LITR 5535: American Romanticism

Sample Student Research Project 2006

Marion Carpenter

The Romantic Spirit in Frost

The Romantic Spirit or ideology is a dynamic interplay of opposites, wherein you must have both sides of the reflection in contention or the puzzle doesn’t fit together. Solitude and inclusion, dark and light, music and noise, sound and silence, comfort and unease, temptation and conviction, grief and passion, control and the uncontrolled, the surface and the depths, and sitting in the middle of it all we find Robert Frost.

Robert Frost is known in many cases for careful adherence to the classical poetic form and his New England depictions of nature and society, a rebellious and nostalgic set of elements during an era of free verse Modern poets like Williams, Eliot, Pound, and the other Imagists. As Carol Frost notes in the essay “Frost’s Way of Speaking,” “... his early poems are overly poetic style, including, too, the tones of melancholic regret and conventionality of mood….” (119-133)

Patricia Wallace understands that “Frost offers us poems written in the spirit of solitude, with all of her delights. Solitude is separateness seen upside down, or from the other side, where what are sometimes felt as limits are not barriers at all.” (5) This is quite true. In most of Frost’s poems, nature exists outside of the social construction, while encompassing all of society and the individual. Elements of a cosmic relevance are attributed to individual or social construction, and those elements exhibited within nature of a cosmic lean are embedded there by some individual conscience.

The overlapping of the boundaries between the social world, the individual, nature, and the spiritual world creates a layered effect with muddled or nonexistent boundaries. With boundaries so ambiguous, you can’t help but to challenge them, while at the same time affirming them: for with every push, you establish the boundary’s presence; for every action, there is an equal but opposite reaction.

Frost purposely incorporates symbols that create a questionable resistance of faith in his poems to keep his readers from relying on any god for guidance to the resolutions. By taking religious convictions out of the poems, Frost can direct the attention to the interaction between the man and society with great success. In the end it is the questions Frost poses through his poems that truly leave the reader thinking, and ultimately coming to a conclusion of his or her own. It is the quest for answers to Frost’s questions that makes his poetry thought provoking.

 Frost questions faith, mortality, and the individual’s duty to society. He uses his poems to unbalance the reader’s spiritual acceptance, confront the reader with the inevitability of change and the ephemeral progression of life and time, and finally tries to express how vital our actions and lives are to the world. By putting us through these tests, Frost promotes our journey

 “For Once, Then, Something” gives us an internal dialogue from the speaker of being taunted for only looking as deep as his reflection and not seeing beyond the surface. He renounces the taunting with an extension of having once looked beyond the surface to see something white beneath the surface, only to have it taken away and hidden from sight again by a disturbance of the water.

“At its heart, the poem is concerned with the difficult search for truth in life and art.” (Frost, C., 119-133) The key to the poem lies within the speaker’s reflection; reflections represent a confronting of identity. The speaker identifies how others see him as looking only at the surface, “…in the summer heaven godlike / Looking out of a wreath of ferns and cloud puffs.” (lines 5-6) He alludes in this way to his readers, perhaps his critics or contemporaries even, accusing him of making himself into an idol through his works. He doesn’t actively deny that he does in fact do this.

However, the speaker makes a point of looking deeper, “…beyond the picture, / Through the picture,” and catching sight of “a something white, uncertain, / Something more of the depths” within the reflection. Beyond the surface, through the speaker’s reflection, we find something, and as soon as it’s there, it’s gone, disturbed from our and the speaker’s knowledge by a ripple. After the disturbance all we have are questions.

You could read this as a fruitless endeavor, looking beyond yourself, through yourself, inside yourself only to be left with questions. You could read it as an excuse not to look inside yourself. In fact, the speaker might be making such an excuse.

Of course, the speaker might be making a point that by looking beyond what is on the surface we find hidden secrets meant to make us question. “What was that whiteness? / Truth? A pebble of quartz?” (lines 14-15) The speaker’s first thought is a metaphysical one, Truth is not substantial or physical, it takes no solid form. His second thought is a physical one, quartz is solid, has shape, weight, and form. Of the two the quartz is most likely to be found at the bottom of the well, the Truth is not, but is he looking in the water, or in himself… In himself he might find Truth, but if he finds a pebble of quartz he needs to see a doctor.

The poem is obviously an allegory, and Frost uses that to bring his other poems into question. If something more than a pretty picture lies beneath the surface of this poem, what lies beneath the surface of his other poems?

