Names, Proverbs, Riddles, and Material Text in Robert Frost

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10.1057/9780230109896 - Names, Proverbs, Riddles, and Material Text in Robert Frost, Timothy O'Brien

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Names, Proverbs, Riddles, and Material Text in Robert Frost



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TIMOTHY D. O’BRIEN



Names, Proverbs, Riddles, and Material Text in Robert Frost

NAMES, PROVERBS, RIDDLES, AND MATERIAL TEXT IN ROBERT FROST

Copyright © Timothy D. O’Brien, 2010. First published in 2010 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978–0–230–10265–1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress. A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: July 2010 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.



All rights reserved.



To Benay




Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction

1

1

The Quest for a Name in “Frost”

11

2 Proverbs and the Quest for Certainty

51

3

The Riddle of It All

95

4

The Material Text as Witness Tree

125

Coda

177

Notes

179

Bibliography

193

Index

203



Contents




I thank the Naval Academy Research Council for several summer grants that permitted me to work on sections of this book. Also, I am grateful for the encouragement I have received from members of the Robert Frost Society, especially from Nancy Tuten, David Sanders, Tyler Hoffman, Robert Hass, Jonathan Barron, and Camille Roman, and also for the support of my terrific colleagues in the English Department at the U.S. Naval Academy.

Permissions The entire text of the poems “Beech,” “Sycamore,” “To An Ancient, “The Secret Sits,” and The Rose Family” and excerpts from various other Robert Frost poems, from The Poetry of Robert Frost, edited by Edward Connery Lathem. Copyright © 1969 by Henry Holt and Company. Reprinted by permission of Henry Holt and Company, LLC. Excerpts from various letters from Selected Letters of Robert Frost, edited by Lawrence Thompson. Compilation copyright © 1964 by Lawrence Thompson. Reprinted by arrangement with Henry Holt and Company. Letter # 34—February 19, 1912, from Robert Frost to Thomas B. Mosher Letter # 44—February 26, 1913, from R.F. to John T. Bartlett Letter # 79—May 18, 1914, from R.F. to Sidney Cox Letter # 93—December 1914 from R.F. to Sidney Cox Letter # 105—March 22, 1915, from R.F. to William Stanley Braithwaite Letter # 122—June 12, 1915, from R.F. to Edward Garnett Letter # 135—September 18, 1915, from R.F. to Walter Prichard Eaton Letter # 260—November 1927 from R.F. to Leonidas W. Payne, Jr. Letter # 276—September 1, 1929, from R.F. to John T. Bartlett Letter # 290—November 1930, from R.F. to Leonidas W. Payne, Jr. Letter # 331—November 1936, from R.F. to Bernard DeVoto



Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments

Letter # 356—March 7, 1938, from R.F. to R. P. T. Coffin Letter dated January 1, 1917, to Louis Untermeyer from The Letters of Robert Frost to Louis Untermeyer. Compilation copyright © 1963 by Louis Untermeyer. Reprinted by permission of Henry Holt and Company, LLC. Parts of chapter 1 and chapter 4 have appeared in The Robert Frost Review 13 (2003) and 16 (2006) and are reprinted here by permission of the editors. J. B. Lankes has granted permission to reprint his father’s woodcut “The Witness Tree.” Dartmouth Library’s Rauner Special Collections, through the work of Joshua Shaw, has supplied a photograph of that J. J. Lankes woodcut and the painting by Alan Haemer from the dust jacket of A Witness Tree. I am grateful for Dartmouth Library’s permission to use these images. The image from The New England Primer is reproduced with permission from Special Collections, Musselman Library, Gettysburg College. The line drawings of a witness tree and blazes are reprinted from the University of Maryland Fact Sheet 619 with the permission of its authors and of the University of Maryland College of Agriculture and Natural Resources. Kevin Collins has granted permission to use his photograph of the Frost birth plaque on the cover.



x

Sorry to have no name for you but You

When Robert Frost, in “The Figure a Poem Makes,” describes a poem as “[finding] its own name as it goes and [discovering] the best waiting for it in some final phrase . . . ” (777), he provides a glimpse into an important, though largely ignored, theme in his poetry.1 This theme, which I will call the quest for a name, cuts across all stages of Frost’s career and all forms of his poetry—the lyric, the meditative poem, the narrative, the eclogue, and the play. It emerges from Frost’s works in a number of ways—from his naming of the characters in his poems and plays to an entire poem, “Maple,” devoted to the problems loaded upon a child by overdetermined naming, to a short play, A Way Out, dramatizing the theft of a name and identity. It occurs in about forty poems partially or entirely devoted to the need to name and the limits of naming. And it shows up in, and in some cases controls, the structure and descriptive details of about forty other poems that express the author’s search for his poetic signature, for versions of a more authentic name than his own, some original sense of self that resists the vagaries of language and the material world. In depicting the poet as namer, Frost both follows Emerson and Thoreau and creates space between himself and them. As it emerges imaginatively from a large cross-section of his poetry, but in a concentrated way from West-Running Brook, this concern with names and naming takes on an impressive level of sophistication, treating such matters as the actual linguistic status of the name, the connection between name and identity, and the relationship between name and thing. Haunting this concern is Frost’s deep-seated questioning about his own name and his own identity, amounting in some cases to confessions about whether or not even the designator “I” points to anything that really exists. The body of Frost’s work displays a full array of positions on naming, ranging from the arrogant persona of New Hampshire, who easily labels people as either “prudes” or “pukes,” to the committed narrator of “Kitty Hawk,” who sees the human



Introduction

Names, Proverbs, Riddles

need for “nomenclature” as the force driving us toward a union of spirit and material, and to the hopeful, yet resignedly puzzled, Narcissus figure in “For Once, Then, Something,” who finally spots an object at the bottom of the well into which he habitually peers, a presence beyond the mere reflection of himself, but can only name it “something.” This abiding interest in naming and the name that a poem arrives at as if by some magic of language and landscape underpins the other concerns that occupy this study, concerns that have been largely ignored in the sophisticated body of commentary on Frost’s poetry, politics, and life. One of these preoccupations is the proverb—in simple terms, a slightly longer version of the name in that it too identifies and captures, contains and packages, a human problem. As a testament to how fully commentators have ignored this proverbial inclination in Frost, the most thoroughgoing examination of it occurs as just a small part of Robert Faggen’s introduction to The Notebooks of Robert Frost. Those notebooks, as Faggen observes, display the ways in which Frost’s mind naturally turns toward the short, aphoristic observation, a “think,” to use the term favored by Frost (xviii-xix). About this tendency, Faggen makes three points that deserve repeating. The first relates to this notion of the proverbial expression as a “think”: Frost uses such expressions in his notebooks, letters, and poetry as openings for thought, not as closures to it. However, Frost’s use of proverbial-like expressions in his poetry has created the problem for many readers, as Faggen states it: “The power and lure of his aphorisms has made him both one of the most remembered and yet widely misapprehended of modern poets” (xx). The second point worth repeating from Faggen’s remarks is that Frost distinguished between obscurity in poetry, which he criticized, often when thinking of Eliot, and what he called in a 1961 reading at Yale, “dark sayings” (xxii). Frost explained: “Some people don’t know the difference between obscurity and what are called in ancient times ‘dark sayings,’ that you go deeper, darker in your life. But obscurity isn’t that. Obscurity is a cover for nothing. You go looking for it and it comes out ‘A stitch in time saves nine.’ But there are dark sayings” (qtd. in The Notebooks xxii). Faggen offers a further explanation: “A ‘dark saying,’ as Frost well knew, was the ancient Hebraic phrase for proverb, and it appears in both Proverbs and Psalms. The Hebrew word for proverb was mashal, which meant ‘coupling’—in other words an association of ideas demanding considerable thought and interpretation. Frost reminded his audience that the power and validity of ‘dark sayings’ was neither their inherent gloominess nor their opacity, but their power to inspire continued thought” (xxii). The third observation that Faggen makes about Frost’s attraction to the proverb is that it speaks to the poet’s notion that conflict is essential in real thinking and that it is part of his cultivation of a posture



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of rebellion against convention: “Wisdom literature,” writes Faggen, “particularly of the Hebrew Bible, was a rebuke to the Deuteronomic world of law and national covenant. Frost’s love of the proverb became symbolic of his particular approach to the contradictions of individual freedom within the constraints of social and national identity” (xxiv). As vital as they are to an understanding of Frost’s poetry, these observations do not fully enough interrogate Frost’s work with proverbs nor delve into the particular critique of them that, as Frost I think was well aware, the Book of Job offers. If proverbs are so invigorating to original thought, why does Frost so patronizingly dismiss “A stitch in time saves nine” when distinguishing between obscurity and “dark sayings?” That saying is certainly part of “the good old folkways” that Frost in a letter actually advises his friend Louis Untermeyer to follow. As Thoreau works with that very proverb, moreover, it does function as a “think”: “Men say that a stitch in time saves nine, and so they take a thousand stitches to-day to save nine tomorrow” (Thoreau 74). Also, if Frost’s attitude toward proverb-like sayings remained as positive as Faggen’s introduction leads us to believe, why does he use the figure of God in A Masque of Reason to express the limitations of those proverbial explanations for Job’s sufferings? The God in Frost’s masque, in fact, thanks Job for setting him free from the proverbial mind-set, “From moral bondage to the human race,” which put God in the position of having to “follow him/ With forfeits and rewards he understood” and of having “to prosper good and punish evil” (374). What Faggen characterizes as “Frost’s love of the proverb” must be seen more as “love/hate” of it, a rebellion against it, but a reliance on it as something which he can, as Poirier suggests in regard to the excursions in Frost’s poems, escape from but always return safely to (Robert Frost 172). It permits him to “be a swinger of birches.” In that poem about escape from the mundane, the speaker tempers his desire for escape by worrying that some fate will misunderstand his wish and “snatch” him “away not to return.” And at the very point of the spell that he puts upon that imagined “fate”—“May no fate willfully misunderstand me”—the speaker, interestingly, resorts to a mundane, proverb-like expression: “Earth’s the right place for love” (118). As with the exploration of the name in Frost’s poetry and other writings, so it is the case with this proverbial inclination: the affair unfolds as a repeated pattern of avowal and disavowal. The pattern moves through a search for a way of capturing the imponderable mystery of human existence and individual identity; it comes upon a name or a saying by which to make that recognition of the imponderable comprehensible; and then just as soon, it backs away from that naming, although even in the process of that withdrawal, it often fastens onto some fixed text—a



Introduction


name or saying—as the very means of withdrawal and reconstitution of a temporarily secure sense of self. The third version of naming dealt with in this study is the riddle—not just of but in Frost’s poems, writings, and talks. The scholarship over the last thirty years has now made it commonplace to discuss Frost’s deviousness and complexity, his mischief making. The underdeveloped area in the growth of this critical commonplace—though I do not mean to suggest that the commentary emerges from anything but careful attention to various misdirections in Frost’s poems—is the identification of a formal way of appreciating this mischief. Poirier calls upon the psychology of D. W. Winnicot, particularly his notion of “transitional objects,” to explain Frost’s playfulness. And Katherine Kearns argues that the tension between appetite and control explains this perpetual game of hide and seek that many of Frost’s most sympathetic readers observe. My approach is more simply generic: the riddle as a minor genre can become a powerful way of detailing the transactional and cognitive dynamics, as well as the dangers and gains to Frost’s sense of self, of this sort of play. Again, this formal, and I hope productive, view of Frost as “riddler,” and even as the figure who fashions life as a predicament of having to be able to answer a threatening riddle, has not found its way into commentary of Frost’s works, even though that commentary often observes the enigmatic element in his writings. The riddles embedded within a number of Frost poems operate in similar ways to the trope of naming and the proverb. The riddle, obviously, involves naming, as the riddlee must come up with the name of the object enigmatically described by the riddler. In miniature, and in cognitive and psychological terms, it requires a quest. As ancient minor genre, moreover, it is part of the folkways that include also the proverb, though it operates in reverse of the proverb: it poses an oblique question and requires an overt answer, perhaps one tacitly involved in the question itself. The proverb offers a solution or answer to an implied problem or question. The interplay of these two genres itself adds to the overall rhythm of avowal and disavowal within Frost’s works. While undercutting conventions of power and authority, the riddle openly enacts power relations, though all the while tending not toward radical disruption but toward reaffirmation of a culture’s way of knowing. The inability to guess that the “whale road” is the sea, after all, both disarms one of complacent awareness and reaffirms cultural values. The riddle also operates on the border between language and objects: its descriptions defamiliarize objects so that the riddlee must experience them anew and must attend to their undeniable materiality. This is the area in which the riddle connects with our examination of the final expression of Frost’s quest for an identity: the attraction in his works toward and reaction



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5

against a materialism by which he defines his identity as poet. I refer to this broad tendency toward self-definition as the material text in Frost’s poetry. In part, Poirier has treated an aspect of this concern by focusing on “the problem of ‘thingness’ ” in Frost, even reversing the common sense of how words and things relate by suggesting that in Frost things stand for words (Robert Frost 330). Another aspect of this concern emerges in the way Frost does much to undermine his poems as autonomous texts. Part of that activity involves his carefully cultivated image as a bard, emphasized occasionally by the same aphoristic, proverbial tendency that, as Faggen explains, makes him such a misunderstood poet. This image was also created by his public readings, which, along with the aura of authorship and even celebrity that the Frost publishing industry fostered, put Frost in an uneasy relationship with his poems. Some sense of his presence was almost required for the poem to exist, especially when we consider the exaggerated emphasis his commentary on poetics gives to the “sound of sense,” the oral aspect of poetry as opposed to what he saw as the “barbaric” reliance on eye reading. The pattern of avowal and disavowal emerges in this arena as well. With the help of collectors, particularly Earle Bernheimer, and the various ways of issuing collections of his poetry, Frost also materialized his poetry to an extent likely unrivalled by any other poet. The very object—a signed copy of the juvenile Twilight, signed copies even of fabricated drafts of plays and poems and essays, the annual production of Christmas cards by Spiral Press fusing some form of visual art with a poem or passage from Frost’s works—became more materially valuable than any sentence sound echoing from the page. Like the name, the object, in these forms, functioned as a marker of the poet’s identity almost apart from the poetic expression. In addition, many of the poems themselves, in one way or another—the motif of black upon white that Kearns observes, various descriptions of nature as book, and techniques of defamiliarization—call attention to the text as a material entity and thus curiously undermine Frost’s emphasis on the oral element of poetry and poetry’s suggested dependence for its force on the implied presence of the poet’s voice. In essence, the success of Frost’s attempt to secure a formidable identity as poet through various materializations of his works undermines that very attempt to be known and understood as a poet. At stake in all of these related modes of exploring identity—of seeking the essential name of something or someone—is not just genre but also gender. Naming, the proverbial inclination, the material text itself, and in some ways the riddle are variously situated as male or female depending on the needs of the poet or the poet’s persona at the site of expression. Proverbial wisdom often represents male wisdom, but at the most fundamental stages it can represent something of a retreat, what is often posed



Introduction


as a feminine undermining of the heroically male effort at staring into the face of meaninglessness. Naming, too, is a function of the patriarchy and yet, like the proverbial inclination, it operates in a way similar to Robert Graves’s “cool web” of language, a maternal, safe retreat from “too much joy and too much pain.” The riddle, though approaching the feminine and the taboo, at the same time preserves the rational, hierarchical, male world view. What is more, the frightening prospect of the material text in Frost’s works has much to do with its feminine aspect. The very word “material,” as we shall explore more fully, is closely related to the word “mater” and to the ancient word for tree or tree trunk. As if it were not enough that the trees and woods are alone seductive, smothering, and frightening sites in Frost’s poems, they must have this fundamental relation to both the maternal and the material. At the same time, however, Frost works overtime to define himself and his poems as material, as commodities of real, solid value. An eighteen-line poem in triplets, “To an Ancient” from Steeple Bush can serve as a brief means of looking forward to the ways in which these themes, sometimes one more dominant than the others, emerge from Frost’s poetry: Your claims to immortality were two. The one you made, the other one you grew. Sorry to have no name for you but You. We never knew exactly where to look, But found one in the delta of a brook, One in a cavern where you used to cook. Coming on such an ancient human trace Seems as expressive of the human race As meeting someone living, face to face. We date you by your depth in silt and dust Your probable brute nature is discussed. At which point we are totally nonplussed. You made the eolith, you grew the bone, The second more peculiarly your own, And likely to have been enough alone. You make me ask if I would go to time Would I gain anything by using rhyme? Or aren’t the bones enough I live to lime? (345)

In a version of ekphrasis, the persona of this poem speaks to two objects, one a bone from an ancient human and the other an eolith that the ancient presumably fashioned with her hands. The poem works through



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routine scientific evaluation and comes to an impasse: “We date you by your depth in silt and dust / Your probable brute nature is discussed. / At which point we are totally nonplussed.” The persona then wonders about the value of the eolith and whether or not the bone itself is not enough to express this brute identity, which in the third line the persona admitted could only be captured by the pronoun “You”—“Sorry to have no name for you but You.” The final stanza becomes more intimate, abandoning the evaluating first-person plural and adopting the first-person singular, who wonders about the relative value of his own artistic endeavors and his mere material composition, wonders ultimately whether his poetry has anything to do with who or what he is. Like the more famous example of ekphrasis, Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” this poem concentrates on an artifact, emphasizes its visual and material qualities, and thereby struggles to find meaning for itself beyond its own mere physicality as reflected in that artifact. Such encounters between the poem and the material world occur again and again in Frost’s poetry, and often the feature encountered has been dislodged from its familiar place in a whole, has become a fragment of some sort, and thereby, as with Heidegger’s broken hammer, turned into a striking expression of its basic, material nature. The same thing has occurred in this work, as the cooking device and bone pieces are displayed, yes for scientific inquiry, but also for their mere materiality, a materiality which requires us to see ourselves as made of just such basic parts and to question our accustomed sense of wholeness and unity. The very bone, for instance, is more the ancient’s own than the artifact, but it is more peculiarly his own, as if what is innate is stranger than the fashioned product. In fact, Frost uses the focus on fragments to pull apart the features of his own poem and to see it as an amalgam of material elements. “Going to time,” after all, means both to be given over to history and archeology eventually as mere bone and to write in meter. “Using rhyme” is another more obvious instance of this synecdoche. Such disaggregation of wholes leads to the radical question about whether or not an attempt to achieve meaning and identity through verse, which has been rendered a mere amalgam, matters anymore than merely living to die and fertilize the soil: “Or aren’t the bones enough I live to lime?” The dire prospect of life as no more than a material existence is so thoroughly emphasized in this stanza—even in the question of whether anything is gained through poetry—that it is also easy to overlook the verbal play. In fact, that final line unfolds in a strange enough way to open up its syntax to ambivalence. It seems as though “bones” works as the object of “lime,” so that the speaker lives merely to provide some sort of element, like lime, that would preserve his bones, or in a sense fertilize



Introduction


them. But the meaning of this more conventional syntax seems a stretch— how does the flesh fertilize a bone that will not grow? This catch in the meaning opens the final line up to its shadow implication, the product of its double syntactical nature: “Or aren’t the bones enough” comprising one unit and “I live to lime” making up another, a mere assertion about the purpose of the speaker’s life. In this way, the word “lime” can mean birdlime as well, suggesting that the persona-poet lives as well to ensnare unwitting “birds.” He lives to fool those bones, his materiality, into feeling they comprise a unified identity and/or to fool others with his poetry, perhaps fooling them into thinking it is meaningful. Like many of the poems we will investigate, this one moves toward a generalizing conclusion, in this case not something like a proverbial statement, but more its opposite, a riddling question. This riddling question also casts the poet as potentially the devious riddler, who lives to “lime” his trees with ensnaring material, who “limes,” in the sense of flattering and deceiving, his readers. The poem, then, troubles our feeling of security in naming with its sense that the only name for this ancient is the mere linguistic pointer “you,” nothing more meaningful and integral to identity than that. The poem calls into question its own status by inviting us to see its reflection in the material fragments dug up in delta and run across in cavern. It also subverts the need for a palliative, proverbial conclusion by offering instead an enigmatic, riddling alternative, “I live to lime,” perhaps the embodying description of the poet as Frost sees “him.” All of these functions undermine certainty and put the reader in the position of the subordinate riddlee, depending on the poet for some name that he will not, and cannot, provide. Though Karen Kilcup and, to a lesser extent, Robert Hass, for example, have quite persuasively highlighted shifts in Frost’s stylistic and thematic emphases, my assumption in this study is that Frost’s poetry does not display obvious, bold phases of development, beyond perhaps an early youthfulness and a later decline. In terms of the several related themes I examine in this study, however, certain books do express a more-thanusual concern with each. For instance, the poems in North of Boston often pivot on a saying or proverbial statement, explore the ways in which such prefabricated ways of knowing interfere with and also preserve relationships. As I have mentioned, West-Running Brook collects the most poems representing the problems of naming. In less obvious but still noticeable ways, the poems of A Further Range betray many of the traits of riddles, not only in terms of form but also in terms of the way they communicate a certain tone and relationship between their persona and readers. And the extraordinary volume, A Witness Tree, with its opening identification of poet and tree, more than any other volume, captures Frost’s concern with



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the materiality of his poems. These rather modest claims about emphases in these four volumes, however, will not keep us from ranging throughout Frost’s works—from the poems to the drama to the essays and the various records of public and private communications—as a way of delving into these largely ignored underpinnings to Frost’s ambivalent quest for identity as a poet.



Introduction





By proper names I find I do my thinking

In an interview conducted by reporter John Sherrill for the August 1955 edition of Guideposts, an inspirational monthly publication, Frost offers some curious observations about naming. In fact, he anticipates the questioning by saying, “I hope you won’t ask me to put names on things . . . I’m afraid of that” (Interviews 148). And in response to Sherrill’s first question about what God meant to him in “Bereft,” he says, “If you would learn the way a man feels about God, don’t ask him to put a name on himself. All that is said with names is soon not enough” (149). Sherrill sums up Frost’s message in this way: “Imagine that you see a butterfly, and its beauty is something you want to capture and take home with you. You catch the butterfly and place it carefully on a cardboard under glass. And to your sorrow, you haven’t caught the butterfly at all. You can examine the thing that you have under glass, and give it a name. But your relation to it is changed. Where once the butterfly had a subtle, vibrant aliveness, the very act of pinning it down has destroyed it for you” (150). In his attempt to express his close understanding of Frost in a Romantic way, Sherrill partly does to the complexity in Frost’s words about naming what he claims ought to be avoided in the case of the butterfly. In this chapter I would like to move beyond this limited response and explore Frost’s dauntingly complex sense of the name, including both his negotiation with the idea of poet as namer and his repeated poetic attempts to find or create his own name through his poems. In both cases, this theme of the name and of the poet’s signature emerging from his works involves the issue of identity that I have discussed in the Introduction.



Chapter 1


This search for identity involves the basic philosophical issues, as well, that Lentricchia and Stanlis most prominently highlight: those related to the post-Kantian, Romantic tradition within which and against which Frost’s poetry, with its Jamesian, pragmatic bent, works. As Lentricchia captures it, Frost’s poetic development involves a Romantic inclination to constitute an identity from imagination, but not one that establishes the identity’s existence in terms of universal truths; instead, that imagination works upon the material world acknowledged to be “out there,” separate from the perceiving mind, and skeptically constitutes “a self in language against” the objects in that world (Lentricchia, Robert Frost 137). One of the trickiest jobs for readers of Frost’s poetry, however, is to negotiate the encounters Frost’s personae have with the material world. This job is tricky because often these encounters quite transparently enclose a search for “the answer,” for some universal truth. Thus, while the momentum of the poems—and we’ll see this as they move toward acts of naming, of coming up with some proverbial solution to a problem, or of constructing a riddle about an object to be identified—flows toward some unifying answer, their various eddies work back against that movement, undercutting any definite sense of meaning derived from the search, leaving only signs that the fundamental elements of human experience are unnameable. The most apparent area of naming in Frost’s poetry can best be approached through territory marked off by Emerson. In two works, the poem “Hamatreya” and the essay “The Poet,” Emerson establishes the rough boundaries of one area of naming in Frost’s poetry. At one extreme, naming expresses the arrogant desire to possess and control, as suggested in “Hamatreya”: Minott, Lee, Willard, Hosmer, Meriam, Flint Possessed the land which rendered to their toil Hay, corn, roots, hemp, flax, apples, wool, and wood. Each of these landlords walked amidst his farm, Saying, “ ‘Tis mine, my children’s and my name’s.” (1–5)1

The ubi sunt? stanza that follows (Where are these Men? Asleep beneath the grounds,” 11), along with the “Earth Song,” in which Earth claims her independence from men, undercuts avaricious naming. This combination of nature’s resistance to naming and man’s need to control nature by labeling occurs either peripherally or centrally in a number of Frost’s poems. For instance, in “A Hundred Collars,” Lafayette’s neck is outgrowing his collars just as “a nursery tree . . . outgrows the wire band of its name tag” (51). In “Paul’s Wife,” Paul’s possessiveness toward his wife, who is so thoroughly “natural” as to have emerged from a log, extends to his



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not wanting anyone else to “so much as name her” (182). “The Birthplace” amounts to a miniature, though tonally more sympathetic, version of the above passage from Emerson’s “Hamatreya” in that it describes a father’s attempt to subdue a mountain slope with “chains of wall” and create generally a permanence of possessions only to have the mountain figuratively “push [the family] off her knees,” leaving “her lap . . . full of trees” and being finally unable, in a typical Frostian personification, to “know [their] name” (243).2 The barn in “The Need of Being Versed in Country Things” similarly remains untouched by the fire that destroyed the farm house as a reminder of the futility of naming: it “was left / To bear forsaken the place’s name” (223). This attention to possessive naming emerges also from the rather arrogant and self-satisfied voice of the narrator of “New Hampshire,” as he labels one thing after another—ranging from “prude” to “puke,” from “New York alec” to “sensibilitist”—even while resisting labels for himself. Naming is also the central concern in the poem “WestRunning Brook,” in which the conversation between husband and wife is monumentalized by their agreeing that the day will be forever marked as the one on which she named the brook: “ . . . today will be the day / You said the brook was called West-running Brook” (238).3 That naming, in fact, is the kind of countercurrent and so in part noble activity that Fred dwells upon in his meditation. In “Kitty Hawk,” labeling amounts to an unavoidable—if not the unavoidable—part of man’s heroic spirit.4 The act of naming becomes a call to action, a version of the counter-current that is human nature: The uplifted sight We enjoyed at night When instead of sheep We were counting stars, Not to go to sleep, But to stay awake For good gracious’ sake, Naming stars to boot To avoid mistake, Jupiter and Mars, Just like Pullman cars, ’Twas no vain pursuit. Some have preached and taught All there was to thought Was to master Nature By some nomenclature. But if not a law ’Twas an end foregone




Names, Proverbs, Riddles Anything we saw And thus fastened on With an epithet, We would see to yet— We would want to touch Not to mention clutch. (449)

In general Frost’s treatment of naming is marked by sympathy, questioning, and complexity rather than satirical judgment or the kind of purely Romantic sensibility expressed in Sherrill’s recharacterization of Frost’s words in the Guideposts interview. Frost gives naming this complex treatment partly because of his fundamental ambivalence about the poet as namer.5 In “The Poet,” Emerson depicts the poet as “the Namer, or Languagemaker, naming things sometimes after their appearance, sometimes after their essence, and giving to every one its own name and not another’s, thereby rejoicing the intellect, which delights in detachment of boundary” (Selected Essays 271). Emerson does acknowledge that “it is dislocation and detachment from the life of God, that makes things ugly” (269); and he does, as the previous quotation suggests, isolate an Adamic power in the poet to connect words with some underlying truth, to bring understanding readers out of their Platonic cave into the light of authentic perception, or at least close to a glimpse of the truth behind the symbols in which they by custom have been buried: “The world being thus put under the mind for verb and noun, the poet is he who can articulate it. For, though life is great, and fascinates, and absorbs,—and though all men are intelligent of the symbols through which it is named,—yet they cannot originally use them . . . The poet, by an ulterior intellectual perception, gives them power which makes their old use forgotten, and puts eyes, and a tongue, into every dumb and inanimate object. He perceives the thought’s independence of the symbol, the stability of the thought, the accidency and fugacity of the symbol” (270). Common humans live in a “prison house of language,” but nevertheless feel the desire to express a truth that haunts them: “The inaccessibleness of every thought but that we are in, is wonderful. What if you come near to it,—you are as remote, when you are nearest, as when you are farthest. Every thought is also a prison; every heaven is also a prison. Therefore we love the poet, the inventor, who in any form, whether in an ode, or in an action, or in looks and behavior, has yielded us a new thought. He unlocks our chains, and admits us to a new scene” (278). He continues: “Hence the necessity of speech and song; hence these throbs and heart-beatings of the orator, at the door of the assembly, to the end, namely, that thought may be ejaculated as Logos, or Word” (282).



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Frost’s treatment of naming in part interrogates Emerson’s notion that “the ground is all memoranda and signatures” that the poet, the truly original poet, can read, as Emerson puts it in his essay on Goethe (Complete Works 4:261). In the process of that interrogation, often taking the shape of a quest for the original name lurking in landscape, Frost offers a sophisticated skepticism about language and the name. On the one hand, he returns to, or tries to return to, the idea that the poet’s heightened sensitivity to language and to the world around him can somehow break through the veil that separates postlapsarian from prelapsarian language. Most often, though, Frost’s exploration of naming shows that it fails; names do not identify the “truth’ about who or where we are except insofar as they miss the mark.6 Naming, though, often emerges from the poems as the fundamental action in human nature. Thus, Frost’s poems enact an investigation into the language by which they are constituted, into the names they give things, and, as we shall see in a later chapter, into the frighteningly inexpressible materialilty of their existence. An occasionally cited passage on onomatopoeia from Frost’s Notebooks, in fact, playfully derails the easy notion that the sign has, at its origins, a one-to-one correspondence with the object that it identifies: God said to Adam “You wait here till I drive up some of these new animals for you to name. So God went over into the woods and pretty soon he came back driving a bear ahead of him. And he shouted to Adam to have a name ready to {give the bear} as he went by. And Adam made his mind just as blank as he could so that when the bear came into his head there wouldn’t be anything else there and he would get a snap result from his first impression. Well the minute he got a full view of him he got it. He made the first sound that came into his mouth, “Bear.” “Bear,” God said, “what do you call him that for?” “Because it sound[s] the way he looks Don’t you think so?” And God said It doesn’t yet but probably will when I’ve heard it in connection with him often enough We’ll let it go at that. Men will be children. Stay where you are and I’ll drive you up another.” Thus was started one of the most dangerous and foolish theories in poetry. (360–61)7

One of the most recognizable features in Frost’s poetry is its combination of positive and negative designation of things, as Poirier suggests (Robert Frost 335). This combination betrays Frost’s extraordinarily rich sense of the problem of naming. On the one hand, his narrators are nothing if not namers—namers of characters; namers of flowers, trees, and weeds; namers of the constellations and planets. Naming is as urgent as his returning to physical structures—homes, cellars, doors, windows, barns, Pullman cars, and woodpiles—in order to make sense out of an ultimately nameless and shapeless existence. His poems’ speakers, however, just as





often betray a troubling resistance to naming things—“Something there is that doesn’t love a wall” (39, emphasis added); “for once, then, something” (208, emphasis added); “the most of it” developing into “that was all” (306, emphasis added); even the “Sorry to have no name for you but You, in “To an Ancient” (345, emphasis added).8 Importantly, Frost’s ranging from name-dropping to the dropping of names captures one of the basic issues in theorizing about the proper name and its possible special connection with its referent, what Gregory McCulloch in The Game of the Name calls the “Basic Problem.” According to this problem, the notion that proper names always refer to an object, or to a description of that object, is vulnerable because routinely the material world just does not offer up the specific object referred to. McCulloch playfully offers the examples, “the woman who married Richard Burton” and “the number larger than four million” (44). A word can function strictly as a proper name only in the presence of that which it designates, as a kind of pointer to a thing. The proper name operates outside of classmatic meaning of other nouns and thus, as Husserl argues, offers a fascinating coincidence of sense and referent, a coincidence that betrays a feeling of authenticity and origin (Willems 102–3). Trying to express his notion of the purity of proper names, Bertrand Russell famously asserted, “The only words one does use as names in the logical sense are words like ‘this’ or ‘that’ ” (McCulloch 74). In this sense, the apparent contradiction in Frost’s poetry between a craving for names on the one hand and a penchant for employing such terms as “this” and “it” on the other actually adds to a rich exploration of the problems of naming. Though it is a matter for a fuller discussion later in this study, his peculiar use of pronouns reflects a conflict in his poetics between a professed orality and an actual textuality. Apart from the more famous examples of “The Most of It” and “For Once, Then, Something,” the last poem from A Further Range, “A Missive Missile,” serves as a useful, because not so obvious, example of the way in which Frost builds the problem of the name into many of his poems. One of the poems that best captures what Frost meant when he said that his poems have literary criticism written into them, “A Missive Missile” treats the impossibility that an ancient pebble dotted with red can be interpreted accurately—the meaning, for the narrator, is either “unknown” or else entirely his own private one (300).9 The poem ends with these sad lines: Far as we aim our signs to reach, Far as we often make them reach, Across the soul-from-soul abyss, There is an aeon-limit set Beyond which they are doomed to miss.



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Rhyming with both “abyss” and “miss,” “this” at the very end of the poem either explodes with meaning or implodes because of a lack of it. Perhaps it does both. As is often the case, a word (particularly a pronoun) in a Frost poem serves as both a referent and a self-referent. It refers to the speaker’s time and place and perhaps even to the poem we are reading; but “this” also refers to itself as word. Thus the beach and its particular artifact in the speaker’s hand cannot even go so far as to point in a brutally inarticulate way—it cannot even so much as grunt, “this.” As an “Afterthought” at the end of the volume A Further Range, whose dedication speaks to the wideranging, expansive nature of its poetry (977), “A Missive Missile” undercuts the whole enterprise of the volume by suggesting that the expansive ranges of difference referred to in the dedication cannot be bridged and that even the verbal signs of poetry, especially absent the speaker’s presence, cannot be trusted to communicate the writer’s intention. The speaker holds “the ocher-written flint” and realizes that its meaning “is unknown, / Or else” entirely the speaker’s: “All modern, nothing ancient in’t, / Unsatisfying to us each” (300). Frost’s exploration of naming—both in terms of positive and negative designation—reveals that ultimately it fails: it cannot identify the truth about who we are, no matter how blessed and talented the poet-namer is. In fact, Poirier puts it much more strongly: “The admissions of an elusive self are meant to defeat our discovery that in fact there is in his poetry a true absence of self” (“Frost” 225). Instead of referring to a communicable meaning, “this” only points to an object, whether it is the ocher-written flint or the black type on the white page before the reader. Paradoxically, the very inability to name becomes the ultimate in meaning. The key here is Frost’s vision—expressed early on in “The Trial by Existence”—that life is “The trial by existence named, / The obscuration upon earth” (28). The word “named” in this passage, as Herbert Marks has pointed out, can be taken as the predicate of “trial,” but also “by a Latinate inversion, as qualifying ‘existence’—the submission to language thus constituting the trial” (130). In other words, the trial of the souls involves having to live by language and naming, even though that symbolic activity cannot give them access to what they have lost. Frost repeatedly marks the limits of naming and the almost sublime significance of that borderland by describing frustrated naming or the absence of a need to name something. As I have already claimed, this theme occurs throughout his poetry, from “The Trial by Existence” to “Blueberries” (the flower without a name in



Two souls may be too widely met. That sad-with-distance river beach With mortal longing may beseech; It cannot speak as far as this. (300)


the baskets carried by the young Lorens) to “I Will Sing You One-O” (the clock-tower’s naming the hour “one” and thus almost controlling the heavenly bodies in doing so) to “The Discovery of the Madeiras” (the castaway’s engraving the name of his beloved on the rocks and the island, unfairly, being named after him rather than her) to “How Hard It is to Keep from Being King . . . ” (the poet naming according to “exact affinity”). However, the most concentrated set of poems exploring naming and the inexpressible truth in the name occurs in one of Frost’s least-praised volumes, WestRunning Brook. Along with the title poem, the poems in this group are “The Rose Family,” “On Going Unnoticed,” “A Passing Glimpse,” “Bereft,” “The Last Mowing,” “The Birthplace,” “The Door in the Dark,” and “Sitting by a Bush in Broad Sunlight.” First the title poem. It grows out of layered and repeated acts of naming. The title itself, a name for the poem, comes from the name of a brook given by a young wife at the beginning of a reflective, almost unrealistically philosophical, discussion between her and her husband. That name given by the wife because the brook runs westward and so counters the direction of all the other brooks in the area is confirmed in a parenthetical expression by the narrator: “ ‘West-running Brook then call it.’ (West-running Brook men call it to this day.)” (236). It remains unclear if the wife’s naming stands as the original naming which “men” followed thereafter, or if coincidentally the name she gives it merely reaffirms what it had been named all along. Nevertheless, this early part of the conversation, along with the wife’s personal sense that the brook’s countercurrent created by its flow against a rock waves to her “in an annunciation,” a kind of naming itself, suggests the feminine power to name, despite perhaps the latter-day, male reinforced tradition of the name—“West-running Brook men call it to this day.” In fact, the husband, unlike his wife possessing a name (Fred), playfully cedes ownership of the brook to his wife because of what he characterizes as the inaccessibility of her female intuition and so identification of and with the brook: “Oh, if you take it off to lady-land, As’t were the country of the Amazons We men must see you to the confines of And leave you there, ourselves forbid to enter— It is your brook! I have no more to say.” (237)

In fact, he has much more to say, particularly about the way in which the countercurrent expresses the very nature of humans, the egregious, resistant self-consciousness that marks the species at its best. As Walter Jost, perhaps the most sympathetic and admiring of the poem’s readers, points



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out, Fred’s reflection, as abstract, wide-ranging, and even apparently contradictory as it is, fuses the question of the human beings’ identity with the dominant issue of naming throughout the poem. The countercurrent in the brook itself captures the questioning, questing, symbolic act of naming; and that urge to name, as Jost, in the context of a comparison between Frost and Heidegger, argues, is also an urge for origins, “The tribute of the current to the source” (32). “It is,” continues Fred, “from this in nature we are from. / It is most us” (238). This identification is a name: the white wave on the black current, a combination of white and black evoking (even as a visual reversal) ink and paper, amounts to a sign about who we are. That name, though, expresses a kind of horror, or what Jost calls “the abyss of naming” (40), even though the poem’s tone remains curiously light. This horror derives from that absence and loss of self, or even the loss of the essence of a thing always somehow embedded in the act of finding a name, an act that essentially classifies and generalizes as it tries to identify something individual. In some ways like Arnold’s “Dover Beach,” this poem calls for the kind of parody of high seriousness offered by Anthony Hecht’s “The Dover Bitch.” Frost senses that and so creates another problem, the incongruity between tone and subject matter noticed by many of the poem’s readers. Though the woman in this poem, unlike Arnold’s mistress, is permitted to speak and name, and though she actually invites the man to pursue his philosophical meditation on the countercurrent, she must nevertheless listen quietly and become the poetic vehicle to rescue the poem from its heavy philosophizing with the obligatory response, “ ‘Today will be the day / You said so’ ” (238). The poem closes with a volley of naming: the naming that takes place in these humoring words by the wife—the name of the day they have just had—and that continued in Fred’s claim that it will be the day she “said the brook was called West-running Brook,’ ” and her concluding effort to make the act of naming a mutual one, “ ‘Today will be the day of what we both said’ ” (238). These naming acts operate as a recovery from the profound sense of naming as an act of peering into the abyss of nothingness, or if not that, perhaps a drawing back from the closeto-confessional expression by Frost of his religious belief, as Thompson suggests (Years of Triumph 303). This concluding series of names given to what has happened is not so much a countercurrent, however, as a “going with the flow,” as a way to return to day-to-day operations as must the family at the end of “Out, Out—.” That retreat is in fact already built into the untenable metaphor upon which Frost bases the poem. The vehicle of the metaphor is a brook that runs against the direction of all the other brooks; the tenor is a prized tendency to risk countercurrency. So far, so good. However, that unusual





flow already against that of the common brooks of the region actually undermines the image of this brook’s own countercurrent as a kind of rebellious originality and authenticity against mindless nature. In other words, if West-running Brook is offered as an example of a human-defining counteractivity equivalent to consciousness and awareness of mortality, as well as a kind of thinking that, in Thoreauvian and Emersonian terms, signals real, authentic human nature as opposed to thoughtless conventionality, then its own countercurrent moves back in the direction of conventionality, in the direction that all the other brooks go—eastward toward the sea. Perhaps, though, this apparent contradiction is less an accident than part of the poem’s meaning: countercurrency and naming is at once risk and safe activation of convention; it works in both directions in that finally the most rebellious acts are ultimately quite conventional ones.10 In a poem enacting metaphorical naming, it does fit that the limit of the metaphorical venture, the site of its failure, is inscribed within it. The least skeptical of the naming poems in West-Running Brook is “Sitting by a Bush in Broad Sunlight.” The poem uses a narrator’s experience of catching a ray of sunlight between thumb and fingers as the pretext for a meditation on how far removed we are from the Creation, “When dust really took in the sun” (244) and formed breathing life. Just because we haven’t actually seen “sun-smitten slime / Again come to life and crawl off” (244) does not mean it didn’t happen, offers the speaker.11 Then he immediately alludes to God’s true, speaking presence as declared in the burning bush as well as to God’s lasting withdrawal. This curious combination of Darwinian and Old Testament versions of creation expresses vividly our separation from some original, paradisal state; and yet it need not mean that truth is unrecoverable: God once spoke to people by name. The sun once imparted its flame. One impulse persists as our breath; The other persists as our faith. (244)

The difference between the two states resembles the difference between the souls in heaven and those infused into flesh on earth in “Trial by Existence”: God “once declared he was true” and spoke to humans “by name” (244); after that, however, he departed, leaving them separated from the realm of dependable naming and having to rely on a diminished version of that authoritative voicing—human language, “our breath,” which never can resemble, except insofar as there is faith, the original language symbolized by the burning bush and the act of naming. Such a search for origin as this poem plays out, in fact, often accompanies the search



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for a name, and the failures of that search amount to failures of naming. Frost later plays with this idea of an original, infallible language when he has God tell Job in A Masque of Reason, “By proper names I find I do my thinking” (379). Frost’s poems concerned with naming, then, participate in “the post-Kantian doubt about the certainty of knowledge . . . and the questions of how one reads inner meaning from outer shape” described by Irwin in American Hieroglyphics. “These basic questions of meaning,” he explains, “inevitably turn out to be questions of origin and ends. From the time of the Romantic poets on, the investigation of man’s linguistic relationship to the world frequently takes the form of literary works whose inquiry into the origin of their own written presence on the page is a synecdoche for the inquiry into the simultaneous origin of man and the world in the act of symbolization” (55). We have already touched on the way in which “The Birthplace” represents the futility of naming as an attempt at possession. This meaning to a certain extent undermines the more self-satisfied naming done in WestRunning Brook’s title poem. As Katherine Kearns and Mark Richardson point out, “The Birthplace” also allegorizes what occurs in a muted form in “West-Running Brook”: the competition between male naming and imposition of order on the one hand and a subversive sense of unruly, female materiality and natural marking of the landscape on the other (Kearns 19–21; Richardson 47–48). Even the seemingly innocent smile in the lines “The mountain seemed to like the stir, / And made of us a little while— / With always something in her smile” (243) contains within it the dread of castration by the vagina dentate. Other poems—“On Going Unnoticed,” “The Last Mowing,” and “A Passing Glimpse”—explore the way unsuccessful naming marks off a region of powerful meaning, that margin between the namable and the unnamable. “On Going Unnoticed” treats a second-person protagonist who looks up into “the tumult of free leaves on high” (226), amid which din any speech is vain. The question that the narrator asks of his protagonist is one of identity: “What are you, in the shadow of trees / Engaged up there with the light and breeze?” (226). Grasping the bark of trees, the “you” in the poem “look[s] up small from the forest’s feet” and notices that the only leaf that the tree drops “goes wide, / [His] name not written on either side” (226). Couched allusively in terms of Macbeth’s own futile attempt to achieve—and be certain about—a name as he “frets his hour upon the stage,” the frustrated quest by Frost’s protagonist for his name ends with a compensatory theft a là those namers in Emerson’s “Hamatreya”: You linger your little hour and are gone, And still the woods sweep leafily on,




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In the “A Passing Glimpse” and “The Last Mowing,” the unnamable site or thing marks that which is meaningful. Neither poem emphasizes so much the poet’s anxiety over namelessness as the mystical nature of it. In “A Passing Glimpse,” the narrator thinks he glimpses flowers beside the tracks as his train car rushes past: he names all the flowers he is sure they are not— fireweed, bluebells, and lupine—and finally asks if something had not just “brushed across [his] mind / That no one on earth will ever find?” (227). The poem ends with the following aphorism: “Heaven gives its glimpses only to those / Not in position to look too close” (227). Frustrated naming, even if suggested as an opening onto the wonderful mystery of things, gives way, interestingly, to one of the other miniature genres of naming we will investigate later in this study, the proverb. Because the poem and its dedication monumentalize Frost’s reading of Ridgely Torrence’s volume of poems, Hesperides, the issues of naming and inexpressibility relate particularly to the kind of meaning, the kind of truth, captured by poetry: that meaning has more to do with the extent to which the poem marks off the unnamed territory and experience than with the things it can name. This unnamable and therefore sublimely precious experience is also the subject of “The Last Mowing.” Abandoned for the purposes of mowing, “Faraway Meadow” (the named spot of the unnamable experience) offers a glimpse of wildness, of a place where “tumultuous flowers” can “go to waste and go wild in, / All shapes and colors of flowers,” which the speaker need not call “by name” (243). The process of naming marks off a site for whose “wildness” names are irrelevant. Naming is thus important, but not so much for what it identifies as for what it suggests remains inexpressible, uncapturable.13 To this extent, it is not, as in Emerson, the unlocking of this inaccessible realm of meaning that the poem is about so much as the very marking off of the limits of expression, the venturing to that borderland of language where meaning and naming must fail. The poem monumentalizes the failure of naming. Two other poems, again from West-Running Brook, without overtly referring to the act of naming, subtly identify this borderland marked off by names. The first is “Bereft,” one of Frost’s poems of terror, according to Lionel Trilling. At home by himself, the speaker holds open his “restive door” looking out upon the threatening weather—complete with “clouds massed,” leaves forming a coil and hissing, and “Something sinister in the tone” of it all that told him his “secret must be known”: Word I was in the house alone Somehow must have gotten abroad,



Not even missing the coral-root flower You took as a trophy of the hour. (226)12


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The use of “Word” here depends on the common expression, “word is out.” It also quite boldly alludes to the beginning of John: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God.” Because of this allusion, “Word” functions, at least in part, as name. The repetition of “Word I was” and the beginning of the last line, “Word I had,” suggest that the speaker is nothing if not “Word,” and thus involved in language. His very identity is words; and as mere word(s) he is bereft, separated from everything and everyone around him, including himself because, after all, the repetition of “Word I” merely emphasizes the strange difference between the arbitrary expression that identifies him—“I” as just a word—and the “essential” entity to which, he thought, “I” referred. Frost’s reported statement about the pronoun “I” after a public reading of “Mending Wall,” I think, captures this arbitrariness about words, labels, and pronouns. It is the feeling we can sometimes have when we just repeat a word or name over and over again and it becomes mere sound, detached from what we had assumed was its fixed referential anchor. Frost said, “The more I say I the more I always mean something else” (qtd. in Mauro, 104). After reciting “The Silken Tent” on another occasion, he reportedly offered, “I sometimes think that there is no I” (qtd. in Mauro 104). Importantly, our focus here highlights how much like the confining settings emphasized by scholars—houses and woods—names and words are, so that those settings themselves turn back upon the language describing them as a reflection of their own limiting function. The house in which Frost’s speaker is alone is the house also of the words by which he must construct, maintain, protect, and never discover his identity. Given these offhand but revelatory remarks that Frost made, the seemingly light “The Door in the Dark” addresses more than a blow that a door gave the speaker on the head—even more than the wonderful irony of the door that Frost occasionally depicted as his primary self-protective device becoming the instrument of harm. The speaker reaches out his hands while going through the dark in order “to save [his] face” (243), a Frostian reformulation of “to save face” that suggests the customary, socially driven meaning of this symbolic act. Neglecting to close the arc of his arms and hands, he slams into a door that gets in past his guard. The result is a jarring of his “native simile,” so that “people and things don’t pair any more / With what they used to pair with before” (243). Ostensibly an injury to his head, the real damage is done to customary language. A kind of wound, this jarring of custom provides an opening onto the arbitrariness of what



Word I was in my life alone, Word I had no one left but God. (230)


before seemed a natural, native connection between the signified and the signifier. “The Rose Family,” regarded as a rather simple piece, also offers a surprisingly complex view of naming. Ostensibly a poem refuting Juliet’s nominalistic argument about names, the poem ultimately reaffirms the arbitrariness of naming: The rose is a rose, And was always a rose. But the theory now goes That the apple’s a rose, And the pear is, and so’s The plum, I suppose. The dear only knows What will next prove a rose. You, of course, are a rose— But were always a rose. (225)

The poem seems to affirm a single truth—that the beloved is authentically a rose. If a rose “was always a rose,” however, it cannot follow that the beloved was “always a rose.” When he employs the seemingly innocent “The dear only knows,” Frost also invites a radical process of substitution that undermines any absolutist sense of language: “dear” invites “deer” and, as well, “rose” invites “roes,” so that the fundamental linguistic stability apparently being affirmed is undercut by linguistic playfulness.14 This punning, I think it is worth noting, expresses what Robert Faggen regards as the influence of Darwin’s “nominalism” on “Frost’s poetry (Robert Frost 23 and 204). More specifically, the substitution of the punning “dear” for “God” (“God only knows” > “The dear only knows”), as this observation by Faggen implies, substitutes “the Lucretian and Darwinian love of procreation” for a divine plan (204). Frost’s poem, then, ends with a dramatization of the speaker’s very human need to assert some constant underlying principle. Its radical textuality, in other words, undoes the speaker even while he cleverly and fondly asserts the power of love: naming is arbitrary, though the need for an Adamic, original sense of naming persists even in the face of the recognition that origins are inaccessible. Because of its relevance to Frost’s short poem, with its allusion to Juliet’s problem with naming Romeo, and also to Frost’s public doubts about the existence of an “I,” Derrida’s discussion of signature and naming might also prove helpful here. In Glas, Derrida suggests what is lost through the name in the particular form of the signature: “When I sign, I am already dead because . . . its singular referent—me—will have already submitted to the requirement of its generalization in order to



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signify itself. I cannot say—or sign—what I mean, and I say precisely what I do not mean. By the same token, ‘I’ spells the death of me; it is already the effacement of a singular nature in a common sig-nature” (qtd. in Kamuf 5). In “Signature Event Context,” Derrida even more starkly makes another observation about the absence involved in authentication: “By definition, a written signature implies the actual or empirical non-presence of the signer” (qtd. in Hancher 229). To be authentic, according to this thinking, the signature must be iterative, but because it conforms to a model and implies, in fact, the nonpresence of the signer, it also testifies to its signer’s absence. This verification through the very device that testifies to absence, the signature, works also with the name, a linguistic device usually seen as a tag for something actually present.15 Derrida explains this matter in “Aphorism Countertime,” a discussion of the name of Romeo Montague. The ambivalence in Romeo’s name, as with everyone’s name, is that the name depends at once on the separability of name and named and on their inseparability. One can call to someone in his absence, as Juliet does to Romeo, only because the name and the bearer are not the same; and yet because one can in fact call to that person, the bearer and the name are at some level inseparable. Juliet, for instance, gains the attention of Romeo from the balcony by calling his name, and yet her purpose for calling out his name is to argue for the separability of him from his name: “Romeo, doff thy name, / And for thy name, which is not part of thee, / Take all myself ” (II.ii. 47–49). Derrida comments: “A proper name does not name anything which is human, which belongs to the human body, a human spirit, an essence of man. And yet this relation to the inhuman only befalls man, for him, to him, in the name of man. He alone gives himself this inhuman name. And Romeo would not be what he is, a stranger to his name, without his name” (qtd. in Schalkwyk 184–85). One of Frost’s last poems to explore the desire for, but ultimate impossibility of, original naming is the lively narrative from In the Clearing, “How Hard It Is to Keep from Being King When It’s in You and in the Situation.” The premise of the narrative—that there is something essential in a person that makes him almost one with what he is called, a king—anticipates, of course, what will be asserted about the poet’s power to name as well: that in apparently neat agreement with Emerson, the poet, unlike the ungifted characters and speakers in the poems from West-Running Brook whose naming usually fails, can name infallibly, just as the king, for instance, can identify the quintessence of many things, including authentic and fake jewels. The relevant passage, spoken by the king’s son, who is a beggar-minstrel at this stage in the




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The reason artists show so little interest In public freedom is because the freedom They’ve come to feel the need of is a kind No one can give them—they can scarce attain— The freedom of their own material: So, never at a loss in simile, They can command the exact affinity Of anything they are confronted with. This perfect moment of unbafflement, When no man’s name and no noun’s adjective But summons out of nowhere like a jinni. We know not what we owe this moment to. (469)

This passage follows one in which the son-poet asserts the priority of blank verse over free verse by referring to its divine origins in a name: “Tell them Iamb, Jehovah said, and meant it” (469). When the poet is free of worldly entanglements, the argument in this passage about poetic epiphanies runs, naming can be a process of unbafflement rather than bafflement as is the case in the other poems we have encountered. At times, by virtue of some sort of aesthetic grace, naming occurs in a way that locates an origin, that ensures one that something more than mere arbitrariness and convention controls the process, that identifies something close to truth. However, the very description of this process threatens to undermine the passage’s claim to any certainty in scenes of nomination. What is exact is “affinity,” not identification, a relationship of resemblances still, rather than one between a “real” and that which represents it. Moreover, the curious explosion of negatives— “no man’s name,” “no noun’s adjective,” “summons out of nowhere,” and “We know not”—has the force of undermining the offered assertion. Even “know”—as a homophone of “no”—contributes to this negation undercutting the apparent tone of affirmation. The confusion in the apostrophes as to whether they indicate the possessive or the contraction —“no man’s name and no noun’s adjective”—suggests, at least in terms of the name, that the moment of unbafflement comes when man is no mere name, when, even in the verbal art of poetry, man becomes nameless, a simple, material entity. Thus, even though this late and vitally important passage seems to return to Emerson’s view of poet as namer, it at the same time unfolds in language that troubles that optimistic assertion. Typically, while the poem seems to swing toward some affirmation, its own countercurrents undercut that affirmation. It is as if what Frost called the sentence sounds of the work, the force of its intonations, are modified by the uncontrollable play of the text.



poem, addresses a topic close to Frost: the freedom that matters to the poet, a freedom not of politics and voting, but of his “material”:


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The notion in the above passage from “How Hard It Is . . . ” —that the poet and/or the poem’s speaker locates a real name in venturing to express that which disappears on naming— marks another intriguing aspect of this theme of naming and identity: not only do Frost’s poems work with and against the Emersonian proposition that the poet is the namer, the one who can disclose the right or real name of people, places, and things without claiming possession of them, but they also map out with surprising frequency the poet’s search for his own “specular name.” “Specular name” is Geoffrey Hartman’s adaptation of Lacan’s specular image, that irreducibly authentic, though elusive, sense of identity for which we are doomed to search once we have entered the symbolic realm of language. “There may be,” Hartman writes, “such a thing as a specular name or ‘imago du nom propre’ in the fantasy development of the individual, a name more genuinely one’s own than a signature or proper name” (101). He continues: “So naming and the problem of identity cannot be dissociated. So literature and the problem of identity cannot be dissociated. Literature is at once onomatopoeic (name-making) and onomatoclastic (name-breaking). The true name of a writer is not given by his signature, but is spelled out by his entire work. The bad or empty name or nicknaming may be countered by the melodious or bardic magic of art” (128). Hartman goes on to quote from Thoreau’s “Walking,” which Frost must have read: There is nothing in a name. The name Menschikoff, for instance, has nothing in it to my ears more human than a whisker, and it may belong to a rat. As the names of the Poles and Russians are to us, so are ours to them. It is as if they had been named by the child’s rigmarole, Iery wiery ichery ban, tittle-tol-tam . . . At present our only true names are nicknames . . . We have a wild savage in us, and a savage name is perchance somewhere recorded as ours . . . I see that my neighbor, who bears the familiar epithet William or Edwin, takes it off with his jacket. It does not adhere to him when asleep or in anger, or aroused by any passion or inspiration. I seem to hear pronounced by some of his kin at such a time his original wild name in some jaw-breaking or else melodious tongue. (128)

Like his character Maple in the narrative about a girl whose mother named her for a tree, Frost himself bore a name overdetermined by meaning. And his poems play out his own struggle with this name, his attempt to find the original, wild, specular name beneath the conventional one. More of Hartman’s description emphasizes the forces of this quest: “The specular name or identity phrase—our true rather than



“Frost knots on an airy gauze”


merely proper name—is affirmed in time by a textual mimicry, joyful, parodistic, or derisory, of the original ‘magnification.’ The repetition of the specular name gives rise to texts that seem to be anagrammatic or to conceal an unknown-unknowable key, a ‘pure’ signifier. These texts are called literature” (102). Not just Frost’s personal concern, that struggle is also unavoidably the ultimate function of art, as in some ways we have already seen from the poems dealing more overtly with naming: “The most art can do . . . is to burn through, in its cold way, the desire for selfdefinition, fullness of grace, presence; simply to expose the desire to own one’s own name, to inhabit it numinously in the form of “proper” noun, words, or the signatory act each poem aspires to be” (110). Frost’s Southern Democrat father named him after the confederate Robert E. Lee. The family name “Frost,” as we occasionally see in Frost’s letters, was also material for a good deal of punning and, by the way, revelation of character. In letters to Cox (Parini 194) and McVeigh (Selected Letters 296), for instance, he characterizes his tendency toward anger and a distanced self-protection as “frostiness”; in another letter from England in December of 1912 to his employer of the year before, Ernest Silver, Frost refers to a recent headline in a British paper—ENGLAND IN THE GRIP OF FROST—and goes on to say, “I accept the omen, says I. I accept the omen. Better so than that Frost should be in the grip of England” (Selected Letters 59). Judith Oster offers the following examples: (1) [I’m] not the same frost as I was when winter came on last year”; (2) “In this case it is the frosts we are running away from and Frosts can hardly help going with us since Frost we are ourselves. If you ever talk of me in print you may notice that it is my frostiness that is more and more played up. I am cold, snow-dusted and all that”; (3) and in a letter to his daughter Lesley, “It is material that has come to the surface of my mind in reading just as frost brings stones to the surface of the ground” (203, n. 3). That Frost puns on his name, or riddles on it, within his poems has not, of course, gone undetected. Helen Vendler, Norman Holland (29), Frank Lentricchia (104), and Robert Fleissner (115–16), for instance, mention such punning. They do so in suggesting it as the answer to the question in “Mending Wall”: it is the “frozen ground swell” (i.e., “Frost”) that does not love a wall. In discussing “Directive,” Charles Berger refers to the habit in this way: “Frost inscribes himself upon the landscape through a favorite trick: ringing changes on his own name. The spirit of this place is ‘an enormous Glacier’—‘Frost’ writ large: ‘You must not mind a certain coolness from him / Still said to haunt this side of Panther Mountain.’ ” Berger goes on to say that “for Frost there is a kind of mystic attunement, a baptismal bond, between his own name and the waters he calls ‘Cold as a spring as yet so near its source’ ” (162).



