11. Acceptance / West-Running Brook(1928) - Robert Frost

[esse]

Acceptance

When the spent sun throws up its rays on cloud

And goes down burning into the gulf below,

No voice in nature is heard to cry aloud

At what has happened. Birds, at least, must know

It is the change to darkness in the sky.

Murmuring something quiet in her breast,

One bird begins to close a faded eye;

Or overtaken too far from his nest,

Hurrying low above the grove, some waif

Swoops just in time to his remembered tree.

At most he thinks or twitters softly, "Safe!

Now let the night be dark for all of me.

Let the night be too dark for me to see

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

• waif : 떠돌이
• swoop : 급강하다

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순응

기진(氣盡)한 태양이 구름에 빛을 던지고

자신을 불사르며 밑의 만으로 사라지니,

일어난 변화에 소리 내어 우는 목소리는

자연에 들리지 않는다. 적어도, 새들만은

하늘이 암흑으로 바뀐 것을 아는 게 틀림없다.

마음속으로 무엇인가를 조용히 중얼거리며,

새 한 마리가 빛바랜 눈을 감기 시작한다.

또는 둥지에서 너무 멀리 방랑하던 새끼 새가.

어둠에 쫓겨, 작은 숲 상공을 낮게 서둘러,

아슬아슬한 시간에 입력된 나무에 급강하한다.

그는 기껏 조용히 생각하거나 지저귄다, “살았다!

이젠 어두운 밤이어도 내겐 걱정이 없습니다.

밤이여, 깜깜한 밤이 되어 저희가 미래를

볼 수 없게 하소서. 무엇이든 올 테면, 오게 하소서.”

-신재실 옮김-

단상(斷想): 석양(夕陽)에 지평선상의 구름이 불탄다. 이윽고 태양이 지평선 아래 바다로 자취를 감춘다. 잠시 침묵의 시간이 흐른다. 순식간에 어둠이 깔린다. 아무런 소리도 들리지 않는다. 텅 빈 어둠을 환영함인가? 아니면 체념의 기도로 순응함인가?

새들만이 어둠에 반응하는 것 같다. 새들 역시 조용하지만, 적어도 어둠이 닥친 것을 느끼는 것 같다. 어미 새 한 마리가 “무엇인가를 조용히 중얼거리며, … 빛바랜 눈을 감기 시작한다.” 어둠을 조용히 받아들인다. 그것이 살 길임을 잘 알기 때문일까?

하지만 미숙한 새끼 새는 둥지를 너무 멀리 벗어났다가 아슬아슬하게 둥지로 돌아온다. 그리곤 조용히 지저귄다. “살았다!” 그리고 기도한다, “이젠 어두운 밤이어도 내겐 걱정이 없습니다./ 밤이여, 깜깜한 밤이 되어 저희가 미래를/ 볼 수 없게 하소서. 무엇이든 올 테면, 오게 하소서.”

어둠은 차라리 보호막이다. 불안한 미래를 가로막는 차단기다. 어둠을 수용하고 둥지에 깃드는 새, 그리고 밤을 수용하고 귀갓길을 서두는 사람, 이들은 서로 닮았다. 밤은 분명 휴식과 평화를 가져온다. 불확실한 미래는 두려움인 동시에 희망이다. 내일은 내일로 살자.

-신재실 씀-

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youtu.be/Sy5AF1EPIR4

youtu.be/ruWn9-X577g

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“Acceptance” (1928) - Deirdre Fagan

First appearing in West-Running Brook, this sonnet represents a sense of both yielding to nature and exhibiting a healthy respect for it. Near the beginning of the poem the speaker points out that no voice in nature gives a cry when the sun goes down. He says that nothing is disturbed by “what has happened.” Frost’s choice of “happened” almost suggests that the sun’s going down is something that has happened to someone or something. It is not merely that it occurred, but that there should be some reason and concern for it. The idea is that nature ought to see the sunset as some sort of death or some sort of sad event, but without mourning. It is as if the speaker were accounting for nature’s inability to reason and suggesting that since it should not know why the sun has gone down, it ought to be fearful when it does, since fear often is rooted in ignorance. In some way, lack of knowledge ought to cause trepidation among birds, but it does not.

The speaker seems almost to envy nature’s unconcern for the passing of light or the passing of time, and he recognizes that human beings cannot be so indifferent. We do mourn the falling of leaves and the setting of the sun, and we do lament the passing of time, but among these birds there is an acceptance of the inevitable that does not question. There is a willingness simply to allow nature to do its duty. Juxtaposed with this, however, is the speaker’s assessment that “Birds, at least, must know.” The idea that nature is not knowledgeable is reconsidered, and instead the narrator asserts that nature must be aware of itself. (These sorts of contradictions often appear in Frost; a similar contradiction can be found in “The Road Not Taken.”) That the bird does know and can accept that the sun has gone and will return again is what the poem hinges on. Other creatures are able to accept in nature what occurs naturally. For humankind, this is a much more difficult task.

The ending of the poem provides a sentient bird who “At most he thinks or twitters softly, ‘Safe!’ ” There is a sense of almost human fear ascribed to the bird, and yet the bird, despite his exclamation, “Safe!,” goes on to accept the darkness and his inability to see into the future. Indeed, he says, “Let what will be, be.” This acceptance is something the speaker desires, because just letting be is not something humans can fully do. This poem ends on a note both resigned and hopeful—a tone of acceptance. The scheme of things, life and the world, has been reduced to one nightfall, which is accepted as a natural occurrence that can be yielded to without subjugation.

But nothing is ever as simple as it seems in Frost. The title, “Acceptance,” alerts the reader that the poem is about anything but. While it seems that the bird is accepting of the darkness, he too is haunted by it. There is a touch of sarcasm in the phrase, “Let what will be, be.” The bird says, “Now let the night be dark for all of me. / Let the night be too dark for me to see.” This darkness is unpleasant and enveloping. It is not so much acceptance that is being witnessed, but a sort of repression. Ultimately, the bird is no better equipped to accept the scheme of things than humans are, and the irony of the title is that the poem is really about the inability to accept.

