an approach to Frost's poem

An Approach to Robert Frost's Nature Poetry Author(s): Nina Baym Reviewed work(s): Source: American Quarterly, Vol. 17, No. 4 (Winter, 1965), pp. 713-723 Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2711128 . Accessed: 21/11/2011 09:02 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. The Johns Hopkins University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to American Quarterly. http://www.jstor.org NINA BAYM University of Illinois, Urbana An Approach to Robert Frost's Nature Poetry THE READER OF ROBERT FROST S NATURE LYRICS, SEEKING FOR THEIR DEFINING qualities, will probably think first of the speaker's unmistakable voice, next of the recurrent rural setting. Most discussions of the lyrics have centered on these aspects. But the speaker has been too quickly assimi- lated into the tradition of the cracker barrel philosopher, merely because he is colloquial and nonallusive. The setting, simply because it is rural, has often been too facilely assumed to prove that Frost is an antimodern. Instead of examining the poetic landscape in detail, critics have talked about the real New England and Frost's retreat to it. They have labeled Frost a "nature poet" and then assumed that he was a version of Emerson or Wordsworth-as though there were only one way to be a nature poet. In the 1930s, when critical approaches to Frost were developing, this nature poet was rejected by the social critics for being hopelessly old- fashioned, scolded by the humanists for an evasive pantheism and ignored by the new critics because his poems lacked (or seemingly lacked) ironic cross-currents, dissolving potential tension in easy humor. Frost's defend- ers have too often accepted the premises of the attacks-that all nature poetry is of a kind, that a colloquial voice cannot carry tension-and thereby served mainly to perpetuate the picture of Frost as a sort of in- spired plowman.' In the last decade, close-reading techniques have been applied to Frost's poetry with exciting and valuable results, but few interpreters have escaped entirely the pervasive conviction that to use nature is to use it 1 Robert Frost: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. James M. Cox (Englewood Cliffs, N. J., 1962) contains examples of all these trends. All three lines of attack have merged recently in the by-now-commonplace assertion that Frost, for purposes of control, re- stricts his universe so tightly as to make its resolutions inapplicable to our world. E.g., George W. Nitchie, Human Values in the Poetry of Robert Frost (Durham, N. C., 1960); Roy Harvey Pearce, The Continuity of American Poetry (Princeton, 1961), pp. 274-83. 714 American Quarterly in Emersonian or Wordsworthian fashion. If it is assumed that the use of nature imagery is necessarily tied to some transcendental doctrine about the correspondence of natural objects to states or laws of mind, then of course the transcendental ethic and aesthetic follow, but in a completely circular way. Outer facts must be used to represent inner meanings, and the poet must celebrate and search for the moment when the barrier between outer and inner disappears. Phrases such as "outer and inner weather" and "a boundless moment" may be culled from Frost's poetry to support this romantic metaphysic, but only through ignoring the context in which such phrases appear, the actual details of the rural setting as well as the action which takes place in that setting.2 Similarly, it is too easily assumed that Frost's use of seasonal imagery necessarily implies a rebirth theme. The very critic who has calculated the impressive proportion of fall and winter poetry in the canon, as com- pared with the scarcity of spring and summer poetry, has used his own findings against their clear testimony to argue that rebirth is Frost's major theme.3 But seasonal imagery can be used for many purposes, and a poet who hastens all his seasons toward an inevitable and almost per- petual winter is not talking about spring. The way out of this dilemma is to abandon the approach to Frost through ideological preconceptions, and to put the poet not in a tradi- tion of thought, but in a specifically "poetic" tradition. Such an approach has been taken most illuminatingly by Lynen and by Brower. Their books, despite quite different emphases, find that both Frost's subject and his methods derive from his conviction that poetry is a unique discipline with its own characteristic subject matters as well as its own uses of language.4 Frost, in the long "public poems" (Brower's phrase) which seem de- signed as defenses of the main corpus of his work, says this himself. When, in "New Hampshire," he responds to the demand that he choose to be a prude or puke by evasion-"me for the hills where I don't have to choose" (p. 210)-he is not making a declaration of retreat from the con- 2 Some examples of good criticism with transcendental presuppositions: Vivian C. Hopkins, "Robert Frost: Out Far and In Deep," Western Humanities Review, XIV (Summer 1960), 247-63; Marion Montgomery, "Robert Frost and His Use of Barriers: Man vs. Nature Towards God," South Atlantic Quarterly, LVII (Summer 1958), 339-53; William T. Moynihan, "Fall and Winter in Frost," Modern Language Notes, LXXIII (May 1958), 348-50; John T. Napier, "A Momentary Stay Against Confusion," Virginia Quarterly Review (Summer 1957), 378-94. 