Robert Frost and a Poetics of Appetite (Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture)

CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN AMERICAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE Robert Frost and a Poetics of Appetite CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN AME...

Author: Katherine Kearns

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CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN AMERICAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE

Robert Frost and a Poetics of Appetite

CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN AMERICAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE Editor ERIC SUNDQUIST, VanderbUt University

Founding Editor ALBERT GELPI, Stanford University

Advisory Board NINA BAYM, University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana SACVAN BERCOVITCH, Harvard University ALBERT GELPI, Stanford University MYRA JEHLEN, University of Pennsylvania

CAROLYN PORTER, University of California, Berkeley ROBERT STEPTO, Yale University

TONY TANNER, King's College, Cambridge University Books in the series 75. Peter Halter, The Revolution in the Visual Arts and the Poetry of William Carlos Williams 74. Barry Ahearn, William Carlos Williams and Alterity 73. Bernard Rosenthal, Salem Story: Reading the Witch Trials of 16Q2 72. Jon Lance Bacon, Flannery O'Connor and Cold War Culture 71. Nathaniel Mackey, Discrepant Engagement, Dissonance, Cross-Culturality and Experimental Writing 70. David M. Robinson, Emerson's Pragmatic Turn 69. Cary Wolfe, The Limits of American Literary Ideology in Pound and Emerson 68. Andrew Levy, The Culture and Commerce of the American Short Story 67. Stephen Fredman, The Grounding of American Poetry: Charles Olson and the Emersonian Tradition 66. David Wyatt, Out of the Sixties: Storytelling and the Vietnam Generation 65. Thomas Strychacz, Modernism, Mass Culture, and Professionalism 64. Elisa New, The Regenerate Lyric: Theology and Innovation in American Poetry 63. Edwin S. Redkey, A Grand Army of Black Men: Letters from AfricanAmerican Soldiers in the Union Army, 1861-1865 62. Victoria Harrison, Elizabeth Bishop's Poetics of Intimacy 61. Edwin Sill Fussell, The Catholic Side of Henry James 60. Thomas Gustafson, Representative Words. Politics, Literature, and the American Language, 1776-1865 59. Peter Quartermain, Disjunctive Poetics: From Gertrude Stein and Louis Zukovsky to Susan Howe 58. Paul Giles, American Catholic Arts and Fictions: Culture, Ideology, Aesthetics 57. Ann-Janine Morey, Religion and Sexuality in American Literature 56. Philip M. Weinstein, Faulkner's Subject: A Cosmos No One Owns Continued on pages following the Index

Robert Frost and a Poetics of Appetite KATHERINE

KEARNS

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, Sao Paulo, Delhi Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521109987 © Cambridge University Press 1994 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 1994 This digitally printed version 2009 A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data Kearns, Katherine. Robert Frost and a poetics of appetite / Katherine Kearns. p. cm. - (Cambridge studies in American Literature and culture ; 76) Includes index. ISBN 0-521-44485-3 1. Frost, Robert, 1874-1963 - Criticism and interpretation. 2. Feminism and literature - United States - History - 20th century. 3. Sex (Psychology) in literature. 4. Appetite in literature. 5. Poetics. I. Title. II. Series. PS3511.R94Z7577 1994 81T.52-dc20 93-13986 CIP ISBN 978-0-521-44485-9 hardback ISBN 978-0-521-10998-7 paperback

"You see, Diamond," said the North Wind, "it is very difficult for me to get you to the back of the north wind, for that country lies in the very north itself, and of course I can't blow northwards." "Why not?" asked Diamond. "You little silly!" said North Wind. "Don't you see that if I were to blow northwards I should be South Wind, and that is as much as to say that one person can be two persons?" "But how can you ever get home at all, then?" "You are quite right - that is my home, though I never get farther than the outer door. I sit on the doorstep, and hear the voices inside. I am nobody there, Diamond." George MacDonald, At the Back of the North Wind

To Jonathan Maxwell Ballenger Nicholas Grady Woodfin Ballenger Grady Woodfin Ballenger

Contents

Acknowledgments

page ix

1

Introduction: The Serpent's Tail Irony: Teiresias's Gaze

i 32

2

Irony II: This Is Not a Pipe

56

3 4

Women: Dryads, Witches, and Hill Wives Eros: The Mischief Maker

86 107

5 6

Prosody: White Noise Lyricism: At the Back of the North Wind Conclusion: Out Far and in Deep

134 157 185

Notes Index

192 225

vn

Acknowledgments

One falls down the rabbit hole into Frost's poetry; once there, one waits and waits for Frost to manifest himself in some definitive and recognizable form (this accounts, perhaps, for my return throughout the book to Alice in Wonderland and Waiting for Godot). There is not much anyone else

can do to aid in this search. Certainly, I have no one but myself to blame for any insufficiencies this book might display. But help comes in many forms, and I have had a wealth of generous friends and colleagues and a wonderfully resilient family without whom this book would never have been written. I would like first to thank the three institutions with which I have been involved over the past few years and those institutions that graciously facilitated my research: the Louisiana School for Math, Science, and the Arts, Centenary College, and Northwestern State University have all been supportive of my work; I have been met with helpful courtesy by archivists at the Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscript Collection at Yale, the Frost Collection at the University of North Carolina, the Frost Collection at Dartmouth College, and the Frost Collection at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. The Louisiana School provided the impetus for this project; the article in American Literature from which the rest has come was the result of a lively senior class in American poetry, where the questions were so provocatively fresh and intelligent that my writing about the poetry became virtually inevitable. My colleagues in English at the Louisiana School provided encouragement, and my good friend and colleague, Arthur S. Williams, has been from the very beginning my most helpful and most reliable reader. My colleagues at Centenary College have also been indefatigable in their enthusiasm - Earle Labor and Lee Morgan have been consistently supportive of all of my professional efforts, and Steve Shelburne has provided many good insights in animated conversations over lunch. Because of Fleming Thomas's unshakable good humor, I have overused and abused Northwestern State Uniix

X

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

versity's interlibrary loan services for the past three years; without his help in tracking down the obscure, the illusive, and the new scholarship I could not have written this book. Robert Alost, once director of the Louisiana School and now president of Northwestern State University, has encouraged my work on his favorite poet, even after reading with chagrin my early essay on Frost's women. He is given to saying that I have ruined Frost for him, but that has not stopped him from being aggressively supportive of my writing. I want to thank, too, Alfred Bendixen, who knows the ropes and shares his information, John Auchard and Margaret Ketchum Powell, whose conversations and friendship and hospitality have been indispensable, William Harmon, whose reading of this manuscript was, as always, generous and helpful, Doris Betts and Lee Smith, whose good sense and good sense of humor keep all things in perspective. I thank Glenda Carter, who teaches by example the art of grace under pressure, and Mrs. Joyner, who taught me to read. I thank William Hunter for reclaiming territories overgrown and undercultivated. I thank Karen Cole, Tom Samet, Darrel Colson, Grady Ballenger, and my other friends and colleagues at the Louisiana Scholars' College whose disciplined minds and good example keep my excesses more or less in check. I want to thank Gwen Coker, who has made up for all of my considerable domestic inadequacies and has never failed in her energy, her good humor, or her kindness. Far removed geographically from their grandparents, my children have found their extended family in her. I want to thank Norman Grabo, whom I have never met but who, back in the summer of 1986, wrote me a wonderfully kind letter of encouragement about the Frost essay I had submitted to American Literature; he is not to be blamed for the direction my inquiries have taken, but he is to be thanked for an act of generosity that, quite simply and definitively, told me that I could, and should, continue writing. I want to thank Eric Sundquist for his good advice, Julie Greenblatt, Charles Berger, who gave up his anonymity barely in time to be thanked for the thorough reader's report that provided the critique and overview I needed to edit this book down from a monstrous 480 pages, and Mary Racine, whose copy editing was meticulous and heroic. I want to thank Sandra Gilbert, Susan Gubar, Khachig Tololyan, and Cary Nelson for their repeated efforts on my behalf, and Patty Roberts and Helaine Ross for their careful reading. During the 1992 School of Theory and Criticism at Dartmouth, Richard Rorty gave willingly of his time, and our conversation on poetry and pragmatism was particularly helpful for this project; Michael Riffaterre, incisive as always, directed his wit to the subject of Frost with good effect. My family - my two young sons, Max and Nicholas, and my husband, Grady Ballenger - have never faltered. They have had the good

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

XI

grace to be neither surprised nor offended nor pleased by the hours I spend writing; their cheerful indifference has normalized the process so that it has been an almost entirely pleasurable one. This book is very much about sons and daughters and mothers and fathers and husbands and wives, and what I have learned in writing about Frost's poetry has never been separable from what I have learned from my own family. I thank the Ballenger family, vast and extended as it is, for endless hospitality and encouragement. I thank my own father and mother, both of whom have taught me invaluable lessons, and my seven brothers and sisters. And to steal Donald Davidson's dedication to W. V. Quine, I thank my husband and my children, without whom not. I acknowledge permission to cite the following: Excerpts from The Poetry of Robert Frost, edited by Edward Connery Latham. Copyright © 1975 by Holt, Rinehart & Winston. Excerpts from The Selected Letters of Robert Frost, edited by Lawrance Thompson. Copyright © 1964 by Holt, Rinehart & Winston. Excerpts from Robert Frost: The Later Years, by Lawrance Thompson. Copyright © 1976 by Holt, Rinehart & Winston. Excerpts from Robert Frost: The Years of Triumph, by Lawrance Thompson. Copyright © 1964 by Holt, Rinehart & Winston. Chapter 3 is a revised and expanded version of an article titled " 'The Place Is the Asylum': Woman and Nature in Robert Frost's Poetry," which appeared in American Literature 59, no. 2 (May 1987): 190—210.

Introduction: The Serpent's Tail

And if man once thought that straight vision could allow him to escape the opaque barrier that every body presents to the light, now, in his impetuous desire, he is plunged into the darkness that a supposedly enlightened gaze had projected in its very rings and reversals. Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman

At a most fundamental and pervasive level, Frost's poetry documents a man's struggle with his own oppositional impulses of appetite and moderation. Enclosed, tersely resolved against histrionic self-display, a man seeks to keep the battle internal. But desire will be made manifest, and so this drama plays itself out correlatively in nature and in women and is enlivened by their natural propensity for capitulation. In the natural world where life rises out of death, fruition out of decay, and light out of darkness, the equivalent downward motion is inevitable: nature and women do not merely accept this gravitational urge but welcome it, inviting men to join them in the fall. Frost's poetry is a heroic assertion of conscious prosodic control placed against his relentlessly subversive awareness of internally derived appetitive impulse. His task is Sisyphean because he cannot remove himself from the source of his desires — enacted by externalities, they are projected from within. And for Frost there are no metaphysical truths to counterbalance the appetitive flux: if desire finds its mansion and its grave in an earthy physicality, metaphysics is a rifled and empty crypt ("A Masque of Reason" 1. 284). Frost's model of control may be seen then to exceed the specifically Christian or Puritan terms he often chooses to employ, as any external "systematic," religious, political, psychological, or otherwise, lacks the compelling vitality of the desirous self: control has to do more secularly with the violent expense of self through the mechanics of a desire that is selfgenerating and is both the reward and the punishment of being a man. Frost's concern is the interdependent physical, ethical, and spiritual con-

2

ROBERT FROST AND A POETICS OF APPETITE

sequences to the self of that virile and necessary appetite when it is brought to expense.1 He maintains in "The Constant Symbol" that "Strongly spent is synonymous with kept," but this is true only as long as the energy is poured into a shape, made into a product - a poem, a piece of work, a career.2 If it is not "kept" within some intact form, however, it is lost. Heautocratic integrity, the internalized deployment of appetite in the service of a virilely informed moderation - or, in poetic terms, the internalized deployment of inspirative "wildness" or delight within the virile containment of a resolute prosodic structure - is a man's best and only goal.3 The poem reifies that most exquisitely precarious balance, as it arouses the poet to his own powers of control. For Frost, anything that expends itself in generation necessarily winds down acceleratively to death, but unlike nature and unlike women, men are possessed of the (potential) rationality by which they might imagine themselves to hold this process in abeyance. Frost's implications about "femaleness" extend far beyond gender, as he suggests that women signal a condition of barrierlessness; in this he is no more than strictly traditional.4 By nature uncontrolled, women are formally compromised in Frost's poetry so that they may, like nature, decompose and reform perpetually: pregnancy, that most singular transformation that begins with the abdomen and extends inexorably to encompass the entire body, is only the first (and frequently the most deferred) metamorphosis in Frost's world, where women emerge as trees, flowers, and fireflies, as dryads and witches and hill wives. Mothers, and mother earth, are possessed of the immense power both to alter and to be altered by what is within them, and one's rootedness to the maternal source remains a conduit through which substance burgeons and subsides. Men, holding themselves as antithetical to this regenerative anarchy, reject the metamorphic capacities that allow for them an eternal recurrence, and it becomes thus all the more essential that they throw up the barriers which, even as they are disintegrating, might slow the inevitable lapse. Women, like seeds or fairy shrimp, may go through periods of quiescence, so that for example the dryad of "Paul's Wife" may remain locked inside her tree as a dry pith until someone should happen to lay that pith beside the pool where it can "drink." Women may, like Paul's wife or like the mother/maple of "Maple," die in one form and be born again in another, so that when the dryad goes out "like a firefly" one can only imagine her reemerging embodied as something else. But men are not formed for transformation, and only a man who rejects some part of his masculinity becomes something other than a man. Thus in "The Subverted Flower" it is not desire alone that brings the male figure to his state of bestial humiliation but also, paradoxically, his sexual ineffectuality. It is his unmanning to a state of uncontrol that makes him a beast. Succumbing to

INTRODUCTION:

THE SERPENT

S TALE

3

a rapacious appetite for a defined "other" while being thwarted in consummation, he is a figure of frustrated impotence. Formal rigor becomes an imperative in this vision where one must be both virile and moderate, for what a man loses is lost forever. Resonating always with his vision of natural unrest, Frost's poetry articulates this most pervasive irony: that desire itself is circular and selfgenerating, like the seasons or like the flow of blood in the body, but that succumbing to one's metamorphic, appetitive "femaleness" means an irrevocable loss of self into the shapeless void. Poured into that which is ever-changing, this expense becomes "substance lapsing unsubstantial; / [Into] The universal cataract of death / That spends to nothingness." Desire threatens a most essential violation of the intact system, for while it may be internally generated and with effort safely diverted, it seeks outlets: "Oh, blood will out. It cannot be contained," warns the speaker of "The Flood. " 5 Yet most outward manifestations necessitate that autonomy be suspended, if only momentarily, and that there be a dangerous breach in the fortified self. "Eyes seeking the response of eyes" are, in "All Revelation," the apertures that most compromise the global autonomy of the geode.6 Expent, that which is, as "West-Running Brook" has it, "time, strength, tone, light, life, and love," is felt to "seriously, sadly run[ ] away, / To fill the abyss's void with emptiness." Contained, enclosed, this energy becomes like the brook channeled under the city, a new potency, a radical and even potentially sinister force to keep others from work and sleep, but released, it becomes a movement toward nothingness. For Frost, the poetic structure becomes the tightly sealed receptacle for desire, a formal containment for the witchery of the inspirative possession implicit in the poetic act itself. The figure in "A Servant to Servants" of the madman in his cell of hickory poles, strumming against the bars and talking of love things, resonates throughout the poetry, for within each prosodic cage the drama of appetite against containment is played out. So it is that for Frost the figure a poem makes is the same for love. It is not insignificant that Frost's famous correlation between love and the poem makes the poetic act virtually inextricable from the sexual, that "love," as the second term, seems the focus of the analogy: The figure a poem makes. It begins in delight and ends in wisdom. The figure is the same as for love. No one can really hold that the ecstasy should be static and stand still in one place. It begins in delight, it inclines to the impulse, it assumes direction with the first line laid down, it runs a course of lucky events, and ends in a clarification of life . . . in a momentary stay against confusion. (Prose 18) The "ecstasy" of which the analogy speaks remains ambiguously located (is it love or the poem to which he refers?) until "the first line laid down"

4


reveals that the indeterminate "it" is the poem which has reasserted itself. And even here, the line is "laid down," bedded like (instead of?) a lover, and what comes of this is a birth of form, "a clarification of life . . . in a momentary stay against confusion." The "poem" becomes, by Frost's semantics, not merely like love, but itself a form of virile, controlled loving. One could indeed say that Frost's insistence that metaphor is the whole of thinking might be tropologically too general, nearly a subterfuge, for one comes to feel instead that, for Frost, it is all metonymy: that the whole of his thinking about poetry, about women, about nature is felt by him as so many contiguities of his own desirous flesh. "The philosophy of the part for the whole; skirting the hem of the goddess" is not, despite Frost's claim, synecdoche so much as metonymy, extensions of the expanding parameters of self.7 The poetic act itself generates that "wonder of unexpected supply" which guarantees that the system of arousal is rheostatic, renewable. "For me the initial delight is in the surprise of remembering something I didn't know I knew," Frost says. "I am in a place, in a situation, as if I had materialized from cloud or risen out of ground. There is a glad recognition of the long lost and the rest follows. Step by step the wonder of unexpected supply keeps growing" (Prose 19). Whether the view is Apollonian (materializing from cloud) or chthonic (rising out of ground), such an experience is intensely pleasurable, productive of delight, gladness, and wonder. It makes one feel a giant, making (phallic) order that is like "the straight crookedness of a good walking stick" (Prose 19). According to the poet of "How Hard It Is to Keep from Being King When It's in You and in the Situation" (one might substitute "Poet" for "King" and examine the opportunistic overtones of this title), this "perfect moment of unbafflement," the climactic recognition of one's own capacity to exploit the exact affinities of a good simile, comes from some potently energizing place: "It may be wine, but much more likely love - / Possibly just well-being in the body" (11. 242-3). One looks for a name for this bodily translation that takes one at once into the clouds and up out of the ground, that makes one feel ten feet tall, that feels like Bacchic wine and like love: that fulfills, in other words, the figure of "love" by a simultaneous spiritual and physical transformation. This is an autonomously derived pleasure that, named after love, comes to generate love's terms, comes, in fact, to seem like love. Tautological, this is the "form of forms," "The serpent's tail stuck down the serpent's throat," indeed. 8 One thing leads to another and on around. This is a kind of autoerotics, perhaps. Perceiving linguistic pleasure in terms of sex, and sex in terms of the disciplined wildness of the poetic inscription, one performs at a most essential level that unification between discourse and act. Involving a mastery of "wildness," Frost's po-

INTRODUCTION: THE SERPENT S TALE

5

etics locates power in the one who can both arouse that wildness and contain it (Prose 18). The cunning tongue and the crafty pen come to derive what Foucault describes in The History of Sexuality as "pleasure in the truth of pleasure, the pleasure of knowing that truth, of discovering it and exposing it, the fascination of seeing it and telling it, of captivating and capturing others by it, of confiding it in secret, of luring it out in the open - the specific pleasure of the true discourse on pleasure. " 9 That Frost began to write poetry just as what Foucault documents as a Scientia Sexualis was being codified and disseminated is perhaps not inconsequential to this habit of mind; that he wrote toward the end of an era in which medicine "wove an entire network of sexual causality" to explain every malady and physical disturbance would perhaps explain the sexual etiology implicit in his seemingly nonironic appropriation of the art/love analogy to verify an impulse perceived oppositionally in terms of creation and annihilation.10 However it may be, Frost may be said to generate his own heat within a self-enclosed system, talking about love, confiding it in secret through his buried allusions to infidelity and arousal, luring it out in the open in his stories of men and the women who leave them, captivating and capturing others by his vision of an earth at once so generative, so dangerous, and so inviting. He is a master of the sexual innuendo, which is always seemingly belied by the hearty voice that utters it. It is not accidental or insignificant that a sexual metaphor dominates his vision of nature, for it is in the metaphor-making process that pleasure resides. "The whole thing is performance and prowess and feats of association," he says, as if to suggest that mental gymnastics is exactly that "performance" which may be most lovingly sustained, most tantalizingly obscured, most subtly deployed.11 In its most delicate construction the poem is a classical figure of love for Frost, Platonic in its articulation of an erotics deriving from the staunch and upright soul. It becomes, as in "The Silken Tent," a structure of unparalleled harmonic balance whereby the "She" that begins the poem is assimilated to become the body of the text: She is as in a field a silken tent At midday when a sunny summer breeze Has dried the dew and all its ropes relent, So that in guys it gently sways at ease, And its supporting central cedar pole, That is its pinnacle to heavenward And signifies the sureness of the soul, Seems to owe naught to any single cord, But strictly held by none, is loosely bound By countless silken ties of love and thought To everything on earth to compass round,

6


And only by one's going slightly taut In the capriciousness of summer air Is of the slightest bondage made aware. It is not the woman, not the tent, but the poetic voice talking this erotically inscribed analogy into being that is foregrounded - as Poirier says, "The elicited suspense waits upon how this voice, with a power of formulation at once flexible, scrupulous, and grand, will conduct itself through the rest of the poem."12 The female aspect, the silken tissue, is supported interiorly and thus transformed to "tent" by the phallic "central cedar pole" that "signifies the sureness of the soul." As is proper to the classical view, the feminine is realized only through the masculine;13 without the pole the "tent" would be "silk" or "cloth" but not serviceable as such - not available to be made into something else - in its state as "untent." Such an integral unification of desire and spiritual certitude, where the "female" silk is tethered gently by lines (of poetry and of rope) and at the same time exalted upward by the central pole, is seldom reiterated in Frost's poetry. The poem's extended conceit, a notably "masculine" device of linguistic and intellectual virtuosity, echoes formally the harmonious but clearly contrived tension between intellect, spirit, and flesh.14 The single, extended, perfectly balanced sentence lasts and does not deflate, even as it embraces itself in interlocking rhymes, even as it proceeds so rhythmically to the delicious double entendre of its final lines, even as it urges the tongue to the rustling virtuosity of "capriciousness" while holding the taut couplet in check. Yet it is not the tent, which is both yielding and, in its yielding, strong, but the house in stages of disintegration that is the prevailing edifice in Frost's poetry, and for the most part, like the houses that fall, the "soul" may not remain sufficiently upright to counterbalance the gravitational pull. Frost's speakers may yearn upward to heaven for spiritual and intellectual latitude or they may, as in "To Earthward," wish for an earthly love that pulls them down to sensual awareness, but they tend to represent the two directions as antithetical to each other so that spirit and flesh cannot be reconciled. As "Bond and Free" so clearly articulates, Love is in bondage to earth "to which she clings / With hills and circling arms about," while Thought "cleaves the interstellar gloom" toward heaven. The poetic "lines" that join soul to body are seldom so balanced as to remove the sense of bondage to earthly need; another such moment of desire as found in "The Silken Tent" manifests itself instead as "A LineStorm Song," showing passion as lines of storms - poetic and atmospheric - that destroy equilibrium in a "rout" of wind and rain that bring the sea back to reflood the "ancient lands" long since dry. Such passion not merely silences the lyric birds, conventional singers of love, but obliterates them:


7

The birds have less to say for themselves In the wood-world's torn despair Than now these numberless years the elves, Although they are no less there: All song of the woods is crushed like some Wild, easily shattered rose. Come, be my love in the wet woods, come, Where the boughs rain when it blows. Compared with this orgasmic fantasy - "Come, be my love in the wet woods, come," "Come forth into the storm and rout" - "The Silken Tent" is an unprecedented moment that is not repeated again, and the ephemerality of its vision is reified in the silken tissue it hoists in place of the stolid boards and nails, the heavy doors, and the echoing stairwells erected in other poems to withstand the deluge. Here virility informs moderation, so that the feminine is penetrated and in fact created by the masculine, making the poem a rare moment of harmonic aphrodisia and of control. Rare, because however pleasurable such a perpetually renewable source of aphrodisia as is intrinsic to a dialectic of arousal may be, it is also frequently problematic, as pleasure itself has come to be, through the endless process of confession to which it has been subjected, almost inevitably productive of guilt and anxiety.15 Desire, guiltily perceived, opens a man to abandonment, violation, and pain, and as Frost discovers and exposes, sees and tells about it, sexuality is made to confess to its own pathological nature. It may be projected into egressing women or made to reside in their often-noted capacities for obsession, hysteria, and lying, so that women become, in effect, conduits to carry off a form of sexual madness. 16 This leaves men to enact their desires as husbandmen of the more available earth, but this too emerges frequently in terms that make pleasure inseparable from and finally dependent upon pain. The speaker of "The Bonfire," who leans in to rub out the wildfire and rises, climactically, scorched and ecstatic (and speaks his delight in a metrical pun as "walking light on air in heavy shoes") is a figure in this dynamic. The speaker of "To Earthward" assumes the earth as lover, and he documents the maturation of this love in terms of an increasing desire for death, a movement from air to earth: "Love at the lips was touch / As sweet as I could bear; / And once that seemed too much; / I lived on air," he begins. The speaker recalls the flower- and musk-laden air that once could, alone and unaided, tantalize and arouse him, crossing his flesh so that he felt the "swirl and ache," the "sting" of love. This vertigo, these aches and stings, were in the beginning "strong sweets" enough, but his appetites quickly become more tangible: "Now no joy but lacks salt, / That is not dashed with pain / And weariness and fault; / I crave the

8


stain / Of tears, the aftermark / Of almost too much love." ("One of the greatest changes my nature has undergone is of record in To Earthward and indeed elsewhere for the discerning," Frost says; Letters 482.) Indeed, the words "love at the lips" which begin this poem suggest that the act of speaking out this drama, of saying love outward from the lips instead of breathing it in, becomes a necessary stimulus. And certainly the poet must have his listeners; he must indulge in the voyeurism of knowing that love from his lips, discovered in the "wild space," is bringing others to pleasure. He must sense that to guarantee pleasure one must, as Barthes says in The Pleasure of the Text, "seek out this reader . . . without knowing where he is. A site of bliss is then created. It is not the reader's 'person' that is necessary . . . , it is this site: the possibility of a dialectic of desire, of an unpredictability of bliss: the bets are not placed, there can still be a game."17 Passion arising from the autonomous self, crossing others autonomously and blurring all conventional heterosexual delimitations for the giving and receiving of erotic pleasure, it proceeds inevitably toward the bittersweet pleasures of masochism, from rose petal to the pungently penetrative "sweet of bitter bark / And burning clove." This figure of "To Earthward" has been so synesthetically alive to nature and to the language that describes his interaction with it that he has needed no human other to awaken desire. This vulnerability proves, as always, to be a problematic bliss, from the beginning described in terms of malaise and pain. The inevitable coital completion of his "love" in its late stages is a fantasy of death in which the speaker is prostrate on the ground: "the earth as rough / To all my length." This speaker who now craves "the stain / Of tears, the aftermark / Of almost too much love" epitomizes the figures throughout Frost's poetry who are informed by a desire that colors and shapes the landscape, for he has become a roue whose engagement with the world's body has been variable but so long-lived that joy must be salted with pain. Invoking a gravity so profound that it will join him to the earth, he is tempted by dissolution. Telling about desire - "love at the lips" - is itself intrinsically problematic, for confession is imbued with a double sense of power and selfabasement: it is a discourse at once pleasurable and painful, and one becomes dependent on the other. No matter how much the confessing agent knows or has done, or how well he has done it, no matter how subtly or delicately the details are deployed, it is the listener who is felt to be invested with the power to judge and to condemn.18 Thus Frost's more consistent speaking model of arousal is not a harmonious Platonism in which desire and its articulation rest in perfect balance, but a more volatile dynamic whereby power is always receding from the speaking voice to locate itself elsewhere: the most literal model by which


9

this truth is illustrated is in the husband's final, impotent words in "Home Burial," spoken as his silent wife is about to leave the house yet again. But this paradoxical display - as desire is articulated it undermines itself — is reified consistently throughout Frost's poetry. One sees the pleading man of "The Subverted Flower" reduced in one elided movement to a bestial state of sheer physical dominance, able to "pounce to end it all," and to a position of nondominance, forced to all fours and off the field. At a more subtle level, one sees a persistent image pattern in which a speaker articulates himself in relationship to some vast, wordless power as a figure of impotence. "On Going Unnoticed," in which the speaker is attuned to the mean and pallid coral root clinging to the skirt of a regal and utterly indifferent tree, is a type: variously, speakers take on the forms of a prudent, priggishly self-justifying woodchuck, a flower beaten by the wind, a listless leaf whose ambitions tofly,driven by storm, it admits to be delusory. Speaking, figures are frequently made to confess to their own impotence, to call themselves "too absent-spirited to count" ("Desert Places"), to see themselves as windy-headed and concerned with turbulent "inner" weather ("Tree at My Window"), to announce themselves self-pityingly as "in my life alone" ("Bereft"). Yet it is not merely those lovelorn or depressed speakers succumbing to the confessional impulse who may be found to have subverted themselves through language, for by Frost's terms the power to undermine any speaking voice lies within the venereal force of language itself. True discourse is pleasure, like love, and as such it is always threatening barriers, urging one toward lapse, moving one toward promiscuity (Prose 39).19 Thus the symbol of the lyric voice, the bird, appears throughout Frost's poetry as at best a compromised figure who "knows in singing not to sing" ("The Oven Bird"). Made to subscribe to Frost's ambivalently declined "sound of sense," it is subsequently burdened, a virtual parody of the romantically conceived lyricist as it consistently represents itself or is represented as powerless, flightless, and lost. As these symbolic birds suggest, it is not ever, in Frost's poetry, within the speakers' scope to seize and hold on to power, which is lost either quite specifically by admission or is taken tacitly by the poet through the more subtle devices of irony. Even the most Apollonian-seeming voices within the poetry may be seen as afflicted. Always subject to ironic subversion, they tend also to betray themselves through their patterns of allusion and imagery. The subtexts frequently reveal darker and far more chthonic preoccupations than the unruffled surfaces would appear to hold, and it comes to seem that utterance for Frost inevitably manifests itself as some version of appetitive impulse. The naked madman upstairs raving about love things, the murdered lover's skeleton sashaying from cellar to attic: these are merely logical extensions of Frost's disabled speakers. Power

10


and control must then reside in form, in sound shaped into prosodic compactness; the bodies within the poem are inevitably compromised while the body of the poem is solid, immune to the hysterias of failed love, tautly disposed in "living lines" so vascularly alive that "they bleed when you cut them" ("but if the body is firm and resistant, if internal space is dense, organized, and solidly heterogeneous in its different regions, the symptoms of hysteria are rare and its effects will remain simple").20 Thus Frost may be said to come close to having it both ways - talking about pleasure, taking pleasure in the truth of pleasure, while holding himself apart prosodically from pleasure's perceived consequences of anarchy and dissolution. Frost's is a world where consummation is always productive of conflict and profound ambivalence, however: this is a dynamic fully articulated in (the "war poem") "The Bonfire" by the man who is aroused to put out the deadly and beautiful fire that he himself has set. That the moment of ecstatic triumph comes when the wildfire is rubbed and beaten out - that it is a moment utterly ambiguous in its conflation of orgasm and controlled stoppage - suggests this ambivalence. Marked in the dramas between men and women by childlessness, infidelity, divorce, abandonment, and madness, marriage is that state of consummated "love" which is virtually guaranteed to reify the dissolution of certainties: in "The Thatch" the symbolic value of the abandoned marital house whose thatched roof deteriorates to let rain into the "upper chamber floors" can hardly be underestimated, as it suggests a correlative state of wounded disorientation in the man who has left it. In "Bereft" that "porch's sagging floor" upon which the abandoned speaker stands suggests an equivalent unmanning, for consummation leaves one's footing uncertain. Marked in the dramas between man and nature, there is often that tendency toward abasement one sees in "To Earthward," for if men penetrate the earth, plowing and sowing seeds, they are also brought low by it. When enacted rather than transfixed as in "The Silken Tent," desire frequently, then, becomes reciprocal with death, contiguously oriented so that the dark and lovely woods simultaneously invite penetration and promise annihilation, equally easeful conditions. It is not fear of death in "Stopping by the Woods" that keeps the man from the woods, but the promises he has to keep. His duty as a man is to resist that generous invitation to nothingness, and yet appetite is felt to extend its seductive invitation even from the grave. Frost so frequently makes this deathdesire consummation explicit, he so completely adheres to the synonymity of "husbanding" both women and soil, he so punctuates his landscapes with cellar holes, graves, and tunnel mouths, that he may be said, to paraphrase his own metaphor, to hurl the symbolic value ahead


II

of him "to pave the future with against the day when we may want to strike a line of purpose across it for somewhere" (Prose 19). Enriched by love's exceedingly complex terms, Frost's poetry always conforms to his ambiguous disclaimer about "Stopping by the Woods": "It means enough without its being pressed. "21 Thus it is that the husband's plunging spade is said to be felt by the grieving mother of "Home Burial," who cannot herself penetrate the space into which her son has gone, as a brutal conflation of sexual and agricultural terms, the replanting of her husband's seed in the grave (and one who has read "Putting in the Seed" will see the macabre logic here).22 One who resists the intellectual tyranny of this standard sexual metaphor will greet such a reading first with skepticism - is it this particular spade in this particular grave that is sexually declined or all such digging? But then one sees that the sexual resonance is clearly meant to be there, reinforced internally by, among other things, the explicit sexual frustration the husband articulates, and reinforced canonically again and again.23 One may discern the seeds of nihilism within a dynamic in which a problematic, always potentially pathological "love" is the figure a poem makes, for the expense one yearns for is that which is most felt to recapitulate uncertainty and hasten annihilation. If "love" and the poem are the same figure, they share equally in Frost's sense that one can know nothing; whether the vicissitudes of love may be said to reify Frost's epistemological skepticism or to cause it (and on this I would not venture to make a guess), love is a figure for Frost of a state of unknowing. One never knows when one will be left, one never knows the beloved loves, and, in that vein, one never knows oneself with absolute certainty as the father or, by upward extension, as the son. Knowing one's mother is to know the very personification of unreason; not knowing one's father, a man cannot, perhaps, know God. In any event, the very figure of love is uncertainty and as such it mimics or mirrors the nihilism implicit in Frost's system of unstable irony. "The Silken Tent," with its Platonic deployment of symbols in a carefully contrived conceit, is a model of love and of poetry impossible to sustain in Frost's restless world of movement and metamorphosis. As it "signifies the sureness of the soul," it is a unique (and artificial) construction in Frost's landscape: as Poirier points out, it brings signification very much to the fore, and this as much as anything else, in the context of Frost's pervasive, unstable ironies, makes it proclaim itself as a poetic tour de force, a declaration of "performance and prowess and feats of association. "24 It is a derivative fantasy predicated on a classical model, and it disguises by its use of the tensile rope and silken cloth the fact that it is so firmly and necessarily staked. It is a vision as static as the figures on Keats's Grecian urn; the tissue, pushed taut by the pole, will nonetheless remain always just before being

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rent, just as Keats's female remains a "still unravish'd bride." Loosed, the silk would fly away in the summer breeze and the central pole fall. And this more nearly approximates for Frost the consequences of "modern love," which as his references to Meredith's sonnet sequence would suggest, is a complex of pathological appetite, shame, and infidelity: "Love, love. Modern love is different than ancient love," he says with finality. "Anything else?"25 Frost's sense that a man must resist that which is irresistible - that the "discipline" he needs most is "to learn his own submission to unreason" ("A Masque of Reason" 1. 210) - rests on a knowledge that the terms by which he must live are mutually exclusive. "Modern love" is merely a (near-comic) "tragic" oxymoron that stands for this state of chronic ambivalence. Modernity, with its satyric bifurcation between soul and body, is better represented by Silenus the satyr than Phaedrus the philosophical lover, and, indeed, the allusion implicit in "The Demiurge's Laugh" articulates Silenus's sardonic nihilism: one who is vouchsafed true knowledge of what is best and most desirable for a man desires nothingness most of all, and the grave is yet another hole toward which one is drawn. As this speaker says, he has heard in the demon's laughter all he needed to hear: It was far in the sameness of the wood; I was running with joy on the Demon's trail, Though I knew what I hunted was no true god. It was just as the light was beginning to fail That I suddenly heard - all I needed to hear: It has lasted me many and many a year. The Demon who rises from his "wallow" to laugh, brushing dirt from his eyes, is Frost's Silenus, whose act of wallowing in the earth is encoded with information about his wantonly appetitive nature and his association with death and whose refusal to articulate what in other incarnations he so clearly knows suggests that his own nihilism is above all importuning. In Nietzsche's telling of the myth, Silenus, sought out by King Midas for his wisdom, finally laughs and divulges this truth: "Oh, wretched ephemeral race, children of chance and misery, why do you compel me to tell you what it would be most expedient for you not to hear? What is best of all is utterly beyond your reach: not to be born, not to be, to be nothing. But the second best for you is - to die soon. " 26 A man is virilely moderate, rationally controlled or he is nothing, and by the terms of the metaphorical construct to which Frost adheres he must fail these requirements. Aspiring to reason, he finds himself only surrounded by the invitations to unreason whose wildness resonates with his own - Silenus cannot be made to speak but only to laugh, and yet "I knew well what the Demon meant," the speaker says. And because for

I N T R O D U C T I O N : THE SERPENT S TALE

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Frost there are no external systems of reason that similarly resonate, "Passions," as he says, "spin the plot."27 "Disciplined submission to unreason," yet another of Frost's faux oxymorons whereby the terms are and remain mutually exclusive, suggests oppositional possibilities: the disciplined submission to unreason that is madness or the disciplined submission to unreason that is nihilism.28 To believe that all ages are equally dark for the soul is incipient nihilism, and to be bedazzled and misled by that darkness - to see it as the light of truth - is to be mad. Frost, seeing the difference, puts his madman to shout in a hickory cage while remaining himself quietly apprised of Silenus's wisdom, by which death is the logical correlative to nothingness and, equally so, its antidote. The immediacy with which a man might capitulate to his own uncontrol is mirrored by Frost's urgently metamorphic landscape, where a dry pith becomes of an instant an explicitly seductive woman like Paul's "wife." ("It slowly rose a person, rose a girl, / Her wet hair heavy on her like a helmet, / Who, leaning on a log, looked back at Paul.") The predilection to fall is inherent in every season, in every age, and in both the child and the man, and the markers of that propensity to capitulation make themselves inescapably manifest. This is a truth potently synthesized in the erotic image of the maple/(mother/daughter) of "Maple," who is caught at the very instant when death and desire are the same figure. "Standing alone with smooth arms lifted up, / And every leaf of foliage she'd worn / Laid scarlet and pale pink about her feet," "she" the dead mother/unfaithful wife reinscribed in scarlet at the moment of her fall - is at once seductive and cautionary. "Nothing Gold Can Stay" epitomizes this minimalist, reductionist vision, as it uses its terms " gold," "leaf," "Eden" - with the economy of one who sees mortality as a condition that does not accrue but that comes fully formed in the very act of generation: "Nature's first green is gold, / Her hardest hue to hold. / Her early leaf's a flower; / But only so an hour. / Then leaf subsides to leaf. / So Eden sank to grief, / So dawn goes down to day. / Nothing gold can stay."29 When the poet says, "Nature's first green is gold," he could mean the gold to be a golden flower or even golden pollen - the beginning - or autumn leaves - the end. It is either way "the hardest hue to hold" in a cycle whose downward revolution begins at inception. Even such immutable stuff as gold is predestined to fail - to go green like baser metals - in an appetitive nature where "leaf subsides to leaf" and golden dawn "goes down to day." Nature's gold may appear in pre-birth or pre-seed as golden pollen, it may appear as glorious flowers, or it may appear in miserly sterility in golden fall leaves, but early or late it represents a moment of capitulation to the generative instinct that turns flowers to leaves on their way to fall or dawn to day on

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its way to night. Conflating humans and their seasonal correlatives, he analogizes that "So Eden sank to grief" through the death embodied in its generative nature. "Eden" is that place where nature and human nature were made inextricably mortal in one appetitive moment. Such a genesis is the beginning of the book, and it predicts the end, for as "leaf subsides to leaf" the story is finished before it has begun. Frost's reduction of the terms leading graveward leaves a gaping vacancy between birth and death, between health and sickness, between being and nothingness: with degenerative "gold" as equally and simultaneously both the pollen and the dead leaf, the middle is excluded, becoming a gravelike gap. The mother of "Home Burial" says angrily, "From the time one is sick to death / One is alone, and he dies more alone." This is a statement whose conviction and impact go far beyond the particulars of infant mortality and far beyond the autobiographical specificities of its source.30 Born "sick," we are all then sick to death, or sick with death. In this equation, we are born utterly and irrevocably alone and stay that way: the illusion of love as commonalty resolves itself into just such morality plays as Frost transcribes. This is a vision that breeds either stoicism (the man's tack) or hysteria (the domestically confined woman's), and it may be felt to predict the hysterical stoicisms of non-Frostian absurdist characters who articulate quite clearly the nihilism that Frost disguises in homely realisms.31 One thinks of Pozzo's furious assertions in "Waiting for Godot": "Have you not done tormenting me with your accursed time! It's abominable! . . . One day he went dumb, one day I went blind, one day we'll go deaf, one day we were born, one day we shall die, the same day, the same second, is that not enough for you? . . . They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it's night once more."32 The mother of "Home Burial" one of the "them" to whom Pozzo refers - is viscerally apprised of her profound isolation and the well of nothingness over which she is suspended. Having given birth astride the grave, she feels a part of herself already interred. She communicates her isolation, however, in a voice that seems, almost literally by virtue of her sudden pronoun change, not her own. The impact of her sibylline pronouncement is to suggest that what she knows, Frost authorizes with equivalent conviction. The movement toward the grave begins at birth and the best one can do in this schema is to be a man about it. Nietzsche predicts as a consequence of the nihilistic sense of meaninglessness a commensurately strengthened faith in moral action.33 For Frost, heautocratic integrity is the only means by which one might sustain even the illusion of order. Frost's vision of birth is that it is under sentence of death, and his attitudes toward both maternity and children are infected with the dark sense that one is conceived by and into the very act of falling. If the


15

creative generation of a poem may be stabilized by form, its parturience removes it from the poet's control and gives it its own unpredictable life; like the child, it will either grow (linguistically) beyond the bounds of even the strictest paternalistic order or, like the infant son of "Home Burial," will fail to fill that order. It is not just the anguished mother of "Home Burial" who feels such a parturition as she has endured almost as a form of amputation. In Frost's terms, for a man to expend himself into children is inevitably to lose them - and the part of himself they are — to the mother/earth/grave. They belong, by definition, to the maternal/female camp and become, thus, throughout the poetry markers of an intense ambivalence.34 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. By implication, it is only children who hold a woman to her domestic life and keep her even nominally to her marital/sexual responsibilities.35 Without children to keep her home, Estelle of "The Housekeeper" runs away from her childish husband (11. 170-5), as does the Hill Wife. Her child dead, the woman of "Home Burial" cannot resist the door to the outside while she rejects the door into the bedroom. Yet for all of his poems about domestic life, Frost seldom envisions children except as flawed products of sin or sadness. Just as his marital relationships are so frequently ambiguous, so too is paternity, where the tenuous nature of the claims a father may make to his sons is reinforced by the theme of cuckolding (this is a potent reification of that "anxiety of influence" which complicates the genealogy of the poem). In at least two of the infrequent poems in which there are children within a marriage, the implication of the wife's infidelity is quite clear - as Frost points out in "New Hampshire," the "dawn people" who furnished Adam's sons with wives were not given to "behaving Puritanly." (Job says, in "A Masque of Reason," "Oh, Lord, let's not go back to anything." God answers, snappishly, "Because your wife's past won't bear looking into? -" [11. 115-16].) In "How Hard It Is to Keep from Being King" King Darius is told that his real father was the cook, a fact the Frostian speaker knows unequivocally by virtue of his command of "quintessences," among them the quintessences of horses, men, and women. While this triad shares traditionally the capacity for lust, presumably it is the quintessence of a woman to be unfaithful and duplicitous: certainly it is the quintessence of romance, for "all romantic comes from the threecornered love affair. . . . You had Mars, see, Mars, Aphrodite and Hephaestus. That's a three-cornered love affair, and that comes clear down into all the romantic times of later. Two and one. . . ."36 Thus, for Frost the same living artifact - the child - that may stand as proof of a man's (sanctioned) virility always stands simultaneously as potential evi-

16


dence of his emasculation, just as does the poem stand to testify to a man's dubious status as "poet." Children, hard to come by and hard to keep in Frost's world, are thus thoroughly implicated in the fall. Not there, children are divisive elements. There, or having been there, they are divisive elements. The son in "The Witch of Coos," for example, may be felt to have caused the death of a man who might have been his father. He is himself quietly mad, and it is unclear whether this visitation of the sins of the father comes from his mother's husband or from her lover, both "fathers" having shown their own corruptive natures through enacted desire with the wanton witch. Though the witchmother has herself spawned only part of his dementia, she has nurtured and approved it over the years. Ultimately the source of the son's compromised rationality does not matter, for in Frost's poetry almost all male-female bonds are problematic, so that bitterness or lovelessness within wedlock might taint as surely as unlicensed passion. Suggestions of this problematic dynamic infiltrate the poetry at every level, from the most explicit to the most subtle, from the comically rendered story of the son who sells his father into slavery in "How Hard It Is to Keep from Being King," to the allusion to Ahaz, who made a burnt offering of his son, in "New Hampshire."37 Children may not be born innocent into Frost's fallen world but only unknowing, and they become, thus, vessels in which inevitable corruption may be measured. As Job says in "A Masque of Reason," in all the not-knowing humans must endure - not knowing what we are or who we are, not knowing one another, not knowing God, not even knowing what time it is relative to some illusion of apocalypse or salvation - "It comes down to a doubt about the wisdom / Of having children - after having had them, / So there is nothing we can do about it / But warn the children they perhaps should have none" (11. 285-94). Children, most particularly sons, must if possible be reclaimed and salvaged from female/maternal influence. This results in a mild sadism which insists that children lose whatever false sense of (maternally derived) security they may possess. There are moments within the poetry in which children are disabused of their naivete by paternal figures who speak under the guise of tutelage: "Locked Out; As Told to a Child" and "The Bonfire" each suggest a level at which children are asked by a paternal voice to accommodate a fearful adult vision of violence - intruders who come at dark to try the lock, planes that come at night to rain down fire. Superficially offered in the venerable (always somewhat sadistic) tradition of ghost stories and fairy tales that are simultaneously fascinating and terrifying, the stories that emerge go far toward stimulating a genuinely nightmarish vision, as if to imply that one cannot know too soon about the dark elements within which one lives. The son in


17

"The Witch of Coos" has been taught by his mother to perceive the story of her adultery and the resulting murder of the lover as if it were a ballad, like "The Wild Colonial Boy" her lover used to sing. The apparent causative agent in the murder, he has been encouraged by his mother to tell the story as if it were about strangers - to distance himself from any sense of responsibility, outrage, or fear through the mediating form of narrative.38 It is significant, then, that only the adult male presence brings the witch momentarily to accountability, so that she instructs her son to "tell the truth for once." Otherwise, he has been allowed to accommodate his mother's appetitive duplicities and his own inheritance in the horror. Once born into Frost's world, male children bear a great burden about which they must be made aware, and they must be wrested from the protective, enveloping mother so that they may be fully apprised. As if earthly fathers enact their paternal duties by model, Frost envisions God the father inflicting a fearful lesson upon Job in "A Masque of Reason," as he fails to explain, except in terms of a caprice and pridefulness that made Job a pawn in his game with the devil, Job's suffering. And in "A Masque of Mercy" he postulates a retributive God, withholding all certainty, whose "justice" seems so severe and cruel as to amount to injustice. Yet the Father/father enacts a necessary cruelty by Frost's terms, for while the knowledge of impenetrable uncertainty is harsh, it enforces a resolute self-containment. ("You don't have to deserve your mother's love. You have to deserve your father's. He's more particular.")39 By bringing one to understand that maternal solicitude, mercifully encompassing, is also subversive of that intact manhood which holds itself against all assaults, the father brings the son to self-sufficiency. It is not, then, just the parents of the wounded son in "Out, Out —" who refuse to distinguish between the boy who is a "big boy / Doing a man's work, though a child at heart," and the man, for Frost too sees the urgency of pulling a son into manhood. The implicit dichotomy Frost establishes between those males who are designated "sons" and those represented as "men" suggests that it is the empowered mother who thwarts manhood with her hysteria, mysticism, and superstition, and with her hunger for men, beginning with her sons. One who remains a "son" becomes prey for all women. "The Housekeeper" is significantly named in the context of Frost's Bachelardian spaces, for the "man's" house is dominated by his lover and, more literally, by her immobilized mother, who is either literally too fat to get through the door or so in possession of the space that she may not be moved (11. 35-8). He is felt by both of them to be ineffectual in all ways: Estelle "has always held the purse" in the family and her "husband" has not been able to distract her by giving her a child. The "purse" she has

18


held apart is both the generative and the economic one, neither of which the emasculated man has been able to appropriate. The currently resident mother speculates on this fifty-five-year-old's impotence: "He's like a child. / I blame his being brought up by his mother" (11. 55—6). This pair divests the male of his house, and though he is preoccupied, understandably, with the prize roosters in his chicken yard, he is otherwise incompetent as a husbandman to his land as well, throwing his hoe into the apple tree (instead of penetrating the earth) and leaving the hay in the rain to rot. The middle-aged son of "The Witch of Coos" epitomizes in his impairment the witchery of the mother who would, alternatively, keep her boy locked away and safe; with no access to the outside, he becomes, in effect, inwombed by her. A "son" may then be of any age, from the infant of "Home Burial" to the aging, childlike hired man of "The Death of the Hired Man," who represents for the childless Mary and Warren their prodigal son "come home." Pollen or autumn leaf, they are kept from manhood by a maternal force whose conservational impulse is potent and ultimately degenerative. In both "Home Burial" and "The Death of the Hired Man," the maternal solicitude that would hold and protect is enacted against the wishes of the adult male figure, who is ready to evict the "son" and move on to other things. 40 Despite Mary's injunction to "Be kind," Warren calls Silas to account for his irresponsibility as regards work. He sees Silas as having chosen a relatively dissolute life, for if Silas has, admirably, rejected the corrupt values implicit in his brother's bank-director status, he has not consistently embraced any more reputable means by which a man may create order. Warren's concerns are economical and his attitude is juridical, and it is only when he is brought to remember that Silas could impose a small but perfect order in building a load of (usable, marketable) hay that he begins to be deterred from anger. He thinks legalistically, in terms of imperatives whose violation would result in some punishment: "Home is the place where, when you go there, / They have to take you in." Mary, whose heart "hurts" for Silas, sees home oppositely as "Something you somehow haven't to deserve." 41 Such yielding as Mary would awaken in her husband is nonetheless a form of unmanning, almost a kind of bewitchment, as if she would bring Warren to be as ineffectual in worldly terms as the "son" Silas whose case she pleads. She is so tied to nature that she is felt to play "the harplike morning-glory strings, . . . / As if she played unheard some tenderness / That wrought on him beside her in the night," and she is felt to hold moonlight in her apron as naturally as a woman might sit with a lap full of apples to peel (or as naturally as the mountain of "The Birthplace" sits, "her lap . . . full of trees"). In Frost's landscape of named witches, Coos and Grafton the most notable, she seems to embody a relatively


19

benign form of power, and she occupies a territory neither so pathologically sealed as the Witch of Coos nor so wild as the Witch of Grafton. Her position on the porch suggests a contained, somewhat domesticated form of power, yet she is so much a part of the earth and the night that she brings her husband out the door and shuts it, taking from his arms and setting aside the tokens of socialized domesticity, the "market things" with which he is so concerned. Mysterious, knowing, she is not merely a watcher but one of the elements - "Then there were three there, making a dim row, / The moon, the little silver cloud, and she" - and it is as if she knows and is thus potentially implicated in the spell by which the collision of moon with cloud will signal (cause) Silas's death. "The Death of the Hired Man" represents one of the most sustained visions of an apparently noncombative male-female relationship to be found anywhere in Frost's work, and yet implicit in Mary's great power to move Warren toward empathy is an equivalent power to remove him from control. Paradoxically, this poem reveals by its unusual status as a representative of marital harmony the dangers even a "good," domesticated female represents, as she threatens to co-opt rational judgment with emotion. The maternal impulse that envelops and protects is a dangerously potent distraction from the businesses by which a man subdues female uncontrol, and thus maternity may be seen in quite literally monumental terms. It threatens males with lethargy and even death as it keeps them from autonomy - and therefore from manhood - by encouraging an empathetic openness. "The Birthplace," whose title suggests the earthy femaleness from which twelve children spring, defines the good father's duties on the maternal mountainside: "My father built, enclosed a spring, / Strung chains of wall round everything, / Subdued the growth of earth to grass, / And brought our various lives to pass." The human mother is simply absent from the poem, so that the dozen children seem raised up from the cultivated ground. The mountain is subdued temporarily by the virile man to benignity, but there is "always something in her smile" that suggests a power as sinister as it is safe. This father, who brings the mountain under his control, raises the children to freedom from the mother. The mountain, against whom only the most constant vigilance can enforce and maintain order, pushes these father-oriented children from her knees, "And now her lap is full of trees," the signifiers throughout Frost's poetry of a regal, dangerous power. If allowed, the mother, both desired and terrifying, will keep a boy from becoming a man. Girls and women, ever changeable, may metamorphose into mothers themselves, moving thus toward empowerment. They may, as "The Birthplace" asserts, change their names, which is to say that they may take husbands for the purpose of being transformed into mothers.

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But a man may not proceed so deviously against the mother and must instead enforce, as does the father of "The Birthplace," his own powers of control, even unto violence. "I'll follow and bring you back by force. I will! —" is a mostly futile battle cry sung by more than just the frenzied husband of "Home Burial." The mountain /mother of "The Birthplace" holds trees; in "Maple" the dying mother marks her daughter with the name and the nature of "Maple." "She put her finger in your cheek so hard / It must have made your dimple there, and said / 'Maple,'" the father says. She appropriates the girl to herself by naming aloud that wild, natural part of her daughter which defies paternal control: "Name children some names and see what you do," says the speaker, as if in warning to those who see the girl or her mother as contained and harmless. So apparently genteel, this poem functions, as do many of Frost's stories, at two oppositionally significant levels. Paternal power is illusory, while maternal power evades even patristic authority and seeks assertion. While the father, left alive, has nominal control over his daughter, he has continued to live in the mother's birthplace, and to sleep in his wife's (childhood) bedroom, the place where she has given birth and where she has died. He is possessed of some knowledge of the mother that he withholds, and he unwittingly "sows" in his daughter the desire to know the secret by failing to yield to her that knowledge. These intimations are "Dangerous self-arousing words to sow" in the girl, who begins to repudiate the father in her search for the meaning of her name: like the men who sow fields against the inevitably encroaching forests, this father's husbanding is insufficient to keep either his wife or his daughter from the woods. The subtextual implications, like the house with its two buried stories, are indeed dangerously self-arousing, for by the most oblique of all possible suggestions the mother may have been guilty of marital infidelity in the deep woods. Her secret "may have been / Something a father couldn't tell a daughter / As well as a mother could" (11. 118-20).42 The only clue is a maple leaf left inside a Bible, by whom it is not clear. But the biblical inscription is lost when Maple closes the book without its maple-leaf marker, and only the words "Wave offering" come back much later to her mind. In Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers there are at least nine mentions of "wave offerings," in which sacrificial offerings are waved in the air, and at its most general and benign level the allusion suggests the waving boughs of the maple tree, a figure of the "good," sanctified maple the father wishfully envisions. But the most extended reference in Numbers 5:12-31 is to a story far darker, as it details the "jealousy offering" made when a woman was thought to have been unfaithful to her husband. Made by priests to drink bitter water, which will cause the impure woman's thigh to rot and her abdomen to swell in a


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grotesque parody of pregnancy, the accused must prove her purity. After drinking, she is divested by the priest of the poisonous "jealousy offering," which he then waves before the Lord. This gruesome story cannot but be associated with the woman who has died just after childbirth, naming her daughter by the one name that most defies the priestly rebuke. "Maple" consigns the girl to the woods where the queenly maple stands, completely naked, arms raised, surrounded by pink and scarlet fallen foliage. The subtext, then, inescapably suggests a standard scenario, whereby the woman has escaped the bounds of civilization by entering the forest and has copulated with a man or with the devil (this is the empowerment of the witch, countered by a poison contrived by patristic authority). Against this name, "Maple," and against these horrific images is the father's feeble injunction, made despite all evidence, that the name is "some word she left to bid you / Be a good girl - be like a maple tree." Mothers, wives, or daughters - women will rise to stand seductive in the forest, generative, metamorphic, and duplicitous, emblems of desire and death. The work of manhood is, then, to urge control on the uncontrollable, to impose upon its own "femaleness" - that which embodied in women seems so randomly destructive - moderation and orderliness; "For Once, Then, Something" may in this context be seen to embody Frost's powerful anxiety at the same time that it works to master and overman the fear of the mother by staring obliquely into the keep and narrow watery place that is the source of myths, dreams, and wishes. Here the question of where self stands relative to the "others" is predicated on a prior and submerged interrogation about where it stands relative to femaleness and maternity. In the context of Frost's mother-earth cathexis, a preoccupation that suggests a wishful memory of infantile barrierlessness, his mirror gazing is more than ordinarily problematized. The "mirror stage" marks the moment at which the distinction between self and outside is begun. Narcissism is, as Kristeva calls it, "a screen for emptiness"; it "protects emptiness, causes it to exist, and thus, as lining of that emptiness, insures an elementary separation."43 It is that crucial moment in which barriers assert themselves, and "without that solidarity between emptiness and narcissism, chaos would sweep away any possibility of distinction, trace, and symbolization, which would in turn confuse the limits of the body, words, the real, and the symbolic."44 The speaker, defensive and ambivalent about his position on the reflective side of the pool and looking, despite his chosen mirror view, to see beneath the surface as well as above it in the Apollonian heights, is, then, poised precariously between egotism and revelatory insight. He resides in a dangerous medium, for he is triangulated as Narcissus between sky/ Apollo/rationality and Telphusa/Pythoness/revelatory "truth." If un-

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able to accept either the narcissistic mirror that discovers and defines emptiness in preparation for the realization of self or the empathetic and temporary barrierlessness of mature insight, he might be left in infantile chaos. To "confuse the limits of the body, words, the real, and the symbolic" is to exist in a true wild space, pre-gendered and unborn, unable to tell the outside from the inside. A failure at this mirror is rife with consequence, for to be left thus is to be incapable of knowing form and thus impotent to achieve it. The speaker defends his right to turn his back to a more demanding, variable nature even as Frost counters his rhetorical stance metaleptically in the Narcissus allusion and figurally in the shallow-deep image of the well.45 Here the "others" are those who look out too far or in too deep; by implication only this Frostian speaker, witty and articulate, can confer value on a given perspective, which others will miscomprehend. He kneels at the well curb with the light behind him so that he can see reflected "Me myself in the summer heaven, godlike." By conscious choice he is not one who would plumb the depths, looking beyond self for deeper meanings, revealed truths; he would say, with Job in "A Masque of Reason," "Get down into things, / It will be found there's no more given there / Than on the surface." Even so, one time he saw through his reflection to "a something white" underneath, an unsoughtfor revelation that briefly troubled his narcissistic preoccupation. Like the whiteness of the whale, the whiteness of the thing is enigmatic, illusive, laden with symbolic possibility. But the vision is clouded almost at once by a droplet of dew from above. Water is perceived by the speaker to "rebuke" water, as if neither the narcissistic reflection nor the glimmer of white is a suitable view. The speaker's voice remains more unruffled than the well's surface - he has, after all, been talking hendacasyllabically about himself when "truth" breaks in and then subsides - and his detached tone, which allows the escape route of an ironic reading even as it suggests the validity of his manly egocentricity, commits him emotionally in no way. But beneath his self-congratulatory tone lie deeper anxieties and desires. Even the title, echoed in the last line, predicts an ambivalence that the poem denies tonally, the "for once, then, something" suggesting a more than once rebuked desire to shatter the mirror he professes to erect, and the figure of the well suggests a claustrophobic fantasy of diving, falling, or being thrown deep into a narrow shaft. His well gazing is evocative of childhood fears of falling down a well, and it touches adult fears of finding at the bottom a real body spread like a hapless skydiver and glimmering white, rather than an Apollonian reflection. A well is the source of wishes and of prophetic voices; one must, in this fantasy, be very careful indeed of one's desires. Even as he sees himself consciously as godlike in the summer sky then,


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as an empowered Apollonian figure who repudiates the "boy" with his status as a good Greek, transcendent over narcissism and immune (hostile?) to the pull of the mother, he reveals an alternative self. The hendecasyllabic form, the elegantly melodic lines reinforce this association with the musical Apollo, as do the carefully wrought repetitions of words like "curb," "water," and "picture," which give the unrhymed form structural rigor. This Apollo allusion is strengthened by the speaker's ambivalence about penetrating the depths of the pool, for even the most generalized vision of Apollo associates him with sky and air rather than earth and water, elements he rejects almost immediately along with his infantile identity with his mother. Slater analyzes the complex functions of Apollo, showing him to be antithetical to earth and femininity:46 "He is the personification of anti-matriarchy, the epitome of the sky god, a crusader against Earth deities. He is all sunlight, Olympian, manifest, rational. He opposes all that is hidden, dark, and irrational. Or so, at least, the poets would have us believe. "47 To complicate the Apollonian allusion in this well-centered landscape, Apollo's relationship to water remains complex: to establish the oracle at Delphi, Apollo kills the Python, a giant (female) excrudescence raised from the mud of the flood, as it lies by a clear spring. He even slaughters Telphusa, the spring nymph who lives within the water. Apollo epitomizes apparent autonomy from women and from the earth, but as Slater points out, he must continually win his freedom from the pull of the mother. The Nietzschean dichotomy between the Apollonian and the Dionysian would suggest that this speaker's rational comprehension of the pool is antithetical to the Cybelean/Bacchic apprehension of the geode in "All Revelation. "48 One is urged here to believe in the hendecasyllabic, Apollonian authority of this speaker, who professes his preference for the light over the dark, the sky over the earth, the father over the mother: to believe, in fact, that his is Apollonian poetic "enthusiasm" "taken through the prism of the intellect" (Prose 36). One must not forget, however, how elsewhere in the poetry mothers are so crucial, so seductive and fearful: they are pythonesses all. Yet despite his sense that femaleness and maternity and, by extension, the entire domestic realm are subversive of manliness, Frost suspects that the concept of socially sanctioned growth, of Bildung, is equally obviated for an enclosed system wherein a man must enforce his autonomy against deteriorative conditions. For although the concept of Bildung is predicated on a separation from the mother, it thrusts one into a world that may pretend to more rational sense but that is equally violative. This sense of an abrasive externality that eradicates markers of individuality may be felt to reify itself in the divestment of body parts and the implications of bodily violence that occur throughout Frost's poetry, as if to

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suggest that one does not so much grow by virtue of one's contact with the world's constructions as diminish.49 One who eats finds himself eaten. One must "build soil": "Turn the farm in upon itself / Until it can contain itself no more, / But sweating-full, drips wine and oil a little" (11.234-6). He must use his thoughts as fertilizer and keep his produce to himself: "The thought I have, and my first impulse / Is to take to market - I will turn it under. / The thought from that thought - I will turn it under. / And so on to the limit of my nature. / We are too much out, and if we won't draw in / We shall be driven in" (11. 239-44).50 There is some evidence, in fact, that Frost sees himself sacrificially, as one whose intrinsic worth not only supersedes the world's constructions but invites attack from without. He is part Jonah, privy to an alternative vision that is imagined to be self-endangering, although the modern world might substitute for his being eaten his being locked away: "the whale you throw me to / Will be some soulless lunatic asylum," he says to the currently obdurate crowd ("A Masque of Mercy" 11. 186-7). He is part uncrowned but inherently regal king, who despite his knowledge of all the "quintessences," offers himself up to be sold by his son as a slave ("How Hard It Is to Keep from Being King" 11. 30-44). He is part Job, lacerated and abused for no discernible reason, God's "Patient" who remains patient even while made an experimental subject, to be afflicted with boils until his skin rots ("A Masque of Reason" 11. 34, 130).51 He reads in the marked pebble of "A Missive Missile" two drops of blood and a sacrificial knife: "the sender must have had to die" ("a meaning . . . / I fear entirely mine," he adds). As "The Lesson for Today" makes clear, Frost specifically mocks those who pretend to know this "outside" world and who use as an excuse for their emasculated state the social, artistic, and political "truths" of their age.52 The "liberal" speaker, who both is and is not Frost in his opinions, invents a dialogue with a medieval poet in which he scorns those who claim global and temporal perspective. One large enough to see epochal truths must "get outside," a direction antipathetic to the revelatory geodesic interiors of a poem like "All Revelation." Once outside, "Our muscles never could again contract: / We never could recover human shape, / But must live out our lives mentally agape / Or die of philosophical distention." Being "mentally agape" is a clear perversion of the intact self, an invitation to violation, a dissolution of the virile tension between appetite and self-control. It also suggests, in the pun on agape, the "openmindedness" of liberal, collectivistic love that is nonexclusionary and undisciplined; agape becomes another kind of promiscuity.53 In the context of Frost's conviction that poetry and (erotic) love are the same figure, this pun seems particularly significant: it suggests that the bodily tensions which are reified in poetic form necessitate something


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beyond agape, and that the eroticism of such poetic language may escape the diseases of modernism. If modern love is different from ancient love, so are moderns, he says here, "sick with space," an assertion that reiterates the image of lax formlessness in the above lines.54 The external correlative for the distended, flaccid "open" mind, space is an infinite void that simultaneously belittles and aggrandizes humankind. The world of metaphysically defined "universals" mirrors this formlessness: Philosophers, "No matter where they stoutly mean to get, / Nor what particulars they reason from, / . . . end up in the universal Whole / As unoriginal as any rabbit. " 55 To "end up in the universal Whole" is to have fallen into the void, down into Alice's rabbit hole where the "truths" are hallucinatory and "wisdom" is fractured by being institutionalized ("Some violence is always done to the wisdom you build a philosophy out of").56 Philosophers, poets, the "state" are all rendered to ludicrous sameness when they leave themselves agape to universal truths. They become, not intact, enclosed individuals embraced by natural correlatives of themselves, but, like programmed ants, departmental. Having become part of the whole, they may only proceed programmatically. Reliance on the external systems by which Bildung is traditionally effected is counterproductive, urging one toward formlessness, but philosophical, social, and political despair is prideful folly: "It is immodest of a man to think of himself as going down before the worst forces ever mobilized by God" (Prose 105). To induce that despair willingly is to invite intellectual and artistic impotence, "a dilation from which the tissues and the muscles of the mind have never been able to recover natural shape" (Prose 106) - but it is also to invite sexual dysfunction. Those so afflicted lose the hands of the lover/artist - "they can't pick up anything delicate or small any more" - and they lose phallic control: "They can't use a pen. They have to use a typewriter. And they gape in agony" (Prose 106). Their work becomes uncontrollably ejaculatory, so that they can write only "huge shapeless novels, huge gobs of raw sincerity bellowing with pain" (Prose 106). Frost's argument in this paragraph of his letter to The Amherst Student reveals again the Scylla and Charybdis of control and release through which he navigates: "Indeed it is as dangerous to try to get outside of anything as large as an age as it would be to try to engorge a donkey," he says. By implication, the body that is too self-contained would write, not vast shapeless things, but nothing; an ass filled to the point of explosion, foundered by its own appetite, the engorged creature is the monstrous corollary of the "huge gob of raw sincerity bellowing with pain." Frost's "Lesson," preached first in his letter to The Amherst Student and reiterated later in "The Masque of Reason," is that one must feel desire in order to contain it and that systematics of any kind is a cold bedfellow. "Earth's a hard place to

