I put it shining anywhere I please.
By walking slowly on some evening later
I've pulled it from a crate of crooked trees,
And brought it over glossy water, greater,
And dropped it in, and seen the image wallow,
The color run, all sorts of wonder follow.
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달의 자유
안개 속에 덩이진 나무와 농가 상공에
떠오른 초승달을 요리조리 기울여봤다.
보석 머리핀을 머리에 꽂아보듯 말이다.
초승달만으로, 또는 하나의 장식 형태로
못지않게 빛나는 어느 1급별과 결합하여,
소량의 광채 폭을 가지고 멋지게 실험했다.
나는 내키는 곳에 그것을 옮겨 빛나게 했다.
좀 늦은 저녁까지 천천히 걸어 다니며,
구부러진 무더기 나무들로부터 달을 끌어내,
더욱 수려하고, 반들반들한 수면 위에서,
달을 물에 떨어뜨리고, 허우적대는 것을 보니,
달의 색깔이 달리면서, 갖가지 경이(驚異)가 뒤따랐다.
-신재실 옮김-
단상(斷想): 사물이 사물을 낳는 것이 아니라 사물을 보는 눈이 사물을 낳는다. 초승달은 만월이 아니어서 좋다. 보는 각도에 따라 더 다양하게 보이기 때문이다. 달은 달이지만, 내가 이동함에 따라 그 모습을 달리한다. 내가 이동한 것인데 신기하게도 달이 바뀐 것처럼 보인다. 내가 달을 바꾼 것인가? 달이 변신한 것인가? 더구나 다른 별과 조합하여 조형(造形)하면 더욱 다채롭다. 달이 자유로운 것인가? 내가 자유로운 것인가? 달이 마법사인가? 내가 마법사인가? 내가 마법사겠지?
더 과감한 시험을 해보자. “구부러진 무더기 나무들로부터 달을 끌어내,/ 더욱 수려하고, 반들반들한 수면 위에서” 달을 물에 떨어뜨려보자. 달이 물속에서 허우적대니, “달의 색깔이 달리면서, 온갖 경이(驚異)가 뒤따랐다.” 자연이 인간의 상상력과 결합하면 경이로운 그림이 무궁무진하다.
예술은 자연과 인간의 상상력의 다양한 조합(combination)이다. 예술은 무궁무진한 조형(造形)이다.
-신재실 씀-
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The Cambridge Companion to Robert Frost
Introduction ROBERT FAGGEN
1 “Stay Unassuming”: the Lives of Robert Frost DONALD G. SHEEHY
2 Frost Biography and A Witness Tree WILLIAM PRITCHARD
3 Frost and the Questions of Pastoral ROBERT FAGGEN
4 Frost and the Ancient Muses HELEN BACON
5 Frost as a New England Poet LAWRENCE BUELL
6 “Across Spaces of the Footed Line”: the Meter and Versification of Robert Frost TIMOTHY STEELE
7 Frost’s Poetry of Metaphor JUDITH OSTER
8. Frost and the Questions of Pastoral ROBERT FAGGEN
9 Frost and the Meditative Lyric BLANFORD PARKER
10 Frost’s Poetics of Control MARK RICHARDSON
11 Frost’s Politics and the Cold War GEORGE MONTEIRO
12 “Synonymous with Kept”: Frost and Economics GUY ROTELLA
13 Human Presence in Frost’s Universe JOHN CUNNINGHAM
Select bibliography
Index
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Frost Biography and A Witness Tree - WILLIAM PRITCHARD
In a 1975 essay, where I proposed Frost’s “The Wind and the Rain” as his best “unknown” poem, I also claimed that the opening ten poems in A Witness Tree(1942) (“The Wind and the Rain” is one of them), is the most impressive sequence of poems to be found anywhere in the poet’s work.1 The sequence, I wrote, contained “extremes of delicate tenderness and of shocking brutality,” and its pervasive melancholy reached a depth not hitherto encountered, or to be encountered again, in Frost.2 Recently two accounts of the biographical circumstances out of which A Witness Tree emerged have caused me and perhaps others to think again about that book, especially its opening sequence, and about the degree to which a poet’s art can be more fully understood and appreciated when we learn more about the life experiences that surround and motivate it. My comments here are directed toward clarifying, or at least exploring further, these matters of literary and biographical criticism.
