Names, Proverbs, Riddles, and Material Text in Robert Frost

10.1057/9780230109896 - Names, Proverbs, Riddles, and Material Text in Robert Frost, Timothy O'Brien

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-14

Names, Proverbs, Riddles, and Material Text in Robert Frost

10.1057/9780230109896 - Names, Proverbs, Riddles, and Material Text in Robert Frost, Timothy O'Brien

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-14

This page intentionally left blank

TIMOTHY D. O’BRIEN

10.1057/9780230109896 - Names, Proverbs, Riddles, and Material Text in Robert Frost, Timothy O'Brien

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-14

Names, Proverbs, Riddles, and Material Text in Robert Frost

NAMES, PROVERBS, RIDDLES, AND MATERIAL TEXT IN ROBERT FROST

Copyright © Timothy D. O’Brien, 2010. First published in 2010 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978–0–230–10265–1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress. A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: July 2010 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

10.1057/9780230109896 - Names, Proverbs, Riddles, and Material Text in Robert Frost, Timothy O'Brien

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-14

All rights reserved.

10.1057/9780230109896 - Names, Proverbs, Riddles, and Material Text in Robert Frost, Timothy O'Brien

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-14

To Benay

10.1057/9780230109896 - Names, Proverbs, Riddles, and Material Text in Robert Frost, Timothy O'Brien

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-14

This page intentionally left blank

Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction

1

1

The Quest for a Name in “Frost”

11

2 Proverbs and the Quest for Certainty

51

3

The Riddle of It All

95

4

The Material Text as Witness Tree

125

Coda

177

Notes

179

Bibliography

193

Index

203

10.1057/9780230109896 - Names, Proverbs, Riddles, and Material Text in Robert Frost, Timothy O'Brien

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-14

Contents

10.1057/9780230109896 - Names, Proverbs, Riddles, and Material Text in Robert Frost, Timothy O'Brien

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-14

This page intentionally left blank

I thank the Naval Academy Research Council for several summer grants that permitted me to work on sections of this book. Also, I am grateful for the encouragement I have received from members of the Robert Frost Society, especially from Nancy Tuten, David Sanders, Tyler Hoffman, Robert Hass, Jonathan Barron, and Camille Roman, and also for the support of my terrific colleagues in the English Department at the U.S. Naval Academy.

Permissions The entire text of the poems “Beech,” “Sycamore,” “To An Ancient, “The Secret Sits,” and The Rose Family” and excerpts from various other Robert Frost poems, from The Poetry of Robert Frost, edited by Edward Connery Lathem. Copyright © 1969 by Henry Holt and Company. Reprinted by permission of Henry Holt and Company, LLC. Excerpts from various letters from Selected Letters of Robert Frost, edited by Lawrence Thompson. Compilation copyright © 1964 by Lawrence Thompson. Reprinted by arrangement with Henry Holt and Company. Letter # 34—February 19, 1912, from Robert Frost to Thomas B. Mosher Letter # 44—February 26, 1913, from R.F. to John T. Bartlett Letter # 79—May 18, 1914, from R.F. to Sidney Cox Letter # 93—December 1914 from R.F. to Sidney Cox Letter # 105—March 22, 1915, from R.F. to William Stanley Braithwaite Letter # 122—June 12, 1915, from R.F. to Edward Garnett Letter # 135—September 18, 1915, from R.F. to Walter Prichard Eaton Letter # 260—November 1927 from R.F. to Leonidas W. Payne, Jr. Letter # 276—September 1, 1929, from R.F. to John T. Bartlett Letter # 290—November 1930, from R.F. to Leonidas W. Payne, Jr. Letter # 331—November 1936, from R.F. to Bernard DeVoto

10.1057/9780230109896 - Names, Proverbs, Riddles, and Material Text in Robert Frost, Timothy O'Brien

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-14

Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments

Letter # 356—March 7, 1938, from R.F. to R. P. T. Coffin Letter dated January 1, 1917, to Louis Untermeyer from The Letters of Robert Frost to Louis Untermeyer. Compilation copyright © 1963 by Louis Untermeyer. Reprinted by permission of Henry Holt and Company, LLC. Parts of chapter 1 and chapter 4 have appeared in The Robert Frost Review 13 (2003) and 16 (2006) and are reprinted here by permission of the editors. J. B. Lankes has granted permission to reprint his father’s woodcut “The Witness Tree.” Dartmouth Library’s Rauner Special Collections, through the work of Joshua Shaw, has supplied a photograph of that J. J. Lankes woodcut and the painting by Alan Haemer from the dust jacket of A Witness Tree. I am grateful for Dartmouth Library’s permission to use these images. The image from The New England Primer is reproduced with permission from Special Collections, Musselman Library, Gettysburg College. The line drawings of a witness tree and blazes are reprinted from the University of Maryland Fact Sheet 619 with the permission of its authors and of the University of Maryland College of Agriculture and Natural Resources. Kevin Collins has granted permission to use his photograph of the Frost birth plaque on the cover.

10.1057/9780230109896 - Names, Proverbs, Riddles, and Material Text in Robert Frost, Timothy O'Brien

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-14

x

Sorry to have no name for you but You

When Robert Frost, in “The Figure a Poem Makes,” describes a poem as “[finding] its own name as it goes and [discovering] the best waiting for it in some final phrase . . . ” (777), he provides a glimpse into an important, though largely ignored, theme in his poetry.1 This theme, which I will call the quest for a name, cuts across all stages of Frost’s career and all forms of his poetry—the lyric, the meditative poem, the narrative, the eclogue, and the play. It emerges from Frost’s works in a number of ways—from his naming of the characters in his poems and plays to an entire poem, “Maple,” devoted to the problems loaded upon a child by overdetermined naming, to a short play, A Way Out, dramatizing the theft of a name and identity. It occurs in about forty poems partially or entirely devoted to the need to name and the limits of naming. And it shows up in, and in some cases controls, the structure and descriptive details of about forty other poems that express the author’s search for his poetic signature, for versions of a more authentic name than his own, some original sense of self that resists the vagaries of language and the material world. In depicting the poet as namer, Frost both follows Emerson and Thoreau and creates space between himself and them. As it emerges imaginatively from a large cross-section of his poetry, but in a concentrated way from West-Running Brook, this concern with names and naming takes on an impressive level of sophistication, treating such matters as the actual linguistic status of the name, the connection between name and identity, and the relationship between name and thing. Haunting this concern is Frost’s deep-seated questioning about his own name and his own identity, amounting in some cases to confessions about whether or not even the designator “I” points to anything that really exists. The body of Frost’s work displays a full array of positions on naming, ranging from the arrogant persona of New Hampshire, who easily labels people as either “prudes” or “pukes,” to the committed narrator of “Kitty Hawk,” who sees the human

10.1057/9780230109896 - Names, Proverbs, Riddles, and Material Text in Robert Frost, Timothy O'Brien

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-14

Introduction

Names, Proverbs, Riddles

need for “nomenclature” as the force driving us toward a union of spirit and material, and to the hopeful, yet resignedly puzzled, Narcissus figure in “For Once, Then, Something,” who finally spots an object at the bottom of the well into which he habitually peers, a presence beyond the mere reflection of himself, but can only name it “something.” This abiding interest in naming and the name that a poem arrives at as if by some magic of language and landscape underpins the other concerns that occupy this study, concerns that have been largely ignored in the sophisticated body of commentary on Frost’s poetry, politics, and life. One of these preoccupations is the proverb—in simple terms, a slightly longer version of the name in that it too identifies and captures, contains and packages, a human problem. As a testament to how fully commentators have ignored this proverbial inclination in Frost, the most thoroughgoing examination of it occurs as just a small part of Robert Faggen’s introduction to The Notebooks of Robert Frost. Those notebooks, as Faggen observes, display the ways in which Frost’s mind naturally turns toward the short, aphoristic observation, a “think,” to use the term favored by Frost (xviii-xix). About this tendency, Faggen makes three points that deserve repeating. The first relates to this notion of the proverbial expression as a “think”: Frost uses such expressions in his notebooks, letters, and poetry as openings for thought, not as closures to it. However, Frost’s use of proverbial-like expressions in his poetry has created the problem for many readers, as Faggen states it: “The power and lure of his aphorisms has made him both one of the most remembered and yet widely misapprehended of modern poets” (xx). The second point worth repeating from Faggen’s remarks is that Frost distinguished between obscurity in poetry, which he criticized, often when thinking of Eliot, and what he called in a 1961 reading at Yale, “dark sayings” (xxii). Frost explained: “Some people don’t know the difference between obscurity and what are called in ancient times ‘dark sayings,’ that you go deeper, darker in your life. But obscurity isn’t that. Obscurity is a cover for nothing. You go looking for it and it comes out ‘A stitch in time saves nine.’ But there are dark sayings” (qtd. in The Notebooks xxii). Faggen offers a further explanation: “A ‘dark saying,’ as Frost well knew, was the ancient Hebraic phrase for proverb, and it appears in both Proverbs and Psalms. The Hebrew word for proverb was mashal, which meant ‘coupling’—in other words an association of ideas demanding considerable thought and interpretation. Frost reminded his audience that the power and validity of ‘dark sayings’ was neither their inherent gloominess nor their opacity, but their power to inspire continued thought” (xxii). The third observation that Faggen makes about Frost’s attraction to the proverb is that it speaks to the poet’s notion that conflict is essential in real thinking and that it is part of his cultivation of a posture

10.1057/9780230109896 - Names, Proverbs, Riddles, and Material Text in Robert Frost, Timothy O'Brien

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-14

2

3

of rebellion against convention: “Wisdom literature,” writes Faggen, “particularly of the Hebrew Bible, was a rebuke to the Deuteronomic world of law and national covenant. Frost’s love of the proverb became symbolic of his particular approach to the contradictions of individual freedom within the constraints of social and national identity” (xxiv). As vital as they are to an understanding of Frost’s poetry, these observations do not fully enough interrogate Frost’s work with proverbs nor delve into the particular critique of them that, as Frost I think was well aware, the Book of Job offers. If proverbs are so invigorating to original thought, why does Frost so patronizingly dismiss “A stitch in time saves nine” when distinguishing between obscurity and “dark sayings?” That saying is certainly part of “the good old folkways” that Frost in a letter actually advises his friend Louis Untermeyer to follow. As Thoreau works with that very proverb, moreover, it does function as a “think”: “Men say that a stitch in time saves nine, and so they take a thousand stitches to-day to save nine tomorrow” (Thoreau 74). Also, if Frost’s attitude toward proverb-like sayings remained as positive as Faggen’s introduction leads us to believe, why does he use the figure of God in A Masque of Reason to express the limitations of those proverbial explanations for Job’s sufferings? The God in Frost’s masque, in fact, thanks Job for setting him free from the proverbial mind-set, “From moral bondage to the human race,” which put God in the position of having to “follow him/ With forfeits and rewards he understood” and of having “to prosper good and punish evil” (374). What Faggen characterizes as “Frost’s love of the proverb” must be seen more as “love/hate” of it, a rebellion against it, but a reliance on it as something which he can, as Poirier suggests in regard to the excursions in Frost’s poems, escape from but always return safely to (Robert Frost 172). It permits him to “be a swinger of birches.” In that poem about escape from the mundane, the speaker tempers his desire for escape by worrying that some fate will misunderstand his wish and “snatch” him “away not to return.” And at the very point of the spell that he puts upon that imagined “fate”—“May no fate willfully misunderstand me”—the speaker, interestingly, resorts to a mundane, proverb-like expression: “Earth’s the right place for love” (118). As with the exploration of the name in Frost’s poetry and other writings, so it is the case with this proverbial inclination: the affair unfolds as a repeated pattern of avowal and disavowal. The pattern moves through a search for a way of capturing the imponderable mystery of human existence and individual identity; it comes upon a name or a saying by which to make that recognition of the imponderable comprehensible; and then just as soon, it backs away from that naming, although even in the process of that withdrawal, it often fastens onto some fixed text—a

10.1057/9780230109896 - Names, Proverbs, Riddles, and Material Text in Robert Frost, Timothy O'Brien

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-14

Introduction

Names, Proverbs, Riddles

name or saying—as the very means of withdrawal and reconstitution of a temporarily secure sense of self. The third version of naming dealt with in this study is the riddle—not just of but in Frost’s poems, writings, and talks. The scholarship over the last thirty years has now made it commonplace to discuss Frost’s deviousness and complexity, his mischief making. The underdeveloped area in the growth of this critical commonplace—though I do not mean to suggest that the commentary emerges from anything but careful attention to various misdirections in Frost’s poems—is the identification of a formal way of appreciating this mischief. Poirier calls upon the psychology of D. W. Winnicot, particularly his notion of “transitional objects,” to explain Frost’s playfulness. And Katherine Kearns argues that the tension between appetite and control explains this perpetual game of hide and seek that many of Frost’s most sympathetic readers observe. My approach is more simply generic: the riddle as a minor genre can become a powerful way of detailing the transactional and cognitive dynamics, as well as the dangers and gains to Frost’s sense of self, of this sort of play. Again, this formal, and I hope productive, view of Frost as “riddler,” and even as the figure who fashions life as a predicament of having to be able to answer a threatening riddle, has not found its way into commentary of Frost’s works, even though that commentary often observes the enigmatic element in his writings. The riddles embedded within a number of Frost poems operate in similar ways to the trope of naming and the proverb. The riddle, obviously, involves naming, as the riddlee must come up with the name of the object enigmatically described by the riddler. In miniature, and in cognitive and psychological terms, it requires a quest. As ancient minor genre, moreover, it is part of the folkways that include also the proverb, though it operates in reverse of the proverb: it poses an oblique question and requires an overt answer, perhaps one tacitly involved in the question itself. The proverb offers a solution or answer to an implied problem or question. The interplay of these two genres itself adds to the overall rhythm of avowal and disavowal within Frost’s works. While undercutting conventions of power and authority, the riddle openly enacts power relations, though all the while tending not toward radical disruption but toward reaffirmation of a culture’s way of knowing. The inability to guess that the “whale road” is the sea, after all, both disarms one of complacent awareness and reaffirms cultural values. The riddle also operates on the border between language and objects: its descriptions defamiliarize objects so that the riddlee must experience them anew and must attend to their undeniable materiality. This is the area in which the riddle connects with our examination of the final expression of Frost’s quest for an identity: the attraction in his works toward and reaction

10.1057/9780230109896 - Names, Proverbs, Riddles, and Material Text in Robert Frost, Timothy O'Brien

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-14

4

5

against a materialism by which he defines his identity as poet. I refer to this broad tendency toward self-definition as the material text in Frost’s poetry. In part, Poirier has treated an aspect of this concern by focusing on “the problem of ‘thingness’ ” in Frost, even reversing the common sense of how words and things relate by suggesting that in Frost things stand for words (Robert Frost 330). Another aspect of this concern emerges in the way Frost does much to undermine his poems as autonomous texts. Part of that activity involves his carefully cultivated image as a bard, emphasized occasionally by the same aphoristic, proverbial tendency that, as Faggen explains, makes him such a misunderstood poet. This image was also created by his public readings, which, along with the aura of authorship and even celebrity that the Frost publishing industry fostered, put Frost in an uneasy relationship with his poems. Some sense of his presence was almost required for the poem to exist, especially when we consider the exaggerated emphasis his commentary on poetics gives to the “sound of sense,” the oral aspect of poetry as opposed to what he saw as the “barbaric” reliance on eye reading. The pattern of avowal and disavowal emerges in this arena as well. With the help of collectors, particularly Earle Bernheimer, and the various ways of issuing collections of his poetry, Frost also materialized his poetry to an extent likely unrivalled by any other poet. The very object—a signed copy of the juvenile Twilight, signed copies even of fabricated drafts of plays and poems and essays, the annual production of Christmas cards by Spiral Press fusing some form of visual art with a poem or passage from Frost’s works—became more materially valuable than any sentence sound echoing from the page. Like the name, the object, in these forms, functioned as a marker of the poet’s identity almost apart from the poetic expression. In addition, many of the poems themselves, in one way or another—the motif of black upon white that Kearns observes, various descriptions of nature as book, and techniques of defamiliarization—call attention to the text as a material entity and thus curiously undermine Frost’s emphasis on the oral element of poetry and poetry’s suggested dependence for its force on the implied presence of the poet’s voice. In essence, the success of Frost’s attempt to secure a formidable identity as poet through various materializations of his works undermines that very attempt to be known and understood as a poet. At stake in all of these related modes of exploring identity—of seeking the essential name of something or someone—is not just genre but also gender. Naming, the proverbial inclination, the material text itself, and in some ways the riddle are variously situated as male or female depending on the needs of the poet or the poet’s persona at the site of expression. Proverbial wisdom often represents male wisdom, but at the most fundamental stages it can represent something of a retreat, what is often posed

10.1057/9780230109896 - Names, Proverbs, Riddles, and Material Text in Robert Frost, Timothy O'Brien

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-14

Introduction

Names, Proverbs, Riddles

as a feminine undermining of the heroically male effort at staring into the face of meaninglessness. Naming, too, is a function of the patriarchy and yet, like the proverbial inclination, it operates in a way similar to Robert Graves’s “cool web” of language, a maternal, safe retreat from “too much joy and too much pain.” The riddle, though approaching the feminine and the taboo, at the same time preserves the rational, hierarchical, male world view. What is more, the frightening prospect of the material text in Frost’s works has much to do with its feminine aspect. The very word “material,” as we shall explore more fully, is closely related to the word “mater” and to the ancient word for tree or tree trunk. As if it were not enough that the trees and woods are alone seductive, smothering, and frightening sites in Frost’s poems, they must have this fundamental relation to both the maternal and the material. At the same time, however, Frost works overtime to define himself and his poems as material, as commodities of real, solid value. An eighteen-line poem in triplets, “To an Ancient” from Steeple Bush can serve as a brief means of looking forward to the ways in which these themes, sometimes one more dominant than the others, emerge from Frost’s poetry: Your claims to immortality were two. The one you made, the other one you grew. Sorry to have no name for you but You. We never knew exactly where to look, But found one in the delta of a brook, One in a cavern where you used to cook. Coming on such an ancient human trace Seems as expressive of the human race As meeting someone living, face to face. We date you by your depth in silt and dust Your probable brute nature is discussed. At which point we are totally nonplussed. You made the eolith, you grew the bone, The second more peculiarly your own, And likely to have been enough alone. You make me ask if I would go to time Would I gain anything by using rhyme? Or aren’t the bones enough I live to lime? (345)

In a version of ekphrasis, the persona of this poem speaks to two objects, one a bone from an ancient human and the other an eolith that the ancient presumably fashioned with her hands. The poem works through

10.1057/9780230109896 - Names, Proverbs, Riddles, and Material Text in Robert Frost, Timothy O'Brien

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-14

6

7

routine scientific evaluation and comes to an impasse: “We date you by your depth in silt and dust / Your probable brute nature is discussed. / At which point we are totally nonplussed.” The persona then wonders about the value of the eolith and whether or not the bone itself is not enough to express this brute identity, which in the third line the persona admitted could only be captured by the pronoun “You”—“Sorry to have no name for you but You.” The final stanza becomes more intimate, abandoning the evaluating first-person plural and adopting the first-person singular, who wonders about the relative value of his own artistic endeavors and his mere material composition, wonders ultimately whether his poetry has anything to do with who or what he is. Like the more famous example of ekphrasis, Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” this poem concentrates on an artifact, emphasizes its visual and material qualities, and thereby struggles to find meaning for itself beyond its own mere physicality as reflected in that artifact. Such encounters between the poem and the material world occur again and again in Frost’s poetry, and often the feature encountered has been dislodged from its familiar place in a whole, has become a fragment of some sort, and thereby, as with Heidegger’s broken hammer, turned into a striking expression of its basic, material nature. The same thing has occurred in this work, as the cooking device and bone pieces are displayed, yes for scientific inquiry, but also for their mere materiality, a materiality which requires us to see ourselves as made of just such basic parts and to question our accustomed sense of wholeness and unity. The very bone, for instance, is more the ancient’s own than the artifact, but it is more peculiarly his own, as if what is innate is stranger than the fashioned product. In fact, Frost uses the focus on fragments to pull apart the features of his own poem and to see it as an amalgam of material elements. “Going to time,” after all, means both to be given over to history and archeology eventually as mere bone and to write in meter. “Using rhyme” is another more obvious instance of this synecdoche. Such disaggregation of wholes leads to the radical question about whether or not an attempt to achieve meaning and identity through verse, which has been rendered a mere amalgam, matters anymore than merely living to die and fertilize the soil: “Or aren’t the bones enough I live to lime?” The dire prospect of life as no more than a material existence is so thoroughly emphasized in this stanza—even in the question of whether anything is gained through poetry—that it is also easy to overlook the verbal play. In fact, that final line unfolds in a strange enough way to open up its syntax to ambivalence. It seems as though “bones” works as the object of “lime,” so that the speaker lives merely to provide some sort of element, like lime, that would preserve his bones, or in a sense fertilize

10.1057/9780230109896 - Names, Proverbs, Riddles, and Material Text in Robert Frost, Timothy O'Brien

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-14

Introduction

Names, Proverbs, Riddles

them. But the meaning of this more conventional syntax seems a stretch— how does the flesh fertilize a bone that will not grow? This catch in the meaning opens the final line up to its shadow implication, the product of its double syntactical nature: “Or aren’t the bones enough” comprising one unit and “I live to lime” making up another, a mere assertion about the purpose of the speaker’s life. In this way, the word “lime” can mean birdlime as well, suggesting that the persona-poet lives as well to ensnare unwitting “birds.” He lives to fool those bones, his materiality, into feeling they comprise a unified identity and/or to fool others with his poetry, perhaps fooling them into thinking it is meaningful. Like many of the poems we will investigate, this one moves toward a generalizing conclusion, in this case not something like a proverbial statement, but more its opposite, a riddling question. This riddling question also casts the poet as potentially the devious riddler, who lives to “lime” his trees with ensnaring material, who “limes,” in the sense of flattering and deceiving, his readers. The poem, then, troubles our feeling of security in naming with its sense that the only name for this ancient is the mere linguistic pointer “you,” nothing more meaningful and integral to identity than that. The poem calls into question its own status by inviting us to see its reflection in the material fragments dug up in delta and run across in cavern. It also subverts the need for a palliative, proverbial conclusion by offering instead an enigmatic, riddling alternative, “I live to lime,” perhaps the embodying description of the poet as Frost sees “him.” All of these functions undermine certainty and put the reader in the position of the subordinate riddlee, depending on the poet for some name that he will not, and cannot, provide. Though Karen Kilcup and, to a lesser extent, Robert Hass, for example, have quite persuasively highlighted shifts in Frost’s stylistic and thematic emphases, my assumption in this study is that Frost’s poetry does not display obvious, bold phases of development, beyond perhaps an early youthfulness and a later decline. In terms of the several related themes I examine in this study, however, certain books do express a more-thanusual concern with each. For instance, the poems in North of Boston often pivot on a saying or proverbial statement, explore the ways in which such prefabricated ways of knowing interfere with and also preserve relationships. As I have mentioned, West-Running Brook collects the most poems representing the problems of naming. In less obvious but still noticeable ways, the poems of A Further Range betray many of the traits of riddles, not only in terms of form but also in terms of the way they communicate a certain tone and relationship between their persona and readers. And the extraordinary volume, A Witness Tree, with its opening identification of poet and tree, more than any other volume, captures Frost’s concern with

10.1057/9780230109896 - Names, Proverbs, Riddles, and Material Text in Robert Frost, Timothy O'Brien

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-14

8

9

the materiality of his poems. These rather modest claims about emphases in these four volumes, however, will not keep us from ranging throughout Frost’s works—from the poems to the drama to the essays and the various records of public and private communications—as a way of delving into these largely ignored underpinnings to Frost’s ambivalent quest for identity as a poet.