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save the soul" because, the "place for love," it is so filled with sensual temptations. As "Fragmentary Blue" reminds us, even heavenly shards transform as they fall earthward to become sapphires, bluebirds, butterflies, flowers, and alluringly wide blue eyes to tempt one from spiritual contemplation. Yet as Frost perpetually reiterates at every level of his poetics, it is only in the struggle for manhood - called saving "soul," "decency," "integrity" - that there is any meaning; without "a trial ground where he can try himself / And find out whether he is any good, / It would be meaningless" ("Masque of Reason" 11. 319-21). If earth were heaven, one might as well be dead. Community, with its necessary imposition of public values, threatens to subvert personal autonomy, and in Frost's vision its systems are transitory enthusiasms that may well devalue or distort the heautocratic balance: the will must be left to make its own order. As Poirier points out, Frost places himself squarely within the American tradition with his sense that conformity within any system is debilitating, yet his nearphobic distaste for systems beyond the circulatory exceeds even the most potent American individualism.57 He would not favor political revolution, not so much out of resistance to (political) disorder, but because he sees as its inevitable outcome a reinstatement of the status quo: as "A Semi-Revolution" says, "The trouble with a total revolution / . . . Is that it brings the same class up on top." He would "go halfway and stop," tearing up the old order without imposing a "new" order; a semirevolution, as it remains perpetually unfinished, necessarily leaves things in flux. "I'm very much in favor of unfinished business," he says.58 This is a vision that recapitulates the instincts among individual Frostian figures to seek a deconstructing place that makes manifest their own restless, appetitive changes, and it clearly says as much about Frost's artistic as about his political leanings. It suggests yet once again the dangers in that which is stayed or, as "Taking Something Like a Star" puts it, "staid." Frost is hardly endorsing political anarchy (although this might well be one of the poems that led The Masses to praise Frost's proletariat sympathies), yet he cannot resist a shot at the systems that keep things and people in their places.59 This attitude also explains to some extent his occasional unashamed endorsements of war and warlike behavior, as a declaration of war "bring[s] to life this old volcano" by being temporarily purgative of static systems ("The Bonfire"). It is the declarative act and not the outcome, of course, that holds potential; war is more valuable metaphorically than politically, as "The Bonfire" suggests in its conflation of world war with the speaker's flagrant and defiant secession from neighborly decorum, for warfare enforces a state in which wildness might prevail over artificial order. Warfare makes a world where the "wild places" infringe upon or take over the systematically ordered edi-


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fices of social, political, and religious organizations, and poetry then can play with impunity in the wild space. One of Frost's rare urban poems, "A Hundred Collars," comically details a Frostian figure (a famous man alienated from his old friends by their awe) who must reluctantly share a hotel room with a stranger: this poem, like "The Lesson for Today" and "The White-Tailed Hornet," works at two distinct levels, one that belittles external systematics and another that questions the poet's own cultural position as a man removed from "democratic" contexts by his intellectuality, his poetic prowess, and his fame. This Ishmael gets only so savage a roommate as a talkative, maternally inclined, sociable traveler: "You can't rest that way. Let me pull your shoes off," he says in a parodically democratized inversion of Queequeg's hiding under the bed to put on his boots. Comically rendered, untattooed but naked above the waist and "creased and shining in the light," the strange bedfellow is nonetheless an equivalent to the civil and charitable "barbarian" who does not recognize the sanctity of the human head: he wants to mail his new friend, the resolutely distant scholar, his hundred outgrown collars, a prospect that offends the decorum of the intellectual beyond all imagining. Frost/Ishmael is also lampooned: "Though a great scholar, he's a democrat, / If not at heart, at least on principle." This figure, it is implied, enhances by his role as a "great scholar" the ways of isolation to which he is prone. He is democratic only in principle, while his heart is tuned autonomously.60 His roommate, on the other hand, is a genuine, "double-dyed" Democrat, tattooed after all. The typically humorous balance that Frost strikes in "A Hundred Collars" distances one from both men, although the implications are clearly autobiographical as regards the teacher; we become the innkeeper who can say goodnight and go, leaving the (deserving) scholar (who serves as a disguise for the poet) to his own private hell. The tone also makes one dismiss as a primarily ironic and comical device the clear allusive exploitation of Moby-Dick. Yet only one judgment is available as to the wearing of another man's collars. Frost would not sanction the democratic switching of heads - the insight into another's life through the intimacy of the communal collar. If Ishmael were to trade his head for one of Queequeg's, he would end up with a shrunken physiognomy. So too, Frost implies, would any trade he could make shortchange him. The "collar" is explicitly suggestive here of political and social affiliations, as it places the teacher against the salesman and the false democrat against the true, and it is implicitly suggestive of the religious collar as well. Yet this scholar/teacher/(poet) who is and is not Frost is very much an Ishmael at heart, resistant to all methodologies and systems: "And he will be a wild man; his hand will be against every man, and every man's hand against him; and he shall dwell in the presence of all his brethren."61

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Frost does not subsidize the concept ofBildung in his poetry because its assumption of the intrinsic worth of a mediated progress through time and space, of a journey whose value lies in its reciprocity, becomes ludicrous in the face of such vast unknowing as he perceives humankind to endure. For Frost, one's "maturity" lies more in the rejection (or ironic exploitation) of intellectual, spiritual, or political systems and their illusory comforts than in any gradual accommodation to these constructs; as "Boeotian" so succinctly puts it, wisdom must be sought from a position outside systematics: "I love to toy with the Platonic notion / That wisdom need not be of Athens Attic, / But well may be Laconic, even Boeotian. / At least I will not have it systematic." Iconoclastic, the real man will "toy with" notions, even those arising from what is considered a proverbial stupidity, claiming for himself a kind of Nietzschean freedom from any conventional ideology. The Frostian-sounding father and son of "How Hard It Is to Keep from Being King" detail what "freedom" means, and its first premise is that "The only certain freedom is in departure" from any leader's truth, that of Marx or Christ, it makes no difference (1. 194). The most essential freedom, as Frost says here and elsewhere, is the freedom of one's material: the freedom to make intuitive connections that transcend all conventions, all contexts, and all creeds. This is the freedom most circumscribed by adherence to external systems of order, which inevitably short-circuit the simile-making process by suggesting that words are most valuable within the predisposed meanings of their contexts. And the making of a simile — that unexpected coupling of words to produce some brand new thing — is an empowerment that brings one alive. Filled with the energy to generate order out of nothing, to create "the form of forms / The serpent's tail stuck down the serpent's throat," the poet may look to his own tongue for pleasure (11. 251-3, 339-40). If the mother co-opts one into a barrierless, empathetic chaos of contradictions, then, encouraging one simultaneously, as mothers always do, to eat everything up and have some more and to remember the starving children elsewhere, the world of more theoretical orders is also co-optive, as it suggests that one might rely on some external system for one's assumptions. What it means to be a "man" is an acceptance of an utter separateness from systems whether emotionally or rationally based. The intact manly dialogue in which desire may be called upon to play its part, arousing the poet to the rigor of his pen, becomes the only available order and the primary source of pleasure. There is no continuity outside the masculine self for Frost, in a world where everything else is constantly metamorphosing, eroding, disappearing, with metaphysical "truth" as much as anything else a variable phenomenon. Sexuality per se is merely another system breaking down, and as it is deployed in the


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recognizable figures of a domestic landscape it takes on a predictable pathology. Frost may even be said to have appropriated without much apparent skepticism or irony a metaphorical construct so ingrained in Western languages and thought as to have become a self-generating "truth," ironically the only one to which he clearly accedes. In this schema, one needs only "mother earth" with all the term implies about female fecundity, beauty, violence, and caprice, and from this comes quite naturally the figure of "To Earthward," talking of the earth as lover. Yet as Frost explores the nuances of the sexual metaphor, focusing on it his full powers of performance, it begins to generate a new dialectic, a stimulating pathology of pleasure against which prosodic bars must be erected and maintained. ("Two things I think about in connection with [(pagan) puritanism]: one is — it is that in you that fears your own pleasure, that distrusts your own pleasure. . . . I can remember my mother had a way of talking about it when things were going too well, you know - that you were too happy. . . . You better throw something away that you value and that you better be careful.")62 The terms — "mother" and "earth" - and all the terms they generate (from "mother" comes father, daughter, son, wife, husband, God; from "earth" comes all the dark chthonic myths against which the Apollonian urge for beautiful form asserts itself) are declined through a poetics of self that first awakens in some Frostian territory outside the boundaries of cultivated intent. Frost is, finally, a man for whom self-imposed form is quite simply everything: he feels the world as metonymous - concentric, contiguous and this is a terrifying and exhilarating responsibility. Against a "background in hugeness and confusion shading away . . . into black and utter chaos" any "figure of order," small and manmade though it be, may concentrate, intensify, and preserve (Prose 107). The full significance of Frost's need for formal control cannot be overestimated, for shapeliness is the antithesis of both flaccidity and distension: it is, in other words, the human body holding dissolution in abeyance in the form of a controlled, eternal virility. Frost is preoccupied with spatial organizations that deteriorate, with boundaries that fail, with forms that elide, and these concerns permeate every level of his discourse. His metaphors of making describe the poetic act in terms of molding, sculpting, chiseling, and his worst nightmare is of a world where the artistic artifact, representing the undisciplined and self-indulgent body/mind, has ejaculated itself as a shapeless mass that valorizes by its very formlessness a heautocratically compromised maker (Prose 106). He is constantly on guard against that which threatens the structural integrity of manhood, which has enough to do in channeling its own appetitive nature into fruitful and virile order: this is an "individual enterprise" that needs nobody's cooperation; for the making of self-enclosed order, "a basket, a letter, a garden, a room, an idea, a

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picture, a poem," "we haven't got to get a team together before we can play" (Prose 107). And so one finds quite understandably that the first symbolic order of external assault resides very close to home: first mothers, then lovers, wives, and daughters, eat away at the intact self. But the assault is not merely domestic, and in fact those systems perceived traditionally as antithetical to the (niggling and invasive) domestic imperatives of attention to circumstantial detail fare no better. If female ways push one to an explosive turgidity of frustration, abstractions metaphysics - invite one to a more insidious dissolution, an expansion without barriers into systems that, being large, leave one to swell into grotesque disproportion. It all boils down to the individuated body - to the tissues, the muscles, the blood, the skeleton on their inexorable path toward becoming nothing. For Frost, "home burial" becomes the most complex of all terms, a metonym for the perceived simultaneity of desire and death: earth is the gravitational stuff from which one is made and the most intimate home of all. The place where the demon wallows, the female earth becomes in Frost's poetry the symbolic locus for the penetrative act that signals at once both procreation and burial. Humans are constructed to yield to the downward pull - "we see our images / Reflected in the mud and even dust," laments the speaker of "The WhiteTailed Hornet" - and the return to dust is the consequence of rising from it to plow and plant. Thus the body as house, the household as embodiment of domestic love, and the edifice of the poem all stand poised over this grave/cellar hole/abyss into which expent substance lapses. In a gravitational world, to rise is hard, to stay elevated requires heroic effort, but to fall down is the easiest motion there is. Like Brown's hapless descent down the icy mountain, one can ride fast straight to the bottom like a coasting child, but to get back to the top requires climbing up the long way around. Frost mandates control in a world he designates as rampant with appetite, and he mandates formal order in a world he perceives to be insistently metamorphic. Believing finally, most of all, in the futility of imposing such controlled order on a (human) nature besieged by anarchic impulse, he nonetheless takes the hero's stand. As William James says, "The world thus finds in the heroic man its worthy match and mate; and the effort which he is able to put forth to hold himself erect and keep his heart unshaken is the direct measure of his worth and function in the game of human life. " 63 Frost channels virile energy, strongly spent, into poetic order, as a momentary stay against the confusion of appetitive dissolution. Yet his poetry reifies in every nuance the hungry gravity that pulls a man down. Implicit in the imagery of falling and reiterated specifically in the figural iconography of men pulled down to kneeling or prostrate postures, his poetic world suggests that the effort a man "is able to put forth to keep himself erect" is futile


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and even slightly absurd. As "The Subverted Flower" says, "Obeying bestial laws" one is apt to go down on all fours, where, as "To Earthward" predicts, one is seduced to stretch prone on the fragrant ground as if desire may be immediately conflated into the graveward pull. Implicit in his pervasive imagery of windows, doors, and thresholds is the conviction that the heautocratic dialogue rests on the paradox of assailable points of entry and egression. Implicit at a most essential epistemological level in his pervasive, unstable irony, which casts meaning down as if it might be "thrown out to delay the wolves," is the failure of the word and letter of the law - that which is written and implicitly rational - to hold against gravity. Language is thus brought, through the seriocomic indignities to which irony subjects it, to approximate man fallen in the dust. Everything that falls converges to rise ever so slightly and to fall again, and in a world whose only meaning lies in this comedy of incessant capitulation a man must take his pleasure as he can.

Irony: Teiresias's Gaze

I have written to keep the over curious out of the secret places of my mind both in my verse and in my letters to such as you. A subject has to be held clear outside of me with struts and as it were set up for an object. A subject must be an object. Robert Frost, Letters 385 I must go on; I can't go on; I must go on; I must say words as long as there are words, I must say them until they find me, until they say me heavy burden, heavy sin; I must go on; maybe it's been done already; maybe they've already said me; maybe they've already borne me to the threshold of my story, right to the door opening onto my story; I'd be surprised if it opened. Samuel Beckett, Molloy By the strictest rules of masculinity, Frost may not write poetry. By the strictest rules of justice, he may not exploit the merciful ambiguities of poetic language to subvert judgment and suspend retributive action. But driven to write poetry, "drop[ping] into poetry" every time he takes pen in hand, he mobilizes the devices of unstable irony to absolve himself from seeming to mean it (Letters 140). He sometimes creates the illusion of a lyric voice, as in "The Silken Tent," while at one level suggesting that he is more intrigued with the (archaic) conventions of that lyric voice than with its revelatory powers. One must then either decipher a metalyrical voice emerging from the oversound of the poetry as a whole or hear nothing but the contradictory play of disembodied other voices, ranging over forms as disparate as the sonnet, the epigram, and the dramatic monologue and dialogue and nullifying each other with their antithetical posturings. For Frost, neither that which is at some essential level ineffable nor that which is resolutely stated, testing itself in dialectic, will alone suffice to bring him to the threshold of his story, and neither pure lyric nor austere prose will allow him mastery of that thresh32

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old, affording both the door and the means to keep it closed to others: "A poem would be no good that hadn't doors. I wouldn't leave them open though," he says to himself in his journal.1 For Frost, to write poetry is to "play[ ] perilously in the wild space" between in and out, field and forest, road and snow-filled woods: to balance, exactly, in that place where the ineffable self seeks to communicate itself, the pleasure of confession against the power of withholding (Letters 466). With irony, one may pretend to meaning without being overtaken by meaning, without having words bear one to and then across the threshold of one's own story. Irony allows one to play the poetic game - to say the words as if meaningful in some objective way - even when, at a most basic level, one senses that nothing transcends the visceral and appetitive impulse to bring words to perform one's needs. By pretending to dialectic, irony perpetuates the necessary game by which a man reaffirms his prowess while by ultimately subverting dialectic it precludes a winner: it is the one device by which a man may escape the masculine imperatives of forthright, structurally rigid thesis and antithesis, the one place where justice and mercy might remain inextricably dependent. For Frost equally a means of defense against the critical invasiveness that seeks to impute lyric intent and, given the tenuous status of "meaning," an epistemological necessity, irony makes it almost safe to play in the wild space between reason and inspiration where poetry makes its home (Letters 466). Poetry is an intrinsically problematic form for a man who would keep his integrity intact, and it necessitates the more than ordinary means of distancing, control, and defense that irony affords. Frost's relatively unguarded prose gives the most immediate evidence of the will to power he brings to bear on his poetry, for he clearly senses that prose, a manly enough genre situated firmly in the rational, can withstand the idiosyncrasies of personality and suffer momentary failures of discipline without giving way to effeminacy: his instinct is, he says, to keep his prose statements "raw" and "fluid," a useful medium "when I cut across them with a poem under emotion" (Letters 461). Prosaically, he may bring words to act out the play in which his by turns gruff and ecstatically Emersonian New England persona performs, and he may oscillate between pronouncements and "poetic" disdain for the prosaic, between didacticism and consciously cultivated ambiguities. There he can proclaim, in good company, aspects of his (lyric, transcendental) self "I can consist of the inconsistent" - because the form in which he declares himself subsidizes his manly common sense.2 "Prose is," he says, "the thing for a man with a family to do," and unlike poetry, it is a way to "earn an honest living" (Letters 102, 60). Yet prose is not attractive to him because he sees it either as entirely raw and fluid or as solidified - "Something in me still fights off the written prose," he tells

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R. P. T. Coffin, and he senses that "the day approaches when [prose statements] will lose their fluidity and in spite of my stirring spoon become crystal" (Letters 461). But poetry, made up of metaphor, is by its nature transformative: "Unless you have had your proper poetical education in the metaphor, you are not safe anywhere" (Prose 39), least of all within poetry. For even with a proper poetical education, he suggests, one is likely to find that the body of the poem is a dangerous, seductive, metamorphic place to invest one's thoughts. Only the masculine rigor of strict form can hope to control and contain metaphor's necessarily metamorphic nature; even so, the wise poet will fight fire with fire by countering metaphor's transformative agility and its promiscuous propensities with an equally unstable irony ("Fight such a fire by rubbing not by beating," Frost says in "The Bonfire").3 For at a most basic level Frost senses that the very words by which he proceeds are intrinsically vulnerable when laid down in a poetic context. He knows that words, like nature and like women, may be to some extent temporarily subdued, but he also knows that one cannot count ever on their staying that way. Once out of his control they may bring a man to his knees, needful and vulnerable.4 Directed by another, they can become erotic arrows, so that a good poem has "a barb to it and a tocsin" that makes a man know "he has taken an immortal wound - that he will never get over it" (Prose 71).5 But loving words can also infect their users, for words, lovely to manipulate, are always potentially whorish, venereally inclined and ready to lure one into "a kind of thinking . . . endemic in the brothel." (Thus one finds in "Education by Poetry" the vision of a corruption of language leading to "epidemic" contamination; Prose 39.) The very matter of which poetry is made - metaphor — is female: generative, inspirative, anarchic, "wild," and susceptible to abuse. It is not surprising that within this tautology the literal female bodies within the text are uncontrollable, giving way at the slightest pressure to impulses to wander off, to find other lovers, to commit adultery, to sanction murder, to become witches. As he remembers so trenchantly from Thoreau, poetry, "a feminine thing," is then quite understandably only "at its best in men," under a man's firm control.6 Metaphor is analogous to women and nature in its potent, random energy, and like the fields that must be plowed or the horse that must be tamed, the metaphor must be taken in hand. If, as Frost asserts, metaphor is the whole of thinking, he also sees it as potentially treacherous in its mutability: when you don't know the metaphor in its strength and weakness, "you don't know how far you may expect to ride it and when it may break down with you" (Prose 39). Frost's implicit image here of riding a metaphor as if riding a horse resonates with his story of "riding" in "The Pauper Witch of Grafton," and juxtaposed so nearly with the brothel image, the implica-

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tion is that the riding is potentially reciprocal and that what the poet doesn't control may ride him to breakdown.7 Succumbing to the venereal power of the word, one may be reduced to Molloy's plight: "I must say words as long as there are words, I must say them until they find me, until they say me - heavy burden, heavy sin," and so Frost articulates his own relationship to language as an exhilarating disciplinary process somewhere between persuasion and coercion. He likes, he says, "to drag and break the intonation across the meter" (Letters 128). And to keep poetry from reducing itself to love and the moon he suggests that one try "a little rough handling once in a while. Do it violence . . . if you have to to make it aware of what's going on around it" (Letters 182). "Get a few words alone in a study and with plenty of time on your hands you can make them say anything you please" (Letters 465). The dual (and unsettling) implications of this statement of what happens behind closed doors between the poet and his words are unmistakable, suggesting both the experienced, loving poet seducing those words he lures inside and the stern disciplinarian, forcing "a few words" to come to order under the threat or the actuality of punitive erasure. The sadomasochistic paradox of this sort of discipline is clear, as the very pleasure such ordering produces is a source of uncontrol.8 Frost can never divest himself of the ironic sense that the same words that perform for him perform for others, that what he can make them do others can make them do: when "you can make them say anything you please," both meaning and belief are placed in jeopardy. Correlative to love, articulable beliefs may not hold under the pressure of time or duress, as words may be wooed or stolen away by another man to other meanings. The aptly named essay "Education by Poetry" suggests that codifying a belief somehow corrupts it, so that personal belief "is a knowledge you don't want to tell others about," like the "love belief" which must exhibit "that same shyness" of revelation ("That belief can fail, of course," he adds, regardless of one's reticence; Prose 44-6). Seductive, words are nonetheless insufficient to say the epiphanic moments of one's bliss: this is perhaps the universal, inescapable dilemma of the poet. As Czeslaw Milosz says in The Witness of Poetry, "Intent on representing [the world of being], the poet is left with the bitter realization of the inadequacy of language. Second, to desire ardently to possess an object cannot be called anything but love. The poet therefore appears as a man in love with the world, but he is condemned to eternal insatiability because he wants his words to penetrate the very core of reality. He hopes constantly and is constantly rejected."9 Making words "say anything you please" is only a half-successful coercion, and any strong man may effect the same sort of wooing; thus for Frost what is most important must

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remain unsaid. This is perhaps why Frost asserts so often his metaphor of "making," that term which is suggestive of both forceful coercion and creation:10 "How can I make you -," the wife of "Home Burial" ends, as if to suggest the generative, molding function of the word that would alter her husband to one who could understand her vision, while he responds with the corollary version of making as an act of almost Schopenhauerian will, "1*11 . . . bring you back by force. I will" The poet's "pleasure must be to make his own words as he goes," because those words that have already been "used" are contaminated, killed off, or worn out (Letters 141).n Given their inadequacy and corruptibility, "all that can be done with words is soon told," he says, and the real surprises lie in the sounds behind the lips "in the cave of the mouth." Sounds are the "real cave things: they were before words were" (Letters 191). Only in this prelinguistic place is there something beyond fraud, something that preempts the promiscuity of the written poetic word with the old-stone savage force of making. Frost's assumptions about language leave "meaning" - that in which one (temporarily) believes - to exist in an extra-articulable state or not at all: if not nihilism then the next thing to it (which is, perhaps, as close as Frost ever gets to anything, given his ambivalence about tearing down/rebuilding the wall). Meaning is perhaps imminent in the making process but is so evanescent as to disappear within the ironically freighted utterance that acknowledges its own words as by nature flawed. This epistemology makes for a problematic placement relative to dialectic for one who otherwise appears so completely to subsidize conventional manly virtues. For by masculinist philosophical tradition, "everything that can be thought at all can be thought clearly. Everything that can be said can be said clearly."12 A man may by these terms both make and enforce his own meaning, whose integrity will lie in the pungent and authoritative clarity of the words that bespeak it. That which lies outside of such linguistic imperialism, whereby meaning is claimed and defended by a show of strength, resides in "the sphere of subjective experience, emotion, feeling, and wish, from which only symptoms come to us in the form of metaphysical and artistic fancies."13 And it is just this territory where imperialist claims fail - where the walls are always falling and the trees come creeping in - to which Frost is drawn. Frost, playing in the territory between enforced meaning and its inevitable erosion by impinging (human) nature, finds himself neither here nor there and clearly both apprehends and is wary of the hermaphroditic view this placement must by his terms afford. For in the conventional bifurcation by which language is the only means of articulating thought, that which is not clearly articulable is not (masculine) thought, but (feminine) feeling; the correlative sexual symbolisms of this dichotomy so


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inevitably place women on the side of feeling and men on the side of rationality that the higher valuation of untainted rationality as a manly virtue is for Frost implicit and unshakable. If this organizational simplicity remains seductive even now, it was the more so for Frost at a time when, as Lentricchia puts it, "manliness was simply the culturally excluded principle in a life given to poetry . . . [making] it difficult for the modern American male to enter the literary life with a clean conscience."14 Not surprisingly, Frost's fear that artistic "fancies" do not in fact hold up against rational assertiveness makes him defensive about his poetic vocation, placing him among a large company similarly afflicted; one might, for one of many examples, think of Pound's remarkable assertion in Pavannes and Divagations that the power of the spermatozoide is precisely the power of exteriorizing a form. . . . There are traces of it in the symbolism of phallic religions, man really the phallus or spermatozoide charging, head-on, the female chaos. Integration of the male in the male organ. Even oneself has felt it, driving any new idea into the great passive vulva of London, a sensation analogous to the male feeling in copulation.15 A male poet may protest (too much) this feminization, but he cannot escape it. Thus in Frost's "The Fear of Man" the poet becomes explicitly, ironically, like a young, sexually vulnerable girl: As a girl no one gallantly attends Sets forth for home at midnight from a friend's She tries to make it in one catch of breath, And this is not because she thinks of death. The city seems in-toppling from a height, But she can trust it not to fall tonight. (It will be taken down before it falls.) There scarcely is a light in all its walls, Except beside a safe inside a bank (For which assurance Mammon is to thank). But there are little streetlights she should trust, So jewel-steady in the wind and dust. Her fear is being spoken by the rude And having her exposure misconstrued. May I in my brief bolt across the scene Not be misunderstood in what I mean. Here the poet is not merely feminized but is clearly violable, not merely a female but an unaccompanied female on the city streets late at night. Explicitly not thinking of death, she/he is as explicitly fearful of "being spoken by the rude." 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

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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. By Frost's terms, poetic words, by virtue of their being divorced from the deep and virile male voice, abandoned to be printed and laid down within a book, are even more inevitably feminized. Printed, words are at once spread vulnerably across the page and, freed from the resonant "cave"/mouth, liable to "having [their] exposure misconstrued." They approximate that paradox of potent vulnerability associated with femaleness: powerless, the printed word that is poetry is also empowered by the muting of the masculine sound that produces it to sing a different, Siren song. Whatever it might originally have "meant," it may appear to extend the most salacious of invitations to pleasure. The poet cannot but greet this possibility of "being spoken by the rude" with a degree of ambivalence; knowing his own pleasure in the poetic words, experiencing what Barthes has called the pleasure of the text, he must in part wish the same for his readers. The poet's most fervent and perhaps most equivocal prayer becomes "May I . . . / Not be misunderstood in what I mean" ("The Fear of Man"). Too aware of the fragility of the word to trust the resolutely linear processes by which meaning is created and claimed, too drawn to words not to "drop into poetry" rather than the less questionable genre of prose (Letters 140), Frost finds himself with one foot in the enemy (female) camp, where what Wallace Stevens calls that "positively ladylike" occupation of verse making holds one, like a woman, hostage always to the specter of the brothel.16 Poetry rises up in him as if a physiological inevitability - "Just when I thought I bade fair to produce a novel, right in the middle of chapter three or four I would bring up in [sic?] another inconsequential poem" - proof of his "incorrigible" poetic instincts (Letters 102-3). The most certain way not to have one's words definitively misunderstood is to make it impossible to pin them to the dubious and shifting value of "meaning." Frost's unstable ironies are thus utterly pervasive throughout his poetry, for by their instability they reify the conflict between barrierlessness and enforced enclosure and between the antinomies of femaleness and maleness as he perceives them without forcing a resolution in which meaning, once stated, can be made to seem, even to its author, absurd, erroneous, or infected. In unstable irony, one erects meaning to find it disintegrating, but this makes the process of erection, though endless, all the more imperative. The gradations of Frost's intent within the enclosure of the poem are seemingly infinite, and meaning modulates into meaning until the concept of "meaning" becomes almost absurd. In this he approximates what D. C. Muecke asserts is the modern comprehension of irony as "saying something in a way that activates not


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one but an endless series of subversive interpretations," as, in fact, "a perpetual deferment of significance."17 This is the perfected art of spending without being spent, of strongly spent being, indeed, synonymous with kept. Meaning, always suggesting itself as imminent, never arrives full on the scene, keeping one forever just before climactic certitude. At this heightened state of possibility the delight of its coming keeps one waiting for verifiable meaning, looking, inevitably mistaking other things for it, like Estragon taking Pozzo for Godot. Frost clothes this vacancy just before meaning in ironies, so that iridescences of possible meaning play across that nihilistic space. In an ironic sense he does indeed take one from delight right up to wisdom's (closed) door. Yet one who wishes to share in this game finds oneself caught in what Sam Weber in "Just Making It" has called the game of "here/gone," in which no mastery is possible because "one never stops passing beyond, without being able to say where one has been."18 Weber employs a metaphor from Kafka's "The Judgment" that illustrates a sense of simultaneous gain/loss comparable to that conveyed by Frost's ironies. Kafka's character Georg remembers only to forget: "At this moment he recalled this long-forgotten resolve and forgot it again, like a man drawing a short thread through the eye of a needle."19 One focuses an acute attention on Frost - finds and pierces the eye of the needle with the thread - only to find the moment of egression implicit in the act of penetration. This is mobility of the highest order, this ironic mode that thwarts the dilemma of being liable to penetration with its fluid refusal to hold open the space one passes through. Stabilized, meaning invites penetration; meaning susceptible to stability risks the freezing glance, the austere "spell" that, like the cold moon of "A Hillside Thaw" who nails the fluid water lizards to the hillside with her rays, crystallizes one's meaning irrevocably. But such unstable irony as Frost employs withstands the penetrative lance by refusing ever to solidify around it. One versed in the stereotypes of gender could almost call this a "female" tactic, this defensive ability to metamorphose under pressure, and it exists, ironically, in direct contrast to Frost's stabilized, resolutely nonmetamorphic male figures and in the company of all his transformative women and witches. Indeed, while irony as a device has historically escaped the taint of feminization, Frost himself articulates his fear that it is not a manly weapon. In its defense, it may be said that irony is essentially antilyrical and thus, as it is subversive of "feeling," is proportionately "masculine." Even unstable irony is felt to emerge from the rational intellect, which is simply choosing a secret language by which the implications of uncertainty may be known: the user of unstable irony is not felt himself to be irrational but merely to be performing postulates of irrationality.20 Irony takes acute rational intelligence, both from the

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one who employs it and from the one who discovers and understands its workings, and by one set of gender stereotypes it cannot therefore spring from a feminine source: as C. Hugh Holman's A Handbook to Literature says, "The ability to recognize irony is one of the surest tests of intelligence and sophistication." Even so, Frost is too immersed in the stereotype of femaleness as defensively metamorphic to be entirely comfortable with irony's evasiveness. That he states his own ironic evasions in terms of defense and of "cowardice" (Letters 299-300) suggests that Frost at times views his epistemological skepticism as a failure of the masculine will, an inability to bring things by main force of energy and commitment to that "rounded conclusion" by which sense is realized and made to stand and be "judged for whether any original intention it had has been strongly spent or weakly lost" (Prose 24). Frost reveals the self-perceived defensive motivations behind his habitual irony in a letter to Louis Untermeyer which suggests that one's "sensitive nature" and the insightfulness that precludes any reductionist vision necessitate a protective ironic disguise; seeing too much, like the women throughout his poetry who see so much more in any vista than men see, Frost cannot fully subsidize the manly, straightforward, resolutely rational view. He gives explicit license to those who would look beneath the "humor" that emerges in his habitual punning, in his often grotesquely inappropriate allusions, and in his almost absurdist delight in undermining terms like "truth" or "instinct," to take his intentions seriously. By his terms, belief may raise a man, "priestlike," above the need for irony (Letters 300). It is disbelief, that anarchic, womanish incapacity to systematize and rationalize wholeheartedly, that bars one from a priesthood of believers that is celibate, cerebral, and pure. Such receptivity as he feels makes one vulnerable, necessitating for Frost an arsenal of ironic weaponry that keeps him out of range of his "enemies" with their guns: Since I last saw you I have come to the conclusion that style in prose or verse is that which indicates how the writer takes himself and what he is saying. Let the sound of Stevenson go through your mind empty and you will realize that he never took himself other than as an amusement. Do the same with Swinburne and you will see that he took himself as a wonder. Many sensitive natures have plainly shown by their style that they took themselves lightly in self-defense. They are the ironists. (Letters 299) He goes on: I own any form of humor shows fear and inferiority. Irony is simply a kind of guardedness. So is a twinkle. It keeps the reader from criticism. Whittier, when he shows any style at all, is probably a greater person than Longfellow as he is lifted priestlike above consideration of the

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scornful. Belief is better than anything else, and it is best when rapt, above paying its respects to anybody's doubt whatsoever. At bottom the world isn't a joke. We only joke about it to avoid an issue with someone to let someone know that we know he's there with his questions: to disarm him by seeming to have heard and done justice to his side of the standing argument. Humor is the most engaging cowardice. With it myself I have been able to hold some of my enemy in play far out of gunshot. (Letters 299-300)

Frost is clearly ambivalent about the function of irony as selfprotection, yet he is tied to the existential specificities that keep him from a "rapt" and unequivocal endorsement of the universalist/impersonalist tradition whereby belief supersedes the variables of experience. Poets are "men who have to feel for a living" (Letters 300) and cannot therefore subscribe to the comfort of abstractions: metaphysics is a "crypt long since rifled by the Greeks" ("A Masque of Reason"), and philosophers who attempt to universalize "end up in the universal Whole / As unoriginal as any rabbit" ("The Lesson for Today" 11. 111-12). A prudent skeptic, then, he makes the "engaging cowardice" of ironic humor another game of here/gone - like the girl running for home in "Fear of Man," he makes a "brief bolt" through the poem - for it is engagement without being engaged.21 He predicts here a curious sort of battlefield, with a "standing argument" as the point of noncontact and the barrier, a wall one side of which (whose is not clear) is felt to be some gun-toting aggressor. Irony is the invisible shield, and the ambiguous image of holding someone "in play far out of gunshot" even allows for the possibility that it is the poet himself who holds the gun, making his critics dance in the well-established Western movie tradition. One may not merely take Frost at his (ironically) self-deprecating word here, however, for he clearly implies that if irony is a kind of cowardice it is also a resolute refusal to be reduced or to reduce the world systematically. A reading based only on Frost's own ambivalence about ironic humor as a form of effeminacy would see Frost as throwing out his ironies to delay the wolves in the same way that figures within his poetry save themselves: like Ahaz offering up his son to the hungry gods ("New Hampshire"), like the Witch of Coos offering up her lover to her angry husband, like the the Self-Seeker selling off his feet for cheap to the powerful mill company. Yet Frost clearly knows that the implications of unstable irony as a means by which irreducible complexities reveal themselves mediate to some extent the stereotype whereby a man either stands and delivers or is not a man: one's ironic humor suggests both an intelligent sensitivity to irreconcilable antinomies and a manly refusal to be cowed into seriousness by his nonreductionist vision. Far more than mere defensiveness, Frost's ironic game playing is meant to signal a

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deeper message, that there are no metaphysical truths to assert, no systems of meaning, literary, historical, cultural, psychological, or otherwise, which can explain or fully subsidize his complicated vision of the world. Moreover, that implied, he means to exclude himself from those sissies, those "pukes and prudes," those whiners who have made "their verse and their excuses lame" by trying to acknowledge, accommodate, and bemoan uncertainty.22 Against the confrontational mode that Frost valorizes at one explicit level as manly must be balanced his appreciation of irony's simultaneous capacity to suggest everything and nothing, leaving the pleasure to reside in the potent act of saying itself. Irony's defensive value is then only correlative to its epistemological significance in Frost's work, as irony serves as a device by which the (exhilarating) apprehension of uncertainty - the nihilistic suspicion that there are no articulable systems to which value accrues - is reified. Even in "The Fear of Man," where the poet describes himself as like a skittish girl fleeing sexual violation, Frost reveals his defiance of those whose "priest-like" transcendence of circumstantialities allows them the dubious comfort of their "rapt" beliefs. "The Fear of Man" subtly displays Frost's dual and conflicting sense that his irony is both selfprotective cowardice and a kind of epistemological integrity. For if the poet does, in his "brief bolt across the scene," act like an unattended girl crossing town late at night, it is in part because there are no sanctified places in which one might walk: he shows a desolate city of wind and dust that "seems in-toppling from a height" even as it refuses to fall. While the poem suggests that evasion is the better part of valor, it also implies that the girl's/poet's stopping under the "little streetlights" that seem so "jewel-steady" in the whirling dust would place her in an even more compromised position. Standing alone under one of these so late at night would, in fact, proclaim her availability: so, too, would the poet's subscription to someone else's enlightened truth make him a man for hire. With all the lights through which she passes either begrimed or motivated entirely by self-interest (the light in the bank is Mammon's assurance against theft), she has no alternative but to try to make home in "one catch of breath." Inspiration would, in this world, simply choke one with the residues and leavings of other men. A gesture of ironic selfdeprecation, the poem also questions the alternative manly rationality implicit in the images of the bank, the leering city buildings, and the symmetrically arranged streetlamps casting inadequate patches of light. It is not a place, Frost implies, in which a poet would want to be too misunderstood in what he means. Irony, for Frost at once a symptom of "female" receptivity, a disguise for it, and a defense against it, affords the Teiresian vision by which simultaneous and oppositional perspectives may be entertained (Tei-


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resias, who knows both woman- and manhood, is safe among men and he is also safe among the maenads):23 this game of seeing all meaning and none thwarts closure, with the individual poem becoming "a kind of guardedness" that diffuses critical energy into the larger text, which is a play constantly unfolding (Letters 299). "Lyric will be piled on lyric till all are easily heard as sung or spoken by a person in a scene - in character, in a setting." "Everything written is as good as it is dramatic," because ironically informed dramatis personae defer lyric accountability indefinitely (Prose 13).24 Kept by suspicion of irony from identification with a (discontinuous) lyric voice whose epiphanic engagements with the world may be infinitely repeatable and nonlinear, the reader is asked to perform an objective function as regards the poetry, in effect mimicking the authorial distance Frost inevitably sustains.25 Insisting on a diffusion of significance into the larger text - his snowfields may be said to reify this appropriation of black inscription to white noise - Frost delays thus the judgmental function typical of those "critics" about whom he often speaks. By refusing to supply discrete moments by which he might be judged, Frost leaves one preoccupied with an essentially creational task.26 It is as if, knowing how words behave under the preemptive critical eye, he simply gives the reader carte blanche, reified sardonically in those endless fields of snow beneath which rocks, animals, hillsides, plants, and even trees hide or disguise themselves. Believing, as Lentricchia says, that "the act of perception which represents the landscape is affectively suffused," one is left to make something of Frost's claimed nothing.27 One begins to look at that field of snow as much for what it conceals as for the snow itself, and like the snowfield, whose significance exceeds its localized symbolic relevance to reside equally in what might be called its intertextuality, Frost's ironic obfuscations begin to communicate their own metalyrical significance. To define that significance requires one's own inscription, however, a concomitant layering of black over white. Reading becomes more than ordinarily extrapolative, so that one is obligated to de- and then to reconstruction, a process that, with its simultaneous modes of selectivity and reintegration, is reified in "After Apple Picking" and "Mending Wall." And one who is involved in reorienting or rebuilding, or even one who merely examines the wall, as does the figure in "A Star in a Stoneboat," is likely to handle the elements of the poem in a neighborly way, with the impulse to become an "old-stone savage armed" diffused into the perpetual reconstruction of a dynamic structure. Implicated in the act of signification, the critic is given a stake in the poem, and the critical stone that might be brought down on the poet's head must necessarily be used more constructively. Ironically, Frost, who half ironically describes his own ironies as a bit

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"girlish," may be said to subvert willfully the judgmental impulse he perceives as intrinsic to criticism, thereby bringing his critics to womanish indecision and inaction. As he necessitates through his ironies contextual and narrative rather than formal and abstract thinking about his poetry, he coaxes one who reads his poetry to approximate the epistemological patterns associated with what has been called a nonexclusionary "maternal ethic."28 The advantages to this deferment into contextual and narrative significance (reiterated, in small, in the dramatic mono- and dialogical exchanges that typify a large body of his poetry) are twofold. By encouraging one to wait and see as the drama unfolds, this Scheherazadic tactic acts as a form of protection, delaying or subverting traditional "paternalistic" judgments - of value, use, rectitude, and so on - that we have seen to be perceived by Frost as severe and even lifethreatening. Given the patterns within Frost's poetry that suggest this paternal figure to be a paradoxical combination of retributive force and frustration, this deferment can be seen as a necessary safety. While the poem as a volatilely living thing does not preclude its being "punished" by stern critical censure, it may be said to resist capture. And this deferment accommodates at an epistemological level that "female" resistance to systematics which, in its undisguised form, is both attractive and dangerous as it opens one simultaneously to being (all things are potentially meaningful) and to nothingness (no conclusions can be drawn; therefore nothing has meaning). It is, either way, a repudiation of all the priesthoods of believers. Frost's poetry, its ironies valorizing a nonexclusionary curiosity about multiple possibilities that may add up to everything or nothing (the snowfield at night again), invites from the maternally inclined reader what Iris Murdoch calls "attention," that "patient and just discernment" which is necessarily an unending task when it is focused on the living things that are both human and artistic. Or perceived more cynically, one could say that Frost, who knows something of what it means to be engaged in the particular of physical labor - raising chickens, picking berries, planting fields, or, as Lentricchia points out, "Mowing," "Going for Water," "Mending Wall[s]," "Putting in the Seed" - knows that an infinity of small gestures will inevitably keep one from looking to some main point or toward where the main point should be.29 This is a truth manifestly familiar to housewives, paid workers, and slaves, but its epistemological correlatives are less apparent to critics making their way to the higher purpose.30 In a maternal epistemology, that which is not yet fully formed - the child and the protean, ironically based poem, a "living thing" that moves infinitely toward completion as lyric is piled onto lyric - most encourages this ethic of watchfulness. This attention is distinguished by its resolute efforts to efface egoistically based, judgmental,


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and frequently retributive action, and to replace those impulses with a close regard for that which might be seen as distinct from what Murdoch calls the "familiar rat-runs" of one's own preoccupations: to see the living poem in all its contradictions as irreducible. Yet by Frost's terms this invitation to surrender the boundaries of self to empathetic engagement with an other must be felt as a ceding of stereotypically defined manhood as it moves one toward apparent passivity: at one level he must perceive his ironies as a form of cajolery, and given his commitment to "poetry as prowess - something to achieve, something to win or lose," this necessarily promotes his own ambivalence about a "cowardice" that may bring the enemy to cowardice.31 For finally, this form of attention focused on the nonstatic, separately existent other brings one to inaction: "If I attend properly I will have no choices and this is the ultimate condition to be aimed at," says Murdoch.32 Locating significance contextually, in the (meta)narrative of a story whose boundaries — the internal structure of the individual, ironically informed poem - are infinitely toppling and infinitely reconstructed, makes wall mending a productive and essential ritual. Preoccupied with picking up and putting back into place that which capitulates so variably to irony, tidying the words that inevitably fall, like stones, like balls, like loaves of bread, a critic's work is never done. Thus by Frost's terms, to arrest the perpetual deferment of significance is made to seem arbitrary and always somewhat punitive in impulse. Frost's ironies convey, lightly, simultaneous and antithetical messages, none of which can finally be established as primary, and thus any critical resolution involves choosing on which side of the constantly deconstructing wall to stand. Unable to subscribe unilaterally to the "female" receptivity without which, in his terms, there would arise no poetic delight, and equally unable to pose as a regenerate rationalist, Frost seeks to leave one similarly nonplussed. Canny, he plays word games that offer both choices, sometimes quite literally, as in his oppositional valuations of "star" in "Take Something Like a Star" to signify both coolly reflective distance and the sexual heat implicit in its linkage with Keats's passionate lover Porphyro, or as in his dually conceived "wave offerings" in "Maple," the one sanctified, the other suggestive of defilement and impurity. Frost is quite clearly not "above paying his respects to . . . doubts" about there being any belief to derive from this conflictual dynamic, other than in the conflict itself. His ironic tactics thus keep one at the verges, for by compromising the middle he suggests that there is nothing there, that there is no synthesis possible. Oppositions do not, in his mind, yield some Hegelian third thing, but exist to sing against one another "like two hands that, by first tightening and loosening the double string between them, make the tin buzzer buzz like a little buzz saw"

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(Letters 466). And as we know from "Out, Out -" and "The Self-Seeker," the little buzz saw itself bites, unpredictably and without warning. This oppositional mode of thought emerges in Frost's frequent use of what amounts to mock syllogistic reasoning, in which the central premise is definitionally ambiguous. For example, in poems like "The Lesson for Today," "The White-Tailed Hornet," "The Black Cottage," and "A Masque of Mercy," crucial terms - "liberal," "instinct," "truth," "justice" - are manipulated by premises that are constantly shifted into betraying an essential absurdity. Frost delights in oxymoronic mock paradoxes that accomplish the same reduction to absurdity by failing, finally, to yield the doubled and enriched meanings of the conventional oxymoron. Fallible instinct, just injustice, false truth, disciplined irrationality - these juxtapositions, which emerge from the intricacies of his language games, are used more to negate than to generate meaning, leaving a void in which anything can happen.33 If "life sways perilously at the confluence of opposing forces," poetry is, says Frost, that thing which frolics in the turbulent middle between oppositions (Letters 466).34 He subsidizes this vision of the anarchic middle at virtually every level, and his pervasive imagery of black against white or white against black "blanker whiteness of benighted snow," for example - suggests both the oppositional and the irreconcilable. This "wild space" between oppositional meanings can seem a delirious place where everything might suddenly reverse itself: where what seems serious might suddenly become ironic mockery and where the jokes are most deadly earnest. For like the king in Through the Looking Glass, Frost refuses to be caught out definitionally: Alice watches the king eat ham sandwiches and, those failing, hay: "There's nothing like eating hay when you're faint," he says. Alice responds commonsensically that she thinks cold water or sal volatile would be better: " 'I didn't say there was nothing better,' the king replied. 'I said there was nothing like it.' Which Alice did not venture to deny."35 Frost's ironies have a similarly irrefutable logic, for as the March Hare, the Hatter, and the Dormouse all know, saying what you mean is not at all the same thing as meaning what you say.36 Or as Frost puts it, "The way is most rigidly prescribed. If it is with outer seriousness, it must be with inner humor. If it is with outer humor, it must be with inner seriousness. Neither one alone without the other under it will do."37 Frost's ironic game is played by the queen's rules, and if for Alice a croquet mallet might turn into a flamingo, so for the reader of Frost might a woman turn into a tree, a tree into a woman, a stone into a star, an ax handle into a snake: things are, simply, not necessarily as they seem, and "meaning" is no more immune to transformation than the artifacts by which it is displayed. "With [humor] I have been able to hold some of my enemy in play far out of gunshot," says


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Frost, and it is impossible to tell who is holding the gun, who is out of range of whom, or if, in fact, there is a gun at all. This protoabsurdist game cannot function by means of a dialectic with the poet, who has no faith in the dialectical process as a means of revealing or stabilizing "truth." "Wejoke about [the world] to avoid an issue with someone to let someone know that we know he's there with his questions: to disarm him by seeming to have heard and done justice to his argument" (Letters 299-300). Even at semantic and syntactical levels this statement works by deflection, the vague terms - "someone," "an issue," "questions" combined with the almost nonsensical-sounding repetition leaving one to puzzle out the sense of it, to play with the words while the poet stays out of range. The definitional end of this statement suggests a further tactical advantage to be derived from irony, for it allows Frost to seem to have listened, to seem to have done justice to the other side without actually having done the impossible in having done it. All seeming rather than being, language is for Frost an extremely intricate and private game whereby he "believe[s] into existence . . . something more felt than known" and, having given it life, leaves it to incite its own anarchies in the reader (Prose 45): his poetry may be said to bring one to oneself. It is in this dual perception of his poetry as at once gestated and made - believing feeling into form - that Frost may simultaneously realize his self-named masculine and feminine impulses: believing (female-based) visceral understanding, that which is "more felt than known," into an existence manifested within the (male-based) hard edges of prosodic form, he leaves the critic an artifact with which to play. Internally transformative, the poem is outwardly shaped to fit the hand; so doubly informed, such a poem is able to appeal simultaneously to that maternal impulse to suspend (punitive) critical action and to the paternal impulse toward a decisive mediation that at once establishes both the truth and the merit of the poetic enterprise. Such a poem is reified exactly in that star/stone the seeker plucks from the wall in "A Star in a Stoneboat, " which, heated by the hand that holds it, chafes and shuffles in the palm, runs off with the arm: the reader "inclines to [the] impulse" awakened by the poem in the same way the hand responds to the divining rod or to the pull of the Ouji stone, by impulses aroused from within.38 The poem makes its own game by locating the desires of its readers, and for those who are paternally inclined Frost seems to issue a manly challenge antithetical to the evasionary tactics intrinsic to his irony: one may opt for justice as easily as for mercy. It is as if he has, as Barthes puts it in The Pleasure of the Text, "cruised" his readers to know what best constitutes for each a "site of bliss."39 In this context Frost's reiterated preoccupation with the problematic and necessary interdependences between "justice" and "mercy" becomes deeply meaningful, as does his

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conviction that these oppositions are both inseparable and finally irreconcilable. They are indeed the two poles between which he is himself, as male poet, caught, as his "poetic" empathies (poets are "men who have to feel for a living"; Letters 300) collide with the rigor of his judgment.40 If he works to promote a merciful, nonjudgmental "maternal" response from critics, he does not do so blatantly or exclusively, for if justice cannot exist without mercy, mercy cannot, by his terms, exist without justice. For those who believe that it is in playing the game well that manhood is established and maintained, his ironies allow exactly that manly game playing, for with the site of bliss so unpredictable, "the bets are not placed, there can still be a game."41 The unrestricted exercise of justice is the necessary other side to Frost's unstable ironies, for by Frost's rules of masculinity there must be a game even if it is played under a full and unrelenting awareness of the uncertainties that obviate winning. Yet of course "justice," that most paternalistically based term and the theoretical given from which dialectic must proceed, enters the definitional wonderland with all the rest of his terms, assuming oppositional connotations - masculine and feminine, pagan and Christian - which bring it to all meaning and to none.42 His ambivalence about justice is perfectly in keeping with the ambivalence he shows toward irony, which, while allying him by his terms with a "female," antisystematic mode of perception, is nonetheless an (anti)epistemological necessity. He cannot speak in detail of (masculine, paternal) justice without pairing it with (feminine, maternal) mercy, any more than he can write poetry based either entirely within the rational or entirely within the lyric self; he lectures Wilbert Snow on the differences between justice and mercy, and he repeats his ideas in "A Masque of Mercy," but he is unable to articulate one concept without the other.43 In "Perfect Day - A Day of Prowess," he maintains that "college athletics should be kept from corruption. They are close to the soul of culture. At any rate, the Greeks thought so. Justice is a close second to prowess" (Prose 91). In this definition he aligns himself unambiguously with the Greek doctrine that a man might, through a salutary dietetics and hygiene, bring his soul and body into harmony.44 Only this physical-spiritual integrity can lead to the enactment of domestic and political "justice." This is, obviously, not a course available to women. Yet justice is also resident in that most quintessentially female of virtues, urged by Mary early on in "The Death of the Hired Man" and derived from painful experience by Keeper in "A Masque of Mercy": "Nothing can make injustice just but mercy," says the final line of the poem. Both of these assertions - "Justice is a close second to prowess" and "Nothing can make injustice just but mercy" are, for Frost, of equal legitimacy, for while one must play one's part well


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and with as much prowess as can be mustered, it is also played under the extreme duress of an undeviating, universalized uncertainty so profound that it becomes "a severity, / A cruelty, amounting to injustice / That nothing but God's mercy can assuage" ("A Masque of Mercy" 11. 71113). So while Frost is just gaming with his ironies, the contest is nonetheless vital, for in a world whose only certainty is uncertainty, playing the game is all there is. Some critics, responding to Frost's explicit and genuine belief in prowess, have seen his unstable ironies as a form of "play" in which the reader is meant to be engaged on equal terms, and yet the "rules" for Frost's games remain fluid. His Loki-like ironic mischief indeed stimulates the reader to energy; if Frost tosses up a stone and it turns into a star, this remains, nonetheless, a game of catch. Yet the game into which the reader is drawn is one from which Frost to a large extent absents himself; as he says, he keeps his enemies "in play" but (himself) out of range. This rejection of dialectic is, in effect, a violation of what Jean-Frangois Lyotard has defined in militaristic terms as "just gaming," that "twosided war" which subverts through agonistic encounters the "terrorism" of eliminating a player from the language game one shares with him.45 Yet there can be no just games, finally, in a world perceived in terms of its failure to adhere to logical rules, but only the semblance of a just game in "seeming" to have listened to, heard, and "done justice to" a voice outside one's own. Frost's is a world that is itself frequently perceived and articulated in militaristic or warlike terms - in his comments to Untermeyer on irony he speaks of "self-defense," of guns, disarmament, and cowardice, and elsewhere he affirms that " War is for everyone, for children too" ("The Bonfire" 1. i n ) . But only the "engaging cowardice" of irony can do combat in a world where being a good Greek has become so very out of fashion: "That course, they tell me, isn't offered this year" ("New Hampshire" 1. 405). His is a world where the ironic game must prevail, where "play" becomes necessarily "a play" perpetually manifesting itself, with a person dispatched to sing or speak "in a scene - in character, in a setting" (Prose 13), where poetry "plays" in the wild places at its own peril (Letters 466). This is a provocative model, whereby masculine prowess must exercise itself wholeheartedly without hope of winning against (paternally derived) "severity" or even "cruelty." "There's nothing but injustice to be had," says the speaker of "The Lesson for Today" (1. 60), but this must not retard one's efforts. The same severe "God" who creates only uncertainty may be imagined but never proven to extend a mediative form of justice that is, in fact, mercy, what might be felt as the maternal antidote to paternal cruelty. (This is an association Frost himself makes in the metaphor ofjustice and mercy coupling as if to give birth; it is, of course,

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significant that the union is a barren, antagonistic one; Letters 466.) Frost's "Justice," a conceptualization so ephemeral as to be here and then gone, brings one to feel that she/he is drawing a short thread through a needle's eye. It exists only by virtue of what it is not. It is a "close second" that never arrives on the scene, a term that can be defined only obliquely because to make "injustice just" is to cancel out the meaning of the term, leaving only "mercy" as tenuous evidence of its bicameral (non)existence. "Take justice and mercy . . . a mind where there was a mind wouldn't think of them as breeding a third thing to live on after they were dead and gone" (Letters 466). Justice, the foundation of any dialectical interchange - the just game whereby one seeks to reveal the truth of the argument at hand - is most essentially not available by Frost's terms, which reduce "justice" to its visceral affects of pain and relief from pain. To hold the conviction that justice does not exist would be to entertain a kind of certainty which belies Frost's nihilistic sense of vacancy; irony becomes the means by which he keeps "justice" only but always imminent. Proceeding as if dialectically inclined, his poetry becomes, by virtue of its instability, essentially internalized: a dynamic literalized in those poems that appear dialogic while in fact being monologues ("Mending Wall," "The Lesson for Today"), this tactic leaves one to argue (justly or not) with oneself. In Frost's terms, then, the "standing argument" cannot resolve itself to some just end but stands to encourage combatants on either side. The wall down, there would be nothing left. So while he shuns the agonistic dynamic, he simultaneously encourages the contest. In a world simplified to its lowest common denominators - pain and not pain, or appetite, birth and death - and devoid of all other certainties, the concept of ultimately and definitively "winning" is obviated, replaced with "seeming to do justice," and only the game becomes essential. By Lyotard's terms, he abrogates dialectic, yet, no terrorist, at the same time he propagates a language game made for an infinity of players, and he does not proscribe the rules by which a winner may be declared.46 Unable to subscribe to the optimistic epistemology that raptly believes in "truth," equally unable to hope that a shared, totally unrestricted access to and discussion of information will be the means by which a just freedom from totalitarianism might be discovered, he nonetheless believes in the value of knowledge, "the mere information we can't get too much of and can't ever get enough of before going into action" (Prose 91). Irony is Frost's version of Lyotard's "non-zero-sum game" in which language may be at once everything and nothing, for it allows the poem to "mean" in a way that is neither restricted nor hypostasized. Unable to subscribe to a system whereby a winner may be definitely declared, he nonetheless believes in the pleasure of the individuated, heautocratic con-


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which meanings are temporarily claimed, and in implicating the reader in this process he perpetuates his own pleasurable discourse. The resolute "masculine" combatant informed by the essential absurdity of the game he nonetheless plays, Frost generates poetic love from the lips with a wiliness that transcends the stereotypes of gender, even while his characters resolve themselves into just such manly men and hysterical women as one might expect. In his valorizing of the contest despite his conviction that the rules of fair play are uninformed by any insight into ultimate "justice," Frost is yet once again, as we will see him in other ways seeking to be, a "good Greek." He supports in his own poetic competitiveness, in his use of metaphors of the gymnasium and of various sports, and in his own avowed love of sports a manly preoccupation with direct and forthright confrontation, even as his ironies subvert such contact within the venue of the poem.47 He shows in this, as in so many things, an acutely dual vision which suggests that such action is its own reward though it is, in absolute terms, not only meaningless but dangerous. In this understanding of and sympathy for what he calls "pagan puritanism," he recapitulates the dynamic Nietzsche describes in "Homer's Contest," where the competitive game is essential but the illusion of certainty - of having, once and for all, won - ensures the dissolution of the victor.48 One must walk a fine line between irresolution and arrogant conviction, between the frustrated immobility of one who sees many paths and cannot choose which to walk and the single-minded forward progress of one oblivious to, or rejecting of, alternatives. Reduced to its most essential information, this attitude suggests that one makes one's only existence through struggle, the cessation of which, through defeat or victory, is annihilation, a succumbing to black nothingness. Frost's own association with this idea of "pagan puritanism" is telling, as he is brought by it to recall from Catullus "the story of Attis who from sheer hatred of love - it said in there 'sheer hatred of love,' you know - destroyed himself and then was sorry, went to the shore and wept at the shore, and then the goddess chased him back off the shore right to the undertombs."49 Love, the preeminent game in which one may never prevail, must nonetheless be played, and those who remove themselves from the conflict are consigned to nothingness. Similarly, one cowed into inaction by uncertainty suffers a kind of death - as Keeper says regretfully to Paul in "A Masque of Mercy," "We both have lacked the courage in the heart / To overcome the fear within the soul / And go ahead to any accomplishment. / Courage is what it takes and takes the more of / Because the deeper fear is so eternal" (11. 728-32). Courage will bring one as close to justice as it is possible to come justice is a close second to prowess - but the arrogant joy of winning

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brings one to disaster: the short thread pulled through the needle's eye, again. Such joy "would spoil your luck, the Greeks would have said," says Frost. 50 One who imagines himself to be a definitive winner, released from his obligation to reprove his eminence, will be seduced to some deed of hubris by the gods, who do not tolerate the one, the preeminently godlike champion. The messenger in Sophocles' Ajax delivers this truth succinctly: "Whenever men forget their mere man's nature, / Thinking a thought too high, they have no use / Of their huge bulk and boldness, but they fall / On most untoward disasters sent by heaven." 51 Frost delivers it no less succinctly in "The Fear of God," which is the masculine version of "Fear of Man": If you should rise from Nowhere up to Somewhere, From being No one up to being Someone, Be sure to keep repeating to yourself You owe it to an arbitrary god Whose mercy to you rather than to others Won't bear too critical examination. Stay unassuming. If for lack of license To wear the uniform of who you are, You should be tempted to make up for it In a subordinating look or tone, Beware of coming too much to the surface And using for apparel what was meant To be the curtain of the inmost soul. To reveal oneself as godlike - to use for outward dress a display of one's self-mastery — is to tempt some god to retribution. Frost has learned at his mother's knee that it does not do to be too happy - when you are, "you better be careful," she warned. 52 And Frost's Christian God, capable of the cruel caprice of "A Masque of Reason," would not brook a man's "subordinating look or tone." Always withholding of approval, in the form of that knowledge which is certainty and which allows one to know that one has chosen or acted correctly and laudably, "He" nonetheless does not suspend judgment and punishment over a man's own choices. The possibility of perpetual competition, the refusal to claim absolute victory or to accept defeat, is vital, for by competition one may keep one's degenerative nature in form. This is what Meserve knows in "Snow," and it is that which a woman cannot, by Frost's terms, fathom: The woman asks an emblematic question as Meserve is about to confront the storm, "But why, when no one wants you to, go on?" Who wants you to go, she asks persistently, half expecting that Meserve will answer, "God." He says, simply, "The storm. That says I must go on. / That wants me as a war might if it came. / Ask any man" (11. 233-41). As


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Nietzsche says, "Combat is salvation" for one who is attuned to the dark theogonic myths, who sees alternatively to his own self-imposed competitive discipline "a life ruled only by the children of the Night: strife, lust, deceit, old age, and death. " 5 3 Combat must also be salvation to one who erects just such a retributive and capricious Old Testament God/Father as Frost reveals in "A Masque of Reason" and elsewhere, for when "the deeper fear is so eternal" one must act or be unmanned. Yet the urge to domination, which is essential to the contest, must be fraught with ambivalence, for the destruction of all opposition leaves the winner open to destruction at the hands of the gods. 54 Frost's own ironic "contest" remains then resolutely oblique in its combatativeness: his speakers play "like men" against all odds for happiness, success, survival, and love while he himself shows a certain womanish/Socratic ambivalence toward simplistic confrontation. Nietzsche imagines Plato's dialogues, played out by that most consummate ironist Socrates, as the result of a contest with the art of the orators, the sophists, the dramatists of his time, invented so he could say finally: Look, I too can do what my great rivals can do; indeed, I can do it better than they. No Protagoras has invented myths as beautiful as mine; no dramatist such a vivid and captivating whole as my Symposion; no orator has written orations like those in my Gorgias - and now I repudiate all this entirely and condemn all imitative art. Only the contest made me a poet, a sophist, an orator.55 "Only the contest made me a poet, a sophist, an orator": or in Frost's terms, "Only the poetic contest makes me (x)." Thus he eludes lyricism, with all that it implies about womanish susceptibility to (one's own) feeling. Only the poetic contest generates figures whose voices inevitably prove them vulnerable or, alternatively, allow them the rope to hang themselves with their own subordinating tones. Repudiated by Frost's ironic games even as they are raised up for inspection or brought to combat, these speakers are, whether self-deprecating or self-exalting, made to be not Frost. His is a secret language whose real meaning and intent are known only to the creator of it, a language whose chief pleasure is in itself and its inviting (im) penetrability. In this heautocratic contest, ironically, Frost may at once be there in the poem and not there, be both a real poet/sophist/orator or a real lyricist and the iron who pretends to these stances while existing as some undefined other. If this is not a just game he plays, neither is it just a game, for to affirm nothing is also to exclude nothing. A sort of philosophicopoetic Pascal's Wager, with "God" (if he exists) demonstrating himself to be primarily a punitive, hypercritical, and vengeful paternal trickster, Frost's irony keeps all possibilities open, the contest intact and eternal.

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Frost sets himself a difficult task (which, it may be said, he successfully pulls off in many cases), for he wants to persuade even the ironically attuned reader to a necessarily nonironic ecstasy, a delight that may temporarily supersede one's own ironic distance. This is the real stake for both poet and reader, and it is entirely dependent on the poet's cunning tongue. To bring oneself and one's readers to transcend ironic distance and reach delight - to know "wisdom's" fallibility even as it jolts one with epiphanic energy - is the quintessence of (erotic) power, a true discourse of pleasure. Accordingly, the poem must have both a "subject that shall be fulfilled" and a "wildness." One's engagement is to be, as with love, potentially ecstatic, revelatory, but this becomes a matter entirely discretionary, a tryst between the consenting adult reader and the poem in which the "wild" card is a function of what the reader finds stimulating. It is within the poem, significantly, that Frost locates the reciprocal "pleasure," for "it should be the pleasure of a poem itself to tell how it can" hold this paradoxical combination of premeditation and spontaneity (Prose 18). This is not to suggest that there is no connection between what the poet intends and the reader perceives: "No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader" (Prose 19). But it is to argue that, by infiltrating his poetry with irony, Frost absolves himself from epistemological and emotional accountability through a resolute effacement of his lyric involvement. No specific claims made directly by the poet, no room for complaint by the reader. The poem is the pleasure and the place where pleasure resides. The poet "goes in like a rope skipper to make his own opportunities," in this language of potentiality, where the protean nature of the metaphor reciprocates the metamorphic qualities of the natural world, and the protean nature of unstable irony reciprocates the unreliability of epistemological systems from which static belief is derived. The poem "is the emotion of having a thought while the reader waits a little anxiously for the success of dawn," but as "Nothing Gold Can Stay" reiterates, dawn quickly, inevitably, goes down to day. The poem is a constant unfolding of itself, here and then gone (Prose 26). The careful poetic process by which the poem becomes a "living thing" is at one generative level felt to be unpremeditated, irrational, and without guarantees: in one sense it must be informed by "female" uncontrol, a paradox Frost suggests when he says that it is "the emotion of having a thought." 56 That part of the poem which comes from reverie is attuned to what has traditionally been defined as an inspirative energy that may not be purchased or coerced and is subversive of control. It is what the Muse confers. Yet the poem also requires an infusion of the poet's will: "Every single poem . . . is a symbol small or great of the way the will has to pitch into commitments deeper and deeper to a rounded conclusion," and it is the poet's prosodic


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and formal vitality that counters the poem's internal anarchies. The poet walks a fine line, balanced between reason and inspiration, justice and mercy, the will as brakes and the will as motor, while the prosodically rounded poem itself must become an irreversible, unpredictable energy, a form of virility that is proof of the poet's virility. Frost then wills his poetry to its own powers but always with the ironic sense that one who commits himself to the transference of "wisdom" is not so much a "sapient" (a dubious enough term in any event) as he is a "poor old sape" ("A Masque of Mercy" 11. 663-4). Yet to capitulate to the despair that uncertainty breeds is unmanly; by terms that are not Kierkegaardian, such despair is, in fact, a sickness unto death as it signals a dissolution of the heautocratic structure in which the contest plays itself out, over and over. Focused on the verifiable physicalities whereby (human) nature makes itself apparent, Frost sees and records the inescapable, nonmetaphysical truths of birth, appetite, and death. The "meanings" to be derived from this record are infiltrated at every level with irony, and, nothing confirmed, nothing is lost.

