6. Devotion / West-Running Brook(1928) - Robert Frost

[esse]

Devotion

The heart can think of no devotion

Greater than being shore to the ocean―

Holding the curve of one position,

Counting an endless repetition.

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헌신

가슴이 생각할 수 있는 최고의 헌신은

바다에 해안(海岸)이 되는 것―

끝없이 반복되는 파도를 헤아리며,

한 위치의 곡선(曲線)을 지키는 것이다.

-신재실 옮김-

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youtu.be/KUw_nsKQvjI

youtu.be/FbumjaDcVAg

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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

“Across Spaces of the Footed Line”: the Meter and Versification of Robert Frost - TIMOTHY STEELE

Robert Frost was an immensely skillful and conscientious poet, and he was fascinated by the technical aspects of versification. The magical paradox of fine verse is that it marries fixed measure with fluid idiomatic speech, and no poet more keenly relished and embodied this paradox than Frost. For more than sixty years, he wrote in a manner that was both utterly conventional and brilliantly idiosyncratic. Further, he was a thoughtful analyst of his art and made many just and original observations about it.

Unfortunately, however, Frost’s talents and insights as a craftsman have seldom been adequately acknowledged. There are two reasons for this neglect. First, Frost is a poet’s poet. His art conceals art. It is easy to overlook his dexterities because he appears to achieve them effortlessly. Second, though Frost made many sparkling perceptions about versification, they are not conveniently accessible in any one place, but are scattered here and there in his correspondence, in the handful of short essays and prefaces he published in his lifetime, and in transcripts of interviews with him and of public lectures he delivered. Moreover, when people have looked at Frost’s criticism, they have tended to concentrate on his remarks about “the sound of sense.” These are arresting and valuable and concern an issue close to Frost’s heart. But they are also in certain respects confused and have left some readers, especially those unfamiliar with the depth and breadth of Frost’s writing and thought, with the mistaken impression that he was, as a theorist at least, naive or eccentric.

This chapter attempts to focus Frost’s practical and critical genius and to discuss his versification both in light of his poems and in light of his written and recorded comments about poetry. The chapter’s main purpose is to increase the appreciation of Frost’s artistry, but there are additional benefits of examining Frost’s verse and ideas about verse. For one thing, Frost is a comprehensive technician in the same way as Shakespeare, Milton, Pope, or Wordsworth. As they do, he modulates meters in a style that is entirely his own and that sensitive readers would never mistake for anyone else’s; yet at the same time he is in the center of the historical tradition of English-language versification. To comprehend his metric is to comprehend the larger metric of our poetry from Gower and Chaucer’s time to ours.

Another benefit of studying Frost’s craft involves its variety. While Frost does not engage such larger genres as epic or tragedy –genres that had drifted, by the end of the eighteenth century, from verse to prose and to the novel – he writes in many meters and stanzas and is equally adept at lyric and narrative. Frost’s collected poems supply a survey of English verse forms and types that is almost as extensive as, and is much more enjoyable than, that contained in any manual or encyclopedia of poetry.

Finally, to study Frost’s art is to experience the hope that poets of the future may be able to heal the terrible breach between rhythm and meter that occurred in twentieth-century poetry. As do all outstanding poets, Frost delights in putting personal rhythm and impersonal meter into, as he says to John Cournos, “strained relation” (CPPP, 680). But unlike such younger contemporaries as Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, Frost never suggests that rhythm and meter get a divorce. Frost is preeminently the modern poet who demonstrates, memorable poem by memorable poem, that the rhythms of colloquial speech can vitally coexist with normative metrical structure. If metrical writing, as it has been practiced for several millennia, is to survive in the twentieth-first century, poets will have to recover and sustain Frost’s love for the dialectic between prosodic rule and individual tonality. 

1. Frost and the Interplay of Meter and Rhythm

In his preface to Edwin Arlington Robinson’s King Jasper, Frost speaks of poetry’s having a “metric frame on which to measure the rhythm”; and in his aphoristic essay, “Poetry and School,” he remarks: “Poetry plays the rhythms of dramatic speech on the grid of meter” (CPPP, 741, 809).

These statements capture the essence of traditional versification, which involves the concurrent but distinguishable phenomena of meter and rhythm. Meter is the basic norm or paradigm of the line. It is an analytical abstraction. It is, to use Frost’s terms, a “frame” or “grid.” In the case of the iambic pentameter, for example, the frame or grid is 

one two, one two, one two, one two, one two 

Rhythm, on the other hand, is the realization in speech of this pattern. Only very rarely will a poet write a line in which the realization exactly mirrors the paradigm – a line, that is, that consists of successive two-syllable, rearstressed phrasal or verbal units. Indeed, not one of the thousands of Frost’s iambic pentameters is so shaped, though the thirty-seventh line of his tetrametric “Brown’s Descent” is: 

He reeled, he lurched, he bobbed, he checked 

More frequently, the rhythm may involve an alternation of weak and strong syllables that approximates the norm fairly closely: 

The birch begins to crack its outer sheath 
(“A Young Birch,” line 1) 

However, most iambic pentameters do not feature such uniform fluctuations. Though the type with five obvious off-beats and five obvious beats is the most common, it can claim only a smallish plurality in Frost’s or almost any other poet’s verse. Poets write not only in feet, but also in larger phrases, clauses, and sentences. These feature syllables which do not all fall neatly into the categories of minimal accent and maximal accent, but which rather display an infinite range of stress-shadings. Hence the fluctuation between lighter and heavier syllables is not absolutely regular, but is instead sometimes more emphatic, sometimes less.

In this respect, we might think of iambic lines in light of the Frostian image of mountain ranges. Peaks and valleys alternate. But not every peak is an Everest, nor is every valley a Grand Canyon. Frequently, a peak or two is not as high as the others: 

And melting further in the wind to mud 
(“The Star-Splitter,” line 81) 

The tribute of the current to the source 
(“West-Running Brook,” line 70) 

Frequently a valley or two is not as deep: 

The winter owl banked just in time to pass 
(“Questioning Faces,” line 1) 

Squire Matthew Hale took off his Sunday hat 
(“The Gold Hesperidee,” line 45) 

Further, because the iambic line requires only the maintenance of the lighter-to-heavier fluctuation –and because the only requirement of an iamb is that its second syllable be weightier than its first – a metrically unstressed syllable at one point in the line may carry more speech emphasis than a metrically stressed syllable at another point. 

Of dead leaves stuck together by the heat 
(“Hyla Brook,” line 11) 

Here, that is, “leaves” (the metrical off-beat of foot two) actually has more speech stress than “by” (the metrical beat of foot four). Even so, the line maintains the fluctuation of lighter to heavier syllables and scans conventionally: 

x  /    x    /    x    /   x   /   x   / 
Of dead || leaves stuck || togeth || er by || the heat 

(Some authorities scan feet like “leaves stuck” as spondees, which consist of of two metrically accented syllables, and feet like “-er by” as pyrrhics, which consist of two metrically unaccented syllables. However, from a linguistic standpoint, routinely scanning pyrrhics and spondees into English iambic verse is doubtful, since successive syllables in our language hardly ever feature equal degrees of accent. From a prosodic standpoint, the procedure can lead to unnecessary complications and confusions, because it suggests that feet whose syllables are relatively close in weight are variants, whereas such feet occur all the time in any naturally and competently written iambic poem. The simplest course, then, is to treat as an iamb any foot whose second syllable is heavier than its first syllable. The degree of difference much affects the rhythm of a line, but is irrelevant to the meter.)

