13. Lodged / West-Running Brook(1928) - Robert Frost

[esse]

Lodged

The rain to the wind said,

"You push and I'll pelt."

They so smote the garden bed

That the flowers actually knelt,

And lay lodged―though not dead.

I know how the flowers felt.

• lodge : 쳐박히다
• pelt : 가죽을 벗기다, 내던지다
• smite : 타격, 감동하다

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납작 엎드렸다

비가 바람에게 말했다,

“당신은 밀고 나는 팽개치겠소.”

그들이 꽃밭을 심히 유린하니

꽃들이 사실상 무릎을 꿇고,

납작 엎드렸다―죽진 않았지만.

나는 꽃이 어떤 기분이었는지 안다.

-신재실 옮김- 

단상(斷想): 비와 바람이 있어야 꽃이 피고 수정한다. 하지만 또한 비와 바람의 급습에 꽃은 떨어진다. 비바람의 공격에 꽃밭의 꽃은 무릎을 꿇고 납작 엎드린다. 불의(不義)의 비바람으로부터 자신을 보호하기 위해서는 납작 엎드릴 수밖에 다른 방법이 없다. 연약한 꽃의 태생적 슬기 아니겠는가?

사람도 마찬가지다. 우리가 당하는 고통도 꽃밭의 꽃이 당하는 것과 비슷한 경우가 많다. 저항과 항의에 앞서 일단 납작 엎드리는 것 또한 고통을 이기는 지혜일 수 있다.

-신재실 씀-

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The Cambridge Companion to Robert Frost

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

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

Human Presence in Frost’s Universe - JOHN CUNNINGHAM

Frost’s poems address the ancient theme of the opposition between absence and presence. Here I will discuss (though not chronologically) ten poems published between 1916 and 1942 in which Frost explores this opposition. They all assume a universe without divine order, absent of purpose, awareness, human comprehension; in them humanity is on its own, the only locus of value, intention, self-consciousness, presence. One does well to be aware of the lure of night and of the deceptive whiteness of snow, to be free of any illusions about them. The heroism available to one is small in scale, and its accomplishments, though real, cannot be grand; it is only the upkeep of human self-consciousness and purpose in a universe otherwise void and absent of meaning, and this scope has shrunk since Frost wrote. These ideas, familiar to the last hundred years, comprise one theme common to the ten poems. One could observe as well that the ethos of the New England countryside has its parallels in the cosmic myths of Yeats, the Christianity of Eliot, and the sequence of ideologies in Auden, though my few pages do not admit of a discussion of these parallels. These ten poems display the poet’s attachment to traditional forms and his artistry in using them; blank verse, open couplets, quatrains, sonnet-like poems, one true sonnet, terza rima, and various other lyrical stanzas. They are traditional without being “poetic”: as slant rhymes, metrical variations (sometimes bold ones), colloquial diction, clichés, and homely metaphors that very often open onto darkness indicate.

This handful of poems considers the problem of man, with self-consciousness, a sense of value, of right and wrong, of beauty, of harmony, existing as a presence lonely in the universe that seems in them wholly absent of any awareness of man’s concerns but rather characterized by mindless forces and unconscious obstacles. The congregation of thoughtless forces clashing with heedless barriers despite a man’s almost frantic desire for “someone else additional to him” makes up “The Most of It”(1942). “Spring Pools” (1927) goes further to show nature heedlessly effecting a scene of beauty and harmony and just as heedlessly ready to destroy it. Only the presence of ahuman can know of this value, but he is defenseless against a universe ignorant of worth. This absence is generalized in “Nothing Gold Can Stay” (1923) as the poem shows the inevitable transience of all golden things. “The Oven Bird” (1916) asks what man with his awareness is “to make” of diminishment; the answer, if the poem gives one, is to learn to expect nothing other and to “sing” despite such knowledge, to maintain one’s humanity, one’s presence with its awareness of value. “Desert Places” (1936), “The Onset” (1923) and “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” (1923) reveal the almost ineluctable temptation to retreat into the nothingness of the natural world and to give up one’s presence and awareness. “Acquainted with the Night” (1928) and “Design” (1936)1 cancel any hope of a transcendent status for value. “The Most of It” shows man’s mistake in how the universe can be “kept”; “An Old Man’s Winter’s Night” (1916) reveals that only by maintaining his presence can a man keep a house, a countryside, the outer world.

