2. Two Tramps in Mud Time / A Further Range(1936) - Robert Frost

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2. Two Tramps in Mud Time

Out of the mud two strangers came 
And caught me splitting wood in the yard. 
And one of them put me off my aim 
By hailing cheerily ‘Hit them hard!’ 
I knew pretty well why he dropped behind 
And let the other go on a way. 
I knew pretty well what he had in mind: 
He wanted to take my job for pay.

Good blocks of oak it was I split, 
As large around as the chopping block; 
And every piece I squarely hit 
Fell splinterless as a cloven rock. 
The blows that a life of self-control 
Spares to strike for the common good 
That day, giving a loose to my soul, 
I spent on the unimportant wood.

splinterless : 좀처럼 깨어지지 않는, 깨져도 튀지 않는

.cloven : 둘로 갈라진

The sun was warm but the wind was chill. 
You know how it is with an April day 
When the sun is out and the wind is still, 
You’re one month on in the middle of May. 
But if you so much as dare to speak, 
A cloud comes over the sunlit arch, 
A wind comes off a frozen peak, 
And you’re two months back in the middle of March.

A bluebird comes tenderly up to alight 
And turns to the wind to unruffle a plume 
His song so pitched as not to excite 
A single flower as yet to bloom. 
It is snowing a flake: and he half knew 
Winter was only playing possum. 
Except in color he isn’t blue, 
But he wouldn’t advise a thing to blossom.

possum : 자는 체 하다

The water for which we may have to look 
In summertime with a witching-wand, 
In every wheelrut’s now a brook, 
In every print of a hoof a pond. 
Be glad of water, but don’t forget 
The lurking frost in the earth beneath 
That will steal forth after the sun is set 
And show on the water its crystal teeth.

rut : 바퀴자국 

The time when most I loved my task 
These two must make me love it more 
By coming with what they came to ask. 
You’d think I never had felt before 
The weight of an ax-head poised aloft, 
The grip on earth of outspread feet. 
The life of muscles rocking soft 
And smooth and moist in vernal heat.

aloft : 위에, 높이

vernal : 봄의

Out of the woods two hulking tramps 
(From sleeping God knows where last night, 
But not long since in the lumber camps) 
They thought all chopping was theirs of right 
Men of the woods and lumberjacks, 
They judged me by their appropriate tool. 
Except as a fellow handled an ax, 
They had no way of knowing a fool.

hulk : 큼직한 모습으로 느릿느릿 나타나다

lumberjack: 목재벌채인부

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.

twain : (고어) two

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.

avocation : 부업

vocation : 직업, 천직

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진흙 시간의 두 뜨내기 일꾼

낯선 두 사람이 진흙 길을 벗어나

마당에서 장작을 패는 나에게 왔다.

그리곤 유쾌하게“세게 치시오!”외침으로써

그중 한 사람이 나의 조준을 빗나가게 했다.

그가 왜 다른 사람은 보내고 자신은 남았는지

그 이유를 나는 빤히 알고 있었다.

나는 그가 무슨 생각을 하는지 빤히 알았으니,

내가 하는 일을 품삯을 받고 하고 싶었던 거다.

내가 쪼갠 것은 튼실한 참나무 토막들로,

장작 패는 도마만큼 굵은 것들이었다.

내가 정면으로 내려친 나무토막들은

바위처럼 짝짝 갈라져 깨끗이 떨어졌다.

절제(節制)의 삶이 공익(公益)에 쓰려고

쓰지 않고 아껴둔 타격(打擊)들,

나는, 그날, 내 혼을 한껏 풀어,

하찮은 장작에 소비(消費)하였다.

해는 따듯했지만 바람은 쌀쌀했으니,

4월의 하루가 어떤지 아시는 바와 같이

해가 나오고 바람이 자면,

당신은 한 달 앞서 5월 중순에 있다.

그러나 감히 그렇게 말하면 어느새,

햇빛 부서지는 아치 위로 구름이 몰려오고,

얼어붙은 산봉우리 너머에서 바람이 불어오면,

당신은 두 달 뒷걸음쳐 3월 중순에 있다.

파랑새 한 마리가 가볍게 내려와

바람 쪽으로 돌아서니 깃털이 다듬어진다.

그의 노래는 아직 단 한 송이의 꽃도

일깨워 꽃피우게 할 정도의 음조가 아니다.

눈송이가 흩날리니, 새가 반쯤 알기로는

겨울이 그저 죽은 체하고 있을 뿐이었다.

색깔은 푸르되, 파랑새는 우울하지 않다.

그러나 개화(開花)를 권하지도 않을 것이다.

여름에는 마술 지팡이로

찾아야 할지도 모르는 물이,

바퀴 자국마다 냇물을 이루고,

말발굽 자국마다 연못을 이룬다.

물을 반가워하라, 그러나 아래 땅 속에

서리가 도사리고 있음을 잊지 마라.

해가 지면 서리가 몰래 나와서

물위에 수정 이빨을 들어 낼 것이다.

내가 내 과업을 최고로 즐기는 시간에

이 두 사람이 와서 무엇인가를 요구하니,

나는 그 일에 더더욱 신바람이 났다.

균형 잡고 치켜든 도끼 대가리의 무게,

쫙 펴고 땅을 제어하는 양 발의 힘,

봄의 열기 속에서 부드럽고

매끄럽고 촉촉하게 움직이는 근육의 활력,

내 평생에 처음 느껴본 것들이리라.

숲에서 온 덩치 큰 두 뜨내기 일꾼들

(간밤에 어디서 잤는지 아무도 모르나,

벌목장을 떠난 지 오래되진 않았다).

그들은 모든 나무패기가 의당 그들 몫이라고 생각했다.

숲의 사나이들과 벌목꾼들,

그들은 그들의 적합한 도구로 나를 판단했다.

그들이 바보를 식별하는 방법이라곤

도끼를 다루는 솜씨뿐이었다.

양쪽에서 아무 말도 없었다.

그들은 다른 사람에겐 돈 벌이가 될 일을

놀이로 즐길 권리가 내겐 없으니.

그들이 죽치고 머무르면 그들의 모든 논리가

내 머리에 쏙쏙 들어올 것이라 생각했다.

내 권리는 사랑일 것이나 그들의 것은 필요였다.

​둘이 따로 존재하는 경우에는

그들의 것이 우선권이다―그렇다.

하지만 분리하고픈 사람은 분리하라.

내 인생의 목표는

두 눈이 합쳐 하나의 시력을 이루듯

나의 도락(道樂)과 생업을 결합하는 것이다.

사랑과 필요가 하나가 되고,

일이 심각한 목적을 위한 놀이인 경우에만

그 행위는 과연

하늘과 미래를 위한 것이다.

-신재실 옮김-​

단상(斷想): “정면으로 내려친 나무토막들은 / 바위처럼 쩍쩍 갈라져 깨끗이 떨어졌다”와 같은 감각적인 이미지가 암시하듯, 화자는 자기 집 마당에서 장작 패는 일을 즐기고 있다. 그에게 장작패기는 노동이 아니라 놀이이다. 이런 화자 앞에 삵 일을 바라는 두 뜨내기 일꾼이 나타난다. 한 쪽에게는 사랑의 놀이지만, 다른 쪽에게는 돈벌이의 노동인 것이다. 놀이와 노동이 부딪히는 경우, 어느 쪽의 권리가 우선일까?

이 문제는 4월의 날씨만큼이나 양면적(兩面的)이다. 4월의 하루는 해가 뜨고 바람이 자면 5월 중순의 하루로 느껴지지만, 구름이 몰려오고 바람이 불면 금방 두 달을 뒷걸음쳐 삼월 중순의 하루가 된다. 낮에는 생명을 키우는 물이 밤이 되면 서리로 변하는 것이 4월의 두 얼굴이다. 지표에는 생명의 물이 풍성하지만, 땅 밑에는 여전히 서리가 수정 이빨을 감추고 있다. 낮에는 생명을 키우는 물이 밤이 되면 서리로 변하는 것이 자연의 두 얼굴이다. 이처럼 명암(明暗)이 교차하는 것이 실존의 조건이다. 장작패기 역시 두 얼굴의 소유자라 할 수 있을 것이다.

우리에게 필요한 것은 파랑새의 지혜이다. 파랑새는 봄을 노래하지만 성급하게 꽃을 깨우지 않는다. 자연의 준엄성을 알고 있기 때문이다. 또한 눈송이가 흩날려도 결코 우울하지 않다. 자연의 순리도 알기 때문이다.

자연의 양면성은 노동의 양면성과 상통한다. 노동 역시 공익과 생계유지를 위한 생업(vocation)과 필요라는 면도 있지만 개인적 기쁨을 위한 취미(avocation)와 사랑의 면도 있는 것이다.