In “Acceptance,” nature’s power is evident, but so is the desire to accept that power as a given and not to resist it. Frost is, however, uncomfortable with nature’s powers, despite the assertion in the poem that those powers should not be challenged. The speaker is observing what nature does and wondering what importance it has for him, and he is trying to diminish its power by denying how unsettling it can be. See NATURE and NIGHT .

FURTHER READING
Bagby, George F. Frost and the Book of Nature. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1993.
Faggen, Robert. Robert Frost and the Challenge of Darwin. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997.

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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’s Politics and the Cold War - GEORGE MONTEIRO

I

Shortly before Robert Frost’s death on January 29, 1963, County Government Magazine published in its December 1962 issue the poet’s response to its request for his participation in a symposium on the theme “The Cold War Is Being Won.” His tone is less that of the disheartened cold warrior that he is sometimes taken to have been than of the resigned, though still optimistic, poet-diplomat he had become in the last ten years of his life. 

I hate a cold war of sustained hate that finds no relief in blood letting but probably it should be regarded as a way of stalling till we find out whether there is really an issue big enough for a big show-down. We are given pause from the dread of the terribleness we feel capable of. I was sometimes like that as a boy with another boy I lived in antipathy with. It clouded my days. But here I am almost writing the article I was going to tell you I couldn’t write. My limit seems to be verse and talk. 
(CPPP, 901) 

But Frost had not always resigned himself to being limited to verse and talk. And thereby hangs the tale of a poet who although he had always had his mind on politics, from the early times when his father taught him politics in San Francisco, would get an extraordinary chance in his eighty-ninth year to play the Cold War diplomat at the highest level.

In 1932, a year of increasing social pressures and widespread political turmoil, both Robert Frost and Walter Lippmann were honored at commencement exercises by the Phi Beta Kappa chapter at Columbia University. Lippmann spoke on “The Scholar in a Troubled World,” and Frost read “Build Soil,” a poem that branched out from his principal theme of the poet in the world to offer counsel to intellectuals, scholars, artists, and politicians. Sharing a principle he would follow for the rest of his life, Frost advised his young scholars and the rest of the world as well to slow down its rush to take action, “Build soil,” he advised, depending on his audience to interpret correctly his metaphor: 

Turn the farm in upon itself 
Until it can contain itself no more, 
But sweating-full, drips wine and oil a little. 
I will go to my run-out social mind 
And be as unsocial with it as I can. 
The thought I have, and my first impulse is 
To take to market – I will turn it under. 
The thought from that thought – I will turn it under. 
And so on to the limit of my nature. 
We are too much out, and if we won’t draw in 
We shall be driven in. 

Lippmann, for his part, offered advice to the scholar that seemed, at least at first look, to be in consilience with Frost’s. He cautioned against the excesses of the scholar’s involvement in matters “outside” the library. As the New York Times reported, “Mr. Lippmann contended that the ‘scholar’ who deserts his books and his research to heed the importunate demands of the present does not do justice to himself and the world.” 

For this is not the last crisis in human affairs. The world will go on somehow and more crises will follow. It will go on best, however, if among us there are men who stood apart, who refused to be too anxious or too much concerned, who were cool and inquiring, and had their eyes on a longer past and a longer future. By their example they can remind us that the passing moment is only a moment; by their loyalty they will have cherished those things which only the disinterested mind can use.1 

Frost might go so far as to agree that the scholar (or poet or statesman) must not leap into the middle of things in reaction to the pressures of the moment. But that he should permanently refrain from direct involvement, if that was what Lippmann advocated, was anathema to the poet who continued to harbor ancient thoughts about the poet’s responsibilities to the world as he found it. If he had stoically awaited the recognition due his poems until he was nearly forty, Frost would await patiently for the time when he might be called upon to perform some meaningful public service on his country’s behalf.

Meanwhile, in the 1930s, during Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s first two terms as President of the United States, Frost would take on the role, at times, of the loyal opposition. He would speak out against the national government’s meddling in the affairs of the individual American citizen, who should be independent of such organized manipulation and control as the Founding Fathers and as Henry David Thoreau had insisted he be. In his most strikingly political poem of the 1930s, “Two Tramps in Mud Time” (published in the Saturday Review of Literature in 1934), Frost questioned the basicpremise of practicing social welfare to the detriment of an individual’s right to well-being. For instance, should he give over the pleasurable and gratifying task of chopping his own wood to the two tramps whose creature needs staked their claim to the task and the compensation that goes with it? Or do his own, quite different needs justify his insistence on continuing with the task himself? It becomes a question of pitting the needs of spirit, aspiration, and self-fulfillment against the need for working for food. The poem’s celebrated conclusion sums up explicitly the poet’s answer to this antinomy. 

Nothing on either side was said. 
They knew they had but to stay their stay 
And all their logic would fill my head: 
As that I had no right to play 
With what was another man’s work for gain, 
My right might be love but theirs was need. 
And where the two exist in twain 
Theirs was the better right – agreed. 
But yield who will to their separation, 
My object in living is to unite 
My avocation and my vocation 
As my two eyes make one in sight. 
Only where love and need are one, 
And the work is play for mortal stakes, 
Is the deed ever really done 
For Heaven and the future’s sakes. 

