3. The Silken Tent / A Witness Tree(1942) - Robert Frost

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3. The Silken Tent

She is as in a field a silken tent 
At midday when a sunny summer breeze 
Has dried the dew and all its ropes relent, 
So that in guys it gently sways at ease, 
And its supporting central cedar pole, 
That is its pinnacle to heavenward 
And signifies the sureness of the soul, 
Seems to owe naught to any single cord, 
But strictly held by none, is loosely bound 
By countless silken ties of love and thought 
To everything on earth the compass round, 
And only by one’s going slightly taut 
In the capriciousness of summer air 
Is of the slightest bondage made aware.

guy : 당김줄

cedar : 향나무 등 삼나무 비슷한 각종 침엽수

pinnacle : 높은 산봉우리, 정점

taut : 팽팽한

capriciousness : 변덕스러움

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비단 텐트

그녀는 들판에 친 비단 텐트 같아서

한 낮 햇빛 밝은 여름의 산들바람이

이슬을 말리고 모든 밧줄이 느슨해지면,

당김 밧줄 속에서도 몸을 편안히 움직인다.

그리고 중앙의 삼목 받침 기둥이

하늘로 정점을 뻗치고 있어서

그녀의 확실한 영혼을 나타내니,

어느 한 밧줄에도 빚진 게 없고,

어느 한 밧줄에도 꽉 잡혀있지 않고,

사랑과 사고(思考)의 무수한 비단 끈으로

땅위 모든 것과 사방으로 느슨히 매어 있는데,

변덕스러운 여름 바람에

밧줄 하나라도 약간 당겨지면

아주 사소한 속박도 의식하게 마련이다.

 -신재실 옮김- 

단상(斷想): 이 시는 1938년 아내 사망 이후 비서로서 프로스트의 문학적―또는 인생의―동반자가 되었던 케이 모리슨(Kay Morrison)에게 바친 사랑의 시로 알려져 있다. 여인의 아름다운 모습이 바람이 살랑 부는 온화한 여름날의 비단 텐트에 비유된다.

여기서 여인을 텐트에 비유한 것은 의미심장하다. 『고린도후서』5:1에서 “만약 땅에 있는 우리의 장막 집이 무너지면 하느님께서 지으신 집 곧 손으로 지은 것이 아니요 하늘에 있는 영원한 집이 우리에게 있는 줄 아나니”에서 “우리의 장막 집(earthly tent we live in)”은 우리의 육체를 상징한다. 텐트가 일시적이고 연약한 거처인 것처럼 우리의 육체 또한 연약하고, 상처 입기 쉽고, 쇠(衰)한다. “비단 텐트”는 실제 존재하는 텐트이기보다는 부드럽고, 매끄럽고, 섬세한 여인의 육체를 암시하는 상상의 여인, 그것도 한 낮 즉 청춘기의 여인이다. 사방에 노출된 들판에서 비단 드레스를 유연하게 늘어뜨리고 가볍게 몸을 흔들어대는 모습은 에로틱하다. 느슨하게 풀어져 있지만 제자리를 지키는 것은 중앙의 삼목(杉木) 받침 기둥 때문이다.

여성의 몸을 한 가운데로 꿰뚫고 하늘로 솟은 기둥은 남근(Phallus)의 상징으로서 여인에게는 영혼의 확실함을 지탱시키는 힘이다. 이와 유사하게 시의 영혼을 확실하게 떠받치는 기둥은 시의 주제(主題)다. 막연하고 방향 없는 시적 연상들―혼돈의 소리―에 어떤 질서―말과 가락―을 부여하는 것은 바로 주제다. 시는 혼돈에 질서를 부여하는 행위 예술이다. 그리고 완벽한 시는 비단 텐트와 같은 여인이다.