In “The Aim Was Song” the wind is treated as a supernatural entity, personified and given thought and action. “It blew too hard—the aim was song.” (line 7) The personification of the wind is unbelievable as a cosmic essence; rather, it becomes a comic essence, as the tone Frost uses for the poem is one of sarcasm. The wind, as independent and separate from man as it is allowed to be, is portrayed as a brutish unskilled thing: no matter what it tries it cannot make song, it can only blow. (Stanza 1) It falls to man to not only train the wind to make song, but to effectively master the wind, “He took a little in his mouth, / And held it long enough for north / To be converted into south,” making it make song by singing with it. (lines 9-11) The wind is such a mindless thing, however, that only after man has made song does it see that song was what it was trying to make all along. (Stanza 4)

“The Aim Was Song” is one of the poems Frost wrote to make you question forces beyond man’s reality. It creates a spiritually inadequate representation of that which lies beyond reality or even of that which exists in reality. Without man, the wind could not sing; what goes without saying is without wind, man could not sing. This is the first sign that this is a poem of man, not of nature.

A nature poem would have the roles reversed, the wind singing beautifully and man unable to capture that reverent perfection. Rather we have the wind bumbling on with no order, and man coming in and establishing measure, word, and note. Frost elevates man in “Aim” to a position above nature. Man is the tamer, the commander, and the teacher of nature as to how things ought to go.

If that’s the way of it, why does nature so often get the upper hand? In “Mending Wall” nature or some other force has gotten the upper hand in man’s attempt to wall off his property. The question seems to be, “But what?” Besides winter’s chill sending ground swells under the stones and dislodging them, man himself is a factor in destroying the speaker’s wall.

In any case, whatever destroyed the wall is soon secondary to repairing the damage, and wondering why the damage must be repaired. “There where it is we do not need a wall: / He is all pine and I am apple orchard. / My apple trees will never get across / And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.” (lines 23-26) The speaker then poses the questions riddling his mind to the neighbor, hoping the neighbor will humor him with an answer if just to prove he has a mind to think. The neighbor fails to meet the speaker’s expectations, and becomes brutish, more beast than man in the speaker’s eyes.

“Mending Wall” has three powerful elements that lend to the speaker’s conclusions about the “something” that doesn’t love a wall, the frozen-ground-swell, the beastly nature of the hunters (to dig out a rabbit hiding in the wall to still the yelping of their hounds), and the individual’s own desire to interact freely with society. In this instance Frost even characterizes his neighbor as a beast, dehumanizing him, devolving him to the point of being a missing link, a cave man heaving a stone, cast in the shadow of ignorance as well as the shadow of the trees he walls in, all because the man refuses to lower his own walls and commune with the speaker.

What causes the damage to the walls is never seen or heard, it is a mystery, it’s just found at mending time, like magic. The supernatural sarcasm of Frost is evident in the speaker using “a spell to make them balance: / ‘Stay where you are until our backs are turned!’” (lines 18-19) He even plays at being a supernatural advocate when deciding he could answer his own questions to the neighbor with “Elves”, but deciding he’d rather the neighbor put in the effort to say it. (lines 36-38)

Frost’s personification of nature is limited to sarcastically reasoning with the neighbor that fixing the wall isn’t necessary, and always the same answer, like a wall unto itself, from his neighbor, “Good fences make good neighbors.” (lines 27 & 45) The criticism of the endeavor is such that the speaker seems to have broken the rules of engagement. Socially, the neighbors are supposed to repair the wall, keep it between them, yet the speaker has engaged in breaking down the wall by speaking, asking questions, trying to communicate.

It isn’t necessarily that the neighbor is ignorant, though the speaker implies that he is (as far as he’s concerned) when seeing him cast in shadows beyond those of the trees, but that he chooses to remain closed off behind his walls, cutting off the communication and remaining sealed away. “The first-person speaker in the poem wishes his wall-mending partner would speak for himself and think for himself,” as Carol Frost puts it. (119-133) …And Frost is indeed correct. The speaker presses the issue, wanting a social connection with the man, but unable to attain it from the neighbor’s own reluctance to break down the walls he’s maintained over the years.

Conversation can break down walls when done right, when done wrong it can do far worse than put up walls, as in “Home Burial.” The husband’s attempt to get what is troubling his wife out of her builds around them and then crashes down in a final catastrophic collapse.

