13

TAKEN AND TOSSED
1926–1927

In those days there were wonders. From one of these wonders we have our breath—from the other our faith by a long descent.

—FROST, NOTEBOOK ENTRY, 1926

Carol and Lillian were left in charge of the farm in South Shaftsbury, while Marjorie joined Lesley in Pittsfield at her bookstore, The Open Book. Irma was back in New York again after having stayed with her family in Franconia during the hay-fever season (she, like her father, suffered terribly from the allergy). Irma had resumed studies at the Art Students League, although the plan was for her to join her parents as soon as possible in Michigan.

The new address in Ann Arbor was 1223 Pontiac Road, a small colonial house far enough from the campus so that students and colleagues could not drop in casually. The Frosts had made a gesture toward permanence in Michigan by having all their furniture shipped from Amherst, but it was several weeks before the furniture arrived. They were forced to stay temporarily with Dean and Mrs. Joseph A. Bursley, who were now their best friends in Ann Arbor, since President Burton had died the previous spring.

The new president of Michigan was Clarence Cool Little, a New Englander who had once taught biology at Harvard; most recently, he had served as president of the University of Maine. His wife wrote poetry, and she found Frost’s presence in Ann Arbor especially attractive. She had recently formed a group of poetry enthusiasts, and she invited Frost to join them. He agreed to come now and then, but he was always wary of these kinds of meetings. Furthermore, he did not want to have his time soaked up in this manner, given that part of the attraction of the Michigan job was the promise of freedom from distractions.

The absence of formal teaching responsibilities certainly came as a relief. “I [am] a poetic radiator,” he said, in describing his duties at Michigan to a friend, “I just sit around and radiate poetry.”1 Indeed, it looked as though the Michigan appointment might really provide a quiet space for Frost to work, but the invitations to read his poetry at various campuses around the country continued to pour in, and Frost could not resist them—in part because he was still supporting his children financially. In October, he returned to New England for an extensive tour that took him from Hanover, New Hampshire, to New York, to Chapel Hill, North Carolina, all within a two-week stretch. (Elinor had accompanied him on the initial swing east, making her way to South Shaftsbury for a brief visit with Carol and Lillian.) When Frost returned to Ann Arbor he was so exhausted that he collapsed with a severe influenza.

Like his father, Carol had weak lungs, and his health was a continuing worry for his parents, who kept in close touch with him by letter and telephone. The situation with Carol worsened suddenly in November, and the Frosts suggested that he seek a higher, drier climate for rest and recuperation throughout the winter; they suggested sternly that he go to Colorado to visit the Bartletts, who were always obliging. On the other hand, Frost understood that Carol was loath to admit to being sick at all. “He has something of my father in him that won’t own up sick,” Frost wrote to John Bartlett.2

Marjorie was another worry. She had been suffering from anxiety and nervous prostration for the past year, and her condition grew worse as winter approached. This was exacerbated by chronic appendicitis, for which she would soon need an operation. Elinor found herself fretting over her, and she left Ann Arbor for Pittsfield, hoping to help. Frost wrote to his friend Otto Manthey-Zorn, “I may follow if she [Elinor] gives the word. It wouldn’t be long anyway before we began to think of heading for Amherst. But I rather wanted to stay still where I was for a few weeks. Elinor may bring Marj out here if she is well enough to move. I’m weary of this scattered way of living. Either I mean to become an explorer and live homeless entirely or to settle down and raise chickens with a single post office address.”3 He did follow Elinor to Pittsfield, but speaking commitments meant that he could not stay at his daughter’s side for long.

In early February he wrote to Untermeyer from Michigan: “We have been East two whole months with a sick Marjorie and are now divided over her, Elinor having stayed on to take care of her and I having come to Ann Arbor to make some show of teaching a little for my year’s pay. I’m sad enough about Marj, but I am more busted up than sad. All this sickness and scatteration of the family is our fault and not our misfortune or I wouldn’t admit it. It’s a result and a judgment on us. We ought to have gone back farming years ago or we ought to have stayed farming when we knew we were well off.”4

Frost would be teaching just one class a week this spring at Michigan, an informal seminar on writing that he had volunteered to conduct. With Elinor back in New England, he felt lonely, and was beginning to worry about his lack of productivity. “I have done four small books in twenty-eight years,” he noted to John Bartlett, “one in seven.”5 Frost was not one to confuse quantity with quality, however, and he was fully aware that he had written a dozen or more poems as good as any that had yet been written in the United States; nevertheless, he was afraid for his career. He understood that it was essential for a writer to publish good work at regular, even frequent, intervals or be dismissed by critics as a “has-been.” He had seen many promising poets come and go, often with amazing speed.