10.1057/9780230109896 - Names, Proverbs, Riddles, and Material Text in Robert Frost, Timothy O'Brien

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-14

Introduction

10.1057/9780230109896 - Names, Proverbs, Riddles, and Material Text in Robert Frost, Timothy O'Brien

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-14

This page intentionally left blank

The Quest for a Name in “Frost”

By proper names I find I do my thinking

In an interview conducted by reporter John Sherrill for the August 1955 edition of Guideposts, an inspirational monthly publication, Frost offers some curious observations about naming. In fact, he anticipates the questioning by saying, “I hope you won’t ask me to put names on things . . . I’m afraid of that” (Interviews 148). And in response to Sherrill’s first question about what God meant to him in “Bereft,” he says, “If you would learn the way a man feels about God, don’t ask him to put a name on himself. All that is said with names is soon not enough” (149). Sherrill sums up Frost’s message in this way: “Imagine that you see a butterfly, and its beauty is something you want to capture and take home with you. You catch the butterfly and place it carefully on a cardboard under glass. And to your sorrow, you haven’t caught the butterfly at all. You can examine the thing that you have under glass, and give it a name. But your relation to it is changed. Where once the butterfly had a subtle, vibrant aliveness, the very act of pinning it down has destroyed it for you” (150). In his attempt to express his close understanding of Frost in a Romantic way, Sherrill partly does to the complexity in Frost’s words about naming what he claims ought to be avoided in the case of the butterfly. In this chapter I would like to move beyond this limited response and explore Frost’s dauntingly complex sense of the name, including both his negotiation with the idea of poet as namer and his repeated poetic attempts to find or create his own name through his poems. In both cases, this theme of the name and of the poet’s signature emerging from his works involves the issue of identity that I have discussed in the Introduction.

10.1057/9780230109896 - Names, Proverbs, Riddles, and Material Text in Robert Frost, Timothy O'Brien

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-14

Chapter 1

Names, Proverbs, Riddles

This search for identity involves the basic philosophical issues, as well, that Lentricchia and Stanlis most prominently highlight: those related to the post-Kantian, Romantic tradition within which and against which Frost’s poetry, with its Jamesian, pragmatic bent, works. As Lentricchia captures it, Frost’s poetic development involves a Romantic inclination to constitute an identity from imagination, but not one that establishes the identity’s existence in terms of universal truths; instead, that imagination works upon the material world acknowledged to be “out there,” separate from the perceiving mind, and skeptically constitutes “a self in language against” the objects in that world (Lentricchia, Robert Frost 137). One of the trickiest jobs for readers of Frost’s poetry, however, is to negotiate the encounters Frost’s personae have with the material world. This job is tricky because often these encounters quite transparently enclose a search for “the answer,” for some universal truth. Thus, while the momentum of the poems—and we’ll see this as they move toward acts of naming, of coming up with some proverbial solution to a problem, or of constructing a riddle about an object to be identified—flows toward some unifying answer, their various eddies work back against that movement, undercutting any definite sense of meaning derived from the search, leaving only signs that the fundamental elements of human experience are unnameable. The most apparent area of naming in Frost’s poetry can best be approached through territory marked off by Emerson. In two works, the poem “Hamatreya” and the essay “The Poet,” Emerson establishes the rough boundaries of one area of naming in Frost’s poetry. At one extreme, naming expresses the arrogant desire to possess and control, as suggested in “Hamatreya”: Minott, Lee, Willard, Hosmer, Meriam, Flint Possessed the land which rendered to their toil Hay, corn, roots, hemp, flax, apples, wool, and wood. Each of these landlords walked amidst his farm, Saying, “ ‘Tis mine, my children’s and my name’s.” (1–5)1

The ubi sunt? stanza that follows (Where are these Men? Asleep beneath the grounds,” 11), along with the “Earth Song,” in which Earth claims her independence from men, undercuts avaricious naming. This combination of nature’s resistance to naming and man’s need to control nature by labeling occurs either peripherally or centrally in a number of Frost’s poems. For instance, in “A Hundred Collars,” Lafayette’s neck is outgrowing his collars just as “a nursery tree . . . outgrows the wire band of its name tag” (51). In “Paul’s Wife,” Paul’s possessiveness toward his wife, who is so thoroughly “natural” as to have emerged from a log, extends to his

10.1057/9780230109896 - Names, Proverbs, Riddles, and Material Text in Robert Frost, Timothy O'Brien

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-14

12

13

not wanting anyone else to “so much as name her” (182). “The Birthplace” amounts to a miniature, though tonally more sympathetic, version of the above passage from Emerson’s “Hamatreya” in that it describes a father’s attempt to subdue a mountain slope with “chains of wall” and create generally a permanence of possessions only to have the mountain figuratively “push [the family] off her knees,” leaving “her lap . . . full of trees” and being finally unable, in a typical Frostian personification, to “know [their] name” (243).2 The barn in “The Need of Being Versed in Country Things” similarly remains untouched by the fire that destroyed the farm house as a reminder of the futility of naming: it “was left / To bear forsaken the place’s name” (223). This attention to possessive naming emerges also from the rather arrogant and self-satisfied voice of the narrator of “New Hampshire,” as he labels one thing after another—ranging from “prude” to “puke,” from “New York alec” to “sensibilitist”—even while resisting labels for himself. Naming is also the central concern in the poem “WestRunning Brook,” in which the conversation between husband and wife is monumentalized by their agreeing that the day will be forever marked as the one on which she named the brook: “ . . . today will be the day / You said the brook was called West-running Brook” (238).3 That naming, in fact, is the kind of countercurrent and so in part noble activity that Fred dwells upon in his meditation. In “Kitty Hawk,” labeling amounts to an unavoidable—if not the unavoidable—part of man’s heroic spirit.4 The act of naming becomes a call to action, a version of the counter-current that is human nature: The uplifted sight We enjoyed at night When instead of sheep We were counting stars, Not to go to sleep, But to stay awake For good gracious’ sake, Naming stars to boot To avoid mistake, Jupiter and Mars, Just like Pullman cars, ’Twas no vain pursuit. Some have preached and taught All there was to thought Was to master Nature By some nomenclature. But if not a law ’Twas an end foregone

10.1057/9780230109896 - Names, Proverbs, Riddles, and Material Text in Robert Frost, Timothy O'Brien

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-14

The Quest for a Name in “Frost”

Names, Proverbs, Riddles Anything we saw And thus fastened on With an epithet, We would see to yet— We would want to touch Not to mention clutch. (449)

In general Frost’s treatment of naming is marked by sympathy, questioning, and complexity rather than satirical judgment or the kind of purely Romantic sensibility expressed in Sherrill’s recharacterization of Frost’s words in the Guideposts interview. Frost gives naming this complex treatment partly because of his fundamental ambivalence about the poet as namer.5 In “The Poet,” Emerson depicts the poet as “the Namer, or Languagemaker, naming things sometimes after their appearance, sometimes after their essence, and giving to every one its own name and not another’s, thereby rejoicing the intellect, which delights in detachment of boundary” (Selected Essays 271). Emerson does acknowledge that “it is dislocation and detachment from the life of God, that makes things ugly” (269); and he does, as the previous quotation suggests, isolate an Adamic power in the poet to connect words with some underlying truth, to bring understanding readers out of their Platonic cave into the light of authentic perception, or at least close to a glimpse of the truth behind the symbols in which they by custom have been buried: “The world being thus put under the mind for verb and noun, the poet is he who can articulate it. For, though life is great, and fascinates, and absorbs,—and though all men are intelligent of the symbols through which it is named,—yet they cannot originally use them . . . The poet, by an ulterior intellectual perception, gives them power which makes their old use forgotten, and puts eyes, and a tongue, into every dumb and inanimate object. He perceives the thought’s independence of the symbol, the stability of the thought, the accidency and fugacity of the symbol” (270). Common humans live in a “prison house of language,” but nevertheless feel the desire to express a truth that haunts them: “The inaccessibleness of every thought but that we are in, is wonderful. What if you come near to it,—you are as remote, when you are nearest, as when you are farthest. Every thought is also a prison; every heaven is also a prison. Therefore we love the poet, the inventor, who in any form, whether in an ode, or in an action, or in looks and behavior, has yielded us a new thought. He unlocks our chains, and admits us to a new scene” (278). He continues: “Hence the necessity of speech and song; hence these throbs and heart-beatings of the orator, at the door of the assembly, to the end, namely, that thought may be ejaculated as Logos, or Word” (282).

10.1057/9780230109896 - Names, Proverbs, Riddles, and Material Text in Robert Frost, Timothy O'Brien

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-14

14

15

Frost’s treatment of naming in part interrogates Emerson’s notion that “the ground is all memoranda and signatures” that the poet, the truly original poet, can read, as Emerson puts it in his essay on Goethe (Complete Works 4:261). In the process of that interrogation, often taking the shape of a quest for the original name lurking in landscape, Frost offers a sophisticated skepticism about language and the name. On the one hand, he returns to, or tries to return to, the idea that the poet’s heightened sensitivity to language and to the world around him can somehow break through the veil that separates postlapsarian from prelapsarian language. Most often, though, Frost’s exploration of naming shows that it fails; names do not identify the “truth’ about who or where we are except insofar as they miss the mark.6 Naming, though, often emerges from the poems as the fundamental action in human nature. Thus, Frost’s poems enact an investigation into the language by which they are constituted, into the names they give things, and, as we shall see in a later chapter, into the frighteningly inexpressible materialilty of their existence. An occasionally cited passage on onomatopoeia from Frost’s Notebooks, in fact, playfully derails the easy notion that the sign has, at its origins, a one-to-one correspondence with the object that it identifies: God said to Adam “You wait here till I drive up some of these new animals for you to name. So God went over into the woods and pretty soon he came back driving a bear ahead of him. And he shouted to Adam to have a name ready to {give the bear} as he went by. And Adam made his mind just as blank as he could so that when the bear came into his head there wouldn’t be anything else there and he would get a snap result from his first impression. Well the minute he got a full view of him he got it. He made the first sound that came into his mouth, “Bear.” “Bear,” God said, “what do you call him that for?” “Because it sound[s] the way he looks Don’t you think so?” And God said It doesn’t yet but probably will when I’ve heard it in connection with him often enough We’ll let it go at that. Men will be children. Stay where you are and I’ll drive you up another.” Thus was started one of the most dangerous and foolish theories in poetry. (360–61)7

One of the most recognizable features in Frost’s poetry is its combination of positive and negative designation of things, as Poirier suggests (Robert Frost 335). This combination betrays Frost’s extraordinarily rich sense of the problem of naming. On the one hand, his narrators are nothing if not namers—namers of characters; namers of flowers, trees, and weeds; namers of the constellations and planets. Naming is as urgent as his returning to physical structures—homes, cellars, doors, windows, barns, Pullman cars, and woodpiles—in order to make sense out of an ultimately nameless and shapeless existence. His poems’ speakers, however, just as

10.1057/9780230109896 - Names, Proverbs, Riddles, and Material Text in Robert Frost, Timothy O'Brien

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-14

The Quest for a Name in “Frost”

Names, Proverbs, Riddles

often betray a troubling resistance to naming things—“Something there is that doesn’t love a wall” (39, emphasis added); “for once, then, something” (208, emphasis added); “the most of it” developing into “that was all” (306, emphasis added); even the “Sorry to have no name for you but You, in “To an Ancient” (345, emphasis added).8 Importantly, Frost’s ranging from name-dropping to the dropping of names captures one of the basic issues in theorizing about the proper name and its possible special connection with its referent, what Gregory McCulloch in The Game of the Name calls the “Basic Problem.” According to this problem, the notion that proper names always refer to an object, or to a description of that object, is vulnerable because routinely the material world just does not offer up the specific object referred to. McCulloch playfully offers the examples, “the woman who married Richard Burton” and “the number larger than four million” (44). A word can function strictly as a proper name only in the presence of that which it designates, as a kind of pointer to a thing. The proper name operates outside of classmatic meaning of other nouns and thus, as Husserl argues, offers a fascinating coincidence of sense and referent, a coincidence that betrays a feeling of authenticity and origin (Willems 102–3). Trying to express his notion of the purity of proper names, Bertrand Russell famously asserted, “The only words one does use as names in the logical sense are words like ‘this’ or ‘that’ ” (McCulloch 74). In this sense, the apparent contradiction in Frost’s poetry between a craving for names on the one hand and a penchant for employing such terms as “this” and “it” on the other actually adds to a rich exploration of the problems of naming. Though it is a matter for a fuller discussion later in this study, his peculiar use of pronouns reflects a conflict in his poetics between a professed orality and an actual textuality. Apart from the more famous examples of “The Most of It” and “For Once, Then, Something,” the last poem from A Further Range, “A Missive Missile,” serves as a useful, because not so obvious, example of the way in which Frost builds the problem of the name into many of his poems. One of the poems that best captures what Frost meant when he said that his poems have literary criticism written into them, “A Missive Missile” treats the impossibility that an ancient pebble dotted with red can be interpreted accurately—the meaning, for the narrator, is either “unknown” or else entirely his own private one (300).9 The poem ends with these sad lines: Far as we aim our signs to reach, Far as we often make them reach, Across the soul-from-soul abyss, There is an aeon-limit set Beyond which they are doomed to miss.

10.1057/9780230109896 - Names, Proverbs, Riddles, and Material Text in Robert Frost, Timothy O'Brien

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-14

16

The Quest for a Name in “Frost”

17

Rhyming with both “abyss” and “miss,” “this” at the very end of the poem either explodes with meaning or implodes because of a lack of it. Perhaps it does both. As is often the case, a word (particularly a pronoun) in a Frost poem serves as both a referent and a self-referent. It refers to the speaker’s time and place and perhaps even to the poem we are reading; but “this” also refers to itself as word. Thus the beach and its particular artifact in the speaker’s hand cannot even go so far as to point in a brutally inarticulate way—it cannot even so much as grunt, “this.” As an “Afterthought” at the end of the volume A Further Range, whose dedication speaks to the wideranging, expansive nature of its poetry (977), “A Missive Missile” undercuts the whole enterprise of the volume by suggesting that the expansive ranges of difference referred to in the dedication cannot be bridged and that even the verbal signs of poetry, especially absent the speaker’s presence, cannot be trusted to communicate the writer’s intention. The speaker holds “the ocher-written flint” and realizes that its meaning “is unknown, / Or else” entirely the speaker’s: “All modern, nothing ancient in’t, / Unsatisfying to us each” (300). Frost’s exploration of naming—both in terms of positive and negative designation—reveals that ultimately it fails: it cannot identify the truth about who we are, no matter how blessed and talented the poet-namer is. In fact, Poirier puts it much more strongly: “The admissions of an elusive self are meant to defeat our discovery that in fact there is in his poetry a true absence of self” (“Frost” 225). Instead of referring to a communicable meaning, “this” only points to an object, whether it is the ocher-written flint or the black type on the white page before the reader. Paradoxically, the very inability to name becomes the ultimate in meaning. The key here is Frost’s vision—expressed early on in “The Trial by Existence”—that life is “The trial by existence named, / The obscuration upon earth” (28). The word “named” in this passage, as Herbert Marks has pointed out, can be taken as the predicate of “trial,” but also “by a Latinate inversion, as qualifying ‘existence’—the submission to language thus constituting the trial” (130). In other words, the trial of the souls involves having to live by language and naming, even though that symbolic activity cannot give them access to what they have lost. Frost repeatedly marks the limits of naming and the almost sublime significance of that borderland by describing frustrated naming or the absence of a need to name something. As I have already claimed, this theme occurs throughout his poetry, from “The Trial by Existence” to “Blueberries” (the flower without a name in

10.1057/9780230109896 - Names, Proverbs, Riddles, and Material Text in Robert Frost, Timothy O'Brien

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-14

Two souls may be too widely met. That sad-with-distance river beach With mortal longing may beseech; It cannot speak as far as this. (300)

Names, Proverbs, Riddles

the baskets carried by the young Lorens) to “I Will Sing You One-O” (the clock-tower’s naming the hour “one” and thus almost controlling the heavenly bodies in doing so) to “The Discovery of the Madeiras” (the castaway’s engraving the name of his beloved on the rocks and the island, unfairly, being named after him rather than her) to “How Hard It is to Keep from Being King . . . ” (the poet naming according to “exact affinity”). However, the most concentrated set of poems exploring naming and the inexpressible truth in the name occurs in one of Frost’s least-praised volumes, WestRunning Brook. Along with the title poem, the poems in this group are “The Rose Family,” “On Going Unnoticed,” “A Passing Glimpse,” “Bereft,” “The Last Mowing,” “The Birthplace,” “The Door in the Dark,” and “Sitting by a Bush in Broad Sunlight.” First the title poem. It grows out of layered and repeated acts of naming. The title itself, a name for the poem, comes from the name of a brook given by a young wife at the beginning of a reflective, almost unrealistically philosophical, discussion between her and her husband. That name given by the wife because the brook runs westward and so counters the direction of all the other brooks in the area is confirmed in a parenthetical expression by the narrator: “ ‘West-running Brook then call it.’ (West-running Brook men call it to this day.)” (236). It remains unclear if the wife’s naming stands as the original naming which “men” followed thereafter, or if coincidentally the name she gives it merely reaffirms what it had been named all along. Nevertheless, this early part of the conversation, along with the wife’s personal sense that the brook’s countercurrent created by its flow against a rock waves to her “in an annunciation,” a kind of naming itself, suggests the feminine power to name, despite perhaps the latter-day, male reinforced tradition of the name—“West-running Brook men call it to this day.” In fact, the husband, unlike his wife possessing a name (Fred), playfully cedes ownership of the brook to his wife because of what he characterizes as the inaccessibility of her female intuition and so identification of and with the brook: “Oh, if you take it off to lady-land, As’t were the country of the Amazons We men must see you to the confines of And leave you there, ourselves forbid to enter— It is your brook! I have no more to say.” (237)

In fact, he has much more to say, particularly about the way in which the countercurrent expresses the very nature of humans, the egregious, resistant self-consciousness that marks the species at its best. As Walter Jost, perhaps the most sympathetic and admiring of the poem’s readers, points

10.1057/9780230109896 - Names, Proverbs, Riddles, and Material Text in Robert Frost, Timothy O'Brien

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-14

18

19

out, Fred’s reflection, as abstract, wide-ranging, and even apparently contradictory as it is, fuses the question of the human beings’ identity with the dominant issue of naming throughout the poem. The countercurrent in the brook itself captures the questioning, questing, symbolic act of naming; and that urge to name, as Jost, in the context of a comparison between Frost and Heidegger, argues, is also an urge for origins, “The tribute of the current to the source” (32). “It is,” continues Fred, “from this in nature we are from. / It is most us” (238). This identification is a name: the white wave on the black current, a combination of white and black evoking (even as a visual reversal) ink and paper, amounts to a sign about who we are. That name, though, expresses a kind of horror, or what Jost calls “the abyss of naming” (40), even though the poem’s tone remains curiously light. This horror derives from that absence and loss of self, or even the loss of the essence of a thing always somehow embedded in the act of finding a name, an act that essentially classifies and generalizes as it tries to identify something individual. In some ways like Arnold’s “Dover Beach,” this poem calls for the kind of parody of high seriousness offered by Anthony Hecht’s “The Dover Bitch.” Frost senses that and so creates another problem, the incongruity between tone and subject matter noticed by many of the poem’s readers. Though the woman in this poem, unlike Arnold’s mistress, is permitted to speak and name, and though she actually invites the man to pursue his philosophical meditation on the countercurrent, she must nevertheless listen quietly and become the poetic vehicle to rescue the poem from its heavy philosophizing with the obligatory response, “ ‘Today will be the day / You said so’ ” (238). The poem closes with a volley of naming: the naming that takes place in these humoring words by the wife—the name of the day they have just had—and that continued in Fred’s claim that it will be the day she “said the brook was called West-running Brook,’ ” and her concluding effort to make the act of naming a mutual one, “ ‘Today will be the day of what we both said’ ” (238). These naming acts operate as a recovery from the profound sense of naming as an act of peering into the abyss of nothingness, or if not that, perhaps a drawing back from the closeto-confessional expression by Frost of his religious belief, as Thompson suggests (Years of Triumph 303). This concluding series of names given to what has happened is not so much a countercurrent, however, as a “going with the flow,” as a way to return to day-to-day operations as must the family at the end of “Out, Out—.” That retreat is in fact already built into the untenable metaphor upon which Frost bases the poem. The vehicle of the metaphor is a brook that runs against the direction of all the other brooks; the tenor is a prized tendency to risk countercurrency. So far, so good. However, that unusual

10.1057/9780230109896 - Names, Proverbs, Riddles, and Material Text in Robert Frost, Timothy O'Brien

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-14

The Quest for a Name in “Frost”

