4. Fireflies in the Garden / West-Running Brook(1928) - Robert Frost

[esse]

Fireflies in the Garden

Here come real stars to fill the upper skies,

And here on earth come emulating flies

That, though they never equal stars in size

(And they were never really stars at heart),

Achieve at times a very starlike start.

Only, of course, they can't sustain the part.

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정원의 반딧불들

상공에는 진짜 별들이 총총 떠오르고,

땅에는 반딧불이 별들을 흉내 내니,

크기는 별들과 맞먹을 수 없지만

(사실 그들의 마음 또한 별인 적이 없다),

때때로 별과 아주 흡사한 출발을 성취한다.

다만, 당연히, 그 역할을 지탱하지 못한다.

-신재실 옮김-

단상(斷想): 하늘엔 별이 총총하고 땅엔 반딧불이 총총하다. 반딧불은 내 마음의 별이다. 별을 따는 마음으로 반딧불의 뒤를 좇는다. 내가 잡은 반딧불은 별이 아니다. 우선 내가 상상하던 별과는 크기부터 다르다. 그리고 물론 그것의 마음도 별이 아니다. 반딧불은 별 같지만 별이 아니다. 사람 또한 신을 닮았지만 신이 아니다. 반딧불이 별의 역할을 지탱할 수 없는 것과 마찬가지로 사람 또한 신의 역할을 감당할 수 없다.

-신재실 씀-

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The Cambridge Companion to Robert Frost

Introduction ROBERT FAGGEN 
1  “Stay Unassuming”: the Lives of Robert Frost DONALD G. SHEEHY 
2  Frost Biography and A Witness Tree WILLIAM PRITCHARD 
3  Frost and the Questions of Pastoral ROBERT FAGGEN 
4  Frost and the Ancient Muses HELEN BACON 
5  Frost as a New England Poet LAWRENCE BUELL 
6  “Across Spaces of the Footed Line”: the Meter and Versification of Robert Frost TIMOTHY STEELE 
7  Frost’s Poetry of Metaphor JUDITH OSTER

8. Frost and the Questions of Pastoral ROBERT FAGGEN 
9  Frost and the Meditative Lyric BLANFORD PARKER 
10  Frost’s Poetics of Control MARK RICHARDSON 
11  Frost’s Politics and the Cold War GEORGE MONTEIRO 
12  “Synonymous with Kept”: Frost and Economics GUY ROTELLA 
13 Human Presence in Frost’s Universe JOHN CUNNINGHAM 

Select bibliography 
Index

Frost and the Ancient Muses - HELEN BACON

Robert Frost repeatedly warns his readers, sometimes openly, often mischievously, to look for further implications in his poems and not to stop with their obvious associations. In 1927 he said, “I almost think a poem is most valuable for its ulterior meanings . . . I have developed an ulteriority complex.”1 This view about his writing has been increasingly acknowledged by his more critical readers from the second half of the twentieth century as they explore the deceptively homespun New England persona and subject matter of many of Frost’s poems and discover the many subtle ways that they embody and play with the forms and thought of our literary tradition, including the Bible, as well as much of the theological, philosophical, and scientific thought of an increasingly global world. It is clear from his critical writings and from his talks that he wanted the public to recognize this aspect of his work and was annoyed by how slow most of his readers were to grasp it. The question to ask a poet, he said, is “not what he means but what he’s up to”(CPPP, 823). His readers failed to see what he was up to, how large a world of forms and ideas he was drawing on. He admonished them against mistaking the agricultural New England scene for his whole subject matter, and him for a rustic New England sage, saying, “I talk about universals in terms of New England . . . I talk about the whole world in terms of New England. But that’s just because I have it all around me.”2

One aspect of this “whole world” not often given the recognition it deserves is the thoughts and literary forms of classical antiquity, with which he was saturated in high school and college and which remained throughout his life part of his perspective on art and the human condition. There is of course general recognition of his fairly solid grounding in the Greek and Latin languages and literatures. Direct allusions to classical material (words, names, ideas) have been identified and commented on; but the many less obvious ways in which such material pervades his work tend to go undetected. In general, critics have treated it as a relatively minor aspect of his writing, of mainly academic interest, if any. In fact it is a large part of that “ulteriority” that he thought of as the very heart of poetry, part of his theory of the “renewal of words” that he regarded as poetry’s main function.3 This “renewal” occurs when, through the use of metaphor (in Frost’s very flexible definition), we are led to perceive affinities between apparently unrelated, often commonplace, words and experiences. In doing so, we see again the inherent life of words and their content, which has been dulled by overfamiliarity or distance in space or time.

Even at the high school in Lawrence, Massachusetts, the college preparatory program that Frost followed was based mainly on the classics, as was the curriculum at Dartmouth (where he walked out after less than a semester), and Harvard (where he spent almost two years with some distinction). The classics and the world of humanistic thought have been almost totally supplanted in the modern curriculum by a bevy of practical, technical, and scientific fields, required for success in the modern economy. It is clear from Frost’s letters that many of his contemporaries shared his tradition and easily picked up on his most glancing references that would mean little or nothing to the more recent generations of even college-trained minds.

“The Pasture,” first published in 1914 as the first poem of North of Boston, is an example of the way an utterly simple poem, apparently restricted to rural New England realities, can talk about “everything” in terms of New England. In this case Frost has included a reminder that he is affiliating himself with poets of classical antiquity by borrowing one of their own familiar devices.

Lawrance Thompson had recognized, even in 1942, some of the wider, more universal references of “The Pasture,” which he described as evoking the delight of lovers in sharing the experience of rustic beauty. In Thompson’s biography, this insight is reinforced by a quotation from Frost himself (CPPP, 756). Others, too, have felt the upwelling spring and the tottering calf as embodiments of life, and seen the fellowship of lovers who view them as part of the larger human fellowship of art. The many layers of such seemingly simple poems, even when not consciously grasped, make them mysteriously moving. This linkage of particular with general is a notable element of Frost’s power.

In 1973, Kiffin Rockwell suggested still another way in which one may understand the poem’s tender vignette of rustic chores. He points out that by evoking the tradition of a whole string of Greek and Roman poems – poems that go back as far as the Homeric Hymn to Apollo –Frost is announcing a new poetic program for North of Boston.4 In 1975, Lowell Edmunds, picking up on this brief and somewhat elliptical statement, expands on the recurrent use of “The Pasture” throughout the rest of Frost’s life as an epigraph to many of his selected and collected poems from 1923 to 1949.5 In 1962, the year before he died, in his final selection, In the Clearing, the epigraph occurs as the single line, “And wait to watch the water clear, I may –,” an expressive leave-taking from one who talks “about everything in terms of New England.” This epigraphical reappearance before every major volume of Frost’s poetry affirms, according to Edmunds, Rockwell’s original perception that Frost had already announced at the opening of North of Boston, “reticently but with his Classics in mind,” a program for a completely new kind of poetry, which, as Edmunds goes on to point out, the poet reaffirmed for the rest of his life, by recalling “The Pasture” in all subsequent collections.

In this simplest of rural poems, at the very beginning of his publishing career, Frost evokes one of the oldest conventions of Western poetry. As it does in the work of his Greek and Roman predecessors, this convention proclaims both his affiliation with that tradition and his own original contribution to it. The additional depth and range that this twofold application gives to his little poem is quite typical of what Frost’s incorporation of classical literature gives to many of his poems.

