Dickinson’s Nerves, Frost’s Woods

ROBERT FROST, “THE DRAFT HORSE”

American literature began with the horse. Our poetry had to wait for Whitman, but the stirrings of an American fiction—a fiction that did not slavishly imitate whatever the British were doing—can be found in the ride of the Headless Horseman. Like Frost a hundred years later, Washington Irving had to go to England to write his most original work, and he came bearing news of the backwaters. The British loved tales of empire, loved them long after the empire had collapsed, and the better when written by exotics. Irving was followed by Kipling, Frost, Walcott, Naipaul, and Rushdie.

Perhaps a national literature must begin in myth. “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” gave nightmares to generations of children. Irving offered, not merely German folk tales transplanted to the New World, but a sense of the uncanny lurking on foreign ground (home yet not home with its New York, New Jersey, New London), the uncanny found in the more stiff-collared, psychological version of Nathaniel Hawthorne a couple of decades later.1 Like James Fenimore Cooper, that other mythographer of the American east, Irving contributed more to American matter than to American style; his humor was so drily secondhand, so calcified and genteel, it had an almost anonymous character. A sentence will serve:

In this by-place of nature there abode, in a remote period of American history, that is to say, some thirty years since, a worthy wight of the name of Ichabod Crane; who sojourned, or, as he expressed it, “tarried,” in Sleepy Hollow, for the purpose of instructing the children of the vicinity.2

If Irving’s tales are almost unread now, they were not unread when Frost and Wilbur were boys.

We forget how much of the American myth was founded in nightmare rides. Revere’s midnight gallop is part of our textbooks now—we can scarcely escape it—but, when Longfellow composed “Paul Revere’s Ride” (1860), only a dozen Revolutionary veterans were still alive. (Tennyson wrote “The Charge of the Light Brigade” when bulletins from the Crimea were warm upon the table.) Until Longfellow, Revere had been just another obscure Boston silversmith. He owed his late fame less to his heroic dash than to the convenient rhymes upon his name. (“Prescott” and “Dawes” offered less attractive rhymes,3 but William Prescott was the only rider to make it to Concord.) If there was Revere, whose fictive history we eagerly recall, there was also Israel Putnam, whose real history has been forgotten. That farmer-general, that latter-day Cincinnatus, raced eighty miles overnight to volunteer after the Battle of Lexington.4 And what of Sybil Ludington of New York, called the female Paul Revere? (She rode twice as far as Revere—he might have been called the male Ludington.) Such headlong gallops did not stop with the Revolution. What of General Sheridan’s frantic ride from Winchester, the subject of a poem much beloved in its day?5

The horse entered our poetry already lathered in exhaustion, and a century later found its place in our great pastoralist, Robert Frost.

THE DRAFT HORSE

With a lantern that wouldn’t burn

In too frail a buggy we drove

Behind too heavy a horse

Through a pitch-dark limitless grove.

And a man came out of the trees

And took our horse by the head

And reaching back to his ribs

Deliberately stabbed him dead.

The ponderous beast went down

With a crack of a broken shaft.

And the night drew through the trees

In one long invidious draft.

The most unquestioning pair

That ever accepted fate

And the least disposed to ascribe

Any more than we had to to hate,

We assumed that the man himself

Or someone he had to obey

Wanted us to get down

And walk the rest of the way.6

“The Draft Horse” begins with the almost throwaway observations typical of Frost, but the balky lantern and frail buggy announce mishap and incipient disaster at the outset. Frost occasionally betrays the theme of a poem in the opening line (think of “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall”), but he prefers to enter a poem by the side gate: “A lantern-light from deeper in the barn,” “Out walking in the frozen swamp one gray day,” “There were three in the meadow by the brook.”7 These aren’t the stuff of pastoral so much as backward introductions to backwoods tales. (There were farmers long before pastoral poems; for all we know, with their long bets on the future, such men have always told stories sidelong, so as not to tempt fate.) Frost loved the quiet before drama—but he loved the quiet after drama, too. Very few of his poems, and perhaps none of his best, end on a dramatic note—his poetry was built for reflection over the ashes or the grave.