Irony II: This Is Not a Pipe

Poetry provides the one permissible way of saying one thing and meaning another. Robert Frost, Prose 36 Keeper. If I were in your place, though, Mr. Prophet, I'd want to be more certain I was called, Before I undertook so delicate A mission as to have to tell New York 'Twas in for an old-fashioned shaking down Like the one Joshua gave Jericho. You wouldn't want the night clubs laughing at you. Jesse Bel. Or The New Yorker. Robert Frost, "A Masque of Mercy"

At any given moment within the poetry, Frost may be felt to invite conflicting assumptions about his significance and his intent, and although he may articulate his habit of creating oppositional values of "spirit and matter, good and evil, monism (cohesion) and dualism (reaction), peace and strife," in ecstatic transcendental terms of "unity," there is within his ironic mode a sense of darkness that does not derive from Emerson and Thoreau.1 Reified in his deconstructing homesteads, his cracked baptismal font, and his broken chalice, all of which are just before being swallowed by the hungry, encroaching trees, his poetic vision peers into a place that defies systematization.2 And he is well aware of the implications of his choice to situate himself as he does; resonating between justice and mercy, he does not expect a safe middle ground, for the two simply do not breed some neutered "third thing" for one to live upon. He says, tartly and in a typical conflation of the physical and metaphysical: "Hegel saw two people marry and produce a third person. That was enough for Hegel - and Marx too it seems. They jumped at the conclusion that so all truth was born. A time succession was the fallacy. 56

IRONY III THIS IS NOT A PIPE

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Marriage, reproduction, and the family with a big F have more to answer for in misleading the analogists" (Letters 466). Sublation is too convenient a notion, too easy, and too optimistic, as is the Marxist vision of the inevitable, ideal state. Frost's place is indeed a wild space, its endpoints of justice and mercy those best chosen to imply the sheer anarchy of the middle. Playing in the wild space, he apprehends that which is wild, and wildness promises a painful, inevitably dangerous kind of pleasure. When, in an apparently bemused response to Trilling's tribute to his Sophoclean capacity to "terrify," he says, "I like to think I live in the middle," he says far more than he admits, for it is that very placedness which makes his poetry so vertiginous.3 As an extreme form of uncontrol, wildness is associated throughout his poetry with death: the witch of Grafton, wildness personified, uses her animalistic sexuality to arouse her husband to balance, quite literally, desire against death so that desire may be enhanced ("I made him gather me wet snowberries / On slippery rocks beside a waterfall. / I made him do it for me in the dark. / And he liked everything I made him do," she recalls), and she takes him to make love on a hill filled with old graves ("The Pauper Witch of Grafton"). In specifically Christian terms, wildness is "sin," so that Maple's mother leaves the maple-leaf token of her marital infidelity to mark the appropriately cautionary biblical message ("Maple"). More universally, such uncontrol resides in the very structure of humanness: "We choose to say it is let loose by the devil; / But power of blood releases blood," says "The Flood" of the human wildness that makes love and war. Poetically, wildness is another name for what Barthes calls "bliss," and it is that which refutes language, subverts poetry: "Bliss is unspeakable, interdicted. I refer to Lacan ('what one must bear in mind is that bliss is forbidden the speaker, as such, or else that it cannot be spoken except between the lines . . .')". 4 To be articulated, bliss must be reduced to pleasure ("delight"), removed from the sublimity of wildness, and brought to terms that are, once systematized by language, reminders of one's inevitable compromise. But even such a sleep and forgetting as language brings cannot narcotize Frost's bliss into the complacent rectitude of the "delight to wisdom" equation, for he destabilizes his pleasures with his ironies, balances his readers on slippery rocks beside a waterfall. Irony becomes both the means by which the poetry resists all reductive terms and all synthesis - of spirit and matter, good and evil, monism and dualism, peace and strife - and the means by which one's involvement with the bliss between the lines remains tangential to the poet himself. With such an ambivalent regard for the territory in which he plays, it becomes incumbent upon Frost to absolve himself by irony from the movement toward bliss that he promises from his poetry. Taking the reader to the edge of the woods at twilight, he knows very well what

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Hawthorne's Satan knows of Young Goodman Brown: the invitation extended, we will enter, even while the poet/speaker seems to sit resolutely on the road in his buggy, thinking of the social and familial "promises" he will keep. "All a man's art is a bursting unity of opposites," Frost claims.5 Yet optimism is not the binding force for this seemingly Emersonian boast, which at its heart says more about the iron grip of the poet who intends to turn the wild world to his poetic will - to play the will as motor against the will as brake - than it does about the capaciously conflictual world itself.6 Knowing oppositional views, he sees not so much their fertile interaction as the (lovely, fearful, and interdicted) nothingness waiting in that wild space between turbulent extremes. Every gesture of cultivation is countered, in Frost's poetry, by an equally aggressive subversion: poetic "delight" is the articulated and insufficient simulacrum of bliss, just as the plowed and planted field is the rectified version of the meadow. Yet the scythe may always bring the orchis and the bright green snake from underneath the hay ("Mowing"), if only for the briefest flash of an instant and in seeming to repudiate them may illuminate momentarily the interdicted space: that place between the lines - of mown and parceled hay, of barlike trees, of mended walls. Irony, in refusing to stabilize the referents, works this subversion at the level of language, becoming a disequilibrating force that is reified at the level of imagery in the object's refusal to conform to static "realisms" of the still life.7 Frost's failure to authorize any system by which meaning might be consistently derived from his poetry inevitably implicates the critic in the (erotic) game of naming, and his ironic habit of mind also thoroughly destabilizes the metaphor, which is by its nature already a protean value; he creates, thus, a dynamic system in which one's most successful certainties are always, at best, held above degree zero. Frost may be said to devalue contexts other than his own, because they imply placedness in cultural, historical, or literary systems that have for him no particular value or meaning as such (all ages being equally dark for the soul, according to, among several such assertions, "The Lesson for Today"). Further, as it limits a poet's power to "make his own words as he goes," such placedness is not merely valueless but restrictive, so that Frost explicitly mandates under threat of being seen as a "little one horse poet" that past contexts be subverted (Letters 141). When he appropriates a metaphor or makes an allusion, then, he feels no obligation to a particular consistency of metaphorical valuation: again black/white becomes a productive image, as it suggests his ability to exploit separately or simultaneously antithetical values for these terms or to make them inextricable, as he pleases ("Design" suggests one level of this complexity, with its punning "design of darkness to appall"). Thus, as the ironically predisposed Frost

IRONY II: THIS IS NOT A PIPE

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goes "further and further in making metaphor the whole of thinking," he creates a dynamic of transformative meaning, unbound by any obligation to historical or literary context, into which the reader is pulled (Prose 37). The poem "finds its name as it goes," but the reader can only follow that trail at a tantalizing distance because Frost's unstable ironies refute all finalities.8 Vital, indefinable by virtue of its iridescences of (potential and possible) meaning, the metaphor/poem is like Paul's lovely nymphet wife, whose erotic potency resides most precisely in her transitory and inaccessible nature ("Paul's Wife"). The poem, like Paul's wife, may be trailed at a distance but may not be spoken of "in any way the world [knows] how to speak" without having some part of itself extinguished. In this dynamic, any naming of parts must just miss, as the metaphor just misses being the thing itself, and it is in the recapitulations of near capture that pleasure resides. In this schema, the metaphor-making process necessarily extends from the living poem to the engaged critic, and there is both danger and delight inherent in this process of divining meaning, of, in effect, making one's own metaphors from someone else's givens. It is not merely the poet who is responsible for taking the metaphor to its breaking point, for it is left to the critic to decide when the deferment of significance must be arrested: All metaphor breaks down somewhere. That is the beauty of it. It is touch and go with the metaphor, and until you have lived with it long enough you don't know when it is going. You don't know how much you can get out of it and when it will cease to yield. It is a very living thing. It is as life itself. (Prose 41) There is in this poetics an essential appreciation for the pleasure of discovery and a concomitant reluctance to name what metamorphic thing it is that has been found: Frost senses that the site of bliss cannot reside in a static, poetic artifact, that the reader must to some extent join him in the wild space where the poem coalesces. Finding its own name as it goes, the poem as a living thing is both resilient and fragile: to arrest significance is to pin the poem against the specimen board, but to accede to its perpetually metamorphic state is to lose language entirely. Despite the traps Frost lays with irony to prove the unattuned reader a fool, one must then accept his challenge to go beyond "eye-reading" - a term that suggests a primary valuation of the cerebral - to an intimate involvement with the text from which significance may be suggested: for the critic as well as the poet, such engagement may be seen as a salvation from impotence. 9 Once anatomized, the variable, unstable ironies that infiltrate the poetry suggest that there is no truth underneath, that what is revealed is the nihilistic presumption of emptiness. Yet it is in the process

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and not the result that the reader may reify the ethic of the heautocratic contest whereby, by the classical model of virile moderation, delight generates wisdom in a perpetually rheostatic system. When Frost asserts that "every poem is a new metaphor inside or it is nothing," he says exactly this (Prose 24): the "new" metaphor is not simply that which the clever poet hands down like a bright new apple from the tree, for as "After Apple Picking" suggests, the poet may approach a state somewhere between stultification and a rapt mesmerism as he chooses, plucks, and places the sensually potent elements of his poem. Made perpetually "new" by what one brings to it, the metaphor/poem must similarly entrance the reader to engage in the participatory act. That newness failing, it is "nothing." The man who fails to "come close" by virtue of his involvement in the poem gets, quite literally in Frost's books, a zero: One remark sometimes told me. One remark was their mark for the year; had to be - it was all I got that told me what I wanted to know. And that is enough, if it was the right remark, if it came close enough. I think a man might make twenty fool remarks if he made one good one some time in the year. His mark would depend on that good remark. {Prose 43-4)

In its generative mode the poem, like nature and like women, is eternally metamorphic, its energies held within the rigorous containment of the structure. Knowing that one may only approximate meaning, the reader must nonetheless enforce through the participatory contest a similar virile discipline, where coming close to victory is what one hopes for. One must look at the specifics of Frost's irony, then, not to arrest it at some arbitrary level of meaning, but to reveal its kaleidoscopic nature. Just as Frost's suspicions about poetry may be said to begin with the word, his ironic gaming begins at the lowly level of the pun. He is an inveterate and often subtle punster, whose word games suggest far more than a playful and momentary ephemera: to make a word perform double and even triple duties is to prove its inherently promiscuous nature. And any word is as vulnerable as another, whatever its pedigree - "soul," for example, is brought to perform pedestrian feats. The mutilated sawmill worker in "The Self-Seeker" has lost his feet to the wheel and he claims to be selling his soul for them, but in Frost's territory the soul/sole is more than comically interrelated, as one's footedness is his tie, always to be regarded with a degree of ambivalence, to the mortal and generative earth. (It is a further irony that his soles have been lost to the ceiling.) More traditionally, Frost plays on the concept of the sole, or solitary soul, of the "self-seeker" looking for lost pieces of himself. The "proper" name, that which distinguishes one person from another and celebrates individuality over type, is no less immune, as if every person, no matter how august, is susceptible to alteration: what God proposes when he


6l

does his thinking by proper names ("A Masque of Reason," 1. 200), Frost disposes. When Frost has Jonah "Bohning up on Thomism" in "A Masque of Mercy," he is playing a multileveled game in which all the players are undermined (1. 296). And when he calls the ill-tempered bookshop woman"Jesse Bel," he is further compromising the base from which his serious purpose might be derived by positing her as representing apparently oppositional but ultimately similar interests. Jesse Bel is, in her manifestation as Jezebel, a version of all women; in her manifestation as Jesse Belle Rittenhouse, whose genteel anthologies of popular (effeminate) lyric poetry (The Younger American Poets [1904], Little Book of

Modern Verse [1912]) offended Frost, she is spokesperson of the literary status quo: by implication a prudish whore, this Jesse Belle/Jezebel captures perfectly Frost's ambivalence about both poetry and women.10 The pun is always based on dual impulses and always has the potential to undercut - it quite literally says one thing and means another - and Frost's word games throughout the poetry are built on a foundation of these double meanings or double suggestions. It is not at all surprising that his poetry is completely infiltrated by puns, for Frost is committed to producing two very different effects - a surface "altogether obvious" to any ordinary reader, which obscures for all but a few the buried and complex subtleties underneath.11 "Mending Wall," for example, reifies this doubleness in the very alleged dichotomy between the neighbor's hackneyed sayings and the putative linguistic/philosophical sophistication of the speaker who, nonetheless, tells his own garrulous tale. The speaker says somberly that before he built a wall he would like to know just whom he was walling in or out and to whom he was likely "to give offense"; the pun, which reminds the reader that the speaker has chosen for yet another year to "give a fence" to his neighbor, thus walling him out, qualifies his injured, self-righteous tone. Just how Frost meant this pun to function is unclear: is the speaker, who so values thoughtful language and so resents cliches, making the pun, or is it being made at his expense? In either instance, an ironic discrepancy between what is said and what is meant exists. The question becomes just who - the reader or Frost - is imposing the ironic value system whereby exclusion occurs; who is giving offense to whom by fencing off the fools from the initiates? To complicate matters, Frost himself gives the reader a fence, prosodically speaking, since the poem is cloven down its middle with caesurae, with repetitions of sound and phrase on either side that force the reader to comparisons. Further, the poem appears to be dialogic while sustaining itself as a monologue; the only movement is on the speaker's side of the fence. The pun usually represents a somewhat limited and momentary irony, but in Frost's case it is so pervasive that it acts as a foundation from which other ironies rise. It becomes, as in the above examples, not just a

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witticism but an equivoque by which seemingly exclusive meanings are implied. One might go further and call such gaming a form of equivocation as the terms, in effect, cancel each other out. Frost's allusions, too, frequently undermine the stated tone or message of the poems in which they appear by very obliquely suggesting an analogy that is comic, grotesque, macabre, or bawdy. John Hollander, in The Figure of Echo, has suggested the term "metalepsis" for allusive echoes: "It is a kind of metatrope, or figure of linkage between figures, and . . . there will be one or more unstated middle terms which are leapt over, or alluded to, by the figure."12 The diachronous nature of the allusion keeps it from catchresis. Frost, whose ear is acute, both hears and reproduces echoes of other texts throughout his poetry - as Poirier says, "When we listen to what Frost calls the sentence sound we hear many . . . poetic tongues" — and given his ironically charged perceptions, he often seems consciously to make these echoes serve a sardonically complex purpose (one seems always to catch wisps of the Demiurge's laugh). 13 When he links, in "New Hampshire," an apparently jocular and self-assured tone, a comically derisive image of weekend nature lovers, and an allusion to the Old Testament king Ahaz, another nature lover who worshiped "under every green tree," one must assume at least that he is saying several potentially contradictory things at once, and that he is using both the biblical and the Miltonic versions as sounding boards. 14 It is perhaps no accident that the narrative frame for the Ahaz story is that it arises in an anecdote the speaker tells us he has told to the "New York alec" with whom he is discussing Freud and "the new school of the pseudo-phallic," for the subtextual implications of his reverie suggest powerful Oedipal concerns. Mocking the dendrophobic intellectual who uses Matthew Arnold as an excuse for his cowardice, Frost's speaker finds himself pulled by his own subtextually manifested dendrophobia-philia: the coward is Agreed in frowning on these improvised Altars the woods are full of nowadays, Again as in the days when Ahaz sinned By worship under green trees in the open. But the speaker goes on as if brought to free association: Scarcely a mile but that I come on one, A black-cheeked stone and stick of rain-washed charcoal. Even to say the groves were God's first temples Comes too near to Ahaz' sin for safety. Nothing not built with hands of course is sacred. This is an oblique reference to the dangers of the wild spaces outside the bounds of cultivation and construction, for that which is not "sacred"


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cannot be invested by patristic authority with stability of meaning and value and will not conform to the linearity of the sanctified edifices "built with hands"; this place is where, the speaker says later in the poem, one meets "The line where man leaves off and nature starts," a place the fearful "never overstep[ ] . . . save in dreams" (11. 379-80). Yet Ahaz himself, with whom the speaker seems in some accord, was so much a "nature" lover that he betrayed his Christian country to pagan infidels and sacrificed his son by his own hand to Moloch. Thus the "blackcheeked stone" that seems the ineffectual leavings of weekend campers becomes also the altar on which human sacrifice, what Frost would remember Milton to have called Ahaz's "odious offerings," occurs. Associated comically and grotesquely with abandoned campfires, Frost's "altar," the focus of Milton's lines and the place on which the sacrifice of the son occurs, is allusively charged: linked by appetite, the two contexts are very different kinds of cooking out under the green trees.15 In the context of a poetry that reiterates a vision of triadic competition (among mother/father/son, among father/lover/son, among woman/man/ nature, etc.) this paternal sacrifice of a son to the "gods" suggests a fearful, propitiatory vision, yet the tone remains predominately brash and comedic. In the context of Frost's antithetical designations of paternal power either as eviscerated by the mother ("Maple," "The Housekeeper," "The Witch of Coos") or as verging on an autocratic severity ("A Masque of Mercy") or a kind ofjocular sadism ("Locked Out," "The Bonfire"), the paternal sacrifice of a son to the gods may be seen to promise a deeper signification, particularly as it takes place among the green woods away from domestically, socially, and religiously sanctioned edifices. (These trees are later in the poem seen themselves to be hostile "Birnam Woods.") The Ahaz joke represents the form Frost's allusions frequently take, as it countermands the confident, assertive tone of "New Hampshire" with its dark context, while it is itself disguised and altered by the new context and the narrative complexities into which it is integrated. As Hollander says of metalepsis, "the echoing itself makes a figure, and the interpretive or revisionary power which raises the echo even louder than the original voice is that of a trope of diachrony";16 to return to thoughts of Frost's disdain for Hegelian sublation, this "synthesis" virtually parodies the familial model of truth in which "two people marry and produce a third person," for here the echo both subverts and revivifies the original even as the son is sacrificed by the father. For the reader who is in on the joke, the effect is not to reorient meaning but to undermine it, leaving neither the eye-reader's cerebral version nor the ear-reader's jocular aural version intact. Taken within the context of the speaker's concurrent discussion of Freud, the Ahaz allusion signifies the darkest side of Frost's father-son

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dynamic, a retributive vision placed against the sons who elsewhere in Frost's poetry sell their fathers into slavery ("How Hard It Is to Keep from Being King") or cause their deaths ("The Witch of Coos"). This drama of sacrifice is, perhaps, a man's worst nightmare: one does not need to be, as was Kierkegaard in Fear and Trembling, possessed of a devout obsession about the meaning and effect of God's demand to Abraham that he sacrifice his son to find in such an act a profound significance. To imagine having such a thing done to one, or to imagine having done it, is to imagine a loss of faith: "For what sin could be more dreadful?"17 That Kierkegaard may use it to reaffirm his faith is a testament to his place among the priesthood of believers from which Frost explicitly excludes himself. And to imagine it being done for a "false" god, as Ahaz is said to have chosen, is to see it done for nothing. Yet to belabor this apparently small moment, this brief allusion, is to risk becoming just such a stodgy "New York alec" as the man to whom the speaker is talking: damned if you miss the deeper significations in Frost's poetry, you are also damned if you don't, and the total effect is a subversion of all meanings into seriocomic absurdity. Lentricchia speaks of Frost's vaunting of parsnips over caviar - of comprehensibility over high modernist inscrutability, but in fact Frost tries for both, hoping to become, oxymoronically, "the ordinary man's modernist."18 So while this kind of allusion is at one level a particularly dark form of irony, as it seems to stand as a buried warning from a "populist" poet to the speaker who would be a king himself and to reflect more generally on a capricious cruelty that may not be explained or contained, it may also be said to subvert past contexts into an essential meaninglessness.19 For the speaker who (ironically) claims to have "attained / A height from which to look down critical / On mountains" it signals, perhaps, the revenge of the gods Nietzsche postulates in "Homer's Contest," as they bring low one who has elevated himself too high. As the reference to Ahaz ties into Frost's concerns about paternalistic obligations, it may be felt to suggest a most extreme form of punishment. Its companion allusion might be seen as emerging in "Maple," with yet another form of offering, this one also productive of death when administered to the impure woman. The tone of "Maple" is, like that of "New Hampshire," at odds with such a buried allusion as Frost chooses to employ, and this discrepancy does not merely exert its effect upward. The biblical and Miltonic subtext is in each case both exploited and undermined, for if the poems are made to seem more bleak, less jocular or genteel, and more serious, the allusions themselves are also being trifled with. The implications of Frost's ironic gaming here are, as always, at least twofold, as the allusions simultaneously subvert the meaning arising from the original context and from the new context. This has the effect of suggesting that


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"meaning" may elide infinitely, while certain bodily truths will supersede all contexts and all intentions. In "Take Something Like a Star," which echoes both Keats and Aristotle, the speaker counsels "a certain height" above the mob that is so inclined to carry both praise and blame "too far" into vehemence. He sees the star as "lofty," "proud," "reserved," perhaps even "taciturn" in its dispassion, and he suggests that to focus on the distant star is to transcend the unquiet and often unworthy emotions of humankind. He begs it to share its secrets, to "Tell us what elements you blend," while speaking in a noncelestial language "we can comprehend." Yet It gives us strangely little aid But does tell something in the end. And steadfast as Keats' Eremite, Not even stooping from its sphere, 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 take something like a star To stay our minds on and be staid. Raised, with the star as an unstooping example, the mind might become "staid" and, by implication, more just and more reasonable than a mind fixed firmly to corporeal nature. This reading of the poem is straightforward, and the speaker and the poet seem to intend no irony that might make one doubt the stated message; this appeal to a higher sensibility is, after all, a fairly standard poetic topic illustrated by a fairly standard metaphor, both of which Frost exploits elsewhere. In the early poem, "Stars," from A Boy's Will, the speaker has associated the stars with snowy cold and with inhuman wisdom that transcends emotion; they "neither love nor hate," and they are "like some snow-white / Minerva's snow-white marble eyes / Without the gift of sight." Associated with the goddess of wisdom, they are divorced from her living body and invested in her statue, so that they become representatives of wisdom without the potential caprice of one compassionate about human affairs.20 The message of "Take Something Like a Star," which seems to echo this earlier vision, is in keeping with Frost's reinforcement throughout his poetry of the need for control, and the metaphor of Olympian high-mindedness is also reinforced throughout the poetry. 21 Clearly, there are many contextual reasons for seeing the poem as nonironic. Yet the specific allusion in "Take Something Like a Star" to Keats - the star is "steadfast as Keats' Eremite" - is ambiguous and, given the apparent message, each possibility is equally problematized. While the steadfast-star allusion is generally assumed to refer to Keats's "Bright

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Star" sonnet, it might as legitimately be said to refer to his "Eve of St. Agnes," a poem whose text seems in every way antithetical to the apparently straightforward, moralistic advice in "Take Something Like a Star" that we rise above mortal passions.22 St. Agnes, the patron saint of virgins, was martyred at age thirteen. (These two facts taken together comprise a comic irony, easily extrapolated from Frost's own preoccupation with women's capacity for infidelity, in the implicit suggestion that the one sure way to keep a female pure is to kill her off at puberty.) On the eve of St. Agnes's Day, young women who follow the proper rituals may be gifted with a dream of their future husbands. "The Eve of St. Agnes" is an opulently sensual tale of two young lovers, the pure Madeline (whose name obviously contains echoes of the less pure "Magdalen" in Keats's manuscript) and the passionate Porphyro. On St. Agnes Eve Porphyro hides, on peril of his life, in Madeline's bedroom, watches her undress, and later wakens her, woos her with a table laden with succulent, exotic sweets in gold and silver dishes, and persuades her to run away with him. Keats's poem is both a celebration of sensuality and an allegory personifying the conflicts between physicality and spirituality, and Frost's intimate knowledge of Keat's poetry allows him, in effect, to speak an erotically inscribed language in words of seeming sanctity, to indulge in a titillating game of speaking love at the lips even while seeming to repudiate passion. Once one takes Frost's "other" meaning, the literary echoes in that small word "star" begin to reverberate, and his assertion in his speech "On Extravagance" (apropos of "Take Something") that "By star I mean the Arabian Nights or Catullus or something," takes on a whole new set of erotic possibilities.23 The briefly mentioned "eremite," which in its generalized meaning suggests a religious hermit, an ascetic, is, quite particularly, "Keats' eremite." Of course, in "The Eve of St. Agnes" the first eremite is the ancient beadsman who begins the poem by shuffling, barefoot and wan, through the cold chapel to his cell to kneel in ashes and continues his prayers and ends the poem asleep in cold ashes after a thousand aves. But the staid beadsman, who has clearly removed himself from the "mob" of celebrants, is never called an eremite; only the aroused Porphyro names himself thus: "And now, my love, my seraph fair, awake! / Thou art my heaven, and I thine eremite." It is in this context that Frost uses the term, for the star says, "I burn" just as, significantly, Porphyro is described as rising from his half-clothed lover's bedside "like a throbbing star / Seen mid the sapphire heaven's deep repose." Of course, in the "Bright Star" sonnet, the eremite is also a lover; he would like to be steadfast as the star, "nature's patient, sleepless Eremite," but "Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night." He would like to remain, instead, "still stedfast, still unchangeable, / Pillow'd upon my fair love's ripening breast, / To feel


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forever its soft fall and swell, / Awake for ever in a sweet unrest, / Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath, / And so live ever - or else swoon to death." In other words, Keats too plays an erotic game in which his "staidness" is tied to the rise and fall of a woman's breast, a "sweet unrest" to be broken only in the "swoon to death" of orgasm. In a poem so ostensibly about the "pure" passions that stay one's mind and elevate one above the "mob" of human frailties to staidness, Frost's embedding of this double allusion, the one to a complex of sexuality, danger, and death, the other to an orgasmic fantasy, is a curious, almost sardonic gesture. The subtext is subversive of his explicit claim that the poem is a personal chastisement about his having been "too much one way and then too much another through fifty years of politics" (as it suggests that leaping into beds is attractive and inevitable) and antithetical to the Platonic authority which suggests that political stability is dependent upon a man's resistance to vice. (Plato's Laws represents vice in the "commonalty of the soul" as akin to mob violence: "Accordingly, when the soul sets itself at variance with knowledge, judgment, discourse, its natural sovereigns, you have what I describe as unwisdom, alike in a community where the commons rebel against magistrates and laws" [Laws 689, a-b].)24 In fact, the arousing allusions may be seen as provocative of the very "mob" of emotions the poem claims to descry. Prosodically, the poem is less than straightforward as well, for while the tone is dispassionate, the rhyme scheme is wily, as intricately woven as Porphyro's "woofed fantasies" must be. Frost creates an immense distance in "Take Something Like a Star" between what is said and what would be, for an uninitiated reader, sensually evoked by a reference to "Keats' eremite"; his star seems to speak simply, potentially in Gradgrindian terms of Fahrenheit and centigrade, when it claims to burn, yet if it burns as Porphyro or the lover of "Bright Star" burns, it is a "throbbing star," turgid with its own desires. Frost is so acutely attuned to mutability that he simply cannot stay himself through nonironic, fixed meanings, and, in fact, his apparently serious endorsement in "Take Something Like a Star" is complicated by consideration of his reiterated use of star/stones elsewhere in the poetry to belie their very stony natures. The traditional "wisdoms" like those offered by the Minerva stars are dead, just as in "Stars" Minerva is snowwhite, marble-cold, and blind. (It is not insignificant that "Stars" is a response to his son Elliot's death.) The word "staid" becomes another complex pun relative to Frost's sense of human nature and nature as impervious to stasis. "We may take something like a star / To stay our mind on and be staid," he says, and yet even the "star" he brings to mind in his allusion to Porphyro is in a kind of heat. One who is "stayed" is, in Frost's terms, one who is stone-cold dead, and so even the relatively

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immutable stars and stones that punctuate his poetry refuse to be frozen in place for long. The stones of "Mending Wall" tumble regardless of efforts to keep them in place; hoisted upward toward heaven by frost, they insist on capitulating to the gravitational pull earthward. The stone star of "Take Something" is, it turns out, no more staid than the stone/star plucked from a wall in "Star in a Stoneboat." It says, "I burn," and it does burn, just as the fallen star makes "the very nature of the soil . . . hot." Here, the Platonic ideal of the passionate but reserved soul represented by the star is undercut from within the poem itself; like Frost's Platonically inscribed silken tent of poised and lovely desire, one knows from contextual evidence that the star is itself not staid. For Frost, even celestial and geological artifacts must make their own motions, must exert their own gravitational seduction on the perceiver, or they become cheapened, tricked out, like the wafer moon of "The Freedom of the Moon," which can be "tried," "put," "pulled," "brought," and then "dropped" down to "wallow" as if used up and discarded.25 Correlative to the imagistic promiscuity of a moon one has "the freedom of," language that is not ironically inclined and thus internally mobilized may be exploited, left to "wallow." Thus even the cerebral geode of "All Revelation" is multiply informed, as the "Cyb'laean avenue" through which the head comes suggests both fertility, birth, and the genital canal and, more wittily, the block of stone by which the earth goddess Cybele was worshiped. Further, as Frost clearly knew from his references elsewhere to Catullus's poem about Attis, this stone — said, significantly, to have been a meteorite, another fallen star - is guarded by love-maddened Galli who have taken sharp flints and castrated themselves, "unmanned for very loathing of love," or as Frost remembers elsewhere, "for sheer hatred of love."26 The geode, so lusterless and lumpish on the outside, is a crystal palace of reflected possibilities within (another figure for Frost's poetry). In these contexts, the metonymically personified "black-cheeked stone" of "New Hampshire," which bears the marks of its having been a part of the sacrificial fire, becomes a potent conflation of appetitive allusion, both the son and the altar upon which he has been consumed. In this world where Frost returns inevitably to a conviction that even the rocks, stones, and stars are hot and everchanging, irony is not only a protective device but also an epistemological necessity. Stony Minerva-wisdom does not suffice in a world where the earth mother's meteorite is the site around which ivy-crowned maenads and castrati dance.27 Just as he exploits allusions, Frost also destabilizes tone through the infinite variations of the "sentence sounds" that he claims always as one level of meaning in his poetry. His theory of "sentence sounds" places interpretive clues in that which is essentially unavailable, as the poems


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exist on the page and not, except in limited and occasional circumstances, in Frost's own readings aloud. 28 When "the living part of a poem is the intonation entangled somehow in the syntax idiom and meaning of a sentence" (Letters 107), the poem itself becomes necessarily dependent upon its reader, whose eyes and ears interpret sound according to an infinity of factors; as one critic points out, "the very quality which Frost insists must get on the printed page is the very quality which cannot itself, by its very nature, get there." 29 This is not to devalue Frost's incorporation of the sounds of common speech into poetry, but to say that only by the most general and broadest of terms may that incorporation be verified or discussed. As with much that Frost does, then, this theory may be appropriated to one's own needs. Frost's generally described and universally accepted use of "colloquial language and the subject matter of everyday life," for example, may be valorized politically. As Cary Nelson points out in Repression and Recovery, Frost was credited in The Masses for his revolutionary impact, despite his modernist tendencies toward doubt and irresolution. Yet "his apparently straightforward verbal surfaces begin to disintegrate under the slightest interpretive pressure and the poems become widely, if not infinitely interpretable," Nelson says.30 This is hardly the medium in which revolutionary rhetoric could be said to thrive. In fact, Frost's theory of sentence sounds is that which most completely absolves him of responsibility for "meaning." He warns one to "remember that the sentence sound often says more than the words. It may even as in irony convey a meaning opposite to the words." 31 This, in effect, amounts to a carte blanche, as it places the evidence for the success of the poem in that space between the oxymoronic endpoints of poetry and common speech, two seemingly incompatible elements whose harmony is as unverifiable as the music of the spheres. The reader is an invited party, then, to the ironic inversions potential in all speech, but it is conversation divested of its primary participants and returned, paradoxically, to the poet. With only such a protean definition of meaning as "intonation entangled . . . in the syntax idiom," which Frost called "the most volatile and at the same time the most important part of poetry" (Letters 107), one must tune one's ear to all the separate notes, the chords, the song, and, finally, to Frost's own "oversound, / [His] tone of meaning but without the words" ("Never Again Would Birds' Song Be the Same"). In a curious way, one is forced to listen for this "voice" emerging from the fabric of the poetry, like the voices that came, disembodied, to Frost himself as a child. In fact, one could go further and suggest that Frost enforces a resolute attention, not just to the poetry but to the poet himself: at one level an oblique repudiation of imagism, with its attention to and valorization of the visual, his insis-

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tence on sound is an act, paradoxically, of willful personalization, a promotion of aural empathy.32 With its dispersion of the sound and meaning of discrete words into a "sentence" structure that may extend or truncate the poetic line, this theory reifies prosodically Frost's dispersion of meaning through irony into the contextual and narrative. The "oversound" that emerges is not, by design, the sum of the parts that make up Frost's careful poetic intent: it is the sound of taut control blanketing like a field of snow a poetics of self. It is, oxymoronically, the sound of an aggressive nihilism, the systematic eradication of the lyric self, to be replaced by voices singing in sounds of sense. He carefully gives over many of his poems to verifiable speakers, and since Frost clearly sees the potential for humans to show themselves off as fools whenever they open their mouths, there is always the chance that his actors are to be ironically perceived. But because there are no ironic constants, his speakers are not demonstrably Hudibrastic or mad or stupid but may be genuinely engaged in the dramas at hand. The dramatic world of each poem is on one level self-enclosed and self-sufficient: the Witch of Coos may assert whatever truth she pleases within her sealedtight house, and when she tells the story of the bones walking from basement to attic it is as possible that her words are accurate as it is that she is not a witch, but a crazy old woman. The women of "A Servant to Servants" and of "Home Burial" may be near hysteria, with all that that term connotes, and they may be, as Lentricchia and so many others have asserted, "unfortunate female characters, inescapably housed in their obsessions," yet there is no evidence beyond the subjectivity of the reader, who may either devalue or valorize their visions, to prove their validity or to discredit them.33 Another "I" might legitimately dispute the seeming dismissal of Frost's women as unfortunate obsessives, for example, being a mother, or being a woman, or being a servant, or, perhaps, being "inescapably housed" in its own obsessions, but Frost will not come forward unambiguously to litigate.34 These poems do not clearly have their disputants say things that are counter to what the poet means the reader to know as the truth, but there is always the possibility, resident in the mysteries of Frost's sentence sounds, that a given speaker is indefensibly self-satisfied, angry, hysterical, and so on. Thus while Frost does not have a "My Last Duchess" - he does not place characters in situations where they reveal by one set of extremities an alternative set of authorial values - he may have a number of Dukes and Duchesses. One has only to see and hear, for example, a dramatic enactment of "Home Burial" to recognize that Amy may be made to play her part so variously that she can be valorized at the expense of her husband or discredited as mad.35 One has only to teach Frost's poetry to discover the utterly oppositional responses to a poem like


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"Home Burial," which promotes emotion while creating an irresolvable emotional dilemma. Even in a poem like "The Lesson for Today," whose ironic potential is clearly implicit in the speaker's claims that he is a "liberal" ("I mean so altruistically moral / I never take my own side in a quarrel") and whose mock-dialogic structure reinforces an ironic reading, the speaking voice, Gulliver-like, is so variably situated that many of its claims must be taken as "serious" in the sense that they are in agreement with what we may be reasonably sure to be Frost's opinions. With so much of the potential for irony invested in the sound of a speaker's voice, only the most oppositional claims are irrefutably ironic; a large part of the meaning once again resides in the gap between oppositions whose endpoints are never entirely clear. Frost's pervasive and variable ironies set up expectations in much the same way that his commitment to the iamb brings one to measure the beat of any given poem against this predetermined fall and rise. Irony becomes, like the meter across which one drags and breaks intonation, an inherent quality, a habit of mind as ingrained as the falling and rising heartbeat of English speech. Yet analogous to Frost's metrical manipulations, irony is most valuable as it collides with the other elements of the poem to release some new energy. The reader's preparation for and expectation of irony acts as a random variable; it may change the value momentarily of an entire structure of meaning. It forces the reader toward skepticism and constant reevaluation, toward a guardedness as regards these human figures who relate their versions, tragic, comic, or otherwise, of reality. It could be, for instance, that the speaker of "A Servant to Servants" is more than half mad; it could be that the kindlyseeming minister/speaker of "The Black Cottage" is something of a pedant and a hypocrite. It could be that Frost means to make Amy of "Home Burial" out as hysterically destructive: certainly a reader predisposed to read the poem in that light could make a case. By the same token, it could be that Frost means for one to see the husband as unsympathetic - unimaginative and nonpoetic in his apprehension of the tragedy: certainly a reader predisposed to read the poem in that light could also make a case.36 The responsibility for such choices devolves upon the reader, for Frost claims to have given up his characters to their own obsessions revealed through their own language. And there is nothing more embarrassing than missing the ironic point; one is left, unknowing, among the fools. Thus the reader becomes the ironic adjudicator and is brought to mimic Frost's own self-claimed guardedness about human nature. Reading, one breaks one's own intonations across meter; meaning remains dynamic, a function of the placement of irony relative to lyric intent. The permutations for this clash of emotion against skepticism are infinite.

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The question of Frost's ironic intent becomes even more complex when it is applied to a poem whose subtext may be the product of Frost's less consciously articulated concerns, what Lentricchia has called "the primordial ground of Frost's creative acts."37 It is arguable, for example, that the self-righteous speaker of "Mending Wall" is himself obsessively committed to wall building, far more intractably and instinctively committed than his cliche-bound neighbor. While the speaker of "Mending Wall" justifiably castigates his unthinking neighbor and is himself far more aware of the powers of language for good and for ill, he is nonetheless caught up, ironically perhaps, in the same actual task, wall building, which will have the same results and look no different from his neighbor's contribution despite the narrative he brings to it. There are several possibilities for irony here, depending on the level of Frost's selfawareness. Wall imagery pervades his poetry, as a conscious poetic image and as a psychosexual marker of control and limitation. That the speaker is the one who calls the neighbor to mend the wall is vitally important, then, but it is not clear that Frost meant for the speaker to be ironically perceived as a hypocrite. The simple explanation, that the speaker acts out of a sense of inevitability, knowing his neighbor's habits, seems hardly enough given the contextual symbolism of the wall in Frost's poetry; the psychological explanation attendant upon this version might suggest that Frost's conscious intent was subverted by his own unconscious need for walls. So while Frost might not mean the speaker to be self-parodic, the reader might judge that there is an ironic discrepancy between what is said and what is meant, both by the speaker and by the poet. On a deeper level even than this is the possibility that Frost was aware of, had taken account of and justified, his own need for barriers. One does, after all, need something against which to push. In this case, the poem might be completely unironic, for while both men are engaged in the same task, each brings a different narrative to it, the one limited to a thoughtless cliche, the other enriched philosophically. It could be that Frost is illustrating what it means to move from delight to wisdom: the road less traveled may not look any different, but it is made different by the inner progress of the traveler. The one wall becomes, in this reading, two walls, the speaker's wall a philosophically differentiated structure, the neighbor's wall a mere landmark of past cliches. Of course, this (theoretically available) reading brings into question "The Road Not Taken," perhaps the most famous example of Frost's own claims to conscious irony and "the best example in all of American poetry of a wolf in sheep's clothing."38 Thompson documents the ironic impulse that produced the poem as Frost's "gently teasing" response to his good friend, Edward Thomas, who would in their walks together take Frost down one path and then regret not having taken a better


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direction. According to Thompson, Frost assumes the mask of his friend, taking his voice and his posture, including the un-Frostiansounding line, "I shall be telling this with a sigh," to poke fun at Thomas's vacillations; Frost ever after, according to Thompson, tried to bring audiences to the ironic point, warning one group, "You have to be careful of that one; it's a tricky poem - very tricky" (Letters xiv-xv). Thompson's critical evaluation is simply that Frost had, in that particular poem, "carried himself and his ironies too subtly," so that the poem is, in effect, a failure (Letters xv). Yet is it simply that - a too exact parody of a mediocre poetic voice, which becomes among the sentimental masses, ironically, one of the most popularly beloved of Frost's "wise" poems? This is the easiest way to come to terms critically with the popularity of "The Road Not Taken" but it is not, perhaps, the only or best way: in this critical case, the road less traveled may indeed be more productive. For Frost by all accounts was genuinely fond of Thomas. He wrote his only elegy to Thomas and he gives him, in that poem, the highest praise of all from one who would, himself, hope to be a "good Greek": he elegizes Thomas as "First soldier, and then poet, and then both, / Who died a soldier-poet of your race." He recalls Thomas to Amy Lowell, saying "the closest I ever came in friendship to anyone in England or anywhere else in the world I think was with Edward Thomas" (Letters 220). Frost's protean ability to assume dramatic masks never elsewhere included such a friend as Thomas, whom he loved and admired, tellingly, more than "anyone in England or anywhere else in the world" (Letters 220).39 It might be argued that in becoming Thomas in "The Road Not Taken," Frost momentarily loses his defensive preoccupation with disguising lyric involvement to the extent that ironic weapons fail him. A rare instance in Frost's poetry in which there is a loved and reciprocal figure, the poem is divested of the need to keep the intended reader at bay. Here Frost is not writing about that contentiously erotic love which is predicated on the sexual battles between a man and a woman, but about a higher love, by the terms of the good Greek, between two men. As Plato says in the Symposium (181, b-c), "But the heavenly love springs from a goddess [Aphrodite] whose attributes have nothing of the female, but are altogether male, and who is also the elder of the two, and innocent of any hint of lewdness. And so those who are inspired by this other Love turn rather to the male, preferring the more vigorous and intellectual bent."40 If the poem is indeed informed by such love, it becomes the most consummate irony of all, as it shows, despite one level of Frost's intentions, how fraternal love can transmute swords to plowshares, how, indeed, two roads can look about the same, be traveled about the same, and be utterly transformed by the traveler. Frost sent this poem as a letter, as a communication in the most basic sense, to a man to whom he

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says, in "To E.T.," "I meant, you meant, that nothing should remain / Unsaid between us, brother . . . " When nothing is meant to remain unsaid, and when the poet's best hope is to see his friend "pleased once more with words of mine," all simple ironies are made complex. "The Road Not Taken," far from being merely a failure of ironic intent, may be seen as a touchstone for the complexities of analyzing Frost's ironic voices. Frost achieves a further range of ironic possibilities through a meticulously self-conscious prosody that holds him apart from his speakers, and yet it is from this structural consistency that one may derive the one apparently transcendent value which remains constant throughout the poetry. The backbone of his metrical voice is, of course, the iambic foot, and it can be argued that, in Frost's dimension of unstable irony and constantly redefined speakers, this unit is the one conscious stability throughout his work. This constant, where there are no others, becomes an invaluable device by which to measure tonal variations. When Frost talks of stringing sounds on a line, there is always the certainty that variations will occur within the inevitable rise and fall of the iamb, and so those variations, as markers of always-conscious choice, may be telling. When, for example, Frost disperses anapests throughout "On Going Unnoticed," he introduces an appropriate stumble into a poem about human ineffectuality. The predominantly nine-syllable lines (twelve of the sixteen) reinforce this hesitation, and in this context the two eightsyllable lines, "Less than the coralroot, you know," and "The only leaf it drops goes wide," use a literal lessening of quantity to underscore the paucity of the human figure. The iambic foot becomes in Frost's poetry a kind of moral baseline, a strong voice whose assertive moments are measured almost solely in trochaic inversions. Whatever vicissitudes one suffers in reading Frost, his commitment to controlled strength is never in question: irony, humor, castigation - all the models by which one may reveal mastery of emotion - are clearly valorized, while susceptibility seems a kind of hysterical weakness. The anapest and the dactyl become in this context not merely melodic variations but markers of weakness: in "On Going Unnoticed" reinforcing the physical meanness of the dwarfed human figure against the goddess-like trees, and the resignation of the speaker who generalizes so defeatedly about humankind. Feminine rhymes, with their implication of passivity, tend in this iambic context inevitably to designate a departure from seriousness or from control, as when in the final stanza of "Desert Places" the speaker jeers (without complete conviction) with the rhymes, "spaces," "race is," "places" that he is unafraid of cosmic vacancies. Frost, in talking of meter, uses a metaphor of violence which rein-


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forces this assertion that one's language is a measure of mental strength and control: . . . there are the very regular preestablished accent and measure of blank verse; and there are the very irregular accent and measure of speaking intonation. I am never more pleased than when I can get these into strained relation. I like to drag and break the intonation across the meter as waves first comb and then break stumbling on the shingle. (Letters 128)

These metaphors suggest Titanic strength, for the poet is at once a conscious agent, forcing two disparate elements into strained relation, and an inexorable natural phenomenon that may "drag and break" sound the way the moon controls the tides. To others, he assigns a more domestic metaphor: "You may string words together without a sentence-sound to string them on just as you may tie clothes together by the sleeve and stretch them without a clothes line between two trees, but - it is bad for the clothes." 41 The "you" here is like "the others" of "For Once, Then, Something" who don't know how to look into the water, the implication being that these poets who do not understand "sentence-sounds" are like slovenly washerwomen. The "you" may string words on a line, but the "I" who appears three times in the quote above is happy to create ordered chaos. While one may not include Frost himself in the assessment, one may, then, evaluate any speaker's potential for consciously articulated irony by examining the rhythms of his speech, for Frost clearly implies that the act of signification should be an act of discipline. One disciplines art - blank verse - and life - the speaking voice - by breaking them across each other, and for that, one must be resolutely detached from both. Thus in Frost's poetry any deviation, not only from the iambic foot but from the iambic pentameter line as well, is an important marker of the speaker's state of mind, his control, and his capacity for irony. "After Apple Picking" keeps resolutely returning to pentameter lines, but the speaker is drowsy, and the opening twelve-syllable line - "My long twopointed ladder's sticking through a tree" - is like the last murmured words before sleep. Of course, it also represents, as does the whole masterful structure of the poem, Frost's own precise control of tone, as he creates a speaker who is precariously "upon [his] way to sleep." This fatigued vulnerability manifests itself in an escalating slippage of control from ten-syllable lines to foreshortened lines like "For all / That struck the earth," or eleven-syllable lines like "No matter if not bruised or spiked with stubble." And as the speaker moves toward an increasing intuition of the symbolic underpinnings of his exhaustion, which is the result not just of his picking apples but of other more visceral frustrations

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and fears, the frequency of these variations increases. (Lines i, 2, 14, 16, 18, 19, 25, 27, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 39, and 42 vary from the pentameter; only lines 18 and 34 are extra-syllabic.) His awareness and fear of this loss of control are manifested in the final lines: The woodchuck could say whether it's like his Long sleep, as I describe its coming on, Or just some human sleep. What he fears is not so much death as the very state the poem has mimicked - that is, a suspension between not-life and not-death where language is narcotized toward incoherence and uncontrol. This metrical value system may be used at least to divine the status of Frost's speakers as ironic commentators, as they may be seen to indicate prosodically a state of exhaustion or defeat or hysteria that precludes ironic control. The unperturbed voice of "For Once, Then, Something" which can speak in consciously contrived hendecasyllabics is in clear command of both language and the erotic tradition of Catullus. The consistently employed eleven-syllable line (as opposed to the erratic fluctuations of "After Apple Picking" and "Home Burial") is a witty tour de force for both speaker and poet, a game played deep in the backcourt, pushing the lines; one just might talk this way to keep an opponent from the net. But eleven- to twelve-syllable lines are the outer limit for a controlled sentence sound, as longer poetic lines echo a self-conscious poetic tradition in which alexandrines become inseparably Spenser's legacy and challenge.42 As Frost says, "The number of words you may string on one sentence sound is not fixed but there is always danger of overloading." 43 Where the lines lengthen beyond the laconically conversational, the poet may well intend to show his own control of language while revealing the speaker as vulnerable. When, for example, the speaker of "A Leaf-Treader" tells his story in fifteen- to sixteen-syllable lines, he communicates the very state he describes as he says, "I have been treading on leaves all day until I am autumn-tired." The voice is, like the voice of "After Apple Picking," one that is at once exhausted, defeated, and anxious. "A Leaf-Treader" is about being mired down, being dragged toward death, and the inevitable consequence of the speaker's clearly fatigued and depressed state is his nonironic candor. While the stated message is weariness and defeat, however, and while the lines drag themselves like long wounded snakes across the page, each of the lines is end-stopped and definitive; moreover, the quatrains impose the internal order of rhymed couplets and all the rhymes are exact and masculine. Here is a poet who has claimed "any length of line up to six feet," making a virtuoso performance with seven and a half to eight (Prose 26). Most


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readers would agree that the speaker of "A Leaf-Treader" is not speaking ironically and that Frost himself does not mean to suggest an alternative vision to the one the speaker articulates. But of course Frost's metrical virtuosity - the hip-hop beat of interspersed dactyls among the long iambic trails - is a kind of authorial irony, an assertion of control that belies his speaker's stated message of defeat. In doing so the poet makes the speaker weak relative to the fit poet, whose prosodically derived, extralinguistic "cave sounds" show a virile containment. He stretches to tautness long lines filled with multisyllabic words (there are no lines without at least one multisyllabic word, and seven of the twelve lines have two to four multisyllabic words) by pinning each end to a full stop and a masculine rhyme. If the speaker is vulnerable, this prosodic combination seems to suggest, Frost is most emphatically not; indeed he, unlike the speaker, could play another set. If one may use a metrical yardstick to evaluate a given speaker's control, then it becomes profitable to compare the dramatic speeches within, for example, "Home Burial," where one crucial theme is the perceived failure of language to communicate adequately the bereaved couple's shared dilemma. Does one speaker show more control, and thus by extension for Frost, more good sense than the other? Neither of them, in fact, is said by the other to be able to use language authoritatively, and this, if it is true, condemns them both to ineffectuality. The husband "can't . . . speak of his own child he's lost" because his "words are nearly always an offense" (another pun, perhaps, as his words are barriers), and he can't ask the right question because, the wife says, he doesn't "know how to ask it." The wife is herself inarticulate with despair, and while she asserts that her husband has no right to talk because he doesn't "know how to speak," she herself knows that nothing she says will be sufficient. When her husband says to her, "There, you have said it all and you feel better," she reacts with contempt: "You - oh, you think the talk is all. I must go -" Both of them use eleven- to twelve-syllable lines, which come in the context of the iambic pentameter base to represent a kind of spillage, a profligacy of language that, for them, is without its desired effect - to communicate their separate griefs. The wife uses about 10 percent more of these extrasyllabic lines, a difference that does not seem conclusive in establishing the husband's authority even as it suggests the direction of Frost's sympathies (of the husband's forty-nine lines, fifteen are extrasyllabic; of the wife's forty-one lines, seventeen are extrasyllabic). Thus the metrical virtuosity of the poet-narrator in lines like the appropriately eleven-syllable "She took a doubtful step and then undid it" is used by Frost within the dialogue to reveal the uncontrol and frustration of both husband and wife.44 Such uncontrived speech argues for their complete sincerity; neither has an agenda beyond personal need,

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neither defends an unreasonable position, and neither is capable of the rhetorical control demanded by irony. This pattern, whereby the speaker is undermined by the erratic instabilities of the speaking voice while the poet's formalism prosodically implies his own immunity to the erotic subversions of language, emerges out of the tangles of Frost's ironies; it is, in fact, the product of those ironies that always leave the critic to ask how much of what a given speaker says is by his or her own terms and by the poet's terms intentional and fully informed. Implicated in the epistemological wonderland, where one's meaning erodes as it is spoken, all of the speakers reside somewhere on that continuum of madness manifested specifically in women, witches, and mothers' boys. Yet in looking only at the speakers, one obscures the total picture (and "Heaven gives its glimpses only to those / Not in a position to look too close," Frost warns in "A Passing Glimpse"): the poetry holds itself transcendent over the lyric voice, even as that same voice countermands the authority of the prosodic shape. The shape of the words on the page, the very formal appropriateness of every line, every caesura, every syllable makes the effect almost calligramic, poetry in the image of the thing it speaks of: the words always make themselves into the same picture, the very image of a set of bars behind which the madman/speaker/poet raves, twanging the poles of his confinement. As Foucault points out in This Is Not a Pipe, the calligram is finally tautological: "For the blink of an eye, it reduces phoneticism to a mere gray noise completing the contours of the shape; but it renders outline as a thin skin that must be pierced in order to follow, word for word, the outpouring of its internal text."45 Plaintive or ecstatic, defeated or victorious claims are lodged in a space that both rebukes and accommodates; "it lodges statements in the space of a shape, and makes the text say what the drawing represents," and the always-repeated configuration in his poetry of (prosodic) bars laid across the emotional speaker reveals Frost's commitment to that paradox of a disciplined submission to unreason ("Masque of Mercy" 1. 210).46 In the calligram, neither the shape nor the message may prevail: it is "a double trap, unavoidable snare" whereby "visible form is excavated, furrowed by words that work at it from within, and which, dismissing the immobile, ambiguous, nameless presence, spin forth the web of significations that christen it, determine it, fix it in the universe of discourse. "47 Conscious always of the irony implicit in this double vision of control laid over immoderation, trapped in the tautology whereby one is continuously entering into and egressing from the interior (lyric) space of the poem, one is implicated but never fully participatory in the speakers' emotions and thoughts. One is always peering through the bars into the cage to see if Frost is the man inside; the possibility of lyricism is com-

IRONY I I : THIS IS NOT A PIPE

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promised, or as Foucault puts it in The Order of Things, "sterilized," but it is not eradicated, bringing the critic to the inevitable, necessary, and futile search for Frost's nonironic significance.48 These caUigramic prosodic bars are, perhaps, Frost's acknowledgment of the space that comes to be shared by poetry and madness when the poet works to bring "meaning" to language even as he, of all people, best understands its antitheological nature. Foucault asserts this nexus in The Order of Things: At the fringes of a knowledge that separates beings, signs, and similitudes, and as though to limit its power, the madman fulfills the function of homosemanticism; he groups all signs together and leads them with a resemblance that never ceases to proliferate. The poet fulfills the opposite function; his is the allegorical role; beneath the language of signs and beneath the interplay of their precisely delineated distinctions, he strains his ear to catch that "other language," the language, without words or discourse, of resemblance. The poet brings similitude to the signs that speak it, whereas the madman loads all signs with a resemblance that ultimately erases them. They share, then, on the outer edge of our culture and the point nearest to its essential divisions, that "frontier" situation — a marginal position and a profoundly archaic silhouette.49 Transcending and superseding all of Frost's specific ironic gestures is this irony of form: Frost formalizes the discrepancy between selfconscious poetic control and spontaneity that convention might have once ignored or idealism obscured in the designation of "lyric" as a genuine expression of self. The application of the term "lyric" has always begged the question of what constitutes a genuine revelation of the poet's personal sentiments, and it has never been better than an intuitive gesture of faith as to whether a given poem is a reasonably straightforward subsidy of personal opinion, but Frost, himself unable to subscribe to the priesthood of rapt believers, sees to it that his readers also enter the realm of the doubters. Barthes predicts in "The Death of the Author" the effects of the utter compromise of (lyric) certitude: In the multiplicity of writing, everything is to be disentangled, nothing deciphered; the structure can be followed, "run" (like the thread of a stocking) at every point and at every level, but there is nothing beneath: the space of writing is to be ranged over, not pierced; writing ceaselessly posits meaning ceaselessly to evaporate it, carrying out a systematic exemption of meaning. In precisely this way literature (it would be better from now on to say writing), by refusing to assign a "secret," an ultimate meaning, to the text (and to the world as text), liberates what may be called an antitheological activity, an activity that is truly revolutionary since to refuse to fix meaning is, in the end, to refuse God and his hypostases - reason, science, law.50

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And Frost accelerates one's movement toward this rich, deconstructive multiplicity as he withholds the certainties that his speakers seem, often enough, content to articulate as if they think them true. An "anti-theological" or antisystematic energy may be seen as intrinsic to Frost's poetics, which stipulates above all that a poem may not be first calculated and then written even as it sees the rhythmic progression of its words as virtually inexorable. At one level Frost's poetry manifests a classical preoccupation with the relational value of words. "Classical language," says Barthes, "is always reducible to a persuasive continuum, it postulates the possibility of dialogue, it establishes a universe in which men are not alone, where words never have the terrible weight of things, where speech is always a meeting with others. Classical language is a bringer of euphoria because it is immediately social."51 And Frost, who uses metalepsis with its multiple layers of signification as the stumbling block against which this socialized momentum will trip, nonetheless always seems at the level of prosody to subsidize a forward motion away from the word, with its emanations of intellectual and emotional density, toward relational structures. One is meant to be carried down the road/line from delight to wisdom, and this is one of the promises he reminds himself he has to keep. The sentence sound is to rush one across the artificial boundaries of the poetic line, urging one to move along the conversational way, without the long pauses by which the "sentence sound" would yield to the vacuum and the word would assert itself, would rise to "shine[ ] forth above a line of relationships emptied of their content. "52 One is to ride the crest of the iambic wave of language toward conclusion. Each poem is to be a single element in an unfolding play, so that "lyric will be piled on lyric till all are easily heard as sung or spoken by a person in a scene" (Prose 13). But his alternative invitation is also irresistible: to stop and feel a closed space filling up, as does the watcher in "Stopping by Woods," is to resist the road, to acknowledge the opacities and layerings within the words themselves. Frost gives one the easy escape of glancing at the snowfield as if it is a simple, empty sheet - a desert place - but he makes the density available to be known, as snow covers the enriched metonymies of his vision - the flowers, the grass, the ground, and the hot, hibernating animals. His sheet is palimpsestic, for when the grass is mown, the orchis lies exposed and the green snake goes disappearing from the corner of one's eye. His spatial instincts make resolutely linear movement difficult and unusual - the enforced passage in "A Passing Glimpse" is borne by one whose urge is "to get out of the train and go back / To see." His figures are pulled downward, and the various "pinnacles toward heaven" that rise up out of his landscapes suggest the ascendancy of the word, with its stories, Platonic, mythological, historic, personal, and ironic.


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Relational language, its essential linearity impervious to all the tricks whereby the multidimensional, multilayered richness of thought is reinstated, is as insufficient for "truth" as it is for bliss: it will go forward, carried within the small accelerations of each rising iambic thrust, despite the visceral origin of the poetic impulse that "bring[s] up" a poem from down below (Letters 102). The sentence sound that Frost sees as violating the poetic "line" with its own energies is still itself a line, its only alternative to forward progress the inadequate reversion of a "meaning opposite to the words."53 The form, that thing which imposes its virile moderation on the profligacy of language, confines within its structural boundaries the "poetic" fertility of words in competition with themselves: not just one word in competition with another, but one word in competition with its own layered opacity of meanings (the pun its most parodic reification, the metaphor its emblem) and, beyond that, all words as they exist in precarious, tenuous, near disjunction with the equally transformative things for which they stand. Held precisely on the border, half suspecting that the Saussurean divorce between words and things is merely one more disintegrated partnership between uneasy pairings, viewing from a near distance a "hetereotopia" of language that, Foucault says, "desiccatefs] speech, stop[s] words in their tracks, contest[s] the very possibility of language at its source," Frost's poetry may pretend to its "secret" but knows it has none except its pleasure in playing in just such a wild space as this.54 To act, without irony, as if there is some a priori truth to be preached implies that the language in which that truth might be stated could be held accountable, brought to transcend its own intrinsic promiscuity. Poetry by its nature as Frost defines it "refuse[s] God and his hypostases - reason, science, law." There can be no secret, no "ultimate meaning," for poetic language is desirous only of itself. Proceeding by a deflection of one meaning into many near meanings, the poem is composed of these peripherals or "it is nothing." "The closeness - everything depends on the closeness with which you come, and you ought to be marked for the closeness, for nothing else," he says (Prose 44). This is an "Education by Poetry" that cannot be achieved in any other way, and it teaches the pleasures of "passing beyond, without being able to say where one has been."55 The metaphor/poem is a version of the narcissistic mirror that sees the world as personal, bodily informed text, as it suggests that "truth" is inextricable from circumstantial perception, that what glimmers beneath the surface image is here, then gone, "for once, then, something" like truth or a pebble of quartz or it is nothing. Frost's self-reflective formalism, always felt as a commentary on and a rebuke of the weaknesses of the lyric subject within the space of the poem, suggests an analogy to modernist discourses on the self-conscious

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nature of the artistic product. In much the same way that Magritte extends the complex discourse of his 1926 painting Ceci n'est pas une pipe with the 1966 Les Deux Mysteres, Frost's form comments on his indulgent predilection for the pleasures of language. The second pipe, hovering above the historically defined figure of the first, meticulously titled 1926 pipe complicates Magritte's sardonic implication that words have no internal authority that link them to things - not to what is on the canvas looking like what we name a pipe and not to the thing we call a pipe that words are inventions, luxuriant while pretending toward utility: one of the (non)possibilities of the 1966 painting, canceling itself even as it is articulated, being to say that this one, this emanation floating above the parameters of the painted, stolid frame, is a pipe, unlike the small one pinned to a black surface, framed, and labeled, "Ceci n'est pas une pipe." Frost, for whom as a child disembodied voices spoke, intuits the contradictory metanarrative always hanging above the circumstantial particularities of the word, and he greets this dual awareness with appropriate irony. For his form frequently seems to say, "This is not a (poetic, lyric, emotionally based) poem." Just as many critics responding to North of Boston said that Frost's dramatic narratives were not "poetry," Frost says at one level the same from beginning to end. 56 Through his insistence on sentence sounds, through his conviction that the iambic rhythms of spoken prose are inviolable, through his proud claim to a vast company of dramatis personae, he reinforces the manly, antilyrical values implicit in his formal control; through his sheer pleasure in the text, he combines the transformative language of metaphor with the subversions of unstable irony to create that "double snare" of meaning and form. Yet as long as Frost's ironic position remains undefined, he is implicated: as the "thin skin" of his formal perfection is "pierced in order to follow, word for word, the outpouring of its internal text," he is both metanarrator and lyricist. A kind of double agent, he may be felt by the reader to move, as he himself would put it, in and out of range, always forcing upon the perceiver the decision about what is meant as opposed to what is said. This evaluation becomes inclusive of Frost himself as he is felt to exist in the text: he becomes as subject to ironic discrepancies what he means as opposed to what, consciously, he thinks he means - as his speakers. Barthes, in discussing Flaubert, predicts this consequence of irony: Wielding an irony fraught with uncertainty, [he] brings about a salutary uneasiness in the writing; he refuses to halt the play of codes (or does so badly), with the result that (and this is no doubt the true test of writing as writing) one never knows whether he is responsible for what he writes (whether there is an individual subject behind his language): for


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the essence of writing (the meaning of the work which constitutes writing) is to prevent any reply to the question: who is speaking?57 Barthes's assessment suggests another version of the calligramic bars that imply the presence of the madman whose figure is both obscured and revealed by his language, for if, for Frost, all poetic utterance is unbalanced, the poet's own madness is always implicit in his speakers and his own "self" moving toward the "abyss's void" which is "nothingness" ("West-Running Brook," 11. 49-57). At this furtherest extension, Frost's irony becomes not so much a disguise - a conscious protection of his lyric self- as evidence of an existential failure to locate, fix, and conserve a lyric, speaking self that he does not sense to be a self-indulgent opportunist: looking in the mirror he sees a series of personas, no one more valid than the others and all prone to overstatement. Frost articulates a version of this sensibility when he professes to see himself as boxed up and ready for sale, his "lyric" self having run out before he ever became recognized as a poet: "I tell you, Louis," he writes Untermeyer in 1916, "its all over at thirty. . . . And I took measures accordingly. . . . I have myself all in a strong box where I can unfold as a personality at discretion" (Letters 202). Frost further suggests this disjunction as he obliquely addresses the issue of "who is speaking" in his poetry, which is so frequently autobiographical in detail at the same time it announces an essential objectivity. As if he is talking about an unpredictable acquaintance, he says: "Trust me on the poetry, but don't trust me on my life. You want to watch me. Check up on me some," and "I was a very hard person to make out if I am any judge of human nature. I might easily be most deceiving when most bent on telling the truth." 58 Even the odd tense arrangement, as if he is speaking posthumously, suggests disassociation, and the admission that what is known to him as truth might very well emerge in his utterances as lies, despite himself, reinforces his sense that language is its own force, distinct from the thing it pretends to represent. Disassociated from the poetry by virtue of its own energetic existence on the page, its not-Frost speakers hemmed into the "strong box" of spatial order of precise line lengths, tough rhymes, and authoritative caesurae, Frost can hope for it to have become "trustworthy" in a way that he, himself, is not. Yet of course the living poem, like the living poet, is subject to the same myth-making inclinations, the same capacity to "be most deceiving when most bent on telling the truth." Irony so "fraught with uncertainty" as Frost's has the clear capacity to turn back on itself. The code, unhalted, may reverse or alter at any given moment what has gone before. This is a turn of events that may be inevitable to the ironic

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mode, even when it is stably employed, for as Kierkegaard says in The Concept of Irony, taking up "with such an underhanded patron as irony which is as fond of playing pranks on its friends as on its enemies" may implicate one in the confusion.59 Frost, himself the consummate gamester, looses words in such a way as to dissociate himself from meaning, and yet, ironically, his very success also ensures that he will be, by virtue of not proving himself otherwise, implicated. Finally, ambiguity prevails over any system by which Frost's intentions may be measured or articulated; for all its appearance of manly candor, Frost's poetry shares the transformative qualities Frost so consistently identifies with femaleness. If, for Frost, prose threatens always to lose its fluidity and "in spite of my stirring spoon become crystal," poetry is so intrinsically fluid as to necessitate the containment of form (Letters 461). One feels certain, at times, that there is a discrepancy between what is being said and what is actually meant, but this discrepancy has the curious quality of widening and narrowing from moment to moment. There is a constant tension between revealing and concealing, between castigation and conciliation, between open conflict and the selfeffacement afforded by a series of personas. What one hand gives, the other takes away: where the speaker is vulnerable, the poet is not, so that admissions of weakness are countered prosodically; where the tone is jocular, the allusions are grim, and where the tone is staid and elevated, the allusions are erotic or comic. At one level this is Frost keeping the reader off balance, "in play out of gunshot," and at another it calls into question one's ability to know any truth beyond the most visceral knowledge of appetite, birth, and death. But ironically, this destabilized environment also valorizes the intuitive - the ambient pleasures of coming close - over the logically penetrative and concise methods whereby meaning is skewered and held. This evasion of "meaning" is an indirect but effective repudiation of that paternalistically based anxiety of influence that confirms fatherhood even as it disputes it, and it is an indirect affirmation of "maternal" modes of perception. It is the most perfect means to be a male poet, to be, as "The Fear of Man" puts it, "misunderstood in what I mean" just enough to have the pleasure without the loss of masculine reputation. Thus, paradoxically, Frost opens himself through his ironic tactics as what seems to be an impenetrable defense of variable and constantly shifting irony becomes an invitation to move by more secret and less well traveled paths from delight to wisdom. Frost privileges no one reading, and by refusing to take any one stance he insists upon multiple interpretations, thus at one level keeping the reader at a safe distance while at another drawing the reader ever inward. By undercutting meaning, he brings one into the contest, into the very act by which those dark the-


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ogonic myths may be held at bay, at the same time he reinforces the essential pointlessness of the effort to prevail; he seems to intuit, beyond all the imperatives of masculine bravado, what Iris Murdoch claims for art. "The enjoyment of art is a training in the love of virtue. The pointlessness of art is not the pointlessness of a game; it is the pointlessness of human life itself, and form in art is properly the simulation of the selfcontained aimlessness of the universe."60 In resisting closure, Frost's poetry makes every reader either a thorough participant or a complacent dupe. Not above giving others a fence/offense, he simultaneously refuses the reader immunity to this reintegrative process of perpetual change. Those who stand stolidly at the wall are like the neighbor of "Mending Wall" mouthing his father's cliches, while those who hoist stones to the wall with the pleasant conviction that these same stones will inevitably fall are privy to the Frostian secret: it is in the building of it and in the anticipation of its inevitable decline, and not in the wall itself, that pleasure resides. For in that deconstructing place the possibilities for naming are infinite and unfettered: "I could say 'Elves' to him," the speaker of "Mending Wall" chortles, and as often as the wall topples he can call that capitulation anything he pleases. Frost creates a world where barriers, always manfully erected, are always eroded away, where the line where "man leaves off and nature starts" is a dream space filled with natural correlatives for the infinitely expanding self. In this world where no other barriers hold, the poems themselves refuse to be dead stones in a wall. All dormant stars, these poems show their "worldly nature and begin / To chafe and shuffle . . . / And run off in strange tangents" the moment one begins to examine them, their ironies more matter for the gravitational urge.

