10. The Most of It / A Witness Tree(1942) - Robert Frost

[esse]

10. The Most of It

He thought he kept the universe alone; 
For all the voice in answer he could wake 
Was but the mocking echo of his own 
From some tree-hidden cliff across the lake 
Some morning from the boulder-broken beach 
He would cry out on life, that what it wants 
Is not its own love back in copy speech, 
But counter-love, original response. 
And nothing ever came of what he cried 
Unless it was the embodiment that crashed 
In the cliff’s talus on the other side, 
And then in the far distant water splashed 
But after a time allowed for it to swim, 
Instead of proving human when it neared 
And someone else additional to him, 
As a great buck it powerfully appeared, 
Pushing the crumpled water up ahead, 
And landed pouring like a waterfall, 
And stumbled through the rocks with horny tread, 
And forced the underbrush—and that was all.

talus : 1.사면(slope) 2.애추(崖錐) 3.(성벽의) 사면

crumple : 1.찌그러지다 2.쓰러지다 3.무너지다 4.뭉쳐지다 5.늘어지다

horny :  성적으로 흥분한, 호색의.

-----------

그것뿐

그는 우주를 홀로 차지했다고 생각했다.

그가 대답으로 깨울 수 있는 목소리라야

호수 건너 나무에 가린 절벽에서 들려오는

그자신의 조소의 메아리뿐이었기 때문이다.

어느 아침에 조약돌 깨진 호숫가에서

그가 삶을 향해 큰 소리로 항의하기는,

삶이 부족한 것은 메아리치는 자체 사랑이 아니라,

주고받는 사랑, 본래적 응답이라는 것이었다.

그러나 그의 고함에 아무런 응답도 없다가

반대 쪽 절벽 사면(斜面)으로부터

어떤 형상이 추락한 후

저만치 떨어진 물에서 물장구를 쳤지만,

그것이 헤엄쳐 건너올 시간이 지난 뒤,

그것이 마침내 접근했을 때 밝혀진 형상은

그 이외의 또 다른 사람의 형상이 아니라,

구겨진 물을 머리 위로 내뿜으며,

힘차게 나타난 큰 수사슴이었으니,

그것은 폭포처럼 물을 털며 착륙하더니만,

도발적인 걸음으로 바위틈을 헤집고 다니다,

덤불을 뚫고 들어갔다―그게 전부였다.

         -신재실 옮김-

단상(斷想): 자연과 인간의 관계는 우호적일까? 아니면 적대적일까? 자연을 자연으로 받아들이고 자연과의 관계를 수립하는 것은 인간의 마음에 달려있을 것이다. 자연과 인간은 때론 하나이고 때론 둘이다. 자연은 사랑스럽고 밝은 동반자로 보일 때도 있지만 무정하고 음흉한 적으로 보일 때도 있다. 하지만 자신의 법칙에 따라 움직이는 자연은 마땅히 인간의 소망과 무관하게 움직이지 않을까?

예컨대, 사랑하는 아내를 잃고 혼자 호숫가의 고독을 씹는 사람이 무엇인가를 큰 소리로 부른다면, 그게 무엇일까? 틀림없이 그의 아내일 것이다. 그는 아침마다 호숫가에 나가 큰 소리로 아내를 부를 것이다. 사랑을 주고받던 아내의 환생, 그런 아내의 “본래적 응답”을 간절히 기대할 것이다. 그러나 자연은 항상 묵묵부답이다. 그저 그의 목소리가 건너편 절벽에 부딪혀 메아리로 되돌아올 뿐이다. 자연은 그렇게 그를 조롱하곤 한다.