In writing in meter, then, Frost modulates the measure from within, laying various and vital segments of speech across the grid so as to adhere to the paradigm without mechanically or monotonously replicating it. The fundamental pattern is constant, but the individual verse lines embody it in ever-changing ways. As Frost remarks, in a conversation with Cleanth Brooks, Robert Penn Warren, and Kenny Withers, the aim of good verse is “to break the doggerel [i. e., the absolute regularity of the metrical norm]. And it mustn’t break with it . . . [T]here’s both the meter and the expressiveness on it – and so we get a poem” (CPPP, 854, 856). Likewise, he comments to John Freeman: “All I ask is iambic. I undertake to furnish the variety in the relation of my tones to it. The crossed swords are always the same. The sword dancer varies his position between them.”1

As Frost emphasizes on several occasions, meter and rhythm coexist inextricably in actual verse. When we read poems, we do not hear the meter at one level of the brain and the rhythm at another. Rather, our experience of the two is integrated. We hear at once the comprehensive metrical pattern and the individual rhythmical realizations of it. Frost makes this point in an interview with William Stanley Braithwaite. The poet speaks of his desire to convey meaning by tone and “sound-posture” as well as by the literal sense of words, and when Braithwaite interjects, “[D]o you not come into conflict with metrical sounds to which the laws of poetry conform?” Frost replies: “No, . . . because you must understand this sound of which I speak has principally to do with tone. It is what Mr. Bridges, the Poet Laureate, characterized as speech-rhythm. Meter has to do with beat . . . The two are one in creation but separate in analysis.”2

Because Frost so keenly appreciates how meter and rhythm support each other –rhythm giving meter life and energy, meter giving the rhythm shape and focus – he is suspicious equally of prosodists who disparage the simple frame element of meter and of prosodists who try to reduce the complex rhythmical element to false simplicity.

On the one hand, Frost is skeptical of the vers-libristes. “They use the word ‘rhythm’ about a lot of free verse,” he says to Brooks, Warren, and Withers; “and gee, what’s the good of the rhythm unless it is on something that trips it –that it ruffles? You know, it’s got to ruffle the meter.” Frost views Pound as a particularly dubious theorist, and he tells Brooks, Warren, and Withers: “Ezra Pound used to say that you’ve got to get all the meter out of it [poetry] – extirpate the meter. If you do, maybe you’ve got true free verse, and I don’t want any of it!” And one of Frost’s best known observations about his own taste is, “For my pleasure I had as soon write free verse as play tennis with the net down” (CPPP, 854, 856, 809).

On the other hand, Frost is distrustful of those who, hungry for prosodic exactitude, seek to establish laws not only for meter, but also for the variable rhythms of speech. However much Frost admires Bridges, he is disturbed by Bridges’ interest in assigning to English vowels and syllables the specific values of length that ancient prosodists gave to syllables in Greek and Latin. Frost knows that English prosody measures syllabic stress rather than syllabic length; and he acutely appreciates, as we shall see, that stress is not entirely classifiable by phonemics and phonetics, as length is in ancient prosody, but instead varies with grammatical and rhetorical sense. And in a letter to Sidney Cox, Frost takes Bridges to task for “his theory that syllables in English have fixed quantity . . . Words exist in the mouth not in books. You can’t fix them and you don’t want to fix them” (CPPP, 670, 671).

In much the same vein, Frost criticizes Sidney Lanier’s view that spoken syllables have, or should be treated as having, the precise durational properties of musical notes. To be sure, Frost dislikes Lanier’s theory partly because it prizes musical tones of speech more than the colloquial tones which Frost was so deft at conveying; but Frost is also troubled by the way in which the specious exactitude of Lanier’s analysis deforms and limits the play of rhythm. Alluding to Lanier’s Science of English Verse and to Carlyle’s statement that if you “think deep enough you think musically,” Frost comments to Braithwaite: “Poetry has seized on this [musical] sound of speech and carried it to artificial and meaningless lengths. We have exemplified it in Sidney Lanier’s musical notation of verse, where all the tones of the human voice in natural speech are entirely eliminated.”3

Because post-Modernist poetic practice has largely followed the Pound–Eliot anti-meter extreme, whereas the Lanier–Bridges reduce-rhythm-torule extreme has had negligible effect, we today think of Frost as one of the twentieth century’s most eloquent defenders of meter against the looseness of free verse. If, however, Frost had lived and written in the sixteenth century, when the strongest attack on the native metric was launched by neo-classical writers seeking to quantify English speech and versification, we would remember him as a defender of rhythm against a factitiously strict prosody.

Frost’s appreciation of rhythm has many applications to his own versification, the most important of which concerns monosyllabic words. Frost realizes that all our monosyllabic words can, given the right context, serve as either metrical beats or metrical off-beats. Admittedly, light articles, prepositions, and conjunctions are mostly metrically unaccented, but they not uncommonly appear in metrically accented positions, as “in” does in the line we cited from “The Star-Splitter.” And though monosyllabic verbs and nouns tend to appear in metrically accented positions, they often turn up in metrically unaccented ones as “bank” does in the line from “Questioning Faces.” Frost summarizes this issue in the same letter to Cox in which Bridges’ theories are addressed. (When Frost mentions different musical notes, he does so merely to indicate that a word may assume different stress properties in different contexts: he is not suggesting, à la Lanier, that he has analytically determined precise durational values.) 

The living part of the poem is the intonation entangled somehow in the syntax idiom and meaning of a sentence . . . It is the most volatile and at the same time important part of poetry. It goes and the language becomes a dead language the poetry dead poetry. With it go the accents, the stresses, the delays that are not the property of vowels and syllables but that are shifted at will with the sense. Vowels have length there is no denying. But the accent of sense supersedes all other accent, overrides and sweeps it away. I will find you the word “come” variously used in various passages as a whole, half, third, fourth, fifth, and sixth note. It is as long as the sense makes it. 
(CPPP, 670) 

Frost gives no examples of this various use of “come,” but attentive readers can point them out in his poems. For instance, in “Fireflies in the Garden,” Frost employs “come” as metrically accented in the first line, but as metrically unaccented in the second: 

x   /    x    /    x   /    x    /    x  / 
Here come || real stars || to fill || the up || per skies 
x  /  x  /  x  /  x  /  x  / 
And here || on earth || come em || ulat || ing flies 

When, that is, “come” first appears, it carries considerable weight, since in English we stress words at the ends of phrases like “here come,” unless context demands contrastive emphasis (“here come,” as opposed “there come.”). This initial “come” assumes stress as well on account of being situated between two words that are grammatically subordinate: the adverbial “here” goes with “come,” and the adjective “real” modifies “star.” When, in contrast, “come” appears in the second line, the word is weaker because it is situated between two strong syllables. “Earth” not only has lexical weight to begin with, but also is a key element of the earth-skies/stars-flies contrast that governs the poem; and “em-” is the primarily stressed syllable of “emulating.” And as linguists have observed, when we have three fairly strong syllables in a row, we tend to “demote” the middle syllable.

Thus are the stress qualities of “come,” “shifted at will with the [syntactical and rhetorical] sense.”

In another letter to Cox, Frost suggests a phenomenon which is related to the one in “Fireflies in the Garden,” but which is even more unusual. Discussing “sentence sounds” –the tones that different sentences carry – Frost remarks: “You recognize the sentence sound in this: You, you! – It is so strong that if you hear it as I do you have to pronounce the two you’s differently” (CPPP, 681). A practical application of this point is that a poet can place, in an English iambic foot, the same repeated monosyllable so that it serves as both a metrical beat and offbeat. To illustrate this application, we could analyze line 3 of “Beyond Words,” in which Frost sets “you” into the meter four times in a row, or line 116 of “The Generations of Men,” in which “great” appears four times in succession, or line 30 of “Home Burial,” in which Amy peppers her husband with four consecutive “don’ts.” (Frost was fond of this last legerdemain, remarking of it to Cournos: “I also think well of those four ‘don’ts’ in Home Burial. They would be good in prose and they gain something from the way they are placed in the verse” [SL, 130]). However, two other cases more plainly illuminate the matter.

The first occurs at the end of “Acceptance” where Frost suggests (13–14) that the bird who has just found a perch for the night is resigned to whatever the future may bring. Frost pictures the bird’s thinking that it does not wish “to see 

Into the future. Let what will be, be.” 

Here “be” supplies both the offbeat and beat of the final foot of the line. The first time the word appears, it follows “will,” which not only is the metrically accented syllable of the fourth foot, but also is conceptually crucial, indicating the futurity with which the bird and poem are concerned –what will be. Hence the voice drops when it moves from “will” to the first “be.” Yet the voice gives prominence to the second “be,” since here the focus shifts from the sense of the future to the very order of existence and the bird’s acceptance of it. The second “be” also receives weight because it is the culminating word of the sentence (and the poem) and because it is the line’s rhyme-syllable. 

x  /  x  / 
Into || the fu || ture. Let || what will || be, be. 

