I should tell you that what follows is a spinoff of a seminar given four years ago at the Collège International de Philosophie, in Paris. Hence a certain breeziness to the pace; hence, too, the paucity of biographical material—irrelevant, in my view, to the analysis of a work of art in general, and particularly where a foreign audience is concerned. In any case, the pronoun “you” in these pages stands for those ignorant of or poorly acquainted with the lyrical and narrative strengths of the poetry of Robert Frost. But, first, some basics.
Robert Frost was born in 1874 and died in 1963, at the age of eighty-eight. One marriage, six children; fairly strapped when young; farming, and, later, teaching jobs in various schools. Not much travelling until late in his life; he mostly resided on the East Coast, in New England. If biography accounts for poetry, this one should have resulted in none. Yet he published nine books of poems; the second one, “North of Boston,” which came out when he was forty, made him famous. That was in 1914.
After that, his sailing was a bit smoother. But literary fame is not exactly popularity. As it happens, it took the Second World War to bring Frost’s work to the general public’s notice. In 1943, the Council on Books in Wartime distributed fifty thousand copies of Frost’s “Come In” to United States troops stationed overseas, as a morale-builder. By 1955, his “Selected Poems” was in its fourth edition, and one could speak of his poetry’s having acquired national standing.
It did. In the course of nearly five decades following the publication of “North of Boston,” Frost reaped every possible reward and honor an American poet can get; shortly before Frost’s death, John Kennedy invited him to read a poem at the Inauguration ceremony. Along with recognition naturally came a great deal of envy and resentment, a substantial contribution to which emerged from the pen of Frost’s own biographer. And yet both the adulation and resentment had one thing in common: a nearly total misconception of what Frost was all about.
He is generally regarded as the poet of the countryside, of rural settings—as a folksy, crusty, wisecracking old gentleman farmer, generally of positive disposition. In short, as American as apple pie. To be fair, he greatly enhanced this notion by projecting precisely this image of himself in numerous public appearances and interviews throughout his career. I suppose it wasn’t that difficult for him to do, for he had those qualities in him as well. He was indeed a quintessential American poet; it is up to us, however, to find out what that quintessence is made of, and what the term “American” means as applied to poetry and, perhaps, in general.
In 1959, at a banquet thrown in New York on the occasion of Robert Frost’s eighty-fifth birthday, the most prominent literary critic at that time, Lionel Trilling, rose and declared that Robert Frost was “a terrifying poet.” That, of course, caused a certain stir, but the epithet was well chosen.
Now, I want you to make the distinction here between terrifying and tragic. Tragedy, as you know, is always a fait accompli, whereas terror always has to do with anticipation, with man’s recognition of his own negative potential—with his sense of what he is capable of. And it is the latter that was Frost’s forte, not the former. In other words, his posture is radically different from the Continental tradition of the poet as tragic hero. And that difference alone makes him—for want of a better term—American.
On the surface, he looks very positively predisposed toward his surroundings—particularly toward nature. His fluency, his “being versed in country things” alone can produce this impression. However, there is a difference between the way a European perceives nature and the way an American does. Addressing this difference, W. H. Auden, in his short essay on Frost, suggests something to the effect that when a European conceives of confronting nature, he walks out of his cottage or a little inn, filled with either friends or family, and goes for an evening stroll. If he encounters a tree, it’s a tree made familiar by history, to which it’s been a witness. This or that king sat underneath it, laying down this or that law—something of that sort. A tree stands there rustling, as it were, with allusions. Pleased and somewhat pensive, our man, refreshed but unchanged by that encounter, returns to his inn or cottage, finds his friends or family absolutely intact, and proceeds to have a good, merry time. Whereas when an American walks out of his house and encounters a tree it is a meeting of equals. Man and tree face each other in their respective primal power, free of references: neither has a past, and as to whose future is greater, it is a toss-up. Basically, it’s epidermis meeting bark. Our man returns to his cabin in a state of bewilderment, to say the least, if not in actual shock or terror.
Now, this is obviously a romantic caricature, but it accentuates the features, and that’s what I am after here. In any case, the second point could be safely billed as the gist of Robert Frost’s nature poetry. Nature for this poet is neither friend nor foe, nor is it the backdrop for human drama; it is this poet’s terrifying self-portrait. And now I am going to start with one of his poems, which appears in the 1942 volume “A Witness Tree.” I am about to put forth my views and opinions about his lines without any concern for academic objectivity, and some of these views will be pretty dark. All I can say in my defense is (a) that I do like this poet enormously and I am going to try to sell him to you as he is, and (b) that some of that darkness is not entirely mine: it is his lines’ sediment that has darkened my mind; in other words, I got it from him.
Let’s look at “Come In.” A short poem in short metre—actually, a combination of trimeter with dimeter, anapest with iamb. The stuff of ballads, which by and large are all about gore and comeuppance. So, up to a certain point, is this poem. The metre hints as much. What are we dealing with here? A walk in the woods? A stroll through nature? Something that poets usually do? (And if yes, by the way, then why?) “Come In” is one of many poems written by Frost about such strolls. Think of “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” “Acquainted with the Night,” “Desert Places,” “Away!,” and so forth. Or else think of Thomas Hardy’s “The Darkling Thrush,” with which this poem has a distinct affinity. Hardy was also very fond of lonely strolls, except most of his had a tendency to wind up in a graveyard—since England was settled long ago, and more thickly, I guess.
To begin with, we again have a thrush. And a bird, as you know, is very often a bard, since, technically speaking, both sing. So as we proceed we should bear in mind that our poet may be delegating certain aspects of his psyche to the bird. Actually, I firmly believe that these two birds are related. The difference is only that it takes Hardy sixteen lines to introduce his bird in a poem, whereas Frost gets down to business in the second line. On the whole, this is indicative of the difference between the Americans and the British—I mean in poetry. Because of a greater cultural heritage, a greater set of references, it usually takes much longer for a Briton to set a poem in motion. The sense of echo is stronger in his ear, and thus he flexes his muscle and demonstrates his facility before he gets down to his subject. Normally, that sort of routine results in a poem’s being as big on exposition as on the actual message: in long-windedness, if you will—though, depending on who is doing the job, this is not necessarily a shortcoming.