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What is more, David Bleich, based on his investigations in Subjective Criticism into all sorts of readers’ reactions to literature, discovered that for uninformed readers the association of Frost’s name with his white hair and winter seemed to provide a sense of comforting familiarity with Frost’s poems (272). But this is only half of it. The word “frost” is etymologically related to “burn,” the Latin pruina, “hoar-frost,” and prūna, “live coal,” both deriving from the root preus (American Heritage 2121). An accomplished Latinist, Frost would likely have observed this fascinating coincidence. He even might have been haunted by the fact that “frost” is also etymologically related to “prurient.” Be that as it may, our appreciation of this “favorite trick” of Frost’s, this reflexive depiction of his name in his poetry, remains incomplete without our noticing the fire and the ice. In a way most intimately related to Frost’s sense of identity, then, his world can easily end with fire or ice. To the extent that the proper name, in a way, can kill, the name Frost, as either fire or ice, kills its bearer: his world ends through writing. Thus, the short, well-known lyric “Fire and Ice” is not just prophecy but also an expression of authorial anxiety about identity; and in that way, it can be seen as the signature poem in Frost’s canon. Importantly though, we must remember Hartman’s notion that the author’s entire work, not just a single poem, constructs this signature activity. Lentricchia also emphasizes this sense of continuity in Frost’s “poetics of the self: in addressing what he calls the “obsessive images” in Frost’s poems, he observes that these images unfold in particular poems in ways that carry experiences from other poems, though “fashioned anew” (42). Insofar as it tries to reclaim a more original version of “Frost” in various facets of the specular name, in those subtle but also obsessive identity images of fire and ice, Frost’s entire body of writing also tries to reclaim a world in which name and identity are one. Frost’s inscription of himself into the landscape, to employ Berger’s especially apt phrasing, is a form of buried punning, but it is a deadly serious punning in the way the authorial signature described by Hartman and Thoreau is serious. Living in the garb of an inherited, overdetermined name, Frost at once casts it off and seeks it afresh, as part of some “jawbreaking or melodious tongue” that he creates in his own poetry. Thus, his poems often depict a discovery of this name without actually punning on it: “frost” appears only nine times and “frosty” only three in all of Frost’s poems (A Concordance 204). In “The Figure a Poem Makes,” Frost describes that “figure”—that image of the specular name—in terms of the self-suggesting imagery of the fire and ice buried in the name, not in terms of the name itself: “The figure is the same as for love. Like a piece of




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Like ice shrieking across a red-hot griddle, his poetry does, indeed, ride on its own melting. One cannot, and Frost has ensured this absolutely with his unstable irony, make a validated choice between the fire and the ice, or between the language, so insistently mundane, and the potent oversound. Fire and ice are, after all, the inextricable complementarities of one apocalyptic vision: the endlessly regenerative cycle of desire and (self) hatred that necessarily brings the productive poet to scourge his own voice as he mocks both the poetic vocation and the state of which poetry—and if poetry then all language—has come.” (159)

I have called “Fire and Ice” the signature poem within the Frost canon. In a number of other poems, however, this combination of fire and ice, whether it comprises fire and snow, light and cold, sun and ice, or predominately one element in the pair, accompanies a heightened anxiety in the poetic voice about identity and poetic inspiration, the kind of crisis of identity that Kearns dramatically identifies. This signature event can occur as the central element of a poem, its organizing trope, if you will, as in “Fire and Ice,” “Wind and Window Flower,” “To the Thawing Wind,” “Mending Wall,” “The Wood-Pile,” “Bond and Free,” “The Bonfire,” “Looking for a Sunset Bird in Winter,” “Evening in a Sugar Orchard,” “A Hillside Thaw,” “A Winter Eden,” “What Fifty Said,” “Afterflakes,” “To a Moth Seen in Winter,” “In the Long Night,” “Choose Something Like a Star,” and “Peril of Hope.” It can also appear more fleetingly as simply one element in a poem’s landscape, but again often accompanying some anxious need of the poem’s speaker to locate a self. In this group, I include, for example, “The Mountain,” “After Apple-Picking,” “Birches,” “Snow,” “Two Tramps in Mud Time,” “Directive,” “Too Anxious for Rivers,” and even “From Plane to Plane.” In “The Mountain,” the brook that is rumored to start in a spring “almost like a fountain” on Hor’s peak is described by the local farmer in this way: “But what would interest you about the brook, It’s always cold in summer, warm in winter. One of the great sights going is to see It steam in winter like an ox’s breath, Until the bushes all along its banks Are inch-deep with the frosty spines and bristles— You know the kind. Then let the sun shine on it!” (47)



ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting” (778). Without discussing the “signature” value of this image, Katherine Kearns writes strongly about its centrality to Frost’s poetry:

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One could argue that this passage amounts merely to a vivid description by a colorful character in the New England countryside, where frost and the steam from an ox’s breath are unavoidable features of the landscape.16 As Priscilla Paton helps us to understand, however, Frost’s natural and regional poetry is written with a view to the horizon of Western culture and the “landscape conventions shared by nineteenth-century poetry and painting,” such as “the sublime mountain; the middle ground of human cultivation; the human figures that provide scale and access for the viewer/ reader; the concept of the prospect that suggests godlike vision, knowledge of nature, and political control” (106). In addition, this fountain is as much the spring stamped out by Pegasus on Mount Helicon as it is the origin of good brook trout water. While asking the local farmer about the mountain, the speaker shows that he feels both the protection from its “black body cut[ting] into the sky” and the limits it imposes upon him: he feels “it like a wall” that prevents him from seeing stars in the west and yet shelters him “from a wind”(45). He is drawn to it as a site from whose top “There ought to be a view around the world” (47). Without imposing an allegory upon the poem, but nevertheless responding to its intertextual details, we must see the issue here in part as poetic inspiration, the anxiety of invention, of having a source for poetry. The poetlike speaker, the Frost character in search of his poetic name, encounters that “name” in the speaker’s description of the frosty and hot spring. When looked at too closely, the details that capture this specular name, however, disappear as geographical truth only to reappear more certainly as a function of the poetic imagination, as a feature of how one tells a story or describes something in nature, and thus as still within the grip of language rather than referentially certain.17 In response to the poet-speaker’s self-searching question—“Warm in December, cold in June, you say?” (48)—the local farmer says: “I don’t suppose the water’s changed at all. You and I know enough to know it’s warm Compared with cold, and cold compared with warm. But all the fun’s in how you say a thing.” (48)

According to Lentricchia, this exchange plays out the fundamental interplay within Frost’s identity-driven poetry between an assertion of man’s imaginative power to shape reality and the opposing stubbornness of nature and of the poet’s skeptical side to finally accede to the unitary, shaping power of the imagination—“all the fun’s in how you say a thing” as opposed to the naturalistic explanation of the heat/cold phenomenon (45–48). In terms of the signatory act we are tracing, this interplay is





complicated by the fact that the poem seeks confirmation of the verbal basis of the poet’s sense of identity, the fire and ice, at some site in the natural world, which of course is being described by the very linguistically driven desire that seeks it. In “Two Tramps in Mud Time,” the specular name of Frost emerges also in the context of the poet-speaker’s dealing with the meaning of his “work.” The setting of the poem, as Kearns has observed, is dominated by the sense of transitional areas: the place between where the speaker works on the one hand and the more common area where the tramps walk on the other, the warmth of April and the mere flakes of snow that signal the potential coldness within the vernal warmth, the emotional place of the poem somewhere on the border of play and work, the figurative emergence of the tramps out of mud, and even the combination of self-control and release that goes into the speaker’s activity at the chopping block (151–52). The tramps appear when the poet-speaker “most love[s] [his] task” (252), at the time that his specular name is most clearly expressed within the physical world: The water for which we may have to look In summertime with a witching wand, In every wheelrut’s now a brook, In every print of a hoof a pond. Be glad of water, but don’t forget The lurking frost in the earth beneath That will steal forth after the sun is set And show on the water its crystal teeth. (251–52)

Again, the classical source of poetic inspiration comes into play, the pond stamped out by a horse’s hoof, and the “fire and ice” images of the author’s name emerge just as the external situation, the tramps interrupting his “play for mortal stakes” (52) at the chopping block, incites an anxiety about poetic inspiration, even the poet’s freedom of material, as it is called in “How Hard It Is . . . ”18 Importantly though, the anxiety does not come from the tramps’ presence so much as from what it brings out in the speaker. In fact the tramps, like many of the characters—or even animals—who encounter the speaker of Frost’s poems, represent an aspect of the speaker. I think this is the case in “Mending Wall,” where the apparently different neighbor embodies in a psychologically fascinating way not only the speaker’s own need to construct walls but also his own close-mindedness. Just as the tramps emerge from the mud, so too does the “lurking frost in the earth beneath . . . steal forth after the sun is set” (252). The tramps, associated with the vernal warmth, and the speaker, with the coldly consuming teeth



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of winter in his iciness toward the strangers, comprise twin halves of the single complex event in the poem of discovering a name for the self and at the same time of coming to terms with the identity of the poet at play in a world of necessary work.19 Often such eruptions of the poetic name occur even more fleetingly than these. In “After Apple-Picking,” for example, the poet-speaker finds himself in an odd transitional state of being tired of apple-picking, a condition in which he is, yes, tired, but also more keenly sensitive to the imaginative rather than routine disposition of affairs: I cannot rub the strangeness from my sight I got from looking through a pane of glass I skimmed this morning from the drinking trough And held against the world of hoary grass. It melted, and I let it fall and break. But I was well Upon my way to sleep before it fell, And I could tell What form my dreaming was about to take. (70)

Perhaps even more ephemerally, this transitional area associated with poetic inspiration occurs in the often-quoted passage from “Birches” about the “inner dome of heaven.” The passage describes the birches as ice-laden and then, on “a sunny winter morning . . . clicking upon themselves” until “the sun’s warmth makes them shed crystal shells / Shattering and avalanching on the snow-crust— / Such heaps of broken glass to sweep away / You’d think the inner dome of heaven had fallen” (117). It can appear in even more muted form, as in “Too Anxious for Rivers,” where the fiery details of the world’s Epicurean creation function also as images of the fecund warmth of love. Science can tell only so much; the rest is dreaming, which will become the imaginative story about how once being molten and vaporous we were set “on fire and . . . revolving” (343) by love—an image of stillness come to revolving life such as is also woven through “A Star in a Stone-Boat.” This fire-and-ice trope, this specular image of Frost, can occur also as part of rather prosaic discourse within dialogue, as it does at the end of “From Plane to Plane,” a poem about opposites—work and play, youth and age, town and gown, winter and summer, presence and absence (or the need for “extrication,” to use Pike’s term). After dwelling on the local doctor’s way of life, which is for Pike a source of envy, the conversation between the fifty-year-old farmhand, Pike, and the college student and summer farmhand, Dick, oddly enough moves onto the topic of the sun





and its need, also, for extrication—just like that of the doctor, who needs to escape now and then from treating illnesses, just like that of Pike in walking back a row without hoeing, and just like that of Dick in having to get away during the summer from his studies. The sun bestows summer on us and then “escapes,” says Dick, “Before our realizing what we have / To thank him for” (370). However, the sun “doesn’t “want our thanks,” Dick continues, because “He likes to turn his back on gratitude / And avoid being worshiped as a god” (370). Pike’s response to Dick’s discussion of the sun—which is based on the essential sameness of any of the “professions,” whether poet, hoer, or god—is so curious and out of place, in fact, as to call more attention to itself than it seems to warrant. Pike agrees with Dick, likening the younger man’s point about the sun-god to his own view of Santa Claus, the “pseudonym,” according to Pike, of our parents in their Christmas giving: “That’s where I reckon Santa Claus comes in— To be our parents’ pseudonymity In Christmas giving, so they can escape The thanks and let him catch it as a scapegoat. And even he, you’ll notice, dodges off Up chimney to avoid the worst of it. We all know his address, Mount Hecla, Iceland. So anyone can write to him who has to; Though they do say he doesn’t open letters. A Santa Claus was needed. And there is one.” (370–71)

It is too simple to discount Pike’s bringing up Santa Claus in response to Dick’s anthropological discussion of the Persian and Peruvian sun gods as Frost’s way of isolating unlearned simplicity. In light of earlier comments in the poem about June being cold and the doctor working energetically in winter when people get sick, not to mention the “lecture” Dick offers, which essentially defines the cold of the sun god’s extrication as just as much a part of the sun god as the heat of his presence, one of the important suggestive elements about Pike’s Santa Claus is that the legendary figure is a “god” of both fire and ice, of both the chimney and Iceland. Even with the distancing device of the dialogue structure and the humorous framing of that dialogue by the narrator, the poem veers unerringly toward Frost’s specular name as it emerges in the myth of Santa Claus; and in the process, it delineates the way in which a false name—a pseudonymity—covers over a longing for a true, original, wild name. In the poems I have been discussing, “the name of Frost” shows up almost as if by surprise, amid verse that does not obviously focus on the speaker as engaged in a search for self. With some careful reading, though,



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it becomes clear that anxiety about inspiration or even the role of the poet, especially as it has to do with his isolating participation in the imaginative realm and separation from “real” work, spawns those outbreaks, or at the very least accompanies them. Because the poet’s “signature,” according to Hartman’s formulation, occurs across all of the works, breaking out almost as if an autonomous force, I might be drawing too fine a distinction by identifying the poems to which I now turn as being devoted almost singularly and formally, rather than just partially, to the poet-speaker’s quest for his specular name. A pair of short poems quite different in tone and delicacy of perception serve nicely, I think, as a kind of “range-finding” for this examination. The poems are “What Fifty Said” and “Afterflakes.” Quite overtly playful and autobiographical in its display of the fire-and-ice trope, “What Fifty Said” begins with this couplet: “When I was young my teachers were the old. / I gave up fire for form till I was cold” (245). A metal having been cast through the twin forces of heat and cold and now in the position of having the young as his teachers, the speaker at fifty can no longer be molded: he can only “be cracked and sprung.” As Virginia Smith has interestingly explained, the poem’s close understanding of this physical process also communicates something about the poet’s own attempt to balance passion and form, or the fire that makes a substance such as molten metal a liquid and the cold that provides it with form. In “Afterflakes,” the signature occurs more typically but nevertheless more interestingly within the framework of the poetspeaker’s half-aware search for himself in the landscape. The poem allusively addresses the symbol of the shadow from Plato’s allegory of the cave, as the speaker ponders his lack of importance during the end of a snowfall.20 After all, if he were as important as he wants to be in his search for self, his substantial, swarthy body itself ought to project a shadow back upward “Against the shapeless shadow of storm” (276). A “higher power,” the sun, produces the shadow, however. In spite of this perception, I do not think that the poem treats so much the issue of evil, as suggested by the word “swarthy,” according to Marcus (154), as the question of how to discover a reliable marker of the self—good or bad. On that matter, the poem takes the reader for a dizzying if short ride: it first locates an image of the self in the shadow on the snow that covers the ground; it then negates the self’s importance by describing its powerlessness to project its own image upon the shapeless storm in the air; it then focuses on the way in which the clearing sky reveals an image that, as Gary Roberts perceptively observes, amounts to both a positive and negative designation of self (Tuten 5). That image occurs in the last stanza: I turned and looked back upward. The whole sky was blue;




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The pun on “frost” slyly affirms that the poet-speaker, however insubstantially, is inscribed within the sky, and yet the equally interesting pun on “knots” as “not” that Roberts points out negates that inscription. Not only are the flakes without significance because they are mere showy “afterflakes”; they are “not frost,” after all. Still, within this repeated, even simultaneous, affirmation and negation at a rather conscious level in the poem (the puns on “frost” and “knot” are hardly accidents), the specular image emerges independently of the punning in a muted version of the fire and ice trope: the heat and energy of the sun shining through the “frost knots.” As untimely as these afterflakes is the appearance of the moth in the ode “To a Moth Seen in Winter.” Here, too, the question is one of identification, even of naming, as the poet-speaker parenthetically asks the moth: “(Who would you be, I wonder, by those marks / If I had moths to friend as I have flowers?)” (323). The speaker sees the moth’s situation as his own, because he has no more power to save the moth’s life than he does to save his own, though he is “tasked to save [his] own a little while” (324). Attracted, and self-destructively so, to hot light and, particularly in this poem, to the heat of the speaker’s “gloveless hand,” the moth in the cold of winter captures the fire and ice of Frost’s specular name. Even the moth’s departure involves a kind of fire and ice event: “Go,” the speaker tells it, “till you wet your pinions and are quenched” (324). The meaning of “quenched” has at its core the notion of fire being put out by water, even hot metal made cool by being thrust into cold liquid. “Looking for a Sunset Bird in Winter” traces the speaker’s search for the lost thing in the form of the hopeful but mistaken sighting in winter of a bird alighting in a tree, where in summer it had sung “with an angelic gift” (215). After verifying that the only thing in the tree was in fact a single leaf, the speaker reflects upon his perception from a position on a hill: From my advantage on a hill I judged that such a crystal chill Was only adding frost to snow As gilt to gold that wouldn’t show. A brush had left a crooked stroke Of what was either cloud or smoke From north to south across the blue; A piercing little star was through. (215)



And the thick flakes floating at a pause Were but frost knots floating on an airy gauze, With the sun shining through. (276)

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The poem works from the imagination’s initial imposition of form and meaning on the landscape to a correction of such power, and then onto a fleeting assertion of the specular image in what by now I hope has become a familiar signature combination: the cold, whether or not connected to the recurring pun on “frost,” as it is here, combined with heat, in this case the smoke and after that the piercing little star. This description unfolds on a rather easily accessible level in the form of the compensatory observation of a poet-speaker who suffers from a sense of vacancy and loss, the inspirational “breath of air . . . [dying] of cold,” even the self-identifying “frost” doing little more than adding “gilt to gold that wouldn’t show.” Because of Frost’s fondness for Palgrave’s Golden Treasury, we are safe in seeing this gilding of gold as an expression of the futility of poetry to distinguish itself, even though the image of gold preserves some sense of value. As in “Afterflakes,” however, the rather unconvincing, self-negating description of a vague sense of security about the presence of self and/or poetic inspiration, at the level of the signature activity that I am tracing, occurs as a haunting expression of an inscribed presence. This inscribed presence results from a process of differentiation as contrasted to the undifferentiated vision in the previous stanza: the “crooked stroke” of cloud or smoke and the piercing of the star amid the chill make this vision of a signature almost an act of penetration or cutting. Not always part of such tentative searches for self, this signature activity occasionally emerges almost in a manic form as it does in “Evening in a Sugar Orchard,” with the call to the fireman to stoke the fire so as to add more stars to the heaven, or as in “The Bonfire,” with its narrator’s recollection of the wild and exhilarating fire he once almost let get out of control, or most clearly in “A Hillside Thaw,” based as it is on the powerful interaction of fire and ice, the wildness spawned by the melting power of the sun combined with and overcome by the freezing, Medusa-like petrification, brought on by the moon. The speaker involves himself in this remarkable collaboration between fire and ice by imagining himself dropping to his hands and knees to try to stop the flowing of the silver lizards across the ground and by admiringly reacting to the freezing power of the moon by saying that the spell “was the moon’s: she held them until day, / One lizard at the end of every ray. / The thought of my attempting such a stay!” (219). We cannot help but recognize from the images of “wildness” and of the Frostian “stay against confusion” that the poem is about the job and identity of the poet, the forces that provide him a self. However, the signature activity in this poem expresses neither anxiety, as in most of the others we have examined, nor apocalypse, as in “Fire and Ice.” Instead, it displays a manic celebration of poetic power. Though the speaker exclaims, “The thought of my attempting such a stay!” the poem itself functions as just such a remarkable stay, capturing and giving shape to wildness in “a bursting unity of opposites,” as Frost called the creative event.21





Though one of Frost’s longest poems and not easily reducible to a single theme because of its focus on a variety of issues such as gender, heroism, religion, and, according to Jost, “civility and madness,” as well as the figure of the poet, “Snow” nevertheless deserves attention as a piece whose fundamental elements—the vast, cold outside and the circumscribed warmth within the Coles’ house—express Frost’s specular name.22 In fact, several passages in the early stages of the poem shape it to the form of this specular image. This emphasis becomes particularly apt in terms of Sears’s observation that Meserve, with all his combination of physical prowess and metaphorical playfulness, operates as a version of the public Frost. The poem grows out of the conversation between the Coles and Meserve, as he stops at their home for a brief rest—more for his horses than for himself, it seems—during a severe snow storm. The opening two pages of this thirteen-page poem concentrate our attention on naming. First, Meserve describes the wind-blown snow in this way: “ ‘You can just see it glancing off the roof / Making a great scroll upward toward the sky, / Long enough for recording all our names on.—’ ” (137). Asked by Helen if he knows his way to the barn, where his horses are resting, he responds: “I guess I know my way. I guess I know where I can find my name Carved in the shed to tell me who I am If it don’t tell me where I am . . . ” (138).

Then Helen and Fred talk about naming after Helen becomes irritated at herself for having called Meserve “brother” and wonders why. Fred explains: “ ‘It’s right enough. / That’s all you ever heard him called round here. / He seems to have lost off his Christian name’ ” (138). The names of the characters themselves contribute to this concentration on naming. “Meserve” suggests self-concern and even lack of consideration for others, but if his “natural” name, as the exchange between Fred and Helen suggests, is “brother” or “Brother Meserve,” then his name also suggests something quite different— service to his brother. “Cole,” of course, puns on “coal” and thus builds on the fundamental dynamic of inside heat and outside cold. This wordplay establishes a heightened self-consciousness in the poem and in us about naming. In addition, though, the names fall out as expressions of the physical elements in the poem—coals as Coles and the colorful description of names appearing on the scroll of windblown snow. In this context, the frequently repeated descriptions of the snow against the house and window emerge as signatures of the poet, of his specular name within the physical setting of the poem. These descriptions are yet another way in



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which “Meserve” has meaning: they turn back on and frame him as the figure of the poet-Frost. The snow-blown scroll that he imagines operates in just this reflexive way: he describes the brutally cold natural forces working against the house, warm within, as if those cold physical elements were exercising their authorship. Later on, Meserve again functions to “sign” Frost into the poem. As he focuses on a text, the page of the book which is also a “leaf” that will not lie down, he describes the inside of the house, against the cold outside, in such a way as to provide a glimpse of the specular Frost: “The wind’s at naught in here. It couldn’t stir so sensitively poised A thing as that. It couldn’t reach the lamp To get a puff of black smoke from the flame, Or blow a rumple in the collie’s coat. You make a little foursquare block of air, Quiet and light and warm, in spite of all The illimitable dark and cold and storm, And by so doing give these three, lamp, dog, And book-leaf, that keep near you, their repose.” (141–42)

Composed against the outside cold, this “clean, well-lighted place” also represents a poem, as suggested by the stanzalike shape of the foursquare block of air, especially in the context of a discourse on the page of a book. Then the poem’s dialogue turns to a series of descriptions of the snow. First Fred’s words inscribe Frost into the setting: “ ‘You see the snow-white through the white of frost?’ ” (142). Next, Meserve responds with a curious personification, which amounts to a rather playful version of Frost the voyeur poet: “It looks as if Some pallid thing had squashed its features flat And its eyes shut with overeagerness To see what people found so interesting In one another, and had gone to sleep Of its own stupid lack of understanding, Or broken its white neck of mushroom stuff Short off, and died against the window-pane.” (142)

After telling the story of the boy who too fervently banked the windows of a neighbor with snow, Meserve offers this description of the snowline running across the Coles’ window-pane: “There where There is a sort of tunnel in the frost—




Names, Proverbs, Riddles More like a tunnel than a hole—way down At the far end of it you see a stir And quiver like the frayed edge of the drift Blown in the wind. I like that—I like that. Well, now I leave you, people.” (143)

The emphasis first on “like” and then on “that” captures living speech, but also, paradoxically, slows down the perception of the words as words so that “like” works not just as an expression of a “passionate preference,” a verb, but also as a marker of similarity, a preposition: the poet-Meserve-Frost resembles (is like) that cold frost just where it is both a tunnel (more the product of art than “hole”) and an opening onto the outside, the stir of wind. He likes it because he resembles it—not surprising for a character called me-serve. In this poem, then, Meserve is the vehicle for embedding Frost’s specular name within the poem. The process unfolds as a thick layering of naming and signature acts. Against the outside storm, the descriptions of the house’s warmth and its inhabitants as “coals” is quite enough to suggest the fire and ice of the specular Frost. The poet-figure Meserve builds upon that signing, though, with the narrative-delaying bursts of metaphorical discourse that make the poet and the function of poetic language—what it does to manage the threats of chilling snow and the equally dangerous façade of warm repose—the subject of the poem.23 Not the snow that Poirier describes as preventing writing and reading in Frost, the snow in this poem is the artist; it is, along with the warmth of the house, the specular image of the poet as written into the world (Robert Frost 337). It is the white sheet upon which the black “cole” can write. According to Stanlis, “Snow” captures the philosophical dualism that informs Frost’s poetry and shapes his poetic identity. In so doing, it illustrates also Lentricchia’s thesis about the landscape of Frost’s poetic self, his working out of his identity particularly through the dynamic of seeking or establishing enclosure against the inhospitable facts of existence. This poem sustains a focus on that dichotomy by hovering at the border of the inside and outside, the warm poemlike inside of the Coles’ house expressing the shape that humans create for themselves over and against the threatening outside world. The figure of Meserve reflects Frost precisely because of his activity at this margin, his fluency with both the inside heat and the outside cold, which in the context of this poem parallels the fire and ice of Frost’s specular name. It is important to emphasize this balance. As an expression of the extreme of the post-Kantian imagination that tries to transmute the unknowable nature into a safe, comprehensible, beautiful retreat, the Coles’ house is just as dangerous to the sound poetic identity as the raw, inhospitable nature that exists apart from human control. Within



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this disclosure of his poetic identity through the poem’s setting, Frost also includes the issue of naming, playing with the prospect that names themselves, like landscape and structures, might afford us a glimpse into some nonnegotiable truth about our identity. I would like to conclude this discussion of the poetic signature in Frost’s works with a quieter, though still complex poem. “The WoodPile” both typifies the kind of poem we have been examining and surpasses the others of its type. In typical fashion, it features a speaker-poet on an uncertain quest that turns into a curious, highly suggestive naming event. The speaker opens the poem in an anxious frame of mind and within an undifferentiated setting, “a frozen swamp one gray day” (100).24 After resolving to turn back in his venture, he nevertheless goes on; the crusty snow holds him up, and yet it does not, his (poetic?) foot breaking through. Around him, the trees are “ . . . all in lines / Straight up and down.” They are “Too much alike to mark or name a place by / So as to say for certain I was here / Or somewhere else: I was just far from home” (100). Just as a sense of self is impossible without a definite sense of place (recall Meserve’s lines about knowing himself by his name carved in the shed if it doesn’t tell him where he is), so is naming impossible where there is no differentiation. That naming is, at least in part, the issue becomes immediately clear as the bird enters the scene.25 He operates as a projection of the Frostian narrator’s anxiety about identity and naming: the bird was “careful / To put a tree between us when he lighted, / And say no word to tell me who he was . . . ” (100). The bird resembles “one who takes / Everything said as personal to himself ” (101). He is also a kind of parody of Nature in Emerson’s “Hamatreya,” who in the Earth-Song, as we have seen, assumes that man is forever and always the namer/taker. Moreover, the bird is depicted as trapped within an uninvestigated, habitual, even suggestively customary way of dealing with the threat: he could escape easily, “undeceive” himself, by one flight out sideways, but like the speaker whom he reflects he can only remain deceived by the limits of his condition. For the speaker and us, the limiting element is language, whose hold over us cannot even be lastingly shaken by the disorienting blow to the head from a “door in the dark.” Within this setting and mood of undifferentiated identity, of the failure to name as well as the threats of naming and of anxiety about identity, the speaker discovers a signature feature in the landscape, the image of the original name itself, a woodpile. It was left there by a shaper, a molder, a poet of sorts; was left there as a muted (and mute) expression of both the fire and ice in “frost”; it was left there “far from a useful fireplace / To warm the frozen swamp as best it could / With the slow smokeless burning of decay” (101).





At the same time that the poem concludes with what Fratalli reasonably describes as an almost anticlimactic image, a vision of the irrelevancy of human work, it also can be seen as arriving at a climax in the more subtle quest for the specular name that informs Frost’s canon (117). Where naming fails and threatens, the specular name of fire and ice emerges, seemingly inscribed upon the external world and therefore an apparent marker of the lost identity; but ultimately, because it is in and of language, that name amounts to words that rename the “Frost” that has already obscured an origin. The key that seems to get the poet outside of postlapsarian language, that finally represents an origin, is always inside language. Finally, that is what happens by Helicon’s well-curb in “For Once, Then Something”: a search for truth that glimpses “something white, uncertain, / Something more of the depths” (208) that is forever and always lost. And the actions that obscure it are those of language, of the text, particularly of reading and writing: a drop of water blurs it, blots it out. The something that the poet might have seen is not an indefinite object referred to so much as the mere word itself—“something.” And that is all.

“Name children some names and see what you do” Not anthologized, not highly regarded, though eliciting a growing body of commentary, the narrative “Maple” is, as Karen Kilcup asserts, both interesting and irritating (133). In keeping with her thesis about the development of Frost’s poetry, she regards the poem as transitional, clearly marking the movement in Frost’s development from a feminine poetics of gossip, sympathetically shared, confided experience, and code breaking to the professional, exclusionary, masculine poetics of the father-language, in which only the paternal, divine figure of the author has “the answer” to the “question” that he poses (130–40). In the case of this poem, as in the poems we have been examining, the question is, “What is my name?” I put this question in the first person because even though it favors third-person narration over dialogue, as Kilcup emphasizes (137) and thereby distances us from Maple’s quest for her name, the poem is at the same time about Frost’s poetic signature, about his search for his own name. He, too, after all, is owned by a name with too much meaning. Just beneath the selfassured tone of the professional narrator’s function as Emersonian namer lurks the poet’s anxiety about his identity. This search for the poetic signature occurs quite typically in a poem that deals not just with naming, but with naming as a subset of interpretation and of the relationship between author and reader, as Judith Oster



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observes (44). Thus, the distanced narration covers over an authorial anxiety about identity; and because of this complexity, I join Robert Faggen in finding it difficult to understand the poem in the clear-cut, gendered terms Kilcup and, even more starkly, Kearns use—the father, narrator, and author linked via a masculine language and the mother essentially the representation of the female language (Faggen 207). At any rate, the poem includes as many implications about names and naming as one can imagine. It ponders a number of technical questions about the proper name—its relationship to the material object to which it points, the difficulty of even discerning what material object a name marks, the notion that certain basic expressions such as natural names give us an unusually direct access to objects themselves (McCulloch 262), and the issues raised with the use of names in fictional texts (Schalkwyck 169). This poem from New Hampshire recounts the development of a girl in the shadow of her name, given to her, according to her father, just before her mother dies as a result of the daughter’s birth. Early in the girl’s life the father has to explain to Maple that her name is really Maple, not Mabel, as her teacher claims it must be. Tell your teacher, her father says, “that it’s M-A-P-L-E” (169). And then he offers her an explanation that is really not an explanation so much as a temptation or puzzle to solve, as Darrel Abel characterizes it (556): “I don’t know what she wanted it to mean, But it seems like some word she left to bid you Be a good girl—be like a maple tree. How like a maple tree’s for us to guess.” (169)

These “dangerous, self-arousing words,” as the narrator calls them, are soon forgotten by the child, but then later remembered as a male co-worker in an office building in New York City says suddenly that she reminds him of a Maple tree. He makes this observation even though he has all along thought her name was Mabel, as she is called by everyone in the office. They end up marrying and sharing an interest in her name, reviewing certain signs that might nudge them closer to its possible meaning: a maple leaf stuck in a “big Bible” at a page that had something to do with “wave offering”; her father having put her off, she thinks, when she questioned him so long ago (the narrator describes this event as the father “[putting] himself off”); even a young maple they once came upon in the autumn on vacation, which stood “alone with smooth arms lifted up, / And every leaf of foliage she’d worn / Laid scarlet and pale pink about her feet” (172). The narrator tells how, during this last experience, “They hovered for a moment near discovery,” but they lacked “faith in anything to mean / The same at different





times to different people” (173). This event causes her to cover her eyes and to stop seeking—“ ‘We would not see the secret if we could now: / We are not looking for it any more’ ” (173). The poem concludes with the narrator’s entirely unhelpful and almost unfitting summary and admonition: “Thus had a name with meaning, given in death, / Made a girl’s marriage, and ruled her life” and “A name with meaning could bring up a child, / Taking the child out of the parents’ hands.” He warns readers, “Better a meaningless name, I should say, / As leaving more to nature and happy chance. / Name children some names and see what you do” (173). This final gesture at completion and definitive statement undermines— and is ultimately part of—the poem’s extraordinarily discontinuous and misleading surface, its mischief, as Robert Pack sees it in his discussion of the poem (222), if not perhaps Frost’s lack of control over its contours. This last statement is remarkable for its incommunicativeness: “Name children some names and see what you do” just does not mean anything definitive. “Some names” and “see what you do” remain entirely wide open in their meaning. The echoing within “happy chance” of “happenstance” or “happenchance” also negatively modifies the upbeat sense of “happy chance.” In addition, the apparent opposition between giving a child a name with meaning and thus giving up parental control (it takes the child “out of the parents’ hands”) on the one hand and providing it with a meaningless name and leaving more to “nature and happy chance” on the other collapses under the weight of its ambiguity. Which alternative offers the more nurturing, parental control? Which is more “natural”—when “nature” in this context seems to be part of the more conventional way of naming? The entire poem, moreover, puts us readers in much the same situation as Maple finds herself in—trying to make sense of a puzzle and dead-end clues. These apparent clues include certain patterns, unaccountable repetitions, weighty symbolic suggestions—the wave offerings and the passionate description of the flaming maple—or non sequiturs. Twice the narrator describes the family home, for instance, as a one-story house in front, but three stories on “the end it presented to the road,” as if to suggest that there is either more or less to it than its mere appearance offers.26 The narrator also calls attention to the girl’s secretarial skill of shorthand in a peculiar way: the self-seeking caused by the mystery of her name, he offers, may have “led her on to read, / And think a little, and get some city schooling.” She learned shorthand, it seems, because of this impetus, though the narrator immediately questions the suggested connection—and also invites interpretation—by saying, “whatever shorthand may / Have had to do with it” (170). The narrator builds up a possible connection among name, identity, and occupation as if to imply that the girl’s job of taking shorthand exposes her limitations as an imaginative reader of her name’s



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mystery. She is only able to record what is said literally or to fathom a direct relationship between meaning and suggestion, as Oster argues (48) in her discussion of the poem as a study in metaphorical reading. Faggen calls this “profession” a “metaphor for dead, sterile reproduction” (206). The narrator also creates this sort of false lead in having the man in the office, by some “natural” impulse, see “maple” in her, as if there is a fundamental connection between name and object. At this same stage in the poem, however, the narrator calls into question the meaningful basis of naming. As Maple takes dictation from her future husband, the man who sees the maple in her, the narrator describes how she watches out of the window “An airship laboring with unship-like motion” (170). The name of the flying machine simply does not match its nature, emphasizes the narrator. Even the footnoting of the poem in the volume’s title poem, “New Hampshire,” contributes to this collection of signs leading to dead ends. Like a number of the other poems that follow “New Hampshire,” “Maple” is referred to in a footnote in the original edition of New Hampshire. The lines related to “Maple” are: “And the two have been / Yoke-fellows in the sap-yoke of old / In many Marches” (155–56). Though some ingenious critical maneuvers could perhaps make a case for significance (the emphasis on the reproductive spring sap run versus the fall of the year, which Maple and her husband favor, as a sign of their misinterpretation of Maple as name), the mutually fitting wedges of Vermont and New Hampshire and the spring running of the sap just do not seem to have much to do with “Maple,” nor “Maple” with them. Such hints of meaning as Frost writes into the poem certainly encourage scholarly and theoretical detective work. Darrel Abel, for instance, identifies what he considers the key to the poem: the allusion to wave offerings, as described in chapter 5 of Numbers, where the issue is husbands’ jealousy of wives and the law that requires a suspected wife to undergo a priestly test, whereby she drinks water that priests give her, and to say whether or not she has slept with another man. If the woman lies, her belly swells and her reproductive organs wither; if she tells the truth, her body and reproductive capabilities manifest themselves as healthy. The allusion, Abel tactfully tries to argue, expresses autobiographically Frost’s incurable jealousy and perhaps his wish fulfillment about Elinor’s absolute loyalty: the poem’s wife likely assures her husband that she faithfully loved him by naming the daughter on her deathbed. It never becomes clear, however, that the husband even knows of the passage marked by the maple leaf, a marking that is lost when Maple fails to return the maple leaf to its intended place in the Bible. Leaning perhaps a little too heavily on her often-revealing and productive view of women as transgressive in Frost’s poetry, Katherine Kearns takes the maple leaf’s marking of this biblical





passage as ultimately a sign of the mother’s unfaithfulness. She accuses Maple of ignoring “the secret implicit in the maple-leaf marking of the ‘wave offering’ passage in Numbers that reveals the passionate extramarital circumstances of her own birth”; she refers to the mother’s “sin”; and she writes of the biblical passage as “signaling [the] mother’s marital infidelity” (100). Despite all this certainty in interpretation, the poem’s details merely invite speculation, even perhaps seduce us into having to come up with an answer about the significance of Maple’s name. In the end, Maple’s resignedly giving up the search for meaning is as responsible as closing off the mystery with an answer that involves narratives of illegitimacy and unconventional, transgressive sexuality. Like the proverb, which we will discuss in the next chapter, the name functions as an answer, a shorthand answer to the enormous question of identity. The answer, though, always begs the question. Though in “New Hampshire,” as I have already suggested, the poet-persona often plays the role of the Emersonian namer and thus brings into the foreground the gender implications of naming, in this poem the naming of Maple is an act shared by the genders: the dying mother offers the name; and the father, as he recalls for the young Maple, says that he “said it [the name] too: ‘Yes, for her name.’ ” The emphasis is on mutuality, as Faggen observes more generally about the gender issues in the poem, not on the wife’s transgressive and secretly rebellious use of the father tongue. There is no reason, moreover, not to see the narrator as part of the poem’s fictional display rather than as its conveyor of definitive statement: his display of sureness and knowledge, despite frequent indications that he also remains clueless, is part of the poem’s complex array of naming. If the narrator simply stands in for Frost, as commentators are tempted to assume, then his closing injunction against names with meaning undermines what we have already seen as Frost’s own tendency to give characters in his narratives meaningful names—Meserve, the Coles’, and, of course, Maple in this poem. In a curious move, Frost calls attention to this very issue by bringing the names of his own children into the poem. The passage in which he does this contains such a rich illustration of the problem of the name that I will quote it here in full: It came back vaguely at the glass one day, As she stood saying her name over aloud, Striking it gently across her lowered eyes To make it go well with the way she looked. What was it about her name? Its strangeness lay In having too much meaning. Other names, As Lesley, Carol, Irma, Marjorie,



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Signified nothing. Rose could have a meaning, But hadn’t as it went. (She knew a Rose.) This difference from other names it was Made people notice it—and notice her. (They either noticed it, or got it wrong.) Her problem was to find out what it asked In dress or manner of the girl who bore it. (169–70)

By introducing his children’s names into the poem, Frost brings his own too meaningful name into play and thus implicitly offers it, along with Maple, as a contrast to their names. This implication that Frost might share the fictional Maple’s dilemma about her name certainly must modify the notion that Frost in this poem remains unsympathetic toward his female character. The move also amounts to a kind of examination of what linguists, logicians, and philosophers argue is a proper name. To repeat Bertrand Russell’s extreme notion, the only proper name is a kind of pointer to something present, the word “this” being perhaps the purest form of such a pointer. Frost’s claim that his children’s names are just such pointers, however, hardly simplifies matters. First, importing those names into a poem invests them with meaning, meaning that likely goes beyond the illustrative point that they serve. Even more obvious is the kind of common sense that any reader must bring to bear upon a text, that consulting of what really happens in the process of naming children: can anyone imagine that the names of Frost’s children did not mean something, did not bear some familial or personal significance, to both father and mother, and did not invest their children with some minimal sense of purpose, affiliation, and expectation? Frost also has Maple say her name repeatedly before the mirror, displaying the common self-defeating attempt to make the name something other than an arbitrary, conventional marker. The operation arises out of the usual assumption that someone just does not look like a Lucy or a Mike, as if there were something close to a fundamental connection between name and appearance, not to mention name and personality as in the equally pervasive notion that a Tom ought to act differently from a Dick or Harry. Usually, such a repetition of the name—before the mirror or not— decouples the word from its referent and intensifies the sense of it as an arbitrary sound, calls attention to the word’s simple materiality. Yet later, Frost has Maple’s eventual husband say she reminds him of a maple, as if the name does have an essential link to her character. Amid all of this almost random play with the issue of naming, the poem finally produces a sense of wonder about the name, the sense, in fact, that Derrida communicates when he claims that the name is both arbitrary and somehow part





of Romeo—he would be Romeo by any other name, and yet his destiny remains inextricably wrapped up with his name and his sense of himself as Romeo. His name is the death of him, just as Maple’s is the death of her in that it always makes her feel absent from herself. Everyone’s name— whether it has too much or too little meaning—misses the point of identity; it is always a fundamental mistake. It merely elicits nostalgia for what has been obscured by the name: even some revelatory explanation of its origin—Maple was conceived in the woods under a maple tree, Maple was born on the same day her father planted a sapling of a maple tree, Maple is the product of an adulterous relationship that caused Maple’s mother to mark with a maple leaf an Old Testament passage about adultery, and so on—could not fulfill the burden produced by that glimpse of ultimate meaning. Thus, when Maple covers her eyes and finally says, “We would not see the secret if we could now: / We are not looking for it any more” (173), she completes a process that equates with Frost’s own sense of a quest for his name in the only way that she can, in the only way that he can.27 In the words of one of Frost’s aphoristic poems from A Witness Tree, “We dance round in a ring and suppose, / But the Secret sits in the middle and knows” (329).

“As a Stranger” to His Name, or Asie Gorrill Comes into His Own We cannot leave off our examination of Frost’s various displays of the problem of naming, signature, identity, and writing without considering perhaps the most ignored piece in Frost’s published works, the one-act play A Way Out. The only one of Frost’s plays published during his lifetime, the drama appeared in The Seven Arts during the first of that magazine’s barely two years in print.28 In one way, the play could serve as an allegorical treatment of the story of the magazine in which it appeared, whose pacifist leanings at the time of the country’s entry into World War I led to its loss of financial backing. The play dramatizes the intrusion of a stranger into the one room of a farm house in which the hermit, Asa Gorrill, lives. The stranger, as it turns out, is a murderer who apparently has worked in a shoe factory and who also seems well read and aware of certain literary conventions that perhaps irritated Frost himself. In sizing up Asa’s character, for example, he asks, “Ever been heard to say you like the innocent woods and fields and flowers like a poem in print?” (571). The play, then, stages an invasion on the part of a worldly-wise, aggressive, and even curiously literate stranger into the territory of one who



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has retreated from the world and who behaves almost like a pacifist. As a result it also plays out not only the issue of the United States’ necessary involvement in world affairs but at the same time Frost’s own duality of escape and entry into the world, not to mention his eagerness and support of war and his lack of participation in it.29 The unspecified “eerie psychological implications” in the play, observed by Herren (Tuten 82), arguably reflect on dichotomies within Frost concerning identity, and not necessarily, as Thompson argues, on Frost’s own imaginary, murderous inclinations (Years of Triumph 109). As the play develops we learn that the Stranger, who is being sought by the police for murder, aims at taking on Asa’s—the stranger calls him Asie— identity. He questions him about his inclinations toward women, art, and society; prepares to put on some of his host’s clothing; gets samples of Asa’s signature so that he can forge it; begins to ape Asa’s speech; sizes up the worth of Asa’s unsold acres of timber; and even asks him if he ever wonders if he has anything to live for. Frost presents this merger of identities in such a way that we do not know at the play’s end, after a fatal struggle between them, if Asa or the stranger survives. The Stranger has them twirl around in a frenzy within the room until they collapse, whereupon the designators of dialogue change from “Asa” and “Stranger” to “First to Speak” and “Second” (574); and the dialogue itself remains unclear about who is who, as each claims he is not the criminal. Then one faints and the other “strikes him a blow with his fist on the head and drags him across the floor and out of the house” (574–75). When the posse and, a minute after, a character now referred to as Asa appears and tells the group that he has just escaped from the criminal who was going to kill him, there is no telling if that character is in fact Asa or the Stranger. After the posse has left and one of them, while passing by the farm once again, yells “Good-night” to Asa from outside, that character, now referred to as “The Hermit,” answers, face in pillow, “Good night” (575).30 If the one who has survived the struggle is Asa, he has gained an altered sense of identity out of a newly perceived separation from his name, a sense of his name’s contingency and arbitrariness: it can become anyone’s property and anyone’s sign. If the play represents identity theft and the Stranger remains on stage, he unavoidably feels determined by the name: he must answer as Asa. At the same time, he is left to experience estrangement from his own name, whatever that name might have been. Suggesting this sense of our names as both strangers to us and us as strangers to our names, our names as estrangers, the dialogue for almost the entire play occurs between Asa (Asie) and Stranger, as if the issue of the tenuousness of the connection between name and identity hinges on the prepositional phrase “as a stranger.” Even the “as” in Asa or Asie





suggests this estrangement: sense of self is not so much identification as resemblance. Names do not locate identity: they imply a search for, but do not discover the origin of, who we are. Though they are nouns, names do invite a quest, and thus the exchange between Joe and his wife in “In the Home Stretch”—Adam and Eve figures after yet another move—captures the futility but necessity in the search for origins. Joe remarks on how they got to the point of moving into another house: “I don’t want to find out what can’t be known. / But who first said the word to come?” His wife responds: “My dear, It’s who first thought the thought. You’re searching, Joe, For things that don’t exist; I mean beginnings. Ends and beginnings—there are no such things. There are only middles.” (113)

Such furtive estrangement from origin, such muted despair over ever finding “the answer,” drives the search for a name, the signature search in a collection of works by a poet who, as we have seen, confessed aloud: “I sometimes think that there is no I,” which is as much to say, I think there is no origin of who I am. This profound doubt about identity, perhaps surprisingly, comes from someone who signed his name to manuscripts, Christmas cards, and books as often as any poet of his generation, it would seem; signed his name as a sort of authentication and as a marker of his presence. Ultimately, though, he must have sensed what we have seen that Derrida points out in “Signature Event Context” and what Frost himself enacts in this short play when the Stranger has Asa write out his name so that he can imitate that signature. A signature is essentially and always “counterfeit, forged, inauthentic” (qtd. in Hancher 229). Ahistorical in that it is repeatable at another time, detached from the particular time of its inscription, and often surviving the existence of its signer, the signature actually documents its alienation from any source, any origin, and even certifies the “nonpresence of the signer” (Hancher 229). When the surviving character at the end of “A Way Out” buries his head in the pillow as he answers the posse’s query, he expresses more than a need to disguise his voice, from which he had become a stranger; he does so as a suggestion of despair over the realization that the illusion of certain identity that determined each of the characters at the beginning can never be recovered.



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Proverbs and the Quest for Certainty

Say something to us we can learn By heart and when alone repeat.