완벽한 영국식 소네트, 게다가 전체 한 문장으로 쓰인 이 시는 비단 텐트로 비유된 여인의 모습으로 이상적 시의 모습을 그린다. “사랑과 사고의 무수한 비단 끈”은 여인을 “땅위의 모든 것”에 매어 놓지만, 느슨하여 일정한 범위의 자유가 허용된다. 이런 느슨한 결합은 결합되어 있지만 묶여있지 않은 이상적인 부부의 사랑과 유사하다. 이와 똑같이 언어 최고의 결혼이라 할 수 있는 시도 제약이 있지만, 어떤 틀 내에서의 자유를 허용한다.

여인의 사랑과 시는 모두 중심축을 둘러 싼 “무수한 비단 끈”으로 자신을 지탱하는 연결망이다. 여인은 사랑을 중심축으로 남편과 친인척을 비롯한 수많은 주변인들의 “사랑과 사고”의 끈에 연결되어 있다. 이것은 여인을 구속하기보다 오히려 안전을 담보하고 행동의 자유를 보장하는 역설적 구속이다. 마찬가지로 시는 주제를 중심축으로 소리와 의미의 끈으로 유기적 망을 형성한다. 시는 감격 (enthusiasm)이나 발견의 기쁨, 그리고 이에 질서를 부여하는 은유적 사고(思考)의 끈으로 연결된 구조물이다.

“변덕스러운 여름 바람”은 사랑에서 여인이 만나는 육체적, 정신적 현실들의 은유이다. 산들바람은 “이슬”을 말려 “밧줄”을 느슨하게 함으로써 여인이 “편안하게” 움직일 수 있게 한다. 그러나 폭풍으로 바뀌어 어느 한 밧줄을 당기면 여인의 텐트는 그 안전이 위협받는다. “아주 사소한 속박”의 의미를 새삼 깨닫는 계기가 된다. 바람은 기쁨과 슬픔을 번갈아 몰고 온다.

-신재실 씀-

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youtu.be/5d0cTfTZsAs

youtu.be/R507EENj8MU

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#

Frost was eager to settle down to writing again. He had a 
solid file of poems in draft that needed revision, some of them

dating from many years before, and he had several new poems in 
rough form. One of the finest poems written (or revised) 
somewhere in this period was “The Silken Tent,” which he gave to 
Kay as though it was written for her, although Lesley later 
claimed to have typed a version of this poem while her mother 
was still alive. Jeffrey Cramer notes, “Although Kay Morrison 
was indeed presented with the poem, there is no reason to 
believe that she was ultimately its original inspiration. In all 
likelihood, the poem was written to Elinor, but after Elinor’s 
death, the increased respect and love he felt for Kay prompted 
Frost to present this sonnet to her.”22 Given Frost’s habit of 
putting poems away for months, even years or decades, before 
revising them, it seems quite possible that this poem was written 
earlier, then revised for Kay. In any case, it remains a 
centerpiece of Frost’s poetry and one of the finest sonnets 
written in English in this century. The whole is a single, 
gorgeously elaborated, sentence:

She is as in a field a silken tent 
At midday when a sunny summer breeze 
Has dried the dew and all its ropes relent, 
So that in guys it gently sways at ease, 
And its supporting central cedar pole, 
That is its pinnacle to heavenward 
And signifies the sureness of the soul, 
Seems to owe naught to any single cord, 
But strictly held by none, is loosely bound 
By countless silken ties of love and thought 
To everything on earth the compass round, 
And only by one’s going slightly taut 
In the capriciousness of summer air 
Is of the slightest bondage made aware.

As Richard Poirier remarks, “The whole poem is a 
performance, a display for the beloved while also being an 
exemplification of what it is like for a poem, as well as a tent or 
a person, to exist within the constrictions of space (‘a field’) and 
time (‘at midday’) wherein the greatest possible freedom is 
consistent with the intricacies of form and inseparable from 
them.”23

The sentence, as a syntactic unit, is grammatically complete 
after the first two words: “She is.” The poet matter-of-factly 
declares her presence, her being: the idealized lover who needs 
no elaboration. But as the impulse toward figurative thinking 
quickly overwhelms, the third word of the poem, “as”—perhaps 
the most important word in poetry—takes over, and the conceit 
begins. The tent is mysteriously “silken,” giving the metaphor a 
vaguely biblical feel, as in the “Song of Songs,” where the bride 
is beautiful “as the tents of Kedar, as the curtains of Solomon.” 
(One would not literally expect to see a silken tent, unless one 
thinks of silken as meaning “shiny” or “shimmering.”)