Now, let’s do it line by line. “As I came to the edge of the woods” is a fairly simple, informative job, stating the subject and setting the metre. An innocent line, on the surface, wouldn’t you say? Well, it is, save for “the woods.” “The woods” makes one suspicious, and, with that, “the edge” does, too. Poetry is a dame with a huge pedigree, and every word comes practically barnacled with allusions and associations. Since the fourteenth century, the woods have given off a very strong smell of* selva oscura*, and you may recall what that selva led the author of the Divine Comedy into. In any case, when a twentieth-century poet starts a poem with finding himself at the edge of the woods there is a reasonable element of danger—or, at least, a faint suggestion of it. The edge, in its very self, is sufficiently sharp.
Maybe not; maybe our suspicions are unfounded, maybe we are just paranoid and are reading too much into this line. Let’s go to the next line, and we shall see:
Looks like we’ve goofed. What could be more innocuous than this antiquated, Victorian-sounding, fairy-tale-like “hark”? A bird is singing—listen! “Hark” truly belongs in a Hardy poem, or in a ballad; better yet, in a jingle. It suggests a level of diction at which nothing untoward could be conveyed. The poem promises to proceed in a comforting, melodious way. That’s what you’re thinking, anyway, after hearing “hark”: that you’re going to have some sort of description of the music made by the thrush—that you are getting into familiar territory.
But that was a setup, as the following two lines show. It was but an exposition, crammed by Frost into two lines. Abruptly, in a fairly indecorous, matter-of-fact, non-melodious, and non-Victorian way, the diction and the register shift:
It’s “now” that does this job of leaving very little room for any fancy. What’s more, you realize that the “hark” rhymes with “dark.” And that that “dark” is the condition of “inside,” which could allude not only to the woods, since the comma sets that “inside” into sharp opposition to the third line’s “outside,” and since the opposition is given you in the fourth line, which makes it a more drastic statement. Not to mention that this opposition is but the matter of substitution of just two letters: of putting “ar” instead of “us” between “d” and “k.” The vowel sound remains essentially the same. What we’ve got here is the difference in just one consonant.
There is a slight choking air in the fourth line. That has to do with its distribution of stresses, different from the first dimeter. The stanza contracts, as it were, toward its end, and the caesura after “inside” only underscores that “inside” ’s isolation. Now, while I am offering you this deliberately slanted reading of this poem, I’d like to urge you to pay very close attention to its every letter, every caesura, if only because it deals with a bird, and a bird’s trills are a matter of pauses and, if you will, characters. Being predominantly monosyllabic, English is highly suitable for this parroting job, and the shorter the metre, the greater the pressure upon every letter, every caesura, every comma. At any rate, that “dark” literally renders the “woods” as la selva oscura.
With the memory of what that dark wood was entry to, let’s approach the next stanza:
What do you think is happening here? A British or a Continental—or, for that matter, a properly American—innocent would still reply that it is about a bird singing in the evening, and that it is a nice tune. Interestingly, he would be right, and it is on this sort of rightness that Frost’s reputation rests. In fact, though, this stanza, in particular, is extremely dark. One could argue that the poem considers something rather unpleasant, quite possibly a suicide. Or, if not suicide—well, death. And, if not necessarily death, then—at least, in this stanza—the notion of the afterlife.
In “Too dark in the woods for a bird,” a bird, alias bard, scrutinizes “the woods” and finds them too dark. “Too” here echoes—no! harks back to—Dante’s opening lines in the Divine Comedy: our bird/bard’s assessment of that selva differs from the great Italian’s. To put it plainly, the afterlife is darker for Frost than it is for Dante. The question is why, and the answer is either because he disbelieves in the whole thing or because his notion of himself makes him, in his mind, slated for damnation. Nothing in his power can improve his eventual standing, and I’d venture that “sleight of wing” could be regarded as a reference to last rites. Above all, this poem is about being old and pondering what is next. “To better its perch for the night” has to do with the possibility of being assigned elsewhere, not just to Hell—the night here being that of eternity. The only thing the bird/bard has to show for himself is that it/he “still could sing.”
“The woods” are “too dark” for a bird because a bird is too far gone at being a bird. No motion of its soul, alias “sleight of wing,” can improve its eventual fate in these “woods.” Whose woods these are I think we know: one of their branches is where a bird is to end up anyway, and a “perch” gives a sense of these woods’ being well structured: it is an enclosure—a sort of chicken coop, if you will. Thus, our bird is doomed; no last-minute conversion (“sleight” is a conjuring term) is feasible, if only because a bard is too old for any quick motion of the hand. Yet, old though he is, he still can sing.
And in the third stanza you have that bird singing: you have the song itself, the last one. It is a tremendously expansive gesture. Look at how every word here postpones the next one. “The last”—caesura—“of the light”—caesura—“of the sun”—line break, which is a big caesura—“That had died”—caesura—“in the west.” Our bird/bard traces the last of the light to its vanished source. You almost hear in this line the good old “Shenandoah,” the song of going West. Delay and postponement are palpable here. “The last” is not finite, and “of the light” is not finite, and “of the sun” is not. What’s more, “that had died” itself is not finite, though it should have been. Even “in the west” isn’t. What we’ve got here is the song of lingering: of light, of life. You almost see the finger pointing out the source and then, in the broad circular motion of the last two lines, returning to the speaker in “Still lived”—caesura—“for one song more”—line break—“In a thrush’s breast.” Between “The last” and “breast” our poet covers an extraordinary distance: the width of the continent, if you will. After all, he describes the light, which is still upon him, the opposite of the darkness of the woods. The breast is, after all, the source of any song, and you almost see here not so much a thrush as a robin; anyhow, a bird singing at sunset: it lingers on the bird’s breast.
And here, in the opening lines of the fourth stanza, is where the bird and the bard part ways. “Far in the pillared dark / Thrush music went.” The key word here is “pillared,” of course: it suggests a cathedral interior—a church, in any case. In other words, our thrush flies into the woods, and you hear his music from within, “almost like a call to come in / To the dark and lament.” If you want, you may replace “lament” with “repent”: the effect will be practically the same. What’s being described here is one of the choices before our old bard this evening: the choice he does not make. The thrush has chosen that “sleight of wing” after all. It is bettering its perch for the night; it accepts its fate, for lament is acceptance. You could plunge yourself here into a maze of ecclesiastical distinctions—Frost’s essential Protestantism, etc. I’d advise against it, since a stoic posture befits believers and agnostics alike; in this line of work, it is practically inescapable. On the whole, references (religious ones especially) are not to be shrunk to inferences.