“The Draft Horse” doesn’t take long to lay out this couple’s plight:

With a lantern that wouldn’t burn

In too frail a buggy we drove

Behind too heavy a horse

Through a pitch-dark limitless grove.

Part of this nightmare is that the grove is “limitless.” Woods can be large, forests immense; but you can usually see from one side of a grove to the other—this half-real grove is half unreal. (“Grove” is without cognate in any Germanic tongue, its origins as mysterious as Frost’s tale.)

Frost could not imagine the day when a reader wouldn’t know a thing about buggies. The lantern is mounted outside. (The absence of a comma at the end of the first line might suggest otherwise.) A buggy is delicate by nature, not made for rough roads or the long haul, and too fragile here for how far the couple has to go (the buggy’s load would have to be trifling)—besides, the horse is “too heavy.” Why? Because, as the title has explained without explaining, it’s a draft horse, thickly muscled, normally used for drawing a wagon or plowing. It’s the wrong horse for the wrong carriage. If the couple do have a long way to go, the draft horse will be forever getting there. Draft horses, the Percheron or Belgian or Clydesdale, are famously docile—you have to be of mild temperament to pull plow or wagon all day.8 They’re plodders. A buggy wants a trotter with deep bottom.

Why is this woebegone couple using an ill-suited horse? The answer must be, because they have to—they no longer have anything better. Their trip is the embodiment of necessity—but, as so often, fate intervenes without warning:

And a man came out of the trees

And took our horse by the head

And reaching back to his ribs

Deliberately stabbed him dead.

The dark trees of “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” are as beautiful and hypnotic as the Sirens; but the grove is malevolent, haunted like Dante’s wood of suicides. Frost piles up his matter-of-fact ands—what might seem like biblical anaphora reads like blackboard addition. (A more theatrical storyteller would have started the stanza with “Then.”) Frost knows how dramatic the undramatic can be; the stranger simply steps from the grove and slaughters the horse. This is no accidental madman, but a man trained to the task. He’s a good Stubbsian anatomist—he grabs the bridle to steady the beast for the fatal blow, knowing just where to strike between the ribs. The disturbing physical detail reads like an autopsy report. This Nemesis, this embodiment of random fate (or a preordained fate more awful for being planned), acts seemingly without motive. Perhaps he has an obscure grudge, perhaps he just hates horses—but Nemesis doesn’t need motive. Frost comes fatally close, not to the fatalism he loved to toy with, but to the Greek notion of Anangke, or Necessity. This is a poem not about a depraved act of cruelty but about the consequences. The murderer disappears as soon as he stabs the horse—he’s as much an instrument of the poem as an instrument of fate. (Poets are dismissive gods, too.) Seen in a sidelong way, he does no more than correct the mistake the couple have committed.

The melodrama is over almost before it has begun—the horse goes down. Frost is good at telling more than we realize. The sound of the splintered shaft (there would have been two, connected to the buggy by shaft clips) is more terrible, because more indirect, than anything he could say about the animal’s death throes. There would have been a terrible tangle of harness, reins, buggy shafts, horse dying or dead, and blood. Nothing follows but a postscript: “And the night drew through the trees / In one long invidious draft.” This afterthought is not the only case where Frost is clever with the trimeter—you can read the line most radically as an ionic followed by an anapest, with the load-bearing spondee like an announcement of doom (“And the | Night drew | through the trees”); but perhaps it sounds more sinuous, and sinister, as anapest-trochee-iamb (“And the night | drew through | the trees”), which requires a syntactic pause after night—the reversal of rhythm and slightly forced pause are eerie, with the emphasis on movement. It might be most telling, however, to scan this simply as anapest-iamb-iamb (“And the night | drew through | the trees”), which would put rhetorical stress on through—there would be little advantage to the meaning of rhythm here, if the line didn’t sound so chilling that way. Effects are language plus meter, not meter alone. Stressed thus, the night slips through the wood like the murderer. If the night approaches only now, the grove must have been dark as a grave by evening, the draft horse finding the road only by feel and by the light of a lantern sputtering or defunct. The reference to a grove suggests the place is unfamiliar.

