8. Dickinson’s Nerves, Frost’s Woods
EMILY DICKINSON, “AFTER GREAT PAIN, A FORMAL FEELING COMES”
After great pain, a formal feeling comes—
The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs—
The stiff Heart questions ‘was it He, that bore,’
And ‘Yesterday, or Centuries before’?
The Feet, mechanical, go round—
A Wooden way
Of Ground, or Air, or Ought—
Regardless grown,
A Quartz contentment, like a stone—
This is the Hour of Lead—
Remembered, if outlived,
As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow—
First—Chill—then Stupor—then the letting go—1
STANZA 1
“Not born” yourself, “to die,” you must reverse us all.
—to Samuel Bowles, about 1875
Not surprisingly for a poet in love with reversals, Dickinson began with syntax head over heels. To launch so rhetorically confesses that the lines were scribbled after deliberation—and calculation. Since the Romantics, many poems sound as if the poet had written in the heat of passion—emotion not recollected in tranquility, as Wordsworth had it, but before the tears had stopped. That is a lie agreed upon.
English often gains traction by inverting normal word order. Other languages have different rules of engagement—the German verb, that bane of simultaneous translators, often straggles along at the tail of the sentence; and it’s not out of order for the Aeneid to begin, “Arma virumque cano.” Inversion in English is the rhetorical signal that rhetoric is present, so a certain formality noses in even before “formal” has been whispered. Inversion of syntax does not reveal, as some critics have it, an inversion of theme, feeling, or argument. That’s not the way writers usually think.
The task of the poet is, not to succumb to rhetoric, but to take advantage of it. Even a good poet might not have been aware of an opportunity beforehand—or troubled to analyze the profit, knowing subconsciously the choice was right. Milton recognized the power of delay when he began Paradise Lost, “Of man’s first disobedience, and the fruit,” an extended prepositional phrase that prevented him from getting round to subject and verb until the sixth line. (Call it acting out the speech act, or purpose by design—drama delayed is the promise of style.) Dickinson began over one hundred and fifty poems with prepositions, as many as begin with “I.”
Her inversion resolves a problem in syntax: “A formal feeling comes after great pain” would have destroyed the pentameter line, as well as any resistant energy the line might have had. When poets compose in brief forms, rhythm is ever-present (Dickinson’s iambics vary here from trimeter to pentameter). Had the phrase “a formal feeling comes” occurred to her first, she’d have realized without thinking that “after great pain” could not follow. The inversion makes peace with the meter and restores chronology—it’s appropriate that the poem start with pain.
Though minute investigation of the dramaturgy of meter is better kept to a minimum, it would be hard not to notice the pitch forward of the inverted first foot, the monumental stolidity of the spondee “great pain” that follows, and the tripping light-footedness of “a formal feeling comes.” Whatever music meter grants is underscored here by alliteration, the more emphatic the shorter and closer the words. The device’s musical qualities depend on other factors and may require more distance. A sensitive ear should detect the falling quality of fore-stressed words like “formal” and “feeling,” casting the line downward in contrast to the rising iambics, as if formal feeling were decrescendo after pain. To work line by line toward the choreography of emphasis and velocity would stress too minutely what is better experienced, like a fireside tale—or a joke. The affect of meter always triumphs over intention. Still, there are moments when analysis proves by no means negligible.
Taxed with grave thoughts, Dickinson might have recalled the passage from the opening of The Winter’s Tale, another fiction touched by cold: “the reverence / Of the grave wearers. O, the sacrifice! / How ceremonious, solemn, and unearthly.”2 “Ceremonious” is sometimes used disparagingly for outward form rather than inward feeling. The rituals of etiquette after a death inform grief while assuaging it; indeed, ritual is the formal repetition that consecrates marriage, baptism, rites de passage, coronation, and the sanctification of the dead. Here, though, emotion seems unassuaged, though the stages of freezing to death are also treated as invariant rite—chill, stupor, submission. The speaker doesn’t know if the Hour of Lead can be outlived, and in the ritual of poetic form creates a symbolic death.
This social, stoical metaphor counterfeits the century’s obsequies of mourning. When the grieving gathered at the house of the dead, the corpse was laid out in the parlor, while mourners kept nightlong vigil nearby. The custom was recorded in Huckleberry Finn (1884):
I peeped through a crack of the dining-room door, and see the men that was watching the corpse all sound asleep on their chairs. The door was open into the parlor, where the corpse was laying, and there was a candle in both rooms.3
And in this New York recollection of about 1830: “The hall and rooms being filled, I stood upon the piazza, which opened by a large raised window into the parlor where the corpse lay in a coffin, clad in grave-clothes.”4 (The older tradition of mourners surrounding the deathbed was fading out by the mid–nineteenth century.)
The dead whom Dickinson had known were buried or entombed. Banned by the Catholic Church until 1963, banned still by the Eastern Orthodox Church, cremation was long considered pagan and sacrilegious. A grave is a metaphorical tomb—aboveground tombs were usually reserved for the rich, who could afford to build them. Though Dickinson’s tombs are abstractions, the world of her nouns is largely abstract, like that of Shakespeare’s sonnets. Still, she knew more of tombs than the tombs in books. In a letter of 1855, while visiting her father in Washington, her farthest trip from home, she wrote to friends, “Hand in hand we stole along up a tangled pathway till we reached the tomb of General George Washington.”5 The overgrown path may have led to the Old Tomb, a simple crypt faced with plain brick. The bodies of the general and his wife had been moved two decades before, however, to the much grander New Tomb, for which he had left a bequest. This mausoleum stands across from a pair of stone obelisks, as if he were a pharaoh.
Dickinson would probably have seen the Amherst town tomb in West Cemetery. Built a few years before the poem was written, it stored bodies democratically through a hard New England winter, when frozen ground could not be broken. The low, gloomy granite-fronted vault, covered in sod, lay not far from her house, the only tomb in the graveyard where the poet, her sister, and her parents were later buried. (Her white coffin was carried, at her request, out the back door of her home and across the fields.)6 Dickinson’s poems live in abstraction, but abstractions may be fleshed.
The trappings of the poem recur in lines probably written a year later,
No Bald Death—affront their Parlors—
No Bold Sickness come
To deface their stately Treasures—
Anguish—and the Tomb.7
The “Sweet—safe—Houses— / Glad—gay—Houses—” that open the poem are caskets—caskets “Sealed so stately tight— / Lids of Steel—on Lids of Marble,” hiding lavish interiors, “Brooks of Plush—in Banks of Satin.” The parlors are the parlors of the dead, where death can no longer visit. (For such houses of the dead, recall “Safe in their alabaster chambers,” with its “Rafter of satin, and roof of stone.”)8
In the opening stanzas of “After great pain,” the speaker’s body is dissected and personified, as if Heart and Nerves and Feet had become independent realms of the senses, no longer alive in coordinate passion. Many know the dissociation of grief—the poet must gather the limbs of Osiris, if they can be gathered at all. (The rendering of the terrible aftermath gives this poem the immediacy of experience, not innocence.) In this autopsy of numbness, the precise sense of “Nerves” is vague because the word was often an amalgam. The meaning draws partly from anatomy, partly from the medical condition (“disordered or heightened sensitivity; anxiety, fearfulness, tension, nervousness.… Freq. in attack of nerves,” OED). The irony endured here is that the nerves have been anesthetized—what would normally carry feeling sit dead as a tomb. Embalmed in the formal hour, they no longer transmit sensation.
The idea of tombs—stolid, mute, imperious—sitting inside the house might be taken as graveyard wit, were the idea not so lurid and Gothic. (Dickens might have made high comedy of the simile.) The scattered nerves have become a crowd of mourners—such a scene could take place only before a funeral. Though the grieving might later return, they’d no longer be obliged to the solemn manners of ceremony.9
This strange vision might have been part of a formal elegy, had Dickinson not directed our attention elsewhere. She could have begun, “After great deaths,” making the funeral arrangements tediously literal. The poem is not a portrait of the hours of mourning but an extended metaphor for the aftermath of an event only alluded to. It’s less an allegory than a mimesis of suffering for the embattled Heart, Nerves, Feet (three cardinal virtues for knight or saint, perhaps). The tableau might be mistaken for the stage set of a morality play. Dickinson forces us to imagine what could have caused a pain so overwhelming that mourning the dead seems the only comparison. Tombs perhaps rose to her mind unbidden, a horror that could not be warded off, because what was dead was hope. And not just hope.
The poet had a particular dread of funerals, as she mentions in a late letter: “When a few years old—I was taken to a Funeral which I now know was of peculiar distress, and the Clergyman asked ‘Is the Arm of the Lord shortened that it cannot save?’ He italicized the ‘cannot.’ I mistook the accent for a doubt of Immortality and not daring to ask, it besets me still.”10
A stiff heart, like the deadened nerves, has lost the living impulse. The OED reminds us that stiff, applied to the body, means “unable to move without pain.” That’s only a short distance from another sense, “rigid in death.” Not long before the poem was written, the noun had passed into slang for a corpse.11 Dickinson was an archeologist of the strata of meaning—the word here absorbs the lesser senses of unbending manners or style without grace. Why not a heavy heart, which would be unable to beat without pain, just alive enough to question? The poet has rescued the cliché by avoiding it, but the phrase goes back at least as far as Venus and Adonis (“Heavy heart’s lead, melt at mine eyes’ red fire!”).12 The reader who heard the suppressed allusion, if it was an allusion, would understand both the condition—Venus longs for death—and Dickinson’s skillful withholding of “lead” until near the end of the poem. The poet was member of a Shakespeare Club at a time when Shakespeare unexpurgated was considered too indecent for women or children.13
What is the heart’s question, however? The usual notion, found in the nuanced reading eighty years ago by Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren in Understanding Poetry (1938),14 is that He must be Christ, that the Heart in pain cannot remember who bore the cross, or when. Yet the revelation must be, not merely that the Heart is bewildered, but that the pain is unbearable. The shock lies in implied recognition, as if the speaker had said, “The pain happened yesterday, but it feels as if I’ve suffered for centuries.”
The interpretation aligns with the standard Christian piety of capitalization; but the ambiguity of syntax festers a bit, since the antecedent of “He” would be absent. In her letters, Dickinson doesn’t capitalize personal pronouns referring to Christ, though in poems she inserts the capital about half the time. Where she personifies “Heart,” however, the pronoun is never capitalized. If her capitals were not accidental, merely inconsistent, the reading must be Christian.
Critics have long been hobbled by the failure of early editors, including Thomas H. Johnson in his variorum edition (1955), or in the reading edition that followed (1960), to include the single quotation marks Dickinson used to set off these questions.15 Though she was perfectly capable of mislaying quotation marks, she didn’t throw them in unwittingly. The direct quotations might have been rendered more clearly,
The stiff Heart questions, ‘Was it He that bore?’
And ‘Yesterday, or Centuries before?’
Like most of her editors, I have kept her single quotations marks. Had the Heart questioned the duration of its own sorrow, the psychology might have been more intense; but then the Heart should have asked, “Was it I that bore?” (R. W. Franklin restored the quotation marks in his now standard edition of her poems [1998].) Still, some sort of amnesia follows the speaker’s fracturing of identity. The measure of devastation, of grief-stricken distraction, is the Heart’s failure to recollect when the major event in Christian faith occurred—or, if that goes too far, then the Heart’s willingness in extraordinary grief, the loss still so fresh, to believe Christ might have died the day before. The loss has canceled the labor of time.
The speaker states, not “My pain is Christ’s,” but “I can think of no pain so severe except His on the cross” or “I feel as if I had been crucified myself.” William Empson remarked in Seven Types of Ambiguity that he “usually said ‘either … or’ when meaning ‘both … and.’ ”16 There are limits, however, to the generosity of ambiguity.
For the zealous, pain is the most aggressive form of devotion. It wasn’t blasphemous for the faithful to believe that in torment they were reliving Christ’s pain—so martyrs consoled themselves. The Heart’s assumption of Christ’s agony is an extraordinary appropriation of Christian myth, especially if, like the speaker, the Heart is female. The speaker gains neither the saintliness of martyrdom nor the assurance of resurrection, only the record of an intensity of anguish beyond measure. It is the condition of great loss always to be immediate.
As so often in Dickinson, the slippery syntax, helter-skelter layering of image, and meanings barely whispered become a powerful method not of statement but, if there were such a word, of suggestedness. (There is such a word, coined by Jeremy Bentham and rarely heard since, except from the mouths of philosophers.) A particular word goes unmentioned here. As it made its way to English through French and Anglo-Norman, “Passion” referred to the sufferings of Christ upon the cross. The use in English for overpowering emotion, the OED reveals, came only late in the fourteenth century, and for love probably only with Spenser. The link is through suffering, not faith—but beneath the suffering, even when the word was only hinted at, ever after lay the veiled pun of romance. There’s a rare romantic acuteness in borrowing the Crucifixion so baldly for the mortal pain of love.
Dickinson was suspicious of the organs of religion. She may have fled Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, where she lasted just a year, because her classmates were so given to proselytizing. (The school ranked the faith of students—Dickinson was among those classed as “impenitent,” pigeonholed with the “No-hopers.”)17 Even at home she was surrounded by those far more pious. The Connecticut River Valley still bore the thunderous inheritance of Jonathan Edwards’s preaching a century before. The poet would have witnessed the decline of the Second Great Awakening in the 1840s and remembered the shock, during the Great Revival of 1850, when many close to her, including her father and sister, had converted to evangelical Christianity. (Her mother had been saved shortly after Dickinson’s birth.)18 “I am standing alone in rebellion,” she wrote.19 Her brother, Austin, followed the others a few years after.20 At school Dickinson could not accept Christ as her savior (“I regret that last term,” she wrote from Holyoke, “… that I did not give up and become a Christian. It is not now too late, … but it is hard for me to give up the world”).21 By thirty she no longer went to church.
Even could the overwrought invocation of the Passion be ignored, the repetitions of pain and paralysis—the ceremonious nerves, the heart in rigor mortis, the mechanical feet, the quartz contentment, the hour of lead—overdo the theatrics to a considerable extent. In reverse angle, however, exaggeration to the point of melodrama expresses the extremity of the speaker’s despair. (One can imagine how the matter would have been handled on the nineteenth-century stage, with weeping and gnashing of teeth.) Though couched in abstraction, the agony is not abstract. Dickinson has presented in four lines an autopsy of traumatic pain—the speaker has become one of the living dead. Such torment is death itself.
STANZA 2
The Feet, mechanical, go round—
A Wooden way
Of Ground, or Air, or Ought—
Regardless grown,
A Quartz contentment, like a stone—
Dickinson apparently suffered a crisis late in 1861, though with a woman so elusive critics might learn more by consulting the shapes of clouds. She was private even within her family. In her thirties she gradually withdrew from company, speaking to rare visitors from the top of the stairs or behind a half-closed door; yet once she’d been eager to join evening society next door at the Evergreens, home of her brother Austin and his wife, Sue, then Dickinson’s closest friend. Stray reminiscences report the delight the poet gave, even in her own kitchen, reciting her poems in a matter-of-fact way.22
What loss could have been so traumatic it would feel like a death, the pain comparable only to Christ’s martyrdom? In April 1862, Dickinson had begun to correspond with Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who had written a lead article in the Atlantic Monthly for young authors, “Letter to a Young Contributor.”23 (As the article was unsigned, it’s unclear how she knew to write “T. W. Higginson. / Worcester. / Mass.”) She asked, “Are you too deeply occupied to say if my Verse is alive?”24 Years after her death, he recalled that her handwriting was “so peculiar that it seemed as if the writer might have taken her first lessons by studying the famous fossil bird-tracks in the museum of that college town.”25 She left the letter unsigned, concealing her name on a card slipped into a small envelope. Higginson added, “Even this name was written—as if the shy writer wished to recede as far as possible from view—in pencil, not in ink.”26
Dickinson enclosed four poems. His reply was cautious. “It is probable that the adviser,” he later wrote, “sought to gain time a little and find out with what strange creature he was dealing. I remember to have ventured … on some questions, part of which she evaded … with a naïve skill such as the most experienced and worldly coquette might envy.”27 She had answered, “You asked how old I was? I made no verse—but one or two—until this winter—Sir.”28 This went beyond shyness to the baldfaced lie. By her editor R. W. Franklin’s estimate, she had already finished more than two hundred and fifty poems, having written seriously for four years.29 It would be charitable to imagine that she didn’t consider the earlier work poetry, but more likely she didn’t want Higginson to know she was already past thirty—his article, after all, was for “young” contributors.
Dickinson needn’t have gone further, but what she wrote next was odd:
I had a terror—since September—I could tell to none—and so I sing, as the Boy does by the Burying Ground—because I am afraid—30
Higginson reflected, “The bee himself did not evade the schoolboy more than she evaded me.”31 What “terror” could have been the proximate cause of her poetry? A boy sings (or whistles) past a cemetery to give himself courage, to pretend he’s fearless. (Dickinson’s house, remember, lay not far from a burying ground—from an upper window she could see funeral processions enter the gate.)32 That her mind leapt immediately to the graveyard suggests the near occasion of death—her own, someone else’s, the death of something. There’s no sign, however, that she had been mortally ill or that anyone close to her had died, apart from the first Amherst boys to fall in the Civil War.33
Perhaps she hoped that Higginson would believe her poems incited by some tragic event. Her letters are full of feints and sleights of hand. It’s hard to believe that the “terror,” whatever it was, could be the sole reason she was writing poetry, yet she had no reason to concoct some mortal panic. The closer to truth, the less prone she was to exaggeration:
My Mother does not care for thought—and Father, too busy with his Briefs—to notice what we do—He buys me many Books—but begs me not to read them—because he fears they joggle the Mind.34
For a letter that ignores so much, the bantering surface and wincing coyness cannot hide the resentment, even rage, within.
When a little Girl, I had a friend, who taught me Immortality—but venturing too near, himself—he never returned—Soon after, my Tutor, died—and for several years, my Lexicon—was my only companion.35
Recall her later testimony of unease at what she had taken as the clergyman’s doubts about immortality.
Dickinson can’t always have seen the ambiguities trembling beneath ambivalence. The friend only ventured near—but near to immortality or to Dickinson herself? If the latter, he rejected her. Immortality would be one way to describe a love match—made in Heaven, we say. (She brooded over immortality, Christian immortality, using the word in more than forty poems.) Dickinson doesn’t mean that after the Tutor’s death she was locked in a room with a dictionary, just that she was reduced to words for company. She closed the letter, which had covered so much ground, having cheerfully avoided the direct questions, “Is this—Sir—what you asked me to tell you?”36 Perhaps Higginson had asked how she came to write poetry. Disingenuous might be the word.