Women: Dryads, Witches, and Hill Wives

You don't catch a woman trying to be Plato. Robert Frost, "A Masque of Reason" Jesse Bel. Can you interpret dreams? I dreamed last night Someone took curved nail scissors and snipped off My eyelids so I couldn't shut my eyes To anything that happened anymore. Robert Frost, "A Masque of Mercy"

In Frost's "A Servant to Servants" the speaker describes her mad uncle. He was kept at home with his family, but within the house was another "house" made of hickory-wood bars, a cage to keep him safe and to keep others safe. He tore all his furniture to shreds, so, undisguised, his cell proclaimed clearly its only function as a cage. Oddly, he stripped himself naked but carried his suit of clothes carefully over his arm, as if on his way somewhere. He lived, animal-like, in a bed of straw and tore at things with his teeth. The man "went mad quite young," and although he may have been bitten by a mad dog, the speaker believes it more likely that he was "crossed in love. . . . Anyway all he talked about was love" (11. 104-8). The other prominent figure in the speaker's memory is the bride, her mother, brought into the madhouse where "She had to lie and hear love things made dreadful / By his shouts in the night." The new bride witnesses the madness, she is in her role as bride an embodiment of the cause of his madness, and she is, as the speaker's mother, a propagational source of madness. The speaker has left this house with her husband, moving from the isolated cabin "ten miles from anywhere" to a place with a lake stretching out beyond her kitchen window like a sheet of glass.1 Her vistas opened, she feels still a prisoner and has escaped outside to talk with the botanizing strangers camped on her husband's land. She is torn by conflicting desires, "to live out on ground" as do 86

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these gypsy-like people who have come to search for ferns, and yet to keep "a good roof overhead." She knows by experience the power of place, for she has moved from her mother's house with the upstairs cage to her husband's house, and she has also been sent to reside in the state asylum, where walls are impregnable and the roof is more than sound. Now feeling trapped in a house filled by her husband's hired men, who themselves come and go readily through doors that remain unlocked, this woman recognizes an essential truth: "The place," she says, "is the asylum" (1. 96). And indeed in her domestic role this woman suffers a heavy bondage, for she has not just one man, Len, but many men to enact their needs upon her: she is "a servant to servants" who may enter her (husband's) house at will. Yet her paradoxical knowledge that "the place is the asylum" is a larger truth that resonates at every level of Frost's poetry, from its most literally defined spatial dynamics to a symbology of the body/place/poem within which one contains or fails to contain one's own appetitive madnesses.2 For a man gone crazy from love, "room" - in both its spatial and stanzaic senses - is significantly problematized. A man so afflicted will deconstruct his room from within, as does the madman of "A Servant to Servants": organizational units deteriorate, both linguistically - he howls until exhausted - and formally - "anything they put in for furniture / He'd tear to pieces, even a bed to lie on." The stanza/room, under such duress, must become instead an empty cell, all the furniture one keeps to organize a space of nothingness, even right down to clothing, gone. Yet marital love - safe enough, denatured as it so quickly becomes - is mostly fictive in Frost's world. A woman's "place" (in the man's home) is exactly that condition which Frost's females are most bent on subverting, and when they succeed in compromising the house that structure falls into the dust, collapsing in on its own vacancy. Thus the man's "house," both as a literal edifice and as a symbolic correlative for the body and for the body of the poem, reveals itself throughout Frost's poetry as a most tenuous construction, predicated upon housing the female but keeping her/it under control: temporarily cowed into what she terms servitude, the woman of "A Servant to Servants" may wonder ambiguously "whether [the hired men] are safe / To have inside the house with doors unlocked," but as long as she remains Len's property whatever fantasies of sex or violence they, or she, might have will go untried despite the unlocked doors. Like most of Frost's women, however, she has a clear capacity for subversion, literalized in her genetic association with the love-crazed paternal uncle and in her institutionalization, and if she awakens to this madness and, walking away through the unlocked doors, denies her role as "servant," her husband's house, his farm, his laborers whom she feeds, and his name will suffer.

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Frost's females, however, are their own (insane) asylums: their formal continuities more organic than architectural, they are relatively flexible and do not disintegrate under pressure but metamorphose. Unlike men, who dutifully transform organic form to geometric, a woman may transform herself: that the "dendrophobic" man of "New Hampshire" says, "The only decent tree [has] been to mill / And educated into boards," while Paul's wife conveniently stores herself as a dry pith in the hollow of a tree is typical of Frost's dichotomous vision of gender. And as "The Black Cottage" makes explicit (and as all of Frost's disintegrating houses imply), a board nailed into a wall eventually becomes its own disintegrative force, so that as soon as a man's house is emptied of those who "tread and put them in their place," "the warping boards pull out their own nails" (11. 49-51). As the speaker of "A Servant to Servants" goes on to point out, ominously, she isn't afraid of these unknown men who wander in and out of her husband's house "if they're not / Afraid of me" (11. 85-6). She may modulate into madness at any moment: "I have my fancies: it runs in the family," she warns, as if to suggest not just her own immanent instability but her capacity to engender madness in men (1. 87). Safe within themselves, Frost's women metamorphose and reoccur, and if this transformative capacity is a figure of madness it is, too, a figure of regeneration: like witches, or as witches, women may transcend the vicissitudes of temporal and spatial placedness. This woman remains yet a "servant" to her husband in her husband's house, but for a man to enter a woman's body-house when she has made it her own asylum is by Frost's implication to penetrate the very source of uncontrol, to commit himself voluntarily to knowledge of what it is that makes the madman rave. (As we will see, "The Witch of Coos" is a revealing architectural/symbolic alternative to "A Servant to Servants," for there the witch has appropriated the house to herself, locking the doors and making the "good roof overhead" her own madhouse, a situation that reifies this truth.) The place, indeed, becomes the asylum in Frost's poetry, with all that this word's simultaneity of safety and incarceration suggests about the ambivalence with which a man must greet his instinct for domicile. For if in "A Servant to Servants" the woman's urgings send her out to range restlessly across the fields, her uncle's restive needs have ensured his place behind bars. These two iconographic figures of "A Servant to Servants," the disturbed woman and the love-crossed and naked madman, are emblematic of Frost's vision of sexual anarchy whereby "femaleness," manifesting itself literally in women whose "natural" capacities tend toward hysteria and irrationality, pits itself against the (insufficient) masculine forces of control and containment. These are the explicit actors embodied by Frost in part to externalize the (poetic) struggle between virile moderation and


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passionate excess: at one level an allegory for the dramatic and necessary conflict between rigorous (masculine) poetic form and subversive (feminine) metaphoric language, this interplay between men, women, and the structures meant to contain them represents Frost's poetics of space. The disturbed woman and the love-crossed madman are the figures whose own powers of language are not sufficient to communicate their lyric despair to each other, who prove that to tell of love is to lure a man into that place between rationality and madness where women habitually make their homes. Men and women possess equivalent powers to frustrate and enrage each other, but women may bring men to madness: it is the man in "A Servant to Servants" who must be locked away for life. Women are powerful, active, magnetic in their madness, which is manifested in escape from the asylum of households into nature. Frost's witches literalize this capacity to transform and to be transformed, and they stand as cautionary figures who prove the powers of women who escape socially determined boundaries of behavior. Promiscuously inclined, femality, whether embodied in human form or in poetic language, represents the metamorphic, the seductive, and the maddening: those forces against which a man must stand his (poetic) ground. While women are empowered by escape, men are rendered impotent when femaleness eludes its domestic contract of servitude. As brides or as mothers, women who have realized their (sexual) powers may dominate households, and their burgeoning energies fill up the houses so that symbolically every threshold is sexually charged. "Cellar holes" become pits that represent female sexuality, birth, death, and the grave, and attics are minds filled with the bones of old lovers. Frost's men can no more fulfill their women than they can populate their houses with life and children, however, and so often the women run away and the men follow. Yet the pursuit is dangerous, for it may lead into nature that is equally "female" in its regenerative metamorphoses and is thus potentially deadly. While Frost fills his outside world with walls, and with ceilings of dark leaves, and with the bars of birch and hickory trees, nature resists containment and defies control as surely as his women do. The earth, flowers, trees, and water have almost mythological powers, as if nature were possessed by naiads and dryads and flower maidens, all thriving under the nurture of mother earth and waiting, invitingly, for women to discover their kinship. Domesticated sexuality is pale and fruitless compared with nature. The woods in Frost's poetry are indeed "lovely, dark and deep," and while his households are often left cold and vacant, his nature is enticing, provocative of both desire and death. Men in Frost's poetry are thus potentially circumscribed in their movements. The maternal presence in "The Housekeeper" quite literally dominates the internal spaces of the house: "built in . . . like a big church

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organ," she presides, immovable, over the man's property. Besides her assertive voice, that "organ" which defines in unambiguous terms the impotence of the man who owns the house, only her fingers work, and she is beading a pair of delicate dancing shoes "for some miss" who by the classic metonymy will presumably dance away with a man's heart. 3 Her daughter has run away from her lover and married someone else; the forsaken lover stands impotently outside his house, refusing to enter but paralyzed to act. He is caught almost literally between the classic dichotomy of the mother and the "whore," and while the mother fills his house, his former lover has abandoned it for the outside world. His idealized version of domesticity lies out in the yard with his prized fiftydollar imported Langshang cock and its pampered harem of hens. But his own women describe him as a "helpless," "bedeviled" exotic himself, one who needs extra care and who is, ultimately, in the last taunting words of the mother, a "dreadful fool." Women who stay inside might then incite men to murder by their actions, their words, or their mere presence (the witch of Coos says that her husband killed her lover so that he wouldn't have to kill her), but women outside, in real and metaphorical dress, exert an equivalent, dangerous, sexual power. "Home Burial" epitomizes Frost's intimate relationships between sex, death, and madness: that "a bedroom" - not, significantly, the bedroom by the husband's terms - and the graveyard are of the same size and shape suggests the geometrical precision by which desire becomes correlated with burial itself. The wife is in the process of leaving the house, crossing the threshold from marital asylum into freedom. The house is suffocating her. Her window view of the graveyard is not enough and is, in fact, a maddening reminder that she could not enter the earth with her son. With its transparent barrier, the window is a mockery of a widened vision throughout Frost's poetry and seems to incite escape rather than quelling it; in "Home Burial" the woman can "see" through the window and into the grave in a way her husband cannot, and the fear is driving her down the steps toward the door - "She was starting down - / Looking back over her shoulder at some fear" - even before she sees her husband. He threatens to follow his wife and bring her back by force, as if he is the cause of her leaving, but his gesture will be futile because it is based on the mistaken assumption that she is escaping him. Pathetically, he is merely an obstacle toward which she reacts at first dully and then with angry impatience; he has lost all authority and all power, a truth manifested most potently in his linguistic failures whereby he is reduced to the stuttering refrain, "A man can't speak. . . . " Without language he is unmanned. He "think[s] the talk is all" and yet he cannot speak. He has become merely an animate part of the embattled household, but her real impetus for movement comes from the grave.


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The house itself, reduced to a narrow passageway between the bedroom and the threshold and triangulated to the graveyard, is a correlative for the sexual tension generated by the man's preoccupation with his marital rights and the woman's rejection of them. He offers to "give up being a man" by binding himself "to keep hands off," but quite clearly their marriage is already sexually damaged and empty. That he makes this concession suggests that his wife has repulsed his sexual advances in the past: in this refusal she empowers herself, symbolically and literally rejecting the role as servant-wife by refusing to acknowledge the conjugal "rights" of the husband and by refusing to provide him with an heir.4 Her egress from the house will be symbolic verification of her husband's impotence, and if she leaves it and does not come back, the house will rot like the best birch fence will rot.5 Unfilled, without a woman with child, it will fall into itself, an image that recurs throughout Frost's poetry and suggests analogously Frost's sense that the poetic structure must be pushed taut by the erotic energy of its language.6 Thus the child's grave predicts the dissolution of household, a movement toward the open cellar of "The Generations of Men," almost a literal "home burial." Randall Jarrell explicates the grave-digging scene in "Home Burial" as perceived by the grieving mother: as if in a dream, she climbs the stairs and looks out to see her husband plunging his spade again and again into the earth. Then she walks down to see her husband's shoes stained with fresh earth, his spade standing against the wall in the entry way. Jarrell says, "Such things have a sexual force, a sexual meaning, as much in our waking hours as in our dreams. . . . When the plowman digs his plow into the earth, Mother Earth, to make her bear, this does not have a sexual appropriateness only in the dreams of neurotic patients - it is something we all understand, whether or not we admit we understand."7 "Home Burial," in its committing to earth the proof of a couple's sexual love, predicts a pattern of imagery, rich and ambivalent, that throughout Frost's poetry relates earth both to sexuality and to death. The grave, with its natural and domestic correlatives, becomes a remarkably potent conflation of the point at which desire and death merge into inextricable ecstasy and despair.8 In "The Generations of Men" this link between sex and death is given a further identification with household. The action centers on a ruined house, marked only by an open cellar. On the surface the poem seems an innocent tale of new friendship - a young man and woman meet at the old homestead and sit gazing down into "the pit from which we Starks were digged." This earthy generation is a typical and provocative image in Frost's poetry, as it conflates both the penetrative act - digging in the pit - and the sense that humans are sown in the female earth to be delivered from the ground like so many potatoes. Unlike the Indian

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myth which sparks this image, that of "The-Seven-Caves-We-CameOut-of," this pit is domestically inscribed: the man and woman are looking at and listening to the strong matriarchal presence that links the girl to her female past. As in "The Housekeeper," the male owner fails to preside, since what appears first to be a vision of the "Grandsir" is instead the clearly dominant, pipe-smoking, cider-drinking foremother, whose voice also arises from the pit at the end. Significantly, it is the man who conjures this image first, while the woman sees, wishfully perhaps, a child, a "little, little boy, / As pale and dim as a match flame in the sun" (11. 99-100). He is perhaps a vision of the child they will not conceive, for while they talk flirtatiously, as young lovers might, they are both Starks, and any union between them would be incestuous. The cellar image is finally more evocative than the apparent lightness of the tone suggests, for it embodies gravity, the relentless, seductive, earthward pull that can wrench a burning star from the sky, pull an empty house into the dirt, or bring the structure of the empty poem in on itself. This hole in the earth, a larger version of the hole dug and crumbling in on itself in "Home Burial," represents both sexuality and death. The implicit ban on their budding but incestuous relationship has, by virtue of the "playful" tone of the poem, gone essentially unnoticed, and yet incest ranks high among the sexual pathologies. "The Generations of Men" seems within the context of Frost's poetry a rare moment of awakening and shared desire between two speaking and defined characters, and yet the man and woman are related. The woman is, quite literally, a card-carrying "Stark" who may become, as women are wont to do in Frost's poetry, Stark mad. She holds three cards of relatedness to the man's one, and he says, "D'you know a person so related to herself / Is supposed to be mad?" She answers, "I may be mad" (11. 82-84): the tone is light, but the meaning is not, as a woman who is "related to herself" only intensifies her stark potential for anarchic irrationality. One might make a number of speculations about this odd poem, which has seemed to some critics so "delightful," or, alternatively, so "offensively genteel," but which is finally filled with so much strangeness.9 The house gone, the cellar hole and surrounding landscape filled with visions and voices, the man and woman themselves become slightly surreal: two opposing figures of the same Stark person, with the female holding a strong hand for madness that the male's one card would not counterbalance. Perhaps this explains, in contrast to a poem like "Home Burial" where the man simply doesn't know how to speak to his wife, why these two get on so well, both conjuring up voices and visions. Desire rises almost narcissistically, just as the man can solicit voices from the nearby water.10 Beneath the innocent conversational tone, one discovers the pair's fas-


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cination with a forbidden sexuality. The young man calls his new friend Nausicaa, thus relating her to a charming scene in The Odyssey. The naked Odysseus improvising a loincloth made from a tree branch so that he can come out among the maidens is comically sexual. But Nausicaa cannot marry Odysseus, despite her father's wish that she might, and while she leads him to the town, they walk separately the last part of the way so that people will not think that Nausicaa is "husband hunting." Neither may these two interrelated Starks marry, unless to propagate insanity or sickliness - a child "as pale and dim as a match flame in the sun." The man imagines taking a charred timber from the cellar and making a new cottage, but he knows that his friend may not enter: "she will come, still unafraid, / And sit before you in the open door / With flowers in her lap until they fade / But not come in across the sacred sill." Her entrance is forbidden, but she sits with flowers in her lap. These flowers, symbols of the female genitalia, control her presence, for she will sit there on the "sacred" threshold until they fade. By implication she will be excluded from sexual love, barred from a house made from a "charred timber." There can be no renewed fire in wood already burned - no child like a flame - just as there can be no consummation of this budding friendship. Nonetheless, the two are powerfully attracted to each other, despite the symbolic rain that at first seems "to cool the eyes" but then becomes an adornment of the woman's "summer looks"; "See how wet I am," she says (1. 119). The poem ends with their promise to meet again the next day even in rain, or at least, she says, "It ought to be in rain. Sometime in rain . . . / But if we must, in sunshine." "The Generations of Men" (originally titled "The Cellar Hole") seems, as so many of Frost's poems, aptly named, for the cellar - the pit — dominates the scene, and the "generation" of men, when taken in the context of incest and madness, seems more degenerative than not. The cellar is traditionally a place of potential horror, often associated with sexual betrayal, and its function in "The Witch of Coos" thus seems predictable, superficially what one would expect from a folktale, and typical of the genre, a place where the consequences of sexual madness reside. But this cellar hole has a house sitting on top of it, and the potent symbolic value of the cellar as a kind of nether half extends upward, making the house itself a vast symbolic labyrinth. Figures move up and down staircases, through doors that must be unlocked, opened, and relocked. The cellar is sealed to the outside, bulkhead double doors "double-locked and swollen tight and buried under snow," and cellar windows "banked with sawdust / And swollen tight and buried under snow." These images seem, in the context of the poem's theme of infidelity, guilt, and madness, overtly sexual, as if the house becomes an extension of the woman's body. Long devoid of a paternal presence, the

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house is now entirely the woman's and to enter it is to become privy to her own mad history. To come inside is to see the grotesquery of the unfledged son, forty-plus and aging within a world that is entirely his mother's construct. Sealed to the outside, the house is nonetheless open to the bones' upward journey from cellar to kitchen, from kitchen to bedroom, from bedroom to attic. Madness, which generally rises to the attic after sexuality has broken out of the basement, is here quite literally tied to passion as the bones, all that is left of the woman's appetitive impulses, doggedly make their way upward. The husband, who can neither see nor hear the skeleton and thus can never authoritatively tell about it, is a parody of Frost's stolid men, but the woman is vouchsafed a vividly reductive vision of love's body, which she transforms into a seductive tale for strangers to hear and admire. This skeleton is the transformative nature of love for a man, this rack of bones trapped irrevocably in a madwoman's attic-head: "We'll never let them [out], will we son? We'll never," she says, triumphantly. The son says the bones want to return to the cellar, and the mother says they want outdoors, but they will never cross either threshold, both representative of sexual freedom, because the woman has promised "to be cruel to them." In an ironic mirroring of the situation in "A Servant to Servants," the bones are tricked into the attic, lured upward by opened doors, then the attic door is nailed shut and the bed pushed against it.11 The lover is locked upstairs, a victim of love in a house presided over by a bride. Presumably any "love things" that might have occurred in this marriage bed have also faltered and died, for while the woman maintains that "The attic was less to us than the cellar," the two are so interconnected that the dry bones "brushing chalky skull with chalky fingers" contaminate the bed that is used as a barrier to their movement. The husband is dead when the "witch" tells her story, but the bones continue to "come down the stairs at night and stand perplexed / Behind the door and headboard of the bed." In this poem, brief lust is replaced by permanent madness just as the lover has become a collection of dry bones. But here, unlike in "A Servant to Servants," where the doors all remain unlocked, no thresholds to the outside are mentioned, nor are there any windows except those exits from the basement sealed so unbreachably tight. The impregnable house personifies the witch and contains her. Like the Sibyl grown too old to move, she may be visited but cannot escape. When there are accessible doors and windows, entry can be forced or escape can be accomplished. Each has ominous possibilities. Often women in Frost's poems stand and look out windows, and what they see, as in "Home Burial," where the woman can look out to see fear, is both troubling and seductive. The husband in "In the Home Stretch" senses this, saying, "I think you see / More than you like to own to out that


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window." The woman in "A Servant to Servants" discovers that there is more to marital happiness "than just window views / And living by a lake." She twice calls the lake she watches from her kitchen window "a fair, pretty sheet of water," as if she wills herself to see, through the windows that are her eyes, the window that is in her house, and the window that is the lake, neither out too far or in too deep. As a glassine "sheet" that reflects the light, the lake is a benign, "pretty" version of the window and the mirror, but she watches, fascinated, as it roils and tosses like some witch's glass. The lake is, in fact, very much like her, immobilized "Like a deep piece of some old running river / Cut short off at both ends," but dangerous, with storms that "come up toward the house, / Drawing the slow waves whiter and whiter" (11. 20-5). The lake pulls her outdoors, she says, to "take the water dazzle" and once to "take the rising wind / About my face and body and through my wrapper" (11. 28-9). The window frames this vista in a house where the doors remain unlocked and the "hungry hired men" come and go (in "In the Home Stretch" the young movers are called, provocatively, "door-filling men"), and the successive depths of perception to which she is drawn suggest the intensity of her gaze and her willingness to "take . . . through [her] wrapper" what she sees. The tension in the speaker is personified in nature by the lake, whose deep, turbulently static water must suggest by standard symbolism a troubled sexuality manifesting itself in a selfacknowledged madness. The speaker thus perceives and articulates nature in a way her husband doesn't, and this restive vision threatens the domestic status quo as it pulls against the mundanities most specifically intrinsic to the stolid farmer-husband. Frost's men, suspecting an allure they cannot themselves see, rightly fear this searching, outward view, so that the husband in "In the Home Stretch" finally says to his wife, "Come away from that window where you see too much." In "The Hill Wife" the woman "sees" nature as alluring and threatening, and she states her fears so convincingly that the tone subverts any rational, fearless response on the reader's part. The birds, the tree, the window, the stranger - all become portents, as ominous a "design" as nature's compiling of white spider, white moth, and white Heal-all in "Design." The Hill Wife implies that a man and woman who loved each other enough would not have to care so much when the nest-building birds came and went around their house. Their marriage is sexually empty, a deficiency reflected in her own empty "nest."12 The childless house is a frightening, vacant-seeming place. They dread going inside after an absence, "preferring the out- to the in-door night." Like the birds in "driven nests," they rattle their door to drive out whatever has settled there, and by analogy, they are the intruders. Their bedroom is haunted by a "dark pine that kept / Forever trying the window-latch."

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The tree has "tireless but ineffectual hands" that in waking hours seem "as a little bird / Before the mystery of glass." The symbols merge and conflate, with the husband and wife like birds, with the tree like a bird but also like a man or a woman with "tireless," dangerous hands, with the threatening stranger in the woods like the dark tree tapping at the bedroom window. The whole tenuous asylum depends on closed doors and unbroken windows, but like the other women for whom nature is an objective correlative, the Hill Wife dreams that the barrier between their bedroom and the outdoors is threatened by the tall pine: "And only one of the two / Was afraid in an oft-repeated dream / Of what the tree might do." The ominous tone suggests sexual violation, the "tireless" and hungry hands of the tree seeking and finding the woman in a nightmarish recapitulation of the beggar whose hands she propitiates with food. Or perhaps she dreams, with the same ambivalent fearfulness, of what the tree might do to her husband. If tireless female hands were to find the man, at least as the wife dreams it, they might seduce him out into the night, where he cannot perform the gestures of control - the furrowing of field and felling of trees - that keep nature at bay. Either way, the woman performs the opposite function to her farmerhusband's, for her internal and external landscapes merge, and the wildness in her nature allows her to see nature as wild and alluring. It is a small step from "preferring the out- to the in-door night" to rejecting the asylum of household completely. She disappears into the ferns and is never seen again, becoming quite literally a "hill wife," subsumed into nature, married to it. The roving Pauper Witch of Grafton, who in her old age is looking to reverse the pattern of egression by seeking asylum in a township, has been in her youth the most flagrantly sexual of all of these women. She claims to have "ridden" men until they were skin and bones, and she candidly acknowledges the bestial urges that took her into the hills and her husband after her. She is now a pauper, significantly houseless and without a town, for her only legal claim to social support is through her dead husband, who is said to have come from one of the two towns that are fighting not to have to take her in. That she claims specifically to have been married to Arthur Amy is important in the context of Frost's ambiguous relationships, as it establishes her as having entered into a legally and socially sanctioned union that she has exploited retroactively in her attempt to enlist financial support. That she thinks herself a witch and has, with Arthur Amy's aid, made others believe her is also highly significant. A "witch," whose powers partly manifest themselves in a sexual abandonment in which townsmen like Mallice Huse might share, may be left to live on the periphery of civilization, serving a dubious


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purpose but not taken into the bosom of the town; a madwoman who calls herself a witch might be institutionalized, shut away from access. Her female "madness" is thus to some extent co-opted, contained by being released, as it allows men the excuse of her being a witch whose supernatural powers leave them no choice in the matter of being ridden. Her cynical assessment of Arthur Amy attests to this: "I guess he found he got more out of me / By having me a witch," she reminisces, and indeed a woman who derives her power from coitus with the devil might have a great deal to offer in the way of forbidden pleasures: she might, in fact, promise bliss. "The Pauper Witch of Grafton" reinforces Frost's implicit assumption that, degenerated to their most natural state, women will become witches, metamorphic and powerfully seductive. Yet it simultaneously suggests that Frost is less preoccupied with an external figure of desire than with himself, for it reveals the "female" clearly as a condition rather than as a human other: correlative to language that capitulates to its own erotic potential when the poet does not check it within rigorous form, the witch, with her spells and incantations, is the embodiment of erotic/linguistic anarchy. In fact, it is just this stereotype that is appropriated by Xaviere Gauthier in her naming of the feminist journal Sorcieres and celebrated in the journal's famous opening statement, "Why Witches?" Here Gauthier answers her question by underscoring the profoundly sexual connotations of witchery ("All witchcraft comes from the carnal desire which is insatiable in women," asserts the historical indictment against witchcraft) and in it that anarchic, dancing, generative, and rapturous female potential to subvert the phallocratic system.13 Defined in legal terms by men, the witch is endowed with all that seems antiscientific, antiacademic, and antisystematic; as E. F. Kittay points out in "Woman as Metaphor," the highly sexualized female figure - the dark woman, the witch, the Jewess, the working-class woman - who is characterized by her salient differences functions as a means by which the male more firmly establishes his oppositional identity.14 Taking those elements of his own character that are least pleasing to him, he may divest himself of them in such clear alterities as these various fantasy figures provide. For Frost, this divestment of female extremism - of a "witchery" that, if it suggests anarchy, also promises an inspirative (poetic) vision otherwise unavailable - occurs throughout the poetry in his witches. With "witchness" immanent in the female form and immune to paternalistic control, one with a piercing clarity of vision can divine it even in the most seemingly domesticated woman: God, in "A Masque of Reason," finds Job's wife so attractive that he must ask if she is a witch, and one is left with the Manichaean suspicion that, since he doesn't know

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what she is, he didn't make her. This is divestment, indeed; yet even God intuits the female's witchery with a curious combination of recognition, desire, and fear. Perhaps this fearful need to find the witch in a woman is what Paul instinctively fears in "Paul's Wife" when he runs from place to place unwilling to let men praise, name, or even think about his dryad wife, for what a woman or what a poem is called (is the poem a lyric? — for if it is it is an invitation into the "secret places") determines the use to which she/it may be put. In "The Pauper Witch of Grafton" the power of naming lies, in large part, within paternalistic systems that may exploit and use the woman according to what they name her. Before he marries her, Arthur Amy exerts himself in disproving the witch's stories of "riding" men like Mallice Huse — he disputes her name of "witch" — but when he marries her, he changes his tune. In other words, his designation of her as witch gives her absolute license coupled with great sexual power, and he takes pleasure in her status at the same time he uses it to explain and excuse his apparent lack of control over her. This is not to say that he makes her a witch - she can milk bats, she says, and ride through the sky on broomsticks - but only that he can make others believe her claims by verifying them. In other words, they come to terms, both of them accepting her natural state as one whose functions are performed in a landscape away from the house "where the trees grow short, the mosses tall," and it is only when she challenges her consignment to the periphery that she becomes a problem. No longer a "strapping girl of twenty" but a hag, desexualized by her old age, she has become known as the "pauper witch" in the legal battles waged by the towns of Wentworth and Warren to keep her out. Divested of her (sexual) powers, she loses her only marketable commodity and is pauperized, despite her enhanced expertise in storytelling. She is, in this, a parodic symbol of the aging (male) poet who fears that his inspirative powers are lagging, that his poetry can no longer attract and seduce (1916: "The poet in me died nearly ten years ago. . . . I tell you, Louis, it's all over at thirty"; Letters 201-2); having become a Crazy Jane, he is pauperized by a (poetic) body that may feel desire but cannot manifest it in any way the world finds erotic. Here then is a woman whose definition as a witch allows Frost to make explicit the paradox of sexual fear coupled with desire at the same time it allows him to repudiate her by showing the social and legal consequences of her extremism.15 The Witch of Grafton is a woman with no house to contain her as the house holds the Witch of Coos, and as a result she is identified completely with nature. She has a complex of images associated with her: she is a "kite," or voracious bird of prey, and she thinks of herself, like an unruly horse, as having "kick[ed] up in folk's faces" when she was young (one who rides Mallice Huse, she may also be ridden). She


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is also linked in what seems remarkably explicit terms to the physical landscape, which clearly becomes the sensual equivalent of her body: her husband fingers "wet snowberries" in a slippery place beside a waterfall, and he is in clear danger of falling into submersion, a sexual drowning, yet, the witch remembers, "I made him do it for me in the dark. / And he liked everything I made him do." In this scenario the metamorphic power of desire is realized in the fluid transitions from identity to identity: the man/horse (and implied centaur, embodiment of sexual appetite), the woman /horse /kite /witch /hillside are virtually simultaneous states, literalized here by the woman's status as a witch who has the power of actual rather than metaphoric transformation, both for herself and for others. This is not a landscape that maintains boundaries between the self and its surroundings, as the "witch" comes to seem a transitional materialization of desire, something between human and animal. The witch is severed from all social connections so that she embodies pure, appetitive impulse; that she claims to know "right" but only chooses to do right when she can "hurt someone by doing it" suggests her profoundly antisocial status and the mythic proportions of her inhumanity. Free from all social connections, the Witch of Grafton plays out in explicit sexual terms the patterns that are only implicit in those poems in which the woman is arrested at the point of egression: she leads her husband both to natural, animalistic desire - he gathers the wet snowberries by the waterfall at night - and to death - he walks over the skulls of Roger's Rangers and is brought to perform tasks described as lifethreatening. She reveals to her husband the nondomestic, nonbucolic "signs" to which she as a female is privy but which for him constitute a mystery and a form of "bewitchment." In language both provocative and ambiguous she recalls the past: Well, I showed Arthur Amy signs enough Off from the house as far as we could keep And away from barn smells you can't wash out of plowed ground With all the rain and snow of seven years; And I don't mean just skulls of Roger's Rangers On Moosilauke, but woman signs to man, Only bewitched so I would last him longer. Far from the house, even far from the barn, where fertility and resultant mating, suggested clearly in the image of barn smells in plowed ground, takes place among domestic rather than wild animals, she shows him "woman signs," and there is bewitchment (of whom or what is not clear) so that she can "last him longer." But she also carries him to a grave: the hillside that embodies her is filled with skeletons. If she has left Mallice Huse "worn to skin and bone," her body/hillside contains beneath its yielding surface of trees embedded in moss a similar memento mori. It is

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a place where skulls are buried, where men have lost their heads and are being transformed elementally. In "The Pauper Witch of Grafton" Frost finally makes explicit the potential in women to induce sexual madness: at a symbolic level he implies that the "woman signs" by which poetry makes its equivalent seduction are equally irrational, equally "feminine," equally dangerous and pleasurable. These woman signs are not decipherable through logic and they do not appeal to rationality, but they instead short-circuit cerebral functions and make their appeals more viscerally. Men who follow women outdoors are, like Arthur Amy on slippery rocks beside a waterfall, in danger of immersion and drowning in sexuality, for while the women might disappear, like the Hill Wife, or grow old, like the two witches, nature itself remains powerfully feminine and perpetually renewed and seductive. Women may choose to accept or reject their dryad mother Eve, just as they may choose to stay or not within the asylum of household and marriage, and those who fail to recognize their mothers may remain for a time domesticated and safe, temporary antitheses to the witch. The woman of "Maple," for example, is shown to reject all the "signs" by which she might divine her own maenadic nature:16 having ignored 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 also turns away from the erotic embodiment of her mother in the maple tree, quite literally covering her eyes against the sight.17 Whether the marked Bible passage signaling her mother's marital infidelity is a caution delivered by the father or an incitement delivered by the mother is unclear; it embodies in either case the dual imperatives of sexuality and submission that the poem both veils and insists upon. Metonymically, the (scarlet) leaf laid across the Bible's page is a figure that at once acknowledges and repudiates the Puritan A, just as the name "Maple," with its profound symbolic and personal significance, is a gesture of defiance and confession similar to that embodied in the naming of Pearl. (It is not insignificant in this context that, while the purchase price of Maple has been the mother's death, the mother names her by that which stands most succinctly for her "sin.") Named thus by an unknown mother who died from giving birth to her, Maple never fully discovers that the essential but subtle tie between woods, sex, and death is established in a naming which also ties her irrevocably to that mother. "Maple" implies that, once a girl's mother is fully recognized and fully known by her daughter, there will be a transfusion of matriarchal power with all its concomitant (potentially maenadic) generative instinct; it also suggests that this knowledge is a form of mystery to be divined by signs and symbols and unavailable by the terms of rational discourse. Without the passing of the thyrsus, which, in Maple's case, is virtually literalized


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by her mother's manifestation as a maple tree, the girl may remain unempowered.18 The house where the ineffectual father lives was the mother's childhood home, and "Her mother's bedroom was her father's yet." The house is built on the slope of a hill, with one story to the front and three stories to the end "it presented to the road." Thus two levels are buried from the front, and while this makes "a pleasant sunny cellar," the cellar comprises two-thirds of the house. These buried levels of the wife's childhood home suggest that the husband lives there as a mere tenant, inhabiting a limited space marked by maternal ownership. Once again, as in "The Generations of Men" and "The Housekeeper," the male is an entirely secondary and dismissible figure compared with the (phantom) matriarchal presence. Potentially a cuckold, he obscures even his vague apprehension of the meaning behind his wife's marking of her daughter with the name "Maple." In fact, he claims not to know why the girl was to be called "Maple," as if his wife was a mystery to him as well, and yet he says to his daughter, "By and by I will tell you all I know / About the different trees, and something, too, / About your mother that perhaps may help," thus implying his vague sense of an intimate connection between his wife and trees and woods. He is both ambivalent and impotent, truths manifested in his linguistic powerlessness as he proves his inability to name or speak an alternative version of the world that might contradict the mother's power of naming. Her passionate imprimatur, the fingerprint she leaves in her daughter's cheek at birth, marks this Maple-leaf as hers alone, just as she has perhaps left her maple-leaf marker in the family Bible. Yet until the daughter fully accedes to her name, finding out truly "what it asked" of her, she may remain safely contained. The girl is consciously searching for the reason behind her name, but her unconscious need is to discover her mother. She wants to know what kind of obligation the name confers, "what it asked / In dress or manner of the girl who bore it." In searching she thinks, "If she could form some notion of her mother - / What she thought was lovely and what good," she might learn that obligation, which her father has once suggested, unconvincingly, is to "Be a good girl - be like a maple tree." The search for the name disguises the essential search for the mother, whom she finds without knowing. She and her husband look for maple trees that might have inspired her name, rejecting the maples tapped for sugar (perhaps an allusion to her childlessness) and considering only those shot through with an "autumn fire" and covered in smooth, white bark. They find a lone maple, arms raised and foliage around her feet, who is a "thing so bridal," so seductive and erotic, that filial diffidence makes the girl cover her eyes. This lovely, naked apparition is both the mother

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reincarnated and the daughter reinscribed in her natural form. The girl and her husband do not discern this though "they hovered for a moment near discovery," but Maple covers her eyes, perhaps finally intuiting the message of this particular wave offering, made by the tree whose smooth arms are lifted up, and stops looking for the secret. The identification between the girl, "Maple," and her mother, the maple, closes the circle even though she never knows; they are both dryads, powerful and elusive, but only the mother has named their condition. Significantly, while Maple does not recognize her kinship with the trees, the man who marries her feels it powerfully. He does not at first know her name but says, "Do you know you remind me of a tree - / A maple tree?" This recognition of her essential nature is enough: They were both stirred that he should have divined Without the name her personal mystery. It made it seem as if there must be something She must have missed herself. So they were married. Yet their energy is diffused into their pilgrimages into woods to discover her namesake, for until the girl can learn to recognize the beautiful maple, arms uplifted and foliage around her feet, as her mother she will never achieve her own sexual power. She does not have to look out windows to see the trees, as so many of Frost's other women, and looks instead into a mirror before which she stands saying her name aloud, "striking it gently across her lowered eyes / To make it go well with the way she looked." "Maple," a name she strikes against her face like a wand or thyrsus that might confer sightedness, does not open her lowered eyes. She never makes the crucial connection between name and symbol and remains thus contained and domesticated. "Wild Grapes" also presents these feminine alternatives ambiguously. The speaker is a woman who has never learned to "let go" with the heart. The meaning of this letting go is not clear, for it may be interpreted as the speaker's tenacious capacity to love faithfully and without reservation. 19 It might mean, conversely, that she has not learned to open her heart to love as she was forced to open her hands to drop from the tree (and this reading is supported by the positive movement that results from the opening of the hands to drop to earth, "the right place for love"). In either reading, however, she remains a "safe" woman, for she will in the first instance never wander off from love like the Hill Wife and, in the second, never possess a man with her wildness like the Witch of Grafton. The speaker's brother has bent a birch tree down for her to pick the wild grapes that have climbed up through the branches. When she reaches to hold the tree in its arc, it picks her up, leaving her dangling like the grapes, to be "gathered from the birch" by her brother. The birch is


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queenly, "Wearing a thin head-dress of pointed leaves, / And heavy on her heavy hair behind, / Against her neck, an ornament of grapes," the Bacchanalian grapes and "heavy hair" potent symbols of sexuality and fertility. The girl was an innocent five-year-old child then and has perhaps remained virginal. If one reads her failure to "let go" to mean that she is more dependent on the mind than the heart, then her final defiance, "I had not learned to let go with the hands, / As still I have not learned to with the heart, / And have no wish to with the heart - nor need," places her among the intellectuals and makes her as harmless as the invalid poetess in "A Fountain, a Bottle, a Donkey's Ears and Some Books" who "was 'shut in' for life." That she tells her own story - makes her own even-toned, meditative poem - supports, against the body of Frost's implicitly masculine speakers, her uniquely intellectual perspective. In any case, she is no threat because she has never become the fruitful tree but has remained merely the parasitizing vine that clings to it, "foxgrapes" which, as fable has it, are sour and unripe. As in "Maple," the queenly tree is the antithesis of the as yet unsexualized girl and the intellectually inclined woman she has apparently become. The tree is "heavy" with grapes, but thefive-year-oldgirl is still virtually weightless. Her brother asks, "Don't you weigh anything / Try to weigh something next time, so you won't / Be run off with by birch trees into space." He himself, like the boy of "Birches," may ride the tree down, subduing it temporarily, but the girl is taken up by and momentarily grafted to the tree, herself suspended with the grapes. Rescued by her brother, she repudiates the tree, declaring herself "reborn" upon her return to earth. In an odd spatial inversion, by which the tree and the "underworld" are conflated, she is "come after like Eurydice / And brought down safely from the upper regions," as if Frost at some most essential level connects the sensuality of the tree with death. All evidence - what she says, the philosophically ruminative way she says it, and the fact that she is vouchsafed the opportunity to say it - suggests that as she rejects the Bacchanalian tree she chooses a more temperate, less "female" second birth. As Helen Bacon has pointed out, there are echoes in "Wild Grapes" of Euripides' Bacchae, and certainly the grape-laden birch tree with her leafy headdress becomes an appropriative, maenadic figure who wants the girl for herself: "The tree had me. / The minute it was left with me alone, / It caught me up. . . ."20 The tree upon which Pentheus roosts in The Bacchae will not hold him above the maenadic frenzies below, allowing him to be shaken off, the way the brother threatens in "Wild Grapes" to "shake the tree and shake you down." This tree, on the other hand, seems reluctant to let her go and is perceived to want to "run off with" her. She rejects the tree and turns homeward, choosing "knowledge" defined in terms of the status quo - "It wasn't my not

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weighing anything / So much as my not knowing anything," she says. Utterly co-opted into a system where she will not "let go with the heart," she subscribes, no matter which way her assertion is read, to a model of control, either domestically inscribed with a commitment to remain steadfast and true to family or autonomously inscribed with a commitment to emotional self-control. Invited by the queenly birth, just as Maple is invited by the gloriously erotic maple tree, to an awareness of her maenadic potential for fruition and violence, she chooses a path that allows her to live without disquiet. She brags at the end that she is not plagued by a mind which keeps her awake at night, and one knows from her self-satisfied voice that she has not yet been brought to imagine what the dark trees outside her window might do. "Paul's Wife" is also about a dryad, this one taken literally from inside a tree and brought alive through immersion in a pond, this one so seductive that Paul falls absolutely, possessively, in love; she is the very embodiment of an eroticism so absolute as to be interdicted, for to speak of her is to extinguish her. Paul is a lumberjack, "the hero of the mountain camps / Ever since, just to show them, he had slipped / The bark of a whole tamarack off whole." This action, viewed in the context of what is to come, is a flagrantly sexual undressing. But he is not the master of the trees, despite being a lumberjack who fells and strips them, but they of him. He is said to have "sawed his wife out of a white-pine log," yet he is only responsible for pulling the existent woman out. The log from which Paul's wife comes emerges from the saw a length of wood split darkly down the middle except for a closure at each end. This vaginal-like opening is narrow, so Paul takes his jackknife and lets enough light into the hollow to see something inside: "A slender length of pith, or was it pith? / It might have been the skin a snake had cast / And left stood up on end inside the tree / The hundred years the tree must have been growing." He takes the dry, fragile pith, lays it at the edge of the pond, "where it could drink," and it slowly rises a girl, "Her wet hair heavy on her like a helmet." Her first sound is a laugh. She is newly created, a new Eve, and when she walks off across the pond on the backs of the logs Paul follows. But she is also the snake as well, for she carries in her the capacity to drive her husband from place to place even after she has gone "out like a firefly" and disappeared.21 She has made Paul a "terrible possessor" with her beauty; she is his goddess alone, and others may not praise her or "so much as name her." Paul is not in Eden, but in a fallen world where there is no language for innocence, and he is mobilized each time someone asks, "How's the wife?" "The Subverted Flower" becomes, in the context of Frost's ambivalence about femality/eroticism/poetry a virtual morality play, as it chokes the man with desire, depriving him of language and sending him


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down on all fours. Because the woman will not become the flower, the man becomes, quite literally, a beast. According to Thompson, the ambiguous accusation made against the flower - "It is this that had the power" - suggests that the speaker blames the flower for his unchecked desire and his importuning of the woman.22 He is both man and beast early in the poem, his smile of apology replaced by a smile of desire that "crack[s] his ragged muzzle" when he sees her "standing to the waist / In goldenrod and brake, / Her shining hair displaced." This is indeed a provocative image, and he stretches out his arms "As if he could not spare / To touch her neck and hair." Words choke him "Like a tiger at a bone." Unprotected because she has gone outside the garden walls, she is afraid to move lest she wake "the demon of pursuit / That slumbers in a brute." She is terrified that he will "pounce to end it all." She sees him as a powerful animal, a tiger, a lion, a wolf, perhaps, until he drops his hands so that they hang like paws and laughs ingratiatingly. He drops his eyes in subjection. At this point he no longer has a muzzle, but a "snout," and is an ugly creature that becomes frightened and runs away. The poem seems straightforward in its allegory of the man turned to beast through sexual desire, but it takes a subtle turn that pulls it back toward many of the poems examined thus far. The woman has the power to madden the man and to make him bestial with her rejection of the sexuality implicit in standing waist deep in flowers with her hair disarranged. She can only see that the flower on which he blames his desire is "base and fetid," words that speak connotatively of sexual corruption and decay. Yet she is herself a beast because she rejects her role as flower. She is, in effect, in rejecting the man who would have her (as wife, by the autobiographical implications of the situation),23 rejecting her own female humanness for bestiality. A mockery of the epithalamium, whereby the flower that is a young virginal bride is tendered by her mother into the husband's hands - "into a young man's hot hands / the fragile bloom of a budding maid / you surrender, though she still clings to mother's arms . . . ," Catullus says — "The Subverted Flower" sees the potential bride, the "girl sweeter far than white blossomed myrtle flowering out of Asia," become antiflower.24 In the battle against the man she has forced him downward from a tiger to a pig with a snout, or a dog, or some worse creature, and she has shamed him into lowering his eyes, a mark of servility in animals. She has deprived him of manliness and she has divested him of language: she nullifies absolutely the two forms of prowess essential to the poetic act as she nullifies the erotic energy from which love and the poem emerge. She watches him run and stumble, and she hears him bark, but then she "spits" bitter words like a snake spits venom or a cat spits in fury. She "plucks her lips" ineffectually, much as the man has pawed the air, and she foams at the mouth like a rabid dog.

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She must, finally, be "drawn backward home" by her mother. She is not a beast in the beginning because she is too much like a flower among flowers, but the metamorphosis of both lovers suggests that the transformative power of denied and subverted sexuality is as inescapable as the metamorphoses wrought on men by the sexual "riding" of witches. She is, like the women in "The Housekeeper," "A Servant to Servants," "The Hill Wife," and "Maple," abetted by her mother, who replaces her comb and takes her back into a walled garden. Only a dryad stepping out of her mother tree is free to walk into the woods and set up housekeeping. If the lover wants to come to this subverted flower it will be on the mother's terms, inside walls and into the asylum of an unjoyous marriage, where the cycle of madness and despair will be perpetuated. Frost's woods can be as lovely, dark, and deep as a woman, but the attraction has all the complexity inherent in a man's own oppositional nature. Femininity, that which swells into the metamorphic language of poetry where metaphor is, indeed, the whole of thinking, must be encased in "masculine" formality. A balance must be struck, for by all traditional terms Eve is contaminated by knowledge of her own intrinsic nature, and Adam in his pursuit of her becomes a beast. At best, he will be caught in an unbreakable tautology, "love's alternations, joy and grief" ("Build Soil"). Desire, domesticated by marriage and contained in household, is eviscerated into childlessness and impotent dread, but when doors are thrown open, thresholds crossed, and escapes effected, it becomes, embodied in the women who run away, irresistibly powerful. All the women who have ever escaped into the world from the asylum of marriage seem, in Frost's poetry, to have died into the earth, like leaves trodden into the mire, to be reborn into nature. Their femininity is both alluring and deadly, provocative of madness and of delight. The only "safe" place is in the cage of hickory bars in the upper floor of the isolated cabin. There the naked and love-crossed madman can "talk" about love, much as the poet writes about it within his strict laws of formalism: without endangering himself or anyone else.

Eros: The Mischief Maker

My father's brother, he went mad quite young. Some thought he had been bitten by a dog But it's more likely he was crossed in love. Robert Frost, "A Servant to Servants" But to the incontinent man may be applied the proverb "when water chokes, what is one to wash it down with?" Aristotle, Ethica Nichmachea 1146a

Whatever the actual cause of the madman's affliction in "A Servant to Servants," whether love or hydrophobia, "all he talked about was love." "Love" becomes for the madman, as it does for Frost, the metaphor by which a fundamental madness is articulated and exposed. Something has reduced this man to a beast, brought him to an insistent nakedness, incited him to tear at things with his teeth, broken down the barriers, in short, that allow him his autonomy, so that he must be contained by an externally imposed system of bars. Within a long tradition whereby madness has been perceived as always immanent in passion, Frost's madman raving about love is a common and known figure, a metonymy for a whole complex of beliefs by which passion both signals the capacity for and is itself a cause of violence. As Foucault says in Madness and Civilization, "The savage danger of madness is related to the danger of the passions and to their fatal concatenations"; "Madness participates both in the necessity of passion and in the anarchy of what, released by this very passion, transcends it and ultimately contests all it implies."1 Without disputing the tautological nature of the traditionally located assumptions about madness and "love" that Frost exploits, and without fully articulating the ultimately self-serving masculine system that this tautology supports when uncontrol and irrationality are seen as fundamentally "female" incitements, one can nonetheless reconfirm the poetic implications 107

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of Frost's correlations between love and madness.2 "Love," "passion," "appetite," "uncontrol," "madness," "witch," "woman" - these terms reside for Frost in near superimposition on a continuum of traditional assumptions and traditional metaphors about femaleness and uncontrol; poetry, its figure the same as for love, risks always that same elision, taking its proponent toward passion and thus toward madness. Whether Frost's articulated system of anxieties preexists this structure or is generated by it will remain unclear. That he perceives a need, relayed in sexual terms, to enforce against madness an internal containment of desire within the heautocratically intact self is reified within every level of his poetry. Yet while love's madness is the fearful danger implicit in the erotic discourse, love is the salvation of poetry, which is, in turn, the antidote to all dogmas. Madness is the necessary anarchy that is at once the refutation of dogma and its most parodic reification, supplying as it does the consistent chaos of unreason for all that is systematized; love is that figure, like poetry, which keeps one just before the extreme. It is a poetic commonplace to imply that erotic tension accedes to the imperatives of sensual particulars and distracts one from abstractions, from the political, scientific, and psychological constructs by which epiphanic insights are quelled by majority vote. As W. B. Yeats says, "How can I, that girl standing there, / My attention fix, / On Roman or on Russian / Or on Spanish politics?"3 Of course, the rejection of abstractions, of idealizations, brings one to the seductive specifics of a world informed by bodily desire: that girl standing there embodies and represents the sensual anarchies against which politics stand, and while she epitomizes aphrodisia, she also signals by the embedded metonym of femaleness/uncontrol the madness implicit in the poet's own love of that which refutes systematics. For Yeats, that part of himself becomes Crazy Jane, and for Frost, it becomes the wandering Pauper Witch of Grafton or the sibylline Witch of Coos. The (male) poet pays a price for the flagrant dismissal of rigorous, systematizing orderliness: the very essence of any poetics is its subversion of logical, linguistic, political, psychological, or social imperialism, and the willingness - the desire - to play in that space between order and anarchy is an invitation to bliss and to madness, perhaps even to criminality. One speaks through poetry at one's peril: as de Man says, in the free use of language "we have no way of defining, of policing the boundaries that separate the name of one entity from the name of another; tropes are not just travelers, they tend to be smugglers and probably smugglers of stolen goods at that. What makes matters even worse is that there is no way of finding out whether they do so with criminal intent or not. " 4 Succumbing to what Frost calls in "The Constant Symbol" "the plea-

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sure of ulteriority" ensures that one's own underhandedness might be discovered and punished; drawn to write poetry, one must always ask oneself the question of "I Could Give All to Time": "But why declare / The things forbidden that while the Customs slept / I have crossed to Safety with?"5 Yeats and Frost, Crazy Jane, the pauper witch, the Witch of Coos, all know the fundamental, anti-Platonic truths of the erotic love that keeps one from fixing attention on ordered systems: they are acutely aware that the primary location of such truth is not cerebral. Crazy Jane knows that "love has pitched his mansion in / The place of excrement; / For nothing can be sole or whole / That has not been rent," and as with the Witch of Coos, whose lover has mortified in the basement before lifting his chalky purity up the stairs, this is both her deepest madness and her profoundest understanding.6 The pauper witch knows that to reach the landscape of pure desire - snowberries and waterfalls - one must move through a territory of "barn smells you can't wash out of plowed ground / With all the rain and snow of seven years." These visions of love are not idealistic, sharing the dual sense that sexual love can mean empowerment and selfknowledge and that the loss of desire leaves one empty. The pauper witch feels at the end no longer "full of it" (1. 105), her state predictive of poetic desire transformed to a madman's babel, a howl of lost love. Frost's pristine silken tent with its taut, unbroken tissue defined only by the presence of the cedar pole/phallus would seem to Crazy Jane and the pauper witch the very emblem of a fraudulent sexuality that can be neither sole nor whole. Frost's instincts about the physiologies of love and poetry allow him to apprehend with every line he writes both love's dangers and its redemptive (poetic) powers: to be "mentally agape" ("The Lesson for Today" 1. 40) is commensurate with the priest's ludicrous preachment to Crazy Jane that she reject bodily needs to "live in a heavenly mansion." Agape is insufficient to poetry, where aphrodisia must prevail despite its venereal dangers. Love becomes for Frost the potent antidote for his ironies, for while "meaning" may diffuse itself into infinity, the shared erotic pleasure in the text itself promotes energy and awakens the manly virility that, aroused, may hope to contain itself against madness. Yet by definition, the essence of love is uncontrol;7 the (extreme) consequence of uncontrol is madness - as Aristotle warns in Ethica Nicomachea, "outbursts of anger and sexual appetites and some other such passions, it is evident, actually alter our bodily condition, and in some men even produce fits of madness" (1147a 15-18).8 And the madman is just that figure which, in Frost's iconography of barriers, resides in noman's-land and personifies nothingness. Caged above, out of sight but within hearing, he is as good as dead: it is no accident that his situation so

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nearly mimics the noisy skeleton locked away in the attic. His language does not inspire delight but retards it, making love things dreadful in the night for those below just as certainly as the skeleton of "The Witch of Coos" thwarts romance by scratching against the headboard. Historically perceived, the madman has occupied before this status as a memento mori, a warning of the consequences of too much passion. The figure most paradoxically alive with motion, he is nonetheless dead to the world and thus predictive of death: as Foucault says, "The substitution of the theme of madness for that of death does not mark a break, but rather a torsion within the same anxiety. What is in question is still the nothingness of existence, but this nothingness is no longer considered an external, final term, both threat and conclusion; it is experienced from within as the continuous and constant form of existence. " 9 Frost's madman, sleepless and raging with energy, stalks his cell; Frost's skeleton goes "every which way in the joints." And in both the motion is pointless, working against itself in an isometrics of futility. Externally contained, Frost's madman is held in a limbo between passion and consummation, always talking about love, with clothes in hand and ready to go, but locked away, alone. Plagued by unreason, he is a figure of what happens in Frost's world when the play of barriers against encroachment is arrested - when the field stays plowed and the trees stay put, or when internalized desire, inchoate in madness - "He'd shout and shout / Until the strength was shouted out of him, / And his voice died down slowly from exhaustion" - cannot be articulated into the reasonable containment of a poem's prosodic structure. The madman is the most frightening figure of them all, for he does not choose his nothingness, which is inflicted both from within and from without. As we have seen, this catastrophic arrestment does not happen so much to women in Frost's world, which is more accommodative of their natural hysterias.10 Indeed, by Frost's terms one might just as soon cage a tree or a hill and expect it to become rational as confine a woman to cure her (intrinsic) madness. Woman is, in any event, more cause than effect, more symbol than significance; how could one, in short, immobilize and contain a woman? For females, there are outlets so that the woman of "A Servant to Servants" may quite literally enter and then leave the asylum, her "fancies" temporarily contained but always ready to blossom forth. Carrying uncontrol, essential to her very self, woman is a self-contained asylum in which Frost imagines the mad, metamorphic fantasies of transformations to beasts, flowers, and trees to occur. For example, that Maple once covers her eyes against her mother delays but does not eradicate the self-knowledge that her husband has already divined about her treeness, which is immanent even at nineteen stories in "the highest city built with hands" ("Maple" 1. 84). n This anticipation of maenadicism is


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merely a logical extension to a physiology of female dissolution; historically characterized by her physicality, a woman is nonetheless a loose, moist, violable structure subject to alteration and upheaval.12 When one posits that the woman of "A Servant to Servants" is meant to be likened in her potential for violence to the deep and restive lake she describes, it is just this expectation that is antecedent. Woman is Pandora's urn, and her global womb spawns and nurtures the creatures that, let loose, are all potential madmen. Thus the marital headboard abuts the skeleton's prison door, a contraceptive that, in the case of "The Witch of Coos," is successful, although the witch has already produced her damaged son; thus the young bride of "A Servant to Servants" conceives her (potentially mad) daughter while listening to cries from the upstairs cage.13 Pleading her belly, a woman may succumb to the transformative urgings of her nature, recapitulating the monstrous disproportions and excesses of the pregnant state. The Witch of Coos thus transfigures reality within her sealed body/house. Paul's wife, baptized, swells from shed snakeskin to nymph. Women may in fact actually propagandize for madness, calling themselves witches or not. When Frost says that he has known at least twenty witches, his hyperbole is only apparent, for the poetry reveals that it is not only the named witches who are possessed but, to some extent, all females.14 (Frost's women invariably have a fey quality about them, from the seemingly innocuous latent dryad Maple to the Hill Wife, who wanders off into the forest, "With a song only to herself / On her lips," stopping maenad-like to "break a bough of black alder" before disappearing into the fern.) When the husband of "Home Burial" moans, "I'm cursed. God if I don't believe I'm cursed," he consigns his wife, empowered by grief, to this category, just as does the imagery associated with the gentle Mary of "The Death of the Hired Man" make her witchlike. And so what, exactly, is this "love" that the madman talks about and that Frost invokes so frequently if it has so little to do with loving specific women and nothing to do with loving men, either sexually or socially? It is, for Frost, simply the single most potent term for the pleasurable pain of breached autonomy, imbued as it is with meanings enriched through time so that it may be made to stand for everything and for nothing simultaneously. In this, "love" is like the symbolically based elaborations of the Gothic form: the edifice stands familiar to be seen and recognized, but the Gothic symbolisms have become mute.15 This is a liberation from all but the most viscerally apprised of "meanings," a freedom that "derives from a proliferation of meaning, from a self-multiplication of significance, weaving relationships so numerous, so intertwined, so rich, that they can no longer be deciphered except in the esotericism of knowledge."16 "Love" is just that code which is at once entirely explicit and

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most secret, and as such it is the one term Frost can use with all the freedom of material he could ever desire. Eros is energy and is effluent from the poet's very natural surroundings; it is the union of Penia (Want) and Poros (Expediency), in which the mother's most essential significance is her want of form, her outcast state, unenlightened by the gods, leaving her as "raw mass," "blind and formless matter" through which poros brings its paths, roads, and boundaries: "Through such an alliance of want and path, could Eros be the place where dialectic takes shape but also opens up to a daimon that overwhelms it?" Kristeva asks.17 Yet resolving itself at the level of language into the struggle of autonomy against the dangerous pleasures of penetration, "love" may be seen to inform Frost's poetry at every level, just as he claims. One might temporarily exit from Frost's sexualized metaphorical structure to say that the question of autonomy almost necessarily gives rise to the metaphor of containment, of the barriers one erects — or discovers - between self and not-self.18 That this has emerged in dialectics as male-self and femalenot-self, and that this therefore necessarily predicates "femaleness" exactly on that which a man most wishes to make separate and distinct from the male-self, must be the ironic truth upon which this discussion turns, for such a dynamic virtually guarantees a sexual construct. But in speaking of Frost, one is bound to some extent by his terms, which, like the love he envisions, invest him with power at one level while divesting him of power at another. "Love," then, is what the husbandman brings to bear on nature, where his "Love burns through the Putting in the Seed," just as nature threatens in return to plow through human control to cultivate appetite, making the one who sows the seed "Slave to a springtime passion for the earth." "Earnest love" is what, in "Mowing," "laid the swale in rows," biting off the spikes of orchises and scaring the bright green snake. Such a love that leaves the hay to make also lays bare the potential simultaneity of desire and of pain as the long scythe whispers to the ground; it cannot be entirely accidental that Frost chose the spiked orchis (orchis is the Greek word for "testicle") to be sliced by the loving scythe or that, coupled as it is with the startled snake, the flower, so earnestly loved, becomes sexualized, in one moment uncovered and eradicated.19 In "To Earthward," love is given back from the ground in "the swirl and ache / From sprays of honeysuckle," the "sting" of the rose petal in assault against the human subject. Love is what one part of (human) nature does to another and has done to it in return; as thefireweedof "A Passing Glimpse" goes, "loving," over burned earth to second the fire's consummation with the flowers and the soil, so too does fire lovingly consume flowers and become flower-like in "The Bonfire." For Frost as for so many others before him, "love" in its dynamic form

EROS: THE MISCHIEF MAKER

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is an equivocal condition resonating between violent upheaval and rigorous ascetism, making an earth predisposed to both spring and winter the perfect mirror and the quintessential model for this bodily preoccupation with desire and control. And so "earth" is not 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 that posits a taut, enforced emptiness - a desert space. The earth's body is a perfect correlative for one's own capricious nature by Frost's terms, alternately yielding and resistant, enough to drive a man mad: "You know how it is with an April day / When the sun is out and the wind is still," says the speaker of "Two Tramps in Mud Time." "You're one month on in the middle of May, / But if you so much as dare to speak, / A cloud comes over the sunlit arch, / A wind comes off a frozen peak." (Speaking, a man inevitably says the wrong thing in Frost's poetry.) But the difference between freeze and thaw, and between continence and incontinence, is only a matter of degree and spring is never far beneath the frost-bound surface in Frost's world. Thawed, the earth is open to penetration and it, itself, penetrates. As its tactile surface reiterates the play of desire against resistance, it comes to reflect the precarious balance inherent in the oxymoronic term "human nature." Whatever touches earth is simultaneously pierced and piercing; as the leaves in "In Hardwood Groves" must "go down past things coming up / . . . must go down into the dark decayed," they also "must be pierced by flowers and put / Beneath the feet of dancing flowers." Only the mower with his scythe can arrest this lovely but potentially cruel reciprocity. The natural cycle of arousal and deflation, of control and submission, is inevitable: this fall must happen "over and over again" before the leaves can "mount again / To fill the trees with another shade." And the insistent relationship between desire - what mounts and fills - and death - going down into darkness and decay - reinforces the truth that every fulfillment begins the arc downward toward nothingness. The speaker of "To Earthward" who "long[s] for weight and strength / To feel the earth as rough / To all my length" conflates these terms, as he wishes to be penetrated, to penetrate, and to be enveloped by the ground. For Frost, ironically, "mother earth" is not an ironically conceived construct, although he senses that it is a capacious enough symbol to accommodate irony, for having succumbed to love's most fundamental stereotypes he cannot be immune to the chthonic model of generation.20 It is, in fact, a nearly literal truth that for Frost earth is the right place for love, because earth is the only monumentality that provides a suitable correlative for the immensity of his apprehensions of "love" as a dynamics of self-control. He is well within the tradition of the good Greek

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when he subordinates the specifics of heterosexual, domestic love to a more grandiose symbolics: love of women has typically been specifically removed from the (masculinely defined) ideal conception of a love that is to be apprehended as far more spiritually significant than such corporeal and temporal manifestations with an inferior creature would allow.21 But Frost must, of course, also eschew the classical homoerotic model of the boy at kairos - the coupling with one who is an imminent man, who is just before that equality that at once makes him sexually unavailable and proves retrospectively his worth as a partner - as the means by which one transmutes physical love to spiritual. He is equally unable to subsidize the fraternal model that is typically advanced as the more acceptable version of this homophilia: with the (ambivalently ironic) exception ot his poem to Edward Thomas, he does not often even pretend to undying fraternity.22 Earth is the right place for love, because it is the one proving ground by which a man can transcend the vicissitudes of desire - as in "The Bonfire," can light the fire, fan it into wildfire, and put it out. Sharing the potential for kairos, which indeed is a term as germane to the vegetative process as to human growth, the earth provides its own (ideal) peaks of perfection, on one side of which is immaturity, the other, decay; the man who "loves" best will intuit that balance and reinforce it himself as husbandman. It is not an accident of place, not an affectation, then, that Frost consistently identifies himself and his personas in terms of farming, of cultivating wildness and bringing it to bear. The "love" that can bring a man prostrate to the earth necessitates such discipline - in a sense, the scythe must first slice away the orchis and frighten the snake before it can leave the hay to make. Frost's georgic instincts are a necessary manifestation of his own chthonic intuitions, which subvert pastoral artificialities with their less ordered apprehension of the earth as inherently passional, "The wildest mount" of all, according to "Riders." One does not husband the generative earth merely as a facile analogy to a more immediate and crucial state of personal ordering: one husbands the earth in order to husband oneself. As Lentricchia makes explicit in his analysis of "Mowing," a man's work must repudiate the "unproductive, masturbatory, the indulgent feminine moment" when the flower is felt to be more lovely than the hay that must be made.23 Frost's vision in "New Hampshire," based on his own experience, of putting a man off his farm and onto the next one because "I like this one better" suggests this duality, as it reveals an appetite for good, bearing land ("It really was better," he goes on to say) and the perceived obligation to keep it cultivated (1. 155-8). The man of "The Housekeeper" who neglects his garden and leaves the hay to rot in the rain is fundamentally disordered, a "dreadful fool," as is Brad McLauglin of "The Star Splitter," who is guilty of "hugger-mugger


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farming" and of arson. McLauglin cannot husband anything and is, not surprisingly, a man of "reckless," "loose talk": the two profligacies are interdependent. Manly "love" is, then, both the power of desire and the power of self-control, the controlled virility of the planter who brings forth his crop and takes it at perfection, and it is predicated on a system vivified by its own eternal conflict between appetite and moderation. But georgic "love" freighted with the implications of "mother" (wife/daughter/woman) and her inevitable concomitant "son" is a weighty subject, so enriched and so condensed as to become a black hole and a veritable grave. The (theoretically) simple bifurcation between what penetrates and what is penetrated elides into a memory of barrierlessness, a more genuine anamnesis of wholeness that Frost can articulate specifically only for the female flowers of the early "In a Vale" as a prenominal, nonrational place "Where the bird was before it flew / Where the flower was before it grew / Where bird and flower were one and the same." This place before naming is also a place before sexual identity, suggestive of an autochthonous wholeness of understanding that does not dichotomize itself into what is manly and what is not. In effect, this is the place where metaphors live, where things have not yet solidified into the hard-edged forms that necessitate a kind of linguistic adjudication: it is a pre-Edenic place to be contrasted to, for example, the fallen landscape of Frost's "A Winter Eden," where the "bud-inspecting" birds "presume / To say which buds are leaf and which are bloom." But of course this lovely prenatal territory is also that place where one is literally unmanned. Thus this blurring of boundaries, emerging subliminally in Frost's apprehension of women and nature as tree women and hill wives, as fire flowers and ice lizards and flower water, becomes a postnatal seduction to be avoided by the man intent upon virile moderation and selfcontainment. The fully born man (unlike the half-born son of "The Witch of Coos" or the half-boy /half-man of "Out, Out -") makes it his business to see with a man's rational eyes: he does not look out of windows at the "fear" outside, and if he momentarily succumbs to the imaginative or the visionary he will hand his instinct over to a woman. Thus the man of "West-Running Brook," who is clearly vouchsafed his own dark, poetic vision of the abyss from which one comes and to which one returns, oddly claims that his wife has possessed the brook for "ladyland," "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," he proclaims before lapsing into his apocalyptic reverie. Privy to the pull of the earth, footed in gravity and able to "see" poetically, Frost's men nonetheless resist or reject that vision, just as Frost may be seen to disguise his own immanent insight with

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ironies. Thinking he has rejected all "systematics," Frost capitulates to the most contradictory mandate of them all: accepting "mother" earth, he also obligates himself to an entire complex of (literary, psychological, ethical) gambits whereby a man may disassociate himself from his "female," prerational/irrational knowledge and bring himself instead to cultivation. For Frost himself irony becomes the tool by which he may both remember that (poetic) place where bird and flower are the same and disguise it. But this tactic is at the sacrifice of his speakers, who are divested of power even as he holds to it. The son's own irrevocable linkage to Gaia and her powers becomes something he must control both in himself and in the world, and "love" becomes synonymous with domination or, domination failing, with an abject submission.24 For every man in Frost's poetry like the speaker of "The Bonfire" who has triumphed over (his) natural, appetitive forces, there is another who sees himself as some small and abject component of larger nature: the speaker in "On Going Unnoticed" may be seen as representative, as he envisions a human figure abasing himself at the feet of an imperial tree as a leafless coral root "Whose spotted flowers hang meanly down." This figure, who is universalized by the pronoun "you," is made to be childlike, "lookfing] up small from the forest's feet" and clinging to the maternal skirts while the mother, unnoticing, converses with her head in the high light and breeze. And in the image of the naked coral root is embodied that ambivalent sense of a rootedness to the earth that is both phallic and umbilical, both tenuous and inescapable. For if a man begins his life tied quite literally to his mother, a bondage reified in the coral root and in every growing thing, he must also know that if he does not take control, does not dominate the earth as he husbands his women, that earth will control him. Nor can he forget that by the mother earth construct the logical extension of his penetration is the grave. In Frost's poetry, the man who most intimately knows his mother, as her son knows the Witch of Coos, is vouchsafed insights alternative to the rational; the man who most intimately knows mother earth will be privy to all that dark, chthonic intuition that subverts cultivated wisdoms. The son who severs that tie may gain a nominal freedom, but he cannot completely eradicate the inheritance of the mother. If Maple carries her maternally inherited treeness like a secret seed, her given (baptismal) name is nonetheless divined by the stranger who may more clearly see what she herself has denied ("y° u remind me of a tree, / A maple tree," he says): the son not just burdened with his portion of femaleness but also under contract to keep that femaleness suppressed, has a more difficult task - to deny it in himself and to keep others from knowledge of it. To penetrate the female earth has a potent, dual significance, then,


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for if it is an act of husbandry it is also a reminder of one's maternal origin. It is an invitation to recall that parturient moment when, head bent and blinded by the light, one emerges to separate oneself from and gain dominance over the mother. So it is in "Putting in the Seed" that Frost sees the seedling as a resolute infant "with arched body / . . . shouldering its way and shedding earth crumbs." So it is that in "Riders" Frost envisions the "mystery of birth" as an infant "mounted bareback on the earth," "his small fist buried in the bushy hide" as he attempts to control his mother, earth, the "wildest mount" of all. The earth/globe becomes in "All Revelation" and "Riders" a symbol of this problematic but potentially revelatory unity of mother earth and her sons. The man who takes not a beautiful young man at kairos but the earth as the passional correlative by which he measures his own spiritual worth must be reminded of his ontogenic kinship to circularity:25 to the rounded womb and the curved fetal form that begins to unfold only at the moment of birth. The image of the arched seedling ("Putting in the Seed") and the reiterated image of hibernating animals curled sleeping beneath the earth's surface ("Desert Places," "After Apple Picking," "The Drumlin Woodchuck"); the persistent vision of heaven as a dome ("Birches"), the universe as a "caul" ("Skeptic"), and the frequent imagery of arcing movement from earth back to earth - all of these recall this formal circularity from which a man must shoulder himself erect. In Frost's natural world, what rises to a peak of ideal form then falls from it, and the logical extension of the arc is the grave. This is the circularity of "In Hardwood Groves," where the leaf that rises to perfect maturity then falls and is pierced, trampled, and buried by maenadic "dancing flowers" before it can begin its upward arc again; it is also the systemic circularity of "Spring Pools," where the hungry, leafless trees have their revenge on the flowers by sucking up both the flowery water and the watery flowers at their feet. Frost's nostalgia for the intact, eternal system suggests why the husband's vision in "West-Running Brook" of filling the "abyss's void with emptiness" is so fearful to him, and it begins to explain the occasional spatial inversions in his poetry whereby interior and exterior placement is simultaneously apprehended as if the body is unable to distinguish itself from its surroundings. This memory of envelopment also illuminates Frost's resistance to what he calls "getting outside" of the areas within which truth might be felt; one who removes oneself from footedness in the earth in favor of a more "universalized" view loses shape and potency, becoming "distended," "dilated," "agape" like some modern-day Antaeus.26 As if Frost genuinely feels the world as a series of contiguous layers of himself, he sometimes has difficulty in finding a place to stand. "We've looked and looked, but after all where are we?" he asks in "The Star-Splitter." This dilemma of perspective plagues him

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throughout, as the poetic process itself, dependent as it is on that anamnesis of nongendered wholeness, subverts the linear, purely rational view. His suspicion of the "objectified" view brings Frost in "All Revelation" to articulate contiguities in a way that suggests his vision of the inseparability of desire and reason, of the body and the head, and of the world and the body: the "geode" is the brain, the skull, the head, and at the same time it is the genitalia and the womb; it is the world, the universe squeezed into a ball. A head thrusts in as for the view, But where it is it thrusts in from Or what it is it thrusts into By that Cyb'laean avenue, And what can of its coming come, And whither it will be withdrawn, And what take hence or leave behind, These things the mind has pondered on A moment and still asking gone. Strange apparition of the mind! But the impervious geode Was entered, and its inner crust Of crystals with a ray cathode At every point and facet glowed In answer to the mental thrust. Eyes seeking the response of eyes Bring out the stars, bring out the flowers, Thus concentrating earth and skies So none need be afraid of size. All revelation has been ours.