Names, Proverbs, Riddles

flow already against that of the common brooks of the region actually undermines the image of this brook’s own countercurrent as a kind of rebellious originality and authenticity against mindless nature. In other words, if West-running Brook is offered as an example of a human-defining counteractivity equivalent to consciousness and awareness of mortality, as well as a kind of thinking that, in Thoreauvian and Emersonian terms, signals real, authentic human nature as opposed to thoughtless conventionality, then its own countercurrent moves back in the direction of conventionality, in the direction that all the other brooks go—eastward toward the sea. Perhaps, though, this apparent contradiction is less an accident than part of the poem’s meaning: countercurrency and naming is at once risk and safe activation of convention; it works in both directions in that finally the most rebellious acts are ultimately quite conventional ones.10 In a poem enacting metaphorical naming, it does fit that the limit of the metaphorical venture, the site of its failure, is inscribed within it. The least skeptical of the naming poems in West-Running Brook is “Sitting by a Bush in Broad Sunlight.” The poem uses a narrator’s experience of catching a ray of sunlight between thumb and fingers as the pretext for a meditation on how far removed we are from the Creation, “When dust really took in the sun” (244) and formed breathing life. Just because we haven’t actually seen “sun-smitten slime / Again come to life and crawl off” (244) does not mean it didn’t happen, offers the speaker.11 Then he immediately alludes to God’s true, speaking presence as declared in the burning bush as well as to God’s lasting withdrawal. This curious combination of Darwinian and Old Testament versions of creation expresses vividly our separation from some original, paradisal state; and yet it need not mean that truth is unrecoverable: God once spoke to people by name. The sun once imparted its flame. One impulse persists as our breath; The other persists as our faith. (244)

The difference between the two states resembles the difference between the souls in heaven and those infused into flesh on earth in “Trial by Existence”: God “once declared he was true” and spoke to humans “by name” (244); after that, however, he departed, leaving them separated from the realm of dependable naming and having to rely on a diminished version of that authoritative voicing—human language, “our breath,” which never can resemble, except insofar as there is faith, the original language symbolized by the burning bush and the act of naming. Such a search for origin as this poem plays out, in fact, often accompanies the search

10.1057/9780230109896 - Names, Proverbs, Riddles, and Material Text in Robert Frost, Timothy O'Brien

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-14

20

21

for a name, and the failures of that search amount to failures of naming. Frost later plays with this idea of an original, infallible language when he has God tell Job in A Masque of Reason, “By proper names I find I do my thinking” (379). Frost’s poems concerned with naming, then, participate in “the post-Kantian doubt about the certainty of knowledge . . . and the questions of how one reads inner meaning from outer shape” described by Irwin in American Hieroglyphics. “These basic questions of meaning,” he explains, “inevitably turn out to be questions of origin and ends. From the time of the Romantic poets on, the investigation of man’s linguistic relationship to the world frequently takes the form of literary works whose inquiry into the origin of their own written presence on the page is a synecdoche for the inquiry into the simultaneous origin of man and the world in the act of symbolization” (55). We have already touched on the way in which “The Birthplace” represents the futility of naming as an attempt at possession. This meaning to a certain extent undermines the more self-satisfied naming done in WestRunning Brook’s title poem. As Katherine Kearns and Mark Richardson point out, “The Birthplace” also allegorizes what occurs in a muted form in “West-Running Brook”: the competition between male naming and imposition of order on the one hand and a subversive sense of unruly, female materiality and natural marking of the landscape on the other (Kearns 19–21; Richardson 47–48). Even the seemingly innocent smile in the lines “The mountain seemed to like the stir, / And made of us a little while— / With always something in her smile” (243) contains within it the dread of castration by the vagina dentate. Other poems—“On Going Unnoticed,” “The Last Mowing,” and “A Passing Glimpse”—explore the way unsuccessful naming marks off a region of powerful meaning, that margin between the namable and the unnamable. “On Going Unnoticed” treats a second-person protagonist who looks up into “the tumult of free leaves on high” (226), amid which din any speech is vain. The question that the narrator asks of his protagonist is one of identity: “What are you, in the shadow of trees / Engaged up there with the light and breeze?” (226). Grasping the bark of trees, the “you” in the poem “look[s] up small from the forest’s feet” and notices that the only leaf that the tree drops “goes wide, / [His] name not written on either side” (226). Couched allusively in terms of Macbeth’s own futile attempt to achieve—and be certain about—a name as he “frets his hour upon the stage,” the frustrated quest by Frost’s protagonist for his name ends with a compensatory theft a là those namers in Emerson’s “Hamatreya”: You linger your little hour and are gone, And still the woods sweep leafily on,

10.1057/9780230109896 - Names, Proverbs, Riddles, and Material Text in Robert Frost, Timothy O'Brien

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-14

The Quest for a Name in “Frost”

22

Names, Proverbs, Riddles

In the “A Passing Glimpse” and “The Last Mowing,” the unnamable site or thing marks that which is meaningful. Neither poem emphasizes so much the poet’s anxiety over namelessness as the mystical nature of it. In “A Passing Glimpse,” the narrator thinks he glimpses flowers beside the tracks as his train car rushes past: he names all the flowers he is sure they are not— fireweed, bluebells, and lupine—and finally asks if something had not just “brushed across [his] mind / That no one on earth will ever find?” (227). The poem ends with the following aphorism: “Heaven gives its glimpses only to those / Not in position to look too close” (227). Frustrated naming, even if suggested as an opening onto the wonderful mystery of things, gives way, interestingly, to one of the other miniature genres of naming we will investigate later in this study, the proverb. Because the poem and its dedication monumentalize Frost’s reading of Ridgely Torrence’s volume of poems, Hesperides, the issues of naming and inexpressibility relate particularly to the kind of meaning, the kind of truth, captured by poetry: that meaning has more to do with the extent to which the poem marks off the unnamed territory and experience than with the things it can name. This unnamable and therefore sublimely precious experience is also the subject of “The Last Mowing.” Abandoned for the purposes of mowing, “Faraway Meadow” (the named spot of the unnamable experience) offers a glimpse of wildness, of a place where “tumultuous flowers” can “go to waste and go wild in, / All shapes and colors of flowers,” which the speaker need not call “by name” (243). The process of naming marks off a site for whose “wildness” names are irrelevant. Naming is thus important, but not so much for what it identifies as for what it suggests remains inexpressible, uncapturable.13 To this extent, it is not, as in Emerson, the unlocking of this inaccessible realm of meaning that the poem is about so much as the very marking off of the limits of expression, the venturing to that borderland of language where meaning and naming must fail. The poem monumentalizes the failure of naming. Two other poems, again from West-Running Brook, without overtly referring to the act of naming, subtly identify this borderland marked off by names. The first is “Bereft,” one of Frost’s poems of terror, according to Lionel Trilling. At home by himself, the speaker holds open his “restive door” looking out upon the threatening weather—complete with “clouds massed,” leaves forming a coil and hissing, and “Something sinister in the tone” of it all that told him his “secret must be known”: Word I was in the house alone Somehow must have gotten abroad,

10.1057/9780230109896 - Names, Proverbs, Riddles, and Material Text in Robert Frost, Timothy O'Brien

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-14

Not even missing the coral-root flower You took as a trophy of the hour. (226)12

The Quest for a Name in “Frost”

23

The use of “Word” here depends on the common expression, “word is out.” It also quite boldly alludes to the beginning of John: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God.” Because of this allusion, “Word” functions, at least in part, as name. The repetition of “Word I was” and the beginning of the last line, “Word I had,” suggest that the speaker is nothing if not “Word,” and thus involved in language. His very identity is words; and as mere word(s) he is bereft, separated from everything and everyone around him, including himself because, after all, the repetition of “Word I” merely emphasizes the strange difference between the arbitrary expression that identifies him—“I” as just a word—and the “essential” entity to which, he thought, “I” referred. Frost’s reported statement about the pronoun “I” after a public reading of “Mending Wall,” I think, captures this arbitrariness about words, labels, and pronouns. It is the feeling we can sometimes have when we just repeat a word or name over and over again and it becomes mere sound, detached from what we had assumed was its fixed referential anchor. Frost said, “The more I say I the more I always mean something else” (qtd. in Mauro, 104). After reciting “The Silken Tent” on another occasion, he reportedly offered, “I sometimes think that there is no I” (qtd. in Mauro 104). Importantly, our focus here highlights how much like the confining settings emphasized by scholars—houses and woods—names and words are, so that those settings themselves turn back upon the language describing them as a reflection of their own limiting function. The house in which Frost’s speaker is alone is the house also of the words by which he must construct, maintain, protect, and never discover his identity. Given these offhand but revelatory remarks that Frost made, the seemingly light “The Door in the Dark” addresses more than a blow that a door gave the speaker on the head—even more than the wonderful irony of the door that Frost occasionally depicted as his primary self-protective device becoming the instrument of harm. The speaker reaches out his hands while going through the dark in order “to save [his] face” (243), a Frostian reformulation of “to save face” that suggests the customary, socially driven meaning of this symbolic act. Neglecting to close the arc of his arms and hands, he slams into a door that gets in past his guard. The result is a jarring of his “native simile,” so that “people and things don’t pair any more / With what they used to pair with before” (243). Ostensibly an injury to his head, the real damage is done to customary language. A kind of wound, this jarring of custom provides an opening onto the arbitrariness of what

10.1057/9780230109896 - Names, Proverbs, Riddles, and Material Text in Robert Frost, Timothy O'Brien

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-14

Word I was in my life alone, Word I had no one left but God. (230)

Names, Proverbs, Riddles

before seemed a natural, native connection between the signified and the signifier. “The Rose Family,” regarded as a rather simple piece, also offers a surprisingly complex view of naming. Ostensibly a poem refuting Juliet’s nominalistic argument about names, the poem ultimately reaffirms the arbitrariness of naming: The rose is a rose, And was always a rose. But the theory now goes That the apple’s a rose, And the pear is, and so’s The plum, I suppose. The dear only knows What will next prove a rose. You, of course, are a rose— But were always a rose. (225)

The poem seems to affirm a single truth—that the beloved is authentically a rose. If a rose “was always a rose,” however, it cannot follow that the beloved was “always a rose.” When he employs the seemingly innocent “The dear only knows,” Frost also invites a radical process of substitution that undermines any absolutist sense of language: “dear” invites “deer” and, as well, “rose” invites “roes,” so that the fundamental linguistic stability apparently being affirmed is undercut by linguistic playfulness.14 This punning, I think it is worth noting, expresses what Robert Faggen regards as the influence of Darwin’s “nominalism” on “Frost’s poetry (Robert Frost 23 and 204). More specifically, the substitution of the punning “dear” for “God” (“God only knows” > “The dear only knows”), as this observation by Faggen implies, substitutes “the Lucretian and Darwinian love of procreation” for a divine plan (204). Frost’s poem, then, ends with a dramatization of the speaker’s very human need to assert some constant underlying principle. Its radical textuality, in other words, undoes the speaker even while he cleverly and fondly asserts the power of love: naming is arbitrary, though the need for an Adamic, original sense of naming persists even in the face of the recognition that origins are inaccessible. Because of its relevance to Frost’s short poem, with its allusion to Juliet’s problem with naming Romeo, and also to Frost’s public doubts about the existence of an “I,” Derrida’s discussion of signature and naming might also prove helpful here. In Glas, Derrida suggests what is lost through the name in the particular form of the signature: “When I sign, I am already dead because . . . its singular referent—me—will have already submitted to the requirement of its generalization in order to

10.1057/9780230109896 - Names, Proverbs, Riddles, and Material Text in Robert Frost, Timothy O'Brien

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-14

24

25

signify itself. I cannot say—or sign—what I mean, and I say precisely what I do not mean. By the same token, ‘I’ spells the death of me; it is already the effacement of a singular nature in a common sig-nature” (qtd. in Kamuf 5). In “Signature Event Context,” Derrida even more starkly makes another observation about the absence involved in authentication: “By definition, a written signature implies the actual or empirical non-presence of the signer” (qtd. in Hancher 229). To be authentic, according to this thinking, the signature must be iterative, but because it conforms to a model and implies, in fact, the nonpresence of the signer, it also testifies to its signer’s absence. This verification through the very device that testifies to absence, the signature, works also with the name, a linguistic device usually seen as a tag for something actually present.15 Derrida explains this matter in “Aphorism Countertime,” a discussion of the name of Romeo Montague. The ambivalence in Romeo’s name, as with everyone’s name, is that the name depends at once on the separability of name and named and on their inseparability. One can call to someone in his absence, as Juliet does to Romeo, only because the name and the bearer are not the same; and yet because one can in fact call to that person, the bearer and the name are at some level inseparable. Juliet, for instance, gains the attention of Romeo from the balcony by calling his name, and yet her purpose for calling out his name is to argue for the separability of him from his name: “Romeo, doff thy name, / And for thy name, which is not part of thee, / Take all myself ” (II.ii. 47–49). Derrida comments: “A proper name does not name anything which is human, which belongs to the human body, a human spirit, an essence of man. And yet this relation to the inhuman only befalls man, for him, to him, in the name of man. He alone gives himself this inhuman name. And Romeo would not be what he is, a stranger to his name, without his name” (qtd. in Schalkwyk 184–85). One of Frost’s last poems to explore the desire for, but ultimate impossibility of, original naming is the lively narrative from In the Clearing, “How Hard It Is to Keep from Being King When It’s in You and in the Situation.” The premise of the narrative—that there is something essential in a person that makes him almost one with what he is called, a king—anticipates, of course, what will be asserted about the poet’s power to name as well: that in apparently neat agreement with Emerson, the poet, unlike the ungifted characters and speakers in the poems from West-Running Brook whose naming usually fails, can name infallibly, just as the king, for instance, can identify the quintessence of many things, including authentic and fake jewels. The relevant passage, spoken by the king’s son, who is a beggar-minstrel at this stage in the

10.1057/9780230109896 - Names, Proverbs, Riddles, and Material Text in Robert Frost, Timothy O'Brien

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-14

The Quest for a Name in “Frost”

26

Names, Proverbs, Riddles

The reason artists show so little interest In public freedom is because the freedom They’ve come to feel the need of is a kind No one can give them—they can scarce attain— The freedom of their own material: So, never at a loss in simile, They can command the exact affinity Of anything they are confronted with. This perfect moment of unbafflement, When no man’s name and no noun’s adjective But summons out of nowhere like a jinni. We know not what we owe this moment to. (469)

This passage follows one in which the son-poet asserts the priority of blank verse over free verse by referring to its divine origins in a name: “Tell them Iamb, Jehovah said, and meant it” (469). When the poet is free of worldly entanglements, the argument in this passage about poetic epiphanies runs, naming can be a process of unbafflement rather than bafflement as is the case in the other poems we have encountered. At times, by virtue of some sort of aesthetic grace, naming occurs in a way that locates an origin, that ensures one that something more than mere arbitrariness and convention controls the process, that identifies something close to truth. However, the very description of this process threatens to undermine the passage’s claim to any certainty in scenes of nomination. What is exact is “affinity,” not identification, a relationship of resemblances still, rather than one between a “real” and that which represents it. Moreover, the curious explosion of negatives— “no man’s name,” “no noun’s adjective,” “summons out of nowhere,” and “We know not”—has the force of undermining the offered assertion. Even “know”—as a homophone of “no”—contributes to this negation undercutting the apparent tone of affirmation. The confusion in the apostrophes as to whether they indicate the possessive or the contraction —“no man’s name and no noun’s adjective”—suggests, at least in terms of the name, that the moment of unbafflement comes when man is no mere name, when, even in the verbal art of poetry, man becomes nameless, a simple, material entity. Thus, even though this late and vitally important passage seems to return to Emerson’s view of poet as namer, it at the same time unfolds in language that troubles that optimistic assertion. Typically, while the poem seems to swing toward some affirmation, its own countercurrents undercut that affirmation. It is as if what Frost called the sentence sounds of the work, the force of its intonations, are modified by the uncontrollable play of the text.

10.1057/9780230109896 - Names, Proverbs, Riddles, and Material Text in Robert Frost, Timothy O'Brien

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-14

poem, addresses a topic close to Frost: the freedom that matters to the poet, a freedom not of politics and voting, but of his “material”:

The Quest for a Name in “Frost”

27

The notion in the above passage from “How Hard It Is . . . ” —that the poet and/or the poem’s speaker locates a real name in venturing to express that which disappears on naming— marks another intriguing aspect of this theme of naming and identity: not only do Frost’s poems work with and against the Emersonian proposition that the poet is the namer, the one who can disclose the right or real name of people, places, and things without claiming possession of them, but they also map out with surprising frequency the poet’s search for his own “specular name.” “Specular name” is Geoffrey Hartman’s adaptation of Lacan’s specular image, that irreducibly authentic, though elusive, sense of identity for which we are doomed to search once we have entered the symbolic realm of language. “There may be,” Hartman writes, “such a thing as a specular name or ‘imago du nom propre’ in the fantasy development of the individual, a name more genuinely one’s own than a signature or proper name” (101). He continues: “So naming and the problem of identity cannot be dissociated. So literature and the problem of identity cannot be dissociated. Literature is at once onomatopoeic (name-making) and onomatoclastic (name-breaking). The true name of a writer is not given by his signature, but is spelled out by his entire work. The bad or empty name or nicknaming may be countered by the melodious or bardic magic of art” (128). Hartman goes on to quote from Thoreau’s “Walking,” which Frost must have read: There is nothing in a name. The name Menschikoff, for instance, has nothing in it to my ears more human than a whisker, and it may belong to a rat. As the names of the Poles and Russians are to us, so are ours to them. It is as if they had been named by the child’s rigmarole, Iery wiery ichery ban, tittle-tol-tam . . . At present our only true names are nicknames . . . We have a wild savage in us, and a savage name is perchance somewhere recorded as ours . . . I see that my neighbor, who bears the familiar epithet William or Edwin, takes it off with his jacket. It does not adhere to him when asleep or in anger, or aroused by any passion or inspiration. I seem to hear pronounced by some of his kin at such a time his original wild name in some jaw-breaking or else melodious tongue. (128)

Like his character Maple in the narrative about a girl whose mother named her for a tree, Frost himself bore a name overdetermined by meaning. And his poems play out his own struggle with this name, his attempt to find the original, wild, specular name beneath the conventional one. More of Hartman’s description emphasizes the forces of this quest: “The specular name or identity phrase—our true rather than

10.1057/9780230109896 - Names, Proverbs, Riddles, and Material Text in Robert Frost, Timothy O'Brien

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-14

“Frost knots on an airy gauze”

Names, Proverbs, Riddles

merely proper name—is affirmed in time by a textual mimicry, joyful, parodistic, or derisory, of the original ‘magnification.’ The repetition of the specular name gives rise to texts that seem to be anagrammatic or to conceal an unknown-unknowable key, a ‘pure’ signifier. These texts are called literature” (102). Not just Frost’s personal concern, that struggle is also unavoidably the ultimate function of art, as in some ways we have already seen from the poems dealing more overtly with naming: “The most art can do . . . is to burn through, in its cold way, the desire for selfdefinition, fullness of grace, presence; simply to expose the desire to own one’s own name, to inhabit it numinously in the form of “proper” noun, words, or the signatory act each poem aspires to be” (110). Frost’s Southern Democrat father named him after the confederate Robert E. Lee. The family name “Frost,” as we occasionally see in Frost’s letters, was also material for a good deal of punning and, by the way, revelation of character. In letters to Cox (Parini 194) and McVeigh (Selected Letters 296), for instance, he characterizes his tendency toward anger and a distanced self-protection as “frostiness”; in another letter from England in December of 1912 to his employer of the year before, Ernest Silver, Frost refers to a recent headline in a British paper—ENGLAND IN THE GRIP OF FROST—and goes on to say, “I accept the omen, says I. I accept the omen. Better so than that Frost should be in the grip of England” (Selected Letters 59). Judith Oster offers the following examples: (1) [I’m] not the same frost as I was when winter came on last year”; (2) “In this case it is the frosts we are running away from and Frosts can hardly help going with us since Frost we are ourselves. If you ever talk of me in print you may notice that it is my frostiness that is more and more played up. I am cold, snow-dusted and all that”; (3) and in a letter to his daughter Lesley, “It is material that has come to the surface of my mind in reading just as frost brings stones to the surface of the ground” (203, n. 3). That Frost puns on his name, or riddles on it, within his poems has not, of course, gone undetected. Helen Vendler, Norman Holland (29), Frank Lentricchia (104), and Robert Fleissner (115–16), for instance, mention such punning. They do so in suggesting it as the answer to the question in “Mending Wall”: it is the “frozen ground swell” (i.e., “Frost”) that does not love a wall. In discussing “Directive,” Charles Berger refers to the habit in this way: “Frost inscribes himself upon the landscape through a favorite trick: ringing changes on his own name. The spirit of this place is ‘an enormous Glacier’—‘Frost’ writ large: ‘You must not mind a certain coolness from him / Still said to haunt this side of Panther Mountain.’ ” Berger goes on to say that “for Frost there is a kind of mystic attunement, a baptismal bond, between his own name and the waters he calls ‘Cold as a spring as yet so near its source’ ” (162).