“균형 잡고 치켜든 도끼 대가리의 무게,/ 쫙 펴고 땅을 제어하는 양 발의 힘,/ 봄의 열기 속에서 부드럽고/ 매끄럽고 촉촉하게 움직이는 근육의 활력,/ 내 평생에 처음 느껴본 것들이리라.” 이렇게 촉각, 운동감각, 그리고 리듬을 통해, 삯과 무관하게 즐기는 장자패기에 그 누가 시비(是非)를 걸겠는가?

하지만 나무패기가 직업인 사람들, “모든 나무패기가 의당 그들 몫”이라고 믿는 두 일꾼이 보기에는 취미로 장작을 패는 사람은 타인의 권리를 침해하는 짓이며, 도끼질하는 솜씨 또한 엉성하기 그지없으니, 그는 “바보”임에 틀림없다.

갈등하던 화자는 이렇게 말한다. “내 권리는 사랑일 것이나 그들의 권리는 필요였다./ 둘이 따로 존재하는 경우에는/ 그들의 것이 우선권이다―그렇다.” 사랑과 필요가 공존할 때에는 후자가 더 중요한 권리라고 인정한다. 실존은 사랑보다 필요를 우선시킨다. 이것이 바로 파랑새의 지혜다.

그러나 화자의 기본 주장은 사랑과 필요, 생업과 취미가 결합되는 것이 노동의 이상적 조건이라는 것이다. 생업(vocation)을 위한 노동을 기계적이라 한다면 취미(avocation)를 위한 노동은 자발적이라 할 것이고, 전자가 손의 일이라 한다면 후자는 마음의 일이다. 양자의 결합이 있을 때, 즉 노동이 “심각한 목적을 위한 놀이인 경우에만/ 그 행위는 과연/ 하늘과 미래를 위한 것이다.

-신재실 씀-

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youtu.be/y5LBLhGZJHc

youtu.be/afm3_nz3LHY

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After an unusually busy summer he returned to Amherst, with his wife, and learned that she needed immediate surgery for cancer. He took her to a hospital in nearby Springfield and was advised that her heart was so weak she might not be able to survive an operation. The desperate decision was made, and the next day Frost wrote to Untermeyer:

 "I tried two or three times yesterday to tell you that Elinor had just been operated on for a growth in her breast. I doubt if she fully realizes her peril. So be careful how you speak in your letters. . . . You can see what a difference this must make in any future we have. She has been the unspoken half of everything I ever wrote, and both halves of many a thing from My November Guest down to the last stanzas of Two Tramps in Mud Time—as you may have divined. I don't say it is quite all up with us. We shall make the most of such hope as there is in such cases. She has come through the operation well, though there was delay over her for a day or so at the Hospital for fear her heart wouldn't stand the ether. Her unrealization is what makes it hard for me to keep from speaking to somebody for sympathy. I have had almost too much of her suffering in this world."

 Since the early days of their marriage, Frost and his wife had differed in their attitudes toward suffering. She had often chided him for acting like a spoiled child when he was ill, and he admitted that she was much braver than he. But in writing, "I have had almost too much of her suffering in this world," he had betrayed himself to such an extent that he regretted the confession almost as soon as he had mailed the letter. The next day he wrote asking Untermeyer to destroy it.

 After Mrs. Frost recovered sufficiently to return home to Amherst, she insisted her husband must keep his promises to give readings in various parts of New England that fall. Then, having been disappointed with their winter in Texas, and still hoping to find a congenial atmosphere in which to hide, the Frosts chose to spend the coldest months of the approaching season in Gainesville, Florida. Plans were made for Carol and his family to drive down from Vermont and for Lesley and her children to join them when she could. Early in December, while staying temporarily at the Thomas Hotel, they began the process of hunting for a house to rent. The one chosen, at 734 Bay Street North, had two furnished apartments, and Lesley insisted that she and her children should take the upstairs apartment, so that her mother would not have to exert her weak heart by climbing the stairs. Mrs. Frost insisted that the downstairs apartment would never do for her husband; he would be constantly annoyed by the sound of the children's busy feet overhead. The arrangement was carried out as she wished, and a house nearby was found for Carol and his family.

 Soon after Christmas, Frost received from DeVoto the long-waited article, "The Critics and Robert Frost," already set in type and scheduled to be published in the issue of The Saturday Review for January 1, 1938. As soon as Mrs. Frost had read it aloud to her husband, he wrote DeVoto:

 "I sat and let Elinor pour it over me. I took the whole thing. I thought it couldnt do me any harm to listen unabashed to my full praises for once in a way. I said to Sidney Cox years ago that I was non-elatable. While I wasn't actually fishing I suppose I hoped he might see I wanted to be contradicted. All I got out of him was [']That's a serious thing for a poet to confess.['] He was plainly by his tone crediting me with courage in self betrayal. After hearing all you said in my favor today, I tried it at the wistfullest I could command on Elinor. 'What a lie,' she answered. 'You can't talk in public or private without getting elated. You never write but from elation.' ..."

 DeVoto's article was ostensibly a review of Recognition of Robert Frost, a collection of notices, reviews, and tributes to Frost, chronologically arranged under subject headings. Using as his point of takeoff Amy Lowell's review of North of Boston, and calling it the worst early piece of criticism, DeVoto added:
 ". . . When Miss Lowell reworked her piece in Tendencies in Modern American Poetry' she brought it down from the higher to the middle strata of the inane, but in the review you get the pure stuff and it is one of the most idiotic pieces written about poetry in this generation. It is screamingly silly. Nothing approached it until the publication of 'A Further Range' impelled a group of muddled minds to tell us about Mr. Frost without bothering to read him. At that time Newton Arvin and Horace Gregory crowded Miss Lowell hard, only to lose in the end to Mr. Blackmur. His piece in the Nation may not be quite the most idiotic review our generation has produced, but in twenty years of reading criticism—oh, the hell with scholarly reservations, Mr. Blackmur's is the most idiotic of our time. It is one of the most idiotic reviews since the invention of movable type. The monkeys would have to tap typewriters throughout eternity to surpass it, and Mr. Blackmur may regard his immortality as achieved. ..."

 Some friends were delighted with DeVoto's ways, in the article, of thumping all of Frost's enemies. Ridgley Torrence wrote that he didn't see how Arvin, Blackmur, and Gregory "would ever get up from the slaughterhouse floor." But others were not so pleased with the almost-apoplectic manner in which DeVoto had thrown his punches. Theodore Morrison felt another kind of defense should be written. Frost answered Morrison: "I wish you could see that by lingering over them too long we make those fellows more important than I for my part like to think they are. I have read not one of their criticisms, but I can't pretend not to know what they think of me. ... As you may imagine I hate all this. It is a vexation of the spirit that cant help me write any more prose or verse. I should think Benny had dealt with it sufficiently for the time being. ..."

 Another friend and poet, R. P. T. Coffin, planning to lecture on Frost, wrote to him in Gainesville and asked for any self-definition Frost had written. Coffin had made notes on a talk given by Frost in New York on April 1, 1937, and hoped that Frost might be able to send him a transcript of it. In his reply Frost explained that he could not even remember the subject of those remarks, and he added:

 "The nearest I ever came to getting myself down in prose was in the preface to Robinson's King Jasper. That is so much me that you might suspect the application to him of being forced. It was really no such thing. We two were close akin up to a certain point of thinking. He would have trusted me to go a good way in speaking for him particularly on the art of poetry. We only parted company over the badness of the world. He was cast in the mold of sadness. I am neither optimist nor pessimist. I never voted either ticket. If there is a universal unfitness and unconformity as of a buttoning so started that every button on the vest is in the wrong button hole and the one empty button hole at the top and the one naked button at the bottom so far apart they have no hope of getting together, I don't care to decide whether God did this for the fun of it or for the devil of it. (The two expressions come to practically the same thing anyway.) Then again I am not the Platonist Robinson was. By Platonist I mean one who believes what we have here is an imperfect copy of what is in heaven. The woman you have is an imperfect copy of some woman in heaven or in someone else's bed. Many of the world's greatest—maybe all of them—have been ranged on that romantic side. I am philosophically opposed to having one Iseult for my vocation and another for my avocation; as you may have inferred from a poem called Two Tramps in Mud Time. You see where that lands me on the subject of Dante's Beatrice. Mea Culpa. Let me not sound the least bit smug. I define a difference with proper humility. A truly gallant platonist will remain a bachelor as Robinson did from unwillingness to reduce any woman to the condition of being used without being idealized. ..."