Only when the two rights at question here – those of love and those of need – exist apart and come into conflict will he capitulate: need comes first. But the poet will take an even higher road on the matter by revealing that the greater principle (reflecting Thoreau’s basic argument “Life Without Principle”) is that the needs of the self are paramount in its constant struggle against the destructive pressures of socialization –or, as Frost put it elsewhere, socialism. The aim was always to bring love and need into consilience, to turn work and play into one thing indivisible. Frost fully agreed with Thoreau when he warned: “Do not hire a man who does your work for money, but him who does it for love of it”, for “if the laborer gets no more than the wages which his employer pays him, he is cheated, he cheats himself.”2 It was on this basis that Frost questioned Roosevelt’s New Deal domestic policies, which were based, as the poet saw it, on unreasoned and indefensible principles of political economy that resulted in hasty, wavering, and vacillating, yet invariably dangerous measures. In The New Frontier for September 1934, eighteen months after Franklin Delano Roosevelt took office, Frost published “Provide, Provide,” a poem inspired by the strike of charwomen at Harvard University that satires the principles, policies, and practices of the welfare state implicit in the New Deal. 

Die early and avoid the fate. 
Or if predestined to die late, 
Make up your mind to die in state. 

Make the whole stock exchange your own! 
If need be occupy a throne, 
Where nobody can call you crone. 

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

No memory of having starred 
Atones for later disregard, 
Or keeps the end from being hard. 

Better to go down dignified 
With boughten friendship at your side 
Than none at all. Provide, provide! 

Frost liked to tell the story of his having once recited the poem to an audience in Washington, with “a very important friend in front.” “To rub it in,” after reciting the final three lines, he repeated, “‘Provide, provide!” adding ominously, “Or somebody else’ll provide for you!” And then – “to make it deeper still” –he asked, “‘And how’ll you like that?’”3 Frost’s highly placed friend was Henry Wallace, who served as Vice-President during Roosevelt’s third term, ran for the Presidency as the Progressive Party’s candidate in 1948, and stood out as the most socialist-minded politician of prominence in the Washington of his day.

In the Saturday Review in January 1936, shortly after Roosevelt was elected to his second term as President, Frost published “To a Thinker in Office” (collected the next year, in A Further Range, as “To a Thinker”). His theme was the inconstancy and vacillation demonstrated by those currently exercising political power in and out of office. It was widely taken to be an anti-Roosevelt poem. 

The last step taken found your heft 
Decidedly upon the left. 
One more would throw you on the right. 
Another still – you see your plight. 
You call this thinking, but it’s walking. 
. . . 
Just now you’re off democracy 
(With a polite regret to be), 
And leaning on dictatorship; 
But if you will accept the tip, 
In less than no time, tongue and pen, 
You’ll be a democrat again, 
. . . 
Suppose you’ve no direction in you, 
I don’t see but you must continue 
To use the gift you do possess, 
And sway with reason more or less. 
I own I never really warmed 
To the reformer or reformed. 
And yet conversion has its place 
Not halfway down the scale of grace. 
So if you find you must repent 
From side to side in argument, 
At least don’t use your mind too hard, 
But trust my instinct – I’m a bard. 

Frost later revealed that he had not originally had Roosevelt in mind, but that he would not deny the identification when others read the poem that way. He wanted his poems put to use. In fact, “the pleasantest use of a poem,” he said, was “seeing a fragment of it quoted in an editorial, we’ll say, in a New York paper.” “That’s a very great triumph.”4 “To a Thinker” had been put to a definite political use that he approved of. As he said at the age of eighty-four, “I don’t want to run for office, but I want to be a politician” (I, 192).

Frost’s long-standing desire to be of public use, along with his hope that his work be useful to the common good, comes to the fore in the more explicit political aspects of his poetry of the 1930s. This turn away from the more purely subjective lyrics and narrative poems of his first five volumes was widely regretted and deplored by many of his critics. Indeed, so marked was the academic and intellectual repudiation of Frost, especially after the publication of A Further Range in 1937, that it took two brilliantly revisionary essays by Randall Jarrell a decade or more later, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, to recall Frost’s readers to what Jarrell pointed to as constituting Frost’s genuine contributions to poetry. Focusing on poems that showed Frost at his lyrical and narrative best, Jarrell significantly made no case for Frost’s more public poetry. He did not mention “Build Soil,” with its profoundly conservative message, for instance, or “Departmental,” a satire on regimentation, specialization, and socialism. For a generation or more, in fact, much of Frost’s political poetry was dismissed as “telling” rather than “showing.” Frost’s sententiousness in such poems, it was asserted, diminished the poet’s overall achievement – a charge that would stick to Frost for the rest of his life and beyond. Still, while the critics disapproved, Frost continued to write his political poetry. At the conclusion of a network television interview conducted when he was serving as Consultant in Poetry at the Library of Congress, he complained that while the half-hour was up, they had not yet “settled anything!”

Frost’s larger complaint about his stay in Washington was that no member of Congress ever consulted with him. He did not know, of course, that what lay ahead of him was something better than talking things over with one or two members of the United States Congress. 

II

There was a long lead-time before Frost was put to his nation’s use by being sent on a cultural mission to the Soviet Union. He first represented the United States, in a small way, in South America. In 1954, under the aegis of the United States Information Agency, the Department of State had sent him to South America as a delegate to the International Writers’ Conference in São Paulo, Brazil. In improvised remarks to the assembly he noted that there was a tendency to see the United States as something of a monster. “I won’t say anything about Russia, which perhaps does want to dominate the world,” he continued, “but I do want to make it very clear that my country does not in any way want to rule the world.”5 Frost’s successful mission to South America encouraged the Department of State to send him to England in 1957, which turned into a series of opportunities for Frost to visit his old friends and the places he had lived in over four decades earlier. His English tour, which saw him honored with degrees from Cambridge, Oxford, and the National University in Dublin, seemed to whet further his appetite for serving his country. Next was the Soviet Union.

