Robert frost, p.27
Robert Frost, page 27
These pools that, though in forests, still reflect
The total sky almost without defect,
And like the flowers beside them, chill and shiver,
Will like the flowers beside them soon be gone,
And yet not out by any brook or river,
But up by roots to bring dark foliage on.
The trees that have it in their pent-up buds
To darken nature and be summer woods—
Let them think twice before they use their powers
To blot out and drink up and sweep away
These flowery waters and these watery flowers
From snow that melted only yesterday.
The identically patterned stanzas, like the subject they mirror, reflect each other—even as the penultimate line comes close to mocking the reflectiveness of this poem: “These flowery waters and these watery flowers.” As in many of his best lyrics, “Spring Pools” is about poetry, about the process of creativity. Water, here as elsewhere in Frost, can be taken to mean a substance into which one dips for inspiration. Yet the poem is more complicated than this. Frost is covertly playing in the first line with the old notion of art as an imitation of nature—an idea that, in various forms, can be traced back to Plato’s Republic and Aristotle’s Poetics.
Horace, who derived a good deal from Aristotle, coined the phrase ut pictura poesis, making the analogy between poetry and painting. The notion that “painting is mute poetry, and poetry a speaking picture” was originally formulated by Simonides, and the suggestiveness of this idea was such that, as Irving Babbitt points out, “It is rare to read through a critical treatise on either art or literature, written between the middle of the sixteenth and middle of the eighteenth century, without finding an approving mention of the Horatian simile.”6
Frost, himself a classicist, would have had in mind the whole range of this discussion. The subject of the poem is the nature of reflection and the way it is absorbed into a larger organic whole. The poem must first be read on a literal plane as being about how leaves and flowers are “brought on” by the act of sucking up spring pools through the roots of trees—a natural phenomenon known to most readers. But Frost gives clear signals that he wants us to read beyond the natural phenomenon, to search for its symbolic implications.
The roots that suck the pools dry are somewhat menacing; they do, after all, obliterate the reflection, the original vision, which was “almost without defect” (even here, Frost hedges with “almost”); the roots “bring dark foliage on,” which may be taken in different ways, not all pleasing; this point is made all the more explicit in the first lines of the second stanza: “The trees that have it in their pent-up buds / To darken nature” are distinctly threatening; they can “blot out and drink up and sweep away” a powerful reflection. Here Frost again subscribes to the Romantic notion (the Germans, especially J. G. Herder, were fond of this idea) of natural or organic violence as part of the dialectic of the imagination.
In another familiar gesture, Frost commands: “Let them think twice” before doing what they do. How serious is he? On some level, he is dead serious; he resists this destruction of easy and near-perfect correspondence—the sky reflected in the spring pools, or art mirroring nature. On a deeper level, however, he does not really want the trees to think twice about the process; the “pent-up buds” must be fed, just as the artist must destroy in order to create, or (in terms Coleridge put forward that Frost would have approved) to re-create. Frost always wants to reach for a more complicated vision, one arrived at after much pain, much “sucking up” of passive, reflected beauty. Although the sucked-up pools will go on to give new life to foliage, “Frost sees that transformation as loss rather than gain,” as George F. Bagby says.7
The poet’s imagination takes the beautiful world and scrambles it, remakes it; there is something dark in the final foliage of the completed art object, perhaps, but this is necessary. As Coleridge put it, “Images, however beautiful, though faithfully copied from nature, and as accurately represented in words, do not of themselves characterize the poet. They became proofs of original genius only as far as they are modified by a predominant passion; or when they have the effect of reducing multitude to unity, or succession to an instant; or lastly, when a human or intellectual life is transferred to them from the poet’s own spirit.”8
Frost was, in fact, obsessed by what is called the heterocosmic analogue, defined by the critic M. H. Abrams as “the parallel between writing poetry and creating the universe.”9 He saw the poet as a kind of god, capable of mixing the given elements of the universe to invent a parallel world. The act of poetic imagination is one of transformation, which must at times verge on the destructive; it can, that is, “blot out and drink up and sweep away” the world’s image of itself. But the result of this act is sublime, at once beautiful and frightening.
Another poem written in Ann Arbor around this time was “A Winter Eden,” in which Frost celebrates “A winter garden in an alder swamp.” It is another of his meticulously observed nature poems, although one begins to see what happens when Frost relies too heavily on mannerisms. The winter garden is said to elevate existence:
It lifts existence on a plane of snow
One level higher than the earth below,
One level nearer heaven overhead,
And last year’s berries shining scarlet red.
The parallelism here seems forced, a point of charm rather than a focus. Frost seems unable to move the poem beyond the surface level, the literal description of place, however evocative.
What remains interesting, however, is Frost’s consistent use of imagery taken from rural New England; even living in Ann Arbor did not distract him from his regional preoccupation. If anything, being away from New England stimulated his memory and spurred his imagination of that region. “I never write about a place in New England, if I am there,” he said. “I always write about it when I am away. In Michigan I shall be composing poetry about New Hampshire and Vermont with longing and homesickness better than I would if I were there, just as in England.”10
Frost was getting more and more eager to assemble a new collection. In his folder of old poems, he found many pieces that, with a little dusting off, would meet the standard of his best work. There was, perhaps, some hoarding instinct at work here; this secret bank of poems was a stake in the future, a way of ensuring that if his creativity entered a period of drought, there was always something in reserve—a deep pool into which he could put his roots.