“The Most of It” demonstrates clearly the absence of human values in the universe and yet by inversion teaches of their presence there. Having both an actor and also an observer of the actor is uncharacteristic of Frost’s lyrics; one is naïve and the other aware. Both are potentially each of us, the everyman figure split in two, the actor thinking that he keeps the universe and the other knowing that the actor only “thought” that he did. The first stands on the stony shore of a lake calling out, often one gathers (“ever” suggests so), for response and receives only an echo from the facing cliff hidden by trees; on one occasion a large stag does swim across the lake and lands on the beach, apparently unaware of the one who cries out. The second offers the final four words of the poem as his eval‎uation of the action: “– and that was all.”

“Kept” suggests a kind of maintenance, as keeping a shop or a house, arranging at least some parts of it to accord with one’s own desires, to possess something to which one imputes value. It can also signify oversees, protects, maintains, controls, perhaps understands, comprehends. It puts man and his wishes axiologically, if not astronomically, at the center of the universe. The poem is a short parable of all of us calling for more from the natural world than it can give, unwilling to be “alone” in it, unwilling to accept the chasm between oneself and the rest of the cosmos, unwilling not to have his way (“alone” rhymes with “own”). Egoistically, ill-advisedly, insistently, he demands more: “He would cry out,” stubbornly “would.” Although all the words describing what follows have human connotations – “answer,” “wake,” “voice” – ironically they do not, in fact, describe self-conscious reactions. Perhaps only human beings can love; certainly only they can know “counter-love,” can offer an “original response” characterized bypersonal intention, moral values, aesthetic awareness. The universe and human desire are not congruous as the slant rhyme wants and response suggests.

Not only the universe is against him; the metaphors, meter, and alliteration are also. Imagery of distance and separation point his condition. The lake divides the speaker from the source of the echo and of the buck. The echo derives “from some tree-hidden cliff,” and the buck begins “in the cliff’s talus” on the “other side” and swims “in the far distant water.” In each case, the meter metaphorically states the isolation, two consecutive stressed syllables impeding the iambic movement. The imagery is of unconscious obstacles like the “boulder-broken beach,” the talus, the rocks; it is of unself-conscious forces colliding with these opposing barriers, like the sound waves of the cryer’s voice bouncing back from the cliff, the buck’s “pushing the crumpled water” and “forc[ing] the underbrush” with “horny tread,” of “stumbl[ing),” as if blindly, among the rocks. The result is the exploding ps above and the irruption of the ps of “powerfully appeared . . . pushing . . . crumpled . . . up . . . pouring” near the end and the harsh though feminine rhyme, “crashed” and “splashed.” The rocks fall from the cliff just as mindlessly, the boulders strewn mindlessly, and the echo twice mocking because it is not human and because not being human it cannot mock. Imagery, meter, alliteration, and rhyme are metaphoric of human impotence. In the face of these powers and these barriers they figure the illusion of the cryer.