With Elinor away, he abandoned all pretense of having a schedule and often slept until early afternoon and stayed up late into the night. One student recalled having stopped by to see Frost just before dinner and not being let go until three in the morning. This life of well-cultivated leisure was just right for creativity, and Frost’s muse responded well. He wrote “Spring Pools” in early spring:

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 identically patterned stanzas, like the subject they mirror, reflect each other—even as the penultimate line comes close to mocking the reflectiveness of this poem: “These flowery waters and these watery flowers.” As in many of his best lyrics, “Spring Pools” is about poetry, about the process of creativity. Water, here as elsewhere in Frost, can be taken to mean a substance into which one dips for inspiration. Yet the poem is more complicated than this. Frost is covertly playing in the first line with the old notion of art as an imitation of nature—an idea that, in various forms, can be traced back to Plato’s Republic and Aristotle’s Poetics.

Horace, who derived a good deal from Aristotle, coined the phrase ut pictura poesis, making the analogy between poetry and painting. The notion that “painting is mute poetry, and poetry a speaking picture” was originally formulated by Simonides, and the suggestiveness of this idea was such that, as Irving Babbitt points out, “It is rare to read through a critical treatise on either art or literature, written between the middle of the sixteenth and middle of the eighteenth century, without finding an approving mention of the Horatian simile.”6

Frost, himself a classicist, would have had in mind the whole range of this discussion. The subject of the poem is the nature of reflection and the way it is absorbed into a larger organic whole. The poem must first be read on a literal plane as being about how leaves and flowers are “brought on” by the act of sucking up spring pools through the roots of trees—a natural phenomenon known to most readers. But Frost gives clear signals that he wants us to read beyond the natural phenomenon, to search for its symbolic implications.

The roots that suck the pools dry are somewhat menacing; they do, after all, obliterate the reflection, the original vision, which was “almost without defect” (even here, Frost hedges with “almost”); the roots “bring dark foliage on,” which may be taken in different ways, not all pleasing; this point is made all the more explicit in the first lines of the second stanza: “The trees that have it in their pent-up buds / To darken nature” are distinctly threatening; they can “blot out and drink up and sweep away” a powerful reflection. Here Frost again subscribes to the Romantic notion (the Germans, especially J. G. Herder, were fond of this idea) of natural or organic violence as part of the dialectic of the imagination.

In another familiar gesture, Frost commands: “Let them think twice” before doing what they do. How serious is he? On some level, he is dead serious; he resists this destruction of easy and near-perfect correspondence—the sky reflected in the spring pools, or art mirroring nature. On a deeper level, however, he does not really want the trees to think twice about the process; the “pent-up buds” must be fed, just as the artist must destroy in order to create, or (in terms Coleridge put forward that Frost would have approved) to re-create. Frost always wants to reach for a more complicated vision, one arrived at after much pain, much “sucking up” of passive, reflected beauty. Although the sucked-up pools will go on to give new life to foliage, “Frost sees that transformation as loss rather than gain,” as George F. Bagby says.7

The poet’s imagination takes the beautiful world and scrambles it, remakes it; there is something dark in the final foliage of the completed art object, perhaps, but this is necessary. As Coleridge put it, “Images, however beautiful, though faithfully copied from nature, and as accurately represented in words, do not of themselves characterize the poet. They became proofs of original genius only as far as they are modified by a predominant passion; or when they have the effect of reducing multitude to unity, or succession to an instant; or lastly, when a human or intellectual life is transferred to them from the poet’s own spirit.”8

Frost was, in fact, obsessed by what is called the heterocosmic analogue, defined by the critic M. H. Abrams as “the parallel between writing poetry and creating the universe.”9 He saw the poet as a kind of god, capable of mixing the given elements of the universe to invent a parallel world. The act of poetic imagination is one of transformation, which must at times verge on the destructive; it can, that is, “blot out and drink up and sweep away” the world’s image of itself. But the result of this act is sublime, at once beautiful and frightening.

