Robert Frost A study in sensibility and good sense
“I know what I want to do most. I don’t do it often enough. In _The
Runaway_ I added the moral at the end just for the pleasure of the
aggrieved tone of voice. There are high spots in respect of vocal image
in _Blueberries_:
There _had_ been some berries--but those were all gone.
He didn’t say where they had been. He went on:
‘I’m sure--I’m sure--as polite as could be.’”
It is plain to see why Frost calls himself an “anti-vocabularian,” for
the speech materials he attends to are limited in number of words. But
there is a gain here: the right limitation of vocabulary will produce
honesty of vocabulary, will insure, that is, some personal content in
experience for the words one employs, and this matching of vocabulary
and personal experience gives force.
If Frost’s ear gives a natural life to his verse, his eye gives it a
clarity, a definiteness, a firmness of outline that produces a strong
feeling of actuality. Edward Garnett in his essay on Frost lifted out
from his better known poems a number of images and held them toward
the reader for inspection of their purity and hardness. We may take
a recently published poem, _Once by the Pacific_,[11] with the same
purpose in mind, the more so as this poem lies on Frost’s usual plane
of excellence and is not quite among his best.
The shattered water made a misty din,
Great waves looked over others coming in,
And thought of doing something to the shore
That water never did to land before.
The clouds were low and hairy in the skies
Like locks blown forward in the gleam of eyes.
You could not tell, and yet it looked as if
The sand was lucky in being backed by cliff,
The cliff in being backed by continent.
It looked as if a night of dark intent
Was coming, and not only a night, an age.
Someone had better be prepared for rage.
There would be more than ocean water broken
Before God’s last _Put out the light_ was spoken.
Here we _see_ rows of waves growing taller as we gaze out from the
shore, and beyond above the fitfully glowing horizon the strands of
clouds disordered by the wind. (“Great waves _looked over others_
coming in.... The clouds were low and _hairy_ Like _locks blown
forward in the gleam of eyes_.”) Already the scene is massive, and we
are being prepared for the introduction of a cosmic word in the last
line. The rest of the poem is devoted to heightening this anticipatory
mood. We stand on the sand which is backed by a cliff which is backed
by a continent: thus the scale of the struggle is enlarged to huge
dimensions. The falling darkness of one night is similarly magnified:
“not only a night, an age.” And then the poem is ready to leave its
symbolic frame altogether in the last two lines. “There would be more
than ocean water broken Before God’s last _Put out the light_ was
spoken.”
It is this simplicity and coherence of imagery that creates the
concreteness of Frost’s vision. At the same time, grandiose though the
theme is, the language is utterly like talk: the waves “thought of
doing something to the shore that water never did to land before ...
you could not tell, and yet it looked as if the sand was lucky” ... God
will say, “Put out the light.”
If Frost is thus faithful in the use of his own eyes and his own ears,
it follows, since they cannot be universal in scope, that he will write
about his own locality. He will be obliged to be American, New England,
indigenous, to be an “environmentalist,” to do things with the “native
touch” Edward Garnett spoke of, because the very process of his writing
poetry commits him to it.
But this is not all the story. The third conspicuous element in his
style is his sense of situation, his sense of drama. This, too, has
been often illustrated by the critics of Frost, and Edward Garnett has
quoted in connection with it one of Goethe’s offhand remarks: “A lively
feeling of situations and an aptitude to describe them makes the poet.”
Frost has qualified in this way many times--in _The Death of the Hired
Man_, in _Fear_, in _The Witch of Coos_, among many others. And he has
given us one “straight” example of drama in the one act play, _A Way
Out_, printed in the _Seven Arts_.
The scene is “a bachelor’s kitchen bedroom in a farmhouse with a table
spread for supper. Someone rattles the door-latch from outside. Asa
Gorrill, in loose slippers, shuffles directly to the door and unbolts
it. A stranger opens the door for himself and walks in” and takes a
survey. “Huh,” he says. “So this is what it’s like. Seems to me you
lock up early. What you afraid of?” And Asa replies in a piping drawl:
“’Fraid of nothing, because I ain’t got nothing--nothing’t anybody
wants.”
The situation has taken form at once: Asa Gorrill, the queer hermit,
on the defensive, and the intruder, hurried, rudely questioning and
commanding, mysterious. The dialog quickly develops both the characters
and the situation. The stranger investigates the room and the old
man’s means as though perhaps his motive might be robbery--in case his
suspicion of miserly hoardings finds evidence to go upon. He hints of
violent action, of a necessity for hurry. He is aggressive, reckless,
a factory hand in some sort of trouble. Asa trembles, wishes he were
off, doesn’t dare to resist, unwillingly answers the questions that
build up a picture of his daily life--when he goes to market and what
for, how he carries in his logs, what he believes in, what his history
has been.
Then the stranger reveals he has committed a murder and is in flight.
He was seen once during the day by a wagonload of women. He insists on
donning some of the hermit’s extra clothes and mimicking his behavior.