The idea to send him to the Soviet Union might have begun with his friend Stewart Udall. Their friendship dated from the late 1950s when Udall was serving in Washington as a congressman from Arizona and Frost was finishing his stint as poetry consultant to the Library of Congress. When Udall heard Frost’s complaint that during his term not a single member of congress had asked him for advice, he did his best to redress this slight by having Frost come to dinner. Over the next several years, largely through Udall’s good offices but not entirely so, Frost would come to enjoy his closest associations ever with powerful politicians. Frost was capable of helping his own cause. He made it known that he admired Kennedy’s book, Profiles in Courage. “That fine book, the Profiles is about,” he would continue to insist to the end of his life, “being somewhat arbitrary, being more answerable to God than you are to your constituents . . . That’s a fine idea.”6 And on his eighty-fifth birthday Frost had helped himself further by “predicting” (that is how the Press construed his not so explicit remarks) that Senator John F. Kennedy would be elected the next President of the United States. This “prediction” evoked first a letter from the young Senator Kennedy and led to what was seen later as something of a friendship. But it was not Kennedy who first thought of inviting Frost to participate in his inauguration as President. That honor falls to Udall, who was by that time Kennedy’s choice for Secretary of the Interior.

The world saw Frost’s performance at the Presidential inaugural ceremony on January 19, 1961.7 The glaring winter sunlight so annoyed and distracted the seemingly disorganized, somewhat disheveled old man that he gave up his attempt to read the poem he had composed for this most public of readings before his greatest audience ever. He set his new poem aside and went on to recite “The Gift Outright,” a piece – tried-and-true –that he knew by heart. But so clearly superior is “The Gift Outright” to the poem he wrote for John Kennedy that some of Frost’s readers wondered whether, not only welcoming the opportunity in that moment of confusion to skip his new poem, he had somehow engineered the whole thing (if only subconsciously). Frost’s popularity with politicians running the so-called New Frontier administration ran unabated into the next year. Congress voted Frost a Congressional Medal “in recognition of his contributions to American letters,” which the President awarded at White House ceremonies on the poet’s eighty-eighth birthday. That evening the Stewart Udalls, along with Frost’s publishers, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, celebrated the poet’s birthday with a dinner in his honor.

All that day, however, Frost had something up his sleeve. Nikita Khrushchev was on his mind. The premier of the USSR had visited the United States in September–October 1960, mainly to attend sessions of the United Nations General Assembly. It was at this time that, to the consternation of some of their readers but mainly to the amusement of many others, the world’s newspapers reported on Khrushchev’s homely, colloquial, even crude language, his generous use of proverbs, and his non-verbal shenanigans, such as taking off his shoe and pounding it on the desk before him in an effort to bring the assembly to attention.8

Khrushchev’s use of his shoe as a parliamentary gavel was amusing. Probably only a person well used to walking would have the natural resourcefulness to see that a familiar shoe might be put to uses that had nothing to do with feet. In the poem “The Objection to Being Stepped On” Frost talks about such useful conversions: 

At the end of the row 
I stepped on the toe 
Of an unemployed hoe. 
It rose in offense 
And struck me a blow 
In the seat of my sense. 
. . . 
You may call me a fool, 
But was there a rule 
The weapon should be 
Turned into a tool? 
And what do we see? 
The first tool I step on 
Turned into a weapon. 

Later, in an interview in Moscow, Frost’s comments on the atom and war repeated the argument of his poem. “I often think about words now: weapon, tool.” “A tool can turn into a weapon,” he said. “When the peasants rebelled, they turned their tools of labor into weapons. I often hear that the atom has to become a tool for peace. But you always have to keep in mind that it can be a weapon for war too.” (I, 284)

Khrushchev’s “shoe” also recalls one of Frost’s California poems from the early 1930s. In Los Angeles for the Olympics in 1932, amidst many of the world’s greatest living athletes (though not the Russians), Frost remembered that he, too, had accomplished an “Olympic” feat and had only recently written a poem to commemorate it. He called it “My Olympic Record Stride,” although he would later shorten the title to “A Record Stride.” 

In a Vermont bedroom closet 
With a door of two broad boards 
And for back wall a crumbling old chimney 
(And that’s what their toes are towards), 
I have a pair of shoes standing, 
Old rivals of sagging leather, 
Who once kept surpassing each other, 
But now live even together. 
. . . 
I wet one last year at Montauk 
For a hat I had to save. 
The other I wet at the Cliff House 
In an extra-vagant wave. 
Two entirely different grand children 
Got me into my double adventure. 
But when they grow up and can read this 
I hope they won’t take it for censure. 
I touch my tongue to the shoes now, 
And unless my sense is at fault, 
On one I can taste Atlantic, 
On the other Pacific, salt. 
One foot in each great ocean 
Is a record stride or stretch, 
. . . 
And I ask all to try to forgive me 
For being as over-elated 
As if I had measured the country 
And got the United States stated. 

Shoes, tools, proverbs, competition, rivalry, games, Olympics, the United States, the Soviet Union, Khrushchev and Frost – all these are counters in the story of Frost as a poet-statesman. Frost could not have been unaware that the Soviet Union had been rejected de facto by the 1932 Olympics committee, which refused to invite that country to participate in the games in Los Angeles. In 1962 things were different. Once, in a discussion about disarmament, Frost had thrown out the suggestion, not entirely facetiously, that the United States might consider entering into a baseball competition with the Soviet Union. Now, perhaps they – the premier and the poet –could get their respective countries on the way to what Frost called one hundred years of magnanimous rivalry. After all, Frost had said of this “a grand man,” Khrushchev: “With all the fears of us, and fears of what’s behind him and round him there, it doesn’t seem to touch him at all . . . He’s my enemy,” Frost concluded, “but it takes just a little magnanimity to admire him.”9

It is not clear whether the notion to send Frost to Russia originated with Udall or Frost himself, though most reports credit it to a third party, Anatoly Dobrynin, the Russian Ambassador to the United States. In any event, when the proposal reached the President, he approved it. Udall would accompany Frost, along with Frederick Adams, the director of the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York and a longtime friend of the poet’s, and F. D. Reeve, a specialist in Russian literature and culture who taught at Wesleyan University. Ultimately, each of Frost’s three companions would write accounts of the trip. Frost, who died within six months of his return from the USSR, did not. Although Frost’s visit was entirely cultural – never diplomatic, of course – it is obvious that it was the possibility that he would meet with Khrushchev –or, as he might have thought it, the thing that he could believe into being – that compelled him to make this long journey and to subject himself willingly to a physically and mentally demanding schedule of public readings and events.