Near the end of A Masque of Reason, God, Job, and Satan pose together so that Job’s wife can snap a picture. She tries to capture their essence and therefore prompts Satan to offer a representative version of his famous smile, because she thinks he looks a bit lost, as if he “were more guilty of mischief than” he really was. She tells him not to worry because she is prepared for any revelation that he can bring out; after all, she snidely remarks, there will not be any new discovery for which “Job himself / Won’t find a formula for taking care of” (386). Then Satan chimes in, “Like the one Milton found to fool himself / About his blindness” (386). Though the Notes to the Library of America edition direct us to the lines in Book 3 of Paradise Lost about the celestial light allowing the blind narrator to write about things “invisible to mortal sight” (984–85), I think Cramer accurately points to Milton’s sonnet “On His Blindness.” That sonnet contains the more formulaic and memorable line, “They also serve who only stand and wait.”1 Whatever the source, the passage is startlingly irreverent toward Milton, and dismissive of Job, especially when we consider that just several years before completing A Masque of Reason in 1943 Frost had emerged from emotionally crippling circumstances that might have made him identify with Job—and perhaps even with Milton. Though irreverent, this passage in A Masque of Reason is hardly unusual for Frost. In fact, it typifies the complexity with which Frost treats the very human need for proverblike expressions or sayings, for “unsystematic / Stray scraps of palliative reason / It wouldn’t hurt You to vouchsafe the faithful”



Chapter 2


(377), as Job’s wife describes them. This largely unexplored concern with the proverblike sayings could very well be one important way in which, as Frost said in 1945, “All [his] poetry is a footnote to the [Masque of Reason]” (Cramer 182). Frost’s dramatic addition to the Book of Job develops that biblical work’s primary concern, the clashing of accepted, proverbial wisdom with an authentic, more profound experience of the basic identity questions that we have examined in the first chapter—who or what am I, what is the source of my existence, and what name can I use to bring a sense of certainty to my experience? More specifically, the masque deals with the question of the poet’s identity, one who merely stands and waits, in a world valuing action, and one who must be original when addressing those who largely seek confirmation of their self-comforting, widely accepted notions of their lives’ worth. It makes sense, then, to explore Frost’s extravagant claim that all his poetry serves as a footnote to this masque and, more specifically, to examine the extent to which proverbial sayings function as names, as unsatisfying though finally necessary markers of our desire to be located and to locate others and things in the world. Like naming and the quest for a poetic signature, with their yoking of the opposites of fire and ice, of desire and form, the proverb serves Frost as a locus for expressing a similar dynamic of impetuous search for an individualizing, original expression of identity and an equal reliance on restricting convention. Frost’s definition of his poetic identity through the proverb, in other words, amounts to “what fifty said”: a process of giving “up fire for form till [he is] cold” and of then being “cracked and sprung” by something more youthful and impulsive (245). Certainly, the implications involved in Frost’s use of these expressions are vastly more complex than is usually suggested by dismissal of, say, the neighbor in “Mending Wall” and the husband in “Home Burial” as mindlessly conventional and helplessly insensitive in their adherence to sayings. By “proverblike sayings,” I mean, as most commentators on proverbs agree, statements that are short and balanced in their expression and that seem to speak from a sense of the shared, traditional, customary wisdom of a community, rather than reflect individuality and irony toward received wisdom. Frost’s use of such proverblike sayings betrays almost a contradiction: on the one hand, a number of his poems condemn, or seem to condemn, them, and yet many of his pieces contain—and some of his shorter poems in fact amount to—proverblike expressions. This apparent contradiction arises from the dilemma that Daniel Barnes describes in his analysis of Emily Dickinson’s use of proverbs: “It is one thing for an individual to know and use proverbs in accepted cultural contexts; appropriating them for poetic ends is quite another—and potentially disastrous—matter, for the time-honored wisdom of any society is inevitably embodied in time-worn clichés” (447). He then cites Archer Taylor: “Folklore uses conventional



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themes and stylistic devices and makes no effort to disguise their conventional quality while the literary artist either divests his work of conventional quality by avoiding clichés of either form or matter, or . . . charges them with new content” (447). The occurrence of sayings in Frost’s poems and even his poems’ focus on sayings as a theme also pick up on other perennial questions readers have with Frost’s poetry. Are such proverbial expressions as “Good fences make good neighbors,” for instance, manly “stays against confusion” or are they aligned with the feminine? Are they, in terms of Frost’s politics, expressions of New Deal socialism or of conservatism? Are they markers of the oral that Frost, as we shall discuss later, so often seems to privilege or are they signs of something more formal and fixed even than the writing in which they appear? Related to this last question, are they more or less like the “sentence sounds” that Frost, at least for much of his career, proposed as the authentic elements of poetical expression or are they the contrived, worn-out diction that he, along with other modern poets— not to mention Emerson and Thoreau before him—opposed? All of these issues, moreover, are involved with what we have called Frost’s search for his name, his poetic identity. Use of proverbs or creation of proverbial-sounding expressions as ways of resolving problems raised in poems signals a fundamental tension between basic psychic needs. This is the kind of tension Lentricchia, in fact, isolates in Frost’s poems between the need for change, supplied by the redemptive imagination that soars to a vision beyond the common grounding in everyday, material reality and on the other hand the need for a “skeptical, ironic awareness” of the “therapy of dull realities and everyday considerations,” as expressed in something as common as a proverb (Robert Frost 112). Before examining the various ways in which Frost centers his poems around this concern with the proverbial inclination, I would like to establish a handful of critical issues related to the proverb to guide us along our way and also, by looking briefly at Emerson and Thoreau and some other likely voices to have struck Frost, to provide an explanation of how Frost’s interest in this proverbial inclination fits into a larger context. First, a short estimation of the proverb as genre. As Kenneth Burke points out, the proverb, like any piece of literature, amounts to a way of naming that expresses an attitude toward and an attempt to control almost as if by magic a situation that an individual or culture experiences: “Proverbs are strategies for dealing with situations. Insofar as situations are typical and recurrent in a given social structure, people develop names for them and strategies for handling them. Another name for strategies might be attitudes” (297).2 The perfect name as well as the perfect proverb, of course, eliminates the need for a kind of magic in this process because the name and the thing named would be identical. We do not need a trip to Swift’s Laputa with its





absurd linguistics experiments, nor do we need to cite proverbs that offer diametrically opposing advice on the same issue (haste makes waste vs. the early bird gets the worm), to expose the impossibility of that ideal language system, and thus we are left with merely approximate names for situations, complicated by attitude, culture, and political aims. As names applied to situations, proverbs, however simple, express a rather complex array of values and expectations, and they also raise some important questions about the discourse in which they occur. They are conservative and unfold according to a kind of “unauthored” objectivity that carries with it the stamp of traditional wisdom (W. Barker xxx). According to Roger Abrahams, proverbs often occur at sites of threat within a community, where it needs “the greatest amount of control” (“A Rhetoric” 48). At these sites the proverb serves as a solution to a problem that arises repeatedly between the community’s members. Importantly, the proverb’s typical phrasing—concise, witty, memorable, and assertive—depersonalizes the problem, its use almost invoking a third perspective that implies the community’s own unbiased judgment. In other words, the proverb’s style “provides a sense of verbal stability” within the situation in which it is used (Abrahams, “Proverbs” 121). Though the proverb does, in Abraham’s terms, “attempt to induce future action through the establishment of the speaker as arbiter of values (and therefore modes of action),” it is different from, say, the curse, taunt, and boast in its impersonal language (“A Rhetoric” 56). According to Donald K. Berry, proverbs put the reader/ hearer in the position of subordinate, allowing no question, as receiving yields to the authority of the text (140). The force of the proverbial inclination, then, is generally to preserve the community at the expense of the individual desire. No surprise that our post-Romantic sense of the proverb differs from that of the Renaissance as expressed in such works as Erasmus’s collection of adages and Brueghel’s “Netherlandic Proverbs” (Sullivan 253). When Polonius uses a string of proverbial-like sayings to advise Laertes how to behave in France, he is not simply the object of generational ridicule in Shakespeare’s play. He also represents the voice of Renaissance education in which proverbs were taught systematically (W. Barker xxvi) and in which knowledge of their applicability reflected a humanistic awareness of how the wisdom of the past could shape, even refresh the present. Though Polonius seems stale and out of touch with a dynamic world of youthful possibility, Shakespeare’s play as effectively interrogates Hamlet’s unsatisfying search for an authentic, individualistic sense of meaning and identity without the support of such accepted wisdom. Ironically, Hamlet arrives at roughly the same position as Polonius by the end of the play, depending on compressed proverblike sayings—“The readiness is all” and “There’s a



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divinity that shapes our ends, / Rough-hew them how we will”—though certainly he seems to have arrived at that position with far more questioning and struggle than Polonius might have experienced. Whatever the extent of satire against Polonius’s dependence on proverbs in Hamlet, by 1774 we see Lord Chesterfield departing entirely from Polonius by advising his son not to use proverbs if he wants to be seen as a man of fashion (W. Barker xxvi). This partially Romantic disdain for poetic diction and established convention, of course, has situated proverbs so that today when we use them, we do so cautiously, even apologetically, if not ironically (W. Barker xxv). Not marking self-consciousness about our use of proverbs, in fact, signals a lack of individual thinking, even perhaps a kind of ignorance. In one important way, however, the Romantic bias against the proverbial inclination encounters a snag: returning to the oral, folk tradition, the social location where, theoretically, one can discover the authentic, original, and unadorned ways of communication, the seeker finds, as folklorists have shown, an equally mannered, conventional, proverbial way of interpreting the world. In a sense the proverb always contains the tension between such two historically opposed views as expressed in the Renaissance and the Romantic periods: the accumulated wisdom of the ages on the one hand and, on the other, the truth of a period before original perception became buried under an accumulation of convention. The proverb, then, can serve both the desire to be conventional and the desire to break through convention and discover origins. As discourse, the proverb presents several problems. After all, it is an already-existing text often employed in another context. A proverb can appear in context almost as an intrusion of a timeless realm into a temporal one, an already-composed discourse into a stream of expression as it unfolds. I might stop by a colleague’s office a little early on the way to the college’s Christmas party, for instance, and try to get him to come along with me a little earlier than he intended—after all, I say, within a series of observations about getting in and out of there and being able to get a good sampling of the spread offered by the dean, “The early bird gets the worm.” That saying intrudes from somewhere, some earlier place in our history, some site of vast experience. Though it seems to come from the “voice” of experience, it has an already-composed feel to it, as if it were something more authorized than the mere conversation in which it occurs. As Roger Abrahams and Barbara Babcock explain, proverbs “are minimal devices of verbal art which involve, as an element of their artifice, a switching of communicational codes, from the (apparently) spontaneous and casual to a more formal and stylized code” (419). At the same time, however, they are often used in written texts, it seems, to compensate for those texts’ formality, for the distancing of speaker from hearer and the





“dissociation of intention and meaning,” at least in so far as those texts have oral communication as their model (Abrahams and Babcock 418). The applicability of the proverb to the case at hand, of course, might be a problem: my colleague might remark that the fare offered by the dean usually tastes of worms. In other words the saying fails to work because it in fact matches too closely the appetitive arena in which it is used. Such formulae as “the early bird gets the worm,” “a stitch in time saves nine,” or “a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush” actually seem more effective as their application moves farther away from their literal language. Communities do not depend on the truth of the vehicle in the proverb’s metaphor; rather they depend on its applicability. In part that is the problem, if I may jump ahead in my discussion of Frost’s interest in proverbial expressions, with “Good fences make good neighbors” in “Mending Wall”: the saying occurs in such proximity to its literal application that it becomes subject to a kind of deconstruction, becomes susceptible to questions about its literal truth—isn’t it needed where there are cows, but here there are no cows to keep out? The proverb is most vulnerable when taken literally, even though it represents itself as wisdom developed from human experience “in the field.” This interesting feature of the proverb’s force actually betrays its therapeutic rather than truth value: a point that the speaker and the neighbor, to a certain extent, miss in Frost’s poem, but one that Frost certainly promotes with his title, at least to the extent that “mending” is as much an adjective as a gerund. In his discussion of the proverb in “Mending Wall,” George Monteiro emphasizes the negative consequences of reliance on the proverb, consequences that Frost, as we shall see, does emphasize: “What finally emerges from Frost’s poem is the idea that the stock reply—unexamined wisdom from the past—seals off the possibility of further thought and communication. When thought has frozen into folk expression, language itself becomes another wall, one unresponsive to that which it encircles”(127). Yes, the saying itself is a wall, an opaque expression, but in a sense it also mends the always already existing sense of rivalry and difference between members of a community. In terms of application, then, the proverbial saying occurs as an attempt ultimately to quell anxiety about a situation or experience; it names and thus familiarizes the unfamiliar. This process includes a marking of that experience as one that has occurred before within a group; and thus it translates a heightened, individual response into a shared, communal one. Politically it seems conservative; yet it can be enlisted as a mark of original language that undermines the artificial, layered-on quality of accepted social practices. As discourse, it seems aligned with oral communication, though when imported into actual or literary conversation, it has the artful, balanced qualities of a preexistent, already-composed form of expression,



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“Old Musty Cheese” or the “Good Old Folk Ways”? Before delving into Frost’s poems, I would like to enrich this overview of the proverbial inclination by looking at a few other authors and even Frost’s own discussions of sayings, or what he, like Job’s wife, called formula. One of these works is the seminal piece in American literature on this proverbial inclination: Franklin’s “The Way to Wealth,” or “Father Abraham’s Speech,” the Preface to the final version of The Poor Richard Almanack issued in 1758. In this preface, Franklin, using the invented character of Father Abraham, strings together the various aphoristic messages with which he had interlarded the important days indicated in his almanacs. Father Abraham gives his harangue to a group of people who complain about governmental taxation as they await the beginning of an auction. They ask Father Abraham what he thinks about the bad times in which they live and especially about the taxes. Abraham responds, “If you’d have my Advice, I’ll give it you in short, for A Word to the Wise is enough, and Many Words won’t fill a Bushel, as Poor Richard says” (Franklin 400).3 As it turns out, his advice could fill more than a bushel basket. Franklin’s persona, Richard Saunders, describes the event, claiming that he was present at the time and really quite flattered to hear Father Abraham apply all the wisdom that Richard over the years had inserted into his almanacs (399). His almost Chaucerian/Swiftian peek-a-boo act exposing his self-regard, pride in popularity, and even profit motive makes the work’s attitude toward the proverbial wisdom it offers complex and curious in ways resembling those of Frost’s persona in many of his poems. Richard betrays bitterness that other almanac authors have “been very sparing in their Applauses” of his works and that “no other Author has taken the least Notice of [him]” (399). He concludes, however, that the large sales of his work vindicate his merit. Moreover, he claims that he has often heard his adages repeated, a fact that shows that his instruction has been widely regarded and that there is some respect among the people for his authority. Throughout the fictional oration, then, Richard has Abraham cite dozens of Poor Richard’s proverbs, as the old man tries to persuade the people that the taxes levied by the government are miniscule compared to



though invoking nevertheless the sense of a spoken truth. It invests the diachronic, in other words, with a synchronic value. These are the issues that we will need to keep in mind as we look at Frost’s various displays of the proverbial inclination in his poems.


the ways in which they “tax” themselves with overspending, indebtedness, lack of industry, impatience, and so on. They blame external causes for their apparently less than financially healthy state, when they have only themselves to blame. The Preface concludes on two levels: the people’s response to Father Abraham’s oration and the persona’s response to the entire situation he describes, including his own involvement. As for the audience awaiting the auction, they heard the harangue, “and approved the Doctrine, and—Immediately practiced the Contrary, just as if it had been a common Sermon; for the Vendue opened, and they began to buy extravagantly, notwithstanding all his Cautions, and their own Fear of Taxes” (412). As for Richard, the repeated quotations of his adages delight his vanity, even though he knows they are the mere “Gleanings” he has “made of all Ages and Nations” (412). Having listened to Father Abraham speak the wisdom he himself has authored/collected, he concludes: “I resolved to be the better for the Echo of it; and though I had at first determined to buy Stuff for a new Coat, I went away resolved to wear my old One a little longer. Reader, if thou wilt do the same, thy Profit will be as great as mine. I am, as ever, Thine to serve thee” (412). The playfulness of this piece and the ways in which it situates this proverbial inclination are fascinating. In the generally contradictory mode of self-help books, Richard’s cataloging of proverbs advising against extravagant spending is itself an invitation to the reader to purchase the almanac. The proverbs themselves amount to commodities, which are, as the setting suggests, consumed and at the same time put to no use—with the exception of the purveyor of the proverbs, that is, who is taken with the echo of his own voice, even though his own voice is really the work of the ages and nations, not of his own imagination. The wisdom of the proverbs has, then, a curious function: it mollifies the people’s potential conflict with their government in the form of accepted wisdom. It amounts to a fabric of truths accepted and approved of, but not immediately applicable to the hearers, who must—we have to assume—approve of that fabric as applied to others, not themselves. In this piece, moreover, the people seek in the old man the sort of clichéd proverbial advice, I suspect, that usually condemns the “modern” times and the increased governmental intrusion into their lives: it seems clear that the people seek this sort of oration, given the invitation to this Father Time figure. They receive something quite different: a speech that makes their individual habits, not the government and the general decay of the times, the true culprit. However, the piece betrays no sense that the people are troubled by the critical wisdom that Father Abraham offers: it is as if they are comforted by the sound of the proverbs’ echoed and re-echoed wisdom, the sound of something familiar, and so do



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not listen in any but a ritualistic way, as if they had just heard “a common sermon.” Immediately the comforting sound of some of Frost’s ultimately disturbing poems—“On Being Versed in Country Things”—comes to mind. Ultimately, then, Franklin offers a humorous, but ambivalent view of this proverbial inclination. On the one hand proverbs are the fodder of people—consumed, listened to, spoken frequently but not heeded— and merely markers of the unthinking masses; on the other hand, they offer truths so close to our origins as to be affiliated with the patriarch Abraham. Though the truths are mere echoes of the wisdom of the ages and nations, the careful heeding of those truths marks a few—the author and the “Reader”—as special. To varying degrees, in the works of Emerson and Thoreau a similar sort of ambivalence toward proverbs emerges, though the stakes are different: worldly success and resistance to the kind of misfortune that strikes Job, for instance, in Franklin, as opposed to a means of perceiving the “Truth” lurking behind appearance and everyday language in both Emerson and Thoreau. What I have tried to suggest is that the self-reflexive layering of voices in Franklin’s Preface to his final version of The Poor Richard Almanack does invite a critical view of the proverbial wisdom offered in his almanacs, a critical view that positions the proverbs, not just the advice they express, as means to an end. That end is the material enrichment and increased security of Richard himself—who is “laughing all the way to the bank.” In other words, Franklin exposes his persona’s own exploitation of proverbs—of their safe, unthreatening criticism of the very folks who consume them. Franklin’s work, therefore, reaches somewhat critically beyond the proverbial equation for which it is largely known: practice prudence and you will achieve material (and even spiritual) security. Likely, Thoreau did not respond to this complexity in Franklin’s piece. As Joseph Moldenhauer points out, Thoreau, in Walden, employs proverbs in ways that counter the commonly regarded “Franklinian level of virtue” with “a ‘higher law’ of moral awareness” (158). As evidence of Thoreau’s preoccupation with proverbs, Moldenhauer refers to the occurrence of about one hundred proverbial or aphoristic expressions in Walden, to his frequent use of “folk locutions” in his letters, journals, essays and books, to his gatherings of maxims and proverbs, and to his possession of Knox’s anthology of memorable quotations and adages, Elegant Extracts. On the one hand, Thoreau viewed proverbs as original expressions of “truth”: they were “naturally and truly composed” in a way that allowed for “most generous interpretation” by the wise man (Moldenhauer 152). They spoke to humans’ reason rather than the more superficial understanding—hence his profound interest in proverbs as the site of original truth. However, he also regarded them as the site of humans’ trivializing, unreflective, common




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Of greater significance for this analysis, however, is Thoreau’s use of proverbial utterance to put his audience off guard, wittily “deluding” them into the impression that he speaks their own language. At the same time, he uses that familiar language as the vehicle of unfamiliar and unconventional notions. His suasive intentions are manifested in two distinct ways: he qualifies and alters current proverbial materials, and he “invents” proverbs—that is, he composes apothegms which, while resembling genuine proverbs in structure and verbal texture, express sentiments quite unlike the usual conservative messages of folk sayings. (153)

In various ways, Thoreau alters existing proverbs. Moldenhauer offers the examples of “a woman’s dress . . . is never done” (155); “Men say that a stitch in time saves nine, and so they take a thousand stitches to-day to save nine tomorrow” (155); and “what is one man’s gain is not another’s loss” (156)—a blatant negation of the original form. He also illustrates the ways in which Thoreau duplicates the form of proverbs, creating “proverb analogues”: “I trust that none will stretch the seams in putting on the coat, for it may do good service to him whom it fits”; or “As if there were safety in stupidity alone.” And then there are Thoreau’s “new proverbs”: “a goose is a goose still, dress it as you will”; “Rescue the drowning and tie your shoestrings”; and “If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer” (156). Most helpful for our purposes, however, is Moldenhauer’s analysis of the representative way in which Thoreau “renews” a proverb that he likely encountered in Franklin’s “The Way to Wealth”: “Early to Bed, and early to rise, makes a Man healthy, wealthy, and wise.” In his chapter “Sounds,” Thoreau asks, “Who would not be early to rise, and rise earlier and earlier every successive day of his life, till he became unspeakably healthy, wealthy, and wise?” (Moldenhauer 156). The modification itself and the context Thoreau builds around it represent his way of trying to revitalize the proverb without entirely demolishing its value. He refers to the early rising rooster and the fowl’s origins in the undomesticated wild Indian pheasant, and makes alterations throughout the chapter in the meaning of “rise,” “early,” “healthy,” “wealthy,” and “wise” so as to suggest their emotional, spiritual, philosophical, and metaphorical meaning rather than their prudential, material value. He moves the saying away from its easily fixable meaning to its ineffable, even highly personal, significance. The maneuver amounts to an effort to trace the proverb back to its origins in



understanding, ultimately just more expressions of “that old musty cheese that we are” (Walden 109).4 Consequently, Thoreau’s aim in Walden is in part to revitalize the proverb, as Moldenhauer explains:

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some inspired, truly representative authorship, to take it out of the marketplace and locate its original coinage. The effort is the same as for the name, an attempt to recover its origin. Seemingly anticipating the equation we have seen Burke make between the proverb and the larger literary work, both being ways of naming so as to deal with cultural situations, Thoreau treats proverbs as miniature versions of literature. This analogous relationship, moreover, gives proverbs a slippery position in terms of the binary oppositions between the oral and written and the feminine and the masculine. The chapter that precedes “Sounds,” the one in which, according to Moldenhauer, Thoreau gradually transforms the Franklinian proverb, is called “Reading,” and deals with the difference between common literature, which Thoreau equates with the oral and feminine, and great literature of the ancients, which he aligns with the written and male. In terms of essential meaning, Thoreau treats writing as synchronic and the oral as diachronic, as something requiring attention though never yielding an absolute, fixable meaning. Thoreau assigns the written to the male position. Two passages in particular capture these values assigned to the written and the oral: We might as well omit to study Nature because she is old. To read well, that is, to read true books in a true spirit, is a noble exercise, and one that will task the reader more than any exercise which the customs of the day esteem. It requires a training such as the athletes underwent, the steady intention almost of the whole life to this object. Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written. It is not enough even to be able to speak the language of that nation by which they are written, for there is a memorable interval between the spoken and the written language, the language heard and the language read. The one is commonly transitory, a sound, a tongue, a dialect merely, almost brutish, and we learn it unconsciously, like the brutes, of our mothers. The other is the maturity and experience of that; if that is our mother tongue, this is our father tongue, a reserved and select expression, too significant to be heard by the ear, which we must be born again in order to speak. (80–81) The works of great poets have never yet been read by mankind, for only great poets can read them. They have only been read as the multitude read the stars, at most astrologically, not astronomically. Most men have learned to read to serve a paltry convenience, as they have learned to cipher in order to keep accounts and not be cheated in trade; but of reading as a noble intellectual exercise they know little or nothing; yet this only is reading, in a high sense, not that which lulls us as a luxury and suffers the nobler faculties to sleep the while, but what we have to stand on tip-top to read and devote our most alert and wakeful hours to . . . There are those who, like cormorants and ostriches, can digest all sorts of this [“easy reading” of the popular sort], even after the fullest dinner of meats and vegetables, for




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Prefiguring in its details the “early to rise” and bird/fowl imagery of the next chapter, which deconstructs Franklin’s proverb, this discussion of reading anticipates also the kind of critical attention Thoreau himself gives that proverb, as if it were a piece of great literature to be inspected actively, to be engaged and even rewritten by the participating reader rather than be mindlessly consumed as if by a cormorant. Though he does distinguish the “gingerbread” of popular literature from the “pure wheat or rye-andindian” of great literature and thus indicate that the “text” itself must be assigned value in terms of the purity of its origin, he largely emphasizes the reader’s role in producing the text. Even if there are machines to produce the “provender” of popular literature, readers do not have to act as the machines that consume it. In a sense, the oral and written distinction can apply to the act of reception as well: people can hear/read as if merely listening to their “mother” tongue; or they can hear/read as if through an assertive, exploratory activity that connects words with their original, natural meanings, as they were born again outside the mother under the auspices of the father figure, who, like the rooster, rises early and is born to a new world ready to be explored as if it were created anew each day—and created anew almost as a result of the “writerly” approach that Thoreau promotes. The proverb, in these terms, remains a neutral expression, a kind of feature of nature, always potentially a “great piece of literature” depending on whether it is consumed or reinvigorated through an active process of “reading,” reading having become a self-exploratory, critical facility. Thoreau aligns intellectually and spiritually trivial activity with the feminine and oral, and the opposite with the masculine, despite the fact that the text of Nature, the original script, is feminine (“We might as well omit to study Nature because she is old”). Moreover, even though the oral realm with which the “unreinvigorated” proverb is aligned seems to have come prior to the written—it is the mother that gives birth, it is the time of brutishness, and it is the first element in that “interval between the spoken and the written language”—it nevertheless seems to come after the written, whose first sentences appeared on the barks of trees (79) and whose expression seems closer to some original site of feeling, ultimately because it always resists exact, reductive interpretation.5 Taken from Frost’s “Choose Something Like a Star,” the epigraph for this chapter could very well have its source in the language of the second passage from Thoreau quoted above. Like Frost’s comment on A Masque of Reason—“All my poetry is a footnote to it”—this poem, it seems, offers more evidence of Frost’s abiding interest in the essential human need for



they suffer nothing to be wasted. If others are the machines to provide this provender, they are the machines to read it. (84)

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palliative sayings. He did, after all, chose this poem as the “Afterword” to the 1949 edition of his Complete Poems. Frost constructs the poem’s speaker as the needy but disrespectful seeker of the truth; I say disrespectful because that speaker wants an immediate and certain answer to his questions. In a similar position as the star-like great literature of Thoreau’s passage (“read . . . astrologically, not astronomically”), the star in Frost’s poem remains obscure to the speaker but also holds the promise of an answer to the mysteries of existence. Frost in fact remarked at one time that in using the image of the star he had in mind “some poet of a thousand years ago—two thousand years—something way out of this” (Cook, Robert Frost 183). However, the speaker wants the star’s answer to be “common,” as it were: “Say something to us we can learn / By heart and when alone repeat” (365). The speaker longs for the star to “Talk Fahrenheit” and “Centigrade,” to “Use language we can comprehend.” He desires, in other words, something like a proverb, with its mnemonically friendly formulation, or some kind of scientific structure. He reads the star astrologically rather than astronomically, to use Thoreau’s terms, trying to make it serve a “paltry need.” The poem makes a sonnet-like turn two-thirds of the way through and assumes a different voice, moving from this urgent, demanding, childlike, almost mother-needy attitude toward one suggesting a kind of metaphorical, open reading of the star-text, one that goes beyond that of the mob. When seen in this preferred way, the star does tell us something, though in the form of a request: It asks a little of us here. It asks of us a certain height, So when at times the mob is swayed To carry praise or blame too far, We may choose something like a star To stay our minds on and be staid. (365)

The willingness to see the star as a question rather than a pat answer raises the mind above the mob and offers consolation of a more profound sort than a simple answer. The proverbial inclination in this poem has two aspects that correspond to the two in Thoreau: on the one hand, it expresses the common desire to close off inquiry and create a sense of authoritative certainty, an answer that can be held in memory and recited by rote and that also features, as do the biblical Proverbs, a comprehensible sense of blame or responsibility; on the other hand, the proverbial inclination expresses a desire to get back in touch with some common source of existence, an affinity for our origin that can inspire authentic, symbolic inquiry rather





than pat answers. This second view accords with Timmerman’s reading of what he calls this “nearly perfect poem,” a poem that offers the best example of Frost’s ethics of ambiguity and his insistence on a deontological ethics guided by the power of imagination, intuition, and belief (145). If not read as if it were great literature, if read as something oral, as, in other words, some aspect of Thoreau’s mother tongue, the proverb can become just what the frantically inquiring speaker in Frost’s poem seeks: something soothing and superficially consoling that can “Say something to us we can learn / By heart and when alone repeat.” Of course, the star’s answer is merely, “I burn.” Even the neat dichotomy that mirrors that in Thoreau, then, is complicated, as Katherine Kearns brilliantly explains, by the sense that the star, in its “burning,” is itself as urgent and unrestrained as the mob for whose limited perspective it is supposed to offer compensation through a sober, historic process of contextualization (65–68). We must observe also, that even in this poem, in which Frost clearly dramatizes a speaker as distanced from Frost’s own less insistent need for an answer, the imagery of the aloof but burning star expresses also the poet’s quest for his poetic signature in fire and ice. Near the end of his life, in a 1962 Dartmouth College address, Frost used this poem, among others, to illustrate his elusive theme of extravagance. One of the supporting motifs of that talk, as expressed through both its manner and subject matter, is the contrast between the proverbial saying received as palliative reason on the one hand and the saying as an invitation to think, to puzzle over existence on the other. In fact, Frost begins his talk with a proverbial expression: “A penny saved is a penny earned” (902). He even performs the same move with it that Thoreau does in turning “What is one man’s gain is another man’s loss” into “ . . . is not another’s loss” (emphasis added). Frost says, “I never took any stock in that doctrine that ‘a penny saved is a penny earned.’ A penny saved is a mean thing, and a penny spent, you know, is a generous thing and a big thing” (902). He humorously refers to the plush surroundings of the newly and lavishly outfitted Hopkins Center as he undermines the easy truth of this conventional saying. As the talk unfolds and he refers to poems he reads as extravagances—on the same order as the Hopkins Center and, indeed, the universe—he loosely associates poetry of the nondoctrinal kind with the undercutting of safe, palliative positions and also with puzzling, disorienting experiences in general. He offers his own sayings or reinventions of customary sayings, along with certain lines from his own poems, as substitute proverbs or adages, though his offerings hardly succumb to easy decoding, to the desire for palliative reasoning. For instance, he makes a gesture at essentializing what he means by “extravagance” with the phrase, “it sometimes seems as if,” an echo of the way in which he ended his



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“Introduction to E.A. Robinson’s King Jasper nearly 30 years earlier: “All virtue’s in ‘as if’ . . . As if they were. As if, as if!” (748).6 He uses the entire poem “The Most of It” to oppose the views of somebody who held “it up for some doctrine that’s supposed to be in it,” and even claims that the one line, “He thought he kept the universe alone,” “could be the whole poem” (904). He also puts his audience in the position of extravagance; that is, he requires them to value something that does not offer an immediate meaning or satisfaction and that might remain forever puzzling. His audience, as he puts it, seems to resemble some homunculus holding on to the whip that he, as lion-tamer/poet/speaker, cracks: “It’s like snapping a whip, you know. Are you there? Are you still on?—you know. Are you with it? Or has it snapped you off?” (907). Later, after invoking the quotation from Mark that he incorporated into “Directive” about preventing through parables “the wrong people” from understanding his meaning and getting “saved,” he says to the audience, “I like to see you. I like to bother some of you. What do we go around with poetry for? Go around just for kindred spirits some way—not for criticism, not for appreciation, and nothing but just awareness of each other about it all” (910–11). While he puts his audience in the position to puzzle over his extravagances, he offers a parable that describes the very thing he is doing in his talk. He tells about one of his great friends who told him that “everything’s in the Old Testament that you find in the New.” Frost continues: And I said, “What is the height of it?” “Well,” he said, “love your neighbor as yourself.” I said, “Yeah, that’s in both of them.” Then just to tease him, I said, “But it isn’t good enough.” He said, “What’s the matter with it?” “And hate your neighbor as you hate yourself.” He said, “You hate yourself?” “I wouldn’t be religious unless I did.” (910)

Frost builds upon this anecdote by returning to the idea of a special meaning for only those special people who expend themselves in reading as extravagantly as he expends himself in writing: “Some people can’t go with you. Let them drop; let them fall off. Let the wolves take them” (910). In the context of this performance, Frost turns to read “Choose Something Like a Star.” That choice, it seems clear, suggests that the poem served for him as one example, if not his anchor example, of the ridiculous, stultifying desire for the proverb (or in Burke’s and Thoreau’s terms, the name and poem) to serve as palliative answer. Yet amid all this sense of extravagance as a kind of rebellion from convention, as Poirier observes in his fundamental discussion of the safe return home always built into





Frost’s depictions of this “extra-vagrant” activity, there is a background of conventionality—almost, one could say, a proverbial safety net. Even his startling reconfiguration of “love thy neighbor as yourself” into “hate your neighbor as you hate yourself” ultimately works to support his depiction of himself as religious, as essentially conventional (Robert Frost 82–119).7 Many of these oppositions concerning the proverb—maternal speaking versus paternal writing; lowness versus elevation; instability versus stability; self-deception versus inquiry; materialism versus spirituality— occur as well in Emerson’s treatment of the proverb, though with different emphases and without quite the same level of irony as in Thoreau. In his thorough and wide-ranging study of the fundamental place of the proverb in Emerson’s philosophy and style, Ralph C. La Rosa carefully lays out the ways in which Emerson uses the proverb as the junction of all oppositions so as to enforce his optimistic sense of man’s possible reconnection, however fleeting, with the original language, the Logos. Aside from the sheer persistence in Emerson’s use of proverbs, which for the most part avoids the deconstruction and reconstruction we have seen in Thoreau, his words about them are remarkably enthusiastic. In Nature, for example, he says that “proverbs of the nations,” such as “a rolling stone gathers no moss” or “a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush,” “consist usually of a natural fact, selected as a picture or parable of moral truth” (Selected Essays 53). He goes on in that work to assert, “What is true of proverbs, is true of all fables, parables, and allegories” (53). Proverbs are “fossil poetry” (La Rosa 161). They are, in “Compensation,” the “literature of reason, or the statements of an absolute truth”; they, “like the sacred books of each nation, are the sanctuary of the intuitions”; they are “that which the droning world, chained to appearances, will not allow the realist to say in his own words,” but will hear as “proverbs without contradiction” (qtd. in Moldenhauer 152). In Wide World 3 (1822), they are “proofs of the action of some single intelligent Principle” (qtd. in Reaver 290). An early record in Emerson’s journal indicates that he saw proverbs as the precursors of written laws and as fundamental expressions of the truth that a divine power was expressed through all things: “proverbs and familiar sayings of all nations . . . are the first generalizations of the mind and have been repeated by the mouth of the million” (qtd. in La Rosa 134). As a record of the accumulated wisdom of mankind over the ages, “common proverbs,” he suggests in YES, avail us of “accurate knowledge of human life” that “no single individual, with whatever penetration, could have attained himself . . . ” (qtd. in La Rosa 136). Like Thoreau, Emerson knew Knox’s collection of quotations and proverbs; he compiled and borrowed proverbs; and he “created” his own, which he actually designated as “My Proverbs.” Even more incessantly than



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Thoreau, he used proverbs in his writings and addresses. Like Thoreau he expressed suspicion of the kind of thinking that supported the common use of proverbs. He warns in “Prudence” that “the world is filled with the proverbs and acts and winkings of a base prudence” (The Collected 1: 132), a prudence that does not “go behind nature and ask whence it is” (The Collected 1: 133). Nevertheless, he persistently identifies proverbs as outcroppings of the original language from which man’s fall from paradise, as he suggests in “The Poet,” alienated him; and those outcroppings occur in “the people,” in “the common style of the people, as one finds . . . in proverbs and forms of speech” (qtd. in La Rosa 191), especially as reinterpreted by the poet, or the poet in all of us. For instance, in “The Over-Soul,” Emerson explains that language cannot pin down this Over-Soul, even though it runs through everyone. To express the very inexpressibility of that Soul, however, he turns to a proverb: “We know that all spiritual being is in man. A wise old proverb says, ‘God comes to see us without bell’ ” (qtd. in La Rosa 184). As it came to Emerson in the Knox compendium, according to La Rosa, the proverb warned humans that they should be ready and prepared for death and God’s reckoning. Emerson, however, turns that negative application into a positive one, explaining that it illustrates the lack of an impenetrable border between God and humans: “That is, there is no screen or ceiling between our heads and the infinite heavens, so is there no bar or wall in the soul, where man, the effect, ceases, and God, the cause, begins. The walls are taken away” (qtd. in La Rosa 185). Thus, as in Thoreau, the active, lively interpretation of proverbs actually activates their original expression of something beyond low prudence. Emerson’s use of the proverbs, according to La Rosa, highlights their power to fuse a sense of historicity with timelessness, the diachronic with the synchronic. As Reaver points out, Emerson felt that the power to recognize and produce the Truth “resides in the moment of transition from a past to a new state, in the shooting of the gulf, in the darting to an aim” (Reaver 296). Giving a proverb a new turn, for instance, activates this sense of transition and renewal. As an expression of the ages and even as an expression of particular periods of time and individual nations, proverbs record diversity and change; and yet at the same time, their primary structural features of balance and, ultimately, of identification in the A = B form they most often take express within this diversity and timelessness an opening onto that which remains unchanging (La Rosa 156). The proverb thus expresses the productive tension between the fleeting phenomenal realm and, through its form, the sense of an origin that is always accessible. In its basic form of identification, the proverb names the usually inapproachable truth that runs through everything. Its formulaic sound and





structure give an audience something to remember, even apart from the proverb’s specific details and message. In La Rosa’s terms, “proverbs always sound like an absolute truth, whatever their particular images or messages” (La Rosa 156). This is why Emerson could say “that the ‘necessary truths’ of proverbs have a ‘quasi’ truth instantly to the ear’ of an audience” (qtd. in La Rosa 156). It is also why Emerson so often turns to proverbial structuring of his thought, even when he is not working from existing proverbs. In responding to the apparent “timelessness” of the proverb’s sound and structure, the audience essentially gets in touch with the “deep structures” within its own nature; it responds to a truth that seems to come as much from within as from without. From this necessarily brief distillation of Emerson’s “proverbial inclinations,” we can observe several themes. For Emerson, the oral model seems to be primary: language that “speaks” rather than whispers on paper more closely approaches the truth of universal identity that he—and by implication, of course—we all seek. The structure of the proverb is vital precisely because it echoes, even activates, a structure embedded within the audience; it strikes the hearer/reader as something it has heard before. Importantly, this recognition of familiarity is not to be confused with merely a hankering for comfort, but rather with a kind of stirring or glimmering of one’s usually unacknowledged identification with what seems like an inaccessible other. The proverb is a fossil, a product of time and of a different culture, as expressed in its different language and field of images, but through its form it represents something that remains always present, no matter what the age and what the culture. This enthusiastic, “transcendental” vision of proverbs, even with such qualifications that Emerson makes about their support of base prudence, is far removed from the vision we get from Job’s wife in The Masque of Reason: that turning to a proverbial formula to capture a sense of “the truth” is a delusion. Part of the reason for that difference emerges from the work of another often-noticed influence upon Frost, William James. That influence shows up most clearly in tone. James does not discuss proverbs overtly, but he does address formulae by which people live—in custom, in common sense, and, as we have seen, in the act of naming. These formulae function as the props that support our need to feel that we live in a world that at least seems coherent despite a background, when examined openly, of uncertainty and incoherence. In a largely sympathetic way, James isolates the need of people, including philosophers, scientists, religious figures, and even the sort of person represented by the neighbor in Frost’s “Mending Wall,” to rely on a certain level of self-deception and merely subjective preference in life decisions. To the extent that it is influenced by James, Frost’s interest in the proverbial inclination exceeds the connection both



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Thoreau and Emerson make between it and some detectable origin of truth or between it and some perversion of the original authenticity of expression that it mimics. As Poirier remarks, “Frost did not feel as acutely as did Emerson . . . the need to rescue life from the ‘old and false’ sense of things. Along with William James he preferred to play with the barely possible virtues and the alleged necessities of ‘false’ beliefs. Certain beliefs might seem contrary to nature, but, by a power of expression given them in the literature of the past they have become ‘true’ ” (Robert Frost, 198–99). The proverb functions as do all conventions: it is a way, as Burke says, of naming something, of fixing it with an attitude, of taking it out of the realm of always negotiable and fluctuating meaning that haunts human consciousness. Still, James’s discussion of the formula by which we live ranges in attitude from critical to accepting. In a powerful passage from the fourth lecture in Pragmatism, “The One and the Many,” a section that must have struck Frost, James actually deals with the tension between Job’s almost unmediated experience of God on the one hand and the palliative advice of the proverbial counselors on the other hand—that “all evil in the universe is but instrumental to its greater perfection.” James remarks: “God’s ways are not our ways, so let us put our hands upon our mouth. A god who can relish such superfluities of horror is no God for human beings to appeal to. His animal spirits are too high, his practical jokes too monstrous. In other words the ‘Absolute’ with his one purpose is not the man-like God of the common people” (Pragmatism 70). The manlike God of the common people, in terms of our discussion, is the God whose purpose can be formulated into phrases we can repeat—“Say something to us we can learn / By heart and when alone repeat.” According to James, the God Job faces has no such limitations, and thus the proverbial expressions that capture his purpose remain irrelevant as accurate descriptions of an absolute truth, though not irrelevant, importantly, as pragmatic means of getting by in life, of preserving a sense of equilibrium. They join other pieces of what James in Pragmatism calls “the magisterial notions of common sense,” that “mother-tongue of thought” by which we operate day to day. “Everyone, however instructed . . . [flies] back to them the moment critical pressure is relaxed” (88). They are, in a passage from James that Poirier cites, things that “cease to represent anything in the way of being; they are but sublime tricks of human thought, our ways of escaping bewilderment in the midst of sensation’s irremediable flow” (Robert Frost 328). James’s pragmatism, with its emphasis on usefulness and the “cash value” of cultural notions, as Poirier points out, cannot in good faith condemn common sense and the “sayings” that support it; in fact, as we see here, it must describe their important, useful function, and oppose





scholastic, rationalistic theorizing about a single truth or source. However, the rhetoric James employs, as with his use of “tricks” in the quote above, often casts a negative light upon the shared human need for self-deception and especially the unwillingness of humans to recognize their dependence on self-deceptive structures. He characterizes “reality” as something independent of human thought, something that can only have been a thing close to “some imagined aboriginal presence in experience” emerging prior to “any human conception [having] been applied to it.” This reality, he continues, “is what is absolutely dumb and evanescent, the merely ideal limit of our minds. We may glimpse it, but we never grasp it; what we grasp is always some substitute for it which previous human thinking has peptonized and cooked for our consumption . . . wherever we find it, it has been already faked ” (Pragmatism 119–20). As we have seen, one of the ways of “cooking it” is naming; another is to rely upon the forms of common sense, the proverblike sayings of the ages. Those who see through the naming and the reliance on sayings as just that—a pragmatic, useful way to get by given the shapeless flow of experience—are, according to James, “the tough-minded”; those, on the other hand, who need to imagine a better world backing the one we experience, who need to see a single purpose, a single God or Truth or Design, that explains every discrete event in terms a larger purpose, every suffering as a consequence of some misstep, or some link in an authentic reality explained by the notion of a God, for instance, are “the tender-minded.” In The Will to Believe, moreover, as Tyler Hoffman points out, James “contrasts the ‘feminine-mystical’ mind with a tougher kind of mind that resists metaphysical thinking” (44). And though James does, in his chapter “Pragmatism and Humanism,” situate the pragmatic stance between these two “camps,” his language often tilts in favor of the “tough-minded”; consequently he suggests that the human need to find shelter from the weariness “of considerations,” from the feeling that “life is too much like a pathless wood,” as Frost puts it in “Birches,” is a stance for the weak of heart. To the extent that James’s philosophy about the forms of common sense relates to this proverbial tendency in human nature, it has a gender component. That gender component, though, is complicated by his repeatedly referring to pragmatism as “she.” In a particularly curious and suggestive strain of language, James actually describes how the feminine pragmatism “unstiffens” theories: “She has in fact no prejudices whatever, no obstructive dogmas, no rigid canons of what shall count as proof. She is completely genial. She will entertain any hypothesis, she will consider any evidence . . . “(Pragmatism 44). In this case the theories of both the rationalists and the positivists remain in a kind of ineffectual erection until



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unstiffened by the easy-going lady pragmatism. Thus, although James’s language is often tinged with masculine, heroic tropes about the brave venture into the self-delusory morass of contradictory gestures toward a unified reality, his positioning of the pragmatic view, alternately critical and supportive of the need for such things as conventional sayings and names, complicates any easy assignment of gender to it. James’s attitude toward the need to attach a name, saying, or theory to some aspect of an always resistant world of experience, is something Frost inherits, as Poirier suggests. This inheritance from James makes Frost’s concern with this proverbial inclination different from Thoreau’s or Emerson’s. In the broadest terms, Frost’s interest in proverblike sayings expresses his larger reaction against formulae and systems, though that reaction often is mitigated by an admission that formulae or forms are vital even for the tough-minded. As Richardson and Kearns have explained in their different ways, Frost tried to keep from running with the herd, and yet as Richardson emphasizes, he always needed to modify that powerful tendency with an equally strong need for community and the shape, comfort, and purpose community gives to one’s life. Planners, systematizers, utopianizers, reformers, converts to the latest schemes, theorizers about poetry, New Dealers—all these and more “run in all directions . . . for security in the game of Pussy-wants-a-corner,” as Frost put it in his “Introduction to Sarah Cleghorn’s ‘Threescore’ ” (749). At the same time, however, Frost himself admits: “I find security chiefly in proper names.” He implicates others in their frantic withdrawal to systems, but at the same time includes himself in the process as well. The difficulty for us is locating the value of proverblike sayings within this conflict that shapes Frost’s politics, life, and poetry. As Kearns, Richardson, Kilcup, Hoffman, and others have pointed out, the conflict reflects Frost’s “issues” with gender, and it bleeds into such matters as his distinction between the oral and the written, the ear and the eye, and even his pet notion of sentence sounds, that almost structuralist notion that the originally oral language is based upon a finite number of sentence shapes with their various “tones” upon which words hang. Unavoidably a romantic, Frost was as much about originality in poetry and the elimination of the latest echoes of poetic diction as Wordsworth and Coleridge. In “The Unmade Word, or Fetching and Far-Fetching,” for instance, he says, “When a man sits down with pen and paper to write, he declares his purpose of being original, instead of taking these second-hand words and phrases. I am sick of people who use only these ready-made words and phrases. I like better a boy who invents them for himself—who takes a word or phrase from where it lies and moves it to another place” (695). At the same time, he often refers to true poetry as the expression of what “was oft thought but ne’er so well





expressed.” In a letter to William Braithwaite, he explains the poet’s job as one of simply finding tones in the speaking voice that already exist but that haven’t as yet “been brought to book.” In writing to Sidney Cox, also, he speaks of the finite number of sentence sounds that already exist for us all, and suggests that the poet’s job—and he’s the only poet, as he tells John Bartlett in a still earlier letter, who recognizes this as his job—is to select and group such sounds as they come to him: “We come into the world with them and create none of them. What we feel as creation is only selection and grouping” (681; discussed by Hoffman, 41). To Bartlett, he writes, “In literature it is our business to give people the thing that will make them say, ‘Oh yes I know what you mean.’ It is never to tell them something they don’t know, but something they know and hadn’t thought of saying. It must be something they recognize” (675). Perhaps even more pointedly, Frost said in an interview with William Braithwaite in February 1915 at Tufts College, “The beginning of literary form is in some turn given to the sentence in folk speech. Art is the amplification and sophistication of the proverbial turns of speeches” (Interviews 7). On the one hand, the proverblike saying, with its suggestion of having roots in the origins of our race, its often oral if not oracular feel, its aura of having always already been there, its tight structure that seems almost in and of itself to express the shape of a truth previously accepted, has some of the qualities that Frost prizes. Moreover it is part of the vernacular, the site of the authentic speaking voice. On the other hand, the sayings are old, worn from use, and ready-made; they are the too-easy hiding places in the game of “pussy finds a corner.” Often cited as an example of Frost’s playful involvement of his reader in the same game of threat and pursuit to shelter that he sees as his life, the famous letter to Louis Untermeyer about formulae also suggests the complexity in Frost’s relation to systems and to the prefabricated structures in our lives. Frost starts by referring to Bergson and Fabre as thinkers who have seen through the formula of evolutionism, which has been taken for granted as truth, and by remarking on the family-like atmosphere in Untermeyer’s “shop” in New York City, which so surprisingly counters the cliché about finding family affairs largely in “country villages” rather than urban areas. He tells Untermeyer, “I should be jealous of you for having such an institution in a modern city where it doesn’t belong according to all our theories, if I wasn’t so fond of seeing our theories knocked into cocked hats” (692). These references lead him to remark on the way in which the artist must at some level acknowledge the formulae by which we live, even plug into them, in order to have a voice: You get more credit for thinking if you restate formulae or cite cases that fall in easily under formulae, but all the fun is outside saying things that



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suggest formulae that won’t formulate—that almost but don’t quite formulate. I should like to be so subtle at this game as to seem to the casual person altogether obvious. The casual person would assume that I meant nothing or else I came near enough meaning something he was familiar with to mean it for all practical purposes. Well well well. (692)

This passage would suggest, certainly, a lack of sympathy for the sayings by which we live, a cynical use of them to play with readers and thereby achieve a curious, personal pleasure, and perhaps, in the manner of Poor Richard Saunders, increase the size of the book-buying audience by providing literature that seems to confirm the safe and conventional structures of society. Frost positions himself on the “outside.” No apparent sense of community here, not even a saving sense of alienation from it. He only acknowledges that the “casual person” is slave to the forms of a community, while he isn’t—though he is at the same time shaping an imagined community for himself, including Untermeyer and the likes of Bergson and Fabre. At any rate, Frost characterizes himself here as the elitist that he detested in Pound and Eliot, who wrote, he complained, not to be understood, and, unknowingly we have to imagine, as the God James describes in the passage from Pragmatism we looked at earlier, a God/author who sits outside of creation and plays in his imponderable ways, whose “ways are not our ways . . . whose animal spirits are too high, his practical jokes too monstrous” to be “the ‘Absolute’ with his one purpose, . . . the man-like God of the common people” (70). On other occasions, however, Frost’s discussions of poetry suggest that the poet’s reliance on the accepted forms actually distinguishes him from other poets and their adherence to theories and systems. In an inscription in North of Boston addressed to Regis Michaud, he praises Emerson for his reliance on the colloquial: “I am as sure that the colloquial is the root of every good poem as I am that the national is the root of all thought and art” (693). “One half of individuality is locality,” he claims, just as “the other half [is] colloquiality.” In his “Introduction to E. A. Robinson’s King Jasper, ” he emphasizes “the old-fashioned way to be new,” linking it to his notion of correspondence, which amounts ultimately to a shared sense of the patterns that let us live together. According to this way of thinking, the artist must “connect” with readers, rather than “pull one over on them”: “It has been said that recognition in art is all. Better say correspondence is all. Mind must convince mind that it can uncurl and wave the same filaments of subtlety, soul convince soul that it can give off the same shimmers of eternity. At no point would anyone but a brute fool want to break off this correspondence. It is all there is to satisfaction; and it is salutary to live in the fear of its being broken off ” (742).





In “Mending Wall” the neighbor is described by the speaker as something close to a brute fool—“an old stone savage armed”—because of his apparently mindless reliance on his father’s saying. However, that saying contributes to the fabric of conventional correspondences by which we remain part of the community of man, a product of what Frost, in this piece on King Jasper, calls—as Richardson emphasizes—“the fear of Man—the fear that men won’t understand us and we shall be cut off from them” (742; Richardson 131). The question we have to address, then, is where does Frost’s lover’s quarrel with the proverbial impulse fit into both the need to undermine formula on the one hand and the fear of Man, the fear of not being understood, on the other? The proverb as comforting answer, as name to capture and control doubt, is not what the poem ought to provide the reader. In another passage from the “Introduction to King Jasper” preface, Frost uses almost the same dynamics of desired answer and response that he does in “Choose Something Like a Star.” He speaks of a kind of reader “who stands at the end of a poem ready to catch you [the poet] by both hands with enthusiasm and drag you off your balance over the last punctuation mark into more than you meant to say. ‘I understand the poem all right, but please tell me what is behind it.’ Such presumption needs to be twinkled at and baffled. The answer must be, ‘If I had wanted you to know, I should have told you in the poem’ ” (745). In responding to the reader who gropes for something that he can “learn by heart and when alone repeat,” the author must behave like the star—twinkle of course and baffle the earnest inquirer with more of a question than an answer: “I burn” or “I merely write the poem,” but do not offer an anxiety-quelling message or a saying to learn by heart. As Poirier reminds us, moreover, this word “baffle” picks up on the term Job uses in A Masque of Reason to describe what amounts to the proverbial tendency to eliminate bafflement by inquiring after a larger meaning behind events. Poirier writes, “Job says something about fools that is wiser than he knows and that represents what Frost thinks best about human beings generally: ‘being baffled for the sake of being.’ ‘Being’ here is both a gerund and a noun. Humans attain their ‘being’ by a willingness to be baffled . . . ; the ‘puzzle [of God’s purpose] is . . . in need of solution only to those who want a ‘design’ which will take care of everything” (Robert Frost 254). In A Masque of Reason this group consists of those proverbial “comforters” who come to Job contending in formulaic fashion that he “must be wicked to deserve such pain” as God hands out to him (384). Authentic human experience, Frost asserts in the “Introduction to ‘King Jasper,’ ” consists of “immedicable woes— woes that nothing can be done for—woes flat and final” (747–48), woes that proverblike sayings cannot sooth.