Americans did not invent the poetry of the gallop or canter. (The rhythm of prose is not quite the rocking horse of meter.) Browning’s “I sprang to the stirrup, and Joris, and he” and Tennyson’s “Half a league, half a league, / Half a league onward”9 must plague any poet who writes of horseback—or, for that matter, on horseback. I don’t believe that poetry has much mimetic faculty; but I’m willing to suspend my disbelief at the metrical choice here, in part because it makes no great difference and in part because the little difference rhythm makes is perhaps crucial to the routines of pause and release into which Frost’s language has been cast—the movement, or in other words the rhythm, of understanding.

“The Draft Horse” requires only five sentences across these five stanzas—had Frost been liberal with semicolons, he might have managed it in three. The final sentence sidles toward moral knowledge of a bewildering kind:

The most unquestioning pair

That ever accepted fate

And the least disposed to ascribe

Any more than we had to to hate,

We assumed that the man himself

Or someone he had to obey

Wanted us to get down

And walk the rest of the way.

A buggy normally seats only two—the poem reveals nothing much about the couple; but, given Frost’s compelled interest in husbands and wives, it’s tempting to make the poem betray the exactions of marriage. Frost takes a whole stanza to describe the couple as a philosophic condition; yet the lines of the penultimate stanza are a dead end syntactically, lying in apposition to the sentence’s real subject, “We.” This puts the horse before the cart, if such a résumé is not to disrupt what follows. Think how much tension would be lost had the penultimate stanza begun, “We were the most unquestioning pair”—the ending would seem presumptive, instead of charged with the premonitions of syntax. Frost was always canny about syntax. (I admire the homeliness of a line that would otherwise be barbaric, “Any more than we had to to hate,” which violates The Elements of Style in about four different ways, merely to hit the rhyme.)

The construction here is almost too sophisticated. (Country yarn-spinners don’t need lumbering syntax to deceive their listeners.) The advantage of backing into the sentence is that when we finally reach subject and verb, they seem a revelation. The poem is based on false clues, of course. The title has all along been an act of misdirection, for the draft horse is only proximate to the argument (the poem would not have been wildly different had the couple been driving a good square trotter)—the title has let Frost undersell what follows.

The couple know who they are—they accept the virtues of their limitations. Never questioning fate, they ascribe nothing to hatred, or no more than they have to. (Indeed, if they are the “most unquestioning pair,” they have almost made a vice of it—they’re as docile and plodding as their beast.) This is Christian submission taken to a slightly deranged degree. They’re not Manichaeans: they don’t believe the universe a permanent struggle between good and evil. Yet they don’t believe that evil does not exist.

Though it requires more strength than most Christians could muster, the couple refuse to act as if their lives were ruined by tragedy. This mysterious stranger, the instrument of fate or perhaps fate itself, must have wanted them to get down. (No other conclusion fits the naiveté of their philosophy.) If he had no motive, he must have his own Nemesis and his own employer. They have answered the God of Job with the forbearance of Christ.

This seems a sapheaded way of thinking; but, if the couple bewailed their fate in the dark grove, beyond any immediate aid (otherwise the husband would walk to a farmhouse and beg), they’d be better off dead. We know too well the preacher’s graveside humbug—the Lord has taken your baby home; the death of the innocent is part of God’s plan; the Almighty gives us no burden greater than we can bear. Such emollient lies are no comfort to the cynic, but this is not a poem about cynicism.

The poem would be an allegory, if we knew exactly of what. Even with their fragile buggy, and their muscle-bound horse, and their malfunctioning lantern, and the pitch-black grove without end, someone thinks this couple has it too easy. The action of their faith is to get down and walk. They must bear their burdens afoot, as Christ did to Calvary, and as imitation Christs do in penance. Half of Frost’s brilliance is to leave the killing unexplained. It merely and terribly is, among the other unknowings of life. The couple don’t speculate, because the universe’s mysteries are inscrutable. The majesty of their philosophy, whatever it is, lies in their acceptance of whatever befalls them. Frost is mocking the couple—but he admires them, too. (Think how discomforting Frost is where someone can’t accept fate, as in “Home Burial,” or where the many shockingly can, as in “ ‘Out, Out—.’ ”) It’s not an allegory—it’s a parable.