그러다 “어느 아침,” 드디어 응답이 오는 듯했다. “그의 고함에 아무런 응답도 없다가/ 반대 쪽 절벽 사면(斜面)으로부터/ 어떤 형상이 추락한 후/ 저만치 떨어진 물에서 물장구를 쳤다.” 하지만 헤엄쳐 호수를 건너온 것은 그의 아내가 아니라, “큰 수사슴”이었다. 수사슴은 본래적인(original)" 형상(embodiment)임이 분명했지만, 그가 기대한 사랑스러운 아내의 형상은 아니었다. 그것은 사나운 동물, 힘세고 무정한 자연의 형상이었다. 수사슴의 출현이 “주고받는 사랑, 본래적 응답”인지 어리둥절하다. “그게 전부였다”는 그의 완곡한 말로 보건대, 그의 실망이 얼마나 컸는지 짐작할 수 있다. 자연의 응답은 그의 기대에 크게 어긋난 것이었다. 이처럼 자연은 독립적이고, 자족(自足)적이며, 때론 무자비하다. 자연은 인간과 남남인가?

   -신재실 씀-

-----------

youtu.be/utfV0HWe3lo

youtu.be/EMu46TrqspI

------------

The reasons for moving to a new farm at this time were clear: 
Stone Cottage had been given to Carol and Lillian, and it was 
unseemly for the elder Frosts to remain there indefinitely. They 
had rented a place called Shingle Cottage, in North Bennington, 
for the past year, as a way of staying out of the way, but they 
wanted a place of their own. Stone Cottage had also become a 
frequent gathering place for the whole Frost clan, and the noise 
and commotion there were such that Frost’s nerves were often 
strained. He wanted peace, and he could afford it now.

A poet and friend, Wade Van Dore, was offered a chance to 
live in the house and make some repairs—although professional 
carpenters would be working to add a bathroom and do the 
necessary renovations. Van Dore took the offer, anticipating a 
lot of free time for his own writing. It was in response to a poem 
by Van Dore that Frost wrote “The Most of It,” one of his most 
complex and interesting poems. Van Dore was a lover of nature in 
the most conventional sense, and had written a poem called “The 
Echo” in which he lamented that the only response he could 
manage to rouse in nature was the faint echo of his own. Van 
Dore recalled, “I often confided in him my strange adventures in 
silence and loneliness in the lake country north-west of Lake

Superior; but, aside from a great answer I might have desired 
from nature, was I crying out for his and not someone else’s 
sympathy after failing to find complete fulfillment in a great 
wilderness? The dark and primitive feeling of his poem suggests 
that he took my seeking as something that touched him 
personally.”15

Frost wrote his poetic response to Van Dore in an inspired 
blaze of composition, “all in one afternoon,” as he later said:

He thought he kept the universe alone;

For all the voice in answer he could wake 
Was but the mocking echo of his own 
From some tree-hidden cliff across the lake. 
Some morning from the boulder-broken beach 
He would cry out on life, that what it wants 
Is not its own love back in copy speech, 
But counter-love, original response. 
And nothing ever came of what he cried 
Unless it was the embodiment that crashed 
In the cliff’s talus on the other side, 
And then in the far-distant water splashed, 
But after a time allowed for it to swim, 
Instead of proving human when it neared 
And someone else additional to him, 
As a great buck it powerfully appeared, 
Pushing the crumpled water up ahead, 
And landed pouring like a waterfall, 
And stumbled through the rocks with horny tread, 
And forced the underbrush—and that was all.

This richly textured poem appears, on the surface, to turn 
the notion of correspondence (which Frost originally got from 
Swedenborg—who was also an important source for Emerson, who 
reframed the idea for American readers) on its head; the

speaker wants more than his “own love back in copy speech” when 
he calls across a lake—as did Van Dore in “The Echo.” Echo is not 
enough. Frost—or the speaker in the poem—seeks “counter-love, 
original response,” but no response is forthcoming except the 
“embodiment” which comes “As a great buck”—a mystifying “as” 
if ever one existed.16 This embodiment charges out of the water 
“with horny tread” and lands “pouring like a waterfall”—a 
terrifying force, utterly inhuman.