A comparable case occurs in lines five and six of “The Egg and the Machine,” in which Frost describes a railroad-hating man who regrets not having sabotaged some track when he had the chance: 

He wished when he had had the track alone 
He had attacked it with a club or stone 

Because Frost is writing in the past perfect tense, “had” changes its metrical nature in the third foot of the first line of this couplet. The first “had” is merely auxiliary, whereas the second “had” –the past participle of “have” – is the main verb: 

x  / 
He wished || when he || had had || the track || alone 
He had attacked it with a club or stone 

(In the couplet’s second line, the auxiliary “had” is promoted to a metrical beat because it is preceded by the light pronoun “He” and is followed by a past participle, “attacked,” whose word-accent is not on its first but its second syllable.)

If Frost uses variable speech rhythms to enliven fixed metrical patterns, he also sometimes employs meter to direct us to a correct interpretation of rhythm. For example, in line 15 of “The Housekeeper,” the title character says to a visitor that it is odd that he should have come to see the man of the house, when the latter has just left to go see him. She comments, “Strange what set you off 

To come to his house when he’s gone to yours. 

If we are reading inattentively, we may give a metrical accent to the fifth syllable, since prepositional phrases like “to the house” usually take strong stress on the object of the preposition and accord only light stress to the preposition and the article or attributive pronoun that precede the object. Yet skimming over “his” and coming down heavily on “house” produces false meter. Even worse, it misses the tonal quality of the speaker. It gives us the sense of her words without, to adapt Frost’s phrase, the sound of her sense. If, however, we read with our ears open to the meter, the voice leaps into tonal clarity. We hear that the speaker is emphasizing “his” and contrasting the word with the other attributive pronoun, down at the end of the line: 

x  /  x  /  x  /  x  /  x  / 
To come to his house when he’s gone to yours. 

There is a related case in which Frost uses metrical pattern to direct rhythmical interpretation. Sometimes, he repeats in a line the same monosyllabic noun, stressing it in one place and, in the other, subordinating it to a modifier. This effect appears relative to “stone” and “arm” in these lines: 

x  /  x  /  x  /  x  /  x  / 
Where they have left not one stone on a stone 
(“Mending Wall,” line 7) 

x  /  x  /  x  /  x  /  x  / 
You link an arm in its arm and you leave 
(“To a Young Wretch,” line 5) 

Though they may initially appear odd, the readings that the meter suggests are natural. “Where they have left not one stone on a stone” is natural, since Frost is talking about rabbit-hunters who, in their monomaniacal lust to kill, totally destroy walls and anything else that might shelter prey. (Frost returns to this subject in his late poem, “The Rabbit-Hunter.”) By the same token, the reading of “You link an arm in its arm” is appropriate. The “its” refers to one of the speaker’s spruce trees, which the young wretch of the poem’s title has chopped down and poached for Christmas. And by stressing the attributive pronoun, Frost reinforces our sense of the comic–bitter spectacle of the wretch’s heading off with the tree as cavalierly as a playboy waltzing off with a mistress. In the Caedmon recording of “Mending Wall,” incidentally, Frost reads the line from the poem iambically. (I have not heard a recording of Frost reading “To a Young Wretch.”)

Examining these lines clarifies a matter that might otherwise puzzle us in Frost’s criticism. Frost associates doggerel with polysyllabic words, as in his comment to his old friend and student, John Bartlett: “Verse in which there is nothing but the beat of the metre furnished by the accents of the polysyllabic words we call doggerel” (CPPP, 665). To be sure, excessive use of long words can produce insipid rhythm, but wooden uniformity of movement can result from any number of other causes. For instance, the numbing effect of Chaucer’s “Sir Thopas” –the mother of all doggerel poems in English, and the one that moved the Host of the Tabard to coin the term “rym dogerel” (Canterbury Tales, B2 2115) – has nothing to do with polysyllabic words. Rather, the clip-clop jog-trot of “Sir Thopas” results from Chaucer’s intentionally unimaginative handling of the romance-six stanza and from his habitually pausing after syllable four in his tetrameters and after syllable six in his trimeters. What is more, Frost himself frequently builds from long words perfectly natural lines: 

By psychological experiment 
(“At Woodward’s Garden,” line 19) 

Collectivistic regimenting love 
(“A Considerable Speck,” line 25) 

Indeed, because any word, regardless of its length, has only one primarily stressed syllable –the other syllables receiving varying amounts of secondary, tertiary, or weak stress – polysyllabic words can give verse pleasing rhythmical modulation, as long as they are not overly exploited.

However, in words of two or more syllables, one syllable customarily takes primary accent, and if secondary and tertiary accents exist, these too are conventionally disposed. And this customary and conventional word-accent overrides and diminishes the possibilities of playing with sense-accent. The internal accentual contour of a polysyllabic word may well be complex. The currently conventional pronunciation of “psychological,” for example, places strong stress on the third syllable, secondary stress on the first, tertiary on the fifth, and weak stress on the second and fourth syllables. But no ambiguity exists in this contour, as might exist when five monosyllabic words appear in succession. And while polysyllabic words can modulate the meter, they never tug it in the way that Frost sometimes likes to tug it. They do not allow him to shift sense off and on words, nor do long words require the reader to listen sensitively to the syllables to hear how they conform to the iambic meter, even as at points their stress properties shade almost levelly into each other: 

You tell her that it’s M-A-P-L-E 
(“Maple,” line 7) 

Not only is Frost a master, as has been observed often, of the striking line comprised of monosyllabic words; he derives, as much as any other poet in our language, interesting rhythmical effects from manipulating monosyllables. And he feels, more acutely than other poets might, that verse which relies excessively on polysyllables is rhythmless, is doggerel.

Frost’s fascination with interplay of meter and rhythm occupies him throughout his career. In 1914 he makes the statement to which I alluded in my introduction and which may be cited more fully now: “My versification . . . is as simple as this,” Frost says of the unrhymed iambic pentameters of his North of Boston narratives: “there are the very regular preestablished accent and measure of blank verse; and there are the very irregular accent and measure of speaking intonation. I am never more pleased than when I can get these into strained relation” (CPPP, 680). Decades later, Frost repeats this idea, giving it a figurative twist, in lines 213–15 of his last big blankverse poem, “How Hard It Is to Keep from Being King When It’s in You and in the Situation.” (Since the poem’s title consists of a pair of iambic pentameters, it should always be printed as two distinct lines.) 

Regular verse springs from the strain of rhythm 
Upon a metre, strict or loose iambic. 
From that strain comes the expression‎ strains of music. 

2. Frost and Iambic Verse

The excerpt from “How Hard It Is to Keep from Being King When It’s in You and in the Situation” recalls a comment Frost offers in “The Figure a Poem Makes”: “All that can be done with words is soon told. So also with meters –particularly in our language where there are virtually but two, strict iambic and loose iambic” (CPPP, 776).

What Frost says of English verse in general applies also to his own verse in particular. Admittedly, he occasionally composes in non-iambic meters, and we shall in due course take note of them. But virtually all of his verse is iambically based.

Though the preval‎ence of iambics in our poetry results from their accommodating the normal rhythms of English better than any other rhythm does, this flexibility is less a consequence of the structure of our individual words than it is of the relatively uninflected character of our language. Many of our most common words are in fact uniambic. They are heavy monosyllables like “love,” “shout,” “green,” and “well,” or fore-stressed disyllables like “table,” “offer,” “ready,” and “very.” Yet English customarily introduces words, phrases, and clauses with lightly stressed articles (that is, “a,” “an,” “the”) or pronominal forms (for example, “her,” “our,” “we,” “you,” “it,”); and English often connects or relates words, phrases, and clauses with lightly stressed conjunctions (for example, “and,” “but,” “so,” “if”) and prepositions (for example, “by,” “to,” “in,” “of”). And these little functional words are apt to catch up the lexically weighty words, however uniambic they may be by themselves, into iambic rhythm.

Because iambic structure often is compounded of non-iambic elements of English word-shape and phraseology, a poet like Frost can initiate, within the basic iambic rise-and-fall movement, all sorts of counter-currents to the prevailing rhythm. An exemplary instance of these modulatory West-Running Brooks occurs in stanza three of “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”: 

He gives his harness bells a shake 
To ask if there is some mistake. 
The only other sound’s the sweep 
Of easy wind and downy flake. 

In the first two lines, Frost uses mainly monosyllabic words, and of the two two-syllable words, one is rear-stressed. As a result, divisions between feet and those between words largely coincide, and this in turn produces a strong sense of rising, iambic rhythm: 

He gives || his har || ness bells || a shake 
To ask || if there || is some || mistake. 

