeology and anthrOpology, "A Cliff Dwelling'l and "To
an Ancient" will illustrate. In the first, a spot of black halfway up
a limestone wall turns out to be a cave, causing the poet to think of
the man who had to climb up to reach his home. "I see a callus on his
sole,‘I he quips, punning on calous soul. (Epetry, p. 392) And in the
poem addressed to the ancient man, Frost contemplates the remains of
the cave dweller's bones in lime, and the man's eolith,or flint instru-
ment, the poet notes that perhaps he gains nothing by using rhyme
instead of a more durable instrument. (Egegry, p. 382) The question
for Frost was always what would stay.

The poet's further struggle with the meaning of time in these
two later volumes appears in many more poems. In general, they seem to
observe, nature moves slowly and man moves rapidly. In a fast-paced
figure, the poet expressed his wish to communicate:

May I in my brief bolt across the scene
Not be misunderstood in what I mean.

(Egetry, p. 386)
The figure bolting across the scene emphasizes the difference in time
between the length of the individual life, and the extent of the whole
play. In contrast, in "Something for Hope" the slow-paced figure,
telescoped to show nature's movements clearly, moves regally, has
nothing hasty or busy about it:
So busy yourself with other things

While the trees put on their wooden rings
And with long-sleeved branches hold their sway.

(Poetry, p. 376)

Thus, in such imagery, combining nature and a hint of theatrical meta-
phor, Frost still intuited the movements of the world. Perhaps the

subtle sense of theatrics is self-ironic, Frost's role having become

164

a series of public performances. But the momentary clarifications of
human life persisted, and would persist brilliantly in either poems or

performances to the end.

4. "Beware of Coming Too Much to the Surface"

However much the poet loved to spend time looking into the.
picture book of nature, his demanding public career had become a fact.
But it was not a fact he had not foreseen. He had an extraordinary
ability to see ahead in his individual life, as he had in intellectual
matters. For instance, writing from England in 1915, he expressed the
wish for some sort of summer writing conference:

. or barring that I shall get me a farm where between

milking one cow and another I shall write Books 111 IV and V

and perhaps draw a few people about me in time in a sort of

summer literary camp.
In 1921 Frost began to participate in the Bread Loaf School of English
at the mountain campus, and suggested the writers' conference, according
to Untermeyer, in 1926.7 Although the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference
in Vermont was actually founded by others, Frost was sought out for it,
spending his first summer there in 1938, and almost every subsequent
summer. We might recall, too, that it was in Frost's high school vale-
dictory that he compared poetry with statesmanship as the opposites of

8 His dreams had a way of coming

thought and action, inseparably linked.
true; as he said, he did not believe in the future, he believed the
future in.

Yet I think one reason Frost became a public figure was that

he was indeed afraid of audiences. His immediate family was well

165

acquainted with this unusual fear of public appearances. He seems to
have somewhat lessened his anxiety sometime in 1938, and wrote to Lesley
in November of that year:
This afternoon at four thirty I shall be reading to a

Harvard audience and Tuesday evening I shall be reading with

you in Washington. My fear of these things beforehand has

largely left me. I have done my ten or fifteen this fall in

Ohio Pennsylvania New York and Massachusetts with almost

perfect calm. Something strange has come over my life. I

shall never be the scared fool again that I used to be.

Nothing can more than kill me.
Fame increased. In 1954 Frost was sent by the Department of State to
the World Congress of Writers in Brazil. He was given a medal by the
Theodore Roosevelt Society for Distinguished Service in American Litera-
ture in 1954, and in 1957 was sent again by the Department of State on
a good-will mission to London where he received three degrees in Great
Britain, and returned to accept more at home.

In 1958 there were more awards, in 1959 three academic degrees,

a college financial award, and a gala Waldorf-Astoria birthday dinner
for his eighty-fifth birthday that turned out to have been his eighty-

]0 With all this, a Vermont mountain was named for him, and in

sixth.
1959 President Eisenhower authorized that he be given a Congressional
Gold Medal. Frost was perhaps most visible to everyone in the United
States when, at age eighty-nine, he read his poem "The Gift Outright"
at the televised inauguration of President Kennedy. Just following

that event he was sent on another good-will mission, this time to the
Soviet Union to visit Premier Kruschev. He and Kruschev talked about

their mutual interests in grandchildren and the future. Frost proposed

that the two countries "compete" in the arts and in cultural exchange

166

rather than in military ways. "We've laid out rivalry in sports,
science, art, democracy," he said. "That's the real test, which demo-
cracy's going to win?"H This visit took place in August preceding
the October Cuban missile crisis, during which fearful time Kruschev
averted a nearly unavoidable world disaster by withdrawing nuclear
weapons from Cuba.

The young President and the elderly poet died in the same
year, 1963. On one occasion, Kennedy made a speech in which he honored
not only Frost, but as Frost would have approved, all the arts, remark-
ing about this country's attitude toward artists and their value:

In honoring Robert Frost we therefore can pay honor to

the deepest sources of our national strength. That strength

takes many forms, and the most obvious forms are not always

the most significant. When power leads man toward arrogance,

poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows

the areas of man's concern, poetry reminds him of the rich-

ness and diversity of his existence. The artist, however

faithful to his own personal vision of reality, becomes the

last champion of the individual mind and sensibility against

an intrusive society and an officious state . . . . And I

look forward to a world which will be safe, not only for 12

democracy and diversity, but also for personal distinction.
If former presidents of the United States may be counted, surely Frost
was not misunderstood in what he meant in his brief stay on the scene.
Frost's attainment in making poetry, to be distinguished from popular
verse, noticed by the general public was surely almost unique in his
time, and a contribution to the modern literary world. But to provide
a balance to his wish to be understood in "The Fear of Man," he wrote
"The Fear of God" about the experience of being a public figure. In
it he advises that if one becomes elevated from "Nowhere up to Somewhere,"

a.distinctly American pattern, "Stay unassuming," he says, and

167

Beware of coming too much to the surface
And using for apparel what was meant
To be the curtain of the inmost soul.

(Egetry, p. 385)
That one must keep his "inmost soul" protected from public view was a
belief that prevented Frost from being direct to one and all on subjects
he considered private. In this, perhaps, he was a Puritan of the first
order.
It was entirely true that the present was too much for the
senses, as Heisenberg, for one, had declared in 1945: "An understanding

"1? But Frost

of the physical world in a primary fashion is impossible.
still wanted the scientists to try to explain their findings, and went
on reading what he could of new developments in science to keep in touch
with nature's gradual revelation. Meantime nature's bard had become
also his nation's bard. It had been in 1913 that Frost, writing to his
friend John Bartlett from England, stated:
I expect to do something to the present state of litera-

ture in America. That is why I don't want any slaps at my

friends at home.14
And he did that. I think, although the passage preceding this one
speaks of his poetic style, here Frost meant also the whole state of
literature, its status in relation to the rest of society. It was not

a very obvious form of change, but it was a difference for the future's

sake.

10.
11.

12.

13.
14.

168
Notes to Chapter Eight

Helen Vendler, "Robert Frost: [he Years 9f Triumph 1915-1938 by
Lawrance Thompson," The New York Times Book Rev1ew, August 8, 1970,
p. l ff.

 

 

 

Charles Mills Gayley, The Classic Myths (New York: Blaisdell,
1963), first edition 1893, rev. and enl. 1911, pp. 44, 59.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Le Phenomene Humain (Paris: editions
du Seuil, 1955), p. 294. "Love, in all'its subtleties, is nothing
more or less than the indirect track made through the center of
the material by the psychical convergence of the universe upon
itself." (my translation)

 

Linda Welshimer Wagner, 1113 Poems pf William Carlos Williams: A
Critical Study (Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan UniVersity Press,
1964), p. 2.