The confusion of antecedents for the pronoun “it” states this illusion of the cryer. He calls out “on life” – boulders, talus, cliff, the unreflective actions of the buck – saying that what “it wants . . . back” is “counter-love.” Grammatically “it” refers to unself-conscious “life” that, of course, cannot, in Frost’s poetry, know such love or “original response,” whereas “it” in fact refers to the one who cries, confusing human values with the natural world quite empty of human purpose and love. Certainly no response comes, “unless it” was the buck, “it” (line 13) that swam, “it” (line 14) that neared, “it” (line 16) that appeared without “proving human,” it that is wholly unaware of the human being standing nearby. It is, certainly, an “embodiment” of “the universe,” manifestation, incarnation, on this one occasion, but “embodiment” is suspended for five lines before being identified with the stag. This embodiment is emblematic of “the most of it.” Frost, as he often does, breathes spirit into this cliché; and by it reveals the mindless confusion in the cryer’s thought. “It” is “nothing”, “unless” is ironic rather than mitigating. The nihilism pervasive in the speaker’s view of the cryer’s action allows for no meaning in the universe, no voice, nothing awake, nothing original. That the natural world is a congeries of unreflective forces and obstacles is the burden of the last three quatrains that “answer” the illusivehopes of the cryer stated in the first two quatrains. “And that was all,” concludes the observer, but not quite all, only “the most of it”; for the naive cryer does indeed “ke[ep] the universe alone.” He only is the locus of values, love, original response in it; only as man maintains his human desires and loves and even naive hopes is the universe “kept.” The price, however, is loneliness; otherwise the universe has no keeper, is not kept. The alert, knowing, ironic observer may miss this one fact in his eval‎uation of the cryer’s actions. To understand this sort of keeping, we must work our slow way toward “An Old Man’s Winter Night.”

The speaker in “Spring Pools” is all too aware of the unknowing phenomena of the natural world but also of the value that, on occasion, they create; yet he knows that, being alien to human concerns, they cannot cherish that value as he can nor know to preserve it. At the short moment between the end of winter and the beginning of spring occurs a situation of harmony, unity, beauty, delicacy, near perfection. Even though they are in the forest – the leaves of which normally close off the light of the sun – these pools can “still” – nevertheless, continue to –“reflect/ The total sky.” Earth and heaven seem united, as do the waters and the flowers beside them that they mirror. At least they do so “almost without defect.” Defect is not an encouraging word, nor does almost go without its irony. The two-syllable rhyme with “reflect” introduces an early sense of something not quite right; and the linking of flowers and pools by “chill and shiver” is not hopeful. Because he has witnessed this state before, the speaker knows that the pools, like the flowers, “will . . . soon be gone,” not by flowing innocently out of a brook but rather by treacherously moving up by the trees’ roots to “bring dark foliage” that will starve the flowers of both water and sunlight. The elements that produced the beauty contribute to its own lessening; unconscious forces seem to work in harmony and then in opposition. Dark is moral and ontological as well as descriptive. During the first stanza the speaker manages to control his regret and only implies the opposition between human desire present in him and absent in the natural world.

His restraint disappears in the second stanza. The unwittingly destructive forces passively present become actively threatening in the “pent up buds” that have “it” in them to “darken nature” diminishing it into “summer woods.” The slant rhyme is properly jarring. The speaker’s own pent up frustration finally breaks out with the spondees of the unthoughtful cliché, “Let them think twice”; but the irony that the trees cannot think even once restores life to the cliché. The rush of the meter in the final lines, figurative of the impending destruction of the near-perfect scene, continues for four lines without punctuation. The waters and the flowers cannot resist the rising meter with its stacked up accents – “To blot out and drink up andsweep away” – that describes the trees’ powers to obliterate “these flowery waters and these watery flowers” with their falling meter and surfeit of weak syllables. The poem ends as the speaker subsides into the resignation of the quiet iambs in the last line: “From snow that melted only yesterday.”