In contrast, the remaining two lines feature four fore-stressed disyllabic words. Consequently, words more often cross foot divisions than end at them. Even as the iambic fluctuation continues, the lines have a falling, trochaic character, which in turn suggests the sweeping movement of wind and snow: 

The on || ly oth || er sound’s || the sweep 
Of eas || y wind || and down || y flake. 

Frost’s first version of the line about the wind and flake read, “Of easy wind and fall of flake.”4 He may have made the change not only because he wanted a more descriptive word for the snow, but also because he intuited that the rhythm would benefit from a more descending flow than “and fall of flake” could give. 
Frost secures expressive rhythmical effects in iambic meters not only by shifting between words of different rhythmical contours, but also by shifting between words of different lengths. Consider, for instance, the passage (lines 6–8) in “The Most of It” in which he describes the young man who, living alone by the lake, longs to hear a human voice other than his: 

He would cry out on life, that what it wants 
Is not its own love back in copy speech, 
But counter-love, original response. 

Frost fills the first two pentameters with mostly monosyllabic words. In the third line, however, he sets across the metric frame four words that are largely unlike those in the previous lines. Further, these four words are all unlike each other. “But” is monosyllabic. “Response” is disyllabic. “Counter-love” is a trisyllabic compound, and “original” has four syllables. The lines all scan conventionally: 

x  /  x  /  x  /  x  /  x  / 
He would || cry out || on life, || that what || it wants 
x  /  x  /  x  /  x  /  x  / 
Is not || its own || love back || in cop || y speech, 
x  /  x  /  x  /  x  /  x  / 
But coun || ter-love, || orig || inal || response. 

But the third line is, rhythmically, worlds apart from its two predecessors, as perfectly suits Frost’s context. Just when the person in the poem demands something different – something more than “copy speech” – Frost changes his diction. He switches from a slow succession of short words to a more rapid and supple mixture involving longer words.

If Frost sometimes introduces longer words into his iambics to speed them up, he on other occasions loads the line with heavy monosyllables to slow it down or to suggest an obstructed effect. Such an effect occurs in that passage (lines 41–43) of “Our Singing Strength,” where Frost describes spring birds coping with an unseasonal snow storm and flying about congestedly. The birds made, Frost says, 

A whir among white branches great and small 
As in some too much carven marble hall 
Where one false wing beat would have brought down all. 

After the first two lines’ easy current, facilitated by the four disyllabic words (“among,” “branches,” “carven,” and “marble”), the monosyllables jammed in the third line give aural emphasis to the crowding that the birds experience.

Frost achieves diverse rhythms by setting across the meter not only words of miscellaneous lengths and shapes, but also phrases and clauses of mixed extent and character. At times, he slots short phrases into the measure: 

We stand here dreaming. Hurry! Call them back! 
(“In the Home Stretch,” line 77) 

No footstep moved it. “This is all,” they sighed. 
(“Two Look at Two,” line 13) 

At other times, he slides longer and more freely running phrases and clauses into the grid. In regard to these latter cases, he has a gift for oddly canted phrases that at first look ungainly, but that are nicely expressive when said aloud: 

Professor Square-the-circle-till-you’re-tired? 
(“A Hundred Collars,” line 44) 

A light he was to no one but himself 
(“An Old Man’s Winter Night,” line 15) 

Frost expressively manages as well the larger relations between sentence structure and the metrical structure. When he seeks emphatic tones, as he does, for instance, in “Once by the Pacific,” he tends to end each line with a full or partial grammatical stop. He makes the metrical and grammatical units correspond. On the other hand, he will, when it suits his purposes, place meter and grammar at variance, and run his lines on. For example, in lines four and five of “The Wood-Pile,” 

The hard snow held me, save where now and then 
One foot went through. . . . 

just as the snow-crust cannot hold the speaker’s weight, the line-end cannot contain the clause, which breaks through the measure to the next verse.

Something similar happens in “The Exposed Nest” when (lines 17–19) the speaker and his daughter discover baby birds whose field-nest has been destroyed by a mowing machine. The daughter tries to build a shelter out of the fresh-cut hay, and the father says: 

You wanted to restore them to their right 
Of something interposed between their sight 
And too much world at once . . . 

That the sentence runs on – and that the grammatical import is divided between two lines – reinforces our feeling of the division between the little birds and the great world, which overwhelms their weak sight.

Frost is no less expressive in handling the conventional variants of the iambic line than he is in handling its customary regularities. One such variant occurs in “The Death of the Hired Man” in those lines (100–01) where Mary comments on Silas’ plight: 

And nothing to look backward to with pride, 
And nothing to look forward to with hope 

Because the only requirement of an iamb is that the second syllable be weightier than the first, poets can, as Frost does in each of these lines, follow a light iamb with a heavy one, so as to produce four degrees of rising stress over two feet: 

1    2    3    4 
And noth || ing to || look back || ward to || with pride, 
1    2    3    4 
And noth || ing to || look for || ward to || with hope 

And here the twin rises through the second and third feet (and the falling-offs to a light fourth foot) throw into rhythmical relief the words “backward” and “forward” and throw into thematic relief Silas’ desolate past and empty future.

Another common variant in English poems in iambic pentameter is the occasional introduction of an alexandrine (that is, an iambic hexameter); and as he does with the rise-over-two-feet, Frost sometimes strikes apt effects with this variant. A good example occurs at line 80 of “Wild Grapes,” where the frightened narrator describes herself hanging in the air from a birch tree: 

My small wrists stretching till they showed the banjo strings. 
My small || wrists stretch || ing till || they showed || the ban || jo strings. 

Just as the girl’s wrists are extended by her exertion, so the meter is elongated.

Frost even expressively employs the two most familiar, workaday metrical variants in iambic verse –the trochaic inversion of the first foot and the feminine ending (that is, an extra unaccented syllable at the end of a line). As Roman Jakobson has suggested5 these variants probably evolved and received sanction because they are not very noticeable: there is usually a suspension of movement and sense at the beginnings and ends of lines, and, under these conditions, rhythmical modification is less disruptive than it would be in the middle of a developing phrase or clause. (An additional reason the variants gained acceptance is their convenience: they enable poets to begin iambic lines with strong syllables and end them with weak ones.) Now and again Frost employs these variants not just by-the-bye, but for the delight of slotting into the line at different points the same word, so as to make it serve different metrical functions. For example, in this line (507) from A Masque of Mercy, 

Failure is failure, but success is failure 

Frost has “failure” initially figure in a trochaic first foot, then as an element integrated into the line’s iambic frame, and finally in a feminine ending: 

/  x  x  /  x  /  x  /  x  / (x) 
Failure || is fail || ure, but || success || is failure 

So, too, in line 115 from Frost’s “The Generations of Men,” 

Making allowance, making due allowance 

we find a pair of repeated words engaged in different metrical functions. When the fore-stressed disyllabic word “making” initially appears, it comprises a trochaic first foot. The second time it appears, it is integrated iambically into the interior of the line. The first time “allowance” appears, Frost merges it into the iambic rhythm of the line’s interior. However, with its second appearance, Frost disposes the word so that its final syllable is a feminine ending: 

/  x  x  /  x  /  x  /  x  / (x) 
Making || allow || ance, mak || ing due || allowance 

And, to return to our point about Frost using his medium expressively, we can see that the poet is having a metrical joke here. This line about allowances avails itself of the two most common in English versification. 
Frost uses feminine endings and trochaic first feet for other expressive purposes. In rhymed verse, feminine endings have a song-like quality, and Frost puts them to musical advantage in, for instance, his Herrickesque “Asking for Roses,” all of whose rhymes are feminine. Feminine rhymes can also produce a sense of comic strain, and the humor of “Departmental” results partly from such wild pairings as “any” and “antennae” and “Formic” (Frost’s coinage for “the language of ants”) and “Jerry McCormic.” (Because feminine rhymes call attention to themselves, Frost uses hypermetrical endings sparingly in his rhymed work; probably fewer than five per cent of his rhymes are feminine. However, feminine endings are less noticeable in unrhymed poems and approximately a third of Frost’s blank verse lines feature feminine endings.)