Frost’s well-known belief in the metaphor as being the heart of poetry – indeed, the heart of all thinking – caused him to refrain from the kind of obvious learning, sometimes accompanied by footnotes, that impressed readers of Pound and Eliot. “Success in taking figures of speech,” Frost asserted, “is as intoxicating as success in making figures of speech”(CPPP, 814). He despised footnotes because they “robbed the heart of the chance to see for itself what a poem is all about” and so to arrive at the “clarification of life,” that poetry can achieve. He claimed to write for his equals, namely, “those I don’t have to write footnotes to. The footnotes, if I used them, would be a condescension to the people that can’t keep up with me.” It irritated him that, as time went on, fewer and fewer of his readers could rise to the challenge of keeping up with him. Too many failed to recognize the depth and range of the intellectual background he drew upon.

Almost as slight and apparently rustic as “The Pasture” is “Hyla Brook,” published in Mountain Interval. An awareness of how it interacts with an almost equally slight poem of Horace (Odes III, 13, often referred to as Fons Bandusiae, “The Spring of Bandusia”) deepens and enlarges both its charm and its frame of reference to reveal previously unexpected implications. Horace’s poem has its own kind of ulteriority, not generally known to classical scholars until pointed out by Steele Commager in 1962: an ulteriority confirmed and elaborated on by Gordon Williams in 1969. In 1916, Frost had already noticed and built into “Hyla Brook” this “ulteriority” of Fons Bandusiae, that apparently had escaped two millennia of Horatian scholarship. Fons Bandusiae, like many of Horace’s poems, celebrates a ritual, an offering to a perpetual spring, on his rustic farm in the Sabine hills, to which Horace often escaped from the crowds and sophisticated society of Rome to enjoy the simpler and more peaceful life of the country. On the following day, the spring will be honored not only with the usual rustic offering of wine and flowers but also with the sacrifice of a kid whose prospect of love and war will be cut off when his red blood stains the icy waters. Horace praises the spring for the coolness and surrounding shade that it offers to straying sheep and oxen weary from the plow in the savage heat of August. He ends by declaring, 

You too shall become one of the renowned springs 
When I tell of the ilex that overhangs your hollow 
Rocks, whence your voluble 
Waters leap down. 
Odes III, 13 (author’s translation) 

It is clear from the offerings of flowers and wine and the promise of a sacrificed kid that the spring is a rustic deity. Horace’s audience would also have realized that his little poem is in standard hymnal form, which reinforces the idea of celebration and worship. Nor would they have had trouble, as some modern critics do, in seeing the implications: a kid cut off before realizing his destiny in lovemaking and war. Here is a variation on the theme of loss transmuted into art, such as we see in the myth when Pan plucks the reeds into which the nymph Syrinx had been changed as she fled his embrace, and makes them into Pan pipes (syrinx), on which he then plays music. Horace’s audience would also have known that the goat is sacred to Dionysus – the god of lyric and dramatic art. The never-ailing spring under a spreading tree that offers refuge from the ferocious August heat is still a familiar Mediterranean scene today. When Horace tells of the ilex tree that overhangs its rocks, he declares that his spring too will become one of the “renowned” ones. Horace’s “renowned” founts can only refer to the several springs of the Muses (Castalia, Hippocrene, Peirene are the most renowned) that are scattered throughout Greek literature. The gushing life of these year-round springs symbolizes the sphere of the Muses – the unfailing creativity of art and its capacity to make the dead past live again. Even as Horace claims membership for his spring in this august group whose cult pervades Greek literature, he seems to distinguish it as belonging to an Italian rather than a Greek world. Castalia, Helicon, and Peirene are all in places made famous by myth, known and visited by worshippers and travelers throughout antiquity. Horace’s Italian spring is known only to Horace and the few rustics in the Sabine hills who honor it with rustic offerings. Generally, throughout Greek literature, and even today, it is a giant plane-tree that shades Greek springs; but Horace’s spring is shaded by the ilex, or live oak, as though to underline the fact that his Muses have migrated from their more famous homes to his humble farm in Italy’s Sabine hills. However, like the waters of the Greek springs, they suggest renewed life and song as their chattering (loquaces) waters leap down (desiliunt) across the rocks.

Though Frost’s “Hyla Brook” runs out of “song and speed” by June, it is, as we shall shortly see, a celebration of the Muses, evoking many of the themes of Horace’s poem. In a fifteen-ine poem (Horace’s poem is sixteen lines), Frost describes a short-lived watercourse on his New Hampshire farm. It is quite typical of Frost’s borrowings that he should claim for his brook the same properties that Horace claims for his Sabine farm spring – though at first glance, the brook is the opposite of Horace’s spring, whose leaping, chattering waters are a never-failing source of coolness and shade, even in the dog days of August.

By June our brook’s run out of song and speed. As it vanishes, it evokes the past, first May and the “spring peepers” (Hylas), whose call pervades the spring nights, 

(And taken with it all the Hyla breed 
That shouted in the mist a month ago. 

The Hylas in turn evoke the more remote past of winter, 

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

Or perhaps the brook has 

gone groping underground 
Or flourished and come up in jewel-weed. 

Even as the poem moves forward to July and August, the brook manifests itself as jewel-eed, which also looks to the past as it bends backward towards its source, rather than forward towards what was once the brook’s course. This image reminds us once again of the brook’s past, whereas in the present, in its summer manifestation, it exists in memory only – 

A brook to none but who remember long. 

Its appearance, however, as a 

faded paper sheet 
Of dead leaves stuck together by the heat – 

reminds us of a book. Only three poems before in the collection, in “A Patch of Old Snow,” Frost compares the snow to a “blow away paper,” that 

is speckled with grime as if 
Small print overspread it, 

a nearby reminder that Frost can see books in unexpected places. Books can be an even more effective reminder of the past than the remains of the brook. Horace’s poem, like Frost’s, plays with the theme of memory and confirm‎s his spring’s place amongst the company of renowned springs –for which he uses the adjective nobilis, derived from a root that means “to know.” This word nobilis is another indication of the presence of the Muses in his poem. The Muses are the daughters of Memory, and it is through their song that the past, which would otherwise be lost, becomes nobilis, known, renowned.

Frost’s list of evocations of the past culminates with a reminder of a “faded paper sheet.” The remains of the brook suggest a book. Through memory, the vanished brook soundlessly carries on its function of preserving and celebrating the past.

What follows echoes Horace’s claim that he has brought the august Greek goddesses to his humble farm, for Frost goes on: 

This as it will be seen is other far 
Than with brooks taken otherwhere in song. 
(CPPP, 115) 

Frost’s brook is “other far” than brooks sung about elsewhere. Horace’s spring, even as it joins the “renowned springs” of Greek literature, remains part of a far simpler Italian world. With Frost, the Muses have migrated once again from Italy to New England. Different though his short-lived brook is from Horace’s never-failing spring, it is still the poet’s source of inspiration. It too gives life through song to the otherwise vanishing past. So Frost honors his brook in a characteristically less ceremonious way with, 

We love the things we love for what they are. 

In the paradoxical Frostian world, his brook is both a New Hampshire brook that runs dry in June and a home to the Muses – an eternal source of life and inspiration.