 

Taylor and Wheeler, §pacetime Physics, p. 156.
Letter to Sidney Cox, 2 January 1915, Selected Letters, p. 149.

The Letters pf Robert Frost to Louis Untermeyer (New York: Holt,
Rinehart and Winston, 1963), pp. 200, 201.

Harris, "Robert Frost, Science," p. 18.

Family Letters, pp. 199, 200.

 

Selected Letters, Thompson's chronology preface, pp. xlvii to xlviii.

Quoted by F. D. Reeve, Robert Frost in Russia (Boston: Little,
Brown, 1964), p. 112.

 

John F. Kennedy, "Poetry andPower." Atlantic 213:2 (February, 1964),
pp. 53, 54. This issue is dedicated to Frost. It contains an arti-
cle by Archibald MacLeish, and other related material.

Mason, Main Currents in Scientific Thought, p. 407.

Letter to John Bartlett, 6 August 1913, Selected Letters, p. 88.

 

NINE. Clarification and Departure

1. "An Adventure by Science"

Robert Frost's final volume of poems, lg tfle Clearing, 1962,
explains the outcome of his use of science, and his thoughts about
science as they relate to motion. The lyric voice of the poet, although
not so frequent as in the early and middle, and even the later, poems,
is still strong in at least six poems in which science is evident.
Further, these six lyrics have a greater value than many of the earlier
best lyrics because they carry the authority of knowledge and belief
pursued over a lifetime, as well as a winnowing of Frost's lyric style
in which only the most satisfying grain remains. Each of these six
poems centers upon a concern already discussed here. "The Pod of the
Milkweed" is metaphorical for entropy or waste in the universe; "Closed
for Good" presents the poet himself as motion figure; "Escapist--Never,"

being patterned on Emerson's "Brahma," gives a figure of existence

169

170

itself; "The Draft Horse" is a metaphor of evil in the universe; "Ends"
deals with the ambiguous outcome of love; "Questioning Faces" gives a
glimpse of beauty in nature as seen through a window-lens; and "In
Winter in the Woods,‘I the final poem of the book, is a comparison of

the poet's own figure with nature's figure or design.1

Many of the
other poems in the volume have some lyrical lines, and many are not
meant to be lyrics at all, but these six do sing in Frost's unmistak-
able tone.
Yet it is in the public talks, and in the least lyrical of
the last poems that we find some of Frost's most direct commentary on
science. His discussion of his poetic theme of mind entering matter
became more frequent and more elaborated as he compared the process to
science's discoveries about the material world. He took up the problem
of increasing technology. or materialism, and its effects in our culture.
Contrary to what might be expected of a simple New England farmer-poet
who liked handmade ax handles and made his own lap desk out of three
pieces of wood and a stick, Frost became the proponent of technological
ingenuity: "Man's ingenuity was good." He took a problem-solving,
rather than a reactive, view of continuing scientific exploration.
And it's been an adventure by science, and the confi-
dence in science that the spirit can save itself and live
in material things.

And you know where we have got the idea? Well, the
Lord God Himself materialized, didn't he? He ventured into
material existence; he substantiated; he took on flesh. And
we've just taken on, by science and the confidence in the
spirit, that it can't be lost in science. That's been us.
That's what I'm going to talk about. And the motion has

been west by noEth into materiality. See. All metaphors,
and all things.

171

This statement, given at the University of North Carolina in 1957,
compresses Frost's thinking about the relation between science and
motion into several metaphors. First he gives the religious metaphor
of energy entering matter, then the historical figure of the direc-
tional migration of knowledge. He tells his audience that all this
thinking is metaphor based in the material world of "things."

The material world has the special significance to Frost that
he resented, as we noted in his defense of Bergson, any disparagement
of it. He especially scoffed at the idea of non-existence. Existence,
plainly, is all there is. In "A Never Naught Song," in "Version," and
in "Escapist--Never" he makes the point clear. The first poem, in
trimeter couplets declares: "There was never naught/There was always
thought." Matter, he explains, is all one, and yet divided, a concept
more easily grasped by the poetic than the Aristotelian mind; and a
universal intelligence has it all thought out.

Matter was begun--

And in fact complete,
One and yet discrete
To conflict and pair.
Everything was there,
Every single thing

Waiting was to bring,

Clear from hydrogen
All the way to men.

(Poetry, p. 426)

The universal secret has conceptualized existence "Out of coming in/
Into having been!" There is nothing, not even the time problem, that
has not been taken into account, although we may not understand it:
"And this gist of all/Is so infra-small/As to blind our eyes/To its

every guise." By this Frost means that physicists are still seeking

172

smaller event forms: quarks or something yet smaller and more elusive,
now. Such particle-events could be traced only by their effects. They
were no more than motions appearing within measurement range, making
perhaps a quiver or stir. If thought is motion, one might say they are
no more than thoughts, or deductions made by the scientists. "So the
picture's caught/Almost next to naught/But the force of thought." These
event-particles move quickly into "having been," and nothing is left
but the track or figure they made.
The unfinished poem "Version" is also concerned with the
origin of matter and the denial of non-existence. (Poetry, p. 427)
Lathem notes that it was originally written to include lines 9 and 10,
and 13-16, although these lines do not occur in the original published
version of "Version." The rejected lines do not improve the poem, but
they show, especially by line 16, "That's how matter mattered," clearly
what the subject of the poem is. The metaphor is of an archer hunting
for "non-existence." The shaft he shoots is blunted against non-
resistence, the joke being that in curved spacetime the object will
return to where it started, eventually. Further, according to Edding-
ton's description of the Fitzgerald contraction principle, the shaft
will change its length as it travels (the same principle as the Doppler
effect). It is motion that changes the rod in Eddington's description:
By setting in motion the rod with all the little electric

charges contained in it we introduce new magnetic forces

between the particles. Clearly the original balance is upset

and the average spacing between the particles must alter until

a new balance is found. And so the extengion of the swarm of
particles--the length of the rod--a1ters.

173

Thinking of the archer's shaft as the rod of the Fitzgerald contraction,
then, Frost makes the point that physically there can be no such dis-
covery as non-existence. The shaft gets blunted on non-existence, after
all.

In “Escapist--Never" the influence of Emerson's "Brahma" is
apparent in the line, "Any who seek him seek in him the seeker." The
shape of the universe becomes metaphorical for the stoic or Buddhistic
attitude that:

His life is a pursuit of a pursuit forever.

It is the future that creates his present.
All is an interminable chain of longing.

(Epetry, p. 421)
I presume that the poem is in riddle form and the answer to the riddle
is: man.
A further poem of Frostian cosmology is "Accidentally on
Purpose." The universe is pictured, humorously, as a sort of mobile
sculpture of the sort popular in the 1950's when it occurred to artists
that motion might be added to structural art. It also reminds of a
model of the atom shown in planetarium displays, probably a simplifica-
tion of the Bohr model.
The universe is but the Thing of things,
The things but balls going round in rings.

Some of them mighty huge, some mighty tiny,
All of them radiant and mighty shiny.

(Poetry, p. 425)

The purpose of the universe is discernible in its form: it is going
around. Williams' "no meaning but in things," becomes "no meaning but
in the motions of things." Yet, says Frost, for us the best guide is

human feelings for human behavior, not intellection.

174

And et for all this help of head and brain
How happily instinctive we remain,

Our best guide upward further to the light,
Passionate preference such as love at sight.

(Egetry, p. 425)
For man, guides as suggested by James and Bergson, of passionate intui-
tion, guides in the psychological dimension, are of utmost importance
for human beings. It is interesting to have this comment from Frost
so late in his life.

But "Kitty Hawk" tells us "in three-beat phrases" of an
important experience the poet once had near the beach where the first
successful airplane flights were made by the Wright brothers. Lesley
Frost recently wrote, “Would that my father might have lived to see the
launchings to the moon--and the arrivals there. He had consuming
interests in astronomy and flight."7 In the poem Frost recounts his
experience at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina (or, rather, at Nags Head and
the Outer Banks near there, as deliniated in the biography by Thompson)
where, as he walked along the beach, he remembered that the moon was
full.