I
I should begin by acknowledging with gratitude the first of these two accounts, Donald Sheehy’s essay, “Refiguring Love: Robert Frost in Crisis, 1938–1942,” by far the most subtle and penetrating treatment of Frost’s life in the years following his wife Elinor’s death in 1938, up through the publication of A Witness Tree in 1942.3 Those years include, most saliently, his relationship with Kathleen (Kay) Morrison, officially his secretary, unofficially and surely his lover, and the most important “other” in his life during those four post-1938 years. During them, Frost composed some of the best poems in A Witness Tree, also his great essay “The Figure a Poem Makes” that prefaced his Complete Poems(1949). Mr. Sheehy’s claim for the opening sequence in A Witness Treeis similar to mine, but sets it more richly within the biographical nexus:
This is admirably and tactfully said, and it invites us to investigate more fully the extent to which it is possible to read this sequence “as a record of personal experience.”
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 firstten 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.”1 2By 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:
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 puta 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:
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. Itsettles, admittedlyin 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.
II
By way of demonstration, in the remainder of this chapter I shall make some remarks about the prosodic rhythms of some of these poems, neglecting – perhaps to the point of folly – their content, my purpose being no more or less than to bring out the strange originality, even for the always original Frost, of their aural inventiveness. In “The Silken Tent,” we have an Elizabethan sonnet, consisting of a single sentence which, like the tent’s central cedar pole, is “loosely bound,” at least to the extent where Judith Oster, at the outset of her rigorously exhaustive grammatical analysis of it, admits that “the sentence comes perilously close to going out of control with the multiplication of subordinate clauses.” Attempts to paraphrase “The Silken Tent,” by way of unpacking its content, inevitably feel lame and uninteresting and tend to sound like this one: “The ties to ‘everything . . . the compass round’ reveals her awareness and concern for all people and the whole scope of experience.” Let us call it rather a poem that is extremely beautiful as you perform it, say it aloud, but from which there is nothing to take away, at least insofar as thoughts about either a woman or a tent. In fact you could even say there is no woman in the poem, and no tent either. For “The Silken Tent” is fictive music played out through a grammar complicated and elusive enough so as to provide no easy and direct way out to the world, to action, to human beings, to a woman – whether she is named Elinor Frost or Kathleen Morrison. In his preface to King Jasper(CPPP, 741) Frost once considered the question of how or whether a poem leads to action. “Surely art can be considered good only as it prompts to action,” says a young man to Frost. “How soon, I asked him. But there is danger of undue levity in teasing the young.”
“All Revelation,” which Reuben Brower writes well about in his still useful book, The Poetry of Robert Frost, is an especially challenging poem, certainly one I have never spoken about with confidence. In calling it Frost’s “most symbolist poem” Brower seems to acknowledge the air of equivocation that characterizes it.20 Brower calls the final line – “All revelation has been ours” – an achieved answer “to the doubts and wonders expressed in the exclamation that concludes the second stanza – “Strange apparition of the mind!” But though he thinks “All Revelation” is “Frost’s most vigorous answer to the larger question of the relation between mind and reality,” he immediately qualifies the claim by finding an “irony” that remains in asserting so limited a revelation.”21 And he warns us not to suppose Frost “has reached a firm conclusion or final position in this or any poem.”22
This lack of a firm position is of course what so annoyed Yvor Winters about Frost’s poetry generally, and though few of us are likely to accept his strictures on Frost’s limitations as a poet, Winters identified something crucial to the poetry. It may be indicated by some words from a letter Frost wrote to Leonidas Payne in answer to Payne’s question whether, in “Mending Wall,” Frost’s intention was fulfilled “with the characters portrayed and the atmosphere of the place.” “I should be sorry,” wrote Frost in reply, “if a single one of my poems stopped with either of those things – stopped anywhere in fact. My poems . . . are all set to trip the reader head foremost into the boundless.” (SL, 344) He went on in the same letter to speak of his “innate mischievousness,” a mischievousness that we find inprogrammatically playful poems like “Mending Wall” or “Departmental,” but just as much in the lyric soundings of affirmation – the large declarations, in A Witness Tree, about “countless silken ties of love and thought,” or of how “All revelation has been ours.” A reader who does not “trip” over them, not just on a first or second reading, but permanently, will not be propelled into the boundless, a place where it is not reassuring to be but which is our true and real destination in Frost’s best work.
In “I Could Give All to Time,” fifth poem in the sequence, a propelling into something like the boundless occurs in the third stanza, two earlier ones having described the inexorable levelling action of “Time” on all things. Now the man, just because he knows all about Time’s effects, is impelled to resist them:
In that final stanza we see those capital letters, hear that ringing human affirmation (which Randall Jarrell compared to the affirmation at the close of Yeats’ “Dialogue of Self and Soul”23) but get tripped up when we attempt to specify or analyze exactly what has been declared. We are left instead with the mischievous, double-edged Customs metaphor and the unparticularized “what” of the final line – “And what I would not part with I have kept.”