Shortly after arriving in Moscow, Frost began to worry that the meeting would not take place. The entire project – despite the warm and enthusiastic reception he received everywhere he went –was, he began to fear, doomed to fail. His momentous talk with Khrushchev would not take place. The story of how it was finally arranged for him to meet the Premier in the final days of the trip, though the poet was almost too ill to travel at all, has been well told elsewhere.10 What needs to be emphasized here is that finally Frost was able to discuss – face-to-face with the Premier – matters such as cultural exchanges, negotiations over the Berlin wall, the desirability of engaging in magnanimous international rivalries in art, sports, science, and democracy, to maintaining the sterile coexistence of a Cold War. He had met with the enemy and though Khrushchev was a “ruffian” (as Frost would call him rather admiringly) he was nevertheless, Frost was certain, a statesman who understood the nature of words, language, and serious play.

Like everyone else, Frost had seen the signs of all this. On Khrushchev’s visit to the United States in 1960 the newspapers had picked up on his penchant for peppering his conversation and cinching his arguments with proverbs and what Frost called “dark sayings.” “We drink out of a small glass, but we speak with great feelings,” he directed at President Kennedy and himself. The newspapers collected his sayings. On changes in the nature of capitalism, he said, “A black frog cannot be whitewashed.” On the production of butter and meat for the Soviet Union, he came up with “A dry spoon will scrape the tongue.” On nuclear weapons as a deterrent to war with the West, he said, “A gale of words will not make a windmill turn.” And on the decay of Western capitalism, he prophesied, “If you cannot hold on by the mane, you will not be able to hold on by the tail.”11 The American poet’s own books had always been studded with aphorisms. No exception was In the Clearing, a copy of which he would inscribe for Khrushchev in Moscow, just as he had for Kennedy back in Washington. That, too, would be a record stride. 

III

The affinity Frost first felt with Khrushchev might have come through their shared confidence in aphorisms, proverbs, and other “dark sayings.” It might be useful, therefore, to look into what Frost meant when he used the term “dark sayings,” along with his reasons for considering them as spiritenhancing challenges to those who would interpret not just literature but life itself.

We might begin this investigation by looking at some lines from the poem “Mending Wall.” 

There where it is we do not need the wall: 
He is all pine and I am apple orchard. 
My apple trees will never get across 
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him. 
He only says, “Good fences make good neighbors.” 
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder 
If I could put a notion in his head: 
“Why do they make good neighbors? Isn’t it 
Where there are cows? But here there are no cows. 
Before I built a wall I’d ask to know 
What I was walling in or walling out, 
And to whom I was like to give offense. 
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall, 
That wants it down.” 
. . . 
He will not go behind his father’s saying, 
And he likes having thought of it so well 
He says again, “Good fences make good neighbors,” 

Most readings of “Mending Wall” are based on the decision as to which of the two voices in the poem – the speaker’s or his taciturn neighbor’s –speaks the “truth” or, at least, expresses the poet’s own view of things. At Bread Loaf in 1955 Frost said this about the poem: 

It’s about a spring occupation in my day. When I was farming seriously we had to set the wall up every year. You don’t do that any more. You run a strand of barbed wire along it and let it go at that. We used to set the wall up. If you see a wall well set up you know it’s owned by a lawyer in New York –not a real farmer. This is just about that spring occupation, but of course all sorts of things have been done with it and I’ve done something with it myself in self-defense. I’ve gone it one better – more than once in different ways for the Ned of it – just for the foolishness of it.12 

Then Frost read “Mending Wall,” only to follow its reading with more commentary. The “first person that ever spoke to me about it was at that time becoming the president of Rollins College,” Frost started out. 

[H]e took both my hands to tell me I had written a true international poem. And just to tease him I said: “How do you get that?” You know. I said I thought I’d been fair to both sides –both national [and international]. “Oh, no,” he said, “I could see what side you were on.” And I said: “The more I say I the more I always mean somebody else.” That’s objectivity, I told him. That’s the way we talked about it, kidding. That’s where the great fooling comes in. But my latest way out of it is to say: I’ve got a man there; he’s both [of those people but he’s man – both of them, he’s] a wall builder and a wall toppler. He makesboundaries and he breaks boundaries. That’s man. And all human life is cellular, outside or inside. In my body every seven years I’m made out of different cells and all my cell walls have been changed. I’m cellular within and life outside is cellular. Even the Communists have cells. That’s where I’ve arrived at that.13 

He noted, too, that “Mending Wall” was “very much taken as a parable.”14 Indeed, since his comments over the years suggest that he agreed with that characterization of the poem, it is profitable to approach the poem as a parable that is centered on the ambiguity of a troublesome proverb. Frost never calls “Good fences make good neighbors” a “dark saying” per se, but in a notebook he attributes it to the Spartans. In the same entry he links the Spartans’ verbal devices for keeping their wisdom secret from outsiders with St. Mark’s parable on the secrecy characteristic of parables. It is Frost’s own little secret that “dark saying,” related to the proverb, was synonymous with “parable.” The linguistic and etymological tracing of these identifications is rehearsed by Frank Kermode in The Genesis of Secrecy: On the Interpretation of Narrative (1979). But the matter is put succinctly and clearly in Richard Chevenix Trench’s Notes on the Parables of Our Lord, an important nineteenth-century study. 

Partly from the fact which has been noted by many, of there being but one word in the Hebrew to signify both parable and proverb; which circumstances must have had considerable influence upon writers accustomed to think in that language, and itself arose from the parable and proverb being alike enigmatical and somewhat obscure forms of speech, “dark sayings,” speaking a part of their meaning and leaving the rest to be inferred. This is evidently true of the parable, and in fact no less so of the proverb.15 

Now, though there is already a good deal written about Frost as a parablist, his identification of the “dark saying” with the parable has been pretty much overlooked. It is not important at this late date that, as Theodore Morrison reports, Frost’s friend Hyde Cox had to point out to him, in the early 1940s, that his memory of St. Mark’s explanation of why Jesus spoke in parables was faulty. “R. F. did not remember” recalled Cox. 