“But no, I was out for stars” is Frost’s usual deceptive maneuver, projecting his positive sensibility: lines like that are what earned him his reputation. If he was indeed “out for stars,” why didn’t he mention that before? Why did he write the whole poem about something else? But this line is here not solely to deceive you. It is here to deceive—or, rather, to quell—himself. This whole stanza is. Unless we read this line as the poet’s general statement about his presence in this world—in the romantic key, that is, as a line about his general metaphysical appetite, not to be quenched by this little one-night agony.
There is too much jocular vehemence in these lines for us to take them at face value, although we should not omit this option, either. The man is shielding himself from his own insights, and he gets grammatically as well as syllabically assertive and less idiomatic—especially in the second line, “I would not come in,” which could be easily truncated into “I won’t come in.” “I meant not even if asked” comes off with a menacing resoluteness, which could amount to a statement of his agnosticism were it not for the last line’s all too clever qualifier: “And I hadn’t been.” This is indeed a sleight of hand.
Or else you can treat this stanza and, with it, the whole poem as Frost’s humble footnote or postscript to Dante’s Commedia, which ends with “stars”—as his acknowledgment of possessing either a lesser belief or a lesser gift. The poet here refuses an invitation into darkness; moreover, he questions the very call: “Almost like a call to come in . . .” One shouldn’t make heavy weather of Frost’s affinity with Dante, but here and there it’s palpable, especially in the poems dealing with dark nights of the soul—for instance, in “Acquainted with the Night.” Unlike a number of his illustrious contemporaries, Frost never wears his learning on his sleeve—mainly because it is in his bloodstream. So “I meant not even if asked” could be read not only as his refusal to make a meal of his dreadful apprehension but also as a reference to his stylistic choice in ruling out a major form. Be that as it may, one thing is clear: without Dante’s Commedia, this poem wouldn’t have existed.
Still, should you choose to read “Come In” as a nature poem, you are perfectly welcome to it. I suggest, though, that you take a longer look at the title. The twenty lines of the poem constitute, as it were, the title’s translation. And in this translation, I am afraid, the expression “come in” means “die.”
While in “Come In” we have Frost at his lyrical best, in “Home Burial” we have him at his narrative best. Actually, “Home Burial” is not a narrative; it is an eclogue. Or, more exactly, it is a pastoral—except that it is a very dark one. Insofar as it tells a story, it is, of course, a narrative; the means of that story’s transportation, though, is dialogue, and it is the means of transportation that defines a genre. Invented by Theocritus in his idylls, refined by Virgil in the poems called Eclogues or Bucolics, the pastoral is essentially an exchange between two or more characters in a rural setting, returning often to that perennial subject, love. Since the English and French word “pastoral” is overburdened with happy connotations, and since Frost is closer to Virgil than to Theocritus, and not only chronologically, let’s follow Virgil and call this poem an eclogue. The rural setting is here, and so are the two characters: a farmer and his wife, who may qualify as a shepherd and a shepherdess, except that it is two thousand years later. So is their subject: love, two thousand years later.
To make a long story short, Frost is a very Virgilian poet. By that, I mean the Virgil of the Bucolics and the Georgics, not the Virgil of the Aeneid. To begin with, the young Frost did a considerable amount of farming—as well as a lot of writing. The posture of gentleman farmer wasn’t all posture. As a matter of fact, until the end of his days he kept buying farms. By the time he died, he had owned, if I am not mistaken, four farms in Vermont and New Hampshire. He knew something about living off the land—not less, in any case, than Virgil, who must have been a disastrous farmer, to judge by the agricultural advice he dispenses in the Georgics.
With few exceptions, American poetry is essentially Virgilian, which is to say contemplative. That is, if you take four Roman poets of the Augustan period, Propertius, Ovid, Virgil, and Horace, as the standard representatives of the four known humors (Propertius’s choleric intensity, Ovid’s sanguine couplings, Virgil’s phlegmatic musings, Horace’s melancholic equipoise), then American poetry—indeed, poetry in English in general—strikes you as being by and large of Virgilian or Horatian denomination. (Consider the bulk of Wallace Stevens’ soliloquies, or the late, American Auden.) Yet Frost’s affinity with Virgil is not so much temperamental as technical. Apart from frequent recourse to disguise (or mask) and the opportunity for distancing oneself that an invented character offers to the poet, Frost and Virgil have in common a tendency to hide the real subject matter of their dialogues under the monotonous, opaque sheen of their respective pentameters and hexameters. A poet of extraordinary probing and anxiety, the Virgil of the Eclogues and the Georgics is commonly taken for a bard of love and country pleasures, just like the author of “North of Boston.”
To this it should be added that Virgil in Frost comes to you obscured by Wordsworth and Browning. “Filtered” is perhaps a better word, and Browning’s dramatic monologue is quite a filter, engulfing the dramatic situation in solid Victorian ambivalence and uncertainty. Frost’s dark pastorals are dramatic also, not only in the sense of the intensity of the characters’ interplay but above all in the sense that they are indeed theatrical. It is a kind of theatre in which the author plays all the roles, including those of stage designer, director, ballet master, etc. It’s he who turns the lights off, and sometimes he is the audience also.
That stands to reason. For Theocritus’s idylls, in their own right, are but a compression of Greek drama. In “Home Burial” we have an arena reduced to a staircase, with its Hitchcockian banister. The opening line tells you as much about the actors’ positions as about their roles: those of the hunter and his prey. Or, as you’ll see later, of Pygmalion and Galatea, except that in this case the sculptor turns his living model into stone. In the final analysis, “Home Burial” is a love poem, and if only on these grounds it qualifies as a pastoral.
But let’s examine this line and a half:
Frost could have stopped right here. It is already a poem, it is already a drama. Imagine this line and a half sitting on the page all by itself, in minimalist fashion. It’s an extremely loaded scene—or, better yet, a frame. You’ve got an enclosure, the house, with two individuals at cross—no, diverse—purposes. He’s at the bottom of the stairs; she’s at the top. He’s looking up at her; she, for all we know thus far, doesn’t register his presence at all. Also, you’ve got to remember that it’s in black and white. The staircase dividing them suggests a hierarchy of significances. It is a pedestal with her atop (at least, in his eyes) and him at the bottom (in our eyes and, eventually, in hers). The angle is sharp. Place yourself here in either position—better in his—and you’ll see what I mean. Imagine yourself observing, watching somebody, or imagine yourself being watched. Imagine yourself interpreting someone’s movements—or immobility—unbeknownst to that person. That’s what turns you into a hunter, or into Pygmalion.