It’s unclear how fervent or abiding Emily’s youthful dalliances were, if there were dalliances at all. Her brother and sister both claimed she was no stranger to romance.37 Dickinson had the romantic spirit. A valentine she wrote in 1850, when just nineteen, is flirtatious and high-strung:
Sir, I desire an interview; meet me at sunrise, or sunset, or the new moon—the place is immaterial.… And not to see merely, but a chat, sir, or a tete-a-tete, a confab, a mingling of opposite minds is what I propose to have.… We will be David and Jonathan, or Damon and Pythias, or what is better than either, the United States of America.38
This delightfully giddy manner goes on a long while. After the piece was published in the Amherst College literary magazine, one of the editors remarked, “I wish I knew who the author is. I think she must have some spell, by which she quickens the imagination, and causes the high blood ‘run frolic through the veins.’ ”39 Her identity could not have been much of a secret, as she’d let slip the name of her dog, Carlo, a black Newfoundland who would have been well known to neighbors.40 The favorite candidate for the recipient of this literary skirmish, the first of her publications, is an impoverished Amherst student named Gould.41
There were other possible suitors in her circle—a young man named Newton reading law in her father’s office; an Amherst student named Emmons; and the brothers Howland, one a tutor and the other also reading law with her father—yet little sign, however deeply drawn these friendships, of what hopes she sustained.42 Courtships of the period seem like signals between ships buried in fog. Newton is probably the tutor mentioned to Higginson. After his early death, she called him her “grave Preceptor” as well as an “elder brother.”43 Any romance is unlikely. Her next letter to Higginson, six weeks later, added, “My dying Tutor told me that he would like to live till I had been a poet, but Death was much of Mob as I could master—then.”44 This is a remark about the common life—the missing “as” and the word “mob” without article introduce more confusion than necessary. (This usage was falling out of fashion—Addison had spoken of a “cluster of mob,” and Chesterfield said that “every numerous assembly is mob,” OED.)
Dated probably to the fall of 1862, some months after she wrote Higginson, “After great pain” is one of a clutch of poems that seem—cryptically, elusively—to rake over the coals of an unhappy love affair. The feelings, the nerves, the stiff heart (all in the aftermath of a loss so enormous it seems like death) make it hard to imagine any loss with so great a torment—any loss but love. Speculation among biographers has been drawn almost entirely to two men, but her life is so occluded they are no more than ghosts of possibility.
Returning from the visit to her father in 1855, Dickinson had stopped for two weeks with family friends in Philadelphia.45 It’s imagined that one Sunday her hosts invited her to hear the charismatic minister Charles Wadsworth at the old Arch Street Presbyterian Church. There’s no evidence they met; but Dickinson’s later references to him and a single stiff-necked, undated letter to her—misspelling her last name and responding to what was apparently a request for counsel or consolation—imply that their letters were later destroyed. (After her death, her correspondence was burned, as she desired. This stray, which mentions an “affliction” and her “trial,” as well as her “sorrow,” may have escaped because unsigned. Absence of evidence may be the evidence.)46 Dickinson could be secretive about correspondence—she used two neighbors to forward some of her letters, and a New York couple, possibly, for letters to Wadsworth in the 1870s.47 The latter story came from their granddaughter. Twenty years later, she insisted she “must have made it up.”48
Wadsworth had been devilishly handsome when young, bushy browed though rapidly balding. Called a “new lion” by one of the New York papers, he was compared to Henry Beecher, the most celebrated preacher of the day.49 Wadsworth’s sermons, which read like the worst sort of Christian bombast now, became so wildly popular that a concealed trapdoor, cut through the floor behind the pulpit, let him enter the chancel like some ham actor.50 We know almost nothing of his interest in Dickinson except through letters she wrote after his death to his friends the Clark brothers.51 Though Beecher’s numerous infidelities are an example of pastoral bad behavior, Wadsworth was happily married and lived hundreds of miles from Amherst. He was also sixteen years her elder. He visited Dickinson once in 1860 and again decades later, two years before his death in 1882.52
There’s no reason to believe that Dickinson exaggerated when she claimed to have enjoyed an “intimacy of many years” with him. She called him her “Shepherd from ‘Little Girl’hood” and “My Philadelphia.” Indeed, he may have confided in her—she referred to him as a “Man of sorrow,” a “Dusk Gem, born of troubled Waters,” and said that he was “shivering as he spoke, ‘My Life is full of dark secrets.’ ”53 There is also the curious story, passed down by Martha Dickinson Bianchi, Emily’s niece, that on that trip south Dickinson had “met the fate she had instinctively shunned,” a love “instantaneous, overwhelming, impossible.” After she “fled to her own home for refuge—as a wild thing running from whatever it may be that pursues,” the man followed her to Amherst.54
Unfortunately, there’s no record of such a visit. Parts of Bianchi’s story align with what we know of Wadsworth—that, for example, he moved to the West Coast—but he did not abandon his profession, as she maintained; his departure did not occur a “short time” after meeting Dickinson; and she did not press a woman to name her son Charles. The tale may be family tattle, passed along in mutilated form. (The source was Bianchi’s mother, Sue Dickinson.)55 Still, there’s a hint of something deeper in the poet’s recollection of their final meeting. She was in the garden, she wrote, “with my Lilies and Heliotropes,” when her sister announced a visitor, the “ ‘Gentleman with the deep voice.’ ”
“Where did you come from,” I said, for he spoke like an Apparition. “I stepped from my Pulpit to the Train” was my [sic] simple reply, and when I asked “how long,” “Twenty Years” said he with inscrutable roguery.56
Is this roguery the bantering of an old friend or a confession of regret?
The same month Dickinson wrote Colonel Higginson about her “terror,” Wadsworth answered the call of a Presbyterian church in San Francisco and moved west with his family. If his looming departure caused her alarm, he must have written her the previous September. (Philadelphia papers reported his intention in January—he may have known earlier.)57 That, at least, is the assumption.
There’s a nearer recipient for her affections, Samuel Bowles, editor and owner of the Springfield Republican. Lively, opinionated, apparently inexhaustible, greedy for company, sometime after her brother’s marriage he began regular visits to the Evergreens.58 Eventually he published most of the very few poems Dickinson allowed into print.59
Bowles is a restless, attractive figure, part of a stratum of American nineteenth-century ambition—the go-ahead sort, eager for the fray, intimate with politics, a gregarious and magnetic striver who eventually worked himself to death. His marriage was bitterly unhappy. His wife suffered from various ailments, not all physical—jealous, oversensitive, a bit of a termagant, she made his life a misery.60 That he found solace in spirited conversation with intelligent women no doubt made a wretched bond more wretched. He had many women friends, and there were rumors that a few were more than friends.61
Bowles became a mainstay of Evergreens society before Emily had begun her long withdrawal (“my crowd,” she once called Susan and Austin).62 He was only four years older, though frequently indisposed by his own list of complaints—headaches, insomnia, and sciatica among them.63 In April 1862, as he prepared to sail to Europe for his health, the poet wrote an anxious letter pleading with him, on behalf of the Dickinson coterie, to make a last visit (“Please do not take our spring—away—since you blot Summer—out! We cannot count—our tears—for this—because they drop so fast”). This he did.64 The “terror” could have been his decision the previous September to take the voyage, presuming that she had heard of it.65 When he returned in November 1862, she declared that she could not see him—she was ill, perhaps, or overwhelmed by the prospect. Or he had rejected her. Soon after his return, her private letters to him stopped for a dozen years.66
It was not a complete break or breach, though afterward he came more rarely to the Evergreens—the letter to Austin that heralds his withdrawal is tortured.67 Some fifteen years later, the year before he died, Bowles arrived in Amherst, and Dickinson again refused to see him. He apparently called up the stairs, “Emily, you damned rascal! No more of this nonsense! I’ve traveled all the way from Springfield to see you. Come down at once.” Her sister Lavinia said that she “never knew Emily to be more brilliant or more fascinating in conversation than she was that day.” The anecdote emerged half a century afterward courtesy of a Dickinson cousin, who claimed that Bowles had begun, “Emily, you wretch!” Thomas H. Johnson, however, editor of her correspondence, justified the revision by noting that a letter Dickinson probably sent soon after is signed “Your ‘Rascal,’ ” with a postscript: “I washed the Adjective.”68 Much of what we know about the poet comes filtered through the prejudice and fading memory of others; much of what we know from her is confused, ambiguous, perhaps equally unreliable.
Dickinson and Bowles found each other captivating, though he seems to have been equally taken, or perhaps a bit more, with her sister-in-law. (Town gossip was town gossip.) Over the years Dickinson sent him some fifty poems, most of which he apparently failed to understand; those he published were the most adapted to the taste of the day.69 Her own taste in literature was conservative and often sentimental. She wrote Higginson, “You inquire my Books—For Poets—I have Keats—and Mr and Mrs Browning.” That seems to have been as much Mr. as Mrs., though she apparently adored Aurora Leigh and had a taste for romantic drivel much worse. (It was Mrs. Bowles whom she pressed with a name for her son—but Robert, after Browning, not Charles.)70 She hung a portrait of Mrs. Browning in her room. “You speak of Mr Whitman—” Dickinson wrote as well, “I never read his Book—but was told that he was disgraceful.”71
Any speculation about the poet’s hidden romantic life, if there was such a thing, must inevitably be bound to three letters to the unknown man she addressed as Master, letters found only in draft, two of them much amended and revised. Dickinson apparently roughed out her letters before making fair copies, though few such drafts exist. No doubt most were lost in the holocaust.72
Though it’s not clear that the Master Letters were ever sent, their tone is very like the provocations and insulations of her letters to Bowles. In one of their comic exchanges, he became Dick Swiveller from The Old Curiosity Shop and she the Marchioness.73 It’s worth remembering that the Marchioness was a lowly maidservant who in the end married Swiveller. Franklin, the scholar most schooled in her handwriting, dates the first letter to the spring of 1858, the others to the first half of 1861.74 Though the gradual changes to certain letter forms in her hand may be almost as good as carbon dating, the science is not exact—and even carbon gives only a range.
Critics who thought Dickinson incapable of passion called the letters fantasies. Had they been mere caprices, there should have been clues elsewhere in her work—her imagination was disturbed, but not in quite that way. Reading her poems suggests that, like T. S. Eliot, beneath detachment lay the turmoil of a mind always under intense pressure of the real.
In the second Master Letter, for example, the abject abasement makes uncomfortable reading:
Oh’ did I offend it—Did’nt it want me to tell it the truth Daisy—Daisy—offend it—who bends her smaller life to his <its’>, meeker <lower> every day—who only asks—a task—who something to do for love of it—some little way she can not guess to make that master glad—
A love so big it scares her, rushing among her small heart—75
“Its’” was meant to substitute for “his”—Dickinson sometimes used her pronouns thus, as she does later in the sentence, as well as in a poem dispatched to Bowles and dated by her writing to “about early 1861,” the possible date of this Master Letter. The poem was pinned around a pencil stub and seems to beg him for a word: “If it had no pencil, / Would it try mine— / Worn—now—and dull—sweet, / Writing much to thee.”76 (Dull is a pleasant bit of self-judgment.) The plea—comic, pathetic—hints that he had kept her waiting for a reply.
There is also the extraordinary poem, dated perhaps to the fall of 1862, that opens,
If I may have it, when it’s dead,
I’ll be contented—so—
If just as soon as Breath is out
It shall belong to me—
Until they lock it in the Grave,
’Tis Bliss I cannot weigh—
For tho’ they lock Thee in the Grave,
Myself—can own the key—
Think of it Lover! I and Thee
Permitted—face to face to be—
After a Life—a Death—we’ll say—
For Death was That—
And This—is Thee—77
The anguish, the separation from the lover in life, the fraught wish for love after death—it’s hard not to place such a poem and others like it in the complex of attraction and rejection that forms the Master Letters.
Clues to the recipient are frustratingly ambiguous. In the third letter, however, Dickinson writes, “If I had the Beard on my cheek—<like you> … ”78 Wadsworth, at least in surviving photographs, had no beard. Bowles did.79 There’s another telling reference:
The prank of the Heart at play on the Heart—in holy Holiday—is forbidden me—You make me say it over—I fear you laugh—when I do not see—but “Chillon” is not funny.80
This is not the only time she refers in her letters to the story of the prisoner of Chillon, which she probably knew from Byron’s sonnet and verse tale, very loosely based on the imprisonment of the monk and Geneva patriot François Bonivard. In the tale, when the prisoner is at last released (Bonivard spent four years in a dungeon), he has become so accustomed to his chains, he declares, “It was at length the same to me, / Fetter’d or fetterless to be, / I learn’d to love despair.”81 To Bowles she wrote, in a damaged letter of early 1862, “My Love is my only apology. To the people of ‘Chillon’—this—is enoug[h].”82 Who are these “people”? Others who share her predicament, perhaps, of not wanting freedom from her chains.
Dickinson’s memory of Byron is imperfect. If “people” meant a town, she has forgotten that Chillon was an island castle. Two years later, she wrote her sister, “You remember the Prisoner of Chillon did not know Liberty when it came, and asked to go back to Jail.”83 Byron’s prisoner did not ask to return, but it’s revealing that she recalled the ending that way. If the meaning is clear, that she was a prisoner of love (or had, like the prisoner, “learn’d to love despair”), her distorted memory is touching. Freed, she’d ask to be shackled again. It seems far likelier that Chillon represented that love whose imprisonment she longed not to leave rather than the incarceration suffered when later her eyes went bad; but metaphors, like letters of credit, may be negotiated over great distances.
There’s also the mutilated evidence of that 1862 letter, torn along the edge with the loss of some writing. In both Master Letters that year, Dickinson repeatedly calls herself Daisy, a nickname chosen or given. The letter to Bowles is similarly apologetic, and there she also refers to herself as Daisy—perhaps. Unfortunately, the crucial word is now incomplete: “To Da[isy?] ’tis daily—to be gran[ted].” Richard Sewall, her best biographer, interprets it so (certainly she might have delighted in the grace note of wordplay in Daisy/daily).84 The pencil poem she sent Bowles ended, “If it had no word— / Would it make the Daisy, / Most as big as I was— / When it plucked me?”85 The meaning is almost impenetrable, even after substituting “he” for “it,” as seems necessary in context. Perhaps, very roughly, if he doesn’t write, would she wither like the plucked daisy? Or shrink back to what she was before she was Daisy? Or would he at least make her his boutonnière? Or. Or. (The sexual meaning of “plucked” presumably went unheard, as it had fallen out of use the previous century.)86 The stub of a pencil might be considered a stalk plucked of its flower. The hints are teasing at best—but her intentions might not have been so hidden from him. She writes as if he would understand.
Much depends on the dating of the third Master Letter and the meaning of “Could you come to New England—this summer—could Would you come to Amherst—Would you like to come—Master?” Johnson dated this “about 1861,” which is little help, though by early December Bowles was staying in New York, just outside New England. Franklin redated it to the summer of 1861, months too early for that trip.87 It’s possible that she took so long to mail a fair copy—if one was ever mailed—that she crossed out “summer” in draft because the season had passed. (Dickinson sometimes procrastinated with letters.) On its current dating, the passage might be read to favor Wadsworth.
A number of the poems Dickinson sent to Bowles can be read as explicit confessions of her feelings, especially the poem beginning “Title divine—is mine! / The Wife—without the Sign!”88 It’s not clear that he had the wit to read them so—a man may be a blockhead in such matters, or in kindness pretend to be. Dickinson was not a woman who risked all by saying all. Even so, many poems that year make all but plain that she was devastated by something. She described herself in the second Master Letter, “Daisy—who never flinched thro’ that awful parting—but held her life so tight he should not see the wound.”89
The secret lives of the nineteenth century have never been adequately revealed—we still misread the lack of manifest sign. (It was most of a century after the poet’s death that the torrid infidelity between Austin Dickinson and Mabel Loomis Todd emerged from the shadows.)90 Early writers sometimes thought Dickinson bloodless, immune to anything that stank of emotion. That was the later family view, at least in public.91 Her propriety was worn like her white dress, immortally laundered—but, if Dickinson were not writing in propria persona, she was giving a good imitation. “After great pain” first appeared in Further Poems of Emily Dickinson (1929), subtitled Withheld from Publication by Her Sister Lavinia—that is worth remembering.92 A cluster of poems of similar direction—one probably from 1861, also not published until Further Poems—began, “A wife—at Daybreak I shall be,” and ended, “Master—I’ve seen the face before.”93 Even so, other readings remain possible, or a layering of conflicted readings, as always with a poet with more to conceal than reveal.
Wadsworth lived too far away and was happily married; Bowles may not have known Dickinson until a few months after the first Master Letter—neither problem is insuperable. Critics have made much of the kinship of image and vocabulary between the Master Letters and Wadsworth’s sermons or her letters to Bowles. Each candidate has his passionate advocates. The Master of the first letter and the Master of the others might even have been different men—in her love, at different hours, she might have served different masters. The arguments are circumstantial, the circumstances impossible to reconstruct.
A humdrum explanation for her “terror” has sometimes been proposed, something she would have been more likely to mention to a stranger like Higginson. Two years later, Dickinson suffered prolonged eye-trouble. Her friend Joseph Lyman transcribed a passage from a letter not preserved: “Some years ago I had a woe, the only one that ever made me tremble. It was a shutting out of all the dearest ones of time, the strongest friends of the soul—BOOKS.” She had endured, she reported, “eight weary months of Siberia.”94 That may refer to the first of two long spells of treatment in Boston, each about seven months; but an even earlier attack might have driven her to poetry at the thought she was about to go blind. Recall, though, that this was a terror “I could tell to none.”95 That sounds deeper than eye trouble.
The “terror,” whatever it was, came near the outset of five years in which Dickinson wrote more than half her poems, over nine hundred. (If you drop the hundred or so that can’t be dated by her handwriting, she apparently wrote two-thirds of her poems between 1858 and 1865.) Unfortunately, there’s no evidence of a previous attack—we have nearly forty letters from the seven months after the “terror,” while scarcely two dozen for the more than two years when her eye problems were acute. The poems declined sharply during the attack in 1864 but—if the dating can be trusted—were not much affected by that of 1865. Terror comes in many forms, and the difficulty with her eyes does not foreclose a romantic disaster that provoked the poems linked to pain and parting.
All this is a long way around the barn, but it’s crucial to keep these letters and these shadow relations in mind, even when the difficulties cannot be resolved. Virtually everything in this précis of romantic love can be quarreled with. With her eccentricities, her catastrophic reserve, her niggling and unearthly brilliance, Dickinson was the oddest of odd ducks—her strange manner taxed the patience of acquaintances.
The Master Letters are so personal and specific (one implies that the recipient knew her dog), they were almost certainly written to someone; and we know Dickinson a little better if we consider that both likely candidates were beyond reach. To read her as a woman apart cannot be sustained when the life lies so close to the surface of the words. The modern idea of romantic passion comes from the sufferings of troubadours over a beloved already married. For Dickinson, male and female could easily have been reversed.
FEET
Returning to the second stanza, we’re faced with the extreme condition of Dickinson’s ambiguity. She lived her life in code (a key word in her poems is “circumference”), her equivocations guarding privacies even from those with whom she corresponded. The ambiguities of the poems and letters are of a piece—puzzling then, puzzling still. In the sort of ambiguity familiar to readers, one meaning radiates into suggestive alternatives, or two readings lie superimposed and entangled. In Dickinson’s work, it’s often hard to decipher the central meaning; the reader is left with two, or three, or four equally plausible variations.