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A self-contained version of Frost’s conflicted attitude about formulae and sayings emerges from his delightful “Letter to The Amherst Student.” Like Franklin in his Preface to the final version of The Poor Richard Almanack, which works against the expectations of the people that Father Abraham will condemn the modern world and its governmental excesses, Frost begins his letter by dismissing the popularly accepted formula, the cliché, that “the age of the world we live in is particularly bad,” a cliché with which he has grown “impatient” (739). Then he goes on to his wellknown discussion of how creation of form is possible in any age at any level, from the poem to the smoke ring. Creation of form represents perhaps the one way in which we can bring pleasure and security into our lives: the “hugeness and confusion shading away from where we stand into black and utter chaos” can be seen, as if by design, to be the very setting we need in which to create order. It is as if we all are authors of our own Genesis, carving out shape from the ancient goddess of the night and darkness, Tiamat. Along the way toward this consoling conclusion about the necessary link between chaos and form, a theodicy of sorts, Frost actually discusses the impossibility of ever achieving the kind of vantage point he so blithely describes in his letter to Untermeyer, that position outside the formula. It is “as dangerous to try to get outside of anything as large as an age as it would be to engorge a donkey.” Those who do so can only “write huge shapeless novels, huge gobs of raw sincerity bellowing with pain and that’s all that they can write” (739–40). Here the dangers of getting outside accepted forms are large and ultimately brutalizing, the egregious author ending up “bellowing with pain” as if he were an animal. Appropriately then, Frost concludes his “Letter to The Amherst Student” by relying on a proverbial saying: “To me any little form I assert upon it is velvet, as the saying is, and to be considered for how much more it is than nothing” (740). He begins by dismissing a somehow comforting convention common to humans that the world is worse than it has ever been and then, in the process of making that convention irrelevant, underscores his point about form by relying on an equally conventional, formulaic notion, whether it stems from the idea of an iron hand in a velvet glove (Oxford Dictionary 321) to suggest the humanizing force of form or, more likely, comes from the idea of velvet being the profit one gains in an endeavor, as in “Though I have something to pay out of it, I shall be on velvet for expense” (Oxford Dictionary 685). Certainly it can be said that Frost, like Thoreau, here revitalizes a saying by applying it in a new and surprising way; he relies on the “old fashioned way to make something new.” Still, his position in relation to the formulaic remains less than clear as he depends on a formula not to disorient and confuse, but rather to explain and comfort the inquiring students at





Amherst, even giving them something they can “learn by heart and when alone repeat.” Another example, this one from Frost’s more private letters to Louis Untermeyer about his friend’s marital difficulties, illustrates the almost contradictory positions Frost takes on the folk wisdom of the proverbs and the mere formulae that they can become. Thompson patiently takes his readers through Frost’s fascinating attempt to act as Untermeyer’s counselor (Years of Triumph 345–52). Remarkably, Frost puts himself in the position almost of Job’s counselors while trying to maintain the role and tone of Yahweh. After Untermeyer’s divorce from his wife, Jean Starr, his marriage and subsequent divorce from Virginia Moore, and the suicide of his son, Richard, Frost resumed communication with his friend by admonishing him not only about his moral failings in the area of marriage, but more energetically about his self-deception, which Frost regards as a function of his having given in to slogans, clichés, new theories, and selfhelp-like palliatives. After apologizing for his silence, Frost begins to scold Untermeyer by saying he was willing to leave consolation and advice to the author of the author of Elmer Gantry, I mean Alfred [Harcourt] the Sloganist. You would have only to call on him to comfort you with slogans and he would touch your various stops as skillfully as if you were the public and he were just what he is. Can’t I just hear him inspiring what I see by the papers you have been free to say on the subject of faith in life. Honestly it sounds like office talk. Om Mani Padmi Hum. Which is to say the lotus flower has a center that means something . . . Come to me if you want to hear some small part of the truth . . . Don’t say things like that about faith in life where I can come across them because they simply bust me all up in the seat of philosophy . . . if you love me for Christ’s sake find some more poetic way of going irresponsible than in dub sophistries. (The Letters 187)

After Untermeyer remarried Jean Starr and they were on their way to Germany to honeymoon, during which time they would be writing a travel book about their experiences in the Black Forest, Frost once again attacks him for his self-deceptive reliance on palliative sayings: How much better if you had been a staid orthodox Jew and never had run wild after a super-wisdom that doesn’t exist . . . The whole experiment has been a waste of time and energy. You haven’t found out anything that you didn’t know before, that we didn’t know before: and I won’t listen to you if you say you have. That’s the one thing I can’t stand from a person in your predicament. For my sake, if you still care for me, don’t talk about having been chastened or having profited in any way. You’ve lost—time, if nothing else. (The Letters 190–91)



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You have been acting . . . under the pressure of the bad smart talk you have listened to and learned to share in the society you have cultivated in your own New York salons . . . None of it was wise or right or real. What I dread most now is that you will go on the assumption that, though it was folly and landed you in tragedy, it was on the way somewhere and somehow prepared you for greater and fuller life. Shut up. To hell with such comforts. (The Letters 192)

In opposition to this new, false talk, Frost offers something more “original”: Talk no more—unless you can talk unclear, unsophisticated, simple goodness. You tempt me to soak you in milk to renew your innocence. The funny positions people can talk themselves into in a lifetime of tryit-on talk . . . Louis Louis very few people that leave the good old folkways can keep from getting all mixed up in the mind. We can make raids and excursions into the wild, but it has to be from well kept strongholds. (The Letters 193)

Quoting these letters in this much detail offers a clear view of the way in which Frost patterns his advice to his friend upon the Book of Job. Even his scolding—“Shut up” and “Talk no more”—has the finality of Yahweh’s absolute dismissal of any complaint Job offers him. As I have mentioned, though, Frost is also in the position of Job’s proverbial counselors, and he tries to maintain that role without fully occupying the position of those ineffectual providers of palliative reason. He puts Alfred Harcourt and Untermeyer’s “sophisticated” friends in that position, and he represents Untermeyer as compliant rather than resistant like Job. The trouble is that his very last statement in this series of judgments connects him with proverbial wisdom, something original and unadulterated, something “unclever, unsophisticated, simple,” something originating in “the good old folkways.” Not just his poetry, essays and plays, then, but even his private advice to his friend serves as a footnote to his preoccupation with the tension in the Book of Job between proverbial wisdom, with its earnest enforcement of a world of discernable cause and effect, transgression and punishment, obedience and reward on the one hand, and a more authentic alternative, some manly facing of loss, waste, and badness, on the other. Even in this conflicted advice, Frost’s emulation of the Book of Job is thorough: that story, after all, exposes the self-deceit of proverbial wisdom, restores Job to his former life, and then punishes his false counselors. In other words, through Yahweh’s agency, the narrative reinstates



Scolding his friend once again, Frost continues to zero in on Untermeyer’s having fallen for bogus wisdom:


the proverbial formula of reward and punishment that it has throughout the story emptied of meaning. Frost tells Untermeyer that his friend has fallen for what he has grown accustomed to hear; Frost’s solution is that he should return to the foundational truth of custom. This apparent contradiction, like the simultaneous devaluing and valuing of the name, remains at the center of Frost’s poetry.

“The best way out is always through” At this stage I would like to begin a more detailed examination of the proverbial inclination in Frost’s poetry and the way in which it figures into the exploration of identity that we have been tracing. First, two poems that mark off one extreme in the way Frost represents that inclination. The companion poems from A Boy’s Will, “Mowing” and “Tuft of Flowers,” both end in proverbial-sounding statements. After a series of conjectures about what the scythe of the speaker-worker was whispering to the ground, the penultimate line in “Mowing” asserts proverbially, in an almost isolated sentence that seems far more succinct, studied, and already composed than the casual and associational feel of the rest of the poem, “The fact is the sweetest dream that labor knows” (26).8 In “The Tuft of Flowers,” the speaker recognizes signs left behind by a kindred spirit who has come before him—someone resembling the speaker of “Mowing.” These signs incite him to replace one proverbial-sounding assessment of his experience with a diametrically opposed one. Early in the poem he says about men at work that they all must be alone “Whether they work together or apart.” However, at the conclusion of the poem, after seeing the tuft of flowers as a message left him by another, he concludes: “ ‘Men work together . . . / Whether they work together or apart’ ” (31). The individual experience delivered in each of these poems moves toward and ends with an expression that generalizes into a sort of wisdom-statement about the tendencies in human experience, as if the speaker adopts an already-existing statement, even if it is original with Frost. Though the poems contain this sort of dual force, they hardly can be said to express an awareness of that tension—the saying is presented as something naturally leading out of the described desires. Perhaps the ease with which one proverbial expression can be replaced by its opposite suggests something like a budding suspicion of proverbial expressions, but that is not at all clear. In fact the often remarked note before “Mending Wall” in the original edition of North of Boston—“ ‘Mending Wall’ takes up the theme where ‘A Tuft of Flowers’ . . . laid it down” (970)—could refer to the emphasis in both on



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the proverbial drive toward discovering general truths that shape human interaction.9 A similar proverblike conclusion occurs in two very different poems: “A Passing Glimpse” and “At Woodward’s Gardens.” In both, the apparently invented proverbial expression names the experience, which perhaps could have been left unnamed. “A Passing Glimpse,” as we have seen in our discussion of Frost’s occupation with naming, expresses the train-riding speaker’s fleeting sense of having seen some flower that he cannot name— “Was something brushed across my mind / That no one on earth will ever find?” (227). The experience itself and this question about it, rather than standing on their own, then yield to a final couplet: “Heaven gives its glimpses only to those / Not in position to look too close” (227). As with the two mowing poems, the proverblike saying, though it follows from what has gone before, stands in an uneasy relationship with the rest of the poem. Responding to the inability to name, even while having shown off his ability to name all the flowers that were not part of his glimpse, the speaker uses another trope of naming, the proverblike expression, to quell the feeling of poetic powerlessness. On the one hand, the reader is invited into the personal exploration and questioning of the individualized lyric; on the other hand, the saying comes from quite a different “tone,” to use one of Frost’s favorite terms. It is the tone of the folk, of the seemingly wellaccepted truth, even if devised by the author. Thus a poem that hints at the sense of the special individuality of the speaker—he having had something brush by his mind “that no one on earth will ever find”—concludes with an expression whose proverbial tone undermines that highly individualized feeling. The more obviously anecdotal and satiric tone of “At Woodward’s Gardens” better prepares us than “A Passing Glimpse” for its closing saying, one that Frost used as well in some of his talks. In its “once upon a time” and illustrative treatment of the boy, the poem’s opening establishes a tone that almost requires a “moral”: “A boy, presuming on his intellect, / Once showed two little monkeys in a cage / A burning-glass they could not understand . . . ” (266). The anecdote continues to develop the monkeys’ lack of understanding and then to show that that lack does not matter, as one of them snatches the magnifying glass from the boy. That act leads to the closing proverbial saying: “It’s knowing what to do with things that counts.” As different as these poems are from each other and as different as they are also from “A Tuft of Flowers” and “Mowing,” they resemble these early poems in simply using the saying without representing an attitude toward the value of the proverbial inclination. In a number of other poems, Frost works with existing proverbs, recasting them or faintly alluding to them. In most of these cases, again, the poem does not confirm or negate the value of the proverblike saying,





but rather develops the curious mixture of the need for individual expression and assertion of identity with the force of the communal truth. “A Peck of Gold” modifies interestingly the American proverb recorded in Taylor and Whiting, “We must eat our peck of dirt before we die” (297). The poem’s retrospective view betrays a sense of disillusionment, as the speaker was one of the children told that the dust blowing about San Francisco was partly made up of gold: “And I was one of the children told / Some of the blowing dust was gold “ (228). By the end of the poem the twice repeated refrain gets modified: “And I was one of the children told, / ‘We all must eat our peck of gold’ ” (228). The modification of the proverb from dirt to gold, the hints of the Golden Age and Eden, and the notion that gold comes in measurements more applicable to fruit than precious metal make the poem highly allusive.10 Typically, the proverb is connected with the oral realm: it comes to the child by word of mouth, apparently handed down from the older generation. Unlike the poems of this kind that have the proverblike expression tacked on at the end, this one dramatizes the use of the proverb, makes it part of the speaker emerging in his individuality from the folkways of proverbial wisdom. The modification of “dirt,” or in some of the original versions of the proverb “dust,” to “gold” obscures the obvious darkness of the saying (and the darkness of the expression “bites the dust” which also lurks behind the wording) and relies instead on the more haunting allusions to myths of mortality and immortality. In such a light-sounding, seemingly inconsequential poem, Frost turns what he configures as a local, customary proverb into a mythic expression. The proverb in this case works for Frost in the way Faggen discusses—as a “think.” In “Dust in the Eyes,” Frost also personalizes a proverb recorded in Taylor and Whiting: “throw dust in your eyes,” as in, “The opposition folks throw dust in your eyes” (114). Instead of advancing from the notion that dust thrown in the eyes is a kind of deception, the poem takes the form of a bold, personalized, even self-injurious challenge: if “dust thrown in my eyes,” says the speaker, will keep me from “getting overwise,” then “Let it be overwhelming, off a roof / And round a corner, blizzard snow for dust, / And blind me to a standstill if it must” (244). We recognize in this description, of course, an element of the fire-and-ice signature trope that we have already examined. Moreover, this bold, almost literal-minded take-off on the proverbial saying not only undoes the sense of deception that it figuratively expresses (“dust in my eyes”), but also alters the indirection of its metaphor through that literalizing act. It takes the figurative proverb literally, just as the speaker in “Mending Wall” measures the neighbor’s traditional saying, an actual proverb, as Monteiro observes (Robert Frost 126), in literal terms—“There where it is we do not need the



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wall . . . / My apple trees will never get across / And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him” (39). Complicating this seemingly straightforward challenge even more, the “Let it . . . ”, in yet another coincidence of Frost’s preoccupation with the Book of Job and his exploration of proverbial expressions, both echoes God’s creation in Genesis and reproduces the kind of language Job uses in parody of Genesis when he demands that he be undone, that he and existence as he knows it be “uncreated.”11 This unexpectedly complex poem also involves a fascinating use of a proverb to debunk the kind of selfsatisfaction associated with proverbial wisdom; at least that is the case if talk “getting overwise” equates to the Old Testament tradition of wisdom as partly expressed in Proverbs. The proverb about dust thrown in the eyes, then, becomes the impetus for the speaker to seek a remedy for the kind of wisdom that traditionally relies on the unexamined “truth,” in fact, expressed in proverbs. At the same time, though, he turns the apparent safety and retreat value of the proverb, a refuge in accepted wisdom from the harshness of confrontation with existential reality’s lack of meaning, into an almost apocalyptic, agonistic, heroic encounter. The speaker calls upon the forces of obliteration to have at him, in other words, but those forces amount to the literalized elements of a proverb that means to let yourself be blinded not by, but from, the truth. As so often happens in Frost’s most fascinating poems, then, the sentence sounds of the piece work against the play of its words and its intertextuality; just as its obvious identity claim in a commitment to some form of naming is undercut by the slipperiness of the language carrying that claim. Because this poem first appeared in broadside form as an advertisement for West-Running Brook, its use of the proverb also invokes the sense of a common folk voice and thereby, though it seems simple to say, attracts the broad, general audience that Frost sought, as opposed to the purely academic one (Cramer 99). The various commentaries on “Leaves Compared with Flowers” ignore the extent to which it too incorporates and reconfigures in fascinating ways three different proverbial sayings.12 Throughout the five quatrains in couplets that produce almost a chant, the poem relies on the physical features of a tree—with a brief reference to fern and lichens as a hint of the inevitably downward movement in life—to express how experience, perhaps a series of sad experiences as suggested by Foster (243), has led the poet/speaker to feel an affinity for the darker aspects of the tree: leaves and bark rather than petals, flowers, and fruit. Perhaps the most noticeable proverbial saying that echoes within these stanzas is the one Jesus offers in Matthew 12:33 about knowing the tree by its fruit: “Either make the tree good, and its fruit good; or make the tree bad, and its fruit bad; for the tree is known by its fruit” (New Revised Standard). Taylor





and Whiting have collected two other sayings that also inform the poem: “Durable trees make roots first” (381) and “the word with the bark on it” or “the truth with the bark on it” (17), suggesting directness rather than guile and euphemism.13 The poem begins with a modified version of “durable trees make roots first”: A tree’s leaves may be ever so good, So may its bark, so may its wood; But unless you put the right thing to its root It never will show much flower or fruit. (270)

In recasting a proverb and thereby adopting the tone of proverbial truth, the poem seems to end as soon as it begins: its first stanza sounds conclusive and complete. Through an apparently personal, experiential response, however, it continues by undermining that opening truism and even the value of the fruit, as expressed in the saying about knowing a tree by its fruit. The speaker postures as one who might not even care for the commonly held value of the tree—the fruit that it produces: “Leaves and bark may be tree enough.” Thus the speaker abandons the palliative wisdom of two sayings and enters into an apparently more authentic realm of his own personal experience, into his mood, which is all about leaning against the bark, almost in a self-punishing way, and listening to the darker tone of the leaves: Leaves and bark, leaves and bark, To lean against and hear in the dark. Petals I may have once pursued. Leaves are all my darker mood. (270)

As is the case in “Dust in My Eyes,” however, the apparently radical, individualizing departure from the common truth of proverbial wisdom is underwritten by another equally common proverbial phrase: something about having experience, life, truth unadorned—“with the bark on it.” As with the poems that stage the speaker’s search for an authentic name, these poems propose an advance toward some confirmation of an unreplicated, meaningful self by way of a naming device that ultimately undermines any prospect of such confirmation. With all the attention given to the moralizing, even proverbial conclusion of “Two Tramps in Mud Time,” the sense of it having been partly built, like these other poems, from proverbs has escaped the attention of commentators. Just as the poem deals with two competing notions of work and two opposed political positions, so does it unfold in terms of two



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opposing proverbial sayings. One of these actually deals with the separation between work and play to which the poem’s speaker objects: that saying involves some variation of “all work and no play,” as “in all work and no play make _____ a dull ____” (Taylor and Whiting 413). The speaker justifies his not giving the passing tramps the job of splitting his wood for money through an independent reworking of this saying: Only where love and need are one, And work is play for mortal stakes, Is the deed ever really done For Heaven and the future’s sakes. (252)

Instead of all work and no play, the speaker makes play of work, and thus, as we have seen before, modifies proverbial wisdom. It does not matter, apparently, that the moralizing proverb does not actually fit the circumstances. After all, the stakes for the speaker, as he admits earlier, really are not mortal: the “blows” he strikes are ones that he knows he ought to “[spare] for the common good” instead of spending “on the unimportant wood.” No mortal stakes in “unimportant wood.” The moral only works, as I have suggested earlier in our discussion of the specular name, if the speaker and the tramps are ultimately conflicting parts of a single psyche. The other proverb lurking behind this poem is more puritanical and conservative: it unfolds in various ways as versions of “them that don’t work should not eat” (Taylor and Whiting 414). It echoes most fully in the nextto-last stanza in passages such as ““I had no right to play / With what was another man’s work for gain” and “My right might be love but theirs was need “ and “Theirs was the better right—agreed.” The proverbial saying about work and gain—or just survival—works in two directions at once: on the one hand it suggests, according to the typical formula of Proverbs— that life is a system of exertion and appropriate reward: work and you eat, or strive morally and you will be rewarded in a spiritual way. On the other hand, it also implies, especially in the context of the Great Depression (when the poem was first published), that people ought to be allowed to work in order to eat. My assumption here, of course, is that Frost was likely aware of the proverbial subtext of his poem, as aware of that as he was of what he occasionally denied—the poem’s political meaning in partial opposition to the New Deal. Given what we have seen of Frost’s investment in the folkways, his reading in Thoreau and Emerson, and his own attraction to Proverbs, wisdom literature generally, and the oral culture, it is difficult to imagine that his poem is not partly formulated around these competing proverbs.14 Once again in this poem the speaker strives individualistically against a proverb and confirms another; and what is more, he





self-conflictingly builds his own concluding proverbial gesture out of his attempted departure from existing proverbial wisdom. In other poems, Frost’s engagement with this proverbial inclination, which is always an engagement with a powerful tendency within him, represents an ironic attitude, even an openly condemnatory treatment of the tendency in human nature to handle complexity and anxiety in terms of sayings. Read in many ways, and more often misread than read with understanding, that seldom-ignored poem in Frost’s canon, “The Road Not Taken,” documents the willfulness that leads to misunderstandings of it and, more to our purposes, the origin of the need to construct a proverblike saying to cover over an inability to understand one’s rationale for a decision. The speaker’s difficulty in locating a clear reason for choosing between two indistinguishable alternatives (two roads that on inspection were actually the same in terms of how many people traveled them) leads to the only predictable truth: that he will construct a saying to cover up the haphazardness of whatever choice he makes and eventually to calcify that choice into essential meaning: “Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— / I took the one less traveled by, / And that has made all the difference” (103). Here we’re back at the photo session with Job, his wife, Satan, and God. The construction of a saying, a formulaic expression, serves as a stay against confusion, just as Milton’s sonnet consoled the poet about his blindness. Perhaps it is even worse: the saying serves to reinforce generational hegemony whereby the seemingly wise old man will proclaim a wisdom statement (this could be about taking a risk to go to war, or quitting school, for instance) that does not, in fact, match his actual experience. The poem curiously compresses time: the narrator at once looks back and, in the present time, projects what he, with all the sound of cultural wisdom because of the formulaic, drumroll of “ages and ages hence,” will be saying in the future. This compression is the poem’s genius because it represents the Dante-like young man, not seeking any advice from a Virgil about his choice, inescapably conscious of the fact that he will dispense proverbial sounding wisdom when he becomes the old man.15 The saying, though, provides little in the way of useable advice. The “by” in “I took the one less traveled by” can mean both “via” or “bypassed”—the one less traveled by people or the one less passed by. Confusing these contradictory alternatives even more, the words “made all the difference” remain entirely too vague to be of use. Does making “all the difference” imply something good or bad? Nor does the sigh provide any help, it too having at least two suggestive possibilities: a sigh of despair or a sigh of knowledge and experience, slightly histrionic in its introduction of a wisdom statement. In any case the poem’s irony about recourse to proverbial sayings mixes with an equally strong suggestion that recourse to formulae is an inevitable



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part of human experience, an inescapable impediment to discovering some original identity. “The Times Table,” from West-Running Brook, provides a more severe criticism of the proverbial response to life. A typically resistant animal in a Frost poem, the farmer’s mare slows down the wagon and lets out a “monster sigh” because, apparently, she normally stops for a drink at a certain spring with a broken drinking glass. She lets out this sigh whether or not the farmer intends to drink. His response, however, is just as much a routine application of a saying: “A sigh for every so many breath, And for every so many sigh a death. That’s what I always tell my wife Is the multiplication table of life.” (241)

The narrator ends the poem with eight lines of commentary on the farmer’s use of the saying: The saying may be ever so true; But it’s just the kind of a thing that you Nor I nor nobody else may say, Unless our purpose is doing harm, And then I know of no better way To close a road, abandon a farm, Reduce the births of the human race, And bring back nature in people’s place. (241)

In having the male farmer respond to a mare in terms of what he usually tells his wife, Frost marks off the proverbial response as an insensitive gesture of male control over what the male sees as unprogressive and feminine. Without observing the importance of the routine proverb-like saying, Richardson links this poem with “Home Burial,” “A Servant to Servants,” and “The Housekeeper,” for instance, in its representation of “the circumscribed lives of country wives” (240). This poem then fits with the stereotype in Frost of male expression aligned with convention. Yet that conventional response is just the kind of thing that is likely to close a road, the road being a symbol of manly, routine normalcy in this poem, as it is in “Stopping by the Woods,” for instance. The farmer’s saying leads to the abandonment of a farm. Abandonment of the farm, however, suggests the kind of uncontainable female response captured in, say, “The Hill Wife.” The saying can “reduce births of the human race”; birth, though a female activity, represents male potency, as for instance in terms of Frost’s own identification of his impregnations of Elinor with





masculine power.16 The saying is also the type of thing that will “bring back nature in people’s place”—an archetypal feminine advance of the wilderness upon male established civilization if there ever was one. In other words, the male gesture of regularizing control, of making a stay against confusion, in its unthinkingly systematic application, actually brings upon a kind of feminization of the world, at least from the perspective of the typical masculine world view. Apart from the specific negativity of the saying—its mechanized and fatalistic sense of an unvarying operation of the human body and psyche—the poem’s speaker ruthlessly attacks the proverbial tendencies in human nature as uncivilized, while at the same time interrogating the easy attribution of that tendency to a particular gender, even though the poem’s inclusion of man, mare, and wife invites such attribution.17 Reminiscent of Shelley’s “Ozymandias,” the early composed but late published “The Ingenuities of Debt” deals with proverbial words carved into stone resting amid a setting of decay that partially undermines those words and thereby asserts the vanity of human works.18 Frost combines an existing aphorism, “The art of life is passing losses on,” with the first part of a saying actually left on the remains of a palace in the city Ctesiphon, “Take care to sell your horse before he dies.”19 The combination creates a proverblike saying whose truth the imagery of the poem undermines and yet in a certain way sustains. Despite its self-awareness as expressed in that proverb, the city itself could not escape inevitable doom—“judging by what little of it stands.” Sand has overtaken its structures; and the single living thing amid the debris, a serpent resting on its chin, waits only “Till it can muster breath inside a hall / To rear against the inscription on the wall” (363). In Shelley’s poem the desert sands undermine Ozymandias’s proud boast, “Look on my works ye mighty and despair”—despair, the Pharaoh means, of ever rising to his level of power; despair, the carving sculptor knows, of ever creating something that endures until the end of time. Amid this vision of human vanity, though, the poem asserts the lasting power of the artist, even his ability to make living expressions out of cold stone. Similarly, Frost’s poem, while having a kind of last laugh on a city’s self-satisfied, proverbial wisdom, at the same time represents that proverb cut into the stone wall as still resisting decay, still surviving, and still worth considering. On the one known occasion that he read this poem, during a 1949 talk at Dartmouth College on perhaps his favorite phrase, “It seems as if,” he discussed the way in which this proverbial inclination we have been discussing is the primary element that survives, and has to be dealt with, in poetry. The “he” in this quote is a scientist who, Frost says, came out of his lab one day and confessed to the importance of literature and art,



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There are many precepts in poetry; they always stick in my mind. I’ve lived by them to a certain extent, lived in the spirit of their creed, and found some other strength according to my need. But I wonder if he didn’t mean that it was a kind of general guide in a way to take life. It’s full of precepts, controversial precepts that nobody would dispute. And you learn to have to live with controversial precepts and not dispute them, and you do that by living with poetry. (Sitar 3)

One of Frost’s various definitions of poetry, this passage equates both reading and writing poetry with the struggle for individualizing identity as it works against, and finally must come to terms with, the force of precepts, convention, and proverbial wisdom. More far-reaching interrogations of the proverbial tendency than we have so far seen occur repeatedly in North of Boston. That volume’s poetry—it is not going too far to claim—is dominated by sayings and by the more inclusive problem of ever being able to say just the right thing. Of this book’s sixteen poems, six hinge on a saying or two, and four more—“The Generation of Men,” “The Code,” “After Apple-Picking,” and “The Mountain”—circle around the issue of how to find a way, some conventional and at the same time acceptable way, of talking about the unknowable. The poems dealing most explicitly with proverblike sayings are “Mending Wall,” of course, “The Death of the Hired Man,” “Home Burial,” “The Black Cottage,” “Servant to Servants,” and “The Housekeeper.” Here is a list of sayings at the center of these poems: (1) “Good fences make good neighbors” and the narrator’s own “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall”; (2) in “The Death of the Hired Man,” Silas’s mechanical “come home to ditch the meadow” and Warren’s proverbial definition of home—“Home is the place where, when you have to go there, / They have to take you in”; (3) in “Home Burial,” the husband’s “Three foggy mornings and one rainy day / Will rot the best birch fence a man can build,” as well as his truism about hands-off areas in a relationship—“Two that don’t love can’t live together without them. / But two that do can’t live together with them”; (4) the tendency of the woman in “The Black Cottage” to depend on “quaint phrases” such as “all men are created free and equal” and especially her adherence to the wording in the Creed, “descended into Hades”; (5) Len’s “one steady pull more ought to do it . . . the best way out is always through,” in “A Servant to Servants”; (6) and, finally, in “The Housekeeper,” John’s “Better than married ought to be as good / As married.” As is the case even in the seemingly straightforward “The Times Table,” there is no easy way to capture the function of the proverblike sayings in



despite the force of his own discipline:


these poems. These expressions do contribute to the regional atmosphere and sense of oral culture for which the entire volume was praised. For the most part they emanate from males, express a formulaic, automatic response to emotional matters, and attempt to damn up the flow of misery, grief, and doubt. Importantly, Frost’s treatment of them is often sympathetic. Faggen’s description of what happens to the usual, neat oppositions in “Home Burial” applies to many other poems: “The gender hierarchy of civilized and uncivilized, ordered and chaotic, male and female, becomes remarkably fluid” (215). Poirier’s characterization of home in Frost’s poetry is also worth mentioning because home can expand in its meaning to represent the value of the proverblike saying: “ ‘Home’ can become the source of those fears from which it is supposed to protect us; it can become the habitation of that death whose anguish it is supposed to ameliorate” (Robert Frost 123). Amy’s censure of her husband’s saying about the birch fence in “Home Burial” certainly makes that saying seem cold, thoughtless, and cruel: “Think of it, talk like that at such a time! What had how long it takes a birch to rot To do with what was in the darkened parlor? You couldn’t care!” (58).

However, Amy’s further criticism about all people in general and the way they pretend to follow the dead friend to the grave even as “their minds are turned / And making the best of their way back to life / And living people, and things they understand” (58) defines her husband’s response as normal, a communal normalcy she rejects just as strongly as she rejects his saying and more generally his thinking that “the talk is all” (58). Her description of what people do to hasten emotionally from the grave expresses the exact function of the proverbial statement—it serves as a pathway “to life / And living people” (58). The husband’s rush to see words and outbursts as a kind purgative dose, however, further balances the debate over the authenticity of any form of expression, as he paternalistically pronounces her healed because of her outburst: “There, you have said it all and you feel better” (58). In the end, his desire to keep her in the house equates with his desire to capture grief and assign it to a comforting saying, even though the imagery in the proverb he utters vividly depicts the futility of man’s attempts to control and contain nature: the best birch fence will rot after just three foggy mornings and one rainy day.20 The form of the proverblike expression and the position in which it puts its hearer/reader function as meaning in this exchange. Like all proverblike sayings, it represents an intrusion of some timeless, universal realm into



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the specific, historical realm of personal experience. Though the male is typically depicted as the primary operator within the pragmatic, day-today occurrences of the world, the masculine proverblike saying is removed from the world in that it offers this quality of timelessness. Amy remains inescapably a part of the world, dwelling on each of its particular occurrences as vital, as just as important as all other occurrences in terms of its feeling to her, and yet this intense engagement prevents her from “going on with her life.” Her individualizing rejection of the proverb reflects almost a nihilistic abandonment of identity. Like the speaker in “Mending Wall,” though not as mischievous certainly, Amy focuses intensely on the proverb’s literal meaning and therefore disarms its palliative force. And as with “The Times Table,” the saying here seems part of the good old folk ways that Frost in his letter to Untermeyer about that bedrock of conventional society, marriage, reinforces. However, the husband’s very use of the convention, just like the use of the conventional saying in “The Times Table,” undermines that bedrock of conventional society: the marriage between Amy and her husband seems irreparably damaged by her perception of her husband in terms of his inability to say things the right way, as she intends to run off indefinitely to someone, somewhere.21 The proverb is a synecdoche for the restraining, confining home. The occurrence of the proverb in this poem, moreover, anticipates what became one of the chief themes coloring Frost’s relationships with other poets later in his life: Frost, as is quite well known, tried to position himself outside politics and its “causes,” outside grievances he called them, and to remain in the arena of griefs, of timeless, universal problems, where he would have what he called the most important freedom, the freedom of his material and, I must add, a feeling of timeless identity. His very activity as poet during the first half of the twentieth century resembles—and not just because of his adherence to old-fashioned conventions of verse, or oldfashioned ways to be new—the intrusion of a proverblike saying, timeless and often oracular in tone, into the discrete, time-bound fluidity of a poem. As has now become the truism about any apolitical stance, however, his attempts to remain above the fray, like the star in “Choose Something Like a Star,” amounted to a kind of unavoidable entrance into the political fray: as soon as he staked out his property lines as resting outside politics he became, unavoidably, political. The husband’s attempt to frame his child’s death as part of a larger course of events, Darwinian forces even, as Faggen would have it, and to depersonalize it, ultimately heightens the immediate, personal dynamics involved in the loss (Faggen 215–25). Frost’s complex, balanced treatment in this poem of the urge to call up a proverbial expression, I think, is remarkable. Like Job’s wife in A Masque of Reason, Amy in this poem understandably accuses her husband of hiding





behind formulaic expressions; yet he has earned the right to do so by having also experienced the loss and by having dug his child’s grave himself. That sort of balance becomes almost too much in “The Black Cottage.” A minister delivers a monologue to a walking companion as they visit the decaying cottage of a widow. She had lost her husband in the Civil War and her sons had moved away and left her alone, not so much out of carelessness as in response to her independent nature. Ostensibly this woman represents a kind of innocent adherence to conventional notions that echo in the minister’s mind as “ ‘quaint phrases—so removed / From the world’s view today’ ” (60). One of these quaint expressions is Jefferson’s, the Welshman’s, “all men are created free and equal” (60). That phrase, the minister tells his companion as they sit on the cottage’s steps, is somehow wrapped up in her mind with a kind of justification for her having lost her husband in the Civil War, as if the war and his participation in it confirmed the truth of that statement, a truth whose clarity the poem in fact roils up as much as possible. More specifically, the minister also identifies the old woman with a phrase in the Creed that he and his parishioners regarded as worn and untimely —“descended into Hades” (61). A “young man who has swallowed William James too hastily,” according to Reuben Brower (229), the minister would willingly modify the Creed so that it can become something the younger generation can call its own, a new palliative phrase of sorts, only he cannot bear the idea that the old woman might detect the change. Though regarded as an embodiment of outmoded, quaint innocence because of her adherence to, or association with, seemingly inapplicable sayings, she nevertheless persists, endures, almost as if she embodies the timeless force of proverbs themselves. “A Servant to Servants” makes the proverbial inclination an integral part of the female speaker’s circumstances and character. The poem develops as a dramatic monologue: we overhear the speaker’s side of a conversation with someone who is tenting on her property by the lake and apparently enjoys botanizing. The listener’s gender remains unspecified, though presumably it is a woman. The speaker tells the visitor of her own past life in another house, that of her parents, where her father’s insane brother, who was kept in a cage upstairs, infected with his constant shouting the relationship between the speaker’s newly wed parents. She tells also of her present situation on the shores of Willoughby Lake, after having moved at her husband’s bidding from her family’s house. Terribly depressed and feeling no sense of purpose, she keeps house for her husband and his work crew—a bunch of useless and rough men, she tells her listener. Because of the way in which the monologue convincingly represents her depression, her feeling that there is “nothing but a voice-like left inside of her,” Len’s responses to her condition seem careless. He attempts to console by filling



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her with a sense that all her hard work will bring her out of her condition: “Len says one steady pull more ought to do it. / He says the best way out is always through” (66).22 The proverblike saying’s inclusion of the word “out” expresses containment, as if the saying itself functions as a circumscribed space in which she lives. Unavoidably, that containment implied by the saying becomes associated with other structures as well, the attic and then the cage used to control the speaker’s insane uncle. In fact, another old saw had dictated the decision to keep the uncle at home: “You know the old idea—the only asylum / Was the poor house” so you kept the insane at home (67). Moreover, the speaker’s recollection of stories about her uncle’s insane hollering caused her to handle her own sense of dislocation and depression in terms of an automatic response: “It got so I would say— you know, half fooling— / ‘It’s time I took my turn upstairs in jail’— / Just as you will till it becomes a habit” (69). However automatic this response, she has reached the conclusion that she has “heard enough of the old-fashioned way”: that keeping the insane at home is best for them. It is “not so: the place is the asylum” (67), she asserts. Though in large part the speaker seems victimized by masculine “containers,” including her husband’s and father’s proverblike sayings, and even envies her speaker’s risk-taking readiness to sleep out in a tent, she knows sadly that she is not the woman to escape from those containers, not the hill wife nor Amy in “Home Burial”: as she tells her visitor, “I need to be kept.” More troublingly, though she has some of the Transcendentalists’ ability to feel the stultifying force of base custom and recognizes that the good old ways are not necessarily the best, she remains sure that she cannot risk venturing out of her role. She possesses all the awareness of the limitations of formulae, but none of the self-defensive and self-deceptive ability to resort to them for comfort. She is a failed pragmatist, incapable of constructing a stable, self-mystifying identity. In “The Housekeeper,” the sayings upon which John depends line him up with Len from “A Servant to Servants.” A dramatic poem more in the style of “Home Burial” than of “A Servant to Servants” because it includes multiple voices, it recounts in a dialogue between a visitor to John’s house, who is a friend of John, and the mother of his live-in housekeeper, the story of how her daughter ended up leaving John suddenly for another man. The problem is that John simply would not conventionalize the relationship and marry Estelle, the daughter, who essentially served as his wife. Once again in this poem, the proverblike saying generates an apparent contradiction: John relies on a saying that typifies the aura of proverbs because it sounds as if it were derived from some wellspring of social, conventional truth about the relationship between men and women. He uses it, though, to justify his ignoring convention. He





excuses his not marrying Estelle with: “ ‘Better than married ought to be as good / As married (84).’ ” He relies on other sayings as well. To justify not selling all the cocks others have offered to buy from him, he repeats: “ ‘If they’re worth / That much to sell, they’re worth as much to keep’ ” (86). According to the mother, he also would explain Estelle’s having to do the housework and half of his outdoor work by another saying he had come to live by: “He’d say she does it more because she likes it” (85). As the speaker slowly discloses to John’s friend that Estelle has left him and married another man, John’s reliance on sayings, like his neglect of his chores in favor of his indulgence in chickens, seems foolish, out of touch with reality, ineffective. When John returns to and then leaves the house after hearing about “some news that maybe isn’t news,” the mother, now uncertain of her own fate, which depends on Estelle’s finding a living where she provides labor for a man, responds to the door he shuts behind him with, “ ‘Who wants to hear your news, you—dreadful fool?’ ” (89). As in the case of “A Servant to Servants,” a woman is subject to a man’s reliance on formulaic responses to a situation whose complexity he does not appreciate. The mother’s invective ultimately says the same thing about John as the speaker in “Mending Wall” says about his neighbor: he lives in darkness, in ignorance, because he will not go against a saying. Or perhaps he willfully uses a saying to justify his self-indulgences. Again in “The Housekeeper,” the saying cannot simply be associated with resistance to change and maintenance of the conventional. John’s saying makes traditional marriage less important than the “something more than marriage” that he and Estelle have. Moreover, John’s discovering that he is the last to know that Estelle has abandoned him suggests that his proverbially sustained understanding of their relationship prevented him from understanding how, in that “more than marriage,” he must have kept something—financial security, communication, and/or sexuality— too much from her. Job’s wife is only partially right about proverblike expressions. She is right in saying that Job, like us all, resorts to the fixed form, but she’s not right in suggesting that recourse to such a form means limitations of thought. This sort of complexity certainly reflects Frost’s own poetics— needing the security of a fixed form and meter; wanting to give readers a meaning and sound that they sense somehow they have already known and heard; providing a notion that seems for all the world like formula, as he remarked to Untermeyer, but ultimately resists formulation; maintaining a dependence throughout on Jamesian pragmatics such as what James calls the “Sentiment of Rationality,” that overwhelming desire for a secure absence of all need to explain what always threatens to be an inexplicable existence (Essays, 4–5); even the fascinating mixing of stereotypical gender



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classifications as they relate to language conventions. Not just local color, not just something to mark off the realm of mindless conventionality, proverbs, and proverblike sayings—and their use in everyday occurrences as reflected in some of our finest dramatic poems—are every bit as much a part of Frost’s exploration of the poetic as the metaphor, the word, the sound. And they are just as much a part of the inevitable conflict in the poet, and especially in Frost, to name and at the same time to leave matter unnamed, to rupture proverbial expressions in search of some original identity and yet to come back around in that very search to the safe conventionality of those sayings.








Sassing the Sphinx

I would like to turn now to what amounts to a companion subgenre to the proverb and the name in Frost’s poetry. Though the riddle has been examined as an important aspect of Emily Dickinson’s and Wallace Stevens’s poetics, for example, it has seldom been mentioned as a formal element worth considering in Frost’s works.1 This omission is surprising given the various ways in which such scholars as Lentricchia, Poirier, and Kearns, to name a few, have developed a suggestion made some years ago by Thompson in his biography of Frost: “Among many aspects of RF’s poetry and prose which deserve more attention than has yet been given them, none is more tantalizingly difficult than his intermittent ways of baffling and teasing his readers” (Years of Triumph 695).2 By turning to the riddle at this stage, we can continue to develop our investigation of Frost’s preoccupation with linguistic devices of naming. As I have tried to make clear, scholars have offered various and interesting readings of Frost’s body of work in terms of his choices about meter, rhyme, poetic forms, the patterns of imagery, and typical tropes within his works, not to mention his responses to the currents of modernism, of which he was a part. Scholars have pursued these approaches for the purpose of tracing the fundamental issues of authorial identity as they take shape within his works and in response to the larger ontological and epistemological traditions of which those identity themes are a part. Not quite as literally as I have done in the first chapter, they have, in other words, tried to discern the signature elements within Frost’s poetry. Without dismissing such work, in fact by leaning heavily upon it, my discussion has focused on some overlooked,



Chapter 3


preexisting linguistic templates through which Frost circulates his fundamental questions about the modern individual’s place in a world that often seems to operate without divine guidance, a world that sometimes seems merely material. Those templates are essentially devices of naming: the name, certainly; the proverb, as we have just seen; and now the riddle whose basic structure overtly involves a search for “the answer” to the question of what to name something, someone, or some attitude or feeling. Frost’s 1955 talk at the Bread Loaf English School, “On Taking Poetry,” addresses quite fully, if indirectly, his riddling tendency. By looking at a number of his observations in this discussion about how to interpret poetry, we can lay out some of the issues raised by his riddlelike poems. At the outset he remarks, “I suppose a poem is a kind of fooling. I’ve just been reading in a sermon by a great Unitarian friend of mine about ‘the foolishness of God’! The foolishness of God. God’s foolishness, you know, and God’s fooling . . . Of course, if the height of everything is fooling— God’s foolishness—then poetry mounts somewhere into a kind of fooling” (818).3 Frost then refers to the passages in Matthew and Mark about Christ teaching by way of “parable[s] so the wrong people can’t understand them” and points out that that notion is not, as is claimed, esoteric. The New Testament, after all, says that you must become like a child to understand, that “it’s so simple and so foolish that only little children can understand it” (819). The danger of this fooling—by poet and God—is that “there’s such a thing as throwing dust in the eye, you know—a person can write so that he’s insulting. He is just throwing dust in the eyes. And that’s again just going a little over the edge about this play, this fooling. To tease people is all right but to insult them is going too far. It’s always one of my concerns” (819). Part of this lecture also is taken up by his elfish interest in his readers’ desire over the years to have him name exactly what he means by certain lines or words in his poems—the “promises” in “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” for instance (823–24). He wants readers to take his poems without grinding out their meanings, without acting as if they can nail them down. In all this talk about poetic invention and poetic interpretation, he also tells the story of how he stood up to his mother, to her antievolutionary version of Creation, which maintained that God made man out of mud. He shocked her by incorporating evolution into the Creation story: “I said I didn’t see that it made any difference at all. ‘Your idea was that God made man out of mud; the new idea is that God made man out of prepared mud.’ You’ve still got God you see—nothing very disturbing about it” (825–26). He then goes on, curiously, to associate this modified version of creation and his own fooling way of “taking” an idea with the very symbol of riddling, the Sphinx: “You’ve got to have something to say



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to it—that’s all—the Sphinx. That’s what the Sphinx is there for. And you don’t have to do it with presence of mind. And it’s nice when you do—when you can sass it right back” (826). I’ll add here that the next poem he reads after this remark is “Directive,” which he introduces by saying: “And I’ll do it slow and you take it straight. But it’s all full of dangers, sideways, off, and all that, you know” (826). Any valuable poem, one that rises to God, then, is a kind of fooling, but the poem should not be contrived to fool, nor therefore should the poet abuse the power he or she holds over the reader. The work of the poem resembles the work of God’s fooling and also the riddle of the Sphinx: it must rise to a kind of imponderable mystery. If the riddle is solved, as in the case of the story of Oedipus, the very solution, though seeming to release the riddle and Thebes from oppression, ultimately makes one subject even more to its unfathomable truth. In Oedipus’s case, this truth is that his assumed intact identity is in fact subject to the mysteries of multiplicity and fragmentation as suggested by the riddle itself—that a single identity can have three separate facets—and by the riddler, the Sphinx herself with her various shapes. That riddle, which we all know from the Oedipus myth but which remains unspecified in Sophocles, amounts to some version of that found in Apollodorus: “What is that which has one voice and yet becomes fourfooted and two-footed and three-footed?” (Hasan-Rokem and Schulman, Untying 257). In other words, where do I come from and where do I go and who am I that can be a single and multiple thing? Solving that enigma destroys this chthonic figure of the Sphinx; it replaces a primitive drive with one more civilized and rational. Oedipus’s solution highlights the destructive tension between his abstract and practical knowledge, a tension that mirrors the fascinating puzzle within the riddle of a univocal creature with various shapes (Hasan-Rokem and Schulman, Untying 256). Frost’s allusion to the Sphinx suggests that reading poetry, an easygoing affair but one that involves patience and education, also has within it the riddling imposition placed upon Oedipus, as Frank Kermode describes it, to solve the riddle of identity or die. But if this is the imposition upon the reader, is the poet the Sphinx that is driven from its perch into the underworld by the reader’s successful solution?4 Certainly these remarks about how to “take” poetry are quite perplexing; but they also lay the groundwork for what we shall see in Frost’s use of the riddle mode within his poems. The experience of poetry closely resembles that of the riddle game, finally; and what is more, that experience implies a core action of risky encounter with, and an overcoming of, a monster, as well as a perilous landscape with “dangers, sideways . . . and all that, you know.” Though the definitions of the riddle offered mainly by folklorists have a good deal of range, including even the fundamental question of whether





or not the answer to the riddle ought to be seen as part of the form, I will try to stay within the boundaries of a definition that enhances slightly that offered by Archer Taylor: the riddle is a minor genre of an interrogative form that “compares an object to another entirely different object” and whose “essence consists in the surprise” created by the solution to the question begged by the comparison, often a comparison that exposes the arbitrariness of our taxonomies. The riddle “consists of two descriptions of an object, one figurative and one literal, and confuses the hearer who endeavors to identify an object described in conflicting ways” (Taylor, A. 129–30). To illustrate, Taylor uses the Humpty-Dumpty riddle—“Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall, Humpty Dumpty had a great fall. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put Humpty Dumpty together again.” Taylor explains that the riddle resolves its own contradiction (that there would be no way to mend someone who has fallen from a wall), what some commentators call the block, with the answer, “Egg.” Another common English riddle—“Little Nancy Etticot in a white petticoat and a red nose, / The longer she stands, the shorter she grows” (a candle)—contains similar features: a comparison and an apparent contradiction to common sense (the longer she stands, the shorter she grows) that both provides the avenue for the answer and blocks that avenue because of its contradictory nature (Taylor, A 131). The unusual terms found in another riddle whose answer is “cow” also function as hints and blockers: “Too hookers, two lookers, and a switchabout” (Taylor, A 134). Richard Wilbur offers another example of the category-breaking, metaphorical leap required to solve a riddle about an icicle: “Lives in winter, / Dies in summer, / And grows with its root upwards” (344). As genre and real transaction between author and receiver, the riddle asks or implies a question and requires a name, almost always the name of some object. It positions the poser of the question as the all-knowing “authority” and the receiver as the subordinate; it is an exercise, then, in power dynamics.5 Dan Pagis describes the structural and social dynamics of the riddle in this way: Every riddle contains two parts of unequal length: the encoded text and revealed solution. These parts are opposites that seek to unite, thus eliminating the tension of opposition between them. The riddle, however, exists for the sake of that very tension, which reflects the social tension, the contest between riddler and riddlee. The division in two is thus textual as well as social; the encoded text is presented to the riddlee, while the solution remains hidden with the riddler until the riddlee discovers it by himself, or until he gives up the game. When the riddlee finds the solution and adds it to the text, the tension dissolves and the text ceases to be a riddle. (83–84)



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Like the proverb, the riddle has it roots in ancient cultural needs of initiation and education, and seems to inhabit a space close to the origins of human experience. Unlike the proverb, however, it questions accepted wisdom, operates at the margins of differentiated fields, and threatens stasis and normal relationships. In nonplayful speech, as Pepicello and Green explain, “one only imposes questions upon parties he believes capable of providing answers . . . In essence, riddling thrives on rending the social and communicative bonds between participants” (125). According to Maranda, “Riddles make a point of playing with conceptual borderlines and crossing them for the pleasure of showing that things are not quite as stable as they appear; and at the same time, they play with boundaries, but ultimately to affirm them (like a child playing with mud to find and define the boundaries of his body)” (131).6 A common house riddle offered by Lieber illustrates this point: the riddle “a house with no door” has as its answer, “an egg” (256). The blockage in the puzzle derives from a description that goes against common sense: no one imagines a house without a door. That blockage and the resulting answer that merges two apparently different categories dispense with the different categories in which we are likely to have put house and egg. This question of categories occurs in even more significant ways, as suggested by Hasan-Rokem’s explanation of the value of the Hebrew riddle: Riddles present categories, meddle them, reconstitute them and constantly reenact their internal collapse. They therefore express and mediate the chaotic and sometimes desperate oscillation between self-assurance gained through powerful, collective intellectual activity, such as the rabbis of Late Antiquity consciously produced, and the threat of individual suffering and collective annihilation . . . It is exactly the presence of riddle tales and other subversively expressive folk literary genres that saves Rabbanic literature from resorting to the complacent bosom of univocal dogmas and brings the thrust of skepticism and rebellion into the heart of its potentially totalistic monotheism. (113)

In G. B. Milner’s terms, “If the riddle is an overt question with a covert answer, a proverb is an overt answer to a covert question” (qtd. in Maranda 130). The proverb, as we have suggested, occupies a spot within the “complacent bosom of univocal dogmas.” The specter of the riddle within a number of Frost’s poems also intensifies the complexity of their relationship with the object world and their reliance on the visual experience of the reader, which, as we will see more clearly in the next chapter, Frost often dismissed in favor of his poems’ audible power. This heightened awareness of the poem’s relation to the





object paradoxically intensifies the sense that the riddle-poem is always somehow about its own status on the margins between word and thing. Like the other two modes by which Frost’s speakers try to locate themselves within the world and within some meaning within that world—naming and proverbial answer to an implied question—the riddle complicates the search immensely, offering within an appealingly simple binary framework of question/answer, authority figure/initiate, and description/object a texture that defies all such coherence and clarity. Some of the broad strokes of the commentary on riddles have been applied by Johan Huizinga and Northrop Frye. In Homo Ludens, Huizinga focuses on the riddle almost as the remnant of the original form and function of poetry. Partly through his discussion of the riddle, Huizinga develops his well-known thesis that early cultures did not express our modern split between seriousness and play. The riddle fuses game with sacred learning. The so-called capital riddle, for instance, involves a test concerning some sacred or culturally essential knowledge. This capital riddle works in one of two ways: either the riddler poses a seemingly impossible question, the successful answer to which kills him; or the riddlee must answer the question posed him or else die. The riddle in literature and sacred texts often displays this sort of tension. Huizinga draws his examples from Vedic, Eddic, and Finnish literature. Such “modern” examples as the question posed to the young knight-rapist in The Wife of Bath’s Tale or that posed by the dead father of Portia to her suitors in The Merchant of Venice express the seriousness of the game of the capital riddle. These examples also contain some of the agonistic elements expressed in the riddle, particularly the notion that the person who engages in the challenge of the riddle is somehow a champion. For Heraclitus, the model poet-philosopher necessarily regarded life as an enigma and himself as the riddle-solver (116). In his discussion of Old English riddle, Craig Williamson treats the “action” of the riddle situation as a kind of quest-adventure and lays out its “story” in this way: 1. Departure from the dead world of reified categories. 2a. Confrontation with the metaphoric world of unknown monsters and shifting shapes. 2b. Recognition . . . of the Other and its relation to the Self. 3. Return to the old world with rejuvenated eyes. (37)

This sense of heroic gesture, of agonistic struggle against the unknown powers, frequently inhabits Frost’s poems. Moreover, Huizinga’s emphasis on the as-yet-unrealized distinction between fact and fiction, seriousness and play, and sacred and profane in ancient cultures, where the riddler was



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at once poet, religious figure, and philosopher, matches nicely the frame of mind that Poirier, by way of D. W. Winnicot’s Playing and Reality, identifies as being fundamental to Frost’s own sense of the importance of play within the serious elements of life (Robert Frost 321–24). This view, according to Poirier, conflicts with the American ego psychology ruling Lawrence Thompson’s biography of Frost, in which conflicts are seen in terms of the real versus the imaginary rather than as matters of self-identification. Thus Thompson constructs a Frost whose playfulness, as expressed in his poetry, letters, and lectures, for instance, amounts to a veil over his true character. Poirier, however, offers Winnicot’s notion of transitional objects and thus transitional areas as a way of understanding Frost almost in the terms that Huizinga presents in his description of ancient culture: as artist/riddler, Frost operates in a world like that of the child lost in play, where objects do not clearly align themselves as subjective and objective, where they are never clearly verifiable (323). This is also a world in which humor and seriousness remain partners, even as a line from Frost’s riddle-like poem “Not Quite Social” asserts: “The way of understanding is partly mirth” (279). Huizinga claims ultimately that “the close connections between poetry and the riddle are never entirely lost.” This connection includes the sense of the enigma. It also includes the sense of metaphor and specifically the kind of ancient metaphor we see in Anglo-Saxon or Old Norse cultures, the kenning: “whale road” for sea, “speech-thorn” for tongue, “floor of the hall winds” for earth and “tree-wolf” for wind (134). Each of these amounts to a riddle in miniature that the hearer/reader solves. Each solution serves as an opportunity for further integration, another involvement in one’s culture; and each solution, in such an animistic world, rather than dismissing the vehicle for the tenor, holds both in equilibrium even as the direction of reference moves toward the tenor. Frye’s broad but wonderfully suggestive discussion takes the shape of a contrast between the riddle and charm, fundamentally opposing forms. The charm pulls us into the mythological universe of traditional names and mysterious powers, the invocation of which and its fundamental stylistic principle of audible repetition short-circuit the ordinary processes of response and require belief or even a kind of hypnotic reaction, as in the case of the lullaby or, in more sinister terms, the siren’s song (126). Authority and subordination are integral to the charm, as in ritual, military commands, and political oratory (128). The core narrative of charms is a descending metamorphosis: the case of Circe changing Odysseus’s companions into pigs is a perfect example. Though power and subordination are very much a part of the transaction implied by the riddle, that transaction looks toward the breaking of such power by way of an answer. In comparing riddle with myth, however, Andre





Jollé emphasizes the enslaving power of the riddle: “In the form myth, we ourselves are the questioners; in riddle, we are questioned and, to be sure, questioned in such a way that we must answer. Therefore myth is found under the sign of freedom; riddle—under the sign of confinement. Therefore myth is activity whereas riddle is suffering; therefore myth means a deep breath; riddle—oppression” (qtd. in Gimbutas 21). According to Frye, the answer to the riddle usually breaks the charm of the riddle’s words as it identifies the name of the object both described and hidden in the riddle. It turns the audible power of the words in the riddle into the visual freedom of the sensory world. Frattali captures a similar interplay between charm and sensual fact in Frost’s poetry as he discusses the ways in which it sometimes approaches music and thus “throw[s] a qualitative change over represented experience,” and yet almost invariably reverts back to, or balances, this charmlike quality against “the precise demands of sight, which places the physical world before one in its ‘thereness’ ” (43). Like the balancing of fire and ice in Frost’s signature poems and in the avowal and disavowal of the proverb’s truth, this “balancing and division of faculties—sight and hearing, ear and eye—” as Frattali puts it, creates “a kind of concordia discors” that allows “the mind an enlarged grasp of the world,” one including “beauty and possibility,” without being “delusory” (43). Richard Wilbur, too, focuses on the dominance of the visual in riddle. In discussing a complex riddle describing the answer “snow” as a featherless white bird, he writes: Like many riddles, this one is strongly pictorial in character, and it gives fascinating proof of the promptness with which we produce mental images, and the stubbornness with which we cling to them. If someone says to me, think of a white bird, a white bird appears in my mind’s eye; if I am then told to forget about the bird, I find that its image will not go away. Furthermore, if someone says to me, do not think of a horse, I think at once of a horse . . . Part of the difficulty in solving the riddle is that we must struggle to decompose the vivid picture which we have insisted on making, and see through it to the answer. (343)

And he goes on to suggest that even when we solve the riddle and replace it with the name of the equally visible object, the original image still persists “as an afterimage” (343). This sense of escape to the outer world of the senses promoted by the riddle, as Frye fascinatingly explains, is an illusion: ultimately “poetry cannot take us outside the world of poetry. Poem and object are very quizzically related” in that “there seems to be some riddle behind all



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riddles which we have not yet guessed” (141). Thus, W. C. Williams’s “No ideas but in things,” as it opposes the hypnotic, charmlike verse of the Romantics, contains a problem because, according to Frye, “in poetry there is no such thing as a thing” (145). “Word and thing are frozen in two separate worlds, and the reality of each can be expressed only by the other in its world. This paradoxical deadlock is precisely the essence of the riddle” (145). Though the process is obscured somewhat by elements of play, the riddle mimics the poem’s fundamental grasping at palpable reality, and in so doing it enacts also the human need to reclaim again and again an identity. In discussing the resemblance of Frost’s early poetry to the pre-Raphaelite tendency toward reverie, Fratalli refers to MerleauPonty’s notion that consciousness is constructed to search “in nature for something that will satisfy its desire for meaning: it questions the world” (34). This questioning, or questing, as we have called it, involves at its root “a desire for presence”; but “this is the one thing it cannot find” (34). For Frost, then, the subgenre of the riddle compels him to challenge his poems to span what Frye calls these two separate worlds, to seek for the one thing it cannot find. His balancing of the riddle with the charm, as we shall see more fully, dramatizes his own search for identity as it ranges between two untenable extremes: at one end, a fabrication of a world through reflexive language and thus an acknowledgment that the world out there is inaccessible and, at the other end, an increased awareness of the palpable world and our part in it. As subgenre, the riddle heightens the activity between these two extremes: it replaces reflexive reverie and the audible charm, which operate as if imagination can virtually create a world, with the humble awareness of the presence of things. The riddle, according Frye’s formulation, accents the visual over the aural; it highlights the actual, or, in the case of the literary riddle, the imagined transactional event at the core of the minor genre. Still, it emphasizes also the existence of an authority that has the answer and will deliver it “in person.” Therefore, like the proverb and the act of naming, the riddle plays out this tension ultimately between author and text as autonomous entities. It clings desperately to the notion of presence. As with the name, the consequences of the riddling game are lethal. The answer to the riddle kills the riddle itself. Dan Pagis identifies this feature as the central paradox of the riddle, one that the poets of the Renaissance and Baroque periods emphasized in their reflexive riddles, as suggested in the following examples: “My veiled face is my face itself; unveiled, it is annulled”; or “I am hidden and concealed, yet if you discover me, I will disappear before your eyes forever” (97). Wilbur offers similar examples of such reflexive riddles: “When one doesn’t know what it is; then it is something; / But when one knows what it is, than it is nothing” and “When




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The Riddle that we guess We speedily despise— Not anything is stale so long As Yesterday’s Surprise— (Dickinson 1222)

The prospect for the riddle, then, amounts to that essential human dilemma that Frost depicts in the early but fundamentally characteristic poem “Revelation.” Though “We make ourselves a place apart” through self-protective humor (27), we at the same time remain unfulfilled unless someone really discovers who we are. “ ’Tis pity,” the poem continues, that “We speak the literal to inspire / The understanding of a friend.” The case for us who play this hide-and-seek game, though, is the same as it is for God: “ . . . all who hide too well away / Must speak and tell us where they are” (28). The attempt to hide, the need to speak and be identified, the employment of play for serious purposes, the paradox of inspiration (with its suggestion of spirit) depending on the literal—all these characterize both the riddle and Frost’s stance vis-à-vis his poetry. In his 1936 review of A Further Range, James McBride Dabbs, in fact, makes this very point about Frost as a kind of personification of the riddle: “So far as that goes, he has always thought of life as an affair of hide-andseek. Only he hides better now. Indeed, if he weren’t so interesting when found—if found—his readers might stop looking” (Wagner 125–26). At the same time that he invites the search for an answer to “the riddle” of a poem and the universe, he suggests, as in the case of this quotation from a 1925 interview conducted by Allen Schoenfield, that the confidence it takes to answer the riddle is errant: “Only in a certain type of small scientific mind can there be found cocksureness, a conviction that a solution to the riddle of the universe is just around the corner” (Interviews 64). This seminal and often-observed characteristic of Frost’s poetry and persona makes the neglect of the riddling in his works so surprising.