Like many other people, it was his recollection that Christ said something about parables being easier to understand. I gleefully pointed out that this was just the opposite of what Jesus had said, and I read to R. F. the 4th Chapter of the Gospel according to St. Mark. He was delighted and said at once “Does that occur anywhere else?” I then read him the thirteenth Chapter of Matthew especially verses 11–13! The rest of the evening was spent discussing the wisdom and the hardness of this thought. R. F. pointed out that it is the same as for poetry; only those who approach it in the right way can understand it. And not everyone can understand no matter what they do because it just isn’t in them. They cannot “be saved.”16 

In effect, what seems to have happened that night is that St. Mark’s own parable about parables came alive for Frost in a new way. He discovered it as an old “dark saying,” new to him, which he could fathom precisely because he was a poet who worked in exactly the same way. In his essay “The Prerequisites” (1954, CPPP, 814), which introduces Aforesaid (a well-made collection commemorating his eighty-fifth birthday), Frost laid out his theory of the “dark saying,” along with its implications for reading and, in a negative way, for teaching. I shall limit myself to some excerpts and an observation or two. First of all, the essay is itself a parable about how not to teach poetry, or, better still, how poetry is usually mistaught. For Frost there are no prerequisites for reading poetry. 

A poem is best read in the light of all the other poems ever written. We read A the better to read B (we have to start somewhere, we may get very little out of A). We read B the better to read C, C the better to read D, D the better to go back and get something more out of A. Progress is not the aim, but circulation. The thing is to get among the poems where they hold each other apart in their places as the stars do.17 

Frost does not say, in so many words, why, having read poem D one might want to go back to poem A. But it can be inferred that there was something in A that one did not understand then but might become clear now after one had experienced other poems. “I don’t like obscurity and obfuscation, but I do like dark sayings I must leave the clearing of to time,” Frost said. He could just as easily have said “dark poems.” 

IV

It cannot be said that Frost’s colloquy with Khrushchev, the Russian farmer and man of “dark sayings,” had made a palpable difference in the confrontational policies of the United States and the Soviet Union. Frost’s not entirely accurate comments to reporters awaiting him as he deplaned in New York were reported as unequivocal statements by Khrushchev about American weakness. “Khrushchev said he feared for us modern liberals. He said we were too liberal to fight. I suppose he thought we’d stand there for the next hundred years saying, ‘On the one hand –but on the other hand.’”18 Frost’s New York interview became big news and that angered Kennedy. “Why did he have to say that?” the President asked Udall.19

The immediate result of Frost’s well-meant but misfiring remarks was that Kennedy cut off all further contact with the poet. He showed no interest inhearing what either his poet-diplomat might have had to say in his own defense or in any messages Khrushchev might have asked Frost to relay to an American president (I, 289). Events, too, grossly overshadowed Frost’s mission. Even as he was meeting with Khrushchev, the Soviet Union was placing its missiles in Cuba. A decade later, Udall would intimate that Khrushchev’s meeting with Frost (and separately with Udall) was part of his audacious plan to turn Cuba into a fortress armed against the United States. Be that as it may, Frost’s last gesture to claim a grand public role for poetry and for the poet’s power to influence policy had melted away before the hard political facts and unexpected world events.20

Frost had traveled to the Soviet Union with a plan. On the eve of his departure he set down the lines of that general plan for the benefit of his biographer and as a contribution, perhaps, to history itself. On the fifteenth of August he briefed Lawrance Thompson: 

The issue before Russia and us is which comes nearer – their democracy or ours –placating everybody. I may tell them what the issue is but won’t claim it is nothing to fight about. Let’s be great about it, not petty with petty twits. We both have a mighty history. I hope we can show ourselves mighty without being ugly. I get round once in so often to the word magnanimity, don’t I? I shall be prophesying not just predicting from statistics – talking of the next hundred years ahead. I may tell them theirs is an imperial democracy like Caesar’s Rome, ours a senatorial like the Roman republic. I have been having all sorts of ideas but as I say for dignity I shall depend on the poems few will understand [turning them into “dark sayings”?]. I guess you pretty well know my attitude. I shall praise them for art and science and athletics. I may speak of the severity they’ve been easing down from towards socialism and our liberality we’ve been straining up from to the same socialism. And then again I may not. I go as an opportunist on the loose. I’d like a chance to ask the great Khrushchev to grant me one request and then ask him a hard one. 
(SL, 592) 

Of peculiar interest to the student of Frost, however, is that the poet, who believed that the thing lost in translation was poetry itself, should have put himself and his poetry in the position of being inevitably lost or – at best –misunderstood. A computer translation would render into Russian the English saw “the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak” as “the whiskey is strong but the cow is dead.”21 There are no indications that anything as dramatically distortive happened to Frost’s poems when he “said” them in Moscow and Leningrad or when he spoke with Khrushchev in Gagra, but it was readily apparent that getting his poetic messages across was a hit-ormiss affair at best. Nevertheless, he took chances. He read “Departmental,” his tale in couplets of the death of the ant Jerry and of the “special Janizary,/ Whose office it is to bury/ The dead of the commissary,” which, among other targets, satirizes bureaucracies and all forms of collectivism – the line “our selfless forager Jerry,” Frost said, “sums up all socialism”22 – and should have been readily understood as such by any literate citizen or leader of the Soviet Union. And seemingly on the spur of the moment (and to the surprise of his American companions) he once read a comic anti-war poem that parodies the nursery rhyme “Hey Diddle Diddle”. He had published “Lines Written in Dejection on the Eve of Great Success” in In the Clearing, his latest and, as it turned out, his last book. The section of the poem labeled “Postscript” reads: 

But if over the moon I had wanted to go 
And had caught my cow by the tail, 
I’ll bet she’d have made a melodious low 
And put her foot in the pail; 

Than which there is no indignity worse. 
A cow did that once to a fellow 
Who rose from the milking stool with a curse 
And cried, “I’ll larn you to bellow,” 

He couldn’t lay hands on a pitchfork to hit her 
Or give her a stab of the tine, 
So he leapt on her hairy back and bit her 
Clear into her marrow spine. 