Nerves have long been a symbol of bravery, calm in battle, sensitivity; the Heart of steadfastness and love (they’re metonymies of feeling); but Feet are pathetically grounded in the physical. The nerves and the heart, apart from Christian use of the latter, have no place in art except in anatomy texts; but drawing legs and feet was a necessary part of the classical artist’s training—Rembrandt was rare in never learning to paint legs convincingly.
“The Feet, mechanical, go round”—every movement labors here, and what might have been conscious act becomes the numbed motion of the machine. (“Going through the motions” would be the modern phrase, but it was current in Dickinson’s day.) Many machines are rotary in action—something goes round. Dickinson would have seen washing machines and sewing machines and locomotive engines enough. A well-oiled machine is soothing and reliable, but it runs without will or thought or feeling. A poem from the same period, late 1862, begins, “From Blank to Blank— / A Threadless Way / I pushed Mechanic feet— / To stop—or perish—or advance— / Alike indifferent.”96 The numbed condition was on her mind. The lines bear contradictory relation to Tennyson’s “That nothing walks with aimless feet”—Dickinson’s feet have lost sense of purpose. (Tennyson’s poem begins, “Oh yet we trust that somehow good / Will be the final goal of ill.”)97
In the nineteenth century, a mechanic was anyone who worked with his hands—a carpenter or blacksmith, even a manual laborer. Though the meaning later narrowed, there remained the sense, recorded in the OED, that things “mechanical” were vulgar. At the start of the century, the essayist Vicesimus Knox had inveighed against the “literary madness of the trading and mechanical orders”—that is, shopkeepers and laborers who had the insolence to become authors.98 The prejudice further taints the slogging movement, as if the feet were condemned, not just to brute labor, but to labor unworthy. Dissociation preserves but also protects. A life nerveless, stiffened, routine need never be examined—some suffering prevents suffering. There are also irrelevant or subordinate meanings to which syntax makes the lines vulnerable. In English idiom, “go round” means to pay a visit (“I can do no better than go round to Jenny’s,” Bleak House), as well as to travel indirectly or aimlessly (“If they could only go round towards the City Road,” Dombey and Son).99
What on earth is the wooden way? Either the feet go round in wooden fashion, wherever they tread (though we might expect “in a wooden way,” and the feet are unlikely to be both wooden and mechanical), or they take a path made of wood. Boardwalks in cities and towns were still a sign of civic improvement—in 1850 San Francisco, the “sidewalks were made of barrel staves and narrow pieces of board.” There’s no evidence Amherst had plank walks then, but other towns did. Even as late as 1895, they could be found in a similar college town, according to Godey’s Magazine: “From the Bryn Mawr station a boardwalk, which sometimes proves full of pitfalls for the unsuspecting stranger, leads along a level road, past attractive houses.” A few years after Dickinson’s visit, a soldier noted the “old plank walk” that led to Washington’s tomb.100 The combination on that trip of a tomb, a wooden way, and Wadsworth is only a cheerful accident.
The way could be a plank bridge, which lies over ground, or air, or ought—the ought that is a river, say—but it isn’t made of those things. The old plank roads (American plank roads boomed in the 1840s), or a belfry’s plank flooring (where one could walk round the bells), or a house’s porch or floors (many a worrier has paced a room)—all are possible, and none is quite convincing. The wooden way in “I stepped from Plank to Plank” seems to be a pier or a seaside boardwalk.101 (The poem has a furtive relation to “From Blank to Blank.”)
The problem lies in the construction of the passage itself. As it stands in manuscript, the stanza is very odd. The original reads:
1 The Feet, mechanical, go round—
3 Of Ground, or Air, or Ought—
2 A Wooden way
4 Regardless grown,
A Quartz contentment, like a stone—102
Dickinson numbered the first four lines for rearrangement. It’s not clear if she changed her mind as she wrote or simply made a copying error. (Her eye might have caught “Ground” as she wrote “round,” and she just thoughtlessly continued.) To “go round— / Of Ground, or Air, or Ought” is bizarre English, even for Dickinson. There are rare locative uses where “of ” may mean “on” or “in” (OED), but the meaning would still be crippled—and there’s no parallel for this sense anywhere in her work.
Though her punctuation was altered, the first appearance of the poem, in Further Poems, took account of her reordering, rendering the lines as “The feet mechanical go round / A wooden way / Of ground or air or Ought, / Regardless grown, / A quartz contentment like a stone.” (Later collected editions made them, for no good reason, a quatrain with lines ending mechanical/way/grown/stone.)103 Johnson in his influential variorum edition placed the reordered stanza in a footnote, but the poem as printed followed the manuscript.104 Franklin’s now standard edition (1998) transposed the lines as Dickinson directed:
The Feet, mechanical, go round—
A Wooden way
Of Ground, or Air, or Ought—
Regardless grown,
A Quartz contentment, like a stone—
Manuscript of Emily Dickinson, “After great pain, a formal feeling comes.”
Source: MS Am 1118.3 (26c), Courtesy of Houghton Library, Harvard University.
Unfortunately, the corrupt stanza, unhappily the version in Johnson’s one-volume reader’s edition (1960), still appears in anthologies and even critical works.105
The second line of the manuscript stanza (“Of Ground, or Air, or Ought”) disrupts her couplet rhyme, and the whole destroys the quatrain pattern; but Dickinson’s stanzaic forms were frequently irregular, sometimes radically so. (Higginson noticed and did not disapprove.)106 Even reordered, the stanza is difficult to interpret. Critics, if they don’t simply ignore the lines, usually tear out their hair trying to explain what the “Wooden way / Of Ground, or Air, or Ought” ought to be.
The confusion is unnecessary if Dickinson’s directions for recasting the stanza were meant only as an aide-mémoire. The terminal punctuation of the second and third lines might always have been in the right place—it was just the two lines themselves she mixed up. And perhaps while concentrating on her task, realizing something was amiss, she put an unnecessary dash after the first line. She never treated punctuation as fixed, altering it manuscript to manuscript, sometimes bending toward convention, sometimes dashing the poem to pieces. On occasion she misplaced punctuation, but she grumbled only once when a mark was changed in print.107 It was not the least consideration against remaking fair copies willy-nilly that the laid or wove paper she used for her fascicles was expensive.
The numbers clearly mean that the stanza should be recast. If we keep Dickinson’s punctuation in place (removing, for this exercise, the unnecessary dash at the end of the first line, though frequently she interrupted syntax this way), the meaning becomes plain:
The Feet, mechanical, go round
A Wooden way—
Of Ground, or Air, or Ought
Regardless grown,
A Quartz contentment, like a stone—
The wooden way is no longer composed of ground or air or something; rather, on this path the speaker is insensible to anything around her. The stanza could just as easily appear as a quatrain, fully restoring the couplet rhymes and iambic meter.
The Feet, mechanical, go round
A Wooden way—of Ground,
Or Air, or Ought regardless grown,
A Quartz contentment, like a stone.108
Cutting off the list at the end of the line would not be unusual in her work (compare “the sound of Boards / Or Rip of Nail—Or Carpenter,” “Of Amplitude, or Awe— / Or first Prospective—or the Gold”).109 Dickinson was not beyond breaking her lines for emphasis, however, or shortening or lengthening her meter. In the irregular version, however, sense perhaps more gracefully follows the line, which seems her intention.
One of the main uses for “wooden way” just before Dickinson’s day was for pre-steam railways, which often ran on wooden rails.110 There’s another possibility. Riddles occupied many a parlor of an evening—“What is a wooden way of ground, or air, or ought?” might at that day have been answered, “Treadmill.” (More than one critic has already suggested this.)111 The mode of punishment later suffered by Oscar Wilde was constructed as a paddle wheel set above the ground but, because each step was open, above air as well. It was the endless staircase that, for many prisoners, led only to death. Introduced in some New England prisons in the 1820s, it proved inefficient at milling grain or pumping water.
The treadmill would expose the speaker’s sense of being punished—she must serve her sentence. (The Crucifixion was a punishment.) It would be pretty to think that a buried pun on “sentence” would have occurred to Dickinson, given the patched-together, dash-happy nine-line extravaganza with which the poem ends. The poem never achieves release—it ends on an interminable dash, a continuation not quite declared an ending. Such a sentence can never be outlived—surely the aftermath of a death feels that way. The idea is too ingenious, unfortunately, like the notion, pursued by Helen Vendler among others, that the disordered stanza reveals a disordered mind.112
None of this can tell us for certain what Dickinson intended by the “wooden way.” Through the nineteenth century the phrase could also mean a bridge approach, a track leading from the ground to scaffolding, and, after her death, more than one type of elevated railway. Indeed, there’s a thin chance that she employed the word as a synonym for “wooded” (this American usage persisted only through the nineteenth century) and that the wooden way is no more than a path through woods. The business of the stanza is to show the speaker, in the stupor of grief, reduced to an automaton walking she knows not where. It’s to the credit of critics that none, so far as I know, has imagined the great pain as merely physical—say, that of a broken leg.
Dickinson often had some ground for her metaphors, but the shadows of her poems lie in the guilts of ambiguity or in simply not caring how easily the reader might be led astray. If her private readers made her aware of the snarls and tangles, they were not snarls and tangles she chose to unravel. (She sent very few friends, only half a dozen or so, more than a handful of poems.)113
“Ought” is the variant spelling of “aught,” that is, “anything whatever.” Given the license of Dickinson’s language, there’s the sidelong possibility that in punning fashion she meant the noun “ought,” duty or necessity (George Eliot, “The will supreme, the individual claim, / The social Ought” [1874]; and Gladstone, “The two great ideas of the divine will, and of the Ought, or duty” [1878], OED). I’d dismiss this as a stray implication if the poem didn’t seem a little short of duty but a little long on necessity. Within the mist of such metaphors, there are shapes but no clear figures. About the best one can hope for with Dickinson’s metaphors is to establish a range or grid of potential meaning within which the real meaning has been embedded. Dickinson hedged her meanings, but hedging at times reveals more than clarity, just as her revisions show the movement of mind toward the opacities of brilliance: in “Blazing in gold and quenching in purple,” the “kitchen window” became “oriel window” and at last “Otter’s Window.”114
Presumably it is the Feet that have grown regardless, personified like Heart and Nerves, embodied though only fractions of the body. Distracted, unconscious of walking but still walking, they have fallen into the contentment of the inanimate. An underlying meaning of “regardless,” just passing out of fashion, was “slighted; not worthy of regard”—that would be an attractive whisper of meaning, even were the other ascendant.
QUARTZ
Ceremonious nerves, stiff heart, mechanical feet grown regardless of their path—the benumbed state of grief is summed in two metaphors: “Quartz contentment, like a stone” and “Hour of Lead.” As a girl, Dickinson had studied geology at Amherst Academy, which she entered aged nine. Students of the academy were allowed to attend lectures at Amherst College, including those by one of the eminent geologists of the day, the Reverend Edward Hitchcock. (Harriet Martineau saw the young girls there some years before Dickinson was a student.)115 A copy of his textbook Elementary Geology, which became one of the most widely adopted, lay in the family library. It was also, perhaps unsurprisingly, the geology book assigned at Mount Holyoke.116 Though she didn’t stay long enough to take up the subject there, Dickinson did write her brother—it shows her bristling enthusiasm for the sciences—that she was “engrossed in the history of Sulphuric Acid!!!!!”117 Hitchcock’s influence appears in later poems like “On a Columnar Self.”118
Dickinson knew enough geology to realize that quartz is a crystal, not a stone; but “quartz stone” was a phrase often used, and Hitchcock repeatedly refers to “quartz rock.”119 Some varieties are considered semiprecious gemstones, and pure quartz is almost as hard as hardened steel. The contentment, then, would be obdurate—but perhaps like pure quartz translucent or transparent, easy to see into.
To press the reading further, and even too far, “Quartz contentment” is a striking metaphor for feeling crystallized within. Of all the minerals, Dickinson chose the one then considered, by Hitchcock among others, the most common (in fact, feldspar predominates).120 When the quartz crystal stops growing, it has reached a state of what might be called contentment—frozen at least metaphorically—but that contentment is a hard, beautiful thing without feeling. “The Dew— / That stiffens quietly to Quartz,” she wrote in another poem, within days or weeks, the word’s only other appearance in surviving poem or letter.121 Lost in the subterranean arguments and silent treaties of language, “Regardless grown” almost becomes the promise fulfilled in grown quartz—just as a spire of quartz crystal might, by its resemblance to an icicle, prepare the frozen death to come.
The main ingredient of sand, quartz glitters—indeed, the unmentioned glittering may anticipate the snow implicit in the ending. A snowflake, too, is a crystal. In Dickinson’s day, contentment could mean, not just ease of mind, but the very action of becoming satisfied, a meaning later lost (Arthur Helps, “With no contentment to the appetites of the hungry” [1851], OED). The flicker of appetite would be disturbing. The metaphor marks the speaker’s ruthless patience, with perhaps a touch of fatalism. A stone has the capacity to wait without change, for eons if necessary. (It would be wrong to assume that contentment requires passivity—a quartz contentment could be read as the grip of obsession, or of near madness.)
Dickinson’s contentment was rarely content. There is, not just “Tell it the Ages—to a cypher— / And it will ache—contented—on” (“Bound—a trouble”), and “A perfect—paralyzing Bliss— / Contented as Despair” (“One Blessing had I”), but more disturbingly “A nearness to Tremendousness— / An Agony procures— / … // Contentment’s quiet Suburb— / Affliction cannot stay / In Acres” (“A nearness to Tremendousness”).122 Contentment can be a frozen despair, a serenity not the least serene.
STANZA 3
This is the Hour of Lead—
Remembered, if outlived,
As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow—
First—Chill—then Stupor—then the letting go—
The machine-like walk is the first hint of the circumstance of the last stanzas—a death march through extreme cold, the body on automatic, numbed within and numb without, mechanical because near exhaustion, moving because stopping is sleep and sleep is death. (“Death march” was a phrase first found in this sense less than two decades before; as the alternative to “dead march,” the march of a funeral procession, it had been in the language for a century [OED].) It’s as if Dickinson remembered the cold before the poem could mention it. Had she been recalling the town tomb, she was already thinking of frozen bodies.
If “Quartz contentment” summarizes the plodding of the feet (meditation by walking in circles is not uncommon), the “Hour of Lead” is the collapsed figure for the state of grief that governs the poem—it returns to formal feeling with a vision of the dull, inertial aftermath of trauma. Apart from uranium, lead is the heaviest naturally occurring element. (Though discovered by a chemist at the time of the French Revolution, uranium had little use beyond glassmaking or photography until the twentieth century—it went unmentioned in Hitchcock’s Geology.) “Heavy as lead” is a phrase at least as antique as Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1621).123 The heart or soul “as heavy as lead” was a customary formula.
Shakespeare took the qualities of the metal beyond the heartsick metaphor in Venus and Adonis. “Like dull and heavy lead” (Henry IV, Part II) and “Is not lead a metal heavy, dull, and slow?” (Love’s Labour’s Lost)124 are confirming instances of the mental dullness and heavy-footed pace intimate with the Hour of Lead. “Leaden”—what is the Hour of Lead but leaden?—has an acute semantic range here, as the OED reminds us: “heavy, dull, benumbing,” and, of the limbs, “hard to drag along.”
It’s no more than an amusing coincidence, given the possible connection to the Master Letters, that the next line in Love’s Labour’s Lost is “Minime, honest master, or, rather, master, no.” The exchange is part of an elaborate quibble between Don de Armado and his page, Moth. There’s a slow-gaited ass, a message to be delivered, and a promise to be “swift as lead”—when his master remonstrates, Moth replies, “Is that lead slow which is fir’d from a gun?” Recall the third Master Letter—“If you saw a bullet hit a Bird …” The reader can cut too deeply, but—whatever connection to Shakespeare, little or none—the lines remind us that any mention of lead may bring up bullets, and that Dickinson, no mean quibbler herself, was perfectly capable of thinking of hardness and perhaps translucency when she wrote “quartz” and then heaviness and stupor, or perhaps brute violence, when she thought of lead. She began a poem, “My Life had stood—a Loaded Gun.”125
I FELT A FUNERAL
Months before, probably, Dickinson had written what may be a trial piece.
I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,
And Mourners to and fro
Kept treading—treading—till it seemed
That Sense was breaking through—
And when they all were seated,
A Service, like a Drum—
Kept beating—beating—till I thought
My mind was going numb—
And then I heard them lift a Box
And creak across my Soul
With those same Boots of Lead, again,
Then Space—began to toll,
As all the Heavens were a Bell,
And Being, but an Ear,
And I, and Silence, some strange Race
Wrecked, solitary, here—
And then a Plank in Reason, broke,
And I dropped down, and down—
And hit a World, at every plunge,
And Finished knowing—then—126
“After great pain” appears here in nascent form, or rather through the looking glass. Both open with a funeral—something has died. We have mourners eventually “seated” versus nerves that “sit ceremonious,” “treading—treading” versus the mechanical feet, “My mind was going numb” versus “Chill—then Stupor,” “Boots of Lead” versus “Hour of Lead,” “Plank in Reason” versus “Wooden way,” and Brain and Ear versus Nerves and Heart. “Dropped down” and “Finished knowing—then” become “Stupor—then the letting go.” Even the critical appearance of “then” betrays a similarity of dramatic construction. There are differences—the mechanical round of the wooden way is enacted in the earlier poem by the relentless ands, a baker’s dozen of them (an anaphora of them, as it were). Half the lines start there, emphasizing the leaden treading and the beating, beating of the funeral service.
The images form a cluster like those in Shakespeare: funeral, mourners, treading, sitting, parts of the body, numbness, silence, lead, solitude, obliteration—and perhaps even verbal echoes like “Wrecked” / “recollect.” (Shakespeare’s clusters are more disconcerting and almost irrational—dogs and candy, for instance, and geese, disease, and bitterness.)127 Though Dickinson’s images derive mainly from the trappings of a funeral, the echoes can’t quite be argued away—her funerals lack a preacher, for instance. The elements of “After great pain” are not exact equivalents—“Hour of Lead” is not “Boots of Lead”—but when lead is invoked, for example, walking or treading lies near. (The latter phrase has some age to it. William Drummond of Hawthornden wrote an epigram about Charles I that included the line “In boots of lead thrall’d were his legs.”)128
There’s a similar cluster in a poem written late in 1862, “A Prison gets to be a friend,” a poem so infused by “The Prisoner of Chillon” it might have been spoken by the prisoner himself. There are parts of the body (“face,” “Eyes,” and, amusingly, the “Cheek of Liberty”); “Content” versus “Quartz contentment”; and, most tellingly, “We learn to know the Planks— / That answer to Our feet,” the image of the prisoner circling in his cell, a “Demurer Circuit— / A Geometric Joy” (later, “The narrow Round—the stint— / The slow exchange of Hope”).129 Perhaps the “Wooden way” also had intimations of such a circuit—certainly that phrase and the “Plank in Reason” have some association with imprisonment and loss of hope. The dominant feeling is loneliness and the passive acceptance of hard fate.