The action of the poem (or nonaction) takes place at high 
noon, in the prime of the love object’s life, so to speak; the 
“silken ties of love and thought” that bind her to “everything on 
earth” are loose, although the crucial point is that they are 
loosely bound. The phrase indirectly celebrates a married love in 
which the beloved is “tied” but not “tied down,” just as in a poem 
one encounters limits, but these limits are liberating. Indeed, 
the poem, as a poem in form, enacts the limits of the sonnet and 
demonstrates by its very performance the act of being freed by 
strictures: the marvelous paradox of poetic form.

The woman-as-tree is an interesting figure in the poem: the 
cedar pole that supports the tent is both a correlative evoking

the “soul” of the woman and “is its pinnacle to heavenward.” This 
line reaches back to “Birches,” where the boy-hero climbed 
heavenward on the trunk of the tree but was ultimately dropped 
back to earth, “the right place for love.” Here, too, Frost does 
not want his love object to get too platonized; “airy nothings,” as 
Shakespeare suggests, must give way to “a local habitation and a 
name” for love to occur in its proper fullness. Hence, at the end 
of the poem, when the breeze strikes—a metaphor for the tugs 
of pain, loss, grieving, and all forms of resistance in life that one 
necessarily encounters as the precondition of being alive—the 
“silken ties” are drawn ever so slightly, suggesting the form of 
this particular love (much as the lines of the poem are made 
visible by the flexing in form that occurs through the writing of 
the sonnet). Frost’s gift for finding the right, as well as 
unexpected, word is never more visible than in that penultimate 
line, when he writes about the “capriciousness” of summer air, 
with its aura of malicious abandon tempered by that sense of 
sprightliness which is part of its connotation. The figure of the 
wind tightening the “silken ties” and making “the slightest 
bondage” visible itself embodies the paradox of freedom and 
control.

Frost regarded the ties of community as well as the ties of 
marriage as productive, liberating attachments. “What is man but 
all his connections?” he said elsewhere. “He’s just a tiny invisible 
knot so that he can’t discern it himself: the knot where all his 
connections meet.”24 And in his notebooks, he wrote, 
“Connections and community—the basis of love, and the 
product.”25

The poem slithers through its form, the lines quietly 
enjambed so that one is only slightly aware of the five-foot line

or the strict rhymes. The form is a classic Elizabethan sonnet, 
and this particular example owes a good deal to the love sonnets 
of Shakespeare, which Frost admired. (“He often quoted the 
sonnets,” recalled one friend, “and always from memory. He said 
he could happily pass the time on train or car journeys by 
reciting these poems in his head.”)26 “The Silken Tent” also owes 
something to Frost’s consistent interest in form itself, which 
gives shape to or “informs” ideas and experience. As Frost wrote 
in his notebooks, “Inform is a good word. Let us inform with idea 
and measuring all we can of works and life.”27

While “The Silken Tent” is a crest in this period of Frost’s 
writing, there is also “Never Again Would Birds’ Song Be the 
Same” to consider, a poem that was certainly written for Kay. It 
opens grandly:

He would declare and could himself believe 
That the birds there in all the garden round 
From having heard the daylong voice of Eve 
Had added to their own an oversound, 
Her tone of meaning but without the words.