The essential landscape of "All Revelation" is, as the title would imply, interior, and it suggests the interdependent polarities of desire and reason through the simultaneous evocation of genital and cerebral spaces. The points of ingression and egression - the head that "thrusts in" and is "withdrawn" and the "Eyes seeking the response of eyes" - are countered by the geodesic inner space, which may represent both the brain, with its physical and metaphysical convolutions, and the convolvular interiors of the genital cavity. There is a repetition of circular images the head, the mind/brain/womb, the geode, the eyes - which may potentially be penetrated, a movement reinforced by the imagery of thrusting (a word repeated four times) and withdrawal. The "Cyb'laean avenue" itself suggests a line both convolutional and straight, becoming by complex association a genital path as well as an avenue to revelation: Cybele, the "Great Mother," is an Asiatic earth goddess, and the head


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that thrusts from that avenue is more viscerally than cerebrally oriented, associated as Cybele is with orgiastic worship, delirium, and Bacchic madness. Entering and exiting by that avenue, frequented by maddened Galli and maenads, the head cannot indeed know "what can of its coming come. "27 It is typical of Frost's ironic use of allusions that Cybele was worshiped under the guise of a large block of stone said to have been a meteorite, and this pun may be one intention. Further, however, one must consider the complex sexual implications of the Cybelean reference in this poem of sightedness and revelation, for at least one of Frost's sources is Catullus's version of the Attis myth, with its consideration of the consequences of emasculation. Those men who devote themselves to service of this earth goddess must first castrate themselves, mimicking a pregendered state. Being "nor man nor woman," they buy their inspirative, orgiastic vision at the explicit and literal cost of their manhood.28 The more masculine, fully sighted cathode ray may then accomplish the "mental thrust" that brings light to the interior, but the full revelatory power lies beyond what this light may reveal about the geode's convoluted folds encrusted with crystals. This geodesic mind/body is the instrument of its own enlightenment, using rational insight to illumine the potencies of human desire. "All revelation" may be derived from this combination of Cybelean mystery and rational enlightenment. The "head" becomes the point of ingression and of egression: it "thrusts in as for the view," so that it is penetrative, and it has eyes, which may themselves be penetrated by the response of other eyes. This head must necessarily be seen metonymically as representative of both the body and the mind, for in Frost's context of thrusting into and removal from the Cybelean avenue it becomes sexualized; the infant head is the literal token, at the moment of crowning, of a body that has seen inside and that may be imagined to have for an infinitesimal moment both an inward view and an outward view: in Cybelean terms, this dual vision is reified by the ambiguously gendered priests whose maenadic associations - their virtual transformation to maenads themselves makes them privy to women's secrets while retaining memories of their own lost manliness.29 In the terms of gender as they emerge in Frost's poetry, this "in-sight" into the mother is both the essence of "all revelation" and the means of emasculation for the male poet. One cannot know what it will take or what it will leave behind, and once the eyes focus outward, they may, like doors and windows that open, seduce one from interior revelations. Here, as potently as elsewhere, "Eyes seeking the response of eyes" generate natural correlatives, stars and flowers, which recapitulate the human body, whose eyes are "stars" and whose genitalia is a "flower." The turn of this last stanza enfolds all the world into the compressed space of the cerebral /genital geode; the head, with its eyes

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wide, looks both inward and outward to the world, "concentrating" in a dual sense to join intellect/sky/stars and sensuality/earth/flowers. So embraced, the world is concentrated, "So none need be afraid of size." This power of cerebral/genital revelation becomes a force that alters the world's substance variably, depending on what the "head" chooses to "take hence or leave behind" from its visit to the interior: as the myth of Attis makes clear in its final, irrevocable reduction to madness of the man who, in Frost's version, from "sheer hatred of love" appropriates the woman's hysterical view, such nonrational, nonlinguistically based "revelation" may translate to dangerous and irreversible passions.30 That source tapped, one may discover that one corruption of the manly "love" which is that ability to say desire within the careful containment of the poem is hatred, visceral, inarticulate, and dangerous: not wildfire but ice. Frostian insight thus often sees the world as one might look at one's hand lifted in anger, suddenly become "an old-stone savage armed," as an extension of self that has the potential to go rampant. Order seems only a rhetorical facade, anarchy icebound at the brink of spring, icicles on a gutter. That which is extralinguistic, which has gotten beyond words, which achieves the interiority of the geode but without the clarifying enlightenment of the ray, is always a form of impotent madness; Frost's four-line "Beyond Words" captures in its "inarticulate" brevity this visceral appropriation of natural phenomena to an interior landscape of anger. "That row of icicles along the gutter / Feels like my armory of hate; / And you, you . . . you, you utter. . . . / You wait!" The speaker's fury emerges in a ululating howl at the same time Frost punningly implies that the other does in fact "utter" what has moved the speaker beyond words to rage: hatred, like the excesses of love that send the madman to his cell, is explosively inarticulate, leaving the other the power of utterance. Once again, the imagery of bars - icicles suspended, pointed and lethal - asserts itself, but this time it is conflated, like the dual significance of "utter," into both weapon and cage. A Dickinsonian interior space in which the weaponry of anger is pendant from a "gutter" conduit, this poem suggests the dangerous consequences of broken barriers, the potential transformation of the bar into the dagger. Consciously, the poet sees himself as rigorously controlled, expending his hostilities productively like the figure in "Two Tramps in Mud Time" who brags that he directs into the wood "The blows that a life of selfcontrol / Spares to strike for the common good." ("Two Tramps" not only says this but, typically, reinforces the poet's sustained control in its prosodic withholding, as most lines are carefully foreshortened to nine syllables. The above line, "The blows that a life of self-control," is a perfect example, as the more natural rhythm, with two central trochaic feet, would be in "that a lifetime of self-control.") But what the hand


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holds may assimilate the violence and energy of the extended arm, which in "Two Tramps" is galvanized by "The grip on earth of outspread feet," and go rampant - the buzz saw in "Out - Out" mutilates, the ax in "The Ax-Helve" may split the skull of the wielder, the building stone may come down in anger in "Mending Wall." What the eye sees may become the emblems of sin - the ax helve stands up like the serpent in Eden, Paul's wife manifests herself first as something like a cast-off snakeskin. If the world's (female) body is also the poet's body as it endures the cycles of generation and quiescence, there must be times when it manifests itself at the height of the appetitive arc. "Riders," also on one level a commentary on twentieth-century technological mastery of the natural world, reveals the intimate, natal association of the earth with a sensuality that is "headless." If the geodesic space of "All Revelation" suggests a benign containment by which the head translates chthonic, Cybelean knowledge to flowers and Apollonian knowledge to stars, "Riders" suggests the alternative power of the (maternal/female) body. Spatial contiguity is reversed from the interiority of "All Revelation," as the global figure is seen from its outside; the head of "All Revelation" has emerged out of the orb as an infant. In this poem the speaker articulates in the central stanza that essential nexus between birth and death revealed so literally in "Home Burial" and so consistently elsewhere as it has human beings born directly from the ground: The surest thing there is is we are riders, And though none too successful at it, guiders, Through everything presented, land and tide And now the very air, of what we ride. What is this talked of mystery of birth But being mounted bareback on the earth? We can just see the infant up astride, His small first buried in the bushy hide. There is our wildest mount - a headless horse. But though it runs unbridled off its course, And all our blandishments would seem defied, We have ideas yet that we haven't tried. The acknowledged truth is simple - j u s t as a good poet knows how far to ride and how to control his metaphors, so are men born to ride the maverick earth and little by little to tame it. Human ingenuity imagines that it will prevail - "We have ideas yet that we haven't tried." Such optimism obviates the necessity of achieving complete control, for as long as there is a destination the journey remains bearable. "We," a pronoun that suggests the confidence of one who speaks for many, have taken the land and sea and "now the very air" with the machines that circumscribe the earth. The speaker evokes images of airplanes, of trains

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and cars, of ocean liners, of wireless telegraphs: technology that tethers the earth like so many cowboy ropes. He is rhetorically assured: "What is this talked of mystery of birth," except being born to ride and guide the earth. Instinctively grasping and tenacious from the instant he is born, the infant begins at once his efforts to tame the shaggy earth/horse. This is the optimistic reading, a modern version of the horse-and-charioteer analogy in the Phaedrus whereby the soul's wanton and appetitive element is gradually brought to rein.31 Yet "Riders" is self-contradictory, and not only with the ironic assurance of one who pins the ludicrous illusion of human control against the infinite evasions of nature but also with the confused intensity of its images. Balanced against its business-like couplets, its definitive endstopped stanzas, its assertive iambic pentameter is the evocative image of being mounted bareback on the earth, which in the context of poems like "To Earthward" and "Putting in the Seed" has inescapable sexual connotations. The animalistic "bushy hide" in which the infant buries its fist is both pubic and Darwinian, a newly born monkey-child fastened to its mother. The superficially reassuring horse image is only retrospective, appearing after the complex suggestiveness of the middle stanza's more elemental intimacy, which manages to convey not just one riding the earth, but an infant not yet separate from its mother, earth. The "mystery of birth" is rendered intact, if unconsciously, for an infant cannot perceive itself as separate from the mother and domination can only come out of a perception of the duality of masculine and feminine impulses. The horse-and-rider image, on the other hand, evokes a classical figure of passion controlled and dominated. The feminine rhymes of the opening two lines become in the context of birth imagery telling: superficially they increase the illusion of control; in metrical tradition another virtuoso manipulation of sound, the extrametrical unaccented syllable is at once testimony to control and willing surrender. Because it is feminine, the eleventh syllable does not count against the assertively pentameter lines that follow; but the rhymes are defined as feminine and yielding and provide an opening echo of the ambivalence that follows. The horse of the third stanza evokes another complex of antithetical associations that compromise the stated destination of control. While one thinks of wild horses as powerful and lovely, the inevitable and concomitant memory is of domesticated beasts of burden, and in that the horse becomes a fitting image of contained power. One cannot imagine the wild horse without the tamed. Houyhnhnm or draft horse, Bucephalus or Black Beauty, the horse is integrated in the imagination as a paradox of controlled, dangerous strength, an animal equivalent to the man of virile moderation. Yet this earth /horse is out of human control; it is the "wildest" mount, "unbridled." It is, imagistically speaking, a par-


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ticularly odd metaphor for the spherical earth, the more so because this "bushy" horse, grotesquely enough, is "headless," becoming in essence antithetical to the most essential definitions of "horse" just as in form it is antithetical to the globe it is said to embody: one thinks of the ungovernable, monstrous horse Socrates describes in Phaedrus - "crooked of frame, a massive jumble of a creature . . . consorting with wantonness and vainglory; shaggy of ear, deaf, and hard to control with whip and goad" (253, e).32 One may "give a horse its head" and trust it to return home, but a "headless horse" is unimaginable, without horse sense. (The centaur is exactly that figure of unrestrained appetite in which, ironically, the horse's head is replaced with the allegedly more rational, and infinitely more cunning, human head; Pegasus, a paragon of virile control, is formed from the blood of the Medusa's severed head.)33 The horse here becomes an emblem of uncontrolled appetite, where the body has preempted the head in its needs; it is this figure that is echoed in the witch's "riding" of Mallice Huse, a man of appetites who is said to "gnaw" at fenceposts and bedposts as if his head has become all hunger and no sense, and in her own "kicking up." "Riders" begs to be read ironically because it is unsettling; to say that it is a subtle jeer at technology and human optimism suggests an orderly vision of what is possible. Or it begs to be taken seriously, as a statement of the human potential to move chaos toward order. Ultimately it accomplishes neither of these goals because its apprehension of the earth's body as headless and essentially genital reiterates nature's function as a correlative for passional human nature. The earth is indeed "off its course" of wished-for and purely theoretical order; the very concept of "course" is meaningless, for the only linearity of impulse exists in the human world of laws and rhetorical order. Holistically perceived, then, the global earth-form that reifies both head and womb does not resolve itself simply into a set of separate and alien "female" correlatives against which a man pits himself: the man who controls some part of the earth controls some part of his (female) self. This construct informs and illuminates Frost's placement of figures relative to the natural landscape and suggests why those speakers who are actively involved in some specific form of cultivation or control tend toward an ebullience of tone: the man who puts in the seed, who plows out the wildfire, who mends the wall, who bends the birches, who chops the wood works his will on the landscape, which, in its turn, galvanizes him to action. But the man who must or can merely watch is dispirited, deathbound. The speaker of "Desert Places" who sees "Snow falling and night falling fast, oh, fast / In a field I looked into going past" abnegates all control, and the world and darkness are falling down around him: he is "too absent-spirited to count" in this expressionless place whose pe-

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riphery he does not penetrate. The male speaker of "West-Running Brook" hands the stream over to his wife, and in watching he sees only the lapse toward annihilation. The watcher of "Stopping by Woods" does not then need to say anything much to communicate a similar fantasy of obliteration, as he sits outside of a wood he does not own, on a journey in which he has little choice ("promises to keep"), as the landscape transforms itself under his impotent gaze. Exactly what a given figure does as regards his natural surroundings seems to become an accurate index of his sense of virile empowerment - his ability to love and to master - or of despondent enervation. It is not surprising, then, that the speaker who enters, without ax, scythe, hoe, or plow, one of these self-enclosed systems of flux finds himself poised between states, awakened to ambivalence. "An Encounter" reveals the ambivalence of the unarmed figure who penetrates an uncultivated system, as it also suggests the irresistible motivation that overcomes this sense of dangerous vulnerability: the speaker is, he says, "Half-looking for the orchid Calypso." At one level this assertion is quite playful, suggesting a quixotic quest for the beautiful goddess Calypso, and at another it merely reflects Frost's own fascination with wildflowers and with botanizing in general.34 Yet, as usual, Frost's choice of flowers is compelling: in keeping with the bloodroot, the coral root, the orchis, and the goldenrod, the Calypso orchid has sexual overtones in this enclosed landscape of heat and moisture through which the speaker "bores." "Half-looking," he sets out to come across the seductive Calypso, whose erotic powers are inextricable from her powers to wound and to transfix. He has, in fact, chosen fertile ground for his imaginings: it is the kind of hot, hazy day called a "weather breeder," in which stillness can turn at once to storm, and he is in a swamp of cedar trees, penetrated by an incense of cedar oil. In this landscape, the glazed surface of the (narcissistic) mirror one sees reiterated in others of the poems ("For Once, Then, Something," "Neither Out Far nor in Deep") is replaced by opacity: haze, the thick odor of cedar, and a "scurf of plants" layer themselves over and around the indeterminate boundaries between water and land. Distinctions among media all but disappear, as land, air, and water share the same turgid liquidity; the orchid, which lives suspended in and dependent upon a precise conjunction of these elements, becomes afigureof the poet's unity with the sensual landscape. The masculine gaze, which imposes order and clarity by enacting a version of the continent self on its surroundings, insists upon, as in "For Once, Then, Something," being reflected "in the summer heaven, godlike" by the surfaces upon which he directs his eye. The surfaces of "An Encounter" refuse to reflect but instead assimilate the figure to themselves: the very title suggests the speaker's lack of control over events. He


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has gotten off the road and into the swamp, has left the linear for something else. But even in this fluid world he looks upward to see, instead of the orchid Calypso, "a barkless specter," a telephone post that links his private position with a world of others. His vision of the "resurrected tree" confirms his dual sense that he is at once there in the world of men and not there, both suspended on some sensual isle of Calypso out of real time and space and tied by the imperatives of manhood to other men. The post is imbued with myriad significances. Described by "the strange position of his hands - I Up at his shoulders, dragging yellow strands / Of wire with something in it from men to men," the post becomes momentarily a figure of Christ on the cross, bearing a burden of wires like thorns: like the speaker, this is at once the most isolated and the most connected of figures. The speaker is also hung momentarily ("I paused and rested on a sort of hook / That had me by the coat as good as seated"), and thus himself reinforces this identification. Yet at the same time, the post is also a titanic figure as it drags handfuls of wires heavy with the weight of men; this titanic or godlike manifestation is a frequent guise of the Frostian speaker who would rise above desire: in "New Hampshire" the speaker both imagines himself as Atlas and takes the Olympian view from the mountaintop. Moreover, given the Odyssean allusion, the "resurrected tree" may become an erect mast, another device by which one keeps oneself from erotic danger. All of these allusions, however, to Christ or to a titanic presence or to the Odyssean mast suggest an attempted repudiation of the more sensual swampland below, an ambivalence the speaker literalizes as he suspends himself on a peg between the antipodes of stark pole and steamy bog. This immobilized figure, hanging himself like an orchid from a tree, ponders humankind from a position of willfully imposed, yet geographically tenuous isolation, and the enclosed, generative locus of the swamp becomes an emblem of what he would escape - having become "sorry I ever left the road I knew" — and what he most desires.35 In a landscape that becomes a correlative for both desire and death (one who looks for Calypso courts both, of course), he finds himself simultaneously aroused and immobilized. His motions are reduced, becoming as much symbolic gestures in the Calypso swamp as ambulatory ones - "I was half boring through, half climbing through a swamp of cedar," he says, before he hangs himself on the hook of a tree. He takes on masculine and feminine characteristics, as he is both penetrating - "boring through" - and penetrated - by the smells, the heat, the moisture, and the phallic peg from which he is suspended. With the heat and the pungent smell of the swamp as solvents, the boundary between self and surroundings disintegrates, so that the speaker may become both the sensual orchid and the

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stripped "specter." Vulnerable to the metamorphic landscape, one must move with care, for the physical correlatives of desire and sacrifice compete with each other, the swamp pulling downward and the figure of resurrection pointing toward the sky. This "resurrected tree," this "barkless specter," this "tree that had been down and raised again," this titanic male figure who carries "something in it from men to men" is perfectly in keeping with Frost's other fantasies of the erect but continent man. It, more than Frost's fascination with technology, helps to explain the introduction of the cathode ray into "All Revelation," for this ray (as opposed to the skewering rays of the moon in "A Hillside Thaw") is a quintessentially "masculine" device both in its penetrative and in its enlightening power and is a necessary antidote to the female "Cyb'laean avenue" which represents that alternative form of nonrational awareness that is poetic "revelation." The icicles counter the gutter in "Beyond Words." The erect figure asserts itself in "The Bonfire" as "my flame . . . a pinnacle to heaven," and in "The Silken Tent" as the "central cedar pole, / That is its pinnacle to heavenward." It is the stripped trees of "Spring Pools," just before bursting into a canopy of leaves. Ridden down, bent over, and made flexible, the erect pole becomes, of course, demasculinized, "like girls on hands and knees," he says in "Birches," or rapacious - when theflame-pinnacleof "The Bonfire" bends itself to the ground, it begins to lick and taste the earth. This (phallic) figure of uprightness takes a man explicitly heavenward (unlike the bowed birches, which carry the boy out and back down to earthly love): the speaker of "An Encounter" implies this when he says, I "Looked up toward heaven, and there against the blue, / Stood over me a resurrected tree," as do the speakers of "The Bonfire" and "The Silken Tent" in their shared image of the pinnacle to heaven. A Platonic synthesis of arousal and control whereby the energy of love, properly directed, effects a transcendence of earthly, consummative desire, the pinnacle heavenward, the enlightening ray, and the resurrected tree are stark figures of virile continence. But that which, like the post of "An Encounter," has been "down and raised again" has, as the allusion implies, also suffered a form of death: this erection is both a resurrection and a crucifixion. The ideal, virilely moderate man, embodied and intact, seems to generate this linear correlative of himself to balance against the fetal circularity of the male who cannot divest himself of his maternal influence. Against those who curl up against earth, like the figure of "On Going Unnoticed" who "look[s] up small from the forest's feet," or like the woodchuck of "The Drumlin Woodchuck" who is "instinctively thorough / About [his] crevice and burrow," must be placed those who hoist themselves upright from the instinct to conform to the global


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curve. As "Devotion" says, "The heart can think of no devotion / Greater than being shore to the ocean - / Holding the curve of one position, / Counting an endless repetition." But the mind must resist this intimate, curved coupling.36 It is a fearful thing to look toward the empty heavens, to stand as does the figure of "Any Size We Please" with arms "stretched . . . out to the dark of space / And held . . . absolutely parallel"; one is instead drawn to approximate a "space all curved, / Wrapped in around itself and self-befriended," a place that is by the implicit resignation of this poem not heaven but a needful "Hell." In a powerful but inherently metamorphic nature, which resolves itself into the symbols of (female or infantile) passivity and impotence and the symbols of powerful anarchy, the heaven-reaching polarity of the straight line contradicts the pull of the arc. The man who capitulates to the earth's pull is brought prostrate to the ground and even under the ground, like the figure of "To Earthward" or like the man who has gotten off the raised road and entered the swamp. Only the most resolute effort brings the kneeling figure of "The Bonfire" to his feet, away from rubbing the fire and back up to the plow, and the speaker of "Putting in the Seed" is unsure whether his wife will be able to raise him up from his digging ("we'll see / If I can leave off burying the white / Soft petals . . .") to assume his domestic responsibilities. But one who erects himself may exploit the geodesic circularity, and when the poet resolutely resists "Mud-time" and plants himself with "grip on earth of outspread feet" and channels that earth-charge into strength, he can become a figure of immense power. "Spring Pools" may be viewed in this context as Frost's fantasy of a consummation with the earth that leaves the figure, not prostrate, but erect and in domination over the entire landscape. Removing himself from his more usual view from the periphery, he enters the forest to make the voracious and relentless trees an embodiment of the circularity of control and release, of ice blossoming into full-leaved darkness, with the sap and water like blood, the power of which releases itself. The speaker is only a disembodied admonitory voice ("Let them think twice," he warns) in the natural landscape, and because he is not there as husbandman, or as watcher, or as some abject coral root or bird, the tree's power becomes his power. In "Spring Pools" no human figure with its instinct to huddle and cower mars the angularity of trees against a winter sky, and there are no (modest, lyric) birds in the stark landscape. There is no one to break the autonomous natural cycle by focusing attention on one subordinate element. Thus these trees become more than trees; not made to feign or to disdain human weakness, neither "window trees" nor "windy headed," and not conversational in any way, they are unrestrainedly voracious. They suck up the shallow pools, "the

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flowery waters and . . . watery flowers" made from melted snow, and they transform them into "pent-up buds" that will burst into encompassing leaves. The pools they drink contain "the total sky almost without defect," so the shallowness of the water is a paradoxical illusion, for from this melted snow will come the summer woods, which will blot out the sky and become a new sky to "darken nature." "Spring Pools" makes summer apocalyptic, as if the explosion of those buds will separate earth from sky, an infidelity of mythic proportions as the divorce of Gaia — Earth - and Uranus - Sky - is replayed. The usurping trees, scions of the union of earth and sky, take what they please from both. They do not "think twice" before despoiling the fragile, neonatal flowers of the "flowery water" so new that it is barely released from the flower-like crystal lattices of snow and ice. The trees of "Spring Pools" embody a hunger so voracious - or a passion so great - that it can bring ice to the boil, turn pristine winter into dark summer heat, and eradicate completely the boundaries of self by subsuming the world. "Spring Pools" has the eerie power of absolute conviction; it is a nonPlatonic version of "The Silken Tent" in which feminine flowers and water will be thrust outward into a canopy of dark leaves: These pools that, though in forests, still reflect The total sky almost without defect, And like the flowers beside them, chill and shiver, Will like the flowers beside them soon be gone, And yet not out by any brook or river, But up by roots to bring dark foliage on. The trees that have it in their pent-up buds To darken nature and be summer woods Let them think twice before they use their powers To blot out and drink up and sweep away These flowery waters and these watery flowers From snow that melted only yesterday. The poem is taut with disaster, but nothing is expended. Borders are obscured so that the deep sky and the shallow pools are one, so that the flowery waters and the watery flowers are one, so that the buds, the roots, the flowers, and the pools are one. Black and white are equal, as the snow becomes dark foliage; winter and summer are one, as the snow becomes the summer woods. The trees have the power of reason, so that the speaker warns, "Let them think twice before they use their powers," but they are at once volitional and without choice for they will "blot out and drink up and sweep away" the pools and flowers at their feet. The pools and flowers are personified as delicate, cold, frightened creatures who will be subsumed. The drama is inevitable and complete, the circle of pool and flower, roots, stem, and leaves, clouds, snow, pools, and


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flowers inviolable. The volitional trees that must, nonetheless, drink up the flowery melted snow and give back out darkness, that have all choice and none, mirror the poet. Here is an alternative version of "For Once, Then, Something" with the truth that has only glimmered, white beneath the reflective water, becoming the melted snow that represents, in Frost, the awakening of more potent forces of fertility and destruction. Here the tall, naked trees must see themselves in the water below as godlike against the winter sky, just as the speaker sees himself in "For Once, Then, Something" in the "shining surface picture" reflected "in the summer heaven, godlike." But the trees are erect, not kneeling as is the speaker of "For Once, Then, Something," and in this landscape they are omnipotent and unrebuked. These mirrored trees are Narcissus drinking himself up, becoming turgid with the reflective snow-water in which they appear and with the early spring flowers, of which the Narcissus is one, until their coiled buds burst into dark foliage. These are the kind of trees Ahaz worshiped, green trees under which he sacrificed his own son, the kind of trees that the speaker of "New Hampshire" knows to be Birnam woods. Their tie to the earth is both umbilical and sexual, and from earth they drink potency. In "Spring Pools" the abased human figure disappears. No bird voices, no prudent woodchucks, no cocksure philosopher kneeling "wrong to the light" to see a preconceived image of himself as Apollo, god of the not-earth, prototype of rationality and masculinity, intrude. Like "A Winter Eden," where Adam has been metamorphosed into a rough beast and Eve is the tree from which he eats, "Spring Pools" replaces human figures with natural correlatives that play out a dark fantasy of appetite. Frost's fantasy here is not that he will, like Narcissus, pine away and die to become the Narcissus that blooms in the snow, but that hefillsup to just before bursting with the energy of his passions like these trees, for which no word of caution has meaning. With aphrodisia intrinsic to the very poetic act and with consummation the very thing that takes one either toward the brothel or toward some more violent fate - the fire, the sword, the scythe - Frost repeatedly returns to this model of virile, potentially explosive turgidity. Appetite, inherent in the formal construct of the living body and awakened by the least taste of a rich metaphor, sees itself reified exteriorly in a nearly infinite display of ambition, lust, greed, all the deadly sins and their subtle offspring, but it is, itself, a first cause. Appetite is, quite literally, blood in the body and, like the endless, bulging boundaries of Frost's poetic landscapes, must be contained against itself. Exteriorized, uncontrolled, appetite is productive of concentricities of violent chaos, not just a "lover's quarrel" but a full-fledged war. As Frost makes clear in "The Flood," human beings can only labor against themselves, for they are

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formed for catastrophe. Passion "will have outlet, brave and not so brave," despite God's promise that there will be no more floods. Blood has been harder to dam back than water. Just when we think we have it impounded safe Behind new barrier walls (and let it chafe!) It breaks away to some new kind of slaughter. Frost knows that "power of blood itself releases blood." He suggests, obliquely, the physiological truth that blood pressure perpetuates the cycle of blood pumped through the heart, that to lose blood pressure is to die, and he also suggests in the image of war the tension of contained desire and the deadly effects of uncontrolled spillage. Both literally and metaphorically, this image of blood releasing blood embodies the tension on which life is founded, for given an outlet blood will spill, the beating heart forcing it out, a stream spending to nothingness. It also inevitably suggests a sexual analogy, the ejaculatory explosion of desire that is both generative and violent. 37 Because blood is life, it becomes indissociable from the sexual act that is meant to give life, and thus the sexual act itself becomes a violent and costly expenditure of the life force, a "kind of slaughter" that is at once terrifying and pleasurable. To invoke blood is thus, now as always, to invoke a power beyond merely serviceable metaphor. The speaker says it finds its outlet in "Weapons of war and implements of peace," but even within the poem blood cannot be contained by such generalities. Blood is bloodlust, passion, sin, the antithesis of white. It is menstrual blood dammed back during pregnancy to flow again at birth. It is bloodlines, inheritance, temperament. The speaker perceives it momentarily in Christian terms of sinfulness - "We choose to say it is let loose by the devil" — but then rejects outside influence. Blood releases blood: "Oh, blood will out. It cannot be contained." The tension between passion and control is inherent, and the odds for containment are not good. Frost's model of appetite and control necessarily predicates love on an (overworked) paradox of tumescence and explosion, the model against which stand all those empty and disintegrating houses falling in on themselves. (Vereen Bell clearly senses this fantasy as she writes about "The Hill Wife" that "the poem is like a hemorrhaging which just flows on until everything is gone. ") 3 8 This is the contradictory impulse that leaves the ice lizards of "A Hillside Thaw" both frozen and prostrate and leaves the moment of triumph in "The Bonfire" ambiguous in its conflation of stoppage and release. For if a man is unmanned by allowing desire to leave the house, to run away and disappear, he is equally unmanned if there is nothing pushing to get out. (One might look at "Bereft" and "Desert Places" in this context.) In fact, historically man has been distin-

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guished from woman by a physiology of density, predicated in part, one must assume, on the model of erection. One who is compact, taut against himself, is masculine; to become loose, soft, and flaccid is to be feminized and to make manifest the female pathologies this state invites and proclaims.39 Blood that cannot be contained makes a virile testament; such tumescence is a state a man must simultaneously desire and fear (and again, it is the madman contained only from without who is the model of impotence). Thus the rousing tone of "The Flood" seems more a brag than a lament. One cannot ignore in this context that, at the level of its political symbolism, "The Flood" refers to the bloodletting of war and violence; nor can one ignore that the poem fails to deplore this inevitable outcome, which, in the context of Frost's opinions on the value of war, seems a righteous display of manhood. Filled to bursting himself, he sees rupture as a way the world might end, in a vast cataclysm he envisions in another poem as a "Bursting Rapture." By the explicit terms of this poem, the new appetite for science infects everything right down to distorting the simple, cyclical reciprocities between the husbandman and his farm; its context among poems like "The Flood" and "The Bonfire" makes the orgasm/war conflation seem more psychosexually than politically motivated. Georgic balance destroyed in "Bursting Rapture," Frost sees appetite prevailing, so that even scientific hunger emerges in bodily terms: "A mounting ecstasy / That when it gets too exquisite to bear / Will find relief in one burst. You shall see. / That's what a certain bomb was sent to be." One can only stand, awed, at the grandiose and, indeed, grotesque implications of this conflation of atomic blast and ejaculation.40 For Frost, tumescence is the embodied oxymoron of potent impotence, as it makes a man at once powerful and threatening and needful of a release that will leave him vulnerably weak. The conflation of blood and semen makes this problematic relationship quite literal in "The Flood," a loss reified in the destructive blackening associated with the wildfire in "The Bonfire" and in the downward, frantic "stampede" of "A Hillside Thaw," which leaves bodies strewn across one another. Of course, this masculinist writing of the body as phallus is no less stereotypical than the reduction of a woman to her genitalia and her womb. Objectively speaking, one must take Frost's apparent preoccupation with rigor with the same degree of irony one would apply to any such simplistic bodily metaphor, for if it has been a stereotype perpetuated by men it is no less dichotomous than those men have perpetuated about women. But "The Flood" would suggest that Frost is not immune to the anxieties of influence that have made this model of turgidity the antithesis to randomly hysterical femaleness: if women were long thought to subside into hysterical convulsions led by the gyrations of their own frantic

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wombs, men, not sparing themselves the rod, have no less perceived themselves as subject to a model of stalwart erection. Frost's model of "love" clearly has both a manly compactness and a manly sound, with one dependent upon the other as surely as testosterone will ruin the choir boy's sweet voice. When asked what he thought of Gerard Manley Hopkins, Frost responded, "His difficulty for me is in the slight hysteric sound some of it has - too throaty. I think Thoreau says somewhere that all poetry is a feminine thing but at its best in men. That's a good one. That is - a little bit too feminine for me - a little - too throaty."41 It is not inconsequential that Hopkins was, by the terms Frost deploys in his comments on irony, not only a priest but one fallen from the priesthood of rapt believers into "hysteric" uncertainty. His poetry described in bodily terms - "feminine," "hysteric," "throaty" - Hopkins is made womanish, a status his dubious priestly celibacy, which might as easily cloak a lack of virility as a manly and religious continence, would by Frost's terms confirm. Poetically, one must ensure, as Hopkins clearly does, one's capacity for arousal (hysteria has always been intimately associated with overweening and conflictual desire, a formula Freud finally locates explicitly within sexual pathology), but one must not give way to desire's rapacious capacity to induce uncontrol. This is a difficult dynamic to project correlatively without resorting to bravado or falling into hysteria: one cannot say, "I'll not untwist these last strands of man in me," but must create the taut sinews, not sprung but wound tight with prosodic certitude. Frost's vision of manliness is based on a systemic circularity of power whereby desire - "love" - is potent and imperative within the man who, defined by desire's presence, is also defined by his ability to contain and control it. The proof, of course, is in the poetry, which is precisely the form that embodies by its nature as metaphor a female wildness and that, under Frost's restraining hands, is "loved" into submission, brought to formal order. His vision of nature, human and otherwise, is that it seeks to usurp control with appetite, and this conviction can have been subsidized only by the alternative modes of poetry practiced by his peers - to be exact, the prosodic laxity and the propensity for (hysterical or depressed) lamentation over the state of the world must be seen by him to go inevitably hand in hand. To his mind, that (verse) which is freed from form opens itself inevitably to the intrinsic wildness of its constituent elements (and viewed analogously to the Hawthornian tradition to which he so frequently alludes, this is a veritable truism). That which is "sprung" is by its (poetic) nature prone to hysteria. By classical terms, manly power is predicated on a most delicate balance, for sheer physical dominance is not a measure of man's control any more than rape is a measure of his virility or tyranny is a measure of a ruler's capacity to rule.


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Poetry, like love, should be a gentlemanly pursuit, a firm and resolute guidance of random and potentially destructive energy into acceptable parameters (the game/set/match model that begins in "love" and ends in winning). For while the irrational may have tremendous force, like the madman who might have been bit by a mad dog when he was young or like all the untamable women in Frost's poetry, forcible containment is not continent or manly. As the madman upstairs proves, love checked only by outside forces is a humiliation and, more fearfully, a kind of living annihilation. But neither is a man devoid of appetite worthy, finally, of the title "man," for it is only out of the perpetual conflict between desire and control that a virile continence may be born. For Frost, however, there is no apparent danger that desire will fail as long as he keeps pen in hand and foot on the earth, which is for him mother, lover, and grave. Frost reiterates at every level the inevitable rise and fall of desire, manifested potentially in every hill, every breeze, every berry, every flower, and every tree, and he documents desire's subversive power. "Love" encourages uncontrol by its very definition as a state that opens one to the penetrative sting of appetite. In a very essential sense, he does see himself as both a rider of earth and one who is ridden by earth. From the moment of birth when one clings to the earth mother's "bushy hide," to the inevitable moment when one is ridden, as Mallice Huse is ridden in "The Pauper Witch of Grafton," by clearly defined sexual desire one is pulled earthward. In this natural world it is difficult indeed to be a "good Greek," for in nature at least it is not a course being offered this year or ever. The imperatives of nature are not the imperatives of moderation but of desire. Here, as surely as the leaves fall, one "must be pierced by flowers and put / Beneath the feet of dancing flowers" before each ascent heavenward.

Prosody: White Noise

No matter how humorous I am I am sad. I am a jester about sorrow. Robert Frost, Family Letters 210 Here I lie mournful with desire, feeble in bitterness of the pain gods inflicted upon me, stuck through the bones with love. Archilochus of Paros

In "The Witch of Coos" only the woman/wife/lover/mother/witch can hear the bones' chalky progress upstairs, while her husband never "seem[s] to hear them," even as he rousts himself reluctantly from bed to help shut the skeleton in the attic. He only humors his wife's hysteria, but just as Frost's own mother funded him with magical stories, the "witch" has, over forty years' time, given her son an intimate knowledge of the night her buried lover wandered upward.1 The poem is antiphonal, with mother and son speaking parts labeled with their names. The son has appropriated his mother's tale and tells it with great relish even though he admits that, when it happened, "I was a baby: I don't know where I was." Of the skeleton, he says, "It left the cellar forty years ago / And carried itself like a pile of dishes / Up one flight from the cellar to the kitchen. . . . " His metaphor, domestic and feminine as it is, is probably originally his mother's, although it also represents his own feminized, maternally oriented vision. It supports, too, as do the mother's images of the skeleton as "like a chandelier" and "a chalk-pile," the crucial interdependence of visual and aural components, a macabre sound of sense. This is, clearly, a story he has got by heart, a narrative embued with not only the sight but the sounds of bones that are "like the dry rattling of a shutter" in a house that is otherwise sealed tight, shutters closed and locked. The pair remain in narrative accord until the astonishing disjunction of line 135: 134

PROSODY: WHITE NOISE

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Son. We think they had a grave down in the cellar. Mother. We know they had a grave down in the cellar. Son. We never could find out whose bones they were. Mother. Yes, we could too, son. Tell the truth for once. They were a man's his father killed for me. The son is willing to tell the story as if it has nothing to do with him, as if the murdered man is not probably his own father, as if his mother is not, the whole time they are telling the story, fishing around in her button box for a finger bone she saved from the night the skeleton rose up. His (nominal) father could never hear the bones; the son can hear them clearly as long as they have nothing to do, finally, with him. This is a familiar dynamic within Frost's poetry but for the son's presence: the women who can see beneath the skin to the grinning memento mori and can hear the disturbing cacophony of bone on bone are juxtaposed with the men, like the witch's husband, who can see and hear nothing. It is not, in "The Hill Wife," the husband who feels the stranger waiting in the woods but the wife; in "The Fear" it is the woman who hears in a stranger's footsteps the specter of an angry, abandoned lover, and who sees a man's face in the bushes, while the man can only say, "I didn't see it"; in "Home Burial" it is the grieving mother who looks out the window at "some fear" that her husband can't see ("She let him look, sure that he wouldn't see, / Blind creature . . ."). This kind of pairing often necessitates a third party who may represent a more balanced view, one that sees more rationally than the feminine and more insightfully than the nonpoetic masculine. In "The Witch of Coos," the brief, dry voice of the "visitor" - "I verified the name next morning," he says - is ostensibly closest to the poet's, as both are meant to be perceived as outsiders to all this madness and violence. But the son's voice may also be seen as the poet's voice as he translates himself out of complicity in this tale of sex and violence by making his "story" about strangers. The son, in his forties, is the very crucial center of this story, just as is the infant son of "Home Burial." He is the probable proof of his mother's infidelity, a baby when the lover is killed, and whether he is legitimate or not he can no more know the truth than the reader can know it. As living evidence, he becomes the goad for murder, caught forever in the knowledge that one of his "fathers" killed the other to keep from killing his mother (1. 140). In this Oedipal struggle the son has achieved a pyrrhic victory, for both fathers have died and he lives alone with his mother in a sealed-up house. If the mother in "Home Burial" wants to enter the grave of her son, this son has entombed himself with his mother, whose identity as "witch" is a metonym for her capacity for wanton behavior. And yet he tells the story as if it has nothing to do with him. Clearly drawn to recapitulate just such stories of lovers, murdered,

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abandoned, or escaped, Frost nonetheless feels it incumbent upon him to mitigate the appetitive impulses he documents.2 He disperses the lyric voice - the mother, the son, and the skeleton all bear testament to love and its painful consequences - while he infiltrates the enclosed environment with the stranger's psychoanalytic, listening presence. The son and the mother in "The Witch of Coos" are almost parodic reifications of this instinct for simultaneous revelation and containment: they have locked the doors to the basement, to the attic, and to the outside. They have limited their view and their audience absolutely and, except late in this telling of the story, have purified their narrative of spontaneity so that it becomes spellbinding, lethal in its ability to subvert temporality and, with temporality, rational "meaning."3 One listening to this tale comprehends the facts of infidelity, madness, and murder aesthetically, induced to a reverie in which the significance of the story is momentarily erased. One reclaims its meanings only in retrospect and only by force of will, for the often repeated story has become litanic, appropriating the individual words to the rhythmic whole. The fact that it is "told" by a witch and her son enhances its trancelike quality; the fact that Frost himself appropriated the tale from an old history of Coos county affords him the safe distance from which to have them tell it (Letters 473). Only at the end of the poem does the narrative chant break momentarily, when the mother says abruptly, "Tell the truth for once." The rattle of the button box, bone buttons and finger bone against metal, is like some primitive rhythm instrument that reinforces the beat. Thus the mother and son have repeated their shared erotic past without its specific horror, making each recounting a ritualistic event rather than a revelation - and recreation - of the actual guilt such a story should invoke. This is not to say that the story is without impact but to suggest that its blank verse cadences and its macabre humor, measurable evidence of a kind of emotional amnesia, contain and therefore qualify the madness as surely as does the sealed-up house. Such lyric control is essential, for the witch and the mother's boy who reveal their story only within the locked enclosure of the house and for the poet; the "feminine" voice, which may reveal the maddening secrets of desire, must remain insulated for its own safety as well as for others'. Job's wife, another alleged witch, persistently asks in "A Masque of Reason" why "women prophets should be burned as witches, / whereas men prophets are received with honor" (11. 89-90), why, although "God's had / Aeons of time . . . still it's mostly women / Get burned for prophecy, men mostly never" (11. 149-50). The answer lies, of course, in what Frost believes that femality knows, for by traditional masculinist terms its knowledge is of anarchic truths whose powers to subvert rationality must be silenced, burned into nothing. Job's wife


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again reveals this dichotomy between masculine sight and feminine insight, whereby the bones either are simply not there or are tangibly there to be felt, seen, and heard. When the Devil enters the scene in "A Masque of Reason" he is as diaphanous as a sapphire wasp because "Church neglect / And figurative use have pretty well / Reduced him to a shadow of himself." Yet unlike the husband, who takes this wispy figure lightly, the wife says, "He's very real to me / And always will be" (11. 434-5). It is crucial for the poet to obscure his own prophetic femininity, which, against church doctrine and common poetic use, sees evil as quite real and even as provocative. Job's wife, for example, likes Satan's voice; "That strain again!" she cries. "Give me an excess of it! / As dulcet as a pagan temple gong!" (11. 418-19). She begs him to stay, she promises to go with him at twilight, and she reaches out and takes his hand (11. 435— 9). Superficially at least, Frost's must be the voice of the prophet, controlled, virile in its moderation, and relatively safe from attack, to insure against this willingness to court the devil's favor. Throughout his poetry Frost thus exploits the potential of sound to circumvent or supersede stated meaning and to defuse explosive emotions, using complex countervoices that are reified in "The Witch of Coos" in the figures of mother, son, bones, and stranger; thus he walks the boundaries between subjectivity and objectivity. "The Witch of Coos" makes, in fact, a suggestive model for the excavational imperatives Frost's poetry thus imposes. The triad of speakers, the trileveled house, and the mobile skeleton ascending from cellar to attic predict the complex permutations of sound and meaning to be found throughout Frost's poetry. Sound, stated meaning, and subtext coexist, often in apparent contradiction to one another, and there is always a sense in which a given listener may be excluded from hearing the noise that is most crucial to meaning. As in "The Witch of Coos" the subtext (mother-woman-witch), the stated meaning (son), and the virile oversound (adult male stranger) may be paralleled to uncontrol, the pretense of control, and control. Yet if the maternally fixated son is sprung from the poet's mind, so too is the poet a son as well. Product of what he would define both as masculine and as feminine impulses, Frost here displaces his feminine and maternal identities so that they emerge in mediational constructs: the "witch" becomes a speaker whose "otherness" allows her both behaviors and insights that the man of moderation must repudiate in himself; the "son" who may not be a man until he alters his identification with the mother is a virtual hermaphrodite, a closed system whose intimate knowledge of "femaleness" is predicated on his equally intimate Oedipal participation in the sins of the fathers. The lover's skeleton is the memento mori, a noisy, tragicomic rhythm box of failed desire for those who can - or will - hear it. This skeleton is

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the perfect Frostian emblem for eviscerated lyricism, the animated lover who can neither speak nor otherwise make love. It is impossible to disentangle these elements from one another, of course; voices heard by the poet, they also come from him. As this model would suggest, the competent Frostian oversound and his darker meanings engage each other at incremental levels. Individual words, chosen by the acute poetic ear as much as by the inventive mind to act both as sounds and as signifiers of meaning, give rise to an oversound that often acts independently of, even in contradiction to, meaning. Frost accounts for this discrepancy by designating those who miss the aural point, who are not sensitive to his carefully chosen sounds, "eye readers," but his system is equally misleading in the opposite direction. The "ear readers" may hear the comical, derisive, romantic, or satiric oversound while being led by Frost's own tones "dulcet as a pagan temple gong" to undervalue the significance of the words, whose meaning is to some extent co-opted by the prosodically induced counterbeat or, as Frost called it, "cadence" (Letters 80). Thus "The Generations of Men," which signifies at one level (counterpointed with visions from inside the "pit") a story of potential incest and madness and of awakening desire, sounds (at the cellar hole's edge) to some critics either "offensively genteel" or "delightful."4 Such discrepancies reside in some form in virtually all of Frost's poems as he uses his prosodic virtuosity as a defense against lyricism: the homonyms, the flippant rhymes ("places," "race is," "spaces" in the somber "Desert Places" is a good example), the definitive, authoritative caesurae send aural signals that counter the confessional nature of (poetic, lyric) language. At its most insistently superior, the Frostian sound goads a critic like Yvor Winters into castigating Frost for his "willful ignorance" and his "smug stupidity" (while we know that Frost can be both willful and smug, we are convinced that he is not stupid).5 The greater the disjunction between poet /sound and meaning, the more isolated the poet seems from his poem and potentially the more condescending toward its subjects, human and thematic. Yet Frost sustains this distancing relationship in various degrees throughout the poetry, for while he aspires to talk about human appetitive frailties he is reluctant to implicate himself as lyric subject; uninvolved, the stranger has no evidential or emotional responsibilities about the story the Witch of Coos tells, with the forty-year-old murder long forgotten and the husband(s) long dead. On the level of sound, then, Frost's confident prosody keeps a "sound of [common] sense" always intact, frequently in contradiction to the apparent meaning of the words themselves and to the subtext implicit in those meanings: whatever the subject there is always a prosodic assurance of virile, rational control. Such a dynamic interplay between rationally


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orchestrated sound and signification as Frost sustains demands a rigorous formalism: one element may snap to another, like the Witch of Coos, "Tell the truth for once," but the measured cadences forbid the revelatory instinct. Frost's tactics of self-assertion are very subtle, for the form always reflects one clear level of content, always admirably so, in fact. Such virtuosity tends to make as its paradoxical antithesis the emotional state of the speaker within the poem itself; the meandering line lengths of "After Apple Picking," for example, reflect the speaker's drowsy state, but the nearly subliminal intricacies of rhyming combined with lines that mimic formally the placement of figural elements suggests another level at which the poet is fully awake and in absolute control.6 In a poem whose speaker is pulled so inexorably earthward that his insteps ache from the pressure, his ears echo with the sound of apples rumbling deep into the cellar bin, and his mind turns toward the burrowing woodchuck, the poet is energized. If the speaker of "After Apple Picking" is beset by doubts and impotently brought low before the sensually overwhelming fruits of his labor, the poet's long ladder is still sticking through a tree toward heaven. A voice of virile moderation, the poet's sound does not capitulate to exhaustion or recognize defeat. Frost's gamesmanship is not merely the necessary control of the poet who must manage a lyrical voice without succumbing to the formlessness of raw emotion, but it is instead an end in itself. Evidence of his mastery, his deployment of language to shape a sound of sense ensures that the battle is kept between a given speaker - one of Frost's "actors" - and his or her environment. Thus Frost often maintains quite consciously a pragmatic discrepancy between word as sound and word as meaning: while he might dispute the Saussurean dichotomy between the "sound image" and the concept or meaning of the word, he nonetheless enhances the discrepancy. This is a habit literalized in small in his persistent punning, the device most dependent on a disjunction between sound and meaning. The thing named only sounds like the word that ordinarily sounds the conceptual note that brings forth the image of a thing. At their most flamboyant, Frost's puns draw complete attention to themselves as sound devices, first and foremost; when he has "Keeper" in "A Masque of Mercy" accuse another character of "Bohning up on Thomism" his first level of humor lies in the "Bohning - boning" homonym. By a clearly artificial but highly humorous stretch he incorporates this reference to the bibliophile, Bohn, in a poem whose setting is a bookstore/gift shop where the books are mysteriously being tumbled off the shelves. He also plays on the Thomas reference at multiple levels, as it refers to "True Thomas," implicitly opposed to the biblical Doubting Thomas (who was later martyred for his belief), with all that Aquinian philosophy suggests about knowledge as both revelation and reason. One who bones/Bohns up on Thomism

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by reading books misses half the point at least, particularly if he gets the wrong Thomas from which to begin. If he is keeping company with "Jesse Bel," both his rational and his aesthetic capacities may be already somewhat impaired.7 While many of Frost's puns are more subtly displayed than these, the pun is for Frost always a figure of dispersal, as it uses one sound to signify complementary or contradictory levels, thereby excluding the center. Frost is a master of complex wordplay, by which sounds - the homonymic force of puns among them - are employed in the subversion of unitary meaning; by virtue of their conscious and often comical cleverness, the playful sound effects may bring one to smile while the text urges a more serious message. Meaning may come to seem almost randomly variable within the obviously sophisticated, consciously competent sound system. This insistent discrepancy between sound and meaning, productive as it is of ambiguity, is a locus for irony, as it becomes a place where words are pushed to operate at two (competing) levels. Irony exists in this nexus as a natural phenomenon like erosion or hoar frost; the words, struggling to maintain signification, find something that wants them down. Yet if meaning deconstructs and multiplies in this game with words, Frost sets the contest between, by his terms, equally formidable opponents: if sound at some level countermands meaning, the words themselves are chosen to manifest the inescapable sensual authority of the things whose ideas they invoke. Anthony Easthope, in Poetry as Discourse, uses as an epigram a quote from Michael Westlake's One Zero and the Night Controller: "My words are things before they become words, and they become things again when they do." 8 This poetic version of signifier and signified evokes Frost's feeling for the "thingness" of the words themselves, implied in his materialist image of stringing words along sentence sounds like clothes on a line. This apprehension of language is traditionally poetic, and by post-Saussurean terms it begs the question of any intrinsic connection between words and things; such faith in any intrinsic relationship between language and things is, as Murphy points out in "The Exile of Literature," "archaic" and "conservative" and yet eminently poetic.9 Based on the conviction that sensual materialities contribute their weight and form to the word that names and represents them, equally based on the conviction that abstractions yield a language that is formless, empty, and without weight or substance, it presumes a hierarchy of connectedness. For Frost, "stone," "star," "snow," "tree" have a sensual immediacy and a felt reality, while "liberal," "justice," "instinct," "political freedom" are all vacancies, a point illustrated vividly in his "oxymoronic" pairings and his dismissive use of such terms ("Political freedom means nothing to me. I bestow it right and left"). By his terms he creates a fair game, with sound squaring


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off against the opacity of words, which embody both tangible realities and an entire symbolic history.10 His poetic methodology perpetuates this game: the phonetic parallelism inherent in the poetic line structure promotes phonetic, syntactic, and semantic repetition, and repetition foregrounds sound, while the words, competitive in their sensuality, continue to rise up above the beat.11 Repudiating free verse, which may foreground meaning by loosening this tension, Frost consistently enhances formal repetition, approaching at times a nearly obsessive ordering.12 Thus as things become words in Frost's poetry, the thingness of the word asserts itself authoritatively, pushing against the things the words were before they became words. Sound collides with concept; the confident, virile tonal range, its base the modest but powerful iamb, forces materiality to an accommodative flexibility. But the thingness of the word - its sound and shape of sense on the page - is balanced against the sensual, rounded, and weighted things the words were before they became words. Like the frost that arches the frozen ground up to tumble the stones from their wall, bringing them out of wallness and back to discrete rocks (like "loaves," like "balls"), such an enclosed environment promotes the "word" in all its enriched autonomy.13 If words are the containers of change, undergoing rapid-fire, transformative meanings, things are also containers whose formal elements are productive of a versatile continuity: this is a truth implied in the title "Mending Wall," which suggests at several levels the reparative capacity of the wall itself, whose own rough stones are the medium by which its gaps are healed annually. Each tangible object exists as a formal moment, a shapeliness that argues against formlessness. What Ransom called "things in their thinginess" preside in Frost's poetry; he possesses that "faculty of presenting images so whole and clear that they resist the catalysis of thought," even as their formal continuities shift.14 Frost is, thus, given to using language that is reflective of a sensual materiality, choosing to argue against a world of things with the things that are words. Frost's skeleton/sound box in "The Witch of Coos" is at once a most tangible thing, relatively indestructible and immutable as natural parts go, and a most immaterial specter, a projection of buried guilt. Frost employs its dual and oppositional identities as symbol and object to pit meaning against sound, for as a symbol it is noiseless and as a skeleton it grates and rattles, scraping against itself with every step it takes. The skeleton actually appears visually to the woman only on the ground floor between cellar and second story. In this middle zone between the nether part of the house, which signifies desire, and the attic, which signifies madness, the bones make an appearance, but at the other levels they manifest themselves only by sound. Frost thus literalizes the interactive

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relationship between the aural and the rational - visually verified - apprehension of a given "reality." What the eyes may see - or not see - is only part of the picture, which also incorporates noise from the visceral/appetitive/cellar and the cerebral/inspirative/attic. Like Paul's wife, who materializes from the merest pith to move briefly in bodily form through time and space before disappearing, the skeleton moves momentarily through the medium of the ground floor, locus of more rational behaviors than those found in either the cellar in which the murder has occurred or in the one finished bedroom upstairs. Its passage gives only a glimpse of the visual, consciously recognized version of its reality. In this it would seem to be one of the multitude of things in Frost's poetry that are, like the leaves that fall or the seeds that sprout, on the way to some other definition of themselves, and yet it is in a most fundamental way different from these other natural artifacts. It can move and lose pieces of itself, but it cannot regenerate or metamorphose: it is a hard, dead thing, and its original definition as a man suggests its obdurate formalism. One of the few mobile things in Frost's poetry that cannot generate through metamorphosis its own series of significances, it is a comically static construct. It becomes at one point, in fact, a "scribble," as if Frost plays on its identity as a poetic device gone dead: the remains of the lyric figure, in fact. Frost masterfully exploits the skeleton's dual nature as a densely tangible object and as a symbol of the woman's guilt - a supernatural/psychic/hysterical manifestation that is sound without substance. He takes this complex totem that is simultaneously so tangible and so nebulous, so symbolic and so real, and shakes it up the stairs, down the central hall, and up into the attic; its sound and his sound effects thus control the poem's effect despite the horrific truth of the story from which the sounds derive. The bones first manifest themselves by their noise alone, coming haltingly up the cellar steps "The way a man with one leg and a crutch, / Or a little child, comes up": both the metrical pattern of trochaic inversions here and the visual image predict an ironic truth - that this lover divested of appendages, sexual and otherwise, is impotent, more a sound and sight of pathos than of terror. The sound of them on the stairs starts the woman wondering how the bones are "mounted." This is a pun that suggests immediately multiple levels of meaning, as "mounted" has inescapable sexual connotations in keeping with the bones' past as a lover (and in keeping with the use of the term in "The Witch of Grafton"), connotations of a dead thing "mounted" for display, and connotations of one who mounts, or ascends upward, as the skeleton does as it heads atticward. In fact, the woman imagines the skeleton specifically as mounted "like a chandelier," bones hanging like prisms, and this meaning is also to some extent confirmed as the skeleton spits out fire and has


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smoke in its sockets, like an electrical fixture shorting itself out (so much for enlightenment). When it comes toward the woman with hand outstretched "the way he did in life once," we may imagine it to recapitulate the seduction, which this time the woman repels, breaking off the hand (this time symbolically repudiating the penis and thus proving that the man is in effect "dismounted") and falling backward away from the skeleton. Inescapably, too, and oppositely, we may imagine this imploring stance to have been repelled once before as the woman has allowed her husband to kill her lover. (The ambiguity of her saying that the bones are "a man's his father killed for me. / I mean a man he killed instead of me" is interesting.) The significance of the skeleton is extremely variable, even contradictory: a symbol of past appetite, it sounds like stacked and emptied plates; a symbol of desire, it is metaphorically missing its leg and literally missing its hand, both clear metonymic references to the lost penis. It is an almost comically disintegrative structure whose meanings may be altered even retroactively. Invested with multiple meanings, the skeleton begins immediately to disperse as a visual artifact - its leg has become a "crutch," the "hand" shatters into "finger-pieces." Its St. Vitus dance movement down the hall becomes the verification of its function as an image of ambivalence (the woman is both frightened and pleased to look at "him"; "he" wants outside but settles for the attic); the bones "go every which way in the joints" as they move down the linear hall, becoming a figure of the contradiction between impulse and conscious intent. The poet holds this jangling construct together prosodically, however, playing off its sound with an assertive formal control. The line "And set off briskly for so slow a thing" shows a perfection of controlled sound, as it embodies the "brisk" slowness of a skeleton whose "sk-sk" sounds ("like a chalkpile") are reified in the "s" alliterations of this line, in the one-syllable words grinding against each other and insisting upon the reader's own halting movement among juxtaposed consonants, and, in small, in the very sound of the word "briskly," whose meaning of "quickly" or "energetically" is less valid than its more Joycean aural suggestions of a word made from "bone," "gristle," and "skeleton." Frost, it is implied, may shake this box and make it sound any way he pleases - like a pile of dishes, a chandelier, a chalkpile, a loose shutter. In yet another inversion of meaning, the skeleton "going every which way in the joints" is said to look like "lightning or a scribble / From the slap I had just now given its hand." Here the skeleton as signification becomes a "scribble," not a word; itself handless, it may not, in either the Marxist or the poetic sense of writing oneself to wisdom, make its own meaning. It in fact becomes not meaning but potentially the thing by which meaning is inscribed, the chalk itself, scribbling in the dark. Again

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embodied in the "sk" sound, this scribble of random movement is on its way to erasure, for in the full light only the sound confirms its existence as it becomes white lines on a white sheet. If, as William James suggests, an attempt to see "inside" to where the meanings are is "like trying to turn up the gas quickly enough to see how the darkness looks," this rack of bones "embodies" the paradox of such a pragmatic nihilism.15 It is a metaphorical construct made of the written word that may be "seen" only in the darkness inside one's head. It is a white scribble of chalk against black like snow-white branches up a black trunk, lightning against a black sky, and as such it is intimately associated with the poet himself, whose own hand holds the pen that must scrawl across the paper when jarred. The bones melt to nothing in the light, but locked behind the attic door they rattle like loose shutters, a reminder of portals once opened and since locked tight. They become that thing which constantly recedes from the vision, visible only peripherally at the edge of the light, but heard inside the head like chalky fingers brushing one's skull despite the "headboard" used to block its reappearance. Whether the skeleton actually exists as a thing or whether it is the cacophonous white noise inside the darkness of a madwoman's head/house, it is a complex figure of the way Frost invokes sound against meaning. His skeleton, daring one to take it seriously, may not by its very nature be made light of. It is simultaneously comical and dreadful, the very sound of nothingness, the mark made by a nonexistent hand. As the skeleton/symbol would suggest, a paradoxical literalness emerges from Frost's consciously dichotomous use of sound and meaning, as he so frequently chooses language that eschews the abstract for the sensually tangible: the bones, the buttons, and the box, for example, make an alliterative noise as words and an actual noise as things brought together in "The Witch of Coos." One finds, in fact, that when Frost deviates from his own stated preference for the concrete, shapely correlatives by which one "say[s] spirit in terms of matter," he exhibits a spatial confusion that affects even his poetic structures; it is not inconsequential that for Frost the devil has no form but is instead "diaphanous / And easy to see through" and seems always to be receding into the distance ("A Masque of Reason" 11. 427-8, 440).16 For him, "The only materialist . . . 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" (Prose 41). The poetic task of shaping is godlike, and he saves himself from the void by the handfuls, bringing it by main force to order. The poetic task is also as fundamental as the potter's task of creating containers, shaping with the hands against the centrifugal force of the wheel: "material" is "thrown" into shape by the gathering metaphor as if each poem is, in small, a revolutionary model in clay of the gravitationally inclined world. The


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words are themselves thus weighty representations of materiality and, while subject to the gravitational urgings that dominate Frost's poetry, seem chosen to contain a level of sensual signification that even the contraindications of sound cannot completely subvert. Even a word like "sky" or "heaven" may be brought gradually to represent a material reality, evidence of a container - domed - that saves one from the shapeless void; as an arc or a dome, the sky might shatter as it does in "Birches" or fall in shapely pieces as in "Fragmentary Blue," yet these are "inner" domes, one level in a potentially infinite concentricity of containment. Frost's is a world of competing tangibilities and yet, as the skeleton so vividly proves, these artifacts, even calcified into bones, are both material and magical. As "Mending Wall" reifies so succinctly, "We have to use a spell to make them balance." The conjurer can only command the words, like precarious stones, to "Stay where you are until our backs are turned!" The poetic spell, like the narrative spell in "The Witch of Coos," is always on the verge of breaking.17 For Frost's balance between words as discrete sound images and words as tied to sensual/symbolic correlatives is necessarily dependent upon the very stuff of nature that he perceives as most insistent upon metamorphosis and therefore most resistant to containment and stasis. If women are perceived to be always on the verge of transition from wife to hill wife, leaving the encasements of houses for the fields and woods, they merely mimic the unstable but solid matter that may shed form like the cicada sheds its perfectly articulated husk: Paul's wife, in fact, is the perfect replica of this dynamic as she swells from her containment inside the hollow tree to a brief life that then extinguishes itself, firefly-like. (Feminine, she is, too, the figural opposite of the skeleton as she absorbs into her dry husk the fluid that gives her form and enhances her sexuality; desiccated, the impotent bones rattle, but rounded, she glides noiselessly and is, in fact, destroyed by sound.) Matter, in other words, makes itself felt even as it capitulates to its own variable nature. If the apple will fall in "After Apple Picking," if it, like the speaker on his way to dreaming, is about to go bruised to the cider heap where it will be pressed into an essence of itself, it nonetheless maintains through all its transmutations an identifiable appleness. The apple holds, against the authoritative prosodic erosion of waking reality into dream state, its own sensual place as an essential ingredient in the spell to which the speaker is succumbing. It glows, its russet flecks showing clear and its scent in the air, as potent as Snow White's apple, while the ice mirror has broken and the speaker is moving toward a hibernatory trance. Such things reify the potent opacity of the word, which is invested with an entire history of meanings, incrementally awakened within the volatile substance of the poem.18 Frost imposes upon his poetry an endless system of checks and bal-

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ances to deter lyric accountability while keeping its possibilities imminent. Irony, always a possibility in his poetry, is the first and last line of defense, for within that instability the other elements may shift in value much as Frost's natural things - his woods and flowers and women may elide from shape to shape. Dark allusions confront jocular tones, puns infiltrate what appears to be serious business, imagery of disintegration subverts the footing of apparently secure speakers.19 Form imposes itself with disciplinarian authority over words perceived to be so venereally inclined as to resist management. The oversound, masterfully appropriate, counters the confessional impulses of the speakers within the poem. It should be no surprise, then, that there are actual figures throughout the poetry which seem designed to provoke and chasten, almost simultaneously, all those speakers Frost deploys in his service (he claims, proudly, to have written only two poems without people in them).20 Frost's speakers are sacrificially inclined, as they willingly act out the paradoxical imperatives of a human desire for rational behavior housed in a body that refuses to allow reason to control it: "Society can never think things out: / It has to see them acted out by actors, / Devoted actors at a sacrifice - / The ablest actors I can lay my hands on," says God in "A Masque of Reason." These bodies, then, represent within the poetic structure the physical, precisely human locus of the heautocratic dialogue between self and soul whereby one summons the "discipline . . . / to learn his submission to unreason" and the discipline to keep that submission contained and under control ("A Masque of Reason" 1. 210). With the act of speaking itself so problematic, Frost is brought to reify his own prosodic composure in the series of laconic strangers who populate his poetic landscape: strange extra-vagants whose anonymity and whose "unyarded" state, to use Thoreau's term, mask a dual potential for equilibration and inexplicably violent disruption.21 His poetry is filled with unspeaking strangers, both benign and frightening; these internal presences enforce the compulsion to confess and conceal that appears at every level of the poetry and is emblematized in the scythe that slices the orchis and frightens the snake even as it reveals them. The stranger in "The Witch of Coos" illustrates this almost psychoanalytic power, which provokes revelation even as it keeps it within the bounds of a kind of decorum, and there are many other such unnamed, peripheral men who walk through Frost's poetic landscape. Thesefiguresmanifest themselves as if to monitor the primary speakers who, even at their most laconic, yield up a degree of power when they assume the role as speaker. These unnamed strangers may be felt to represent lyric displacement quite literally as they seem to embody a given quality - control or potential appetite - and carry it away through time and space. Peripatetic, they are