This is certainly one of Frost’s darker poems, especially with 
“and that was all” coming as the final utterance. Randall Jarrell 
called it “a poem which indicates as well as any I can think of 
Frost’s stubborn truthfulness, his willingness to admit both the 
falseness in the cliché and the falseness in the contradiction of 
the cliché; if the universe never gives us either a black or a 
white answer, but only a black-and-white one that is somehow not 
an answer at all, still its inhuman not-answer exceeds any answer 
that we human beings could have thought of or wished for.”17 In 
its beautifully controlled, argumentative compactness, matched 
by a wonderful spareness and ingenuity,“The Most of It” stands 
well above the usual run of Frost poems from this period. It is 
worth noting that Frost decided to sit on this poem, holding it in 
reserve for a later date. It finally came to light in A Witness 
Tree (1942). As ever, this habit of holding back poems for a 
later volume makes it virtually impossible to analyze Frost in 
terms of his progressive development: he did not, like most 
poets, grow and shift; rather, like a tree, he added rings.

from "Robert Frsot : A Life - Jay Parini"

----------

Of all the students Frost met, one who augmented his belief mightily by showing a determined capacity for disconnecting himself from society, for the purpose of cultivating poetic growth, was the young man who had hung around the edge of the campus at the University of Michigan—and, yet, resisted the academic: Wade Van Dore. Van Dore sometimes sent Frost new poems, with accounts of his latest peregrinations, and Frost could rarely resist answering, in ways such as this:

 "Two of these last four you sent are thrust home, High Heaven and The Seeker. The Silence and The Moment before and after Moonrise are less merciless. You are finding out. You are going to do it—if you dont let up on yourself—if you dont get to[o] conceited to watch yourself and everybody else who ever attempted it. Dont miss any tricks or arts, traits or ingredients. Look and then look some more. Its your funeral. Little I can do to help except say 'em as I see 'em. ..."

 When Van Dore showed too much eagerness to get his poems into print, and wrote to tell of those who might give him a hand in finding a publisher, Frost tried to slow him down:

 ". . . It is pleasant to have those folks out there so kind to you. But remember nothing counts but the sheer goodness of your own thought and art. Weight is what you must achieve to make a place for yourself in the ruck of rhymsters. The visitors at the Bread Loaf School of English  made a great fuss discovering a certain young Charles Malam last summer and already he is out with a book, the only really good poem in which I enclose you. From that culture spot he might have spread out pretty far. Whats now to prevent his spreading out from his other and worse poems. ..."

 As soon as Van Dore really had the makings for a first volume, Frost helped him select the best poems and found a publisher for him. When the book appeared, under the title Far Lake, it bore this dedication: "To the sunlight on the pines near Far Lake; to the sound of the aspen leaves at Shebandowan Lake; and to Robert Frost."

 Among the poems Frost advised Van Dore to hold back was one entitled "The Echo," which the older poet criticized as being merely sentimental. And part of what seemed unsatisfactory and sentimental to Frost about "The Echo" and other poems by Van Dore was a recurrent unwillingness to accept the loneliness of that wilderness life Van Dore claimed to like best. Occasionally, Frost was inspired to answer, in a poem of his own, a particular attitude he found annoying in the work of another poet. Van Dore apparently provided one such inspiration, in that Frost grew impatient with Van Dore's wistful attitude of asking nature for something nature could not give. One sought the solitude of wilderness, Frost believed, to make the most of it, in terms of natural wonders (whatever they might be), without cultivating a "troubled heart" over such companionship as it would obviously fail to provide. His ironic reply to Van Dore was first entitled "Making the Most of It." Later, the title was shortened to "The Most of It."

 Such a poem, stimulated by the intensity of Frost's reaction against an attitude taken by someone else, in or out of verse, did not often occur to Frost. Usually, he found release in outspoken, and sometimes vituperative, complaints. Yet, with undergraduates and former students who were still trying to establish themselves, he seemed to remember so strongly his own long years of apprenticeship, and of neglect from others, that he was inclined to give them support along with criticism.