As regards trochaic first feet, Frost sometimes introduces these to communicate a sense of heaviness in keeping with his subject, as when he describes, in line six of “Birches,” the way the trees are bent, 

/  x 
Loaded with ice a sunny winter morning 

And in the next-to-last line of “The White-Tailed Hornet,” the trochaic first word and foot emphasize the spiritual desolation that ensues when we forget that we are related to higher as well as lower life forms: 

/  x 
Nothing but fallibility was left us 

At the risk of pleonasm, we might observe that Frost’s strict iambic is strict. Rarely do we find extra syllables. Those that do appear are often subject to elision (i.e., metrical contraction); and in his recordings of his poems, Frost generally elides where the metrical context calls for contraction. For example, when he reads, in the Library of Congress recording of “The Mountain,” the poem’s forty-eighth line, he clearly pronounces, for meter’s sake, “interest” in the disyllabic, syncopated manner (“ín • trist”): 

x  /  x  /  x  /  x  /  x  / 
But what would interest you about the brook 

As adept as Frost is, he occasionally fudges a pentameter. He occasionally writes a decasyllabic line that fails to maintain the iambic fluctuation, but instead has a swingy four-beat rhythm. Robert Francis has noted this aspect of Frost’s practice and has used the word “crumbling”6 to describe the effect of such lines. Usually, the problem is that neither lexical structure nor rhetorical context attract a metrical beat to syllable two or syllable four, whereas syllable three is heavily stressed. Consequently, the first six syllables in the line have a pattern of light-light-heavy, light-light-heavy: 

And the back of the gig they stood beside 
(“The Fear,” line 6) 

But suppose she had missed it from the Creed 
(“The Black Cottage,” line 101) 

Sophistry might salvage such lines by dividing them into disyllabic feet and scanning them as exotic pentametric variants. We might, for instance, treat the line from “The Fear” as having a light trochaic first foot and a trochaic second foot: 

/  x  /  x  x  /  x  /  x  / 
And the || back of || the gig || they stood || beside 

But the effect on the ear is of a semi-anapestic, semi-iambic four-beat line: 

x x /  x  x  /  x  /  x  / 
And the back of the gig they stood beside 

Because Frost is such a master, one feels like a Zoilus in pointing out these slight slips. Nor do they occur often. Indeed, Frost once challenged Lewis Chase, “Find ten lines in North of Boston that won’t scan.”7 We will find maybe half that number among the 1983 lines of the collection.

If Frost is extraordinarily resourceful in strict iambic verse, he is scarcely less inventive in “loose iambic,” which is iambic verse that features extra metrically unaccented syllables. These extra syllables produce (or can most conveniently be scanned as producing) anapests. Loose iambic mostly appears in Frost –as it mostly does in English verse overall – in measures of less-than-pentameter length. Extra syllables are less problematic in such measures than they are in longer measures. The brevity of a short measure allows the ear an easier purchase on the beatcount, and we can more readily absorb the extra syllables in the shorter line, especially when the poet reinforces the line’s identity by means of rhyme.

The nature of loose iambics is illustrated by Frost’s “Neither Out Far Nor In Deep,” which is written in iambic trimeter. This poem examines our fascination with the unknown and explores its theme by means of a contrast in which the sea symbolizes the unknown, the land the known. 

The people along the sand 
All turn and look one way. 
They turn their back on the land. 
They look at the sea all day. 

As long as it takes to pass 
A ship keeps raising its hull; 
The wetter ground like glass 
Reflects a standing gull. 

The land may vary more; 
But wherever the truth may be – 
The water comes ashore, 
And the people look at the sea. 

They cannot look out far. 
They cannot look in deep. 
But when was that ever a bar 
To any watch they keep? 

A number of the poem’s feet (eleven of forty-eight) are anapests instead of iambs. Yet the beat count is clear, and the rhymes help us hear the lineendings distinctly.

The poem also well demonstrates the expressive potentials of loose iambic verse. Particularly skillful is Frost’s coordination of his intermittently lilting rhythm with his theme. For example, in each of the first two lines of the second stanza he introduces an anapest, and these suggest the instability of the sea and the rocking of the passing vessel on the horizon: 

x  /  x  x  /  x  / 
As long || as it takes || to pass 
x  /  x  /  x  x  / 
A ship || keeps rais || ing its hull 

Then in the stanza’s third and fourth lines, Frost returns to regular iambics to suggest the stability of the land: 

x  /  x  /  x  / 
The wet || ter ground || like glass 
x  /  x  /  x  / 
Reflects || a stand || ing gull. 

A related effect appears in the final stanza. The first two lines are not only iambic. Their regularity is metronomic. The light syllables are very light, the heavy ones very heavy. And this is appropriate. Frost is making an emphatic statement. Oceans – literal and figurative –lie out far and in deep in the universe. They are beyond our knowing. Of their mysteries, we can get only distant and incomplete glimpses. 

x  /  x  /  x  / 
They can || not look || out far 
x  /  x  /  x  / 
They can || not look || in deep 

Yet this does not lessen the mind’s curiosity about the unknown. And when Frost, in the stanza’s third line, voices this counter-idea – “But when was that ever a bar . . .” –the rhythm shifts away from the straightforward regularity of the previous lines, almost in defiance of them and the truth they express: 

x  /  x x  /  x x  / 
But when || was that ev || er a bar 

It is an exquisite touch, and sets up the return to the norm in the final line: 

x /  x  /  x  / 
To an || y watch || they keep? 

Because of its lilting quality, loose iambic has limited capacities for modulation. It would be hard to write something with the extended gravity and grace of “The Census-Taker” in loose iambic, and certain of Frost’s great short poems – including “Spring Pools,” “Once by the Pacific,” “The Most of It,” and “Never Again Would Birds’ Song Be the Same” – require the sure grace and framing power of the stabler line.

Nonetheless, in the hands of masters like Frost, the loose iambic mode is a wonderful one.

To get a feel for Frost’s loose iambic measures, one can do no better than to read poems that embody them alongside poems in the same measure’s stricter manifestation. Read the loose dimeters of “Dust of Snow” and “Gathering Leaves” in conjunction with the strictly dimetric “Pertinax” and “The Rabbit-Hunter.” (The apparent extra syllables in lines eight and thirteen of the latter are resolvable by elision). Read the loose iambic trimeters of “They Were Welcome to Their Belief” and “A Drumlin Woodchuck” in connection with the strict trimeters of “Happiness Makes Up in Height for What It Lacks in Length” and “Closed for Good.” Read the loose iambic tetrameters of “The Road Not Taken” (a poem in which the wavering rhythm reflects the regretful condition of the speaker and his memory of his indecision) and “The Need of Being Versed in Country Things” in conjunction with the strict tetrameters of “Revelation,” “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” and the first poem of the two-part “The Wind and the Rain.” Frost adopts loose iambic less often when he works in iambic pentameter, but once in a while he relaxes that line, too, as in “Mowing,” “On Looking Up by Chance at the Constellations,” and “Willful Homing.”

Meters other than iambic exist in English, and Frost uses several of these. For instance, “Clear and Colder,” “An Importer,” and “A Correction” feature trochaic tetrameters; and Frost also uses trochaics for “To the Thawing Wind,” “The Hardship of Accounting,” “A Reflex,” “Four-room Shack Aspiring High,” though in these poems the lines are chiefly catalectic (that is, the final unaccented syllable is dropped from the line). “Blueberries” and “Too Anxious for Rivers” are in four-beat trisyllabic meters. Because trisyllabics admit alternative foot-division, nomenclature is arguable in these cases. Probably the best course is to say that “Blueberries” is in anapestic tetrameters (with occasional iambic substitutions) and to call “Too Anxious for Rivers” an amphibrachic tetrameter poem whose second and twentysixth lines are catalectic. “For Once, Then, Something” imitates, in accentualized verse, classical Phalaecean hendecasyllabics.

Frost also sometimes experiments with astrophic iambics. He writes poems, that is, which have rhymed, iambic lines, but in which the rhymes appear in irregular sequence and in which the line-lengths vary, unusually running from monometer at the low end of the scale to hexameter at the high end. “After Apple-Picking” is the masterpiece in this mode, which Frost evidently got from Coventry Patmore, who had made it his special métier and whose “Magna est Veritas” was one of Frost’s touchstones.8 “Storm Fear” and “The Telephone” are other Frost poems of this type. “The Lovely Shall Be Choosers,” Frost’s powerful tribute to his mother, represents a rhymeless version of the type. A final – and beautifully profound – poem in an unusual iambic measure is “Carpe Diem,” which Frost composes in rhymeless iambic trimeters with feminine endings.