Another poem written in Ann Arbor around this time was “A Winter Eden,” in which Frost celebrates “A winter garden in an alder swamp.” It is another of his meticulously observed nature poems, although one begins to see what happens when Frost relies too heavily on mannerisms. The winter garden is said to elevate existence:

It lifts existence on a plane of snow

One level higher than the earth below,

One level nearer heaven overhead,

And last year’s berries shining scarlet red.

The parallelism here seems forced, a point of charm rather than a focus. Frost seems unable to move the poem beyond the surface level, the literal description of place, however evocative.

What remains interesting, however, is Frost’s consistent use of imagery taken from rural New England; even living in Ann Arbor did not distract him from his regional preoccupation. If anything, being away from New England stimulated his memory and spurred his imagination of that region. “I never write about a place in New England, if I am there,” he said. “I always write about it when I am away. In Michigan I shall be composing poetry about New Hampshire and Vermont with longing and homesickness better than I would if I were there, just as in England.”10

Frost was getting more and more eager to assemble a new collection. In his folder of old poems, he found many pieces that, with a little dusting off, would meet the standard of his best work. There was, perhaps, some hoarding instinct at work here; this secret bank of poems was a stake in the future, a way of ensuring that if his creativity entered a period of drought, there was always something in reserve—a deep pool into which he could put his roots.

Among the poems held back was “Tree at My Window,” which he apparently revised in Michigan. The locale of the poem is unspecific, but Frost told Lawrance Thompson that it was inspired by a memory of the Derry farm, where a big tree would scrape against the window of his house in summer. The poem opens with an address to the tree:

Tree at my window, window tree,

My sash is lowered when night comes on;

But let there never be curtain drawn

Between you and me.

Frost’s interest in the world of Emersonian correspondences becomes the central subject of this poem. The implicit question posed by the poet concerns the relation of inner and outer worlds, described here as “weathers.” This idea is distinctly Coleridgean (by way of the German aesthetician F. W. J. von Schelling, whom Coleridge had been reading closely); Coleridge’s article “On Poesy or Art” (1818) arises from Schelling’s idea of parallelism between the mental world and the physical world. Essences found within nature are seen to have a corresponding life in the mind; in this metaphysics, art is seen by Coleridge as “the mediatress between, and reconciler of, nature and man. It is, therefore, the power of humanizing nature, of infusing the thoughts and passions of man into everything which is the object of his contemplation.”

Frost, of course, cannot resist making fun of the tree as a “Vague dream-head lifted out of the ground,” with the leaves as “light tongues talking aloud.” He is aware that not everything in nature is profound, and that much of what he experiences in listening to this tree is mere chatter. Nevertheless, his identification with the tree becomes complex in the third stanza:

But, tree, I have seen you taken and tossed,

And if you have seen me when I slept,

You have seen me when I was taken and swept

And all but lost.

The strange, startling beauty of this stanza compares favorably with any other lines in Frost. The rigidity of the rhythm breaks down artfully into a more colloquial rhythm in those two middle lines, with its poetic feet boldly syncopated (iambs becoming anapests at just the right moments); the swaying of the lines seems to mimic the motion of the branches in a slight wind as they reach for the house.

The poem ends, perhaps a little cutely, but with undeniable aphoristic brilliance:

That day she put our heads together,

Fate had her imagination about her,

Your head so much concerned with outer,

Mine with inner, weather.

Even Frost was dazzled by his own technical prowess in this last stanza: “No matter what I think it means,” he said, “I’m infatuated with the way the rhymes come off here.”11

A surprise visit from President Olds of Amherst in the spring lifted Frost’s spirits: a continuation of the old tug-of-war between Amherst and Michigan for Frost’s presence. Olds offered Frost $5,000 for ten weeks of teaching per year, a remarkably high sum in those days for anyone in the teaching profession. Frost accepted the offer at once, relieved to put the Michigan experience behind him. He wrote to Roy Elliott (who had mentioned to Olds that Frost might be open to a fresh offer), “Think of the untold acres I can spade up in the forty weeks of every year I am going to have free for farming. Suppose I live like [Walter Savage] Landor till ninety. That will give me one thousand six hundred weeks all to myself to put in at any thing I like.”12 As it were, Frost did live almost to the age of ninety, getting most of those coveted “one thousand six hundred weeks.”