Return to “I felt a Funeral.” “I heard them lift a Box”—this must be a coffin, a “box of boards,” as Dickinson wrote in a letter that year.130 The old euphemism was frequently heard in the nineteenth century. (A Gold Rush miner wrote in 1849, “They take a poor fellow when he does happen to die, and put him in a rough box, clothes and all, and chuck him in a hole.”)131 “Box” was not pure slang, as the OED has it, but figurative at times for a lowly coffin resembling a long packing crate—at times it was a packing crate. Dickinson’s use of the word may therefore be calculated—there’s more of the plain terror of death in being pitched, like candles or twists of tobacco, into a miserable box. The poem, like “After great pain,” is about a loss that drives the speaker nearly mad—the cause is likely the same.
The mourners tread in the brute, steady way of mechanical feet. They sit during the service, where the words batter the speaker into numbness. Do they beat like the drum of a dead march? As pallbearers, the mourners lift the coffin and walk across her soul in their “Boots of Lead.” The heavens toll like a church bell, probably the slow, steady knell of the funeral bell. All being becomes just a passive state of listening, of being forced to hear. The speaker and Silence are shipwrecked (Dickinson usually uses “wrecked” of shipwrecks), a “strange Race” together—it’s hard not to see an allusion to Robinson Crusoe here. Are they “strange” because they do not speak in a world where everyone else can’t stop talking, or because she is now so estranged from the living? Her growing discomfort with company is perhaps shadowed here.
The speaker is not describing her own funeral—the funeral is “in my Brain.” Still, great loss makes the living feel that something inside has died. The poem may be a literal version of the idea. When the mourners tread across her soul (Dickinson originally wrote “across my Brain,” probably forgetting she had used the word in the opening line), that is all figurative—but the poet writes as if someone had just walked over her grave. Again, the line seems the literal version of a commonplace. The shuddering in the usual phrase goes back at least to Swift.132 There is a death to answer a death.
Should we be reminded of that nineteenth-century horror, being buried alive? Poe was obsessed by the idea. His stories “The Premature Burial” and “The Fall of the House of Usher,” among others, are the most famous examples; but the fear was widespread. Dickinson once wrote Higginson, “Of Poe, I know too little to think”133—but that doesn’t mean she knew nothing. The line, as so often, is cunningly evasive.
The horror of life in death lies not far from the death in life beneath both poems. Dickinson continued, after her remark on Poe, “Hawthorne appalls, entices.” Did she know “The Minister’s Black Veil” from Twice-Told Tales (1837),134 where a village parson appears one Sunday in a black veil, causing consternation among his congregation and leading his betrothed to break their engagement? He continues to wear it all his life, refusing to remove it even at the point of death. The Recluse, as Bowles once called Dickinson, might have had a moment of recognition—of enticement—after being appalled. She wrote a poem about a veil, after all, that opens, “A Charm invests a face / Imperfectly beheld— / The Lady dare not lift her Vail / For fear it be dispelled.”135 Reticence has its responsibilities.
Reason breaks down, but where is the “Plank in Reason”? Is it just an imaginary plank across the great reach of the Heavens? Cynthia Griffin Wolff, in her biography of Dickinson, offers a telling emblem from the book Religious Allegories (1848), showing a gentleman crossing a plank that bestrides a dark abyss. The man holds a radiant book that must be the Bible, the plank is carved with the word “FAITH,” and a shining mansion awaits his crossing.136 Dickinson’s “Plank in Reason” would be quietly critical. Other senses of “plank” seem not to apply.
If the speaker feels buried, is the plank the bottom of a board coffin from which her corpse plummets into whatever realms lie below? “And Finished knowing—then—”: the speaker vanishes into unknowing and the poem ends in dissolution, just as “After great pain” ends in … in nothing. Dickinson considered changing “Finished” to “Got through” but perhaps felt the ambiguity would have promised survival.137
FREEZING
The last line of “After great pain” is a death not quite death. “If outlived” introduces the species of doubt that secures the magnitude of pain. The effects of extreme cold were familiar—Dickinson’s knowledge of death by freezing could have come from many sources. There may have been some local incident (Samuel Bowles suffered severely from sciatica after a harrowing sleigh ride to Amherst early in 1861);138 but, throughout this period, there are scenes in tales like “The Christmas Letter” from Godey’s Lady’s Book (1856):
She is so very weary, and the stupor is returning. So, feebly brushing off the snow from a felled tree lying by the wayside, she sits down. She grows colder, more lethargic, more numb; minute by minute goes by, yet still she sits. She is just sinking into unconsciousness.139
The most notorious incidents of freezing to death, however, occurred half a century before on the retreat of the French army from Moscow and more recently during the Arctic expeditions.
In The United States Grinnell Expedition in Search of Sir John Franklin (1854), Elisha Kent Kane, who served as ship’s surgeon to the first Grinnell Expedition, quoted from his own “scrap-book”:
“I will tell you what this feels like, for I have been twice ‘caught out.’ Sleepiness is not the sensation. Have you ever received the shocks of a magneto-electric machine, and had the peculiar benumbing sensation of ‘can’t let go,’ extending up to your elbow-joints? Deprive this of its paroxysmal character; subdue, but diffuse it over every part of the system, and you have the so-called pleasurable feelings of incipient freezing. It seems even to extend to your brain. Its inertia is augmented; every thing about you seems of a ponderous sort; and the whole amount of pleasure is in gratifying the disposition to remain at rest, and spare yourself an encounter with these latent resistances. This is, I suppose, the pleasurable sleepiness of the story books.”140
Can’t let go. Here is the numbness of the “formal feeling” and “Hour of Lead,” here the incipient freezing, the inertia of the mechanical feet (“Regardless grown”) and “Quartz contentment” and “Hour of Lead.” Here, in short, is the memory of someone freezing to death. Kane is adamant that the feeling is not sleepiness—and nowhere does Dickinson mention sleep. This may be the very passage that informed the poem, the details reworked, perhaps even the “letting go” suggested by the bizarre tingle of the “magneto-electric machine.”
Kane had prefaced the account by saying, “I felt that lethargic numbness mentioned in the story books.” I’ve been unable to find any book that answers the surgeon’s reference: Frankenstein (1818) will not do, nor Symzonia (1820), nor The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838).141 Perhaps The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798/1834) comes closest among imaginative speculations about the frozen north or south, with “The ice was here, the ice was there, / The ice was all around,” the “Night-mare Life-in-Death,” and the “gentle sleep” the Mariner enjoys. At times Coleridge approaches Dickinson’s own nightmarish vision. When the Mariner wakes, he recalls,
I moved, and could not feel my limbs:
I was so light—almost
I thought that I had died in sleep,
And was a blessed ghost.142
The numbness is there, and the fall into sleep that may be a falling out of life; but the connections are weak.
“Storybook” had increasingly come to mean a collection of children’s stories. There are tales of the cold in Grimm and Andersen, but none relevant to Kane’s memory. One novel within range is Fenimore Cooper’s Sea Lions (1849), toward the end of which a man almost freezes to death in the snow. His companions rub his limbs and give him a dose of brandy, followed by coffee:
After a swallow or two, aided by a vigorous friction, and closely surrounded by so many human bodies, the black began to revive; and the sort of drowsy stupor which is known to precede death in those who die by freezing, having been in a degree shaken off, he was enabled to stand alone.143
Drowsy stupor. But perhaps we don’t need to know what books or stories Kane referred to. He recorded in Arctic Explorations (1856) his later experiences leading the second Grinnell Expedition:
I was of course familiar with the benumbed and almost lethargic sensation of extreme cold; and once, when exposed for some hours in the midwinter of Baffin’s Bay, I had experienced symptoms which I compared to the diffused paralysis of the electro-galvanic shock. But I had treated the sleepy comfort of freezing as something like the embellishment of romance. I had evidence now to the contrary.144
The “embellishment of romance” suggests that he wasn’t thinking of children’s stories. Two of his men “came begging permission to sleep”:
Presently Hans was found nearly stiff under a drift; and Thomas, bolt upright, had his eyes closed, and could hardly articulate.… The floe was of level ice, and the walking excellent. I cannot tell how long it took us to make the nine miles; for we were in a strange sort of stupor, and had little apprehension of time.145
Benumbed, lethargic, extreme cold, diffused paralysis, sleepy comfort, freezing, stupor. Emily’s father’s copy of the 1857 printing of Arctic Explorations was in the Dickinsons’ library.146 This immensely popular book stayed in print for half a century and eventually sold over 150,000 copies.147 If Dickinson were not recalling Kane’s first book, the second would have done—and perhaps she knew both.
A lost traveler making endless circles appears in Charles Francis Hall’s account in Arctic Researches and Life Among the Esquimaux (1865) of the search for a lost shipmate: “The tracks turn again in a circle. Now they come in rapid succession. Round and round the bewildered, terror-stricken, and almost frozen one makes his way.”148 Such aimless circling is much like that of the prisoner in his cell. During the 1860s, references in her poems to the polar regions show that the poet had read of the search for Sir John Franklin. The lines “When the lone British Lady / Forsakes the Arctic Race” (in “When the Astronomer stops seeking”) refer to the end of Lady Franklin’s search for her husband.149 In “Through the strait pass of suffering,” Dickinson makes the expeditions north a figure for suffering martyrs (“The Martyrs—even—trod”), intent to the point of death on their search for grace:
Their faith—the everlasting troth—
Their expectation—fair—
The Needle—to the North Degree—
Wades—so—thro’ polar Air!150
The “even—trod” through the “strait pass of suffering” echoes the numbing round of the feet in “After great pain,” as well as Christ’s journey through the Stations of the Cross. Dickinson sent this poem to Bowles, adding meaningfully, “Because I could not say it—I fixed it in the Verse.”151
Looking again, it’s possible to see the figure of cold creeping backward into the second stanza. The “Quartz contentment” is a figure for cold-heartedness, the inner stiffening for which “icicle” had been a metaphor for two centuries (Herrick: “Shall I go to Love and tell, / Thou art all turn’d isicle?”)152 Could the “going round” be that compassless wandering of the lost, freezing traveler, another perhaps unconscious preparation for the cold to come? Or was it conscious? If “Quartz contentment” is implicated by the inner chill, then “stiff Heart” may be as well.
Anyone living in a clapboard house in New England, as the Dickinson family did for fifteen years, knew how cold the cold was.153 In Robert Frost’s “Snow,” the preacher Meserve says, “This house is frozen brittle, all except / This room you sit in.”154 (It’s midnight, and his hosts have been roused from bed. Probably they’re in the kitchen, with the fire in the stove stirred up.) Lying alone in bed on a frozen winter night when the fire has gone out, lying under a dead weight of quilts, too cold to risk moving an inch, even a woman not a poet might imagine she knew the touch of the Arctic, and a little of death to come.
IF OUTLIVED
The poem occurs after the inciting pain and before pain has been outlived. The doubt in “If outlived” offers neither solace nor proportion—letting go would be letting go of life, not putting the past behind (the poem is too despairing for that), though the latter exists as a ghost reading. Ghost readings have reason but not probability; they lurk below the surface as a contradictory palimpsest or “drama of Reason,” as Coleridge called his parenthetical remarks.155
Elsewhere during these months, Dickinson used “let go” for the end of life (“Looking at Death, is Dying— / Just let go the Breath,” “You’ll find—it when you try to die— / The easier to let go”), but also, a year later, for renunciation (“Renunciation—is a piercing Virtue— / The letting go”).156 Perhaps that’s how long renunciation took. The immediate layer of meaning is governed by the metaphor of the freezing victim, letting go of consciousness, not yet life itself. “Letting go” occurs rapidly in the poem, but such a death would have been slow.157 The ending serves not as catharsis but as a record of exhausted surrender. It may reveal, not a longing to die, only a longing not to feel or think.
If agony is the condition, death would be a cure. Some in great pain, Dickinson would have known, choose death by freezing. (Cold was sometimes employed as an anesthetic—it’s not too much to hear through this, from a lover of Keats, “My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains / My sense.” Hemlock was the sedative.)158
THE DASH
Many of Dickinson’s poems end with a dash, which here acts like an ellipsis, the gradual lapse into oblivion—or a flourish, the end of things. She ended more than half her poems thus, in one version or another. Often where there are two versions, one ends with a dash and the other with an exclamation point. A dash also suggests that there might have been more to say—or rather something that remains unsaid. Her punctuation has driven critics slightly mad. Shakespeare, like other Elizabethan authors, left his stops to the printing house; and letter writers of her century often slapped down one dash after another (Austen and Byron, for example, Keats and Whitman). It can be difficult to tell whether one of Dickinson’s marks is period, comma, dash, or a stray dot where her pen rested. Punctuation in all printed versions of the poems must therefore be provisional—the precision of the editor conceals the guesswork.
Though her punctuation often seems intuitive, Dickinson was not obliged to clarify the poems for anyone but herself, not even the friends to whom they were sometimes sent. A poet does not have to revel in such discretions to take advantage of them, or to put off the labor of making decisions necessary for the printer. When she left only these sketchy notations toward the pauses that delay our run-on words, the poems preserved their original privacy. Or perhaps something closer to dignity.
END
“After great pain” is the memoir of a Lazarus not yet dead, by a speaker who does not even say she wants to survive. She’s merely reporting how the experience would feel—peaceful, that is—from the rare accounts of survivors. If such pain can be outlived, only those who have returned from the cold of the tomb can speak with authority. The Resurrection surfaces here, given the way Christ’s exemplary act of suffering stands at the edge of the first stanza. That would deepen the speaker’s degrading torment—Christ was never more a man than at the moment His faith gave out upon the Cross. He rose from a tomb, of course.
Beneath signs of claustrophobic horror and deathlike formality, beneath the mechanical walk and inner paralysis, the poem lives in the aftermath of shock. The speaker has passed beyond chill (“formal feeling” perhaps introduces the idea) into stupor (“Hour of Lead”). “Formal feeling” doesn’t mean absence of pain—only numbness to it, and the wish to be numb is proof of its severity. The poem describes the period after terrible loss when the feelings insulate themselves—such grief is a climate that may continue for months or years. Reading too much Dickinson is like suffering an attack of claustrophobia—no later poet produced that feeling so oppressively until Sylvia Plath.
There are crowds enough in this poem—nerves, mourners, freezing persons—but at center a speaker who never refers to herself. The “I” has been erased in radical solitude—despair lies beneath what seems a valediction. The poem leaves the matter of survival in doubt. That is the horror. There’s no better poem about dying alone, whether physically or emotionally—yet, if this is a poem of obliteration, Dickinson has written with unnerving detachment. The most extraordinary aspect of this moving narrative, this narrative of movement, is that despite the great pain the speaker does keep moving. A traveler cannot freeze to death until he stops.
Dickinson’s poems of love denied are some of the most extraordinary documents of American passion. Though she sustained her cryptic privacies, it’s surprising how raw the emotions remain. In her refusal of recollection and tranquility, the poems resist consolation—their furies lie just beneath the surface, sometimes not even that deep. In this she was a modern poet, not just avant la lettre, but avant la naissance. She died, as did Whitman, as a new generation was born. Her surface meters perhaps made it difficult to recognize that she was a poet out of her time. The occasional corruptions of meter and rhyme therefore seem, whether a mild sloppiness of craft or the extremity of calculation, the sign of naked pain breaking through. Sonya in Uncle Vanya says about love, “Uncertainty is better. At least with uncertainty there is hope.” “After great pain” occurs when there’s no longer any hope.
ROBERT FROST, “STOPPING BY WOODS ON A SNOWY EVENING”
I fear I am not a poet, or but a very incomprehensible one.
—Robert Frost to Susan Hayes Ward, 1896
STOPPING BY WOODS ON A SNOWY EVENING
Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.
My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.
He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound’s the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.
The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.159
For a long while, Robert Frost was a failure with a vague longing for poetry. At eighteen, after one semester at Dartmouth College, he’d left out of boredom. Five years later he lasted three semesters at Harvard before abandoning college for good. Frost’s wife was then heavily pregnant with their second child, and the scapegrace began to complain of mysterious pains and chills. Thinking that the young man suffered from nervous illness or tuberculosis, the family doctor told him to work outdoors. As a boy in San Francisco, Frost had raised chickens, so he decided to become a poultryman.160
Though squeamish about the art of butchering, Frost soon owned a large flock of Wyandottes at a house and barn rented in Methuen, thirty miles north of Boston. In 1900, a year along, his three-year-old boy had died of cholera, his own health was still precarious, and the landlady couldn’t wait to bid good riddance to the poet and his white fowl. His grandfather, William Prescott Frost, bought him a farm some fifteen miles farther north in Derry, New Hampshire, though the old man held back the title deed and, apparently without asking, arranged for his ne’er-do-well grandson to board a hired man—Frost’s good friend from high school, Carl Burell.161 Leather cutter, harvester, hotel handyman, assistant to a mill gatekeeper: as a young man Frost had been no stranger to hard work.162 After Dartmouth, he’d drifted from job to job, teaching at first, then becoming a guardian for his future wife’s older sisters (he tried to induce an abortion when the eldest, unhappily married, showed up pregnant). He had briefly managed a hack Shakespearean actor, and before returning to teaching spent months replacing arc-lamp filaments at a woolen mill.163 That his grandfather was so indulgent is remarkable. Frost nonetheless was offended by the arrangement. He also apparently never paid the Methuen landlady for several months of rent.164
The Magoon Place, as the Derry farm was called, offered pastures, an apple orchard, a grove of hardwoods, and a hayfield. The bay window of the clapboard farmhouse overlooked the Londonderry Turnpike; the three bedrooms upstairs proved suitable for the Frost family and the hired man, as well as Burell’s aged grandfather. A west-running brook ran through the thirty acres, and to the south a stone wall kept the Magoon apple trees from the neighbor’s pines. Thickets of berries lay by the barn, with a few pear, peach, and quince trees elsewhere.165
Frost’s grandfather died the following summer, in July 1901, bequeathing the dumbstruck poet, who thought the man despised him, the farm rent-free for ten years, after which he would be handed the deed. The legacy came with a $500 annuity, increasing after a decade to $800. Grandfather had torn up grandson’s promissory notes, of which there were more than a few. (Old Mr. Frost was an antique progressive who washed the dishes, cooked, and cleaned with his wife, an early suffragette.) The poet, who received far more than his sister, managed to resent what his grandfather left to charity.166
Frost was no farmer. Burell and his grandfather did most of the farm work, while their boss kept the chickens. The two boarders made the farm efficient and for their industry were repaid with Frost’s petty bickering. By the spring of 1902, Burell’s grandfather was dead and Burell was gone. It’s no wonder the farm started to decline—Frost didn’t even know the proper way to milk a cow. By his own admission, he rose late, milked at noon and midnight, and preferred writing to biblical day-labor. His neglect meant there was little outside income.167
The would-be poet had usually spent his annuity long before the check arrived. In debt throughout the town, he made matters worse by buying a high-strung dapple-gray mare named Eunice, then in 1905 a red sleigh and a dashing sulky. For four years after Burell’s departure, Frost straggled along, helped each summer by the annual check, which aroused some jealousy among his impoverished neighbors.168 Life on the Derry farm might have made a screwball comedy in the thirties (a local theater advertised “moving pictures” as early as 1908),169 but they were very dark years for Frost. No longer young, he was writing poems and getting nowhere.