The influence of Shakespeare’s love sonnets is again present 
here, especially in that first line, which echoes a line from the 
first scene in Hamlet: “So have I heard and do in part believe it.” 
(Frost once called this line “the most beautiful single line of 
English verse.”)28

Pritchard has called this poem “the quietest and most 
discreet of his sonnets,” saying that it “has about it the air of a 
tour de force.”29 Like all of Frost’s best poems, it is at least on 
some metaphorical level about poetry itself. Like Eve, or the 
subject of the poem (Kay?), Frost has himself created “an

oversound,” adding something to the universal bank of emotional 
and verbal music. The poem is also a fascinating account of how 
human language and nature’s nonhuman sounds intermingle to 
forge meaning:

Moreover her voice upon their voices crossed 
Had now persisted in the woods so long 
That probably it never would be lost. 
Never again would birds’ song be the same. 
And to do that to birds was why she came.

The witty couplet that brings the sonnet to a close might well be 
taken as a gloss of Blake’s famous observation that “Without 
man, nature is barren.”

#

Frost returned to Ripton in time for the Bread Loaf Writers’ 
Conference, where he was greeted by the news that Louis 
Untermeyer would not attend this year—a disappointment for 
Frost, who always found Untermeyer buoyant and supportive 
company. In his place was Benny DeVoto, whose relations with 
Frost had been awkward since 1943, when Frost had made those 
careless remarks about him in Bloomington. There was also 
tension between Frost and DeVoto over Kay: DeVoto, like 
Lawrance Thompson, had grown extremely fond of Kay (and may 
well have been a lover). The DeVotos and the Morrisons were 
neighbors in Cambridge, and DeVoto was apparently furious with 
Frost for attempting (as he saw it) to disrupt the marriage 
between Kay and Ted.

“Kay Morrison was a planet,” Louise Reichert recalls, “and 
these men circled around her, barely avoiding each other—her 
husband, Frost, Thompson, DeVoto, others. She was beautiful 
but cold. The coldness was, perversely, attractive to them all. 
And she obviously had a way of connecting to them. She was 
witty and bright. The situation must have appealed to her, at 
least in some way.”2 Reichert also notes that Kay, who was born 
in Nova Scotia, had “the stiffness of an Episcopal clergyman’s

daughter.” She retained an elegant detachment from those 
around her, “a certain aloofness.” This manner had been acquired 
during her teenage years in Philadelphia, where she’d attended 
the fashionable Miss Hill’s School. “Kay had a sense of herself as 
someone from the upper echelons, though she wasn’t haughty. It 
wasn’t that. She was just supremely confident.”

Her trim build and auburn hair were complemented by well chosen 

clothes. According to Wade Van Dore, she possessed an 
“outward calmness” that “seemed to be hers by birthright.” 
Others found her extremely remote, even icy. The poet Adrienne 
Rich, for example, described her as full of “repressed anger and 
bitterness.”3 Louise Reichert detected “ a feeling of resentment 
there,” although she adds, “Kay could be remarkably good 
company—when she was around those she liked and trusted.” 
Peter J. Stanlis points to her mercurial temperament: “Kay was a 
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde personality. I found her either very 
warm and friendly, and socially charming, or cold and harshly 
austere, depending upon circumstances—which had nothing 
personal about them.”4

“People knew that the way to Frost was through Kay,” one 
friend noted.5 Hyde Cox, being well attuned to Frost, understood 
this point, and proposed a party in Kay’s honor in the summer of 
1951. Frost replied with enthusiasm, “A tribute to Kay would be 
the ideal thing for our concerted expense. I’m glad you thought 
of it and glad of the way you express it. No one can praise her 
too much for me. I have cried her praises myself in such pieces, 
to be specific, as The Silken Tent, Never Again Would Birds’ 
Song Be the Same, and—if the truth were known—the character 
of Thyatira in the better Masque [A Masque of Reason].”6 But

not everyone was as sensitive to Frost’s feelings about Kay—and 
Frost “was often anxious on the subject.”7

from "Robert Frost : A Life"