10.1057/9780230109896 - Names, Proverbs, Riddles, and Material Text in Robert Frost, Timothy O'Brien

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-14

28

29

What is more, David Bleich, based on his investigations in Subjective Criticism into all sorts of readers’ reactions to literature, discovered that for uninformed readers the association of Frost’s name with his white hair and winter seemed to provide a sense of comforting familiarity with Frost’s poems (272). But this is only half of it. The word “frost” is etymologically related to “burn,” the Latin pruina, “hoar-frost,” and prūna, “live coal,” both deriving from the root preus (American Heritage 2121). An accomplished Latinist, Frost would likely have observed this fascinating coincidence. He even might have been haunted by the fact that “frost” is also etymologically related to “prurient.” Be that as it may, our appreciation of this “favorite trick” of Frost’s, this reflexive depiction of his name in his poetry, remains incomplete without our noticing the fire and the ice. In a way most intimately related to Frost’s sense of identity, then, his world can easily end with fire or ice. To the extent that the proper name, in a way, can kill, the name Frost, as either fire or ice, kills its bearer: his world ends through writing. Thus, the short, well-known lyric “Fire and Ice” is not just prophecy but also an expression of authorial anxiety about identity; and in that way, it can be seen as the signature poem in Frost’s canon. Importantly though, we must remember Hartman’s notion that the author’s entire work, not just a single poem, constructs this signature activity. Lentricchia also emphasizes this sense of continuity in Frost’s “poetics of the self: in addressing what he calls the “obsessive images” in Frost’s poems, he observes that these images unfold in particular poems in ways that carry experiences from other poems, though “fashioned anew” (42). Insofar as it tries to reclaim a more original version of “Frost” in various facets of the specular name, in those subtle but also obsessive identity images of fire and ice, Frost’s entire body of writing also tries to reclaim a world in which name and identity are one. Frost’s inscription of himself into the landscape, to employ Berger’s especially apt phrasing, is a form of buried punning, but it is a deadly serious punning in the way the authorial signature described by Hartman and Thoreau is serious. Living in the garb of an inherited, overdetermined name, Frost at once casts it off and seeks it afresh, as part of some “jawbreaking or melodious tongue” that he creates in his own poetry. Thus, his poems often depict a discovery of this name without actually punning on it: “frost” appears only nine times and “frosty” only three in all of Frost’s poems (A Concordance 204). In “The Figure a Poem Makes,” Frost describes that “figure”—that image of the specular name—in terms of the self-suggesting imagery of the fire and ice buried in the name, not in terms of the name itself: “The figure is the same as for love. Like a piece of

10.1057/9780230109896 - Names, Proverbs, Riddles, and Material Text in Robert Frost, Timothy O'Brien

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-14

The Quest for a Name in “Frost”

30

Names, Proverbs, Riddles

Like ice shrieking across a red-hot griddle, his poetry does, indeed, ride on its own melting. One cannot, and Frost has ensured this absolutely with his unstable irony, make a validated choice between the fire and the ice, or between the language, so insistently mundane, and the potent oversound. Fire and ice are, after all, the inextricable complementarities of one apocalyptic vision: the endlessly regenerative cycle of desire and (self) hatred that necessarily brings the productive poet to scourge his own voice as he mocks both the poetic vocation and the state of which poetry—and if poetry then all language—has come.” (159)

I have called “Fire and Ice” the signature poem within the Frost canon. In a number of other poems, however, this combination of fire and ice, whether it comprises fire and snow, light and cold, sun and ice, or predominately one element in the pair, accompanies a heightened anxiety in the poetic voice about identity and poetic inspiration, the kind of crisis of identity that Kearns dramatically identifies. This signature event can occur as the central element of a poem, its organizing trope, if you will, as in “Fire and Ice,” “Wind and Window Flower,” “To the Thawing Wind,” “Mending Wall,” “The Wood-Pile,” “Bond and Free,” “The Bonfire,” “Looking for a Sunset Bird in Winter,” “Evening in a Sugar Orchard,” “A Hillside Thaw,” “A Winter Eden,” “What Fifty Said,” “Afterflakes,” “To a Moth Seen in Winter,” “In the Long Night,” “Choose Something Like a Star,” and “Peril of Hope.” It can also appear more fleetingly as simply one element in a poem’s landscape, but again often accompanying some anxious need of the poem’s speaker to locate a self. In this group, I include, for example, “The Mountain,” “After Apple-Picking,” “Birches,” “Snow,” “Two Tramps in Mud Time,” “Directive,” “Too Anxious for Rivers,” and even “From Plane to Plane.” In “The Mountain,” the brook that is rumored to start in a spring “almost like a fountain” on Hor’s peak is described by the local farmer in this way: “But what would interest you about the brook, It’s always cold in summer, warm in winter. One of the great sights going is to see It steam in winter like an ox’s breath, Until the bushes all along its banks Are inch-deep with the frosty spines and bristles— You know the kind. Then let the sun shine on it!” (47)

10.1057/9780230109896 - Names, Proverbs, Riddles, and Material Text in Robert Frost, Timothy O'Brien

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-14

ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting” (778). Without discussing the “signature” value of this image, Katherine Kearns writes strongly about its centrality to Frost’s poetry:

31

One could argue that this passage amounts merely to a vivid description by a colorful character in the New England countryside, where frost and the steam from an ox’s breath are unavoidable features of the landscape.16 As Priscilla Paton helps us to understand, however, Frost’s natural and regional poetry is written with a view to the horizon of Western culture and the “landscape conventions shared by nineteenth-century poetry and painting,” such as “the sublime mountain; the middle ground of human cultivation; the human figures that provide scale and access for the viewer/ reader; the concept of the prospect that suggests godlike vision, knowledge of nature, and political control” (106). In addition, this fountain is as much the spring stamped out by Pegasus on Mount Helicon as it is the origin of good brook trout water. While asking the local farmer about the mountain, the speaker shows that he feels both the protection from its “black body cut[ting] into the sky” and the limits it imposes upon him: he feels “it like a wall” that prevents him from seeing stars in the west and yet shelters him “from a wind”(45). He is drawn to it as a site from whose top “There ought to be a view around the world” (47). Without imposing an allegory upon the poem, but nevertheless responding to its intertextual details, we must see the issue here in part as poetic inspiration, the anxiety of invention, of having a source for poetry. The poetlike speaker, the Frost character in search of his poetic name, encounters that “name” in the speaker’s description of the frosty and hot spring. When looked at too closely, the details that capture this specular name, however, disappear as geographical truth only to reappear more certainly as a function of the poetic imagination, as a feature of how one tells a story or describes something in nature, and thus as still within the grip of language rather than referentially certain.17 In response to the poet-speaker’s self-searching question—“Warm in December, cold in June, you say?” (48)—the local farmer says: “I don’t suppose the water’s changed at all. You and I know enough to know it’s warm Compared with cold, and cold compared with warm. But all the fun’s in how you say a thing.” (48)

According to Lentricchia, this exchange plays out the fundamental interplay within Frost’s identity-driven poetry between an assertion of man’s imaginative power to shape reality and the opposing stubbornness of nature and of the poet’s skeptical side to finally accede to the unitary, shaping power of the imagination—“all the fun’s in how you say a thing” as opposed to the naturalistic explanation of the heat/cold phenomenon (45–48). In terms of the signatory act we are tracing, this interplay is

10.1057/9780230109896 - Names, Proverbs, Riddles, and Material Text in Robert Frost, Timothy O'Brien

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-14

The Quest for a Name in “Frost”

Names, Proverbs, Riddles

complicated by the fact that the poem seeks confirmation of the verbal basis of the poet’s sense of identity, the fire and ice, at some site in the natural world, which of course is being described by the very linguistically driven desire that seeks it. In “Two Tramps in Mud Time,” the specular name of Frost emerges also in the context of the poet-speaker’s dealing with the meaning of his “work.” The setting of the poem, as Kearns has observed, is dominated by the sense of transitional areas: the place between where the speaker works on the one hand and the more common area where the tramps walk on the other, the warmth of April and the mere flakes of snow that signal the potential coldness within the vernal warmth, the emotional place of the poem somewhere on the border of play and work, the figurative emergence of the tramps out of mud, and even the combination of self-control and release that goes into the speaker’s activity at the chopping block (151–52). The tramps appear when the poet-speaker “most love[s] [his] task” (252), at the time that his specular name is most clearly expressed within the physical world: The water for which we may have to look In summertime with a witching wand, In every wheelrut’s now a brook, In every print of a hoof a pond. Be glad of water, but don’t forget The lurking frost in the earth beneath That will steal forth after the sun is set And show on the water its crystal teeth. (251–52)

Again, the classical source of poetic inspiration comes into play, the pond stamped out by a horse’s hoof, and the “fire and ice” images of the author’s name emerge just as the external situation, the tramps interrupting his “play for mortal stakes” (52) at the chopping block, incites an anxiety about poetic inspiration, even the poet’s freedom of material, as it is called in “How Hard It Is . . . ”18 Importantly though, the anxiety does not come from the tramps’ presence so much as from what it brings out in the speaker. In fact the tramps, like many of the characters—or even animals—who encounter the speaker of Frost’s poems, represent an aspect of the speaker. I think this is the case in “Mending Wall,” where the apparently different neighbor embodies in a psychologically fascinating way not only the speaker’s own need to construct walls but also his own close-mindedness. Just as the tramps emerge from the mud, so too does the “lurking frost in the earth beneath . . . steal forth after the sun is set” (252). The tramps, associated with the vernal warmth, and the speaker, with the coldly consuming teeth

10.1057/9780230109896 - Names, Proverbs, Riddles, and Material Text in Robert Frost, Timothy O'Brien

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-14

32

33

of winter in his iciness toward the strangers, comprise twin halves of the single complex event in the poem of discovering a name for the self and at the same time of coming to terms with the identity of the poet at play in a world of necessary work.19 Often such eruptions of the poetic name occur even more fleetingly than these. In “After Apple-Picking,” for example, the poet-speaker finds himself in an odd transitional state of being tired of apple-picking, a condition in which he is, yes, tired, but also more keenly sensitive to the imaginative rather than routine disposition of affairs: I cannot rub the strangeness from my sight I got from looking through a pane of glass I skimmed this morning from the drinking trough And held against the world of hoary grass. It melted, and I let it fall and break. But I was well Upon my way to sleep before it fell, And I could tell What form my dreaming was about to take. (70)

Perhaps even more ephemerally, this transitional area associated with poetic inspiration occurs in the often-quoted passage from “Birches” about the “inner dome of heaven.” The passage describes the birches as ice-laden and then, on “a sunny winter morning . . . clicking upon themselves” until “the sun’s warmth makes them shed crystal shells / Shattering and avalanching on the snow-crust— / Such heaps of broken glass to sweep away / You’d think the inner dome of heaven had fallen” (117). It can appear in even more muted form, as in “Too Anxious for Rivers,” where the fiery details of the world’s Epicurean creation function also as images of the fecund warmth of love. Science can tell only so much; the rest is dreaming, which will become the imaginative story about how once being molten and vaporous we were set “on fire and . . . revolving” (343) by love—an image of stillness come to revolving life such as is also woven through “A Star in a Stone-Boat.” This fire-and-ice trope, this specular image of Frost, can occur also as part of rather prosaic discourse within dialogue, as it does at the end of “From Plane to Plane,” a poem about opposites—work and play, youth and age, town and gown, winter and summer, presence and absence (or the need for “extrication,” to use Pike’s term). After dwelling on the local doctor’s way of life, which is for Pike a source of envy, the conversation between the fifty-year-old farmhand, Pike, and the college student and summer farmhand, Dick, oddly enough moves onto the topic of the sun

10.1057/9780230109896 - Names, Proverbs, Riddles, and Material Text in Robert Frost, Timothy O'Brien

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-14

The Quest for a Name in “Frost”

Names, Proverbs, Riddles

and its need, also, for extrication—just like that of the doctor, who needs to escape now and then from treating illnesses, just like that of Pike in walking back a row without hoeing, and just like that of Dick in having to get away during the summer from his studies. The sun bestows summer on us and then “escapes,” says Dick, “Before our realizing what we have / To thank him for” (370). However, the sun “doesn’t “want our thanks,” Dick continues, because “He likes to turn his back on gratitude / And avoid being worshiped as a god” (370). Pike’s response to Dick’s discussion of the sun—which is based on the essential sameness of any of the “professions,” whether poet, hoer, or god—is so curious and out of place, in fact, as to call more attention to itself than it seems to warrant. Pike agrees with Dick, likening the younger man’s point about the sun-god to his own view of Santa Claus, the “pseudonym,” according to Pike, of our parents in their Christmas giving: “That’s where I reckon Santa Claus comes in— To be our parents’ pseudonymity In Christmas giving, so they can escape The thanks and let him catch it as a scapegoat. And even he, you’ll notice, dodges off Up chimney to avoid the worst of it. We all know his address, Mount Hecla, Iceland. So anyone can write to him who has to; Though they do say he doesn’t open letters. A Santa Claus was needed. And there is one.” (370–71)

It is too simple to discount Pike’s bringing up Santa Claus in response to Dick’s anthropological discussion of the Persian and Peruvian sun gods as Frost’s way of isolating unlearned simplicity. In light of earlier comments in the poem about June being cold and the doctor working energetically in winter when people get sick, not to mention the “lecture” Dick offers, which essentially defines the cold of the sun god’s extrication as just as much a part of the sun god as the heat of his presence, one of the important suggestive elements about Pike’s Santa Claus is that the legendary figure is a “god” of both fire and ice, of both the chimney and Iceland. Even with the distancing device of the dialogue structure and the humorous framing of that dialogue by the narrator, the poem veers unerringly toward Frost’s specular name as it emerges in the myth of Santa Claus; and in the process, it delineates the way in which a false name—a pseudonymity—covers over a longing for a true, original, wild name. In the poems I have been discussing, “the name of Frost” shows up almost as if by surprise, amid verse that does not obviously focus on the speaker as engaged in a search for self. With some careful reading, though,

10.1057/9780230109896 - Names, Proverbs, Riddles, and Material Text in Robert Frost, Timothy O'Brien

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-14

34

35

it becomes clear that anxiety about inspiration or even the role of the poet, especially as it has to do with his isolating participation in the imaginative realm and separation from “real” work, spawns those outbreaks, or at the very least accompanies them. Because the poet’s “signature,” according to Hartman’s formulation, occurs across all of the works, breaking out almost as if an autonomous force, I might be drawing too fine a distinction by identifying the poems to which I now turn as being devoted almost singularly and formally, rather than just partially, to the poet-speaker’s quest for his specular name. A pair of short poems quite different in tone and delicacy of perception serve nicely, I think, as a kind of “range-finding” for this examination. The poems are “What Fifty Said” and “Afterflakes.” Quite overtly playful and autobiographical in its display of the fire-and-ice trope, “What Fifty Said” begins with this couplet: “When I was young my teachers were the old. / I gave up fire for form till I was cold” (245). A metal having been cast through the twin forces of heat and cold and now in the position of having the young as his teachers, the speaker at fifty can no longer be molded: he can only “be cracked and sprung.” As Virginia Smith has interestingly explained, the poem’s close understanding of this physical process also communicates something about the poet’s own attempt to balance passion and form, or the fire that makes a substance such as molten metal a liquid and the cold that provides it with form. In “Afterflakes,” the signature occurs more typically but nevertheless more interestingly within the framework of the poetspeaker’s half-aware search for himself in the landscape. The poem allusively addresses the symbol of the shadow from Plato’s allegory of the cave, as the speaker ponders his lack of importance during the end of a snowfall.20 After all, if he were as important as he wants to be in his search for self, his substantial, swarthy body itself ought to project a shadow back upward “Against the shapeless shadow of storm” (276). A “higher power,” the sun, produces the shadow, however. In spite of this perception, I do not think that the poem treats so much the issue of evil, as suggested by the word “swarthy,” according to Marcus (154), as the question of how to discover a reliable marker of the self—good or bad. On that matter, the poem takes the reader for a dizzying if short ride: it first locates an image of the self in the shadow on the snow that covers the ground; it then negates the self’s importance by describing its powerlessness to project its own image upon the shapeless storm in the air; it then focuses on the way in which the clearing sky reveals an image that, as Gary Roberts perceptively observes, amounts to both a positive and negative designation of self (Tuten 5). That image occurs in the last stanza: I turned and looked back upward. The whole sky was blue;

10.1057/9780230109896 - Names, Proverbs, Riddles, and Material Text in Robert Frost, Timothy O'Brien

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-14

The Quest for a Name in “Frost”

36

Names, Proverbs, Riddles

The pun on “frost” slyly affirms that the poet-speaker, however insubstantially, is inscribed within the sky, and yet the equally interesting pun on “knots” as “not” that Roberts points out negates that inscription. Not only are the flakes without significance because they are mere showy “afterflakes”; they are “not frost,” after all. Still, within this repeated, even simultaneous, affirmation and negation at a rather conscious level in the poem (the puns on “frost” and “knot” are hardly accidents), the specular image emerges independently of the punning in a muted version of the fire and ice trope: the heat and energy of the sun shining through the “frost knots.” As untimely as these afterflakes is the appearance of the moth in the ode “To a Moth Seen in Winter.” Here, too, the question is one of identification, even of naming, as the poet-speaker parenthetically asks the moth: “(Who would you be, I wonder, by those marks / If I had moths to friend as I have flowers?)” (323). The speaker sees the moth’s situation as his own, because he has no more power to save the moth’s life than he does to save his own, though he is “tasked to save [his] own a little while” (324). Attracted, and self-destructively so, to hot light and, particularly in this poem, to the heat of the speaker’s “gloveless hand,” the moth in the cold of winter captures the fire and ice of Frost’s specular name. Even the moth’s departure involves a kind of fire and ice event: “Go,” the speaker tells it, “till you wet your pinions and are quenched” (324). The meaning of “quenched” has at its core the notion of fire being put out by water, even hot metal made cool by being thrust into cold liquid. “Looking for a Sunset Bird in Winter” traces the speaker’s search for the lost thing in the form of the hopeful but mistaken sighting in winter of a bird alighting in a tree, where in summer it had sung “with an angelic gift” (215). After verifying that the only thing in the tree was in fact a single leaf, the speaker reflects upon his perception from a position on a hill: From my advantage on a hill I judged that such a crystal chill Was only adding frost to snow As gilt to gold that wouldn’t show. A brush had left a crooked stroke Of what was either cloud or smoke From north to south across the blue; A piercing little star was through. (215)

10.1057/9780230109896 - Names, Proverbs, Riddles, and Material Text in Robert Frost, Timothy O'Brien

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-14

And the thick flakes floating at a pause Were but frost knots floating on an airy gauze, With the sun shining through. (276)

37

The poem works from the imagination’s initial imposition of form and meaning on the landscape to a correction of such power, and then onto a fleeting assertion of the specular image in what by now I hope has become a familiar signature combination: the cold, whether or not connected to the recurring pun on “frost,” as it is here, combined with heat, in this case the smoke and after that the piercing little star. This description unfolds on a rather easily accessible level in the form of the compensatory observation of a poet-speaker who suffers from a sense of vacancy and loss, the inspirational “breath of air . . . [dying] of cold,” even the self-identifying “frost” doing little more than adding “gilt to gold that wouldn’t show.” Because of Frost’s fondness for Palgrave’s Golden Treasury, we are safe in seeing this gilding of gold as an expression of the futility of poetry to distinguish itself, even though the image of gold preserves some sense of value. As in “Afterflakes,” however, the rather unconvincing, self-negating description of a vague sense of security about the presence of self and/or poetic inspiration, at the level of the signature activity that I am tracing, occurs as a haunting expression of an inscribed presence. This inscribed presence results from a process of differentiation as contrasted to the undifferentiated vision in the previous stanza: the “crooked stroke” of cloud or smoke and the piercing of the star amid the chill make this vision of a signature almost an act of penetration or cutting. Not always part of such tentative searches for self, this signature activity occasionally emerges almost in a manic form as it does in “Evening in a Sugar Orchard,” with the call to the fireman to stoke the fire so as to add more stars to the heaven, or as in “The Bonfire,” with its narrator’s recollection of the wild and exhilarating fire he once almost let get out of control, or most clearly in “A Hillside Thaw,” based as it is on the powerful interaction of fire and ice, the wildness spawned by the melting power of the sun combined with and overcome by the freezing, Medusa-like petrification, brought on by the moon. The speaker involves himself in this remarkable collaboration between fire and ice by imagining himself dropping to his hands and knees to try to stop the flowing of the silver lizards across the ground and by admiringly reacting to the freezing power of the moon by saying that the spell “was the moon’s: she held them until day, / One lizard at the end of every ray. / The thought of my attempting such a stay!” (219). We cannot help but recognize from the images of “wildness” and of the Frostian “stay against confusion” that the poem is about the job and identity of the poet, the forces that provide him a self. However, the signature activity in this poem expresses neither anxiety, as in most of the others we have examined, nor apocalypse, as in “Fire and Ice.” Instead, it displays a manic celebration of poetic power. Though the speaker exclaims, “The thought of my attempting such a stay!” the poem itself functions as just such a remarkable stay, capturing and giving shape to wildness in “a bursting unity of opposites,” as Frost called the creative event.21

10.1057/9780230109896 - Names, Proverbs, Riddles, and Material Text in Robert Frost, Timothy O'Brien

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-14

The Quest for a Name in “Frost”

Names, Proverbs, Riddles

Though one of Frost’s longest poems and not easily reducible to a single theme because of its focus on a variety of issues such as gender, heroism, religion, and, according to Jost, “civility and madness,” as well as the figure of the poet, “Snow” nevertheless deserves attention as a piece whose fundamental elements—the vast, cold outside and the circumscribed warmth within the Coles’ house—express Frost’s specular name.22 In fact, several passages in the early stages of the poem shape it to the form of this specular image. This emphasis becomes particularly apt in terms of Sears’s observation that Meserve, with all his combination of physical prowess and metaphorical playfulness, operates as a version of the public Frost. The poem grows out of the conversation between the Coles and Meserve, as he stops at their home for a brief rest—more for his horses than for himself, it seems—during a severe snow storm. The opening two pages of this thirteen-page poem concentrate our attention on naming. First, Meserve describes the wind-blown snow in this way: “ ‘You can just see it glancing off the roof / Making a great scroll upward toward the sky, / Long enough for recording all our names on.—’ ” (137). Asked by Helen if he knows his way to the barn, where his horses are resting, he responds: “I guess I know my way. I guess I know where I can find my name Carved in the shed to tell me who I am If it don’t tell me where I am . . . ” (138).