Many critics have recognized and written feelingly about the many springs in Frost’s poems that symbolize life and creativity. But on the basis of these two very early (1914 and 1916) evocations of the Muses in association with water, it seems probable that for him, whenever watercourses represented life and creativity, they frequently, if not always, suggested the Muses –the sources of art and inspiration in both Greek and Roman literature.

A relatively late (1945) example of this theme is “Directive,” which seems to be a more concise retelling (62 lines) of “The Mountain” (1914) (109 lines). Both poems deal with a mountain, wildness, harmony, and a mysterious journey on a hidden path to a spring at the very top of the mountain –a journey that suggests to most some kind of initiation. Harmony and wildness are for Frost two essential and complementary aspects of poetry to which he often refers. In “The Figure a Poem Makes” (1939), he speaks of the mystery of “how a poem can have a tune in such a straightness of meter” and “how a poem can have wildness and at the same time a subject that shall be fulfilled.” And he goes on to say that a poem “begins in delight and ends in clarification of life – not necessarily a great clarification . . . but in a momentary stay against confusion.”

For anyone as steeped in antiquity as Frost, the setting of these two poems (in spite of the obvious Biblical allusions) brings to mind (with its suggestions of initiation and revelation) Mount Parnassus where, near the town of Delphi, the sacred spring Castalia, one of the homes of the Muses, gushes out between its twin peaks. There, Apollo and Dionysus, both gods of music and inspiration, appropriately share a cult. These two gods are embodiments of Frost’s two basic principles of poetry. Apollo represents harmony and order; Dionysus represents wildness and instinct. But Dionysus does not represent instinct run wild, as he so often appears to do in modern interpretations. Though he dances with his barefoot Maenads in the wilderness, he also tames and harnesses savage leopards and panthers to his chariot. He is the god who transmutes impulse into art as already described in the myth of the Syrinx. Harmony and order brought to bear on the chaos of impulse result in a “clarification of life,” which is a “momentary stay against confusion.”

It is interesting that the opening lines of Wordsworth’s sonnet: 

The world is too much with us; late and soon, 
Getting and spending we lay waste our powers; 

is echoed in Frost’s “this now too much for us” (near the beginning of “Directive”) with a typical Frostian twist. The whole sonnet longs for a retreat to antiquity, where, rid of the distractions of the present, the poet might experience the freshness of an encounter with ancient divinities. It ends: 

Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea; 
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn. 

Frost’s allusion to Wordsworth reinforces the need expressed in “Directive” to return to our origins in antiquity and thus affirm the timelessness and universality of our inspiration.

In each of these poems about New England springs or watercourses, separated as they are in time over more than thirty years, Frost looks to the antique sources of his poetic inspiration. These and many other images and symbols that date from his early saturation in the classics stayed with him and continued to generate potent poetry throughout his life. The poems that recall this ancient world share with his other poems the suggestion of many possible meanings. Though often one may barely guess at them one feels the mystery and power of unplumbed depths. The more they are pressed the more they reveal analogies beyond analogies. Their many meanings make them as unpredictable as life itself. A poem for which one can discover the one and only meaning is a dead poem.

In drawing attention to the way Frost incorporates antique images and forms into his poetry throughout his life, I do not pretend to have found the only meaning of any of the poems I discuss. I hope only to point out another dimension, another depth, to a few of his multi-faceted poems – and also, perhaps, a more far-reaching aspect of his work than many readers and critics are aware of. Frost confesses, in a 1916 letter to Louis Untermeyer, what he calls “a very damaging secret” that he has only confided to one other person, namely, “The poet in me died nearly ten years ago.” That would be a few years after the end of his formal, largely classical, education in 1899, when he withdrew from Harvard, and during the period of his early teaching ventures in various secondary schools, well before A Boy’s Will (1913). Frost goes on to claim, 

The calf I was in the nineties I merely take to the market. I am become my own salesman . . . The day I did “The Trial by Existence” [first published in 1906 in The Independent] says I to myself says I, this is the way of all flesh. I was not much over twenty, but I was wise for my years. I knew then . . . I must get as much done as possible before thirty. 

This claim or boast, that he had laid the basis for his whole prospective oeuvre by age thirty, is, as Poirier points out, literally absurd and involves a good deal of attitudinizing in a typically Frostian manner; it does, however, if not taken too literally, tend to bear out my suggestions that the ongoing source of his later poetic creativity is an imagination formed largely by his intense contact at a very impressionable age with the writers of antiquity, and some of their successors among English writers. When asked in 1942 to list and comment on sixteen of his own favorite poems, he described his poems as “all written by the same person out of” a restricted region (north of Boston) and “out of” a limited group of books. Among these he singles out “a few in Greek and Latin,” the rest in English, intimating that his creative imagination developed out of and continued to be inspired by the same twofold source –a narrow landscape and a small core of books. To this New England landscape and this core of reading he returns again and again for the rest of his life as to an inexhaustible source.

The sense of fellowship in art going back to its early originators in classical antiquity is implicit in “The Pasture” and in other poems such as those we have been discussing that involve membership in the cult of the Muses. The sense of relatedness to the past generations of artists going back to our literary beginnings is poignantly expressed in an early poem, “The Tuft of Flowers” (1906). There a laborer comes “to turn the grass” of a meadow where in early dawn a previous laborer had laid flat both grass and flowers with his scythe. A straying butterfly leads the latecomer’s eye to a tuft of flowers. 

A leaping tongue of bloom the scythe had spared 
Beside a reedy brook the scythe had bared. 

The latecomer perceives that the unseen mower has saved the tuft of flowers because 

The mower in the dew had loved them thus . . . 
from sheer morning gladness. . . 

The sight of the flowers later in the day puts him in mind of the mower’s morning joy –the birdsong and the sound of the scythe. The “message from the dawn” brings the past to life, as the Muses do across the generations. In connecting to the morning mower he feels, 

a spirit kindred to my own; 
So that henceforth I worked no more alone. 

And dreaming, as it were, held brotherly speech 
With one whose thought I had not hoped to reach. 

This fellowship across the generations is the fellowship of art that unites men by their participating in and contributing to the tradition of poetry. This is what makes it possible to be in touch with the dawn. 

“Men work together,” I told him from the heart, 
“Whether they work together or apart.” 

For Frost, this feeling of being part of the long succession of poets is not one of rivalry but of fellowship in the service of the Muses. And here too as in many of his other poems, he finds the image for this experience in the New England landscape.

Up to now we have been considering the way ancient ideas of the Muses and their followers pervade the way Frost thinks of the art of poetry and himself as a poet in relation to poets past and present. I will only show how two of Frost’s poems – “Wild Grapes” and “One More Brevity” –rely for their “ulteriority” to a large extent on two extended individual ancient poems, one Greek and one Latin.

“Wild Grapes” was written at the request of Susan Hayes Ward, the poetry editor of The Independent magazine. Frost referred to her as “my first discoverer” because she was his first publisher (“My Butterfly,” 1894). From then on, she and her brother, who was editor-in-hief of The Independent, were friends and encouragers of the young Frost. Miss Ward asked Frost to write her a poem that would do for girls what “Birches” did for boys – a poem to be based on her own childhood experience. Her older brother had bent down a birch tree so that she could reach the wild grapes entangled on vines in its upper branches. When he released it, she was carried heavenward as she grasped the vines, only getting back to earth when her brother bent the tree back down again. Riding heavenward and back to earth on a birch tree is the central motif of “Birches” and “Wild Grapes.” In the case of the boy, both the ascent and the descent are achieved with conscious mastery; in the case of the little girl both are involuntary – “run off with by birch trees into space,” then rescued when her brother bends the tree back down. This same motif links “Wild Grapes” to Euripides’ Bacchae.