“The Draft Horse” is ill at ease with a world reduced to science, but the poem implies that any response other than submission is fatal. (For the Old Testament Christian, God tries his faithful by humiliation.) We know we wouldn’t act this way, and we’re not sure we should—but we’re not sure we shouldn’t, either. Frost isn’t interested in the horror of circumstance. His pathos lies in how people adapt—the daily grind is always, for the poet, the choice to live. There’s a lot of death in Frost but a lot of survival, too—and it takes poems like “Home Burial” and “Snow” to force the confrontation. The couple are really too mild to be Stoics, just as they’re not gloomy enough to be fatalists. (They also lack the rueful irony.) Their primitive faith is scarier than Christianity, invoking neither God nor Devil, just the unknowable agency that drives Frost’s universe. (Frost was no believer, but he wasn’t quite an unbeliever, either.) Modern examples of such behavior are rare; but I’m reminded of the Amish families in Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania, who a few years ago embraced the family of the man who had murdered five of their children in the village schoolhouse.10 What irritates us about this couple is that they don’t respond to the murder with righteous anger—it would be easy to see them as slightly stupid. The terror for a reader comes, not because they don’t feel rage, but because they have mastered it. They submit to their fate and by doing so conquer fate. Such acts are difficult to bear. The couple is nearly as incomprehensible as the murderer.

In an undated blue buckram notebook,11 Frost left a late draft of “The Draft Horse” that shows how subtly he wrestled with the occasion of verse. The original title of the poem was “Rather Pointed.” “Too heavy a horse” was once “a great Percheron horse”—the revision’s gain in implication is far greater than the loss of specificity. (This is a model of when telling is better than showing.) The effect would have been blunted, the couple’s knowledge of the horse’s shortcomings more opaque, had only the breed been mentioned. In the third stanza, “ponderous” is merely “cumbersome”—a word so slightly wrong, perhaps it was just a placeholder until Frost thought of better. He fiddles with the next lines, having arrived at “The night sighed through the grove / In one long terminal draft.” “Drew through the trees” is more insidious, ridding the wind of sentimental personification. (The night draws—from that ancient root that gives us “tractor”—just at the moment the horse can draw no longer.) “Invidious” is a judgment, “terminal” too knowing—and too meaningful, in an Empsonian way, for this couple straitened in what they can know.

Draft of Robert Frost, “The Draft Horse.”

Source: Rauner Special Collections MS 02348, p. 6 recto, Courtesy of Dartmouth College Library.

Frost published “The Draft Horse” in his final book, In the Clearing (1962). I long thought it the best of his late work, a revenant among the case-hardened Yankee poems he wrote after fame got the better of him; but he told his biographer Lawrance Thompson that it had been written nearer 1920.12 It might have been included in New Hampshire (1923) with the equally death-haunted (and horse-haunted) “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” the poem it genetically most resembles. “The Draft Horse” is one of the last uses of the American uncanny that began with Irving and Hawthorne. By the end of Frost’s life it had been demoted to genre.

RICHARD WILBUR, “THE RIDE”

Frost knew by hard fact the behavior of the horse in “Stopping by Woods”—he kept horse and carriage (as well as sleigh, sulky, and democrat wagon) on his farm south of Derry.13 The horses in “Stopping by Woods” and “The Draft Horse” have been closely observed, not imagined after some lesson in Dotheboys Hall. The culture of the horse lasted longer in America than in England, as a matter of poetic knowledge—but then American poets were more likely to have been plowed up on a farm. (In Seamus Heaney’s childhood, his father’s horses were stabled in part of the farmhouse, as was common when Ireland was still an agricultural country.) Horse-drawn streetcars vanished from Manhattan in 1917,14 but until after World War II it was common to keep horses on the American farm. (They were driven off, of course, by the tractor.) Even in the suburbs now, the cult of the horse has not entirely been lost—indeed, the last public stable in Manhattan closed as recently as 2007.15 For most British poets of the past century, however, riding a horse could be treated only nostalgically, as in anthology fluff like Alfred Noyes’s “The Highwayman.” I doubt English poetry has had a decent horseman since Byron.