And its being full

And right overhead

Small but strong and round,
By its tidal pull

Made all being full.
(Poetry, p. 433)

And in Part Two of the poem he says that our ability to fly in machines
means, "Mind you, we are mind," and that we have simply extended our
imagination into material inventions. Further explaining our peculiar

proclivity for complexifying matter, he says,

 

175

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.

(Poetry, p. 435)

The poem goes on, elaborately as the form will allow, to say that the
ethereal has gone with "one mighty charge" into matter in recent Western
history. And we have made the universe intellectually ours to the most
remote "Swirl of neon-lit/Particle afloat." The next section of the
poem is titled "The Holiness of Wholeness" and says, essentially, that
we should have more confidence in ourselves, arguing again for synech-
doctal metaphorical thought. We should not be frightened into not at
least trying to use our minds.

The becoming fear

That becomes us best

Is lest habit-ridden

In the kitchen midden

Of our dump of earning

And our dump of learning

We come nowhere near
Getting thought expressed.

(Poetry. pp. 441, 442)

In the last section, "The Mixture Mechanic," mechanics being “the old
Cartesian word for physics, Frost gets to his favorite insight that
because everything is in motion we must respect the laws of motion in
our own actions, and that this fact about the universe will guide us

in physics and technology and everything else. "Action," after all,

176

"is the word." We must keep on with the adventure by science, maintaining

the humility to obey the laws of nature.

2. "A Line of Shadowy Tracks"

In his last book, Frost allows himself a more complete identi-
fication with his concept of the figure as an object in motion through
time and space. This is how he pictures himself in the signatory poem
of the volume. In a three-quatrain tetrameter lyric, the poet fells a
symbolic tree with a symbolic ax, and returns making tracks through the
snow that the setting sun has left some afterglow to light.

At four o'clock I shoulder ax,
And in the afterglow

I link a line of shadowy tracks
Across the tinted snow.

(Poetry, p. 470)
The tracks make a “shadowy" reflection of the self, as in earlier poems.
The poet's movement has been made through spacetime. The tracking is
the record of his identity, a signature, a last printed figure.

And in "Closed for Good" Frost says that when he is finished
making footprints into winter, other creatures of nature will walk in
the same paths he took. The last stanza shows us some tracks:

And so on into winter

Till even I have ceased

To come as a foot printer,
And only some slight beast

So mousy or so foxy
Shall print there as my proxy.

(Poetry, p. 416)

But the poem has given figures overlaying figures. In the first stanza,
there is a road cut through the countryside. The people who formerly

raced by, cutting the road "to last" are missed now by the poet:

 

177

And come not back with steed
And chariot to chide

My slowness with their speed
And scare me to one side.
They have found other scenes
For haste and other means.

(Poetry, p. 415)

Against this scene of the past, the foot-printer figure of the last
stanza is clearly symbolic of considerable time having past, a lifetime.
But, in between in autumn, the road is covered with a "priming coat of
leaves." The poet then tells a tree silently that because there is
less sun in the late autumn,

The prospects are in white

It will be further done,

But with a coat so light

The shape of leaves will show
Beneath the brush of snow.

(Poetry, p. 416)

These may all be considered mirror images, suggesting the layers of
reality in time as the poet remembers the world, as he moves, making a
figure, into winter along the country road. We may recall that “In
White" was the first title of "Design" and that Frost's wife's maiden
name was White. It is one of those unexplainable lyric touches that
the first snowfall is said to allow the shape of leaves to be still
visible, unless we recall Frost's fondness for the forms of things:
for distinctness. And it is with the poet's light touch of humor that,
when his own footprints have disappeared under heavy snow, only a very
lightweight sort of animal dares to venture over them--others might
sink into the heavy snowdrifts. A number of other poems in the final
volume make specific comments on scientific subjects, but probably

"Kitty Hawk" and others cited here best illuminate the attitude Frost

178

had toward science in his last years. To intuit nature's motions,
whether slight or astronomical, seems still to have been the poet's

intention.

179
Notes to Chapter Nine

Poetry, pp. 4ll, 4l5, 42l, 443, 444, 445, and 470 ff.

"Frost in the Carolinas," recorded and ed. Richard J. Calhoun, Ih§_
South Carolina Review 7:l (November, l974), p. 5. Frost's talk was
delivered at the University of North Carolina, Spring, l957.

Eddington, Physical World, p. 5.

Lesley Frost, "Robert Frost Remembered," p. 17.

TEN. A Shaping Metaphor of Motion

1. "I Wait for Form"

Frost's prosody, the metrical arrangements, the stanzaic and
whole poem arrangements, is best considered as a framework in which
the whole poem's structure rests. The full and actual formal arrange-
ment of the whole canon of the poetry depends upon much more than the
formal elements of prosody. We can be led astray by examining metrics
alone. Meaning must be taken into account in each phrase or figure
because the sense, or the meaning in the sound of the voice, interacts
with meter, line, stanza, or other prosodic elements to make, as Frost
pointed out, another thing altogether. But with such cautions in mind,
one is free to be astonished by the number of forms from traditional
verse Frost used, and to applaud, with Lawrance Thompson, Frost's "excep-
tionally fine understanding and mastery of technical possibilities," and

. . . . . . . . l
hlS "extraordinary range in metrical and stanzaic modification."

180

181

It was in Lawrance Thompson's early study of the poetry in
1942 that the first and only ample analysis was made of prosodic ele-
ments in Frost. Furthermore, Thompson took into account some of the
modifications Frost made upon forms (although a full interpretation was
not possible at that early date) such as the sound of sense, the empha-
sis placed upon metaphor, and something of the relationship between
these and meter or stanza and poem form changes. But I think it should
also be remembered that Frost did not make the interpreter's job easy
by pointing out to him the importance of, for instance, synechdoche and
motion imagery. As we have seen, clues about style were often tucked
away in letters to family and friends, and Frost often dodged helping
the literary critics find him out. Thompson, who has probably done
more helpful ground-breaking work in Frost scholarship than anyone else,
wrote of the difficulty one finds in the poems even after long study:

But I can't get the slipperiness out of it. There are

times when I despair of explaining to anyone else what really
still puzzles me about Frost's slipperiness. And some people
think he is so charming because his poems are so--easy to
understand!2
Because of this slipperiness, the further one goes into Frost studies,
the greater is the hazard of sinking through the snowdrift. It is pos-
sible to point out the nature of some of the difficulties.

The difficulties exist because, first of all,Frost adopted
poetic form just as he found it: then his modifications created an
irony against the established or expected forms. He also adopted ideas
just as he found them, and used them as framework ideas within which to

modify, to create some entirely new thought. We have noted what he did

with the grindstone theory. Even with religion, as Nancy Joyner has

182

pointed out, Frost took popular misinterpretations of biblical writings
as given, and was then able to form witticisms which allowed fresh
interpretations of biblical passages.3 Sometimes when Frost speaks,

in his poems and talks, as if he is fully taken in by a popular miscon-
ception, he is merely describing it so that he can modify it later in
some way. It does take all sorts of schooling to get accustomed to

this sort of fooling. Anybody can get lost in the layers of meaning.
That is why the study of any one element of the poems, or of the prosody
alone, will simply lead us astray.

In the interpretation of Frost's poems up to this point we
have looked at not only ideas which arose from scientific knowledge,
but also sometimes at the poem form, and sometimes at some event of the
poet's life or personal historical situation. But in poetry it seems
to me that what we feel the force of mostly is the formal elements. It
is the sense of form in a poem, the result of that esthetic faculty in
man that enables him to intuit the large and small arrangements of the
universe, Bergson says,--it is that manner of organization that draws
us to poetry rather than, say, to dissertations. Two large ingredients
go into poems, after all: knowledge and organization of knowledge.