Toward the end of a lecture at Bowdoin in 1947, a student from the University of Maine asked Frost to name his favorite poem. The poet, then in his seventies, declined rather brusquely. Afterward he called the young man to the podium:
“I’d have to say ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’ is that poem. Do you recall in the lecture I pointed out the importance of the line ‘The darkest evening of the year’? … Well—the darkest evening of the year is on December twenty-second—which is the shortest day of the year—just before Christmas.”170
The student, N. Arthur Bleau, wrote down his recollections three decades later, so their accuracy can’t wholly be trusted. He paraphrased the rest of Frost’s answer:
It was a bleak time both weatherwise and financially.… It wasn’t going to be a very good Christmas unless he did something. So—he hitched up the wagon filled with produce from the farm and started the long trek into town.
When he finally arrived, there was no market for his goods.… He finally accepted the fact that there would be no sale. There would be no exchange for him to get a few simple presents for his children’s Christmas.
As he headed home, evening descended. It had started to snow, and his heart grew heavier with each step of the horse in the gradually increasing accumulation. He had dropped the reins and given the horse its head. It knew the way. The horse was going more slowly as they approached home. It was sensing his despair. There is an unspoken communication between a man and his horse, you know.
Around the next bend in the road, near the woods, they would come into view of the house. He knew the family was anxiously awaiting him. How could he face them? What could he possibly say or do to spare them the disappointment he felt?
They entered the sweep of the bend. The horse slowed down and then stopped. It knew what he had to do. He had to cry, and he did. I recall the very words he spoke. “I just sat there and bawled like a baby”—until there were no more tears.
The horse shook its harness. The bells jingled. They sounded cheerier. He was ready to face his family.… Not a word was spoken, but the horse knew he was ready and resumed the journey homeward.171
However approximate Bleau’s memory, Frost’s daughter Lesley confirmed that her father had told her the same story “so closely, word for word.”172 The poet’s tale is not particularly revealing, because the elements not in the poem—the failed journey to market, the unbought presents, the horse’s decision to halt (which would change the implication of the title), the tears—are not necessary. Rather, they provide to the tone and tenor of criticism Frost’s shrewdness in knowing what to leave out.
WHOSE WOODS
Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.
“Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” begins so casually, it hardly seems to begin at all. The opening inversion delays our perception of the line’s intent, while recording the reflections of the traveler who has brought his chilly journey to a stop. The line is the very imitation of musing—the tacit question must have been asked before the poem had begun. The present tense is not the first act of artifice.
The title is “Stopping by,” not “Stopping in,” because the traveler sits on a road with a lake on the other side. He’s not in the woods; he’s outside looking in. “Stopping by” of course means to pay a visit, but implicit in stopping by is that eventually you must go. You say hello, bring a gift, offer condolences, return the hammer. You stay the period dictated by local etiquette, then make your excuses and push off. Frost has managed the brief incident as if stopping by were the neighborly thing to do. In a sense, it is. The traveler is paying his respects.
Few poems in English literature begin with “whose,” perhaps none before the seventh song in Astrophil and Stella:
Whose senses in so evil consort, their stepdame Nature lays,
That ravishing delight in them most sweet tunes do not raise.173
Later examples occur in Herrick, Burns, and Hardy; but the gambit is rare—perhaps unduly so, as it’s a strategic way to begin in medias res, by an act of possession or inquiry. The poem opens with Frost’s traveler mildly dismayed—he has asked himself a question he cannot answer with confidence. Something caused him to halt the slow journey home. Knowing Frost’s account at Bowdoin, the reader must proceed divided. What does the poem say for itself, and how does the tale alter or adjust what the poem reveals?
The overwhelming despair Frost later remembered is absent, at least from the opening—and the tone is not the least despondent. The traveler stops, it seems, only to puzzle over the property map; but the following lines make clear he may have deeper motive. Why does he wonder about the owner? Because he doesn’t want to be observed. (That’s one of many hints his state of mind is not plainly disclosed.) “I think I know”—it’s almost dark or dark already, the man knows the place roughly, may have heard who owns woods thereabouts but cannot be sure. His house is in the village though—so the traveler need not worry about him. Introducing a species of doubt so early creates a tremor of unknowing through the whole. The traveler’s uncertainties are never resolved—and he may be mistaken.
The cleanest reading of “Stopping by Woods” is lighthearted and whimsical. The seven sentences fairly gallop along in tetrameter—the poem has to be read slowly to prevent it from bouncing. The jaunty meter (tetrameter so regular always cozies up to doggerel) and homely diction (only one word beyond two syllables, the lead plumb of “promises”) welcome the puckish sensibility rejected at the end with little more than a shrug—if you choose to read the end that way. Why would a man worry about being seen on an empty road at dusk, unless he had stolen the horse? Why would he worry, unless stopping to watch the woods was a most uncountry-like thing to do—impractical, lazy, pointless? Such unease would cut deeper if the traveler already had a reputation for not being a local, not one of them, not a true Yankee.
At winter solstice, the sun sets in Derry at roughly a quarter past four p.m., so it would be pitch black well before five. “Evening” reaches from the first shadows of night to blind dark—winter light doesn’t linger. As it’s snowing, when dusk fades no stars would be visible and probably no moon. In such conditions, no one fifty yards distant could identify traveler or horse. The longer you ponder the lines, the more they seem pitched against the sober-mindedness of the Yankee farmers who took such a dim view of Frost’s farming. (The stereotypical Yankee was flint-hearted and penny-pinching—businessman first, businessman second.) Traces of Frost’s bemusement at his neighbors linger in “Mending Wall,” “The Code,” “Snow,” and other poems. Even the practical horse can’t see the point. The man who doesn’t want to be observed doesn’t want to be observed observing, because the snow-dusted woods are beautiful—or, in the word that fired the Romantics, sublime.
Watching was a rejection of everything Frost had come to dislike about mill towns and hardscrabble farms. For all the homely wisdom embedded in the poems, he was a man who by then loathed hard labor and avoided it, while sniping at those with a Calvinist faith in honest work. The pastoral is more appealing if you don’t have to slave dawn to dusk.
The opening byplay about the owner briefly distracts the reader from any suggestion that the traveler has stopped merely to watch falling snow and filling woods. (You might have thought he was going to praise the owner’s taste—or his good fortune.) The syntactic inversion also rescues the metronomic tetrameter from sounding like an advertising jingle: the poem might have begun, “I think I know whose woods these are. / I’ve watched them from my touring car.” (A man drove a Pierce-Arrow through Derry in December 1906.)174 Such lines would rush helter-skelter toward meaning, comically betraying the intent. Instead, the opening gradually reveals the thoughts whose development drags through the stanza.
Frost was canny to raise the question of ownership, the old quarrel concealed at the center of the poem. Who owns the woods? From the days of Jamestown and Plymouth (or, further back, the lost colony at Roanoke), the untamed forest, home to the Indian often a mortal enemy, had been cut down for timber or cleared for farms. In the country from which early settlers came, Sherwood Forest and the Forest of Arden were mythic antecedents—how strange it must have been for such pilgrims to disembark in a land of trees unending. The forest was that darkness all colonists fear, the darkness that had to be destroyed to establish civilization in the New World. What Auden wrote of the sea applies equally to the forest: it is “that state of barbaric vagueness and disorder out of which civilisation has emerged and into which, unless saved by the effort of gods and men, it is always liable to relapse.”175
Woods usually have a collar of settlement around them, while forests remain deep enough, broad enough, to conceal a hidden realm. Often just remnant forest, woods preserve a scrap of wildness within civilized bounds. No man without good reason bothered to fence his woods—that wasn’t the purpose of fences. It would have been unneighborly. In what is perhaps the first draft of the poem, Frost wrote, “Between a forest and a lake.”176 He had to struggle toward the difference.
Early settlers of New England had little idea that the glacial soil was poor and thin, especially in upland farms. Even farms with better soil were often too stony. Almost all the old growth in New Hampshire had been chopped down for farms before 1800—not many generations later, land laboriously cleared of boulders, which became the boundary walls sometimes called stone fences, was abandoned when the ground played out.177
Worse, not long after the Civil War, growing grain for flour proved no longer economical in the East—the railroads could deliver it more cheaply from the Midwest. Farms failed by the hundreds; trees sprang up again in deserted fields. Wheat prices in the 1890s had fallen to as little as a quarter of what they’d been after the war, and during the first decade of the new century they were not much higher. (In constant dollars, bushels brought only slightly more than 40 percent of their price three decades before.) Even at the pre–World War I peak, in 1910, the cost of a bushel was a little over 80 percent of what it had been in 1866.178 By 1900, only one man of fourteen in Derry was a farmer full-time, most working for other farmers.179 In much of New England, the new woods were crisscrossed by the stone walls of derelict farmsteads. There were long discussions of the consequences.
Vermont, 1871: “Here are huge stone walls inclosing nearly all the fields, standing now after their weight has pressed the earth for more than half a century, as high as a man’s shoulders. And like heavy old fences [they] enclose the old roads that wind up the hill—old roads never to be traveled more.”
Maine, 1891: “Very many of the abandoned farms are well fenced with good stone walls, while many of them have nice stone walls dividing fields, where trees are thickly growing.”
New England, 1901: “Where once were ‘mowings’ and ‘plowings’ are now wild and free stretches of woodland. Dilapidated stone walls ramble through the woods and are heaved by the roots of great trees. Here and there is the ruin of a foundation, with trees growing inside and the tiger lilies still persisting at the border.… Roads that once were clean from wall to wall are now narrowed to mere wagon trails.”180
In “The Generations of Men,” Frost mentions a “rock-strewn town where farming had fallen off, / And sprout-lands flourish where the ax has gone.” Echoes of this abandonment can be heard in “The Wood-Pile” and “Directive” (“There is a house that is no more a house / Upon a farm that is no more a farm”—with later mention of “forty cellar holes”).181 “Stopping by Woods” could be considered a side effect of the skirmishes between large landholders and impoverished labor. The man who could let his woods lie idle was a convenient target for the quiet fury, or exhausted resignation, that lay beneath the surface of small American towns.
In an 1873 survey of New Hampshire town selectmen, those in Londonderry, just west of Derry, responded, “There are very few if any farmers who are making money.… There are men who style themselves farmers, but who have made their money by some kind of business or speculation such as lumbering, and return to the old homestead to spend their days and live by farming, but in reality live upon their income.”182 The young found their jobs in Derry’s shoe factories.
The owner of the woods, however, is a blank. He could be rich enough not to live on his land, or just a man who had moved to the village for work. (He has a house there, so he isn’t merely boarding.) Were these maple woods, they might have been used once a year when the sap was running, otherwise appearing neglected.183 The owner may have moved because he was elderly, or because he possessed far more than he had use for, or because he needed a woodlot. Perhaps he just enjoyed owning a stretch of trees. We cannot say he was wealthy enough not to use them, like a great patron who scarcely glances at the art he’s purchased—a Hearst, say, or Browning’s duke in “My Last Duchess.” Though he lives in the village, the owner cannot represent a simple opposition between capital and poverty, philistine and philosopher.
Frost grew up during a series of economic catastrophes that stretched from the Panic of 1873, the year before he was born, through the Panics of 1893 and 1896, two decades sometimes called the Long Depression. Sharp falls in business and trade were more devastating than any the country had experienced, even worse than during the Great Depression to come. The standard of living declined by more than half between 1865 and 1898 and was not much better by 1905.184 During such deflation, farmers did poorly, paid on the barrelhead only what little their crops were worth, while laborers—those still in work, whose wages stayed fairly steady—benefited from the drop in prices. Despite his annuity, Frost was barely scraping up a living. Had he gone to the local grocers to sell eggs or apples, the worse for him.
The traveler reins in his horse. We can read the woods then as no longer the absentee owner’s, but briefly the traveler’s own. He takes the woods at their honest value. Were Frost writing of himself, the lines open to a psychological turn where the woods stand for an abandon he must control if not suppress. The poem would then read more fiercely as an act of imaginative trespass and reparation. Could Frost have felt a touch of envy when he looked at woods owned by a man who could afford to live elsewhere? Who could afford, perhaps, not to work?
The guilty violation might give a little thrill. If the traveler felt that sense of trespass, though he isn’t yet trespassing, he needn’t worry—unless the fictive Melmotte were particularly disagreeable, he’d have been unlikely to take offense. Forty years ago, it was still local custom in northern New England not to lock a house in winter, in case someone needed to come out of the cold; and any land not posted was open to hunters. Some Yankees still live that way.
MY LITTLE HORSE
My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.
He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound’s the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.
In this winter’s tale, the traveler drives home in the dark under steady snowfall. Otherwise the woods would not fill up. He’s alone except for the horse, which provides comic relief. The harness makes clear the man is riding in something—buggy, sleigh, sulky, wagon, all of which Frost owned. Downy flakes fall gently. It’s not a blizzard—only someone addicted to irony would describe a blizzard as a snowy evening. It’s nothing like the weather in “Snow.”
A New England road quickly becomes impassable in the snow, even a mild wind causing drifts. If a storm were threatening, the wagon would have been the best choice for the task the poet recalled at Bowdoin. Unlike the other vehicles, it had room for a load of eggs and other produce. When Frost wrote “horses” in the first draft, he was certainly thinking of a wagon, with a dash lamp and perhaps side lamps to light the way. He wouldn’t want to wander off the road in the dark. (The wagon could have been drawn by one horse, like buggy, sleigh, or sulky.)
We’re not required, however, to draw Frost’s life into the poem. Indeed, if we untether ourselves from his recollection, the drama of the scene becomes more interesting. Had the traveler halted on a snowy road in buggy or sulky, he might never have reached home. Stopping to watch the woods fill up does not imply the ground was bare, making the sleigh impossible, though empty woods thickening with snow would be dramatic.
The traveler is simply going somewhere, and he stops. For all the poem cares, he could be traveling away as easily as traveling home. It’s difficult to talk of the relation between life and art in Frost, because the life was entirely in service to the art, as it was in confessional poets like Lowell and Plath. (Nothing they confess, however, should be taken on trust.) Frost often ignores the binding constraints of his life—the harness, if you will—when he turns to poetry. The scene in a poet’s mind, it must also be remembered, may be very different from the scene in the reader’s.
The weather would have been below freezing. Downy flakes are the familiar flat, usually hexagonal snow crystals, forming between 32° and 25° or between 14° and −8° Fahrenheit.185 (Snow between those ranges is shaped like small needles or prisms.) In such temperatures, a man might freeze to death, an exhausted traveler even more likely to succumb.
Return to the interior of Frost’s tale: the poet owned a democrat wagon, a light flatbed farm wagon (in “Blueberries” he mentions a “democrat-load / Of all the young chattering Lorens alive”).186 The horse seems endowed with good sense—a go-ahead sort, without the dreaminess, the romantic wistfulness, of the traveler, without the sense of failure or deprivation. Many of Frost’s characters resemble Frost, or what he imagined himself to be. During the years at Derry, he aged through his mid-twenties long into his thirties, no closer to his design of becoming a poet, burdened by family, mourning the death of his boy.187 The man who wrote “Home Burial” probably lived those scenes. The world at times tumbles in on such a man.
The traveler doesn’t halt in the woods, but beside them. Readers often forget, because of the title, that the road passes between woods and an ice-bound lake—the traveler is caught between two potential deaths. The woods and lake lie in the empty quarter between small towns, small-minded societies claustrophobic with the cares and woes of American character. (Babbitt was published in 1922, the year Frost wrote the poem.) In northern New England, that distance may stretch ten miles or more, a long way to travel even if you pass the occasional farm. It’s hard to convey the desolation of those spaces, the sense of absolute isolation of such woods—and such farms. Full of old quarrels with myth and death, such vacant expanses are the glass plate on which to expose dark tales of the id.
An icy lake would have required days of temperatures below freezing. Wind off the lake, even easy wind, would have made the night still colder, in what now is called wind chill. The sound suggests a wind stronger than the traveler admits—he may be softening the bitterness of the weather. Or, to press the reading a little far, he only half hears the wind because he’s mesmerized by the loveliness. Though the snow-covered lake might have been just as lethal as the woods, the traveler doesn’t seem drawn there. Perhaps since the famous scene in The Prelude no lake has offered much by way of revelation.188
Sometime in these years, Frost wrote “Despair,” a poem about suicide by drowning. He chose never to publish it. The speaker compares himself to a dead diver in lake or pond (“He drank the water, saying, ‘Oh let me go— / God let me go’ ”), but at the end the speaker also seems to drown. The sonnet ends hauntingly, “I tore the muscles from my limbs and choked. / My sudden struggle may have dragged down some / White lily from the air—and now the fishes come.” Lawrance Thompson, in his biography of Frost, used the poet’s handwriting to date the sole copy to 1906.189
Such a poem didn’t fit with the poet Frost became, but it seems to derive from that same bleak period. Thompson notes that “each time [Frost] drove from his farm with his old horse and wagon along the back-country road to Derry Depot for provisions, he passed an isolated pond deep enough for drowning.” The poet told Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant that he and his family “sometimes took drives on forgotten Derry roads that had forgotten farms.” There was one “with a black ‘tarn’ beside it (for convenient suicide) and what a pang it cost the poet not to have chosen it!”190 Probably he was joking.
“The darkest evening,” Frost said, was the winter solstice. A similar phrase had been used half a century before by Alexander Smith, a poet once as beloved as Frost. In 1920, a contributor to the Atlantic mentioned Dreamthorp and North of Boston among books suitable for kitchen reading—“utterly sincere,—simple and candid,—caring nothing at all for the shams and pretensions of life but everything for its realities.”191 Consider the opening of part 3 of Smith’s “A Boy’s Poem”:
A dark hour came, and left us desolate:
Then, as a beggar thrust by menial hands
From comfortable doors, doth wrap his rags
Around him, ere he face the whistling wind
And flying showers that travel through the night,
We gathered what we had; and she and I
Went forth together to the cruel world.
O we were bare and naked as the trees
That stand up silent in the freezing air,
With black boughs motionless against the sky,
While midnight holds her lonely starry sway.192
The setting is probably Glasgow; but note the “dark hour,” the “whistling wind,” the cold, the hard travel, then the simile “bare and naked as the trees / That stand up silent in the freezing air,” the motionless branches, midnight. In European folklore, the woods were often a place of danger or refuge.193 Some two dozen lines later, the speaker recollects his birth:
Red Autumn died unseen along the waste,
The soundless snow came down in thickening flakes,
And Poverty, who sat beside our hearth,
Blew out the feeble fire, and all was dark.