Let me press this Pygmalion business a bit further. Scrutiny and interpretation are the gist of any intense human interplay, and of love in particular. They are also the most powerful source of literature: of fiction (which is by and large about betrayal) and, above all, of lyric poetry, where one is trying to figure out the beloved and what makes her/him tick. And this figuring out brings us back to the Pygmalion business quite literally, since the more you chisel out and the more you penetrate the character, the more you put your model on a pedestal. An enclosure—be it a house, a studio, a page—intensifies this pedestal aspect enormously. And, depending on your industry and on the model’s ability to coöperate, this process results either in a masterpiece or in a disaster. In “Home Burial” it results in both. For every Galatea is ultimately a Pygmalion’s self-projection. On the other hand, art doesn’t imitate life but infects it.
So let’s watch the deportment of the model:
On the literal level, on the level of straight narrative, we have the heroine beginning to descend the steps with her head turned to us in profile, her glance lingering on some frightful sight. She hesitates and interrupts her descent, her eyes still trained, presumably, on the same sight: neither on the steps nor on the man at the bottom. But you are aware of yet another level present here, aren’t you? Let’s leave that level as yet unnamed. Each piece of information in this narrative comes to you in an isolated manner, within a pentameter line. The isolation job is done by white margins framing, as it were, the whole scene, like the silence of the house; and the lines themselves are the staircase. Basically, what you get here is a succession of frames. “She was starting down” is one frame. “Looking back over her shoulder at some fear” is another; in fact, it is a closeup, a profile—you see her facial expression. “She took a doubtful step and then undid it” is a third: again a closeup—the feet. “To raise herself and look again” is a fourth—full figure.
But this is a ballet, too. There is a minimum of two pas de deux here, conveyed to you with a wonderful euphonic, almost alliterative precision. I mean the “d”s in this line, in “doubtful” and in “undid it,” although the “t”s matter also. “Undid it” is particularly good, because you sense the spring in that step. And that profile in its opposition to the movement of the body—the very formula of a dramatic heroine—is straight out of a ballet as well.
But the real faux pas de deux starts with “He spoke / Advancing toward her.” For the next twenty-five lines, a conversation occurs on the stairs. The man climbs them as he speaks, negotiating mechanically and verbally what separates them. “Advancing” bespeaks self-consciousness and apprehensiveness. The tension grows with the growing proximity. However, the mechanical and, by implication, physical proximity is more easily attained than the verbal—i.e., the mental—and that’s what the poem is all about. “ ‘What is it you see / From up there always?—for I want to know’ ” is very much a Pygmalion question, addressed to the model on the pedestal: atop the staircase. His fascination is not with what he sees but with what he imagines it conceals—what he has placed there. He invests her with mystery and then rushes to uncloak it: this rapacity is always Pygmalion’s double bind. It is as though the sculptor found himself puzzled by the facial expression of his model: she “sees” what he does not “see.” So he has to climb to the pedestal himself, to put himself in her position. In the position of “up there always”—of topographical (vis-à-vis the house) and psychological advantage, where he put her himself. It is the latter, the psychological advantage of the creation, that disturbs the creator, as the emphatic “ ‘for I want to know’ ” shows.
The model refuses to coöperate. In the next frame (“She turned and sank upon her skirts at that”), followed by the closeup of “And her face changed from terrified to dull,” you get that lack of coöperation plain. Yet the lack of coöperation here is coöperation. For we have to bear in mind that the woman’s psychological advantage is in the man’s self-projection. He ascribes it to her. So by turning him down she only enhances his fantasy. In this sense, by refusing to coöperate she plays along. That’s basically her whole game here. The more he climbs, the greater is that advantage; he pushes her into it, as it were, with every step.
Still, he is climbing: in “he said to gain time” he climbs, and also in
The most important word here is the verb “see,” which we encounter for the second time. In the next nine lines, it will be used four more times. We’ll get to that in a minute. But first let’s deal with this “mounting” line and the next. It’s a masterly job here. With “mounting,” the poet kills two birds at once, for “mounting” describes both the climb and the climber. And the climber looms even larger, because the woman “cowers”—i.e., shrinks under him. Remember that she looks “at some fear.” “Mounting” versus “cowered” gives you the contrast, then, between their respective frames, with the implicit danger contained in his largeness. In any case, her alternative to fear is not comfort. And the resoluteness of “ ‘I will find out now’ ” echoes the superior physical mass, not alleviated by the cajoling “dear” that follows a remark—“ ‘you must tell me’ ”—that is both imperative and conscious of this contrast.
And now we come to this verb “see.” Within fifteen lines it’s been used six times. Every experienced poet knows how risky it is to use the same word several times in a short space. The risk is that of tautology. So what is it that Frost is after here? I think he is after precisely that: tautology. More accurately, nonsemantic utterance. Which you get, for instance, in “ ‘Oh,’ and again, ‘Oh.’ ” Frost had a theory about what he called “sentence-sounds.” It had to do with his observation that the sound, the tonality, of human locution is as semantic as actual words. For instance, you overhear two people conversing behind a closed door, in a room. You don’t hear the words, yet you know the general drift of their dialogue; in fact, you may pretty accurately figure out its substance. In other words, the tune matters more than the lyrics, which are, so to speak, replaceable or redundant. Anyway, the repetition of this or that word liberates the tune, makes it more audible. By the same token, such repetition liberates the mind—rids you of the notion presented by the word. (This is the old Zen technique, of course, but, come to think of it, finding it in an American poem makes you wonder whether philosophical principles don’t spring from texts rather than the other way around.)
The six “see”s here do precisely that. They exclaim rather than explain. It could be “see,” it could be “Oh,” it could be “yes,” it could be any monosyllabic word. The idea is to explode the verb from within, for the content of the actual observation defeats the process of observation, its means, and the very observer. The effect that Frost tries to create is the inadequacy of response when you automatically repeat the first word that comes to your tongue. “Seeing” here is simply reeling from the unnameable. The least seeing our hero does is in “ ‘Just that I see,’ ” for by this time the verb, having already been used four times, is robbed of its “observing” and “understanding” meaning (not to mention the fact—draining the word even further of content—that we readers are ourselves still in the dark, don’t know what there is to see out that window). By now, it is just sound, denoting an animal response rather than a rational one.