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always potentially threatening; in lonely lanes and hidden farmhouses, every stranger is to be met with caution. Like fairy-tale figures, however, they tend to manifest themselves as figures either of the harmless light or of the dangerous dark, and sometimes they remain the embodied specters of the main speakers' own preoccupations. Their impingements upon other more dramatically realized and defined characters are temporary but inevitably illuminating as their presence forces these others to some accountability. Their revelatory force lies in their relatively mysterious identities; a stranger who stays long enough to articulate himself thoroughly alters his function within the poem, because to speak is to reveal, and to reveal, as delicious as it might be, is to divest oneself of power. As long as he maintains some quality of "strangeness," the stranger's presence may provoke a change in the status quo and simultaneously enforce the assertion of a new balance. Much as Frost employs sound to quell the various rising hysterias implicit in the lyric voice, these figures act as receptacles for the spoken word. The psychoanalytic ear absorbs language, while the mouth rebuffs with its silence all but the interior dialectic of the speaker, promoting in the confessor, first disequilibrium, and then some (temporary) internally generated balance. In "A Masque of Mercy" this quality is allegorically elaborated and named: a heavy knock on the door and the knob violently tried signal the entrance of the prophetic "Fugitive." The woman has reacted typically to the sound, imagining a "senile runaway" and saying, "Wretchedness in a stranger frightens me / More than it touches me." The Fugitive is the literal force of change; he is Jonah, there to shake things up. "I'll break your door down," he says to protest their locking him inside, trying to incorporate him into their schema. "Always the same when I set out in flight. / I take the first boat. God puts up a storm / That someone in the crew connects with me." His presence causes the books to fall from the shelves and forces the people inside to defend themselves and their positions. This Jonah is, as always, cast down, but his body on the floor brings the others to reconsider the issue ofjustice. Having defined themselves as "revolutionaries," they return to some semblance of an ordered vision through the stranger's intermediary function. The stranger figure, whether of the light or of the dark, tends to work toward realignment; in this he becomes an externally accommodative force that assimilates the energy of the change. ("Jonah" takes it quite literally, both in his biblical manifestation and here, where the door slams so hard in his face that "the blow and the repulse crumple him on the floor.") By this means, change may occur without the "revolution" of emotion that invites anarchy. After the self-described, problematic lyricism of A Boy's Will, Frost begins to endorse tonally the willful limiting of emotion that the son represents so literally (and that the mother has clearly encouraged in the

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past) in "The Witch of Coos." 22 The dramatic poems that begin to emerge in North of Boston are a conscious abandonment of a more revelatory voice, and they give birth to a noninvolved narrator who is frequently embodied as a figure within the poetic landscape itself. The dialogue poems like "Home Burial," "The Death of the Hired Man," and "A Servant to Servants" clearly imply the value and necessity of the rational observer/commentator, as they allow Frost to disassociate himself absolutely from the emotions articulated within the dramatic structure. Through the medium of the narrator he is teaching himself to (seem to) talk about others rather than about himself. The narrators in poems like "The Death of the Hired Man" and "Home Burial" are by definition objectively reportorial, and as such they keep the reader back from the immediacies of emotion as well; like a reporter or a policeman at a crime scene, they are the filters through which the impact is diffused. In "The Death of the Hired Man" the narrator begins with typically straightforward, objective exegesis: Mary sat musing on the lampflame at the table, Waiting for Warren. When she heard his step, She ran on tiptoe down the darkened passage To meet him in the doorway with the news And put him on his guard. Even when his language is "poetic" it holds a tight rein, the prosaic subject-verb constructions in their ten-syllable lines reinforcing an almost terse control: Part of a moon was falling down the west, Dragging the whole sky with it to the hills. Its light poured softly in her lap. She saw it And spread her apron to it. The narrative sequence from "Home Burial" is representative of the narrator's business-like tone, as it proceeds syntactically by subject and action verb constructions: "He saw her," "She was starting down," "She took a doubtful step," "He spoke," "She turned . . . and sank," "He said," "She refused," and so on. This pellucid, minimally descriptive narrative replaces the necessary stage directions of the otherwise dramatic structure, of course, for these are poems to be read and not plays to be acted, and yet this narrative voice is frequently reproduced within the poetry by the physical presence of an objectively placed, relatively silent nonparticipant. 23 The narrative structure of "The Witch of Coos," for example, gives the outsiderstranger figure a literal position within the poem; his 7 lines out of the 155 open and close the scene, but "They did all the talking." He has never before met these people and must verify their name the next morning as


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he leaves by looking at their mailbox. In "New Hampshire" the listening figure remains silent as the speaker moves from a sardonic, kingly pose to memories of the dendrophobic friend who was afraid of that line where man leaves off and nature starts "and never overstepped it save in dreams." In "The Black Cottage" the listener waits through the minister's quiet nostalgia until the storyteller brings himself to the realization that the walls of the sanctified edifices about which he speaks - the black cottage and himself- are invaded by angry bees. These figures, whether offstage and undefined as is the stranger on the road in "Home Burial," or a catalyst for the story that materializes by virtue of their presence, emerge as embodied correlatives for Frost's prosodic composure: whatever other function that stranger in "Home Burial" may be meant to serve, symbolically or otherwise, he halts the man's half-hopeful, halfcondescending pleas. As such, they share the literalness of the skeleton of "The Witch of Coos," who is a disembodied physical correlative of the woman's complex erotic past. More specifically, they may be seen as yet another logical increment in Frost's deployment of discrete objects, of his instinct for a "thingness" within which spirit presents itself in terms of matter. At times this outsider is, by virtue of his appearance on the scene alone, enough to distract disputants momentarily from themselves, as does the stranger in "Home Burial," but always the listening stranger moderates by his presence. One must assume, for example, that it is the third-party stranger in "The Witch of Coos" who is the catalyst for the "true" story of the bones rather than the romanticized narrative the mother and son have shared between themselves. This interventionary function is most graphically illustrated by the dynamics of "The Fear," in which the offstage presence of the stranger causes revelatory behavior and then calms it: materializing from darkness, he enters the lantern light for a brief moment, and he has a child by the hand. This poem says quite literally what so many of Frost's poems suggest tonally: that while hysteria, fear, anger, and other potent feelings may erupt, a structural containment of these emotions may be effected by one who remains uninvolved and, because relatively silent, in control. The stranger, who is only visiting down the road for a fortnight and is thus a complete outsider, is an absolutely neutral party. He is divested of mystery by his movement into the light, while he is also divested of his capacity to incite fear of sexual or physical violence by his paternal association with the child whose hand he holds; he becomes a father figure in this scene with all that this implies of authority and ordering in Frost's poetry. He is, in short, the embodiment of the healthy-minded poet and of the paternalistic (psychoanalytic) force by which hysteria is abated. Yet he is also a virtually magical presence, again a figure of the poet, as he mediates the end of the scene,

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literalized in a fade to black; the iconographic lantern, whose tangibility in the frightened woman's hand is the first level in a series of meanings, "touched, . . . struck . . . clattered and went out" after his appearance in the spotlight. There is almost always in the poetry one level at which Frost seems to claim to be this calmly rational figure passing by, stopping in just to listen or walking down the road past houses filled with desperate women and frustrated men. Frost embodies himself in all the quiet watchers and listeners throughout the poetry whose silent objectivity mimics the psychoanalytic mode by which others, less self-possessed, come to reveal themselves and in the revealing begin the return to rational behavior. Moreover, by so frequently establishing an actual figure, Frost gives life to a roving presence, a person who, while felt to be in the vicinity, may never actually enter thefieldof vision of the poem. Frost conjures up this very figure in absentia by his tonal detachment and his prosodic coolness in the poems where the speakers stand alone. Always there and not there, he imposes upon the reader a similar distance, enforcing the objectivity that is always, necessarily, inclusive of irony. Yet, of course, Frost's relationship to his speakers is, finally, much more intimate than the merely objective, for he is no stranger to their fears and desires; if on one level he is a visitor to the Witch of Coos, on another he is resident in that household as mother, son, husband, and skeleton/lover. In fact, Frost establishes an almost physical continuity between poet and poem with his wandering strangers, his listeners, and his people who appear out of nowhere, as if irresistibly he must manifest a controlling self somewhere close by. That this figure is frequently felt to be imminent is enhanced by the metamorphic capacities of objects within Frost's poetry, where as in his favorite Maeterlinck story, The Bluebird, mundane things have a way of transmuting themselves as if under a spell from one materiality to another. Frost grants to things that they might always be on the way to other functions and other meanings, but as one pairing spirals out of control he often generates, as if from the air, another figure who may assume rational authority. "The Subverted Flower" reinforces Frost's ability to shift the terms of this triad, for as the young man and woman begin deteriorating into animals "Obeying bestial laws" the "mother" calls out from the walled garden. This figure of control - not woman but fully empowered mother, seen elsewhere in the poetry in the "housekeeper" (significantly named) and the degraded mother/witch of Coos - seems to have been summoned up from the depths of need, for she is at once savior and oppressor, simultaneously rescuing and prohibiting the girl from desire.24 Not there in the scene, she is suddenly at hand to erase the evidence of what has gone before and to draw the girl back home. This magical materialism reinforces Frost's dialogic and in-


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cipiently dramatic relationship with his own speakers, as if to suggest that contentious parts of the same psyche cannot wander too far from each other. If Frost's rational self wanders like a Doppleganger through the poetry as an intermediary who works against the human proclivity toward unrestrained emotion, however, it also, not surprisingly, assumes the form of punisher - that extension ofjudgment into the sadism which resides at the extreme end of the continuum of control. Thus the poet also peoples his landscape with more ominously undefined, laconic strangers who never walk full into the circle of light and who do not hold children by the hand; they, too, seem part of a magical materialism that must manifest a body of potential uncontrol along with the body of control. "The Draft Horse," for example, is the very tincture of this fantasy of raw peril at the hands of a stranger; it is both particularized and universalized in its paranoia that there are dreadful lessons to be taught and that there are hidden forces at the ready to teach them. The violence is apparently random but also inevitable, and the landscape is both bucolically realistic and allegorical: in a pitch-dark, limitless grove, with a light that won't light, in a buggy too frail, with a horse too heavy, a pair of travelers is assaulted. "And a man came out of the trees / And took our horse by the head / And reaching back to his ribs / Deliberately stabbed him dead." The wild ferocity of this vision is compelling, its tonal control remarkable: "The ponderous beast went down / With a crack of a broken shaft. / And the night drew through the trees / In one long invidious draft."25 And its conclusion has the ring of one who senses a dire incommensurability between any conscious knowledge of guilt and the inevitable punishment for that unknown crime: "the man himself / Or someone he had to obey / Wanted us to get down / And walk the rest of the way." The "stranger" is also a man who calls the guilty to accounts for their own bestial residue. In some essential sense in Frost's poetry, "mud time" — that precarious season between winter and spring, freeze and thaw, control and uncontrol - is always imminent; in that same sense, so too are the "hulking tramps" who begin to wander through the landscape in that season, threatening the equanimity of the socially proprietous speaker and bringing him finally to recognize and reassert his own capacity for control. In "Two Tramps in Mud Time," the strangers materialize out of nowhere, startling the speaker so thoroughly that he mis-hits the wood: this is a dangerous game, axes being what they are in Frost's poetry, capable of striking like a snake, or biting. The strangers are there to take the speaker's job of woodcutting, again a dangerous game, for it is his job to channel his aggressive energy away from others and into the (temporarily inanimate) kindling: "The blows that a life of self-control / Spares to

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strike for the common good, / That day, giving a loose to my soul, / I spent on the unimportant wood." The tramps would deprive him of both his balance and his heat, elements condensed figurally into the dynamic precision of the titanically wrought woodchopper: "The weight of an ax-head poised aloft, / The grip on earth of outspread feet, / The life of muscles rocking soft / And smooth and moist in vernal heat." They would, in short, leave him to less harmless pastimes there in the crux between winter and spring. Warmth, the smooth and moist flow of muscles relaxed by vernal heat, has as its complement in this poem the water that fills every wheel rut and every hoofprint, but water without heat is ice. The speaker, warmed to a task, may be generative, but left to find other outlets becomes sinister: "Be glad of water," the speaker says, "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. " 26 What these silent strangers would take, then, is all that keeps the speaker from unrestrained appetite, that keeps F/frost from stealing forth in the dark to show his /its teeth. A Boy's Will predicts that there will be such figures wandering through Frost's poetry, as it gives the Stranger an allegorical function designed to resonate beyond the immediate context of the poem in which he first appears. "Love and a Question" creates a stranger whose presence is most specifically felt to threaten man and wife but who also clearly sounds the integrity of the individual soul by urging it away from domestic community and toward isolation. The poem brings the stranger to the door at twilight, and his burden is said to be "care." He predicts by his presence that this newly married, happy couple will be visited often by Sorrow, who will soon no longer seem a stranger and who will, in time, be invited inside. (In this he does indeed predict the course of human events within Frost's poetry.) Yet more specifically and more ominously, this Stranger prefigures yet another Frostian version of "Young Goodman Brown" (see too "A Dream Pang"). He arrives at the crux of twilight, when one is balanced between the light and the dark; this is when Brown chooses to leave his young wife, despite her protestations. Like the tramps of mud time, the stranger would urge the speaker toward extremity. He carries in his hand "a green-white stick," a figure of the serpentine staff carried by the Devil in Hawthorne's story; it is not yet withered, as the marriage is not yet stale, but in the naturally accelerated course of deterioration one sees in Frost's poetry it will soon dry and fade. The stranger brings the husband outside away from his wife, where they look at the sky and "question what of the night to be"; this is the locus of supernatural flight and the antithesis of the domestic hearth within. The wife, so newly wed, is still bound to the fireplace, but her face shines "rose-red with the glowing coal"; she thus reminds one of the


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lurid reflections cast upon husband and wife in Hawthorne's Satanic Mass. The husband, like Goodman Brown, who would "cling to [Faith's] skirts and follow her to heaven," wants to imagine preserving his wife's innocence for himself against the encroachments of men such as the stranger: he "wished her heart in a case of gold / And pinned with a silver pin." And in this he ensures his own abandonment, for the very containment he desires for his wife will force her out the door, into the hills. This particular mysterious stranger is presented with a candor typical to A Boy's Will, which does not trouble to disguise the poet's magical visions. He may legitimately be felt to have some sinister power through his oblique connection with Hawthorne's Satan, and this is an identification enhanced by the proximity of "Love and a Question" to "The Demiurge's Laugh," where the stranger in the woods is, quite literally, a demon.27 But Frost's world remains populated with these threatening male figures whose powers of evil, metonymically presented by the merest suggestion, gain contextual force from these first manifestations. Thus when the wife of "The Hill Wife" fears the tramp who has come to her door, she may be felt to have good reason. Her stranger is doubly invasive, inhabiting both domestic and natural spaces as if the stranger of "Love and a Question" has found himself a key to the front door. In the section "House Fear," the young couple, coming home at night to the lonely house, "rattle the lock and key / To give whatever might chance to be, / Warning and time to be off in flight." The title directs one who knows of Frost's poetic houses to anticipate a nonhuman threat — to feel that the house, unlighted and with the "fire gone gray," possesses an animus of its own. But after the next section, "The Smile," the presence becomes retrospectively connected to the beggar who is felt to be "watching from the woods as like as not." This stranger clarifies the sexual threat implicit in all of Frost's sinister wanderers, for he is clearly a man who arouses the woman more than she understands or admits, just as the "door-filling men" of "In the Home Stretch" and the unnamed workers who come and go through unlocked doors in "A Servant to Servants" are also productive of a woman's sexual ambivalence. This stranger troubles the woman by smiling at her, and his is a smile that "never came of being gay"; when she fantasizes about the tree's hands and of "what the tree might do," she clearly has incorporated her fear/desire of the stranger, who is also presented metonymically through his hands. The stranger lets her give him food - fulfill his appetite — "instead / Of seizing . . . as he might have seized," but left "hungry" long enough, she clearly feels, he might seize and devour her instead. Unlike the skeleton of "The Witch of Coos," which has its hand shattered into finger pieces, the stranger may use his hands to take what

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he wants: hands, the instruments by which the speaking voice is made superfluous. And when she leaves, wandering off into the woods where before she has imagined him to wait, she has forgotten her fear in her desire to escape from her stolid, cultivating husband and into the ferny forest. Her husband has left her childless, her house unfilled; the stranger, who mocks her for being wed, for being that which is not wild, becomes by merest suggestion part of the force that seduces her into the hills. In balance against the judicious listeners, then, are these male figures who threaten the balance: "tramps" whose very name suggests their function as men who trample upon proprieties and arouse one to a similar fever for wandering or, in "Locked Out: As Told to a Child," "thieves" who threaten to violate and take from domesticated areas the things they desire. From the woods as like as not, these are embodiments antithetical to the "mother" of "The Subverted Flower," who pulls the woman back into the walled and cultivated garden, rescuing her from desire; as "Locked Out" suggests, the unsubstantiated thieves would as soon eat up a flower left unprotected. These figures are, thus, more threatening finally to women than to men, for women must find in them the inviting correlatives to their own inherent uncontrol, while men must react adversarially by reinforcing their own moderate rationality. "Locked Out" suggests the fantasy level at which these dark and potentially violent men are conceived, as it suggests two scenarios, oppositional sides of the speaker's psyche, one of which he keeps locked away from himself. He tells this story to a child, and yet it is most powerfully suggestive of dark, nighttime forces whose appetites are dangerous.28 "When we locked up the house at night, / We always locked the flowers outside / And cut them off from window light," he tells the child. This opening sets the fairy-tale tone, for it suggests clearly that the flowers have some powers that might be mobilized by the light; left in darkness, they will stay put and out of trouble until morning, but they are also vulnerable to being "molested" by wandering thieves. It also suggests that the "feminine" aspects of the speaker's self remain closed away from him along with other "thieves" of control. In his dreams, which are like the hill wife's nightmare/fantasy of the dark pine brushing against the glass and trying to get inside the bedroom, he fears (and perhaps desires) that "the door was tried / And brushed with buttons upon sleeves." But the only evidence that thieves have come is in a flower with a bitten stem left on the front steps. The matter-of-fact, parental voice, which tells this as a sort of ghost story to a child, is fraught with the same ambivalence one finds in the teller of "The Bonfire," another story told to children. For in the speaker's fantasy it is bad men, violators who might have "molested" the entire flower bed, who have left a single bitten flower like a witch's totem on the doorstep;


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in reality, however, he says, "I may have been to blame. . . . " The bitten nasturtium is "some flower [he] played with" as he sat waiting himself for the dark. With its pungent, slightly bitter flavor, the nasturtium is, of course, often quite literally eaten in salads, but its fluted shape and its soft petals make it yet another of Frost's sexually evocative manifestations of Flora. And here the speaker has sat watching the moon disappear, becoming himself that thing which "after the sun is set / . . . show[s] . . . its crystal teeth." One is often hard-pressed to explain the level of dread Frost is able to arouse - Trilling's "terror" - until one recognizes the metonymic force of these seemingly peripheral figures, these silent thieves, beggars, and tramps who come out of nowhere as if they are the necessary manifestations of a poet who cannot fully deny "the lurking frost in the earth beneath," the frost whose crystal teeth will bite, not speak. It is as if they are part of Frost, part of the reader, "the destructive half of the schizophrene" who surges into inexplicable evil.29 Frost very subtly creates a world that is at an essential level magical, a fact frequently obscured by the commonsensical oversounds that argue a matter-of-fact, realist's vision of the world. Frost knows exactly how reassuring the realist can seem and, in fact, how nonthreatening the realist is to those who prefer not to hear the bones rise up. 30 He knows that his masterfully deployed "sound of sense," with all the term suggests about its grounding in the rational, will work to convince one of his firmly nonfanciful orientation, his Yankee integrity. Yet while Frost's complex, intensely poetic vision generates its own resolute prosodic structure, it is not so much to shut things out as to keep them in. Despite his extremely self-conscious, architechtonic use of language, he never closes out what he feels are the aural visitations by which "delight" and "wisdom" become the final alchemical product of his poetry. He can hear very well the skeleton rattling like stacked dishes from cellar to attic and, admirably, he chooses to hear it; at one level the consummate ironist, he also has an Emersonian ear for the oracular. As Emerson says in "Experience," "How easily, if fate would suffer it, we might keep forever these beautiful limits, and adjust ourselves, once and for all, to the perfect calculation of the kingdom of cause and effect And yet he who should do his business on this understanding would be quickly bankrupt." Within the elegant calculations of his own prosodic ear, Frost also suggests that he can hear voices outside the rational, and he reifies them within his poetry in various magical forms, from the beautiful flower maidens of the early "In a Vale" to his numerous witch women. One is drawn inexorably back to Frost's skeleton in all of this: to its sheer effrontery as a symbol, to its pathos as a testament to failed and punished love, to its comic absurdity as it makes its doggedly haphazard

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way upward, to its briskly macabre sound rattling from cellar to attic, from line to line. "The Witch of Coos" is Frost's Narrenschiff, an enclosed space floating in snow in the middle of nowhere stuffed tight with mad figures from his dreams.31 The mother turned witch, a matriarchal presence swollen to become her very house; the son held inside, enthralled by the mother's voice and implicated in the deaths of his fathers. The stranger, housed for a night and temporarily privy to their story, a catalyst for revelation. And the mournful bones, the dry leavings of the woman's appetitive interlude. Within the larger context of Frost's poetry, each one of these human characters comes to be an exceedingly enriched figure: the mother and the son, the witch and the lover, the unseeing husband, the rational stranger. Only the skeleton, which permeates the house from basement to attic and leaves a piece of its hand to be kept like a scapular in the parlor button box, is unique to "The Witch of Coos." But the skeleton is Frost's oversound made manifest, both as the jolly comic racket that counters the dead seriousness of the witch's story and as the slight but insistent noise behind the headboard. One who misses hearing the skeleton, as does the cuckolded husband in this poem, will fail to hear Frost's audacious blend of darkness and light and will hear his stories instead as if they were exactly the rational, distanced accounts they often pretend to be.

Lyricism: At the Back of the North Wind

I'm not here to make exorbitant claims for poetry, lest they seem personal, but one thing must be said about poetry - it's the ultimate. The nearest thing to it is penultimate, even religion. Poetry is the thoughts of the heart. . . . It's a thought-felt thing. Poetry is the thing that laughs and cries about everything as it's going on - and makes you take it. Robert Frost, in Thompson, Robert Frost: The Later Years 238

A poet is a person who thinks there is something special about a poet and about his loving one unattainable woman. You'll usually find he takes the physical out on whores. I am defining a romantic poet — and there is no other kind. An unromantic poet is a self-contradiction like the democratic aristocrat that reads the Atlantic Monthly. Ink, mink, pepper, stink, I, am, out! I am not a poet. What am I then? Not a farmer - never was - never said I was. Robert Frost, in Thompson, Robert Frost: The Years of Triumph 381

In Frost's poetry the birds never seem to fly very high, and when they do take flight they risk being overtaken by darkness. For them, the trees become both havens and traps, to be flown to for cover at twilight and, more treacherously, to be flown against after sundown. Ousted from their safe perches in "The Thatch," the birds "must brood where they [fall] in mulch and mire, / Trusting feathers and inward fire / Till daylight [makes] it safe for a flyer." Trapped by a spring snow in "Our Singing Strength," they sit huddled and vulnerable on the muddy road where the speaker drives them "underfoot in bits of flight." In "A LineStorm Song," caught in "the wood-world's torn despair," their songs are "crushed like some / Wild, easily shattered rose." The cautious, small bird of "The Woodpile" is silent and fearful; he will "say no word to tell . . . who he [is]," and his "little fear" makes his evasive movements erratic and small. These birds that do not fly, that secret themselves in the 157

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evening forest in "Come In" to call the speaker to "come in / To the dark and lament," seem defeated or resigned, tethered to the ground. In "Acceptance" the mated birds are forlorn creatures separated by night; the female closes a "faded eye" and the lost male is a "waif." In "The Exposed Nest" baby birds lay revealed and vulnerable, their nest torn by the plow blade; the speaker imagines that they will die before they fledge, abandoned by parents too fearful to return to them. Like the infant son in "Home Burial," these nestlings will return to the ground, which is plowed and open to receive them. No blithe spirits, Frost's birds never rain pure melody down from the sky. These seemingly negligible birds, symbols of the lyric voice, have intuited the Oven Bird's lesson and are the signs by which one is meant to divine Frost's acceptance of the linguistic implications of the fall from innocence. The Oven Bird, who watching "That other fall we name the fall" come to cover the world with dust, "Knows in singing not to sing." Instead, "The question that he frames in all but words / Is what to make of a diminished thing." The fall, in necessitating both birth and death, imposes a continuum of identity that compromises naming. The process toward death, begun with birth, transmutes and gradually diminishes form, thus adding to the equation - words are things before they become words and things again when they do - an element of inevitable, perpetual senescence. The birds of "A Winter Eden" say "which buds are leaf and which are bloom," but the names are always premature or too late: gold goes to green, dawn to day, everything rises and falls and is transformed. Thus the Oven Bird says, "Midsummer is to spring as one to ten," because a season — this or any other - may only be codified analogously. "Fall" takes on a series of identities: petal fall, the fall season, the first and fortunate fall, each of which bears, at the moment of articulation, the burden of a whole complex of moral, aesthetic, and literary valuations. This bird is a "midsummer and a mid wood bird" that sees things at the moment of capitulation to the imperatives of fall. Loud, he predicts the inevitable, and his "language" reflects the potential meaninglessness of a world in which one is forced to define a thing by what it departs from or approaches rather than what it "is." To anticipate and recognize in the full-blown flower only its inevitable decay is to miss the mark, but to ignore its ephemerality is an equal failure. The paradox of the Oven Bird's assertive voice completes the suggestion that only a new "language" can accommodate the diminishing of things, for he neither sings nor speaks: he "knows in singing not to sing" and he frames his question "in all but words." He neither sinks nor soars, and he lives in a solid, domed house that typifies his Yankee ingenuity, his forethought, his prudence. In a voice of virile moderation, loud but unhysterical, he sets out to articulate his surroundings.

AT THE BACK OF THE NORTH WIND

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But at the same time, and in a way that refuses to cancel out this message, Frost obliquely mocks his meager lyric birds and the compromised, oven-bird speakers throughout his poetry who are equally pinioned, held by their own voices from transcendence. He is ironically and ambivalently aware of the Palgravian definition of "lyric poetry." (Lentricchia sums it up: "No narrative allowed, no description of local reference, no didacticism, no personal, occasional, or religious material, no humor the very antithesis of the 'poetical' - no dramatic textures of blank verse because the speaking voice is alien to song lyric," etc.)1 And Frost is very much dedicated to deconstructing this mode with his own lyricism: he writes to Amy Lowell: "The great thing is that you and some of the rest of us have landed with both feet on all the little chipping poetry of a while ago. We have busted 'em up as with cavalry. We have, we have, we have."2 Yet paradoxically, Frost holds on to lyric power by seeming to abnegate it: there is in this erotically declined game of loving (an abased and abasing) language an element of what can only be called sadomasochism. If poetry takes "a little rough handling once in a while," Frost is willing to "do it violence" in order to maintain his own poetic potency (Letters 182); yet he is both the abased - with his words - and the abaser - with his prosodically virile sound. 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: that 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 to which poetry - and if poetry then all language - has come. Frost anticipates modernism's lament and, it may be said, prefigures in his dualism its dubious palliative of self-referential irony. The lyric birds and the weary speakers tell us the genuine Frostian wisdom of achieving a commonsensical accommodation with the fallen world, while inciting at another, and ineffable, level a profound disquiet. His virile prosody does not, then, merely supersede what Frost has to say about the necessary failure of lyricism when language fails to hold meaning. As if there were not this contradictory prosodic claim to an ironic distance from the problem that must plague lesser men, one must consider Frost's apparently genuine sense of his own lyric dilemma. Given his typical bifurcation between a gravity-bound voice and the ludicrous, gaseous immensities of speculative and traditionally "poetic" language, one must ask where the possibilities for lyricism lie. Where would an ascending bird fly to in the frangible dome that is Frost's vision

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of the arced sky; can it escape to sing hymns at heaven's gate like Shakespeare's lark or to rise like a cloud of fire or an unembodied joy into Heaven like Shelley's? The "dome" represents both form and necessary containment, so that the Oven Bird's arc of mud and sticks suggests its rounded view, while space is, and is a correlative for, formlessness. Thus "as a little bird / Before the mystery of glass" are these enclosed creatures under the sky. Earth may be a diminished place where everything is metamorphically inclined, but it is the only alternative to the void, where the only names are empty. Inside this dome the birds may not soar very high, but neither will they become distended, their songs "agape." To project a bird into the heavens is to imply that it is divinely inspired, that it may reach an ecstasy so close to celestial that it is posed at the gateway to God. But Frost's birds carry the weighty oversound of Eve's "daylong" fallen voice, "her voice upon their voices crossed," so that "Never again would birds' song be the same" as before God introduced woman into the garden.3 Other lyric birds than Frost's may verify sensually a world outside of self, their songs evidence of some inhumanly orchestrated harmony or some divinely ordained artistry, but it is as if this function wanes inevitably in Frost's poetry with the suspicion that there is no truth outside of one's own capacity to make some (perhaps arbitrary) sound of sense and some sense of sound. The "Sunset Bird" sang "with an angelic gift" in a season long past, but in Frost's silent winter landscape the place where the bird once sang "sweet and swift" is empty, and silence prevails. In fact, only when the flood is an external phenomenon rather than the internal surge of blood in the body documented in "The Flood" may the dove leave the ark and return with an olive branch as proof of another land that is not submerged. Birds are traditionally messengers carrying otherworldly news, harbingers whose very existence in a given time and place is a portent. As such, they become inviting embodiments for the Platonic soul, which may transcend visceral and appetitive apprehensions of reality to discover, and to sing, some alternative vision.4 But even Frost's songbirds are bound to the standard metaphors from their literary pasts: in "The Valley's Singing Day," they sing "pearly-pearly," which the speaker translates into cliche: "(By which they mean the rain is pearls so early, / Before it changes to diamonds in the sun.)" (Like the songbirds, this speaker is a somewhat indifferent poet.) What the birds say here - or more to the point, what they are heard to say - represents an economic vision disguised as an aesthetic one, since pearls and diamonds maintain a precarious literary status only by virtue of their monetary worth. Like the birds, the metaphors are fallen, their "beauty" dependent on their post-Edenic market value and the hearer's recognition and admiration of them as a mark of exchange. Birds are a perfect paradox of


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connectedness and free flight, for they cannot remain on the wing forever, and where they touch down must exist sensually - whether it is heaven's gate, a golden bough, or an olive tree. To divest them of this capacity for translation, to tether them to low bushes, eaves, and roadbeds, to place worn-out lyric cliches in their weary beaks is to render them more human than otherwise. Frost's birds, so often personified as defeated humans, are measured almost solely by their silence or by their voices, which are inevitably perceived as uttering some sad or aggrieved human message that seems to urge one to lamentation. It takes an enormous effort of will not to superimpose Eve's voice; as "The Need of Being Versed in Country Things" points out, the burned farmhouse and the abandoned barn are in reality only sorrowful to human eyes, but even to one who understands country things it is still almost impossible "Not to believe the phoebes wept." And Frost himself does not pretend to hear in this intimate country the unhumanized, nonpersonified sounds of nature: His birds are selfconsciously literary creations, burdened with postlapsarian knowledge, correlatives for the saddened and diminished voices of people bereft of human love. Birds may not actually weep at human tragedy and despair, but to hear anything else in their voices is, for Frost's speakers, nearly impossible. The solemn speaker of "A Late Walk" who sees in his autumnal landscape all the signs of bereavement and death - the "headless aftermath of mowing," the bare trees - feels that "The whir of sober birds / Up from the tangle of withered weeds / Is sadder than any words." The "hill wife," who ultimately is herself subsumed into the natural world, knows that the birds she waits so eagerly to hear are preoccupied "But with each other and themselves," and she does not pretend to translate "whatever it is they sing" to each other. But even she, who might be expected to hear a wilder, more natural song, imposes upon them a sad domestic metaphor, believing them to "fill their breasts" selfishly only with thoughts for their mates, themselves, and "their built or driven nests." When Frost's birds sing, they are perceived to sing in a minor key - minor in its sense of lesser significance as much as in its musical sense; in "A Minor Bird," the speaker wants to banish the song whose tones must reflect (with myna-bird precision, if the title is any evidence) his own melancholy, self-blaming tune. As personifications of the compromised poetic voice - the pinioned soul - these birds as often speak as sing, and they are used to call the speakers to account for their own mundane lives. They give them, as in "A Nature Note," "a piece of their bills." The double pun here suggests a thoroughly antiromantic vision: they are like the merchant from Porlock come to dun the dreaming Coleridge. The "note" is less musical than promissory (they sing "All out of time pell-mell!"), and the phrase "piece

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of their bills" suggests a cacophony of images and linguistic turns: the bill of a bird and the bill owed, the implied phrase "I'll give him a piece of my mind" connoting an angry speech but used synecdochally to suggest a language that comes from the mouth but not from the head. In other poems the birds are more quietly rational than the whippoorwills of "A Nature Note," but the message remains essentially unheroic: in "The Last Word of the Bluebird" the bluebird "sends word" through three parties that "The North wind last night / Almost made him cough his tailfeathers off. " 5 The symbol of transcendence over despair has a bad cold, word of which is carried by a quiet but unmusical crow (who says, "Oh, / I was looking for you. / How do you do?") to the equally phlegmatic speaker who recounts the interchange. In "Our Singing Strength" the birds are reduced to "a talking twitter." More like cows than birds, they are herded on the road by the "Drover"/speaker, who, it may be assumed, has a song that is equally hemmed in and bound down (the birds can't leave the snowless roads for the snowfields, and they cannot fly upward into the "too much carven marble hall" of the trees). The speaker's voice manifests itself in matter-of-fact couplets; he drives the talking twitter down the page as he moves the birds down the road. By implication the combined mass of thrushes, bluebirds, blackbirds, sparrows, and robins might represent enough "singing strength" to bring spring out of winter if they could raise their voices above a nervous twitter. But when the spring snowfall melts, this potentially explosive chorus will immediately disperse — "Really a very few [come] to build and stay" - leaving the song unsung. And just as Frost's lyric birds are burdened, weary creatures, so too do his speakers frequently and explicitly claim for themselves a noninspirational safety well out of the lyric-inducing wind. The standard romantic metaphor for inspiration, wind among Frost's speakers tends instead to be perceived as a force of disruption; internalized, it creates "inner weather" so turbulent as to threaten the careful poetic process. Inspirative possession is potentially dangerous, and for Frost's avowed purpose of bringing about wisdom through pleasure, it is more invasive than generative. That which is invasive or penetrative, that which transports a man outside his reason is, as we have seen, subversive of manliness; to be overwhelmed bespeaks a passivity as regards one's self that is defined as feminine and thus as highly suspect.6 The manly course involves controlled choice and the imposition of a self-generated order that asserts Platonic shapeliness — as the speaker says in "Pertinax," "Let chaos storm! / Let cloud shapes swarm! / I wait for form." As "The Aim Was Song" (ironically?) points out, a little inspiration - translated here to mean, literally, an indrawn breath that penetrates no further than the lips and throat - may tame the "untaught" wind, which blows too loud and


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too hard: "He took a little in his mouth, / . . . And then by measure blew it forth" to transform noise to song. The small taste of wind may be warmed and molded; one merely holds it "long enough for north / To be converted into south." By implication, the sounds the wind makes on its own are loud and wild; it thrums no aeolian harp, but shrieks indiscriminately across "any rough place where it caught." Too much of this wind, taken upon the body or into the lungs where inspirative singing begins, makes a bellows of the singer. This speaker seems to believe that it is better to sing a small song - the sound he produces, ambiguously described, may even be whistling - better to be a careful, self-controlled bird than one that is lofted by the wind to soar and sing uncontrolled. "To the Thawing Wind" suggests explicitly that the wind-warmed natural world is subversive of the domesticated and tamed poetic vocation, causing a surrender of barriers that transforms the careful poet into a spring-fed rioter. In an image that suggests molten heat, the speaker imagines that the warm wind will "Bathe my window, make it flow / Melt it as the ice will go." As the window goes, so goes the house of words that makes a poem; the windowpane of ice that breaks in "After Apple-Picking" signals entrance into the half-world of dreams as barriers dissolve. The window that separates the sleeper in "The Hill Wife" from the wind-tossed "dark pine" with its tireless hands reduces the ominous tree to "seem as a little bird / Before the mystery of glass"; broken, the window would reverse the transformation of power to impotence turning the lyric bird back into the ineffable tree - and the windanimated tree is not seeking entrance to speak, but to "do." Once the panes in "To the Thawing Wind" are melted, the "Hermit's crucifix" that is left of the window will not suffice to keep the wind at bay. It will enter the monklike "narrow stall" and toss the tools of introspection, the books and pictures, about; it will "Scatter the poems on the floor; / Turn the poet out of door." A force of excess, the wind subverts vigilant moderation, inviting explicitly nonintellectual, nonmonkish pleasures.7 By implication the Christian totem, the crucifix, has little power in this scenario of melting barriers. In "Bereft," in the teeth of a powerful wind the figure on the porch is feminized, subject to violation and no longer in control of "the word." He sees the wind as an aggressor that might mistake his presence as a kind of availability: "What would it take my standing there for?" he wonders, as if his motives might be misapprehended in the same way that the girl/poet of "The Fear of Man," buffeted by wind and dust, might be misunderstood in what she/he means. He feels that the wind is there specifically because word has gotten out of his abandonment — "Word I was in the house alone / Somehow must have gotten abroad, / Word I was in my life alone, / Word I had no one left but God." This

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escaped "word" has been transformed to howling wind, much as Frost's escaped women are transformed elementally, and has become antithetical to order as it urges the world to the border of a storm. The wordless human figure, neither in nor out, neither man nor woman, is bereft of effective language as certainly as he is bereft of love: his "house" is sagging, indeed, as he is divested simultaneously of the woman and of the erotic power of the word. The wind's sound is a deep masculine roar, and the speaker hears "Something sinister in the tone." As if to provide a mocking symbol for the speaker's impotent rage at his abandonment, it has whipped the leaves up into a snakelike, hissing coil that strikes "blindly" at the speaker's knees and misses its mark: the snake that can only strike blindly and ineffectively is both phallically and verbally impotent, neither penetrative nor persuasive. The wind has churned the lake at the bottom of the hill into froth, as if to provide a symbol, too, for the absent female who has left the speaker "in [his] life alone."8 The wind possesses, in short, the clear capacity to animate the speaker as well, for his feminized, passive state invites penetration, but with its words and not the speaker's own. Frost's speakers, aware that submission to desire subverts their commonsensical version of how language is to work, thus seldom bare themselves willingly to feel the wind against their bodies, and so they tend to seem, like the urbane, ironic Drumlin woodchuck who is "instinctively thorough / About [its] crevice and burrow," the very embodiment of prudence. In keeping with the implication that to be ruled by outside forces signals a culpable appetitive uncontrol, the willingness to take on the wind may even signal a kind of licentiousness, suggested even in "To the Thawing Wind" by the uncloistered monk image. The Witch of Grafton is said by her husband to be out "kiting. / She thinks when the wind makes a night of it / She might as well herself." As one who "kites" she becomes a combination of things: she is one who soars on the wind; she is a bird of prey; she is by extension a person who preys on others; she is one who knows how the wind blows and who will, thus, "make a night of it," with the sexual license this term connotes. Borne by wind, she is at the mercy of her own rapacious desire. Similarly, but with less pejorative connotations, the wind in "A Line-Storm Song" is associated with rising desire that will flood the civilized land and crush its spokesmen, the lyric birds, with an orgasmic "ancient sea." Wind stirs ashes into sparks and drives sparks into conflagrations; both literally and figuratively, it is a force associated with cataclysm and purification. Frost's speakers consistently place themselves in impotent opposition to elemental forces; they are there in the poems to choose their stated correlatives, to claim their own limitations of power - to confess. The speaker of "Bereft" locates himself clearly in the realm of nonpower; he


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and his sagging house are belittled by the roaring wind, which is a masculine correlative to his feminine powerlessness. The figure in "On Going Unnoticed" is the very emblem of abasement, and the "you" of which he speaks universalizes his impotence: grasping the "rugged pleat" of the great windswept tree, he is an abject figure, a child clinging to his mother's skirts, a slave prostrate at the feet of the master, a boy at the feet of a man. The figure of the speaker is metonymically contained in the phallic failure of the spotted and pallid coralroot whose "flowers hang meanly down," and the plucking out of this feeble root becomes, thus, a gesture encoded with the sadomasochism implicit in such willful abasement. The confessional impulses of these speakers reduce the potentially analogous relationships between man and nature to named metaphors that inevitably place the human figures in defensive, vulnerable positions: "I am like a woodchuck, or a coral root, or a fallen leaf, or a helpless, storm-tossed tree"; "I am like the frozen field of snow, frostbound to impotence"; "I am too absent-spirited to count." Even the urbane speaker of "For Once, Then, Something" qualifies his authority with his defensiveness about placing himself "wrong to the light," thus making his Apollonian pretensions at least potentially ironic and deprecating. It is no accident that in "Spring Pools," where hunger and the power to sate it are unqualified, the embodied human presence within the poem disappears: the trees "have in their pent-up buds / To darken nature" in a way that a speaking figure cannot, and in fact the distant voice remains cautionary, warning, "Let them think twice before they use their powers." Like the birds that symbolize Frost's stated version of his lyric voice, these figures do not claim to be lofted skyward, nor do they particularly wish to be - "May no fate willfully misunderstand me / . . . and snatch me away," they pray. "Misgiving" seems in this context a consciously parodic version of Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind," where the wintry West Wind drives the sickened and pestilential leaves before it along with the winged seeds that will give birth to spring. Shelley's speaker wants to be lifted by the wind, driven "Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth!" He begs to be taken and tossed by a wind so powerful that it can lift the clouds "Like the bright hair uplifted from the head / Of some fierce Maenad." But Frost's poem embodies an antithetical desire for rest and safety, a fear that when given the chance to be translated to some "knowledge beyond the bounds of life" he will prefer to rest like the sleepy leaves. The leaves first cry, "We will go with you, O Wind!" having promised themselves ever since spring that they will "follow him." But they become oppressed by sleep, "And they end by bidding him stay with them." Unable to rise, they seek the shelter of walls, thickets, and hollows in which to rest, answering the wind "with an ever vaguer and vaguer stir." The speaker

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sees himself as like the autumn leaves, just as Shelley envisions himself as an autumnal forest, but Frost's vision is without the fire implicit in Shelley's hectic reds, yellows, and blacks that will scatter ashes and sparks of prophecy among humankind. His speaker's prayer is not to be lifted from the thorns of life, but is far more modest: "I only hope that when I am free . . . It may not seem better to me to rest." He identifies himself with the leaves who choose an inglorious sleep and who ultimately seem more hibernatory than sacrificial. For Frost, whose "The Bonfire" re-creates the romantic scenario of wind and fire in seriocomic, quasi-heroic terms, the generative effects of wind are compromised by its equal potential for subverting control. In "The Bonfire" the wind takes a flame that, in the breezeless, quiet afternoon, makes "a pinnacle to heaven" and spreads it in tongues across the ground. The mystical route from earth to heaven, the unmoving pillar of flame, is replaced with moving, all-consuming fire, and the speaker spends himself ecstatically in rubbing it out, thus saving civilization - the town - from wind-fed destruction. His battle with the fire that the wind awakens must be read at one level as an erotic one, and thus the victory may be seen as pyrrhic. Ecstatic release is accompanied in this case by acres of "coal-black," charred earth, yet he does, significantly, quell the wildfire before it reaches civilization. In actuality, Frost saved his home from the fire he had set, and in the poetic version the speaker saves the entire town;9 in both cases the virile containment of the appetitive, tonguelike fire ensures domestic and civil order. For the most part, Frost's equating of the wind with passion makes it a force productive of ambivalence and confusion. Without the wind, the fire of "The Bonfire" remains spiritually oriented, upright and heavendirected like the central pole of "The Silken Tent," which may contain both soul and phallus simultaneously. In this manifestation love may be generative of a more immortal beauty, a Platonic communion of desire and spirit that produces, not human offspring, but "something lovelier and less mortal than human seed."10 This state is, however, by nature tenuous, for a sudden wind can transform the spiritual flame into a "flaming sword." His speakers, who eschew the heroic stance, tend thus to find the low bushes and walls that make windbreaks and they mostly keep their windows closed. Outside, they find their correlatives in silently falling snow or in gray, windless landscapes; but "When the wind works against us in the dark / . . . And whispers with a sort of stifled bark / The beast, / Come out! Come out! - / It takes no inward struggle not to go." "Lodged" presents the image of a bullying pair, the wind and the rain, lashing the piteous flowers into submission: "They so smote the garden bed / That the flowers actually knelt, / And lay lodged though not dead." "I know how the flowers felt," the speaker says,


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again, as in "On Going Unnoticed," proclaiming metonymically his own humiliation envisioned in terms of enforced prostration and sadistic physical punishment.11 In two poems where speakers are subjected to powerful winds - "The Thatch" and "Bereft" - they have been driven outside by domestic troubles, and as in "Storm Fear," they perceive the wind as actively aggressive, more dangerous than inspirational.12 In an early poem, "Now Close the Windows," the speaker asks that the windows be shut to silence even the sounds of the wind, saying "So close the windows and not hear the wind, / But see all wind-stirred." He is able thus to create his own illusions, making this significant qualification: "No bird is singing now, and if there is, / Be it my loss." The lyric birds who would sing in a winter gale are not birds he would want to hear, for the wind brings subversion of control and may awaken the passion that bruits down the sound of sense. Even the trees that otherwise are filled with power and beauty, as the queenly maple in "Maple" or the sibylline trees of "On Going Unnoticed, " lose their preeminence when the speaker of "Tree at My Window" associates them with himself. In "On Going Unnoticed" the trees sweep leafily by the dwarfed figure below, and they are "engaged [presumably in conversation] up there with the light and breeze" as equals. But in "Tree at My Window" the tree becomes insubstantial as it is made an external referent for the speaker: the tree outside his bedroom, made vague and diffuse as a cloud, does not toss down oracular leaves: "Not all your light tongues talking aloud / Could be profound," the speaker says. This tree, gossipy, familiar, is not engaged in a dialogue with the wind but is instead "taken and tossed" by it just as the speaker's dreams cause him to be "taken and swept / And all but lost." Both the man and the tree are in danger of being deprived of meaningful speech by toopowerful "weather," for just as the tree's leaves, its "light tongues," can only babble, so too can the man only dream, wordless, of chaos. The one a "fated" correlative for the other, they are both reduced to the status of victims: "The day she put our heads together, / Fate had her imagination about her, / Your head so much concerned with outer, / Mine with inner, weather." And so what with all these symbolically pinioned birds and these selfdeprecating, depressed speakers wary of inspirative power, it begins to seem that the sound of sense Frost aims for is exactly the down-home, conversational, and aphoristic "wisdom" of the Oven Bird. It seems that he really might have been shocked by Lionel Trilling's birthday compliment, that instead of desiring that Sophoclean capacity to terrify he might indeed rather wish to think that he lives "in the middle" at variance with no one and nothing.13 Yet so laid out before us, this New Englander's version of the compromised lyric voice seems too patently

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symbolic and too straightforward in its message for one so ironically inclined as Frost. And in fact it may be said that Frost's modest and unaspiring birds and his wind-wary speakers and his battered flowers are decoys, the lyric sacrifices that "keep the overcurious out of the secret places" of his mind while freeing a metalyrical power that may not be fully articulated in any way the world knows how to speak (Letters 385).14 As Poirier points out, Frost, all too wary of the "egotistical sublime," could not, nonetheless, completely give it up; the schizoid split between neoclassical reserve and visionary intensity that makes him so fond of mad Kit Smart is potential in his own devices of disguise and control.15 If his lover's skeleton in "The Witch of Coos" is a veritable chandelier of consciously reticulated symbolisms constructed to aggrandize and undercut simultaneously love's body, his lyric symbols are another such wily, eccentric device. Frost's birds beg to be taken at their word when they sing a commonsensical message of compromise - the Oven Bird is such a fruitful symbol as regards Frost's masculinist, deep-voiced rigor - and his dispirited speakers really do seem to argue against the sublime. But the full poetic song does not completely sanction their limited view. The birds demand in their consistency to be taken analogically, as rather obvious metaphors for the poet's commitment to the earth's being the right place for love, even if that means that love becomes a quarrelsome, mundane affair tainted by Eve's first betrayal. But Frost is contriving a way to sing that transcends words, goes beyond words to an aural source that is uncompromised and subverts rationality: he seeks "the abstract vitality o f . . . speech" that is "pure sound - pure form" (Letters 80). In this he is enacting a Frostian version of the Schopenhauerean premise that holds music forth as transcendent, a medium that moves one with a power beyond the rational, even as he repudiates the traditional poetic uses of music as a model by which harmonized vowels and consonants are brought to sing pretty songs (Letters 79).16 In rediscovering and exploiting the "cave things," the sounds "living in the cave of the mouth" that "were before words were," he seeks to bring to poetry the true power of music, which may not be mimicked by language alone and which may not be sung by what Wallace Stevens calls, in "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird," the "bawds of euphony" (Letters 191). The lyric bird may know in singing not to sing, but the poet with his virile oversound drums out the flagging lyric voice: he sets out "to make music out of what I may call the sound of sense" (Letters 79). The language of love, with its ambivalent impulses toward confession and aggrandizement and toward guilt and rapture, is dominated by a more powerful song. Lyric poetry is exactly that locus which is most problematized for Frost, for at the same moment in poetic history when the lyric form is


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being indicted for its effeminacy and for its failure to accommodate the modern world, it is also having attributed to it the explicitly sexual energies seen as intrinsic to the revelatory mode. 17 By the time Frost gets to it, the lyric, classically associated only in part with love poetry, is caught in an inescapable tautology whereby it gradually removes itself from all that is not in some way correlative to sexual desire: love thus moves from a subset of lyric content to the standard by which lyric is measured. The underlying assumption that informs this tautology is based on a presupposition, articulated with detailed precision in Freud and long suspected as an implicit truth, at least literarily, before he so baldly laid it out: reality is sex. 18 One uncomfortable with this minimalist assertion might turn instead to Plato, who articulates a similar preoccupation with sex, which, codified and divested of its essential disorder, becomes the first necessary step toward Love, or the supreme Good, or the absolute Spirit; recognizing what he sees as love's preeminence, Plato makes the first of many philosophical attempts to integrate (sexual) love as an initiatory movement toward the divine.19 Or, in fact, one uncomfortable with this assertion might turn to Frost himself, who sees even his apprehension of Christ as infiltrated by an inescapable eroticism: You know Plato virtually says himself two thousand years before Freud that the love of the invisible, philosophy is a sublimation of ta eooxiKa, sex love the mans love not only of fair girls but also of fair boys. The metaphor with him is always drawn from sex. Is it ever a single moment with Christ? Great play has been made with the ladies, not all of them sinless, he had around him. . . . It's reached a point with me where I've got to have it out with myself whether I can think of Christ but as another manifestation of Dionysus, wine in his beard and the love leer in his eye. Is he even a little Pagan? Isn't he pretty nearly all Puritan for better or worse? (Letters 313-14) Even the most resolute effort of will, Frost seems to imply, cannot divest the metaphor-making process - "another manifestation of" x — of its eroticism. Whether or not this letter is meant, as Thompson asserts, to be one of Frost's many "provocations that bordered on insolence," its question appears to be quite genuine. By this love - reality equation and by definition of lyric as a mode that expresses the genuine emotion of the speaker, any man who discovers his most fundamental lyric self will find desire and its concomitant states: empowerment and impotence, invigoration and enervation, the entire dialectic of appetite that mimics (or embodies) the inexhaustible tautologies of sadomasochism. The echoes one sends out come back virtually engorged with one's own virile power - this is the most of it, the most of what lyric poetry will inevitably reveal. A cry allegedly con-

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structed, implies "The Most of It," to get "not its own love back in copy speech, / But counter-love, original response," the echo is embodied in the glorious beast that swims back toward the source: "As a great buck it powerfully appeared, / Pushing the crumpled water up ahead, / And landed pouring like a waterfall." Whether or not it is "true" that reality is sex, it is true that it has come for many to seem so and that Frost is not immune: his reality inevitably displays itself in sexual terms, with "love" at the center of it all - love as poetry, love as farming, love as love; poetry in the wild space, metaphor in the brothel, poetry and love like ice searing on the stove. To speak lyrically is to declare oneself sexually: the great buck "with horny tread" will have appeared, "forced the underbrush," and disappeared: such is the "copy speech" from Frost's lips. Yet to speak with candor of desire without the distancing devices of irony or other rhetorical strategies is a form of unmanning, a masochism that brings one, as in "The Fear of Man," to the desire for and fear of violation. On the other hand, to seem not to love, not to yield to the eroticism of a language that simultaneously unveils and regenerates this potent erotic source is also to invite impotence. The (unreachable) ideal of lyric is to communicate feeling in its immediacy, but that failing, one must work to imply that there is a site of bliss, interdicted but imminent. That originally the form was indissociable from the lyre and the dance suggests its physical orientation and its proximity to a kind of possession. The lyric bird as it is romantically declined recapitulates in small these elements of musicality and dancing: "pant[ing] forth a flood of rapture so divine," Shelley's skylark springs from the earth, soars, floats, and runs, and it is its ability to articulate itself through unfettered movement as well as sound that both separates it from and joins it with the word-bound but participatory lyric poet. Ideally, then, the poem is, as Frost would have it, the same as love - an ecstatic song that, internalized in the movements of desire, approximates the dance in its power to alter stasis to ecstasy. Yet Frost chooses such birds as know not to fly too high or to sing too long, their "inspiration" lying in the "inspiration to desist" from singing before hostile ears might track them down ("On a Bird Singing in Its Sleep"). Described as "loveless" in "A Winter Eden," they deny their own lyric symbolism, and given in "Acceptance" a "faded eye," they abrogate their lyric vision for a diminished view. And yet in acknowledging that the speaking voice is its own source of impotence Frost empowers his own metalyrical sound. There is, then, an inescapable discrepancy to be accounted for in this nearly absurdist reification of the lyric poet as oven bird: Frost's poetry itself is not mundane, despite frequent pretenses to the contrary. It is the speaking voice that tends to be mundane or preoccupied with life's daily insults. Those figures who embody themselves in the "I" that looks like


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Frost but, by virtue of Frost's ironic habits, can never quite be Frost show a consistent pattern of graceless attributes from self-aggrandizement to self-belittlement while the poetry prevails over their revealed weaknesses. Frost articulates this very disjunction in "A Minor Bird," which suggests the intimate connections and the asserted disparities among the singing bird, the speaking voice, and the poet. The poet denigrates the bird as "minor," and he displays the subject in predominately ninesyllable lines deployed in rhymed couplets. The poem, in fact, looks quite minor, its simplicity of form and its brevity proclaiming a kind of intended deflation of the lyric mode: this is not, despite its "Ode to a Nightingale" allusion, an ode, nor, the poet implies, does it deserve to be. Ironically perceived, the poem could in fact be read as a veiled insult to another, unnamed poet making his poetic presence unendurable with its interminable, minor-keyed warble; there are, as "The Lesson for Today" makes clear, more than enough poets moaning about what is out of joint in the world to fit this bill (11. 30-5). But taken as serious, "A Minor Bird" has a remarkably resonant simplicity, as it suggests an intimate contiguity between speaker and bird, both of whom are masterfully represented in language reflective of the colorless nonspecifities of depression. "I have wished a bird would fly away," the speaker says, "And not sing by my house all day." In this opening one intuits the repetitive nature of his wish, and in the nonspecificity of "a bird" one understands that all birds may sound to him the way this one does. The sad voice cannot muster the energy or will to extend himself to ten syllables; he cannot rouse himself from monosyllables (four two-syllable words out of sixty-six). The unexpected hand clapping of the second couplet - the only image of movement - is balanced by the admission that "it seemed as if I could bear no more." The third couplet is richly ambiguous, as the situation is perceived in terms of "fault" and "guilt," and the bird and speaker are conflated into correlatives of each other. At one level, the "fault" - the melancholy reaction awakened by the bird's song - is partly in the speaker, whose own hearing of the bird is, he feels, irrationally judgmental: one cannot blame a bird for singing its "little inborn tune" ("On a Bird Singing in Its Sleep"). At another level, this one reinforced by the punning title whereby the (mynah) bird mimics the speaker, it is the speaker interpreting the song who creates/causes the minor key: "a bird" or any bird would sound the same. Like one unable to imagine that the phoebes don't weep, he makes weeping where there may be none. In short, the speaker reveals himself as the minor bird, and the poet by his precisely appropriate form confirms him as the minor bird while confirming his own transcendent song. Plagued by what he senses to be his own serious limitation - there is "something wrong" with him for wanting to silence

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any song - he sings the very monotonal, abbreviated song that most aptly declares his own depressed state. By the logic of this poem, to silence the bird's song would be to silence himself. As lyricists, Frost's speakers are such mynah birds as the selfrevelatory figure of "A Minor Bird" who is made to perform the poet's service almost ventriloquistically. Because they talk they guarantee their own deconstruction: again, those sacrificial actors at their play.20 This dynamic reiterates the essential mandate of the manly struggle for selfcontainment and self-control, for the man of moderation, the good Greek, is a man of logos, competent to command, to discuss, and to persuade.21 He does not use the word to reveal his lyric (insecure, rhapsodic, depressed, narcissistic, impassioned) self. And so Frost's speakers are the (always compromised) lyricists, while Frost himself, forever potentially ironic and always in prosodic control, may seem the quintessential man of logos. In any event, with others deployed to say the parts of what he feels, he remains himself untouchable, seemingly possessed of immanent sense - the secret word - which can be neither refuted nor denied. Of course, the secret may in fact be nothing, Frost's cloaked nihilism which pervades this game of obfuscation and shares his balanced assessment that the unverifiable thing lying beneath the surface may be truth or a pebble of quartz, some thing or nothing. What he aspires to do is really quite extraordinary in its Socratic audacity, for he would both convince one of his capacity for the most intense emotions - be the lyricist - and convince one of his transcendence over those feelings to a state in which the absurdity of the human pretension to knowing is the one incandescent reality - be the consummate ironist. And so, unlike the birds' apparent subscription to a fairly monotonal lament, the music of Frost's poetry is intricate, multileveled, and powerful. Poirier suggests this paradox in his assertion that Frost is "committed to the most subtle, insinuating, and diffident kind of self-perception"; even as the sound rises to assertiveness the message it speaks is of compromise, and thus it manages to deny possibilities for empowerment while "surreptitiously" keeping these possibilities alive.22 It is always implied through his prosodic virility that he could obliterate the bird song and make his own "Line Storm Song" if he wished. "A Line-Storm Song" from A Boy's Will can be seen in the context of the bird metaphor as an early prediction of what he fantasizes might occur, poetically and sexually, when the moderate voice of reason is stilled; a world genuinely reflective of passion - a true lyric song if it were to be sung - is both sublime and terrible, productive of ecstasy and violence. The poem suggests in its punning title its self-consciously lyrical (and therefore potentially ironic) and generative nature; with each "line-storm" touching off another, the poem may be seen as an explosive "song" whose lines


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generate their own sequential energy. In "A Line-Storm Song," the birds are, quite literally, silenced; they "have less to say for themselves" than the long-silent elves, while the rain and wind supersede both human voices and the voices of the human-like birds. The speaker here calls for the wind to "bruit our singing down," and in the drowning of all sounds of sense, he feels in the east wind an ancient flood of desire. The use of the curiously ambiguous word "bruit" suggests the duality of the human/bird voice that articulates both passion and sense, for the term, also spelled brute, can mean "to noise abroad," "to rumor," or "to din." Singing that is "bruited down" is at once drowned out by the wind and noised abroad by it, as if the human love song has two levels, a commonsensical level that the wind batters down just as it has crushed the bird's voices, and a passionate oversound that resonates with the voices of the wind and the rain. This world of passion is both lovely and violent: the birds' songs are "crushed like some / Wild, easily shattered rose" in order for the phallic "rain-fresh goldenrod" to prevail. (One must think, inevitably, of "The Subverted Flower" in the context of "A Line-Storm Song"; its female figure stands waist-high in goldenrod, while the woman of "A LineStorm Song" is urged to wet her breast with "the rain-fresh goldenrod.") The speaker's fantasy of passion includes "rout" and apocalypse, with the return of a prehistoric sea that will retake dry land (which may be cultivated and civilized) in its flood. "A Line-Storm Song" reiterates the seemingly inextricable bond in Frost's poetry between sexuality and danger or violence - passion as line storms, as a bonfire, as a fireweed - and it suggests, too, the link Frost makes between nature and uncontrol. It also suggests that if Frost were to unleash his own lyric nature it would, he imagines, come in storm and whirlwind, in lines of storm, rather than disguised as a patient "minor" bird. The bird metaphor in any of its manifestations must inevitably be selfconscious, as Frost well knows when he sets out to subvert its romantic status as an emblem of the free soul and the transcendent poetic spirit, but it cannot fully escape its association with transcendence. Birds can fly; humans cannot. Just as water is used to symbolize life because in a significant sense it is life, birds symbolize transcendence because they have wings. Meaning is thus not only inherited literarily but is inherent in form; the Oven Bird cannot eradicate the lark or the nightingale despite its own cast-iron weight, and, in fact, its preaching, premised upon their flightiness, brings them more inevitably to mind. One may reasonably extend this analogy to poetry; it may be disciplined at one level to carry the sound of (common) sense, but fundamentally it is closer to song than to prose. The compromised flight and the voice that knows in singing not to sing are thus Frost's conscious and somewhat ironic

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imposition of restraint on a form that he willfully encourages to sing its own prosodic harmonies and to create its own line storms. Like so many of Frost's images of precarious withholding - walls about to tumble, cold stars on the verge of wakening, still pools about to become revelatory - these birds carry in their hollow wing bones the potential to destroy their own enforced repose; their singing strength "though repressed and moody with the weather / [Is] nonetheless there ready to be freed / And sing the wild flowers up from root and seed." For Frost poetry resides not in free flight but in the beat of wings against the arc, words fluttering hard against structure. Like the dark pine that seems "as a little bird / Before the mystery of glass" in "The Hill Wife," poetry is force barely contained, leaving one to the fear and delight of "an oftrepeated dream / Of what the tree might do" if the glass were to break: bondage, and discipline, the barely concealed delight that comes from Frost's insight into the equivocal pleasures of containing and being contained. Frost, one might reasonably maintain, is himself like the "great tree" seeming to be a little bird, pushing against the barriers that he erects. These barriers are, it is implied, too strong for the traditional symbol of lyricism to shatter but necessary to contain the tremendous power of a less self-indulgent nature. The bird metaphor carries a great deal of literary baggage, and thus the little birds cannot get very high off the ground. So too, Frost seems to be implying in his pinioning of the lyric birds, does poetry carry the excess baggage of its literary heritage: it must find a new song, a new metalanguage by which to regenerate itself. Frost may, in his domesticated, depressed birds, be making one of his most subtle and^sophisticated puns about literary convention, in fact. In the autobiographical "The Bonfire," his bluebirds have the rug pulled out from under them - the "spent" breezes fail, leaving them "Short of the perch their languid flight was toward." But the poet's fire is first a pinnacle to heaven and then a wildfire. He starts the fire, he fuels it with an inspirative gust, and he rubs it out; the languid bluebird may be spent like the worn-out winter wind in April, but the poet emerges erect. The bluebird may be earthbound, but Frost "walk[s] . . . light on air in heavy shoes," his "feet" bound in blank verse but his poetic spirit soaring. The bluebird is silent, freeing the poet to ignite a new kind of poetry. Frost's birds cannot measure up to his own poetic virility. They are talkers, but in a world such as the Oven Bird describes, where things and words that name them are metamorphic, language loses its penetrative function to fix or to pin down: what is immobilized in Frost's poetry is dead or hibernatory or momentarily frostbound. The overlay of unstable irony that echoes this suspicion of fixed "meaning" further keeps language from a "point" and suggests that its function lies elsewhere.