The climax of Bacchae is the messenger’s account of what happens when Pentheus, the young king of Thebes, disguises himself as a Maenad in order to spy on the Theban women who, against his orders, have followed Dionysus to revel as Maenads in the nearby mountains. Dionysus, disguised as his own priest, lures the deluded king who has repudiated him to climb to the top of a pine tree, which the god bends to earth, like the birch in “Wild Grapes,” and then gently releases so that Pentheus is carried up into the sky the better to witness what he imagines to be the orgies of the Theban women. When the women, who include Pentheus’ mother and aunts, catch sight of a male intruder in the top of the tree peering at their rituals in honor of Dionysus, they tear down the tree and bring him to earth, where in their ecstatic frenzy they fail to recognize him and literally tear him limb from limb.

Frost is working with a twofold motif –on the one hand, that of his own poem “Birches,” and on the other, that of Euripides’ play with all of its complex Dionysiac lore of Maenadism in the wilderness.

This complex of motifs seems to have had a special importance for Frost. Although “Wild Grapes” was first published in Harpers in 1920, and “Birches” in the Atlantic in 1915, it appears from his unpublished papers that he was contemplating in 1958 a collection of poems (never published) that went from “Birches” to “Wild Grapes” “with an inner logic that I don’t have to account for.” The motif of the tree bent down to earth and in some sense functioning as an intermediary between earth and heaven is common to Bacchae and both Frost’s poems. It is an aspect of one of his lifelong preoccupations with the relation of matter and spirit. Already in “Birches” his longing for a retreat toward heaven is tempered by the reminder that “Earth’s the right place for love.” In “Wild Grapes,” the little girl who is “run away with by birch trees into space” achieves a second birthday, is born again, when her brother brings her safely back to earth by bending down the birch tree. The same relation of matter and spirit is developed at length in “Kitty Hawk” –a poem that existed in several early forms, but was not published until 1962 in his final volume, In the Clearing. Frost chose an eighteen-line passage from it, in which he condenses his idea of the relation of matter and spirit, to affix to the dedication of the volume that contains the whole poem, as though to emphasize for his friends and for the public this lifelong concern.

As so often, when Frost appropriates foreign material, ancient or modern, he drastically modifies it. The little girl’s journey heavenward on a bentdown tree has an opposite outcome to that of Pentheus. Pentheus when he rides the tree to the sky is brought to earth by the outraged Theban women and dismembered. The little girl, as she travels to the sky with the birch tree, has to be 

come after like Eurydice 
And brought down safely from the upper regions 

–a second inversion, of course, because Orpheus failed in his attempt to bring back Eurydice from the nether regions. Eurydice failed to acquire “an extra life” as her little counterpart did; who, as a result of her adventure, can for the rest of her life celebrate two birthdays. She has become twice born, like Dionysus himself, whom his father, Zeus, had ripped from his mortal mother Semele’s womb as she was being consumed in flames at the sight of Zeus in his full glory. Zeus then sewed his premature offspring up in his own thigh and nurtured him there until he was ready for his second birth in the sky. The twice-born are children both of earth and sky. Dionysus was the offspring of a mortal mother, Semele, and her immortal celestial lover, Zeus; whereas Frost’s little heroine is both carried off to heaven on a birch branch and returned to earth. She is thereby born again, as she immediately realizes.

Pentheus, on the other hand, is only earth-orn. His ascent to heaven and back results not in second birth but in being torn apart by Maenads. He has rejected Dionysus and forbidden the attempt to introduce his cult in Thebes. He does not believe in miracles and thinks the claim that the son of Semele is also a son of Zeus is just a cover-up for an illegitimate affair, and, moreover, that the celebrations in the wilderness are some kind of sexual orgy that he has a lubricious desire to witness. Dionysus plays into this delusion, persuading him to put on female dress and follow the Theban Maenads to spy on them. Because of their initial cynicism about Dionysus, they too, like Pentheus, have fallen under his spell and have rushed off into the wilderness as Maenads. Both Pentheus and the Theban women, having self-righteously rejected the miraculous claims of the Dionysiac religion as physical impossibilities advanced by an effeminate charlatan, have lost their grip on reality. Pentheus’ delusion about his own identity is revealed in his complacent reply to the taunts of the disguised Dionysus, that he does not know what he is doing or who he is, “I am Pentheus, son of Agave, my father was Echion.” His blindness to the possibility of the miracle of second birth has led him to ignore the forces which, when denied, can lead to insanity. The women’s delusion about reality is equally great. Though his mother, Agave, and her two sisters, his aunts, are among them, they fail to recognize him in the treetop where Dionysus has lodged him, and so take him for a lion. They drag him to earth and destroy him. His mother then carries his head home in triumph believing it to be the head of a lion. Her father, King Kadmos, brings her back from her ecstatic state to everyday life by getting her to recognize first the actual sky, then by stages to name her husband, then her son, then to say what she holds in her hand; and only finally, to look at what it is. Frost suggests a similar staged return for the little girl when her brother bends down the tree, and lowers her to earth again from where she dangled among the grapes. Frost represents her as having been as far away from the ordinary world as Euripides’ Agave:

I don’t know much about the letting down; 
But once I felt ground with my stocking feet 
And 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. 

For Agave it is the sight of the sky that triggers her return to the real world; for the little girl it is the feel of earth under her feet that brings the world “revolving back” to her. Her experience, so different from Agave’s, is to have been “translated,” as she herself says.

The Dionysiac context of this experience is the heart of Frost’s tribute to Miss Ward. The birch tree that carries her off is an ivy-crowned Maenad. 

Wearing a thin headdress of pointed leaves, 
And heavy on her heavy hair behind, 
Against her neck, an ornament of grapes. 

Frost reflects Euripides here, who implies that the pine tree that Pentheus rides skyward is a Maenad. When he describes how Dionysus gently prevents the pine tree from shaking Pentheus off, he uses a Greek verb that means literally “shake the hair while throwing back the head.” This is the traditional gesture of a Maenad dancing in Dionysiac frenzy, very familiar in ancient literature, sculpture, and painting. Almost certainly Frost recognized its implications for the pine tree that carried Pentheus to his death, and adapted them to the birch tree that carried the little girl to hang among the grapes. Her brother’s description of her as having been 

run off with by birch trees into space. 

implies that she has been swept up and carried away by reveling Maenads. Her own perception of the grape-laden birch trees when her brother first shows them to her is also highly Dionysiac: 

Grapes, I knew grapes from having seen them last year. 
One bunch of them and there began to be 
Bunches all around me growing in white birches. 

Frost must have been familiar with accounts of such miraculous burgeonings. They are commonplace in ancient literature and art about Dionysus –signs of his magical power, as when the mast of the ship in which pirates are trying to abduct him turns into a grape-laden vine and the pirates into dolphins.

The many Dionysiac motifs that I have been pointing out indicate Frost’s very attentive reading of Bacchae, almost certainly in Greek, as his picking up the notion of the Maenad tree suggests. It is one of the signs of his deep involvement with ancient texts, his poet’s awareness of their nuances of language. It is a poet’s reading of a fellow poet –a reading that some scholars might not agree with. In my opinion it comes close to the heart of the play. Many further themes of Euripides that are built into “Wild Grapes” will appear in the discussion that follows.