The universe, in its “absence,” unwittingly does produce occasions of beauty and harmony that mortals, with their “presence,” find valuable, and they foolishly go on to suppose that value of itself entails the obligation to endure. In Frost it does not. “Nothing Gold Can Stay” begins with one of these episodes and gives over half its lines to charting the diminishment of it. Then it cites two or three more examples and ends with the generalization that is its title. One may suppose that the series of long ōs –gold, hold, only, so, so, so, goes, gold, rather large for an eight-line trimeter poem – represents a continuous moan at universal lessening. The poem opens with a trochee – “Nature’s” – warning of nature’s dominance, and its last line begins with one – “Nothing” – that by the end is unarguable. The first indication of new life after the death of winter is the pale yellow, golden nascent leaves. Frost uses the noun to describe them, gold, not the adjective. For human beings gold is valuable in many ways, beautiful as in jewelry, pure, unchanging, enduring from chemistry, perfect from alchemy, rare and precious from finance. Frost makes it a metaphor for nature’s “first green,” connecting it and green also by alliteration, and conveys all its connotations to the “early leaf” that he calls “a flower” thereby adding suggestions of loveliness and delicacy to the bud. In this color, nature displays “her hardest hue to hold.” The h requires more effort to pronounce than some other consonants; therefore, the difficulty in saying this alliterative line runs counter to the ease with which the color passes away. The feminine rhyme “flower” and “hour” suggests the fragility of the flower but also represents our effort to try to preserve it for, perhaps, just two more weak syllables. Flowers are metaphors of mutability, and the speaker knows that the leaf will be a bud for “only . . . an hour.” After this delicacy, the syntax moves relentlessly on with “Then . . . /So . . . /So . . . /Nothing.” The first stanza begins in the present but looks to the future. With the beginning of the second stanza, the diminishment occurs, “Then leaf subsides to leaf.” The delicacy, beauty, rarity of the golden leaf opens out to a larger merely green leaf. Eden, man’s beginning, the ancients named the Golden Age; it “sank to grief,” downward. What is true of “nature’s first green” is projected backward – and forward – as true of the race. It is also true of the cosmos. Dawn, the day’s beginning, is bright red gold; but dawn “goes down” to ordinary sunshine. The movement of the sun in the sky has long been a metaphor for the course of each person’s life, for its first beginning to its lessened maturity. The movement in each case is paradoxically downward.

One may ask why such a short poem opens so many paradoxes. Green is not gold. One cannot hold a hue. A leaf is not a flower, not even for an hour. The growing leaf increases rather than subsides. The dawn does not go down, but rather the sun comes up. The perfection of Eden should not have in it the wherewithal for sinking. The chemical element that resists bonding with other elements and, thereby, withstands change should not be universally subject to mutability. These paradoxes point toward a disjunction between what the natural world is like, absent of a sense of value or meaning, and the human presence desiring illogically that the valuable should, just because it is valuable, endure. Yet “Nothing Gold Can Stay” is not so dark as “The Most of It” or “Spring Pools.” The bud becomes a leaf, not a thorn; golden yellow becomes green and not black, dawn goes down, but night does not come before the poem finishes. Eden sank to grief but not to despair. Moreover bright long ās and long ēs – nature, green, leaf, leaf, leaf, Eden, grief, day, stay –move counter to the mournful ōs. Diminishment is not so bad as mindless clashing forces or thoughtless obliteration.

In “The Oven Bird” Frost puts and, perhaps, answers the question of what one is “to make of a diminished thing.” In his poetry a bird, of course, is incapable of contemplation and reflection. That failing, however, does not prevent its being emblematic of a meditative person: “The bird would cease and be as other birds/ But that he knows in singing not to sing.” That he knows and reasons from what he knows to appropriate action makes clear his figurative status. He is “a singer everyone has heard.” The poem tells us only that his song is “loud”; a handbook on birds informs us that it is also shrill. The other birds, we may suppose, sang “when pear and cherry bloom went down in showers/ On sunny days a moment overcast”; we may also assume that their song was melodic, tuneful, pleasant to the ear, a song appropriate to a universe of blossoms. They did not attend to the overcast moment and to what the falling blooms signified. The world is now greatly different and their song now inappropriate. We no longer hear it; they “have ceased.” The oven bird is prosaic; he says rather than sings: three times, “He says . . .” “He says that leaves are old,” that their summer green has long displaced the varied colors of the flowers. “Old” seems an overstatement, but it well marks the great distance here between the two seasons. He uses a matter-of-fact metaphor from percentages –“for flowers/ Mid-Summer is to Spring as one to ten” – yet the process is as certain as the laws of mathematics. And regarding autumn, one to – what? One thousand? “He says . . . / And comes that other fall we name the fall”: the autumn does occur, but we give it the appropriate name. It will bring a worse loss, the “fall” of the leaves themselves and will be figurative of the approaching death of winter. When “he says” that the “highway dust” is “over all,” we cannot ignore thesubmerged metaphor of the Biblical Fall that cast the dust of death over the whole universe – “fall” does rhyme with “all” – nor the image of the highway of exile out of Eden into a world of absence, save only for the presence of man. The oven bird is a denizen of this diminished world, “Loud, a mid-summer” and “a mid-wood bird.” After a period of quiet left by the silencing of the “other birds,” the oven bird “makes the solid tree trunks sound” again, resound, resonate.