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If “metaphor is the whole of poetry,” where does that leave form, which Frost spoke of just as often – sound, meter, sentence-sounds; forming as a way of saving our sanity? 22 He had noted early on, in his English notebook, that “metaphor is not only in thought it is in sentence sounds as well.” As one might suspect, he depended on metaphor (one of loving coupling and creation at that) to show how integral form is to the poem: “Form in language is such a disjected lot of old broken pieces it almost seems as nonexistent as the spirit till the two embrace in the sky. They are not to be thought of as encountering in rivalry but in creation” ( CPPP , 790). One can take this the further step I suspect he wanted us to take: when they form a perfect union, the poem reaches the sky. In both a tribute to poetry and to a woman, he invokes a “heavenward” direction. “The Silken Tent” ( CPPP , 302) he has written “in praise of [a woman’s] poise” 23 has at its center a pole that is its pinnacle to heaven. This poem of woman in relation seems to me unsurpassed in the way it marries form and its central metaphor, and the way both work together as metaphor(s) of “She.” Frost was very proud of his feat in creating a sonnet in a single sentence –a sentence that as a sentence merits very close attention along with the image:

 She is as in a field a silken tent At midday when a sunny summer breeze Has dried the dew and all its ropes relent, So that in guys it gently sways at ease, And its supporting central cedar pole, That is its pinnacle to heavenward And signifies the sureness of the soul, Seems to owe naught to any single cord, But strictly held by none, is loosely bound By countless silken ties of love and thought To everything on earth the compass round, And only by one’s going taut In the capriciousness of summer air Is of the slightest bondage made aware.

 This poem is a tribute to the kind of woman who, because of her loving and thoughtful ties to others, becomes proud, erect, and beautiful even as she exists as a shelter, creating a home, or providing a haven of privacy and emotional protection.

 The silken tent swaying gently at ease presents an image not only of beauty but of dignity and free movement –the tent swaying “in guys” sways also in the “guise” of freedom of movement. But one guy going taut, a summer breeze, or increased moisture remind her occasionally of “the slightest bondage.” Because these are ties of love and thought, however, because they are “silken ties,” the slightest bondage is not undesirable. What is necessary and positive about such bondage only becomes fully apparent when we realize that in giving she receives; that those “ties” to others are what keep her erect; that were those ties to snap, the tent would collapse; that heavenward pinnacle signifying the sureness of the soul would fall, for nothing emanates simply from the pole. The pole stands only in relation to the guys. 24 It is important too that the ties are many, for that very diversity is what keeps the pole balanced at the center. In the relationship between heavenward pole and guys, it is almost as if the ties of love and thought are in fact her claim to heaven.

 This poem of loving bondage and of an existence based upon it is a perfect example of form and words, form and idea “embracing.” What seems so remarkable about this sonnet/ sentence is the way in which the structure of this sentence is analogous to the metaphor itself and to the relationship the metaphor expresses. The single sentence construction provides, even more firmly than the sonnet form, a unified tightness which corresponds to the tightness of the single image and the tightness of the ropes controlling the very existence of the silken structure. At the same time, the sentence, like the tent “swaying” in the breeze, comes perilously close to going out of control with its multiplication of subordinate clauses (a guise of freedom). Sentence structure has become metaphor.

 When one identifies the subordinate clauses, their subjects, verbs, and antecedents, one discovers that the sentence raises some real syntactical questions: for one, what is the main clause? For another, if “as” is used as a conjunction of comparison, it must introduce a clause –a subject and a predicate. If we assume that “tent” is the subject, what verb completes the clause – what verb that is not inside another clause and governed by its own subject? We find that “tent” actually governs no verb in the poem. It is “pole” not “tent” that is the subject of the verbs in the “and” clause; reduced to its simplest terms the sentence would read: “and its pole seems to owe naught to any single cord, but loosely held by countless ties to earth, and only by one’s going taut is of the slightest bondage made aware.” Grammatically, it would be the pole that is “made aware.” We are made aware of “its” [the pole’s] centrality to the erectness of the tent, and thus its connection to it; our intuition, though, tells us that only “she,” the human subject, can be made aware. The logic of our intuition has supplied a human subject, grammar has supplied “pole” as subject, with “tent” as inseparable from it, with the result that we have a metaphoric fusion of woman, her soul, tent, and pole.