*   *   *

If there were any hard feelings in Michigan about his departure, Frost did not care. He was glad to rejoin his family in South Shaftsbury, and to put the Midwest behind him. Elinor had already gone ahead of him, and she was busily helping Carol and Lillian with Prescott, their son, who was just beginning to walk. Carol had recently made significant improvements to the property, adding a hundred dwarf Astrachan apple trees and a large patch of blueberry bushes. One small hillside had been set aside to grow flowers, and there was talk of setting up a greenhouse to supply flowers for the newly established Bennington College, which was only four miles away.

Elinor was quite overworked, even overwhelmed. Both Lillian and Marjorie had been ill, and they could hardly be expected to help with the farm chores. Lillian’s condition turned perilous in July, requiring surgery in Bennington. Elinor wrote to her friend Edith Fobes about the situation: “I have had an anxious and busy time since our return. I found Lillian not feeling well, and felt puzzled about her. Her doctor didn’t seem to know and finally advised an examination by the surgeon that comes to the Bennington hospital from Albany once a week. This surgeon advised an exploratory incision, and probably other things. It was most fortunate he advised it. She was operated on last Thursday, and they found a tubal pregnancy. It would surely have ruptured sometime during the next two weeks, and would have caused her death in all probability. The uterus was bound down in such a way that they could not diagnose it.”13

On top of everything, Irma had decided to get married. She and her prospective husband, John Paine Cone, were busy making wedding plans. Cone had grown up in Kansas, on a wheat farm, and hoped to return home with Irma after the wedding to help his elderly parents run their farm. This plan gave Elinor some distress: she liked her children nearby. The whole scene at Stone Cottage made Frost extremely nervous, and Elinor decided it was best for them both to get away to Franconia for much of August. “Robert has become very nervous,” she wrote to Mrs. Fobes, “and it is necessary for us to be by ourselves, without the children, for a little while, so that he may recover his equanimity.”14 One is struck by the degree to which Elinor, by now, had completely identified with Frost, ploughing under her own needs and early ambitions for herself; for the rest of her life, she served the family as protector, facilitator, and go-between.

The Frosts stayed in Franconia for three months, through the end of October. It proved a remarkably good place to work. Frost picked up a poem begun in 1920 called “West-Running Brook” and found himself inspired to revise it thoroughly. It had been started in response to an Amherst student who’d published, in the Amherst Monthly (March 1920), a poem called “Joe Wright’s Brook.” That poem was about two lovers discussing the name of a brook. Frost told the student, Edward Richards, that he would have done it quite differently; the poem, he said, brought to mind a brook on his Derry farm that defied its natural parameters and flowed west instead of east, toward the Atlantic. In 1937, Frost explained in a letter that “West-Running Brook” was connected, in his mind, with “Reluctance,” “The Tuft of Flowers,” and “The Death of the Hired Man,” in being about “the same subject,” which he described as “my position … between socialism and individualism.”15

Frost often seemed to think he was talking about these great abstractions, but there is little in “West-Running Brook” to make one think about either of these terms except in the most general, uninteresting way. The poem has more in common with a very early poem, “Hyla Brook,” where a stream is likewise the symbol of poetic inspiration, or a very late poem, “Directive,” which ends: “Here are your waters and your watering place. / Drink and be whole again beyond confusion.”

The poem inhabits the dialogue form that one saw frequently used in North of Boston, but there is nothing dramatic about “West-Running Brook.” Frost attempts something quite different, a kind of meditative lyric couched in the spoken voice. The husband-wife dialogue has none of the edginess of the dramatic lyrics (as in “Home Burial,” where the dramatic tension is brought to a fierce climax). Fred, the husband, seems to get carried away by the sound of his own voice. He asks at the outset:

“What does it think it’s doing running west

When all the other country brooks flow east

To reach the ocean?”…

His answer is the point of the poem: “‘It must be the brook / Can trust itself to go by contraries.’”