The imagination simply integrates all that.

In Frost's life, as in the form of his poems, "action is the
word." (Poetry, p. 442) In the form of the poems, as we have noticed,
both through the movement of feeling and thought in the stream of con—
sciousness, motion imagery becomes the most frequent and significant
prosodic element. The motion figure is almost always coherent with the

sound of sense of the human voice, and it also sometimes serves as a

183

selected natural object behaving in a revelatory way. The motion figure
is not exclusively kinesthetic: it incorporates other kinds of imagery
such as sight, sound, scent, kinesthetic pressure or touch, and taste.
And it can speed up or slow down time for whatever purposes the poem
has. It can reveal something about time and, obviously, by its speeding
up and slowing down,the motion figure modifies the metrical framework.
Meanwhile, from the other approach, the metrical framework with its
accompanying voice sounds modifies the motion figure. This plurality

of sound and movement that must become a unity in the successful poem,
may be illustrated, for instance, in "Acceptance" wherein the rapidity
of the birds' movements creates a tension, a balance, or a "strain of
music," to use Frost's term, against the solemn voice sounds accented
fully on each syllable to slow the meter in the closing "Let what will
be, be." (Poetry, p. 460)

In looking back over the volumes of Frost's poems for their-
prosody, I want to keep in mind some of the qualifications just men-
tioned. In the three volumes up to l9l6, including the small, privately
printed Twilight, all the prosodic elements to be employed throughout
the poetry are already present. Several devices were dropped early,
notably archaisms and personifications, but other than these none were
either dropped or added, although emphases were changed. In the inscrip-
tion to the one extant copy of Twilight, Frost mentions Bliss Carman's
praise of "My Butterfly," the only poem of that early volume he later
republished, and remarks of the little book as a whole, "A few scattered
lines in it are as much mine as any I was ever to write."4 Other poems

in it are "Twilight," "An Unhistoric Spot," "Summering," and "The Falls."

184

Frost's tantalizing observation may refer to lines such as the final
one from "Summering," a poem about sleeping in summertime: "I could
not slumber if the wains were out!" because, although the archaisms
"slumber," and "wains" (wagons) are used, the voice sound of sense
breaks through. In spite of archaic words, the diction of the line is
basically idiomatic, ending in the preposition “out." The refrain line
of the quatrains in "The Falls" is also sound of sense and idiomatic,
ending in a substantive preposition, the verb changing from present to
past tense in the second quatrain: line 4, "And the falls come down
there," and line 8, I'And the falls came down there," changing only the
verb tense.

But almost entirely uncharacteristic in both form and meaning
is the last stanza of "Twilight" which is pure Swedenborgian mysticism,
so rhapsodic as to seem to dissolve both scene and poet before our very
eyes:

By invocation, 0 wide silentness
Thy spirit and my spirit pass in air!
They are unmemoried consciousness,

Nor great nor less!
And thou art here and I am everywhere!

(Twilight, facsim., n. pag.)

Perhaps this poem was reason enough for Frost to ever afterwards insist
on the lyric being placed in a scene, in a setting, and given theme to
steady it down. The rendering of such pure lyrical or mystical expe-
rience simply did not communicate without the ordinariness of common
day to balance it. The violation of the old dramatic unities of time,
place, and action is too extreme. But surely no one who loves Frost's

poems can read Twilight without being touched by the evidence that

 

185

even so so sophisticated a modern poet was, at the start, almost totally
innocent of his eventual technical competence. Yet it was interesting
to Frost to later recognize something of his own style in only a few
lines, but they are there, at the beginning of his attempt.

A Bgyis Will_showed, as against other new poetry being pub-
lished in London at the time, Frost's preference for traditional metri-
cal forms. Stanza lengths were regular, usually quatrains or sometimes
five line stanzas. The preferred poem forms were the ballad, the ode,
and the sonnet. Thompson categorized most of these poems as dramatic,
descriptive, or reflective lyrics. The basic meter is usually iambic
pentameter, as in "The Trial by Existence" which uses rhyme, and in "A
Prayer in Spring" which has four iambic pentameter quatrains rhyming
aabb--or the two couplet quatrain as in Shelley's “The Sensitive Plant."
"Into My Own" is also a poem of couplet-rhyming quatrains, but is
basically a Shakespearean sonnet, the usual form of it having quatrains
rhyming abab. But throughout, Frost will vary forms slightly, and the
sonnet will expand and contract, be added to, and subtracted from, to
make briefer or longer poems which are essentially three verse para-
graphs with a final set off conclusion or commentary. The imagery of
A Bgylg Will, as throughout, is primarily in the kinetic mode. To
present the kind of stillness he sensed in "Twilight," Frost presents
in "Stars" a marble Athena, a common ornament in Victorian homes:
"Minerva's snow-white marble eyes/Without the gift of sight."

Little bits of quoted conversation between people, and between
flowers and breezes, had already appeared in some of the poems of the

first volume, but in North gf Boston, published the following year,

186

came the long dialog narratives in the verse form of Shakespeare,
Milton, and the English Romantics: blank verse. Across its basic
iambic pentameter, by using dialog in dramatic settings, the poet was
able to get the sound of sense effect he wanted, and to establish that
curious ironic truth-of-feeling sense rendered from idiomatic speech

in tension with regular meter. He dedicated the book: “To EMF: This
Book of People" which I think suggests the psychological realism he
intended to capture in it. The best known among the psychological poems
are "Mending Wall," "The Death of the Hired Man," "The Mountain," I'A
Hundred Collars," "After Apple-Picking," and "The Wood-Pile." He even
named some of the characters, such as Mary and Warren, in "The Death
of the Hired Man." It becomes clearer even than in the first volume
that the imagery is meant to be symbolic, and that it is almost always
phrased metaphorically. After_flgrth.gf.§g§tgg, Frost mixed in more of
the simple lyrics with the psychological narrative dialogs or monologs,
but he never again wrote anything as "pure" as "Twilight."

In Mountain Interval, l9l6, the poems are still primarily in
blank verse, including shorter poems such as "An Old Man's Winter Night,"
interesting for its internal consonance: "Birches," replacing rhyme
with repetition of end words, and longer narratives such as "Out, Out--,"
and "Snow," a very long unrhymed dialog: but important poems also
appear again in other regular forms. "The Road Not Taken," written for
Frost's friend Edward Thomas, is four five-line stanzas in iambic tetra-
meter, while "Hyla Brook“ is iambic pentameter with a complexly varied
scheme. Sometimes, in these poems, Frost uses the neo-classic rhymed

couplet for serious, sometimes for light or satiric verse. This form

 

 

187

anticipates his later New England Primer verse, sometimes called
doggerel either in the technical or pejorative sense.5 In the Hill

Wife sequence in this volume, the form varies in each poem, presenting

a successful virtuosity of sequential psychological lyrics. "Brown's
Descent" is done in the regular abcb rhyming ballad stanza appropriate
for the mock heroic tale, and "The Bonfire" is a long but suspenseful
blank verse narrative having end words and rhyming sounds often repeated
several lines apart, binding the story loosely.

The volumes New Hampshire, l923, and West-Running Brook, l928,
comprise what I have called the middle poetry. In New Hampshire, no
new forms are introduced except in "For Once, Then, Something" which
Thompson calls basically a hendecasyllabic Latin form; and there are
other usual variations on basic forms. Both "The Ax-Helve" and "The
Star-Splitter" are in blank verse narrative, as is the shorter “The
Need for Being Versed in Country Things." In West-Runniflg Brook the
title poem is blank verse narrative dialog, the characters having long
speaking parts as if saying their own poems together. Some other not-
able poems are "Spring Pools“ with two rhymed six-line stanzas, "A
Soldier," a superb regular Shakespearean sonnet, "The Armful“ in heroic
couplets, and "Acquainted With the Night" in four three-line stanzas
ending in a couplet, a variant sonnet that Thompson points out is in

terza rima, meaning the tercets have interlocking rhyme. Although not

 

an especially easy form to use, it supports one of Frost's best poems.