In that same essay of Jarrell’s on Frost, he speaks of how some Frost poems might be considered “slight,” yet says that the sigh we give after we read them is not a slight one.24 In these terms, perhaps the two slightest poems in the sequence are “Happiness Makes Up in Height For What It Lacks in Length,” and “Carpe Diem.” Both are slim poems to the eye, twenty-four and twenty-six lines long respectively, written in trimeter – “Happiness” in trimeter couplets; “Carpe Diem” unrhymed. Especially as we encounter it in couplets, trimeter seems unpromising as a vehicle for lyric depth, although Yeats uses it (without couplets) in some of his finest verse – in “Easter, 1916,” “The Tower,” section III, and “In Memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Con Markiewicz.” Frost had exploited trimeter with success in “The Sound of the Trees,” and in “Happiness Makes Up in Height . . .” he also manages to portray a meditative imagination at work, arriving at “wisdom” over the course of, through the figure of, the poem. (“It begins in delight and ends in wisdom. The figure is the same as for love,” – from the essay, “The Figure a Poem Makes,”CPPP, 776.) He achieves his effects, in “Happiness . . .”, mainly by playing the sense units against the couplet rhyme and overridingthe couplet’s closure. It is an excellent meter for poems designed to “trip the reader” since it has in its feel, a “tripping” rhythm, reluctant (in Frost’s words) to “stop anywhere”:
It is a poem of three sentences, the first completing itself with line eleven, the second with line seventeen, then sweeping on to end the third in line twenty-four. As with the way the couplets succeed one another, there is a sense of irregularity about the sentence units, and both these qualities help to create the illusion of a mind exploring the past, rather than owning an attitude toward it all made up in advance:
No punctuation at the ends of lines; slightly off rhymes like ours/ flowers and wood/ solitude: it is an example of what Milton in the note he added to Paradise Lost called “the sense variously drawn out from one Verse into another.” In Frost’s words from “The Figure a Poem Makes,” a “clarification of life” has been achieved, but just barely, and not one “such as sects and cults are founded on.”
Similarly with “Carpe Diem,” which Poirier treats sketchily and rather condescendingly as “inadequate to the mixed complications it proposes to sort out.”25 On the contrary, it seems to me a highly adequate way of thinking about time present and time past, and as with “Happiness . . .” its adequacy – call it rather its beauty – is intimately connected with the movement of its verse. Instead of rhyming couplets, each line has a feminine ending (stress on the penultimate syllable) that contributes to the irregularity andinformality of rhythm. There is also a playful jamming-up of words that echo, sometimes duplicate, one another – both within and at the ends of lines – perhaps by way of suggesting the crowding, confusing present that defeats our imagination. The poem opens with a rather creaky personification, “Age,” who takes it upon himself to instruct a pair of youthful lovers (though not to their faces) on how to seize the day. After Age does his number, Frost takes over the poem and instructs Age on the way things happen in real life, rather than in the commonplaces and conventions of literary wisdom. Simple enough, but it is made complicated and complexly satisfying by the way the language is worked:
Three “happy”s succeeding one another in a line is almost enough in itself to demonstrate the fatuity of Age’s advice, and immediately after he says his little piece Frost plays with Age’s personified status by turning it back on him – “The age-long theme is Age’s” – before delivering a seven-line, unpunctuated sentence that makes a tricky, quite unobvious sound of sense:
The play with overtaken/ overflooded, the repetition at line ends of “have it,” guarantees that Frost’s sense will be sounder than Age’s simple “Be happy, happy, happy.” The play continues in the poem’s final eight lines – another sentence – with “the present” concluding three of the lines and introducing something of an aural vertigo (“Too crowding, too confusing”) from which we emerge only in the final line. There “present,” now no longer “the present,” becomes instead an adjective nested within the line and replacedat its end with the weighted verb “imagine.” One thinks, by contrast, of the weighty, toneless annunciation of Eliot in the opening lines of “Burnt Norton” – “Time present and time past/ Are both perhaps present in time future,/ And time future contained in time past.” Indeed a comparison between Frost and Eliot could well be conducted by juxtaposing “Carpe Diem” and the beginning of “Burnt Norton.” Frost said of Eliot: “We are both poets and we both like to play. That’s the similarity. The difference is this: I like to play euchre. He likes to play Eucharist.”26
No wonder then that Frost critics often look up from the analytical task, clear their throats and admit how difficult it is to perform that task without heavy-handedness. Even so resourceful an interpreter as Poirier says at one point that some of Frost’s poems are beyond us, not quite understandable. A recent essay on the poet by Jason Mauro speaks of how hard Frost makes us work, how the reader “must strain to keep things from splitting apart,” and Mauro notes that Frost’s genius “works at teasing out the duplicitous, complex nature of any utterance, any sentence, any word.”27 Judith Oster, before launching her commentary on “The Most of It,” says “This is a poem that eludes any definite interpretation or response.”28 This elusiveness, which I believe to be part of the greatness of these Witness Tree poems, is there in “The Most of It” not despite but because of its forthright, declarative sequence of assertions, right down to “And that was all,” – which says everything, and nothing in particular. It is there as well in “Never Again Would Birds’ Song Be the Same,” through the opposite of declarative forthrightness, in a sonnet that begins, cagily, “He would declare and could himself believe,” then follows such conditionals with subtle qualifiers like “Admittedly,” “Be that as may be,” “Moreover,” and “probably.”