It was the closing evening of the year,
The night that I was born.194
The closing evening of the year. Though the scene in “Stopping by Woods” is different, the trappings and themes are eerily similar, especially if Frost had never read Alexander Smith. There were poems by Smith, though not this poem, in Frost’s well-thumbed copies of The Oxford Book of English Verse (1900) and The Oxford Book of Victorian Verse (1912).195
It’s curious that two stanzas in “Stopping by Woods” are given, more or less, to the horse—this clever displacement concentrates on the trivial while the poem ignores what lies beneath. If his thoughts were dark, a man might think the horse had sensed his despair; but even were that merely projection he would feel no less devastated. There’s a similarly willful horse in “A Hundred Collars,” where a college professor, having missed his train, must share a room in a small-town hotel. The man already in the room is a subscription agent for the Bow Weekly News. The professor is right to be wary—such agents were often suspected of jiggery-pokery. (Frost had sold magazine subscriptions as a boy.)196 The paper was apparently fictitious; but the annual subscription cost the same dollar charged by the Derry News, the village weekly.197 The agent is an easy-going sort:
I take the reins
Only when someone’s coming, and the mare
Stops when she likes: I tell her when to go.
I’ve spoiled Jemima in more ways than one.
She’s got so she turns in at every house
As if she has some sort of curvature,
No matter if I have no errand there.198
“The mare / Stops when she likes.” The horse in “Stopping by Woods” tells the owner when to go. They’re both in charge.
Frost had no illusions about horses—he says the horse “must” think the stop queer, which is some way short of saying that the beast does, or could. It seems at first yet more projection. Horses are so easily trained, however, compared to undomesticated equids like zebras, that disrupting their routines makes them uneasy. In the following stanza, the traveler interprets the shake of harness bells as impatience, not a stray shiver. Horses adapt to cold, growing a longer coat when the days begin to shorten. Though the solstice comes fairly early in a New England winter, the horse should have had its full coat.199 Besides, the horse doesn’t share the man’s fears—if they are fears—or his hypnotic fixation. The horse, which no doubt just wants to get home to his stall and his feed, is the animating devil that draws the traveler back to his conscience. That the traveler is saved more or less by accident, whether by shiver or shake, may be part of the dry comedy.
The harness bells deserve a moment. There’s no evidence of a New Hampshire law requiring the driver of a sleigh to fit his horse with bells, though such laws had been enacted in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Massachusetts. A reference in an 1833 Nashua newspaper is probably to a local ordinance.200 Sleighs, because almost silent, could be dangerous to pedestrians—a creaking wagon would hardly have needed bells, and the only examples I’ve found of wagon horses decked out so come from Europe. Unless Frost were the only man in New Hampshire to put bells on a wagon horse, the bells reveal a crucial fracture between the poem and the tale. Though Frost says “harness bells,” the term was often used for “sleigh bells.” “Harness bells” fits the meter. Perhaps Frost in his draft changed back to a single horse because the sleigh was more appealing. That he never specifies wagon or sleigh is an ambiguity the reader must bear.
Why would the horse think it queer? Because it must be used to stopping at farmhouses. This halt beside the woods on a freezing night is out of character for the traveler. Whatever caused him to draw back the reins must have been an impulse perhaps never succumbed to before. The traveler’s explanation touches on the whimsy that would make light reading of the poem—the horse represents, as a farcical touch, the social world that judges dreamers and romantics, or perhaps protects them from themselves. Still, a traveler so affected by the sight of woods under snow, so susceptible to the message nature might write, would not be immune to reading irritation—or warning, or criticism—in a shiver.
As a young poet, Frost once admitted he had a sweet tooth for the “traditional cliches”; but his lazy phrasing may sometimes deceive a modern ear.201 Frost never tried too hard to give the language tension—his interest was always deeper, in the torsions of meditation or the conflict between people. “Easy wind” might seem difficult to salvage; but the range of “easy” has encompassed, as the OED reminds us, “freedom from pain or constraint,” “comfortable, luxurious, quiet,” “free from mental anxiety, care, or apprehension,” “indolent,” and, when used of motion, “not hurried, gentle.” (Dickinson had “easy Sweeps of Sky.”)202 The very peacefulness of the scene conceals the threat—and freedom from pain is precisely its fatal allure. An easy road could be traveled without hindrance. An easy burden was no burden—and burdens are the underlying theme. (In Frost’s tale, produce unsold, presents unbought.) In the more ominous reading of the poem, ease is what the traveler cannot feel—and ease at this period offers the sharpest and unhappiest contrast to what Frost knew.
“Downy flake” seems trite now, but in Frost’s day the reader would have heard more acutely the old meaning—soft as goose or duck down. Chaucer spoke of the down of doves, and there were down beds as far back as the fourteenth century (Robert Greene, before 1592: “Mars lies slumbering on his downy bed,” OED). Feather pillows were a luxury when many farm pillows were filled with corn husks or hay (Spanish moss was a little fancier). The link here is to the desire to sleep, always a hazard to a traveler stranded in the cold. Still, “downy flake” was not a new phrase—it had been used by Cowper and Thomas Moore, as well as in an early eighteenth-century translation of Oppian (“While downy Flakes lie scattered on the Ground”).203 Frost raised chickens. Only a couple of months after he moved to Derry, an ad appeared in the Derry News:204
Breeding Cockerels
WHITE WYANDOTTES
I have for sale a number of thorough-
bred Cockerels from a strain of first class
layers at $1.00 apiece.
R. L. FROST, Magoon Place,
Or Lock Box, 140, West Derry.
A man who had plucked a few would know, not just that drifting snow is soft as feathers, but that the air filled with flakes looks like an explosion in a hen house.
“The woods are lovely” also doesn’t take the language very far from the surface. The adjective seems more English than American, but Frost had spent two and a half years in England between 1912 and 1915. The phrase can be found, among other places, in The Journal of Horticulture (1880) and in a poem of 1827 from the New-York Mirror, and Ladies’ Literary Gazette (“The woods are lovely in their gorgeous train”). Southey in Madoc (1805)—“Thy summer woods / Are lovely”—comes near.205
Of course the adjective was broadcast—in Rokeby (1813), Walter Scott has, not just “lovely woods,” but a lovely heir, vale, glade, road, maid, land, sight, as well as a “lovely child, a lovelier wife.”206 Most early meanings of the word have died out (loving, amorous, friendly, lovable); but this vague synonym for “attractive,” first for people, then for things, remains. (“Attractive” has itself almost lost touch with its origins, as have “rapture” and “charm,” “captivate” and “enchant.”) Other phrases in the poem, like “dark and deep,” are found more often than one might imagine (“The rising world of waters dark and deep,” Paradise Lost)207—as are “I think I know,” “must think it queer,” “there is some mistake,” “miles to go,” “before I sleep.” Frost constructed something memorable from phrases anyone might have picked up by the way. “Stopping by woods,” however, and “promises to keep” (in the sense of having them) are rare or nonexistent before the poem was published.
THE WOODS ARE LOVELY
The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
The lighter reading comes easily enough. However alluring the woods, their darkness and depth can’t safely be explored on such a night. (Their mystery inhabits an enchantment.) The traveler’s duties beckon, so with a shake, or a shiver, and a recollection of how far he has to travel, he rides away. The power of the poem lies in how deviously, how hauntingly, a darker reading lurks beneath the lighter one. Only gradually does something lethal seem concealed within the shadowy woods.
It’s not impossible that the poem was meant to be somewhat droll, that “the woods are lovely, dark and deep” is no more than aesthetic appreciation. The description, coming where the traveler is almost obliged to offer an explanation for tarrying, must be followed by qualification or rejection, if he’s not to stay. The traveler doesn’t consider the description for long before being roused to himself—his promises cancel out those bewitching trees almost immediately. Frost’s later tale was a recognition of all those things he found troubling to admit. Traveling slowly in such temperatures can be risky. The drowsy numbness should remind us of Keats.
The woods represented everything wrong with disorderly nature, a patch of wildness within civilized bounds. Was Eden garden or forest? “Paradise” came from the Persian word for walled garden, and “Eden” probably from an Aramaic word meaning “fruitful”; but artists have at times—Cranach the Elder in The Garden of Eden, Brueghel and Rubens in The Garden of Eden with the Fall of Man—interpreted it as a jungle of wild animals that would have gratified both Rousseau the painter and Rousseau the philosopher. From Creation to Expulsion lasts but a few score verses.
James Fenimore Cooper and Henry David Thoreau might be called the tutelary spirits of the American hinterland. The American sublime depended on American landscape; and by the later nineteenth century that came to mean, through painters like Thomas Moran, Albert Bierstadt, and Thomas Hill, the untrammeled spaces of the American West. The exotic realms of these artists who began in or near the Hudson River School originally lay in the forests of New York and New Hampshire. The founder of that school, Thomas Cole, made his own version of the Garden of Eden look like the Hudson Valley or the Catskills, with palms added and what might be the Matterhorn.208
In readings both light and dark, the woods become seductive—dark beauty cuts both ways, toward fulfillment or destruction. Even if the speaker pulls away at the end of the poem, that doesn’t mean the enticement is lessened or won’t call again, some dark night on the road. To be powerful, the lines must leave the polarities unresolved. Perhaps they’re not truly opposed—for the traveler, peril is submerged in a terrible beauty.
Are the woods “lovely, dark and deep,” as Frost’s original punctuation had it? Or are they “lovely, dark, and deep,” as his posthumous editor, Edward Connery Lathem, revised the line in The Poetry of Robert Frost (1969), long the standard edition?209 (Lathem’s frequent alteration of Frost’s punctuation has been much deplored.) Frost’s absent comma left loveliness defined as “dark and deep,” while the editor’s revision gave the three qualities equal weight. Perhaps the poet was insensitive to the difference or entertained by the ambiguity, but his choice must have been deliberate. Frost knew very well how to use the Oxford comma (“measured against maple, birch, and oak,” “I’d summon grouse, rabbit, and deer”).210 Despite the encroaching dark, the traveler can see something under the cloud cover—snowfall and ground snow scatter light effectively, making the evening lighter. He cannot see far into the dark woods, but he knows or senses that they’re deep.
The scrupulous Library of America edition of Frost’s poems (1995) removed Lathem’s comma after “dark.” It failed to restore the period after “deep,” however, which ended the line in all early printings. The period was present through the first printing of Collected Poems of Robert Frost (New York: Henry Holt, 1939); but the piece of type became worn, as is evident in the printing of September 1941. By the printing of July 1945, the type had eroded so badly the period had vanished, except for a faint smudge. Complete Poems of Robert Frost (New York: Henry Holt, 1949) was apparently set from one of the later printings of Collected Poems (1939), with the period missing. Frost didn’t notice when he corrected the proofs, but someone else afterward inserted a comma.211
The period stops the cold contemplation cold, as if the traveler had to think hard at that moment, as if the only right choice were to stay and walk into the woods. The “But” that follows then comes with a tortured heave. The comma makes the shift from contemplation to resolution entirely too easy. The case for the period—critically, not forensically—would be that the tetrameter runs along so fluently Frost realized it had to be brought up short at this moment of decision. The traveler has halted, been woken to himself by the horse’s bells, and taken a last long look at the woods. Then, after the pause the period demands, he gives himself excuse to move on.
The poem first appeared in the New Republic of March 7, 1923 (reprinted the following month in the British magazine Chapbook).212 The version was slightly revised for his book New Hampshire later that year, where Frost changed “The little horse” of the draft to “My little horse,” which established a stronger bond between man and beast. Responsibility is the shadow of possession—the traveler might have been more likely to heed the animal’s warning. Curiously, the thirteenth line in the New Republic read, as it did in the draft, “The woods are lovely dark and deep,” with no internal punctuation at all.213
Is the traveler thinking of suicide? It’s possible that from the start he saw not just allure, or the emptiness of terror, but escape. The woods are beckoning—enchanting, perhaps—yet nothing before that crucial “but” implies that the traveler can’t look, appreciate, and quietly depart. That he has halted long enough for the horse to shake suggests he has lingered. Does beauty always wear a shroud? It was with their beguiling song that the Sirens lured sailors to destruction—and there’s a mini-Odyssey in this journey from nowhere, from a past not recounted to a home at increasing distance. Indeed, if we take this traveler’s tale as the epic writ small, the attraction of the woods makes sense—beauty can be as fatal as other poisons. Odysseus was waylaid by beauty, indeed, overcome by just a song. Whether the Sirens sang in Greek or just warbled indecently remains unknown.
A man who thinks about walking into the freezing woods could as easily walk onto the lake, if the ice were thin. Recall the miller’s wife in Edwin Arlington Robinson’s “The Mill,” who after her husband’s suicide walks to the millpond:
Black water, smooth above the weir
Like starry velvet in the night,
Though ruffled once, would soon appear
The same as ever to the sight.214
That was one method of a quiet country death.
A number of critics have proposed that the dark woods and frozen lake place the traveler between Dante’s selva oscura and the lake of Cocytus—that would leave the man at both ends of Hell. It’s an ingenious reading (Hell with no Virgil except the horse), but like many such readings perhaps overingenious. Still, on this night the traveler has the chance to begin his own Commedia, his own journey through Hell; and he doesn’t take it. Perhaps he’s already aware of the icy lake of traitors at his back.
The traveler’s longing to enter the woods, if we choose to read the poem so, is very different from a desire to walk out onto the unknown blankness of the lake. Unless the lake were pocket-sized, it might look, covered in snow, with snow falling, like the endlessness of the Arctic. The woods are inviting because they seem a kind of home, a refuge where a man can hide from responsibility—that’s what makes them hazardous. At least since the days of Robin Hood, if not the Christian hermits, men have headed to the woods to escape the burdens or iniquities of the world. Loners, criminals, the monster of Frankenstein—all found a place where they could isolate themselves without choosing to die. Thoreau wrote in Walden of the virtues of being lost in the woods:
Often in a snow storm, even by day, one will come out upon a well-known road and yet find it impossible to tell which way leads to the village. Though he knows that he has travelled it a thousand times, he cannot recognize a feature in it, but it is as strange to him as if it were a road in Siberia.… Not till we are completely lost, or turned round, … do we appreciate the vastness and strangeness of Nature.
Thoreau saw self-knowledge there—“Not till we have lost the world,” he wrote, “do we begin to find ourselves.”215
The trees may offer knowledge to some, solace to others; but on a snowy night, the temperature below freezing, they contain nothing for a man without shelter or fire—nothing but extinction. The traveler must know this, but no doubt the certainty of death and the loveliness of the woods are part of the attraction. The power of that desire is made clearer by how near he might have come to staying. What if the horse hadn’t jingled its bells?
The feelings in “Stopping by Woods” were not so rare in Frost. The mise en scène closely resembles “Into My Own,” the opening poem of A Boy’s Will (1913), the poet’s first book, published not long after he had taken his family to England in 1912.
One of my wishes is that those dark trees,
So old and firm they scarcely show the breeze,
Were not, as ’twere, the merest mask of gloom,
But stretched away unto the edge of doom.
I should not be withheld but that some day
Into their vastness I should steal away,
Fearless of ever finding open land,
Or highway where the slow wheel pours the sand.
I do not see why I should e’er turn back,
Or those should not set forth upon my track
To overtake me, who should miss me here
And long to know if still I held them dear.
They would not find me changed from him they knew—
Only more sure of all I thought was true.216
The wish to disappear into those dark trees (old, so perhaps remains of ancient forest), the woods both dark and deep (where one might never find farmed land or highway again), perhaps the slightly arrogant touch of the ending—these are announcements of a disposition.
“Stopping by Woods” is darker. Frost touches there on the American dread, so common in northern and western states, of freezing to death. It was a genuine fear, since in a blizzard (the word that shortly before the Civil War came to mean a severe snowstorm) a traveler could easily lose his way. The poem might seem too complicated in its slants and affirmations to be read simply, but there’s something darkly tempting about those woods—and a man in the depressed mood to which Frost confessed might have seen such a death as peaceful. He was highly offended, however, when John Ciardi, in a provocative 1958 article,217 argued that the traveler had a death wish: “I suppose people think I lie awake nights worrying about what people like Ciardi of the Saturday Review write and publish about me …,” the poet grumbled. “He makes my ‘Stopping By Woods’ out a death poem.… It’s hardly a death poem.” Frost continued, “No mystery about it.… These people can’t seem to get it through their heads that the obvious meaning of a poem is the right one.”218
Frost was not a man comfortable with his fears. At a lavish dinner for his eighty-fifth birthday, the critic Lionel Trilling called him a “terrifying poet.”219 The poet seemed disconcerted by the remark. He usually rejected the bleaker reading of his lines, but with “Stopping by Woods” he had already admitted his utter despair to his daughter, as well as to the young man at Bowdoin. The poem revealed, or at least permitted, a reading too close to the truth—it’s hard to imagine Frost plucking the story from thin air, just for the sake of sympathy.
What exactly were those promises? If we keep to the narrow track of Frost’s tale, duties to family, obligations explicit in marriage (ceremonial vows having legal consequence), and those stray professions and trivial promises to wife and children that are burdens only when a man cannot fulfill them. Frost resisted the pure autobiographical, so the unnamed traveler might have made promises to God, state, man, woman, employer, stranger. We should not forget his implicit promise to the horse, which if abandoned might freeze to death. The poem opens itself to all the burdens that constitute a life: social contracts met easily or by hard graft, business matters that leave a weary trail of paper, old resolutions unkept. Frost’s poems often open out this way, whatever the autobiographical seed-corn. That’s the matter of poems when narrow experience is adjusted into art.
AND MILES TO GO
The most striking turn in the poem—what makes it memorable—is the closing repetition of “And miles to go before I sleep.” It displays, perhaps, the fatigue, the reluctance, the beaten-down condition of the traveler—he has surrendered to the demands of the world he has almost forsaken. The same exhaustion might have made him give up, had he been seduced just a little more. Something draws him back, and not something as abstract as “promises.” These must be specific promises, ones that may conflict with those he has made to himself.
The ending is even starker when we recall that what the woods have offered and the traveler has refused is sleep, the sleep of freezing to death. The snow’s comforting but lethal embrace seems gentle. Travelers who burrow deeply enough may even survive the night—there’s more than one reason to call it a “blanket” of snow. “Sleep” has a dark ambiguity here—the traveler comes close to sleeping forever in those woods. For Frost, the day would have been long, farmers on market days usually rising long before dawn. The disappointment has at last caught up with him. We might wonder, if not for the poet’s habit of rising late, why he spent so long getting to and from a village scarcely two miles away.