Frost’s Riddle Poems In one way, this riddling element emerges from Frost’s poetry as pieces that are almost pure riddles. Not the best of his poems, these twenty or so examples do betray Frost’s tendency to make of his poetic voice the riddler who poses an implied question, the answer to which must somehow



first I appear I seem mysterious, / But when I’m explained I am nothing serious” (333). Emily Dickinson, the arch poet-riddler, offers her version:

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be found out by the subject-reader. He makes these skeletal riddles into poems, into forms that strive to live beyond the production of an answer. “One Guess” from A Further Range is the purest example: “He has dust in his eyes and a fan for a wing, / A leg akimbo with which he can sing, / And a mouthful of dye stuff instead of a sting” (282). Though Marcus offers “grasshopper” as the answer to this riddle (158), it requires the reader to linger beyond such a literal answer. The original title of the poem with its personal pronoun, “A Riddle.—Who Is Intended,” suggests that the answer involves more than the grasshopper or, say, the cricket (Cramer 117). Tuten observes that the answer requires another layer of metaphorical decoding: the description of the grasshopper in turn depicts the poet in a humorous way, whose flight can hardly soar on “a fan for a wing” and who relies on “a mouthful of dye stuff (ink) instead of a sting” (254–55). The riddle’s reliance on the visual images and material detail, if the description of the insect metamorphoses into one of the poet, foregrounds the poetic event as a physical one and thus renders strange and new the act of writing. The poem just before “One Guess” in A Further Range, “Waspish,” is also a riddle, having on its first publication in 1936 borne the title “Untried” (Cramer 115; Tuten 399). Without its title, “Waspish” resembles an AngloSaxon riddle describing an object in the physical world, only once again, as with “One Guess,” it tends to expand toward an allegorical, human application. It begins with physical clues—“On glossy wires artistically bent,” “His natty wings with self-assurance perk,” and “His stinging quarters menacingly work”—and then gives way to commentary: “Poor egotist, he has no way of knowing / But he’s as good as anybody going” (280). The play of the riddle form involves that extra turn so that the discovery of the physical thing described in human terms (personification) actually moves back toward the human realm, the vehicle reverting to the tenor in a way that causes the wasp to represent the self-important person, whether poet or politician. The technique is one that Frost criticizes earlier in this same volume toward the end of “The White-Tailed Hornet”: “Downward comparisons” (254). As with “Waspish,” if you take away the titles of a handful of similar poems, they unfold as riddles.7 “A Drumlin Woodchuck,” for example reads as though it were the kind of Anglo-Saxon riddle poem spoken by the object or animal that the audience must identify. The autobiographical implications of the poem—as reflected, for instance, in Saul Bellow’s comment that “Frost is a different kettle of woodchuck altogether . . . because he has more exits to his burrow than any man can count” (Tuten 86–87)— actually obscure its affiliation with the early genre. It contains a series of clues, even the detail “All we who prefer to live / Have a little whistle we give” (257). As Eric Brown has pointed out, those lines refer to the animal’s





nickname of “whistle pig” (Tuten 87). Again in this poem, Frost moves the riddle form toward an allegory of human behavior even while riddling about the identity of an animal. The very early poem “Ghost House,” along with “The Telephone,” “An Encounter,” and “The Line Gang,” also amount to riddles. The “I” of “Ghost House” seems to be the boy of A Boy’s Will, whose story of emotional and social development is played out within the collection of largely lyrical poems and is highlighted by the notes to the poems printed originally in the volume’s table of contents. The note for “Ghost House” reads: “He is happy in the society of his choosing” (969). However, this “I” speaks of his surroundings more as if he were a ghost than the typical wandering narrator of Frost’s poems. He “dwells” in a house that appears to have burned down or been destroyed somehow “many a summer ago” (15); he seems confined to that space. Even the small graveyard nearby is described in enigmatic terms: it is a place where “Mute folk are” and where “They are tireless folk (16).” As in “A Drumlin Woodchuck,” this poem’s prosopopeia puts the reader in the position of having to answer a riddle; the answer is the ruined house’s ghost, though Frost’s gloss on the poem in the table of contents adds another level of mischief to the piece by treating the ghostly speaker as a developing young man. Emphasizing Frost’s curious use of “ghost” here is the title of the very next poem, “My November Guest.” “Guest,” of course, is etymologically the same word as “ghost.”8 Frost’s telephone poems—“The Telephone,” “An Encounter,” and “The Line-Gang” (one might include “Snow” in this category)—in their riddling ways express the poet’s fascination with this new invention, as they play with both familiarizing its strangeness and defamiliarizing its technology, with which humans were growing increasingly familiar since its invention in 1876. The kinship of the metaphysical poetry and riddles that Frye points out becomes clear in “The Telephone.” It builds upon a comparison between a flower on a stalk and a telephone. The wandering speaker claims to have heard his beloved speak to him through a flower, as she “spoke from that flower on the window sill” (114). On the one hand, this little dialogue makes of the comparison a riddle, the flower on the window sill amounting to a description of the telephone, the answer that Frost provides in the title. On the other hand, the riddling technique once again expands, this time into a privileging of love and language over technology. The communication between the two actually involves something close to telepathy. Having learned from the beloved that the “come” that he thought he heard through the flower was never spoken, but perhaps thought, he nevertheless responded assertively to the sound, whatever it was and whoever spoke it: “Someone said ‘Come’—I heard it as I bowed”: “Well, so I came” (115).



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As the poem disavows communication through language in this inexplicable, distant exchange between the two lovers, made all the more puzzling by the nearly inapplicable and mundane metaphor of the telephone, it actually celebrates the ways in which language works. As with the sonnet recited by Romeo and Juliet on their first meeting, the shared rhymes between the two halves of this dialogue suggest language functioning at an uncanny level. The slight detail about the man (I arbitrarily call this speaker a man) driving a bee away from the flower/phone before he answers also implies the instinctive messaging going on between the two lovers, even the way in which the flower itself is a kind of code shared by all romantically attached couples. The reinvestment of original meaning into the word “telephone,” moreover, suggests this unaccountable way in which language operates: the combination of the Greek tele (afar) and phone (sound or voice) gets physically played out in the poem. Thus, the answer to the poem’s riddle is not so much the object, the telephone, as the word “telephone” and the way in which, at some fundamental level, its original meaning obtains even if sent adrift by Alexander Graham Bell’s invention. The poem’s riddling tendency emerges also from the dialogue. The first speaker makes the claim that he heard his beloved say something to him through the flower he held to his ear when far away on his walk. He quizzes her: “ ‘Do you remember what it was you said?’ ” (114). She answers by testing him with her own quiz: “ ‘First tell me what it was you thought you heard’ ”(114). His answer intensifies the interrogative dynamic of the poem because within that answer he questions himself about the word he thought he “caught”: “ ‘What was it? Did you call me by name? / Or did you say—’ ” (115). Then even the answer to his self-questioning involves uncertainty about the source of the word he heard: “Someone said, ‘Come.’ ” And yet in spite of his uncertainty, his response, even after she remarks with equal uncertainty that she might have thought “come,” is inexplicably certain—“ ‘Well, so I came’ ” (115). This riddling poem asks layers of questions that demand answers; those answers are never clear (even the solution-title misleads); and yet the action it describes, “I came,” exudes commitment. What a remarkable representation of love—and what a heroic one in miniature and in respectful parody, as the wandering lover, enacting in a sense, what Frye describes as the core romance action of the riddle, turns his errant activity into quest and question into assertive answer. Acknowledging this core activity in the poem, we also must appreciate the way in which it works against itself. The poem is set up as a riddle, as I have argued. As such, it invites expectations that its “system” of indirectly described object and quest for answer will lead to a satisfying identification of that





object. Its resolution, as we have seen, ends up betraying this limiting riddle structure by asserting an uncanny “will to believe” as its operative force. The title of another poem, “An Encounter,” emphasizes the sudden meeting the speaker has with an object, a telephone pole. A good deal of this poem, though, occurs as a riddling description of this unnamed object: . . . and there against the blue, Stood over me a resurrected tree, A tree that had been down and raised again— A barkless specter. He had halted too, As if for fear of treading upon me. I saw the strange position of his hands— Up at his shoulders, dragging yellow strands Of wire with something in it from men to men. (121)

The riddle is for the reader; the speaker, after all, expresses familiarity with the object. He even talks with it as if it were some neighborhood giant. That does not mean, however, that the description eliminates the strangeness in this ubiquitous object; this making the familiar odd turns easy, routine identification, along with the accompanying sense of one’s own identity, into a problem. Within its context the description travels in various directions and thus can become almost as disorienting to the reader as the experience of the swamp of dense cedar and brush is to the speaker. That situation, in fact, alludes to Dante in the dark woods. The description also allegorizes the tree as both cross and Christ-figure; and in its final reference to the orchid Calypso, the poem brings into play this siren’s temptation of Odysseus and also his encounter with another towering figure, the Cyclops. This impersonal object carrying phone wires becomes personified, deified, and even mythologized; and it gathers a sort of oracular mystery because of the speaker’s riddling description of it. It requires a name; yet that requirement for a name runs counter to the wandering experience that, after being portrayed at first as mistake and confusion, becomes privileged at the end of the poem in the speaker’s suddenly untroubled lack of direction in his casual searches for the orchid Calypso. The linear elements of the telephone pole and the question/answer elements of the riddle game embedded in the poem reflect the speaker’s original affiliation with purpose and problem-solution thinking as expressed in his trouble with ever having “left the road [he] knew” (121). His meeting with this “monster,” then, amounts to an encounter with part of himself that he disavows even perhaps without recognizing. The riddling description



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of the telephone pole as a giant afraid of trampling the speaker makes the speaker part of the very environment through which he himself has been trampling; this shift of perspective affiliates him with what is natural and slovenly. The riddle contributes, then, to the poem’s main experience: a corrective erosion of the apparently secure borders between a human and nature and the resulting disturbance in any sense of a secure self, even as the poem ends with the speaker reclaiming his security in self through commitment, paradoxically, to half-hearted searching: “Me? I’m not off for anywhere at all. / Sometimes I wander out of beaten ways / Half looking for the orchid Calypso” (121). “Anywhere at all,” “Sometimes,” “Half looking”— these descriptions betray, as we have seen in other riddle poems, the directed search that the riddle-form sets up. If it were not for the references to the line-gang in the poem called “The Line-Gang,” that piece too would amount to a riddle. Again the description puzzles while offering clues about what is represented: the members of the line-gang “throw a forest down less cut than broken. / They plant dead trees for living, and the dead / They string together with a living thread” (135). As with the other two poems about the telephone, this one represents puzzlement over the status of the communication the device enables. The wire the line-gang attaches to these newly planted dead trees is the avenue “Wherein words whether beaten out or spoken / Will run as hushed as when they were a thought” (135). As with the relationship of the poet to the text he writes and leaves to the reader, without assurance of an oral presence, the relationship between word and its messaging through this “instrument” confuses a distinction between the spoken and written— “words whether beaten out or spoken” convey themselves silently, almost returning to the status of unarticulated thought, and they are unavoidably material.9 “A Trial Run” from A Further Range is another riddle poem about technology. Marcus identifies the object of this riddle as a fan, but it could describe anything from an automobile to a mill saw (156). Such details as “start hair-raising currents of air,” “it will make a homicidal roar,” and “it will gather speed till your nerves prepare / To hear it wreck in a thunderclap” (279) make it seem like something more powerful than a fan. Again the riddle element of the poem, its defamiliarizing, piece-by-piece, but still-ambiguous description of the object’s features, requires us to guess what it is. However, that required guess, as is also the case in many of these riddling poems, is not the point, as the poem expands beyond the description of the object into a representation of creation, of deism, and design. Though a riddle, “A Trial Run” is also an experimental sonnet in tetrameter. Its turn at lines eight and nine matches the change in the speaker’s attitude from a sense of the machine’s monstrous, uncontrollable aspects





to a calming sense of its integrated, systematic design and the control that the humans have over it: “Everything its parts can do / Has been thought out and accounted for” and therefore just as “Your least touch sets it going round” so “when to stop it rests with you” (279). What is more, the interesting shift from first person to second person—“I” to “you”—captures something beyond what the internal dialogue of the speaker records; it makes of the poem a machine that has been handed off to its readers. My use of the passive voice here matches that in the poem, as the creator of the machine gets lost in the process of its operation at the hands of the “you” to whom it has been given custody. The combination of the riddle with the sonnet captures the poem’s central paradox—and a paradox essential to Frost’s view of human existence: familiar, routine action of control applied to what is at some level strange, unaccountable, and uncontrollable. The sonnet form implies the former, while the embedded riddle captures the latter. Though not as overt, the implication of this short poem about the “machine in the garden” repeats that offered in “Riders,” which depicts our technological adventures, including flight, through the Platonic allegory of humans as little more than infants mounted bareback on a headless horse: we are just such unsuccessful riders, “Through everything presented, land and tide / And now the very air, of what we ride” (246). I focus on these “telephone poems,” along with “A Trial Run,” because they combine this riddling feature and Frost’s abiding concern for the “material” with which he works as poet. They contribute to the defamiliarizing process that foregrounds this materiality and they play with the established margins that we must take for granted during our routine lives. They also, generally, emphasize the interrogative, what Frost elsewhere punningly calls the “universal whole,” and what in A Masque of Reason is the inexplicable, unanswerable riddle that God poses to humans, as described by Job: I fail to see what fun, what satisfaction A God can find in laughing at how badly Men fumble at the possibilities When left to guess forever for themselves. (381)

This complaint leads to that passage we have already examined: “Let fools bemuse themselves / By being baffled for the sake of being. / I’m sick of the whole artificial puzzle” (382). Job’s wife also emphases this notion of life as a riddling form of play by referring to “the game called twenty questions” (382). This sense of human existence as riddle also emerges in the epigrammatic “The Secret Sits”: “We dance round in a ring and suppose, / But the Secret sits in the middle and knows” (329).



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Part of this dancing around a ring and supposing is metaphorical thought, the experiencing of, and attempt to capture, one thing in terms of another. This process can unfold in a continual chain, and an unstable one—the relationship between vehicle and tenor does not often remain intact. As Aristotle originally observed, the metaphor is an enigmatic form; and when extended as a kind of conceit as it often is in Frost’s poems, it turns into a riddle. In “A Patch of Old Snow” the narrator says he “should have guessed” that the snow he sees in the corner “Was a blow-away paper the rain / Had brought to rest” (107). A version of what Gimbutas refers to as “the book riddle,” this poem picks up on the black-on-white trope throughout Frost’s poetry.10 The blue butterflies of “Blue-Butterfly Day” “are flowers that fly and all but sing” and now “lie closed over in the wind and cling / Where wheels have freshly sliced the April mire” (208). The untitled poem from In the Clearing, almost in a revisiting of the kind of puzzlement over technology we see in the “telephone poems,” obliquely describes an antenna and thereby approaches the riddle in technique: from a shack aspires high “an arm of scrawny mast / For visions in the sky / That go blindly pouring past” (477). Even the slightly moralizing continuation of these lines still maintains their riddling nature: “In the ear and in the eye / What you get is what to buy. / Hope you’re satisfied to last” (477). Also from In the Clearing, “A Reflex” builds upon the tendency to riddle. Another confrontation of science and technology by way of the riddle, the poem puts the scientific quest into spatial terms: “Science stuck a pole / Down a likely hole / And he got it bit.” And then “Science gave a stab / And he got a grab” (476). For science, all nature, especially its apertures, is a riddle, a gap that must be probed. Next, the scientist becomes the alert, riddling sentry with his “Qui vive, / Who goes there . . . ?” Specifically, the sentry’s challenge asks something like “long live who?” so as to identify political allegiance. The correct answer to this sentry’s riddle tests a kind of tribal affiliation. Applied here to science’s search for “an answer,” the riddle lays bare the circularity of the scientific search: the answer from the unknown must mouth the already known. The play with pronouns—“who” (qui) versus “It” at the end—“ . . . and what / ARE we to believe? / That there is an It?” (476)— expresses science as a matter of belief and its process of discovery as a tribal issue of finding an answer that fits the tribe’s conventions. The last question of having to believe that there is an “it” is as much a rhetorical assertion as an interrogative. Without the conclusive “answer”—“So love will take between the hands a face . . . ”—“Moon Compasses” also develops a riddlelike conceit that calls for an identifying response: “ . . . a masked moon had spread down compass rays To a cone mountain in the midnight haze,




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The description of the tiny streams running out of melting snow piles in “A Hillside Thaw” also unfolds as a sixteen-line conceit: they are “ten million silver lizards” running out from beneath a “rug that bred them on the floor,” the “stampede” of which the speaker could not stop if he tried (218). The effect of these conceits because of their length and their layered comparisons (lizards becoming the kinds of animals that could stampede and the snow bank turning into a rug), as commentators have remarked about “The Silken Tent,” is the loss of the metaphorical thread so that we readers, seeking to stabilize the process, must respond as if we were facing a riddle and periodically insert an answer: yes, the answer here is that the lizards really describe that natural phenomenon of snow melting and, later on in the poem, of water freezing once again. This intermittent need for reconfirmation of what the riddling description identifies enacts a kind of peek-a-boo experience, a fort/da game shared between author and reader, always playing with sustaining the precarious relationship between the self and external world. The variations in the attitude of the Frostian persona in these riddling poems, or those involving a discernable riddling element, range from emphasis on the answer to emphasis on the question, though the answer is always, I think, more of a problem than the question. In “Lost in Heaven,” the persona faces a visual riddle as the clouds break enough on a stormy evening to provide a small opening onto the sky. He looks for clues to lead him to know which stars he sees belong to which constellations. Unable to achieve any such orientation among the stars and thereby any orientation about where he is, he first sighs, “ ‘Where, where in Heaven am I?’ ” (269). Then he changes his mind and orders the clouds not to tell him “by opening wide,” because he wants his “heavenly lostness” to “overwhelm” him. In other words, he does not want to participate in the riddle game, does not want the answer; in fact he seeks annihilation of self and its need to sustain a world depending on differentiation. The core action of this poem moves in the opposite direction from the ascent that Frye ascribes to the riddle: the persona seeks descent into a chthonic realm of the charm, a return to the womb. The opening of “Home Burial” also treats what might be regarded as a visual riddle. The husband wants to know what it is that Amy stares at out the window at the top of the stairs: “ ‘I will find out now—you must tell me, dear’ ” (55). Regarding him as a “blind creature” and thus “sure that he wouldn’t see,” she lets him look (55). He does see, though: he solves the riddle, but his identification of what she sees in exact terms,



As if the final estimate were hers; And as it measured in her calipers, The mountain stood exalted in its place.” (273)

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his naming it, “the child’s grave,” essentially destroys the visual riddle, the integrity Amy felt in harboring her grief alone and against her husband who buried the child. Like “Lost in Heaven,” this poem ebbs toward the world of charm, of the inarticulate, aggregate force of grief as opposed to the upper world, to use Frye’s formulation, of reason and intellect. Thus, solving the riddle resolves nothing in the relationship; it as much destroys Amy, who embodies the riddle, as Oedipus’s answer destroys the Sphinx. Also from A Further Range, “Not Quite Social” is a riddle. In the informal sense of the word, it is a riddle because it leaves the reader on the outside of an imagined explanation by the speaker to an apparently inside, knowledgeable group—“Some of you will be glad I did what I did, / And the rest won’t want to punish me too severely” (279). Because the poem refers to an unknown, almost entirely undisclosed event, it seems more like a venting diary entry than a published poem meant to be read by “outsiders.” In that way the poem itself is not quite social. Functioning as a communication and an invitation to play, the poem sets up a question—what is the event I describe that might have offended others and for which I need to offer a vague, allusive apology? Are you clever enough to figure it out? Or more importantly in this poemriddle, are you insider enough to know? Even the long, narrative poem “The Vindictives” documents one culture’s self-protective riddling of another; it displays, in other words, this insider-versus-outsider dynamic. The Incas use the Spaniards’ lust for gold to destroy them: One Inca prince on the rack, And late in his last hour alive, Told them in what lake to dive To seek what they seemed so to want. They dived and nothing was found. He told them to dive till they drowned. The whole fierce conquering pack Hunted and tortured and raged. There were suns of story and vaunt They searched for into Brazil Their tongues hanging out unassuaged. But the conquered grew meek and still. They slowly and silently aged. They kept their secrets and died, Maliciously satisfied. (285)

The Incas do to the Conquistadors what Frost in part does to readers: require the search; incite them to find the answer. Frost’s riddling poems, however, often indicate in one way or another that the answer does not





lie in some name given to the object enigmatically described but in the very condition of recognizing the need to search for an inaccessible name and coming to terms with that recognition. In this poem, the narrator’s (almost excessively moralizing) affiliation with the Incas displays vividly the power dynamics of the unanswerable riddle. The poem’s significant puns emphasize the play involved in this culture war: in the passage above, for instance, the repetition of “dive” participates in the same play with “dive” and “Divés” that occurs in the poem in A Further Range just before “The Vindictives,” “In Divés’ Dive” (283). That poem, too, amounts to an allegorizing riddle: the poker game, because of the reference to “the Declaration,” represents the nation. The other pun in “The Vindictives” occurs at the very end of the poem, as it plays on the spellings of the English “real” and the Spanish real: of the “self-conquered” Conquistadors, with their unfulfilled greed for gold and the ideal of an El Dorado, the speaker says: “ ‘Let their trappings be taken away. / Let them suffer starvation and die / Of being brought down to the real’ ” (286). The English “real” here undercuts the Spanish real, or royal. I think it is safe to say that more of the poems in A Further Range than in any other of Frost’s volumes depend on this riddling and on a persona who projects a self-satisfied tone, along with an insider’s knowledge. In this way, even the notorious “To a Thinker” riddles about President Roosevelt’s social changes and perhaps even his handicap. At the end of that poem, this self-satisfied voice predominates, saying “I own I never really warmed / To the reformer or reformed” (298). He will even assist the thinker, who repentantly wavers “side to side in argument”; after all, he declares, “trust my instinct—I’m a bard.” Though playful, this representation of himself as somehow possessor of the answer ultimately, I think, offended the various critics who panned A Further Range in their reviews. This self-satisfied riddling about “things”—drumlin woodchucks, wasps, grasshoppers, presidents, hidden gold, the nation, the Wright brothers’ biplane, the incident in “Not Quite Social,” the engine in “A Trial Run,” the coincidence of spider, moth, and white heal-all in “Design,” love in “Moon Compasses,” the constellations in “Lost in Heaven,” and perhaps the description of Frost in those “frost knots on an airy gauze” in “Afterflakes”—even if handled deftly, creates not so much a feeling of shared experience but of knowledge somehow simultaneously represented and withheld, a lack of interest in the need for answers (“The Strong Are Saying Nothing”) despite the fact that the poems’ form invites a search for answers. In a time of utopian striving for social reform and self-improvement, such a superior and self-satisfied stance does not produce sympathy in return. “Leaves Compared with Flowers” is also part of A Further Range. As we have seen, that poem develops largely through its manipulation of several



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proverbial expressions: “Durable trees make roots first,” “Judge a tree by its fruit,” and get at “the truth with the bark on it.” The poem also involves the riddle, despite many features that make it sound like a charm: it depends largely on various forms of repetition (modified refrain and tetrameter couplets, for instance) and an appeal to the ear. In short it amounts to a tour de force in mingling these minor genres—the proverb, the riddle, and the charm. In the fourth stanza the speaker depicts himself as riddler and those whom he has riddled as incapable of providing the answer: I bade men tell me which in brief, Which is fairer, flower or leaf. They did not have the wit to say, Leaves by night and flowers by day. (270)

In this experiential lyric, with all its emphasis on emotion, the persona makes of himself “the one apart,” the only one with the answer. The answer to this riddle does not so much activate Frye’s upper world of sense and reason as solidify the realm of intuition. The prospect of promise and change in buds and flowers is discounted for the darker and more enduring aspects of the tree, its leaves and bark. Laissez faire replaces a progressive attitude; and the laissez faire attitude is oddly connected with a kind of ancient knowledge as reflected in primitive, minor genres—the charm, the riddle, and the proverb. Though an “apprentice poem” and, like most of the poems in A Boy’s Will, largely displaying the features of the charm, as defined by Frye, “In a Vale” also expresses the traits of what Wilbur calls “the ancestral voice of riddle” (349). In the most basic terms it hinges on the sense of question and answer. The table of contents to the 1913 edition of A Boy’s Will includes this note on the poem: “Out of old longings he fashions a story” (967). The story the speaker tells is etiological: through the experience he gained while he “dwelt in a vale,” he became the answerer of the riddles that nature poses to us all. In the last stanza of the poem, he concludes: And thus it is I know so well Why the flower has odor, the bird has song. You have only to ask me, and I can tell No, not vainly there did I dwell, Nor vainly listen all the night long. (25)

Behind this personal narrative lies the core story that Frye says the riddle often contains: the romance movement of escape from the lower or underworld dominated by the incantatory, irrational powers of charm to the actual, open world of sense experience and the predominantly visual. The young speaker has emerged from a spell put on him by the “misty





fen” into knowledge, signaled by the “Thus” that opens the final stanza: he now “know[s] . . . Why the flower has odor, the bird has song.” He has become almost the oracle to whom the reader can go to find the answer to the riddle of existence. The poem deals with issues of borders as well, the borders between the supernatural and natural, between the auditory and visual, and between the word and thing. The “maidens pale,” who come to him at night, journey from a world that lacks differentiation, a world from which all the discernable and distinguishable features of the outer world originated, “Where the bird was before it flew, / Where the flower was before it grew, / Where bird and flower were one and the same” (24). Curiously, the poem treats visual perception as audible experience. The maidens are pale; the blooms in the fen have all sorts of faces (I assume visually discernable ones); and they become heavy with dew as the stars begin to fade away. Yet the visually misty fen “rang all night”; and the blooms gave off a voice for every face and “brought so much to say” (24). Even the description of the “maidens pale” seems riddlelike in that it treats a possible thing, moving wisps of mist, as maidens “whose garments trail / Across the reeds to a window light” or blooms as the faces of other visiting maidens (24). The core riddle of the first of these, to explain more clearly what I mean, would be something like, “A pale girl who travels lightly over the fen at night in a garment.” Answer: “the mist.” The differences between humans and the elements, between sound and sight, between feeling and thinking get conflated until the end of the poem, where the speaker makes his claim of knowledge gained from that experience. While suggesting in the typical pattern of the riddle that answers to mysteries are available, that return to distinguishable categories of thought and experience is possible, the poem jealously guards its mysterious quality. The poem has riddle qualities but resists the process of providing an answer so as not to disappear as its own genre. The speaker, more specifically, maintains his earned sense of a distinguishable self, as opposed to the feeling of having been merged with the elements in some incantatory experience. He maintains this sense of self by defining his relationship with his audience as that created by the riddle situation, a relationship of power in which he has posed the question to be asked—“Why flower has odor, the bird has song”—to the audience that occupies the subordinate position of the one who cannot answer the riddle and must ask the riddler to provide the answer. In fact, this power dynamic works whether the speaker is the riddlee, asked the question by the riddler-reader, or the riddler as I describe it: in the former case, after all, the speaker-riddlee has the answer and would be the superior in the kind of mock capital riddle proposed. He is ready, in other words, for the challenge by the sorcerer; by providing the answer, he can break the spell the reader might impose upon him.



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As I have suggested, the charm seems to rule the poems of A Boy’s Will, while the riddle begins to emerge in Frost’s poems thereafter. In fact, the poems of North of Boston thrive off the dynamic of characters talking with each other about an often tacit question, of characters keeping things away from others who seek an answer to the puzzle: “Mending Wall,” “The Mountain,” “Home Burial,” as I already have described it, “The Generations of Men,” “The Housekeeper,” and even the end of “After Apple-Picking,” with the sense that the woodchuck, “were he not gone,” could say what kind of sleep the speaker is entering. Even that ending (“The woodchuck could . . . ”) evokes the wording of the unanswerable riddle, “How much would could a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?” Frost’s best poems often represent a play between these two competing tendencies of charm and riddle, as Frye describes them, and also between the riddle and its “opposite,” the proverb. For the perfect example of this blending and tension we turn once again to “Mending Wall.” In part the poem has at its core a complete riddle. Posed more directly as a question, that riddle is, “What is that thing that doesn’t love a wall, that moves beneath it and upsets its stones?” The answer, as is the case in many riddles, is built into its language, at least in so far as the poet’s name is always an element of that language: “Frost,” the frozen ground swell that runs beneath the surface. That name for the physical force refers also to Robert Frost and his particular poetic spirit, as several commentators have remarked. The answer of “Frost” satisfies us readers to a certain extent. As a problem posed within the poem by the inquisitive speaker to the obtuse neighbor, however, “frost” as the name of poet does not exist, nor does the answer seem to be clearly a physical one, though the one possibility eliminated as an answer is physical—the work of hunters. The riddling energy of the poem also unfolds in opposition to the neighbor’s reliance on the proverb “good fences make good neighbors.” The speaker wants to turn that proverb into a riddle: “Why do they make good neighbors?” (39). And he almost immediately asserts the interrogative mode once again by insisting on his riddle about that something that does not love a wall, “that wants it down.” Just as he voices his riddle twice, the neighbor offers his proverb twice, almost as if the poem plays out this unavoidable conflict of ancient genres, one protecting the status quo and borders, the other calling into question the received wisdom about such areas.11 The poem itself occurs at a margin, the very site of these two genres’ activity. The poem has two other features that complicate this dramatized interplay between the two folk genres. The riddle typically operates as a disruptive force, even in possibly reversing established hierarchies by giving the questioner, no matter what his actual social rank, the position of authority, as in the Fool’s riddling of King Lear, for instance. On the other





hand, the riddle can also function as indoctrination, as a preserver of folk wisdom. This effect emerges most clearly from riddles whose answer must be come by through rote, almost as if the riddle is part of a catechism. If there is one correct answer, and the riddler possesses that answer, even if other possibilities can work, the riddle game likely works to reinforce a culture’s codes (Scott 114). The riddler in Frost’s poem seems to be the type who wants the game to be something other than propaganda: he remarks, “I could say ‘Elves’ to him, / But it’s not elves exactly, and I’d rather / He said it for himself” (40). He does not want to be party to some further indoctrination and join the neighbor’s father by arranging the game in that conservative way. Yet the speaker, as is also often observed, does more to maintain the wall than his neighbor. The riddle, and the riddler, preserve the established borders, even if they produce an experience that plays at the edges of those borders.

Riddling and Staying Alive In touching on the riddle in Frost’s poetry, particularly “One Guess,” Richard Wilbur remarks: “Are there other riddles, other what-is-its, in Frost’s work? Strictly speaking, no; but when the ancestral voice of riddle surfaces in Frost’s poems, as it does, it is generally a sign that no easy message or solution should be looked for” (349). Then Wilbur focuses on “Directive,” wherein he identifies “Frost’s most oracularly riddling lines”: “There is a house that is no more a house / Upon a farm that is no more a farm / And in a town that is no more a town” (349–50). I think Wilbur could go further in his claims for this poem’s affinity to the riddle: it is the most extended case in Frost of poem as riddle and poetic voice as that of privileged riddler. Frattali, in fact, characterizes Frost’s voice in this poem as that of the riddler: he assumes “a somewhat confrontational posture: he seems to be at once taking our measure and mocking us; informing and describing, yet all the while maintaining a contemptuous coldness—questioning, riddling, and obscurely accusatory” (141). As we have seen in our brief look at his 1955 talk at Bread Loaf, Frost chooses to read “Directive” just after he brings up the business about having some sass for the Sphinx, whom we all, presumably, must meet at some time. I take this association of “Directive” with the Sphinx, along with the overall focus of Frost’s talk on fooling, on the errancy of the reader who looks for an answer, and on the Grail search implied by the poem’s imagery, as significant. The talk can serve as a gloss on this controversial poem.



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Frost wants those who listen to his reading of the poem to “take it straight,” even though he also says “it’s full of dangers, sideways, off, and all that.” To take it straight, though, would require succumbing to its charmlike characteristics—its haunting sound, its abundant repetition of words and phrases, not to mention its evocation of the “spell” of the Grail. The experience of reading it, in essence, involves the tension between its charmlike qualities and its riddling appeal to the intellect; and that tension seems to be one that Frost built into the poem, just as his introductory words on reading it at Bread Loaf prepare his audience to experience it in both ways simultaneously. The only way in which the poem achieves a coherent meaning, however, is if its speaker is its subject; if its confusion, rather than its claimed achievement of clarity, is its meaning. It just has too many “dangers” and “sideways” to be taken straight. For example, the riddle of “a house that is no more a house,” “a farm that is no more a farm,” and “a town that is no more a town” (341) seems to gain some clarity as the speaker guides the reader along a path to that house/farm/ town. Soon, though, that single town that is no more a town becomes, it seems, part of “two village cultures” that “faded / Into each other.” In fact, this riddling about naming something as something that it is not echoes the riddle referred to in Book 5 of Plato’s Republic, as Socrates sorts out for Glaucon the differences between belief—the middle state of understanding—and the opposites, truth and untruth. He does this sorting out for the purpose of defining the true rulers of the republic, the philosophers who are concerned with nothing more than truth. The series of riddles tells an absurd story of things that are not what their names say they are so as to expose limited knowledge: (1) a man who is not a man (= a eunuch); (2) seeing and not seeing (= understanding imperfectly); (3) a bird that is not a bird (= a bat); (4) perched on a limb that is not a limb (= a reed); (5) pelts and does not pelt (= misses) it (the bat/ bird); (6) with a stone that is not a stone (= a pumice-stone) (Republic, Book 5). If seen in terms of this hauntingly similar-sounding riddle in The Republic, the guidance Frost’s speaker provides is an unenlightened sort (belief) in an unenlightened place (a place that is not a place, or, in other words, a state of being lost). Another confusing circuit in the poem develops from its temporal element: the journey “back” in time to some more original, untainted site returns one to a situation created actually by time’s advance upon that site’s physical features: “A time made simple by the loss / Of detail, burned, dissolved, and broken off / Like graveyard marble sculpture in the weather” (341).12 Back in this original place are this house, farm, and town that are not what they are precisely because of what time has done to them. This early in the poem, then, we find ourselves either in Alice’s riddling





wonderland or a time-machine world such as Frost depicted in his epithalamion “The Master Speed.” Like Alice with the Mad Hatter’s riddle about the Raven and the writing-desk, we might wonder why the poet would waste our time “in asking riddles that have no answers.”13 Perhaps the promising biblical allusions offer more coherence. However, if one looks at them in their context they are just as troubling and indeterminate as the poem’s “confusion” of time. One of these allusions addresses the parable of the sower as recorded in both Mark (4:11–12) and Matthew (13:10–13). Jesus explains to his disciples that he speaks in parables (like the riddle, the parable is an enigmatic genre) so as to keep those who do not deserve to learn his mysteries from knowing them. The proposition parallels Jolles’s explanation of the cultural function of riddles: a game of initiation imposed upon the outsider of a group by the insider so as to separate the worthy-for-admission from the unworthy (Scott 112).14 The parable of the sower, in fact, brackets Jesus’ explanation of why he speaks in parables. In that parable the seeds are sown on the path, where birds consume them; on the rocky ground, where they spring up quickly and die; on the thorns, which choke out the grass; and on good soil, where the sprouted seeds thrive. The good soil is the good audience, which hears and believes. Dominating the landscape of “Directive,” however, is glacial rock and overgrown land, the only good soil (pasture?) amounting to the size of “a harness gall” (342). The landscape of the poem, its lack of fertility, undermines the terms of the allegorical landscape within Jesus’ parable. As Berger remarks, that very landscape, marked by “a certain coolness,” might very well form a riddle about the poet’s name—“Frost writ large” (162). What about the poem’s allusion to Mark 10:15 and God’s preference for a childlike attitude in his worshippers? Even that does not seem to be a coherent pattern in the poem. The speaker prizes the lost simplicity of childhood and the privileging of the children’s make-believe house from which he has, in a far-from-innocent way, actually stolen a broken goblet and designated it as the chalice. That chalice permits him and his readers to drink waters that make us whole again. However, the theft of the goblet and the fact that the broken goblet might not be able to “hold water,” if you will forgive the pun, undermine the solemn mystery of the poem’s apparently transformative ending. So, too, does the earlier image of the youthful, childlike trees: their rustling leaves express the errancy of upstart inexperience and thus also erase much of what is put forth by the poem’s nostalgic return to the perceptiveness of childlike innocence and susceptibility to charms. And if we read this poem’s ending in light of Frost’s other poems, as well as in terms of a pun within the poem, we simply cannot take the ending seriously, unless it and its speaker, as



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is the case in “The Road Not Taken,” are on display as in themselves errant in proposing to have accomplished a proverblike answer to some unannounced mystery of life. The directive “Drink and be whole again beyond confusion” (342) echoes the several puns on “whole”/“hole” throughout Frost’s poetry and also within this poem. “Whole” in the final line must have the same recursive force advanced in other ways in the poem of moving backward to the “hole” sixteen lines earlier, which describes the house “that is no more a house” as “only a belilaced cellar hole” (341). If Lentricchia is right in his claim that the meaning of chaos for Frost “is that of ‘chasm’ or ‘gulf,’ ” this “whole” amounts to chaos (146). Being “whole again beyond confusion” means being swallowed up in Frost’s universal whole/hole, an annihilation of boundaries and borders, something finally more like confusion than a place beyond confusion. George Nitchie makes a similar point in quite another way: by effacing as sentimental fiction even the last thing to which the narrator/Frost holds—the image of Old New England—the poem turns wholeness beyond confusion into a vision of the ultimate emptiness of things (48). I emphasize this point even while acknowledging that section in “Kitty Hawk” called “The Holiness of Wholeness.” In that earnest passage, even the now religiously tinted meaning of the “hole” in “holiness” is offered guardedly. Though it will never be for “man” to be able to create authentically “One least germ or coal,” at least the one comfort is: In the covenant We may get control, If not of the whole, Of at least some part Where not too immense, So by craft or art We can give the part Wholeness in a sense. The becoming fear That becomes us best Is lest habit-ridden In the kitchen midden Of our dump of earning And our dump of learning We come nowhere near Getting thought expressed. (452)

“Wholeness in a sense,” with its ambiguous use of “sense” as meaning both “partial” and “of the senses,” certainly remains less emphatic than the





unmeasured and therefore, I would argue, exaggerated for effect “whole again beyond confusion” in “Directive.”15 In “Directive” we are supposed to follow the speaker into a lost place, into a paradoxical truth of getting lost so that we can find ourselves. In “Education by Poetry,” however, Frost highlights the dangers of getting lost, as he addresses also the dangers of materialism: “The only materialist—be he poet, teacher, scientist, politician, or statesman—is the man who gets lost in his material without a gathering metaphor to throw it into shape and order. He is the lost soul” (724). I think it is arguable that rather than offering some profound spiritual, religious answer, this poem presents this act of getting lost in the material, of offering language in the form of well-worn religious formulae and evocative, but finally incoherent, strands of sentiment, without offering “a gathering metaphor to throw it into shape and order.”16 In terms of “Kitty Hawk,” the poem’s speaker, through such “habit-ridden” thought, remains stuck in “that kitchen midden / Of our dump of earning / And our dump of learning” (452). The narrator takes us into a labyrinth—nothing if not a spatial riddle—and leaves us stranded with no Ariadnean thread by which to find our way out. Responding to this dissatisfying final claim of fulfillment in the poem, along with the overall disillusionment in most of Frost’s “quest poems,” Robert Faggen claims that “ ‘Directive’ remains a striking example of Frost’s relationship with his readers, that of a pied piper of the diabolical” (276). Notably, for Poirier, the poem is more alluring than substantial and fulfilling. He writes: “It is for me the culminating example of contrived and stagey imaginative daring that actually involves no daring at all. It is about traveling in order to get ‘lost’ so that you may then find yourself whole again ‘beyond confusion’ by virtue of some quasi-religious ritual. But it is a tricky and devious poem not because it has a lot to say but because it is not sure of what it does want to say, or do” (Robert Frost 99–100). And Steven Frattali regards the poem as an attempt to “pour cold water on the idea of such personal and transcendental moments” that it tries to capture: “Its hieratic tone is a kind of Socratic ruse designed to show the foolishness of such self-flattery and self-deceptive transcendentalizing impulses . . . In this sense the poem is a moral criticism of our culturally determined anthropocentricism” (144). In fact, one could go so far as to see the poem as a series of worn Frostian gestures from other poems woven together and thus representing the worst of all “as ifs”—as if it were an authentic, vital expression. The list would include the decaying, worn structure (grave stone, barn, or house); the questing for an answer; the road or path; the image of a door closed for self protection (a sign saying “CLOSED to all but me”);



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the overgrown field; the source of a river or stream; the looming mountain; the ache in the instep arch from “After Apple-Picking”; and even the image of the tatters left by a swollen stream—all, once again, memorable gestures from Frost’s earlier poems, but at worst gestures thrown together nostalgically.17 Looking at the poem in terms of the riddle—especially as Frye sets that minor genre off from its opposite, the charm—helps us to emphasize once again the possibility that I have suggested: that “Directive” dramatizes its speaker for our examination. Always the problem here, though, is the one that Frost himself created with his barding around, his manufacturing an aura about his authorial presence. A concern that we will examine more thoroughly in the next chapter, Frost’s attempt to make himself over as a valuable commodity by rivaling the material independence of his poems with a sense of his always-present voice works against our recognizing this dramatization. The prime example is, of course, “The Road Not Taken,” whose speaker is so often regarded as proverbial sage rather than the rationalizing, self-satisfied accommodator that Frost devises for inspection, even ridicule. Must we, as our students do with most poems and as adulators of Frost will forever do with his works, give into this “confusion,” even if Frost brought it upon himself? If we see the poem dramatizing the tension between the riddle and the charm, both fundamentally concerned with power over the audience, and perhaps more forcefully representing through the persona’s voice, the Siren-like influence of the charm, we get a sense of the poem’s “master irony.” As Kearns points out, Frost consistently exploits the hypnotic potential of sound to countermand stated meaning, so that what one senses is something external to what the eye sees on the page” (175). Certainly, the irony produced by such tension is not a friendly one. Like all irony it depends upon recognition of incongruity, in this case that between the meaningful-sounding tropes and the evocative allusions to prefabricated ways of “taking” our lives on the one hand and their actual patchwork, furtive, and incoherent quality on the other. And like Frost’s other riddle poems, in presenting itself disingenuously as a riddle with an answer, it spurs us to embrace all too readily the search for an answer—a name, a saying, a voice emerging from the words—that will cease all our questing and quiet all our questions. The aim then is the preservation of the poetic voice—to write a riddle without an answer and thereby keep it from disappearing and the poetic voice from fading. The aim ultimately is the preservation of the sense of an “I” by dilating and yet never bringing to satisfaction a relationship between author and reader, between self and the other who confirms that self’s existence: as Frattali explains in discussing the tendency of the Frost persona to seek withdrawal from others and to face starkly the external, indifferent environment, we start to get the





sense that “ ‘I’ is the abyss . . . We recognize that there must be both ‘I’ and ‘others’ if there is to be anything” (121). The game of the riddle in Frost’s poetry is a fundamental aspect in balancing these issues of the dream of an intact, self-sufficient identity, a need for others to confirm its wholeness, and the danger of its dissolving in the very act of that confirmation through naming.