No doubt she would have preferred the fork. 
She let out a howl of rage 
That was heard as far away as New York 
And made the papers’ front page. 

He answered her back, “Well, who begun it?” 
That’s what at the end of a war 
We always say – not who won it, 
Or what it was foughten for. 

Only Frost would have run the risk of taking on the Russians with a comic anti-war fable that had to run the gauntlet of translation. It did not work. “It meant nothing to his audience, though there was a scattering of polite applause,” reported his friend Adams.23 But perhaps Adams missed something. For, although Frost might not have known why, his choice of a poem parodying the nursery rhyme “Hey Diddle Diddle” would have undoubtedly struck a familiar note for some of his Russian listeners. In fact, it has been noted, “English nursery rhymes en masse seem to appeal to the children of Russia.” “Colourfully illustrated collections have been published in Moscow,” write Iona and Peter Opie, with translations made by eminent poets.24 Frost was decidedly more successful with “Mending Wall.” His Russian audiences already knew the poem (it had been translated in the 1930s) and often requested it. If, as will be recalled, Frost had claimed that “the pleasantest use of a poem” was to see “a fragment of it quoted in an editorial,”25 one can only surmise the number of times “Mending Wall” had been put to use in political discourse, especially in the protracted controversy over the Communist-built wall that divided Berlin. “Perhaps Frost’s most apposite line for the present moment in history is his famous: ‘Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,’” reads the New York Times review of In the Clearing five months before Frost went to Russia. “Old-stone savage or new-power-hungry savage,” the reviewer concludes, “the good-fencesmake-good-neighbors philosophy is riddled again in Berlin.”26 That Frost was reading the poem in the Soviet Union became news when the Times printed a page of photographs of the poet in audience among the Russians. Several pictures – under the title of “‘Mending Wall’ in Moscow” – carried a single caption: 

Some of the gentlest mockery the Soviet Union has endured came recently from the 88-year-old poet, Robert Frost, a cultural-exchange visitor. Among other things, he read from his poem, “Mending Wall,” in Moscow: “Before I built a wall I’d ask to know/ What I was walling out. / And to whom I was likely to give offense.” The reference to Berlin seemed clear, but Frost would not interpret.27 

Frost, like everyone else, knew America’s official position on the wall, and he was in agreement with his President that the wall should come down. It was, after all, consonant with his dictum that nations must be nations before they could go international. But he was also aware that his poem – indeed, all poems –could be put to different uses, just as jokes told on different occasions to different audiences might aim at different purposes and convey different meanings. It is doubtful, therefore, that Frost read the poem merely because his audiences had asked him to include it in his reading. It seems ingenuous to think, therefore, that he did not read it, as Reeve insisted, “as a commentary on Berlin, which one reporter unfortunately interpreted it to be.’”28

For some unstated reason Frost had come to trust this man of power who could turn a shoe into a weapon and a proverb into a tool. It was that trust and a considerable faith in himself that took Frost at the end of his life to Russia. He had no wish to confront the Premier of the Soviet Union before a worldwide audience as President Eisenhower’s Vice-President Richard Nixon had ended up doing. He wanted no equivalent of a kitchen debate with Nikita Khrushchev. Rather, he would talk with the Premier – on a very high plane – of national accomplishments such as the flight of the Wright Brothers at Kitty Hawk. He had entitled one of his latest poems “How Hard It Is to Keep from Being King When It’s in You and in the Situation,” andnow, in his eighty-ninth year, he found himself in the rough equivalent of such a situation. Knowing that words are deeds, he now had an opportunity to prove that grand deeds can also be poems.

In fact, even when it became public knowledge, almost immediately after his return from Russia, that things had turned dark for the two superpowers, he remained preoccupied with what he considered to have been his wondrous trip to the Soviet Union and his one-on-one meeting with Khrushchev. At the National Poetry Festival in Washington in October 1962, still hoping for a debriefing meeting with the President, he went over those recent events: 

Everything was so nice, with the great man, too. Just what I wanted him to be; and talked, and went the whole length, everywhere – the greatness of it.

The biggest thing about it was that he wanted –he agreed with me that the great thing was to make the issue great; not to have petty squabbles decide it. The great issue between our two kinds of democracy, we called it. I called it that myself, in courtesy, and he agreed to that. Big – make it magnificent, you know, the great world thought – next hundred years. And whatever came, we didn’t name the word “war.” We didn’t talk about love or peace or any of those silly things. All talk big, but splendid, and the kind of thing that we could rest in, with big trials – trials of athletics and science and all that – and about democracy: who’s produced the greater men, the greater leaders, and all that. And the showdowns, I wasn’t talking about those, you know, and he wasn’t, but we knew what we meant.29 

And when Norman Thomas, the best-known American Socialist of his time, asked him for clarification or explanation of what he had been reported as having said upon his arrival in New York, he set down carefully his answer: 

I can’t see how Khrushchev’s talk got turned into what you quote that we weren’t mean enough to fight. I came nearer than he to threatening; with my native geniality I assured him that we were no more afraid of him than he was of us. We seemed in perfect agreement that we shouldn’t come to blows till we were sure there was a big issue remaining between us, of his kind of democracy versus our kind of democracy, approximating each other as they are, his by easing downward towards socialism through various phases of welfare state-ism. I said the stage or arena is set between us for a rivalry of perhaps a hundred years. Let’s hope we can take it out in sports, science, art, business, and politics before ever we have to take it out in the bloody politics of war. It was all magnanimity –Aristotle’s great word. I should have expected you to approve. Liberal in a good sense of the word . . . If only a word would stay put in basic English. 
(SL, 595) 

Frost dictated his reply to Thomas, but, keeping it, apparently, for revisions, he did not get to mail it.