More important than what is said, at times, is what goes unsaid. The wife is clearly distraught over the loss of their child. She is an emotional force trapped in a cell formed of his complacence, reason, and simplicity. She seems to be unreasonable, letting all her emotions guide her words, though she tries at first to be diplomatic and fails when her emotions get away from her. Her husband is a logical mind tracking the ticking seconds as they pass until he is free of his grief. He never releases his emotions fully, but his anger and frustration escape in his words.

Honestly, “Home Burial” contains three parts, the husband realizing his wife’s pain, the confrontation of the pain, and the escape from the pain. In the first part of the poem, the husband spots his wife staring, from the top of the staircase, at his family plots. “Not so much larger than a bedroom, is it?” (line 26) He makes note that it isn’t the stones that bother her, “But the child’s mound—“ (line 31) He tries to talk to her about her grief, but his own grief gets in the way and all he can find is anger.

In the second part of the poem, she refuses to discuss her grief, his anger gets the better of him, and she explains her inability to put up with him for his demeanor during and after he prepared the child’s grave, for he had gone at digging the grave as any other chore, and had come in from digging it to sit and talk about everyday concerns as far as she can see. “What had how long it takes a birch to rot / To do with what was in the darkened parlor. / You couldn’t care!” (lines 99-101)

The final portion of the poem has the wife leaving as the husband dismisses the need for her to leave by noting she’s said her piece and it is all over. His wife leaves and he swears he’ll follow and bring her back by force.

The questions are left to the reader to muddle through. We are told the wife’s looking at the family plot and that it’s the child’s mound causing her to fear, but she’s upset too at the husband for seeming callous even at the loss of his son. She sees him as being without feelings, “you that dug…his little grave; I saw you…making the gravel leap and leap in the air…” (lines 76-79) She can’t connect with him, she doesn’t recognize him as the man she married, and when she went to check to make certain it was him she heard him as he sat covered with the soil from his child’s grave at the kitchen table talking about what she considers “everyday concerns.” (line 90) Even after explaining how she feels he still seems unfeeling, trying to reason that she feels better because she’s finally crying, but he’s wrong and she leaves anyway.

Carol Frost makes an excellent observation about “Home Burial,” “…it’s a presentation of two views of grief, and its subject is really the difficulties people have in speaking openly to one another, especially if one of them has a fixed and unyielding notion of what is and isn’t moral.” (119-133) The wife’s views of the husband’s behavior over his son’s death and consequential burial are unmoving in the light of reason and consolation. The husband meanwhile is forced to relieve his tension in metaphor as it is the easiest means of acknowledging the reality of the event that has left him emotionally incapable of communication.

“Three foggy mornings and one rainy day / Will rot the best birch fence a man can build.” (lines 96-97) That incriminating phrase which has cost him his wife’s recognition has so many other possible implications. Considering he’s just been digging his son’s grave, we can’t believe he has been completely callous to the whole ordeal. It’s his child, “his own child that’s dead” (line 74) he’s been digging the grave for. He has to be aware. Consider digging a beloved child’s grave, no matter how calm and collected in demeanor, under it all, how bad does it really feel? The loss is an unbearable thought.

If the birch fence is truly a birch fence, this man is colder than a New England winter night. Metaphor escapes his wife, she understands only direct emotion. She must speak openly and in plain language to express her emotions. Even then, she can’t speak it because the pain and grief are too strong. He can reason through the pain, the grief, the loss. He can find words—but to admit in plain language the emotion he’s trying to control—he has to convert it to something else.

Three foggy mornings and a rainy day… (line 96) Perhaps that’s all the longer the child lived; perhaps that’s why the child fell ill and died. There’s no certainty, but the child is the best birch fence the speaker could build… (line 97) It’s a tender wood, pale, softer than most, sturdy if cared for properly… But when cut down and put in the ground, it doesn’t take long for nature to take its course.

Metaphor is his escape from the pain and even as they speak he’s busily confronting her with words he cannot say. She has it right that he can’t speak, but not because he can’t say what he’s feeling, but rather because how he expresses his feelings is not in a way she understands him.

When finally she can take no more misunderstandings from him, she leaves, and he’s forced to question her and threaten her. “Where do you mean to go? First tell me that. / I’ll follow and bring you back by force. I will!—“ (lines 119-120) What sounds so like a threat, is in fact more of a promise. She’s alive and he can follow her and bring her back. Deep inside, and the reason he stops after the last word so hard, as registered by the caesura, is his realization that he can’t go after his child. He can’t follow the child and bring it back, but he can follow her. Whether she hears and understands is unsaid. Considering her misunderstanding of his words previously, it is doubtful it registers as deeply with her as it does with him or the reader.