Among the poems held back was “Tree at My Window,” which he apparently revised in Michigan. The locale of the poem is unspecific, but Frost told Lawrance Thompson that it was inspired by a memory of the Derry farm, where a big tree would scrape against the window of his house in summer. The poem opens with an address to the tree:
Tree at my window, window tree,
My sash is lowered when night comes on;
But let there never be curtain drawn
Between you and me.
Frost’s interest in the world of Emersonian correspondences becomes the central subject of this poem. The implicit question posed by the poet concerns the relation of inner and outer worlds, described here as “weathers.” This idea is distinctly Coleridgean (by way of the German aesthetician F. W. J. von Schelling, whom Coleridge had been reading closely); Coleridge’s article “On Poesy or Art” (1818) arises from Schelling’s idea of parallelism between the mental world and the physical world. Essences found within nature are seen to have a corresponding life in the mind; in this metaphysics, art is seen by Coleridge as “the mediatress between, and reconciler of, nature and man. It is, therefore, the power of humanizing nature, of infusing the thoughts and passions of man into everything which is the object of his contemplation.”
Frost, of course, cannot resist making fun of the tree as a “Vague dream-head lifted out of the ground,” with the leaves as “light tongues talking aloud.” He is aware that not everything in nature is profound, and that much of what he experiences in listening to this tree is mere chatter. Nevertheless, his identification with the tree becomes complex in the third stanza:
But, tree, I have seen you taken and tossed,
And if you have seen me when I slept,
You have seen me when I was taken and swept
And all but lost.
The strange, startling beauty of this stanza compares favorably with any other lines in Frost. The rigidity of the rhythm breaks down artfully into a more colloquial rhythm in those two middle lines, with its poetic feet boldly syncopated (iambs becoming anapests at just the right moments); the swaying of the lines seems to mimic the motion of the branches in a slight wind as they reach for the house.
The poem ends, perhaps a little cutely, but with undeniable aphoristic brilliance:
That day she put our heads together,
Fate had her imagination about her,
Your head so much concerned with outer,
Mine with inner, weather.
Even Frost was dazzled by his own technical prowess in this last stanza: “No matter what I think it means,” he said, “I’m infatuated with the way the rhymes come off here.”11
A surprise visit from President Olds of Amherst in the spring lifted Frost’s spirits: a continuation of the old tug-of-war between Amherst and Michigan for Frost’s presence. Olds offered Frost $5,000 for ten weeks of teaching per year, a remarkably high sum in those days for anyone in the teaching profession. Frost accepted the offer at once, relieved to put the Michigan experience behind him. He wrote to Roy Elliott (who had mentioned to Olds that Frost might be open to a fresh offer), “Think of the untold acres I can spade up in the forty weeks of every year I am going to have free for farming. Suppose I live like [Walter Savage] Landor till ninety. That will give me one thousand six hundred weeks all to myself to put in at any thing I like.”12 As it were, Frost did live almost to the age of ninety, getting most of those coveted “one thousand six hundred weeks.”
* * *
If there were any hard feelings in Michigan about his departure, Frost did not care. He was glad to rejoin his family in South Shaftsbury, and to put the Midwest behind him. Elinor had already gone ahead of him, and she was busily helping Carol and Lillian with Prescott, their son, who was just beginning to walk. Carol had recently made significant improvements to the property, adding a hundred dwarf Astrachan apple trees and a large patch of blueberry bushes. One small hillside had been set aside to grow flowers, and there was talk of setting up a greenhouse to supply flowers for the newly established Bennington College, which was only four miles away.
Elinor was quite overworked, even overwhelmed. Both Lillian and Marjorie had been ill, and they could hardly be expected to help with the farm chores. Lillian’s condition turned perilous in July, requiring surgery in Bennington. Elinor wrote to her friend Edith Fobes about the situation: “I have had an anxious and busy time since our return. I found Lillian not feeling well, and felt puzzled about her. Her doctor didn’t seem to know and finally advised an examination by the surgeon that comes to the Bennington hospital from Albany once a week. This surgeon advised an exploratory incision, and probably other things. It was most fortunate he advised it. She was operated on last Thursday, and they found a tubal pregnancy. It would surely have ruptured sometime during the next two weeks, and would have caused her death in all probability. The uterus was bound down in such a way that they could not diagnose it.”13
On top of everything, Irma had decided to get married. She and her prospective husband, John Paine Cone, were busy making wedding plans. Cone had grown up in Kansas, on a wheat farm, and hoped to return home with Irma after the wedding to help his elderly parents run their farm. This plan gave Elinor some distress: she liked her children nearby. The whole scene at Stone Cottage made Frost extremely nervous, and Elinor decided it was best for them both to get away to Franconia for much of August. “Robert has become very nervous,” she wrote to Mrs. Fobes, “and it is necessary for us to be by ourselves, without the children, for a little while, so that he may recover his equanimity.”14 One is struck by the degree to which Elinor, by now, had completely identified with Frost, ploughing under her own needs and early ambitions for herself; for the rest of her life, she served the family as protector, facilitator, and go-between.