“Decency, honor, and not too much deceit,” he had cautioned diplomats when leaving Brazil in 1954, “are about the best one can aspire to in international relations.”30 But in his one attempt at high international diplomacy, both quixotic and exemplary, this “opportunist on the loose” (as he called himself) had set aside his own advice to diplomats and tried to believe in his country’s future. 

NOTES 
1 “Democracy Losing, Lippmann Asserts,” New York Times, June 1, 1932, p. 18. 
2 The Writings of Henry David Thoreau, vol. IV (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1906), p. 459. 
3 Reported in Proceedings, National Poetry Festival Held in the Library Of Congress October 22–24, 1962 (Washington: General Reference and Bibliography Division, Reference Department, Library of Congress, 1964), p. 242. 
4 Robert Frost, “‘For Glory and for Use,’” Gettysburg Review, 7 (Winter 1994), 94. 
5 Reported in Congresso Internacional de Escritores e Encontros Intelectuais (São Paulo: Anhembi, 1957), p. 482. My translation. 
6 Proceedings, National Poetry Festival, p. 255. 
7 A clip of Frost’s recitation at John F. Kennedy’s Inauguration is available on CD-ROM, Robert Frost: Poems, Life, Legacy, compiled by Joe Matazzoni, ed. Donald Sheehy (New York: Henry Holt, 1997). 
8 Benjamin Welles, “Khrushchev Bangs His Shoe on Desk,” New York Times, October 12, 1960, pp. 1, 14. Khrushchev’s shoe-pounding nearly forty years ago is still remembered. See “Cold War satellite images are paying off,” Boston Sunday Herald, July 12, 1998, p. 23, which begins: “If former Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev were alive, he’d have to eat the shoe he pounded in fits of socialist passion as he vowed that capitalism would perish.” 
9 Russell Baker, “Frost Honored on 88th Birthday; Praises His ‘Enemy’ Khrushchev,” New York Times, March 27, 1962, p. 39. 
10 See, for example, Frederick B. Adams, Jr., To Russia with Frost (Boston: The Club of Odd Volumes, 1963); Stewart L. Udall, “‘. . . and miles to go before I sleep’: Robert Frost’s Last Adventure,” New York Times Magazine (June 11, 1972); and F. D. Reeve, Robert Frost in Russia (Boston and Toronto: Little, Brown, 1964). 
11 “A Khrushchev Proverb Begins Second Day of Vienna Meeting,” New York Times, June 5, 1961, p. 12; and “Khrushchev Gets Off Some More Aphorisms,” New York Times October 18, 1961, p. 18. 
12 Reginald L. Cook, Robert Frost: A Living Voice (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1974), p. 82. 
13 Ibid., pp. 82–3. 
14 Ibid., p. 55. 
15 Richard Chevenix Trench, Notes on the Parables of Our Lord (New York: D. Applet‎on, 1855), pp. 13–14. 
16 Theodore Morrison, “The Agitated Heart,” Atlantic Monthly, 220 (July 1967), 78. 
17 Robert Frost, “The Prerequisites,” in Selected Prose of Robert Frost, ed. Hyde Cox and Edward Connery Lathem (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1966), p. 97. 
18 Philip Benjamin, “Robert Frost Returns With Word of Khrushchev,” New York Times, September 10, 1962, p. 8. 
19 Quoted in Udall, “‘. . . and miles to go before I sleep,’” p. 30. 
20 In August 1954 Frost was sent, along with William Faulkner, to the International Writers Congress in São Paulo, Brazil. Faulkner was more skeptical about such State Department sponsored visits by writers than was Frost. “The artist is still a little like the old court jester. He is supposed to speak his vicious paradoxes with some sense to them,” he told an interviewer in 1955, “but he isn’t part of whatever the fabric is that makes a nation. It is assumed that anyone who makes a million dollars has a unique gift, though he might have made it off some useless gadget” (Lion in the Garden: Interviews with William Faulkner, ed. James B. Meriwether and Michael Millgate [Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1980], p. 82). 
21 See Lewis Turco, “Comparative Literature,” College English, 27 (March 1966), 511. 
22 Reading at Brown University, December 7, 1955. “All socialism is bad arithmetic,” he told Peter J. Stanlis in 1940, “in which two comes before one.” (Robert Frost: The Individual and Society, [Rockford, Illinois: Rockford College, 1973], p. 56.) 
23 Adams, To Russia with Frost, p. 26. 
24 Iona and Peter Opie, A Family Book of Nursery Rhymes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964), p. 189. 
25 Ibid. 
26 Charles Poore, “Books of the Times,” New York Times, March 27, 1962, p. 35. 
27 “‘Mending Wall’ in Moscow,” New York Times Magazine, September 16, 1962, p. 34. 
28 Reeve, Robert Frost in Russia, pp. 91–92. 
29 Proceedings, National Poetry Festival, p. 253. Perhaps contributing to Frost’s desire to act the diplomat, was the image of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s destiny to exercise great diplomatic power. In language that recalls the language of “The Lovely Shall Be Choosers,” Frost recalled: “And He [God] gives him polio, and then he sits on top of the world along with Stalin and Churchill! That row is forever in my mind.” (I, p. 157) 
30 “Robert Frost, 80, Gives A Recipe for Diplomats,” New York Times, August 11, 1954, p. 27. Some of the material that informs “Robert Frost’s International Diplomacy” was presented at the “Robert Frost Colloquium” at St. Lawrence University, Canton, New York, October 19–30, 1993, and reported in the bulletin of the friends of the Owen D. Young Library. 

from "The Cambridge Companion to Robert Frost"