“The Oven Bird” is technically not a sonnet, but it behaves as if it thought it were one, having a longer unit of ten lines framed with a couplet at its beginning and another couplet at its finish and a shorter unit that is a quatrain. The longer bit places the scene in the midst of a diminished forest; the setting bristling with details that beg the question “all but frame[d]” by the bird and its song in the second bit and perhaps answered there. The setting is the puzzling “diminished thing” that bird knows and knows not “what to make of.” He looks back with regret but without paralysis. What he does make of it is a loud, if not tuneful and beautiful, song offered with the confidence that comes of freedom from the illusion of beauty’s permanence that troubles the other birds into silence; moreover, he knows and accepts that worse is to come with “the other fall.” Without this awareness and this acquiescence “the bird would cease and be as other birds.” His wisdom is paradox: “he knows in singing” his loud, assured song “not to sing” as the other birds, now mute, did not know. “Not to sing” rhymes fittingly with “diminished thing.” The speaker tells us that the bird “knows” and “says” – understands, interprets – but we know in Frost that unself-conscious birds cannot do so. The oven bird’s actions and its advice are, however, relevant to a human being desirous of understanding his place in a universe where nothing gold can stay; the poem shows the oven bird as emblematic of such a human. The answer, if it is one, is to be rid of foolish illusions about the universe, to be assured in the values that one knows, to sing loudly and confidently: to maintain one’s preference, to make the trees echo with one’s notsinging.

In “Desert Places” the dead weeds, the stubble, the animals “smothered in their lairs,” stars without human life, the vast distance between these stars – all desert places –are not metaphors of literal death but of the death of human presence in a person. Nor are these the only images of death. Freezing snow with its “smooth,” undifferentiated whiteness, its emptiness usual in Frost, and night with its darkness and its own blankness convey absence; they offer not the opposites that light and dark ought to but rather both image an absence that is a kind of death. The iambic poem begins unexpectedly with spondees metrically linking these two metaphors: “Snow falling and night falling.” The obliteration of presence and meaning, moredisastrous than the obliteration in “Spring Pools,” comes with unusual rapidity, “fast oh fast,” without time even for commas before and after the “oh.”