 Just how much literary education Frost might manage to impart, in genuinely sincere and sympathetic efforts to be of help, he continuously refused to estimate. His only certainty was that if an undergraduate had been led, through the study of literature, to reconsider his attitude toward the important uses of analogy and metaphor, in any form of human response to experience, such a student could use this knowledge to advantage in any profession he might later choose. He had tried to find different ways of talking about this topic, and of extending it, on many occasions subsequent to his talk on "Metaphor" at Bryn Mawr College. When the alumni council at Amherst invited him to address them on any subject he liked, he entitled his talk "Education by Poetry."

from "Robert Frost : A Biography - Thompson Lawrance Roger"

----------

The other recent effort to make a case for A Witness Tree in its biographical circumstances is to be found in Jeffery Meyers’ biography of Frost, whose most revelatory chapter is one that treats Frost’s relations with Kay Morrison. What Sheehy’s essay did with tact and complication, Meyers approaches in his typically blunt, free-swinging way, providing us with a you-are-there glimpse of the poet and his new love. In a key paragraph he describes the consummation of their relationship, and the single footnote to this paragraph refers us to Robert Newdick’s unfinished biography of Frost – in which Frost spoke to Newdick about being “fearful” of the “arrangement with Kay” – also, more germanely, to Lawrance Thompson’s unpublished “Notes on Frost.” It is presumably the latter source, unless Meyers is inventing things, that enables him to write as follows: “Troubled and excited by their long walks in the woods, [Frost] took along condoms (which he had been reluctant to use with Elinor.)” 5 There follows, and in quotation marks, “Then Frost began making passionate love to her and found that she was willing . . . All he had to do was to take off her drawers and consummate an urge that seemed mutual.” 6 Meyers makes things even more exciting by alluding to a figure from “The Figure a Poem Makes”: “Frost rode on her own melting.” 7 Meyers concludes the paragraphs with two sentences I am quite unable to fathom: “Frost wrote that no one could object to being legally wed when the marriage was consummated naked in bed. But it is an entirely different matter when you have sex out of doors with no clothes off but drawers.” 8

 At the conclusion of this chapter about Kay Morrison – whose love affairs with Bernard DeVoto, a hired man named Stafford Dragon, and with Thompson himself are detailed – Meyers writes three-and-a-half pages in which he reveals “the real meaning of A Witness Tree .” 9 Of course such a phrase as “real meaning” should in itself be enough to alert readers that some activity other than sensitive criticism of lyric poetry is likely to go on. As usual Meyers is of no two minds in his judgments, telling us that the first ten poems of A Witness Tree under the rubric “One or Two,” take up “the question of whether Frost will be alone or joined with Kay.” 10 (Meyers neglects to mention that Frost’s previous collection, A Further Range (1936), organized its poems under the rubrics “Taken Doubly” and “Taken Singly.”) “The ten poems express, directly or indirectly,” Meyers goes on, “his love for Kay.” 11 Meyers thinks that the first of them, “The Silken Tent,” “describes, with the greatest possible delicacy, the conflict between Kay’s bondage and freedom as she is pulled, loosely by Ted in marriage or tightly by Frost in love.” 12 By way of indicating an aspect of the poem’s great delicacy, Meyers instances Frost’s use of the word “guys” (“So that in guys it gently sways at ease”) as “a triple pun on ropes, mockery, and men.” 13 So much for delicacy. Among other poems mentioned by the biographer is “The Most of It,” which “describes Frost’s longing for and response to Kay.” 14 Presumably Frost identified with the great buck who “creates an orgasmic waterfall, so that his mate can make The Most of It.” As for “Never Again Would Birds’ Song Be the Same,” its final line – “And to do that to birds was why she came” –“concludes on a bold sexual pun,” suggesting that “as the lady’s voice intensified the birds’ song, so Kay’s sexual passion inspired the words that made this poem.” 15