 Coffin wanted more, and he got it by reminding Frost that he had talked on "Crudities":
 "Your letter brings back my animus of that April 1st. I was gunning for the kind of Americans who fancied themselves as the only Americans incapable of crudity. I started off with some crudity I knew they could join me in laughing at and I ended up with some they might not be so incapable of themselves. But I protested all the way along my love of crudity. I thank the Lord for crudity which is rawness, which is raw material, which is the part of life not yet worked up into form, or at least not worked all the way up. Meet with the fallacy of the foolish: having had a glimpse of finished art, they forever after pine for a life that shall be nothing but finished art. Why not a world safe for art as well as democracy. A real artist delights in roughness for what he can do to it. He's the brute who can knock the corners off the marble block and drag the unbedded beauty out of bed. The statesman (politician) is no different except that he works in a protean mass of material that hardly holds the shape he gives it long enough for him to point it out and get credit for it. His material is the rolling mob. The poet's material is words that for all we may say and feel against them are more manageable than men. Get a few words alone in a study and with plenty of time on your hands you can make them say anything you please. ..."

from "Robert Frost : A Biography - Thompson Lawrance and R. H. Winnick"

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#

In a time when most colleges have a poet on campus, if not several, it seems difficult to imagine how odd it was for Amherst College to have hired Robert Frost in the winter of 1917. The initial work of Stark Young and Alexander Meiklejohn had resulted in Frost’s becoming a temporary member of the Amherst faculty as a replacement for George Bosworth Churchill, who had been elected to the Massachusetts Senate. Exactly how he might fit in was an open question—one that Frost himself entertained quite frankly. In the recesses of his heart, he wondered if teaching was a good way to support his avocation. “My object in living is to unite / My avocation and my vocation,” he would write in “Two Tramps in Mud Time.” A poet first and last, he often said that teaching distracted him from the real work of making poems. But a reliable income was sorely needed, especially now, the English sojourn having utterly depleted his savings. Furthermore, the lure of Amherst was considerable.

#

Two other major poems of this period were “Neither Out Far nor In Deep,” which had actually been written a year earlier, in California, and was revised for publication in the fall of 1933, and “Two Tramps in Mud Time,” which has long been a favorite of anthologists. The latter was based on an incident that happened several years before on the farm in Franconia. The poem has an almost mythic opening:

 Out of the mud two strangers came
 And caught me splitting wood in the yard.
 And one of them put me off my aim
 By hailing cheerily “Hit them hard!”
 I knew pretty well why he dropped behind
 And let the other go on a way.
 I knew pretty well what he had in mind:
 He wanted to take my job for pay.

 These were stressful economic times, and tramps were everywhere—honest men, mostly, in search of a meager living. Frost’s narrator, as the second stanza makes clear, is enjoying his work: “every piece I squarely hit / Fell splinterless as a cloven rock.” Few poets in the history of English verse have written so well about work, or the pleasure of doing physical chores.

 “The sun was warm but the wind was chill,” he writes in the third stanza, describing with freshness and particularity the feel of a volatile April day in northern New England, when you hover between March and May, depending on the wind and sun. The narrator notes that the mere fact of these two tramps showing up and wanting his job makes him enjoy the job even more. He does not want to relinquish it, even though he knows he should. The penultimate stanza puts the matter frankly: “My right [to work] might be love but theirs was need.” And when it came down to love against need, “Theirs was the better right—agreed.”

 Agreed. That’s the final political or moral point. But Frost’s speaker in the poem cannot leave off there. He concludes:

 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.

 “I am philosophically opposed to having one Iseult for my vocation and another for my avocation,” Frost said, echoing his poem, in a letter to R. P. T. Coffin. 20 As usual, the poet takes away with one hand what he has given with the other, suggesting that, with his head, he knows that need overrides love in situations such as that posed in this poem. Yet he refuses to let it rest there. He wants to make a generalization about how, ideally, “love and need are one,” even though the concrete situation of the poem seems to contradict this notion. As always in Frost’s best work, various levels of argument swirl below the surface. It is pointless to complain, as Malcolm Cowley does, that the speaker in the poem should have offered these homeless men some other work if he was too selfish to give up the chopping himself. 21

 If the poem is based on a real incident (as Frost suggested it was), he may well have offered the men work. Nevertheless, the literal truth of any poem is subordinate to its imaginative truth, so it becomes pointless to worry about what “did” or “didn’t” happen. “You never know where a poem comes from,” Frost said, “but where it’s gone, that you can tell. You can see the tail, the trace of the comet, after it’s gone.”

from "Robert Frost : A Life - Jay Parini"

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George Montiero: On "Two Tramps in Mudtime"

"TWO TRAMPS IN MUD TIME" was first published in 1934. At the time Frost remarked that he considered the poem to be "against having hobbies." Two years later, when he collected it in A Further Range as one of ten poems to be "taken doubly," he added to its title in the list of contents the thematic phrase,"or, A Full-Time Interest." In both instances Frost provided a clue to his intended meaning. Unfortunately, critical interpretations of the poem have seldom pursued the leads suggested by the poet.

Two such commentaries, published twenty years apart, are particularly instructive regarding the manner in which each reaches out for the meaning of the poem. Each sees the poem as a vehicle for an idea, for a social ideology; but neither finds it necessary to locate the poem in the context of traditional American thought and literature.

Denis Donoghue, writing in 1965, reads "Two Tramps in Mud Time" as a clear instance of the relation between Frost's "temperament and the ideas of Social Darwinism." The poet did not find compelling the arguments for giving the tramps a job, and hence Donoghue reaches this puzzling conclusion: "So need is not reason enough. The narrator has need and love on his side, hence he survives and nature blesses him as the best man. The tramps are unfit to survive because they have only their need, and the Darwinist law is that they should not survive." Donoghue's overall reading of Frost's poem, not to mention his extraordinary application of Darwinist law, defies explanation. The idea that conjoined need and love constitute in themselves a higher claim for survival than need alone is a curious form of Darwinism. Frost's poem does show a concern with personal integrity and the survival of the human spirit, but nowhere does it come close to hinting that need without love, lamentable as it may be, actually renders the mud-time tramps unfit for survival. The narrator may have need and love "on his side" (as Donoghue puts it), but this fact hardly constitutes evidence either that the situation enables him to survive or that "nature blesses him as the best man." There is no indication, either within the confines of the poem or in the facts of the poet's life as we know them, that "Two Tramps in Mud Time" is intended to recall Charles Darwin or to echo the Social Darwinists.

Donoghue's reading bears a curious relationship to Malcolm Cowley's famous commentary on the poem, made more than forty years ago. His Darwinist interpretation is an offshoot of Cowley's "liberal" chastisement of Frost in the New Republic in 1944. Donoghue offers a specific reason for Frost's behavior toward the tramps, while Cowley describes and deplores the poet's reaction to their request. But both critics are interested in faulting the poet for his inhumanity. "In spite of his achievements as a narrative and lyric poet," argues the dissenting Cowley, there is "a case against Robert Frost as a social philosopher in verse and as a representative of the New England tradition" of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. Assuming that the poem reflects an actual incident of the depression years, Cowley criticizes Frost for evading the socioeconomic fortune of the masses and retreating into "sermon." Instead of helping men who want work, preaches Cowley, "Frost turns to the reader with a sound but rather sententious sermon on the ethical value of the chopping block."

To acknowledge that Cowley's account of the poem has some, albeit limited, merit, is not, however, to endorse his vestigial reading with its earmarks of the 1930s. It may be granted that Frost was an early outspoken foe of the social excesses he found exhibited in Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the administrators of his New Deal. But to insist unequivocally that in this poem Frost lacks all social conscience is to mislead grievously: Cowley's concept of a social conscience is at best limited.

That the strangers who come at him "out of the mud" display great need, Frost acknowledges. Too readily is his head filled with the narrow logic that he has "no right to play / With what was another man's work for gain." "My right might be love but theirs was need," he admits; "and where the two exist in twain / Theirs was the better right—agreed." Frost is not insensitive to the tramps' need for "gain," for shelter and food perhaps, but, individualist that he is, he is too thoroughly self-reliant and humanistic to assign all priority to satisfying such basic needs. Rather, he hopes to remind us, in offering himself as example, that men have other kinds of need as well and that their failure to meet those needs results from their inability to recognize the high necessity that "love and need" must make one (''as my two eyes make one in sight"). This failure, common to men everywhere, is particularized for the moment in the tramps whose only thought was that, claiming economic need, "all chopping was theirs of right." Frost deplores, of course, the plight of the unfortunates who for whatever reason must totally dissociate need and love, vocation and avocation. He does not deny that poverty is problematic to society; but he does indicate that the necessity for any man to work much or all of his time for pay alone will rapidly dissolve his sense of other values of self and spirit. He concludes triumphantly:

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.

Frost's ideology in this poem has its roots deep in the nineteenth century; and to understand his poem's relationship to that century; we must turn, pace Donoghue and Cowley; to the traditions of Concord transcendentalism. Specifically; we must look to Henry Thoreau, whose work, encountered early, had a pervasive and formative impact on Frost's life as well as on his poetry. The spiritual morality of the individual self expressed in "Two Tramps" is endemic to both Thoreau and Frost, while Frost's economy accords perfectly with Thoreau's views on work and labor as nurture for the human spirit. In "Two Tramps" the kinship of Frost and Thoreau is evident at every turn.