These are not, however, the violent contraries of William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. (“Without contraries is no progression,” wrote Blake.) Frost’s contraries are mere motions against the grain, formulated as a resistance to going with “the drift of things,” as he said in “Reluctance.” In addition, the moral dimension in Frost’s poem is, as Robert Faggen notes, “more ambiguous” than in Blake, “drawn across lines of male and female, the rational and the intuitive, the ethereal and the telluric, in this case a man named Fred (how worldly!) and his mate.”16

Overall, the unnamed wife in the poem operates mostly as a sounding board for her husband, who gets most of the good lines. And they are good lines indeed:

“Speaking of contraries, see how the brook

In that white wave runs counter to itself.

It is from that in water we were from

Long, long before we were from any creature.

Here we, in our impatience of the steps,

Get back to the beginning of beginnings,

The stream of everything that runs away.”

Frost seems much taken by the Darwinian idea that the human race began in a primitive, aquatic environment, then evolved landward, skyward. The stream, of course, is a familiar symbol of life in Western literature from Lucretius on, and one of Frost’s recurrent images. In this poem, the symbol is refined and beautifully nuanced:

“It is this backward motion toward the source,

Against the stream, that most we see ourselves in,

The tribute of the current to the source.

It is from this in nature we are from.

It is most us.”

William H. Pritchard sees his final peroration by Fred as “eloquent, perhaps rather too much so.” He adds that the unnamed spouse “might justifiably have wondered what came over Fred that he could suddenly rise to such heights or depths of profundity.”17 That Frost’s speakers notice their excess of eloquence is acknowledged in the last exchange: “Today will be the day / You said so,” the wife remarks, wryly. Fred counters: “No, today will be the day / You said the brook was called West-Running Brook.” Importantly, the wife has the last word, and plays the role of reconciler: “Today will be the day of what we both said.”

I place this poem higher in Frost’s canon than Pritchard does, largely because so many of the poet’s preoccupations converge here. The symbol of the stream is nowhere in Frost more carefully construed; as Rueben Brower says, “The rebellious flowing of the stream is a figure for the loving trust of husband and wife in the other’s difference, the expected and desired contraries that make a marriage.” With severe compactness, Frost manages to talk about this particular marriage in terms of the stream, but to talk about matters of life and death as well. “In explaining why the brook runs west,” says Brower, “the wife had given her husband the metaphor that has shaped all the rest of his thinking.”18

There is also the fact that Frost’s two chief forms of poetry, dramatic and lyric, merge in “West-Running Brook.” As in most of his bucolic lyrics, the poet begins with close observation of a natural phenomenon; he moves from that to analysis by metaphor. Fred might well have spun into the ether too quickly had not his wife been there, gently tugging him back to earth. (Brower, oddly, sees it the other way around, with his wife being less down-to-earth.) It must also be said that Fred’s eloquence is, at times, ear-catching, as when he talks with Shakespearean fluidity about “The universal cataract of death / That spends to nothingness.”

In the end, Frost seems to suggest that what ultimately redeems us, as human beings, is our natural resistance in the face of extinction. The poet’s identification with nature is, in effect, his own quiet tribute to the source, which might be seen as the Universal Ground, or perhaps even God. “It is most us,” he says; that is, the kingdom of God is within us, whether we like it or not.

One is tempted to overread such a poem, but Frost—always the sly and canny poet—never gives too much away, is never explicit. The reader is left tantalized, drawn ineluctably forward, expectant but never satisfied. Schooled in imagism by Pound and Hulme, Frost believed in the adequacy, the self-sufficiency, of the symbol. A little bit of faith, in poetry, goes a long way. As Frost put it, “Why literature is the next thing to religion in which as you know or believe an ounce of faith is worth all the theology ever written. Sight and insight, give us those.”19

*   *   *

Irma’s wedding was the primary event of the fall, followed by a lecture tour that began in early December. A two-week visit to Wesleyan University in Connecticut was eventually to be followed, in spring, by brief residencies at Michigan, Dartmouth, and Bowdoin—an exhausting string of assignments for a man who had supposedly given up teaching for farming and writing poetry.