The lines possess a rather sprightly rhythm for a poem about suicide contemplated and rejected, but “sleep” is the word that retrospectively sends the poem toward the funereal and melancholy. The traveler wants to sleep, but he cannot sleep there. It was not by accident that the German chemist’s apprentice who first extracted an active alkaloid from the opium poppy named it morphium, after the god of sleep. We know it as morphine—to “fall into the arms of Morpheus” was the nineteenth-century euphemism for nodding off. Frost’s story at Bowdoin reveals that just such bleak thoughts lay beneath the poem—and that, even if edited out, they remained lodged there for him. If you call the underlying distemper of the poet’s tale merely recognition of a failure terrible and complete, the black longings overlie reasons the finished poem has suppressed.
Had the invitation been any stronger, the traveler might not have been able to resist the call of the snowy Sirens. (It would push things too far to say the wind was their song.) Still, it’s possible that his first hesitation was the compelling one, that these were not his woods and he had no right to enter them, not that such a worry would stop a man who really wanted to die. If he were doubtful, however, the embarrassment of his corpse being found on someone else’s land might have been enough.
What should we call the tone of the final lines? The promises form the standing debts recalled only after the horse’s reminder. At the end we have the denial of art and longing, of beauty and desire, for the burden of promises very different from the burden of promise Frost felt as a young artist. The tone could be touched with sadness (at having to abandon a beautiful place), resignation (that his liabilities to the world loom larger than his attraction to the woods), frustration or regret, irritation, anger, fatigue, self-castigation, consolation, determination, rueful acknowledgment, relief, even love. All suggest themselves, even were the lines tossed off nonchalantly. Nonchalance may be the deepest road into the self. If sleep is a metaphor for death, for the easing of great pain, the poem’s traveler is admitting that his life has some distance to run—that may be a burden as well.
Frost’s poems are often an excellent mirror of the reader’s ambivalence. The tone of the ending could be, could have been intended to be, a sort of harrumph, a Yankee’s “Well, I must be getting on. No more nonsense, now.” Perhaps the poet did not see all the possibilities, which put every reading of the poem at hazard from some silent alternative. The second time the traveler says the line, it might even have been in a different tone. In Pale Fire, Nabokov’s scholar Charles Kinbote calls “Stopping by Woods” “one of the greatest short poems in the English language.” Kinbote believes “And miles to go before I sleep” is “personal and physical” the first time, “metaphysical and universal” the second.220
FORM
In Vermont, one evening the summer of 1922 (Lawrance Thompson says July, then June), Frost worked through the night writing the title poem of New Hampshire, a poem that must have made some readers think they’d been wrong about the poet.221 This satire of manners was no doubt meant to conjure up Horace, but Horace Greeley on a bad day could have done no worse. There are poets like Auden who can write as public men, then retreat to the privacies of genius. Frost was a disaster as a public man, his jokes so leaden you wonder how he could think them funny (“Lately in converse with a New York alec / About the new school of the pseudo-phallic …”).222 The cornball sophistry of his state-of-literature poem that was also a state-of-the-nation poem might leave you sorry to be within a mile of his opinions.
Having finished the draft of this disaster at sunrise, Frost wasn’t ready to sleep. “Stopping by Woods” was written “with one stroke of the pen,” he later remarked.223 He made a similar remark about a number of poems. Frost told Thompson,
there was something more that he wanted to write. Tired as he was, he sat down, and heard the old sound of the voice speaking words clearly. Half asleep, and without any consciousness of ever having thought of the idea before, he continued to write steadily until the short poem was done.224
This slightly spooky autodictation went a little far toward the mythology of self in which Frost delighted. Perhaps he said such things just to see if someone would believe him. John Ciardi was one of many who heard a version: “Time and again I have heard him say that he just wrote it off, that it just came to him, and that he set it down as it came.”225
There’s no reason to disbelieve Frost, however, when he claimed that the poem “just came.” What may be the first draft has survived, as mentioned—but only the last three stanzas, which show many changes, some radical. It’s almost impossible for a poem to appear all at once without second thoughts. The revisions may have rushed like a millrace, may have been no more than the immediate recasting poets often do in their heads—here we simply have the record. It might have seemed to Frost that the poem was born complete, without the long wrestling and spilled ink, the third thoughts and fifth thoughts, that frequently attend a poem’s birth. Even so, except where he inserted revisions the hand shows no hesitation at all—it’s the fluent writing of a fair copy, not a draft.
The form Frost chose has been called an “interlocking Rubáiyát,” taking the Rubáiyát stanza (aaba) and using the unrhymed third line as the base rhyme for the stanza following (aaba bbcb ccdc). In 1898, Frost had written “The Rubaiyat of Carl Burell”226 (the friend later his hired man)—the poem was fashioned in limericks, but Frost almost certainly knew Edward FitzGerald’s translation of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám (1859).227 The interlocking form, however, was probably Frost’s invention.
THE DRAFT OPENING
The draft page shows how difficult simplicity can be. We don’t have a sheet with the opening stanza, so perhaps Frost spoiled a whole page on alternatives or started scribbling on a scrap now lost. (His ruled notebook paper fit three quatrains almost exactly.) First he wrote, “The steaming horses think it queer / To,” then canceled it. Having interviewed the poet in the early 1940s, John Holmes reported—in Charles W. Cooper’s Preface to Poetry (1946)—that Frost “began with what was the actual experience of stopping at night by some dark woods in winter, and the fact that there were two horses. He remembered what he saw then. ‘The steaming horses think it queer.’ ”228 Holmes had a copy of the draft before him when he questioned the poet. As Frost never owned a pair of horses, already he had edged into fiction. Bleau recalled his talking of only the single horse. The disparities in the poet’s tales offer their own commentary.
The next line appears roughly as follows:
Horse Must
Little xxxx will
The horse begins to think it queer
The poet had started again, “The horse begins to think it queer,” probably then deleting “begins to” while adding “little” and “will,” then crossing out “horse” and squeezing in a word now illegible (“xxxx” above, probably a one-syllable synonym, possibly “mare”)229—at last restoring “horse” and replacing “will” with “must.” (The handwriting seems to indicate that these last two revisions were almost simultaneous.) The line looks set, “The little horse must think it queer”; but he started the next line “We stop,” only to return to his original idea, “To stop.”
Draft of Robert Frost, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.”
Source: Courtesy of Special Collections, The Jones Library, Inc., Amherst, Mass.
Queried by Holmes, Frost replied,
I launched into the construction “My little horse must think it queer that we should stop.” I didn’t like omitting the “that” and I had no room for “should.” I had the luck to get out of it with the infinitive.230
That isn’t exactly what the draft shows (he didn’t make the change to “My” until its printing in the New Republic); but, except for altering “a forest and a lake” to “the woods and frozen lake,” the stanza was otherwise finished and almost unpunctuated, as was common in his drafts.
The third stanza begins, “He gives harness bells a shake.” Frost must have been writing so rapidly he failed to put pronoun or article before “harness bells,” making a similar error two lines later, before “sweep.” Then he changed the horse from male to female, so the draft read, “She gives her harness bells a shake.” This must have been almost immediate, probably when Frost first read the line over, because he caught the missing word and put “her,” not “his.” Had “mare” been the word scratched out above, he might have tried to sneak the idea into this line, or gone back to the opening only later to replace the unnecessary word with the earlier version, “horse.” The change to a mare might have drawn the poem closer to life, since from early 1902 to early 1906 the only horse he owned was Eunice, the small high-stepping mare, preceded by a large roan gelding named Billy and succeeded by another large roan gelding, also named Billy—or Billy-the-Second.231 The incident was most likely to have taken place in the years he owned Eunice, if it took place at all. By the time he published the poem, he had changed the horse back to a gelding (stallions being unsuitable). Later in the stanza, he replaced “falling,” the redundant adjective, with “downy.”
No one seems to have pointed out the obvious, that “Stopping by Woods” may originally have started, “The steaming horses think it queer.” So long as he had the title in mind, or one similar, the poem would have made perfect sense. The eventual opening, providing the anxiety crucial to the psychological complication and moral depth—the traveler enters as a man with guilts—could have come belatedly. (A single horse would have a more defined and intimate relation to this lone traveler.) Frost might have thought he’d finished the poem, hence, even with the hesitation and revision at the top of the page, this near-fair copy of a three-stanza version.
THE DRAFT CLOSE
There’s no way of halting Frost’s interlocking Rubáiyát without leaving a line unrhymed, except by adding a line to pick up the hanging rhyme, as Dante did at the end of his terza rima cantos. In “Stopping by Woods,” Frost might instead have rhymed this odd line on “ō,” the base rhyme in the first stanza, making a cycle of the whole, though the echo would have gone unheard. He found a third way, breaking the form by continuing the stanza rhyme through the third line, providing closure by repeating an entire line. Such a master stroke, leaving no line unrhymed, became all but a signature—it can never be borrowed without imitating Frost. Here is a transcription of the draft stanza:
The woods are lovely dark and deep
But I have promises to keep
me on. And there are miles [“. A” written over “, a”]
That bid me give the reins a shake
And miles to go before I sleep
And miles to go before I sleep
The poet admitted in a letter to Charles Madison, published in the revised edition of Brooks’s and Warren’s Understanding Poetry (1950), that the ending had raised hell. Initially he’d written the third line
in such a way as to call for another stanza when I didn’t want another stanza and didn’t have another stanza in me, but with great presence of mind and a sense of what a good boy I was I instantly struck the line out and made my exit with a repeat end.232
The draft stanza’s first lines read, “The woods are lovely dark and deep / But I have promises to keep / That bid me give the reins a shake.” It’s not clear whether he continued immediately to the fourth line or, as he said, stopped to reconsider. (“Stopping by Woods” could have ended with the peripeteia “But I have promises to keep,” making an un-Shakespearean Shakespearean sonnet.) A new rhyme-sound would have been left hanging, so bringing the “āk” rhyme down from the third stanza could have been intentional. The echo of the third stanza’s base rhyme would have been unorthodox, but more pleasing than leaving the line unrhymed. Frost must have forgotten, however (this is another sign the poem was, then or originally, written headlong), that he’d just used “shake”—it would have been rattling around in his head. Changing the rhyme to “awake” would not have been impossible.
The poet instead revised the third line to “That bid me on and there are miles” (altered briefly to “That bid me on. And there are miles …”), which may accidentally have provided the solution. “That bid me on” is weak as motivation or transition—the poet realized that if he dropped the line the poem could find a more troubling register. The usual notion, found in John Holmes’s remarks, is that once “miles” gave Frost the clue he quickly wrote the pair of repeating lines.233 This is certainly plausible, but the intermediate version of the stanza may instead have been:
The woods are lovely, dark and deep
But I have promises to keep
That bid me on, and there are miles
And miles to go before I sleep.
That seems more probable, however Frost recalled it decades later. The draft can’t reveal whether he started to revise the third line before or after writing the next. If he’d already written the last line or had it in mind, he’d have seen that the syntax of “But I have promises to keep / That bid me give the reins a shake / And miles to go before I sleep” is ambiguous—it’s not immediately clear whether “miles” is governed by “have” or “give.” “Miles” here might have suggested “miles” for the line before, the internal rhyme providing a sort of closure—perhaps that was consolation enough.
The mistaken repetition of “shake” may have given him the idea of repeating a word in closure—or, no, a whole line, resolving the discord with the unexpected return, which he called a repetend. (When base or crown molding cannot be continued into a wall because it would look awkward, the molding is “returned,” folded into itself at a ninety-degree angle.) Sensing the failure of the third line in either version, Frost might at last have seen in “miles to go” a far better line and decided to repeat it, bringing the poem to its unexpected close.
In a letter to Sylvester Baxter, the year after the poem was drafted, Frost recounted his struggle with rhyme:
What [the repetend] does externally is save me from a third line promising another stanza.… A dead [e.g., unrhymed] line in the last stanza alone would have been a flaw. I considered for a moment four of a kind in the last stanza but that would have made five including the third in the stanza before it. I considered for a moment winding up with a three line stanza. The repetend was the only logical way to end such a poem.234
The three-line stanza would presumably have been “The woods are lovely dark and deep. / But I have promises to keep, / And miles to go before I sleep.” He might have seen, in other words, that the draft third line was superfluous, seen too that he could bring the last line up and end there. His brilliance was in realizing that if he repeated the line, the poem had found a satisfying and unexpected close.
There were a number of logical ways to end the poem. Drafts can’t always speak. Frost may even have considered repeating the last line as a flourish after closing the poem with the Rubáiyát stanza, but the five-line stanza would have been unwieldy. If that’s how we should read the palimpsest of the draft, Frost saw its wordy inadequacy. Crossing out the third line, he achieved that rare thing in poetry, a coup de theatre.
FROST’S TALE
A poem may possess an autobiographical germ, the infection or inflection of a life; but once freed of circumstance its meanings become open to negotiation. Frost’s later tale of despair in the snow has its limiting attractions, but how far can the critic reasonably go beyond that? Until Occam takes back his razor? What if the owner were God, whose house, His church, stands in the village? This has been proposed.235 The woods would then be protected, holy, a place where a man might wander or meditate distant from the roils of the fallen world. (The identifying pronoun in line 4 is in lowercase. Frost capitalized the divine pronoun uniformly in the masques but only once in a poem, and then in his first book.)236 However lovely the scene, the traveler has made promises and must abandon those sacred woods until he owes less, perhaps, to the world. Such woods would align with Romantic notions of Nature, the embodiment of a Deistic universe that offers man the sublime, whether or not he has faith. Edmund Burke saw the particular attraction of sublime wilderness: “In nature dark, confused, uncertain images have a greater power on the fancy to form the grander passions than those have which are more clear and determinate.”237 It is only a mild irony that Frost’s woods would almost certainly have been second growth, so only the imitation of wilderness.
Take a different reading that stretches the bounds of the probable. The villages of East Derry, Derry, and West Derry (the last, through which the railroad passed, also called Derry Depot) run east to west along the old road traveling southwest to Nashua. Born by the Pacific, Frost had come of age in eastern mill-towns when not dropping in and out of college. Apart from his brief misadventure in Methuen, the outskirts of these villages, which together form the town of Derry, were the first place he had lived among farmers. Say he had two selves, a village self and a country self (a pastoral version of Henry James’s “The Private Life”). The village self would have been a man like his grandfather, a farmer who became overseer of a cotton mill, a man of money and good sense, living in town but with property elsewhere—that is, the Derry farm.238 The owner of the woods in this fantasy of selves would have been the village Frost. This practical Frost would never see his dreamy country self stop by the woods. With village manners and village proprieties, the village Frost would never succumb to the rich enticements of dark trees and falling snow. Such a man couldn’t imagine doing the unexpected. These two views of the world mark the inner division, the tension, between the two Frosts. He almost became a village Frost when he moved to town in 1909.
The Frost who stops is the poet, who must risk the encounter in order to survive it. One of Frost’s poetic virtues is that he could court the darkness within himself (in “Desert Places,” among other places), then draw back, divided between the pragmatic self and the self taken by nature and beauty. This reading of Frost as his own dark twin is mildly fanciful; but many men are divided against themselves, and only a man like the doppelgänger would stop on such a chilly night, against reason, against the instinct of the horse, against the promises that eventually draw him home. I doubt Frost would have been upset by either reading, since both avoid intimations of the death wish he was so eager to reject. The lighter reading, toward wildness and art, is pulled by the darker toward escape from obligation and failure.
The poet once claimed he’d like to follow “Stopping by Woods” with “forty pages of footnotes”—whether his or his critics’, he didn’t say.239 (He probably meant endnotes, like Eliot’s for The Waste Land.) He also remarked to an audience, about the meaning of his verse, “I’ll take credit for anything you find.”240 Would the criticism stand criticism, however? With symbols so free-floating, it’s difficult to bring the poet’s life strictly to bear—the conditions of the life offer only hints, not strictures. Shadings, not clean lines.
Can we determine the precise date of Frost’s dark night of the soul? He knew his calendar: during the years in Derry, the solstice occurred December 22, though when he was growing up it was almost always the twenty-first. The year could have been as early as 1900, when the Derry News noted on September 28 that the Magoon Place had been sold “to R. Frost of Lawrence, Mass., who will take immediate possession.” He moved in days later.241
According to Lawrance Thompson, Carl Burell and his grandfather were soon “helping to pack eggs in boxes and load live ‘broilers’ into crates,” arranging to buy, with old Mr. Frost’s money, a Jersey cow and the democrat wagon. Apples were picked and shipped to Boston. Still, the hired man was working under a sharecropping arrangement that gave him most of the fruit and vegetables.242 Apart from the year Carl Burell left, Frost didn’t pick apples—he sold them from the tree, according to the Derry historian Richard Holmes.243
Frost arrived at Derry in debt, perhaps debt even beyond the promissory notes held by his grandfather and the rent never paid to his Methuen landlady—he had no spare cash, we know from an incident not long after, so nothing for store-bought presents. On the other hand, local merchants would probably have extended credit to a newcomer, a man who apparently owned a farm. (Merchants of the day were often liberal with a customer until they learned better.) Frost’s budget must also have been tight in 1901, because he tried to get an advance from his grandfather’s trust.244 When the Frosts moved, however, their daughter Lesley, then only a year old, was their only surviving child. Their son Carol was born in 1902, so Frost could not have worried about “children’s” presents before then. The Frosts had a third child the following year, a fourth by Christmas 1905.245
In the summer of 1902, the poet received his first annuity check not long after arranging a sizable investment loan from a friend.246 Frost did not repay the full amount, if he ever paid back a cent. (The loan was worth almost 40 percent of the value of the farm.) He continued to spend beyond his means, given to lavish purchases like the red sleigh and the handsome sulky. Though unable to pay his bills, in 1903 Frost took the family for a month of sightseeing in New York. In 1905, the year he impulsively bought sleigh and sulky, he owed money to the local butcher and probably other merchants.247 The longer he pretended to be a farmer, the worse his finances must have become. He took out another large private loan in the spring of 1906, using as collateral the farm he didn’t yet own. He was already teaching part-time and by that fall could count on a steady teacher’s-salary.248 Though the family stayed on the farm until 1909, for the last three years Frost’s income—apart from the spring of 1907, when he was ill with pneumonia—came almost entirely from the annuity check and his teaching. His neighbor Napoleon Guay in the later years sharecropped the farm, taking care of the cow and the chickens.249 Frost sold the Magoon Place in 1911, after he had been given the deed.
Hard evidence for Frost’s version of events must come from the weather. Good snow records exist for Concord, twenty-five miles north; Nashua, ten miles southwest; and Lawrence, fifteen miles south. (The records for Manchester, which lies closer than Concord, are incomplete.) Unfortunately, snowfall can vary greatly even within a New England town—a heavy snow of over six inches in Concord on Christmas Eve, 1901, produced less than half an inch along the river nearby.
|
1901 |
December 24 |
Concord |
6.2" |
|||||
|
1904 |
December 18 |
Nashua |
2.5" |
|||||
|
1905 |
December 21 |
Concord |
2.6" |
|||||
|
December 21 |
Concord River |
2.6" |
||||||
|
1906 |
December 22 |
Nashua |
4.0" |
|||||
|
December 23 |
Concord |
5.5" |
||||||
|
December 23 |
Concord River |
6.0" |
||||||
|
December 23 |
Manchester |
8.0" |
||||||
|
1908 |
December 18 |
Concord |
4.0" |
|||||
|
December 18 |
Concord River |
4.0" |
||||||
|
December 18 |
Nashua |
4.0" |
The table shows the only significant snowfalls the week before Christmas during Frost’s farm years.250 (More than a week before the holiday or after Christmas Eve and Frost’s solstice-and-presents story falls apart—heavy snows earlier and later are not helpful.) The storm of 1901 did not come soon enough. Merchants were unlikely to buy produce late on Christmas Eve—Frost should have known this. Had the failed trip occurred that afternoon, he would likely have mentioned it in the telling. His trials would have been more pathetic as a Bethlehem journey. The produce was probably eggs and poultry, the eggs wrapped in hay, though after Burell left there might have been vegetables.