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My proof of being not unbounded

Acts of naming, the name itself, the proverb, and the riddle—these are all fundamental elements in the search for identity represented in Frost’s works. As we have seen, though, all these gestures involved in that search lead to the same outcome: the self and the sense of secure knowledge underpinning it disappear in the act of naming. What survives is either the intimidating, imponderable mystery of our condition or mere materiality, whether flesh and bones or the letters of a name. In a way, that perception of our existence as nothing more than material, as nothing more than Kant’s ding an sich (“thing-in-itself”), is the mystery of it all, at least to a consciousness that, because it senses itself as separate from its material lodging, assumes that something equally separate and outside of its own time and space, and just as unidentifiable as itself, must have created it.1 The essential project in Frost’s poetry, the search for identity through external structures in nature and, as I have tried to emphasize, preexisting linguistic structures, inevitably fails. The game of the name ends without satisfaction, even if the game haunts the searcher with a pending answer. This game leaves Frost to define himself in terms of his relationship with his poems. It makes sense, therefore, to move to the poems as the things that might redeem Frost’s always-already lost sense of who he is. The poem resembles the name: it at once locates and loses what it seeks; as signature, it seems palpable and real on the page, but that palpability by its very nature excludes the intangible self and the presence of the poet. More generally, then, the identity issues we have been tracing emerge through the attempts Frost makes to negotiate a place for his self within or next to



Chapter 4


the poems he creates. This negotiation takes the shape almost of a dialectic that goes something like this: I write books that I fear possess a materiality of their own, that seem affiliated with the female world, and that readers experience outside my controlling presence; I want to participate in the manly world of physical activity and the management and marketing of real objects, not just of books whose status in the world is questionable; and I want to remain a poet who is also a man, certain of who he is and what he and his tangible outputs can command of the world. While exploring the poem-object as perhaps Frost’s “last best hope” at marking his identity, we will be moving back and forth from the view of the poem as commodity to the perception of it as material fact, mere type on paper, and as an expression that also highlights the “thingness” of the objects in the imaginary world the poem creates. The rubric “material text” stands loosely for this broad range of activity. Though it would be neater to cull out the various “materialities” in Frost’s poetry and life, it would not be as accurate: Frost himself often tangles up these different implications in his poetry and poetics, and in tracing his often quizzical attempts to conceive of identity as economical value and material presence, we must respect these tangles. Published in 1942 when the sixty-eight-year-old Robert Frost was thought to be well past his creative prime, the Pulitzer Prize–winning A Witness Tree presents the reader with a cover image of a tree marked with what seems like a text, and its largely ignored preface poems are both titled after trees—“Beech” and “Sycamore.” As Douglas Mao reminds us in Solid Objects, the tree, in its “banality,” is “both a fine provocation to existential crisis and one of the standard examples of the ordinary object, referent, or thing-out-there in Western philosophical and literary discourse, its popularity in this area rivaled only by that of the . . . table and chair” (48). Though it refers specifically to Virginia Woolf’s use of the tree to explore material reality, Mao’s observation can spur us to examine Frost’s abiding concern with the material presence of his poems and his anxiety about the autonomous presence of the text unaccompanied by the voice of its author.2 Focusing on this largely unexplored element in Frost’s poetry as it relates to his quest for identity involves us in a discussion of several significant aspects of Frost’s poetics. First, Frost himself repeatedly calls attention to the material presence of his poems in a negative way by distancing himself from the words on the page, as if they were somehow misleading without an authorial presence. He did this in discussions of his poetics of the “sentence sound” that emerged largely through a series of letters to friends during his stay in England and in his stylizing himself throughout his career as the bard who at public occasions would “say” rather than “read”



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his poems.3 In fact, the one event by which most people likely remember him involves his prevailing during a struggle with the material text: while reading the presidential inaugural poem in 1961, he strained to see the print on his paper because of the wind, the light, and the cold and finally had to abandon the reading of his prepared poem and rescue the occasion by saying “The Gift Outright.”4 Also related to Frost’s privileging of sound over sight are his derogatory comments about the eye-reader as opposed to the ear-reader, even going to the extreme of calling the eye-reader a “barbarian” (809). Moreover, the poetic activity in Frost’s time calls for some acknowledgment of the poem as object. Sandburg and Lindsay gave musical performances of their poems, and visual displays often accompanied labor-related and leftist poetry. In addition, the elitist venture by Amy Lowell, Ezra Pound, and Gertrude Stein called attention to the poem as thing, as self-contained object, even while also asserting contradictorily that the poem must carry an authentic, present-sounding voice.5 In addition, as the work of Mark Richardson and Karen Kilcup in particular has made clear, all such attempts to redefine poetry had to face the question of gender, its affiliation with the feminine, and thus, unavoidably, with the sense of verse as marginal, decorative, and ineffectual expression within a palpable, but not bookish, world of business, war, work, and sports. The degree to which Frost regarded his poems as objects matters for other reasons as well: he adored books for their appearance; he also collaborated with visual artists such as J. J. Lankes in his volumes of poetry and in Christmas card poems he regularly sent out to friends; he affiliated himself with collectors such as Earle Bernheimer; and he cultivated the value of such material as his signature on early drafts, or contrived early drafts, of poems. All of these interests, affiliations, and activities caused him to deal in various, even unexpected, ways with the materiality of his own writings and books and thus even to view of himself as commodity.6

Sound versus Sight At the heart of the matter is what Derrida identifies as the chief assumption controlling Western thought about language: that there is “a good and a bad writing: the good and natural is the divine inscription in the heart and soul; the perverse and artful is technique, exiled in the exteriority of the body” (17). As Michael Kaufman in Textual Bodies explains, “The body of the book is treated as a shameful necessity that readers must look past even while staring at it. They must pretend to look through its flesh and into its soul. The printed page that they hold is not to be perceived as the paper





and ink it is, but as something else” (14). This accepted way of reading through the material into the spiritual is essentially a sacramental view of literature, with the text, as we generally term it, referring to the spiritual thing that the physical object of the book carries (Hoagwood, “Books” 1). According to W. J. T. Mitchell, in Iconology, such a procedure preserves the word as conveyor of the remote, invisible male God, not letting the word slide into the realm of graven image and become motherlike in its intimacy and accessibility (130). Though words convey the suggestion of God, the name of God cannot be written down. According to this notion, the text can have the same meaning no matter what the particular vehicle—folio, paperback, or Internet. Such a view originates in the Platonic notion that the valued ideas are invisible and that the less valued things are visible (Shell 42). Aristotle’s concept of a core action that drama imitates, in a sense, anticipates this craving for the timeless, essential “meaning” hovering somewhere in that no man’s land between the physical page or audible and visual enactment of a scene and the audience’s reception of it—no matter who the audience and who the author. In its particularly strong engagement with the visual arts, in which the art object itself is not so easily overlooked as a printed page, modernism and, to an even greater extent, postmodernism, however, move toward making the text itself and the printed elements of the material text less transparent. Most of what Frost has to say about poetry’s power and meaning, as commentators on his poetics point out, brakes against this momentum. In fact, Hugh Kenner’s description of Faulkner’s resistance to twentieth-century modernism, at least initially, can apply almost as well to Frost. In Kenner’s terms, the modernism that Faulkner resisted involves “a consolidation of all that printed paper implies: the well-wrought artifact, the tireless revision, the skilled reader, the habitual re-reader, in an economy of typescripts, numbered pages, typographic cues for which a speaking voice has no equivalent, etymologies, dictionaries” (186). Frost’s very application of a system of notes to the title poem of New Hampshire satirizes all such bookishness, such textuality, as is captured by Kenner’s description of the modernism Faulkner resisted. At the same time, though, Frost’s application of that mock scholarly system foregrounds the textuality of his volume. In a piece called “Poetry and School,” published in the Atlantic Monthly during 1951, Frost writes: “The eye reader is a barbarian. So also is the writer for the eye reader, who needn’t care how badly he writes since he doesn’t care how badly he is read” (809). As we shall see, this late, crusty statement only exaggerates slightly the language Frost used early in his career to formulate a poetics, as Tyler Hoffman and Mark Richardson argue, designed to make him look sophisticated to an early audience who



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tended to see in his poetry an unschooled naturalness of expression.7 The idea participates in what W. J. T. Mitchell, Murray Krieger, John Hollander, James Heffernan, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida discuss in their various ways as a central concern in the attempt of poets and critics to define the position of poetry within the arts and human experience. According to Mitchell, Something like the Renaissance notion of ut pictura poesis and the sisterhood of the arts is always with us. The dialectic of word and image seems to be a constant in the fabric of signs that a culture weaves around itself. The history of culture is in part the story of a protracted struggle for dominance between pictorial and linguistic signs, each claiming for itself certain proprietary rights on a ‘nature’ to which only it has access . . . Among the most interesting and complex versions of this struggle is what might be called the relationship of subversion, in which language or imagery looks into its own heart and finds lurking there its opposite number.” (Iconology 43)

This dialectic, in other words, is a political struggle, as reflected, for instance, in Edmund Burke’s rhetoric, which affiliates the English with the living, organic, oral realm of language and the French with the visual, artificial realm of writing. It can also be seen in his reactions against Thomas Paine, who demanded that a constitution must exist as a written document (Iconology 140–45). No wonder, writes Mitchell, that Burke “can find nothing to admire in the written constitutions framed by the speculators and geometricians of France, whose imaginations have conquered their feelings” (142).8 Burke’s view, moreover, coincides with that of Wordsworth and Coleridge in their complex distaste, as poets, for the written (or perhaps “overly written”) word, which at best should function as a mere indicator of an actual voice. The imagination, after all, was seen as a power that transcends mere visualizing (Mitchell, Picture 115). The political implications of this contest between the visual and the audible emerge quite sharply in Wordsworth’s description of the eye in the Prelude as “the most despotic of our senses” (Prelude 1805, XI 173). One of Frost’s notebook meditations revealingly participates in this concern with the written as weak and motherly, even specifically referring to the U. S. Constitution: “Our democracy with a written constitution to keep power from taking its natural course toward centralization and monarchy may be like the sad attempts {of a woman} to keep young {or keep a pup young with whisky} and keep thought from generalization {Generalization is to be defined as observation ageing-or-thought ageing.)” (The Notebooks 44).9 This conflict between eye and ear, and, by extension, between the poem as picture and the poem as record of authorial presence, as Mitchell explains in his discussion of Lessing’s foundational Laocoon, unfolds in terms of familiar




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Painting Space Natural signs Narrow sphere Imitation Body External Silent Beauty Eye Feminine

Poetry Time Arbitrary (manmade) signs Infinite range Expression Mind Internal Eloquent Sublimity Ear Masculine

The book, the page, and print belong in the left column and speech in the right, thus underscoring Walter Ong’s generalization in Orality and Literature about the “thingness” of the written word, which in its autonomy, unresponsiveness, and fixity opposes the utterance with its situational, fleeting, and potent nature (10–15, for instance). Despite these clear lines of opposition, the boundaries become blurred as poets and critics maneuver to emphasize their originality and authenticity through convenient appropriation of ideas. Affiliated with the pictorial poetics inspired by Fenollosa’s The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry and its emphasis on such special elements as juxtaposition, Ezra Pound and Amy Lowell nevertheless argue for the primacy of speech patterns in poetry. Pound dismisses “literaryisms” and “book words,” while privileging the authentic oral element: “When one really feels and thinks, one stammers with simple speech; it is only in the flurry, the shallow frothy excitement of writing, or the inebriety of metre, that one falls into the easy—oh, how easy!—speech of books and poems that one has read” (qtd in Bradford 178).10 Similarly, Amy Lowell claimed that “Poetry is a spoken and not a written art” (qtd in Bradford 179). Tyler Hoffman explains, moreover, that Frost’s introduction to the poetry scene in London occurred when he attended the opening of Harold Munro’s bookshop, which was founded, paradoxically, to promote the oral performance of poetry (88). Even in a shop selling books, the effort here, as we shall see with Frost, is to disavow any acknowledgment of the text as object, as material presence. In his partial flight from the text’s autonomy, Frost betrays an awareness of the very problem that Bradford says Pound and the Imagists repeatedly confronted: “How to maintain the effect of organic form and spontaneity when the poem must function in the absence of the poet, its anonymity displacing the moment of origin



Western binaries and expresses an ideological struggle. Mitchell offers the following table of these oppositions (Iconology 110):

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and allowing in aberrant reading strategies based on the ‘speech of books and poems’ ” (Bradford 178). In Frost’s commentary on poetry, this flight from the material often takes on an all-too-obvious gender component. It also hinges on his relation with the world of business, on a puritanical distaste for idols, an appreciation of the unnameable, unmaterializable Old Testament God (he stylized himself as an Old Testament Christian), and on his own use of the visual in presenting his poems. My aim is to show the extent to which Frost’s various statements about poetics and his publications themselves express his lifelong struggle against the nagging sense that his texts, through which he explored and constructed his identity, might amount only to their material presence; that they might be, as the old saying goes, like girls, “pretty as a picture.” Thanks to Robert Faggen’s editorial work on Frost’s notebooks, we now realize that Frost practiced formulating this poetics of sound versus sight even before he tried it out in a more well-known series of letters, the most often quoted of which is the one to his former student at Pinkerton Academy, John Bartlett, in which he explains his notion of the “sentence sound.” The aim of the writer is to string words upon these sentence sounds, which amount to preexisting patterns of speech, whose meaning, almost independent of the words themselves, is caught by the ear. In that same letter he claims, “The ear is the only true writer and the only true reader. I have known people who could read without hearing the sentence sounds and they were the fastest readers. Eye readers we call them. They can get the meaning by glances. But they are bad readers because they miss the best part of what a good writer puts into his work” (677). Referring to Robert Bridges’s effort to establish a fixed quantity in written verse, to write syllabic meter, in other words, Frost asserts many of the same things in a 1914 letter to Sidney Cox: Neither can you with the help of all the characters and diacritical marks pronounce a single word unless you have previously heard it actually pronounced. Words exist in the mouth not in books. You can fix them and you don’t want to fix them. You want them to adapt their sounds to persons and places and times . . . Bridges wants to fix the vocables there and now because he sees signs of their deteriorating. He thinks they exist in print for people. He thinks they are of the eye” (671).

And in a letter to Walter Pritchard Eaton in September of 1915, Frost emphasizes what he only implies in his letters to Bartlett and Cox: that these sentence tones comprise the core of true poetry because they capture the basic forms of speech and because they are original expressions, not, to take the line from “The Most of It,” “copy speech.” He writes that





they are both original and forever: “No one makes them or adds to them. They are always there—living in the cave of the mouth. They are real cave things: They were before words were. And they are as definitely things as an image of sight” (691). Poetic beauty occurs only when they are “thrown and drawn and displayed across spaces of the footed line.” Though this observation is not “in the text-books . . . , everyone knows it though he may have lost sight of it in an age of mere diction and word-hunting” (691). This sort of commentary occurs also in a letter to William Braithwaite, in which Frost explains that words are “chiefly a kind of notation for indicating and fastening to the printed page” the sentence sounds in people’s speech (648). In the 1918 lecture titled “The Unmade Word or Fetching and Far-Fetching,” this privileging of the oral continues with the masculine, tough inflections suggested in his letter to Eaton (“thrown” and “drawn”). Frost distinguishes between spoken and written language, and carefully positions himself on the masculine side: I, myself, could get along very well without this bookish language altogether. I agree with the poet who visited this country not long ago when he said that all our literature has got to come down sooner or later to the talk of everyday life. William Butler Yeats says that all our words, phrases, and idioms to be effective must be in the manner of everyday speech . . . We’ve got to come down to this speech of everyday, to begin with—the hard everyday word of the street, business, trades, work in summer—to begin with; but there is some sort of obligation laid on us, to lift the words of every day, to give them a metaphorical turn. No, you don’t want to use that term—give the words a poetic touch” (694)

While preserving the sense of the special activity of poetry, Frost attempts to distance himself from a precious sense of poetry as bookish, from “the poetic touch.” Poetic writing does something with words—it fetches them from “our everyday speech, practical, hard, and unliterary; and that’s the way I like the word” (696).

Mater and Material All of this commentary contributes to what Richardson calls Frost’s “imitations of a muscular poetics of the sort practiced by Pound” (50). Similarly Peter Nicholls writes about the gender implications of poetic diction in Pound and Eliot: for them “a decadent language is one which has become somehow ‘bodily,’ a condition which prevents ‘objectivity’ and which is quickly marked as ‘feminine’ (195). Like Pound and Eliot, at least in terms



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of the marketing of their poetry described by Lawrence Rainey, Frost extends this sense of a muscular poetics by demanding proudly a certain price for his services as poet, something to show for his profession: in a letter of 1929 he tells John Bartlett that for his self-respect he would ask more than $600 dollars to appear at his friend’s writers institute in Colorado; it is, after all, he continues, “a miserable business being a poet among professors and business men. The only way to make them respect you is to make them pay” (Selected Letters 359). Even in regard to his teaching, the material value of his work is the key measure: Frost writes to Sidney Cox that the best hour he ever spent “in a class room was good only for the shape it took”: “There is such a thing as random talk, but it is to be valued as a scouting expedition for coinable gold” (Selected Letters 361). Here he combines his measure of quality by the marketplace with a palpable sense of form. And this sense of form is akin to Pound’s, as described by Nicholls: “ ‘Form’ must be seen to be won through what Pound calls the ‘combat’ of arrangement, a ‘combat’ only marginally less dramatic than ‘the phallus or spermatozoide charging, head-on, the female chaos’ ” (196). In 1936 Frost offers this assessment of Bernard DeVoto’s collection of essays and reviews: “And the way you lay into the writing with your whole body like an archer rather than a pistolman. Neither perverse precious nor international. I wasn’t marked off from the other children as a literary sissy like Yates and Masters. Maybe thats whats the matter with me. Theres consolation in the thought that you werent marked off either (Selected Letters 431). Here and in the earlier examples, Frost partakes of the language of the competitive, masculine realm of American business, with its linguistic gestures toward the battlefield and the poker table; his language, however, leaves out, as Richardson goes on to observe, “all the seductive, charming, sensuous, merely pleasurable satisfactions that the writing and reading of poetry afford—satisfactions that had been gendered ‘feminine’ in American culture” (51). The immediate focus of Richardson’s observations is Frost’s widely distributed “Definitions of Poetry,” which include the following descriptions: “words that have become deeds,” “as in ultimatums or battlecries,” as “flat and final” as “the show-down in poker”; and “all poetry is a reproduction of the tones of actual speech” (701). Frost’s positioning himself as something other than the fragile, reclusive female writer in “A Fountain, a Bottle, a Donkey’s Ears, and Some Books” hinges on this connection of poetry with speech rather than with writing. Speech is ultimately manly activity within the world, a tangible presence. In this long narrative poem from New Hampshire (a volume, as we have already suggested because of its apparatus, that both ridicules a modernist fetishizing of, and calls attention to, the material text), the speaker and his





guide search unsuccessfully for a rumored fountain upon a mountain, another of Frost’s Helicon allusions. The two end up at the base of the mountain, climbing through the window of a house once inhabited by the poet Clara Robinson. Instead of discovering something akin to the fountain of poetic inspiration, they find stored in the attic of this house scores of books, copies of Clara’s only published volume of poetry, in boxes and in and out of their wrappings.11 The description of this discovery amounts to thirty or more lines that meditate on the materiality of the books, some sodden, some “thrown irreverently about” and left half open, one imagined by the speaker to be thrown out of the window to sail upon the wind, “Like a bird (silent in flight, / But all the burden of its body song), / Only to tumble like a stricken bird” (200). The books are “wet and swollen” with rain, a description not only contributing to the sense of them as material but also, as Karen Kilcup asserts, making them replicas of the female body (161–62). In this way the etymological connection between material and maternity, both ultimately deriving from the Indo-European root mater, becomes almost all too obvious. The sheer number of the identically produced books, what is more, isolates their materiality from the meaning of the poems they contain. The enhanced “thingness” of these books emerges from a process like that described by Leo Stein in his A-B-C of Aesthetics, whereby everyday objects whose function we take for granted become in our perception more intensely objects only when they cease to work as they should. Unread books, books sodden with moisture, books thrown out of a window—all of these resemble Heidegger’s hammer (the same instrument Stein uses in illustrating defamiliarization), which calls attention to itself as an object only when it breaks, only when its habitual function somehow gets interrupted (Brown 212, n. 57). The poem ends with the speaker carrying a volume home in his pocket and offering a rather sentimental reinforcement of the oral tradition of authorial presence, almost as if to overcome the sheer weight of having experienced writing as voiceless material. He imagines Clara Robinson sighing in heaven because he has “eased her heart of one more copy”; and he claims that she feels “the tug. / In time she would be rid of all her books” (201). Structured as a walking dialogue, obviously emphasizing conversation and speech, and especially conversation and speech between two males, the poem comes upon a stationary, silent, material/maternal presence reflecting the mute, written body of Frost’s own poem despite all its represented conversation. Frost’s poem, if I might be permitted the personification here, can recover from this shock only through a rather clumsy, overdetermined, and sentimental reinforcement of the myth of voiced, authorial presence, a reinforcement, moreover, that depends upon a



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male rescuer of silent, weak, precious, merely material femininity that had not succeeded in the marketplace.12 A similar presentation of this conflict between male orality and silent female materiality occurs in the curious poem “Paul’s Wife,” also collected in New Hampshire. The etymology that links material with mother and, in this poem, with tree trunk (materies) haunts this poem.13 The poem focuses on the question of why Paul, a version of Paul Bunyan, silently disappears whenever a fellow woodsman asks him about his wife. The setting of the poem is the world of male gossip, essentially, as the narrator offers the different explanations developed in the lumber camps for Paul’s behavior: that he really had no wife and hated to be teased about it (implications of homosexuality); that he had been jilted and was thus touchy about the subject of a wife; that he actually had a wife and when reminded of her suddenly and obediently returned to her; or finally that Paul married a wife inferior to him and was ashamed of her, perhaps a “half-breed squaw” (179). A fellow named Murphy, however, offers the one story that the narrator values enough to retell. While piling sawed boards for a demanding sawyer, Paul discovers a stain uncovered by the first rip-cut through a pine log. Not grease from the saw, the stain suggests a hollow log. After completing his day of work, Paul makes a cut along the stain with his knife and discovers a slender pith within. Wondering how the pithy sliver would respond to water, Paul dips it into the lake; it first grows limp, then becomes invisible, and after a delay reappears as a woman walking upon the log drive out on the lake. Paul pursues her. On the next evening, Murphy and some other drunken fellows track the pair up to a niche in the side of a cliff, where the woman appears as a light itself and Paul her shadow. Apparently like a bunch of construction workers in Gotham harassing a female passerby, the ruffians “put their throats together, / And let out a loud yell, and threw a bottle, / As a brute tribute of respect to beauty” (182). When “the shout reached the girl,” it “put her light out. / She went out like a firefly, and that was all” (182). The poem ends with the narrator recounting Murphy’s own explanation of Paul’s behavior toward his wife: as far as Paul was concerned, his wife was nobody’s business, either to praise her or even to give her a name. According to Murphy, “a man like Paul / Wouldn’t be spoken to about a wife / In any way the world knew how to speak” (182). The Pygmalion resemblances in this story link the wife with art and thus present a complex dynamic between voicing and silence, between concrete thing and the naming that makes it disappear. One part of the dynamic remains quite simple: the ruffians’ oral tribute replaces the fundamentally material and certainly silent beauty of Paul’s wife. In a way, she represents the poem that disappears in the face of paraphrase and summary; and





Paul, along these lines, amounts to the author who wants that which he has hewn out of rough material to remain undefined, unspoken of, since it is its own light and needs no other. By extension, though, Paul is the poet who at some fundamental level does not want his poem read by any other voice but his own, so involved is he in its existence. Paul never talks about his wife. And she was only seen this once, as becomes clear in a pun repeated from “ ‘Out, Out’—” on “saw” as both cutting and seeing: “Paul sawed his wife / Out of a white-pine long. Murphy was there, / And, as you might say, saw the lady born” (180). We might say that Murphy represents one of those barbarian eye readers from whom the figure of the poet, Paul, would like to keep his poem. “Paul’s Wife,” like “A Fountain, a Bottle, a Donkey’s Ears, and Some Books,” hinges on the portrayal of a mute, material, and unnamable existence accessible only to the eyes, a portrayal that undermines the manly, conversational mode of the poem itself. It also expresses, it seems, Frost’s anxiety about Paul’s unacknowledged, embarrassing association with a female shadow world of beauty; his anxiety, in other words, about his identity as poet. Also among Frost’s “Definitions of Poetry” is a classification of realism in terms of the preparation of a potato: the one realist offers up “a good deal of dirt with his potato,” the other “brushes it clean.” Frost prefers the second one, who must somehow turn the feminine, domestic act of tidying up a potato for consumption into an aggressive, masculine act of ravishing to get at its original, as yet undiscovered form: “To me, the thing that art does for life is to clean it, to strip it to form” (701, emphasis added). This view of creative event conforms to the act of ravishing and stripping that Katherine Kearns claims characterizes the discovery Paul makes of his pithy wife (104). Conforming here to the New Critics’ notion of internal form, Frost positions the poetic act as aggressively male and as a venture into the realm of origins, both of which are linked with the oral rather than the written. Again, in a letter to Edward Garnett about a review Garnett wrote in praise of Frost’s poetry and hoped to publish in Ellery Sedgwick’s New Atlantic, Frost jokes with him in a way that distinguishes between real men’s judgment about his poetry and a bookish, unmastered female’s: “I had quite believed Sedgwick when he told me he didn’t see how he could use your article because he had already handed me over for review to some single-bed she professor with a known preference for the beautiful in poetry” (Selected Letters 178). In a much later message sent to R. P. T. Coffin in 1938, Frost uses similar language: “Meet with the fallacy of the foolish: having had a glimpse of finished art, they forever after pine for a life that shall be nothing but finished art. Why not a world safe for art as well as democracy. A real artist delights in roughness for what he can do to it. He’s the brute who can knock



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the corners off the marble block and drag the unbedded beauty out of bed” (Selected Letters 465).14 Not unexpectedly, Frost goes on in the same letter to display his anxiety about the manliness of writing poetry and the fate of being fixed in books. He does so by telling the story, which he recounted with variation elsewhere, about the businessman’s identification of reading with womanly activities: after hours of talk with a businessman about his adventures, Frost finally and sheepishly admits to writing poetry for a living, whereupon the businessman replies, “My wife writes that stuff” (Selected Letters 465). The primary opposition here occurs between manly talk and writing. In “On Extravagance: A Talk,” the story unfolds in this way: “When I catch a man reading my book, red-handed, you know, he usually looks up cheerfully and says, ‘My wife is a great fan of yours.’ Puts it off on the women” (903). And in a 1961 news conference reported for the Washington Post by Thomas Wolfe, Frost said, “It’s a distressing thing to have a poet in the family . . . I’ve had a friend apologize and say, ‘My boy’s a fine lad underneath it all. It’s just that he can’t get this poetry business out of his system.’ Said it right to my face. Every now and then I catch a man reading a poem of mine. Catch him dead to rights. He always looks up sheepishly and says, ‘My wife’s a great fan of yours.’ That puts us poets in our place” (Interviews 266). Feeling victimized by this association of his vocation with womanly activity, Frost turns around and victimizes others with it, as he does in his strained letter to Leonidas Payne, the chair of the English Department at the University of Texas, who sent Frost a list of what he thought were errors in Frost’s Collected Poems. Frost markedly characterizes Payne’s recommended changes as bookish and even girlish. At one stage he writes, “My passive is perfectly idiomatic. You must remember I am not writing school-girl English.” Later in the letter, he positions himself as masculine and his academic acquaintance as feminine by writing, “[Codling] is a form still in use among apple men” (emphasis added). Soon thereafter he asserts, “Substituting but that for but in ‘Waspish’ would show school girl timidity and spoil my metrics”; and “Inserting its after doubt on page 87 would be school girl English to my ear” (Selected Letters 370). Indirectly, Katherine Kearns explains Frost’s urgency here about the threat of schoolgirl English. She writes: “Frost’s ironic refinement of the stereotype of the poet as a sissy whose sensitivities to language make him girlish is in keeping with his obsession with the sound of the speaking voice, for if the male poet is by common assumption girlified, the books into which he commits his poetry lay him open to the charge of prostitution” (37–38). Separated from the male voice, she explains, the words in books are “abandoned to be printed and laid down within a book,” feminized as they are left “spread vulnerably across the page” (38). Frank





Lentricchia too discusses Frost’s view of the book as female object, quoting a Frost statement about “all those enemies of a living (i.e., a ‘contemporary,’ a genuinely ‘modern’) literature who come at us from the feminized crypt of manliness, the book” (“The Resentments” 184). While focusing on Frost’s discussion in a letter of 1915 to Walter Prichard Eaton (Selected Letters 191) of sentence tones that “haven’t been brought to book,” Lentricchia even more ambitiously glosses “bringing to book” as meaning “bring to bed with child” (“The Resentments” 184).15 Karen Kilcup has shown, however, that Frost’s stance as poet of the ear rather than the eye at the same time affiliates him with the feminine tradition of story telling and gossip (107–111).16 Moreover, as we have already seen in our discussion of proverbs, Thoreau regards the spoken language as the “mother tongue” and the written as the “father tongue.” According to Irwin, Thoreau’s position is part of the competing traditions about Adam’s original naming, which we have seen Frost ridicule (33). One tradition held that speech preceded writing and that the need for writing amounted almost to a kind of Babel-like departure from original, unified orality. The take of Swedenborg, which Frost himself might have known, held that Adam’s power of naming animals really comes from his God-given power to read the ideographic “names” of animals in their physical shapes. Thus, reading— sight-reading, I should add—comes before speech. Irwin puts it this way: “Adam’s naming is the appropriation of God-given natural forms into a language of signs, gestures, and pictures” (33). A corollary to this tradition is that a language of spoken words, far from approaching some prelapsarian state, actually signals the fall of human nature from that original, ideographic intelligence. Frost’s attempts to make himself a poet of the ear and thereby to assert his manhood, as we see, put him in a complex, even contradictory position. Kilcup situates Frost’s dilemma in this way: “In tandem with his reliance on formal written traditions, Frost’s insistence on spoken language resonates throughout American poetry and American literature more generally: the relationship between the oral and the written, their gender affiliations, and their investment in matters of popularity and canonicity” (107). She goes on to imagine the question with which Frost, at some level, had to struggle: “What is a poem, anyway? And what kind of a person is a poet, especially one who emphasizes spoken language?” (108). These questions of identity for Frost might have become especially urgent as the new century developed and the poem began more and more to be regarded as an object. According to Kilcup’s theory that Frost’s retreat from the feminine tradition occurs clearly in New Hampshire, it makes sense that that volume—at least its first edition with the marginal notes and thus heightened textuality, not to mention the eye-appealing woodcuts by J. J. Lankes— betrays spectacularly the conflict in Frost between the oral and textual, the



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rhetorical and the visual, as even the notes undercut textuality while they unwittingly promote it.17 Thus, in parodying Eliot’s Waste Land, Frost at the same time participates in the kind of poem that, according to Joyce’s remark about Eliot’s modern epic, “Ends the [idea] of poetry for ladies” (qtd. Kilcup 153).

Pictures and Poetry In a carefully argued chapter in Robert Frost and the Politics of Poetry, Tyler Hoffman delineates the many ways in which Frost insisted on the primacy of sentence sounds and the equally numerous ways in which his poems and their operation at the level of the sentence, including punctuation and other graphic communicators of tone such as italics and capital letters, undermine the poet’s claims that the construction of the sentence is almost entirely self-sufficient in controlling tone, in indicating the poet’s voice, and in preserving that voice for the ages. Hoffman quotes a passage from Frost’s notebook to highlight the untenable direction of the poet’s theorizing: “Writing must disappear as speech becomes more far reaching” (The Notebooks 304). As Hoffman points out, Frost “imagines inscription yielding wholly to the spoken word, the page and its marks withering away in the face of an encroaching orality. His idealization of that vanishing act signifies his reluctance (in theory) to commit fully to a scripted medium, and accounts for his promotion of the ear over the eye in his principle of ‘the sentence sound’ ” (84). We might here recall that this question of the status of the poetic text, especially as it reflects on the identity of the poet, mirrors the ambivalence of the proverb, with its simultaneous sense of oral familiarity and formal textuality, and the riddle as both about itself and the world outside itself. This highlighting of the status of the material text also calls up many of the same questions expressed in Frost’s hypersensitivity to naming and signature, especially the unsuccessful attempt to embody a name, “Frost,” that can only be mere letters on the page. Behind the act of naming, the application of the proverb, and the riddle game is often the question of the existence of a body of knowledge and, more personally, of a self apart from its materiality, as described by Alec Marsh in his analysis of the “economics” of Pound and Williams (170–73) in terms of the “neo-Kantian” fantasy. In all three of these gestures at naming, and in this case of the material text, Frost’s stance is contradictory, as thoroughly displayed by Hoffman. Making Frost’s stance even more complex and curious, though, is the way in which he paired his poetry with pictures and visual representations, and his attempt to cultivate collectors of his material output.





Pairing picture with poem or poems raises a number of important questions related to Frost’s penchant for opposing the eye to the ear and for defining his identity as artist in terms of this opposition. Those questions often arise in discussions of the subgenre ekphrasis, a poem that addresses or speaks about a piece of visual art. James Heffernan identifies it as the “literary mode that turns on the antagonism—the commonly gendered antagonism—between verbal and visual representation” (Museum 7). Though our study here is certainly not of ekphrasis—Frost has only a handful of poems, such as “A Missive Missile,” “To an Ancient,” “For Once, Then, Something,” and “All Revelation,” that could be thought of in terms of this subgenre—Heffernan makes some observations about the form that we would do well to keep in mind as we turn to Frost’s interest in pairing poetry with pictures. Heffernan points out, for one, that the root meaning of ekphrasis, “speaking out” or “telling in full,” emphasizes its focus on the process of “envoicing a silent object” (Museum 6). As the poem speaks about, and sometimes to, the work of visual art, it also “stages . . . the revolution of the image against the word,” which has a strong gender component because the duty of pictures is “to be silent and beautiful (like a woman), leaving expressing to poetry.” Also, ekphrasis “reveals a profound ambivalence toward visual art, a fusion of iconphilia and iconphobia” (Museum 7). In discussing the ways in which the calligram (a highly visual poem like those of Herbert and Cummings, for instance) foregrounds the material, textual elements of the poem and thereby stages the play between the visual and the oral, Michel Foucault makes a generalization similar to Heffernan’s: “The calligram uses the capacity of letters to signify both as linear elements that can be arranged in space and as signs that must unroll according to a unique chain of sound. As a sign, the letter permits us to fix words; as line, it lets us give shape to things. Thus, the calligram aspires playfully to efface the oldest oppositions of our alphabetical civilization: to show and to name; to shape and to say; to reproduce and to articulate; to imitate and to signify; to look and to read” (Foucault 21). Frost certainly does not play with print as shape in any way near the methods of Herbert or Cummings. His pairing of the visual with the written is also far more casual than that created by the ekphrasis of Keats’s “Ode to a Grecian Urn,” Stevens’s “Anecdote of the Jar,” or Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts,” for example, and that pairing of art and poetry practiced, say, by William Blake. Still, it puts the clearly referential and oral assumptions about language at risk, and thus brings into play Blake’s notorious claim: “Time & Space are Real Beings Time is a Man Space is a Woman” (Mitchell, Iconology 114). During the period between 1929 and 1962, excluding four years of the Great Depression, thirty-three of Frost’s poems or passages from them or



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his plays were printed as Christmas cards, in most cases complete with quite elaborate, often representational artwork. Joseph Blumenthal and Spiral Press were responsible for twenty-five such seasonal greetings; the others, according to Welford Taylor, “were either private press imprints or else were printed at the direction of Frost collectors (e.g., Earle J. Bernheimer, Clifton Waller Barrett)” (Tuten 52). Briefly describing just a sampling of these cards will suggest how they illustrate the problems in what Frost says about the poem’s essentially oral, voiced presence. While the first issue, “Christmas Trees,” is modest, having a border of six-pointed stars and a small image of a Christmas tree at the beginning of the poem’s first line, the 1935 issue of “Neither out Far Nor in Deep” includes a border of yellow stars and a woodcut background by J. J. Lankes of an ocean and beach. The 1939 issue of “Triple Plate,” later titled “Triple Bronze,” is decorated with a gray star designed by Fritz Eichenberg and a watermark of a snow-covered house with the word “Winterbourne” rising as if it were smoke from the chimney, along with an Eichenberg illustration extending over both covers of a small figure standing on a hill at the lower right of the front cover, looking up at a night sky filled with stars and a large, bright star in the upper left of the front cover. The 1944 issue of “An Unstamped Letter . . . ” comes on paper with a watermark of a castle and a vignette woodcut of a mailbox. The 1946 “Young Birch” has decorations by Joseph Low of a rock and flowers in gray and yellow-green and a painting of birches on the front page. The 1954 “From a Milkweed Pod” includes a wood engraving by Thomas Nason of a milkweed pod and a headpiece vignette of six butterflies. The 1961 card of “The Wood-Pile” includes a Nason wood engraving of trees and a wood pile. This engraving appears inside the front cover of the card. A wood engraving of a chickadee faces the first two lines; and on the seventh page of this elaborate card, there is a wood engraved head piece of a tree stump and axe. The outside front page offers the reader—or is it viewer?—an illustration of bare trees crossing in a snow setting. Beginning with several hundred, the size of these printings grew to 17,055 for Frost’s final card in 1961, “The Prophets Really Prophesy as Mystics / The Commentators Merely by Statistics,” which was decorated modestly with a red five-pointed star. These cards, Taylor explains, were personalized according to the senders to whom they were issued, so that in the case of the 1958 “Away,” there were twenty-two variants each with the name of a different sender (Tuten 53).18 All of these details about the cards and how they were issued make for a complicated perspective on literary texts, highlighting their value as property and confusing, at least in casual terms, the matter of their ownership. Frost signed those cards he sent out in his family’s name; those other senders signed theirs. In all cases, the poem





or the literary passage on the card is treated overtly as a part of a material object. And the emphases created by that object fall on the values indicated in the right-hand column of Mitchell’s table of binaries juxtaposing the oral with the visual: body, space, externality, silence, the feminine. Apart from the various affiliations of interest—the affiliation of sender with the poet, the poem with the artwork, the name of the poet with the signature of the poet, and those two different identifications with the poem itself— the association of the poem with the visual representation creates a curious sense of the poem’s iconic status. In these cards the poem does not speak to, or directly about, the accompanying illustration, as in the case of ekphrasis. The passages in all cases were completed before the illustrations designed to accompany them. This fact, though, hobbles the passages: the presence of the illustration suggests that the poem’s expression requires the assistance of an associated visual reference. The visual reference, in a sense, silences the poem, turns it into a still form, more suitable for the eye-reader than for the ear-reader. In the case of the first of these cards, “Christmas Trees,” that relationship between picture and poem is highlighted, in fact, within the poem itself. The card, remember, consists of a border of six-pointed stars, with an illustration of a Christmas tree at the beginning of the poem’s first line. This presentation is far more subtle than that of the 1996 children’s booklet version of the poem illustrated by Ted Rand or of the 1915 card reportedly sent out by Frost and his family containing the poem and a sketch by Lesley.19 At the end of this poem about the slight value of the speaker’s thousand trees in the marketplace, and by extension the value of Frost’s poems (their “trial by market”), the speaker addresses those who receive the card/read the poem: A thousand Christmas trees I didn’t know I had! Worth three cents more to give away than sell, As may be shown by a simple calculation. Too bad I couldn’t lay one in a letter. I can’t help wishing I could send you one In wishing you herewith a Merry Christmas. (105)

Quaint and popularly inflected as it is, this concluding observation nevertheless captures in a way emphasized by repetition the issues we have been exploring. Frost’s letter tries to represent a confiding, conversational mode. It makes this attempt by marking itself off from the actual letters the speaker will write to his friends—either Christmas letters or accounts of the very episode he describes in this confiding, epistolary poem: “Three cents so small beside the dollar friends / I should be writing to within the



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hour / Would pay in cities for good trees like those” (105, emphasis added). The poem we experience is really not writing—that will come later, the speaker assures us. The regret that the tree itself could not replace the writing in the letter or card—“Too bad I couldn’t lay one in a letter”—seems to yearn for an original materiality, mute and visual. But that regret, in a coy way, separates the material from the apparent spoken voice that the poem ultimately represents and valorizes; in other words, the lines express a poetic presence by admitting to the frustration over being unable to offer up something more palpable and, oddly by implication, less authentic than the voice itself. Finally, though, this poem, like the others in Frost’s annual Christmas greetings, is part of a package, a gift, delivered in the spirit of Christmas, and thus it functions as a gift-object. My focus here on this good-natured seasonal gesture by Frost and his publisher might seem out of place, a kind of overdetermined theoretical invasion of a minor aspect of Frost’s life—an attack by the literary paparazzi, if you will. In short, it might seem ridiculous to apply Frost’s ad hoc theorizing about the barbarity of eye-reading and the importance of sentence sounds to a set of Christmas cards. If one sits, say, in the Special Collections room of the University of Maryland, handling these cards, the impression changes. The circumstances of that experience—the preservation of silence and thus emphasis on sight reading; the guidelines for careful handling of material objects, which in this case are designed to be appreciated precisely because of their tangibility and visual appearance; and the idolatry of it all, what with our handling these relics with such worshipful care—certainly counter such a casual regard for them. Even my characterization of that experience, though, might be exaggerated were it not for the fact that Frost actively promoted the collection of such material versions of himself.

The Collectable Frost Though Frost has in some measure been reclaimed from what many see as Thompson’s unnecessary emphasis on the underlying meanness ruling his life, I know of no commentator who has tried to correct the view we get in Thompson of Frost as the manager of his own collection and material representation. His well-documented agreement with Earle Bernheimer in the mid-1930s more or less regularly to send that collector scraps of paper, notebooks, manuscripts, and signed editions for a salary of $150 dollars per month certainly exposes Frost’s urgent desire to sustain and fashion himself through a well-managed and regulated material presence. In fact,





when Frost learned years later that Bernheimer would have to sell the collection to finance the settlement of his divorce, he used every rhetorical trick to persuade him to keep the collection intact. Mark Richardson describes Frost’s handling of this material as a remarkable effort at selling “his charisma as such.” He goes on to write, “It is an interesting case of what . . . Walter Benjamin called the aura of uniqueness that surrounds such objects—manuscripts of printed works, signed books—in an age of mechanical reproduction . . . [Frost] even undertook on several occasions— always at the request of collectors—to copy out certain of his works again in manuscript when the ‘original’ manuscripts no longer existed to be sold, a curious act of self-forgery whereby the ‘literary’ value of the artifact is superseded almost entirely by the ‘charismatic’ value of its aura” (Tuten 60). This aura depends upon presence, the presence of the original, as Benjamin explains, and in this case that presence involves both the text of the work and the sense of the author’s presence, his hand upon it, in the form of the signature and even signs of the artifact’s changing circumstances, changes even in physical condition and ownership (Benjamin 220). This process of commodification, including, of course, Frost’s signing limited editions of his works, as Richardson writes, “in an effort to make them as ‘rare’ as possible” (Tuten 60), depends on a reaction to his poetry that comes much closer to the barbaric act of eye-reading than to the more authentic ability, according to Frost, to “hear” the sentence sounds. The whole matter is laden with paradox as Frost emphasizes those elements on the material, feminine spectrum of aesthetic experience to achieve a sense of his freedom from material and to affirm his masculinity, to achieve this aura, as Richardson, after Benjamin, calls it. The Christmas cards offer a particularly interesting example because as mere gifts for a relatively small collection of people—compared to all of Frost’s readers—they were not a part of his income as are the sales of his books, his appearance fees, and the efforts at making valuable even the scraps of paper to which he “fastened” those sentence sounds. What the cards as well as the various editions of his poems reveal is his intense interest in the physical appearance of his writings. Early on, even before the publication of A Boy’s Will, Frost was attracted to the finely printed editions produced by Thomas Mosher, who published Frost’s “Reluctance,” though not in his monthly anthology The Bibelot, but rather as an advertised specimen serving as a prelude to a small catalogue of Mosher titles (Selected Letters 46). In the last letter that we know of to Mosher, one written from Lascelles Abercrombie’s house in December of 1914, Frost expresses some regret in not having had his books published by Mosher, “in whose hands,” he writes, “I should feel so much happier and safer” (Nash, “The Poet”318; Sokol 235). He goes on, “I meant to make it



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perfectly clear to you how sorry I was that I couldn’t see my books named in your catalogue . . . My first care is that the poetry shall be right”; and then he adds, “Lately I have begun to care a little about placing it where it will stand the least chance of being lost” (Nash, “The Poet” 319). Ray Nash interprets Frost’s words in this way: “This nice compliment to Mosher’s book-making is early evidence of the poet’s perceptive eye and interest in the physical side of his books” (319). In a short piece written for “The Book Collector’s Packet” in 1948 on the subject of Frost and his printers, Nash again highlights Frost’s more than passing interest in textual appearance and material concerns of publishing as it emerged from the poet’s talk with The Grolier Club. In discounting the idea that Frost had nothing to do with the attractive books produced after his first two David Nutt volumes, Nash writes: No doubt Robert Frost has been exceptionally fortunate in his printers and publishers. Luck, he calls it, but the printing sort can readily see through that to something more. Witness the time he talked to the Grolier Club about what he had observed and thought with respect to bookmaking, a discourse revealing so much insight into methods and men and so much discernment as to problems and results in the bookish province that ever since these bookmen speak of the poet as “one of us.” One will serve: the occasion was a noble feast to honor the greatest living poet [Frost] and he was surrounded by his best friends—those who shared with him the pleasures and pains of making his books. Mr. Frederic Melcher, publisher of publishers, was talking shop and he held aloft a copy of the trade edition of Collected Poems, 1930, as a paragon of excellence in bookmaking. At the gesture a command immediately rang out from the seat of honor, “Tell them who made it.” (“Robert Frost” 12)

Nash clearly eliminates the possibility here that Frost alluded to the Middle English sense of the poet as “maker”: Frost, Nash emphasizes, takes credit for the material appearance of the volume. According to Sergeant, Frost himself said that he was “the best-printed American writer,” his books having been “produced . . . by the best book designers in the East—Bruce Rogers, D. B. Updike, W. A. Dwiggins, Harbor Press, and Spiral Press. This was done on the initiative of publishers who found the sales advantageous, but with the warm support and stimulus of the poet, who loved fine art” (307). In practice, Frost clearly participated in the full range of what Roger Chartier describes as the complex way in which a text is produced— through the strategies of writing as expressing authorial intention, through the material and visual presentation of the text in the book or publication, and through the reception of the text. All of this entails more than sentence sounds: “No text exists outside of the support that enables it to be





read; any comprehension of writing, no matter what kind it is, depends on the forms in which it reaches its reader” (161). Frost worked to make his poems and his texts property. His urgency to create this sense of property by cultivating an aura about his texts leads to what seems a curious gesture he made for Earle Bernheimer in the first American edition of A Boy’s Will. “On the open endpaper recto, Frost,” according to Joan Crane, “has written a fair copy of the poem ‘Stars,’ in which there is no textual variation from the printed poem at p. 18 of the book. Beneath he has signed his name and ‘For Earle Bernheimer.’ An extension of the note was appended later, ‘and from him / to R. V. Thornton / with my approval / R.F.’ ” (12). This act of copying out one of the very poems that appears in the text is puzzling, even apart from the question of why he would choose this poem about indifference to human concerns as the one to copy for Bernheimer. This act differs from, say, his copying out “Nothing Gold Can Stay,” “signed and dated ‘Ann Arbor May 1922,’ ” in another copy of this edition of A Boy’s Will. That poem had not been published: it appeared later in the Yale Review and also in 1923 in New Hampshire. To copy out a poem already in a text seems a curious undermining of the poem in its context. The copied version signals Frost’s presence, and yet, as we have seen through Derrida’s discussion of the paradox of the signature, it, along with the actual signature accompanying it, marks in fact the poet’s absence from the site of inscription. Moreover, what is the copied poem if not some alternative way of “taking” the poem as it already appeared in the volume? That copied version personalizes the poem, makes it something other than a manufactured thing, perhaps dematerializes the poem. It also places more emphasis on the medium itself, as the written version in comparison to the printed one calls attention to the visual, tactile surface and thus lessens the sense of the written form as a mere transparency into the “real poem” as expressed and sounded out by the poet. By “real poem” here, I mean the “work” which, according to the accepted but often unexamined view, amounts to “the imaginary event presumed to have existed in an author’s mind” (Hoagwood and Ledbetter, “Colour’ d” 20). Through this publishing “industry” Frost enhanced a kind of response that he otherwise rejected, a response to his material text as something tactile, palpable, and static. That response, as Walter Benn Michaels in The Shape of the Signifier explains, takes two forms, one more extreme than the other, but both replacing the idea of a text’s meaning with something else. In an extreme case—the mere handling of an object representing the presence of an author—the text becomes most real because most meaningless. Michaels employs the example of Russell Cheney finding a shopping list on the back of a letter from F. O. Matthiessen: “The shopping list, not



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the letter,” explains Michaels, “produces the ‘actual scene’ of Matthiessen’s life”; it derives its power “not from its meaning but from its physical connection to Matthiessen” (8). Its meaninglessness is its power. In the less extreme case, the emphasis on the material text, which I have tried to suggest Frost, in spite of his poetics, encouraged, leads to what Michaels describes as something like an absolute subjectivity: “The different meanings the same text can have for different readers in different situations” (8). As Michaels puts it, referring also to Paul de Man’s theorizing about the material text, “Once we become interested in what we see, in what the text makes us think of, we become in principle as indifferent to the question of what the text means as de Man could wish” (8). The paradox is complete: Frost’s intense interest in the material text actually promotes a response from his audience that makes it all the more urgent for him to insist upon the voiced poem and the “tones” that it captures, else he disappears as both the poem’s owner and its intending author. Many of the issues involved in this process by which Frost—in some ways wittingly and in other ways unwittingly—turned his works and even himself into collectors’ items emerges in the curious, politicized, and almost entirely ignored poem from A Further Range called “The Old Barn at the Bottom of the Fogs,” subtitled “Class Prejudice Afoot.” Another of Frost’s poems in which his persona focuses on some sort of structure, artifact, or device, this one dwells on an old barn oddly set off by itself and especially on the long, chestnut props that hold its large two-story doors open in the summer and closed in the winter. The barn and the props once provided subject matter for commentary by a tramp when he conversed with the speaker. The poem reflects upon that conversation in which the two agreed upon the memorable features of the barn: its windowless walls, whose vertically aligned boards created a feeling for the temporary lodger—apparently they both had slept there—of “waking in a cage of silver bars”; and those props, which were both good and bad in that a tramp could easily enter the barn by lifting them up and pulling the doors outward and yet be trapped within, because the doors could not be locked from the inside but could be locked from without upon anyone who had entered for a restful night. This recounting of the conversation about the barn provides a context for some interesting moves. One is a repeated defamiliarizing of material details that goes beyond the normal process of poetic language; the poem describes objects as if to highlight their appearing or operating in unexpected ways and thereby to suggest their “thingness.” The barn itself, because it sits unaccountably out in the open without house or sheds in a kind of “ring-around a dooryard” (263), as the narrator familiarly says, is divorced from its usual setting and function. The shotgun that the hunter





shouldered on his way past the barn in the morning is defamilarized in the description of that same hunter’s return past the barn in the evening: “The gun reversed that he went out with shouldered” (263). The creature that occupies the barn’s threshold flees this returning hunter; but it is described in a way that also emphasizes its thingness: “The fur-thing, muff-thing, rocking in and out / Across the threshold in the twilight fled him” (263). Then the political opining by the speaker’s tramp-acquaintance reconfigures the props themselves, but amid a good deal more complexity. The much-traveled tramp uses them to deride conservatives; at the same time, the process exposes him and also displays an intriguing view of collectorship. An educated tramp, he complains about the rich by offering an etymological play on “conservatives”: he gripes that they don’t know what to conserve, what to keep (servare) for display, what to “treasure under glass” (Tuten 247). Apart from the biographical relevance here to Frost as, in a sense, one who promoted the collection of himself by the rich, though read by the hoi polloi, that etymological play itself makes the word “conservative” strange, takes it out of its normal realm of usage. Though that process arguably reinvests the word with meaning, it also calls attention to it as word, especially in the neighborhood of the loaded word in the next line, “treasure,” coming from the Latin term thesaurus that names both a treasury and a collection of words, as if the treasure chest, say, and the thesaurus were equally the collection of material objects. The speaker’s acquaintance goes on to imagine those props themselves, perhaps the last remnants of chestnut tree because of the chestnut blight that lurks behind this poem, positioned in some museum “on a rack like famous oars, / Their label Prop-locks, only specimens / In chestnut now become a precious wood / As relic of a vanished race of trees.” After all, he adds, “When these go there will be none to replace them” (264). Because of the way in which the speaker ironically introduces the tramp’s opinions—“Trust him to have his bitter politics / Against his unacquaintances the rich / Who sleep in houses of their own, though mortgaged” (264)—those opinions appear self-involved and self-blind. Frost seems to be playing with another word here to emphasize that self-contradiction. Anyone the least read in Chaucer will immediately catch the word queynte in “acquaintance”: we don’t need to refer in much graphic detail to hende (cleverly accomplished) Nicholas’s overly familiar introduction to Allyson in The Miller’s Tale to know that, although queynte derives from cognoscere, to know or to learn, it has everything to do with the curious combination of unfamiliarity in the familiar, as with the modern English word “quaint,” in fact. That word combines a sense of the recognizable and the odd. Thus Frost’s severely disorienting formulation, “unacquaintance,” not only once again creates a blockage at the word itself as word, but also opens



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up a full range of possibilities in this tramp’s relationship with the rich. On the one hand he does not know them—he is not (“un”) in the position of closeness (“ad”) to knowledge (“cognizant”) of them; and yet he is not in the position of strangeness to them either, as he acts just as he imagines them to act toward him. This notion interestingly emerges in his snotty and also “class-conscious” sense of superiority to other tramps. According to the speaker, “It had almost given him troubled dreams / To think . . . / The cheapest tramp that came along that way . . . / Could mischievously lock him in to stay” (264). From Frost’s play with words to his politicizing the tramp’s words, the poem highlights a curious array of materialisms. At its center is the picture of the once useful props becoming a specimen in some museum, separated from their function, their meaning, and returned to their materiality, their mere woodenness, as “relic[s] of a vanished race of trees” (264). Named and contained, they nevertheless achieve an acute sense of realness by virtue of their mute substance. Mirroring that containment, though, is the tramp’s fretted containment of himself within the barn, locked in and, as it were, “preserved,” if not “conserved.” And finally, the hypothetical other tramp whom he imagines containing him in this way is a mere commodity in that he is “cheap,” an item of inexpensive exchange value, as opposed to the special materiality of the props, whose existence as relics achieves meaning to the extent that they evoke something lost, something irretrievable. It is difficult to nail down Frost’s tone here, though the poem’s techniques and voices emphasize quite clearly a material worldview and specifically how pervasive that material view is. The tramp resembles the unaware freeloader who expects others to take up his causes: “Would someone only act in time we yet / Might see them on a rack like famous oars” (264). He also expresses—in the notion of “cheap”—the very materialism he seems to criticize in the conservatives and, by implication, the well-to-do. He represents a side in the conflict between functionality of an object and an elitist aestheticizing of it. Typically, then, Frost seems to hide in the middle somewhere, poking fun at the Left, who are fundamentally just as “conservative” as the Right, and at those on the Right, who want to acquire things to preserve but lack the taste to do it without help, expressing taste through ownership, not understanding. More central to our argument, though, Frost seems to be digging around in the materiality of his world, including his own poems. His fear—not just that of his tramp acquaintance—is that he as poet might get caught in the barn of his poem by a reader, that is, be nothing more than its words, and be “[locked] in to stay”—lacking any exterior voice by which to extricate himself. According to Andrew DuBois and Frank Lentricchia, this fear expresses the trap of modernism, whereby the desire of the poet to preserve an “independent selfhood against the





coercions of the market . . . is subverted by the market” precisely because he has produced poems suggesting “a direct access to the life and thought of the famous writer,” who lurks “inside the poem like a rare animal in a zoo” (52). This simultaneous desire for and fear of recognition also speaks to the point that Poirier makes about Frost’s self-protective, elusive representation of himself in his poetry and lectures as one actually enjoying “self-communication, comfortable at being with and of the voices he uses.” “Quite the opposite,” writes Poirier, “it is his way . . . of enjoying his extraordinary capacity for not letting himself be known. In the voice is not the found, but the unfindable Frost, like Whitman’s unknowable ‘Me myself’ ” (Robert Frost 334). That which is “unfindable” is also uncontainable and unidentifiable, unlike the preserved, aestheticized prop-lock and the tramp without means of extrication. Lawrence Rainey offers perhaps the most useful means by which to review what we have been describing as the complicated, self-contradictory approach Frost takes to naming himself through the materiality of his works and their economic value. As we have seen, Frost privileges the oral and the aural, identifying himself as the voice we should hear behind the physical words on the page. His voice, moreover, connects with the original, fundamental sounds and meanings of human expression; sentence sounds are no different in that way from elemental proverbs and the original, specular identity discernable in one’s name, if not in the natural surroundings. At the same time, the solidity of the poem, its form, and even its vendible properties—those aspects clearly related to the visual experience of the fine arts—provide the poet with a palpable, confirmed identity, even a sense of masculine presence in the world of business and measurable achievement—all this despite the fact that materiality remains hauntingly feminine. To the extent that Frost defines his poems as commodities, as relics such as the prop-locks will become in a museum, he can certify his identity through the process of exchange. But that evaluation of his works all but eliminates the need to read them, eliminates any sense of authorial presence and voice except insofar as that presence is certified by something other than the poetry itself—a signature or an illustration, for instance. The poet gains a sense of the economic value of his name, but loses a sense of meaning. Rainey describes a similar process that occurred at the very peak of modernism, as he examines in fascinating detail the marketing of Ulysses and The Waste Land. In both cases the emphasis on aesthetic quality downplayed the commercial value of the work of art. However, the publication of the works in limited editions ultimately lent credence to “the status of art as commodity, but simultaneously [transformed] into a special kind of commodity, a rarity capable of sustaining investment value” (39). “The unremitting emphasis



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on display and image” in this process, as Rainey explains, “could lead to a paradoxical state of affairs, one in which active readers were slowly replaced with passive consumers, mere buyers who were less engaged with a book’s contents and more bedazzled by its wrappings . . . Buying was no longer a means to the experience of reading, but an experience in its own right, an autonomous activity that threatened to overshadow and replace the reading event that it was meant to facilitate” (67). Treated as an insider by members of The Grolier Club, a society devoted to collecting fine books, Frost would have been keenly aware of the avantgarde’s layered marketing strategy of the limited edition followed by the commercial issue (Rainey 100), a method that turned “each book into an objet d’art that acquired potential investment value for collectors” (Rainey 154). In this process the aesthetic, which in fact Frost ridiculed at times, gives way to the market as “sole arbiter and guarantor of value” (171). As a result of this process, of which Frost in his relationship with his publisher and collectors was a part, the book of poems does not have to be read to be of value. The distinction between eye-reader and ear-reader, therefore, becomes moot. On several occasions, but notably during a talk on the fine arts at Colorado Springs in April 1939, Frost defined the market as the standard for the artist, the trial by market through which people “pay blood money for what I’ve done.” After all, he went on, “I know very well that to the world at large money talks, money speaks” (Thompson and Winnick, Later Years 46). But as we have seen, when money talks, when money speaks, the poem can become an object, however “fine,” and is silenced, as is the accompanying voice of the artist, unless he is paid to speak.