His promised ten-week term at Amherst began in January, and he settled in happily at the college that had been important in his life thus far. “It was always Amherst that mattered to him,” recalled Jack W. C. Hagstrom, a student from Amherst in the early 1950s who became a friend.20 “Wherever else he taught, it felt temporary. Amherst was always home.” Among those whom Frost was especially glad to see again was Otto Manthey-Zorn. One afternoon, Manthey-Zorn asked Frost to visit his seminar on German philosophy, which met from four until six in the evening. One student in the class remembered vividly the impression the poet made: “Frost began to discuss metaphors in an easy way, asking occasional questions to bring out our ideas. Gradually the evening shadows lengthened and after a while Frost alone was talking. The room grew darker and darker until we could not see each others’ faces. But no one even thought of turning on the light. The dinner hour came and went, and still no one of that half score of hungry boys dreamed of leaving. We dared not even stir for fear of interrupting. Finally, long after seven, Frost stopped and said, ‘Well, I guess that’s enough.’ We thanked him and left as if under a spell.”21

Despite many happy experiences in the classroom, Frost had constantly to deal with family problems, which became increasingly intense. Marjorie had been ill throughout the winter, and she stayed in Amherst with her parents at their house on Amity Street, even though—as Elinor wrote to Edith Fobes on February 22, 1927—“she really ought to have been in some warmer climate for the winter.”22 The Frosts began to see that part, perhaps the largest part, of Marjorie’s illness was psychological. She seemed horribly fragile, and the strain of dealing with her wore on both parents. Frost himself would plunge into dark moods periodically. What kept him going was the public occasions. “I think he needed these obligations,” a friend recalled. “One could easily imagine him subsiding, never leaving his bedroom. But teaching, and the public readings—these demands were crucial. They kept him from withdrawing. He knew that, of course. He was self-protective in this way. He used the demands of his public career to keep himself afloat.”23

Meanwhile, the next volume of poems was taking shape. Frost did not want his book to be a mere miscellany; he felt, quite sensibly, that a collection of verse should be read whole, and that it was important to arrange his poems in some thematic way. Just as New Hampshire had a long title poem that served as a principle of organization, Frost realized that “West-Running Brook” was exactly the right poem for the new collection, with its theme of progression by contraries. Indeed, this poem became his title poem.

The volume moves through six sections, beginning with Frost’s strongest poem, “Spring Pools.” This section ends with “Acceptance,” a poem about the eerie silence that follows even the most spectacular defeats in nature, as when the “spent sun” goes down “burning into the gulf below” and still “No voice in nature is heard to cry aloud / At what has happened.” Echoing a famous line by Alexander Pope, the poem ends with a declaration (in ironic quotes): “Let what will be, be.”

Frost takes up that line again as a preface to the second section, “Fiat Nox” or “Let There Be Darkness.” He writes again: “Let the night be too dark for me to see / Into the future. Let what will be, be.” There follows a sequence of poems which follow, in part, the Via Negativa—the dark way of knowledge. “Once by the Pacific” and “Bereft” are here—two strong poems rescued from earlier days. The former has one of Frost’s finest rhetorical swells at the opening:

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.

Later in the sonnet, Frost says: “It looked as if a night of dark intent / Was coming, and not only a night, an age.” He follows this depressing thought with: “Someone had better be prepared for rage.” Like Dylan Thomas after him, Frost was prepared to “rage against the dying of the light.”

Intriguingly, Frost places “Tree at My Window” in this section, suggesting an even darker interpretation than one might have guessed for this poem about being “taken and swept / And all but lost.” Nobody writes about near misses with deep depression better than Frost, and this poem might be taken as a self-rebuke, with the poet scolded by the tree as it scratches the window, the poet’s own head too much obsessed by inner weather.

The section ends with “Acquainted with the Night,” which had been written in Ann Arbor:

I have been one acquainted with the night.

I have walked out in rain—and back in rain.

I have outwalked the furthest city light.

I have looked down the saddest city lane.

I have passed by the watchman on his beat

And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.

I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet

When far away an interrupted cry

Came over houses from another street,

But not to call me back or say good-by;

And further still at an unearthly height,

One luminary clock against the sky

Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.