Writing in the early 1920s to John Gallishaw, Frost summarizes his verse by saying, “I have written very little except in perfectly regular iambic.”9 We should place next to this statement his answer to the question of why he writes poems: “To see if I can make them all different.” Commenting on this response, Richard Wilbur well observes, “There are no two lines alike in Frost.”10 Frost’s measures are simple and few, but his effects are complex and many. His work shows the breadth and vitality of the iambic tradition, and confirm‎s his own maxim, “The possibilities for tune from the dramatic tones of meaning struck across the rigidity of a limited meter are endless” (CPPP, 776).

Because “the sound of sense” has attracted more attention than any other facet of Frost’s criticism, I should like to examine it briefly before moving to the concluding section of this essay.

Between 1913 and 1915 – that period when his work at last is receiving book-publication and recognition – Frost endeavors, in a series of letters, interviews, and public talks, to explain his aesthetic position to others and, one suspects, himself. In particular, he wishes to justify his use of colloquial speech in his work and to assert his originality in doing so. And in a well-known letter of July 4, 1913 to Bartlett, he says: “I am possibly the only person going who works on any but a worn out theory (Principle I had better say) of versification . . . I alone of English writers have consciously set myself to make music out of what I may call the sound of sense” (CPPP, 664).

What is this “sound of sense”? It is tone of voice. It is the power of vocal tone to communicate meaning in addition to or independent of words in their merely definitional function. It is sound that makes sense purely as sound. In his letter to Bartlett and in his 1915 interview with Braithwaite, Frost demonstrates the existence and communicative capacity of pure tone by, as he puts it to Braithwaite, “the example of two people who are talking on the other side of a closed door, whose voices can be heard but whose words cannot be distinguished. Even though the words do not carry, the sound of them does, and the listener can catch the meaning of the conversation.”11 The listener can catch, that is, “[the] tone of meaning but without the words,” to quote a line from Frost’s “Never Again Would Birds’ Song Be the Same.” Or, as Frost says in his letter to Bartlett, “The sound of sense, then. You get that. It is the abstract vitality of our speech. It is pure sound – pure form” (CPPP, 665).

To understand further Frost’s ideas about the sound of sense, we must explain the reasons that he is so interested in tone of voice generally and in colloquial tone specifically. For one thing, Frost simply loves talk and the human voice. “I like the actuality of gossip, the intimacy of it,” he writes Braithwaite in 1915. “Say what you will effects of actuality and intimacy are the greatest aim an artist can have” (CPPP, 685). In much the same spirit, he tells Chase in 1917, “I can’t keep up any interest in sentences that don’t SHAPE on some speaking tone of voice.”12 And it is telling that when Frost performs his poems in public, he does so in an almost conversational manner and often uses the verb “say” rather than “recite” or “read” to describe his presentation of his work. Prefacing “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” he tells one audience, “I’ll say this little one”; and later, before concluding his performance with “Come In,” he remarks. “I’ll say one of the old ones Doc Cook asked me to say” (CPPP, 822, 829).

Frost’s interest in colloquial tone also has a slightly defensive aspect. When he was a budding writer, an early reader judged his work to be “too near the level of talk.”13 And when in 1894 William Hayes Ward and Susan Hayes Ward of The Independent discovered the young poet and accepted “My Butterfly” for publication, they nevertheless questioned his diction and his metric and mailed him a copy of Lanier’s Science of English Verse to help him out (SL, 21, 22). Frost was always grateful to the Wards, especially Susan Hayes Ward, for their support; but he rightly felt misunderstood when they sent him to school to Lanier, just as he felt misunderstood when the other early reader questioned the colloquial quality of his writing. Such responses implied criticisms of what Frost most cherished in speech and verse.

Frost’s concern with the tones of actual speech represents as well reaction against the excessively mellifluous qualities of the work of such late-Victorian poets as Tennyson and Swinburne. In this regard, Frost’s views are not unlike those that Robinson, Pound, Eliot, and the later Yeats are expressing during the same period; and his views are not unlike those expressed by any number of earlier literary innovators and renovators who had sought to reform poetic diction. And although Frost at times suggests that his interest in colloquial tone is unique, he at other times acknowledges the connections between his ideas and those of his predecessors. For instance, in a letter in 1914 to Cox, Frost observes of his theories: “Of course the great fight of any poet is against the people who want him to write in a special language that has gradually separated from spoken language” (CPPP, 682). And in the 1915 interview with Braithwaite, Frost correlates his preoccupation with the sound of sense with Wordsworth’s desire to restore natural speech to poetry when its diction was still largely dominated by the model of Pope’s Iliad. “As language only really exists in the mouths of men,” Frost tells Braithwaite, “here again Wordsworth was right in trying to reproduce in his poetry not only the words – and in their limited range, too, actually used in common speech – but their sound.”14

Frost’s theory of the sound of sense is additionally, I suspect, a reaction against Imagism and the cult of the Image that T. E. Hulme, F. S. Flint, and Pound were encouraging in England when Frost arrived there in 1912. Frost values sharply observed detail as much as any poet does, but he worries that the concentration on the visual in poetry is undermining its aural aspect. “We value the seeing eye already,” he remarks to Cox in 1914. “Time we said something about the hearing ear –the ear that calls up vivid sentence forms” (CPPP, 682). In the same year, he tells Cournos: “I cultivate . . . the hearing imagination rather than the seeing imagination though I should not want to be without the latter” (SL, 130). And in 1925 he writes to John Freeman: “Fool psychologists treat the five sense elements in poetry as of equal weight. One of them is nearly the whole thing. The tone-of-voice element is the unbroken flow on which the others are carried along like sticks and leaves and flowers.”15

In his verse, Frost’s sensitivity to the tones of living speech contributes to a style that is fresh and idiomatic. It is a style that involves, as Wilbur notes in connection with “After Apple-Picking,” “colloquial language, but a beautifully refined and charged colloquial language.”16 In his letters, interviews, and lectures, however, Frost at times loses sight of the “refined and charged” element of his writing and makes dogmatic statements that come dangerously close to equating colloquiality with poetic speech per se: “All poetry,” he asserts at one point, “is a reproduction of the tones of actual speech” (CPPP, 701). Frost, moreover, repeatedly goes beyond the sensible position that poetry always should maintain some contact with living speech to the unreasonable position that phrases and sentences on the page can and must exactly communicate specific tones of voice.

This latter view is evident in his letters to Bartlett. In the July 4, 1913 communication, he says, “The reader must be at no loss to give his voice the posture proper to the sentence” (CPPP, 665). On February 22, 1914, he writes, “The voice of the imagination, the speaking voice must know certainly how to behave how to posture in every sentence he [the poet] offers” (CPPP, 675). On May 30, 1916, he adds, “A sentence must convey a meaning by tone of voice and it must be the particular meaning the writer intended. The reader must have no choice in the matter. The tone of voice and its meaning must be in black and white on the page” (SL, 204). Reading such remarks, one feels that Frost is standing on its head Alexander Pope’s dictum that “sound must seem an echo to the sense” and is urging that “sense is a mere echo of the sound.”

To his credit, Frost recognizes the difficulty of precisely establishing, on the page, tone of voice; but he suggests, in an address he delivers in 1915 to the Browne and Nichols School, that a writer can resolve the difficulty by providing a context from which tone can be inferred. He also on this occasion illustrates his ideas by citing the opening stanza of his poem, “The Pasture.” 

[I]t is a fundamental fact that certain forms depend on the sound; –e.g., note the various tones of irony, acquiescence, doubt, etc. in the farmer’s, “I guess so.” And the great problem is, can you get these tones down on paper? How do you tell the tone? By the context, by the animating spirit of the living voice . . . And my poems are to be read in the appreciative tones of this live speech. For example, there are five tones in this first stanza, 

The Pasture 
I’m going out to clean the pasture spring; 
(light, informing tone) 
I’ll only stop to rake the leaves away 
(“only” tone – reservation) 
(And wait to watch the water clear, I may): 
(supplementary, possibility) 
I sha’n’t be gone long. – You come too. 
(free tone, assuring) 
(after thought, inviting) 
(CPPP, 687, 688) 

Although this is interesting analysis, it is unlikely that many readers, if asked to guess how many tones were in the stanza would answer five, or, if told that there were five, would guess them to be those Frost designates. If it be objected that his example ill suits his argument, and that it is hard to infer any but a sketchy context from the opening lines of a lyric poem, we might respond that even when poets minutely particularize their contexts, tone may remain elusive or subject to interpretation. For example, Shakespeare clarifies, with extensive circumstantial detail, the political and personal issues that surround Prince Hal, Hamlet, and Prospero, but fine actors have offered equally plausible but very different readings of these characters and of the tones appropriate to particular lines and passages.