Take Walden for the moment. In chapter 13 Thoreau contemplates his metaphoric "House-Warming." He begins by talking about woodpiles:

I loved to have mine before my window, and the more chips the better to remind me of my pleasing work. I had an old axe which nobody claimed, with which by spells in winter days, on the sunny side of the house, I played about the stumps which I had got out of my bean-field. As my driver prophesied when I was plowing, they warmed me twice, once while I was splitting them, and again when they were on the fire, so that no fuel could give out more heat.

These few sentences anticipate Frost's poem as a unit, but they have their closest dramatic equivalence in the second and sixth stanzas:

Good blocks of oak it was I split, As large around as the chopping block; And every piece I squarely hit Fell splinterless as a cloven rock. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . You'd think I never had felt before The weight of an ax-head poised aloft, The grip on earth of outspread feet. The life of muscles rocking soft And smooth and moist in vernal heat.

In situation, motif, and theme, the passage from Walden offers a meaningful context for "Two Tramps."

For a full understanding of the transcendental tradition behind Frost's poem, however, a more useful document is Thoreau's brilliant essay "Life without Principle." A discursive presentation of his central ideas on society, labor, and the self, this essay was published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1863, after having served for several years as a lyceum talk. It is an important manifestation of Thoreau's dedication to the spiritual needs of the self and to the idea that the self must be served constantly in its struggle against the destructive pressures of socialization. As such, it can now serve us as a kind of manifesto of the intellectual and literary tradition to which "Two Tramps in Mud Time" properly belongs.

Frost is wary of those who want to take his "job for pay." Thoreau's more generalized complaint makes the same point. "The ways by which you may get money almost without exception lead downward. To have done anything by which you earned money merely is to have been truly idle or worse. If the laborer gets no more than the wages which his employer pays him, he is cheated, he cheats himself." In fact, such a laborer is deceived in that he is "paid for being something less than a man" when his aim should be "not to get his living . . . but to perform well a certain work. . . . Do not hire a man who does your work for money," cautions Thoreau, "but him who does it for love of it."

Frost takes these Thoreauvian ideals and dramatizes them in his lyric poem. It is not the tramps who work for the love of the work, it turns out, but the poet himself, and consequently he cannot without compromise and self-betrayal give way to those who work merely for wages. He must, in Thoreau's words, "be fastidious to the extreme of sanity, disregarding the gibes of those who are more unfortunate than ourselves." Thoreau reminds us that, surprisingly, "a man may be very industrious, and yet not spend his time well": "There is no more fatal blunderer than he who consumes the greater part of his life getting his living. All great enterprises are self-supporting. The poet, for instance, must sustain his body by his poetry, as a steam planing-mill feeds its boilers with the shavings it makes. You must get your living by loving."

The values that Thoreau conveys discursively and didactically in "Life without Principle" Frost exalts in narrative subsumed by lyric. Given such commitments, there is no question that Frost must fail Cowley's test in socioeconomics and collectivist philosophy, but so must Thoreau. Frost might have said, with Thoreau: "To be supported by the charity of friends, or a government pension,—provided you continue to breathe,— by whatever fine synonyms you describe these relations, is to go into the almshouse." Frost did say that a man "should be a large-proportioned individual before he becomes social."

In sum, "Two Tramps in Mud Time" should not be read as the one-sided, frontal attack on socialist or collectivist thinking that Cowley would have it be, nor should it be read as Donoghue's illustrative apologia for the wondrous workings of Darwinist law. Grounded in social and transcendental ideas the poet shares with Henry Thoreau, the poem stands in opposition to that capacity for self-betrayal and degeneration which inheres in each and every man: that propensity to "quarter our gross bodies on our poor souls, till the former eat up all the latter's substance." When the thematic and ideological affinities of Frost and Thoreau are fully recognized, we shall have a surer sense of what Frost is about in his poem " against having hobbies." Thoreau's statement that "the whole duty of life is contained in the question how to respire and aspire both at once" is an adage the import of which Frost seems not to have missed. As he insisted in the early 1950s, at the age of seventy-eight, "I have never outgrown anything that I ever liked. I have never had a hobby in my life, but I have ranged through a lot of things."

From Robert Frost and the New England Renaissance. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1988. Copyright © 1988 by the UP of Kentucky.

Katherine Kearns: On "Two Tramps in Mudtime"

In some essential sense in Frost's poetry, "mud time"--that precarious season between winter and spring, freeze and thaw, control and uncontrol--is always imminent; in that same sense, so too are the "hulking tramps" who begin to wander through the landscape in that season, threatening the equanimity of the socially proprietous speaker and bringing him finally to recognize and reassert his own capacity for control. In "Two Tramps in Mud Time," the strangers materialize out of nowhere, startling the speaker so thoroughly that he mis-hits the wood: this is a dangerous game, axes being what they are in Frost's poetry, capable of striking like a snake, or biting. The strangers are there to take the speaker's job of woodcutting, again a dangerous game, for it is his job to channel his aggressive energy away from others and into the (temporarily inanimate) kindling: "The blows that a life of self-control / Spares to strike for the common good, / That day, giving a loose to my soul, I spent on the unimportant wood." The tramps would deprive him of both his balance and his heat, elements condensed figurally into the dynamic precision of the titanically wrought woodchopper: "The weight of an ax-head poised aloft, / The grip on earth of outspread feet, / The life of muscles rocking soft / And smooth and moist in vernal heat." They would, in short, leave him to less harmless pastimes there in the crux between winter and spring. Warmth, the smooth and moist flow of muscles relaxed by vernal heat, has as its complement in this poem the water that fills every wheel rut and every hoofprint, but water without heat is ice. The speaker, warmed to a task, may be generative, but left to find other outlets becomes sinister: "Be glad of water," the speaker says, "but don't forget / The lurking frost in the earth beneath / That will steal forth after the sun is set / And show on the water its crystal teeth." What these silent strangers would take, then, is all that keeps the speaker from unrestrained appetite, that keeps F/frost from stealing forth in the dark to show his/its teeth.

From Robert Frost and a Poetics of Appetite. Copyright © 1994 by Cambridge University Press. Reprinted by permission of the author.

Jeffrey Meyers: On "Two Tramps in Mudtime"

"Two Tramps in Mudtime" opens in early spring when (as in "The Ax-Helve") the speaker is interrupted while chopping wood. Two intimidating tramps want to "take"--not do--the job for pay. Frost then shifts away from the main subject, as he often does, to a brilliant description of the treacherous New England spring, which suddenly changes from May to March. He returns, three stanzas later, to describe the intense pleasure he takes in physical labor and to consider the demands of the tramps. They are professional lumberjacks, who have left the forest and chosen not to work, and therefore have no pressing claim on his charity. The argument finally comes down to the speaker's love of work against their need of work for gain. He concedes that they have the better right, but the "But" that begins the final stanza suggests that his point of view will prevail. Using a daring Metaphysical conceit (like Donne's "twin compasses" in "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning"), he says his aim in life is to write poetry and chop wood, just as his two eyes focus into single sight. Though it would be socially beneficial to give employment to the tramps, Frost believes--since the physical pleasure of chopping wood while observing the hesitant coming of spring is absolutely essential to the creation of his poetry--that his personal needs are paramount. The speaker looks after Number One rather than Number Two. As he told Untermeyer, he was brought up to think of self-preservation as a virtue, not an instinct. Just as "The Lone Striker" disappoints Left-wing expectations by advocating an individual's flight from industrial disputes rather than workers' solidarity and communal effort, so "Two Tramps in Mudtime" resists the liberal impulse and sends the tramps back into the mud instead of responding to their urgent but unspoken demand for money. As the speaker cunningly says when describing the spring, the lurking frost will show its crystal teeth.

From Robert Frost: A Biography. Copyright © 1996 by Jeffrey Meyers.

Walter Jost: On "Two Tramps in Mudtime"

Like many of Frost's poems, "Two, Tramps in Mud Time" unites divergent lines of thought by placing in tension opposed or contradictory values: the self and the other, the literal and the symbolic, the general and the particular, the straight-forward and the ironic, and so on. It is generally agreed that, at the end of the poem, Frost leaves it to his readers to apply to their own lives, to their "avocations and vocations," the maxim that love and need, work and play, can and should be one. But less agreement exists as to the message and quality of this "editorializing."

[. . . .] 

Regarding the poem's message, critics have focused on whether or not the narrator-author should be understood to have surrendered his job of wood-cutting to the tramps who need the work. The wood-cutting is obviously symbolic, so the matter is usually re-framed as follows: is Frost urging that we sacrifice self for others, or are we to expect those “others” to look out for themselves?

[. . . .]

Be glad of water, but don't forget The lurking frost in the earth beneath . . .