But first, what do the cult of Dionysus and maenadism have to do with a tribute to Susan Ward? The cult of Dionysus, as represented by Euripides, is a celebration of freedom and wildness, most prominently by women, but open to men, too. Dionysus’ female worshippers temporarily abandon their traditional female roles in the domestic interiors of the house and rush off in groups to celebrate him with ecstatic dances in the wilderness – the traditional province of men only. There they behave in culturally forbidden ways – clothed in fawnskins, wreathed in snakes and sprays of ivy, oak, or pine, carrying sacred wands and torches, reveling barefoot in the mountains, and forcibly attacking profaners of their rites. They revel as do Artemis and the nymphs and other woodland divinities –all virgins who resist male domination. They also briefly enjoy the freedom of the wilderness. The loss of identity that they experience in their ecstatic self-abandonment leads to a kind of second birth. The little girl of “Wild Grapes” also abandons herself. Carried away by birches, she holds on by both hands with her eyes shut against the sun and her ears deaf to her brother’s advice, and throws back her head in the traditional Maenad gesture (the same gesture of throwing back the head that Dionysus stops the pine tree from making, as it carries Pentheus skyward. She feels when she returns to herself that she has acquired a second birthday. She is “a little boyish girl” who, like a Maenad, had repudiated conventional female restraints and escaped temporarily into the wilderness. Frost has turned Susan Ward’s childhood anecdote into a characteristically inverted version of Bacchae, casting Susan Ward as a Maenad because of her untraditional role (for a female of the 1890s) as a single woman, the poetry editor of The Independent, functioning in the traditional male world outside the home.

Poetry, which is Susan Ward’s sphere of activity, is also part of Dionysus’ function. Dionysus and Apollo as patrons of music (poetry in the largest sense) share a cult on Mount Parnassus, as already described in connection with “Directive.” Within that cult Apollo represents harmony or order, and Dionysus, wildness or instinct. These are the two necessary bases of poetry, which Frost describes in his projected (1958) preface to the never-published volume of poems that were to go from “Birches” to “Wild Grapes” –that is, “footbeats for the meter, and heartbeats for the rhythm” (see the discussion in “The Figure a Poem Makes,” CPPP, 776). The little girl’s transport hanging on by both hands among the grapes in the birch tree leads to her having two birthdays. Her brother points out that she has a special qualification beyond the ordinary grapes: 

“Now you know how it feels,” my brother said, 
“To be a bunch of fox-grapes . . . 
“Only you have the advantage of the grapes 
In one way: you have one more stem to cling by, 
And promise more resistance to the picker.” 

Unlike an ordinary grape, she has “one more stem to cling by.” Though her brother is joking, she interprets the experience as a sign that 

I had not taken the first step in knowledge; 
I had not learned to let go with the hands, 
As still I have not learned to with the heart. 
I have no wish to with the heart – nor need, 
That I can see. The mind is not the heart. 

. . . but nothing tells me 
That I need learn to let go with the heart. 

She seems to understand “the one more stem to cling by” as the instinctive knowledge of the heart. Her brother insists on her lack of knowledge: 

“Don’t you know anything, you girl, let go!” 

His knowledge is of the mind. The same knowledge with which he mastered the trees in “Birches” and rescued her in “Wild Grapes” is what she had yet to learn, as she ignored his cries to let go, and clung instinctively with 

the baby grip 
Acquired ancestrally in just such trees 
[referring to the wild practices of prehistoric times] 
I held on uncomplainingly for life. 

The knowledge of the heart belongs to the sphere of wildness and primitive instinct –the sphere of Dionysus. This knowledge Susan Ward acquired during her adventure among the grapes and has not let go since. As her brother said, she had “one more stem to cling by.”

This Dionysiac experience, going back to her early childhood, is a necessary part of Susan Ward’s connection with poetry, but we must not forget what Frost (in that preface to the proposed 1958 collection) referred to as “footbeats for the meter,” the sphere of Apollo –the world of order and harmony which is the other prerequisite of poetry. It is with this sphere, the knowing with the mind when to let go, that the little girl must still learn to deal. The comparison of her rescue to that of Eurydice implicitly links the brother with Apollo, the father of Orpheus. Orpheus, as already pointed out, failed because he succumbed to passion, whereas the brother succeeded because he kept his head. This Apollonian knowledge involves conscious self-control – good judgment about the way things work. It is not to be confused with the seeming common sense of earth-born Pentheus and the Theban Maenads that causes them to reject the miraculous claims of Dionysus and to imagine that they can master him. They are therefore carried away by powers they have already rejected. This contrast between true enlightenment and earthbound common sense that leaves no room for wildness and instinct is a central theme of Bacchae. Frost’s earliest poetry reflects the Dionysiac/ Apollonian theme, which in his 1958 unpublished preface he referred to as heartbeats and footbeats.

It is part of Frost’s extraordinary ability that he sees the underlying human reality that links Susan Ward’s childhood experience (at least as he imagines it) to the complex Dionysiac themes in Euripides’ Bacchae. That discernment lifts the episode from a charming personal anecdote to a universal experience, turning it also into a tribute to Susan Ward’s special gifts. We have often observed how Frost can expand from the personal and particular the stage on which his poems are enacted to take in great stretches of space and time and human experience.

“The artist must value himself,” Frost said, “as he snatches a thing from some previous order in time and space into a new order with not so much as a ligature clinging to it of the old place where it was organic.” In another context, he again asserts: “In the little poem it ought to be – even in a short one you know – that you can put your finger on five or six items that come from different quarters of the universe . . . I summon something I almost didn’t know I had. I have command.”6 These two related descriptions of the way he combines superficially unconnected material to produce a kind of ulteriority which draws it all together come late in his career.

In “Wild Grapes” (a relatively early poem, 1920), the links with Bacchae extend beyond Susan Ward’s personal adventure to include some implications of the ancient cult. Her allusion to bunches of grapes growing round her in the birches 

The way they grew round Leaf the Lucky’s German 

unexpectedly transfers the scene to a different time and place –the discovery of grapes in Vineland by Leif Erikson’s German foster father Tyrker. As recounted in the Greenland Saga, he has the distinction of discovering the grapes growing in the New World and introducing them to his Norse companions, together with wine making, which he had learned in his native Germany. Euripides’ Dionysus brought the culture of the vine and the beliefs of his cult to Greece from the ancient civilized East. Tyrker is a New World Dionysus. He introduces grapes with viticulture and all that goes with it – from the well-established vineyards of the Rhine to the wilder, more westerly worlds. Leaf, who is Tyrker’s foster son, in turn brought back grapes and the culture of the vine to Greenland. He too had a Dionysiac role, and like Dionysus, can claim a second birth.

These are some, by no means all, of the “items that come from different quarters of the universe” that Frost has put his finger on in order to present Susan Ward’s childhood adventure in the context of a Dionysiac experience. Dionysiac impulses go back to the Stone Age. They involve not just the world of Euripides but its diffusion westward through Europe to the cultures of Greenland and the Americas.