The horse was probably domesticated upon the steppes, perhaps as early as six thousand years ago. The archeology takes us no further than the chariot graves a thousand years before Homer. Homer was no historian—he was ignorant of the tactics and weapons of Mycenaean warfare; indeed, his sense of how such battles were fought is confused and anachronistic. Though he retains a trace memory of the horse’s importance in battle, he thinks chariots provided a taxi service for the likes of Achilles and Hector.16

The epithets of oral composition are often fossilized remains of a vanished world (just as idioms like hue and cry, at loggerheads, and spick and span retain linguistic fossils). Homer’s running epithet for the Trojans was “breakers of horses,” hence the irony—really the tactical joke—of gulling them with a wooden horse, which they mistook as an offering to civic pride by their vanquished enemy. Domestication has in fact left only the thinnest coat of civility on a beast essentially still wild. The horse quickly reverts to a feral state—apart from Przewalski’s horse, on the Asian steppes (which has sixty-six chromosomes, not the sixty-four of the modern horse), there are no longer true wild horses, merely feral domestics.

THE RIDE

The horse beneath me seemed

To know what course to steer

Through the horror of snow I dreamed,

And so I had no fear,

Nor was I chilled to death

By the wind’s white shudders, thanks

To the veils of his patient breath

And the mist of sweat from his flanks.

It seemed that all night through,

Within my hand no rein

And nothing in my view

But the pillar of his mane,

I rode with magic ease

At a quick, unstumbling trot

Through shattering vacancies

On into what was not,

Till the weave of the storm grew thin,

With a threading of cedar-smoke,

And the ice-blind pane of an inn

Shimmered, and I awoke.

How shall I now get back

To the inn-yard where he stands,

Burdened with every lack,

And waken the stable-hands

To give him, before I think

That there was no horse at all,

Some hay, some water to drink,

A blanket and a stall?17

“The Ride,” published in 1982, throws us on horseback in medias res, without even the breathless preamble of “I sprang to the stirrup.”18 That is the course of dream—and perhaps only on re-reading the first lines does the reader notice the sly admission that this is a dream. The poem needs no cause but the ride itself (no reader really gives a damn about the news brought to Aix—and in any case Browning made the whole thing up), just as we don’t know if Frost’s doomed couple are abandoning a bankrupt farm or traveling home as best they can.

Wilbur’s rider is cast into the midst of a blizzard, that terror for early settlers. A man could die within yards of his own door. The dream requires no reason for its terrors—if dreams permitted reflection, the real terror might be how the speaker got there in the first place. This is a more metaphysical point than it seems. The rider plunges forward, apparently all night. (This must be the night in the dream and the night of the dream—apparently, because dream imagination may be almost instantaneous, then retrospectively filled out and given body.)

In small ways, Wilbur allows the dream its absurdities—the ability to ride without holding rein, the “magic ease”—but its illusion is rooted in a sharpened experience of the character and provision of riding. A rider hugging the horse’s neck would receive a fair amount of heat from the beast, and there are convincing records of long-distance nightlong rides like Israel Putnam’s. Such a ride can’t be taken at a gallop. No horse can gallop for ten hours; for long rides, an easy lope or Wilbur’s “quick, unstumbling trot” is necessary. (Thoroughbred races give a misleading impression of stamina—blood horses can go flat out for a mile or so, but at the end they’re knackered.)