The Frosts stayed in Franconia for three months, through the end of October. It proved a remarkably good place to work. Frost picked up a poem begun in 1920 called “West-Running Brook” and found himself inspired to revise it thoroughly. It had been started in response to an Amherst student who’d published, in the Amherst Monthly (March 1920), a poem called “Joe Wright’s Brook.” That poem was about two lovers discussing the name of a brook. Frost told the student, Edward Richards, that he would have done it quite differently; the poem, he said, brought to mind a brook on his Derry farm that defied its natural parameters and flowed west instead of east, toward the Atlantic. In 1937, Frost explained in a letter that “West-Running Brook” was connected, in his mind, with “Reluctance,” “The Tuft of Flowers,” and “The Death of the Hired Man,” in being about “the same subject,” which he described as “my position … between socialism and individualism.”15
Frost often seemed to think he was talking about these great abstractions, but there is little in “West-Running Brook” to make one think about either of these terms except in the most general, uninteresting way. The poem has more in common with a very early poem, “Hyla Brook,” where a stream is likewise the symbol of poetic inspiration, or a very late poem, “Directive,” which ends: “Here are your waters and your watering place. / Drink and be whole again beyond confusion.”
The poem inhabits the dialogue form that one saw frequently used in North of Boston, but there is nothing dramatic about “West-Running Brook.” Frost attempts something quite different, a kind of meditative lyric couched in the spoken voice. The husband-wife dialogue has none of the edginess of the dramatic lyrics (as in “Home Burial,” where the dramatic tension is brought to a fierce climax). Fred, the husband, seems to get carried away by the sound of his own voice. He asks at the outset:
“What does it think it’s doing running west
When all the other country brooks flow east
To reach the ocean?”…
His answer is the point of the poem: “‘It must be the brook / Can trust itself to go by contraries.’”
These are not, however, the violent contraries of William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. (“Without contraries is no progression,” wrote Blake.) Frost’s contraries are mere motions against the grain, formulated as a resistance to going with “the drift of things,” as he said in “Reluctance.” In addition, the moral dimension in Frost’s poem is, as Robert Faggen notes, “more ambiguous” than in Blake, “drawn across lines of male and female, the rational and the intuitive, the ethereal and the telluric, in this case a man named Fred (how worldly!) and his mate.”16
Overall, the unnamed wife in the poem operates mostly as a sounding board for her husband, who gets most of the good lines. And they are good lines indeed:
“Speaking of contraries, see how the brook
In that white wave runs counter to itself.
It is from that in water we were from
Long, long before we were from any creature.
Here we, in our impatience of the steps,
Get back to the beginning of beginnings,
The stream of everything that runs away.”
Frost seems much taken by the Darwinian idea that the human race began in a primitive, aquatic environment, then evolved landward, skyward. The stream, of course, is a familiar symbol of life in Western literature from Lucretius on, and one of Frost’s recurrent images. In this poem, the symbol is refined and beautifully nuanced:
“It is this backward motion toward the source,
Against the stream, that most we see ourselves in,
The tribute of the current to the source.
It is from this in nature we are from.
It is most us.”
William H. Pritchard sees his final peroration by Fred as “eloquent, perhaps rather too much so.” He adds that the unnamed spouse “might justifiably have wondered what came over Fred that he could suddenly rise to such heights or depths of profundity.”17 That Frost’s speakers notice their excess of eloquence is acknowledged in the last exchange: “Today will be the day / You said so,” the wife remarks, wryly. Fred counters: “No, today will be the day / You said the brook was called West-Running Brook.” Importantly, the wife has the last word, and plays the role of reconciler: “Today will be the day of what we both said.”
I place this poem higher in Frost’s canon than Pritchard does, largely because so many of the poet’s preoccupations converge here. The symbol of the stream is nowhere in Frost more carefully construed; as Rueben Brower says, “The rebellious flowing of the stream is a figure for the loving trust of husband and wife in the other’s difference, the expected and desired contraries that make a marriage.” With severe compactness, Frost manages to talk about this particular marriage in terms of the stream, but to talk about matters of life and death as well. “In explaining why the brook runs west,” says Brower, “the wife had given her husband the metaphor that has shaped all the rest of his thinking.”18
There is also the fact that Frost’s two chief forms of poetry, dramatic and lyric, merge in “West-Running Brook.” As in most of his bucolic lyrics, the poet begins with close observation of a natural phenomenon; he moves from that to analysis by metaphor. Fred might well have spun into the ether too quickly had not his wife been there, gently tugging him back to earth. (Brower, oddly, sees it the other way around, with his wife being less down-to-earth.) It must also be said that Fred’s eloquence is, at times, ear-catching, as when he talks with Shakespearean fluidity about “The universal cataract of death / That spends to nothingness.”