 “The poem must resist the intelligence/Almost successfully,” wrote Wallace Stevens, and Frost himself either as man or poet had no wish to be too easily found out. In a letter of 1929 he addressed the question of how much personal material should go into one’s poems:

 Everybody knows something has to be kept back for pressure and to anybody puzzled to know what I should suggest that for a beginning it might as well be his friends, wife, children, and self . . . Poetry is measured in more senses than one: it is measured feet but more important still it is a measured amount of all we could say an we would. We shall be judged finally by the delicacy of our feeling of where to stop short.
 ( SL , 361)

 The trouble with Meyers’ account of these Witness Tree poems is that it does not know where or when to stop short. The poems do not resist his intelligence “almost successfully,” indeed they do not resist it at all. Or so he presumes, insofar as their real and true meaning can be grasped and stated as easily and quickly as it takes to desubtilize them by plugging their lines and imagined situations into real-life equivalents named “Kay,” or “orgasmic waterfall.” The question remains, what exactly has one understood by so penetrating the poems’ language in order to extract their real meanings? The answer is, I am afraid, not very much. And even Meyers would probably agree that establishing the crucial biographical importance of the love between Frost and Kay Morrison does not mean perforce that we must put a high value on the poems supposedly resulting from it. We might remind ourselves that A Further Range, dedicated to Elinor Frost, contained poems as major to the Frost canon as “Two Tramps in Mud Time,” “Desert Places,” “The Strong are Saying Nothing,” “Neither Out Far Nor In Deep,” “Design,” “Provide, Provide,” and the lovely, under-appreciated “Iris by Night.” It is not as if Frost in the 1930s had entered or declined into some rut in which he did no more than rework old themes or perform his bardlike functions as public entertainer.

 Yet the sequence in A Witness Tree is something special. After two epigraph-like and rather enigmatic short poems, “Beech” and “Sycamore,” we have the following: “The Silken Tent,” “All Revelation,” “Happiness Makes Up in Height For What It Lacks in Length,” “Come In,” “I Could Give All to Time,” “Carpe Diem,” “The Wind and the Rain,” “The Most of It,” “Never Again Would Birds’ Song Be the Same,” and “The Subverted Flower.” After this sequence the final four poems in “One or Two,” are a falling-off, although “The Quest of the Purple-Fringed,” written much earlier, is exquisite. Perhaps the use of that adjective about this poem in praise of the orchis (or rather, as George Monteiro has suggested, the gentian), may suggest the difference between it and the earlier ten poems:

 Then at last and following him I found –
 In the very hour
 When the color flushed to the petals it must have been –
 The far-sought flower.

There stood the purple spires with no breath of air
 Nor headlong bee
 To disturb their perfect poise the livelong day
 ’Neath the alder tree.

 With reference to the man’s discovery of the flower he has been seeking, Frank Lentricchia called it “the purest celebratory moment in Frost’s poetry,” 16 surely it is a lovely one, a lyric instance of song that ends itself as fully as Frost ever ended any poem: “Then I arose and silently wandered home,/ And I for one/ Said that the fall might come and whirl of leaves,/ For summer was done.” It does not invite a search for some key that might unlock it; it is not a “conflicted” poem, and if, as Frost claimed, everything written is as good as it is dramatic, I take “The Quest of the Purple-Fringed” to be a small exception to that rule. Or at least its dramatic component – in the sense of some argument or complication going on between voices in the poem – is small: it has an “I” whom we can trust, who is telling us a small story of discovery that has a beginning, middle, and end. It settles , admittedly in a slightly melancholy way, rather than unsettles; in this it is distinguished from the earlier sequence in A Witness Tree.