Frost's admonishment to us here not to forget to accommodate antithetical norms illustrates the fact that we do forget, that we normally seek to avoid or escape oppositions of the sort that we find in stanzas one through eight, which are themselves reconciled only in stanza nine: the tension, for example, between the various contradicting images and values in one through five; between pleasures we naturally love and the reasonableness or prudence we know we need; and ultimately between one code of prudence (the tramps') and another (the narrator's). These tensions are so arranged as to climax on an emotional level in the excerpt from stanza five above, with the images of water and frost, the pleasurable preferred to the painful (so the narrator needs to remind us, "don't forget"); and on a more intellectual level in stanza eight, with the logic of the tramps over the weaker right attributed to the narrator—reason over feeling, prudence over pleasure (hence the easy "agreed"). Although diverse, these contrasting images, values, and ideas align in sequences of association summarized in the topics "love," "need," "work" and "play." For instance, love and play first represent the physical delight both in "muscles rocking soft / And smooth and moist in vernal heat," and in the other vernal images as well; and then represent more generally (in stanza eight) any pleasure in life or life of pleasure ("My right might be love . . ."): love-play: narrator, woodcutting, warmth, air, brightness, bird, water, life of muscles, vernal heat—in short, everything in life we are "glad of," symbolized most effectively by the vital water of "brook " and "pond" in five. By contrast, need and work first represent tactics for survival in the marketplace, and then more generally any struggle, difficulty or necessity that "lurks" or "hulks" "out of the mud" or woods, or just out of sight: work-need: strangers, blows, coldness, earth, darkness, silence, frost, tramps, cold logic—in short, everything in life we "dare not speak," "spare to strike," and wish to "forget."

Now the point is that these associated images, ideas, and values are arranged and treated by a method of disjunction and subordination, a pattern which structures and determines how we consciously react to the world presented in stanzas one through eight. Here it is not so much that we agree with what the tramps say, as that we see things in the way they do, by division and negation. This is the tramps' own method and modus vivendi—one hardly unfamiliar to us, or opposed to the way we normally act—which Frost exploits in the form of the poem itself. We are all adept enough in life at being "glad of" what gives pleasure and at shunning ills, just as we are, on the other hand, prudent enough to subordinate pleasure to the need to survive. Thus we appreciate what in nature is pleasurable, and tend to avoid what is difficult and associated with struggle and need (the cold, dark, silent, frozen). Rhetorically, this tendency to see things as existing "in twain " (separate in the sense of opposed and contradictory) is the "common place" we occupy at the beginning and throughout most of the poem ("yield who will to their separation"), which Frost explores for its powers and limits. Accordingly he has us identify on the one hand with the narrator and the images associated with him, and to feel reserve toward those "strangers" who "put him off," and caution or fear at the images associated with them (mud, mid-March, frost, teeth). On the other hand he has us agree with the tramps against the pseudo-narrator's sentimentalized love and self-absorbed play. The point is that in both cases the two exist "in twain."

As a result, commentators have always seen the tramps and narrator as locked into opposition! And yet, although we don't come to realize it until stanza nine, in stanza eight we don't know what the narrator really believes. Actually he is not opposed to the tramps at all: his "right" only "might be love" (pleasure, etc.), and turns out not to be. Until the last, however, the narrator's true position is subordinated to the one attributed to him (which is subordinated in turn to the tramps' own view). The narrator, Frost himself, is "lurking" behind a second or pseudo-self, momentarily eclipsed by a world-view in which the terms of the debate are set—and more importantly by a worldview whose chief characteristic is that there is a debate at all. In short, Frost achieves his effects by manipulating the point of view from which we see and understand the world of. the poem.

This becomes clearer in stanza nine, which not only talks about those preceding oppositions as unities, but which unifies them with various rhetorical devices: paradox ("work is play"), pun ("play for mortal stakes"), simile (''as my two eyes make one in sight"), repetition of the conjunctive "and," unity of idea (the idea of unity itself), and the unifying of form and content of the previous two sections. As a result we learn (or remember) a way of seeing oppositions as unified wholes, which resolves conflict not by avoidance or negation, but by asserting the equal importance of the opposed parts, in nature (cold and warm, water and frost), in self (body and soul, avocation and vocation), in human relations (love and need, narrator and tramps), and in our relations with the transcendent (Heaven and the future's sakes).

Again, contrast this view and its methods with our mode of apprehension in the first two sections. Section one (1-5) controls how we eval‎uate its images by juxtaposing opposites, presenting first what is the more obvious and pleasurable, and then balancing that with the less obvious and somehow more threatening or difficult. Arrangement is crucial, for it suggests the precariousness of our satisfaction with the seemingly self-evident (the "cheery" tramps, the "unimportant" wood, the sun, the bluebird, the water, the "right" of love). It does so by juxtaposing these with the need to provide ("don't forget") for what is no less real for being less obviously pleasant or present. But note that this is accomplished with our attention directed, not to this one-sidedness of ours, but to the emotional pleasure of act and scene—the implications of inadequacy are only "lurking." Similarly, section two (6-8) brings this pattern to its logical conclusion by sharpening the differences between the pseudo-narrator and the tramps, and by sacrificing one of those "sides," love and play, to the need to work. Here again our attention is elsewhere, on the prudential over the pleasurable, and again the explicit view is that these elements are at odds. Hence, throughout both sections elements are joined only by the disjunctive "but": "But if you so much as dare to speak"; "But he wouldn't advise a thing to blossom"; "My right might be love / But theirs was need"; "The sun was warm but the wind was chill." In sum, careful selection and arrangement of images and actions analogically related to each other and connoting good and bad, the separation of emotion and reason, and various syntactical and stanzaic divisions dichotomize the reader's perceptions and responses, leading him to see the world as the tramps do—dualistically. This is so successfully accomplished, in fact, that we have to ask ourselves how it is that we come to find the claims about unity in stanza nine persuasive at all. Why not agree with Cowley that stanza nine is a sententious sermon, or with Poirier that the poem is a "failure?" Surely stanza nine alone does not overcome the world-view enacted in the preceding eight: why then accept it?

The answer lies, I think, in the fundamental ambiguity of the poem's images, actions, terms, and methods of dividing and uniting. Frost does counter each of these with its opposite, but he does so ambiguously, encouraging us in effect to see the elements of each pair not simply as separated, but also as united. This means that Frost does not rely in the ninth stanza on abstract sermonizing extraneous to the rest of the poem, as Cowley, Cook and others allege, but simply recommends at the end of the poem what he has been surreptitiously doing all along, uniting opposites.

[. . . . ]        

From this perspective we can now grasp the whole poem as an argument whose conclusion is drawn in stanza nine. Past disjunctive pairs can now be understood as so many examples of unity-in-division, related to each other by analogy, which simultaneously, but on different levels of the reader's awareness, (1) show the powers and limits of the tramps' view, and more importantly (2) prove by inductive generalization the maxim with which the poem ends. We are persuaded, moved to a new "place," by virtue of our having experienced several plausible examples, whose terms then become, in Kenneth Burke's formulation, "equipment for living." And this explains, I think, why Frost refrains from telling us how he responded to the tramps' putative request. It is not that this request is insignificant or irrelevant, since this situation is morally as real as any other we might imagine. Rather, Frost has us answer our own question by requiring us to apply the message we learned from the poem. And we can only answer that the narrator must give the work because, to put it negatively, not to give would be to ignore that "common good" and those "mortal stakes" now before him (and us) in the persons of the needy tramps. To imagine refusing this unity of "self" and "other" in the act of giving is simply to have missed the "message," to have failed to grasp what the poem enacted. To put this more positively, to give the woodcutting is itself a creative "deed" which unites the narrator's love and need just as the woodcutting itself had previously done for him. Indeed, the narrator has been giving (by denying himself) for a long time:

The blows that a life of self-control  Spares to strike for the common good . . .

Furthermore, by giving the job Frost in effect concedes that values do often exist "in twain" (the tramps, for one, simply have no choice about uniting values such as love and need, work and play); the narrator's giving thus signals the fact that his ideal realistically admits the tramps' view, and qualifies it without simply negating it: narrator and tramps are thus unified again in their separation. What Frost has done, then, is to equip us, not with Christian, liberal, or any other kind of determinate doctrine, but with a language and experience requiring innovative thought and feeling, practical "wisdom " which completes and finally becomes our "delight."

[. . . .]

Applied to poetry itself, then, love and need, work and play signify Frost's ideal of the "philosophic poet" as one who unites knowledge and action in the unity of art and propaganda, poetic and rhetoric. The poet as philosopher is the rhetorician, not in any narrow partisan sense, but as one seeking to stimulate inquiry, to transform commonplaces, and to move to new perceptions of self and world. It is the classical rhetorical ideal of Cicero, Horace and Sidney, for whom the offices of poet, as of orator, were to teach, move and delight. For too long critics have one-sidedly favored the poetic against the rhetorical, and the romantic "I" against the more pragmatic "we," and in consequence have failed to do justice to one of Frost's most representative poems. It is not unlikely that more rhetorical analyses can enrich our sense of Frost as communicator, and of his work as play for mortal stakes. We have not yet found the lurking Frost. 

From "The Lurking Frost: Poetic and Rhetoric in 'Two Tramps in Mud Time'" in Cady, Edwin H. and Louis J. Budd (eds.) On Frost: The Best from American Literature. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1991. Copyright © 1991 by Duke UP. Originally published in American Literature 60.2 (May 1988).