Then Helen and Fred talk about naming after Helen becomes irritated at herself for having called Meserve “brother” and wonders why. Fred explains: “ ‘It’s right enough. / That’s all you ever heard him called round here. / He seems to have lost off his Christian name’ ” (138). The names of the characters themselves contribute to this concentration on naming. “Meserve” suggests self-concern and even lack of consideration for others, but if his “natural” name, as the exchange between Fred and Helen suggests, is “brother” or “Brother Meserve,” then his name also suggests something quite different— service to his brother. “Cole,” of course, puns on “coal” and thus builds on the fundamental dynamic of inside heat and outside cold. This wordplay establishes a heightened self-consciousness in the poem and in us about naming. In addition, though, the names fall out as expressions of the physical elements in the poem—coals as Coles and the colorful description of names appearing on the scroll of windblown snow. In this context, the frequently repeated descriptions of the snow against the house and window emerge as signatures of the poet, of his specular name within the physical setting of the poem. These descriptions are yet another way in

10.1057/9780230109896 - Names, Proverbs, Riddles, and Material Text in Robert Frost, Timothy O'Brien

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-14

38

39

which “Meserve” has meaning: they turn back on and frame him as the figure of the poet-Frost. The snow-blown scroll that he imagines operates in just this reflexive way: he describes the brutally cold natural forces working against the house, warm within, as if those cold physical elements were exercising their authorship. Later on, Meserve again functions to “sign” Frost into the poem. As he focuses on a text, the page of the book which is also a “leaf” that will not lie down, he describes the inside of the house, against the cold outside, in such a way as to provide a glimpse of the specular Frost: “The wind’s at naught in here. It couldn’t stir so sensitively poised A thing as that. It couldn’t reach the lamp To get a puff of black smoke from the flame, Or blow a rumple in the collie’s coat. You make a little foursquare block of air, Quiet and light and warm, in spite of all The illimitable dark and cold and storm, And by so doing give these three, lamp, dog, And book-leaf, that keep near you, their repose.” (141–42)

Composed against the outside cold, this “clean, well-lighted place” also represents a poem, as suggested by the stanzalike shape of the foursquare block of air, especially in the context of a discourse on the page of a book. Then the poem’s dialogue turns to a series of descriptions of the snow. First Fred’s words inscribe Frost into the setting: “ ‘You see the snow-white through the white of frost?’ ” (142). Next, Meserve responds with a curious personification, which amounts to a rather playful version of Frost the voyeur poet: “It looks as if Some pallid thing had squashed its features flat And its eyes shut with overeagerness To see what people found so interesting In one another, and had gone to sleep Of its own stupid lack of understanding, Or broken its white neck of mushroom stuff Short off, and died against the window-pane.” (142)

After telling the story of the boy who too fervently banked the windows of a neighbor with snow, Meserve offers this description of the snowline running across the Coles’ window-pane: “There where There is a sort of tunnel in the frost—

10.1057/9780230109896 - Names, Proverbs, Riddles, and Material Text in Robert Frost, Timothy O'Brien

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-14

The Quest for a Name in “Frost”

Names, Proverbs, Riddles More like a tunnel than a hole—way down At the far end of it you see a stir And quiver like the frayed edge of the drift Blown in the wind. I like that—I like that. Well, now I leave you, people.” (143)

The emphasis first on “like” and then on “that” captures living speech, but also, paradoxically, slows down the perception of the words as words so that “like” works not just as an expression of a “passionate preference,” a verb, but also as a marker of similarity, a preposition: the poet-Meserve-Frost resembles (is like) that cold frost just where it is both a tunnel (more the product of art than “hole”) and an opening onto the outside, the stir of wind. He likes it because he resembles it—not surprising for a character called me-serve. In this poem, then, Meserve is the vehicle for embedding Frost’s specular name within the poem. The process unfolds as a thick layering of naming and signature acts. Against the outside storm, the descriptions of the house’s warmth and its inhabitants as “coals” is quite enough to suggest the fire and ice of the specular Frost. The poet-figure Meserve builds upon that signing, though, with the narrative-delaying bursts of metaphorical discourse that make the poet and the function of poetic language—what it does to manage the threats of chilling snow and the equally dangerous façade of warm repose—the subject of the poem.23 Not the snow that Poirier describes as preventing writing and reading in Frost, the snow in this poem is the artist; it is, along with the warmth of the house, the specular image of the poet as written into the world (Robert Frost 337). It is the white sheet upon which the black “cole” can write. According to Stanlis, “Snow” captures the philosophical dualism that informs Frost’s poetry and shapes his poetic identity. In so doing, it illustrates also Lentricchia’s thesis about the landscape of Frost’s poetic self, his working out of his identity particularly through the dynamic of seeking or establishing enclosure against the inhospitable facts of existence. This poem sustains a focus on that dichotomy by hovering at the border of the inside and outside, the warm poemlike inside of the Coles’ house expressing the shape that humans create for themselves over and against the threatening outside world. The figure of Meserve reflects Frost precisely because of his activity at this margin, his fluency with both the inside heat and the outside cold, which in the context of this poem parallels the fire and ice of Frost’s specular name. It is important to emphasize this balance. As an expression of the extreme of the post-Kantian imagination that tries to transmute the unknowable nature into a safe, comprehensible, beautiful retreat, the Coles’ house is just as dangerous to the sound poetic identity as the raw, inhospitable nature that exists apart from human control. Within

10.1057/9780230109896 - Names, Proverbs, Riddles, and Material Text in Robert Frost, Timothy O'Brien

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-14

40

41

this disclosure of his poetic identity through the poem’s setting, Frost also includes the issue of naming, playing with the prospect that names themselves, like landscape and structures, might afford us a glimpse into some nonnegotiable truth about our identity. I would like to conclude this discussion of the poetic signature in Frost’s works with a quieter, though still complex poem. “The WoodPile” both typifies the kind of poem we have been examining and surpasses the others of its type. In typical fashion, it features a speaker-poet on an uncertain quest that turns into a curious, highly suggestive naming event. The speaker opens the poem in an anxious frame of mind and within an undifferentiated setting, “a frozen swamp one gray day” (100).24 After resolving to turn back in his venture, he nevertheless goes on; the crusty snow holds him up, and yet it does not, his (poetic?) foot breaking through. Around him, the trees are “ . . . all in lines / Straight up and down.” They are “Too much alike to mark or name a place by / So as to say for certain I was here / Or somewhere else: I was just far from home” (100). Just as a sense of self is impossible without a definite sense of place (recall Meserve’s lines about knowing himself by his name carved in the shed if it doesn’t tell him where he is), so is naming impossible where there is no differentiation. That naming is, at least in part, the issue becomes immediately clear as the bird enters the scene.25 He operates as a projection of the Frostian narrator’s anxiety about identity and naming: the bird was “careful / To put a tree between us when he lighted, / And say no word to tell me who he was . . . ” (100). The bird resembles “one who takes / Everything said as personal to himself ” (101). He is also a kind of parody of Nature in Emerson’s “Hamatreya,” who in the Earth-Song, as we have seen, assumes that man is forever and always the namer/taker. Moreover, the bird is depicted as trapped within an uninvestigated, habitual, even suggestively customary way of dealing with the threat: he could escape easily, “undeceive” himself, by one flight out sideways, but like the speaker whom he reflects he can only remain deceived by the limits of his condition. For the speaker and us, the limiting element is language, whose hold over us cannot even be lastingly shaken by the disorienting blow to the head from a “door in the dark.” Within this setting and mood of undifferentiated identity, of the failure to name as well as the threats of naming and of anxiety about identity, the speaker discovers a signature feature in the landscape, the image of the original name itself, a woodpile. It was left there by a shaper, a molder, a poet of sorts; was left there as a muted (and mute) expression of both the fire and ice in “frost”; it was left there “far from a useful fireplace / To warm the frozen swamp as best it could / With the slow smokeless burning of decay” (101).

10.1057/9780230109896 - Names, Proverbs, Riddles, and Material Text in Robert Frost, Timothy O'Brien

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-14

The Quest for a Name in “Frost”

Names, Proverbs, Riddles

At the same time that the poem concludes with what Fratalli reasonably describes as an almost anticlimactic image, a vision of the irrelevancy of human work, it also can be seen as arriving at a climax in the more subtle quest for the specular name that informs Frost’s canon (117). Where naming fails and threatens, the specular name of fire and ice emerges, seemingly inscribed upon the external world and therefore an apparent marker of the lost identity; but ultimately, because it is in and of language, that name amounts to words that rename the “Frost” that has already obscured an origin. The key that seems to get the poet outside of postlapsarian language, that finally represents an origin, is always inside language. Finally, that is what happens by Helicon’s well-curb in “For Once, Then Something”: a search for truth that glimpses “something white, uncertain, / Something more of the depths” (208) that is forever and always lost. And the actions that obscure it are those of language, of the text, particularly of reading and writing: a drop of water blurs it, blots it out. The something that the poet might have seen is not an indefinite object referred to so much as the mere word itself—“something.” And that is all.

“Name children some names and see what you do” Not anthologized, not highly regarded, though eliciting a growing body of commentary, the narrative “Maple” is, as Karen Kilcup asserts, both interesting and irritating (133). In keeping with her thesis about the development of Frost’s poetry, she regards the poem as transitional, clearly marking the movement in Frost’s development from a feminine poetics of gossip, sympathetically shared, confided experience, and code breaking to the professional, exclusionary, masculine poetics of the father-language, in which only the paternal, divine figure of the author has “the answer” to the “question” that he poses (130–40). In the case of this poem, as in the poems we have been examining, the question is, “What is my name?” I put this question in the first person because even though it favors third-person narration over dialogue, as Kilcup emphasizes (137) and thereby distances us from Maple’s quest for her name, the poem is at the same time about Frost’s poetic signature, about his search for his own name. He, too, after all, is owned by a name with too much meaning. Just beneath the selfassured tone of the professional narrator’s function as Emersonian namer lurks the poet’s anxiety about his identity. This search for the poetic signature occurs quite typically in a poem that deals not just with naming, but with naming as a subset of interpretation and of the relationship between author and reader, as Judith Oster

10.1057/9780230109896 - Names, Proverbs, Riddles, and Material Text in Robert Frost, Timothy O'Brien

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-14

42

43

observes (44). Thus, the distanced narration covers over an authorial anxiety about identity; and because of this complexity, I join Robert Faggen in finding it difficult to understand the poem in the clear-cut, gendered terms Kilcup and, even more starkly, Kearns use—the father, narrator, and author linked via a masculine language and the mother essentially the representation of the female language (Faggen 207). At any rate, the poem includes as many implications about names and naming as one can imagine. It ponders a number of technical questions about the proper name—its relationship to the material object to which it points, the difficulty of even discerning what material object a name marks, the notion that certain basic expressions such as natural names give us an unusually direct access to objects themselves (McCulloch 262), and the issues raised with the use of names in fictional texts (Schalkwyck 169). This poem from New Hampshire recounts the development of a girl in the shadow of her name, given to her, according to her father, just before her mother dies as a result of the daughter’s birth. Early in the girl’s life the father has to explain to Maple that her name is really Maple, not Mabel, as her teacher claims it must be. Tell your teacher, her father says, “that it’s M-A-P-L-E” (169). And then he offers her an explanation that is really not an explanation so much as a temptation or puzzle to solve, as Darrel Abel characterizes it (556): “I don’t know what she wanted it to mean, But it seems like some word she left to bid you Be a good girl—be like a maple tree. How like a maple tree’s for us to guess.” (169)

These “dangerous, self-arousing words,” as the narrator calls them, are soon forgotten by the child, but then later remembered as a male co-worker in an office building in New York City says suddenly that she reminds him of a Maple tree. He makes this observation even though he has all along thought her name was Mabel, as she is called by everyone in the office. They end up marrying and sharing an interest in her name, reviewing certain signs that might nudge them closer to its possible meaning: a maple leaf stuck in a “big Bible” at a page that had something to do with “wave offering”; her father having put her off, she thinks, when she questioned him so long ago (the narrator describes this event as the father “[putting] himself off”); even a young maple they once came upon in the autumn on vacation, which stood “alone with smooth arms lifted up, / And every leaf of foliage she’d worn / Laid scarlet and pale pink about her feet” (172). The narrator tells how, during this last experience, “They hovered for a moment near discovery,” but they lacked “faith in anything to mean / The same at different

10.1057/9780230109896 - Names, Proverbs, Riddles, and Material Text in Robert Frost, Timothy O'Brien

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-14

The Quest for a Name in “Frost”

Names, Proverbs, Riddles

times to different people” (173). This event causes her to cover her eyes and to stop seeking—“ ‘We would not see the secret if we could now: / We are not looking for it any more’ ” (173). The poem concludes with the narrator’s entirely unhelpful and almost unfitting summary and admonition: “Thus had a name with meaning, given in death, / Made a girl’s marriage, and ruled her life” and “A name with meaning could bring up a child, / Taking the child out of the parents’ hands.” He warns readers, “Better a meaningless name, I should say, / As leaving more to nature and happy chance. / Name children some names and see what you do” (173). This final gesture at completion and definitive statement undermines— and is ultimately part of—the poem’s extraordinarily discontinuous and misleading surface, its mischief, as Robert Pack sees it in his discussion of the poem (222), if not perhaps Frost’s lack of control over its contours. This last statement is remarkable for its incommunicativeness: “Name children some names and see what you do” just does not mean anything definitive. “Some names” and “see what you do” remain entirely wide open in their meaning. The echoing within “happy chance” of “happenstance” or “happenchance” also negatively modifies the upbeat sense of “happy chance.” In addition, the apparent opposition between giving a child a name with meaning and thus giving up parental control (it takes the child “out of the parents’ hands”) on the one hand and providing it with a meaningless name and leaving more to “nature and happy chance” on the other collapses under the weight of its ambiguity. Which alternative offers the more nurturing, parental control? Which is more “natural”—when “nature” in this context seems to be part of the more conventional way of naming? The entire poem, moreover, puts us readers in much the same situation as Maple finds herself in—trying to make sense of a puzzle and dead-end clues. These apparent clues include certain patterns, unaccountable repetitions, weighty symbolic suggestions—the wave offerings and the passionate description of the flaming maple—or non sequiturs. Twice the narrator describes the family home, for instance, as a one-story house in front, but three stories on “the end it presented to the road,” as if to suggest that there is either more or less to it than its mere appearance offers.26 The narrator also calls attention to the girl’s secretarial skill of shorthand in a peculiar way: the self-seeking caused by the mystery of her name, he offers, may have “led her on to read, / And think a little, and get some city schooling.” She learned shorthand, it seems, because of this impetus, though the narrator immediately questions the suggested connection—and also invites interpretation—by saying, “whatever shorthand may / Have had to do with it” (170). The narrator builds up a possible connection among name, identity, and occupation as if to imply that the girl’s job of taking shorthand exposes her limitations as an imaginative reader of her name’s

10.1057/9780230109896 - Names, Proverbs, Riddles, and Material Text in Robert Frost, Timothy O'Brien

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-14

44

45

mystery. She is only able to record what is said literally or to fathom a direct relationship between meaning and suggestion, as Oster argues (48) in her discussion of the poem as a study in metaphorical reading. Faggen calls this “profession” a “metaphor for dead, sterile reproduction” (206). The narrator also creates this sort of false lead in having the man in the office, by some “natural” impulse, see “maple” in her, as if there is a fundamental connection between name and object. At this same stage in the poem, however, the narrator calls into question the meaningful basis of naming. As Maple takes dictation from her future husband, the man who sees the maple in her, the narrator describes how she watches out of the window “An airship laboring with unship-like motion” (170). The name of the flying machine simply does not match its nature, emphasizes the narrator. Even the footnoting of the poem in the volume’s title poem, “New Hampshire,” contributes to this collection of signs leading to dead ends. Like a number of the other poems that follow “New Hampshire,” “Maple” is referred to in a footnote in the original edition of New Hampshire. The lines related to “Maple” are: “And the two have been / Yoke-fellows in the sap-yoke of old / In many Marches” (155–56). Though some ingenious critical maneuvers could perhaps make a case for significance (the emphasis on the reproductive spring sap run versus the fall of the year, which Maple and her husband favor, as a sign of their misinterpretation of Maple as name), the mutually fitting wedges of Vermont and New Hampshire and the spring running of the sap just do not seem to have much to do with “Maple,” nor “Maple” with them. Such hints of meaning as Frost writes into the poem certainly encourage scholarly and theoretical detective work. Darrel Abel, for instance, identifies what he considers the key to the poem: the allusion to wave offerings, as described in chapter 5 of Numbers, where the issue is husbands’ jealousy of wives and the law that requires a suspected wife to undergo a priestly test, whereby she drinks water that priests give her, and to say whether or not she has slept with another man. If the woman lies, her belly swells and her reproductive organs wither; if she tells the truth, her body and reproductive capabilities manifest themselves as healthy. The allusion, Abel tactfully tries to argue, expresses autobiographically Frost’s incurable jealousy and perhaps his wish fulfillment about Elinor’s absolute loyalty: the poem’s wife likely assures her husband that she faithfully loved him by naming the daughter on her deathbed. It never becomes clear, however, that the husband even knows of the passage marked by the maple leaf, a marking that is lost when Maple fails to return the maple leaf to its intended place in the Bible. Leaning perhaps a little too heavily on her often-revealing and productive view of women as transgressive in Frost’s poetry, Katherine Kearns takes the maple leaf’s marking of this biblical

10.1057/9780230109896 - Names, Proverbs, Riddles, and Material Text in Robert Frost, Timothy O'Brien

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-14

The Quest for a Name in “Frost”

Names, Proverbs, Riddles

passage as ultimately a sign of the mother’s unfaithfulness. She accuses Maple of ignoring “the secret implicit in the maple-leaf marking of the ‘wave offering’ passage in Numbers that reveals the passionate extramarital circumstances of her own birth”; she refers to the mother’s “sin”; and she writes of the biblical passage as “signaling [the] mother’s marital infidelity” (100). Despite all this certainty in interpretation, the poem’s details merely invite speculation, even perhaps seduce us into having to come up with an answer about the significance of Maple’s name. In the end, Maple’s resignedly giving up the search for meaning is as responsible as closing off the mystery with an answer that involves narratives of illegitimacy and unconventional, transgressive sexuality. Like the proverb, which we will discuss in the next chapter, the name functions as an answer, a shorthand answer to the enormous question of identity. The answer, though, always begs the question. Though in “New Hampshire,” as I have already suggested, the poet-persona often plays the role of the Emersonian namer and thus brings into the foreground the gender implications of naming, in this poem the naming of Maple is an act shared by the genders: the dying mother offers the name; and the father, as he recalls for the young Maple, says that he “said it [the name] too: ‘Yes, for her name.’ ” The emphasis is on mutuality, as Faggen observes more generally about the gender issues in the poem, not on the wife’s transgressive and secretly rebellious use of the father tongue. There is no reason, moreover, not to see the narrator as part of the poem’s fictional display rather than as its conveyor of definitive statement: his display of sureness and knowledge, despite frequent indications that he also remains clueless, is part of the poem’s complex array of naming. If the narrator simply stands in for Frost, as commentators are tempted to assume, then his closing injunction against names with meaning undermines what we have already seen as Frost’s own tendency to give characters in his narratives meaningful names—Meserve, the Coles’, and, of course, Maple in this poem. In a curious move, Frost calls attention to this very issue by bringing the names of his own children into the poem. The passage in which he does this contains such a rich illustration of the problem of the name that I will quote it here in full: It came back vaguely at the glass one day, As she stood saying her name over aloud, Striking it gently across her lowered eyes To make it go well with the way she looked. What was it about her name? Its strangeness lay In having too much meaning. Other names, As Lesley, Carol, Irma, Marjorie,

10.1057/9780230109896 - Names, Proverbs, Riddles, and Material Text in Robert Frost, Timothy O'Brien

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-14

46

47

Signified nothing. Rose could have a meaning, But hadn’t as it went. (She knew a Rose.) This difference from other names it was Made people notice it—and notice her. (They either noticed it, or got it wrong.) Her problem was to find out what it asked In dress or manner of the girl who bore it. (169–70)

By introducing his children’s names into the poem, Frost brings his own too meaningful name into play and thus implicitly offers it, along with Maple, as a contrast to their names. This implication that Frost might share the fictional Maple’s dilemma about her name certainly must modify the notion that Frost in this poem remains unsympathetic toward his female character. The move also amounts to a kind of examination of what linguists, logicians, and philosophers argue is a proper name. To repeat Bertrand Russell’s extreme notion, the only proper name is a kind of pointer to something present, the word “this” being perhaps the purest form of such a pointer. Frost’s claim that his children’s names are just such pointers, however, hardly simplifies matters. First, importing those names into a poem invests them with meaning, meaning that likely goes beyond the illustrative point that they serve. Even more obvious is the kind of common sense that any reader must bring to bear upon a text, that consulting of what really happens in the process of naming children: can anyone imagine that the names of Frost’s children did not mean something, did not bear some familial or personal significance, to both father and mother, and did not invest their children with some minimal sense of purpose, affiliation, and expectation? Frost also has Maple say her name repeatedly before the mirror, displaying the common self-defeating attempt to make the name something other than an arbitrary, conventional marker. The operation arises out of the usual assumption that someone just does not look like a Lucy or a Mike, as if there were something close to a fundamental connection between name and appearance, not to mention name and personality as in the equally pervasive notion that a Tom ought to act differently from a Dick or Harry. Usually, such a repetition of the name—before the mirror or not— decouples the word from its referent and intensifies the sense of it as an arbitrary sound, calls attention to the word’s simple materiality. Yet later, Frost has Maple’s eventual husband say she reminds him of a maple, as if the name does have an essential link to her character. Amid all of this almost random play with the issue of naming, the poem finally produces a sense of wonder about the name, the sense, in fact, that Derrida communicates when he claims that the name is both arbitrary and somehow part

10.1057/9780230109896 - Names, Proverbs, Riddles, and Material Text in Robert Frost, Timothy O'Brien

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-14

The Quest for a Name in “Frost”

Names, Proverbs, Riddles

of Romeo—he would be Romeo by any other name, and yet his destiny remains inextricably wrapped up with his name and his sense of himself as Romeo. His name is the death of him, just as Maple’s is the death of her in that it always makes her feel absent from herself. Everyone’s name— whether it has too much or too little meaning—misses the point of identity; it is always a fundamental mistake. It merely elicits nostalgia for what has been obscured by the name: even some revelatory explanation of its origin—Maple was conceived in the woods under a maple tree, Maple was born on the same day her father planted a sapling of a maple tree, Maple is the product of an adulterous relationship that caused Maple’s mother to mark with a maple leaf an Old Testament passage about adultery, and so on—could not fulfill the burden produced by that glimpse of ultimate meaning. Thus, when Maple covers her eyes and finally says, “We would not see the secret if we could now: / We are not looking for it any more” (173), she completes a process that equates with Frost’s own sense of a quest for his name in the only way that she can, in the only way that he can.27 In the words of one of Frost’s aphoristic poems from A Witness Tree, “We dance round in a ring and suppose, / But the Secret sits in the middle and knows” (329).