3 Moynihan, MLN, LXXIII, who also notes that most of the rare spring and summer poems are undercut by end-season imagery. 4 John Lynen, The Pastoral Art of Robert Frost (New Haven, 1960); Reuben Brower, The Poetry of Robert Frost: Constellations of Intention (New York, 1963). Frost's Nature Poetry 715 temporary.5 He is resisting the attempt of the New York poet to confine him within arbitrary and limited boundaries which cut him off from his special task and subject as poet. "It seems a narrow choice the age insists on" (p. 211). Running to the hills, Frost is moving toward the poet's theme, a theme which city poets avoid not because it is out of date, but because they are afraid of it. This theme Frost calls "flux." The city poet "had a special terror of the flux/ That showed itself in dendro- phobia" (pp. 210-11). This poet may rationalize his rejection of nature as a rejection of the irrelevant, but Frost believes that he is really cover- ing up the paralyzing fear he feels when confronting "flux." In "Build Soil" Frost repeats the idea that he uses the rural landscape to fulfill his commitments to the "poetic" theme. As he refused, in "New Hampshire," to write urban poetry, he refuses here to write agrarian poetry. His purpose in using nature is not to be political or topical, and he will not "advertise our farms to city buyers/ Or else write something to improve food prices" (p. 421). He denies that the times have ''reached a depth Of desperation that would warrant poetry's Leaving love's alternation, joy and grief, The weather's alternation, summer and winter, Our age-long theme" (p. 422). Poetry's special subject, called "flux" in New Hampshire, is here called "alternation." If we give the theme its age-long name, "mutability," we have to recognize the truth in Frost's contention.6 This division between love's alternations and the weather's alternations corresponds roughly to the two types of poetry (excluding the apologetics) which are the bulk of Frost's work. First, we have the pastoral dialogues, eclogues and monologues dealing with the mutability of human relations and human existence. Among these we find poems about the severing of ties of life ("Out, Out,-"), of limb ("The Self-Seeker"), of youth, pride and beauty ("The Lovely Shall Be Choosers," "Two Witches"), of love ("The Hill Wife," "The Housekeeper"), even of grief ("Home Burial"). Second, we have the nature lyrics, usually composed as tiny dramas of recognition, illumination or resolution involving a lone speaker confront- 5 References to Frost's poetry, given in the text, are to the Complete Poems of Robert Frost (New York, 1949). 6 Radcliffe Squires, Major Themes of Robert Frost (Ann Arbor, 1963), p. 38, mentions mutability as a theme in Frost's poetry, but does not explore the idea. Committed to a view of Frost as a transcendentalist, although a somewhat shaky one, the author sees Frost as attempting on the whole to deny or overcome or hide the vision of nature which he sees. But I would argue that the poems involve a confronting of the fact of mutability. 716 American Quarterly ing the landscape. In these poems, the landscape demonstrates the fact of mutability incessantly and obviously, forcing the speaker into reaction. In these poems, Frost shares with Emerson nothing more than the assump- tion that nature can be used to uncover and illustrate the underlying laws of the universe, because it operates by such laws. Ultimately, Frost's approach to nature is more scientific than Emersonian, for Frost does not take Emerson's next step, to insist that the laws of outer nature correspond to the laws of inner mind. Without this step there is no arriving at a transcendental absorption into nature. Emerson himself recognized clearly that none of his statements about nature proved the doctrine of correspondences; he only maintained that it was a possible way of looking at the world, and one which was par- ticularly congenial to human wishes. This justified, to him, taking it for true. "The advantage," he said in the "Idealism" section of Nature, "of the ideal theory over the popular faith is this, that it presents the world in precisely that