Judith Oster: On "Two Tramps in Mudtime"

The question of respect for one's own needs despite an apparent selfishness is raised in "Two Tramps in Mud Time." Because the speaker has had no previous relationship with the tramps—they are "two strangers"—the question can remain the abstract one of what one owes to one's fellow man, what one must give of one's self to the claims of another if the claims conflict, even if there is no obligation to that person, no claim by right of anything except common humanity, human kindness, or guilt in the face of another person's need. One issue in this poem, then, is simply that of selfless giving up as opposed to keeping something for oneself. It is a question relevant to the artist's need to hoard himself as opposed to his human obligation to give himself; it illustrates the kind of conflict in Frost that was generated by his mother's hero tales of self-sacrifice and his opposite need to work for himself in asserting his creative originality (EY 377, 578-79). Like the question in "Love and a Question," this poem too asks how far one is supposed to go in self-sacrifice, how one is to draw the line between personal rights, property, or needs and some other's right to make a claim on his sympathy, to make him feel guilty, or to make him give up something that he need not have given up.

In this case the conflict is further complicated because it seems to be between something that is of little consequence to the speaker, yet vital to the tramps. The claims are not of equal weight: they are work as opposed to play, need as opposed to love. The last stanza, which declares the necessity for uniting vocation and avocation, love and need, work and playas the ideal way of doing a deed, does not resolve the dilemma of who should be chopping the wood. There seems to exist a separation between love and need, work and play.

Yet there is need and need: there is financial need and there is emotional need. There is also right and right—the right of a man to expect sympathy for his need to earn a living and the right of a man to chop wood—especially if it is on his own property—if he wants to do so. In fact the recognition on the part of the speaker is a generous and an unselfish one:

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. (CP 358-59)

The claim on his conscience may not have been valid or fair, but it worked all the same. Their "logic" did fill his head as they had counted on its doing, and whether he gives up the task or not is irrelevant, for once their logic had fined his head, the pleasure in the task would be gone. At first their claiming the task simply intensified his love for it ("The time when most I loved my task / These two must make me love it more / By coming with what they came to ask "); but then that was before their logic filled his head. The resolution of the poem will depend on whether feeling wins out over logic, and then the question is which feeling—sympathetic feeling for another or feeling about the task that unites work and play, love and need. The separation the speaker sees between work and play, love and need, is, after all, the separation he assumes the tramps to see—it is their logic, and he shows himself to be very sensitive in assuming it. If the conflict is resolved on his terms, we must assume he will give up the task should these claims remain separate; that he will continue to do it should they be united. "Theirs was the better right" only "when the two exist in twain."

Here, as elsewhere in Frost, we are shown the seriousness of "play," for this activity was "play" as long as one did not do it from motives of gain. Pay then was what defined it as work rather than play, that made it vital and "right." That it was hard work in either case is beside the point; that there was something at stake—pride in the quality of the workmanship and the aim—is beside the point. The crucial question is what will be the gain. Of what importance is it to the chopper? At least that becomes the question once the speaker feels himself to have been "caught" in the act (a tacit admission of guilt), which leads him to consider the wood "unimportant" despite the fact that he was loosing his soul, giving vent to whatever was pent up—"the blows that a life of self-control / spares to strike for the common good" (357). Loosing his soul in spending these blows on the wood is an important activity whether the wood is important or not.

In the inability of the tramps to understand his needs, Frost proves them inferior to the speaker who sees theirs. It is, once more, a matter of how one is reading the scene and what one brings to the reading. Frost reads them better than they read him. They see what their agenda permits them to see, a criticism we could level at the socialist critics who made the poem—and Frost—a target on their agenda, often unfairly, certainly missing rich possibilities of interpretation and maybe missing the point or mistaking the resolution.

Another need that the task answers is for a physical connection, muscular exertion, pitting oneself against an earth, a tree, a nature that shows crystal teeth, that moves capriciously between March and May and back in a moment:

You'd think I never had felt before

Th weight of an ax-head poised aloft,

The grip on earth of outspread feet.

The life of muscles rocking soft

And smooth and moist in vernal heat. (CP 358)

A deed done "for. ..future's sake" must exert weighty grip and muscle in the face of so uncertain and capricious a future. It must require poise and balance as surely as does that boy mastering birches.

In this poem, as in "Birches," "love" is introduced where it has not seemed to be the subject: love of the work, love of the feel of the earth, and "the life of muscles, rocking soft / and smooth and moist in vernal heat"; love as it relates to labor, love as it relates to need. We see that only in uniting these will the speaker be entitled to make a claim that equals the claim of the tramps, for love must be related to need and to effort. Only in applying this union to any relationship, any task, or act of creativity does the last stanza seem to be genuinely a part of the poem and not simply the gratuitous nonresolution of Frost's poetic career, which it is so often taken to be.

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. (CP 359)

In two separate letters, Frost relates this poem somewhat curiously to love of a woman. In his famous assertion that Elinor had been the unspoken half of everything he wrote, he went on to add: "and both halves of many a thing from My November Guest down to the last stanzas of Two Tramps in Mud Time" (SL 450). In writing about his view of imperfection, he said: "I am not a Platonist…one who believes…the woman you have is an imperfect copy of some woman in Heaven…I am philosophically opposed to having one Iseult for my vocation and another for my avocation; as you may have inferred from a poem called Two Tramps in Mud Time…a truly gallant Platonist will remain a bachelor…from unwillingness to reduce any woman to the condition of being used without being idealized" (SL 462).

Love and need, then, must be one, or the relationship, whether in marriage, in friendship, or in art, is exploitation. But there is another factor in a love relationship—in a relationship with any other human being or with one's task—which distinguishes love and need from exploitation, and that is "spending" oneself rather than merely spending another: "be it art, politics, school, church, business, love, or marriage—in a piece of work or in a career. Strongly spent is synonymous with kept. "The speaker in this poem speaks of the soul-loosing blows he "spent on unimportant wood," and if anything entitled him to "keep" the task rather than to give it up, it is the effort, the love with which he spent himself on the task. In the above quotation from "A Constant Symbol," Frost had been speaking of writing poetry: "Every single poem written regular is a symbol small or great of the way the will has to pitch into commitments deeper and deeper to a rounded conclusion and then be judged for whether any original intention it had has been strongly spent or weakly lost (5P 24; emphasis mine). Peculiar to relationships of love and creativity is the opposition of spent and lost. In commerce, one is short by what one spends; in love and in creation, one only keeps by spending, saves one’s heart with losing it; one only fulfills oneself by giving oneself. In "Two Tramps," strongly spent, being strongly spent, is the only real justification for keeping.

The question of respect for self, of integrity of self as opposed to giving up of self, is posed in two ways in "Two Tramps in Mud Time," for there are two relationships: the relationship between the speaker and the two tramps, and the relationship between the speaker and his work. If the relationship between himself and his work is one of love, need, and spending of himself for his task and the perfection of the job for its own sake, then that may take precedence over a relationship with two strangers where there is no love, no pride in work, no effort, no mutuality of give and take. The self and its labor of love are united and preserved, kept, in the face of claims that would separate that unity. If, however, the task separates love and need, if nothing further will be "spent" on it, then the job is exploitive. It had better be given to those who can use it for gain.

While the drama of the poem is more overtly social than sexual, the relationship between love and need, keeping and spending oneself, respect for the needs of the self and the other, and willingness or unwillingness to surrender to it are clearly also applicable to a discussion of love, especially as the poet has drawn attention to this poem in such a connection. If we see the sexual undertone of "outspread feet. / The life of muscles rocking soft / And smooth and moist in vernal heat" it would not be the only poem, as we shall see, to connate earth and love, the act of earth-labor with the act of love.

From Toward Robert Frost: The Reader and the Poet. Copyright © 1991 by The University of Georgia Press.

Hayden Carruth: On "Two Tramps in Mudtime"

"Two Tramps in Mud Time" opens with the poet as wood-splitter in the thawing time of late winter, suffering the interruption of two unemployed loggers; this is good localized description, the kind Frost was master of. But then he appears not to know what to do with his opening. The poem wanders into further unnecessary description: the April day, the bluebird, the snow and water; and then it ends in four stanzas of virtually straight editorial matter. The two tramps and the mud-time are left utterly stranded. When one thinks how Frost would have used these figures at the time when he was writing his earlier dramatic and narrative poems, one can see clearly, I believe, how he had deserted his own imagination and how he tried to make up the deficiency through conscious manipulation and force

From "Robert Frost" in Parnassus: Poetry in Review, Spring-Summer, 1975.

Walter Jost: On "Two Tramps in Mudtime"

Like many of Frost's poems, "Two, Tramps in Mud Time" unites divergent lines of thought by placing in tension opposed or contradictory values: the self and the other, the literal and the symbolic, the general and the particular, the straight-forward and the ironic, and so on. It is generally agreed that, at the end of the poem, Frost leaves it to his readers to apply to their own lives, to their "avocations and vocations," the maxim that love and need, work and play, can and should be one. But less agreement exists as to the message and quality of this "editorializing."