“As a Stranger” to His Name, or Asie Gorrill Comes into His Own We cannot leave off our examination of Frost’s various displays of the problem of naming, signature, identity, and writing without considering perhaps the most ignored piece in Frost’s published works, the one-act play A Way Out. The only one of Frost’s plays published during his lifetime, the drama appeared in The Seven Arts during the first of that magazine’s barely two years in print.28 In one way, the play could serve as an allegorical treatment of the story of the magazine in which it appeared, whose pacifist leanings at the time of the country’s entry into World War I led to its loss of financial backing. The play dramatizes the intrusion of a stranger into the one room of a farm house in which the hermit, Asa Gorrill, lives. The stranger, as it turns out, is a murderer who apparently has worked in a shoe factory and who also seems well read and aware of certain literary conventions that perhaps irritated Frost himself. In sizing up Asa’s character, for example, he asks, “Ever been heard to say you like the innocent woods and fields and flowers like a poem in print?” (571). The play, then, stages an invasion on the part of a worldly-wise, aggressive, and even curiously literate stranger into the territory of one who

10.1057/9780230109896 - Names, Proverbs, Riddles, and Material Text in Robert Frost, Timothy O'Brien

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-14

48

49

has retreated from the world and who behaves almost like a pacifist. As a result it also plays out not only the issue of the United States’ necessary involvement in world affairs but at the same time Frost’s own duality of escape and entry into the world, not to mention his eagerness and support of war and his lack of participation in it.29 The unspecified “eerie psychological implications” in the play, observed by Herren (Tuten 82), arguably reflect on dichotomies within Frost concerning identity, and not necessarily, as Thompson argues, on Frost’s own imaginary, murderous inclinations (Years of Triumph 109). As the play develops we learn that the Stranger, who is being sought by the police for murder, aims at taking on Asa’s—the stranger calls him Asie— identity. He questions him about his inclinations toward women, art, and society; prepares to put on some of his host’s clothing; gets samples of Asa’s signature so that he can forge it; begins to ape Asa’s speech; sizes up the worth of Asa’s unsold acres of timber; and even asks him if he ever wonders if he has anything to live for. Frost presents this merger of identities in such a way that we do not know at the play’s end, after a fatal struggle between them, if Asa or the stranger survives. The Stranger has them twirl around in a frenzy within the room until they collapse, whereupon the designators of dialogue change from “Asa” and “Stranger” to “First to Speak” and “Second” (574); and the dialogue itself remains unclear about who is who, as each claims he is not the criminal. Then one faints and the other “strikes him a blow with his fist on the head and drags him across the floor and out of the house” (574–75). When the posse and, a minute after, a character now referred to as Asa appears and tells the group that he has just escaped from the criminal who was going to kill him, there is no telling if that character is in fact Asa or the Stranger. After the posse has left and one of them, while passing by the farm once again, yells “Good-night” to Asa from outside, that character, now referred to as “The Hermit,” answers, face in pillow, “Good night” (575).30 If the one who has survived the struggle is Asa, he has gained an altered sense of identity out of a newly perceived separation from his name, a sense of his name’s contingency and arbitrariness: it can become anyone’s property and anyone’s sign. If the play represents identity theft and the Stranger remains on stage, he unavoidably feels determined by the name: he must answer as Asa. At the same time, he is left to experience estrangement from his own name, whatever that name might have been. Suggesting this sense of our names as both strangers to us and us as strangers to our names, our names as estrangers, the dialogue for almost the entire play occurs between Asa (Asie) and Stranger, as if the issue of the tenuousness of the connection between name and identity hinges on the prepositional phrase “as a stranger.” Even the “as” in Asa or Asie

10.1057/9780230109896 - Names, Proverbs, Riddles, and Material Text in Robert Frost, Timothy O'Brien

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-14

The Quest for a Name in “Frost”

Names, Proverbs, Riddles

suggests this estrangement: sense of self is not so much identification as resemblance. Names do not locate identity: they imply a search for, but do not discover the origin of, who we are. Though they are nouns, names do invite a quest, and thus the exchange between Joe and his wife in “In the Home Stretch”—Adam and Eve figures after yet another move—captures the futility but necessity in the search for origins. Joe remarks on how they got to the point of moving into another house: “I don’t want to find out what can’t be known. / But who first said the word to come?” His wife responds: “My dear, It’s who first thought the thought. You’re searching, Joe, For things that don’t exist; I mean beginnings. Ends and beginnings—there are no such things. There are only middles.” (113)

Such furtive estrangement from origin, such muted despair over ever finding “the answer,” drives the search for a name, the signature search in a collection of works by a poet who, as we have seen, confessed aloud: “I sometimes think that there is no I,” which is as much to say, I think there is no origin of who I am. This profound doubt about identity, perhaps surprisingly, comes from someone who signed his name to manuscripts, Christmas cards, and books as often as any poet of his generation, it would seem; signed his name as a sort of authentication and as a marker of his presence. Ultimately, though, he must have sensed what we have seen that Derrida points out in “Signature Event Context” and what Frost himself enacts in this short play when the Stranger has Asa write out his name so that he can imitate that signature. A signature is essentially and always “counterfeit, forged, inauthentic” (qtd. in Hancher 229). Ahistorical in that it is repeatable at another time, detached from the particular time of its inscription, and often surviving the existence of its signer, the signature actually documents its alienation from any source, any origin, and even certifies the “nonpresence of the signer” (Hancher 229). When the surviving character at the end of “A Way Out” buries his head in the pillow as he answers the posse’s query, he expresses more than a need to disguise his voice, from which he had become a stranger; he does so as a suggestion of despair over the realization that the illusion of certain identity that determined each of the characters at the beginning can never be recovered.

10.1057/9780230109896 - Names, Proverbs, Riddles, and Material Text in Robert Frost, Timothy O'Brien

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-14

50

Proverbs and the Quest for Certainty

Say something to us we can learn By heart and when alone repeat.

Near the end of A Masque of Reason, God, Job, and Satan pose together so that Job’s wife can snap a picture. She tries to capture their essence and therefore prompts Satan to offer a representative version of his famous smile, because she thinks he looks a bit lost, as if he “were more guilty of mischief than” he really was. She tells him not to worry because she is prepared for any revelation that he can bring out; after all, she snidely remarks, there will not be any new discovery for which “Job himself / Won’t find a formula for taking care of” (386). Then Satan chimes in, “Like the one Milton found to fool himself / About his blindness” (386). Though the Notes to the Library of America edition direct us to the lines in Book 3 of Paradise Lost about the celestial light allowing the blind narrator to write about things “invisible to mortal sight” (984–85), I think Cramer accurately points to Milton’s sonnet “On His Blindness.” That sonnet contains the more formulaic and memorable line, “They also serve who only stand and wait.”1 Whatever the source, the passage is startlingly irreverent toward Milton, and dismissive of Job, especially when we consider that just several years before completing A Masque of Reason in 1943 Frost had emerged from emotionally crippling circumstances that might have made him identify with Job—and perhaps even with Milton. Though irreverent, this passage in A Masque of Reason is hardly unusual for Frost. In fact, it typifies the complexity with which Frost treats the very human need for proverblike expressions or sayings, for “unsystematic / Stray scraps of palliative reason / It wouldn’t hurt You to vouchsafe the faithful”

10.1057/9780230109896 - Names, Proverbs, Riddles, and Material Text in Robert Frost, Timothy O'Brien

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-14

Chapter 2

Names, Proverbs, Riddles

(377), as Job’s wife describes them. This largely unexplored concern with the proverblike sayings could very well be one important way in which, as Frost said in 1945, “All [his] poetry is a footnote to the [Masque of Reason]” (Cramer 182). Frost’s dramatic addition to the Book of Job develops that biblical work’s primary concern, the clashing of accepted, proverbial wisdom with an authentic, more profound experience of the basic identity questions that we have examined in the first chapter—who or what am I, what is the source of my existence, and what name can I use to bring a sense of certainty to my experience? More specifically, the masque deals with the question of the poet’s identity, one who merely stands and waits, in a world valuing action, and one who must be original when addressing those who largely seek confirmation of their self-comforting, widely accepted notions of their lives’ worth. It makes sense, then, to explore Frost’s extravagant claim that all his poetry serves as a footnote to this masque and, more specifically, to examine the extent to which proverbial sayings function as names, as unsatisfying though finally necessary markers of our desire to be located and to locate others and things in the world. Like naming and the quest for a poetic signature, with their yoking of the opposites of fire and ice, of desire and form, the proverb serves Frost as a locus for expressing a similar dynamic of impetuous search for an individualizing, original expression of identity and an equal reliance on restricting convention. Frost’s definition of his poetic identity through the proverb, in other words, amounts to “what fifty said”: a process of giving “up fire for form till [he is] cold” and of then being “cracked and sprung” by something more youthful and impulsive (245). Certainly, the implications involved in Frost’s use of these expressions are vastly more complex than is usually suggested by dismissal of, say, the neighbor in “Mending Wall” and the husband in “Home Burial” as mindlessly conventional and helplessly insensitive in their adherence to sayings. By “proverblike sayings,” I mean, as most commentators on proverbs agree, statements that are short and balanced in their expression and that seem to speak from a sense of the shared, traditional, customary wisdom of a community, rather than reflect individuality and irony toward received wisdom. Frost’s use of such proverblike sayings betrays almost a contradiction: on the one hand, a number of his poems condemn, or seem to condemn, them, and yet many of his pieces contain—and some of his shorter poems in fact amount to—proverblike expressions. This apparent contradiction arises from the dilemma that Daniel Barnes describes in his analysis of Emily Dickinson’s use of proverbs: “It is one thing for an individual to know and use proverbs in accepted cultural contexts; appropriating them for poetic ends is quite another—and potentially disastrous—matter, for the time-honored wisdom of any society is inevitably embodied in time-worn clichés” (447). He then cites Archer Taylor: “Folklore uses conventional

10.1057/9780230109896 - Names, Proverbs, Riddles, and Material Text in Robert Frost, Timothy O'Brien

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-14

52

53

themes and stylistic devices and makes no effort to disguise their conventional quality while the literary artist either divests his work of conventional quality by avoiding clichés of either form or matter, or . . . charges them with new content” (447). The occurrence of sayings in Frost’s poems and even his poems’ focus on sayings as a theme also pick up on other perennial questions readers have with Frost’s poetry. Are such proverbial expressions as “Good fences make good neighbors,” for instance, manly “stays against confusion” or are they aligned with the feminine? Are they, in terms of Frost’s politics, expressions of New Deal socialism or of conservatism? Are they markers of the oral that Frost, as we shall discuss later, so often seems to privilege or are they signs of something more formal and fixed even than the writing in which they appear? Related to this last question, are they more or less like the “sentence sounds” that Frost, at least for much of his career, proposed as the authentic elements of poetical expression or are they the contrived, worn-out diction that he, along with other modern poets— not to mention Emerson and Thoreau before him—opposed? All of these issues, moreover, are involved with what we have called Frost’s search for his name, his poetic identity. Use of proverbs or creation of proverbial-sounding expressions as ways of resolving problems raised in poems signals a fundamental tension between basic psychic needs. This is the kind of tension Lentricchia, in fact, isolates in Frost’s poems between the need for change, supplied by the redemptive imagination that soars to a vision beyond the common grounding in everyday, material reality and on the other hand the need for a “skeptical, ironic awareness” of the “therapy of dull realities and everyday considerations,” as expressed in something as common as a proverb (Robert Frost 112). Before examining the various ways in which Frost centers his poems around this concern with the proverbial inclination, I would like to establish a handful of critical issues related to the proverb to guide us along our way and also, by looking briefly at Emerson and Thoreau and some other likely voices to have struck Frost, to provide an explanation of how Frost’s interest in this proverbial inclination fits into a larger context. First, a short estimation of the proverb as genre. As Kenneth Burke points out, the proverb, like any piece of literature, amounts to a way of naming that expresses an attitude toward and an attempt to control almost as if by magic a situation that an individual or culture experiences: “Proverbs are strategies for dealing with situations. Insofar as situations are typical and recurrent in a given social structure, people develop names for them and strategies for handling them. Another name for strategies might be attitudes” (297).2 The perfect name as well as the perfect proverb, of course, eliminates the need for a kind of magic in this process because the name and the thing named would be identical. We do not need a trip to Swift’s Laputa with its

10.1057/9780230109896 - Names, Proverbs, Riddles, and Material Text in Robert Frost, Timothy O'Brien

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-14

Proverbs and the Quest for Certainty

Names, Proverbs, Riddles

absurd linguistics experiments, nor do we need to cite proverbs that offer diametrically opposing advice on the same issue (haste makes waste vs. the early bird gets the worm), to expose the impossibility of that ideal language system, and thus we are left with merely approximate names for situations, complicated by attitude, culture, and political aims. As names applied to situations, proverbs, however simple, express a rather complex array of values and expectations, and they also raise some important questions about the discourse in which they occur. They are conservative and unfold according to a kind of “unauthored” objectivity that carries with it the stamp of traditional wisdom (W. Barker xxx). According to Roger Abrahams, proverbs often occur at sites of threat within a community, where it needs “the greatest amount of control” (“A Rhetoric” 48). At these sites the proverb serves as a solution to a problem that arises repeatedly between the community’s members. Importantly, the proverb’s typical phrasing—concise, witty, memorable, and assertive—depersonalizes the problem, its use almost invoking a third perspective that implies the community’s own unbiased judgment. In other words, the proverb’s style “provides a sense of verbal stability” within the situation in which it is used (Abrahams, “Proverbs” 121). Though the proverb does, in Abraham’s terms, “attempt to induce future action through the establishment of the speaker as arbiter of values (and therefore modes of action),” it is different from, say, the curse, taunt, and boast in its impersonal language (“A Rhetoric” 56). According to Donald K. Berry, proverbs put the reader/ hearer in the position of subordinate, allowing no question, as receiving yields to the authority of the text (140). The force of the proverbial inclination, then, is generally to preserve the community at the expense of the individual desire. No surprise that our post-Romantic sense of the proverb differs from that of the Renaissance as expressed in such works as Erasmus’s collection of adages and Brueghel’s “Netherlandic Proverbs” (Sullivan 253). When Polonius uses a string of proverbial-like sayings to advise Laertes how to behave in France, he is not simply the object of generational ridicule in Shakespeare’s play. He also represents the voice of Renaissance education in which proverbs were taught systematically (W. Barker xxvi) and in which knowledge of their applicability reflected a humanistic awareness of how the wisdom of the past could shape, even refresh the present. Though Polonius seems stale and out of touch with a dynamic world of youthful possibility, Shakespeare’s play as effectively interrogates Hamlet’s unsatisfying search for an authentic, individualistic sense of meaning and identity without the support of such accepted wisdom. Ironically, Hamlet arrives at roughly the same position as Polonius by the end of the play, depending on compressed proverblike sayings—“The readiness is all” and “There’s a

10.1057/9780230109896 - Names, Proverbs, Riddles, and Material Text in Robert Frost, Timothy O'Brien

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-14

54

55

divinity that shapes our ends, / Rough-hew them how we will”—though certainly he seems to have arrived at that position with far more questioning and struggle than Polonius might have experienced. Whatever the extent of satire against Polonius’s dependence on proverbs in Hamlet, by 1774 we see Lord Chesterfield departing entirely from Polonius by advising his son not to use proverbs if he wants to be seen as a man of fashion (W. Barker xxvi). This partially Romantic disdain for poetic diction and established convention, of course, has situated proverbs so that today when we use them, we do so cautiously, even apologetically, if not ironically (W. Barker xxv). Not marking self-consciousness about our use of proverbs, in fact, signals a lack of individual thinking, even perhaps a kind of ignorance. In one important way, however, the Romantic bias against the proverbial inclination encounters a snag: returning to the oral, folk tradition, the social location where, theoretically, one can discover the authentic, original, and unadorned ways of communication, the seeker finds, as folklorists have shown, an equally mannered, conventional, proverbial way of interpreting the world. In a sense the proverb always contains the tension between such two historically opposed views as expressed in the Renaissance and the Romantic periods: the accumulated wisdom of the ages on the one hand and, on the other, the truth of a period before original perception became buried under an accumulation of convention. The proverb, then, can serve both the desire to be conventional and the desire to break through convention and discover origins. As discourse, the proverb presents several problems. After all, it is an already-existing text often employed in another context. A proverb can appear in context almost as an intrusion of a timeless realm into a temporal one, an already-composed discourse into a stream of expression as it unfolds. I might stop by a colleague’s office a little early on the way to the college’s Christmas party, for instance, and try to get him to come along with me a little earlier than he intended—after all, I say, within a series of observations about getting in and out of there and being able to get a good sampling of the spread offered by the dean, “The early bird gets the worm.” That saying intrudes from somewhere, some earlier place in our history, some site of vast experience. Though it seems to come from the “voice” of experience, it has an already-composed feel to it, as if it were something more authorized than the mere conversation in which it occurs. As Roger Abrahams and Barbara Babcock explain, proverbs “are minimal devices of verbal art which involve, as an element of their artifice, a switching of communicational codes, from the (apparently) spontaneous and casual to a more formal and stylized code” (419). At the same time, however, they are often used in written texts, it seems, to compensate for those texts’ formality, for the distancing of speaker from hearer and the

10.1057/9780230109896 - Names, Proverbs, Riddles, and Material Text in Robert Frost, Timothy O'Brien

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-14

Proverbs and the Quest for Certainty

Names, Proverbs, Riddles

“dissociation of intention and meaning,” at least in so far as those texts have oral communication as their model (Abrahams and Babcock 418). The applicability of the proverb to the case at hand, of course, might be a problem: my colleague might remark that the fare offered by the dean usually tastes of worms. In other words the saying fails to work because it in fact matches too closely the appetitive arena in which it is used. Such formulae as “the early bird gets the worm,” “a stitch in time saves nine,” or “a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush” actually seem more effective as their application moves farther away from their literal language. Communities do not depend on the truth of the vehicle in the proverb’s metaphor; rather they depend on its applicability. In part that is the problem, if I may jump ahead in my discussion of Frost’s interest in proverbial expressions, with “Good fences make good neighbors” in “Mending Wall”: the saying occurs in such proximity to its literal application that it becomes subject to a kind of deconstruction, becomes susceptible to questions about its literal truth—isn’t it needed where there are cows, but here there are no cows to keep out? The proverb is most vulnerable when taken literally, even though it represents itself as wisdom developed from human experience “in the field.” This interesting feature of the proverb’s force actually betrays its therapeutic rather than truth value: a point that the speaker and the neighbor, to a certain extent, miss in Frost’s poem, but one that Frost certainly promotes with his title, at least to the extent that “mending” is as much an adjective as a gerund. In his discussion of the proverb in “Mending Wall,” George Monteiro emphasizes the negative consequences of reliance on the proverb, consequences that Frost, as we shall see, does emphasize: “What finally emerges from Frost’s poem is the idea that the stock reply—unexamined wisdom from the past—seals off the possibility of further thought and communication. When thought has frozen into folk expression, language itself becomes another wall, one unresponsive to that which it encircles”(127). Yes, the saying itself is a wall, an opaque expression, but in a sense it also mends the always already existing sense of rivalry and difference between members of a community. In terms of application, then, the proverbial saying occurs as an attempt ultimately to quell anxiety about a situation or experience; it names and thus familiarizes the unfamiliar. This process includes a marking of that experience as one that has occurred before within a group; and thus it translates a heightened, individual response into a shared, communal one. Politically it seems conservative; yet it can be enlisted as a mark of original language that undermines the artificial, layered-on quality of accepted social practices. As discourse, it seems aligned with oral communication, though when imported into actual or literary conversation, it has the artful, balanced qualities of a preexistent, already-composed form of expression,

10.1057/9780230109896 - Names, Proverbs, Riddles, and Material Text in Robert Frost, Timothy O'Brien

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-14

56

Proverbs and the Quest for Certainty

57

“Old Musty Cheese” or the “Good Old Folk Ways”? Before delving into Frost’s poems, I would like to enrich this overview of the proverbial inclination by looking at a few other authors and even Frost’s own discussions of sayings, or what he, like Job’s wife, called formula. One of these works is the seminal piece in American literature on this proverbial inclination: Franklin’s “The Way to Wealth,” or “Father Abraham’s Speech,” the Preface to the final version of The Poor Richard Almanack issued in 1758. In this preface, Franklin, using the invented character of Father Abraham, strings together the various aphoristic messages with which he had interlarded the important days indicated in his almanacs. Father Abraham gives his harangue to a group of people who complain about governmental taxation as they await the beginning of an auction. They ask Father Abraham what he thinks about the bad times in which they live and especially about the taxes. Abraham responds, “If you’d have my Advice, I’ll give it you in short, for A Word to the Wise is enough, and Many Words won’t fill a Bushel, as Poor Richard says” (Franklin 400).3 As it turns out, his advice could fill more than a bushel basket. Franklin’s persona, Richard Saunders, describes the event, claiming that he was present at the time and really quite flattered to hear Father Abraham apply all the wisdom that Richard over the years had inserted into his almanacs (399). His almost Chaucerian/Swiftian peek-a-boo act exposing his self-regard, pride in popularity, and even profit motive makes the work’s attitude toward the proverbial wisdom it offers complex and curious in ways resembling those of Frost’s persona in many of his poems. Richard betrays bitterness that other almanac authors have “been very sparing in their Applauses” of his works and that “no other Author has taken the least Notice of [him]” (399). He concludes, however, that the large sales of his work vindicate his merit. Moreover, he claims that he has often heard his adages repeated, a fact that shows that his instruction has been widely regarded and that there is some respect among the people for his authority. Throughout the fictional oration, then, Richard has Abraham cite dozens of Poor Richard’s proverbs, as the old man tries to persuade the people that the taxes levied by the government are miniscule compared to

10.1057/9780230109896 - Names, Proverbs, Riddles, and Material Text in Robert Frost, Timothy O'Brien

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-14

though invoking nevertheless the sense of a spoken truth. It invests the diachronic, in other words, with a synchronic value. These are the issues that we will need to keep in mind as we look at Frost’s various displays of the proverbial inclination in his poems.