“The Draft Horse” is set during a blackout, in a tar-black grove with no lantern to see by; Wilbur’s dream vision lies in a whiteout, the nothing’s nothing of blizzard. (The seeing imagine that the blind are plunged into unearthly darkness, but some live in the swirling of an inner snowstorm.) Being lost may be, as I suggest, a metaphysical condition—one of the poem’s quiet virtues is that this does not exhaust the subject. The first five stanzas of “The Ride” live on trust—the rider abandons himself to the horse. Trust, however, is the medium of betrayal. The “pillar of his mane” must mean, by metonymy, the neck of the beast; if you cling to a pillar, you grasp a symbol of strength. No one thought that the blind Samson (blindness often being mistaken for weakness) could bring down the pillars of the temple.

This reading of “pillar” is no more than a likelihood, because it’s a word that has so much metaphorical substance—there is Jesus’s pillar of flagellation; the Scottish pillar of repentance (the whipping post); the pillars on which the earth rests; the Pillars of Hercules; the upright post in a harp; the phrase “from pillar to post” (which comes from tennis); various uses in anatomy, metallurgy, conchology, typography, mining, horology, and dressage; and of course the compounds of pillar box, pillar-brick, pillar dollar, pillar drill, pillar hermit (like St. Simeon Stylites), and much else, none of them apparently relevant to the pillar of his mane.

The blizzard dissipates. Just as an inn appears, the dreamer wakes. The rider’s first reaction on escaping the dream is not relief but the terror of having left something unfinished—a sophisticated version of thinking in Ohio that you left the stove on back in Massachusetts. If sleep offers the absolution of our cares, sometimes waking relieves us of the burden of sleep, like the dream of murder (though that is not necessarily unpleasant). “The Ride” leaves us in a state of sin, in other words—and the worse for being imaginary, for who can ever be released from an imagined state of sin? Even the dreamer admits that in an instant he will realize there was no horse. Yet for that instant, a terrible obligation descends—and the guilt is not, as so often in dreams, over the adultery indulged or the murder committed, but over something never done at all. Damnation is the guilt of having left something forever undone, something that can never be atoned for.

In the dawn of that earlier Wilbur poem, “Love Calls Us to the Things of This World,” the sleeper is roused to a half-waking state where things are not what they seem. The simplicity of “The Ride,” in a poet once so deliriously baroque, pares away the literary accretion of consciousness. Dreams often fail to provide the gratifications foreseen. No wonder, having woken, we so often want to return. The only relief will come in the realization that the horse never existed. And perhaps not even then.

Wilbur has been given too much credit for his essential good nature, as Frost has suffered for his pretense of wisdom. Here, however, the later poet offers terror without catharsis. “The Ride” denies those satisfactions a rhymed poem usually promises in its perfected form. The form does not bring analysis to extinction—the reader is refused release, the matter left undone, even when the manner is at rest. This is the proximate condition of life when it longs for the absolution of death.

Wilbur’s dream was part of a past itself already unreachable—at least, the sort of inn where you could get hay and a stall hasn’t been much available in our country since shortly after the Model T rolled out. (It would be too much to imagine that Wilbur is alluding to the inn where Christ was born—the magi could not have ridden horses.) That makes the predicament of the dream horse more pathetic. The poem ends on a question to which there is no answer—but there are some debts we can never repay. There is always darkness at the edge of Wilbur’s brightness; behind that good cheer lies the shadow of mortality. In “The Ride,” this is not simply joined to the matter but embraced in some damp wedding of the soul.

Where Wilbur’s rider plunges “on into what was not,” the literal emptiness of the dream might be thought the figurative emptiness of the imagination (for the dreamer there is no there there). The plummet into a world of nothing is, for a poet, always preliminary. The real blizzard, in no way trivially, is the stark emptiness of the page; but this poem is an ars poetica in the weakest sense, the sense of Stevens’s “The Snow Man,” where the speaker, like a poet, is nothing himself and where at last, in the absoluteness of perception, he beholds “Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.” There is no better description of the burden, and the gift, of modernism’s impersonality.

CODA

We have left undone those things which we ought to have done; and we have done those things which we ought not to have done.