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This is a condition of language that inevitably invites formalism to prevail over the epistemological circuities of unknowing, and, indeed, Frost's poetry has a formal rigor that resonates against unstable irony's resistance to closure and to the consummation of some mutual understanding with the reader. The closure this formal rigor affords is not rationally situated. He wants poetically to walk "light on air in heavy shoes," maintaining a lovingly disciplinarian relationship to the word rather than, like Keats, seeking to find the exact, lightly woven "sandals . . . / To fit the naked foot of poesy": "her" word is necessarily not Frost's entire, manly message. Prosodically rigorous, Frost is committed to a nearly punitive relationship with language in which he sees himself as one who "like[s] to drag and break intonation . . . across meter." What Keats sought to escape - the "chains" and "fetters" of rhyme and meter - Frost insists upon. Language itself may be diffusible into an endless "deferment of significance," but form - meter pounding against rhyme and line length, intonation pulsing against meter - has its own penetrative function.23 It may even, as Lyotard has argued, subvert memory and thwart the backward gaze: "As meter takes precedence over accent in the production of sound . . . time ceases to be a support for memory to become an immemorial beating that, in the absence of a notable separation between periods, prevents their being numbered, and consigns them to oblivion. "24 The subversion of memory is the subversion of rational thought, as it eradicates the premises upon which conclusions are built. Held in the poem's hermeneutic embrace, aroused to its rhythm, one may, in fact, feel temporarily the Nietzschean "strength to forget the past."25 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. To "drag and break intonation . . . across meter" is to postulate some truth beyond that which is signified by the word, as it takes language from a speaker's mouth and breaks it metrically to release something else. Frost's own "lyric" voice (what we are made to feel are genuine, nonironic revelations as opposed to rhetorical postures) is never directly identifiable in the poetry through what is spoken, suggesting a cynicism about the power of language alone to communicate or to reveal the essential self. The birds, limited and ventriloquistic as they are, are merely components of Frost's metalyrical voice in which both emotion and control are displayed on equal terms. It being possible to describe only a border condition, not the state one is in but what one is moving toward or away from, any zero-order lyricism must reside extralinguistically. The complex contradictions within the poetry, where the dialectic elements may be shifted into a near infinity of relationships text versus subtext, stated meaning versus tone, allusion versus "theme,"

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virile prosody versus claimed impotence, irony versus the straightforward, and all the permutations of these and other combinations - may be seen in this context as a form of oscillation that reproduces this state of disequilibrium. A tennis game that never ends, the back and forth between pairings nonetheless necessitates a net and boundary lines: containing this dynamically unstable condition necessitates a rigorous formalism if the energy is not to become dissolute. Spatial dissipation is a moral slippage as well, and formal control is imperative. The reiterated image of the impotent bird becomes a limited version of the poet who must find a place from which to sing, for placement both mirrors and creates form. The Oven Bird's house is a concretized dome of mud; it re-creates the arc of heaven in small and sings from the middle ground that its "nest" suggests spatially. In "The Lockless Door" the speaker writes of himself as a timid bird who, at a knock on the door, "emptied [his] cage / To hide in the world / And alter with age."26 Neither the domestic "cage" nor the natural hiding place can afford a perspective from which to impose form; caged or hibernatory, the madman or the tame bird or the woodchuck, one so encased does not create form but is formed by his space. "On a Bird Singing in Its Sleep" obliquely suggests in its version of evolutionary adaptation that the speaker endorses the safety of the unawakened, ventriloquistic voice that seems to come from where it isn't: "Partly because it sang ventriloquist / And had the inspiration to desist / Almost before the prick of hostile ears" the bird remained unharmed. The ventriloquistic function of the poet/bird — the mimicry of voices thrown onto wooden figures - ensures a very limited range and power; he sits on a low bush, hidden, and gives a short, muted whistle. But ventriloquism - thrown language - subverts form by disembodiment, and while Frost's "ventriloquism" vivifies a whole series of speakers, his full poetic voice makes it apparent that they remain just that: "speakers" who reproduce words but do not create or originate sound, meaning, or form. Most frequently, Frost chooses to occupy poetically the borderlands between civilization and nature, a destabilized place where language is both created and destroyed but where, paradoxically, form may be perceived to emerge triumphant from the eternal decay and resurrection of particulars. His birds, another kind of border creature, are so humanized that they sit in nature taking as their view and as their theme human concerns. Frost, on the other hand, keeps an eye always on the outer boundaries, the place where cultivation yields to wildness. "My address is Amherst Mass, though really we are living in the abandoned town of Pelham so close to the woods that if the wood burn our house must go too," he writes to Amy Lowell (Letters 220). The successive qualifications of his literal place are telling - his address, what one would write down


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on a letter, is not really where he lives, just as in "New Hampshire" he is writing from Vermont. Where he is, actually, is in an abandoned town, which places it, as so many of his households are placed within the poetry, at a point of linguistic and actual transformation: when is a town no longer called a town and what does it then become?27 For practical and perhaps for spiritual purposes he is part of the woods, for if they burn so too will the house and the "town" that abuts them. His poetic vision reiterates this ambiguous placement, and in examining as he does "the line where man leaves off and nature starts" ("New Hampshire"), Frost sets himself a more complex task than the birds' stated functions of qualifying, inspecting, defining, evaluating, and reminding: he looks directly at the place where transformation occurs, where words are coming unformed because meaning is always in flux. There are no formal gardens in the borderland he inhabits, no topiaries, no artificial, miniaturized grottos, and no Penshursts that embody the optimistic assumption that a man may order his physical and spiritual estates; even the small stream captured underground in concrete at the city limits in "A Brook in the City" retains its dark power to keep a city "from both work and sleep," the two states most necessary to the maintenance of an ordered physical and spiritual life. The bird/poet in the cage metaphor of "The Lockless Door" is, thus, a highly artificial construct, almost intrinsically ironic in the context of Frost's spatial arrangements. The walls he erects are in natural, uncontrolled landscapes that defy them to hold, so that as the drama implicit within the poetic structure unfolds formalism becomes its only containment.28 If Frost's perception of one's obligation to moderate appetite with control is classical, the reiterated sense of the futility of this effort predicts a modernist preoccupation with the decentered self and how one might translate that existential precariousness into language or into art. There is no condition, no state, no speaker in Frost's poetry for whom the heautocratic struggle is resolved into what would be, for the good Greek, its expected payoff in the ability to act upon and to influence others: it is by these terms emblematic that in Frost's poetry no man can persuade a woman to return to him or not to leave him, that men are reduced, as in "The Subverted Flower," to choking on words "Like a tiger at a bone," that they are brought to threaten, as in "Home Burial," "I'll follow and bring you back by force." This impotence is doubly fraught, for it signals both a social and a lyric insufficiency. Frost's unstable irony disperses the forward movements by which he claims to proceed - the "sentence sound" and the iambic surge are not sufficient to override the meanderings through which one must go to approach meaning(s). He creates a medium in which, ironically, the word takes precedence by default, rising up in all its contaminated, erotic force to suggest possibilities above

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and below and between the lines. He does not need to be "poetic" in his diction or syntax or even in his choice of subjects, and he thus protects himself from the most unmanly elements of lyric poetry; language works its own subversions on linear, forward-moving progress toward resolution. The movement is toward isolation rather than away from it, so that the discrete formal continuity of a given poem is the necessary cage for an autonomous internal conflict. The birds give a very limited, opinionated, prudential version of this reality which must be, to a large extent, supplemented by the natural correlatives for passion and appetitive uncontrol that fill the poetry. The glaring discrepancy between the uninnocent birds who know Eve's language and the elemental powers that may unmake that language - between the clock-watching birds and the gaunt beast ravaging the apple tree in "A Winter Eden" - suggests that Frost, who sees only struggle and never resolution, engages in a dialectic in which one impulse is the subversion of rational meaning to sound and form. This is an active and vigorous nihilism which suggests that "meaning" is so fluid as to be nonexistent so that arbitrarily imposed form becomes everything. Frost's birds are, finally, at so considerable a remove from his own prosodic and tonal range that they may be seen less as direct symbols of his lyric voice than as a prosopopoeia for those who speak. The speakers, animated by Frost's voice, share only ventriloquistically in his being, as if to objectify the profound limitations of speech and language to communicate the self. They are, in effect, personifications as surely as the birds are personifications: thus the constantly shifting line between actual bird speakers (as in "The Oven Bird"), the "speaker as bird" metaphor (as in "The Lockless Door"), and the bird as symbol or correlative for the speaker (as in "Our Singing Strength" or "The Thatch" or "A Minor Bird"). Words turn men into birds - myna birds and parrots whose language is inextricably tied more to the literary past than to the lyric self - and birds into men, indiscriminately. The birds thus come to represent the rejection of traditional lyricism, begun consciously for Frost after A Boy's Will, as a mode that, traditionally employed, was appropriate to his poetic purposes. The Frostian overtone is wily, evasive, always potentially ironic and thus subversive of "meaning" as it resides linguistically. Only his speakers tend toward earnestness, toward the kind of articulated stolidity that one comes to perceive in the birds. As embodiments of a literary tradition (only by knowing other songs by other birds may the Oven Bird know how to frame its own unlyrical song), they are locked into thesis or antithesis, either transcendence or the denial of transcendence. This disjunction between speaker and poet might suggest that Frost


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consciously obfuscates a known condition or, alternatively, that he seeks to expose an unknown and essentially unnamable condition in the nexus between two projections of self; in either case the poem uses language against itself in the service of some unarticulated state whose only encasement is the larger formal structure of the poem. After all, the movement from delight - pleasure, desire, aphrodisia - to wisdom - rationality, knowledge, logos — must be a careful progress between two seemingly antithetical states. The good Greek may in theory rise above desire so that wisdom is delight, thus becoming free to act and to rule, but in a more visceral reality the play of appetite against virile moderation produces an essentially unnamable condition of potentiality. 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. The image of the nighttime snowfield becomes endlessly evocative, as its substance resides as much in the animals buried by the sheet of snow and in the overlay of night upon it as in the snow itself. Frost's calligram of resilient prosodic bars is constructed to contain such burgeoning language, even as the cell poles may be twanged "like bow and bowstring" by the lovecrazed madman. But the subversion of form and meaning are interdependent, a dynamic that can be neither completely contained nor halted.29 If Frost's personas are the speaking masks of one aspect of his being, his formal control is just such another mask, more stylized perhaps, but designed as well to encase the shadow self- the "real" self- in a disguise that may be seen. He would, in fact, give the oversound priority over the literally stated message available even to eye readers, so that a combination of discrete particles, not language but sound, an abstraction of "meaning," takes precedence. By handling the symbol of lyricism - the bird - over to the speakers whose assertions make up only half of the story, he approximates a modernist skepticism about the possibility and even about the value of locating oneself relative to others: the traditional lyric voice is inadequate to the task of communicating that self which is generated perpetually out of the ashes of quelled desire. Not the Oven Bird so much as the phoenix, he is like the figure in "The Bonfire" who kneels to reach into flame and then rises up out of the charred field, most potently defined at the instant of transfiguration.30 The orgasmic moment epitomizes that most essentially oxymoronic condition, an epiphany of desire quelled, like the simultaneous victory and defeat of the man who rubs out the fire. The metaphor for lyricism is thus revealed as a

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completely artificial construct, a mere pretense of self-revelation as it is used to refer explicitly to a series of personas that are at best partial versions of the poet. Frost seems to approach, in this disjunction between form and content, what Clement Greenberg defines as modernism: "The essence of modernism lies . . . in the use of the characteristic methods of a discipline to criticize the discipline itself, not in order to subvert it, but in order to entrench it more firmly in its area of competence. " 31 By objectifying it, Frost "criticizes" the lyric voice, a very core of poetry, while in doing so he reinforces what he perceives to be poetry's area of competence, its formal control of language, as a means of conveying a more genuine poetic truth. Greenberg would have us consider a Monet water lily: at one level it does indeed look like a water lily, but critics point to Monet's preoccupation with the "possibilities of reflection, light, color, brushwork, texture, pictorial structure, and format" as leading to the "apparent dissociation of colour and brushwork from object." What is said of Monet could almost be said of Frost: "Nature, prodded by an eye obsessed with the most naive kind of exactness, responded in the end with textures of color that could be managed on canvas only by involving the autonomous laws of the medium - which is to say that Nature became the springboard for an almost abstract art. " 32 Frost asserts that the assimilation of rational meaning into sentence sounds that may reverse or alter the apparent sense ("it may even as in irony convey a meaning opposite to the words") 33 is crucial to his poetic intent. The sentence sound is itself an entity from which words may be suspended, the entirety becoming a version of truth independent of the particular word or phrase. He calls the sound of sense "the abstract vitality of our speech. It is pure sound pure form. One who concerns himself with it more than the subject is the artist" (Letters 79-81). His speakers, while detailed with what might be called "the most naive kind of exactness," are not drawn for their intrinsic value, for what they themselves have to say. They become instead like the lilies, the medium through which formal elements may be elaborated; their "lyric" selves are of less value finally than the possibilities of "reflection, light, color, . . . texture, pictorial structure, and format" they afford. Lyotard defines modernism thus: "I shall call modern the art which devotes its 'little technical expertise' . . . as Diderot used to say, to present the fact that the unpresentable exists. To make visible that there is something which can be conceived and which can neither be seen nor made visible." 34 Naming Frost's ambivalence about language "modernism" is one way of articulating his preoccupation with the unsaid or the unsayable, of giving, perhaps arbitrarily, a context and form to the shadow shape residing between the "speaker" and the self. It has the


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value, however, of suggesting, at least analogously, the distancing effects of Frost's use of dissonances within the poetry; there is an essential abstraction, a breaking of the self into planes - of language, of prosody, of natural correlatives. Monet's paint on a canvas, Frost's black ink on white paper: in both there is a surface - laid across the lilies and across the words - that reflects what is finally a nonrepresentational, extralinguistic version of self. This perhaps is the glimmer of white beneath the narcissistic pool in "For Once, Then, Something," or it could be what Frost's women see when they look out of windows, or it could be what that stranger who wanders through the poetry knows; it is, in any event, what cannot be simply said or simply heard. One might say in more poetic terms that Frost is entranced by the elegant paradox of the Fall, when the birds gained at once knowledge and guilt by listening all day to Eve's voice. Spoken by a woman, the words will be by definition both corrupt and arousing. Perhaps, in fact, this is the most fundamental meaning in Eve's having been the first to fill her mouth with forbidden knowledge, for it must take an intrinsically compromised creature to bring about the compromise God had in mind when he set her up for the Fall. This is the original model by which it becomes possible not only to recognize meaning but also to understand its vulnerability: to see in the very articulation of one's "knowing" its fundamentally illusory, misleading quality, its quotient of contamination. In the very beginning things could be truly named but not explained, and afterward, when it became possible to speak untruth, their names became mere disguises, at best metaphors for their variable identities. This discrepancy is, after all, what allows for and necessitates poetry, this inexorably dying generation of language. Yet the loss of innocence makes it possible to name desire - by eating the apple Adam and Eve discover appetite - and to see it as oppositional to reason. Energized by conflict, the poet may nonetheless give way to nostalgia for a more holistic view. Frost, in the very early poem "In a Vale," from A Boy's Will, creates a vision of a place where language and desire are close to being the same, but it is, by implication, only the tenuous receptivity of boyhood that allows the speaker to hear and value the feminine, prerational voices. When I was young, we dwelt in a vale By a misty fen that rang all night, And thus it was the maidens pale I knew so well, whose garments trail Across the reeds to a window light. This poem reveals an alternative vision to a world reflective of the masculine heautocratic struggle. It is an ephebian vision, predictive of the

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necessary limiting of sightedness in manhood and evocative of a childlike receptivity. Almost pre-fallen, this vale is a territory outside the opaque, snowbound world of silence where self is obliterated into blank whiteness and outside the world of unbridled appetite. Here the landscape is dominated by yielding mist - a veil in a vale, a tissue of air, light, and moisture. From the mist nymphs come to the speaker's windowsill. The pale maidens are flowers come to life: The fen had every kind of bloom, And for every kind there was a face, And a voice that has sounded in my room Across the sill from the outer gloom. Each came singly unto her place. While the speaker remains in his room, he leaves his ground-floor window open, and he comes to know the maidens intimately through their nightly visitations. Personifications of femininity and of nature, born of the mist and blossoming out of the boggy earth, these maidens reveal their secrets: But all came every night with the mist; And often they brought so much to say Of things of moment to which, they wist, One so lonely was fain to list, That the stars were almost faded away Before the last went, heavy with dew, Back to the place from which she came Where the bird was before it flew, Where the flower was before it grew, Where bird and flower were one and the same. Unlike the speakers who direct their eyes into the dark sky, this boy is riveted to the flower nymphs while the stars fade into morning. They tell him "things of moment" to which he listens because he is lonely and young. Flowers heavy with dew, they embody a lovely sexuality, but like the man's vision in "The Generations of Men" of the girl with flowers in her lap who cannot cross the sill, they may only touch him with their voices. These nymphs reveal the earth's natal secrets: they know of a time and place "Where bird and flower were one and the same." In this place, unlike that in which one sings in "A Line-Storm Song," the bird songs do not have to be "crushed like some wild / Easily shattered rose" so that the goldenrod may prevail: the petaled interiority of the rose - the vulnerable lyricism of the birds - does not have to be shattered by the wind and rain, which is here transformed to mist. The nymphs are incarnations of water, flowers, and birds, their trailing garments, the clinging mist, and their voices becoming petals, bird song, and the odor of


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flowers all intertwined. They teach the young speaker lessons that, in Frost's later poetry, are obscured by the Oven Bird's insistence that one must know "in singing not to sing," must know that the pure, undisguised lyric voice has nothing to say in a fallen, diminished world: And thus it is I know so well Why theflowerhas 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. This speaker, young and receptive, predicts the duality of Frost's later speakers who can only hear human woe in birds' voices and who can use flowers only as metaphors for something else. Perceived even here as knowledge natural only to females, the maiden's secrets are yet gladly heard through a window left open to receive them. Unlike Frost's human women, who look out of windows and seek to escape, these nymphs come freely each night to salve the speaker's loneliness, and unlike the men who, like the husband of "Home Burial," "think the talk is all," this speaker is still receptive and can hear them. These voices, projections of a "female" self whose knowledge is not rational because it prefigures cause and effect, are benign and lovely. They are like the beautiful Lady North Wind of Frost's favorite childhood book, At the Back of the North Wind, as they teach him mysteries. And he, the poet-speaker, is the translator who puts mystery into words. He senses at once both an innocent locus of nonwords, where maidens embody flowers, dew, birds, mist, and darkness because they come from a place that is prenatal, and the erotic (fallen, guilt- and ecstasy-producing) world of names, where the ineffable emanates from the flowers called as odor and from the birds called as song. The maidens of "In a Vale" are like the nymph in "Paul's Wife," who, delivered from her tree as a length of dry pith, rises from the water, her hair a wet helmet, and walks into the woods with Paul, enraptured, following. She goes out like a firefly when she is seen by other men, vaporized by perceptions that extinguish her unnamable state. Paul is left to be driven from place to place every time someone asks "How's the wife," because "to praise or so much as name her" is to defile her. In this later world the nymphs of "In a Vale" cannot exist, because they, like Paul's wife, cannot be spoken of "In any way the world [knows] how to speak." Frost chooses most frequently to name both the human and the poetic condition as fallen, his ironic vision epitomized in the lyric birds whose voices whimper, whisper, or shout their rational conviction that the world is a diminished, dusty place. The dewy maidens of "In a Vale" are replaced with women fleeing, like the wife of "Home Burial" for

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whom the husband's "words are nearly always an offense" because he doesn't "know how to speak of anything / So as to please [her]." Even the wind broadcasts the language of separation, isolation, lovelessness: "Word I was in the house alone . . . Word I was in my life alone . . . Word I had no one left but God," wails the speaker of "Bereft. " But Frost hears other voices even when his speakers have become parrot-like in their endorsement of the diminished view. In the damp, low-lying vale where "bird and flower were one and the same" the lyric bird would know more sensual songs than the Oven Bird's. These maidens' "garments / Trail across the reeds . . . " like the silken tent raised by the pole. Yet this is not an accessible world, even to the boy, who must speak only across a sill. He listens all night, every night, but he never joins them in the "misty fen," never penetrates their territory. For once naming occurs, only the scent of wholeness remains. But language, erotic, defiled, and irresistible, has the power to awaken in Frost the ambivalence of one who has known mystical voices that are, whether perceived as literal or as metaphorical, the echoes of another world beyond the rational and beyond language.

Conclusion: Out Far and in Deep

To be a poet you have to believe something so hard that it would break your heart if it wasn't true. Baird W. Whitlock, "Conversations with Robert Frost" Some people want you not to understand them, But I want you to understand me wrong. Robert Frost, "A Masque of Mercy"

In the spirit of all of Frost's wandering women, I shall divagate back to the issue of gender by way of a brief discussion of the sublime; for Frost the two are not, finally, separable. But first I should admit that Frost's poetry really does begin to kick up its heels when subjected to the critical gaze; like the Witch of Grafton, it eludes respectability, refuses to be stabilized, goes out kiting when it is supposed to be home in bed. Pick up a Frost poem and you have plucked a star, disguised, from a stone wall; it begins to chafe and shuffle in your hands; if you are a critic, writing, it makes your fingers run off in strange tangents, pulling the pen along. If Frost's poetry tends toward the transformative beauties of dryads and hill wives, starting out dry and pithy and ending as fully erotic, it is also exactly like all of those artifacts - stones, axes, chain saws - within it that snap back; use one and it is likely to bite your hand off, or to fly off the handle and split your skull. More than this, his poetry refutes the critic's attempt to separate herself from these energies. And if, as I asserted early on, Frost's is poetry that brings one to oneself, it also necessarily resonates with the conditions within which it is read, and so I leave Frost with some fairly postmodern ruminations, strange tangents indeed ("I cannot rub the strangeness from my sight / I got from looking through [this] pane of glass"). Frost's poems, even those that claim to take the passing glimpse, to choose the surface reflection, to take the view from the kingly mountain185

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top, are highly infused with the doubled energies of his poetic intelligence and his more visceral, conflictual impulses, both sexual and linguistic: they are confessions of power and impotence, insight and blindness, and not only because we are trained to hear every word as revelatory but because he himself perceives them and speaks of them as confessional. Like love, in fact. Frost's poems are always embattled with contradictions that unsay the rational, producing pleasurable disquiet. This is Trilling's "terror," this (delicious) illusion of simplicity like a tenuous film over great depth, and this is Frost's "love," this condition of fascinating dis-ease. This is also a definition of the sublime: an apprehension of an unfathomable depth that may produce (like love?) the same contradictory resonance between self-aggrandizement - "I can see the depths" - and humiliation — "but I cannot articulate them" - as the terrifying grandeur of Burke's mountain peaks. "Terror" was Burke's word before it was Trilling's, and it quite precisely embodies the paradox of the sublime, which reveals the threat of "solitude, silence, and the approach of death" even as it holds out the exhilarating promise that "something will happen, despite everything, within this threatening void."1 As absent-spirited or pinioned as Frost's speakers might claim to be, his prosody beats a countermeasure: the sound, like drums in the jungle, promises and threatens both at once. Frost's poetic world balances exactly between death and resurrection because they are interdependent; the gorgeous, breathtaking threat of dark, snow-filled woods pulls against a man's uprightness - his promises, his erect and continent virility, his Platonic soul. Frost sees and implies the sublime abyss beneath his crusts of snow. He looks at the places where nature was once claimed and projects a nearly surreal vision of a florid entropy: all those cellar holes closing up like dents in dough, those sinking woodpiles contoured in clematis - Dali's flaccid timepieces are no more estranged than these from the safe and ordinary world. Frost's nature, apparently sublimated into farms and fields, is all the more sublime as it proves what Burke's sublime only suggests: that it is too powerful to be mastered. Frost, conjuring up the sublime, testifies obliquely to its ineffable quality. He would not profess to know, and in fact claims most emphatically not to know ("A Masque of Mercy" 11. 710-13), what revelation lies finally in the wild space he enters: he may imagine piercing the surface reflection to see to the bottom of the well but, having looked in, he cannot name what he sees. His conclusion could, in fact, be the very motto of the sublime, with its sense of evanescent but empowering insight: for once, then, something. This "playing in the wild place" that is Frost's version of the sublime is also, as Lyotard reminds us, an aesthetic version of nihilism. This vision sees reality only to discover it as insufficient to account for itself or for the

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effects it produces: "the imagination fails to present an object which might, if only in principle, come to match a concept. " 2 The poetry, one is brought to feel, sees out far and in deep, and yet such sightedness cannot be articulated in any way the world knows how to speak. It pretends to quiescence at one level, as if accepting of this compromise, and at another it affords one a glimpse - fleeting, here and then gone like a short thread through the needle's eye - of the nothingness disguised beneath those white sheets of snow (and it is no accident that the Witch of Coos extends this image to the marital bed, itself made of ice, its sheets of snow). One could, in fact, say in general of Frost's poetry what Trilling said about "Neither Out Far nor in Deep": "See if you are warmed by anything in it except the energy with which emptiness is perceived."3 For Frost's vision evokes the grand abyss even as his speakers acknowledge the futility of articulating it. The sublime moment is that instant in which one feels a surge of immense power whose very nature is interdicted, so that one's irresistible attempts to articulate it produce a concomitant impotence: in its impulse to enhance pleasure through pain resides a kind of sadomasochism.4 One is driven to seek humiliation - to be made small relative to this vast unknown - in order to tap into the concomitant unnameable power; this is what fuels the energy with which emptiness is perceived. Frost cannot leave poetry alone because of what it does for him, even as he reiterates its potential to degrade and unman and as he perpetually reifies the disjunction between sublimity and its adequate illustration in his tongue-tied and ineloquent speakers. One could say that Frost admits that he is driven to write poetry, that he picks up his pen to write in the more manly and more economically dependable mode of prose but finds himself dropping into poetry every time. Or with equal validity, one could say that Frost brags that he is driven to write poetry, that he picks up his pen to write that prosaic stuff that earns a man bread and finds himself, too virile for the prosiness of prose, inevitably capitulating to the seductions of poetry. This nexus of admission and braggadocio - this ambivalent pleasure in confession in all of its psychosexual complexity - is at the heart of the Frostian sublime. This is a medium in which the speaking voice necessarily becomes merely a form of activation, as it awakens the exhilarating sense that the unspeakable aroused within is the real locus for power. It is also an enclosed, unimpeachable system that has had everything extraneous either purged from it or subordinated to it; Bildung is not the issue here. Systemically integrated, it is a tautology in which women, sexuality, and nature merge into one sublime energy constantly feeding back into a masculine gaze, which, in its turn, becomes charged: charged with energy and charged with the crime of desire. Keenly, irrevocably attuned to this paradox, Frost's is at heart a

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love/poetry that knows, and seeks out, both pleasure and pain; it is this knowledge that provokes, in the complex twinings of Frost's oversounds, muted but undeniable notes of sadomasochistic desire. The desire to tease, to seduce, to withhold, and to punish; to discipline (to wisdom) and to arouse (to delight) all together. The figure a poem makes is the same as for love, for love as the figure for poetry is a most precise shorthand for both the complexities of establishing and holding some sense of the distinctions between subjective and objective and the ambivalence such an effort necessarily produces. Kristeva, in Tales of Love, attempts to articulate the state of being in love; one is "at the zenith of subjectivity," yet at the same time the limits of one's own identity vanish, and "the precision of reference and meaning become blurred in love's discourse." "Dread of transgressing not only proprieties or taboos, but also, and above all, fear of crossing and desire to cross the boundaries of the self. . . The meeting, then, mixing pleasure and promise or hopes, remains in a sort of future perfect. It is the nontime of love that, both instant and eternity, past and future, abreacted present, fulfills me, abolishes me, and yet leaves me unsated. " 5 Love, by Frost's apprehension, is clearly just such an ambivalent state, declined in terms of the ecstasy lex stasis of resistance and capitulation. Poetry, its lyric impulse to be simultaneously awakened, chastened, and disguised, is another such figure. Poetry for Frost is a crime of passion, and so women - and it is the old story of course - are rounded up as the usual suspects. Actually, I could say "women" to you, but it's not women exactly: it is "femaleness," the embodiment of all that is imaginative, metamorphic, fickle, canny, promiscuous, that gives a name to Frost's desires. I recognize now in retrospect, after so intimate a time with it, why Frost's poetry has from the beginning sounded to me always familiar, as if it were a distillate of something I knew already quite well. It may even explain, from a substantially different angle than the usual attacks and apologia, Frost's "popularity," for if it speaks thus to me it very likely does the same to others. (It is, of course, impossible to determine whether my experience with Frost may be generalized, either to all readers or to women readers in particular; I can never know but that these words of mine have said me and not touched Frost at all; perhaps I have been taken instead, as Molloy says, to "the threshold of my own story, right to the door opening onto my story." I can only presume.) Frost's poetry tells readers explicitly what they have already been told over and over again obliquely: that, spoken of in virtually any way the world knows how to speak, woman becomes indistinguishable from metaphor. For Frost, she really does disappear - go out like a firefly as does Paul's wife - when the words used to bespeak her are insufficient. She is not just the subject from which metaphors are drawn but is herself a construct created from a combina-

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tion of loathing and desire. The tautology is precise: metaphor"female"-poetry-love- woman-metaphor. And further, metaphor is not just the stuff from which poetry is made; it is for Frost the whole of thinking. It is language, and language is the one thing Frost sees as spilling irretrievably from himself even as he tries to hold to it by keeping it attached to his own, inviolable, distinctive sound. (It is inevitable that his speakers are usually impotent.) Language, with its beginnings within the intact self, becomes part of the same outside that is nature, and so - and this is finally quite utterly logical women (metaphor/language) and nature are also inextricable. This is why Frost's mythologies of hill wives and dryads and witches and sibyls and fates and subverted flowers are not merely decorative but real enough to raise gooseflesh. Like Dickinson, whose vision is in its own way as self-referential and rigorously enclosed as Frost's, Frost only mediates but does not arrest the slippage between language and artifact, between dream and reality, between interior and exterior, between fantasy and fact, between desire and repulsion. Everything outside the erected facade of the man elides, with woman as its primary name. Frost does not imply that the poetry-making process is a sublimation for sexual desires and frustrations, any more than he suggests that his literal, mundane misogyny is a product of his linguistic mythologies: the reader is divested by the wiliness of Frost's poetry from even the illusion that this indecipherable matter of intent, conscious or otherwise, can be decided. All those stories he tells about witches, all those fantasies about women's promiscuities and infidelities are not simple extensions either of his sexism or of his poetics. In the beginning of my work on Frost I felt that any assertion of cause and effect as regards the love/poetry equation would be presumptuous; armchair psychology could only be reductionist and arbitrary, especially when necessarily based on the correlative psychodramas of Thompson's complex relationship to his subject and the resultant revisionist biographical accounts. I am left with the sense that it is not merely presumptuous but impossible to define the directional impulse of Frost's energies. This question - whether Frost is used by language or uses it, is telling or being told, making or being made - is at the crux of things: it is, perhaps, the definitive question of postmodernism, the question that puts humanism on the line and gender into halflight. One could simply choose an authority, Lacan, for example, or Freud, and thus assign causality, but the poetry itself seems to me to resist yielding even an illusion of this univocity of meaning. Frost neither denies the enigma of selfhood nor capitulates to it, but he achieves this precarious balance by carving out a vision of virile moderation predicated on a classical model: he defines the figure of a man by outlining his form against a seductive world teeming with that meta-

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morphic femaleness the continent man sloughs off through a hygienic effort of will. He creates a physique both brawny and vulnerable. What his poetry gives with one hand it takes back with another; for every assertion of control and heautocratic mastery there is a concomitant confession of weakness, and for every deflated speaker and every distressed and defeated husband - and every coral-root, woodchuck, damp-leaf correlative - there is an unimpeachable prosodic virility. Behind every moment of earnestness irony stands ready. A suspicious nihilist, he hedges his bets about nothingness along with everything else. But this double-mindedness has its price, and Frost's poetry is filled with strangers, the variable second selves of the schizophrene who is intermittently calm and violent. And it also has its invariable and beloved scapegoat, which is "femaleness." So a woman reading Frost's poetry will find that the usual gymnastics (those perceptual and emotional contortions that allow one to read beyond misogyny as if it is about someone else's gender or as if it is just a "joke"), which are difficult enough as is and increasingly impossible as one stiffens with age, hardly suffice; for on top of her own schizophrenic displacements she must include Frost's. Women, reading, are accustomed to filtering out the misogyny to hear about the applicable "human," but here the message is that, faith in humanness failing, one can only willfully construct some crash-dummy of a "man." And "man" as defined by Frost is that which is not womanly. Yet for precisely these reasons, Frost's poetry rewards a feminist reader, whether the reader is male or female; paradoxically, the poet who so valorizes the games by which manhood is tested and confirmed enforces an equivalent rigor on his readers. One may indeed move toward wisdom through reading Frost's poetry, and to do so - to weave and bob through the obstacle course of his ironies, his self-depreciations and self-aggrandizements, his grim humor, and his misogyny - requires a virtually calisthenic effort of will. And there is more: his voice is not merely the "enemy's" voice but it is too much our own, so that his delight is often enough also the reader's delight. In other words, this poetry, with its figures the same as love, is an original ascesis: a reminder and a clarification of how we have made pleasure dependent upon pain, so that both literature and love have at bottom the same bivalent sources. Frost, we discover if we pay careful heed to our own responses, is not the only closet sadomasochist in the group.6 Nor is he, often enough, the only misogynist. So reading Frost takes a mind of winter, really. More particularly, it demands a concomitant self-referentiality; for every one of Frost's ironies one must recognize the irony at the heart of the whole enterprise of reading Frost. Frost wanted to write poetry and still be a man, even as he devalued the vocation as feminine. He wanted to express sentiment while

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maintaining his cover as a laconic Yankee. He wanted to be taken as serious while seeming to jeer at the pukes and prudes who wanted to be taken seriously. He wanted to abjure the egotistical sublime while being egotistical and evoking sublimity. He wanted to be self-revelatory and virtually psychoanalytic about sexual matters while denying that the school of the "pseudo-phallic" had any credence. He wanted to be popular and to be an artist, to be both parsnips and caviar, to sell enough books to make himself rich while infiltrating his apparent accessibility with inside literariness. He wanted to be a man who knew women, a poet who knew prose. He wanted to be a farmer who wasn't a farmer, a teacher who wasn't a teacher, a lyric poet whose intentions were dramatic. And he wanted to acknowledge to his readers that the poetic act was an act of manipulation even as he used it to manipulate them: he wanted to take them from delight to wisdom, and he did, in fact, choose in this matter the road less traveled. For Frost does not really try to disguise his own ambivalence, his incipient nihilism, his skepticism about whether what he sees is truth or a mere pebble of quartz. Nor did he much disguise his ability to be aroused and terrified by nature - his own, and that maenadic female ecology all around him, ready to seduce and suborn and subsume. One who reads, knowing these things, must reify Frost's own doubled perceptions, and a woman who reads must do so with more than ordinary whimsy. I myself stand by Frost's side, both amused and embattled (and suckered one more time by literature), for his poetry does still enact an odd magic. More now than ever in fact, as its rather candid duplicities seem to epitomize the postmodern condition. Frost brings out the schizophrenic in one: the act of interpretation must proceed by similar bivalencies — to say here that a woman reading must become Frost's sister is only to enter the game at his level.7 Reading Frost enforces the recognition that the whole game is, and has always been despite delusions to the contrary, temporary accommodation. (I do think that most women learn this lesson early - like the Bible salesman, Manly Pointer, in O'Connor's "Good Country People," who tells the Ph.D. philosopher and self-styled nihilist, "You ain't so smart. I been believing in nothing ever since I was born!") Frost claims to be just gaming, but when he says this is play for mortal stakes I believe that he is right. To refuse, or to prefer not, to play is by Frost's reckoning to die. If joining the contest is also to acknowledge that we are all involved in something of a shell game, the contest is at the same time a most essential commonalty. The constantly shifting, metamorphically inclined "self" is all there is. It is "manhood" that is merely spectral, while all the rest is human.

Notes

Introduction: The Serpent's Tail 1 Michel Foucault, The Use of Pleasure: The History of Sexuality, vol. 2, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Pantheon, 1985), documents in detail the heautocratically intent subject as defined in classical Greek terms. By the model of the "good Greek" to which Frost refers in "New Hampshire," a man's heautocratic integrity is his first order of defense against his own and others' dissolution. Aphrodisia and other appetitive impulses were categorized by the Greeks as powerful natural conditions that necessitated self-dominance. The active agent is the only truly moral agent capable of choice, upon whom moderation is incumbent. The passive agent cannot by definition be either moral or moderate since "she" is by nature liable to be filled up to the point of hysteria - with passion, love, anger, maenadic ecstasy, etc. As Aristotle says, one would not apply the term "incontinent" to those in brutish states "any more than one would apply the epithet to women because of the passive part they play in copulation" (Ethica Nicomachea 1148, 33). See Lawrance Thompson, Robert Frost: The Early Years, 1874-1915 (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1966), 239-40, on Frost's interest in James's comments on asceticism. 2 Hyde Cox and Edward Connery Lathem, Selected Prose of Robert Frost (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1966), 18. All further references will be cited parenthetically as Prose. 3 "Heautocratic," a rather cumbersome word, comes from my reading of Foucault's The Use of Pleasure, and it is the only term I can discover that locates precisely Frost's instinct for virile moderation, for an enclosed intactness; this is an impulse that, by virtue of its basis in both control and aphrodisia, suggests the bipolar energies of Frost's personal and poetic concerns. I have tried to use the word sparingly, but there are moments when nothing else works quite so economically to speak to Frost's subsidies of both chaos ("wildness") and form. 4 See Luce Irigaray's "The Little Girl Is (Only) a Little Boy," in Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1985), 25-34, f ° r her comments on the Freudian conclusion to a classical philosophy of (male) desire by which women are defined in terms of men: born "masculine," they then must transform themselves by a masochistic process into femininity. 192

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This is one essence of the mythology of a transformative femaleness that lacks formal integrity. See too Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Sanity in the Age of Reason, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon, 1985), 140-54, on the physiology of hysteria. Predicated on the female body as noncompact and prone to upheaval ("slack and therefore feeble, without action or elasticity"; 140), hysteria could run rampant through a barrierless system. 5 The Poetry of Robert Frost, ed. Edward Connery Lathem (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1975). All further references to Frost's poetry will be cited parenthetically in the text. 6 Consider in this context "Mending Wall," in which the (integumental) barrier, made to seem a living thing nudged by an equally living ground swell, is generative of its own disrepair; it does not take a violent breach of the wall — the apple trees "will never get across / And eat the cones under his pines" - to make gaps. 7 See Donald G. Sheehy, "Refiguring Love: Robert Frost in Crisis, 19381942," New England Quarterly 63, no. 2 (June 1990): 179-231, for his assessment of the period in which "The Figure a Poem Makes" was produced, at a time when Frost's love affair with Kathleen Morrison was beginning. For more on the Kathleen Morrison story, see Stanley Burnshaw, Robert Frost Himself (New York: Braziller, 1986). Richard Poirier's elegant study of Frost, Robert Frost: The Work of Knowing (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1977), returns often to this inevitable connection in Frost between sex and poetry as a way of "keeping" things from time (see 176-7). We share this crucial central assumption while, I very much hope, providing two distinct perspectives on its effects and significations throughout the poetry. 8 From "A Masque of Reason," 11. 339-40. See Philip E. Slater, The Glory of Hera: Greek Mythology and the Greek Family (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968), 75-

122, for a discussion of serpents and boundary ambiguity (91), of the serpent's hermaphroditic associations, and of its unifying of dichotomous symbolic values (80-6). 9

Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1: An Introduction, trans. Rob-

ert Hurley (New York: Pantheon, 1978), 71. 10 Ibid., 65. See too Reginald Cook, Robert Frost: A Living Voice (Amherst: Univ. of Massachusetts Press, 1974), 88-99. Frost's preoccupation with the term "Puritanism," which he uses as a metaphor for a concern with sexual continence (thus "pagan puritanism" - "Of course, everything about Diana and Minerva had something to do with chastity and all that - and restraint"; 90), is significant in this context. 11 Edward Connery Lathem, ed., Interviews with Robert Frost (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1977), xiv. 12 Poirier, The Work of Knowing, 234. 13 Foucault, in The Use of Pleasure, calls upon many of the classical sources for the designation of "female" as a state antithetical to the compact, muscular body/mind of the virilely moderate man. "Female" becomes the code for shapelessness, passivity, weakness, dissolution, that which in a man is effeminacy. See too K.J. Dover, Greek Homosexuality (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1978). See Aristotle's Ethica Nicomachea for an elaboration of this dynamic: "Now

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the man who is defective in respect of resistance to the things which most men both resist and resist successfully is soft and effeminate; for effeminacy too is a kind of softness" (1150b). 14 For example, we see Eliot in "The Metaphysical Poets" examining the conceit in terms of the rigor it demands from both poet and critic; it "requires considerable agility." This capacity for a "direct sensuous apprehension of thought" requires looking into a "good deal more than the heart. One must look into the cerebral cortex, the nervous system, and the digestive tract." 15 See Foucault, History of Sexuality, 1: 17-35, for a discussion of the history of confession, religious, medical, psychoanalytical, etc., to which pleasure has subjected itself and to which it has been subjected. See too Frost's comments, in Cook, A Living Voice, 90, on pleasure as "Puritanism" circumscribes it, becoming that "in you that fears your own pleasure, that distrusts your own pleasures." 16 Frank Lentricchia, Robert Frost: Modern Poetics and the Landscape of Self (Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press, 1975), 12, calls them "unfortunate female characters, inescapably housed in their obsessions." James M. Cox, "Robert Frost and the Edge of the Clearing," in Critical Essays on Robert Frost, ed. Philip L. Gerber (Boston: Hall, 1982), 144-54 says, "[Women] disintegrate into hysteria or slump into depression" (140). See too Patricia Wallace, "The 'Estranged Point of View': The Thematics of Imagination in Frost's Poetry," in Frost: Centennial Essays II, ed. Jac Tharpe (Jackson: Univ. Press of Mississippi, 1976), 177-95. 17 Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill & Wang, 1975), 4. 18 One might locate "To Earthward" in a familiar literary tradition, from Edgar Allan Poe to Gabriele D'Annunzio, of hypersensitive men whose need to tell is a source of deep guilt and intense pleasure. Indulging themselves synesthetically, with one locus of pleasure always at the (speaking) lips, they become caught in a spiral that coils inevitably toward masochism. Frost's poem, first published in 1923, seems predicated in part on literary nostalgia. Foucault, in The Use of Pleasure, 22-5, locates as a power mechanism the nineteenth-century encouragement of a confessional discourse on sex: "A policing of sex: that is, not the rigor of a taboo, but the necessity of regulating sex through useful and public discourse." 19 See Julia Kristeva, Tales ofLove, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1987), 15-16, 267—383, for a discussion of the "amorous dynamics" of symbolic and semiotic systems that are open to one another. See too Paul de Man, "Epistemology of Metaphor," Critical Inquiry 5, no. 1 (Autumn 1978): 15-16, as he speaks of eloquence as defined by Locke and as traditionally regarded in precisely these terms: "Like a woman, which it resembles ('like the fair sex'), it is a fine thing as long as it is kept in its proper place. Out of place, among the serious affairs of men ('if we would speak of things as they are'), it is a descriptive scandal - like the appearance of a real woman in a gentleman's club where it would only be tolerated as a picture, preferably naked (like the image of Truth), framed and hung on the wall." 20 Foucault, Madness and Civilization, 149. See Cook, A Living Voice, 64, for Frost's application of Emerson's praise of Montaigne's prose. "Cut these words and they would bleed; they are vascular and alive; they walk and run": Emerson's

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journal entry on Montaigne is cited by Frost as applicable to three men - Montaigne, Emerson himself, and Frost. 21 Cook, A Living Voice, 52. 22 See Randall Jarrell, "Robert Frost's 'Home Burial,'" in The Moment ofPoetry, ed. Don Cameron Allen (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1962), 99-132; for his assessment of the sexual overtones of the husband's digging of the grave. One must consider the potential tautology in Jarrell's reading, which, one might argue, imposes a literarily stable (and psychologically prominent) equation on a potentially transparent - nonsymbolically inscribed - action. One who writes on Frost is implicated in the fluid parameters of his language games, so that it is never certain who, critic or poet, brings the metaphor to its breaking point. Or who, in the terms of the sexual analogy, is moving toward prurience. 23 The dangers of imposing what Mary Ellman calls the "intellectual tyranny" of the sexual analogy are omnipresent and, perhaps, inescapable. See Thinking About Women (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1968). One can only speculate as scrupulously as possible about how much of this tyranny infiltrates Frost's metaphorical constructs and how much one inevitably reads into Frost's, or any, work. 24 Poirier, The Work of Knowing, xiii. 25 See Cook, A Living Voice, 169, for Frost's reference to "Modern Love," a poem he quotes in the context of his discussion of tragedy. The entire text of Meredith's sonnet sequence makes an interesting backdrop for Frost's implications about women. See too Lawrance Thompson (ed.), The Selected Letters of Robert Frost (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1964), 394. All further references to this text will be cited parenthetically as Letters. 2.6 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1967), 42. Thompson has also noted this allusion, which springs out inescapably as one reads Nietzsche's account. See Thompson, The Early Years, 367. Frost himself refers to Silenus, making in near juxtaposition an extended reference to sardonic laughter, in Cook, A Living Voice, 93. 27 Cook, A Living Voice, 169. This is Frost's quote from Meredith's "Modern Love," an association he makes in the context of talking about tragedy, "women and men, a woman and a man." "George Meredith has a sonnet about that, hasn't he? 'Passions spin the plot,' he says. 'In tragic life, God wot, / No villains need be!' See, he agrees with me. 'Passions spin the plot.'" 28 Frost's frequent pairing of terms that do not yield the doubled meanings of the conventional oxymoron can be found throughout his poetry; just injustice and reasonable unreason are two examples. See Foucault, Madness and Civilization, 105-7, for a discussion of madness in which he elaborates upon the term "unreason." Frost's original gloss for this poem was "about science," a reading that adds to questions of reason and nothingness. 29 See de Man, "Epistemology of Metaphor," 18, for his discussion of the Lockean substances. Locke uses "gold" as the first model of a substance, yet cannot hold his own discussion from metaphor. As de Man says, "Not only are tropes, as their name implies, always on the move - more like quicksilver than like flowers or butterflies which one can at least hope to pin down and insert in a neat taxonomy — but they can disappear altogether, or at least appear to disap-

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pear." See Judith Oster, Toward Robert Frost: The Reader and the Poet (Athens: Georgia Univ. Press, 1991), 224—6, for early versions of this poem. 30 "Home Burial" is informed, according to Thompson in The Early Years, 597-8, both by Frost's knowledge of the marital consequences of the death of Leona and Nathaniel Harvey's child and by the death of his own firstborn, Elliott, in 1900. 31 Frost's choices of the autobiographical and historical details he uses in his poetry must be considered part of what Lentricchia, Modern Poetics, 4, has called the "primordial ground of Frost's creative acts." In other words, it is not sufficient to assert that Frost was merely reporting on the details of a life that was necessarily afflicted by illness, infant mortality, accident, and death. 32 Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot (New York: Grove Press, 1954), 5 8 33 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale, ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1968), 16. 34 See Slater's chapter, "The Greek Mother-Son Relationship: Origins and Consequences," in The Glory of Hera, 3-74, for a detailed discussion of sources of ambivalence in a classically declined mother-son relationship. 35 A partial list of "marriages" (frequently the legal status is unclear) that are demonstrably or by implication childless: "The Death of the Hired Man," "Home Burial," "A Servant to Servants," "The Housekeeper," "The Fear," "The Hill Wife," "Maple," "Bereft, "The Thatch," "West-Running Brook," and "The Investment." 36 For other suggestions of female infidelity see, e.g., "Maple" and "The Witch of Coos." See too the unpublished "Pride of Ancestry," in Lawrance Thompson, Robert Frost: The Years of Triumph (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1964), 473: the Deacon's wife "was a bit desirish / And liked her sex relations wild, / So she lay with one of the shanty Irish / and he begot the Deacon's child." 37 That Frost feels the poetic body as almost physical extension is reinforced by Thompson's locating of his poem in the context of Frost's battle to keep E.J. Bernheimer from selling his signed collection of Frost books. See Lawrance Thompson, Robert Frost: The Later Years (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1976), 187-96. For an alternative account of the creation of this poem see Baird W. Whitlock, "Conversations with Robert Frost," Xavier Review 3, no. 2 (1983): 1-3. See too David W. Shaw, "The Poetics of Pragmatism: Robert Frost and William James," New England Quarterly 59, no. 2 (June 1986): 165; Shaw sees the poem as a gloss on William James's antideterministic essay, "Great Men and Their Environment." 38 See Jean-Franqois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledgef trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1988), 18—23, on the appropriation of memory into the narrative flow, particularly as it is manifested in the rhythmic cadences of a story like the one the witch and her son tell. 39 Writers at Work: The "Paris Review" Interviews, ed. George Plimpton, 2d ser. (New York, 1963), 25. 40 See Sara Ruddick, "Maternal Thinking," Feminist Studies 6 (1980): 342-67, and Margaret Urban Walker, "Moral Understandings: Alternative 'Epistemology' for a Feminist Ethics," Hypatia 4, no. 2 (1989): 15-28, for discussions of the


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epistemological and ethical implications of this maternal solicitude. The allusion to Ahaz in "New Hampshire" seems in these contexts less than circumstantial, since it suggests as the end result of this "father"-"son" competition the sacrifice of the son; "The Witch of Coos" may be said to pose the antithetical triumph of the son over two "fathers." See too Slater, The Glory of Hera, on the patterns of violence associated with family dyads; Appendix I, "Aggression in Parent-Child dyads in Apollodorus," 468-9, suggests the classical underpinnings of Frost's dynamics. 41 See Walker, "Moral Understandings," 17-19, for a context within which to place Mary's alternative definition. See too, for the larger implications of an epistemology that valorizes an introspective, perpetually ongoing moral watchfulness over judgmental action, Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good (New York: Ark, 1986). Frost comments on these lines in his Paris Review interview (Writers at Work, ed. Plimpton), relating the "feminine way" with the New Deal and the Democrats and the masculine, paternal way with the Republicans. Typically, Frost claims the middle ground. 42 Notice the similarity between what the father tells his daughter in "Maple" "by and by I will tell you" - and what the mother tells her son about the fact that his real father is a cook - "someday I'll tell you, dear" - in "How Hard It Is to Keep from Being King When It's in You and in the Situation." 43 Kristeva, Tales of Love, 21-4. 44 Ibid., 24. 45 See John Hollander, The Figure ofEcho: A Mode ofAllusion in Milton and After (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1981), 113-32, and my discussion of Frost's metalepsis in Chapter 2. Hollander's "figure of echo" is, of course, wonderfully pertinent in this poem predicated in part on the Narcissus/Echo allusion. 46 See the Homeric Hymn to Apollo, no. 3, 11. 137-60. Apollo was said to be autonomous almost from birth, never suckling his mother's breast but eating ambrosia from Olympus, casting off his swaddling clothes and talking, and, at four days, assuming the weapons of manhood. Apollo's mother, Leto, was hounded by Hera, who would not allow her to give birth on land; only the rocky island of Delos, a place of "Not-earth," would receive her, and then, in some versions, only after Neptune submerged it in a glaze of water to make it more completely disassociated from earth (defined here implicitly as dirt, where things may grow and be buried). 47 Slater, The Glory of Hera, 137. 48 See Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1967), for the formulation of this Apollonian-Dionysian distinction. 49 "Two Tramps in Mud-Time," "The Hill Wife," "The Fear," "The Subverted Flower," "The Witch of Coos," "Out, Out - , " "The Self-Seeker," "The Bonfire," "The Ax-Helve" all share visions of potential or actual violence; where harm has not been done, it is imagined as imminent, in the ax flying off its handle, the tramps resorting to violence, the man springing like a hungry beast, the irate lover materializing out of the darkness. 50 See Annabel Patterson, "Hard Pastoral: Frost, Wordsworth, and Modernist

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Poetics," Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts 29, no. 1 (Winter 1987): 67-87, on Frost's use of "Build Soil" and the pastoral mode to assert autonomy in the face of what would become New Deal policies. 51 This image of rotting skin, which is used further to describe the dissolution of Job's tents - "when, as rotten as his skin, / His tents blew all to pieces" — impinges in significant ways on Frost's decaying-house imagery and, more grotesquely, on "The Silken Tent," both used by Frost as correlatives for the body. See Philip Gerber, "Remembering Frost: An Interview with William Jewell," New England Quarterly 59, no. 1 (March 1986): Jewell remembers that at Frost's memorial service one of the ministers likened him "quite properly" to Job. See too Poirier, The Work of Knowing, 50, as he takes issue with Thompson's reading of Frost and asserts that "Frost would never blame the *age' for anything. . . . This was the virtue of his pride." 52 "The Lesson for Today" is one of several poems in which the poet's emasculation within a potentially coercive systematic of some kind is an issue. "The White-Tailed Hornet," with its metonymic stinging wasp as a model of appetitive uncontrol and resultant poetic ineffectuality, is worth consideration in this context. The poem's subtitle, "The Revision of Theories," in A Further Range suggests Frost's preoccupation both with Darwinian and with Freudian theories of instinct and appetite; his focus on the ineffectual "stinger" suggests his conflation of pen, sword, and penis in an animal fable in which the wasp is the poet bewildered by theoretical considerations. The speaker muses that the wasp might almost be a poet, "comparing / Nailhead withflyandflywith huckleberry" and muttering "How like afly,how very like afly."Comically, the hornet cannot hit the derisive, mobile fly he hunts for supper, pouncing instead on the look-alike huckleberry, which throws him on his head; that failing, the wasp attacks again, this time mistaking a nailhead for the fly. He quite literally hits the nail on the head, the only problem being that it is the wrong target. In other words, the wasp/poet is in the most essential sense impotent, all stinger but unable to find the target that will accept him; his mistakes are not even particularly legitimate, since the nailhead, flat and not in the least flylike, is fastened down, and the huckleberry is "Wrong shape, wrong color, and wrong scent." 53 One keeps coming back to Frost's definition of the Platonist as "one who believes what we have here is an imperfect copy of what is in heaven. The woman you have is an imperfect copy of some woman in heaven or in someone else's bed" (Letters, 462). 54 See Cook, A Living Voice, 169. 55 See Shaw, "The Poetics of Pragmatism," 165-6, for his argument that Frost's pragmatism is a mode which, following James's use of "tough-minded" to describe a skeptical, empirical temperament, allows Frost to avoid idealism and metaphysics. I am, myself, not convinced that "pragmatist" is the best term to describe Frost's habits of mind, but as Shaw, and most recently Richard Poirier in Poetry and Pragmatism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1992) have shown, the conjunction is indeed an interesting one. 56 Guy Rotella, Reading and Writing Nature (Boston: Northeastern Univ. Press, 1991), 60. 57 Poirier, The Work of Knowing, 264.


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58 Rotella, Reading and Writing Nature, 60; "I'm less and less for systems and system-building in my old age," says Frost, adding, "I'm afraid of too much structure." 59 Cary Nelson, Repression and Recovery: Modern American Poetry and the Politics of Cultural Memory, igio-iQ45 (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 84. 60 This clear incorporation of biographical detail and of opinions Frost articulates without apparent irony in his prose statements makes the Frostian speaker in longer, issue-oriented poems like "The White-Tailed Hornet," "The Lesson for Today," and "A Hundred Collars" particularly interesting. Their professed liberalism or intellectualism balances against specific biographical detail to create a speaker who is proclaiming himself Frost and not-Frost simultaneously. This tactic continues the Frostian program of undermining abstract terms like "intellectual" and "liberal." 61 Genesis 16:12. 62 Thompson, The Later Years, 268. 63 See Thompson, The Later Years, 238-43, for his speculations on Frost's interest in James. 1. Irony: Teiresias's Gaze 1 Lawrance Thompson, Robert Frost: The Early Years, 1874—1915 (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1966), 397. 2 Ibid., 427. 3 "The Bonfire" lays out the conflicting imperatives of desire and control quite explicitly. The speaker wants to climb a hilltop and to light a fire so huge that it will "bring to life this old volcano . . . / Let wild fire loose," and he tells a story of having once started such a wildfire which he then had to extinguish before it threatened civilization. This moment of rubbing out the fire, conflating an act of self-control and a moment of orgasmic release, is emblematic of Frost's ambivalence. 4 Frost's equating of figural language and femaleness is, of course, within a long tradition. See Paul de Man, "The Epistemology of Metaphor," Critical Inquiry 5, no. 1 (Autumn 1978): 13-30, as he lays out the classic effort to free philosophical, serious discourse from the contamination and seduction of tropes. As Locke says, de Man points out, "Eloquence, like the fair sex, has too prevailing beauties in it to suffer itself ever to be spoken against. And it is in vain to find fault with these arts of deceiving wherein men find pleasure to be deceived (Bk 3, Chp 10)" (15). See too Jacqueline Lichtenstein, "Making Up Representation: The Risks of Femininity," in Misogyny, Misandry, and Misanthrophy, ed. R. Howard Bloch and Frances Ferguson (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1989), 77—87, for a discussion of rhetorical excess as "female." 5 In the context of Frost's use elsewhere of poetry and metaphor as potentially contaminative, this term "tocsin" is quite interesting. "Tocsin" is a signal of alarm, often sounded by bells, and there is later in Frost's carefully ambiguous praise of Amy Lowell's imagism the assertion that "Her poetry was forever a clear resonant calling off of things seen" (Prose 72). Yet its use in the context of the "barb" makes its homonymic value as "toxin" prevail.

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6 Reginald Cook, Robert Frost: A Living Voice (Amherst: Univ. of Massachusetts Press, 1974), 63. 7 This sexualized reciprocity, embodied so succinctly in the witch who rides men and is herself metamorphically animalistic, is merely one more permutation of a standard sexualized construct of poetic creativity. One thinks of pristine Lady Philosophy in Boethius's Consolation, who angrily banishes the Muses of Poetry: "'Who,' she demanded, her piercing eyes alight with fire, 'has allowed these hysterical sluts to approach this sick man's bedside? . . . They are the very women who kill the rich and fruitful harvest of Reason with the barren thorns of Passion.'" The Consolation of Philosophy, trans. V. E. Watts (New York: Penguin, 1969), 36. See too Eve Feder Kittay, "Woman as Metaphor," Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy 3, no. 2 (Summer 1988):

63-88. 8 Again, Frost is not by any means unique in this imagery of virtual rape. See Paul Ricoeur, "The Metaphorical Process," Critical Inquiry 5, no. 1 (Autumn 1978): 148, where he speaks of the process by which a successful metaphor creates a new predicative meaning from the collapse of literal meaning: "All new rapprochement runs against a previous categorization which resists, or rather which yields while resisting, as Nelson Goodman says." 9 Quoted in Bruce F. Murphy, "The Exiles of Literature: Poetry and the Politics of the Other(s)," Critical Inquiry 17, no. 1 (Autumn 1990): 169. Murphy argues for an essential conservatism and a linguistic "archaism" that denies the Saussurean dichotomy between words and things in Milosz's ideas about poetry and language. Milosz seems, thus, closer to Frost's ambivalence about language than to more resolutely postmodern sensibilities, his lover/poet parallel within the Frostian tradition. 10 Frost's images of "making" are constant throughout his prose statements about poetic language. See, e.g., Letters, 141. See too Frank Lentricchia, "The Resentments of Robert Frost," American Literature 62, no. 2 (June 1990): 193-200, for a discussion of the connections Frost makes within the poetry between poetry and physical labor. 11 On Keats's use of "alien": "He could never have used it again with just that turn. It takes the little one horse poets to do that. I am probably the only Am poet who haven't used it after him. No if I want to deal with the word I must sink back to its common usage at Castle Garden. I want the unmade words to work with, not the familiar ones that everybody exclaims Poetry! at" (Letters 141). Analogously, "A truly gallant Plantonist [sic] will remain a bachelor as Robinson did from unwillingness to reduce any woman to the condition of being used without being idealized" (Letters, 462). See too Louis Untermeyer, Interviews with Robert Frost (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1966), 26: "Words that are the product of another poet's imagination cannot be passed off again." Or see Roland Barthes on newness, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill & Wang, 1975), 80: "The language I speak within myself is not of my time; it is prey, by nature, to ideological suspicion; thus, it is with this language that I must struggle. I write because I do not want the words I find: by subtraction. And at the same time, this next-toAast language is the language of my pleasure: for hours on end I read Zola, Proust, Verne. . . . This is my pleasure, but


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not my bliss: bliss may come only with the absolutely new, for only the new disturbs (weakens) consciousness." 12 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 4.116. Wittgenstein is quoted in Suzanne K. Langer, Philosophy in a New Key: A Study in the Symbolism of Reason, Rite, and Art (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1942), 84—5, in her discussion of Carnap, Russell, Wittgenstein, and others who argue this position, which is fairly representative ofpre-Philosophical Investigations assumptions about language. Wittgenstein's own later negative attitude toward the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus suggests the conservative attitude she is describing as a something of a given in 1942. 13 Langer, Philosophy in a New Key, 86. 14 Lentricchia, "The Resentments," 191. 15 Ezra Pound, Pavannes and Divagations (Norfold, Va.: New Directions, 1958), 204. In "The Resentments," Lentricchia discusses Frost's concerns in the contexts of Eliot, Stevens, and Pound. 16 Letters of Wallace Stevens, ed. Holly Stevens (New York: Knopf, 1966), 180. Stevens, in this same letter to his wife, says defensively, "There is something absurd about all this writing of verses; but the truth is, it elates and satisfies me to do it." 17 D.C. Muecke, Irony and the Ironic (London: Methuen, 1970), 31. 18 Sam Weber, "Afterword: Literature - Just Making It," in Jean-Franqois Lyotard and Jean-Loup Thebaud, Just Gaming, trans. Wlad Godzich (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1985), 118. Weber's entire discussion of the ambivalence inherent in entering the dangerous game of discourse is provocative, as it incorporates a Freudian reading of this da/fort dynamic. 19 Weber, "Just Making It," 118. 20 This is not to underplay the danger of the ironic game, which is compelling because it flirts with irrationality. Frost, who plays very close to the net in this matter, infiltrates his poetry with images of madness. See Paul de Man, "The Rhetoric of Temporality," in Blindness and Insight (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1983), 208-28. "Irony is unrelieved vertige, dizziness to the point of madness," he says (215). 21 See Margaret Urban Walker, "Moral Understandings: Alternative 'Epistemology' for a Feminist Ethics," Hypatia 4, no. 2 (Summer 1989): 18-19, for the implications of a nonmonological model of reasoning. 22 For "pukes and prudes" see "New Hampshire," 1. 406; for "their verse and excuses lame," see "The Lesson for Today," 1. 33. See too "Letter to The Amherst Student," in Prose, 105-7. 23 See Euripides, Bacchae, ed. E.R. Dodds (Oxford: Clarendon Press, i960), 91, for Dodds's commentary on Teiresias, including the chorus leader's congratulation that he may become Dionysiac without ceasing to be Apollonian. 24 See too Frost's letter to L.W. Payne in Letters, 427, where he makes the sentences themselves dramatic participants: "I've just found out what makes a piece of writing good . . . : it is making the sentences talk to each other as two or more speakers do in drama. The dullness of writing is due to its being, much of it, too much like the too long monologues and soliloquies in drama." 25 See Margaret Dickie, "Dickinson's Discontinuous Lyric Self," American Lit-

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erature 60, no. 4 (December 1988): 537-53, for a discussion of the renewable individuality of the lyric voice in Dickinson. This antinarrative instinct, whic"h Dickie associates in Dickinson with a Nietzschean sense of individuality as "unaccountable surplus," is directly counter to Frost's claims for the perpetually unfolding dramatic interplay of his (lyric) voices. 26 See Walker, "Moral Understandings," 18, for some of the implications of this dispersion into narrative. 27 Frank Lentricchia, Robert Frost: Modern Poetics and the Landscapes of Self (Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press, 1975), 13. 28 See Walker, "Moral Understandings," for a summary of the critical work on this idea of a "maternal ethic." 29 Lentricchia, "The Resentments," 194, discusses Frost's own sense of the relationship between labor and poetry: "Labor: the grudging basis for poetry for those who have no traditional means of economic and cultural support for the writing of lyric - those whose lyricism, like Frost's, had better somehow be supported by and in the very course of the actual tasks of daily work because there is no alternative system of literary support available; those who somehow must be simultaneously poets and laborers." See too Richard Poirier's Robert Frost: The Work of Knowing (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1977), and Priscilla M. Paton, "Robert Frost: 'The Fact Is the Sweetest Dream That Labor Knows,'" in On Frost: The Best from American Literature, ed. Edwin H. Cady and Louis J. Budd (Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press, 1991): 120-32. 30 Critical "work" is, of course, only distantly analogous to enforced physical labor; yet Frost's tactic of creating a critical involvement whereby the reader is always shoring up meaning as it falls invites the comparison to the kinds of work that render one relatively harmless. Frederick Douglass articulates the power of unceasing and repetitive work to make one "manageable": "We were worked in all weathers. It was never too hot or too cold; it could never rain, blow, hail, or snow, too hard for us to work in the field. Work, work, work, was scarcely more the order of the day than of the night. . . . I was somewhat unmanageable when I first went there, but a few months of this discipline tamed me." Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (New York: Penguin, 1988), 105. 31 Lawrance Thompson, Robert Frost: The Years of Triumph (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1964), 467. 32 Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty ofGood (New York: Ark, 1985), 86, 24. Murdoch does not here locate her philosophical position in terms of gender, but her position has been congenial to feminist theory. See, e.g., Sara Ruddick's "Maternal Thinking," Feminist Studies 6 (1980): 342-67. I do not imply here my own unskeptical subsidy of this designation of a maternal ethic. For an essay examining cultural feminism, see Linda Alcoff, "Cultural Feminism versus Post-Structuralism: The Identity Crisis in Feminist Theory," Signs 12, no. 3 (1988): 405-36. 33 Fallible instinct is an idea exploited in "The White-Tailed Hornet." False truth is an idea Frost explores in "The Black Cottage" - "why abandon a belief / Merely because it ceases to be true. / Cling to it long enough, and not a doubt / It will turn true again, for so it goes" (11. 105-8). Just injustice / unjust justice occurs frequently, notably in "A Masque of Mercy." "Boeotian wisdom," which occurs in "Boeotian," is another of these constructs.