The proposal is apparently that he hide here in the house and take
turns with the hermit in “stretching his legs” abroad.
Dressed to resemble the old man, the murderer then drags Asa round and
round in a game to get themselves dizzy. “And then when we’re down,”
he says, “I want you should wait till you can see straight before you
speak and try to tell which is which and which is t’other.”
This is the high dramatic moment of the play as they fall moaning from
their whirling and each accuses the other of the crime. The weak old
man faints from terror in the excitement, the stranger clubs him with
his fist and drags him out. The room is empty for a time.
A posse calls and the sham hermit fools it. Its members pass on. It is
“a way out.”
It will be noted that this play has both literary and theatrical form.
The two are not the same: for instance, Eugene O’Neill, generally rated
the best American playwright, often fails to produce a coincidence
of what is visually effective with what is psychologically and
dramatically determined. That Frost has done; the form stands up on the
printed page as well as on the boards: the psychological springs of
action are revealed: the writing is terse and necessary.
Needless to say, these elements of his style--the gift for tones
of voice, the aptitude for concrete images, and the sense of the
dramatic--would not suffice if they did not give rise to full-bodied,
vital and corresponding emotions. Robert Frost is the type--the pure
poet. The outline of his life has shown that he has all of the poet’s
traditional impracticality, though in his case there is no indulgence
in utopian flights. Now, on the basis of his poems, we can add that he
is emotionally centered, and the world is to him predominantly a source
of emotion. It is his _sensibility_, and not ideas and his actions,
that mostly strikes at his emotions, and the result is song inspired
by _natural_ objects which include, of course, people. Yet though his
poetry is clearly not cerebral, neither is it thumpingly emotional.
His personal make-up gives it its flavor--the humor and slyness, the
sense of rural retreat, the friendliness. But to his intelligence goes
the credit for its economy and restraint, its solidity and subtlety,
for its bounding lines. Frost knows sufficiently what he is about in
writing poetry to compose his own _ars poetica_.
“Imagery and after-imagery are about all there is to poetry. Synecdoche
and synecdoche--My motto is that something must be left to God.
“In making a poem you have no right to think of anything but the
subject matter. After making it, no right to boast of anything but the
form.
“A poem must at least be as good as the prose it might have been. A
poem is a box with a _set_ or assortment of sentences that just fit
together to fill it. You are rhyming sentences and phrases, not just
words. They must go into it as unchanged in size and shape as the words.
“A straight crookedness is most to be desired in a stick or a line.
Or a crooked straightness. An absolutely abandoned zig-zag that goes
straight to the mark.
“Sometimes I have my doubts of words altogether and I ask myself
what is the place of them. They are worse than nothing unless they
can do something, unless they amount to deeds as in ultimatums or
battle-cries. They must be flat and final like the show-down in poker,
from which there is no appeal. My definition of poetry (if I were
forced to give one) would be this: words that have become deeds.
“All poetry is a reproduction of the tones of actual speech.
“There are two types of realists: the one who offers a good deal of
dirt with his potato to show that it is a real one, and the one who is
satisfied with the potato brushed clean. I’m inclined to be the second
kind. To me, the thing that art does for life is to clean it, to strip
it to form.
“A poem begins with a lump in the throat; a home-sickness or a
love-sickness. It is a reaching-out toward expression; an effort to
find fulfilment. A complete poem is one where an emotion has found its
thought and the thought has found the words.
“........ the lines of a good helve
Were native to the grain before the knife
Expressed them, and its curves were no false curves
Put on it from without. And there its strength lay
For the hard work.”
IX. “AGAINST THE WORLD IN GENERAL”
_How about being a good Greek, for instance?
That course, they tell me, isn’t offered this year._
Some readers,[12] no doubt, were surprised when the poet told them in
his last book, _New Hampshire_:
I may as well confess myself the author
Of several books against the world in general.
There had been no protest, no satire, no revolt to be noticed in his
poetry. On the contrary, here was quietude, good humor and a certain
manly acceptance of circumstance. Yet this author who never whines,
who never seems savagely to resent the present state of affairs, this
author considers himself to have been writing against the world in
general! The surprise was salutary, for the shock directed attention to
the implications of Frost’s confession, the implications of his poetry
_in toto_, and a study of these implications will lead to the quite
sudden realization that the purest classical poet of America today is
Robert Frost.
With Frost in the field as a classicist, T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound,
conspicuous rivals for the title, begin to look like something else.
Eliot’s poetry, for example, has romantic elements: his sentimental
melancholy and wistfulness, the dandyism and obfuscation that cut him
off from a more general appeal. Pound likewise seems to be hewing no
closer to a norm of thought, feeling and conduct: he does not appear
to be making a bridge from the special to the general experience,
to be achieving the “grandeur of generality”: he is given up to the
irritations and discomforts of a sensitive person. Yet a romanticist
tinge does not make a romanticist and _au fond_ Eliot and Pound are
nearer to classicism than they are to romanticism. Still there is an
important difference in kind between them and Robert Frost.