A Further Range may be considered a pivotal volume between

 

the middle and later poems. I have drawn upon it primarily to show the

fully-realized shaping metaphor of the moving lens in one grouping of

188

its poems. The difference between the volumes up to this one, and the
later and last volumes, parallels the change in Frost's life from
private to public, as we have already noted. YetA_Further Range con-
tains superb poetry with continuing apt variations in metrics. "Two
Tramps in Mud-Time" is a narrative in iambic tetrameter with anapestic
variation, composed of nine eight-line stanzas. “Desert Places" is
essentially a Shakespearean sonnet with two additional lines. "The
Master Speed" is a regular Shakespearean sonnet. “Design" is a perfect
Petrarchan sonnet, with the first eight-line stanza being a presenta-
tion and the sestet a reflection on it as in the strict ancient form
that influenced many of Frost's poems. “Provide, Provide“ has seven
tetrameter tercets rhyming aaabbbccc and so on, with an epigrammatic
ending. Although Frost continued to lean heavily on blank verse, his
variations on regular metrical and poem and stanza forms still produced
some of his most memorable work. Blank verse was considered a regular
form. It was the new phenomenon of free verse Frost did not attempt.

In A Witness Tree, l942, the memorability of poems written

 

in regular forms continues. "The Silken Tent" is a regular Shakes-
pearean sonnet of noted excellence. Seven quatrains rhyming heroically
comprise "The Quest of the Purple-Fringed" written in Frost's basic
ballad style. "The Subverted Flower" is rendered in trimeter lines of
irregular rhyme; and "The Gift Outright" is in blank verse. In Steeple
Beeh, l947, "Directive" is in masterful sustained blank verse. As the

volume begins to lean more toward political and social commentary,

189

although there is not very much of that, there are a number of rhymed
couplet satires.

Some fine poems with regular metrical forms in the last vol-
ume, lg the Clearing, 1962, are "The Draft Horse," in five trimeter
quatrains, "In Winter in the Woods Alone," (title taken from the first
line by Lathem) in three tetrameter quatrains, and the lighter "Peril
of Hope" in three dimiter quatrains. "Pod of the Milkweed" is in two
long stanzas of variant rhyme, and illustrates Frost's expanded Pet-
rarchan sonnet form. That is, the basic presentation is followed by
reflection, yet there are a number of additional lines in each section.
Many of the other poems are epigrams or light verse in dimeter heroic
couplets. The narratives are often too topical and diffuse to match
the range and concentration of the earlier dialog narrative poems,

although they are interesting for other reasons.

2. "Pythagoras' Comparison of the Universe with Number"

Pythagoras whom Frost mentions in "Education by Poetry"
believed that the universe had in it the beauty of perfect mathematical
arrangements. This inner harmony was a source of music in nature that
poets, composers, and mathematicians all tried to imitate. Nature was
sacred to Pythagoras, and so were poetry, music and mathematics because
they were the earthly reflection of the harmonious music of the spheres.
Pythagoras' hope was to discover the sacred harmonies through the mathe-
matics of his time. Frost's remarks about science coming from Pytha-
goras' comparison of the universe with number are therefore not sur-

prising.

190

But the best and most fruitful was Pythagoras' comparison

of the universe with number . . . and we had science and all

that has followed in science.
In poetry, metrical analysis is the counting of the number of feet in
a line, observing the variant stresses of the feet (accented and unac-
cented syllables, or length of stress of the syllable) and establishing
a basic number pattern. Through the nineteenth century poets referred
to verse as "numbers." Frost liked the Pythagorean metaphor probably
because it supported his use of regular metrics.

Since Pythagoras, one might say, the universe has become more
rather than less mysterious and its harmonies more difficult of access.
The awkward human voice breaks its rhythms across the regular meters,
its intonations straining against the perfect grammar and sentence
structure toward meaningful sounds:

My versification seems to bother people more than I should

have expected--I suppose because I have been so long accustomed

to thinking of it in my own private way. It is as simple as

this: there are the very regular preestablished accent and

measure of speaking intonation. I am never more pleased than

when I can get these into strained relation. I like to drag

and break the intonation across the meter as waves first comb

and then break stumbling on the shingle. That's all but it's

no mere figure of speech though one can make figures enough

about it.7
This is one of Frost's most helpful statements about his use of metrics,
although he restated the idea a number of times. Whatever metrical
dissonance there is in the poems, then, comes first from the strain
between voice sound of sense and the basic meter. Sometimes the voices
are characters. Sometimes it is the poet's own voice we hear. Less

often it is an unidentifiable narrator such as the third voice in "West-

Running Brook."

191

I would not venture whether it is true that Frost chose to
use metrical forms as a basis for his poems because "insanity in his
own family gave him enough evidence to fear the lack of such inner
structure," as Barry claims.8 Every poet chooses one form or another.
I would compare Frost's bending of the traditional meters (he did not
use all of them, after all) with the activity of modern painting going
on in the same creative era. Braque and Picasso first painted tradi-
tionally from likeness, and then carried elements of tradition into
their work, breaking perspective (in line, form, and so on) across the
old traditions. Cubism, for instance, was merely a way of looking at
an object from several sides which is bound to give the model more than
two eyes (or feet) at once, just as Frost gave regular meter an extra
foot or so here and there.

Frost's participation in the modern period, say from Twilight,
l894, to West-Running Brook, l928 (which brings us just to the beginning

 

of the depression in the United States, perhaps a turning point into the
contemporary present), was a time of artistic rearrangements. The
artists of the modern period, whether poets, painters, sculptors, or
musical composers, were all in a rage for new forms. While respecting
the esthetic order of the past, they made departures from it. Such
artistic departures retained many of the same materials of the art form
along with similar attitudes and beliefs. One may see the typically
modern (and contemporary) mixture of Romantic and Classic character-
istics in a large artist such as Picasso with whom I compare Frost here
because they both were able to reach large audiences of their own cul-

tures in their own time.

192

But Frost's enjoyment of form is tucked into the poems
everywhere, as well as being revealed in his ponderous or light remarks.
For instance, anyone would think the little poem "Boeothian" simply
means that Frost does not like closed systems of philosophic thought.
While it does mean that on one level, it is also a special comment for
artists, for poets, from poet to poets, about metrics and poem form.
The title "Boeothian" is the clue.

I love to toy with the Platonic notion

That wisdom need not be of Athens Attic
But well may be Laconic, even Boeothian.

(Poetry, p. 362)

"Wisdom" is the word designed to lead us astray. While many others
were from Athens, the Greek poet Pindar was Boeothian. Pindar (with
only one exception) wrote no poems in the same metrical stanzaic form,
while his contemporaries usually searched for and chose one form and
stayed with it. Frost is obviously comparing his practice of using
various meters and stanza and poem forms with Pindar's. This poem is
slight but revelatory of Frost's avowed intention to make "one poem
different from another."

I think among the reasons Frost loved form, the most com-
pelling was his avid interest in the physical universe, motivated by
his obsessive concern with the entropic‘rush of time within (or as)
matter. Form was the negentropic current within the entropic torrent,
for Frost. A poet's conscious intuition could capture the larger
design by truly seeing the smaller designs in nature and in art. This
was the way life moved toward clarity, toward sanity, by the distinction

of one thing from another through art, Frost believed.

193

Anyone who has achieved the least form to be sure of it
is lost to the larger excruciations . . 9 It is really every-
body's sanity to feel it and live by it.
Perhaps Frost felt that a greater variety of metrical forms together
with a variety of settings and distinct situations for human voice
sounds would better reflect nature's variety. In any case, it is
satisfying to the artist to be able to create even the least form.