 Those ten poems are neatly divided in half, five of them with an “I” speaking out of a dramatic situation whose level of realization varies, though in none of them is it as strongly located in place and time as is “The Quest of the Purple-Fringed,” or as it was in earlier Frost poems like “The Tuft of Flowers,” “The Wood-Pile,” or “Two Look at Two.” Perhaps the most conventionally “dramatic” of the first-person poems from “One or Two” is “Come In,” with its familiar prop of man confronting dark woods (“Into My Own” began all that) and debating whether or not to enter them. What is most familiar about “Come In” is the play of tone by which the speaker declines the thrushes’ blandishment, first by making much of their song, although in a way that hedges slightly – “Almost like a call to come in/ To the dark and lament” – then more emphatically declining the invitation in two stages: “But no, I was out for stars:/ I would not come in.” followed by the admission that it was not an invitation at all – “I mean not even if asked,/ And I hadn’t been.” Recently Joseph Brodsky made much of the poem, in a line-by-line exposition, but ended up with translating, disappointingly, the title into a meaning – “I am afraid, the expression‎ ‘come in’ means die” – rather than pointing out how Frost the trickster once more, in the language of “One Step Backward Taken,” “saved myself from going.” 17 For all its cleverness, I find “Come In” perhaps the least interesting poem in the sequence.

 Of course thinking sequentially about the ten poems is not an inevitable or even necessary way of proceeding: they could be read individually, without regard to juxtapositions; or they could be put with poems from earlier volumes by way of establishing thematic and other relationships. But if we care at all about Frost’s literary career with its order of published volumes, and if we take seriously the order in which, within the individual volume, Frost arranged the poems, then there appears to be visible a grouping of these ten poems by way of how they approach subject and reader. The first two, “The Silken Tent” and “All Revelation,” are impersonal pronouncements that propose universal or mythic, revelatory disclosures. They are followed by five more personal disclosures, especially as concerned with the lyric speaker’s feelings about present and past, time, change, and death told in the first person. (Even though one of these five, “Carpe Diem,” is not in the first person, it belongs with the others in tone and theme.) Then follow “The Most of It,” “Never Again Would Birds’ Song . . .”, and “The Subverted Flower”: large, parable-like declarations that refuse to declare themselves quickly or unambiguously.

 As for how these poems have been valued, relative to one another, the nod goes clearly to the third-person ones, which tend to get anthologized. (Interestingly enough Randall Jarrell, in “To the Laodiceans,” where he made lists of Frost’s best and second-best poems, included only “The Most of It” and “I Could Give All to Time.”) Richard Poirier has made the strongest case for the closing three poems, claiming that they suggest, as did Frost’s earliest ones in A Boy’s Will , “That consciousness is determined in part by the way one ‘reads’ the response of nature to human sound.” 18 He also claims that by placing “Never Again . . .” between “The Most of It” and “The Subverted Flower,” “Frost once again revealed his deep commitment to married love as a precondition for discovering human ‘embodiments’ in nature.” Poirier is eloquent about both “The Most of It” and “Never Again . . .” and his phrase, in referring to “The Most of It,” about that poem’s “large but wavering mythological context” 19 suggests to me that, especially with reference to the second adjective, the formulation may be of use in thinking about not just “The Most of It” but the whole Witness Tree sequence.

 “Wavering” – restless, playing or moving to and fro, swaying, hesitating, faltering, unsettled in opinion – these filial relatives in the wavering family have often been invoked by readers of Frost who are responding to the moral and human doubleness that informs his situations and concerns. The principle of wavering informs the last poem from Frost’s earlier volume Mountain Interval (1916), “The Sound of the Trees.” From the beginning of his career, it was not only the sound of trees, but more centrally the sound of sense that the real poet cultivated and the good ear-reader attended to, having acquired a listening air. There is no diminishment of this commitment to sound in the Witness Tree poems; indeed, the more we reread them, the more familiar we become with their content, the more we marvel at the rhythmic life and variety of their sentence sounds. And the more they add up to an achieved “wavering,” from one poem to the next and within individual poems. Which makes biographical accountings for them, such as Meyers’ (how “Kay” inspired this one, how that one is “about” Frost and her) less and less to the point.

from "Frost Biography and A Witness Tree - WILLIAM PRITCHARD"