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34 Ricoeur, "The Metaphorical Process," 151, suggests that metaphorical meaning blurs the distinctions between sense and representation or reference, thus compelling one to "explore the borderline between the verbal and the nonverbal." 35 Lewis Carroll, The Annotated Alice: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking Glass, intro. and notes Martin Gardner (New York: Potter, i960), 281. Frost speaks in Letters, 79-80, of Alice in Wonderland: "Now it is possible to have sense without the sound of sense (as in much prose that is supposed to pass muster but makes very dull reading) and the sound of sense without sense (as in much prose that is supposed to pass muster but makes very dull reading) and the sound of sense without sense (as in Alice in Wonderland which makes anything but dull reading)." 36 Carroll, The Annotated Alice, 95. 37 Thompson, The Years of Triumph, 421-2. 38 One sees the image of artifacts that convey their own energies throughout Frost's poetry: the divining rod in "Maple," the stone, which has the capacity to turn the neighbor to an old-stone savage, in "Mending Wall," the scythe whispering, gathering secrets, and communicating them through the arm of the reaper in "Mowing," the buzz saw which responds to the call for supper by biting the arm that holds it. 39 Barthes, Pleasure of the Text, 4. 40 See Reginald Cook, "Frost's Asides on His Poetry," in The Best from American Literature, ed. Cady and Budd, 34. Cook details Frost's speaking of "A Masque of Reason" as a "comedy" and his saying that mercy is for the undeserving, justice to the deserving: "All my poetry is a footnote to ['The Masque of Reason']." 41 Barthes, Pleasure of the Text, 4. 42 See Dorothy Judd Hall, Robert Frost: Contours of Belief (Athens: Ohio Univ. Press, 1984), for a reading of Frost as Christian; in this context, see her chapter, "A Mercy-Justice Cross." 43 Thompson, The Early Years, 403; see too idem, The Years of Triumph, 656— 5744 See Michel Foucault, The Use of Pleasure: The History of Sexuality, vol. 2, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985), 656-7, for a discussion of the genealogy of this doctrine. 45 See Weber, "Just Making It," and Jean-Franqois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1984), 63. 46 In Lyotard's most recent book, The Inhuman, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Stanford, Calif: Stanford Univ. Press, 1991), he suggests that his faith in the antitotalitarian effects of the unrestricted play between informational systems and their users might have been misplaced: "The inhumanity of the system which is currently being consolidated under the name of development (among others) must not be confused with the infinitely secret one of which the soul is hostage. To believe, as happened to me, that the first can take over from the second, give it expression, is a mistake. The system rather has the consequence of causing the forgetting of what escapes it. But the anguish is that of a

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mind haunted by a familiar and unknown guest which is agitating it, sending it delirious but also making it think - if one claims to exclude it, if one doesn't give it an outlet, one aggravates it" (2). Frost's more oblique methods may be a way of escaping the amnesias produced by systemic participations. 47 See Thompson, The Years of Triumph, 467, where Frost is quoted as talking of his friend Edward Morgan Lewis, one-time record-setting pitcher for the team that became the Boston Braves and president of the University of New Hampshire: "So poetry to him was prowess, as running was prowess. And it was our common ground. I have always thought of poetry as prowess - something to achieve, something to win or lose." Frost, in a "Meet the Press" interview documented in the Public Broadcasting series Voices and Visions, says, "I don't think anybody can think right in this world who didn't play games some time in his life." 48 Cook, A Living Voice, 90. 49 Ibid., 90. Frost's version of this story is interesting, as Cybele is said to have loosed the lions that pull her chariot, rousing them to chase the repentant Attis back into the forest, where he "his whole life long inhabits them, the goddess's waiting woman." See William A. Aiken, The Poems of Catullus: Translated into English by Various Hands (New York: Dutton, 1950), 137, for Arthur Symon's 1913 translation of the Attis poem. 50 Cook, A Living Voice, 91. 51 Sophocles, Ajax, in Sophocles II, ed. David Grene and Richmond Lattimore, trans. John Moore (New York: Washington Square Press, 1957), 38. 52 Cook, A Living Voice, 91. 53 Friedrich Nietzsche, "Homer's Contest," in The Portable Nietzsche, trans., ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Viking Press, 1968), 34. 54 Weber, "Just Making It," 107. 55 Nietzsche, "Homer's Contest," 37-8. 56 See Ricoeur, "The Metaphorical Process," 156, on the role of feeling in the apprehension of metaphor, as he attempts to counter the prejudicial connotations of feeling as emotionalism divested of intentionality: "Feeling is not contrary to thought. It is thought made ours. This felt participation is a part of [the poem's] complete meaning as a poem." 2. Irony II: This Is Not a Pipe 1 Lawrance Thompson, Robert Frost: The Early Years, 1874-IQ15 (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1966), 427. 2 For the broken baptismal font, see "A Fountain, a Bottle, a Donkey's Ears, and Some Books." In looking for this font, the speaker finds a dead poetess's house. Clara Robinson "was 'shut in' for life. She lived her whole / Life long in bed, and wrote her things in bed": she is a ludicrously cautionary figure of the poet who spins everything from his own subjectivity and the world at his "inner windowsill, / And . . . outer windowsill." The box of unsold and unread books left in the abandoned house in an attic filled with wasps is its own statement. This speaker articulates the very dilemma of the poet who cannot shut himself in to subjectivity like a woman - to become a "poetess" - but who is nonetheless


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forced by his intellectual and poetic predilections to wander like a hill wife through the nonsocialized, abandoned, and deteriorative constructs outside of the workaday world. He imagines a book of poetry - the poet's product and a metonym for his poetic self - flung sailing out the attic window "Til it caught wind and, opening out its covers, / Tried to improve on sailing like a tile / By flying like a bird (silent in flight, / But all the burden of its body song) / Only to tumble like a stricken bird, / And lie in stones and bushes unretrieved." The poet's task is to navigate no-man's-land, to sing in Oven-bird tones which repudiate lyric fragility about things that are neither too personal nor too objectively systematized. The broken chalice is from "Directive," which takes place in a deconstructed land that evades the pitfalls of both town and farm even as it repudiates the possibility of an uncorrupted wild space: near "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" one may find a hidden, but significantly broken grail. To find it you must become "lost enough to find yourself" in a metamorphic landscape where the cellar holes that marked civilization are "closing like a dent in dough." 3 Lawrance Thompson, Robert Frost: The Later Years (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1976), 268. In "On Emerson" in Prose, Frost makes a wonderfully typical assertion, "A melancholy dualism is the only soundness. The question is: is soundness of the essence." 4 Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill & Wang, 1975), 21. 5 Thompson, The Early Years, 427. 6 Job's assertion in "A Masque of Reason" that "There's will as motor and there's will as brakes. / Reason is, I suppose, the steering gear. / The will as brakes can't stop the will as motor / For very long. We're plainly made to go" (11. 230-3) has a Schopenhauerean ring. Both Thompson, in The Early Years, and Reginald Cook, Robert Frost: A Living Voice (Amherst: Univ. of Massachusetts Press, 1974), document Frost's speaking of Schopenhauer in the context of his own poetry. 7 See Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1984), 73-9. 8 In "The Hill Wife," Frost says, "Sudden and swift and light as that / The ties gave, / And he learned of finalities / Besides the grave." The abandoned husband's awareness of "finalities" is testament to his static, nonmetamorphic condition: having been left, like the lover in "The Housekeeper" or "Bereft" or "The Fear," he will have lost his woman irrevocably. The woman, however, will by implication reappear; she shows up with another man in "The Fear," and she marries another man in "The Housekeeper." Metamorphic, she knows no finalities but the grave. Like Paul's wife, who stores herself until she is discovered by an admiring man, the poem may be said to elude capture even while the (male) speakers tend to be left within a disintegrative environment (see, e.g., "Bereft" or "The Thatch"). 9 For an extended discussion of a sightedness that goes beyond the superficially cerebral level of "eye-reading" see Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good (New

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York: Arc, 1986). See too Suzanne K. Langer, Philosophy in a New Key: A Study in the Symbolism of Reason, Rite, and Art (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1957), especially "Discursive Forms and Presentational Forms," 79-102, particularly 101-2, in which Langer talks of the different functions of speech and music. Frost does not consistently or unembarrassedly subsidize the notion that one can transcend the particulars of vision for a more visionary knowledge, but he shares with these (female) philosophers a sense that mere eye /brain-located sight does not account for the nonrational components of his poetics or his poems. The ear, with its connectedness to a more viscerally located understanding, may even subvert "eye-reading." See Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, 18— 23, as he makes a related argument against the dichotomy in which "scientific" method is valorized as having access to true information while narrative, which has a "vibratory, musical property," is seen as a remnant of the "savage" mind. 10 See Frank Lentricchia, "The Resentments of Robert Frost," American Literature 62, no. 2 (June 1990): 193-5, f° r a reference to Frost's attitudes toward Rittenhouse. For some provocative comments on proper names, see Julia Kristeva, "Women, Psychoanalysis, Politics," in The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1986), 234-6. See too Jacques Derrida, "The Politics of Friendship," Philosophical Forum 85 (1988): 638-9. George F. Bagby, Jr., "Frost's Synechdochism," in On Frost: The BestfromAmerican Literature, ed. Louis J. Budd and Edwin H. Cady (Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press, 1991), 139-40, talks of Frost's synechdochal punning. 11 See Frank Lentricchia, "Lyric in the Culture of Capitalism," American Literary History 1, no. 1 (Spring 1989): 83. 12 John Hollander, The Figure of Echo: A Mode of Allusion in Milton and After (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California, 1981), 114. Hollander speaks briefly of Frost in his chapter on metaleptic echo. 13 See Richard Poirier, Robert Frost: The Work of Knowing (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1977), 13. Poirier speaks of echoes in Frost's poetry of Wordsworth, Tennyson, Rossetti, Thoreau, Marvell, James, Plato, and others. See too Charles Berger, "Echoing Eden: Frost and Origins," in Robert Frost, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 1986): 147-65. 14 II Kings 16:4. 15 Paradise Lost, book I, 11. 472-5. See too "Moloch," The Encyclopaedia Britannica, n t h ed. 16 Hollander, The Figure of Echo, 114. 17 Soren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling and The Sickness unto Death, trans. Walter Lowrie (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1954), 29. 18 Lentricchia, "Lyric," 66. 19 See ibid., on Frost's populist aspirations. 20 See Thompson, The Early Years, 258-9, for the circumstances of Elliott Frost's death that are associated with the writing of this poem. Thompson sees "Stars" as a restatement of Elinor Frost's words, "There is no oversight of human affairs." See Poirier, The Work of Knowing, 98-9, on Frost and stars. 21 In both "The Figure a Poem Makes" and "The Constant Symbol" Frost imagines the poet as giant {Prose, 19, 78); in "New Hampshire" he places his speaker on a mountaintop above other lower mountaintops where he wonders,

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only half ironically, if his linguistic presumption in "look[ing] down critical / On mountains" is an Olympian flaw. Sensing his Atlas-like inclination to lift up mountains, he asks, "Can it be some strength / I feel, as of an earthquake in my back, / To heave them higher to the morning star?" (11. 317-19). 22 See Cook, A Living Voice, 285. For the sonnet titled here "Bright Star," see John Keats, Complete Poems and Selected Letters, ed. Clarence DeWitt Thorpe (New York: Odyssey Press, 1935), 329. Certainly the more obvious of the allusions would be to the "Bright Star" sonnet, yet Thompson, in The Later Years, 245, documents Frost's familiarity with "The Eve of St. Agnes," quoting him as saying of Keats: "His five odes are beautiful. I say his book of 1825 is the finest book of the century." Frost is, I take it, actually speaking of Keats's 1820 edition, in which the five odes, "The Eve of St. Agnes," "Lamia," "Hyperion," and other major poems appear. 23 Poirier, The Work of Knowing, 300. 24 Cook, A Living Voice, 183; The Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1961), 1284. 25 Frost's title, "The Freedom of the Moon," seems predictive of the flagrant "poetic" manipulation he celebrates in this poem, where the moon has lost the weighty significance one finds in, for example, "The Death of the Hired Man" ("Part of a moon was falling down the west, / Dragging the whole sky with it to the hills") and has been turned into an objet d'art to be "pulled . . . from a crate." 26 Cook, A Living Voice, 90. Gaius Valerious Catullus, The Complete Poetry, trans. Frank O. Copley (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1957), 65. 27 Catullus, Complete Poetry, 66. 28 One could make an interesting analogy here between poetry and offspring. Frost's constant references within his poetry to the cuckoldry by which illegitimate children are begotten and passed off as legitimate are, as I have suggested in the Introduction, doubly informed by both a sexual and a literary anxiety of influence. To place, as Frost does, essential meaning in the sound of his voice is to hedge his bets as to responsibility for the poems that may or may not then be counted as his offspring. 29 Tom VanderVen, "Frost's Dramatic Principle of 'Oversound,'" in On Frost, ed. Cady and Budd, 97. 30 Cary Nelson, Repression and Recovery (Madison: Univ of Wisconsin Press, 84). See too Poirier, The Work of Knowing, 236-41, on Frost's work as seen from the Left. 31 Thompson, The Early Years, 435. 32 See John Sears, "Robert Frost and the Imagist: The Background of Frost's 'Sentence Sounds,'" New England Quarterly 54, no. 4 (December 1981): 479, on Frost's resistance to imagism and its proselytizers, Pound and Lowell. 33 Frank Lentricchia, Robert Frost: Modern Poetics and the Landscapes of Self (Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press, 1975), 12. 34 This problem does not simply resolve itself into a question of reader perspective, whereby an excluded other sympathizes with a character with whom the author has no patience. See Josephine Donovan, "Toward a Woman's Poetics," Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature 3 (Winter 1984): 99—110, for a discus-

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sion of the "gynocentricism" that might bring one to sympathy for such a character. Because Frost clearly sees women as a locus for the imaginative as well as the unreasonable, the witchlike, and the insane, he approaches his female speakers with a significant degree of ambivalence. In "Home Burial," for example, Amy might be said to have been given the climactic, insightful moment in her "The nearest friends can go / With anyone to death" speech. 35 See, e.g., the dramatic enactment of "Home Burial" in the 1984 PBS Voices and Visions series. See too David W. Shaw, "The Poetics of Pragmatism: Robert Frost and William James," New England Quarterly 59, no. 2 (June 1986): 167. Read through the vision of Frost as pragmatist, the wife of "Home Burial" is said by Shaw to be at fault in a way that the "tough-minded" pragmatic husband is not. "Frost seems to me to be gently critical of the inflexible wife," says Shaw. 36 Frost himself told Amy Lowell that in North of Boston and Mountain Interval he had put his speakers in tragic circumstances "with no one to blame." See Cook, A Living Voice, 216. 37 Lentricchia, Modern Poetics, 28. 38 Lentricchia, "Lyric," 84. 39 See Thompson, The Early Years, 455-68, for a discussion of Frost's relationship to Thomas. In his account Thompson cites without further comment Thomas's own metaphor for his melancholia as "an unfathomable, deep forest where all must lose their way" (463), and he also cites W.H. Hudson's 1913 comment to Edward Garnett concerning Thomas: "I believe he has taken the wrong path and is wandering lost in the vast wilderness" (463). Frost's appropriation in "The Road Not Taken" of a metaphor so apparently apt complicates readings of the poem as convivial irony. 40 Plato, Collected Dialogues, 535. 41 Thompson, The Early Years, 435. 42 See John Hollander, Melodious Guile: Fictive Pattern in Poetic Language (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 1988), especially his chapter "The Footing of His Feet: A long Line Leads to Another." 43 Thompson, The Early Years, 435. 44 See Peter Vanderberg, "Prosody as Meaning in Selected Poems of Robert Frost," Platte River Review 18, no. 2 (Spring 1990): 32-4, as he makes a case for the woman's "mounting instability" in the face of the man's control. One must be aware here - and always - of how often the very same behavior is either valorized or denigrated in accordance to which gender performs it; it is not, by virtue of emanating from a man, either seen or named the same as that which emanates from a woman. 45 Michel Foucault, This Is Not a Pipe, trans. James Harkness (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1982), 21. 46 Ibid., 21. 47 Ibid., 22. 48 Ibid., 4. 49 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage Books, 1973), 49-50. 50 Roland Barthes, Image, Music, Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Noonday Press, 1977), 147.

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51 Roland Barthes, Writing Degree Zero, trans. Annette Lavers and Colin Smith (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968), 49. 52 Ibid., 47. 53 Thompson, The Early Years, 435. Langer, Philosophy in a New Key, uses Frost's very metaphor when speaking of the inadequate linearity of words: "As it is . . . all language has a form which requires us to string out our ideas even though their objects rest one within the other; as pieces of clothing that are actually worn one over the other have to be strung side by side on the clothesline" (81). 54 Foucault, This Is Not a Pipe, 4. 55 Sam Weber, "Just Making It," Afterword to Jean-Franqois Lyotard, Just Gaming, trans. Wlad Godzich (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1985), 118.

56 Frost had early on written a number of short stories for the Farm-Poultry Semi-Monthly, which are collected in Robert Frost: Farmer-Poultry man, ed. E. C. Lathem and Lawrance Thompson (Hanover, N.H.: Dartmouth Univ. Press, 1963). Many critics felt that his North of Boston dramatic narratives were unpoetic, too much like prose. See Reginald L. Cook, "The Critics and Robert Frost," in Frost: Centennial Essays, ed. Jac L. Tharpe (Jackson: Univ. Press of Mississippi, n.d.), 15-30. See too Philip L. Gerber, ed., Critical Essays on Robert Frost (Boston: Hall, 1982), for some contemporaneous assessments of the poetry. 57 Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Noonday Press, 1974). 58 Thompson, The Early Years, xiv-xv. 59 Soren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Irony, trans. Lee M. Capel (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1965), 265. 60 Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good, 86. 3. Women: Dryads, Witches, and Hill Wives 1 Despite queries as to Len's relationship to the speaker (see Floyd G. Watkins, "The Poetry of the Unsaid - Robert Frost's Narrative and Dramatic Poems," Texas Quarterly 15 [1972]: 89), it seems, nonetheless, a defensible assumption to assign Len the more conventional role of husband rather than brother or lover. The speaker has suffered a life that the woman of "The Housekeeper" (the title of which suggests an equivalency between the two poems) simply up and leaves since she is not married to the man whose house she has kept. 2 See Richard Poirier, Robert Frost: The Work of Knowing (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1977): 87-172. This chapter, "Outward Bound," discusses at length Frost's ambivalence about "home." 3 From his reading of Greek lyric poets and of Catullus, Frost would have assimilated the classical use of the female foot as a kind of sexual shorthand. Anacreon writes: "The love god with his golden curls / puts a bright ball into my hand, / shows a girl in her fancy shoes, / and suggests that I take her." In Greek Lyrics, trans. Richmond Lattimore (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, i960), 45. Catullus's no. 61, an epithalamium, describes the bride's feet and shoes: in the Copley translation she comes "on snowy foot / wearing the saffron sandal," and

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in Gregory's translation she wears "fatal golden slippers." See Gaius Valerius Catullus, The Complete Poetry, trans. Frank O. Copley (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1957), 52, and The Poems of Catullus, trans. Horace Gregory (New York: Grove Press, 1956), 77. This image of the female foot in its fancy shoe is significant at two levels, for it stands metonymically for Frost's egressing, sexually roving women, even as it makes a metrical pun. 4 See Ivan Illich, Gender (New York: Pantheon Books, 1982), 125-6, for bibliographic information on contraceptive issues. 5 The man and woman move in an intricate dance, she coming downward and then retracing a step, he "Mounting until she cower[s] under him," she "shrinking from beneath his arm" to slide downstairs. Randall Jarrell examines the image of the woman sinking into "a modest, compact, feminine bundle" upon her skirts; it might be further observed that this childlike posture is also very much a gesture of sexual denial, body bent, knees drawn up protectively against the breasts, all encompassed by voluminous skirts. The two are in profound imbalance, and Frost makes the wife's speech and movements the poetic equivalent of stumbling and resistance: her lines are frequently eleven syllables and often are punctuated by spondees whose forceful but awkward slowness embodies the woman's vacillations "from terrified to dull" and from frozen and silent immobility to anger. See Randall Jarrell, "Robert Frost's 'Home Burial,'" in The Moment of Poetry, ed. Don Cameron Allen (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1962), 104. 6 See, e.g., "The Census Taker," where the rotting and abandoned house never held women, "The Black Cottage," where the boards are warping and bees live in the walls, "A Fountain, a Bottle, a Donkey's Ears, and Some Books," where the doors still hold but the broken windows allow easy entry, "The Thatch," where a hundred-year-old cottage opens itself to the rain at the dissolution of the marriage within, "The House Keeper," where the mother predicts the disintegration of the farm, and "The Generations of Men," where all that is left is an open cellar. 7 Jarrell, "Home Burial," 123. 8 Frost makes this connection almost comic in "Place for a Third," where a man's third wife, a woman who has also been married three times, asks not to be buried with the first wives. The husband Laban is made to seem almost a panderer as he seeks burial for his wife by the side of her first husband, whose grave is presided over by a spinster sister. In the end Laban's petition is rejected, the spinster's reason, "There wouldn't be no sense / Eliza's had too many other men." 9 Robert W. Swennes, "Man and Wife: The Dialogue of Contraries in Robert Frost's Poetry," American Literature 42 (1970): 365; Poirier, The Work of Knowing, 108-9.

10 Frost's characters often use some enclosed, framed space as a kind of "mirror" that both reflects and generates emotion. Relative to the Apollonian vision of the speaker of "For Once, Then, Something" who looks into the reflective pool, this sustained gaze into the "cellar hole" is suggestive of an alternative, more chthonic fantasy. 11 Poirier, The Work of Knowing, 116-18, also comments on this similarity.

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12 See Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964), the chapter titled "Nests." 13 Xaviere Gauthier, "Why Witches?" in New French Feminisms, ed. Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron (New York: Schocken Books, 1981), 199-203. See too Helene Cixous and Catherine Clement, The Newly Born Woman, trans. Betsy Wing (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1986), 26-39. The witch who rides men is a common figure in American folklore, and frequently the consequence of that "riding" is that the man is so weakened he can no longer plow, plant, or harvest. Thus as in "Putting in the Seed," there is implied rivalry between women and the womanly earth. For a sustained rendering of the witch who rides a man until his farm fails see the Red Emmy story in Lee Smith's Oral History (New York: Putnam's 1983). 14 E.F. Kittay, "Woman as Metaphor," Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy 3, no. 2 (1988): 74-5. 15 See Baird W. Whitlock, "Conversations with Robert Frost," Xavier Review 3, no. 2 (1983): 3-4, for one of Frost's witch stories, this one especially intriguing in its conclusion. With their men away, all the women in a village are convicted of being witches by a roving band of witch-hunters. Just as the women are to be burned, the men return and save them, driving the persecutors out of town. Then the men spank all the women who were involved. This ending pleased Frost and he told it often, saying, "It may not be true, but it should have been." 16 See Helen Bacon, "For Girls: From 'Birches' to 'Wild Grapes,'" Yale Review 67 (1977): 13-30, for a reading of the maenadic implications in "Wild Grapes." 17 See Numbers 5:12-31. 18 The thyrsus is the wand carried by maenads during their Bacchic rituals and is a staff topped by a pine cone and wound with ivy and vine branches. Euripides has his messenger recount how the maenads struck their wands against the ground and brought up fountains of clear water and how "pure honey spurted, streaming, from their wands." The Bacchae, trans. William Arrowsmith, vol. 5 of The Complete Greek Tragedies, ed. Richmond Lattimore and David Grene (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1959), 185-6. 19 See Bacon, "For Girls," on the evidence that the young girl is Susan Hayes Ward, to whom this event happened, and on her conclusion that Miss Ward, who never married, used not letting go with the heart as a means to become poetry editor of The Independent: "A single woman in traditionally masculine territory, she 'wasted' her extra life on writing and on fostering unknown young writers" (29)20 Ibid., 18-23. 21 This image of woman/wood/snake is subtly reiterated in "The Ax-Helve," where the Frenchman Baptiste stands the finished handle erect and the speaker says it is "as when / The snake stood up for evil in the garden." Baptiste caresses and feminizes the shapely helve, calling it "she." 22 Lawrance Thompson, Robert Frost: The Early Years, 1874-1Q15 (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1966), 512. 23 Ibid. 24 Catullus, The Complete Poetry, trans. Copley, 54; idem, The Poems of Catullus, trans. Gregory, 78; see too ibid, 80: "you give the flowering bride away /

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(warm from her mother's shelter) / into the powerful encircling arms / of a flaming bridegroom." 4. Eros: The Mischief Maker 1 Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Vintage Books, 1988), 85, 91. 2 The quote from Freud with which Luce Irigaray begins Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1985), begins to sum up this attitude: "Ladies and Gentlemen . . . Throughout history people have knocked their heads against the riddle of the nature of femininity - . . . . Nor will you have escaped worrying over this problem - those of you who are men; to those of you who are women this will not apply - you are yourselves the problem." See Donald Sheehy, "(Re)figuring Love: Robert Frost in Crisis," New England Quarterly 63, no. 2 (June 1990): 184. Sheehy talks of Frost's two lovers, Elinor White and, after Elinor's death, Kathleen Morrison. Sheehy quotes from Thompson's unpublished "Notes" on the years 1939 and 1940: "I saw Frost come very close to the verge of insanity. He was a wild man, he was frantic, he was deeply upset, he was just plain 'crazy' in some of his actions." Thompson sees this as produced, in part, by Frost's "passionate prejudice" in favor of Mrs. Morrison. See too Sheehy, "Aphrodite and the Factory: Commercialism and the Artist in Frost and Cather," South Atlantic Review 51, no. 2 (1986): 55-6, who quotes a highly suggestive passage from Frost's unpublished play, "In an Art Factory," which links "the way art is produced" with sexual corruption, defilement, blasphemy, and madness: the stage directions for the character's jealous dispute with his figure-model lover say, "He walks back and forth as if he were kept by the bars of a cage from getting at her." 3 W.B. Yeats, The Collected Poems (New York: Macmillan, 1974), 337. See Bruce F. Murphy, "The Exile of Literature: Poetry and the Politics of the Other(s)," Critical Inquiry 17, no. 1 (Autumn 1990): 167, for a discussion of how these assumptions about poetic language as apolitical subsidize a conservative ideology. 4 Paul de Man, "The Epistemology of Metaphor," Critical Inquiry 5, no. 1 (Autumn 1978): 19. 5 See John Hollander, Melodious Guile (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 1988), 2, on this use of "ulterior." 6 Yeats, The Collected Poems, 255. 7 See Julia Kristeva, Tales ofLove, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1987), 1-17, for a discussion of love that impinges on this issue. 8 See Foucault, Madness and Civilization, especially chap. 4, "Passion and Delirium," 85-116. 9 Ibid., 15-16. 10 See ibid., 136-58. Whether it was used as a catchall term for otherwise undiagnosed women's diseases and apparently pathological behavior or whether it was, as in the Freud and Breuer studies on hysteria, more rigorously defined and diagnosed, the term "hysteria" is associated either with a physiological determinism (hystero means "uterus") or an inherent character flaw or weakness in

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women. "This disease in which women invent, exaggerate, and repeat all the various absurdities of which a disordered imagination is capable, has sometimes become epidemic and contagious," asserts one eighteenth-century doctor (ibid., 138-9). See too Josef Breuer and Sigmund Freud, Studies on Hysteria, trans. James Strachey (New York: Basic Books, 1957). 11 Frost enriches this scene with a series of metonymic devices whereby the woman, Maple, is shown to be completely severed from her natural, forest environment and yet still associated with treeness. She has learned "shorthand, whatever shorthand may / Have had to do with it - she sometimes wondered," and she is "taking dictation on a paper pad." When her boss interrupts her reverie by telling her she reminds him of a maple tree, "She almost wrote the words down on her knee." Having been removed from the forest and lofted to the nineteenth floor with the "airships," Maple has herself become a kind of shorthand, which the man deciphers. Frost creates elsewhere the sense of how trees are transformed to boards and paper: Paul's wife is a fragile, dry pith - a piece of paper - before she is reconstituted as woman; the dendrophobic man of "New Hampshire" fears trees until they have been made "decent" by having "been to mill / And educated into boards." 12 Foucault, Madness and Civilization, 149: "The more easily penetrable the internal space becomes, the more frequent is hysteria and the more various its aspects; but if the body is firm and resistant, if internal space is dense, organized, and solidly heterogeneous in its different regions, the symptoms of hysteria are rare and its effects will remain simple. Is this not exactly what separates female hysteria from the male variety, or, if you will, hysteria from hypochondria? Neither symptoms, in fact, or even causes form the principle of separation between the diseases, but only the spatial solidarity of the body, and so to speak the density of the interior landscape." 13 "I made him nail the door shut / And push the headboard of the bed against it," says the Witch of Coos (11. 119-20). And as the woman remembers in "A Servant to Servants," "And just when [the madman] was at the height, / Father and mother married, and mother came, / A bride, to help take care of such a creature, / And accommodate her young life to his: / That was what marrying father meant to her. / She had to lie and hear love things made dreadful / By his shouts in the night" (11. 125-31). 14 Reginald Cook, Robert Frost: A Living Voice (Amherst: Univ. of Massachusetts Press, 1974), 9415 Foucault, Madness and Civilization, 18, uses the Gothic form as a metaphor for madness. 16 Ibid., 18. 17 Kristeva, Tales of Love, 72-5. Kristeva's reading of the birth of Eros resonates with Frost's anxieties about the invitation to formlessness extended by the mother and with his sense of that paternalistic and manly obligation to make inroads on chaos. Poros and proi are words used in connection with "roads, sky and sea boundaries, what enlightens the darkness of primeval waters and blazes a trail for the sun." Penia, who is excluded from the gods' feasting, is poor and lacking, without form. See, in the Symposium, Socrates' musing on Diotima's lessons about the paradoxical oppositions inherent in Love, by virtue of this

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birth. In Plato: The Collected Dialogues, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns, Bollingen Series 71 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1989), 553— 63; for the story of Penia and Poros, 203, b-d. 18 See Joel Feinberg, "Autonomy," in The Inner Citadel: Essays on Individual Autonomy, ed. John Christman (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1989), 27-53. As Feinberg points out, using his own metaphor for containment, the notion of personal autonomy, that "realm of inviolable sanctuary most of us sense in our own beings," is conceived in terms of boundaries, called one's "territory," "realm," "sphere," "domain"; it is "self-possession" in its deepest sense. The implications of ownership suggest the defensive nature of the position, which guarantees a vested interest in creating alterities that will have no legitimate claim to one's self-possession. 19 One might further speculate on the complex iconography of the mown "feeble-pointed spikes of flowers / (Pale orchises)" and the mobile, disappearing, "scared," "bright green snake." It is Frost's strength that he often creates highly sexualized landscapes that will not resolve themselves into simplistically phallic terms. Here, as elsewhere, the naturalistic level - what would ordinarily be there in such a scene - remains uncompromised by sexual symbolisms that are both explicitly "masculine" and more ambiguously sexualized. As Thomas Laqueur points out in Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1990), 4, the "one-sex model" (based on male physiology) used orcheis to refer both to male testes and to the ovary, the organ that had, by the nineteenth century, become a synecdoche for woman. The scene in "Mowing" becomes generative of typically dense Frostian complexity, which holds sexual productivity through desire (either way the flower is perceived) hostage to the more ordered productivity of the husbandman. 20 See David W. Shaw, "The Poetics of Pragmatism: Robert Frost and William James," New England Quarterly 59, no. 2 (June 1986): 165: "As Frost would say, the free man is not the slave of metonymy," Shaw says in his argument for Frost's pragmatic approach to language as inextricably bound to use, so that "all the fun's in how you say a thing." Shaw's argument consolidates some of my reservations about Frost as a "pragmatist," for it seems undeniable to me that the poet's sense of his own bodily integrity makes into metonymies what might otherwise be perceived as metaphors. Peirce's definition of pragmatism eschews a great deal, suggesting the rigorous limits pragmatism sets to all those habits of mind having to do with inherent meaning, Platonic forms, etc.: "Consider what effects, that might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object." Philosophical Writings ofPeirce, ed. Justus Buchler (New York: Dover, 1955), 31. See too Richard Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1982), and idem, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1989). To be reductionist, I don't believe Frost favored the kind of intellectual discipline necessary to be even mostly a pragmatist. 21 See Socrates, Symposium, 180 d-181 d: "Well then, gentlemen, the earthly Aphrodite's Love is a very earthly Love indeed, and does his work entirely at random. It is he that governs the passions of the vulgar. For, first, they are as

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much attracted by women as by boys; next, whoever they may love, their desires are of the body rather than of the soul. . . . For this is the Love of the younger Aphrodite, whose nature partakes of both male and female. "But the heavenly Love springs from a goddess whose attributes have nothing of the female, but are altogether male, and who is also the elder of the two, and innocent of any hint of lewdness. And so those who are inspired by this other Love turn rather to the male, preferring the more vigorous and intellectual bent." 22 See Frank Lentricchia, "The Resentments of Robert Frost," American Literature 62, no. 2 (June 1990): 175-200, for his reading of Frost's locating himself within an "unflinchingly masculine" poetics. The picture that emerges is interesting, as the high modernists (Eliot, Pound, Stevens) whom Untermeyer attacks in The New Era in American Poetry (1919) are repudiated for their, in Lentricchia's words, "effeminate and morbid" attraction to what Untermeyer called "verbal legerdemain." In other words, the unmanly urge to write poetry and the act of writing it are so intrinsically problematized that competition is fierce to prove that one can do it and still be a man. 23 Lentricchia, "The Resentments," 99. 24 See Sheehy, "(Re)figuring Love," 192, who quotes from Lawrance Thompson's note in Robert Frost: The Later Years (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1976) on Frost's romantic relationship with Kathleen Morrison: "No woman can mother me with impunity." Sheehy sees this assertion, coming as it did on the heels of the sexual consummation of Frost's interest in Morrison, as evidence that Frost saw sexual intercourse as a "punishment" for Morrison's overly maternal solicitude. 25 The geode looks very much like the representations of the blastula in embryology; this similarity echoes, in effect, an arrestment of form in its secret phase, with complexity imminent and hidden. 26 Hyde Cox and Edward Connery Lathem, Selected Prose of Robert Frost (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1966), 106; see too "The Lesson for Today." 27 Frost may have other versions of the Cybele myth in mind, but his references to Catullus's recounting of Attis (cited in Cook, A Living Voice, 90) suggest his awareness of the interdependence of frustrated love, castration, madness, and frenzy found in Catullus's treatment of the cult of Cybele. 28 See Gaius Valerius Catullus, The Complete Poetry, trans. Frank O. Copley (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1957), 66. Also see The Poems of Catullus, trans. Horace Gregory (New York: Grove Press, 1956), 96; Attis cries, "Look at my misery and hear me cry my curse against this miserable fate, / I am a woman, hear my voice and look at me. . . . / Witness me, a girl, a slave of Cybele, dressed like a girlish follower of Bacchus, / Half my soul destroyed, and sterile I must live on this cold mountain. . . . " 29 See Catullus, The Complete Poetry, trans. Copley, 68: "am I now called waiting-maid of the gods and Cybele's slave? / a maenad I, half of myself I, a man unsexed, shall that be I?" The worship of Cybele and the maenadic worship of Dionysus are intertwined; see The Bacchae, ed. David Grene and Richmond Lattimore, trans. William Arrowsmith (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1959), 11. 76-80: " - Blessed are the dancers and those who are purified, who dance on the hill in the holy dance of god. / - Blessed are they who keep the rite of Cybele

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the mother. / - Blessed are the thyrsus-bearers, those who wield in their hands the holy wand of god." See too E.R. Dodds's commentary on the coupling of Dionysus and Cybele myths in Euripides Bacchae (Oxford: Clarendon Press, i960), 76-7. 30 Cook, A Living Voice, 90. 31 Plato: The Collected Diatogues, ed. Hamilton and Cairns, 499-500. See too Sigmund Freud, "The Ego and the Id," in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, trans. James Strachey, vol. 19 (London: Hogarth Press, 1961), 25, for his analogy of the ego as the man on horseback "who has to check the superior strength of the horse [the id]. . . . The analogy may be carried a little further. Often a rider, if he is not to be parted from his horse, is obliged to guide it where it wants to go; so in the same way the ego is in the habit of transforming the id's will into action as if it were his own." "The Ego and the Id" was published in 1923, "Riders" in 1930. 32 Plato: The Collected Dialogues, ed. Hamilton and Cairns, 499-500. 33 See Philip Slater, The Glory of Hera (Boston, Mass.: Beacon Press, 1968), 3i9n. 34 See Lawrance Thompson, Robert Frost: The Early Years, 1874—IQ15 (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1966), 217-24, for Frost's interests in botany. 35 Thompson's account of Frost's Dismal Swamp experience in ibid., 177-81, speaks of the narrow wagon road Frost used, precariously, to cross the swamp and of a place where the road was submerged so that only a narrow plank walk remained above the water. This memory may inform the road image in "An Encounter." 36 See Richard Poirier, in Robert Frost: The Work of Knowing (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1977), 178. Poirier notes the sexual energies in this poem, but it seems to be that the fetal fantasy, which is also obviously a sexual one, is only thus more fully problematized. 37 See Foucault, Madness and Civilization, 125-39, on correlations between sexual expenditure, violence, and death. 38 Vereen Bell, "Robert Frost and the Nature of Narrative," New England Review and Bread Loaf Quarterly 8, no. 1 (Autumn 1985): 77. 39 See Foucault, Madness and Civilization, 85-116, 136-58, for discussions of how the "spatial solidarity of the body" and the "density of the interior landscape" (149) are related to one's capacity for passion, delirium, and hysteria. 40 Not that Frost is alone in this fantasy, which is, admittedly, usually slightly less than atomic: the blues singer's "churning urn of burning funk" has many variations, with Prince among the most grandiose and insistent of the recent pretenders to the orgasmic flood (hear, e.g., Prince's "Delirious"). 41 Cook, A Living Voice, 63. 5. Prosody: White Noise 1 See Lawrance Thompson, Robert Frost: The Early Years, 1874-igi^ (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1966), 35-6. 2 "Home Burial," "The Housekeeper," "The Fear," "The Hill Wife," "The Witch of Grafton," "Maple," "Paul's Wife," "The Subverted Flower"

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are among those poems in which lovers or spouses are alienated, angry, fearful, etc. 3 See Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1984), 1823. Lyotard, in speaking of this quality of meter to render temporality "simultaneously evanescent and immemorial," speaks of ritualistic phrases whose power and significance reside more in their sound than in linguistic "content." 4 Robert W. Swennes, "Man and Wife: The Dialogue of Contraries in Robert Frost's Poetry," American Literature 42 (1970): 375; Richard Poirier, Robert Frost: The Work of Knowing (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1977), 108—9. 5 See Yvor Winters, "Robert Frost, Or the Spiritual Drifter as Poet," in The Function of Criticism: Problems and Exercises (Denver: Alan Swallow, 1957), 176.

This essay makes an extended attack on Frost and his poetry and sees as fundamental to hisflawedcraft his position relative to irony: "Frost, the rustic realist of North of Boston, appears in his old age as a standard exemplar of irresponsible Romantic irony, of the kind of irony that has degenerated steadily from the moderately low level of Laforgue, through Pound, Eliot, Cummings, and their younger imitators" (174). 6 The examples of Frost's conscious and virtuoso manipulations of form to reflect content are endless. Perhaps the comic example of "Departmental," with its antlike, methodical randomness, would provide a fresh reminder of his sheer pleasure in words and his almost calligramic instinct for form. Proceeding by arhythmic, six- to eight-syllable lines that form into units of variable lengths, the poem scurries down the page. The feminine rhymes with their unstressed final syllables - "any/antennae," "Jerry/Janizary/bury/commissary," "people/sepal/petal/nettle," "atwiddle/middle" - parody a funereally lingering resonance, a ministerial rhythm. Word ofJerry the ant's death "goes forth in Formic" (another Frostian pun, perhaps, as language is carried on the odor of formic acid and in Frost's own formic virtuosities), thus bypassing language with odor, much as Frost undermines it with sound. 7 See Lawrance Thompson, Robert Frost: The Years of Triumph (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1964), 53, and Letters, 173-4. 8 Anthony Easthope, Poetry as Discourse (New York: Methuen, 1983), 3. 9 Bruce F. Murphy, "The Exile of Literature: Poetry and the Politics of the Other(s)," Critical Inquiry 17, no. 1 (Autumn 1990): 166-7. 10 While Frost explicitly claims that he does not want a special poetic language that has separated itself from spoken language, and while he claims to search for the "unmade words to work with, not the familiar ones that everybody exclaims Poetry! at," he is nonetheless acutely aware of how words are infiltrated by their literary antecedents, and in his allusions and his puns he in fact exploits those antecedents. See Letters, 141. 11 Easthope, Poetry as Discourse, 16. 12 For example, the insistent repetitions, the series of end-stopped lines, the medial caesurae in "Mending Wall" are designed to bifurcate just as the wall separates pines from apple trees. Frost's prosodic mimicry of the physical becomes a display in itself, as if to assert unequivocally his prowess. See Frost's Paris Review interview in Interviews with Robert Frost, ed. E.C. Lathem (New York:

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Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1966), 232, 234: "I look at a poem as a performance. I look on the poet as a man of prowess, just like an athlete. He's a performer. . . . " "How could I, how could anyone, have a good time with what cost me too much agony? How could they? What do I want to communicate but what a hell of a good time I had writing it? . . . Scoring. You've got to score. They say not, but you've got to score - in all the realms: theology, politics, astronomy, history, and the country life around you." 13 See Easthope, Poetry as Discourse, 3-18, and Roland Barthes, Writing Degree Zero, trans. Annette Lavers (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968), 41-52, 84-8. Barthes says, "The multiplication of modes of writing is a modern phenomenon which forces a choice upon the writer, making form a kind of behavior and giving rise to an ethic of writing. . . . Modern writing is a truly independent organism which grows around the literary act, decorates it with a value which is foreign to its intention, ceaselessly commits it to a double mode of existence, and superimposes upon the content of the words opaque signs which carry with them a history, a second-order meaning which compromises or redeems it, so that with the situation of thought is mingled a supplementary fate, often diverging from the former and always an encumbrance to it - the fate of the form" (84). 14 John Crowe Ransom, "Poetry: A Note on Ontology," in Critiques and Essays in Criticism: 1920-1948, ed. Robert Stallman (New York: Ronald Press, 1949), 3i, 3415 Quoted in Guy Rotella, Reading and Writing Nature (Boston: Northeastern Univ. Press, 1991), 66. 16 When Frost poetically tackles abstractions - instinct ("The White-Tailed Hornet"), religion ("The Black Cottage"), justice ("A Masque of Mercy"), etc., he tends to exacerbate the discrepancy between the physical and the abstract to a point where his arguments take on an Alice-in-Wonderland quality: the minister in "The Black Cottage" says, "dear me, why abandon a belief / Merely because it ceases to be true. / Cling to it long enough, and not a doubt / It will turn true again, for so it goes"; in "A Masque of Mercy," "Nothing can make injustice just but mercy." In "The Spiritual Drifter as Poet," Yvor Winters, irascible, sees Frost's "didacticism" as characterized by "perversity and incoherence of thought" (179). In keeping with Ransom's assertions about "physical poetry" ("All true poetry is a phase of Physical Poetry") and Warren's discussion about "Pure" poetry, Frost manifests a typical (and topical) poetic mistrust of abstractions and an equivalent inability to find a (physical) place relative to them. See Ransom's "Poetry: A Note on Ontology," and Warren's "Pure and Impure Poetry" in Critiques and Essays in Criticism, ed. Stallman. 17 It is perhaps this very sense of a crucial balance between stable sound and a precarious but tenacious materiality that causes Frost to repeat the suggestion of the magical "spell" throughout his poetry and that enhances his interest in witch figures; a spell is, typically, brought about by a combination of potent sensual artifacts and sound/language - a hank of hair, a fingernail paring, bats' wings, spiderwebs, invoked to some power by the magical and knowing voice. The Witch of Coos would, understandably, save out a finger bone and keep it close by. In their simultaneous dependency on dual and often conflicting elements -

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the formalized words and intonations of the invocation against the individual, symbolically and subtextually enriched sensual ingredients - each of Frost's poems is a version of the witches' broth of "Design," where the triadic figural elements of the poem - the "ingredients" of spider, moth wing, and flower - are combined into a magical design held within the pristine structure of the sonnet. The meanings derived from this juxtaposition may be read as diametrically opposed to each other, as Frost, in the line "What but design of darkness to appall?" invites contradictory valuations based on the pun of "a pall" or shroud of white laid over darkness. The "correct" reading, or the one that would effect the right spell as opposed to a disastrously wrong one, is available only to the conjurer, who has both the ingredients and a knowledge of the intonations that will formalize the mixture; the implication seems to be that, without the right sounds, the meaning of the totems is endlessly recombinant between these two poles of black and white. 18 See Barthes, Writing Degree Zero, 47—8: "Fixed connections being abolished, the word is left only with a vertical project, it is like a monolith, or a pillar which plunges into a totality of meanings, reflexes, and recollections: it is a sign which stands. The poetic word is here an act without immediate past, without environment, and which holds forth only the dense shadow of reflexes from all sources which are associated with it." 19 Frost's poetry willfully violates poetic decorums at every level, as if to leave always open the possibility that poetry itself is a thing to be mocked. One can almost hear the vaudeville drumshot after certain speeches, and yet the speeches themselves may be quite extraordinarily nonhumorous. For example, in the context of the lively disputations in the bookshop/gift store of "A Masque of Mercy," Jesse Bel speaks as Jonah sits down, without a break in the comic rhythm: "Can you interpret dreams? I dreamed last night / Someone took curved nail-scissors and snipped off/ My eyelids. . . . " 20 Interview in the "Robert Frost" program of the 1985 PBS series Voices and Visions. 21 See Poirier, The Work of Knowing, 87-90, on extra-vagance. 22 See Thompson, The Early Years, 396-400, on Frost's arrangement of these lyrics in such a way as to achieve an ironic distance, a distance enhanced by the detached tone of Frost's glosses. 23 Frost, of course, wrote plays and had "a juvenile dream of Broadway," which included his hope that the two masques would be staged. See Tom VanderVen, "Robert Frost's Dramatic Principle of'Oversound,'" in Robert Frost: The BestfromAmerican Literature, ed. Edwin H. Cady and Louis J. Budd (Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press, 1991), 86-8. 24 Thompson's account in The Early Years, 135-7, 512, of the biographical impulse for this poem is interesting. 25 One cannot completely ignore Frost's pun here on draft/draft horse, as if to point out the macabre connection between venting the horse's heart - a draft that creates for Frost the most ominous kind of spillage - and the "invidious" draft that visits the travelers. 26 See David Bromwitch, "Wordsworth, Frost, Stevens and the Poetic Vocation," in Robert Frost, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 1986), 113-

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16, in his discussion of "Two Tramps" and Wordsworth's "Resolution and Independence." Bromwitch maintains that, unlike Wordsworth, Frost virilely embodies himself as both poet and laborer; there is a corollary here, I think, to the tramp and laborer pairing, in which the poet - a tramp in more ways than one in Frost's view - balances that self against a more manfully productive one. 27 The "Demiurge" is sometimes thought to be the originator of evil; he is also, as Frost tells the story, to be associated with Silenus, the satyr who reveals to Midas the "secret" that it is best not to be born and, if born, to die soon. See the Introduction. 28 Frost repeats this image of night terror in "The Bonfire," which also sounds as if it is told to children: "Haven't you heard, though, / About the ships where war has found them out / At sea, about the towns where war has come / Through opening clouds at night with droning speed / Further o'erhead than all but stars and angels - / And children in the ships and in the towns?" 29 Scott Donaldson, "Frost, Dickinson, and the Strategy of Evasion," Concerning Poetry 19 (1986): 114-16. 30 See Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, 73—9. 31 See Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Vintage Books, 1988), 7-13, for his discussion of the historical Narrenschiff.

6. Lyricism: At the Back of the North Wind 1 Frank Lentricchia, "Lyric in the Culture of Capitalism," American Literary History 1, no. 1 (1989): 72. See too Richard Poirier, Robert Frost: The Work of Knowing (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1977), 38. Palgrave's Golden Treasury was a favorite of Frost's; see "Waiting: Afield at Dusk" in A Boy's Will, where the speaker notes "the old worn book of old-golden song / I brought here not to read, it seems, but hold / And freshen in this air of withering sweetness." 2 Lesley Lee Francis, "A Decade of 'Stirring Times': Robert Frost and Amy Lowell," New England Quarterly 59, no. 4 (December 1986): 522. See too Sydney Lea, "From Sublime to Rigamorole: Relations of Frost to Wordsworth," in Robert Frost, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 1986), 85-110, for a discussion of Frost's ambivalent regard for Wordsworth and his resistance to "Romanticism." 3 Lawrance Thompson, Robert Frost: The Later Years (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1976), 304, documents that Frost wrote this for "the woman who had been his 'devoted secretary' for more than twenty years." See Donald G. Sheehy, "(Re)Figuring Love: Robert Frost in Crisis, 1938—42," New England Quarterly 63, no. 2 (June 1990): 179-231, on Frost's relationship with Kathleen Morrison after the death of Elinor in 1938. A stately Elizabethan sonnet and a love poem, it also suggests a premeditated and predetermined fall from pure song to song crossed with language: "Never again would birds' song be the same. / And to do that to birds was why she came." 4 In the Phaedo, 85, a-b, Socrates affirms that birds do not sing when they are hungry, cold, or distressed. When swans sing before their deaths, it is because they "have prophetic powers and . . . because they know the good things that

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await them in the unseen world, and they are happier on that day than they have ever been before." 5 See Lawrance Thompson, Robert Frost: The Early Years, 1876-1915 (New

York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1966), 304: Maeterlinck's The Blue Bird was read to Frost by his father; Frost calls this poem "The Blue Bird to Leslie" in Letters, 355. 6 See Michel Foucault, The Use of Pleasure: The History of Sexuality, vol. 2,

trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon, 1985), 82-3. While Frost claims that a poem never begins in thought but "as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness" (Letters, 199), he also holds firmly that enthusiasm must be "taken through the prism of the intellect" (Prose, 36). This is to subvert what he calls "sunset raving," where "It is oh's and ah's with you and no more." Lentricchia, in "The Resentments of Robert Frost," American Literature 62, no. 2 (June 1990): 176—7, locates Frost's contempt for "sunset raving" lyricism, which derives its energy from pretty things, in his shared contempt for what Eliot called "the Feminine in literature." 7 See too the poem immediately preceding this, "Wind and Window Flower," in which the wind is a potential lover of the flower just inside the frozen pane of glass. 8 In "A Servant to Servants" the woman is drawn to look at the lake, "Like a deep piece of some old running river / Cut short off at both ends," as the wind whips "the slow waves whiter and whiter and whiter"; this is clearly a correlative for her imminent and immanent anger/madness. 9 Thompson, The Early Years, 301. 10 Plato, Symposium, in The Collected Dialogues, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1989), 561. 11 One is drawn to think of all of the poems in which Frost pictures figures brought to the classic posture of supplication, as they find themselves in kneeling or bowing positions before a retributive or indifferent power, positions the prostrate figures themselves usually detail: "The Subverted Flower," "On Going Unnoticed," "To Earthward," "Putting in the Seed," "The Bonfire," among others, place men in positions of self-abasement, about which they speak. The dynamic in "Birches" is resonant, as it uses the erotic image of the girl on hands and knees to balance against the taut, downward-arching saplings ridden by the boy into submission. 12 In "The Thatch," the speaker, outside after a quarrel with someone upstairs (by implication, in the bedroom), finds "The world was a black invisible field. / The rain by rights was snow for cold. / The wind was another layer of mold." Once the house is abandoned, its "wind-torn thatch" lets in the rain and ends the life of the house. This living thatched house with its angry woman upstairs acts as a metonym for the speaker, who himself is windy-headed with anger. The birds living in the thatch are displaced by his sudden presence outdoors at night, and their fall into "mulch and mire," their inability to rise out of it until daylight comes and flying is "safe," is also indicative of the speaker's lyric impotence. 13 Thompson, The Later Years, 268. 14 An ungenerous reading of Frost's invariable undercutting of his speakers would tie in with his preoccupation with "the middle," both spatially and intel-

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lectually. Economically, he wishes to be received as a popular poet read and bought by thousands and thousands, but he achieves this at some cost (see Lentricchia, "Lyric," 63-88). See too Earl J. Wilcox, "Psyching-Out the Public and His Contemporaries: The Curious Case of Robert Frost," McNeese Review 31 (1984—6): 3-13. Wilcox argues that Frost is an example of what Dwight MacDonald called "Masscult": "The technicians of masscult at once degrade the public by treating it as an object . . . and at the same time flatter it and pander to its taste and ideas by taking them as the criterion for reality." The public, says MacDonald, "demands a secret rebate; he must play the game - their game . . . " Seen in this context, these compromised speakers of Frost's, who are so often inescapably Frost at the same time that they are not Frost, may be seen as the inevitable result of such self-abuse. 15 Poirier, The Work of Knowing, 86. 16 See Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea, trans. R.B. Haldane and J. Kemp (New York: Dolphin, 1961), 268-79, on music as, rather than a copy of Ideas, a copy of the will itself. See too Robert P. Morgan, "Secret Languages: The Roots of Musical Modernism," Critical Inquiry 10 (March 1984): 442-61, as he locates these ideas about music, articulated in philosophical terms by Schopenhauer but also widely shared in the nineteenth century, relative to painting and poetry. 17 See Lentricchia, "Resentments," for evidence of this perception of lyric as too "feminine." 18 Julia Kristeva, Tales of Love, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1983), 8. 19 Ibid., 8. 20 "A Masque of Reason," 11. 222-5: "Society can never think things out; / It has to see them acted out by actors, / Devoted actors at a sacrifice - / The ablest actors I can lay my hands on." 21 See Foucault, The Use of Pleasure, 89—91. 22 Poirier, The Work of Knowing, 191-2. 23 D.C. Muecke, Irony and the Ironic (New York: Methuen, 1970), 31. 24 Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, trans. Brian Massumi and Geoff Bennington (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1988), 22. 25 Ibid., xii. 26 See Frost on "The Lockless Door," in Letters, 468. 27 See Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, 40, on Wittgenstein's use of the metaphor of language as "an ancient city" and his application of the paradox "How many houses or streets does it take before a town begins to be a town?" See too Frost's "Directive." 28 Maynard Mack, The Garden and the City: Retirement and Politics in the Later Poetry of Pope, 1731-1743 (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1969), locates Pope in a landscape of conscious artificiality, one that Romanticism would utterly displace. Yet Frost does not completely abandon markers of civilization: the "garden" is always at an advanced stage of deconstruction. 29 See Michel Foucault, This Is Not a Pipe, trans. James Harkness (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1982), 21, on the double subversion of the calligram.

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30 See Norman N. Holland, "The Brain of Robert Frost," New Literary History 15, no. 2 (Winter 1984): 365-85, on the identifiable sameness - the "Frostness" of his poetic and his interpretive voices; Holland sees this continuity as Frost's identity, which is characterized by a system of inclusive dualism. 31 Lillian S. Robinson and Lise Vogel, "Modernism and History," New Literary History 3, no. 1 (Autumn 1971): 177. 32 Ibid., 191. 33 Thompson, The Early Years, 435. See too Robert Kern, "Frost and Modernism," in On Frost: The BestfromAmerican Literature, ed. Edwin H. Cady and Louis J. Budd (Durham, N.G.: Duke Univ. Press, 1990): 191-206. 34 Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, 78. Conclusion: Out Far and in Deep 1 Jean-Franqois Lyotard, The Inhuman, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford Univ. Press, 1991), 84. 2 Jean-Franqois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, trans. Brian Massumi and Geoff Bennington (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1984), 78. 3 Lawrance Thompson, Robert Frost: The Later Years (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1976), 268. 4 Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, 77. 5 Julia Kristeva, Tales of Love, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1987), 3-6. 6 I have used this incendiary word before in this text, without comment, even knowing that it is a designation that will awaken resistance: "Too strong a word for Frost's rather conventional if sometimes bullying erotic-linguistic games," one is likely to say, "and certainly too strong for my own." My intention is to call to accountability the punishment/pleasure dynamic that has been refined and enhanced in romantic and erotic discourse. As a political move, I would like to call this spade a spade, to enlist its power to shock and repel and awaken. One analogy would be the unequivocal use of the term "rape" for situations that in the past have been named something else and thus treated, legally and otherwise, either as manly "passion" or, at best, as less egregious than rape. 7 Frost had his sister Jeanie committed to the state hospital in Augusta, Maine. See Lawrance Thompson, Robert Frost: The Years of Triumph (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1964), 128-34.

Index

agape, 24-5, 109 Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass (Carroll),

25, 46, 20311 Annunzio, Gabriele, d\ 19411 Apollo, 22-3, 129, 19711 Archflochus of Paros, 134 Aristotle, 65, 107, 109, 19211 Arnold, Matthew, 62 At the Back of the North Wind (Mac-

Donald), 183 Attis, 51, 68, 119, 2O4n, 2i5n autoerotics, 4—5 Bacon, Helen, 103 Barthes, Roland, 8, 38, 47, 48, 57, 79-80, 82-3 Beckett, Samuel Molloy, 32, 188 Waiting for Godot, 14, 39

Bell, Vereen, 130 Bildung, 23-8, 187 Boethius, 2oon calligram, 78—9, 179 Calypso, 124-5 Catullus, 51, 68, 76, 105, 204n, 2O9n, 2i5-i6n Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 161 confession, 7—10 Cybele, 23, 68, 118-19, 121, 2O4n, 215i6n de Man, Paul, 108, I95n, 2O5n Dickinson, Emily, 189 Douglass, Frederick, 202n 225

Eliot, T. S., I94n Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 56, 58, 155, 2O5n Euripides' Bacchae, 103, 21 in Foucault, Michel, 5, 7, 10, 78, 81, 107, n o , i n , I92n Freud, Sigmund, 62, 63, 169, 189, 2i2n, 2i6n Frost, Robert, Letters, 8, 32, 34, 35, 36, 38, 40, 41, 43, 45, 47, 48, 49, 50, 57, 58, 69, 73, 75, 81, 83, 84, 98, 136, 138, 159, 168, 176, 180 Frost, Robert, poems "Acceptance," 158, 170 "After Apple Picking," 43, 60, 75-6, 117, 139, 145, 163, 185 "The Aim Was Song," 162-3 "All Revelation," 3, 23, 24, 68, 117, 118-20, 121, 126 "Any Size We Please," 127 "The Ax-Helve," 121, I97n, 21 in "Bereft," 9, 10, 130, 163, 167, 184, I96n, 2O5n "Beyond Words," 120, 126 "Birches," 117, 126, 145, 22m "The Birthplace," 18, 19, 20 "The Black Cottage," 46, 71, 88, 149, 202n, 21 on, 2i8n "Boeotian," 28, 202n "Bond and Free," 6 "The Bonfire," 7, 10, 16, 26, 49, 63, 112, 114, 116, 126, 127, 130, 131, 154, 166, 174, 179, I97n, I99n, 220n, 22m A Boy's Will, 147, 152, 153, 172, 178, 181

226

INDEX

"A Brook in the City," 3, 177 "Brown's Descent," 30 "Build Soil," 24, 106 "Bursting Rapture," 131 "The Cellar Hole," see "The Generations of Men" "The Census Taker," 2ion "Come In," 158 "The Death of the Hired Man," 18, 48, i n , 148, I96n, 2O7n "The Demiurge's Laugh," 12, 62, 153 "Departmental," 2i7n "Desert Places," 9, 74, 117, 123, 138 "Design," 58, 95, 2i9n "Devotion," 127 "Directive," 2O5n "The Draft Horse," 151 "A Dream Pang," 152 "The Drumlin Woodchuck," 117, 126, 164 "An Encounter," 124-6, 2i6n "The Exposed Nest," 158 "The Fear," 135, 149-50, I96n, I97n, 2O5n, 2i6n "The Fear of God," 52 "The Fear of Man," 37-8, 41, 42, 52, 84, 163, 170 "Fire and Ice," 159 "The Flood," 3, 57, 129-30, 131, 160 "For Once, Then, Something," 21—3, 75, 81, 124, 129, 165, 181, 2ion "A Fountain, a Bottle, a Donkey's Ears, and Some Books," 103, 2O4~5n, 2ion "Fragmentary Blue," 25-6, 145 "The Freedom of the Moon," 68, 207 "The Generations of Men," 91—3, 101, 138, 182, 2ion "Going for Water," 44 "The Hill Wife," 15, 95-6, 102, 106, i n , 130, 135, 153-4, 160, 161, 163, 174, I96n, I97n, 2O5n, 2i6n "A Hillside Thaw," 39, 126, 130, 131 "Home Burial," 11, 14, 15, 18, 70, 71, 76, 77-8, 90-1, 92, 94, 121, 135, 148, 149, 158, 177, 183-4, I96n, 2o8n, 2ion, 2i6n "The Housekeeper," 15, 17, 63, 101, 106, 114, 150, 2O5n, 2ion, 2i6n "How Hard It Is to Keep from Being King When It's in You and in the Situation," 4, 15, 16, 24, 28, 64, I97n

"A Hundred Collars," 27-8 "I Could Give All to Time," 109 "In a Vale," 115, 155, 181-4 "In Hardwood Groves," 113, 117, 133 "In the Home Stretch," 94-5, 153 "The Investment," I96n "The Last Word of the Bluebird," 162 "A Late Walk," 161 "A Leaf Treader," 76-7 "The Lesson for Today," 24-5, 27, 41, 42, 46, 49, 50, 58, 71, 109, 171, I98n, "A Line-Storm Song," 6-7, 157, 164, 172-3, 182 "Locked Out; As Told to a Child," 16, 63, 154-5 "The Lockless Door," 176, 177, 178, 222n "Lodged," 166 "Looking for a Sunset Bird in Winter," 160 "Love and a Question," 152-3 "Maple," 2, 13, 20-1, 57, 63, 64, 1002, 103, 106, n o , i n , 116, I96n, I97n, 2O3n, 2i3n, 2i6n "A Masque of Mercy," 17, 24, 46, 48, 49, 5i, 55, 56, 63, 78, 86, 139, 147, 185, 186, 202n, 2i8n, 2i9n "A Masque of Reason," 1, 12, 15, 16, 17, 22, 24, 25, 26, 41, 52, 53, 61, 97,

136-7, 144, 146, 2O3n, 2O5n, 222n "Mending Wall," 43, 44, 50, 61, 68, 72, 85, 120, 121, 145, I93n, 2O3n, 2i7n "A Minor Bird," 161, 171-2, 178 "Misgiving," 165—6 "A Missive Missile," 24 "The Most of It," 170 "Mowing," 44, 58, 112, 114, 146, 2O3n, "A Nature Note," 161-2 "The Need of Being Versed in Country Things," 161 "Neither Out Far nor in Deep," 124, 187 "Never Again Would Bird's Song Be the Same," 69, 160 "New Hampshire," 15, 16, 41, 49, 623, 64, 68, 88, 114, 125, 129, 149, 177, I92n, I97n, 2o6~7n North of Boston, 82, 148

"Nothing Gold Can Stay," 13-14, 54

227

INDEX "Now Close the Windows," 167 "On a Bird Singing in Its Sleep," 170, 171, 176 "On Going Unnoticed," 9, 74, 116, 126, 165, 167, 22m "Our Singing Strength," 157, 162, 174, 178 "Out, Out - , " 17, 46, 115, I97n "The Oven Bird," 9, 158, 160, 167, 168, 173, 176, 178, 179, 183, 184, "A Passing Glimpse," 78, 80, 112 "Paul's Wife," 2, 13, 59, 88, 98, 104, i n , 121, 142, 145, 183, 188, 2O5n, 2i6n "Pertinax," 162 "Place for a Third," 2ion "Pride of Ancestry" (unpublished), I96n "Putting in the Seed," 11, 44, 112, 117, 122, 127, 21 in, 22m "Riders," 114, 117, 121-3, 133 "The Road Not Taken," 72-4, 2o8n "The Self Seeker," 41, 46, 60, I97n "A Semi-Revolution," 26 "A Servant to Servants," 3, 70, 71, 869, 94, 95. 106, 107, n o , i n , 133, 148, 153, I96n, 2i3n, 22m "The Silken Tent," 5-6, 10, n , 109, 126, 128, 166, 184 "Skeptic," 117 "Snow," 52 "Spring Pools," 117, 126, 127-9, 165 "The Star Splitter," 114-15, 117 "A Star in a Stoneboat," 43, 47, 68, 85 "Stars," 65, 67 "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," 10, n , 80 "Storm Fear," 166 "The Subverted Flower," 2, 9, 104-6, 150-1, 154, 173, 177. I97n, 2i6n, 22m "Take Something Like a Star," 26, 45, 65-7, 68 "The Thatch," 10, 157, 167, 178, I96n, 2O5n, 2ion, 22m "To Earthward," 6, 7, 10, 29, 31, 112, 113, 122, 127, 22m "To E.T.," 74 "To the Thawing Wind," 163, 164 "Tree at my Window," 9, 167 "Two Tramps in Mud Time," 113,

120-1, 127, 151-2, 155, I97n, 22On

"The Valley's Singing Day," 160 "Waiting: Afield at Dusk," 22on "West-Running Brook," 3, 83, 115, 117, 124, I96n

"The White-Tailed Hornet," 27, 30, 46, I98n, 202n, 218n

"Wild Grapes," 102-3 "Wind and Window Flower," 22m "A Winter Eden," 115, 129, 158, 170, 178 "The Witch of Coos," 16, 17, 18, 41, 63, 64, 70, 88, 90, 93-4, 98, 108, 109, n o , i n , 115, 116, 134-8, 139, 141-4, 145, 146, 148, 149, 150, 153, 156, 168, 187, 2i3n, 2i8n "The Witch of Grafton," 34, 57, 96— 100, 102, 108, 109, 123, 133, 142, 164, 185, 2i6n "The Woodpile," 157 Frost, Robert, Selected Prose, 3, 4, 5, 9, n , 23, 25, 29, 30, 34, 35, 40, 43, 47, 48, 49, 50, 54, 56, 60, 76, 80, 81, 144 Greenberg, Clement, 180 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 58, 100, 132, 152 Hegel, G. W. F., 45, 56, 63 Hollander, John, 62, 163 Holman, C. Hugh, 40 Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 132 hysteria, 14, 17, 70, 131-2, 134, 147, I92n, I93n, 2I2-I3n Irigaray, Luce, 1, I92n James, William, 30, 144 Jarrell, Randall, 91 justice, 17, 32, 33, 41. 46, 47, 48-53, 55, 56, 140, 147 Kafka, Franz, 39 Keats, John, n - 1 2 , 65, 66-7, 171, 175, 2oon Kierkegaard, Soren, 55, 64, 84 Kristeva, Julia, 21, 112, 188 Lacan, Jacques, 57, 189 Lentricchia, Frank, 37, 43, 44, 64, 70, 72, " 4 , 159

228

INDEX

Lowell, Amy, 159, 176, 19911 Lyotard, Jean-Frangois, 49, 50, 175, 180 Maeterlinck, Count Maurice, The Bluebird, 150, 22in Magritte, Rene, 82 marriage, 10, 15, 57, 91, 100, 104, 105-6, 152 Marx, Karl, 56, 57 "Masscult," 222n Masses, The, 26, 69 maternity, "maternal Ethic," 2, 14—22, 23, 44, 47, 48, 49, 84, 90, 101, 113, 11617, 121, 126, 134, 137 Meredith, George, 12, I95n Milosz, Czeslaw, 35 Moby-Dick (Melville), 27 modernism, 64, 69, 81-2, 159, 177-8 Morrison, Kathleen, I93n, 2i2n, 2i5n, 220n Muecke, D. C , 38-9 Murdoch, Iris, 44, 45, 85 Narcissus /narcissism, 21, 22, 129 Nelson, Cary, 69 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 12, 14, 23, 28, 51, 53, 64, 175, 202n nihilism, 12, 13, 14, 59, 83, n o , 144, 172, 178, 186-7, 190, 191 O'Connor, Flannery, 191 "pagan puritanism," 29, 51 Palgrave's Golden Treasury, 159, 22on Payne, L. W., 20m Peirce, C. S., 21411 performance, 5, n , 29, 2i8n Plato, 67, 68, 73, 80, 86, 122, 123, 162, 166, 169, 186, 2I3-I4n, 2I4-I5n, 220-in Poe, Edgar Allan, I94n Poirier, Richard, 6, n , 26, 62, 168, 172 Pound, Ezra, 37

pragmatism, I98n, 2i4n puns, 40, 58, 60-2, 67, 77, 81, 119, 120, 161, 173 Ransom, John Crowe, 141, 2i8n Rittenhouse, Jesse Belle, 61 sadism/sadomasochism, 151, 159, 165, 167, 169, 187, 188, 190, 22m, 223n Saussure, Ferdinand de, 81, 139, 140 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 36, 168, 2O5n Shakespeare, William, 160 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 160, 165, 166, 170 Silenus, 12-13, 220n Slater, Philip, 23 Snow, Wilbert, 48 Socrates, 53, 173, 2isn, 22on Sophocles, 52, 57, 167 sound of sense/sentence sound, 9, 62, 68— 70, 74-5, 76, 80, 134, 137-9, H6, 155, 167, 168, 177, 180, 2O3n spells, 2i8-i9n Spenser, Edmund, 76 stars, 65-8 Stevens, Wallace, 38, 168 sublimity, 57, 168, 185-8 Thomas, Edward, 72-3, 2o8n Thoreau, Henry David, 56, 132, 146 Trilling, Lionel, 57, 155, 167, 186, 187 Untermeyer, Louis, 40, 49, 83 Ward, Susan Hayes, 21 in Weber, Samuel, 39 Winters, Ivor, 138 witches, 18-19, 21, 70, 78, 88, 89, 94, 96-8, 106, i n , 134, 135, 136, 137, 155, 156, 189, 2oon, 21 in Wordsworth, William, 22On Yeats, William B., 98, 108, 109

CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN AMERICAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE

Continued from the front of the book 55. 54. 53. 52. 51. 50. 49. 48. 47. 46. 45. 44. 43. 42. 41. 40. 39. 38. 37. 36. 35. 34. 33. 32. 31. 30. 29. 28. 27. 26. 25. 24. 23. 22. 21.

Stephen Fender, Sea Changes: British Emigration and American Literature Peter Stoneley, Mark Twain and the Feminine Aesthetic Joel Porte, In Respect to Egotism: Studies in American Romantic Writing Charles Swann, Nathaniel Hawthorne: Tradition and Revolution Ronald Bush (ed.), T. S. Eliot: The Modernist in History Russell Goodman, American Philosophy and the Romantic Tradition Eric J. Sundquist (ed.), Frederick Douglass: New Literary and Historical Essays Susan Stanford Friedman, Penelope's Web: Gender, Modernity, H.D.'s Fiction Timothy Redman, Ezra Pound and Italian Fascism Ezra Greenspan, Walt Whitman and the American Reader Michael Oriard, Sporting with the Gods: The Rhetoric of Play and Game in American Culture Stephen Fredman, Poet's Prose: The Crisis in American Verse, 2d ed. David C. Miller, Dark Eden: The Swamp in Nineteenth-Century American Culture Susan K. Harris, igth-Century American Women's Novels: Interpretive Strategies Susan Manning, The Puritan-Provincial Vision: Scottish and American Literature in the Nineteenth Century Richard Godden, Fictions of Capital: Essays on the American Novel from James to Mailer John Limon, The Place of Fiction in the Time of Science: A Disciplinary History of American Writing Douglas Anderson, A House Undivided: Domesticity and Community in American Literature Charles Altieri, Painterly Abstraction in Modernist American Poetry John P. McWilliams, Jr., The American Epic: Transforming a Genre, 1770-1860 Michael Davidson, The San Francisco Renaissance: Poetics and Community at MidCentury Eric Sigg, The American T S. Eliot Robert S. Levine, Conspiracy and Romance: Studies in Brockden Brown, Cooper, Hawthorne, and Melville Alfred Habegger, Henry James and the

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The Cambridge Introduction to Robert Frost (Cambridge Introductions to Literature)

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The American Epic: Transforming a Genre, 1770-1860 (Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture)

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A House Undivided: Domesticity and Community in American Literature (Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture)

The Origins of American Literature Studies: An Institutional History (Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture)

Chicano Poetics: Heterotexts and Hybridities (Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture)

Multilingual America: Language and the Making of American Literature (Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture)

Multilingual America: Language and the Making of American Literature (Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture)

The Culture and Commerce of the American Short Story (Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture)

Elizabeth Bishop's Poetics of Intimacy (Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture)

Race, Work, and Desire in American Literature, 1860-1930 (Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture)

Race, Citizenship, and Law in American Literature (Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture)

Democracy, Revolution, and Monarchism in Early American Literature (Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture)

In Respect to Egotism: Studies in American Romantic Writing (Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture)

Imagining Equality in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture (No. 157))

Oliver Wendell Holmes and the Culture of Conversation (Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture)

The Cambridge Companion to Robert Frost (Cambridge Companions to Literature)

The Cambridge Introduction to Robert Frost (Cambridge Introductions to Literature)

Romance, Diaspora, and Black Atlantic Literature (Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture)

The American Epic: Transforming a Genre, 1770-1860 (Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture)

Orientalism, Modernism, and the American Poem (Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture)

Formalism, Experience, and the Making of American Literature in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture)

Edith Wharton: Matters of Mind and Spirit (Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture (No. 92))

Edith Wharton and the Politics of Race (Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture)

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