Names, Proverbs, Riddles

the ways in which they “tax” themselves with overspending, indebtedness, lack of industry, impatience, and so on. They blame external causes for their apparently less than financially healthy state, when they have only themselves to blame. The Preface concludes on two levels: the people’s response to Father Abraham’s oration and the persona’s response to the entire situation he describes, including his own involvement. As for the audience awaiting the auction, they heard the harangue, “and approved the Doctrine, and—Immediately practiced the Contrary, just as if it had been a common Sermon; for the Vendue opened, and they began to buy extravagantly, notwithstanding all his Cautions, and their own Fear of Taxes” (412). As for Richard, the repeated quotations of his adages delight his vanity, even though he knows they are the mere “Gleanings” he has “made of all Ages and Nations” (412). Having listened to Father Abraham speak the wisdom he himself has authored/collected, he concludes: “I resolved to be the better for the Echo of it; and though I had at first determined to buy Stuff for a new Coat, I went away resolved to wear my old One a little longer. Reader, if thou wilt do the same, thy Profit will be as great as mine. I am, as ever, Thine to serve thee” (412). The playfulness of this piece and the ways in which it situates this proverbial inclination are fascinating. In the generally contradictory mode of self-help books, Richard’s cataloging of proverbs advising against extravagant spending is itself an invitation to the reader to purchase the almanac. The proverbs themselves amount to commodities, which are, as the setting suggests, consumed and at the same time put to no use—with the exception of the purveyor of the proverbs, that is, who is taken with the echo of his own voice, even though his own voice is really the work of the ages and nations, not of his own imagination. The wisdom of the proverbs has, then, a curious function: it mollifies the people’s potential conflict with their government in the form of accepted wisdom. It amounts to a fabric of truths accepted and approved of, but not immediately applicable to the hearers, who must—we have to assume—approve of that fabric as applied to others, not themselves. In this piece, moreover, the people seek in the old man the sort of clichéd proverbial advice, I suspect, that usually condemns the “modern” times and the increased governmental intrusion into their lives: it seems clear that the people seek this sort of oration, given the invitation to this Father Time figure. They receive something quite different: a speech that makes their individual habits, not the government and the general decay of the times, the true culprit. However, the piece betrays no sense that the people are troubled by the critical wisdom that Father Abraham offers: it is as if they are comforted by the sound of the proverbs’ echoed and re-echoed wisdom, the sound of something familiar, and so do

10.1057/9780230109896 - Names, Proverbs, Riddles, and Material Text in Robert Frost, Timothy O'Brien

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-14

58

59

not listen in any but a ritualistic way, as if they had just heard “a common sermon.” Immediately the comforting sound of some of Frost’s ultimately disturbing poems—“On Being Versed in Country Things”—comes to mind. Ultimately, then, Franklin offers a humorous, but ambivalent view of this proverbial inclination. On the one hand proverbs are the fodder of people—consumed, listened to, spoken frequently but not heeded— and merely markers of the unthinking masses; on the other hand, they offer truths so close to our origins as to be affiliated with the patriarch Abraham. Though the truths are mere echoes of the wisdom of the ages and nations, the careful heeding of those truths marks a few—the author and the “Reader”—as special. To varying degrees, in the works of Emerson and Thoreau a similar sort of ambivalence toward proverbs emerges, though the stakes are different: worldly success and resistance to the kind of misfortune that strikes Job, for instance, in Franklin, as opposed to a means of perceiving the “Truth” lurking behind appearance and everyday language in both Emerson and Thoreau. What I have tried to suggest is that the self-reflexive layering of voices in Franklin’s Preface to his final version of The Poor Richard Almanack does invite a critical view of the proverbial wisdom offered in his almanacs, a critical view that positions the proverbs, not just the advice they express, as means to an end. That end is the material enrichment and increased security of Richard himself—who is “laughing all the way to the bank.” In other words, Franklin exposes his persona’s own exploitation of proverbs—of their safe, unthreatening criticism of the very folks who consume them. Franklin’s work, therefore, reaches somewhat critically beyond the proverbial equation for which it is largely known: practice prudence and you will achieve material (and even spiritual) security. Likely, Thoreau did not respond to this complexity in Franklin’s piece. As Joseph Moldenhauer points out, Thoreau, in Walden, employs proverbs in ways that counter the commonly regarded “Franklinian level of virtue” with “a ‘higher law’ of moral awareness” (158). As evidence of Thoreau’s preoccupation with proverbs, Moldenhauer refers to the occurrence of about one hundred proverbial or aphoristic expressions in Walden, to his frequent use of “folk locutions” in his letters, journals, essays and books, to his gatherings of maxims and proverbs, and to his possession of Knox’s anthology of memorable quotations and adages, Elegant Extracts. On the one hand, Thoreau viewed proverbs as original expressions of “truth”: they were “naturally and truly composed” in a way that allowed for “most generous interpretation” by the wise man (Moldenhauer 152). They spoke to humans’ reason rather than the more superficial understanding—hence his profound interest in proverbs as the site of original truth. However, he also regarded them as the site of humans’ trivializing, unreflective, common

10.1057/9780230109896 - Names, Proverbs, Riddles, and Material Text in Robert Frost, Timothy O'Brien

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-14

Proverbs and the Quest for Certainty

60

Names, Proverbs, Riddles

Of greater significance for this analysis, however, is Thoreau’s use of proverbial utterance to put his audience off guard, wittily “deluding” them into the impression that he speaks their own language. At the same time, he uses that familiar language as the vehicle of unfamiliar and unconventional notions. His suasive intentions are manifested in two distinct ways: he qualifies and alters current proverbial materials, and he “invents” proverbs—that is, he composes apothegms which, while resembling genuine proverbs in structure and verbal texture, express sentiments quite unlike the usual conservative messages of folk sayings. (153)

In various ways, Thoreau alters existing proverbs. Moldenhauer offers the examples of “a woman’s dress . . . is never done” (155); “Men say that a stitch in time saves nine, and so they take a thousand stitches to-day to save nine tomorrow” (155); and “what is one man’s gain is not another’s loss” (156)—a blatant negation of the original form. He also illustrates the ways in which Thoreau duplicates the form of proverbs, creating “proverb analogues”: “I trust that none will stretch the seams in putting on the coat, for it may do good service to him whom it fits”; or “As if there were safety in stupidity alone.” And then there are Thoreau’s “new proverbs”: “a goose is a goose still, dress it as you will”; “Rescue the drowning and tie your shoestrings”; and “If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer” (156). Most helpful for our purposes, however, is Moldenhauer’s analysis of the representative way in which Thoreau “renews” a proverb that he likely encountered in Franklin’s “The Way to Wealth”: “Early to Bed, and early to rise, makes a Man healthy, wealthy, and wise.” In his chapter “Sounds,” Thoreau asks, “Who would not be early to rise, and rise earlier and earlier every successive day of his life, till he became unspeakably healthy, wealthy, and wise?” (Moldenhauer 156). The modification itself and the context Thoreau builds around it represent his way of trying to revitalize the proverb without entirely demolishing its value. He refers to the early rising rooster and the fowl’s origins in the undomesticated wild Indian pheasant, and makes alterations throughout the chapter in the meaning of “rise,” “early,” “healthy,” “wealthy,” and “wise” so as to suggest their emotional, spiritual, philosophical, and metaphorical meaning rather than their prudential, material value. He moves the saying away from its easily fixable meaning to its ineffable, even highly personal, significance. The maneuver amounts to an effort to trace the proverb back to its origins in

10.1057/9780230109896 - Names, Proverbs, Riddles, and Material Text in Robert Frost, Timothy O'Brien

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-14

understanding, ultimately just more expressions of “that old musty cheese that we are” (Walden 109).4 Consequently, Thoreau’s aim in Walden is in part to revitalize the proverb, as Moldenhauer explains:

61

some inspired, truly representative authorship, to take it out of the marketplace and locate its original coinage. The effort is the same as for the name, an attempt to recover its origin. Seemingly anticipating the equation we have seen Burke make between the proverb and the larger literary work, both being ways of naming so as to deal with cultural situations, Thoreau treats proverbs as miniature versions of literature. This analogous relationship, moreover, gives proverbs a slippery position in terms of the binary oppositions between the oral and written and the feminine and the masculine. The chapter that precedes “Sounds,” the one in which, according to Moldenhauer, Thoreau gradually transforms the Franklinian proverb, is called “Reading,” and deals with the difference between common literature, which Thoreau equates with the oral and feminine, and great literature of the ancients, which he aligns with the written and male. In terms of essential meaning, Thoreau treats writing as synchronic and the oral as diachronic, as something requiring attention though never yielding an absolute, fixable meaning. Thoreau assigns the written to the male position. Two passages in particular capture these values assigned to the written and the oral: We might as well omit to study Nature because she is old. To read well, that is, to read true books in a true spirit, is a noble exercise, and one that will task the reader more than any exercise which the customs of the day esteem. It requires a training such as the athletes underwent, the steady intention almost of the whole life to this object. Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written. It is not enough even to be able to speak the language of that nation by which they are written, for there is a memorable interval between the spoken and the written language, the language heard and the language read. The one is commonly transitory, a sound, a tongue, a dialect merely, almost brutish, and we learn it unconsciously, like the brutes, of our mothers. The other is the maturity and experience of that; if that is our mother tongue, this is our father tongue, a reserved and select expression, too significant to be heard by the ear, which we must be born again in order to speak. (80–81) The works of great poets have never yet been read by mankind, for only great poets can read them. They have only been read as the multitude read the stars, at most astrologically, not astronomically. Most men have learned to read to serve a paltry convenience, as they have learned to cipher in order to keep accounts and not be cheated in trade; but of reading as a noble intellectual exercise they know little or nothing; yet this only is reading, in a high sense, not that which lulls us as a luxury and suffers the nobler faculties to sleep the while, but what we have to stand on tip-top to read and devote our most alert and wakeful hours to . . . There are those who, like cormorants and ostriches, can digest all sorts of this [“easy reading” of the popular sort], even after the fullest dinner of meats and vegetables, for

10.1057/9780230109896 - Names, Proverbs, Riddles, and Material Text in Robert Frost, Timothy O'Brien

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-14

Proverbs and the Quest for Certainty

62

Names, Proverbs, Riddles

Prefiguring in its details the “early to rise” and bird/fowl imagery of the next chapter, which deconstructs Franklin’s proverb, this discussion of reading anticipates also the kind of critical attention Thoreau himself gives that proverb, as if it were a piece of great literature to be inspected actively, to be engaged and even rewritten by the participating reader rather than be mindlessly consumed as if by a cormorant. Though he does distinguish the “gingerbread” of popular literature from the “pure wheat or rye-andindian” of great literature and thus indicate that the “text” itself must be assigned value in terms of the purity of its origin, he largely emphasizes the reader’s role in producing the text. Even if there are machines to produce the “provender” of popular literature, readers do not have to act as the machines that consume it. In a sense, the oral and written distinction can apply to the act of reception as well: people can hear/read as if merely listening to their “mother” tongue; or they can hear/read as if through an assertive, exploratory activity that connects words with their original, natural meanings, as they were born again outside the mother under the auspices of the father figure, who, like the rooster, rises early and is born to a new world ready to be explored as if it were created anew each day—and created anew almost as a result of the “writerly” approach that Thoreau promotes. The proverb, in these terms, remains a neutral expression, a kind of feature of nature, always potentially a “great piece of literature” depending on whether it is consumed or reinvigorated through an active process of “reading,” reading having become a self-exploratory, critical facility. Thoreau aligns intellectually and spiritually trivial activity with the feminine and oral, and the opposite with the masculine, despite the fact that the text of Nature, the original script, is feminine (“We might as well omit to study Nature because she is old”). Moreover, even though the oral realm with which the “unreinvigorated” proverb is aligned seems to have come prior to the written—it is the mother that gives birth, it is the time of brutishness, and it is the first element in that “interval between the spoken and the written language”—it nevertheless seems to come after the written, whose first sentences appeared on the barks of trees (79) and whose expression seems closer to some original site of feeling, ultimately because it always resists exact, reductive interpretation.5 Taken from Frost’s “Choose Something Like a Star,” the epigraph for this chapter could very well have its source in the language of the second passage from Thoreau quoted above. Like Frost’s comment on A Masque of Reason—“All my poetry is a footnote to it”—this poem, it seems, offers more evidence of Frost’s abiding interest in the essential human need for

10.1057/9780230109896 - Names, Proverbs, Riddles, and Material Text in Robert Frost, Timothy O'Brien

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-14

they suffer nothing to be wasted. If others are the machines to provide this provender, they are the machines to read it. (84)

63

palliative sayings. He did, after all, chose this poem as the “Afterword” to the 1949 edition of his Complete Poems. Frost constructs the poem’s speaker as the needy but disrespectful seeker of the truth; I say disrespectful because that speaker wants an immediate and certain answer to his questions. In a similar position as the star-like great literature of Thoreau’s passage (“read . . . astrologically, not astronomically”), the star in Frost’s poem remains obscure to the speaker but also holds the promise of an answer to the mysteries of existence. Frost in fact remarked at one time that in using the image of the star he had in mind “some poet of a thousand years ago—two thousand years—something way out of this” (Cook, Robert Frost 183). However, the speaker wants the star’s answer to be “common,” as it were: “Say something to us we can learn / By heart and when alone repeat” (365). The speaker longs for the star to “Talk Fahrenheit” and “Centigrade,” to “Use language we can comprehend.” He desires, in other words, something like a proverb, with its mnemonically friendly formulation, or some kind of scientific structure. He reads the star astrologically rather than astronomically, to use Thoreau’s terms, trying to make it serve a “paltry need.” The poem makes a sonnet-like turn two-thirds of the way through and assumes a different voice, moving from this urgent, demanding, childlike, almost mother-needy attitude toward one suggesting a kind of metaphorical, open reading of the star-text, one that goes beyond that of the mob. When seen in this preferred way, the star does tell us something, though in the form of a request: It asks a little of us here. It asks of us a certain height, So when at times the mob is swayed To carry praise or blame too far, We may choose something like a star To stay our minds on and be staid. (365)

The willingness to see the star as a question rather than a pat answer raises the mind above the mob and offers consolation of a more profound sort than a simple answer. The proverbial inclination in this poem has two aspects that correspond to the two in Thoreau: on the one hand, it expresses the common desire to close off inquiry and create a sense of authoritative certainty, an answer that can be held in memory and recited by rote and that also features, as do the biblical Proverbs, a comprehensible sense of blame or responsibility; on the other hand, the proverbial inclination expresses a desire to get back in touch with some common source of existence, an affinity for our origin that can inspire authentic, symbolic inquiry rather

10.1057/9780230109896 - Names, Proverbs, Riddles, and Material Text in Robert Frost, Timothy O'Brien

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-14

Proverbs and the Quest for Certainty

Names, Proverbs, Riddles

than pat answers. This second view accords with Timmerman’s reading of what he calls this “nearly perfect poem,” a poem that offers the best example of Frost’s ethics of ambiguity and his insistence on a deontological ethics guided by the power of imagination, intuition, and belief (145). If not read as if it were great literature, if read as something oral, as, in other words, some aspect of Thoreau’s mother tongue, the proverb can become just what the frantically inquiring speaker in Frost’s poem seeks: something soothing and superficially consoling that can “Say something to us we can learn / By heart and when alone repeat.” Of course, the star’s answer is merely, “I burn.” Even the neat dichotomy that mirrors that in Thoreau, then, is complicated, as Katherine Kearns brilliantly explains, by the sense that the star, in its “burning,” is itself as urgent and unrestrained as the mob for whose limited perspective it is supposed to offer compensation through a sober, historic process of contextualization (65–68). We must observe also, that even in this poem, in which Frost clearly dramatizes a speaker as distanced from Frost’s own less insistent need for an answer, the imagery of the aloof but burning star expresses also the poet’s quest for his poetic signature in fire and ice. Near the end of his life, in a 1962 Dartmouth College address, Frost used this poem, among others, to illustrate his elusive theme of extravagance. One of the supporting motifs of that talk, as expressed through both its manner and subject matter, is the contrast between the proverbial saying received as palliative reason on the one hand and the saying as an invitation to think, to puzzle over existence on the other. In fact, Frost begins his talk with a proverbial expression: “A penny saved is a penny earned” (902). He even performs the same move with it that Thoreau does in turning “What is one man’s gain is another man’s loss” into “ . . . is not another’s loss” (emphasis added). Frost says, “I never took any stock in that doctrine that ‘a penny saved is a penny earned.’ A penny saved is a mean thing, and a penny spent, you know, is a generous thing and a big thing” (902). He humorously refers to the plush surroundings of the newly and lavishly outfitted Hopkins Center as he undermines the easy truth of this conventional saying. As the talk unfolds and he refers to poems he reads as extravagances—on the same order as the Hopkins Center and, indeed, the universe—he loosely associates poetry of the nondoctrinal kind with the undercutting of safe, palliative positions and also with puzzling, disorienting experiences in general. He offers his own sayings or reinventions of customary sayings, along with certain lines from his own poems, as substitute proverbs or adages, though his offerings hardly succumb to easy decoding, to the desire for palliative reasoning. For instance, he makes a gesture at essentializing what he means by “extravagance” with the phrase, “it sometimes seems as if,” an echo of the way in which he ended his

10.1057/9780230109896 - Names, Proverbs, Riddles, and Material Text in Robert Frost, Timothy O'Brien

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-14

64

65

“Introduction to E.A. Robinson’s King Jasper nearly 30 years earlier: “All virtue’s in ‘as if’ . . . As if they were. As if, as if!” (748).6 He uses the entire poem “The Most of It” to oppose the views of somebody who held “it up for some doctrine that’s supposed to be in it,” and even claims that the one line, “He thought he kept the universe alone,” “could be the whole poem” (904). He also puts his audience in the position of extravagance; that is, he requires them to value something that does not offer an immediate meaning or satisfaction and that might remain forever puzzling. His audience, as he puts it, seems to resemble some homunculus holding on to the whip that he, as lion-tamer/poet/speaker, cracks: “It’s like snapping a whip, you know. Are you there? Are you still on?—you know. Are you with it? Or has it snapped you off?” (907). Later, after invoking the quotation from Mark that he incorporated into “Directive” about preventing through parables “the wrong people” from understanding his meaning and getting “saved,” he says to the audience, “I like to see you. I like to bother some of you. What do we go around with poetry for? Go around just for kindred spirits some way—not for criticism, not for appreciation, and nothing but just awareness of each other about it all” (910–11). While he puts his audience in the position to puzzle over his extravagances, he offers a parable that describes the very thing he is doing in his talk. He tells about one of his great friends who told him that “everything’s in the Old Testament that you find in the New.” Frost continues: And I said, “What is the height of it?” “Well,” he said, “love your neighbor as yourself.” I said, “Yeah, that’s in both of them.” Then just to tease him, I said, “But it isn’t good enough.” He said, “What’s the matter with it?” “And hate your neighbor as you hate yourself.” He said, “You hate yourself?” “I wouldn’t be religious unless I did.” (910)

Frost builds upon this anecdote by returning to the idea of a special meaning for only those special people who expend themselves in reading as extravagantly as he expends himself in writing: “Some people can’t go with you. Let them drop; let them fall off. Let the wolves take them” (910). In the context of this performance, Frost turns to read “Choose Something Like a Star.” That choice, it seems clear, suggests that the poem served for him as one example, if not his anchor example, of the ridiculous, stultifying desire for the proverb (or in Burke’s and Thoreau’s terms, the name and poem) to serve as palliative answer. Yet amid all this sense of extravagance as a kind of rebellion from convention, as Poirier observes in his fundamental discussion of the safe return home always built into

10.1057/9780230109896 - Names, Proverbs, Riddles, and Material Text in Robert Frost, Timothy O'Brien

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-14

Proverbs and the Quest for Certainty

Names, Proverbs, Riddles

Frost’s depictions of this “extra-vagrant” activity, there is a background of conventionality—almost, one could say, a proverbial safety net. Even his startling reconfiguration of “love thy neighbor as yourself” into “hate your neighbor as you hate yourself” ultimately works to support his depiction of himself as religious, as essentially conventional (Robert Frost 82–119).7 Many of these oppositions concerning the proverb—maternal speaking versus paternal writing; lowness versus elevation; instability versus stability; self-deception versus inquiry; materialism versus spirituality— occur as well in Emerson’s treatment of the proverb, though with different emphases and without quite the same level of irony as in Thoreau. In his thorough and wide-ranging study of the fundamental place of the proverb in Emerson’s philosophy and style, Ralph C. La Rosa carefully lays out the ways in which Emerson uses the proverb as the junction of all oppositions so as to enforce his optimistic sense of man’s possible reconnection, however fleeting, with the original language, the Logos. Aside from the sheer persistence in Emerson’s use of proverbs, which for the most part avoids the deconstruction and reconstruction we have seen in Thoreau, his words about them are remarkably enthusiastic. In Nature, for example, he says that “proverbs of the nations,” such as “a rolling stone gathers no moss” or “a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush,” “consist usually of a natural fact, selected as a picture or parable of moral truth” (Selected Essays 53). He goes on in that work to assert, “What is true of proverbs, is true of all fables, parables, and allegories” (53). Proverbs are “fossil poetry” (La Rosa 161). They are, in “Compensation,” the “literature of reason, or the statements of an absolute truth”; they, “like the sacred books of each nation, are the sanctuary of the intuitions”; they are “that which the droning world, chained to appearances, will not allow the realist to say in his own words,” but will hear as “proverbs without contradiction” (qtd. in Moldenhauer 152). In Wide World 3 (1822), they are “proofs of the action of some single intelligent Principle” (qtd. in Reaver 290). An early record in Emerson’s journal indicates that he saw proverbs as the precursors of written laws and as fundamental expressions of the truth that a divine power was expressed through all things: “proverbs and familiar sayings of all nations . . . are the first generalizations of the mind and have been repeated by the mouth of the million” (qtd. in La Rosa 134). As a record of the accumulated wisdom of mankind over the ages, “common proverbs,” he suggests in YES, avail us of “accurate knowledge of human life” that “no single individual, with whatever penetration, could have attained himself . . . ” (qtd. in La Rosa 136). Like Thoreau, Emerson knew Knox’s collection of quotations and proverbs; he compiled and borrowed proverbs; and he “created” his own, which he actually designated as “My Proverbs.” Even more incessantly than

10.1057/9780230109896 - Names, Proverbs, Riddles, and Material Text in Robert Frost, Timothy O'Brien