“Not Unbounded” In A Witness Tree, Frost’s sense of the text’s presence leads to a kind of resignation concerning what remains once the speaking voice of the author departs. Just after the volume’s title page (301) appear two preface poems: BEECH Where my imaginary line Bends square in woods, an iron spine And pile of real rocks have been founded. And off this corner in the wild, Where these are driven in and piled, One tree, by being deeply wounded, Has been impressed as Witness Tree And made commit to memory





My proof of being not unbounded. Thus truth’s established and borne out, Though circumstanced with dark and doubt— Though by a world of doubt surrounded. —The Moodie Forester SYCAMORE Zaccheus he Did climb the tree Our Lord to see. —The New England Primer

The few scholars who have examined these poems largely follow Thompson and Winnick’s lead in emphasizing the contrast they introduce between the bounded, threatening, circumscribed doubt involved in the attempt to establish “truth” and the religiously elevated view that finds surety (92–93). Douglas Watson expresses this conventional view: “Taken with its companion, ‘Sycamore,’ borrowed from The New England Primer, ‘Beech’ establishes the poetic and thematic tension of the volume—a range between the limitation of a boundary marker and the freedom of an elevated vantage point” (Tuten 23). No doubt that interplay and tension occur throughout the volume; however, this conventional view of the poems leaves out the almost blatant, but as yet unexamined, emphasis given to textuality and the material text, a pattern that unfolds far more earnestly in A Witness Tree than in any other of Frost’s volumes. This tension between the limitation of a boundary marker and the elevated vantage point mirrors, in fact, the tension we have noticed between the visual medium and the linguistic, between the visual and the oral. It expresses what Murray Krieger, in his discussion of ekphrasis, calls the two opposed feelings about language: the one “craves the spatial fix”; “the second yearns for the freedom of the temporal flow” (10). “The first asks for language—in spite of its arbitrary character and its temporality—to freeze itself into a spatial form,” while it at the same time knows that language cannot “come together at an instant (tout à coup), at a single stroke of sensuous immediacy” (10). “Words,” he continues, “cannot have capacity, cannot be capacious, because they have, literally, no space.” So in this way the poet operates according to “the nostalgic dream of an original, pre-fallen language of corporeal presence” (10). The second of these impulses, however, “accepts . . . demystified language that claims no magic, whose arbitrariness and temporal succession can escape the frozen momentary vision that, in seeking the momentous, would belie the fleetingness of the moment in an anti-pictorial



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blur” (10). This impulse—affiliated with the oral, temporal movement of language—fears the deprivation that the tether between the sign and the referent imposes upon “our imagination and its flow in its arbitrary signs” (11). To appreciate the ways in which Frost stages this conflict between the spatial and temporal, between the words to be read versus the words to be heard, and even between the representational and the textual, look for a moment at the language related to books and text in “Beech.” The line, “My proof of being not unbounded ” (emphasis added), for instance, employs the language of the physical book and printing, as do other lines with such terms as “line,” “spine,” and “impressed.” 20 We do not need to know much about Frost’s morethan-passing interest with the production of books to recognize this pattern, though that knowledge certainly enriches our understanding of this poem’s identification of the speaker with the physical object, the book he has produced. The apparently natural scene that Frost describes is as much as anything his own text; even the beech depicted in the poem bears not just a scar that relates to an iron spine driven in at the corner of Frost’s property, presumably that on the Homer Noble farm in Ripton, Vermont, as Thompson and Winnick explain (92), but something like the very title of this volume of poems: it has had impressed into it the title A Witness Tree. In an interestingly selfcontained version of ut pictura poesis, the poem, moreover, refers also to the representation of the witness tree by Alan Haemer on the cover of Frost’s volume. Used by surveyors to mark property lines and trails, blazes on actual witness trees are certainly not as textual as the one on this imagined tree, with its image suggesting a page of a book. As shown in Figure 4.1, the blaze usually consists of a scar in the tree’s bark covered with a brightly colored paint; and its meaning unfolds in terms of how it relates to some artificial marker of the property line and other blazed trees. Haemer’s wash drawing on the dust jacket of A Witness Tree (Figure 4.2 is a highly stylized version of the witness tree, emphasizing the textual, not just spatial, aspect of the speaker’s claim of “being not unbounded.” The witness tree with imprinted text essentially represents the poet, and as identifying marker it amounts to a naming trope, partly an image of a clarifying proverb and partly the riddle to be decoded. That Frost would have sanctioned Haemer’s depiction of the beech as a kind of self-referential, textual tree seems clear if we look at the woodcut (Figure 4.3) (that would likely have appeared on the jacket of A Witness Tree had J. J. Lankes, the illustrator of other Frost volumes, not suffered a falling out with Henry Holt & Co.




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6 inches

5 feet

(b) MN

Red Maple

Black Birch 16 feet

N30°E

B

Red Maple A

10 feet

5 feet C

N 20°W

S5°E

Property Line

Figure 4.1 Illustrations of how to determine property boundaries. Courtesy of the University of Maryland Extension.



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Figure 4.2 Dust jacket of Frost’s A Witness Tree, by Alan Haemer. Courtesy of Dartmouth Library.

Used by Henry Holt & Co. on the cover of its prospectus announcing the publication of Frost’s volume (Welford Taylor), the illustration by Lankes also accompanied Frost’s Christmas poem of 1941, “I Could Give All to Time,” which a year later appeared among the group of highly prized poems in A Witness Tree. Even here the blaze resembles a page. Unlike Haemer’s wash drawing, this woodcut matches perfectly





Figure 4.3 The Witness Tree, cut by L.L. Lankes 12.23.42. Courtesy of Dartmouth Library and with permission of J. B. Lankes.

the suggested violence and enclosure in Frost’s imagery: the tree, like the wood upon which Lankes cut the image, has been “deeply wounded” and “impressed.”21 My central concern here, though, is to justify what might seem like an arbitrary reading of such terms as “unbounded” and “line” as being just as bookish as geographical.22 We ought to remember also that Frost at this time was clearly discovering the commercial value of even the



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unpublished marks he put on paper. In the year before the publication of A Witness Tree, as Thompson and Winnick (86)—and Parini (337–38) after them—have explained, Frost struck his deal with Earle Bernheimer for a monthly income in exchange for material documenting the author’s presence. According to Thompson and Winnick, “Frost had scarcely believed that the collector would be willing to relieve him so handsomely of materials he would otherwise have merely stored or destroyed” (86). Given this background, and more specifically the thought of Frost signing such documents, inscribing them with his own blaze, as it were, and sending them off periodically to Bernheimer for hard cash, it is difficult not to see “Beech” as a poem in which Frost defines himself, confirms his sense of himself, in terms of the material presence of his books, which marks his property line, so to speak. Before moving on to “Sycamore’s” contribution to this theme and on from there to a suggestion of how these two poems’ emphasis on the material text anticipates a number of poems that follow, I would like to touch on two other related ways in which “Beech” works. Though serious, the poem depends on puns. I have suggested obviously that “not unbounded” refers to the circumscribed, bound volume in which Frost has chosen to lodge himself, a captive of the visual. As others have pointed out, moreover, his attribution of the poem to “The Moodie Forester” plays upon his mother’s maiden name, Moodie, and perhaps, as Norman P. Will writes, “punningly alludes to the moodiness he struggled to overcome following his wife’s death in 1938” (Item 2). Simply, though, puns call attention to words as words. In this way their function resembles that of rhyme and other poetic devices, as Murray Kreiger shows by way of the following passage from Sigurd Burckhardt: their function “is to release words in some measure from their bondage to meaning, their purely referential role, and to give or restore to them the corporeality which a true medium needs.” The poet, according to Burckhardt, must “drive a wedge between words and their meanings, lessen as much as possible their designatory force and thereby inhibit our all too ready flight from them to the things they point to” (Krieger 183). Though “Beech” refers to a tree, it also picks up on the last poem in Frost’s previous volume, that “Afterthought,” according to the heading in A Further Range, called “A Missive Missile.” In that poem, Frost’s speaker imagines, and tries to connect with, the maker of an image found not on a beech, but rather on a beach, “That sad-with-distance river beach” (300) that harbors the dotted artifact from the distant past in which the speaker tries to locate meaning. Parini’s amplification of Thompson and Winnick’s work in this area (92) emphasizes that Frost had a choice of what kind of tree to name his witness tree: after following Winnick’s





claim that the poem refers to the witness tree on the boundaries of the Homer Noble Farm, Parini adds the detail that it was in fact “an old sugar maple marred by a spike” (340). In referential terms, Frost had every reason to call the witness tree in his poem a maple. Because the word “beech” does not even occur in the poem, neither rhyme nor meter dictates its use. In American Hieroglyphics, John Irwin, writing about Thoreau’s seeing nature as book and language, offers us at least one other way in which to make sense of Frost’s choice of the beech. The word “book,” in fact, derives from “the Anglo-Saxon name for the beech tree (bec), perhaps because runes were first carved on trees or because writing was done on beech bark” (32–33). If he were not mindful of this root meaning of “beech,” however, Frost had an even better reason to call the tree of his poem beech. “Beech” does not just name the poetic group of words following it, does not just name the type of tree referred to in that group of words; it also plays with its nonreferential connection to another word, “beach,” from another volume of poems, A Further Range. This playfulness in one way undermines the bounded aspect of the volume called A Witness Tree and in another way calls attention to boundaries, particularly those of the closed system of language whose words ultimately can only refer to other words. The previous volume’s last poem, “A Missive Missile,” and “Beech” also mirror each other thematically, emphasizing as they do the marking on an object and the limited power that marking has actually to reach into another’s culture, understanding, and psyche.23 The word “miss,” after all, is doubled within the title. In naming “A Missive Missile” “an afterthought,” then, Frost not only calls attention to its function within a closed, self-referential system; he emphasizes its brute, material presence, existing, as it were, after the process of thought, incalculably lingering outside the reach of reason and imagination, uncontainable but there.24 One of Frost’s entries in Notebook 8 from the period of 1912–1915, oddly occurring at the same time that he was obsessed with the originality of speech, reveals a strong awareness as well of the inability to perceive the world in a way that is not shaped by the reading experience, the visual: he writes, “Walls of books with here and there a window in them. The books are part of what we perceive with in looking out the windows” (The Notebooks 125). This is not too far from David Abram’s ecological claim that “Language is as much a property of the . . . landscape as of the humans who dwell in it” (Michaels 126). By employing the image of a blaze on a tree, moreover, Frost must have been aware of how he was echoing the opening remarks by William James in his published address on pragmatism to the Philosophical Union of the UC Berkeley in 1889. James’s approach anticipates the way in which many



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of Frost’s poems operate: as we have seen, they set up the expectation of an answer, a name, a solution to identity, and end up confounding that expectation. James begins his address by playfully claiming he has come to give the audience what he knows he has in him: “The final word of philosophy.” He brings something that will cause them to say, “ ‘Why, that is the truth!—that is what I have been believing, that is what I have really been living on all this time, but I never could find the words for it before”; it will once and for all turn into “a solidity and a possession . . . all that eludes, all that flickers and twinkles, all that invites and vanishes even whilst inviting” (“Philosophical” 138). However, he suddenly tells the audience that he must apologize that he has journeyed all the way across the continent and cannot produce this answer for the occasion, cannot produce this certainty. What he does here is to dramatize the point that philosophers, like poets, can only approximate the truth, can only erect rather general directional markers. The words and thoughts of poets and philosophers, he goes on to say are so many spots, or blazes,—blazes made by the axe of the human intellect on the trees of the otherwise trackless forest of human experience. They give you somewhere to go from. They give you a direction and a place to reach. They do not give you the integral forest with all its sunlit glories and its moonlit witcheries and wonders. Ferny dells, and mossy waterfalls, and secret magic nooks escape you, owned only by the wild things to which the region is a home. Happy they without the need of blazes! But to us the blazes give a sort of ownership. We can now use the forest, wend across it with companions, and enjoy its quality. It is no longer a place merely to get lost in and never return. The poet’s words and the philosopher’s phrases thus are helps of the most genuine sort, giving to all of us hereafter the freedom of the trails they made. Though they create nothing, yet for this marking and fixing function of theirs we bless their names and keep them on our lips, even whilst the thin and spotty and half-casual character of their operations is evident to our eyes. (“Philosophical” 139)

This is an absolutely essential passage for understanding Frost’s poetry, ranging from “The Pauper Witch of Grafton,” and that witch’s jaunts into the wild upper lands with Arthur Amy, whom she makes gather “wet snow berries / On slippery rocks beside a waterfall” (194), to the threats of the unmarked realms in “Come In” and “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” It is also essential to understanding Frost’s tentative identity as poet, who offers us blazes in the forest even while being all too aware himself of the “thin and spotty and half-casual character of [his] operations.” In these terms, “Beech,” with its blaze, and the way it speaks to more than the biographical drama of Frost’s having found some equilibrium amid his





personal struggles, addresses the question of the text, and the way that its reality, inscribed or printed on a page, functions as a marker where we try to claim our place, our spot, our identity. That spot is as much the page as the forest. In fact, Poirier’s insight is relevant here, though it is not connected with “Beech” or A Witness Tree: he cites part of James’s passage on blazes to argue that Frost “is often a radically nonreferential poet,” that “it is less true . . . that words are the signs of ‘things’ in Frost than that ‘things’ are the signs of words” (Robert Frost 334–35). Perhaps this is the best place to move on to the other prefatory poem, “Sycamore.” It is difficult to imagine a more overtly material, intertextual act than to transport a verse wholesale from one book into another.25 In his brief entry on the poem in The Robert Frost Encyclopedia, Jeffrey Cramer explains that the type of tree, the sycamore, is Frost’s invention. In fact, even the type of tree is textually derived, coming as it does from Luke 19:1–4: Zaccheus, the King James Bible reads, “climbed up into a sycamore tree to see [Jesus]” (Tuten 353). This poem, too, participates in Frost’s wordplay on this prefatory page of A Witness Tree, and it does so in a way that expresses one of the volume’s major themes, love: “sycamore” seems to break down into something like “seek” amor, if it does not suggest as well “sick amor.” The story of Zaccheus in Luke, not just the suggestive value of his climb up the tree in this verse, is also relevant to the upcoming poems in Frost’s volume. Though the little commentary we have on the poem emphasizes Zaccheus’s active attempt to get a glimpse of Jesus, the actual story in Luke highlights Zaccheus’s passivity: atop the tree, he does not so much do the seeing, as put himself in a position to be seen by Jesus, who calls him down from that height, telling him that he, Jesus, will spend the night at his house.26 Zaccheus is also a rich tax collector, a man whose concern with the material goods of the world seems to onlookers to disqualify him from any attention from Jesus—a similar condition to that of the popular, commercially oriented Frost as compared to some of his fellow poets. The emphasis on home, property, and money anticipates, then, what I am arguing is the principal theme of A Witness Tree, the equating of property with identity. Frost’s importing of this verse from a primer into A Witness Tree says much about language, particularly “book language,” as the way to determine the truth. The 1605 version of The New England Primer (Figure 4.4) emphasizes the pictorial aspect of letters. Its presentation of the alphabet confuses the direction of reference: do the picture and story determine the letter, or does the letter determine the picture? The letter is almost a thing in these designs. Also, the arrangement of the letters in the primer from Adam’s fall at “A” to Zaccheus’s rise at “Z” expresses biblical history; the letters themselves are invested with it.



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Figure 4.4 From the 1805 edition of the New England Primer. Courtesy of Special Collections, Musselman Library, Gettysburg College.

In terms of Frost’s use of the Primer, both the importation of the little verse about Zaccheus and the sense of language that the school text expresses speaks to a kind of literariness and materiality of the word that before, even though it exists in earlier poems, Frost would not have





publicly admitted to, what with all his emphasis on the speaking voice and his bardic insistence on “saying” his poems. 27 When he has the speaker of “Beech” say—in language, by the way, that is hardly that of speech, so tortured, passive, and guarded as it is—that the witness tree stands as proof of his “being not unbounded,” Frost betrays his sense of the limiting materiality of his poems, his essential relinquishment of ownership over his words as they become lodged physically on the page, without the accompanying presence of his voice to control their use. 28 He is thus “bound” by, and separated from, the very marketability and materiality of his words. The material value through which he defines his identity as poet threatens what he had intended to make secure. Though expressive, the blaze on a tree is mute; it depends on eye-readers who cannot be trusted to detect the presence of the poet’s voice.

“The Most of It” In a number of ways, these prefatory poems insist on their own and their volume’s material presence, as well as express that sense of materiality as theme. Even though “Sycamore” invokes the transcendent signifier in Jesus’ taking Zaccheus out of the sycamore tree, as a pair the two poems set up an even stronger sense of a self-contained and intertextual system of semiotic circulation: the volume’s title repeats the name “witness tree” within “Beech” and vice versa; “beech” replays “beach” from “A Missive Missile,” the last poem in Frost’s previous volume, A Further Range, just as “beach” anticipates “beech”; the cover illustration of a witness tree and the apparent page of a book carved on it represents the poem and the book that have in fact engendered the illustration; and the witness tree within the imagined landscape of “Beech” has meaning only in reference to a spike driven in the ground, and that spike has meaning only in relation to the marks on the witness tree. Imported wholesale from The New England Primer, “Sycamore,” moreover, adds to this sense of intertextuality. The primer’s identification of word and thing, especially as encouraged by its inextricable linking of illustration to verse, emphasizes the materiality of language. This borrowing of the verse from The New England Primer also complicates the whole matter of ownership, as it marks the reader’s—Frost’s—appropriation of another text as his own, an action that foregrounds language as transferable property rather than as a transparent medium through which an author’s voice always speaks. Even the “I” in “Beech” and A Witness Tree can claim an existence only within the materiality of the language that imprints or impresses itself



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upon something and thereby paradoxically marks the absence of that which it designates. These prefatory poems trouble the all-too-easy notion by which Frost, in his popular and professionally cultivated guises, had operated since his time in England: that his poems are mere sites of the real voicing of a presence outside their margins.29 As I have tried to explain, “Beech” and “Sycamore” actually display the problems and complexities of their material presence, and they also treat this materiality as theme. In this way they prefigure a largely unexplored pattern throughout A Witness Tree of poems that represent this concern with the material text. Our understanding of these two modest poems’ important prefatory function remains incomplete, then, without a look at the rest of the volume, where the insistence on the presence of the material text occurs even in the most apparently referential and descriptive pieces. The most subtle, but perhaps in some ways the most powerful, example occurs in “The Most of It,” with the word “crumpled,” which appears as the speaker describes the arrival of the buck on his side of the lake, powerfully showing itself as it climbs out of the water, “Pushing the crumpled water up ahead” and then moving violently into the underbrush (307). It disappears, leaving the expectant viewer with no answer in his quest for an original response to the audible queries he has shouted across the lake about his identity. All his messages have returned only as echoes of his own voice. If the buck is an answer to this question about a truth outside of language or one that is not just counter speech, it offers two extremes: brute, physical, unexplained biological action on the one hand and a crumpled plane, something like a discarded page, on the other.30 The impression upon, the cutting into, a natural surface is confused with the written text. Frost’s other uses of crumpled, by the way, mostly refer to a page: the crumpled legal document in “The Self-Seeker” and “the crumpled, better / Left-unwritten letter”—probably to Elinor—to which he refers in “Kitty Hawk” (17). Other poems from A Witness Tree offer similar references to printing and the book, and thereby turn the apparent vehicle of the metaphor back into the tenor, which implicates language as the subject of the poem. In “Willful Homing,” the speaker returning home in a snow storm is made to sit “astride a drift,” and “Imprint a saddle, and calmly consider a course,” an imprinting that allows him to peer “out shrewdly into the thick and swift” and eventually to find his way home (310, emphasis added). The search for the special bloom in “The Quest of the PurpleFringed” involves a journey over a page of text, the speaker “[skirting] the margin alders . . . / In a sweeping line,” while singing or saying “snatches of verse and song of scenes like this” (310). Technically a form of deixis—the





use of a word, often a pronoun, to indicate a referent determined by the sentence’s context— “this,” as is often the case in Frost, is ambiguous: it refers both to the landscape and the poem before us on the page. We have already seen such a tactic operating at the end of “A Missive Missile,” when the persona concludes the poem with the line, “It cannot speak as far as this”; the “this” refers not only to the artifact being inspected in this ekphrastic poem, but also to the very poem we are reading on the page and, more materially, to the mere markings themselves : t – h – i – s. What is more, the poem unsuccessfully frames with representations of orality the powerful, mute experience of the narrator’s discovering the purplefringed orchis. In the first stanza, as we have said, he sings snatches of verse and songs—presumably taken from pages such as those in Palgrave’s Golden Treasury of Songs and Lyrics. His discovery of the flower, though, emphasizes sight and silence, as he worshipfully encounters the orchis, where there is “no breath of air / Nor headlong bee” (311). This passage, which Lentricchia calls “the purest celebratory moment in Frost’s poetry” (Robert Frost 86), captures an experience that actually sends the narrator home “silently,” but that mute, unnamable, uncapturable experience is not enough. The silent vision, like the palpable, but noiseless volumes in “A Fountain, a Bottle, a Donkey’s Ears, and Some Books,” calls the anxious male speaker back into an oral declaration, a definitive “saying”: “And I for one / Said that the fall might come and whirl of leaves, / For summer was done” (312). The redundant “I for one” actually betrays how thoroughly the sense of an indivisible identity has been called into question by an event not sufficiently mediated by voice. This poem illustrates one of the many ways in which the tension in Frost’s poetry between the unvoiced and voiced, between material and pronouncement upon that material, unfolds; and it also displays how that tension can go unnoticed. My observation here, in fact, counters what William Pritchard says about the poem’s ending. In light of Frost’s wellknown claim that any writing is only as good as it is dramatic, Pritchard points out that “The Quest of the Purple-Fringed” really does not offer “the sense of some argument or complication going on between voices in the poem” (Pritchard, “Frost Biography” 38). If I am right, that is not the case, as the poem in fact illustrates one of Pritchard’s other observations in his essay, that the simple surface of Frost’s poems, an apparent closure, is often the very opposite, an opening, in fact, onto the very tension between the comprehensibly balanced and unsolvable that Frost so carefully cultivates. Pritchard even refers to Frost’s playful letter to Leonidas Payne, from November 1927, which offers the following response to a question Frost had received in the previous day’s mail—from a New Yorker—about



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whether his intention in “Mending Wall” was “fulfilled with the characters portrayed and the atmosphere of the place” (Selected Letters 344). He reports to Payne the answer he gave: “I should be sorry if a single one of my poems stopped with either of those things—stopped anywhere in fact. My poems—I should suppose everybody’s poems—are all set to trip the reader head foremost into the boundless. Ever since infancy I have had the habit of leaving my blocks carts chairs and such like ordinaries where people would be pretty sure to fall forward over them in the dark. Forward, you understand, and in the dark. I may leave my toys in the wrong place and so in vain. It is my intention we are speaking of—my innate mischievousness” (Selected Letters 344). This passage is often enough quoted as evidence of Frost’s intended trickiness as a poet; and, as with Pritchard’s case, it also works to illustrate that Frost, in fact, attempts to achieve in his poetry a resistance to intelligence, to reach what Wallace Stevens says is the poem’s purpose: “The poem must resist the intelligence / Almost successfully” (qtd. in Pritchard, “Frost” 37). Two other details, though, are important for our purpose. First, the use of “boundless” in this letter, which anticipates in an interesting way Frost’s reliance on the same root word in “Beech”: that poem’s speaker, remember, claims that the witness tree stands as proof that he is “not unbounded.” As we have argued, “bounded” puns on bound books and invites us to look at Frost’s fascinating emphasis on the silent materiality of his poems, which often counters his insistence on their essentially aural quality, on their existence primarily as sound. Composed more than a decade before the publication of “Beech,” this passage from a letter offers a seemingly different, but ultimately illustrative, sense of “bound.” Even here the emphasis falls on things being employed in unfamiliar ways. Frost refers to his toys appropriately as an element of his play with the reader, but he does not use these toys in their intended way: he leaves them in the wrong place. The equivalent here is the kind of defamiliarization we have seen, say, in “The Old Barn at the Bottom of the Fogs,” that process by which the words somehow become more obviously palpable things, palpable items to be seen, but not seen through or even into. So the sense of material boundaries—that which the person roaming through Frost’s dark house strikes his shin against as sensibly as Johnson strikes his foot against a stone to refute Bishop Berkeley—paradoxically sends him reeling into the boundless realm of uncertainty, of the mystery of things, of the darkness in which we all exist despite the blazes we occasionally encounter on the trees in the forest. The other important detail in this letter is Frost’s repetition of “forward”: “where people would be pretty sure to fall forward over them in the dark. Forward, you understand, and in the dark.” I take “forward” to suggest something positive, something like progress,





without a systematic and idealistically utopian element. That is why Frost also emphasizes “dark.” “Falling for” Frost’s poetic pranks amounts to an alternative to retrograde, backward formulations—simple applications of proverbs (“Something there is that doesn’t love a wall”), of paraphrase, or names, such as “Prop-locks,” for something as complex as a device, like a Frost poem, that both locks you out and invites you in to stay. In a curious reversal of Plato’s allegory, he even defamiliarizes “dark” here by suggesting that a fall into the darkness is an advance. The closing lines of “The Quest of the Purple-Fringed”—“And I for one / Said that the fall might come and whirl of leaves, / For summer was done” (312)—make of that poem, then, more than just a simple, linear advance toward a quietly revelatory experience, as Pritchard argues; they make it enact the tension between the reawakening to one’s silent boundedness within the material world and the opposing need to turn that event into speech— the tension, in other words, between the poet and bard, a fundamental tension within Frost’s identity. In “A Cloud Shadow,” the poem immediately before “The Quest of the Purple-Fringed,” the material status of the text moves into the foreground. The personified breeze, on discovering the speaker’s open book, flutters the “leaves to look / For a poem there used to be on Spring” (311). The book’s “leaves” and the search for the spot in the book that will not just represent but actually be the poem about spring, again, confuse nature and text. That confusion also masks a conflict between matter and place (her) on the one hand and the intending, speaking author (him) on the other. The poem’s speaker certainly creates intention in the breeze; as he says, she flutters the leaves in order to find a poem on the theme of spring. He also quotes himself as trying to tell her emphatically, “ ‘There’s no such thing!’ ” There is no such thing because, in a self-reflexive quip, the speaker says it is inconceivable that any one would author such a poem: “For whom would a poem on Spring be by?” Though this question deals with authorial intention (and it does so ironically, of course, because a poem on Spring could be “by” any one of thousands of poets), the breeze’s response remains entirely spatial and silent (she “disdained to make reply”): it seems as if the “by” (as with Frost’s polysemous use of it in “The Road Not Taken”—“the one less traveled by”) remains merely a matter of location for the breeze. Quite unassumingly, then, the poem represents this persistent conflict between the male voice, impatient to ascribe meaning to physical presence, and the implacable silence of the breeze, whose movement of the book’s leaves highlights the book’s materiality, its spatial quality. In this light, even “Trespass,” later in the volume, where the speaker watches restlessly as a trespasser busies himself by the speaker’s woods and brook, amounts to a parable of the relationship between author and reader.



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The speaker frets that the unwanted visitor will open the “leaves of stone, / The picture book of the trilobite” (331). But all is well once the visitor comes to the speaker’s door and asks for a drink: that act of acknowledgment restores the speaker’s ownership and identity. It makes him the author of that bookish world that he calls his property.31 In “A Serious Step Lightly Taken” and also “The Lesson for Today,” the speaker measures time in terms of written pages: “A hundred thousand days / Of front page paper events” (334) in the former and “ten thousand pages” (318) back to Alcuin’s dark ages in the latter. In the curious sonnet “Time Out,” the very slope of a hill, moreover, amounts to “a text albeit done in plant,” which the climber “followingly fingered as he read” (323). George Bagby notices in what he calls the archaism of “a text albeit done in plant” “a bow to the venerable tradition descending from the seventeenth century” of nature as a book. But he also recognizes that Frost’s attention to names of the particular plants—“Dwarf cornel, goldthread, and Maianthemum”—moves that veneration toward a Thoreauvian naturalism.32 Part of time and nature, that bookish slope seems almost timeless, almost apolitical: the slope it gave the climber’s head was “The same for reading as it was for thought,” so different finally from “the hard and level stare / Of enemies defied and battles fought” (323). Though history is measured in pages, pages are “still and silent,” somehow outside history, as they are also in “The Lost Follower.” In this poem the defectors from poetry are inevitably utopians who think some longed-for perfect age can be achieved by social and political improvement, when it really can be located “right beside you booklike on a shelf, / Or even better godlike in yourself” (326). In keeping with the seventeenth-century view of nature as book in which to detect divine workings, many of the textual images we have examined, at least at first glance, suggest a coherent organization behind the surface reality, an organization that requires a “reading into” for the “author” or “Author” to be found, a kind of puritanical detective work leading to confirmation of an identity. This last passage from “The Lost Follower,” moreover, equates the book with a god. However, even there, neither the book nor the god is absolute, but only godlike, just as the witness tree can only exist in reference to a property line, which can only exist in reference to that tree and other such lines. The expected answer in the form of an unconcerned buck and a crumpled piece of paper in “The Most of It” is no answer at all, only a reminder of the endless copy speech—or printing—of language. The images of the text embedded in Frost’s poems, then, comprise not so much facets of some system of correspondence, à la Emerson or Jonathan Edwards, as mere chances to pause, escape, and give into a mode of experience that seems to resist the changing world of history. That is why, in a play on the “lit” and “literate” in “The Literate Farmer and the





Planet Venus,” Frost implies that Edison’s utopian elimination of wasted time by the introduction of the light bulb is the very antithesis of true literacy (337). But even in the resistance that such pauses as are brought on by darkness put in the way of perpetual activity—resistance being a virile activity for Frost—they function like pictures; or else, and this seems closer to Frost’s sense of their mode, they signal a mute materiality that has no meaning—no name, no answer to a riddle, no palliative proverb. Most of the poems in the “Time Out” section of A Witness Tree, though obviously tracking—as the subtitle suggests—different senses of time, also unfold in ways that suggest the struggle between voiced meaning and mute materiality. We have just looked at this section’s title poem, “Time Out,” which seems to turn the text of the mountain into a picture, with all its emphasis on eye-reading: it “had the slant / As of a book held up before his eyes” (323). The act of reading is tactile, as in “fingered as he read.” Opposed to the gentle “air” of both the hill and the “he’s” attitude (his “air”) is the audible “clamor[ing] at by cause and sect.” In fact Frost’s scrapping the poem’s original title, “On the Ascent,” to “Time Out” appropriately captures the poem’s favoring of pause and reflection over the manly, linear progress suggested by “On the Ascent” (Tuten 359). In “To a Moth Seen in Winter,” one in a series of English odes on this physical representation of the psyche, Frost dwells on the materiality of this meeting between human body and moth, his gloveless hand holding it for a moment as it lingers in some “untimely” search for its Cupid before its “pinions” become wet and it gets “quenched” (324). The mystery of this meeting emerges in the touch without meaning, the reach of the hand to the moth, and the impossibility of that hand reaching into the moth’s fate. Although the tradition within which Frost writes this poem calls for an emphasis on soul, the poem achieves its modest sense of sublimity by halting at the imponderability of mere physical existence joined with the ultimate mystery of consciousness, which is the capacity to recognize what the narrator sees in the moth as the “something human, / The old incurable untimeliness, / Only begetter of all ills that are” (323). Describing the fall of leaves as “a story” that ends with them “Get[ting] beaten down and pasted” (“wasted,” in other words), the little lyric “November” focuses on comforting materiality as entirely dependent on “waste”—ranging from a year of leaves wasted to “The waste of moments sleeping, / The waste of pleasure weeping” and the “waste of nations warring” (326). Frost’s repeating “waste” four times calls attention to the word, of course, which curiously plays upon the binary relationship between full and empty, as “waste” comes from the Latin vastus, meaning empty. Something darker than the Renaissance notion of copiousness, this vision repeats that in “Desert Places,” for



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instance, where the startling, materialistic perception of nothingness, one that has “no expressions” and “nothing to express” (269) simply cannot be replaced with something—meaning, statement, spirit, god— unless it is the mere letters of the poem itself. In terms of A Witness Tree, the notion of “waste” anticipates what we have already seen in connection with “Directive”: a favorite Frost pun on “whole” and “hole.” In “The Lesson for Today” the modern speaker tells the ancient Alcuin that when dealing with the haunting notion that “We’re either nothing or a God’s regret,” philosophers reason from different particulars but always “end up in the universal Whole / As unoriginal as any rabbit” (321). Five lines later he says about his imagined dialogue with Alquin, “I’m having the whole argument my way”; and then in another eighteen lines, when explaining why he lately visited a graveyard to get some answers to his questions about longevity and what it matters to live in different times, he says, “But I was only there to read the stones / To see what on the whole they had to say . . . ” (321, emphasis added).33 As with his use of the word “waste” to mean both substance and a sign of a vacated place (and in this case the hole in the ground), “whole” means both everything and nothing, the world and the hole it amounts to. The insistent play with such binaries ultimately emphasizes the overwhelming, almost obliterating, substantiality of things, and also points to the arbitrary selectiveness of identifying the world as something that counts anymore in this material universe than other matter. “A Loose Mountain,” in describing our earth as an inevitable target of a “heartless and enormous” force, builds upon this imposing sense of utter materiality (328). And “The Rabbit Hunter” does the same thing, but by merely describing the lack of meaning in a hunter’s “rend[ing]” a rabbit with a bullet, “deal[ing] a death / That he nor it / (Nor I) have wit / To comprehend” (327). Two other poems in this section of A Witness Tree—“A Considerable Speck” and “The Lost Follower”—call attention to the materiality of the text, and do so with some of the political implications that we recognized in “The Old Barn at the Bottom of the Fogs.” “A Considerable Speck” works with the textual theme that Katherine Kearns has noticed in Frost’s poetry: the motif of black on white or white on black. She remarks: The recurrent image of black over white throughout Frost’s poetry is suggestive of the linguistic borderland in which this condition resides, for if one sees the ‘black branches up a snow-white trunk’ as ink on paper, the full poetic meaning nonetheless resides in the calligramic cage formed in the meeting of opposites. The word does not take precedence over the background but gains its full significance only in juxtaposition” (179).





This juxtaposition is modern in that it presents, as Diderot (via Lyotard) points out, “the fact that the unpresentable exists” (qtd. in Kearns 180); it highlights what Kearns claims is Frost’s “preoccupation with the unsaid or the unsayable” (180) and it “reflects what is finally a nonrepresentational, extralinguistic version of self” (181). In “A Considerable Speck,” this generalized analogy between black on white and ink on a page becomes, in fact, the very subject of the poem. While writing, the narrator notices a “mite” (the pun with “might” is definitely in play) on his manuscript. Continuing with the “time” (and space, as in “out”) theme of this “Time Out” section, he says that he noticed it just as he “had idly poised [his] pen in air / To stop it with a period of ink”(324)—even the period in this context refers to pause as much as to a mark of ink. The poem amusingly plays on the mite’s movements, as if the microscopic creature’s pausing with suspicion at the speaker’s pen and his loathing either the smell or a sip of the wet ink amount to critical judgments against what the speaker has written. It even has “feet,” as if it were capable of poetic meter. As it comes into the middle of the open sheet, however, it hesitates and “cower[s] down in desperation to accept / Whatever [the speaker] accorded it of fate” (324). This gesture launches the speaker into a rather overdetermined political observation and then an excessively clever and in some ways incongruent conclusion. First, he justifies his letting the mite survive with this remark: “I have none of the tenderer-than-thou / Collectivistic regimenting love / With which the modern world is being swept” (324–25). On the one hand, the speaker defends himself against charges that in protecting the mite he acts according to the social agenda of some “bleeding heart,” overly conscientious leftist. On the other hand, he depicts the collectivistic leftist as participating in the very unthinking action that would brush the mite off the page: the world is being “swept” by this regimenting love. Then, in a separate verse paragraph, the speaker concludes in the lighter, self-effacing, witty tone that had dominated the poem before the political jab: I have a mind myself and recognize Mind when I meet with it in any guise. No one can know how glad I am to find On any sheet the least display of mind. (325)

Though predominantly light in its tone, this poem continues the emphasis in A Witness Tree on the materiality of the text, this “mity” critic’s movements amounting to mere instinctive responses to the not-yet-dry physical markings on the page. Again, the poetic page is defamiliarized through this process, words becoming their mere shapes and those reflex reactions



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to shapes ironically signs of intelligence. That this “least display of mind” amounts to mere physical event, moreover, undercuts any sense of transcendent meaning. This irony of materialism emerging from a reaction against materialism also drives the even more overtly political, but also intensely personal “The Lost Follower.” Briefly, the poem describes, in a sarcastically sympathetic and defensive tone, the defection of poets from the aesthetic, ahistorical standard of the lyric into political, reformist activity, whether that activity involves their abandoning poetry or, as Richardson assumes, turning to poetry with a political agenda, the kind Frost did not want to write and which some of his friends hoped he would compose (Tuten 193). The poem’s speaker occupies a middle position, which tonally comes off as the unquestioned, right place to be. In fact “position” seems the right word here because the poem depicts the problem largely in spatial terms. The certainty in the speaker’s point of view, moreover, gains force from the tightly constructed iambic pentameter quatrains whose rhymes suggest certainty and definitiveness and also imply both a sense of deterministic inevitability and a feeling of self-sufficiency in the poetic realm.34 Spatially the speaker exists in a poetic realm between those on one side who “link a chain of money-metal banks” and those on the other who flee from poetry in order to try to realize some utopian reform, what the speaker calls “the Golden Age.” Those who flee from poetry never swell the ranks of the first group; instead, like Yeats’s “Helen of social welfare dream” who “climb[s] on a wagonette to scream,” they move toward a selfdestructive, self-impoverishing, but politically and idealistically driven, existence “in some abysmal city street” where even their brides share with them “the crust” they “break to eat” and are “as grave . . . about the world’s defeat” (326). The poem’s allusion to Dante’s political world of Ghibelline or Guelph, moreover, implies that the “lost follower” resembles a Dante figure who ignored his Virgil. In an August 15, 1962, letter to Lawrence Thompson, Frost identifies Jean Flexner and Carter Goodrich as the “passionate and fine” young writers who left the ranks of poets for work of social reform (Selected Letters 590–91). He goes on to remark that the poems he had been reading in an anthology of Russian poetry—presumably in preparation for his government-sanctioned cultural exchange visit to the Soviet Union—“seem to be saying in verse they were making the same sort of sacrifice” as Flexner and Goodrich made in moving from the aesthetic world to the sociological endeavor of making a better world (Selected Letters 591). Here Frost retrospectively interprets his poem in a way that connects it with the materialistic, utopian experiment of communism. This connection with Marxism is supported also by the association in one of Frost’s notebooks of the line





“Thy kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven” with Marx and the utopian inclination (The Notebooks 32). By implication, then, the speaker positions himself also between two versions of materialism—the capitalistic one of “money-metal banks” and the tightly controlled one arising out of the “grace of state-manipulated pelf.” Though the defectors move away from obvious devotion to wealth and succumb to poverty, they nevertheless are depicted as seeking a material reality: “There is in the sadness of his eye, / Something about a kingdom in the sky / (As yet unbrought to earth) he means to try” (326). They have taken the imaginative constructs from literature and religion—the Golden Age and the “kingdom come”—and literalized them to the extent that they want them realized in their own political, material world. Thus their defection, according to the speaker, is toward an errant sense of materialism and a ridiculously “real,” firsthand awareness of materiality as a result of their choice to become poor. The speaker adopts the attitude, then, of the ahistorical, “superior” discourse described by Cary Nelson in Repression and Recovery: from this point of view “having an impact on one’s contemporaries is either diminishing or actually degrading, a falling away from the high, productive cultural mission of transcendent discourses. This position implicitly valorizes political passivity and impotence in general by articulating political ineffectuality to a decisively (and unreflectively) idealized cultural domain” (134). Frost’s frequent repetition of “gold” and “golden” (eight times in the first five stanzas) adds to and complicates the poem’s treatment of materialism. At first the speaker seems to be sorting out the various definitions of words with golden in them: “The gold for which [the defectors] leave the golden line / Of lyric is a golden light divine, / Never the gold of darkness from a mine” (325); they’ll bring us “by short cut” what “poetry with all its golden rage / For beauty on the illuminated page / Has failed to bring—I mean the Golden Age” (325); and if they fail to realize this dream, they will at least, in their own perverse self-satisfaction, “live ungolden with the poor, / Enduring what the ungolden must endure” (325). These riffs on “golden,” or forms of “gold,” however, become almost a form of equivocation, where the meaning changes but also gets strangely confused, so that the speaker’s position of laboring with the “golden line,” though seemingly opposed to the kind of materialism of those who “link a chain of moneymetal banks,” ends up, in contrast with the defectors’ site, resembling a position of material well-being from which he almost derides those who chose to let themselves become poor. As Frost rhetorically asks in another notebook entry, “If a man is so improvident as to incur a debt he can’t pay what does he deserve but prison?” (The Notebooks 34).35 Complicating this move, also, is the probable allusion in “the golden line of lyric” to Palgrave’s Golden Treasury, perhaps Frost’s favorite



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anthology beginning in 1892, when he first discovered it, to, late in his life. This is the volume that Pound in Letters to Ibbotson referred to less flatteringly as “that stinking sugar teat” (qtd. in Kearns 26). In his preface, Francis Turner Palgrave, the editor of that anthology, makes this claim for the broadly defined lyric poetry within: “Poetry gives treasures ‘more golden than gold,’ leading us in higher and healthier ways than those of the world, and interpreting to us the lessons of Nature.”36 This quote, taken with the fact of the anthology’s remarkable success in the marketplace, captures just the kind of difficulty that occurs in Frost’s poem. The preface disavows the material worth of the volume; and while the quote from Sappho, “more golden than gold,” sets the poetry apart from material gold, it nevertheless betrays the fact that it depends on the importance of gold for its meaning. Frost’s description of poetry in this lyric, similar to the rather fluid golden versus gold distinction made by Palgrave, involves an interesting fetishizing, almost, of the printed page: when Frost’s speaker refers to “poetry with all its golden rage / For beauty on the illuminated page” and how it too has failed to bring into existence the utopian “golden Age” (325), he materializes writing as a visual art form: he alludes not only to Palgrave’s successfully marketed anthology but more obviously to the gilded, ornate pages of illuminated, handcrafted, and therefore extraordinarily valuable manuscripts. In criticizing the defectors from poetry as responding to a “strange religious prank” of the spirit that causes them to turn a metaphor into a material reality, he veers toward constructing poetry as a material value, as a material entity, as something that will support a social position apart from poverty—as if good poetry really does feed a family and perhaps even takes one close to this poem’s spatial notion of fulfillment: found “right beside you booklike on a shelf, / Or even better godlike in yourself ” (326). In this rather self-satisfied self-definition, Frost makes of the poet, whose position generally remains outside the neighborhood of wealth, one who can “provide, provide,” one who can, in other words, buy a secure name for himself.37 Moreover, Frost’s description of poetry as the expression of a “golden rage for beauty on the illuminated page” moves toward a fusion of the inscription and the inscribed almost as if in support of the claim by Lessing, in his discussion of the epigram, that “true inscription is not to be thought of apart from that whereon it stands or might properly stand” (Shell 9). The rhyme of “Golden rage” and “illuminated page” underscores this connection, which opposes the threat that the poem, like printed money, for instance, amounts only to an inscription tethered imaginatively to some disembodied “standard.”38 Though the tone of the poem seems to ridicule the utopians’ confusion of an ideal with a material reality, the speaker’s desire to make of





his poetry something substantial puts him in a comparable, materialistic position. As Frost commented in his lecture “Poverty and Poetry,” “We counter-revolutionaries believe in property” (766). Recognized more for its display of Frost’s rare use of dialect in rhyming “gransir Ira” with “inquiry, “Of the Stones of the Place” is hardly a memorable poem, but it does continue this volume’s delving into the issue of the poet’s identity by insistently questioning the status of the physical text and of the oral as opposed to the silently read (Lynen, The Pastoral 86). A letter from an easterner to a relative transplanted, it seems, in a fertile valley of California, the poem describes the playful prospect of sending a material object, one of the boulders from a boulder riddled New England pasture, out west to the relative as “An eolith palladium to guard / The West and keep the old tradition safe” (332). Another of Frost’s objects that says more than words, the boulder, as the speaker warns, should not be marred by carving. The relative must respond to any “quizzical inquiry” from a passerby with the response: “ ‘The portrait of the soul of my Gransir Ira. / It came from where he came from anyway’ ” (332). Again we are in familiar territory: the paradox of a poem that seems to prefer the mute object over the written word and offers the aesthetic object as something that requires a supporting voice, an oral performance, to activate it. Frost, in fact, invites this attention to problems of signification by introducing the hypothetical transfer of New England pasture stone to California loam with, “I wonder if it wouldn’t signify / For me to send you one out where you live . . . ” (332, emphasis added). The seldom-discussed but fascinating “The Discovery of the Madeiras” focuses on the discovery and naming of islands and on troubled love. In the process it also builds upon the associations of writing and materiality that we see in “Beech” and throughout A Witness Tree. Briefly, the story involves a couple that boards a ship to flee from England. The woman becomes depressed after hearing her lover glibly recount a story told to him by the captain about a sick slave couple once thrown overboard. Her companion, thinking to revive the woman from her sadness, has the captain leave them on an island; despite his efforts to make her happy, she dies “from thought,” emotionally estranged from him. His response is to carve: he carves their names, along with a decorative scroll, on a stone. This combination of carving and scroll repeats the combination of poem (“Beech”) and illustration (“The Witness Tree”) that introduces Frost’s volume. The castaway also carves out a clumsy sailing trough from “a fallen tree.” Much of this activity duplicates what Irwin describes as the fundamental link among naming, writing, and the search for origins involved in stories of nineteenth-century exploration: with the arrival at a new place, “The first act attendant thereto is that of naming things”—fundamentally a



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repetition of Adam’s primary task in Eden, that is, “to name things as yet unnamed” (71). As it turns out, the gouged-out trunk gets the man off the island; and the story he tells of his adventure gets him freed from the Moors who captured him and eventually sent back to his shire in England, where the island he found is verified and named. This last verse paragraph describing the carving, the rescue, and commemorative naming that only partially captures the truth is remarkably rich. As Richardson has in passing noted, it contains much about Frost’s relationship with Elinor, particularly his nagging feeling that her life with him was more one of submission than of choice (241). The carving on the rock, the gouging out of a tree trunk as a transporting act, and the naming of the island, all focus on both the identifying and limiting qualities of inscription. The poem ends: The island he found was verified. And the bay where his stolen lady died Was named for him instead of her. But so is history like to err. And soon it is neither here nor there Whether time’s rewards are fair or unfair (315).

As with A Witness Tree’s two prefatory poems, the closing lines of “The Discovery of the Madeiras” isolate the problems of the material text. On the one hand, the carving on the rock—with accompanying illustration in the form of the decorative scroll—functions as a verifying marker of the man’s island. On the other hand, the passively described verification and naming of the island—“was verified” and “was named”—ignores the female’s name in the carving. The materiality of the carving, its existence without the accompanying, directing voice of authorial presence, has only the force that those with the power of naming give it. In one of the first instances, at least to my knowledge, of punning on “history” as “his” + “story,” Frost even suggests that those authorizing an interpretation of the scroll and naming the discovery of the Madeiras leave out as much as they include. They mark a boundary, but miss all that the text, in its material presence, cannot contain and all that ultimately cannot be verified about the subject who committed the words to a material form. In keeping with the etymology of “Madeiras,” as related to mater and materia, then, “The Discovery of the Madeiras,” like the prefatory poems to A Witness Tree, amounts to an exploration that leads to nothing more than the undeniable and limiting materiality of the poetic text, and that materiality is its maternity. In this unusual case, one bound up in the poet’s mind with his having achieved a public identity through his writing but also with the





support of the wife he has lost in the process, Frost actually uses the poem to represent and name the forgotten, unspoken, material/maternity behind the carving and scroll, rather than to obscure it through representation of male voicing, as he must do in “A Fountain, a Bottle, a Donkey’s Ears and Some Books.”



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This study began with Frost’s memorable description in “The Figure a Poem Makes” of how a poem unfolds: “It finds its own name as it goes and discovers the best waiting for it in some final phrase at once wise and sad . . . ” (777). Through the various circuits of this study, I have tried to trace the ways in which Frost’s poems find their names as they go, ranging from gestures, both overt and highly suggestive, that closely resemble naming; to the more removed notion of the proverb itself as a means of naming; to the riddle, that subgenre founded on the playful yet identitythreatening requirement to come up with the name of an object; and from there to the consequence of these failed efforts: the final hope that the material presence of the poem on the page or its worth as commodity will somehow stand in as something like a name. It should be clear by now that this story of the poem’s unfolding applies also to the author. “[Finding] its own name as it goes and [discovering] the best waiting for it in some final phrase at once wise and sad”—that story captures Frost’s belief in an accessible identity for himself amid what at times he must have seen as the debris of his existence; it expresses the necessary fiction that allows him to search amid the material of his art and life for that ultimate christening. But even the final name disclosed through the process of writing remains conflicted by wisdom and sadness: the suggestion of a transcendent identifier, wisdom, opposes the thoroughly material sense of completion suggested by the echo of “sated” in the “sadness” of that final phrase with which the poem and the poet’s quest for identity must cease. One need only trace the geographically expressed frenzy in Frost’s early crisis with Elinor to recognize the underlying material, even unexpectedly maternal, nature of this search for identity. As recorded by Lawrence Thompson, Frost journeyed to St. Lawrence University in Canton, New York, to present her with one of the two copies of his self-published Twilight as the definitive gesture of who he was (The Early 173–89). Even at the age of twenty his identity depended on both the material fact of his poetry and its exchange value. Elinor, a persistent figure in his works of both blank whiteness (Elinor White) and silence, indifferently accepted his gesture,



Coda


however, and sent him away. In response, Frost discarded his companion copy of Twilight and made a determined beeline to the Dismal Swamp and Lake Drummond in Virginia, what on the map too plainly represents a womb and the birth canal leading from it, or back to it, as is more accurately the case for Frost. His journey was both a stylized literary gesture (R. Franklin, “Literary Model”; and Miller, Dark Eden) and an emotional retreat from his poetic venture at individuation toward an expression of self-annihilation and submersion in the maternal. In “Kitty Hawk,” Frost returns to this event as a self-identifying companion story to the saga of the Wright brothers, figuratively fulfilling the meaning of their name (“right” and “wright,” as in “work” and “maker” of something). He systematically masculinizes their flight and his adventure with images of projection and penetration, while also emphasizing science and technology. These moves disclose how troubled he must have remained by the overwhelming, feminizing materiality of his youthful flight. His rehearsing the episode in this late poem, then, is no singular act. It crystallizes the lifelong terms by which he played out his quest for identity. When in 1939 he parlayed the one remaining copy of Twilight, complete with autograph, into a serviceable commodification of himself and his work—a $4,000 check from Earle Bernheimer—and thereby into another reaffirmation of his identity within the world of material value, he at the same time gained a name for himself and lost it in the very aura created by that materiality (Thompson and Winnick, The Later 58). He became a “witness tree”—a name, a proverbial-like gesture of apparent orientation, a riddle to be decoded, and an object of no little worth.



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Introduction 1. This and all subsequent quotations from Frost’s works, unless otherwise noted, are based on The Library of America’s 1995 Robert Frost: Collected Poems, Prose, and Plays,edited by Richard Poirier and Mark Richardson. I refer to page numbers from this volume in the parenthetical citations. I revert to the 1969 edition of Henry Holt’s The Poetry of Robert Frost, edited by Connery Lathem, whenever there may be a question about the format of a poem.

1

T Q   N  “F”

1. Quotations from Emerson’s poetry, unless otherwise noted, come from Collected Poems and Translations. 2. Calling on Simone de Beauvoir’s work, Richardson analyzes the connections between “Hamatraya” and Frost’s “The Birthplace” (227–29), both of which display man’s attempt to master nature through naming. 3. Judith Oster briefly discusses the naming in “West-Running Book” as an expression of mutuality between the couple, as opposed to the willful resistance of the couple in “Home Burial” to agree on what words mean (214). 4. Treating the American poet as nature’s conqueror, Roy Harvey Pearce writes of Whitman as the poet-namer: “The ego asserts itself Adamically, in naming. The poem is a titanic act of adoption. The poet is father, giving his name to all he sees and hears and feels” (4). As we shall see, Frost finds ways of voicing this attitude, but often retreats from it. 5. For a parallel discussion of Frost’s notion of authorship insofar as it can be derived from his poetry and statements about composing and interpreting, see Richardson, Chapter 3, “Believing in Robert Frost.” 6. In defining such a search for identity in Frost’s poems, Richardson refers to Burke’s remarks in A Grammar of Motives on the reasons for writing: the “poet writes to usurp . . . a place, a stance, a fullness, an illusion of identification or possession; something we can call our own or even ourselves” (17). Richardson then translates this observation into what



Notes

7. 8. 9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

15. 16.

17.

18. 19.