Skeptical of Frost’s assertion that writers can precisely convey tone, Gamaliel Bradford remarks to the poet in 1924: “It is probable that every writer hears his own composition as well as sees it. But the subtle possibilities of variation in the matter are so wide, that I can hardly feel that you are right in feeling that any one interpretation out of many can possibly be imperatively indicated” (SL, 298–99). This seems a sensible assessment of the issue. Writers should compose, as Frost does so magnificently, with their ears sensitively attuned to the resources of the live voice. But it is overstating matters to demand that writing consistently specify vocal tone.

Frost himself sometimes appears to doubt his theory of the sound of sense. In discussing it, he keeps fiddling with his terminology in a way that suggests he cannot focus his meaning to his own satisfaction. What begins, in the first letter to Bartlett, as “the sound of sense,” becomes, in the second letter to Bartlett “sentence sounds.” And we may well feel that these phrases indicate somewhat different things – pure tone in the first case, sentence as tone in the second –even though Frost indicates in his letter of March 1915 to Braithwaite that the terms are synonymous: “[M]y conscious interest in people was at first no more than an almost technical interest in their speech – in what I used to call their sentence sounds – the sound of sense” (CPPP, 684). Other phrases Frost employs to indicate the sound of sense include “sound-posture” (e. g.,17), “vocal posture” (e. g.,18), “sentence tones” (e.g., CPPP, 690), and “vocal imagination” (e. g., CPPP, 789). 
Moreover, in his February 1914 letter to Bartlett, Frost remarks of his ideas about tone, “This is no literary mysticism I am preaching”; and he says shortly afterwards, “I wouldn’t be writing all this if I didn’t think it the most important thing I know. I write it partly for my own benefit, to clarify my ideas for an essay or two I am going to write some fine day (not far distant)” (CPPP, 675, 677–78). And in February 1915, after saying to Cox, “Words are only valuable in writing as they serve to indicate particular sentence sounds” – a statement that overlooks the essential if untonal value of words as communicators of denotative meaning – Frost immediately adds: “I must say some things over and over. I must be a little extravagant too” (SL, 152). That Frost realized that his ideas might puzzle others, that he never wrote the essay or two he hoped to write, that he recognized that he was being “a little extravagant” – all of this may indicate that he intuited that this aspect of his thought was not wholly workable.

If “the sound of sense” gives pause as a “theory” or “principle,” we should stress in Frost’s defense that he manages, as well as any poet, to suggest tone. In such story-poems as “The Death of the Hired Man” and “The Code” the dialogue is vividly realized, and many lines among his lyrics carry similar tang or bite. The following tercet from “Provide, Provide” is typical: 

Some have relied on what they knew; 
Others on being simply true. 
What worked for them might work for you. 

To mix a metaphor, one can almost hear the twinkle in the poet’s eye as he says the tercet’s final and culminating line.

We should also note that Frost’s interest in the sound of sense ties into his love of the paradox mentioned at the beginning of this chapter: good verse can fuse vivid and variable speech with the fixed units of meter. Nowhere is Frost’s love of this paradox and of colloquial tone clearer than in a letter which he writes in 1915 to Walter Pritchard Eaton: 

I am only interesting to myself for having ventured to try to make poetry out of tones that if you judge from the practice of other poets are not usually regarded as poetical. You can get enough of those sentence tones that suggest grandeur and sweetness everywhere in poetry . . . I have tried to see what I could do with boasting tones and quizzical tones and shrugging tones (for there are such) and forty eleven other tones. All I care a cent for is to catch sentence tones that havent been brought to book . . . But summoning them is not all. They are only lovely when thrown and drawn and displayed across spaces of the footed line. 
(CPPP, 690–91) 

3. Feats of Association: Frost’s Rhymes and Stanzas

In addition to being a fine metrist, Frost is a remarkable rhymer. Like Aristotle, Frost believes that one of the surest signs of genius in a poet is a gift for metaphor –for making unexpected but illuminating connections between things. And Frost regards rhyme as an acoustic equivalent of metaphor, or an extension of metaphor into sound. “[A]ll there is to thought is feats of association,” is the way Frost sums up the matter. “Now, wouldn’t it be a pretty idea to look at that as the under part of every poem: a feat of association, putting two things together and making a metaphor . . . Carry that idea a little further, to think that perhaps the rhyming, the coupling of lines is an outward symbol of this thing that I call feats of association.”19

Like good metrical composition, good rhyming entails an element of similarity and an element of dissimilarity. Just as versification fuses the fixed units of meter with the variable rhythms of speech, so rhyming involves syllables which, on the one hand, sound alike, but which, on the other hand, denote different things and serve different grammatical functions. Rhyme audially folds syllables into each other, while lexically opening them outward to connect with conceptual categories remote from their own.

To grasp this point, and its relevance to Frost, we can examine the first two stanzas of “Good Hours”: 

I had for my winter evening walk – 
No one at all with whom to talk, 
But I had the cottages in a row 
Up to their shining eyes in snow. 

And I thought I had the folk within: 
I had the sound of a violin; 
I had a glimpse through curtain laces 
Of youthful forms and youthful faces. 

These lines are graceful and fluid in part because of the effective variety of their rhymes. Frost matches not only nouns with nouns (as happens in lines three and four and in lines seven and eight), but also a noun with a verb (talk/walk) and a preposition with a noun (within/violin). Likewise, though the rhymes in the first stanza all entail monosyllabic words, in the second they concern words of other lengths and shapes. We have a rear-stressed disyllable (“within”) chiming with a trisyllable with significant stress on its third syllable (“violin”). And we have two fore-stressed disyllables (laces/faces) that comprise a feminine rhyme.

Frost takes many small and tactful pains to keep his rhymes as interesting as possible. For example, he realizes that if a poet rhymes a common word with an unusual one, it is as a rule best for the unusual word to come second. This understanding is evident in the couplet (lines 15–16) of “Evening in a Sugar Orchard,” in which Frost describes sparks that, rising from a sugarhouse chimney, catch in the bare maples above it and form sublunary constellations: 

They were content to figure in the trees 
As Leo, Orion, and the Pleiades. 

What reader, hearing the initial “trees” termination, would anticipate its being answered by “Pleiades”? Yet this word is just right. It is visually apt. It is, moreover, intellectually striking, concluding as it does the arresting comparison between the small, transitory sparks in the trees and the vast and virtually immutable stellar groups in the heavens. And it is important that “Pleiades” clinches rather than sets up the rhyme. If we reversed the lines, they would still make prefect grammatical sense: 

As Leo, Orion, and the Pleiades, 
They were content to figure in the trees. 

But the rhyme would not startle us with the same pleasure.

At the same time, Frost is careful not to show off. He never lets the rhymes run away with the poem. More important, Frost appreciates that when good poets rhyme they are coupling not only similarly sounding syllables, but whole phrases, sentences, and thoughts. In his essay “The Constant Symbol,” he remarks: “No rhyming dictionary for me to make me face the facts of rhyme. I may say the strain of rhyming is less since I came to see words as phrase-ends to countless phrases just as the syllables ly, ing, and ation are word-ends to countless words” (CPPP, 790–91). And Frost knows that, contrary to what is sometimes alleged by critics, there are no intrinsically banal rhymes. There are no rhymes that cannot be redeemed by the appropriate context. The first poem in Frost’s first book begins with a couplet that employs what many consider one of the tritest of rhymes in our language. 

One of my wishes is that those dark trees, 
So old and firm they scarcely show the breeze . . . 
(“Into My Own,” lines 1–2) 

However, few of us feel that the rhyme here is feeble. Rather, we are simply struck by the memorable image of the rigid, ancient trees – stiff even when the breeze blows through them. The rhyme is fine.