This sort of explosion of bona-fide words into pure, nonsemantic sounds will occur several times in the course of this poem. Another happens very soon, ten lines later. Characteristically, these explosions occur whenever the players find themselves in close physical proximity. They are the verbal—or, better yet, the audial—equivalents of a hiatus. Frost directs them with tremendous consistency, suggesting his characters’ profound (at least, prior to this scene) incompatibility. “Home Burial” is, in fact, the study of that, and on the literal level the tragedy it describes is the characters’ comeuppance for violating each other’s territorial and mental imperatives by having a child. Now that the child is lost, the imperatives play themselves out with vehemence: they claim their own.
By standing next to the woman, the man acquires her vantage point. Because he is larger than she, and also because this is his house (as line 23 shows), where he has lived, presumably, most of his life, he must, one imagines, bend somewhat to put his eyes on her line of vision. Now they are next to each other, in an almost intimate proximity, on the threshold of their bedroom, atop the stairs. The bedroom has a window; a window has a view. And here Frost produces the most stunning simile of this poem, and perhaps of his entire career:
“ ‘The little graveyard where my people are!’ ” generates an air of endearment, and it’s with this air that “ ‘So small the window frames the whole of it’ ” starts, only to tumble itself into “ ‘Not so much larger than a bedroom, is it?’ ” The key word here is “frames,” because it doubles as the window’s actual frame and as a picture on a bedroom wall. The window hangs, as it were, on the bedroom wall like a picture, and that picture depicts a graveyard. “Depicting,” though, means reducing to the size of a picture. Imagine having that in your bedroom. In the next line, though, the graveyard is restored to its actual size and, for that reason, equated with the bedroom. This equation is as much psychological as it is spatial. Inadvertently, the man blurts out the summary of the marriage (foreshadowed in the grim pun of the title). And, equally inadvertently, the “is it?” invites the woman to agree with this summary, almost implying her complicity.
As if that were not enough, the next two lines, with their stones of slate and marble, proceed to reinforce the simile, equating the graveyard with the made-up bed, with its pentametrically arranged pillows and cushions—populated by a family of small, inanimate children: “Broad-shouldered little slabs.” This is Pygmalion unbound, on a rampage. What we have here is the man’s intrusion into the woman’s mind, a violation of her mental imperative—if you will, an ossification of it. And then this ossifying hand—petrifying, actually—stretches toward what’s still raw, palpably as well as in her mind:
It’s not that the contrast between the stones and the mound is too stark, though it is; it is his ability—or, rather, his attempt—to articulate it that she finds unbearable. For, should he succeed, should he find the words to articulate her mental anguish, the mound will join the stones in the “picture,” will become a slab itself, will become a pillow of their bed. Moreover, this will amount to the total penetration of her inner sanctum: that of her mind. And he is getting there:
The poem is gathering its dark force. Four “Don’t”s are that nonsemantic explosion, resulting in hiatus. We are so much in the story line now—up to the eyebrows—that we may forget that this is still a ballet, still a succession of frames, still an artifice, stage-managed by the poet. In fact, we are about to take sides with our characters, aren’t we? Well, I suggest we pull ourselves out of this by our eyebrows and think for a moment about what it all tells us about our poet. Imagine, for instance, that the story line has been drawn from experience—from, say, the loss of a firstborn. What does all that you’ve read thus far tell you about the author, about his sensibility? How much he is absorbed by the story and—what’s more crucial—to what degree he is free from it?
Were this a seminar, I’d wait for your answers. Since it is not, I’ve got to answer this question myself. And the answer is: He is very free. Dangerously so. The very ability to utilize—to play with—this sort of material suggests an extremely wide margin of detachment. The ability to turn this material into a blank-verse, pentameter monotone adds another degree to that detachment. To observe a relation between a family graveyard and a bedroom’s four-poster—still another. Added up, they amount to a considerable degree of detachment. A degree that dooms human interplay, that makes communication impossible, for communication requires an equal. This is very much the predicament of Pygmalion vis-à-vis his model. So it’s not that the story the poem tells is autobiographical but that the poem is the author’s self-portrait. That is why one abhors literary biography—because it is reductive. That is why I am resisting issuing you with actual data on Frost.
Where does he go, you may ask, with all that detachment? The answer is: utter autonomy. It is from there that he observes similarities among unlike things, it is from there that he imitates the vernacular. Would you like to meet Mr. Frost? Then read his poems, nothing else; otherwise, you are in for criticism from below. Would you like to be him? Would you like to become Robert Frost? Perhaps one should be advised against such aspirations. For a sensibility like this, there is very little hope of real human conjugality; and, actually, there is very little romantic dirt on him—of the sort normally indicative of such hope.
This is not necessarily a digression, but let’s get back to the lines. Remember the hiatus, and what causes it, and remember that this is an artifice. Actually, the author himself reminds you of it with
It is still a ballet, you see, and the stage direction is incorporated into the text. The most telling detail here is the banister. Why does the author put it here? First, to reintroduce the staircase, which we might by now have forgotten about, stunned by the business of ruining the bedroom. But, secondly, the banister prefigures her sliding downstairs, since every child uses banisters for sliding down. “And turned on him with such a daunting look” is another stage direction.
Now, this is a remarkably good line. It has a distinctly vernacular, almost proverbial air. And the author is definitely aware of how good it is. So, both trying to underscore its effectiveness and to obscure his awareness of it, he emphasizes the unwittingness of this utterance: “He said twice over before he knew himself.” On the literal, narrative level, we have the man stunned by the woman’s gaze, the daunting look, and groping for words. Frost was awfully good with those formulaic, quasi-proverbial one-liners. “For to be social is to be forgiving” (in “The Star-Splitter”), or “The best way out is always through” (“A Servant to Servants”), for example. And a few lines later you are going to get yet another one. They are mostly pentametric; iambic pentameter is very congenial to that sort of job.