[. . . .]

Regarding the poem's message, critics have focused on whether or not the narrator-author should be understood to have surrendered his job of wood-cutting to the tramps who need the work. The wood-cutting is obviously symbolic, so the matter is usually re-framed as follows: is Frost urging that we sacrifice self for others, or are we to expect those “others” to look out for themselves?

[. . . .]

    Be glad of water, but don't forget     The lurking frost in the earth beneath . . .

Frost's admonishment to us here not to forget to accommodate antithetical norms illustrates the fact that we do forget, that we normally seek to avoid or escape oppositions of the sort that we find in stanzas one through eight, which are themselves reconciled only in stanza nine: the tension, for example, between the various contradicting images and values in one through five; between pleasures we naturally love and the reasonableness or prudence we know we need; and ultimately between one code of prudence (the tramps') and another (the narrator's). These tensions are so arranged as to climax on an emotional level in the excerpt from stanza five above, with the images of water and frost, the pleasurable preferred to the painful (so the narrator needs to remind us, "don't forget"); and on a more intellectual level in stanza eight, with the logic of the tramps over the weaker right attributed to the narrator—reason over feeling, prudence over pleasure (hence the easy "agreed"). Although diverse, these contrasting images, values, and ideas align in sequences of association summarized in the topics "love," "need," "work" and "play." For instance, love and play first represent the physical delight both in "muscles rocking soft / And smooth and moist in vernal heat," and in the other vernal images as well; and then represent more generally (in stanza eight) any pleasure in life or life of pleasure ("My right might be love . . ."): love-play: narrator, woodcutting, warmth, air, brightness, bird, water, life of muscles, vernal heat—in short, everything in life we are "glad of," symbolized most effectively by the vital water of "brook " and "pond" in five. By contrast, need and work first represent tactics for survival in the marketplace, and then more generally any struggle, difficulty or necessity that "lurks" or "hulks" "out of the mud" or woods, or just out of sight: work-need: strangers, blows, coldness, earth, darkness, silence, frost, tramps, cold logic—in short, everything in life we "dare not speak," "spare to strike," and wish to "forget."

Now the point is that these associated images, ideas, and values are arranged and treated by a method of disjunction and subordination, a pattern which structures and determines how we consciously react to the world presented in stanzas one through eight. Here it is not so much that we agree with what the tramps say, as that we see things in the way they do, by division and negation. This is the tramps' own method and modus vivendi—one hardly unfamiliar to us, or opposed to the way we normally act—which Frost exploits in the form of the poem itself. We are all adept enough in life at being "glad of" what gives pleasure and at shunning ills, just as we are, on the other hand, prudent enough to subordinate pleasure to the need to survive. Thus we appreciate what in nature is pleasurable, and tend to avoid what is difficult and associated with struggle and need (the cold, dark, silent, frozen). Rhetorically, this tendency to see things as existing "in twain " (separate in the sense of opposed and contradictory) is the "common place" we occupy at the beginning and throughout most of the poem ("yield who will to their separation"), which Frost explores for its powers and limits. Accordingly he has us identify on the one hand with the narrator and the images associated with him, and to feel reserve toward those "strangers" who "put him off," and caution or fear at the images associated with them (mud, mid-March, frost, teeth). On the other hand he has us agree with the tramps against the pseudo-narrator's sentimentalized love and self-absorbed play. The point is that in both cases the two exist "in twain."

As a result, commentators have always seen the tramps and narrator as locked into opposition! And yet, although we don't come to realize it until stanza nine, in stanza eight we don't know what the narrator really believes. Actually he is not opposed to the tramps at all: his "right" only "might be love" (pleasure, etc.), and turns out not to be. Until the last, however, the narrator's true position is subordinated to the one attributed to him (which is subordinated in turn to the tramps' own view). The narrator, Frost himself, is "lurking" behind a second or pseudo-self, momentarily eclipsed by a world-view in which the terms of the debate are set—and more importantly by a worldview whose chief characteristic is that there is a debate at all. In short, Frost achieves his effects by manipulating the point of view from which we see and understand the world of. the poem.

This becomes clearer in stanza nine, which not only talks about those preceding oppositions as unities, but which unifies them with various rhetorical devices: paradox ("work is play"), pun ("play for mortal stakes"), simile (''as my two eyes make one in sight"), repetition of the conjunctive "and," unity of idea (the idea of unity itself), and the unifying of form and content of the previous two sections. As a result we learn (or remember) a way of seeing oppositions as unified wholes, which resolves conflict not by avoidance or negation, but by asserting the equal importance of the opposed parts, in nature (cold and warm, water and frost), in self (body and soul, avocation and vocation), in human relations (love and need, narrator and tramps), and in our relations with the transcendent (Heaven and the future's sakes).

Again, contrast this view and its methods with our mode of apprehension in the first two sections. Section one (1-5) controls how we eval‎uate its images by juxtaposing opposites, presenting first what is the more obvious and pleasurable, and then balancing that with the less obvious and somehow more threatening or difficult. Arrangement is crucial, for it suggests the precariousness of our satisfaction with the seemingly self-evident (the "cheery" tramps, the "unimportant" wood, the sun, the bluebird, the water, the "right" of love). It does so by juxtaposing these with the need to provide ("don't forget") for what is no less real for being less obviously pleasant or present. But note that this is accomplished with our attention directed, not to this one-sidedness of ours, but to the emotional pleasure of act and scene—the implications of inadequacy are only "lurking." Similarly, section two (6-8) brings this pattern to its logical conclusion by sharpening the differences between the pseudo-narrator and the tramps, and by sacrificing one of those "sides," love and play, to the need to work. Here again our attention is elsewhere, on the prudential over the pleasurable, and again the explicit view is that these elements are at odds. Hence, throughout both sections elements are joined only by the disjunctive "but": "But if you so much as dare to speak"; "But he wouldn't advise a thing to blossom"; "My right might be love / But theirs was need"; "The sun was warm but the wind was chill." In sum, careful selection and arrangement of images and actions analogically related to each other and connoting good and bad, the separation of emotion and reason, and various syntactical and stanzaic divisions dichotomize the reader's perceptions and responses, leading him to see the world as the tramps do—dualistically. This is so successfully accomplished, in fact, that we have to ask ourselves how it is that we come to find the claims about unity in stanza nine persuasive at all. Why not agree with Cowley that stanza nine is a sententious sermon, or with Poirier that the poem is a "failure?" Surely stanza nine alone does not overcome the world-view enacted in the preceding eight: why then accept it?

The answer lies, I think, in the fundamental ambiguity of the poem's images, actions, terms, and methods of dividing and uniting. Frost does counter each of these with its opposite, but he does so ambiguously, encouraging us in effect to see the elements of each pair not simply as separated, but also as united. This means that Frost does not rely in the ninth stanza on abstract sermonizing extraneous to the rest of the poem, as Cowley, Cook and others allege, but simply recommends at the end of the poem what he has been surreptitiously doing all along, uniting opposites.

[. . . . ]         

From this perspective we can now grasp the whole poem as an argument whose conclusion is drawn in stanza nine. Past disjunctive pairs can now be understood as so many examples of unity-in-division, related to each other by analogy, which simultaneously, but on different levels of the reader's awareness, (1) show the powers and limits of the tramps' view, and more importantly (2) prove by inductive generalization the maxim with which the poem ends. We are persuaded, moved to a new "place," by virtue of our having experienced several plausible examples, whose terms then become, in Kenneth Burke's formulation, "equipment for living." And this explains, I think, why Frost refrains from telling us how he responded to the tramps' putative request. It is not that this request is insignificant or irrelevant, since this situation is morally as real as any other we might imagine. Rather, Frost has us answer our own question by requiring us to apply the message we learned from the poem. And we can only answer that the narrator must give the work because, to put it negatively, not to give would be to ignore that "common good" and those "mortal stakes" now before him (and us) in the persons of the needy tramps. To imagine refusing this unity of "self" and "other" in the act of giving is simply to have missed the "message," to have failed to grasp what the poem enacted. To put this more positively, to give the woodcutting is itself a creative "deed" which unites the narrator's love and need just as the woodcutting itself had previously done for him. Indeed, the narrator has been giving (by denying himself) for a long time:

    The blows that a life of self-control     Spares to strike for the common good . . .

Furthermore, by giving the job Frost in effect concedes that values do often exist "in twain" (the tramps, for one, simply have no choice about uniting values such as love and need, work and play); the narrator's giving thus signals the fact that his ideal realistically admits the tramps' view, and qualifies it without simply negating it: narrator and tramps are thus unified again in their separation. What Frost has done, then, is to equip us, not with Christian, liberal, or any other kind of determinate doctrine, but with a language and experience requiring innovative thought and feeling, practical "wisdom " which completes and finally becomes our "delight."