Finally, “One More Brevity,” a really late poem (1953), also incorporates ancient material into a contemporary context. It evinces a comparable skill in snatching “a thing from some previous order in time and space into a new order with not so much as a ligature clinging to it of the old place where it was organic.” As we shall see in this case the principal thing “snatched” is from Virgil’s Aeneid. Such “snatchings” are by no means limited to ancient material. As I hope is becoming clear by now, Frost uses the same poetic techniques in his ancient borrowings as in all his other borrowings. He is at home with all the many fields which engaged his far-ranging and powerful imagination.

The unlikely subject matter of the poem is a visit from a stray dog, a Dalmatian, who unexpectedly drops in to his Vermont cabin, spends the night, and vanishes the next morning as suddenly as he appeared. The episode is described in such an endearingly and doggily appropriate way that it scarcely seems to need exploration. Except that the poet does hint that the visit has a special, not to be divulged, message for him. The brief, companionable, trusting acceptance of each other by visitor and host seems almost enough to account for the suggestion of meaning and for the poet’s regret at the brevity of the encounter. When the poet opens his door for a last look at Sirius in the night sky, the dog slips in as though seeking asylum. The poet’s reaction, 

and I was stirred 
To be the one so dog-preferred – 

establishes the emotional tone of the visit. The welcome is unquestioning: 

I set him water. I set him food, 
He rolled an eye with gratitude . . . 
His hard tail loudly smacked the floor 
As if beseeching me, “Please, no more.” 

This description is so engaging that it seems almost pedantic to look further, but there are indeed suggestions to look beyond the surface impression for some ulteriority in the incident.

Sirius, the brightest of the fixed stars, the tail of the dog in the constellation Orion, is invoked even before the real dog is mentioned. The poem begins, 

I opened the door so that my last look 
Should be taken outside of a house or a book. 
Before I gave up seeing and slept 
I said I would see how Sirius kept 
His watchdog eye on what remained 
To be gone into if not explained. 

Throughout Greek and Roman literature Sirius is familiar as the “dog-tar” that rises with Orion and presides over the “dog days” of August (see discussion of Horace’s Fons Bandusiae above). In New England latitudes the rising of Orion and his dog occurs considerably later, in the fall. The idea of Sirius as a watchdog or guardian is also familiar from ancient literature. Frost, quite characteristically, is checking on him to see how he is keeping his “watchdog” eye on things. The end of the poem brings us back again to Sirius. In the last line, after the visiting dog vanishes, Frost speculates that it might indeed have been Sirius who dropped in on him: 

The star itself – Heaven’s greatest star, 
Not a meteorite, but an avatar – 
Who had made an overnight descent 
To show by deeds he didn’t resent 
My having depended on him so long, 
And yet done nothing about it in song. 

The stray dog has surprisingly become portentously symbolic. He is also the bearer of a message for Frost himself, as was implied by the affinity and mutual acceptance between dog and man at the beginning of the poem. What that message may be seems to need “to be gone into” a little further, “if not explained.”

Frost’s lifelong obsession with Sirius seemingly dates from a chapter in a book of popular astronomy that his mother gave him when he was a boy. In a 1935 letter Elinor Frost quotes him as saying he is “down here in Key West now to find out if Canopus is as good a star as Sirius.” Up to 1953, he had done nothing about Sirius in song in spite of his lifelong concern. Though he does not name the star of “Take Something Like a Star,” one feels that only the brightest of the fixed stars could be the subject of that poem. Like Keats’ star and Shakespeare’s star, which the poem evokes, Frost’s star is a marker and guide for uncertain human beings. In other places, stars in general and meteorites appear as examples of the wondrous extent and complexity of the cosmos, but only here (in “One More Brevity”), as far as I can discover, does Frost claim a personal relationship with Sirius, so personal that he imagines the star may actually have made an “overnight descent” to pay him a visit.

But how is Sirius, the heavenly watchdog, related to Frost’s “problem guest” who plops himself down exhausted as soon as he slips in the door? When Frost sees that the dog is too tired to respond to his hospitable welcome, except with a roll of his eye and a thump of his tail, he reassures him in the only triplet in this poem, which is otherwise entirely in couplets. 

So I spoke in terms of adoption thus: 
“Gustie, old boy, Dalmatian Gus, 
You’re right, there’s nothing to discuss . . . 
Meanwhile feel obligation-free. 
Nobody has to confide in me.” 

The poet’s instant affinity with the dog inspires him to give him a name as a sign of adoption, and reaffirm it by repetition. 

In fancy I ratified his name 
Gustie – Dalmatian Gus, that is – 
And I started shaping my life to his 
Finding him in his right supplies 
And sharing his miles of exercise. 

This affinity seems to foreshadow the feeling he expresses at the end of the poem: that his visitor was Sirius himself with a personal message. Near the beginning of the poem, while Frost is contemplating Sirius at the cabin door, there 

Slipped in to be my problem guest 
Not a heavenly dog made manifest – 
But an earthly dog of the carriage breed. 

Already, the poet has set up some kind of correspondence between the watchdog in the sky and the visitor on earth. The end of the poem wipes out the implied contrast between the two dogs by suggesting that one is a temporary manifestation of the other.

The story of “One More Brevity” is clearly a variation on a familiar Indo-European folktale about hospitality offered to a god in disguise by a stranger without pretension to rank or power. This story is familiar in European literature from the story of Baucis and Philemon (cf. Ovid’s Metamorphoses, VIII, 8.618–24), and from more recent tales that generally derive from Ovid. In the poem Frost suspects that his vanished guest has been Sirius, 

The star itself – Heaven’s greatest star, 
Not a meteorite, but an avatar. 

He has clearly, without knowing it, entertained a denizen of the heavens who was bringing him a message. 
Classical mythology is also full of stories of mortals who have been translated to the stars after death –like Orion and his dog, who pursue the Pleiades across the heavens. In particular there is a tradition that certain notable figures appeared in the sky after death as stars and were thought to have joined the immortals who dwell on Olympus. The tradition that Roman rulers became deified after death was publicly affirmed after Julius Caesar’s murder. A comet appeared at his funeral and people immediately identified it as his soul transported to the realm of the gods. After this, Augustus (Caesar’s adoptive son and successor) was saluted as the son of a god, himself to become a god after death and to join his “father” in the sky. Virgil projected this destiny onto Aeneas, the founder of the original Trojan settlement on the banks of the Tiber and ancestor of Romulus and Remus who would later found the actual city. The Aeneid is, among other things, the story of the ordeals which forced Aeneas reluctantly to relinquish his commitment to his life as a mortal and finally to accept his destiny as a godto-be – the proto-founder of Rome and the progenitor of a line of mighty leaders.

In Frost’s poem, hospitality was in fact enjoyed by a “heavenly dog,” though the poet imagined initially that he was welcoming “an earthly dog.” He had entertained a god in disguise –not only an inhabitant of the heavens but an avatar. Frost uses this word only here. He might have found it described in Bulfinch’s Age of Fable (with which he was very familiar) as a brief manifestation of a savior god in earthly form, a temporary incarnation of deity.

The carefully indicated attitude of withdrawal that the dog adopts when he first slips in Frost’s door has associations from the same world of belief. Here is a dog who has “failed of the modern speed,” and is out of step with the world. 

He dumped himself like a bag of bones, 
He sighed himself a couple of groans, 
And head to tail then firmly curled 
Like swearing off on the traffic world. 