This whole section of the poem, from “ ‘Don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t’ ” on, obviously has some sexual connotations, of her turning the man down. That’s what the story of Pygmalion and his model is all about. On the literal level, “Home Burial” evolves along similar “hard to get” lines. However, I don’t think that Frost, for all his autonomy, was conscious of that. (After all, “North of Boston” shows no acquaintance with Freudian terminology.) And, if he was not, this sort of approach on our part is invalid. Nevertheless, we should bear some of it in mind as we are embarking on the bulk of this poem:
What we’ve got here is the desire to escape: not so much the man as the enclosure of the place, not to mention the subject of their exchange. Yet the resolution is incomplete, as the fidgeting with the hat shows, since the execution of this desire will be counterproductive for the model as far as being the subject of explication goes. May I go so far as to suggest that that would mean a loss of advantage, not to mention that it would be the end of the poem? In fact, it does end with precisely that, with her exit. The literal level will get into conflict, or fusion, with the metaphorical. Hence “ ‘I don’t know rightly whether any man can,’ ” which fuses both these levels, forcing the poem to proceed; you don’t know any longer who is the horse here, who is the cart. I doubt whether the poet himself knew that at this point. The fusion’s result is the release of a certain force, which subordinates his pen, and the best it can do is keep both strands—literal and metaphorical—in check.
We learn the heroine’s name, and that this sort of discourse had its precedents, with nearly identical results. Given the fact that we know the way the poem ends, we may judge—well, we may imagine—the character of those occasions. The scene in “Home Burial” is but a repetition. By this token, the poem doesn’t so much inform us about their life as replace it. We also learn, from “ ‘Don’t go to someone else this time,’ ” about a mixture of jealousy and sense of shame felt by at least one of them. And we learn, from “ ‘I won’t come down the stairs’ ” and from “He sat and fixed his chin between his fists,” about the fear of violence present in their physical proximity. The latter line is a wonderful embodiment of stasis, very much in the fashion of Rodin’s “Penseur,” albeit with two fists, which is a very telling self-referential detail, since the forceful application of fist to chin is what results in a knockout.
The main thing here, though, is the reintroduction of the stairs. Not only the literal stairs but the steps in “he sat,” too. From now on, the entire dialogue occurs on the stairs, though they have become the scene of an impasse rather than a passage. No physical steps are taken. Instead, we have their verbal, or oral, substitute. The ballet ends, yielding to the verbal advance and retreat, which is heralded by “ ‘There’s something I should like to ask you, dear.’ ” Note again the air of cajoling, colored this time with the recognition of its futility in “dear.” Note also the last semblance of actual interplay in “ ‘You don’t know how to ask it.’ ‘Help me, then’ ”—this last knocking on the door, or, better yet, on the wall. Note “Her fingers moved the latch for all reply,” because this feint of trying for the door is the last physical movement, the last theatrical or cinematic gesture in the poem, save one more latch-trying.
The speaker’s hectic mental pacing is fully counterbalanced by his immobility. If this is a ballet, it is a mental one. In fact, it’s very much like fencing: not with an opponent or a shadow but with one’s self. The lines are constantly taking a step forward and then undoing it. (“She took a doubtful step and then undid it.”) The main technical device here is enjambment, which physically resembles descending the stairs. In fact, this back-and-forth, this give-and-take almost gives you a sense of being short of breath. Until, that is, the release that is coming with the formulaic, folksy “ ‘A man must partly give up being a man / With womenfolk.’ ”
After this release, you get three lines of more evenly paced verse, almost a tribute to iambic pentameter’s proclivity for coherence, ending with the pentametrically triumphant “ ‘Though I don’t like such things ’twixt those that love.’ ” And here our poet makes another not so subdued dash toward the proverbial: “ ‘Two that don’t love can’t live together without them. / But two that do can’t live together with them’ ”—though this comes off as a bit cumbersome, and not entirely convincing.
Frost partly senses that: hence “She moved the latch a little.” But that’s only one explanation. The whole point of this qualifier-burdened monologue is the explication of its addressee. The man is groping for understanding. He realizes that in order to understand he’s got to surrender—if not suspend entirely—his rationality. In other words, he descends. But this is really running down stairs that lead upward. And, partly from rapidly approaching the end of his wits, partly out of purely rhetorical inertia, he summons here the notion of love. In other words, this quasi-proverbial two-liner about love is a rational argument, and that, of course, is not enough for its addressee.
For the more she is explicated, the more remote she gets: the higher her pedestal grows (which is perhaps of specific importance to her now that she is downstairs). It’s not grief that drives her out of the house but the dread of being explicated, as well as of the explicator himself. She wants to stay impenetrable and won’t accept anything short of his complete surrender. And he is well on the way to it:
The last is the most stunning, most tragic line, in my view, in the entire poem. It amounts practically to the heroine’s ultimate victory—i.e., to the aforementioned rational surrender on the part of the explicator. For all its colloquial air, it promotes her mental operations to supernatural status, thus acknowledging infinity—ushered into her mind by the child’s death—as his rival. Against this he is powerless, since her access to that infinity, her absorption by and commerce with it, is backed in his eyes by the whole mythology of the opposite sex—by the whole notion of the alternative being impressed upon him by her at this point rather thoroughly. That’s what he is losing her to by staying rational. It is a shrill, almost hysterical line, admitting the man’s limitations and momentarily bringing the whole discourse to a plane of regard that the heroine could be at home on—the one she perhaps seeks. But only momentarily. He can’t proceed at this level, and succumbs to pleading:
He tumbles down, as it were, from the hysterical height of “ ‘Tell me about it if it’s something human.’ ” But this tumble, this mental knocking about the metrically lapsing stairs, restores him to rationality, with all its attendant qualifiers. That brings him rather close to the heart of the matter—to her taking her “ ‘mother-loss of a first child / So inconsolably’ ”—and he evokes the catchall notion of love again, this time somewhat more convincingly, though still tinged with a rhetorical flourish: “ ‘in the face of love.’ ” The very word—“love”—undermines its emotional reality, reducing the sentiment to its utilitarian application: as a means of overcoming tragedy. However, overcoming tragedy deprives its victim of the status of hero or heroine. This, combined with the resentment over the explicator’s lowering of his explication’s plane of regard, results in the heroine’s interruption of “ ‘You’d think his memory might be satisfied—’ ” with “ ‘There you go sneering now!’ ” It’s Galatea’s self-defense, the defense against the further application of the chiselling instrument to her already attained features.