Heavy snows in 1902 and 1903 fell on or after Christmas. The snows of 1904 and 1905 (the latter almost at the solstice) seem too paltry. In her journals, published as New Hampshire’s Child (1969), Lesley Frost listed the children’s presents for 1905: “a horn … and a little table and a little chair for a doll and a little play house and some strore berry [strawberry] and three crismas books with picshers in them and a stove handle and some stove covers.”251 That doesn’t seem a mean Christmas for a farmer’s family. Though Lesley was six, the other children were only three, two, and a babe in arms. The Derry historian thinks this the hardest year for Frost financially, because he lost his egg contract; but Thompson, who doesn’t give an exact date, implies that the contract was canceled after the new year. Even then, Frost could sell eggs to the local dairy H. P. Hood and Sons, if not advantageously.252 John Evangelist Walsh, in Into My Own: The English Years of Robert Frost (1988), also believes 1905 the year of the snowy evening; but he mistakenly thinks that was the only Christmas Frost owned Eunice.253
The town historian points out that Lesley’s diary entry for the 1905 presents was made a month before Christmas (“It will be fore weeks before crismas will be here and irma and carol and i are to have these things.”) This looks like something the mother has confided in her daughter, however—and Lesley seems to record a trace of their conversation (“Downt [don’t] you thingk all those things will be nice ‘yes very nice[’]”).254 The list is in any case so specific (were the strawberries a jar of preserves?), it seems hard to imagine that, for example, “three crismas books with picshers in them” were not already at hand. There’s no entry after Christmas expressing misery, and Lesley’s much later recollection of the holiday betrays no disappointment—indeed, she thinks she received a new composition book in which she almost immediately wrote half-a-dozen little anecdotes, as all are dated 1905.255 Had Frost not brought the promised presents, had the children suffered a joyless Christmas, there should probably have been evidence in the aftermath.
In the fall of 1906, Frost began receiving a regular teacher’s salary, so that Christmas was even better:
There was a christmos tree with candles on it.… Carol had an atomobeel and and some tules [tools]. And Irma some some dishes and the noars [Noah’s] ark. And i had some dishes and we both had dolls. And I had a go-go and a trunk.256
(A go-go may have been a child’s toy, but it could have been Lesley’s mishearing of “go-cart,” a baby’s walking frame.) The solstice snow that year would otherwise be very promising; but Frost no longer owned Eunice, the little horse. He would have had barely any produce to trade. (The sharecropping would have given him enough milk, eggs, and broilers for the family, not much more.) From 1906 until Frost left the farm, he spent weeks away each summer.257 After he started teaching full-time that fall, it’s hard to imagine that he could have raised more vegetables than the family needed. Though the poet was ill the following spring and lost his salary for the term, the Christmas of 1907 was even better:
There was a rocking chair and doll and a dog with a little bell tied around his neck and pichures for Irma, and there was a train of cars and and a pig and a pig’s trogh and a pig pen and a little boat and a ball and some pichures for Carol and a ball and a doll and a rocking chair and a kitty and some pichures for Marjorie and some dominos and some dice and a ruler and a little tracing and drawing book and two dolls and a rabbit for me, and there was a blackboard and some candy for all of us together.258
Lesley left no record in her journal of Christmas 1908, though by then Frost’s salary had made the family financially more secure. Snowfall in Derry must remain speculative.
In short, the first two Christmases (1900–1901) Frost had just one child, so young she probably would have thought a potato a fine present. The next four (1902–1905), there isn’t a snowstorm that obviously answers the description, and in 1905 the children apparently did not do without. In 1906 and 1907, the children received a cornucopia. The last three Christmases (1906–1908), Frost was scarcely involved with the farm. Apart from 1901, 1906, and 1908, during the nine Christmases the family spent on the Derry farm no snows beyond a dusting fell within a few days of the solstice. By the “darkest evening,” Frost might have meant, though he said otherwise, a night of the new moon near the solstice. In the farm years, that could only have been 1903 (December 18), 1906 (December 16), or 1908 (December 21)—none, according to the snow records, a likely year for Frost’s journey.
Curiously, when Lesley Frost confirmed N. Arthur Bleau’s story, she wrote,
I find there was at least one other to whom [my father] vouchsafed the honor of hearing the truth of how it all was that Xmas eve when “the little horse” (Eunice) slows the sleigh at a point between woods, a hundred yards or so north of our farm on the Wyndham Road.259
She hadn’t read the account carefully, since Frost recalled that he was driving a wagon and that the night was the solstice. This could not have been the same story, “word for word.” Her “Xmas eve” might have been approximate, covering the week just before the holiday—but, at the Christmas Eve snow in 1901, Lesley was the only child, and the horse could not have been Eunice, bought months later.260 The distance to the house was much farther than one hundred yards, and she may have forgotten the name of the road—the Frost farm sat beside the Londonderry Turnpike, though in the family the pike might have been known as the Windham Road, as it did run more or less toward Windham. (The official Windham Road lay half a mile west.) There were problems with Lesley’s memory as she aged. In a 1963 Redbook article about the Christmas of 1907, she recalled a metal train-set her older brother Elliott received on Christmas seven years before, when she “must have been going-on-two, and he was four.”261 Though she was twenty months old that Christmas, he had been dead almost six months.
The factual world of the poem continues to fray. Remember, however, that Frost started his rough draft with two horses, made them a single male, then at least for a time a mare. He might, in other words, already have drifted from fact into the compromises of art. The fluidity of this single detail suggests that from the beginning the description of the snowy evening was poetic. Frost did not have “miles to go,” because the farmhouse was just down the road—according to his tale, almost in sight. “To stop without a farmhouse near” was an exaggeration. There were a couple of houses at the corner, at least one a farmhouse, though none on the drive down the pike home.262 Emptying the landscape of people made the night more ominous. The poem, in the writing, forced itself toward cunning—but poems are rarely transcriptions of life. They worship at a different altar.
That the details of the poem cannot be made to align with the supposed origin should serve as a sober reminder that a poet’s obligation does not extend to any shallow adherence to facts. Poems are fictions, but origins may be fictions, too. It’s far more important that the poem pay homage, say, to physics. The only part of “Stopping by Woods” that seems less than fanciful is the frozen lake. During the years 1900 to 1905 the Derry News mentions skating or ice cutting in the weeks before Christmas except in 1902 and 1904, and the temperatures recorded in Nashua then were as cold or colder. In 1906, it reported on December 28 that the Hood company had started cutting ice—that might have been before the holiday.263 Each element in Frost’s tale probably derived from life in Derry; but it’s unlikely that the failure to sell produce, the lack of money for presents, the snowstorm, and the stop by the woods all occurred one year at the solstice.
Frost’s route, when he sold produce, can be followed along the roads from West Derry. Frost probably drove along Broadway, the main street, visiting the likely markets. The village grocers listed in the New Hampshire Register, Farmer’s Almanac and Business Directory for 1901 included Morse and Tenney, the Annis Grain Company, G. W. Sargent, and G. B. Smith. E. Nelson dealt in fruit; and Benson and Morse sold meat, fish, and groceries. Other merchants in town offered shoes, clothing, dry goods, stoves, hardware, coal, coffins, meat, drugs, stationery and tobacco, furniture, jewelry, and millinery. There were also a baker; two laundries; and H. P. Hood and Sons, which sold milk, cream, and butter.264 Postcards show West Derry as a thriving town by the time the Frosts arrived, Broadway crowded with brick blocks and clapboard stores, the large shoe factories just out of sight.
Source: From Derry, Rockingham Co. Seabrook, Rockingham Co. … (Boston: D. H. Hurd, 1892), courtesy of David Rumsey Map Collection, www.davidrumsey.com.
Failing to sell his goods, the poet drove home, crossing the tracks in the center of town, turning south off Broadway down Birch Street, then east at Shute’s Corner onto Rockingham Road (labeled Island Pond Road on the endpapers of Lesley Frost’s journal, though that lay beyond the next crossroads), and after another half-mile or so turning south again at Webster’s Corner onto Londonderry Turnpike. From the corner the road ran straight to the Magoon Place, half a mile further south. Frost was mistaken in his recollection—you can’t see the farm until you crest a rise. He pulled up, according to Richard Holmes, just past the corner to watch the snow fall on Nat Head’s Woods—the woods ran along the west side of the turnpike from Webster’s Corner down to Berry Road, which entered the pike across from the farm.
Frost’s daughter told Lawrance Thompson “that there was a family legend … that the pond regularly passed by [my father] on his drive from the farm to West Derry was the one he had in mind, and mentioned as a ‘frozen lake,’ in ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.’ ”265 Holmes says that just northwest of the crossroads, along West Running Brook, lay a now vanished millpond.266 Had Frost drawn up at the “bend in the road” and the “sweep of the bend,” as he says, he’d have been between the woods and the pond just above the crossing. Lesley Frost’s memory that her father mentioned a stop between woods is interesting; but there would have been woods in all directions, rising as well beyond the millpond. The scene on that snowy evening of course doesn’t have to make sense according to Derry’s geography—it only has to make sense according to the poem’s. Frost was forever turning anecdote to allegory. If a poet is not on oath when he writes, he’s certainly not on oath when he confides his inspiration.
Nathaniel Head owned a large house at Glidden’s Corner in East Derry. Frost should have known of the man, because decades before he had built the Magoon Place.267 It’s common in New England to name, not just houses after their owners, but woods and other landmarks. Names continue long after the owners are dead. Magoon was three owners back—but the Magoon Place eventually became the Frost Place.
West Broadway, West Derry, N.H., c. 1910.
Source: Author’s collection.
Broadway, Looking West, West Derry, N.H., c. 1908.
Source: Author’s collection.
The reader of the poem is not told the traveler is a farmer, that he has a wagon of unsold goods, or even that he’s driving a wagon. Frost’s mood, his longing, his despair—none enters the poem directly. They can be only conjectures lying above a psychology deeply buried. Were the tale true, approaching home on that miserable ride brought on the crisis of failure. Were the tale true, Frost might have flinched from being observed, not just because watching the woods was odd, but because he was weeping. Such a man passed between two worlds—commerce in town and family at home, failure behind and before, like the Charybdis of the cold forbidding lake, from which the traveler implicitly turns, and the Scylla of the tall and welcoming woods. (Snow falling on a frozen lake might, to a different man, have been just as beautiful and beckoning.) The poet, by his own account, chose instead the failure that is life.
Frost was often guilty of self-mythologizing, and the poem was written more than a dozen years after he left the farm. He was a Yankee fabulist, known to stretch a blanket, his myths carefully nursed, elaborated, curated. The harrowing Christmas tale—the drive through heavy snow with what were probably unsold eggs (Frost’s “revulsion” at butchering, as Thompson calls it, makes dressed chickens less likely),268 the empty pockets for presents, the mad weeping before the woods—would have been laughed out of Hollywood; but Frost’s story, Christmas and failure and weeping and all, is the ghostly descendent of A Christmas Carol, just as it’s the ghostly ancestor of It’s a Wonderful Life. Was the tale a fiction cobbled up for his daughter, a fireside yarn that made Frost a heroic and vulnerable father? The geography is probably the geography of Derry, source of so many of his poems; but the weather records reveal a tale that might have come from whole cloth. Lesley said that her father asked her not to repeat it, because he feared being pitied—yet he told the same story to a gullible stranger.
There’s another possibility. Before his grandfather purchased the Derry farm, Frost had agreed to rent a farmhouse in Pelham.269 After he moved to Derry, the Pelham farmer threatened to sue. Frost had run through his grandfather’s cash and had to return to the old man, hat in hand, for thirty dollars in settlement money. The poet was rebuked even more roundly than he’d expected. He believed, according to Lawrance Thompson, “that his grandfather was saying under his breath, ‘Good riddance. Go on out and die’ ”:
During the drive from Lawrence to Pelham, a bleak wind began to blow fine flakes of the year’s first snowfall, and Rob could feel the chill penetrating to his bones so ominously that he imagined his grandfather’s unspoken wish might be carried out before the day was over. It was nearly suppertime before he reached Pelham, and his enemies there were so hostile to him, even after he had paid the $30, that he was glad to get out of their house in the dusk and start the long drive back to Derry. As the darkness settled in[,] the wind-blown snow felt like fine sand against his face. Snow began to pile and drift in the road just enough to hinder the tired horse and threaten serious difficulties. Rob lost his way in the dark, had to stop at a farmhouse to ask for directions, grew more and more miserable as he got closer to home, and finally drove into his barn near midnight sick with rage and disgust.270
This was no easy ride—more than fifteen miles down to Lawrence, ten miles northwest to Pelham, then ten miles home. (The situation, a man stopping at a farmhouse during a blizzard then pressing on into the storm, was used later in “Snow.”) The long drive, the bitter cold, the exhausted horse, the heavy snow, the lack of money, the disgrace—these come very close to a rough draft of Frost’s tale. Which was the better story to tell his daughter? Frost’s Derry version of Dickens offered the resolution of abject failure in simple homecoming, and quiet nobility in weeping over the presents he could not buy.
Frost’s humiliation before grandfather and angry farmer leaves the origin of the poem with rough edges and without consolation, a grubby account of money borrowed and money owed, rage against his grandfather, rage against everyone who had done him wrong. Rage seems the chief furniture of Frost’s discontent. Of course a critic must be wary, as the Pelham tale must also have come from Frost—but it’s much less prettified than the stories Frost liked to tell.271 The snow in 1900 did not come early. At the end of November a few inches fell in Nashua and Concord; but on December 4 Concord reported one of the worst storms of the period, almost fifteen inches. Curiously, Lawrence and Concord River received almost nothing, and Nashua only a few inches the next day.272 Still, the fourth might have been the evening of that snowy drive Frost later transposed to a mythical solstice ride.
“Stopping by Woods” was his “best bid for remembrance,” Frost wrote Louis Untermeyer in 1923—and, he added at Middlebury College decades later, “all I ever knew.”273 The years on the Derry farm were responsible for most of the poems that made Frost Frost. The physical geography of the Magoon Place and the roads and woods nearby became the settings for, not just “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” but “Mending Wall,” “After Apple-Picking,” “West-Running Brook,” “Birches,” and many another. (“To a large extent,” Frost said, “the terrain of my poetry is the Derry landscape, the Derry farm.”)274 When you drag in narrative poems short and long about his neighbors or his hapless life as a farmer, the foundation of his greatness lies in the half-dozen years when he failed once more: “The Code,” “A Hundred Collars,” “The Black Cottage,” “The Ax-Helve,” “ ‘Out, Out—,’ ” “Snow,” among many others, are Derry poems. Frost’s economy of means was part of his necessary laziness.
Had Frost’s grandfather not taken a rough liking to his prodigal grandson, had Frost gone straight from chicken farming in Methuen to the schoolroom, most of his characteristic poems would never have been written. He had been born in San Francisco. The Yankee farmer and cracker-barrel philosopher so knowing in country ways was the invention of those brief years off the Londonderry Turnpike. The further Frost got from that farm, the lesser the poems were. They lost their sense of place.
CODA
In the aftermath of some private devastation, Dickinson adapted the experience of Arctic traveler to the New England nightmare of freezing to death. The loss was local, the unease local; but the alien source answered something in the far-flung nature of the original desire, desire for a man himself a kind of Arctic—distant in place, remote in feeling, never to be considered a home. Assuming, of course, that the poem was personal.
There was torment in or near “After great pain” and “Stopping by Woods.” It should not be surprising that two poems buried so deeply in the American character drew on the lethal conditions of snow. Such poems, though we scarcely think of it, were limited by geography—they would probably not have been written by poets below, say, the fortieth parallel. They require felt knowledge of the deep snows of the northern states or the blizzards of the Midwest. Frost’s snow is gentle, but a traveler on the open road had to seek shelter—a little more snowfall, a little more wind, and the roads would have become impassable. In a severe storm, a man could die between his house and his barn.
Frost was a boy of eleven when his widowed mother moved east in 1885.275 He’d have had no real experience of snow before then, but the snows of 1886–1887 killed millions of cattle across the West and ended the era of the open range. Had the Frosts stayed in San Francisco, they’d have seen nearly four inches fall downtown, still a record. Frost would have been almost fourteen when the Great Blizzard of March 1888, struck the Northeast, drifts up to forty feet high covering New England. A sudden blizzard two months earlier, known as the Schoolhouse Blizzard, killed over two hundred people on the Great Plains.
Dickinson was dead by then; but when she wrote her poem she’d have remembered the Cold Storm of 1857, which left ten-foot drifts around Washington. Though New England was not as severely affected, a few days later temperatures there dropped to minus forty, and it was colder than minus twenty as far south as West Virginia. In her letters of the 1850s and early 1860s, Dickinson often referred to snow (it’s unfortunate that no letters survive from 1857). Among the prose fragments Dickinson left was a phrase from Emerson’s “The Snow Storm,” in which he had written of the cheery privacy a storm afforded: “the housemates sit / Around the radiant fireplace, enclosed / In a tumultuous privacy of storm.” “Tumultuous privacy of storm” was what Dickinson plucked out.276 That contains a hint of the character that embraced the ending of “After great pain.”
We are presented, considering these two very different poets, with a life too opaque and a life not opaque enough. Which was which remains an open question. Frost’s poetry grows deeper the less we impose constricted meaning upon it. His poems are not so shifty symbolically as Dickinson’s, but pinning him down amid his contraries and contrariness can be almost as difficult. We tend to read the nods and winks as defining whatever went on behind the facts. Just as we have too many facts in Frost’s poems, we have too few in Dickinson’s; yet, in all the volumes about Frost, we learn little of the inner man. Though Dickinson has left fewer traces in the factual record, at least of many things a reader would like to know, sometimes she seems entirely present on the surface of her letters, her poems.
As for the lack of passion in this “recluse,” fifty years after the poet’s death, her editor Millicent Todd Bingham interviewed a cousin of the niece of Judge Otis Lord, with whom Dickinson may have had an affair, probably in the later 1870s. “Little hussy—didn’t I know her?” the niece had said of Dickinson, so the cousin reported. “I should say I did. Loose morals. She was crazy about men.”277 That’s another way of saying that in the evasions of their different heats both Frost and Dickinson contributed to a poetics of cold.