The dead cannot return. It is a fact of nature and life. Once you’re gone, you cannot be brought back. Perhaps that is why “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” is such a powerful poem. The message carried within it is one of devotion, determination, and dauntlessness in the face of adversity, though not directly death.

On the surface, the poem is a simple story of a man and his horse stopping to watch a patch of woods fill with snow. His horse shakes its reins. The woods are comforting in spite of their darkness, but he has to continue on.

The search for the truth begins early in the poem, as the speaker is uncertain of the person who owns the woods, but he thinks the owner’s house is in the village. (lines 1-2) The owner is at once in question, and honestly, who owns the woods? It’s a question of Emersonian proportions. Emerson regards nature as having many facets of existence, commercially it exists as the property of men, naturally it is no one’s property, and spiritually it encompasses man and therefore bonding with Nature makes man a part of the spiritual connection that bonds us all to each other and the world. (Emerson, 486-514)

Yvor Winters (apparently an advocate against Frost) argues against Frost’s Emersonian Romanticism, “In Frost, however, we find a disciple without Emerson's religious conviction: Frost believes in the rightness of impulse, but does not discuss the pantheistic doctrine which would give authority to impulse; as a result of his belief in impulse, he is of necessity a relativist, but his relativism, apparently since it derives from no intense religious conviction, has resulted mainly in ill-natured eccentricity and in increasing melancholy.” (60-61)

“Stopping by Woods,” however, stands proudly as a contradiction of Winter’s belief.  All the natural possessions Emerson denotes are included along with a few small additions. And nowhere is eccentricity or melancholia noticed in the workings of the poem.

Ownership of the woods is a question brought up in “Stopping by Woods.” Most assuredly man can own property on which he grows woods for cutting or harvesting, or chopping. In a like manner, Nature can own the woods, but Nature, personified or not, wouldn’t live in the village. God could be the owner of the woods, and a church is the house of God, so were the village to have a church the statement makes sense if God is the owner being referenced. Of course, elves could own the forest, and I suppose they could have a village, but it is doubtful Frost wants us to think the woods are owned by elves, not this time anyway.

John Ogilvie notes a special kind of ownership I didn’t notice before, “The poet is aware that the woods by which he is stopping belong to someone in the village; they are owned by the world of men. But at the same time they are his, the poet's woods, too, by virtue of what they mean to him in terms of emotion and private signification.” (66) It is an ownership of completely sentimental value as placed upon the scene by the poet or the speaker.

The speaker is certain the owner won’t see him stopping to watch the snow fill the woods though. (lines 3-4) So God is right out, unless we are to question his all-seeing omnipresence. The owner must simply be some man that the speaker is uncertain of his identity. Not too hard to figure out, and even under the surface that’s not too deep.

But we can’t be sure, perhaps Frost means for us to question God’s omnipresence, or perhaps the speaker simply doesn’t believe in God’s all-seeing, all-knowing, ever-present being. In that case, the speaker is someone who knows of God, but doesn’t believe in God in the same way devout followers believe.

What I find most interesting about this passage is the exact phrase Frost chooses to describe the moment, and therein rests many questions. “Between the woods and frozen lake / The darkest evening of the year.” (lines 7-8) It smacks of Dante and The Inferno. Dante also found himself at the edge of a wood before entering Hell, and it was through the frozen lake that Dante had to descend to escape into The Purgatorio. The scene itself takes on an ominous quizzical nature at that point, with the darkest evening of the year taking on a much deeper darkness than merely the night being long.

Should the woods be the path to hell, and the lake be the way to perdition, the speaker has stopped in between and seems trapped by his wonderment. Should that be the case, he is also in a place where even God would not see him stop, for Hell is out of God’s grace, and the beasts there have been cast out of his sight. Will he journey on? Will he explore the woods, or the lake? The woods seem to call to the speaker, as it is the woods he watches fill with snow. And if his passage lies between the woods and the lake, is he already trapped and unable to escape?

Dante had Virgil to guide him, and the speaker has his horse. The speaker reads into his horse thought, imagining that it must think he’s strange to stop with no shelter near between a frozen lake and snow-filled woods on what is more than likely the winter solstice, when the night is longest, and in turn making the night that much darker. (Stanza 2) In all likelihood, the speaker’s horse is only concerned with keeping warm, either by continuing to move or by getting into a nice stable with some hay and eggnog.