Because of its absorbing story line, there is a strong temptation to bill “Home Burial” as a tragedy of incommunicability, a poem about the failure of language; and many have succumbed to this temptation. In fact, it is just the reverse: it is a tragedy of communication, for communication’s logical end is the violation of your interlocutor’s mental imperative. This is a poem about language’s terrifying success, for language, in the final analysis, is alien to the sentiments it articulates. No one is more aware of that than a poet; and, if “Home Burial” is autobiographical, it is so in the first place by revealing Frost’s grasp of the collision between his métier and his emotions. To drive this point home, may I suggest that you compare the actual sentiment you may feel toward an individual in your company and the word “love.” A poet is doomed to resort to words. So is the speaker in “Home Burial.” Hence, their overlapping in this poem; hence, too, its autobiographical reputation.
But let us take it a step further. The poet here should be identified not with one character but with both. He is the man here, all right, but he is the woman also. Thus you’ve got a clash not just of two sensibilities but of two languages. Sensibilities may merge—say, in the act of love; languages can’t. Sensibilities may result in a child; languages won’t. And, now that the child is dead, what’s left is two totally autonomous languages, two non-overlapping systems of verbalization. In short: words. His versus hers, and hers are fewer. This makes her enigmatic. Enigmas are subject to explication, which they resist—in her case, with all she’s got. His job, or, more exactly, the job of his language, is, therefore, the explication of her language, or, more exactly, her reticence. Which, when it comes to human interplay, is a recipe for disaster. When it comes to a poem, an enormous challenge.
Small wonder, then, that this “dark pastoral” grows darker with every line; it proceeds by aggravation, reflecting not so much the complexity of the author’s mind as words’ own appetite for disaster. For the more you push reticence, the greater it gets, having nothing to fall back upon but itself. The enigma thus grows bigger. It’s like Napoleon invading Russia and finding that it goes beyond the Urals. Small wonder that this “dark pastoral” of ours has no choice but to proceed by aggravation, for the poet’s mind plays both the invading army and the territory; in the end, he can’t take sides. It is a sense of the incomprehensible vastness of what lies ahead, defeating not only the notion of conquest but the very sense of progress, that informs both “ ‘Tell me about it if it’s something human’ ” and the lines that follow “ ‘There you go sneering now!’ ”:
A language invading reticence gets no trophy here, save the echo of its own words. All it has to show for its efforts is a good old line that brought it nowhere before:
It, too, falls back on itself. A stalemate.
It’s broken by the woman. More exactly, her reticence is broken. Which could be regarded by the male character as success, were it not for what she surrenders. Which is not so much an offensive as a negation of all the man stands for.
This is the voice of a very foreign territory indeed: a foreign language. It is a view of the man from a distance he can’t possibly fathom, since it is proportionate to the frequency with which the heroine creeps up and down the stairs. Which, in its own right, is proportionate to the leaps of his gravel in the course of his digging the grave. Whatever the ratio, it is not in favor of his actual or mental steps toward her on that staircase. Nor in his favor is the rationale behind her creeping up and down the stairs while he is digging. Presumably, there is nobody else around to do the job. (That they lost their firstborn suggests that they are fairly young and thus not very well off.) Presumably also, by performing this menial task, and by doing it in a particularly mechanical way—as a remarkably skillful mimetic job in the pentameter here indicates (or as is charged by the heroine)—the man is quelling, or controlling, his grief; that is, his movements, unlike the heroine’s, are functional.
In short, this is futility’s view of utility. For obvious reasons, this view is usually precise and rich in judgment: “ ‘If you had any feelings,’ ” and “ ‘Leap up, like that, like that, and land so lightly / And roll back down the mound beside the hole.’ ” Depending on the length of observation—and the description of digging runs here for nine lines—this view may result, as it does here, in a sensation of utter disparity between the observer and the observed: “ ‘I thought, Who is that man? I didn’t know you.’ ” For observation, you see, results in nothing, while digging produces at least a mound, or a hole. Whose mental equivalent in the observer is also, as it were, a grave. Or, rather, a fusion of the man and his purpose, not to mention his instrument. What futility and Frost’s pentameter register here above all is rhythm. The heroine observes an inanimate machine. The man in her eye is a gravedigger, and thus her alternative.
Now, the sight of our alternative is always unwelcome, not to say threatening. The closer your view of it, the sharper your general sense of guilt and of a deserved comeuppance. In the mind of a woman who has lost her child, that sense may be fairly sharp. Add to that her inability to translate her grief into any useful action, save a highly agitated creeping up and down, as well as the recognition—and subsequent glorification—of that inability. And add a cross-purpose correspondence between her movements and his: between her steps and his spade. What do you think it would result in? And remember that she is in his house, that this is the graveyard where his people are. And that he is a gravedigger.
Note this “and I don’t know why,” for here she unwittingly drifts toward her own projection. All that she needs now is to check that projection with her own eyes. That is, she wants to make her mental picture physical:
So what do you think she sees with her own eyes, and what does that sight prove? What does the frame contain this time? What does she have a closeup of? I am afraid she sees a murder weapon: she sees a blade. The fresh earth stains either on the shoes or on his spade make the spade’s edge shine: make it into a blade. And does earth “stain,” however fresh? Her very choice of noun, denoting liquid, suggests—accuses—blood. What should our man have done? Should he have taken his shoes off before entering the house? Perhaps. Perhaps he should have left his spade outside, too. But he is a farmer, and acts like one—presumably out of fatigue. So he brings in his instrument—in her eyes, the instrument of death. And the same goes for his shoes, and it goes for the rest of the man. A gravedigger is equated here, if you will, with the reaper. And there are only the two of them in this house.
The most awful bit is “for I saw it,” because it emphasizes the perceived symbolism of that spade left standing against the wall outside there in the entry: for future use. Or as a guard. Or as an unwitting memento mori. At the same time, “for I saw it” conveys the capriciousness of her perception and the triumph of somebody who cannot be fooled, the triumph of catching the enemy. It is futility in full bloom, engulfing and absorbing utility into its shadow.
This is practically a nonverbal recognition of defeat, coming in the form of a typical Frostian understatement, studded with tautological monosyllables quickly abandoning their semantic functions. Our Napoleon or Pygmalion is completely routed by his creation, who still keeps pressing on.