I have been one acquainted with the night.

What first strikes the reader here is the sound of the poem, its insistent and peculiar rhythms. The poem was, Frost later suggested, “written for the tune.” Although a sonnet by form, with a closing couplet, the poem has the fluid, repetitive aspect of a villanelle, with the three-line stanzas mimicking the terza rima of Dante—appropriate for a poem about the descent into darkness.

One unusual feature of this poem is the urban setting, with the speaker as a troubled visionary who has “outwalked the furthest city light” and plunged into dark regions around the city, the ghostly suburbs. One is reminded, indeed, of the Unreal City evoked in The Waste Land, especially where Frost writes of the “One luminary clock against the sky” proclaiming that the time “was neither wrong nor right.” (The clock, Frost once said, was in the tower of the old Washtenaw County Courthouse.)24 Time, in Frost, is neutral, amoral; Frost’s theology, as ever, is concealed—his truth is difficult to place. The protagonist of the poem is a solitary wanderer of sad city lanes, someone who averts his eyes from other human beings. As Harold H. Watts has noted: “To be responsive to the pressures of nature or process, man must live with the pressures that come from other men (modern society, traditional culture) reduced to a minimum.”25

I find this poem overwhelmingly melancholy, but oddly compelling. The rhythms seem inescapable, and the deft rhyming and consistent, well-defined images all work together. The poem makes a unified, definite impression on the reader, preparing the way for “West-Running Brook,” the title poem, which is ultimately a poem about resistance, about the human need to overcome the downward drift toward darkness, the natural disintegration of the organic universe. Just as the riffles in the water “send up” something to the source, so human beings—those who have the gumption and gift—are called upon to “send up” something to the source, too. (Again, the metaphysics of Henri Bergson are fairly explicit here.)

After the huge swell of “West-Running Brook,” with its curlicues of philosophy and rhetoric all placed in a slightly ironic context by the figure of Fred’s wife, who indulges his flights of fancy but keeps bringing him back to reality, tugging gently at the margins of his speech, the last two sections of the collection open a broader base of irony, culminating in “Riders” and “The Bear,” two of Frost’s shrewdest, though little-read, poems. In the former, Frost writes:

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.

Human beings are at once passive (riders) and active (guiders), depending on the angle of vision. History is regarded as a bareback ride on earth’s headless horse. The ride is terrifying, though comic, too. The one good thing Frost can think of to say is that “We have ideas yet that we haven’t tried,” and so there is hope.

That hope is restrained, wittily, in the last poem of the book, “The Bear,” where Frost writes in rhyming couplets (occasionally expanding into triplets), the favorite form of the English Augustan poets, whose tone Frost emulates. He celebrates “the uncaged progress of the bear” as it roams the natural world, noting with irony that while “The world has room to make a bear feel free; / The universe seems cramped to you and me.” People are, in effect, caged—by each other, and by conventions of one kind or another; our mode of vision is limited, though we try to extend it with “The telescope at one end of his beat, / And at the other end the microscope, / Two instruments of nearly equal hope, / And in conjunction giving quite a spread.” In his witty conclusion, Frost offers a portrait of the human being as a caged animal:

He sits back on his fundamental butt

With lifted snout and eyes (if any) shut,

(He almost looks religious but he’s not),

And back and forth he sways from cheek to cheek,

At one extreme agreeing with one Greek,

At the other agreeing with another Greek

Which may be thought, but only so to speak.

A baggy figure, equally pathetic

When sedentary and when peripatetic.

West-Running Brook is not evenly first-rate as a collection, though it is filled with luminous moments—even whole poems, such as “Acquainted with the Night” and “Once by the Pacific,” that are small miracles of perfection. The ironic note so often sounded here has been heard earlier, especially in New Hampshire; but Frost is not a poet who developed in any obvious ways from book to book, as did Yeats or Eliot or Stevens. Instead, he grew by accretion. His peculiar method of hoarding poems (going back to them, often decades later, to revise) only adds to the difficulty of discerning “development.” In a sense, Frost achieved his vision early, and he restates, re-creates, refigures this original vision in book after book. There are no great leaps forward, only deepenings, confirmations, and subtle extensions.