“As for “The Subverted Flower,” final poem in the sequence, Frost liked to say – in his “devilish” way and while not reading the poem aloud – that it was about “frigidity in women.” The poem may have originated from an incident involving him and Elinor, though Poirier suggests that it is more a nightmare, a symbolic dream-enactment of something terrible. Meyers says that it “obliquely describes their passionate sex life” but does not demonstrate how it does so “obliquely.”29 An important part of that obliqueness I take to attribute to its meter, which is again trimeter (not the four-stressed line Poirier hears), here rhymed in an irregular, off-balanced way that gives it the shimmering strangeness of fairy tale (I quote roughly the poem’s second half):
Brower, in his remarks on the poem, says that the girl’s “discovery” of her lover’s bestiality (if these are the right words) is rendered with some of D. H. Lawrence’s hard purity.30 Yet when he quotes to illustrate this, Brower omits the very lines that are to me supremely and relentlessly memorable:
In one of his best formulations, Frost has said that there should be more than disagreement and debate in a classroom: “Clash is all very well for coming lawyers, politicians and theologians. But I should think there must be a whole realm or plane above that – all sight and insight, perception, intuition, rapture . . . Get up there high enough and the differences that make controversy become only the two legs of a body.”(SL, 324) I have written before about Frost’s “elevated play” and these lines from “The Subverted Flower, ”for all the terror of their content, are a great instance of both elevation and play, in the face of the unspeakable. At such a moment, and in these poems from the section of A Witness Tree most clearly connected to Frost’s life-experiences of love and death, he reaches the realm or plane where a reader, rather than explaining things biographically or otherwise, must prepare to be tripped head foremost into the boundless.
NOTES
1William Pritchard, “Bearing Witness: ‘The Wind and The Rain,’” inGone Into if Not Explained: Essays on Poems by Robert Frost, ed. Greg Kuzma (Crete, Nebraska: The Best Cellar Press, 1976), pp. 129–34.
2Ibid., p. 187.
3Donald G. Sheehy, “The Poet as Neurotic: The Official Biography of Robert Frost,”American Literature(October 1986), pp. 393–409.
4Ibid., p. 394.
5Jeffrey Meyers,Robert Frost: A Biography(Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1996), p. 246.
6Ibid., p. 246.
7Ibid.
8Ibid.
9Meyers, p. 264.
10Ibid.
11Ibid.
12Meyers, p. 265.
13Ibid.
14Meyers, p. 266.
15Ibid.
16Frank Lentricchia,Robert Frost: Modern Poetics and the Landscapes of Self(Durham: Duke University Press, 1975), p. 86.
17Joseph Brodsky, “On Grief and Reason,”Homage to Robert Frost(New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1996), p. 243.
18Richard Poirier,Robert Frost: The Work of Knowing(New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 169.
19Ibid., p. 165.
20Reuben Brower,The Poetry of Robert Frost: Constellations of Intention(New York: Oxford University Press, 1963), p. 139.
21Ibid., p. 144.
22Ibid., p. 145.
23Randall Jarrell, “To the Laodiceans,”No Other Book: Selected Essays, ed. Brad Leithauser (New York: HarperCollins, 1999), p. 32.
24Ibid., pp. 37–38.
25Poirier,Frost: The Work of Knowing, p. 204.
26Quoted inThe Letters of Robert Frost to Louis Untermeyer(New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1963), p. 321.
27Jason Mauro, “Frost and James: The Gaps I Mean,”South Carolina Review, 28, 2 (1998), p. 112.
28Judith Oster,Toward Robert Frost: The Reader and the Poet(Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1991), p. 84.
29Meyers,Frost: A Biography, p. 161.
30Brower,The Poetry of Robert Frost, pp. 120–21.
from "The Cambridge Companion to Robert Frost"