Now, this is where our poem effectively ends. The rest is simply dénouement, in which our heroine goes rambling on in an increasingly incoherent fashion about death, the world being evil, uncaring friends, and feeling alone. It is a rather hysterical monologue, whose only function, in terms of the story line, is to struggle toward a release for what has been pent up in her mind. It does not, and in the end she resorts to the door, as though only landscape were proportionate to her mental state and thus could be of solace.
And, quite possibly, it is. A conflict within an enclosure—a house, say—normally deteriorates into tragedy, because the rectangularity of the place itself puts a higher premium on reason, offering emotion only a straitjacket. Thus in the house the man is the master not only because the house is his but because—within the context of the poem—rationality is his. In a landscape, “Home Burial” ’s dialogue would have run a different course; in a landscape, the man would be the loser. The drama would perhaps be even greater, for it’s one thing when the house sides with a character, and another when the elements do so. In any case, that’s why she is trying for the door.
So let’s get back to the five lines that precede the dénouement—to this business of rotting birches. “Three foggy mornings and one rainy day / Will rot the best birch fence a man can build,” our farmer is quoted as saying, sitting there in the kitchen, clods of fresh earth on his shoes and the spade standing up there in the entry. One may ascribe this phrase again to his fatigue and to the next task in store for him: building a little fence around the new grave. However, since this is not a public but a family graveyard, the fence he mentioned might indeed be one of his everyday concerns, something else he has to deal with. And presumably he mentions it to take his mind off what he has just finished doing. Still, for all his effort, the mind is not entirely taken, as the verb “rot” indicates: the line contains the shadow of the hidden comparison—if a fence rots so quickly in the damp air, how quickly will a little coffin rot in earth damp enough to leave “stains” on his shoes? But the heroine once again resists the encompassing gambits of language—metaphor, irony, litotes—and goes straight for the literal meaning, the absolute. And that’s what she jumps on in “ ‘What had how long it takes a birch to rot / To do with what was in the darkened parlor?’ ” What is remarkable here is how diverse their treatment of the notion of rotting is. While he is talking about a “birch fence,” which is a clear deflection, not to mention a reference to something above the ground, she zeroes in on “what was in the darkened parlor.” It’s understandable that, being a mother, she concentrates—that Frost makes her concentrate—on the dead child. Yet her way of referring to it is highly roundabout, even euphemistic: “what was in.” Not to mention that she refers to her dead child as a “what,” not a “who.” We don’t learn his name, and, for all we know, he didn’t have much of a life after his birth. And then you should note her reference to the grave: “the darkened parlor.”
Now, with “darkened parlor,” the poet finishes his portrait of the heroine. We have to bear in mind that this is a rural setting, that the heroine lives in “his” house—i.e., that she came here from without. And the “darkened parlor” is an answer to the question “From where?” since, in the context of the poem, it strikes one as very much an urbane locution. I’d say it is distinctly Victorian, though we can’t be sure, as “Home Burial” was written some time before 1914.
I think you will agree that this is not a European poem. Not French, not Italian, not German, not even English. I also can assure you that it is not Russian at all. And, in terms of what American poetry is like today, it is not American, either. It’s Frost’s own, and he has been dead for over a quarter of a century now. Small wonder then that one rambles on about his lines at such length, and in strange places, though he no doubt would wince at being introduced to a French audience by a Russian. On the other hand, he was no stranger to incongruity.
So what was it that he was after in this, his very own poem? He was, I think, after grief and reason, which, while poison to each other, are language’s most efficient fuel—or, if you will, poetry’s indelible ink. Frost’s reliance on them here and elsewhere almost gives you the sense that his dipping into this inkpot had to do with the hope of reducing the level of its contents; you detect a sort of vested interest on his part. Yet the more one dips into it, the more it brims with this black essence of existence, and the more one’s mind, like one’s fingers, gets soiled by this liquid. For the more there is of grief, the more there is of reason. As much as one may be tempted to take sides in “Home Burial,” the presence of the narrator here rules this out, for, while the characters stand, respectively, for reason and for grief, the narrator stands for their fusion. To put it differently, while the characters’ actual union disintegrates, the story, as it were, marries grief to reason, since the bond of the narrative here supersedes the individual dynamics—well, at least for the reader. Perhaps for the author as well. The poem, in other words, plays fate.
I suppose it is this sort of marriage that Frost was after, or perhaps the other way around. Many years ago, on a flight from New York to Detroit, I chanced upon an essay by the poet’s daughter printed in the American Airlines in-flight magazine. In that essay Lesley Frost says that her father and her mother were co-valedictorians at the high school they both attended. While she doesn’t recall the topic of her father’s speech on that occasion, she remembers what she was told was her mother’s. It was called something like “Conversation as a Force in Life” (or “the Living Force”). If, as I hope, someday you find a copy of “North of Boston” and read it, you’ll realize that Elinor White’s topic is, in a nutshell, the main structural device of that collection, for most of the poems in “North of Boston” are dialogues—are conversations. In this sense, we are dealing here—in “Home Burial,” as elsewhere in “North of Boston”—with love poetry, or, if you will, with poetry of obsession: not that of a man with a woman so much as that of an argument with a counterargument—of a voice with a voice. That goes for monologues as well, actually, since a monologue is one’s argument with oneself; take, for instance, “To be or not to be . . .” That’s why poets so often resort to writing plays. In the end, of course, it was not the dialogue that Robert Frost was after but the other way around, if only because by themselves two voices amount to little. Fused, they set in motion something that, for want of a better term, we may just as well call “life.” This is why “Home Burial” ends with a dash, not with a period.
If this poem is dark, darker still is the mind of its maker, who plays all three roles: the man, the woman, and the narrator. Their equal reality, taken separately or together, is still inferior to that of the poem’s author, since “Home Burial” is but one poem among many. The price of his autonomy is, of course, in its coloration, and perhaps what you ultimately get out of this poem is not its story but the vision of its ultimately autonomous maker. The characters and the narrator are, as it were, pushing the author out of any humanly palatable context: he stands outside, denied reëntry, perhaps not coveting it at all. This is the dialogue’s—alias the Life Force’s—doing. And this particular posture, this utter autonomy, strikes me as utterly American. Hence this poet’s monotone, his pentametric drawl: a signal from a far-distant station. One may liken him to a spacecraft that, as the downward pull of gravity weakens, finds itself nonetheless in the grip of a different gravitational force: outward. The fuel, though, is still the same: grief and reason. The only thing that conspires against this metaphor of mine is that American spacecrafts usually return. ♦