In one iambic pentameter narrative, "The Black Cottage," the
voice alters the basic meter interestingly. The speaker is a character
we know only as "the minister." Regular sentence form is altered and
grammar is changed, as the minister is carried away into his fantasy:

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 monarch of a desert land

I could devote and dedicate forever
To the truths we keep coming back and back to.

(Poetry, p. 58)

The voice emphasis must be on "oftentimes" to mean he sits there often,
although "and oftentimes" should metrically be two iambs. The voice
might slide in several intonations over the word, but the word has
emphasis, either by the voice rising or getting louder or both. This
cannot be shown in our usual scansion systems which can show only that
"Iambs march from short to long,/With a leap and a bound the swift
Anapests throng" as Coleridge helpfully wrote. Where is an extra foot
or two, anacrusis at the beginning of lines, evidently a frequent
effect of voice sounds to Frost's ear. In the second to last line
quoted above, anacrusis is the only metrical variation except for the
feminine ending or extra unaccented syllable at the end of the line.

In the last line an anapestic foot (also anacrusis) is followed by a

. lb! ll 11.1

194

spondee, another anapest, and an iamb with an additional foot, unless
one wants to hear the voice sound "back and back to" with every syl-
lable accented, in which case we have a double spondee. Scansion
becomes a debatable subject always in poetry, and I believe these
lines indicate the difficulty involved. Frost's "voice ways" do sug-
gest why there is always scansion disagreement.

We are on firmer ground looking at what the motion figures
do to bend the basic metrics. These abundant bounding images we have
been noticing everywhere in the poems have no generally prescribed pace
whatever. Frost remarked on the subject of tempo in modern civilization
(and the same, as relativity theory showed, is true of nature):

Give me the speed of a perfectly geared automobile that

I can slow down to half a mile an hour, to tell one flower

from another. My intolerance has been for the throng who

complain of the modern pace yet strive to keep it. There is

the widest choice of companions you will fall into step with,

be they living18r dead. There is no such thing as a pre-

scribed tempo.
Obviously the poet is making reference to two of his own poems, "A
Passing Glimpse," and "The Gum Gatherer" which were discussed earlier
for their motion figures.

An even more obvious example of what happens to the metrics
because of motion is to be found in "Brown's Descent" which was dis-
cussed earlier also. The metrics reveal devices of slow and fast pace.
As Farmer Brown picks up speed, the ballad metrics become regular, and
there is no slowing interruption of the metrics. This gives a speeded-
up effect:

He reeled, he lurched, he bobbed. he checked:

He fell and made the lantern rattle

(But saved the light from going out).
So halfway down he fought the battle.

(Poetry, p. 138)

195

And the basic ballad form itself helps to move the motion figure
along. But in "Meeting and Passing“ the pace is slow to accommodate
the more serious material. It is a strolling pace. Sentences end in
the middle of lines and there are also caesuras in the phrasing. The
iambic meter is often anapestic with spondees and double spondees,
even with a string of accented syllables as in the last line to slow
the pace even more:

And all the time we talked you seemed to see

Something down there to smile at in the dust.

(Oh, it was without prejudice to me!)

Afterward I went past what you had passed
Before we met, and you what I had passed.

(Poetry, p. ll9)

Here, the stresses on all the words in the phrase “you what I had
passed" except for the iambic "and you" cannot be avoided because of
what the voice does. These devices both slow the voice pace and
emphasize the somber tone of meaning.

It is the same technique Frost uses in many last lines of
somber-sounding, serious poems, and for important lines within poems
as well: "We love the things we love for what they are," and "Today
will be the day of what we both said." And often, to emphasize words
which were important both in voice emphasis and in meaning, Frost
underlined them so the reader would not miss the emphasis. For in-
stance, he italicized this word from "Birches," as we noted earlier
in another connection: "Ieyetg_heaven, till the tree could bear no

more," and this word from "The Code": You understand that meant the

 

196

easy job/For the man up on top, of throwing down/the hay . . . ,"
emphasizing, as the voice would do, non-substantive words just as Wil-
liam James did in insisting on, say, a "feeling of toward," and a
"feeling of down."

As for the diction in the poems which must be considered part
of the formal arrangement always, Frost purposely limited his vocabulary
to the everyday word. Robert P. Tristram Coffin wrote in 1964,

It was no accident, of course, that Robinson and Frost

brought in the plainer style in poetry . . . Thanks to
science, and it is good to be able to thank science for some .
assistance to poetry . . . the tide had set, around the 1] q
beginning of the century, towards a plainer way of speaking.
"Science" perhaps had distracted everyone from verbal to technological
virtuosity. Poems lost their embellishments. Poem logic therefore
became more evident. Frost's word-arrangement is, of course, the poems'

logic. Logic is an important element of structure and of Frost's inten-

tion; therefore, it needs its own full discussion.

3. "A Better Wildness of Logic"

Frost's objection to the logic of the English sentence with
its subject-verb-object structure was essentially the same as that of
William James. Activities could not be emphasized because the so-called
substantives, the adjectives and nouns, received all the attention.
Besides, the Aristotelian deductive framework that is the background
of the normal English sentence was not a sufficient one to describe
nature which is composed of processes. Scientific method and thought

12

had pretty much left grammar behind. , The Aristotelian deductive

system employed in school debate, furthermore, was not especially

 

197

productive since it prevented ample exploration of subjects, wasting
energies on rhetorical fencing. Frost wrote to Sidney Cox in 1926,
But I'd like to put it to you while you are still young and
developing your procedure if you don't think a lot of things
could be found to do in class besides debate and disagree.
Clash is all very well for coming lawyers politicians and
theologians. But I should think there must be a whole realm
or plane above that--all sight and insight, perception,
intuition rapture.
I have wanted to find way? to transcend the strife-method. r
I have found some . . . . 3
For the purpose of "contending" in life situations, Frost suggested a
course in "rowing" might do, but for the class in writing and literature
he recommended another approach which he codified somewhat in his later
explanations of thought as metaphor, and education by presence, which
is to say, by the example of the teacher's work. But what Frost thought
of "logic" as popularly conceived from Aristotelian either-or proposi-
tions, and of strict methodologies built on popular logic, is best
illustrated in his outrageous example, or metaphor of "logic."
Your whole life can be so logical that it seems to me
like a ball of hairs in the stomach of an angora cat. It
should be broken up and interrupteda and then brought to-
gether by likeness, free likeness.
This cure, clearly, could not be affected by any deductive process.
Metaphorically, the breaking up of a previous shaping metaphor in order
to make a new one becomes necessary because of the factor of process
(i.e. the cat hairs will continue to collect). This analytic-synthetic
method in Frost reminds me of one of his favorite Emerson poems, in
which the god Uriel discovers a heretofore unknown principle in the

universe:

 

198

Line in nature is not found;
Unit and universe are round;
In vain produced, all rays return;
Evil will bless, and ice will burn.

15

Having discovered relativity and mutability in nature, the young god
Uriel perceived the new law as a "sad self-knowledge,“ and withdrew
into "his cloud" from which he would not emerge except when "truth-
speaking things" occur. Such interesting processes are those in which
good comes out of evil, or the "speeding change of water." Whenever
he does speak because such processes occur, the other gods blush, but
they "know not why." Uriel retreats back into his cloud.

But the logic of a poem that Frost has mostly in mind is the
movement the whole poem makes from beginning to end. The best descrip-
tion of a single poem's motion that I have found is John Robert Doyle's
analysis of "Looking for a Sunset Bird in Winter." He writes,

Though it is merely a presentation of the winter land-

scape, it is never allowed to become static. The movement
is a progression in time. In the first line the sunset is
disappearing; in the last the stars are beginning to come

out. Between these extremes movement is continuous . . .