The field is one desert place; the woods are another: “The woods around it have it –it is theirs.” The second stanza possesses – encloses – the absence, the “it,” of the first, “it” is what the woods achieve with the field. Moreover, the woods “includes” the speaker, too. Or, rather, what the woods and the field signify, “loneliness,” encompasses the speaker. With the emphasis on the speaker that begins in the middle of the second stanza, the “desert” receives human attribution, “loneliness”; it includes the man “unawares.” “Unawares” is adverbial because the emptiness does not know what it is doing to the human being; it is also adjectival because the speaker finds himself enclosed before he is aware of the danger. He only “looked into [the field] going past”; yet he is already “too absent-spirited” to be an exception to all that the field and the woods represent. His human spirit, his presence, is gone – “unawares.” The “its” of line 5 becomes loneliness in lines 9 and 10, an emptiness worse than that of uninhabited stars and of the light-years of vacant space between them. As the snow increases with the advance of winter and as the darkness intensifies with growing night, so the loneliness, once begun, “will be more lonely,” not to be stopped by a mere human being. It will become a “blanker whiteness”; the literal has become metaphoric in a trice. It is now “benighted snow”: at one with the night but also morally benighted in that the loneliness is without human purpose, presence, and spirit, having “no expression‎, nothing to express.” For the speaker, this desert place is nearer and more “scar[ing]” than all the others; in fact, it is plural, “spaces.” The three feminine rhymes, the last one of which leaves the poem seemingly unfinished in its meter, are ironic in sound and intent. The action of the poem is unfinished because as the snow will melt and the night pass into dawn, the loneliness “will be less”, the speaker has traveled through it before. Now he must, however, travel through it again; the rhyme scheme is, therefore, aaxa.

Indeed it is “always the same”; a comma sets off this metrical unit that begins “The Onset.” The descent of absence upon one, an unexpected void, is like the first snowfall of winter “on a fated night.” This snow, as white “as may be in dark woods” – white and dark are again paradoxically not opposites –causes the unsuspecting speaker almost to stumble as, startled, he looks “up and round.” The open couplets and the absence of end punctuation for five lines, with only two internal commas, allows the syntax to parallel the rush of the falling snow and night. The onset is “fated” only in the sense that the unconscious forces of the natural world have been bringing it to pass since perhaps the beginning of the universe, enigmatic but not fated in any theological sense. The falling of emptiness upon a person seems just as enigmatic, perchance, just as “fated”; as “death [just] descends” uponone. Frost’s metaphor is threefold: A (the literal onset of snow and night leads one walking in “dark woods” “almost [to] stumble”); B (death’s onset causes one actually to “give up his errand”); C (the onset of the void of spirit causes one almost to fall into the absence of the natural world). In each case is one “overtaken by the end,” but only one of the three is amenable to moral discipline. “Errand” is a word with human connotations that snow and night do not have; in Frost’s ethics, willingly to “give[] up [one’s] errand,” however tiresome, is evil. If “hissing” of the first snow on the fallen and dead leaves does not suggest the serpent, then the “disappearing snake” does. At the onset of the final “end” one must indeed give up one’s errand, “with nothing done/ To evil, no important triumph won.” No person can effect a lasting victory over the void of the universe but each one may attend to one’s own errand of the moment. Not to do so is to let the end come too early and to let evil have its triumph too soon. “Evil” in this handful of poems has this precise meaning, abandonment of human presence, descent into absence.

In the second stanza, Frost continues his analogy of the onset of snow and night with the onset of void on the human spirit, “Winter death,” a summary of stanza one, has always failed when it has “tried/ The earth”; therefore, all the precedent is “on [the] side” of the speaker. “Triumph won” and “on my side” are, I take it, military metaphors; the second one is also a legal image. As the snow will suffer defeat with the coming of spring and the night will lose to day, so the testing of the speaker will pass, too –at least it always has. He will see the melted snow become “a slender April rill.” Yet reminders of “winter death” remain in the spring’s renewal of the earth: “withered brake,” “dead weeds,” a white birch, a white church. A descent of void upon human presence need not wait the coming of winter: the spring birds were silenced by the coming of summer.