view which is most desirable to the mind." But desir- ability is far from justification for Frost. On the contrary, this is the danger signal which calls for re-examination. He considers and resolves very early in his poetry the question of whether "correspondences" or any other version of the pathetic fallacy is a valid approach to nature, and answers negatively. The New England landscape reveals only the laws of the natural world. Why then, one might ask, does Frost care about these laws? Isn't purely natural truth the province of the scientist? If nature reveals no human truth, why write poetry about it? Questions such as these lie beneath the insistence of most critics that Frost's approach to nature is somehow transcendental. But the answer is that of course Frost is interested in the human truth of nature; yet such truth need not be transcendental. Man wants to know the laws of the world he lives in precisely because it is the world he lives in. He can act meaningfully in it only if he understands it. If there are correspondences, he should know this; if there are not, he should know that, and he should not then act as if there were. And the laws which Frost's investigations uncover force him to abandon, re- gretfully, the transcendental position. For he does not find in nature a transcendental unity or an assurance of rebirth, but rather the grim laws of change and decay. The poem "A Boundless Moment" with its teasing transcendental title, provides an epitome of the process of rejecting wishful thinking about nature for a more somber truth (p. 288). It describes what seems a glimpse of promise and delight in nature. Walking in the woods in March, the speaker and a friend sight something white through the trees. It looks Frost's Nature Poetry 717 like flowers, and suggests May with all its connotations of spring, hope, rebirth. "'Oh, that's the Paradise-in-bloom,' I said." But truth, with all its matter of fact, breaks in. Though it is pretty to imagine this white something to be May flowers, so hopefully named, the speaker and his friend cannot remain in this "strange world" they know to be false. They must reject a May interpretation when they know it is March. The interpretation of the mystery is "a young beech cling- ing to its last year's leaves." This reality is not symbolically neutral. The substitution of a beech clothed in dead leaves for paradise-in-bloom effectively replaces images of spring with images of autumn, images of birth with those of death. Spring flowers viewed through the blurred vision of hope and wish turn to dead leaves when the eyes focus. The story recounted in "A Bound- less Moment" dramatizes the movement of man's mind away from a com- forting illusion toward a harsh truth. The cyclic seasonal imagery which has so often provided poets with symbols of faith and hope is here manip- ulated to suggest a movement which culminates in death. Insofar as man is part of the natural order, he is part of a system of perpetual waste and decay. What hope there is for man, what faith he may develop, cannot be based on the assumption that nature tends toward renewal and regeneration. The recognition of and reaction to mutability constitute in a great number of cases the "action" in a Frost nature lyric. The channel for conveying the knowledge of mutability is nature, usually in autumn or winter, but occasionally in spring or summer. Moynihan has calculated that almost one-third of Frost's total output uses fall and winter imagery (see note 2). Among fall and winter poems are some of the poet's most famous-"Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," "Desert Places," "The Wood Pile," "An Old Man's Winter Night," "After Apple Pick- ing," "The Onset," "The Strong Are Saying Nothing," "I Will Sing You One O." "Bereft," to name a few. The idea of mutability in such poems is conveyed not only in their late season settings, but by the details which emphasize the inevitable and ceaseless movement toward death- night fall, leaf fall, snow fall. Fall in Frost's poetry is less a static season than a process which continues through all seasons, signifying the move- ment toward death. Much the greater number of the occasional spring and summer poems are also poems about "fall" in this sense. I have found only one spring poem which is entirely affirmative, "Putting in the Seed." In the typical spring poems, like "Nothing Gold Can Stay," dawn goes down, or falls, to day, reminding us in its beauty mainly of its transience (p. 212). Spring pools, in earliest spring reflecting the sky "almost without defect," will 718 American Quarterly "like the flowers beside them soon be gone," drunk up by roots, turned into leaves which "darken nature" (p. 303). Summer is a time to mourn the lost spring and to