Even the description of the sky in the final stanza is not
static. The cloud of smoke across (movement) the blue was
put there by a brush stroke (movement) from north to south
(movement). Finally, the piercing (movement) little star

was through (movement).

What I am saying about the metrical line in Frost's poems,
then, is that at least two other factors altered the basic metrical
pattern, in addition to the sound-of-sense of the meaningful voice.
Motion figures speeded up or slowed down the pace, altering the metri-
cal pattern, and a different logic, the logic of the progression of
figurative ideas in a space-time frame (notice that the poem Doyle

discusses is space description in a time frame) also determined how

 

199

the metrics would go along. Frost describes this, hinting that his
kind of logic is indeed of consequence,
I tell how there may be a better wildness of logic than

of inconsequence, but the logic is backward, in retrospect,

after the act. It must be more felt than seen ahead like

prophecy. It must be a revelation, or a series of revela-

tions, as much for the poet as for the reader. 7
Here, of course, the poet is talking about the psychological process of
creating the poem as well as its movement or “series of revelations,"
and it seems to me that this point in Frost's theory of poetry is the
most interesting of all the fresh thought he gave to the subject. The
poem was formed into a series of figures or metaphors by synechdoche 1
and all such devices with the voice carrying it across the metrical
base, but Frost's insistence on this as a better logical structure is
quite provocative. The intuition is not logical thought to start with
but stretches out, so to speak, into thought. The demarcation between
feeling and thought is functionally unimportant because of the esthetic
component in the "haunting feeling,"

Poetry won't begin in thought. It begins in a haunting feeling

that must be satisfied . . . The first thing that the mood

picks up is not words . . . it is some vague urge of an idea

to embody itEETf in. The idea picks up the words. The words

make the poem. You've get t9 know the difficulty ef it. 8
This explains something of the nature of poetic logic, at least as
Frost arranged it in his poems. The logic, seen as part of the diction,
also works to alter the basic metrical line, changing the pace of the
poem, depending upon the ease or difficulty of the thought progression,

along with the motion figures which carry the thoughts.

Throughout this study of Robert Frost's relation to science

 

in the poems, I have come up against the form of the poems in one way

200

or another, and been forced by the nature of the subject to describe
the prosody of Frost's poems. The prosody has turned out to be a
coherent subject for exploration, with many elements fitting meaning-
fully and formally together. It has been especially rewarding to see
the way esthetics has related to nature in Frost's thought. Moreover,
there is one brief poem that illustrates, for me, the lyric Frost form.
It is not the long blank verse poem we think of as typically-Frost,
but a honed-down meditative lyric. It contains all the elements of
style I have been discussing, in perfect compression. It lodges in

the mind to stay.

4. “Nothing Gold Can Stay"

I began this study with a look at Frost's boyhood in San
Francisco of which he later wrote, "Gold dusted all we drank and ate."
There was the gold of relative financial security while his father was
alive, but there was also the great golden city of San Francisco, to
which he referred in the last talk he gave to a college audience:
And one of the expressions I like best is--in the bible
it is and in poets--they say, "of no mean city am I." That's
a great saying, ain' it?--to be "of no mean city," like San
Francisco or Boston.
I think Frost was guardedly referring to his own astronomical viewpoint,
his coming to terms with entropy and also to that golden time of child-
hood when the nature poets were first read to him, when his mother's

Swedenborgian mystical mind analogized poets, nature and a devoted life

with science.

 

201

Frost took the "cosmic motes of yawning lenses," as well as
the “inner dome of heaven," as material for his poems. Yet metaphors
from his knowledge were often expressed in the most simple lyric. It
was a long time since the gold-dusted days of early childhood to the
turns of irony and the other movements of “Nothing Gold Can Stay." The
poem has ordinary heroic couplet rhymes, and a trimeter base of eight
lines. Everything moves and changes, figure transposed into figure in
an abbreviated sonnet form (two quatrains instead of three) in which
the final couplet is compressed into one line. The poem opens with a
phenomenon of early spring.

Nature's first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.

Her early leaf's a flower;
But only so an hour.

Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief.

So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

(Poetry. pp. 222, 223)

The short sentences slow the pace. The poet is talking about how
quickly yellow buds open into flowers on early bushes and trees such

as the willow. Further, these early flowers seem to be leaves but hold
the illusion only briefly. Compression or telescoping of time is accom-
plished by claiming these early "leaves" last an hour (not several
days). Then the flower-leaf becomes another kind of 1eaf--a leaf of
entirely another morphology anyway, so who can say it is the same as

the bud it once was? It has subsided into another form. In this man-
ner Eden changed into something else, and early morning becomes the
Wordsworthian "light of common day." The irony of gold not staying is

that it is widely presumed to be the substance one can keep, while

202

other substances decay. The poem shows a number of gold color images
in nature that will not keep--for they are all motion figures. Every-
thing is mutable, "Nothing gold can stay." This is a poem about
appearances, myths, and time. But the irony of the poem, finally, is
that, relatively speaking, the poem itself does stay. Its fonn keeps
it in motion in our minds. Certainly, Frost's perception of change
in nature, of motion itself, was a valuable shaping metaphor in the
poems throughout. And I think this poem shows, as well as any, the
general sense of that metaphor Frost drew from nature through science.
Spring, innocence, life, love, enlightenment, all change to our vision
and within our experience--it is the nature of the universe, both

heaven and atom.

10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

203
Notes to Chapter Ten

Thompson, Fire 929 tee, p. 92 ff.
Thompson, Letter to the author, 6 December, 1969.

Nancy Joyner, "Robert Frost: Exegete," paper read at the Modern
Language Association Annual Meeting, New York, 1974.

Twili ht (Lawrence, Massachusetts, 1894). Facsimile copy, Jones
rary, Amherst, Massachusetts. Original in University of Virginia
Library. The inscription is dated February 1, 1940 by Frost.

See Poetry, p. 331. The poem "Sycamore" indicates Frost's interest
in the New England Primer form.

"Education by Poetry," Poetry ehe Prose, p. 332. The essay was
first in Amherst Graduates _Quarteriy, February, 1931: Selected
Prose, p. 37. 7

To John Cournos, 8 July, 1914, Selected Letters, p. 128. From Lit-

tle Iddens, Gloucestershire. Cournos was a novelist living in New
York.

 

Robert Frost eh Writing, Introductory essay by Barry, p. 20.
Early Years, p. 627.

Conversation with Reginald Cook, Ihe Listener, August 26, 1954, in
Interviews, p. 147.

Robert P. Tristram Coffin, New Poetr of New England: Frost ehg_
Robinson (New York: Holt, 1964 , pp. 78,

Herbert L. Searles, Logic ehe the Scientific Method (New York:
ROnald Press, 1948), Chapter Two, "Logic and Language,“ pp. 19-42.

 

Letter to Sidney Cox, c. January 1, 1926, Selected Letters. pp. 324,
325.

 

Gorham B. Munson, Robert Frost: (A Stud .13 Sensibility ehg Good
Sense (New York: George HT Duran, 2 , p.7llO.

 

 

Ihe Complete Poetical Works of Ral h Waldo Emerson (New York:
Houghton Mifflin, 1924), pp._T3-15.

John Robert Doyle, The Poetry ef Robert Frost, Ah Analysis (New
York: Hafner, 1962):—

"The Figure a Poem Makes," Complete Poems, p. vii.

 

‘s-
in

 

204
18. Robert Frost, Introduction te A Swinger 9f Birches by Sidney Cox
(New York: Collier, 1961), p. 2.

19. "On Extravagance,“ Dartmouth Alumni Magazine, March 27, 1962, in

Poetr and Prose, ed. Edward C. Lathem and Lawrance Thompson (New
York: Holt, 1972), p. 447.