The speaker of “Desert Places” needed but to look into the field filling up with snow and night to be ensnared by all that they figure; the person in “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” is so ill-advised as to stop and “to watch” the “woods fill up” with snow. The opposition between humanity (the owner of the woods whose “house is in the” village and who will not see the speaker, the absence of “a farmhouse near”) and the purposeless natural phenomena (descending snow and night, the woods, the frozen lake) Frost establishes early. Even the horse “must think it queer.” Three times the poet uses some form of stop. The setting is becoming blank, undifferentiated whiteness, a desert place on “the darkest evening of the year,” literally an overstatement but metaphorically not so to the speaker. For him movement forward ceases; his choice is between the “woods and frozen lake,” either offering only death to one who stops. In effect the horse asks “if there is some mistake.” To have so stopped could well prove to be such. The “sweep/of easy wind,” free of the thousand mortal shocks that one is heir to, and the“downy flake,” like warm bedding, entice the speaker to give up his human errands and to sleep in the void of death. The woods are “dark and deep,” not promising words in Frost, deep as the final absence of death, and “lovely” only in the temptation to shuffle off that they offer. With “but I have promises to keep,” the speaker and the poem pivot, rejecting the temptation, affirming his promises, a word with human connotations of duty and presence, and accepting the “miles [that he must] go” before he sleeps this night and before he “sleep[s]” finally in death. Repeating the two last lines is congruent with the stacked-up accents at the pivot above as is the alteration of the rhyme from aaba to the resolution of aaaa. The metaphor of the journey obtains in “The Oven Bird” and in “Desert Places”; the speaker of “Stopping by Woods” finds the human courage to go his miles and to be present.

“Acquainted with the Night” is also a journey of sorts; no way exists within the logic of a stanza that rhymes aaba to bring a poem to its close. Frost ended “Stopping by Woods” by adding another a and dispensing with the b; terza rima offers a like problem. After four tercets, the poet returns to the a rhyme and makes a couplet giving a fourteen-line poem that ends in the same line with which it began. The journey is seemingly endless. The tense is present perfect, action having begun in the past, continuing in the present, and probably projecting into the future. If one is lucky, one is never more than “acquainted” with the night, never on familiar terms with it. The poem opens with a generalization: “I have been one acquainted with the night.” Then it gives five examples of the generalization,2 the first three have one line each, the fourth two lines, and a fifth four. Each of the six lines begins with a trochee followed by a spondee (“I have walked out”); the repeated metrical unit marks out the five examples which document the generalization. One might have thought that the four-line fifth illustration was the climax, but Frost drops the parallel construction (“I have . . .”) and the recurring meter to offer a sixth. The five take place on earth, but the sixth is “one luminary clock against the sky,” the moon, “at an unearthly height.” The “night” of the generalization and of the five instances of it give no respite to the journeyer; nor does the sixth. For the “clock . . . / Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.” One may not look above, as pilots once looked there for direction, to find human and moral values. Cosmic time moves just as mechanically as the “great buck” in “The Most of It.” The Deists were right – Providence does not interfere in the creation – and wrong: for no Providence asserts itself in the poems we have been looking at. One does well in Frost’s universe to be acquainted with the night, to know what it is like, but values and meaning are existential in the one who carries out his errands and keeps his promises. They are not transcendental. If this terza rima poem ironically alludes to Dante, I cannot say.

Unlike “The Oven Bird” and “Acquainted with the Night,” “Design” is a proper sonnet, with an octave and sestet. The sestet ends, uncharacteristic of the Italian sonnet, with a couplet; Donne allowed himself the same liberty. Donne it was and Herbert, who took the sonnet, used in English for amorous love, and baptized it to use for divine love. This poem ironically teaches the opposite of love or, worse, of no love at all. The title, too, is ironic, pointing as it does the argument from “Design”: the universe is so clearly ordered –like, say, a clock – that one can but posit a Designer. Yet the flower, ironically called a “heal-all,” normally blue, is ironically in this little design a white mutation; the spider is ironically a white mutation also. Therefore, the moth, unawares, flies into the white web without seeing it as it otherwise might; white ironically forms a “design of darkness.” The a rhyme ironically links “white” with “right” and “blight”; Frost carries the a over into the sestet in its first line and then rhymes it with “night” and “height.” The spider seems most innocent, “dimpled . . . fat and white.” It is not so from our human standpoint; it is so from nature’s, being unaware of value, not free in its choice of action. We have “assorted characters of death and blight/ Mixed ready to begin the morning right.” With too much glee – or, perhaps, bitterness – Frost renews the cliché. The word “characters” makes the design into a little drama, but I do not think that a divine playwright shapes their ends. The sestet is largely questions: what choice had the flower in being white? What brought the spider to the height of the flower? What steered the moth there during the night? The answers: 1) “what but design of darkness to appall –”: the little design or the little play is the work of some evil omnipotence petulantly to appall us, or, 2) “design [may not] govern in a thing so small”: and if it govern not in small things, can it govern in larger ones, is there such an omnipotence at all? The universe has not the wherewithal to value moths, to understand the disjunction between white heal-alls and seemingly treacher-ous death; only man as he maintains his presence can judge. The irony, here bitter, results from the disjunction between human value and a purposeless universe.