Frost often arranges his rhymed poems into stanzas, and he does so for two reasons chiefly. The first is musical. Stanzas enable Frost to fashion verbal harmonies difficult to achieve in non-stanzaic verse. Stanzas permit him to play with patterns of rhymes and to mix together lines of different lengths. Consider, for example, the second and third stanzas of “A Late Walk,” a poem in ballad stanza. (A ballad stanza is a quatrain whose first and third lines are unrhyming iambic tetrameters and whose second and fourth lines are rhyming iambic trimeters. In this poem, the iambics are slightly loosened, with occasional extra unaccented syllables within the lines.) 

And when I come to the garden ground, 
The whir of sober birds 
Up from the tangle of withered weeds 
Is sadder than any words. 

A tree beside the wall stands bare, 
But a leaf that lingered brown, 
Disturbed, I doubt not, by my thought, 
Comes softly rattling down. 
(“A Late Walk,” lines 5–12) 

Frost could have written this passage in blank verse and said something like 

And when I’m visiting the garden ground, 
The birds that rise from tangled, withered weeds 
Make sounds as sad as words could ever make. 
A bare tree standing by the wall lets fall 
A brown leaf (troubled by, it seems, my thought), 
And it comes softly rattling to my feet. 

But deprived of the rhymes and the varying line-;engths (and of course Frost’s inimitable phrasing), the verse loses its wistfully pointed quality.

The second key function for which Frost uses stanzas is indicated by the origin and history of the term. “Stanza” comes from an Italian word meaning “stopping place” or “room.” Just as architects divide buildings into rooms to help people organize various aspects of their lives, so Frost stanzaically partitions poems to help the reader find a way through their components. Consider Frost’s eight-line poem, “Fragmentary Blue”: 

Why make so much of fragmentary blue 
In here and there a bird, or butterfly, 
Or flower, or wearing-stone, or open eye, 
When heaven presents in sheets the solid hue? 

Since earth is earth, perhaps, not heaven (as yet) – 
Though some savants make earth include the sky; 
And blue so far above us comes so high, 
It only gives our wish for blue a whet. 

This poem consists of a question and an answer. Frost devotes the first stanza to the former and the second to the latter. He asks, “Why make so much of the beauty of the color blue, wherever we find it here on earth, when there’s such an abundance of blue in the sky above us?” Then he answers, “However abundant the blue above us is, it is inaccessible; and though it stimulates our love of beauty, we prize the fragmentary earthly blue because we can see it closely and feel part of it.” And thanks to Frost’s putting the question in one stanza and the response in another, we can readily grasp the poem’s dialectical nature.

In addition, Frost at times expressively opens up his stanzas and lets the sense run from one to another. “To Earthward” well illustrates this technique: 

Love at the lips was touch 
As sweet as I could bear; 
And once that seemed too much; 
I lived on air 

That crossed me from sweet things, 
The flow of – was it musk 
From hidden grapevine springs 
Down hill at dusk? 

I had the swirl and ache 
From sprays of honeysuckle 
That when they’re gathered shake 
Dew on the knuckle. 

I craved strong sweets, but those 
Seemed strong when I was young; 
The petal of the rose 
It was that stung. 

Now no joy but lacks salt 
That is not dashed with pain 
And weariness and fault; 
I crave the stain 

Of tears, the aftermark 
Of almost too much love, 
The sweet of bitter bark 
And burning clove. 

Notice how the transversal of the first stanza into the second –“I lived on air /That crossed from sweet things” – communicates the happy sensory “flow” the poet experienced when young. By the same token, the movement from the fifth to the sixth stanza – “I crave the stain/Of tears, the aftermark / Of almost too much love” – gives us the sense of the emotional effects that excessive passion leaves in its wake. Finally, the way that the argument drives through the end of the next-to-last stanza, and into the concluding stanza, reinforces the impression of the speaker’s desire: 

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. 

Just as the speaker voices dissatisfaction with the limits of his feeling, so the sentence expressing that dissatisfaction bursts the boundary of its stanza. “The hurt is not enough,” and neither is the stanza.

One other notable quality of Frost’s stanzaic verse is syntactical variety. In the same way that Frost varies the rhythms playing across his meters, he modulates the kinds of phrases, clauses, and sentences he sets across his stanzas. As he says in an interview with The Paris Review: “I’m always interested, you know, when I have three or four stanzas, in the way I lay the sentences in them. I’d hate to have the sentences all lie the same in the stanzas” (CPPP, 890). Even “To Earthward,” with its tight trimeter-trimeter-trimeter-dimeter stanza, features considerable syntactical diversity. For example, the third stanza consists of a relatively straightforward sentence, following the common subject-verb-object pattern, with additional predicate matter that clarifies the object, which is in this case compound (“the swirl and ache”). 

I had the swirl and ache 
From sprays of honeysuckle 
That when they’re gathered shake 
Dew on the knuckle. 

The seventh stanza, in contrast, is an introductory dependent clause, 

When stiff and sore and scarred 
I take away my hand 
From leaning on it hard 
In grass and sand, 

that attaches to the main clause (“The hurt is not enough”) only in the succeeding stanza. 
Frost, then, enacts with his stanzas the same timeless dialectic of art that he enacts with his meters and his rhymes, balancing likeness and unlikeness, coherence and diversity.

Any discussion of Frost’s versification would be incomplete if it failed to speak of the pleasure his poems give. The most significant feature of his technical skill is that it serves not itself but its subjects. Whether weighty or light or both, his poems exhibit a spirited engagement with language and an enchantingly exact observation of the world. Thanks to their strong and honest technique, they enable us to perceive beauties and joys that we might otherwise overlook or imperfectly appreciate; and they enable us as well to confront darker aspects of experience, aspects from which, but for his mediating grace, we might turn away in fear or emotional cowardice.

Discussing the process by which he wrote a poem, Frost once said: “What do I want to communicate but what a hell of a good time I had writing it?” (CPPP, 892). And there is no better way to end this discussion of Frost’s versification than by citing an exchange between the visitor and the farmer in “The Mountain.” At one point earlier in the poem, the farmer has told the visitor that at the top of a mountain is a brook that is “always cold in summer, warm in winter” (49); and toward the close of the poem (100–04) the visitor recurs to the subject, asking, “Warm in December, cold in June, you say?” to which the farmer replies: 

“I don’t suppose the water’s changed at all. 
You and I know enough to know it’s warm 
Compared with cold, and cold compared with warm. 
But all the fun’s in how you say a thing.” 

NOTES 
* My analysis of Frost’s handling of the stanzaic structure in “To Earthward” is indebted to Kenneth Fields, who years ago in conversation perceptively remarked on the expressive opening up of the first stanza into the second. I am indebted as well to Kevin Durkin and John Ridland, both of whom read an early draft of this chapter and made helpful suggestions and corrections. 
1 Elaine Barry, Robert Frost on Writing (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1973), p. 81. 
2 Ibid., p. 153. 
3 Ibid., p. 154. 
4 Charles W. Cooper, in consultation with John Holmes, Preface to Poetry (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1946), pp. 604–07. 
5 Quoted in Thomas A. Sebeok, ed. Style in Language (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1960), pp. 363–64. 
6 Robert Francis, Frost: A Time to Talk: Conversations and Indiscretions (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1972), p. 97. 
7 Barry, Robert Frost on Writing, p. 73. 
8 Ibid., pp. 80–81. 
9 Notes by Robert Frost on His Life and Early Writings, with an introduction by William H. Pritchard (Amherst: The Friends of The Amherst College Library, 1991), p. 11. 
10 Speaking of Frost, Richard Wilbur and William H. Pritchard, interviewed by Donald G. Sheehy (Amherst: The Friends of The Amherst College Library, 1997), p. 13. 
11 Barry, Robert Frost on Writing, p. 153. 
12 Ibid., p. 70. 
13 Ibid. 
14 Barry, Robert Frost on Writing, p. 154. 
15 Ibid., p. 81. 
16 Speaking of Frost, Wilbur and Pritchard, p. 9. 
17 In Barry, Robert Frost on Writing, p. 153. 
18 In ibid., p. 94. 
19 Robert Frost, Poetry and Prose, ed. Edward Connery Lathem and Lawrance Thompson (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1972), p. 380.

from "The Cambridge Companion to Robert Frost"