Head to tail is the position of that image of detachment and eternity, the “tail eater,” the ouroboros. The dog in this position is seeking what Frost had only recently come to understand, the state of Nirvana –“the perfect detachment from ambition and desire that can alone rescue us from the round of existence,” as Frost had recently pointed out in “The Prerequisites” (CPPP, 814), after coming to realize that even gods long for this escape.

Who is this unfamiliar god, this star from the heavens, that appears bodily to the poet as an avatar, collapses exhausted and the next morning vanishes as unexpectedly as he came? Why does Frost feel that Sirius is the bearer of a mysterious message which the poet is reluctant to share? What metaphor unites all the disparate elements of the poem into an ulteriority which can give us some inkling of the nature of the dog? As we have seen, his host in adopting him emphasizes his name. When Frost repeats the dog’s name he also repeats that name along with the name of his breed, thus “Dalmatian Gus,” and in addition characterizes him as “an earthly dog of the carriage breed” reminding us yet again that he is a Dalmatian. These recurrent reminders help us to think more about this god-come-to-arth and what his message might be. Improbable as it seems, two important books of the second half of the Aeneid, Books VIII and X, in a typically Virgilian way, link the beginnings of Rome (when Aeneas and his refugee band founded their first camp on the banks of the Tiber) with Virgil’s contemporary Rome (when the Emperor Augustus achieved his triumphant pacification of the Roman world). Virgil brings these two worlds together through his description of the gift from his mother Venus – the shield that Aeneas will carry into battle against the enemies on Italian soil of Roman destiny. Vulcan, at Venus’ request, has inscribed on the shield prophecies of Rome’s progress through the ages, from Romulus and Remus to Augustus. The origins of Rome and the culmination of its future are thus juxtaposed in Book VIII.

This juxtaposition of past and present is repeated with the bringing together of the image of an Augustus triumphant on the shield with that of Aeneas triumphant in Book X –the span from first to last of the many founders that will have helped to create the new civilization.

When Aeneas, a friendless exile, is welcomed by Evander (the king of the rustic village of Arcadian refugees on the future site of Rome just upstream from the Trojan camp), we already begin to realize that he is being recognized as a hero destined for future godhood because of his service to humanity. In this scene Evander evokes Heracles, the prototype in the Roman tradition of deified mortals. King Evander had entertained Heracles in his thatched hut on the Palatine (where Augustus later had built his studiedly modest dwelling) after Heracles had rescued the villagers from the firebreathing monster Cacus, who was preying on them. Evander salutes Aeneas as a hero in the same tradition. 

Victorious Heracles crossed this threshold, 
This “royal” dwelling received him, 
Dare, my guest, to despise pomp, and make 
Yourself worthy of godhood and enter 
Without passing judgment on meager means. 

In reminding Aeneas to abjure worldly pomp and make himself worthy of godhood, he is foreshadowing the future deification of Aeneas and of the many “founders” to come, particularly of Julius Caesar, already among the stars, and Augustus who will someday join him there. Aeneas shares the typology of Heracles, the hero who for his tireless labors on behalf of humanity becomes one of the Olympians. Virgil links Aeneas through this typology to many Roman leaders that follow. As we shall see, he has additional ways to associate him with Augustus.

The association of Aeneas with the heroic redeeming hero destined for godhood is extended farther in Book X by the way the description of Aeneas’ first triumph in Italy anticipates on a small scale the triumphant climax to come represented on his divine shield: namely, Augustus at the battle of Actium, transfigured in the stern of his ship, flames shooting from his temples, the Julian star and the ancestral gods above his head, then celebrating in Rome his triple triumph of Actium, Dalmatia, and Alexandria, and finally, seated gloriously on the Palatine receiving the homage of the pacified peoples of the empire.

Aeneas’ first triumph on Italian soil occurs in Book X as he descends the Tiber by ship bringing reinforcements to his beleaguered comrades. He raises his shield in greeting “as he stands in the high stern,” stans celsa in puppi – the very words that are used of Augustus at Actium on the shield. Aeneas’ transfiguration is marked by comparable imagery. Flames stream from his helmet and a star, not literally present, but introduced in a typically Virgilian way via a double simile, shines over him. The flames from his helmet are compared to a comet “glowing blood red and mournful through the clear night” –a reminder of the Julian Star, the patrium sidus that stood over Augustus at Actium and whose connection now with Aeneas assimilates his triumph to that of his successor in Virgil’s time. The two events, so far apart in time, contribute to one historical process. The second part of the simile connects Sirius with the same process by comparing the same flames to the glowing heat of Sirius which “brings thirst and sickness to mortals when it saddens the sky with sinister light.” This links Aeneas to Achilles whom Homer (Iliad, XXII, 26ff) compares to Sirius when clad in divine armor, the gifts of his goddess mother, he races into battle, and instills terror in the Trojans.

The light around Achilles is baneful like the light of Sirius because it portends the death of Hector and ultimately of Achilles too, and the fall of Troy. But the positive side of this baneful light, at least for Romans, is that Rome’s earliest beginnings can take place only after Troy has fallen. Then, Aeneas, bearing on his back his father, who holds the images of the ancestral gods of Troy, and leading by the hand his little son, can leave Troy to begin the search for a new homeland. The part of the simile that reminds us of the star of Julius has a similarly double message. It signals not only mourning for the death of a murdered leader but also his deification and the eventual deification of his son. Such Virgilian passages may well have been models for Frost’s own charged uses of metaphor.

This abridged analysis of Aeneid Books VIII and X shares themes with “One More Brevity” –the major one being hospitality to a homeless wanderer, who is either destined for godhood and a dwelling among the gods, or a god in disguise (already a star) descended briefly from the heavens. Both hosts (Frost and Evander) ultimately become aware of the divine origins of their visitors. These correspondences suggest that we should look to Aeneid Books VIII and X for the explanation of Frost’s emphasis on the name and breed of his visitor. The imagery shared by Aeneas, Augustus, and the intervening leaders (all of whom helped to create Roman civilization) affirm the exhausting effort of trying to create a Roman world of peace and brotherhood. This ideal is articulated at various stages of the epic, mainly in councils among the gods. The goal, though foretold on Olympus, is not achieved in the epic. Those who struggle toward it, from Aeneas to Augustus, will be rewarded with godhood after death for their attempt to bring the Golden Age to earth. The exhaustion of Dalmatian Gus is like theirs. Like them, he has done all he can in this world and belongs among the stars.

Gus is short for Augustus. Dalmatian Gus has much in common with Augustus Caesar, whose defeat of Antony and Cleopatra at Actium was followed by his triple triumph, whose celebration included not only Actium and Alexandria, but also Dalmatia. This threefold triumph appears on the shield, followed by the scene which depicts the submission to Augustus of the subject peoples of the Empire and his attempt to establish the Golden Age of peace and brotherhood on earth with pacification of the Roman world. If Dalmatian Gus is really Augustus Caesar, then the undisclosed message for the poet must be something about the pain and struggle involved in trying to give social and political reality to a political ideal. 

This sampling of ways Frost drew on the literature and concepts of the Greek and Roman world at every stage of his life indicates how imbued with it he was. The intense exposure of his high school and college years was formative for him, providing both literary material and ideas about poetry that he drew on for the rest of his life. It is clear from the poems discussed how resourcefully and variously he drew on his knowledge of antiquity and with what art he used it to add breadth and depth to the apparently simplest of poems. The fact that he was able to continue to draw on it throughout his life indicates how inexhaustible a source it was for him for his poetic theory and practice. It was of course only one of many of Frost’s uses of Metamorphoses.