“The Ride” is an homage to “The Draft Horse,” borrowing the meter (Frost the more liberal with anapestic substitution) and reworking the quatrain (Frost’s is abcb, Wilbur’s abab). Both are indebted to our long identification with the animal that was necessary to our farming, our mails, our military, our modes of travel, and the romances spun around the struggle for the land itself. The horse was once the most valuable thing a common man could own; it was his guarantee of independence. (A good horse was more expensive than a good car today.) Wilbur has taken a poem of philosophic acceptance and made it one of psychological torment—not what the world does, but what we do to ourselves; not what the world asks, but what we ask of ourselves. The Sermon on the Mount might be Frost’s text; the Book of Common Prayer, Wilbur’s. There’s an old quarrel between resignation and guilt—acceptance over what is versus guilt over what was. (There is a theological argument over which is worse, the sin of commission or omission—in narrow legal terms, omission can also be punished severely. One term for it is guilty knowledge.)

In folk etymology, the nightmare has something to do with a horse; but the mare is instead the Anglo-Saxon’s malign, suffocating spirit that squats upon your chest. (Wilbur’s night mare turns out to be a nightmare, of a sort.) Tales of running or being chased are no doubt lodged deep in the reptilian brain—indeed, the dominant motif of horror is being hunted by an unkillable foe. The Terminator movies, like “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” deftly reinvent “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight”—and earlier, in the chases of Burns’s “Tam O’ Shanter” and Bürger’s “Der Wilde Jäger,” the ordinary horror has been made the horror of art. Perhaps the dream of riding is the conceit of a brain rationalizing what used to be known as Wittmaack-Ekbom’s Syndrome, now comically called Restless Legs Syndrome, a condition first recorded by Thomas Willis, one of Charles I’s physicians. (Willis coined the term “neurology,” and a portion of the brain is still called the “Circle of Willis.”) When a sleeping dog twitches its limbs, we assume it is dreaming of hunting; but perhaps the prey is merely the invention of a canine brain trying to keep the dog asleep, as the human dreamer turns the annoying alarm clock into a car alarm or ringing telephone. But what is being chased by a ghost, or an apparition, or even a living enemy, to that of being chased by another poem?

A poem sometimes lies in the shadow of the poem that provoked it. A great sonnet darkens both Frost and Wilbur, Milton’s about duty.

When I consider how my light is spent

Ere half my days, in this dark world and wide,

And that one talent which is death to hide

Lodged with me useless, though my soul more bent

To serve therewith my Maker, and present

My true account, lest he returning chide,

“Doth God exact day-labour, light denied?”

I fondly ask. But Patience, to prevent

That murmur, soon replies: “God doth not need

Either man’s work or his own gifts: who best

Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best. His state

Is kingly; thousands at his bidding speed

And post o’er land and ocean without rest:

They also serve who only stand and wait.”19

“When I consider how my light is spent” marks blindness as a physical crippling that makes a moral failing inevitable and asks a question not the least rhetorical—how can a man serve his God if he cannot do his job? “Patience” is the personification of an old virtue as much pagan as Christian—it retains the dark undercurrent of the original almost sacred idea embodied in Frost’s couple: the “calm, uncomplaining endurance of pain, affliction, inconvenience” (OED).

Milton’s poem is transparently about writing poetry. Thousands of couriers already bear the word of the Lord (they are his mail service); but others must stand by, awaiting His call, no doubt bored and anxious—patience is the hardest of virtues, far harder to practice than faith, hope, or charity, whose rewards are more immediate. For a poet worried about the cost of blindness to his art, worried that his art may be extinct, Milton provides his own answer in writing the sonnet—that call is the vocation of poetry. Being called to an action is no small part of the bewildering faith of Frost’s couple and the duty implicitly felt by Wilbur. (Guilt can be triggered by illusion—that is the pity and terror of art.) Poets are haunted by poets because beneath every poem lies another poem avoided, cannibalized, stolen, or betrothed. Milton’s patience tells him that numberless messengers already carry the Lord’s dispatches. But how did those “thousands at his bidding speed”? They sped by horse.