 This may work as a complex metaphor, but it does not solve the issue of the subject “tent” left with no verb. Only by supplying an implied but unstated “is” can it be solved: “She is as is . . . a silken tent in a field at midday.” The parallelism then is one based on existence – analogous existence, and we must see this in relation to Frost’s choice of “as” over “like.” There would have been no grammatical problem had Frost written: “She is like a silken tent . . .,” which would make perfect sense. The way he did write the poem – with “as” –he has rejected the easier comparison between woman and tent, and forced the comparison, not of nouns, but of relationships. She is not like a tent; she exists in the same manner as a tent does, by means of the same conflicting, balancing pulls. The main clause, then, is simply: “She is.” The rest of the poem shows how such existence is maintained and kept upright. In addition to the image of tent and pole being bound by ties of love and thought we are reminded that these are ties “to everything on earth the compass round.” “Earth’s the right place for love,” after all; without the tie to earth that pole could not rise heavenward.

 As with the metaphor of transformation and process, of climbing birches, what is being compared is not the more usual noun to noun, but verb to verb –in this case the verb of existence, comparing the way she is to the way that silken tent is . We do not see that second “is,” though, any more than we see the pole/soul that does the supporting. The process we undergo to “see” what is implicit but not obvious or explicit is also analogous to the way we must read a poet who expresses himself through indirection.

 Poetry provides the one permissible way of saying one thing and meaning another. People say, “Why don’t you say what you mean?” We never do that, do we, being all of us too much poets. We like to talk in parables and hints and indirections –whether from diffidence or some other instinct. ( CPPP , 719–20)

 Why “permissible,” and what might “some other instinct” be? Perhaps permissible because, as noted at the outset, metaphors do open doors, but not always, and not to everyone. They do not lie, they hint and veil. And veils allow us to see through them, their partial concealing, partial revealing no small part of their attraction. Perhaps “other instincts” might be both to protect the self, yet at the same time to be attractive and inviting. Frost used to mark his students according to how close they came to poetry, and it may well be that we too are being tested, or perhaps invited. But there is more to share than the feelings or insights or understanding or experience available in a poem: we are also being invited to share his considerable intellect. To use Frost’s metaphor that combines these qualities: “I for my part would not be afraid to go in for enthusiasm . . . [b]ut the enthusiasm I mean is taken through the prism of the intellect . . . such enthusiasm is one object of all teaching in poetry . . . I would be willing to throw away everything but that: enthusiasm tamed by metaphor” ( CPPP , 719). Metaphor then is the ground on which we meet a poet’s “enthusiasms” and his intellect. But how shall we be marked? How shall we know if we are at least passing the test of taking metaphors, if not making them?

from "Frost’s Poetry of Metaphor - JUDITH OSTER"

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Frost had been a faithful husband for 47 years but when Elinor died in 1938 the famous poet became fair game. Kay Morrison, the wife of a colleague, seduced him within the year.  Frost, smitten by the contrast between Kay’s public persona – respectable wife, two children – and her passionate sexuality, urged marriage, but she would not leave Ted.  Over the 25 years till Frost’s death the tangle became ever more complicated. This famous sonnet was written when it was fresh.*

The Silken Tent

She is as in a field a silken tent
At midday when the sunny summer breeze
Has dried the dew and all its ropes relent,
So that in guys it gently sways at ease,
And its supporting central cedar pole,
That is its pinnacle to heavenward
And signifies the sureness of the soul,
Seems to owe naught to any single cord,
But strictly held by none, is loosely bound
By countless silken ties of love and thought
To every thing on earth the compass round,
And only by one’s going slightly taut
In the capriciousness of summer air
Is of the slightest bondage made aware.

ripe-tomato.org/2015/05/30/the-silken-tent/