The horse shakes its bells, and again a question arises, this one from the horse: Is there some mistake? (lines 9-10) But not even the speaker answers, and the wind and snow are the only other sounds. (lines 11-12) Silence can be a good thing, or a bad thing, considering the questions left from the previous stanza, we’ll take this as a bad omen. Death is silent, and a cold death in the snowy field would be something to make the evening of the previous stanza darker yet. The wind is easy, and the flakes are downy, as opposed to blustery and hard I find these conditions appealing, comforting even, it is no wonder he would consider staying.

You have to ask if he considers staying at a point like this. He’s been given few options, and the woods are at least some shelter, the wind is barely blowing, but moving enough to sooth, the flakes are soft and fluffy, and perhaps they would make a nice pillow for a short rest. But the horse’s actions prompt him to return his thoughts to his duty. Horse sense is not always best, but sometimes it only takes a nudge to get us moving again.

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. (Stanza 4)

“The ascription of lovely to this scene of desolate woods, effacing snow, and black night complicates rather than alleviates the mood when we consider how pervasive are the connotations of dangerous isolation and menacing death.” (Ogilvie, 73) Still, this is a temptation of the speaker to draw him from the path into the dark, deep woods. His psychological and societal boundaries are being tested by the forest, and the speaker considers entering the woods a pleasing thought or else he would not find them lovely.

The woods call to him, but thanks to his trusty steed, let’s call him “Elf”, he has awakened to realize his contemplations. He is not ready to go to that dark wood, to explore what lies within. He has devoted himself to a cause and cannot rest; whether peaceful or tormented he cannot give in to desire and tread the path of dead pilgrims. The speaker must strive, and continue on. The cold, the snow, the darkness, the enticing woods, the frozen lake, he must leave them all behind and carry on.

What are his promises? Where must he go? When will he sleep? All that matters is living, and perhaps living is the most important promise of all to keep, the greatest journey.

We have explored a myriad of questions; we have doubted faith, questioned reality, and found Truth in the bottom of a wishing well. Our elves have been walled in and our walls have been torn down. We have realized the mortality of man, heard the unspoken emotion, and stared into Hell only to turn our horse and keep on riding.

The hardest thing to do is ask “Why?” It isn’t the pretty pictures; most of his pictures aren’t that pretty if you look beneath the surface. It isn’t the stories he’s telling; many of his poems don’t even tell one. It isn’t each individual meaning; he contradicts himself from time to time.

It’s the human condition.  Frost is a poet of “Man,” not mankind, but the individual. It’s the shaping of man he’s interested in. Showing his faults, showing his achievements, proving it doesn’t have to come from God, or Nature to be great. Man can achieve greatness on his own.

The “How?” you might be asking is answered in his poems. Close reading, exploration beneath the surface, finding his examples and learning from them provides a blueprint. What the reader does with it is the reader’s question to ponder.

The dark of the depths, of the forest, of the ignorance of man, the light of the snow, the snow-filled woods, the “something white,” the grief, the loss, the desire to bring back those lost to us, the inability to express clear thought, the ability to only express pure emotion, the temptation to leave the path, the conviction to stay the course, the warmth of the Summer, the cold of the wind, and the quest for truth are all elements of Frost’s intricate test of Man’s boundaries. As Frost’s poetry is formed from a vast interplay of dynamic opposites, it cannot be imagined that Frost could be considered anything but a Romantic poet. Frost undertakes the journey to transcendent ideology in his poetry not for himself, but for his readers. His poems are our horse shaking its bells as we stop somewhere in between.

Works Cited

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. "Nature." The Norton Anthology of American Literature. 6th ed. 2003.

Frost, Carol. "Frost's Way of Speaking." New England Review Vol. 23 (Winter 2002): 119-133.

Frost, Robert. “The Aim Was Song,” “For Once, Then, Something,” and “Home Burial.” Frost: Collected Poems, Prose, & Plays. New York: The Library of America, 1995.

Frost, Robert. “Mending Wall,” and “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” The Norton Anthology of American Literature. 6th ed. 2003.

Ogilvie, John T.. "From Woods to Stars: A Pattern of Imagery in Robert Frost's Poetry." South Atlantic Quarterly Vol. 58 (Winter 1959): 64-76.

Wallace, Patricia. "Separateness and Solitude in Frost." Kenyon Review Vol. 6 (Winter 1984): 5-6.

Winters, Yvor. "Robert Frost: Or, the Spiritual Drifter as Poet." The Function of Criticism: Problems and Exercises. Alan Swallow ed. 1957.