[. . . .]

Applied to poetry itself, then, love and need, work and play signify Frost's ideal of the "philosophic poet" as one who unites knowledge and action in the unity of art and propaganda, poetic and rhetoric. The poet as philosopher is the rhetorician, not in any narrow partisan sense, but as one seeking to stimulate inquiry, to transform commonplaces, and to move to new perceptions of self and world. It is the classical rhetorical ideal of Cicero, Horace and Sidney, for whom the offices of poet, as of orator, were to teach, move and delight. For too long critics have one-sidedly favored the poetic against the rhetorical, and the romantic "I" against the more pragmatic "we," and in consequence have failed to do justice to one of Frost's most representative poems. It is not unlikely that more rhetorical analyses can enrich our sense of Frost as communicator, and of his work as play for mortal stakes. We have not yet found the lurking Frost.

    from "The Lurking Frost: Poetic and Rhetoric in 'Two Tramps in Mud Time'" in Cady, Edwin H. and Louis J. Budd (eds.) On Frost: The Best from American Literature. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1991. Copyright © 1991 by Duke UP. Originally published in American Literature 60.2 (May 1988).

Judith Oster: On "Two Tramps in Mudtime"

The question of respect for one's own needs despite an apparent selfishness is raised in "Two Tramps in Mud Time." Because the speaker has had no previous relationship with the tramps—they are "two strangers"—the question can remain the abstract one of what one owes to one's fellow man, what one must give of one's self to the claims of another if the claims conflict, even if there is no obligation to that person, no claim by right of anything except common humanity, human kindness, or guilt in the face of another person's need. One issue in this poem, then, is simply that of selfless giving up as opposed to keeping something for oneself. It is a question relevant to the artist's need to hoard himself as opposed to his human obligation to give himself; it illustrates the kind of conflict in Frost that was generated by his mother's hero tales of self-sacrifice and his opposite need to work for himself in asserting his creative originality (EY 377, 578-79). Like the question in "Love and a Question," this poem too asks how far one is supposed to go in self-sacrifice, how one is to draw the line between personal rights, property, or needs and some other's right to make a claim on his sympathy, to make him feel guilty, or to make him give up something that he need not have given up.

In this case the conflict is further complicated because it seems to be between something that is of little consequence to the speaker, yet vital to the tramps. The claims are not of equal weight: they are work as opposed to play, need as opposed to love. The last stanza, which declares the necessity for uniting vocation and avocation, love and need, work and playas the ideal way of doing a deed, does not resolve the dilemma of who should be chopping the wood. There seems to exist a separation between love and need, work and play.

Yet there is need and need: there is financial need and there is emotional need. There is also right and right—the right of a man to expect sympathy for his need to earn a living and the right of a man to chop wood—especially if it is on his own property—if he wants to do so. In fact the recognition on the part of the speaker is a generous and an unselfish one:

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. (CP 358-59)

The claim on his conscience may not have been valid or fair, but it worked all the same. Their "logic" did fill his head as they had counted on its doing, and whether he gives up the task or not is irrelevant, for once their logic had fined his head, the pleasure in the task would be gone. At first their claiming the task simply intensified his love for it ("The time when most I loved my task / These two must make me love it more / By coming with what they came to ask "); but then that was before their logic filled his head. The resolution of the poem will depend on whether feeling wins out over logic, and then the question is which feeling—sympathetic feeling for another or feeling about the task that unites work and play, love and need. The separation the speaker sees between work and play, love and need, is, after all, the separation he assumes the tramps to see—it is their logic, and he shows himself to be very sensitive in assuming it. If the conflict is resolved on his terms, we must assume he will give up the task should these claims remain separate; that he will continue to do it should they be united. "Theirs was the better right" only "when the two exist in twain."

Here, as elsewhere in Frost, we are shown the seriousness of "play," for this activity was "play" as long as one did not do it from motives of gain. Pay then was what defined it as work rather than play, that made it vital and "right." That it was hard work in either case is beside the point; that there was something at stake—pride in the quality of the workmanship and the aim—is beside the point. The crucial question is what will be the gain. Of what importance is it to the chopper? At least that becomes the question once the speaker feels himself to have been "caught" in the act (a tacit admission of guilt), which leads him to consider the wood "unimportant" despite the fact that he was loosing his soul, giving vent to whatever was pent up—"the blows that a life of self-control / spares to strike for the common good" (357). Loosing his soul in spending these blows on the wood is an important activity whether the wood is important or not.

In the inability of the tramps to understand his needs, Frost proves them inferior to the speaker who sees theirs. It is, once more, a matter of how one is reading the scene and what one brings to the reading. Frost reads them better than they read him. They see what their agenda permits them to see, a criticism we could level at the socialist critics who made the poem—and Frost—a target on their agenda, often unfairly, certainly missing rich possibilities of interpretation and maybe missing the point or mistaking the resolution.

Another need that the task answers is for a physical connection, muscular exertion, pitting oneself against an earth, a tree, a nature that shows crystal teeth, that moves capriciously between March and May and back in a moment:

You'd think I never had felt before The weight of an ax-head poised aloft, The grip on earth of outspread feet. The life of muscles rocking soft And smooth and moist in vernal heat. (CP 358)

A deed done "for. ..future's sake" must exert weighty grip and muscle in the face of so uncertain and capricious a future. It must require poise and balance as surely as does that boy mastering birches.

In this poem, as in "Birches," "love" is introduced where it has not seemed to be the subject: love of the work, love of the feel of the earth, and "the life of muscles, rocking soft / and smooth and moist in vernal heat"; love as it relates to labor, love as it relates to need. We see that only in uniting these will the speaker be entitled to make a claim that equals the claim of the tramps, for love must be related to need and to effort. Only in applying this union to any relationship, any task, or act of creativity does the last stanza seem to be genuinely a part of the poem and not simply the gratuitous nonresolution of Frost's poetic career, which it is so often taken to be.

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. (CP 359)

In two separate letters, Frost relates this poem somewhat curiously to love of a woman. In his famous assertion that Elinor had been the unspoken half of everything he wrote, he went on to add: "and both halves of many a thing from My November Guest down to the last stanzas of Two Tramps in Mud Time" (SL 450). In writing about his view of imperfection, he said: "I am not a Platonist…one who believes…the woman you have is an imperfect copy of some woman in Heaven…I am philosophically opposed to having one Iseult for my vocation and another for my avocation; as you may have inferred from a poem called Two Tramps in Mud Time…a truly gallant Platonist will remain a bachelor…from unwillingness to reduce any woman to the condition of being used without being idealized" (SL 462).

Love and need, then, must be one, or the relationship, whether in marriage, in friendship, or in art, is exploitation. But there is another factor in a love relationship—in a relationship with any other human being or with one's task—which distinguishes love and need from exploitation, and that is "spending" oneself rather than merely spending another: "be it art, politics, school, church, business, love, or marriage—in a piece of work or in a career. Strongly spent is synonymous with kept. "The speaker in this poem speaks of the soul-loosing blows he "spent on unimportant wood," and if anything entitled him to "keep" the task rather than to give it up, it is the effort, the love with which he spent himself on the task. In the above quotation from "A Constant Symbol," Frost had been speaking of writing poetry: "Every single poem written regular is a symbol small or great of the way the will has to pitch into commitments deeper and deeper to a rounded conclusion and then be judged for whether any original intention it had has been strongly spent or weakly lost (5P 24; emphasis mine). Peculiar to relationships of love and creativity is the opposition of spent and lost. In commerce, one is short by what one spends; in love and in creation, one only keeps by spending, saves one’s heart with losing it; one only fulfills oneself by giving oneself. In "Two Tramps," strongly spent, being strongly spent, is the only real justification for keeping.

The question of respect for self, of integrity of self as opposed to giving up of self, is posed in two ways in "Two Tramps in Mud Time," for there are two relationships: the relationship between the speaker and the two tramps, and the relationship between the speaker and his work. If the relationship between himself and his work is one of love, need, and spending of himself for his task and the perfection of the job for its own sake, then that may take precedence over a relationship with two strangers where there is no love, no pride in work, no effort, no mutuality of give and take. The self and its labor of love are united and preserved, kept, in the face of claims that would separate that unity. If, however, the task separates love and need, if nothing further will be "spent" on it, then the job is exploitive. It had better be given to those who can use it for gain.

While the drama of the poem is more overtly social than sexual, the relationship between love and need, keeping and spending oneself, respect for the needs of the self and the other, and willingness or unwillingness to surrender to it are clearly also applicable to a discussion of love, especially as the poet has drawn attention to this poem in such a connection. If we see the sexual undertone of "outspread feet. / The life of muscles rocking soft / And smooth and moist in vernal heat" it would not be the only poem, as we shall see, to connate earth and love, the act of earth-labor with the act of love.

From Toward Robert Frost: The Reader and the Poet. Copyright © 1991 by The University of Georgia Press.