5?:-

 

APPENDIX

APPENDIX

On Frost and Science

The way to move through Frost's ambiguities is boustrophe-
donically, to use a word from the Greek that Frost wished would not

be lost.1

It means reading according to the path of the plow, as Frost
explained, or reading every second line backwards as the plow turns

at the end of a row. Opposite directions, opposite attitudes and
meanings must always be considered in Frost's poems alongside the most
obvious meanings. But Frost, like William James, liked to show when
opposites need not be in conflict, when they were false dichotomies.
For instance, probably remembering the adverse criticism Bergson's
Creative Evolution had received, and quarreling with his culture's
tendency to think that to be serious meant to be ethereal rather than
realistic (and to know nothing of the physical world in order to be

religious) Frost took this boustrophedonic tack and turn against the

pejorative sense of the word "materialist.“

205

206

It is wrong to call anybody a materialist simply because he
tries to say spirit in terms of matter, as if that were a sin.
Materialism is not the attempt to say all in terms of matter. The
only materialist [here the plow begins to turn ix> the pejorative
sense of the word]--be he poet, teacher, scientist, politician,
or statesman--is the man who gets lost in his material without a
gathering metaphor to throw it into shape and order. He is the
lost soul.

Clearly, the matter of saving the soul is metaphorical to Frost for
the ability to perceive order, or to have, as we say, one's own vision
of life. This would be, for Frost as grounded in Jamesean psychology,
an indication of the health of the personality as well. But more
importantly, I think, Frost's material was the nature of the universe,
and his gathering metaphor a vision of its motion.

Frost was interested in myths of all sorts as most modern
poets were. Sometimes his readers may not be inclined to take his
knowledge of science, or of other fields, seriously because he often
took a popularly accepted view about science as given, and worked from
there as he did with the popular pejorative sense of "materialist."
For instance, Frost got a good metaphor of popular belief and social
interaction from the grindstone theory, a generally held puritanical
attitude about the nature of creativity based in the old Cartesian
theory of the origin of the universe. However, it must be noted that
some of Decartes' ideas tallied with scientific fact, such as his view
that space was not a vacuum and that the earth was shaped as an oblate
spheroid, both observations Frost used. Descartes, like many other
scientists of his time, also spent much time dividing up the elements,

but his essential grindstone theory, that primary blocks of matter

were whirled in a giant vortex and ground down to their present shapes

207

by friction, was as out of date to Frost as the idea that a piece of
literature was either good or bad according to how easy or difficult
it was to read or to write.

The Iliad, Odyssey, and Aeneid are easy. The Purgatorio is
said to be hard. The §ehg gt Songs is hard. There have been works
lately to surpass all records for hardness. Some knotted riddles
tell what may be worth our trouble. But hard or easy seems to me
of slight use as a test either way.

 

 

We can see from this that Frost did indeed intend "The Trial by Exist-
ence" as satire, although human suffering is true enough. The concept
of the trial is a social myth arising from experience of hardship.

Although Frost used popular myths of all kinds as starting

points in his poems and talks, he made one statement about myth that
clarifies its relation to science for us. In a playful mood, he begins
to talk about works one dreams about writing:

I'm going to write a play--not called the Scopes trial but
called the Telescope's Trial. I've always been interested in
astronomy . . . . And in the play I make it come out that we had
more left to guide our lives, how to live, from science than we do
from mythglogy. Mythology is the Bible or any other mythology
you want.

Not disparaging mythologies altogether, Frost seemed to want to leave
another clue to the way he made use of the knowledge of science in his
poems: sometimes it revealed "how to live." Numerous poems come to
mind such as "There Are Roughly Zones," "Acceptance," and "Meeting and
Passing" in which natural phenomena or laws of nature serve as models
for man's ethics and attitudes. There is a good possibility, Frost is
saying, that astronomy will tell you more than myths can, and that
science is a better way to be close to nature: choose something like

a star to deepen the stoical sense of life. Is it implicit in Frost's

poems that science is "something like a star?"

208

Frost sought answers to some of the larger social questions
through science. One of his favorite problems was freedom, especially
the freedom of the individual. He questioned Niels Bohr about the will
or freedom of particles in matter, and reported Bohr's response to an

audience:

. . and he [Bohr] said, "Yes, it is so. It can come when
it wills and as it wills; and the action of the individual particle
is unpredictable. But it is not so of the action of the mass.
There you can predict." He says, "That gives the individual atom
its freedom, but the mass its necessity."5

Bohr's statement of the behavior of a particle and the mass is no less
paradoxical or ambiguous than a Frost poem. It is one of the scientific
situations in which the answer is both rather than either-or: and yet
the mass will undoubtedly have its effect upon the individual particle
as in Frost's figure of the silken tent. The tent is "loosely bound."

Granted that the concept of freedom is not simple, Frost
further compared his poetic material with the material of nature, to
write in a late poem:

The reason artists show so little interest

In public freedom is because the freedom

They've come to feel the need of is a kind

No one can give them—-they can scarce attain--

The freedom of their own material:

So, never at a loss in simile,

They can command the exact affinity
0f anything they are confronted with.

(Poetry, p. 461)

And further, as nature has time in it, so do poems: metrics. "Free
verse so called is really cherished prose. . . ./It has its beauty,

only I don't write it," Frost tells us in iambics. (Peetty, pp. 460-
461) It was noted in this study how closely he related the timing of

astronomical and biological clocks with metrics, with prosody, in

209

"Acquainted With the Night" and other poems. There had always to be,
in poetry, as in the physical world, the actual sense of the small but
significant freedom of the particle or individual within the determined
mass: "in the moment we depart," in the choice of direction, or in the
freshly connected thought.

This tracing of Frost's metaphor of motion was not intended
to be systematic, nor is this afterword a summary. Frost avoided the
systematic for good reason: it often tends to make the writer claim
more than he knows to be actual fact. This study has not assumed to
cover every point one might make about Frost and science. But I hope
that, by concentrating on dominant aspects of motion found in the poems,
it has been possible to reveal concerns that were uppermost in Frost's
thinking. I suspect that it may come out, when Frost scholars have
time to consider,-that the entropy-negentropy puzzle was the impetus
for Frost's vision of motion and his avid interest in science. Prob-
ably an unusual knowledge of the reality of death was experienced
early by the poet and he retained a consequent desire to hold back the
cataract that moves unalterably toward death.

We have looked sufficiently at poems dealing with the prob-
lem of waste in the universe to see Frost's concept of it. Entropy is
now of much interest again to the scientific world. In fact, in 1974,
Albert Claude, accepting a Nobel prize in physiology, expressed him-
self on the subject of entropy-negentropy in much the same tone as
Frost's.

Life, this anti-entropy [negentropy], ceaselessly reloaded

with energy, is a climbing force, toward order amidst chaos, toward
light among the darkness of the indefinite, toward the mystic-dream

of love, between the fire which devours itself and the silence of
the cold.8 ,

210

Claude's words bring to mind "Desert Places," "The Bonfire," "West-
Running Brook," “Fire and Ice," and the enormous Glacier of "Directive."
I believe one can say that, on balance, many of Frost's most profound
expressions in poetry were tempered by his knowledge of and quarrel

with science.

ROOM

211

Notes to Appendix

"A Romantic Chasm," Selected Prose, p. 76.

 

"Education by Poetry,“ Selected Prose, p. 41.
"The Constant Symbol," Selected Prose, p. 23.

"An Interest in Science," in Robert Frost: ‘A Living Voice, DP.
175-184.

"Education by Poetry," Selected Prose, P. 38.

Albert Claude, I'The Coming of Age of the Cell," Science 189:4201
8 Aug. 1974. p. 435. Republished, he Prix Nobel en 1974 and
Nobel Lectures (New York and Amsterdam: Elsevier PUBlisfiing
Company, 1975).

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