An adequate discussion of the varied ways that Frost adopted or adapted Plato’s thought and imagery would fill another chapter. “The Trial by Existence” (first published in 1906, even before his first book) is an example of the way a passage of Plato with its many far-eaching implications can dominate a poem and enlarge its scope. Frost’s poem actually paraphrases the “myth of Er” that closes Plato’s Republic (Book X, 614ff). Some awareness of this passage and its relation to the main argument of the ten books of the Republic is necessary in order to understand, let alone grasp the richness of “The Trial by Existence.” Earlier critics have acknowledged that the main structure of Frost’s poem is unmistakably determined by specific features of Plato’s myth. More recent critics often do not mention Plato’s account. Either they are unfamiliar with it, or consider it irrelevant.

Like many other of Plato’s “myths” that appear here and there throughout the Dialogues (the most familiar being the “myth of the cave” – also in the Republic, VII, 514–21), the “myth of Er” restates in poetic form arguments the speakers have previously presented philosophically. The speakers in the Republic are seeking, throughout its ten books, to discover what kind of man will attain the greatest happiness –whether the most just man, that is, the philosopher, or the most unjust man, the tyrant. The basic discourse is structured around the discussions of the proponents of one or other of these two types, in what Socrates more than once calls a “contest for happiness.” The argument ends when Socrates proclaims the philosopher to be the victor.

Socrates, when he tells the “myth of Er,” widens the range of the contest. Now included is the well-eing and happiness of souls traveling their many cycles of birth and death. For a reader who is not aware of this myth and of the whole argument that it sums up poetically, Frost’s poem becomes imaginatively diminished.

The “myth” tells the story of a man named Er who comes back to life after having died in battle and reports as follows to the living. After a period of rewards and punishments in the next world for lives already lived, souls are summoned for rebirth to a meadow where they will select the life they will live in their coming transmigration. Frost reproduces the main features of Plato’s scene of the gathering of souls for rebirth. He describes on the right hand a path up into the sky by which the souls pass to be rewarded, and also a road down from the sky by which they return eventually to choose a new life. On the left is the path leading down into the earth by which souls descend for punishment, along with an upward path out of the earth by which they return after punishment to choose their next life. Thus there is a continual coming and going of souls enacting this cycle of rebirths. This scene anticipates by hundreds of years the outlines of the familiar Christian version of the Last Judgment which depicts souls rising to Heaven on the right and descending to damnation on the left. Plato’s version postulates many cycles involving thousands of years for each soul’s punishments or rewards; the Christian version coalesces the process into one apocalyptic judgment.

In most of the poems I have discussed, the source of the image that governs the poem’s structure is far less obvious than it is in “Directive” or “Wild Grapes.” In “The Trial by Existence,” all the critical elements of Plato’s myth, even beyond what we have mentioned, are in Frost’s version –for example, the eyewitness account, the openings to heaven and the underworld thronged by souls coming and going in both directions, the majestic enthroned authority that oversees the choice of lives (the goddess called Necessity for Plato, God with a capital G for Frost), the display of the many patterns of life to choose from, the distribution of the lots that determine the order of choice, and the stern proclamation that though the order is determined by necessity, the responsibility for the life chosen is the chooser’s alone, not god’s. 
Plato dwells on the soul that having drawn the last lot gets to choose last of all. This is Odysseus, whose previous life of heroic struggle has taught him to give up on the rewards of ambition. After long search he chooses the life of an obscure private citizen which other souls have overlooked. Frost picks up on the meaning of this repudiation of worldly glory. 

Nor is there wanting in the press 
Some spirit to stand simply forth, 
Heroic in its nakedness, 
Against the uttermost of earth. 
The tale of earth’s unhonored things 
Sounds nobler there than’neath the sun. 

In Frost’s version, the assembled souls greet the daring choice with a shout of joy. Though he does not name Odysseus, he clearly understands the choice as a wise one.

Though Frost christianizes some aspects of Plato’s account of the inexplicable pivot of the human condition, he also reproduces the atmosphere of mystified reverence and awe with which Plato presents it. The reader shares Frost’s stunned awareness that the very basis of human existence is the seemingly contradictory fact that whatever one must endure in this world one has brought upon oneself. 

Tis of the essence of life here, 
Though we choose greatly, still to lack 
The lasting memory at all clear, 
That life has for us on the wrack 
Nothing but what we somehow chose; 
Thus are we wholly stripped of pride 
In the pain that has but one close, 
Bearing it crushed and mystified. 

The poem ends with this affirmation of the thought that governs the “myth of Er” –that is (in Plato’s own words): “The responsibility [for the life chosen] belongs to the chooser. The god is not responsible.” Frost, by choosing the image of the transmigration of souls over aeons of time to present this dilemma of the human condition, though almost certainly thinking metaphorically, gives this thought the same kind of solemnity and cosmological weight that it has had for Plato. Without this parable that furnishes the context, the poem is reduced from an impassioned statement about all human life to a quirky and self-centered assertion of Frost’s personal control over everything in his own destiny.

Plato as a young man sacrificed a burgeoning career as a poet to devote his life to philosophy. His works are permeated with passages of poetry, in the form of myths and parables, like the story of Er, which give expressive form to his theoretical arguments. In addition, his Dialogues, as Aristotle (Poetics 1447 b7) early noted, are to be classified as works of art –poetry in its highest sense. The Dialogues should be recognized as dramas in prose, not technical treatises. Plato’s gifts as a poet are one reason for his notorious distrust of the seductiveness of poetry. The combination of philosophy and poetry are clearly one of the causes of Plato’s pervasive appeal to Frost as reflected both in his imagery and thought. Frost too had a comparable combination of poetic gifts and a mind powerfully engaged with scientific and philosophic ideas-something like Plato’s synoptic grasp of poetry and philosophy. Plato himself comes from a tradition which began with poets (such as Pythagoras and Parmenides), who were also sages and philosophers. In later times, the tradition carries on with the Epicurean Lucretius and Virgil, who was also trained and deeply involved in philosophy; and in a lesser way with Horace, who saw himself as a prophet-poet and moral leader. Later still, Dante, who claimed Virgil as his master, built his epic around Aquinas’ version of Aristotelian thought. Frost shared with these poets their ability to incorporate the ideas of philosophy and science into a comprehensive vision of the human condition. His thinking and writing in prose and poetry belong in this same grand tradition. 

NOTES 
1 Quoted from the Buffalo (NY) Evening News, November 11, 1927, p. 27, in a report of a reading given by Frost at the Grosvenor Library, Buffalo, November 10, 1927. 
2 Quoted in Reginald L. Cook, Robert Frost: A Living Voice (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1974), p. 23. 
3 “But the whole function of poetry is the renewal of words, is the making of words mean again what they meant,” from “What Became of New England,” Oberlin College Commencement Address, June 8, 1957 in CPPP, 756. 
4 Kiffin Rockwell, Classical Journal, December 1972–January 1973, 182–83. 
5 Lowell Edmunds, Classical Journal, 70, 3 (February–March 1975), 36–37. 
6 Quoted in Cook, Frost: A Living Voice, p. 117.

from "The Cambridge Companion to Robert Frost"