wait, resignedly, the certain approach of autumn. The purple fringed flower is sought for and found, but the discovery means only that "summer was done" (p. 459). The oven-bird, from the darkened mid-summer wood, recalls the petal fall and heralds that "other fall" (p. 150). Though Frost never hesitates to infer from spring and summer the certain coming of winter, he is not correspondingly ready to affirm from winter the certain return of spring. "The strong are saying nothing until they see" spring return with their own eyes (p. 391). And in "The Onset," that perplexing poem, even though the poet avers "I know that winter death has never tried/ The earth but it has failed," he cannot commit himself entirely to an affirmation. When all the white snow is gone from the earth, a few white objects around will still wear the color of mor- tality-a birch, for example, symbolizing (as trees usually do in Frost's poetry) natural life which is always necessarily obedient to universal law; and some houses and a church, symbols almost certainly for human life (p. 278). Occasional gleams in this darkening universe serve only to make the darkness visible, as in "An Old Man's Winter Night" (p. 135). White is usually the color of death, especially as associated with snow. At times it signifies indifference, especially when connected with the stars (p. 12). And occasionally it is used as Melville uses it to mean an enticing but unfathomable truth, perhaps delusory. The white beech in "A Bound- less Moment" is an example of this; so is the mysterious white something in "For Once, Then, Something," which may be truth, or perhaps a peb- ble of quartz (p. 275). The moon in "Acquainted With the Night" pro- claims nothing relevant to man, only that the "time is neither wrong nor right" (p. 324), and falling snow in "Desert Places" has "no expres- sion, nothing to express" (p. 386). To this traditional imagery Frost has added a whole new vocabulary of metaphor drawn from scientific law, and thereby perhaps shown him- self to be the one modern poet for whom scientific truth is not necessarily at odds with poetry. Radcliffe Squires has presented a reading of "West Running Brook" based on the Second Law of Thermodynamics, a law familiar in the literary context because Henry Adams selected it to ex- plain history." But despite some startling coincidences of imagery in Frost's poems with some images used by William James in correspond- ing on the Second Law with Adams (the correspondence is detailed by 7 Squires, p. 103. Frost's Nature Poetry 719 Squires), it is not likely that Frost found the law here. This is because Adams used it metaphorically to explain human history, while Frost leaves the law in context and uses it where it belongs, to explain nature. This law simply says that the amount of disorder in the universe is continually increasing. In our universe, heat cannot of itself flow from a cold to a hot body; the movement of heat is always in one direction. It can never go backward, and thus our universe is an "irreversible sys- tem." Since the predominant temperature of our universe is cold, the predominant direction of heat flow is from individual bodies out into their environment, and as the temperature of the body approaches that of its environment (in our world, cools) it runs down, stops working. The process being irreversible, is one of a universe getting increasingly run- down, increasingly disorderly. It is quite clear that Frost uses this law consciously in his poetry as a source of metaphor, for there are passages which refer to it unmistakably. In "The Wood Pile," for example, the pile itself provides an almost classic illustration of the law as it is left to "warm the frozen swamp/ With the slow, smokeless burning of decay" (p. 126). Job, discoursing with God in "A Masque of Reason," rejects Dante's view of the universe as a circular or reversible process where "rays return upon themselves," insisting "I hold rays deteriorate to nothing,/ First white, then red, then ultra-red, then out" (p. 601). In "West Running Brook," the man makes a parallel contrast between a view of the world as static, and his own view of the world running down. "Some say existence . . . Stands still and dances, but it runs away, It seriously, sadly runs away, To fill the abyss' void with emptiness" (p. 328). The movement of the universe is the "universal cataract of death/ That spends to nothingness" (p. 329). We are not dealing here with a modernized version of the golden age myth. The cataract is the eternal condition of existence itself. There never was a time in the created life of anything when that life was not running down. New life is continually coming into being, new dawns are dawning, new springs springing, but the instant of springing