*   *   *

Frost lost another editor when Lincoln MacVeagh resigned from the firm of Henry Holt, but he was soon replaced by Richard H. Thornton, who came to see Frost in South Shaftsbury. Frost was not tempted to leave Holt, which had done a fine job with New Hampshire and his Selected Poems. Now, with a Pulitzer Prize to his credit and a new volume of poems in hand, Frost felt in a good position to drive a bargain.

Much to his surprise, Holt did not resist his request for higher royalties and a monthly payment of $250 over the next five years. They would publish West-Running Brook in the fall of 1928, with woodcuts by Frost’s favorite illustrator, J. J. Lankes, who had now become a good friend. (Frost and Lankes were linked, over four decades, by “subject, theme, tone and perspective,” says Welford Dunaway Taylor in a study of this long and fruitful collaboration.)26 There would be an advance of $2,000. Furthermore, Holt would reissue his Selected Poems with added material, and they would publish a Collected Poems in a year or two. What more could a poet ask for?

Frost’s reputation had been steadily growing in other ways. The New York firm of George H. Doran published a well-known series of monographs on American writers, and an editor whom Frost had met at Bread Loaf, John Farrar, decided to have someone write on Frost and offered him the chance to select his own profiler. One possibility, in Frost’s mind, was Edward Davison, a young English poet who had moved permanently to the United States in 1925; Frost had met Davison at Bread Loaf and liked him. Somewhat impulsively, he asked Davison to write the monograph, and Davison showed interest.

At the same time, an article on Frost appeared in the Saturday Review of Literature in which Frost was celebrated by Gorham B. Munson as “the purest classical poet in America today.”27 Munson was fascinated by the lines in “New Hampshire” where Frost talks about “being a good Greek.” The idea of himself as a classical poet appealed to Frost, and he suddenly wanted Munson as his biographer, not Davison. After some delicate backtracking with Davison, Munson was elected for the job and given access to several of Frost’s closest friends, including Louis Untermeyer and John Bartlett. He produced a little volume in November 1927 called Robert Frost: A Study in Sensibility and Good Sense.

The same month the book appeared, Frost wrote amusingly to Bartlett, “The first report I have had on the biographical sketch speaks chiefly of your contribution to it. I ain’t a-going to thank you. It was an inspiration of mine to give Munson direct access to my past through two or three of my independent friends. I thought it would be fun to take the risk of his hearing something to my discredit. The worst you could [reveal] was my Indian vindictiveness. Really I am awful there. I am worse than you know. I can never seem to forgive people that scare me within an inch of my life. I am going to try to be good and cease from strife.”28

Munson’s book remains a fascinating volume, although it puts forward the unsustainable thesis that Frost was somehow more “classical” than “romantic” as a poet and thinker, invoking Irving Babbitt (the Harvard critic and humanist) as Frost’s spiritual mentor. Frost actually disliked Babbitt’s version of humanism, which was antireligious, and rejected Munson’s book as simplistic and wrongheaded. On the other hand, aspects of Frost’s thinking have something in common with Babbitt’s: namely, a commitment to common sense and moderation as a corrective to the fashionable nihilism that Babbitt saw around him and decried. Babbitt, however, was strictly anti-Platonic, and had no use for a spiritual realm. This did not settle well with the son of a Swedenborgian who maintained a quiet belief in traditional religious values.

“Frost often appeared to side with religion,” says Peter J. Stanlis. “He admired Darwin, but did not like Darwin’s supporters, such as T. H. Huxley, or any brand of rationalism or humanism. In general, Frost believed that religion and science, including scientific theories such as Darwin’s on evolution, were two different metaphorical ways of perceiving the same reality, and were ‘contraries,’ and not to be set against each other in ways that forced one to choose between them. The final harmony of the wife and Fred in their dialogue in ‘West-Running Brook’ is a fine example of this point. She presents a religious and idealistic view of the brook; he a scientific account of the origins of life out of matter and water. In the end they are harmonized though still distinct in what they said.”29

Munson’s account of Frost was highly influential, however, and it set in place a vision of Frost as a crusty Yankee with a sharply antiromantic side. As one critic would say, “It would take a good while for readers to get Munson, or Munson’s version of Frost, out of their heads.”30