I can now suggest how one “ke[eps] the universe alone,” and to do so I turn in conclusion to “An Old Man’s Winter Night.” The details of the setting beyond those in the title include a farmhouse with some empty rooms, a cellar with barrels, an oil lamp, and a wood fire in the old man’s room. The poem introduces a series of oppositions: warmth and cold; light and darkness; waking and sleeping; sounds and silence; life and death; man and nature; presence and emptiness; meaning and nothingness. Each pair is a metaphor of all the other pairs. The sounds of “the outer night” – the roar of trees and the crack of branches –are like the noise of “beating on a box,” a sound, I take it, of emptiness; the sounds within are of the old man’s“clomping” which “scare[s] the cellar . . . and scare[s] the outer night” and of the jolt as logs in the fire shift, the sounds of presence. We are not told that beating on a box scares the old man. “All out-of-doors looks darkly in at him,” threateningly; he, however, cannot return the mindless “gaze.” In the empty room where he stands, the moisture has condensed on the freezing window panes; and as he holds his lamp up to the window to look out he receives its light back, reflected from the “separate stars” of the “thin frost” on the glass. This light, for which he is responsible, cannot look into the darkness; human life cannot look into death, into nothingness. Even though he represents human life at its final frontier, aged and forgetful of why he went into the empty room, he, nevertheless, is “concerned with he knew what.” His burning lamp, and his concerns, and his fire to which he responds even in his sleep all represent the presence of his humanity. Of course the lamp and the fire and his concerns are burning out; and so, too, is the sun. In this little snuggery of entropy, “one aged man – one man – can’t keep a house,/ A farm, a countryside, or if he can,/ It’s thus he does it of a winter’s night.” Surprisingly the old man’s keeping moves farther and farther outward: house, farm, countryside. “All out-of-doors” may look “darkly in at him”; but the threat would seem to advance outward, not inward.

On such a winter’s night in such a universe, with its noise paradoxically of emptiness, of beating on a box, with its intention seemingly to threaten darkly, with the burning out of the lamp and of the fire and of one’s concerns, one may well be tempted to pack it all in when the onset comes, as in Frost come it will. The carrying out of errands and the keeping of promises at such times may seem no other than very stale, flat, weary, and unprofitable, especially when there is no Heaven for one to crawl under, only the earth to crawl upon. Despite a lack of ontological status to assure its value, self-consciousness with its duties is the best one may achieve. To Frost, its achievement seems worth the whistle. To call out for counter-love and original response from the universe is futile, but it seems to have its merits. To recognize the beauty of spring pools. To cherish nature’s first green. To notsing, and to do so loudly. These things are heroic acts of presence that face otherwise universal absence. These ten poems attest to Frost’s confidence that they matter, and that greatly.

NOTES 
1 First published in 1934. 
2 They are: “walk[ing] out in rain – and back in rain”; “outwalk[ing] the furthest city light”; “look[ing] down the saddest city lane”; “passing by the watchman on his beat/ And drop[ping] my eyes, unwilling to explain”; standing “still and stop[ping] the sound of feet/ When far away an interrupted cry/ Came over houses from another street, / But not to call me back or say good-bye.”

from "The Cambridge Companion to Robert Frost"