Notes “Frost might say: We write in order to escape from a succession of dead selves—a succession of outworn stances or illusions of identity” (206). See Tyler Hoffman’s discussion of this passage in his treatment of Frost’s claims about “sentence-sounds” (67). Richard Poirier provides examples of how Frost resists naming and uses “thing” in telling ways (“Frost” 226). Judith Oster writes that “the question of how to read, or how to read into, a text does not simply arise from the reading of a Frost poem. It is a question about which he wrote poems, such as ‘A Missive Missile’ and ‘Maple’ ” (44). For example, Jost writes, “It is this paradox that is also for Frost intrinsic to symbolic ‘naming’—the paradox that indeterminancy (insubstantiality, absence) attends all our positive definitions—and in so doing makes man’s Being-as-possibility possible” (“It Wasn’t” 32). Faggen calls attention to the image of the evolutionary opposable thumb and to the poem’s emphasis on the material—dust, fire, and sun-smitten slime—as “the force[s] behind our religious impulses” (280–81). Because Kearns sees the childish figure in this poem as unrecognized by, but needing, the maternal figure represented by the trees, the subject’s theft of the flower amounts to an impotent attempt to achieve masculinity—and a name of sorts (116). Lentricchia treats the poem as a Frostian display of the “recognition of an irreparable division between self and nature,” a nature “which only serves to emphasize the smallness, the precariousness, and separateness of self” (180). Richardson highlights the gender component in this naming episode: “So far is the speaker from masculinity, as this poem seems to understand it, that she refuses even the mildly proprietary gesture of naming the flowers. Alone in the woods, together with her ‘wasted’ flowers, Frost’s speaker is released, if only for a moment, from the dominion and oversight of men—and released, I would add, from the tyranny of masculinity itself” (62). See Frost’s hyperawareness of the word “dear,” by the way, in his “Preface to the British Edition of A Masque of Reason, 1948,” in which he writes, “The Dea knows (as we still say in New England) . . . ” (802). Avrum Stroll’s study provides a clear discussion of the question of proper names as tags. See also Russell Grigg, 73–75. As Lentricchia writes, the poem “seems as much about the playfully free and creative spirit, here manifesting itself in the indigenous speech of a country man, as it is a poem about a brook” (47). See the second chapter of Robert Frost, in which Frank Lentricchia discusses the connection in Frost’s poems between the unseen brook and the poetic imagination. Faggen also acknowledges the figure of the stream, relating it particularly to Frost’s “reinterpretation of Lucretius” (41). Kearns too points out the pun on Frost’s name in these lines (152). Richardson’s dwelling on the identity issues in this poem—the way in which it captures the poem’s expression of a distrust in its author about being seen as poet—is important for our purposes. The poem’s expression of a fundamental anxiety about the cultural identity of “the poet” is the very thing that provokes the fire-ice outburst of identity (65). Kearns’s characterization of the always-present



180

20.

21. 22.

23. 24.

25.

26.

27.

181

potential in Frost’s poetry for shifts between summer and winter, hot and cold, and desire and control also relates to what we are exploring here: “And so ‘earth’ is just the location where love takes place in Frost’s poetry; it is alternatively a sensual landscape of desire made manifest and a winter wasteland of frozen and impenetrable surfaces . . . The earth’s body is a perfect correlative for one’s own capricious nature by Frost’s terms, alternately yielding and resistant . . . ” (113). In relation to this connection of the shadow and origin of poetic vision, see also Irwin’s discussion of the ways in which the shadow or silhouette is connected with the origin of art in the American Renaissance (63–64). Judith Oster discusses this poem as Frost’s “cold pastoral” (169–79). The quote from Frost comes from The Early Years 427. While emphasizing the importance of the breakthrough function of Meserve’s unconventional rhetoric, his opening up the Coles and us to “the mystery of time and language,” Jost also makes the interesting observation that Frost’s solution to the poem, the adventure/riddle-answer structure, actually closes off the open-endedness and mystery he cultivates in the first two-thirds of the poem (53–54). While also regarding Meserve as a figure who “shakes up” the life of the Coles, Lewis Miller makes of the Coles’ relationship a less nuanced one than it seems to me. John Sears offers a detailed discussion of the ways in which Meserve embodies the persona that Frost developed for his public performances. For a discussion of the security of the Coles’ house as symbolizing “the walls of conventional thought and speech,” see Jost (“Civility” 52). Faggen cites “Walking,” in which Thoreau defines the swamp as a sacred place where he can “recreate” himself. According to Faggen, Frost’s swamp is different: it does not simply symbolize what Thoreau calls the sacred “marrow” of Nature, but “offers ambiguous evidence of order and cultivation that does not yield simple revelation” occurring on retreat from the misleading influence of civilization (263). See also, of course, David Miller’s Dark Eden for a discussion of the swamp in American culture. The first chapter deals with Frost’s perhaps contrived use of the swamp, the Dismal Swamp in Virginia, as the site of a revelatory event in his life. Fratalli regards these lines as “perhaps the most succinct poetic presentation of . . . the idea of relativity, for they describe a condition in which all basis for measurement and orientation has been lost” (113). Faggen takes a stab at this one: “Just as the home shows three stories to the road, the single family represents three individuals whose purposes may not conform to a single ordering purpose” (205). While acknowledging the fact that the narrator says the house’s arrangement actually suggests openness (“The arrangement made a pleasant sunny cellar”) and that the description does not, in general terms, emphasize something hidden, Katherine Kearns nevertheless transforms the architecture in this way: “The subtextual implications [of the father’s reluctance to tell his daughter the meaning of her name], like the house with its two buried stories, are indeed dangerously self-arousing”(20). Cecily Parks writes that the poem’s conclusion emphasizes the power of loving affiliation with another to create accommodation with irresolution, as “confusion becomes lovely through love” (26).



Notes

Notes

28. See The Years of Triumph 108, 113, and footnote 26 on 554 for brief descriptions of the magazine and Frost’s attitude toward it. Also consult Herren’s entry on “Drama” in Tuten, 82–84; and Cramer’s background to the unpublished poem “The Seven Arts” (235). 29. Cramer explains the likely biographical inspiration behind this poem: Frost’s youthful experience of escaping from an intruder while staying in a rented room in the Horne house on Ossipee Mountain in Hew Hampshire during the summer of 1895 (85). See also The Early Years (206–08). 30. Though Thompson, in The Years of Triumph, seems certain that the Stranger survives—”By the time the posse begins hammering at the door, the intruder has killed Asa and hidden the body off stage” (109)—the manipulation of the action and the curious alteration of the speakers’ names resists such a certain conclusion.

2

P   Q  C

1. See Cramer, 186. 2. Abrahams and Babcock also mention this naming function: “Oral proverb usage usually involves an attempt of the speaker to ‘name’ and suggest an attitude toward a recurrent social situation . . . ” (420). 3. This and all other quotations from the almanac come from The Complete Poor Richard Almanacks, Vol. 2. 4. When quoting from Thoreau without relying on Moldenhauer’s references, I use, for simplicity’s sake, the Signet edition of Walden and “Civil Disobedience.” 5. Kilcup addresses Thoreau’s privileging of the written in the first of the two passages from Walden. Based on an analysis of the feminine/regionalist tradition, she points out that the affiliations among orality, the written, the feminine, and the masculine “often shift . . . hence, the ‘orality’ explored by Thoreau, Whitman, and Frost himself is neither identical nor intrinsically gendered” (109). 6. The most interesting discussion I have encountered of Frost’s frequent use of “as if” is Lentricchia’s (150–70, for instance). He connects “as if” with both Frost’s attraction to “the supreme fiction” that counters the imposing facts of existence and his sense of poetry as play. 7. See “Quandary” from In the Clearing (475), in which Frost incorporates this undercutting of “love thy neighbor” with hate yourself and associates the idea with the Delphic oracle. 8. Abrahams and Babcock discuss the ways in which proverbs “[call] attention to their proverbial character . . . as one means of establishing their differences from the surrounding talk, and thus their integrity and detachability” (418–19). 9. George Monteiro puzzles over Frost’s “intent in linking “Mending Wall” with “The Tuft of Flowers,” settling finally on the notion of statement and counterstatement about the theme of men communicating. Interestingly, Monteiro



182

10.

11.

12. 13. 14. 15.

16.

17.

18.

183

poses and answers his question just after discussing the theme of the proverb in “Mending Wall,” a theme that “The Tuft of Flowers” shares with that poem, even though it focuses on it far less obviously (Robert Frost 125–29). See Michael Berndt’s entry on the poem in Tuten (271). Berndt connects “The Vindictives,” “The Gold Hesperidee,” and this poem and argues that “A Peck of Gold” is another of Frost’s poems about the Fall. In his contribution to The Robert Frost Encyclopedia (88), Michael Berndt curiously invokes the Prometheus myth as a way to understand the desire for self-punishment represented in the poem. Chapter 3 of the Book of Job opens with Job speaking after seven days and nights of silent suffering on a pile of ashes: “Let the day perish in which I was born . . . Let that day be darkness . . . Let gloom and deep darkness claim it . . . Let clouds settle upon it . . . ” (New Revised Standard). See Oster 147–48; Foster 422–23; and Bagby, Frost and the Book 3 for discussions of this poem. Loomis collects “Durable trees make roots first” as one of the hundreds of proverbs Emerson used (259). Loomis collects another proverb about work from Emerson that might be behind this poem: “Working in your calling is half praying” (259). In discussing Thoreau’s reconfiguration of proverbs in Walden, Moldenhauer emphasizes Thoreau’s reconstitution of himself as young man into the wise old man who reclaims the fresh, original meaning within the proverbs behind which the false old men, intent merely on buying and owning, hide their ignorance (155). My emphasis here falls on the way in which Frost makes the speaker almost the sympathetic self-deceiver, the figure of common humanity that is at some level aware of, and yet determined by, its need for self-deception. Frost’s letter to Untermeyer, quoted often enough (see Poirier 133 and Faggen 216), partly illustrates this attitude: in discussing the oversensitivity of Jeanie, his sister, Frost says, “I am coarse for having had children and coarse for having wanted to succeed a little. She made a birth in the family the occasion for writing us once of the indelicacy of having children” (The Letters 102–03). Kearns discusses the cultural attitude more fully: “A child is proof of a man’s sanctioned, domestic virility, yet both its presence, where ‘motherlove’ threatens to supplant the husband for the child, and its absence compromise the model of virile moderation” (15). Concerning the association of the feminine with the wild, see Richardson’s discussion of this theme in Frost as related to Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown” and Emerson’s The Conduct of Life (39). It is just such a poem and others like it that must qualify Kilcup’s interesting and important thesis about the change in Frost from a feminine poetics to a male one. This poem aggressively attacks male self-satisfaction. In James Sitar’s transcription of Frost’s 1947 talk at Dartmouth College, we find Frost remarking on the poem: “And you might be interested in just hearing this: that I wrote this poem . . . it’s in my new book. It’s called ‘The Ingenuities of Debt.’ And you’d think from the content even that it must have



Notes

19. 20.

21.

22.

Notes been recent, but I wrote it as early as nineteen-hundred-and-five, see, and it’s laying around. I remember Ezra Pound objected to one word in it; he saw it way back in nineteen-eleven. And I myself didn’t like the fourth line in it. So I left that fourth line; I couldn’t get a fourth line for it, and I left it ‘round for thirty or forty years you see, and finally just before I went to press this time (I had a vision, you know, just like a vision), I saw that fourth line and I put it in there and you’ll hear it. See how nice it is. [Laughter] Maybe it’s the best thing in the poem. [Reads “The Ingenuities of Debt”] It went, you know, it had to meet its losses in the end. Every nation will meet its losses in the end; you can’t stave them off by ingenuities of debt. And you want to know again, as fellow writers, what Ezra Pound objected to? The word? ‘Tessellation.’ That’s just tied in, you know, but he said I gotta get rid of that word. Well I never . . . that didn’t seem important to me. I was having so much trouble with that third line. [Laughter]” (14). See the explanation by Jacqueline McCurry in Tuten (170). Lentricchia also picks up on the actual appropriateness of the saying’s imagery to the issue of mortality: in commenting on Amy’s response to the saying, he observes, “contrary to what she says, [it] has everything to do with what was in the ‘darkened parlor’ ” (Robert Frost 64). It would be satisfying, I suspect, to be able to conclude, as does David Shaw (167), that Frost’s sympathies in this poem move toward the husband, who, unlike the wife, expresses a Jamesian tough-minded pragmatism. As we have seen, however, part of that tough-minded pragmatism involves a facing of the meaninglessness of life along with the need to adopt a conventional response. Perhaps this poem is typical in that very way: the two sides of the conflict comprise the whole issue, without being part of the dialectic process that Frost occasionally derided as contrived. As an illustration of a recent use of this proverb, I refer the reader to the Sunday Opinion section of the June 8, 2008, edition of the New York Times, where the editors use the saying as the title for their brief description of the poetic punishment, overseen by Jay Parini from nearby Middlebury College, of the twenty-five Ripton, Vermont, teenagers who broke into and trashed Frost’s summer house.

3

T R  I A

1. Wilbur, “Persistence,” and Jost, “Civility” 53–54, are the exceptions. 2. Misleadingly, Peter Stanlis refers to this playfulness as “the most frequently omitted element in Frost’s intellectual makeup.” Stanlis calls that element “the role of thought, talk, and poetry, his play with words and his wit, humor, and sense of comedy.” He goes on to say that “practically every biographer and literary critic has ignored his [Frost’s] dictum that ‘The way of understanding is partly mirth’ ” (9). This claim ignores the section in Tharpe, Frost: Centennial Essays, Vol. 2, 211–279, on “Play” in Frost’s poetry. In a sharper attack on



184

3. 4.

5. 6. 7.

8.

9. 10.

11.

12. 13.

14. 15.

185

Lawrence Thompson, moreover, Stanlis claims that this “sense of ‘play’ was also beyond Thompson’s imagination” (9). Though perhaps not appreciating it in quite the same way that Stanlis does, as part of Frost’s dualism, and not as sensitive to it as Poirier in his fundamental explanation of the psychologically formative nature of play in Frost’s character and poetry, Thompson certainly understood and documented it, as well as observing in this important footnote that it needed more study. Peter Stanlis touches on this passage while developing one aspect of his comparison of Einstein and Frost, Frost’s appreciation of Einstein’s humor (163). It is difficult to imagine that Frost did not have in mind Emerson’s early poem, “The Sphinx,” in which the Sphinx calls upon the poet to take the quest through nature to find out her secret. In the end she speaks: “Who telleth one of my meanings, / Is master of all I am” (Emerson, Collected Poems, 8). See, for instance, the Glaziers’ description of such power relations within the riddling game among the Mbeere (199). The Glaziers also discuss the ways in which the riddle works at the margins of traditionally different classificatory systems and its relation to taboo (212). This transformation from riddle to poem reflects the truth of Hasan-Rokem’s observation about the literary riddle, which, “once it has been solved, no longer continues to be a riddle but is transformed into a ‘poem’ or poetic text where the answer to the initial riddle now serves as its title” (261). Timmerman sensitively discusses these companion poems in terms of voice and metrics. His pointing out Frost’s “Contents” notes on “My November Guest” only intensifies the sense of these poems as riddles: the note says that the speaker “is in love with being misunderstood” (24). See Paul Gilmore’s Aesthetic Materialism for a thorough discussion of the relation between electricity and the telegraph and poetry. Gimbutas gives some examples: “A snow-white field I own, / with my hands it is sown, / with my lips it is mown” and “A white meadow, black rind, for a clever one to feast eyes on” (16). See Frost’s comment in a 1954 interview: “I played it exactly fair in it. Twice I say ‘Good Fences’ and twice ‘Something there is—’ ” (Qtd. in R. Cook, “Robert Frost’s Asides” 355). On this time-warp, also see Faggen, Robert Frost, 274–76. Wilbur also refers to this episode: “The only thing we ask, as Alice said to the Mad Hatter, is that people not make up riddles which have no answers at all” (340). Frank Kermode examines this parable and its riddlelike qualities (28–34). See Richardson (241–43) for a far less suspicious reading of this claim of wholeness at the end of “Directive,” which amounts to what Richardson calls Frost’s “defense” of poetry, his “apologia.” Dorothy Judd Hall reads “whole” etymologically as “heal” and “holy,” derived from Old English hal, to emphasize the positive use of the word in both “Kitty Hawk” and “Directive” and specifically the “integral bonding of body and spirit” (330).



Notes

Notes

16. David Sanders offers a sensitive and more positive reading than mine about the ways in which the poem brings into the foreground through its play the necessary relationship between poet and reader, the poet’s very survival depending on the reader. Thus, according to Sanders, the locale to which the narrator directs us is more the poem before us than the merged towns with the children’s chalice from which we are to drink. In Sanders’s view our imaginative reading of the poem, our acceptance of its literal inconsistencies, preserves the poet, or the poet-riddler, as I call him here. The reader as questing hero must not supply the answer to the poem, else the poet-Sphinx dies, though the reader must play the game. 17. Richardson provides a slightly different and more fully explained list of these nostalgic features (238–42).

4

T M T  W T

1. See Barbara Johnson for a discussion of the relationship between thing and form (27–33). 2. In discussing “The Demiurge’s Laugh,” Robert Hass refers to the tree against which that poem’s speaker sits as “Emerson’s symbol for organic unity and benevolence in nature” (3). Hass’s point is that Frost rematerializes, as it were, a symbol of an assumed higher, spiritual order guiding human existence. 3. With the recent publication of The Notebooks of Robert Frost by Harvard University Press, we now easily see how Frost’s discussions of this issue of sentence sounds and the priority of the oral over the visual, the ear over the eye, dominated his thinking during the period from 1912 to 1919. See Notebooks 8 and 11, for example. Though often enough referred to, Frost’s habit of using the word “say” rather than “read” becomes connected more formally to Frost’s desire to “override the mediation of print” (Hoffman 84). 4. For an account of this event see Thompson and Winnick (278–83). 5. See Frost’s comments on the beatniks chanting poetry to jazz (856). For samples of the combination of visual art with poetry in political pamphlets, consult Nelson’s Repression and Recovery. Edward Larissy isolates the assumption in Pound’s poetics that language at best is “essentially voice or speech” (32–33). 6. Frost’s interest in the materiality of books appears, for example, in his letters to the American publisher Thomas Bird Mosher, a discussion of which letters can be found in Nash, “Robert Frost and His Printers.” 7. Importantly, both Mark Richardson (1–17) and Tyler Hoffman (45–63) argue that much in Frost’s attempts to separate himself from Pound actually positions him within the same camp as Pound. 8. Bill Brown briefly discusses the conflict between Paine and Burke, emphasizing Paine’s focus on the constitution as a “real existence” (45). 9. Curiously, Frost continues this entry by examining the implications of the reverse side of the Seal of the United States, which depicts an unfinished pyramid on whose flat top rests an image of the “divine eye.” The unfinished



186

10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

187

pyramid topped with the divine eye indicates, according to Frost, the limits to which humans ought to go in governing a country, leaving something to God. Not surprisingly Frost turns the symbol against “The New Deal’s impatience with the idea of power refraining and breaking off ” (The Notebooks 44). Here, though, the eye is not that of the text bound, material bound, barbarian eyereader, but rather a symbol of imagination and spirituality. See also Edward Said, who discusses Gerard Manly Hopkins’s similar emphasis on “the text as supported by a discursive situation involving speaker and audience; the designed interplay between speech and reception, between verbality and textuality, is the text’s situation, its placing of itself in the world” (40–41). Acknowledging the stereotypical treatment of the poetess as located in the attic and as concerned with nothing more important than flowers on the window sill, Kilcup goes on to treat the poem as kind of homosocial overpowering of the independent female—Clara Robinson—on the part of the narrator and his male friend, an enactment typical of the era’s over-determined masculinity. Kilcup emphasizes the sexually suggestive aspect of the description of the books’ materiality (159–63). The material body of the text in Frost certainly has a feminine inflection: he tends to identify the voiceless ink on the page with not only sissy pursuits but also uncontrollable sexuality. Still, I would like to emphasize that part of the anxiety at the end of this poem results in the binary opposition that accompanies the male/female one: the oral/written. Kilcup treats the poem as enacting “the threat of female erotic self-sufficiency [threatening] a masculine poet’s self-definition, which ironically can be recovered only by his hypermasculine and spurious ‘rescue’ of her, abetted by another man” (163). Without acknowledging the etymological implication that I mention, Robert Faggen quite sensibly addresses the connection between women and trees in Frost’s poetry. He openly departs from the tendency in Katherine Kearns’s and to a lesser extent Karen Kilcup’s discussions to regard nature, chaos, and women as one part of a fairly rigid binary with rationality, order, and men on the other side. Faggen writes, “What makes the tree [a symbol in Faggen’s phrasing for natural, complex human development] grow, flourish, develop, is always the action of both sexes encouraging and contradicting each other (188). Kilcup also deals with this passage as she examines the way in which the early twentieth-century culture of manliness pervades Frost’s depiction of manhood and poetry (147). Lentricchia, in “The Resentments of Robert Frost,” isolates “Mowing” as the poem typifying Frost’s position in the “poetic” movement of the early twentieth-century. A poem about work and its aesthetic joy, it tries to transform the female aesthetic experience into fact, into male work (198). The complexity behind Frost’s separation from the feminine tradition gains another dimension if we consider that William James himself, a strong influence on Frost, also “suffered” from the same competing affiliations. Ann



Notes

17.

18.

19.

20.

21.

22.

Notes Douglas, in Terrible Honesty, points out this apparent contradiction in James, as she describes both his often hypermanly stance and his sincere interest in the “feminine mind-cure tradition of concrete therapeutics,” at a time when every branch of science was urgently trying to masculinize (132), as well as his tangible support of the “Emmanuel movement” (150). See Kilcup’s summary of this argument about Frost’s shift away from his participation in the feminine literary tradition (189). Though I am trying to highlight the troubling complexities in Frost’s effort to set himself apart from other poets on the basis of his sensitivity to sentence sounds, Robert Hass offers a lucid characterization of the difference between Frost and Pound on the basis of the spatial versus the temporal: “Pound thought that by presenting a series of surface images and then fixing in collage form the surprising relations between them, he could defamiliarize ordinary experience and direct the reader’s attention to an objective world uncorrupted by emotional excess. By contrast Frost located truth in the temporal rather than in the spatial elements of experience. Employing an intoned language that approximated the sequential character of music, Frost, early in his career, sought to recreate in his poetry the fluid movements of consciousness. Since visual or conceptual surfaces always served as a barrier to the dynamic processes of actual experience, the poet was to make those surfaces as transparent as possible. Only then could the reader recognize the poet’s subtle changes in thought and emotion as they unfolded over time” (138–39). For a list of the twenty-two people from whom this card was designed to be sent, see http://www.libumd.edu/RARE/SpecialCollection/privatepress/ spiralpress.html. Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant reports that on this card “Lesley made a sketch of a snowy slope grown with firs and a sky with a new moon, above a poem written in R.F.’s own beautiful script” (177). See Norman P Will, Item 2. Without regard to their textual implications, he treats these details as geometrical and thus part of the poem’s energy to assert control over the uncontrollable and to express Frost—the Moodie Forester’s—renewed artistic prowess. David L. Miller explains this image of wounding as a suggestion of the inextricable link between forgetfulness and memory in Frost. Referring to Nietzsche, in Genealogy of Morals, Miller writes: “Memory endows man with the terrible responsibility of an identity, and gives him ‘the right to make promises’ . . . The insistence on driving things in and piling them up and carving them out is defensive in two ways, a response not only to the threats of darkness and doubt but to the attractions as well” (153). To recognize more fully that Frost’s imagery in “Beech” is largely textual rather than topographical, consider the possible allusions in it to the passage from Romeo and Juliet in which Capulet’s wife tries to persuade Juliet to work up an interest in Paris, whose very face is a volume, who is a “precious book of love,” an “unbound lover” (Act 1.3, 81–87).



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23. Discussing “A Missive Missile” in the Robert Frost Encyclopedia, Michael Hancher emphasizes the importance of the poem because of Frost’s decision to use it as the conclusion to his Collected Poems (1939). Hancher also treats the poem as a self-referential document, capturing “the experience of reading that the reader of ” the preceding books “has just undergone. Frost deployed this poem as a gloss on the reading of all of his poems” (Tuten 209). 24. Evidence that Frost might be using “after thought” in this basic way occurs in his youthful valedictorian speech, “A Monument to After-Thought Unveiled” (636–38). Consider also his use of the term in A Masque of Reason, as Job characterizes God’s sense that he actually planned out his punishment of Job as “An afterthought, a long, long afterthought” (380). 25. See Walter J. Ong, who discusses the latter-day emphasis on intertextuality as an interesting reappearance of the assumptions behind oral culture as opposed to the formalist, print culture’s emphasis on the individual author and the enclosed nature of the literary work, once it has removed “words from the world of sound” (160–71). Such a discussion only emphasizes the extent to which Frost’s practices place him in the middle of a complex opposition that he often oversimplified in his poetics. 26. Concerning the value of assent in Frost’s poetry, see Wakefield (58). 27. Hass wonders why Frost, in his later years, seemed to have abandoned or forgotten his oral poetics, his emphasis on sentence sounds. Hass answers his own question in terms of Frost’s sensitivity to the empiricism of science and the way in which that approach might have made him keenly aware of the immature, impractical, and subjective nature of his “theories” (144–46). I would suggest, of course, that Frost’s increased sense of the materiality of his own text, of its existence apart from the authorial voice, likely had a part in his abandoning anything more than passing echoes of his earlier, urgent claims for sentences sounds. However, if one looks at a poem such as “Too Anxious for Rivers,” the connection between Frost’s enhanced sense of his poetry’s materiality and his sensitivity to empiricism perhaps becomes clear. That poem imagines a progression from our mere materiality to our conscious state: “Time was we were molten, time was we were vapor. / What set us on fire and what set us revolving / Lucretius the Epicurean might tell us” (343). It was “the effort, the essay of love.” The obsession with the material—the anxiety for rivers and where they go, and the concession that finally the materiality of it all does not speak its answer—leads to this notion that science’s materialistic “story” of our existence is incomplete and that all she can do is put her children to bed to dream the rest, saying, “You children may dream it and tell it tomorrow” (343). The answerless quality of existence is its sublime mystery, but it appears answerless when it presents itself most clearly as mute materiality; it is not meaning but effort—the picture of the “elephant’s howdah”—a turtle on a rock in the ocean with the elephant on its back. And the essay of love amounts to a “text” and, what is more, a text—Lucretius’s Of the



Notes

28.

29.

30.

31.

32.

33.

34.

35.

36.

37.

Notes Nature of Things—that describes the universe in terms of a material, atomic theory. Frattali describes the language of “Beech” in this way: “And we may even notice a somewhat resolute tone in the verse with its emphatic syntax and prominent rhymes, as well as its diction suggesting the clash of effort and resistance” (109). Here I should mention that Joseph Garrison argues that Frost’s “theory of poetry is a corrective, a way out of the linear bondage of typography and a way into what he considered the life’s blood of a poem” (342). Ronald Martin uses this poem, among others, as evidence of his claim that Frost was “one of the earliest and most insistent of American authors in presenting the new conception of a neutral or nonreflexive universe” (131). Frost was, in this way, to use Martin’s terms, “a knowledge destroyer.” Guy Rotella focuses on the way in which “Trespass” holds in balance Frost’s opposing economic views—respect for the established business practices and ownership and rebellion against them (253). Bagby briefly discusses a few ways in which Frost refers to natural elements as words. Among the several poems he mentions are “A Patch of Old Snow,” seen as a blown-away piece of paper, and “Design,” with the use of “characters” to suggest “letters in a message which the observer seeks to decipher” (“Frost’s Synecdochism” 138–39). See Barbara Johnson’s discussion of Heidegger’s essay “The Thing” and of how the jug or urn represents the force of art to shape and disguise the nothingness upon which its existence depends (61–65). With a slightly different emphasis, Richardson argues that the poem’s design calls attention to the very artfulness that it promotes as the only site of the Golden Age (158). See Richardson’s brief discussion of Frost’s efforts, perhaps influenced by Emerson’s “Wealth,” at “naturalizing” materialism and, in Burke’s terms, establishing a “frame” for his acceptance of the consumer culture of America (210–11). Palgrave’s sentiment mirrors that of Frost’s mother in the poem she published in a San Francisco newspaper in 1884, “The Artist’s Motive,” which Donald Sheehy describes as a “pathetic tale of a painter who paints for ‘gold’ and loses inspiration and then starts painting in response to ‘the sacred light’ and becomes productive” (58). Concerns with the gold standard, which the country abandoned around 1933, linger behind this poem. It first appeared, after all, in the Boston Herald in 1936 (Cramer 138). This poem’s struggle with materiality and metaphor reflects the concerns over money as metaphor and gold as real, a concern famously expressed in William Jennings Bryan’s “Cross of Gold” speech in 1896, with which he won the nomination of his party by arguing against the gold standard and for the common citizen. See Frost’s notebook entry: “Bryans heart was all right in sympathizing with the poor: his brain may have been all right too. It was his finger that was wrong. He



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was always putting it on the wrong thing as to blame for the poverty of the poor” (367). 38. Guy Rotella makes a similar observation when he argues that poems such as “Hyla Brook” and “For Once, Then, Something” “are powerfully connected to the money debates of [Frost’s] own cultural moment, debates which were as much philosophical and aesthetic as they were economic” (259).



Notes




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Wilbur, Richard. “The Persistence of Riddles.” Yale Review 78.3 (Spring 1989): 333–51. Will, Norman P. “Robert Frost’s ‘Beech’: Faith Regained.” Notes on Modern American Literature 6 (Spring–Summer 1982): Item 2. Willems, Klaas. “Form, Meaning, and Reference in Natural Language.” Onoma 35 (2000): 85–119. Williamson, Craig. A Feast of Creatures. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982. Winslow, Donald J. “The Origin of Frost’s ‘Witness Tree.’ ” American Notes and Queries 13 (June 1975): 153–54. Wordsworth, William. The Prelude: 1799, 1805, 1850. Edited by Jonathan Wordsworth, M. H Abrams, and Stephen Gill. New York: W.W. Norton, 1979.



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Abel, Darrel, 43, 45 Abrahams, Roger, 54–6, 182 n. 2, n. 8 Arnold, Matthew, 19 aura of authorship, 5, 72, 91, 123, 144, 146, 150, 178 authorial presence, 127, 129, 136, 144, 162 Bagby, George, 167 Barker, William, 54–5 Barnes, Daniel, 52 Bartlett, John, 72, 131, 133 “basic problem,” 16 Bellow, Saul, 105 Benjamin, Walter, 144 Berger, Charles, 28–9 Bernheimer, Earle, 5, 127, 141, 143–4, 146, 157, 178 Berry, Donald, 54 Bible, 3, 43, 45, 160 The Book of Job, 3, 52, 77, 81, 183 n. 11 Genesis, 75, 81 John, 23 Luke, 160 Mark, 65, 96, 120 Matthew, 81, 96, 120 Numbers, 45–6 Proverbs, 2, 63, 81, 83 wisdom literature, 3, 83 black on white trope, 111, 169–70 Blake, William, 140 blazes, 153, 158–60, 165

Bleich, David, 29 Blumenthal, Joseph, 141 Bradford, Richard, 130–1 Braithwaite, William, 72, 132 Bridges, Robert, 131 Brower, Reuben, 90 Brown, Bill, 134, 186 n. 8 Brown, Eric, 105, 183 n. 16 Bryan, William Jennings, 190 n. 37 Burke, Kenneth, 53, 61, 65, 69, 129 business and poetry, 127, 131–3, 135, 137, 150 charm as genre, 101–3, 112–13, 115, 117, 119–20, 123, 133 Chartier, Roger, 145 Chaucer, 57, 148 Christmas cards, 5, 50, 141–4 Coffin, R.P.T., 136 Coleridge, Samuel, 71, 129 commodity poet as, 123, 127, 133, 144, 147, 150, 173, 177–8 poem as, 126, 142, 144, 147, 149–50, 173, 178 Cox, Sidney, 28, 72, 131, 133 Cramer, Jeffrey, 51–2, 81, 105, 160, 182 n. 28, n. 29, n. 1, 190 n. 37 Crane, Joan, 146 Dabbs, James, 104 Dante, Alighieri, 84, 108, 171 Darwin, Charles, 20, 24, 89



Index

INDEX

defamiliarizing techniques, 4, 147–8, 166, 168, 170, 188 n. 17 deixis, 163 Derrida, Jacques, 24–5, 47, 50 127, 129, 146 see also naming DeVoto, Bernard, 133 Dickinson, Emily, 52, 104 Dismal Swamp, 178, 181 n. 24 Douglas, Ann, 126 Eaton, Walter P., 131–2, 138 Eichenberg, Fritz, 141 ekphrasis, 6–7, 140–2, 152, 164 Eliot, T.S., 2, 73, 132, 139 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 167, 174 n. 1, 183 n. 13, n. 14, n. 16, 185 n. 4, 186 n. 2, 190 n. 35; “Goethe,” 15 “Hamatreya,” 12–13, 21, 41 “The Poet,” 12, 41 “The Sphinx,” 185 n. 4 naming and, 1, 12–15, 20–2, 25–7, 41–2, 46, 53, 59 use of proverbs and, 66–9, 71, 73, 83 epicurean, 33, 189 see also Lucretius; material eye readers, 123, 127–131, 136, 138, 142–4, 151, 162 see also material extravagance, 64–5, 137 Faggen, Robert, 2–3, 5, 24, 43–6, 80, 89, 122, 180 n. 11, n. 17, 181 n. 24, n. 26, 183 n. 1, n. 6, 185 n. 12, 187 n. 13 Faulkner, William, 128 female/feminine, 5, 18, 43, 47, 53, 61–2, 70, 85–6, 88, 90, 130, 132–6 material and, 6, 21, 126, 132–6, 144, 150, 175

Frost’s identity as poet and, 42, 127, 133, 137–8, 187 n. 12, n. 14 Fenollosa, Ernest, 130 fire and ice trope, 29–42, 52, 64, 80, 102 see also name/naming Fleissner, Robert, 28 Franklin, Benjamin, 57–62, 75 see also proverbs Foster, Richard, 81, 183 n. 12 Foucault, Michel, 129, 140 Frost, Elinor, 45, 85, 163, 175, 177 Frost, Robert books A Boy’s Will, 78, 106, 115, 117, 144, 146; A Further Range, 8, 16–17, 104–5, 109, 113–14, 147, 157–8, 162; A Witness Tree, 8, 48, 126, 151–5, 157–60, 162–3, 168–70, 174–5; Collected Poems, 137, 145, 179 n. 1, 189 n 23; In the Clearing, 25, 111, 182 n. 7; New Hampshire, 1, 13, 43, 45–6, 128, 133, 135, 138, 146; North of Boston, 8, 73, 78, 87 117; Steeple Bush, 6; Twighlight , 5, 177–78; West-Running Brook, 1, 8, 18, 20–3, 25, 81, 85 drama A Masque of Reason, 1, 3, 21, 74, 89, 110, 180 n. 14, 189 n. 24; A Way Out, 1, 48–50 essays and talks “Definitions of Poetry,” 133, 136; “Education by Poetry,” 122; “On Extravagance: A Talk,” 137; “The Figure a Poem Makes,” 1, 19, 177; “Introduction to King Jasper,” 65, 73–4; “Introduction to Sarah Cleghorn’s Threescore,” 71; “Letter to The Amherst



204

Student, 75; “A Monument to After-Thought Unveiled,” 189 n. 24; “Poetry and School,” 128; “Poverty and Poetry,” 174; “On Taking Poetry,” 96–7; “The Unmade Word, or Fetching and FarFetching,” 71, 132 poems “After Apple-Picking,” 30, 33, 70; “Afterflakes,” 30, 35–7, 114; “Beech,” 126, 151–3, 157–60, 162–3, 165, 174, 188 n. 22, 190 n. 28; “Bereft,” 1, 18, 22–3; “Birches,” 30, 33, 70; “The Birthplace,” 13, 18, 21, 179 n. 2; “The Black Cottage,” 87, 90; “BlueButterfly Day,” 111; “Bond and Free,” 30; “The Bonfire,” 30, 37; “Choose Something Like a Star,” 30, 62–3, 65, 74, 89; “Christmas Trees,” 141–2; “A Cloud Shadow,” 166; “The Code,” 87; “A Considerable Speck,” 169–70; “The Death of the Hired Man,” 87; “Desert Places,” 168; “Design,” 114, 190 n. 32; “Directive,” 28, 30, 65, 97, 118, 120–3, 169, 185 n. 15; “The Discovery of the Madeiras,” 18, 174–5; “The Door in the Dark,” 18, 23; “A Drumlin Woodchuck,” 105–6; “Dust in the Eyes,” 80; “An Encounter,” 106, 108; “Evening in a Sugar Orchard,” 30, 37; “Fire and Ice,” 29–30, 37; “For Once, Then, Something,” 2, 16, 140, 191 n. 38; “A Fountain, a Bottle, a Donkey’s Ears, and Some Books,” 133, 136, 164, 176; “From Plane to Plane,”

205 30, 33–34; “The Generations of Men,” 117; “Ghost House,” 106; “The Gift Outright,” 127; “On Going Unnoticed,” 18, 21; “The Gold Hesperidee,” 183. n. 10; “The Hill Wife,” 85; “A Hillside Thaw,” 30, 37, 112; “Home Burial,” 52, 85, 87–8, 91, 112, 117, 179 n. 3; “The Housekeeper,” 85, 87, 91–2, 117; “How Hard It Is to Keep from Being King When It’s in You and the Situation,” 18, 25, 32; “A Hundred Collars,” 12; “Hyla Brook,” 191 n. 38; “The Ingenuities of Debt,”86, 183 n. 18; “I Will Sing You One-O,” 18; “In a Vale,” 115; “In the Home Stretch,” 50; “In the Long Night,” 30; “In Divés’ Dive,” 114; “Kitty Hawk,” 1, 13, 121–2, 163, 178, 185 n. 15; “The Last Mowing,” 18, 21–2; “Leaves Compared with Flowers,” 81, 114; “The Lesson for Today,” 167, 169; “The Literate Farmer and the Planet Venus,” 167; “The LineGang,”106, 109; “Looking for a Sunset Bird in Winter,” 30, 36 ; “A Loose Mountain,” 169; “The Lost Follower,”167, 169–71; “Lost in Heaven,” 112–14; “Maple,” 1, 27, 42–8, 180 n. 9; “The Master Speed,” 120; “Mending Wall,” 23, 28, 30, 32, 56, 68, 74, 78, 80, 87, 89, 92, 117, 165, 182 n. 9; “A Missive Missile,” 16–17, 140, 157–8, 162, 164, 180 n. 9, 189 n. 23; “Moon Compasses,” 111, 114; “The Most of It,” 16, 65, 131, 162–3, 167;



INDEX

INDEX

Frost, Robert—Continued “The Mountain,” 30–1, 87, 117; “Mowing,” 78–9, 187 n. 15; “My November Guest,” 106, 185 n. 8 ; “The Need of Being Versed in Country Things,” 13; “Neither Out Far Nor In Deep,” 141; “New Hampshire,” 13, 45; “Not Quite Social,” 101, 113–14; “Nothing Gold Can Stay,” 146; “November,” 168; “Of the Stones of the Place,” 174; “The Old Barn at the Bottom of the Fogs,” 147, 165, 169; “One Guess,” 105, 118; “On Going Unnoticed,” 18, 21; “Out, Out––,” 18, 136; “A Passing Glimpse,” 18, 21–22; “A Patch of Old Snow,” 11, 190 n. 32; “Paul’s Wife,” 12, 135–6; “The Pauper Witch of Grafton,” 159; “A Peck of Gold,” 80, 183 n. 10; “Peril of Hope,” 30; “Quandary,” 182 n.7; “The Quest of the Purple-Fringed,” 163–4, 166; “The Rabbit Hunter,” 169; “A Reflex,” 11; “Reluctance,” 144; “Revelation,” 104; “Riders,” 110; “The Road Not Taken,” 84, 121–3, 166; “The Rose Family,” 18, 24; “The Secret Sits,” 48, 110; “The Self-Seeker,” 163; “A Serious Step Lightly Taken,” 167; “A Servant to Servants,” 85, 87, 90–2; “The Silken Tent,” 112; “Sitting by a Bush in Broad Sunlight,” 18, 20; “Snow,” 30, 38, 40, 106; “A Star in a Stone-Boat,” 33; “Stars,” 146; “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” 96,

159; “The Strong Are Saying Nothing,” 114; “Sycamore,” 126, 152, 157, 160–3; “The Telephone,” 106–7; “Time Out,” 167–8; “The Times Table,” 85, 87, 89; “To a Moth Seen in Winter,” 30, 36, 168; “To a Thinker,” 114; “To an Ancient,” 6–8, 140; “To the Thawing Wind,” 30; “Too Anxious for Rivers,” 30, 33; “Trespass,” 166, 190 n. 31; “A Trial Run,”109–10, 114; “Triple Bronze,” 141; “An Unstamped Letter in Our Rural Letter Box,” 141; “Tuft of Flowers,” 78–9. 182 n. 9; “Two Tramps in Mud Time,” 30, 32, 82; “The Vindictives,”113–14, 183 n. 10; “Waspish,” 105, 137; “West-Running Brook,” 13, 18–21; “What Fifty Said,” 30, 35, 52; “The WhiteTailed Hornet,” 105; “Wind and Window Flower,” 30; “A Winter Eden,” 30; “The Wood-Pile,” 30, 41, 141; “At Woodward’s Gardens,” 79 Frye, Northrop, 100–3, 106–7, 112–13, 115, 117, 123 Garnett, Edward, 114, 136 Garrison, Joseph, 190 n. 29 Gilmore, Paul, 185 n. 9 Gimbutas, Zivile, 102, 111, 185 n. 10 Glazier, Jack and Phyllis, 185 n. 5, n. 6 gold standard, 190 n. 37 Golden Age, 80, 171–3, 190 n. 34 The Golden Treasury, 37, 164, 172–3, 190 n. 36 see also Palgrave Grigg, Russell, 180 n. 15 Great Depression, 83, 140



206

INDEX

identity, 1, 3–4, 52 existence of “I,” 23, 25, 50, 123–4, 162–3 gender and, 42, 136, 164 marketability of poems and, 126, 150, 162, 175, 178 material and, 5–8, 12, 96, 103, 125–6, 131, 150, 160–2, 164, 167–8, 177 the poet/Frost and, 4–5, 7–8, 32–3, 37, 40, 49–50, 52, 95, 113, 136–40, 159, 166, 174–8 proverbs and, 54, 68, 78, 80, 87, 89, 91–3 riddles and, 4, 97, 103, 106, 108–9, 112, 124 as signature and naming, 1, 3, 11, 12, 19, 21, 23, 29–50, 81, 142, 159 see also quest

Irwin, John, 21, 138, 158, 174 James, William, 12, 90, 92, 104, 158–60, 184 n. 21, 187 n. 16 formulas and, 51, 57, 63, 67–9, 71–6, 78, 83–4, 88, 90–2, 122 proverbs and, 68–73 see also blazes; naming Jost, Walter, 18–19, 38, 180 n. 10, 181 n. 22, n. 23, 184 n. 1 Juliet, 24–25, 107, 188 n. 22 see also naming Kamuf, Peggy, 25 Kant, Immanuel, 12, 21, 40, 125, 139 Kaufman, Michael, 127 Kearns, Katherine, 30, 32, 43, 45, 64, 71, 95, 123, 136–7, 169–70, 180 n. 12, n. 18, 181 n. 26, 183 n. 16 Kenner, Hugh, 128 Kilcup, Karen, 8, 42–3, 71, 127, 134, 138–9, 182 n. 5, 187 n. 11, n. 12, n. 14 Krieger, Maury, 129, 152, 157 Lacan, Jacques, 7 Lankes, J.J., 127, 128, 141, 153, 156 Larissy, Edward, 186 n. 5 LaRosa, Ralph, 66–8 Lentricchia, Frank, 12, 28–9, 31, 40, 53, 95, 121, 138, 149, 164, 180 n.12, n.16, n. 17, 182 n. 6, 184 n. 20, 187 n. 15 Lieber, Michael, 99 Loomis, C. Grant, 183 n. 13, n. 14 Lowell, Amy, 127, 130 Lucretius, 24, 33, 180 n. 17, 187 n. 27 see also epicurean MacVeagh, Lincoln, 28 Masculinity, 42–3, 61–2, 71, 86, 89, 91, 130, 132–3, 136–7, 150, 182 n. 5, 187 n. 12



Haemer, Alan, 153–5 Hamlet, 54–5 Hancher, Michael, 25, 50, 189 n. 23 Hartman, Geoffrey, 27, 29 Hasan-Rokem, Galit, 97, 185 n. 7 Hass, Robert, 8, 186 n. 2, 188 n. 17, 189 n. 27 Hecht, Anthony, 19 Heffernan, James, 129, 140 Heidegger, Martin, 7, 19, 134 Helicon, 31, 42, 134 Herren, Graley, 49, 182 n. 28 Hoagwood, Terence, 128, 146 Hoffman, Tyler, 70–2, 128, 130, 139, 180, 186 n. 7 Holland, Norman, 28 Hollander, John, 129 home Frost’s identity and, 23, 39–41 Proverbs and, 65–6, 72, 77, 88–91 Huizinga, Johan, 100–01 see also riddle Husserl, Edmund, 16

207

INDEX

Maranda, Elli, 99 Marcus, Mordecai, 35, 105, 109 Martin, Ronald, 190 n. 30 material gender and, 6, 66, 127–9, 130–40, 144, 150, 166, 170, 175, 177–80 identity of poet and, 7–8, 26, 96, 103, 122–3, 126, 131, 136, 138, 143– 4, 147, 149, 150, 153, 159– 60, 162, 167, 177 poetic text as, 5, 7–8, 47, 103, 105, 125–6, 127–30, 142–3, 153, 157, 160–1, 169–70, 174 silence and, 109, 134–5, 140–3, 149, 151, 153, 164–8, 170, 174, 184 n. 11 sound vs. sight and, 127, 129–34, 136–44, 150, 152, 158, 162–5, 168, 174 see also female/feminine; identity; black and white trope; eyereaders Mao, Douglas, 126 Marsh, Alec, 139 Marxism, 171 Mauro, Jason, 23 McCullogh, Gregory, 16, 43 Michaels, Walter Benn, 146–7, 158 Miller, David, 178, 181 n. 24 Milton, John, 51, 84 Mitchell, W.J.T., 128–30, 140, 142 Modernism, 95, 128, 150 Moldenhauer, Joseph, 59–61, 66, 182 n. 4, 183 n. 15 Monteiro, George, 56, 80, 182 n. 9 Mosher, Thomas, 144–45, 186 n. 6 Munro, Harold, 130 Name/naming, 11–50 failure of, 20–22, 42, 135, 139, 164, 175 gender and, 6, 21, 42–8, 71, 175

identity and, 1, 3, 11, 29, 81, 124, 150, 15 the poet and, 11, 26, 33, 37 riddle and, 108, 113, 124 search for origins and, 15, 20–1, 24, 27, 34, 42, 50, 175 signature and, 24–5, 27–30, 35, 80, 102, 126, 146, 150 specular name and, 27–42, 83, 150 see also basic problem; punning; fire and ice trope Nash, Ray, 144–45, 186 n. 6 Nelson, Cary, 172, 186 n. 5 The New England Primer, 152, 160–2 Nitchie, George, 121 The Notebooks of Robert Frost, 2, 186 n. 3 Oedipus, 97, 113 Ong, Walter, 189 n. 25 oral, 127, 130, 135,138–42, 150–3, 162–4, 174, 181 n. 21, 182 n. 2, n. 5, 186 n. 3, 187 n. 11, 189 n. 25, n. 27 see also proverbs; sentence sounds Oster, Judith, 28, 42, 45, 179 n. 3, 180 n. 9, 181 n. 21, 183 n. 12 Pagis, Dan, 93, 103 Palgrave, Francis, 37, 164, 172–3, 190 n. 36 see also The Golden Treasury Payne, Leonidas, 137, 164–5 Parini, Jay, 28, 157–8, 184 n. 22 Parks, Cecily, 181 n. 27 Paton, Priscilla, 31 Pearce, Roy, 179 n. 4 Pepicello, W.J., 99 Plato, 14, 35, 110, 119, 128, 166 Poirier, Richard, 3–5, 15, 17, 40, 65, 69, 71, 74, 95, 101, 122, 150, 179 n. 1, 180 n. 8, 183 n. 16, 185 n. 2 Polonius, 54–5



208

Pound, Ezra, 73, 127, 130, 139, 173, 184 n. 18, 186 n. 5, n. 7, 188 n. 17 pronouns Frost’s tendency to use as names, 16 –17, 23, 47, 111, 163 – 64 see also Russell; “basic problem” proverbs convention and, 3, 52, 55, 66, 75, 78–89, 91–3 definition of, 2, 52–4 naming and, 22, 51–4, 56, 61, 74, 79, 82, 93, 96 Franklin’s use of, 57–9, 61–2, 78–89, 91 gender and, 5, 53, 61–3, 70–1, 85–6, 88–9, 92–3 individual identity and, 52, 54–6, 150 oral and, 53, 55–6, 61–2, 67–8, 72, 80, 88, 138, 150, 182 n. 5 politics of, 53–4, 56, 83–4, 89, 114 search for origins and, 61–3, 66–9, 75, 93, 150 timelessness of, 55, 61–2, 67–8, 88–90 see also Emerson; Thoreau; home puns/punning, 24, 26, 28, 36, 38–9 49–50, 110, 114, 121–2, 136, 148–9, 153, 157–60, 169, 185 n. 15 see also naming/names quest for name, 15, 19, 21, 35, 41–2, 48, 50, 52, 122–4, 177, 183 in riddles, 100, 103, 107, 115–16, 122–3 Rainey, Lawrence, 133, 150–1 Rand, Ted, 142 Reaver, Russell, 66–7

209

Richardson, Mark, 21, 71, 74, 85, 127–8, 132–3, 144, 171, 175, 179 n. 1, n. 2, n. 5, n. 6, 180 n. 13, 185 n. 15, 186 n. 17, 190 n. 34 riddle definition of, 97–9 charm and, 101–2, 112–13, 115–17, 120, 123 name/naming in, 95, 119, 123–4, 153 lethal nature of, 97, 100, 103, 113, 124 poet as, 8, 103, 118, 123 as compared to proverb, 4, 95, 99, 117, 139, 153 science and technology in, 106–7, 111 social dynamics of, 98, 100–4, 112–18, 120–4 see also sphinx; visual; oral Roberts, Gary, 35–6 Rotella, Guy, 190 n. 31, 191 n. 38 Russell, Bertrand, 16, 47 Said, Edward, 187 n. 10 Scott, Charles, 118, 120 Sears, John, 38, 181 n. 22 Sedgwick, Ellery, 136 sentence sounds, 5, 26, 53, 71–2, 81, 126, 131–2, 139, 143–5, 150, 180 n. 7, 186 n. 3, 188 n. 17, 189 n. 27 Sergeant, Elizabeth Shepley, 145, 188 The Seven Arts, 48, 182 n. 28 Shaw, David, 184 n. 21 Sheehy, Donald, 190 n. 36 Shell, Marc, 128, 173 Silver, Ernest, 28 Sitar, James, 87, 183 n. 18 Smith, Virginia, 35 sonnet, 51, 63, 84, 107, 109–10, 167 sphinx, 95–7, 113, 118–19 Spiral Press, 5, 141, 145



INDEX

INDEX

Stanlis, Peter, 12, 40, 184–85 n. 2, n. 3 Stein, Gertrude, 127 Stein, Leo, 134 Stevens, Wallace, 95, 140, 165 Stroll, Avrum, 180 n. 15 Swedenberg, Emanuel, 138 Taylor, Archer, 52, 80–1, 83, 98 Taylor, Welford, 141, 155 telephone poems, 106, 110–11 Thompson, Lawrance, 19, 49, 76, 95, 101, 143, 151–3, 157, 171, 177–8, 182 n. 30, 185 n. 2, 186 n. 4 Thoreau, 1, 3, 7, 29–37, 53, 59–69, 75, 83, 138, 181 n. 24, 182 n. 5 see also names/naming; proverbs Timmerman, John, 64, 185 n. 8 Trees materiality and maternity of, 6, 8, 126, 158, 187 n. 13 Tuten, Nancy, 105 Untermeyer, Louis, 3, 72–3, 75–8, 89, 92, 183 n. 16 utopian inclinations, 71, 114, 166–9, 171–3

Vendler, Helen, 28 Visual, 5, 7, 99, 102–3, 105, 112–13, 115, 127–31, 139–43, 145–6, 150, 152, 157–8, 173, 86 n. 3, 188 n. 17 Wakefield, Richard, 189 n. 26 Watson, Douglas, 152 Whitman, Walter, 150, 179 n. 4, 185 n. 15 whole/hole, 110, 121–2, 169, 185 n. 13 see also puns/punning Wilbur, Richard, 98, 102–3, 115, 118, 185 n. 13 Will, Norman, 157, 188 n. 20 Williams, W.C., 139 Williamson, Craig, 100 Winnick, R.H, 151–3, 157, 178, 186 n. 4. Winnicot, D.W., 4, 101 Wolfe, Thomas, 137 Wordsworth, William, 71, 129 ut pictura poesis, 129, 153 Yeats, William Butler, 132, 171



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Names, Proverbs, Riddles, and Material Text in Robert Frost

Robert Frost

Gedichte von Robert Frost

Robert Frost (Critical Insights)

Collected Poems of Robert Frost

Frost, Robert - A Boy's Will

Collected Poems of Robert Frost

Collected Poems of Robert Frost

Complete Poems of Robert Frost

Frost, Robert - North Of Boston

Robert Frost and the Challenge of Darwin

Proverbs

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Beach Riddles (Silly Millies)

Tamil Proverbs in English

Frost

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Frost

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Frost

Frost

Frost

Frost

Frost

Names, Proverbs, Riddles, and Material Text in Robert Frost

Robert Frost

Gedichte von Robert Frost

Robert Frost (Critical Insights)

Collected Poems of Robert Frost

Frost, Robert - A Boy's Will

Collected Poems of Robert Frost

Collected Poems of Robert Frost

Complete Poems of Robert Frost

Frost, Robert - North Of Boston

Robert Frost and the Challenge of Darwin

Proverbs

About the Supplemental Text Material - all supplements

Beach Riddles (Silly Millies)

Tamil Proverbs in English

Frost

Frost

Frost

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Frost

Frost

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Frost

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