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-14

66

67

Thoreau, he used proverbs in his writings and addresses. Like Thoreau he expressed suspicion of the kind of thinking that supported the common use of proverbs. He warns in “Prudence” that “the world is filled with the proverbs and acts and winkings of a base prudence” (The Collected 1: 132), a prudence that does not “go behind nature and ask whence it is” (The Collected 1: 133). Nevertheless, he persistently identifies proverbs as outcroppings of the original language from which man’s fall from paradise, as he suggests in “The Poet,” alienated him; and those outcroppings occur in “the people,” in “the common style of the people, as one finds . . . in proverbs and forms of speech” (qtd. in La Rosa 191), especially as reinterpreted by the poet, or the poet in all of us. For instance, in “The Over-Soul,” Emerson explains that language cannot pin down this Over-Soul, even though it runs through everyone. To express the very inexpressibility of that Soul, however, he turns to a proverb: “We know that all spiritual being is in man. A wise old proverb says, ‘God comes to see us without bell’ ” (qtd. in La Rosa 184). As it came to Emerson in the Knox compendium, according to La Rosa, the proverb warned humans that they should be ready and prepared for death and God’s reckoning. Emerson, however, turns that negative application into a positive one, explaining that it illustrates the lack of an impenetrable border between God and humans: “That is, there is no screen or ceiling between our heads and the infinite heavens, so is there no bar or wall in the soul, where man, the effect, ceases, and God, the cause, begins. The walls are taken away” (qtd. in La Rosa 185). Thus, as in Thoreau, the active, lively interpretation of proverbs actually activates their original expression of something beyond low prudence. Emerson’s use of the proverbs, according to La Rosa, highlights their power to fuse a sense of historicity with timelessness, the diachronic with the synchronic. As Reaver points out, Emerson felt that the power to recognize and produce the Truth “resides in the moment of transition from a past to a new state, in the shooting of the gulf, in the darting to an aim” (Reaver 296). Giving a proverb a new turn, for instance, activates this sense of transition and renewal. As an expression of the ages and even as an expression of particular periods of time and individual nations, proverbs record diversity and change; and yet at the same time, their primary structural features of balance and, ultimately, of identification in the A = B form they most often take express within this diversity and timelessness an opening onto that which remains unchanging (La Rosa 156). The proverb thus expresses the productive tension between the fleeting phenomenal realm and, through its form, the sense of an origin that is always accessible. In its basic form of identification, the proverb names the usually inapproachable truth that runs through everything. Its formulaic sound and

10.1057/9780230109896 - Names, Proverbs, Riddles, and Material Text in Robert Frost, Timothy O'Brien

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-14

Proverbs and the Quest for Certainty

Names, Proverbs, Riddles

structure give an audience something to remember, even apart from the proverb’s specific details and message. In La Rosa’s terms, “proverbs always sound like an absolute truth, whatever their particular images or messages” (La Rosa 156). This is why Emerson could say “that the ‘necessary truths’ of proverbs have a ‘quasi’ truth instantly to the ear’ of an audience” (qtd. in La Rosa 156). It is also why Emerson so often turns to proverbial structuring of his thought, even when he is not working from existing proverbs. In responding to the apparent “timelessness” of the proverb’s sound and structure, the audience essentially gets in touch with the “deep structures” within its own nature; it responds to a truth that seems to come as much from within as from without. From this necessarily brief distillation of Emerson’s “proverbial inclinations,” we can observe several themes. For Emerson, the oral model seems to be primary: language that “speaks” rather than whispers on paper more closely approaches the truth of universal identity that he—and by implication, of course—we all seek. The structure of the proverb is vital precisely because it echoes, even activates, a structure embedded within the audience; it strikes the hearer/reader as something it has heard before. Importantly, this recognition of familiarity is not to be confused with merely a hankering for comfort, but rather with a kind of stirring or glimmering of one’s usually unacknowledged identification with what seems like an inaccessible other. The proverb is a fossil, a product of time and of a different culture, as expressed in its different language and field of images, but through its form it represents something that remains always present, no matter what the age and what the culture. This enthusiastic, “transcendental” vision of proverbs, even with such qualifications that Emerson makes about their support of base prudence, is far removed from the vision we get from Job’s wife in The Masque of Reason: that turning to a proverbial formula to capture a sense of “the truth” is a delusion. Part of the reason for that difference emerges from the work of another often-noticed influence upon Frost, William James. That influence shows up most clearly in tone. James does not discuss proverbs overtly, but he does address formulae by which people live—in custom, in common sense, and, as we have seen, in the act of naming. These formulae function as the props that support our need to feel that we live in a world that at least seems coherent despite a background, when examined openly, of uncertainty and incoherence. In a largely sympathetic way, James isolates the need of people, including philosophers, scientists, religious figures, and even the sort of person represented by the neighbor in Frost’s “Mending Wall,” to rely on a certain level of self-deception and merely subjective preference in life decisions. To the extent that it is influenced by James, Frost’s interest in the proverbial inclination exceeds the connection both

10.1057/9780230109896 - Names, Proverbs, Riddles, and Material Text in Robert Frost, Timothy O'Brien

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-14

68

69

Thoreau and Emerson make between it and some detectable origin of truth or between it and some perversion of the original authenticity of expression that it mimics. As Poirier remarks, “Frost did not feel as acutely as did Emerson . . . the need to rescue life from the ‘old and false’ sense of things. Along with William James he preferred to play with the barely possible virtues and the alleged necessities of ‘false’ beliefs. Certain beliefs might seem contrary to nature, but, by a power of expression given them in the literature of the past they have become ‘true’ ” (Robert Frost, 198–99). The proverb functions as do all conventions: it is a way, as Burke says, of naming something, of fixing it with an attitude, of taking it out of the realm of always negotiable and fluctuating meaning that haunts human consciousness. Still, James’s discussion of the formula by which we live ranges in attitude from critical to accepting. In a powerful passage from the fourth lecture in Pragmatism, “The One and the Many,” a section that must have struck Frost, James actually deals with the tension between Job’s almost unmediated experience of God on the one hand and the palliative advice of the proverbial counselors on the other hand—that “all evil in the universe is but instrumental to its greater perfection.” James remarks: “God’s ways are not our ways, so let us put our hands upon our mouth. A god who can relish such superfluities of horror is no God for human beings to appeal to. His animal spirits are too high, his practical jokes too monstrous. In other words the ‘Absolute’ with his one purpose is not the man-like God of the common people” (Pragmatism 70). The manlike God of the common people, in terms of our discussion, is the God whose purpose can be formulated into phrases we can repeat—“Say something to us we can learn / By heart and when alone repeat.” According to James, the God Job faces has no such limitations, and thus the proverbial expressions that capture his purpose remain irrelevant as accurate descriptions of an absolute truth, though not irrelevant, importantly, as pragmatic means of getting by in life, of preserving a sense of equilibrium. They join other pieces of what James in Pragmatism calls “the magisterial notions of common sense,” that “mother-tongue of thought” by which we operate day to day. “Everyone, however instructed . . . [flies] back to them the moment critical pressure is relaxed” (88). They are, in a passage from James that Poirier cites, things that “cease to represent anything in the way of being; they are but sublime tricks of human thought, our ways of escaping bewilderment in the midst of sensation’s irremediable flow” (Robert Frost 328). James’s pragmatism, with its emphasis on usefulness and the “cash value” of cultural notions, as Poirier points out, cannot in good faith condemn common sense and the “sayings” that support it; in fact, as we see here, it must describe their important, useful function, and oppose

10.1057/9780230109896 - Names, Proverbs, Riddles, and Material Text in Robert Frost, Timothy O'Brien

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-14

Proverbs and the Quest for Certainty

Names, Proverbs, Riddles

scholastic, rationalistic theorizing about a single truth or source. However, the rhetoric James employs, as with his use of “tricks” in the quote above, often casts a negative light upon the shared human need for self-deception and especially the unwillingness of humans to recognize their dependence on self-deceptive structures. He characterizes “reality” as something independent of human thought, something that can only have been a thing close to “some imagined aboriginal presence in experience” emerging prior to “any human conception [having] been applied to it.” This reality, he continues, “is what is absolutely dumb and evanescent, the merely ideal limit of our minds. We may glimpse it, but we never grasp it; what we grasp is always some substitute for it which previous human thinking has peptonized and cooked for our consumption . . . wherever we find it, it has been already faked ” (Pragmatism 119–20). As we have seen, one of the ways of “cooking it” is naming; another is to rely upon the forms of common sense, the proverblike sayings of the ages. Those who see through the naming and the reliance on sayings as just that—a pragmatic, useful way to get by given the shapeless flow of experience—are, according to James, “the tough-minded”; those, on the other hand, who need to imagine a better world backing the one we experience, who need to see a single purpose, a single God or Truth or Design, that explains every discrete event in terms a larger purpose, every suffering as a consequence of some misstep, or some link in an authentic reality explained by the notion of a God, for instance, are “the tender-minded.” In The Will to Believe, moreover, as Tyler Hoffman points out, James “contrasts the ‘feminine-mystical’ mind with a tougher kind of mind that resists metaphysical thinking” (44). And though James does, in his chapter “Pragmatism and Humanism,” situate the pragmatic stance between these two “camps,” his language often tilts in favor of the “tough-minded”; consequently he suggests that the human need to find shelter from the weariness “of considerations,” from the feeling that “life is too much like a pathless wood,” as Frost puts it in “Birches,” is a stance for the weak of heart. To the extent that James’s philosophy about the forms of common sense relates to this proverbial tendency in human nature, it has a gender component. That gender component, though, is complicated by his repeatedly referring to pragmatism as “she.” In a particularly curious and suggestive strain of language, James actually describes how the feminine pragmatism “unstiffens” theories: “She has in fact no prejudices whatever, no obstructive dogmas, no rigid canons of what shall count as proof. She is completely genial. She will entertain any hypothesis, she will consider any evidence . . . “(Pragmatism 44). In this case the theories of both the rationalists and the positivists remain in a kind of ineffectual erection until

10.1057/9780230109896 - Names, Proverbs, Riddles, and Material Text in Robert Frost, Timothy O'Brien

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-14

70

71

unstiffened by the easy-going lady pragmatism. Thus, although James’s language is often tinged with masculine, heroic tropes about the brave venture into the self-delusory morass of contradictory gestures toward a unified reality, his positioning of the pragmatic view, alternately critical and supportive of the need for such things as conventional sayings and names, complicates any easy assignment of gender to it. James’s attitude toward the need to attach a name, saying, or theory to some aspect of an always resistant world of experience, is something Frost inherits, as Poirier suggests. This inheritance from James makes Frost’s concern with this proverbial inclination different from Thoreau’s or Emerson’s. In the broadest terms, Frost’s interest in proverblike sayings expresses his larger reaction against formulae and systems, though that reaction often is mitigated by an admission that formulae or forms are vital even for the tough-minded. As Richardson and Kearns have explained in their different ways, Frost tried to keep from running with the herd, and yet as Richardson emphasizes, he always needed to modify that powerful tendency with an equally strong need for community and the shape, comfort, and purpose community gives to one’s life. Planners, systematizers, utopianizers, reformers, converts to the latest schemes, theorizers about poetry, New Dealers—all these and more “run in all directions . . . for security in the game of Pussy-wants-a-corner,” as Frost put it in his “Introduction to Sarah Cleghorn’s ‘Threescore’ ” (749). At the same time, however, Frost himself admits: “I find security chiefly in proper names.” He implicates others in their frantic withdrawal to systems, but at the same time includes himself in the process as well. The difficulty for us is locating the value of proverblike sayings within this conflict that shapes Frost’s politics, life, and poetry. As Kearns, Richardson, Kilcup, Hoffman, and others have pointed out, the conflict reflects Frost’s “issues” with gender, and it bleeds into such matters as his distinction between the oral and the written, the ear and the eye, and even his pet notion of sentence sounds, that almost structuralist notion that the originally oral language is based upon a finite number of sentence shapes with their various “tones” upon which words hang. Unavoidably a romantic, Frost was as much about originality in poetry and the elimination of the latest echoes of poetic diction as Wordsworth and Coleridge. In “The Unmade Word, or Fetching and Far-Fetching,” for instance, he says, “When a man sits down with pen and paper to write, he declares his purpose of being original, instead of taking these second-hand words and phrases. I am sick of people who use only these ready-made words and phrases. I like better a boy who invents them for himself—who takes a word or phrase from where it lies and moves it to another place” (695). At the same time, he often refers to true poetry as the expression of what “was oft thought but ne’er so well

10.1057/9780230109896 - Names, Proverbs, Riddles, and Material Text in Robert Frost, Timothy O'Brien

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-14

Proverbs and the Quest for Certainty

Names, Proverbs, Riddles

expressed.” In a letter to William Braithwaite, he explains the poet’s job as one of simply finding tones in the speaking voice that already exist but that haven’t as yet “been brought to book.” In writing to Sidney Cox, also, he speaks of the finite number of sentence sounds that already exist for us all, and suggests that the poet’s job—and he’s the only poet, as he tells John Bartlett in a still earlier letter, who recognizes this as his job—is to select and group such sounds as they come to him: “We come into the world with them and create none of them. What we feel as creation is only selection and grouping” (681; discussed by Hoffman, 41). To Bartlett, he writes, “In literature it is our business to give people the thing that will make them say, ‘Oh yes I know what you mean.’ It is never to tell them something they don’t know, but something they know and hadn’t thought of saying. It must be something they recognize” (675). Perhaps even more pointedly, Frost said in an interview with William Braithwaite in February 1915 at Tufts College, “The beginning of literary form is in some turn given to the sentence in folk speech. Art is the amplification and sophistication of the proverbial turns of speeches” (Interviews 7). On the one hand, the proverblike saying, with its suggestion of having roots in the origins of our race, its often oral if not oracular feel, its aura of having always already been there, its tight structure that seems almost in and of itself to express the shape of a truth previously accepted, has some of the qualities that Frost prizes. Moreover it is part of the vernacular, the site of the authentic speaking voice. On the other hand, the sayings are old, worn from use, and ready-made; they are the too-easy hiding places in the game of “pussy finds a corner.” Often cited as an example of Frost’s playful involvement of his reader in the same game of threat and pursuit to shelter that he sees as his life, the famous letter to Louis Untermeyer about formulae also suggests the complexity in Frost’s relation to systems and to the prefabricated structures in our lives. Frost starts by referring to Bergson and Fabre as thinkers who have seen through the formula of evolutionism, which has been taken for granted as truth, and by remarking on the family-like atmosphere in Untermeyer’s “shop” in New York City, which so surprisingly counters the cliché about finding family affairs largely in “country villages” rather than urban areas. He tells Untermeyer, “I should be jealous of you for having such an institution in a modern city where it doesn’t belong according to all our theories, if I wasn’t so fond of seeing our theories knocked into cocked hats” (692). These references lead him to remark on the way in which the artist must at some level acknowledge the formulae by which we live, even plug into them, in order to have a voice: You get more credit for thinking if you restate formulae or cite cases that fall in easily under formulae, but all the fun is outside saying things that

10.1057/9780230109896 - Names, Proverbs, Riddles, and Material Text in Robert Frost, Timothy O'Brien

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-14

72

73

suggest formulae that won’t formulate—that almost but don’t quite formulate. I should like to be so subtle at this game as to seem to the casual person altogether obvious. The casual person would assume that I meant nothing or else I came near enough meaning something he was familiar with to mean it for all practical purposes. Well well well. (692)

This passage would suggest, certainly, a lack of sympathy for the sayings by which we live, a cynical use of them to play with readers and thereby achieve a curious, personal pleasure, and perhaps, in the manner of Poor Richard Saunders, increase the size of the book-buying audience by providing literature that seems to confirm the safe and conventional structures of society. Frost positions himself on the “outside.” No apparent sense of community here, not even a saving sense of alienation from it. He only acknowledges that the “casual person” is slave to the forms of a community, while he isn’t—though he is at the same time shaping an imagined community for himself, including Untermeyer and the likes of Bergson and Fabre. At any rate, Frost characterizes himself here as the elitist that he detested in Pound and Eliot, who wrote, he complained, not to be understood, and, unknowingly we have to imagine, as the God James describes in the passage from Pragmatism we looked at earlier, a God/author who sits outside of creation and plays in his imponderable ways, whose “ways are not our ways . . . whose animal spirits are too high, his practical jokes too monstrous” to be “the ‘Absolute’ with his one purpose, . . . the man-like God of the common people” (70). On other occasions, however, Frost’s discussions of poetry suggest that the poet’s reliance on the accepted forms actually distinguishes him from other poets and their adherence to theories and systems. In an inscription in North of Boston addressed to Regis Michaud, he praises Emerson for his reliance on the colloquial: “I am as sure that the colloquial is the root of every good poem as I am that the national is the root of all thought and art” (693). “One half of individuality is locality,” he claims, just as “the other half [is] colloquiality.” In his “Introduction to E. A. Robinson’s King Jasper, ” he emphasizes “the old-fashioned way to be new,” linking it to his notion of correspondence, which amounts ultimately to a shared sense of the patterns that let us live together. According to this way of thinking, the artist must “connect” with readers, rather than “pull one over on them”: “It has been said that recognition in art is all. Better say correspondence is all. Mind must convince mind that it can uncurl and wave the same filaments of subtlety, soul convince soul that it can give off the same shimmers of eternity. At no point would anyone but a brute fool want to break off this correspondence. It is all there is to satisfaction; and it is salutary to live in the fear of its being broken off ” (742).

10.1057/9780230109896 - Names, Proverbs, Riddles, and Material Text in Robert Frost, Timothy O'Brien

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-14

Proverbs and the Quest for Certainty

Names, Proverbs, Riddles

In “Mending Wall” the neighbor is described by the speaker as something close to a brute fool—“an old stone savage armed”—because of his apparently mindless reliance on his father’s saying. However, that saying contributes to the fabric of conventional correspondences by which we remain part of the community of man, a product of what Frost, in this piece on King Jasper, calls—as Richardson emphasizes—“the fear of Man—the fear that men won’t understand us and we shall be cut off from them” (742; Richardson 131). The question we have to address, then, is where does Frost’s lover’s quarrel with the proverbial impulse fit into both the need to undermine formula on the one hand and the fear of Man, the fear of not being understood, on the other? The proverb as comforting answer, as name to capture and control doubt, is not what the poem ought to provide the reader. In another passage from the “Introduction to King Jasper” preface, Frost uses almost the same dynamics of desired answer and response that he does in “Choose Something Like a Star.” He speaks of a kind of reader “who stands at the end of a poem ready to catch you [the poet] by both hands with enthusiasm and drag you off your balance over the last punctuation mark into more than you meant to say. ‘I understand the poem all right, but please tell me what is behind it.’ Such presumption needs to be twinkled at and baffled. The answer must be, ‘If I had wanted you to know, I should have told you in the poem’ ” (745). In responding to the reader who gropes for something that he can “learn by heart and when alone repeat,” the author must behave like the star—twinkle of course and baffle the earnest inquirer with more of a question than an answer: “I burn” or “I merely write the poem,” but do not offer an anxiety-quelling message or a saying to learn by heart. As Poirier reminds us, moreover, this word “baffle” picks up on the term Job uses in A Masque of Reason to describe what amounts to the proverbial tendency to eliminate bafflement by inquiring after a larger meaning behind events. Poirier writes, “Job says something about fools that is wiser than he knows and that represents what Frost thinks best about human beings generally: ‘being baffled for the sake of being.’ ‘Being’ here is both a gerund and a noun. Humans attain their ‘being’ by a willingness to be baffled . . . ; the ‘puzzle [of God’s purpose] is . . . in need of solution only to those who want a ‘design’ which will take care of everything” (Robert Frost 254). In A Masque of Reason this group consists of those proverbial “comforters” who come to Job contending in formulaic fashion that he “must be wicked to deserve such pain” as God hands out to him (384). Authentic human experience, Frost asserts in the “Introduction to ‘King Jasper,’ ” consists of “immedicable woes— woes that nothing can be done for—woes flat and final” (747–48), woes that proverblike sayings cannot sooth.

10.1057/9780230109896 - Names, Proverbs, Riddles, and Material Text in Robert Frost, Timothy O'Brien

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-14

74

75

A self-contained version of Frost’s conflicted attitude about formulae and sayings emerges from his delightful “Letter to The Amherst Student.” Like Franklin in his Preface to the final version of The Poor Richard Almanack, which works against the expectations of the people that Father Abraham will condemn the modern world and its governmental excesses, Frost begins his letter by dismissing the popularly accepted formula, the cliché, that “the age of the world we live in is particularly bad,” a cliché with which he has grown “impatient” (739). Then he goes on to his wellknown discussion of how creation of form is possible in any age at any level, from the poem to the smoke ring. Creation of form represents perhaps the one way in which we can bring pleasure and security into our lives: the “hugeness and confusion shading away from where we stand into black and utter chaos” can be seen, as if by design, to be the very setting we need in which to create order. It is as if we all are authors of our own Genesis, carving out shape from the ancient goddess of the night and darkness, Tiamat. Along the way toward this consoling conclusion about the necessary link between chaos and form, a theodicy of sorts, Frost actually discusses the impossibility of ever achieving the kind of vantage point he so blithely describes in his letter to Untermeyer, that position outside the formula. It is “as dangerous to try to get outside of anything as large as an age as it would be to engorge a donkey.” Those who do so can only “write huge shapeless novels, huge gobs of raw sincerity bellowing with pain and that’s all that they can write” (739–40). Here the dangers of getting outside accepted forms are large and ultimately brutalizing, the egregious author ending up “bellowing with pain” as if he were an animal. Appropriately then, Frost concludes his “Letter to The Amherst Student” by relying on a proverbial saying: “To me any little form I assert upon it is velvet, as the saying is, and to be considered for how much more it is than nothing” (740). He begins by dismissing a somehow comforting convention common to humans that the world is worse than it has ever been and then, in the process of making that convention irrelevant, underscores his point about form by relying on an equally conventional, formulaic notion, whether it stems from the idea of an iron hand in a velvet glove (Oxford Dictionary 321) to suggest the humanizing force of form or, more likely, comes from the idea of velvet being the profit one gains in an endeavor, as in “Though I have something to pay out of it, I shall be on velvet for expense” (Oxford Dictionary 685). Certainly it can be said that Frost, like Thoreau, here revitalizes a saying by applying it in a new and surprising way; he relies on the “old fashioned way to make something new.” Still, his position in relation to the formulaic remains less than clear as he depends on a formula not to disorient and confuse, but rather to explain and comfort the inquiring students at

10.1057/9780230109896 - Names, Proverbs, Riddles, and Material Text in Robert Frost, Timothy O'Brien

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-14

Proverbs and the Quest for Certainty

Names, Proverbs, Riddles

Amherst, even giving them something they can “learn by heart and when alone repeat.” Another example, this one from Frost’s more private letters to Louis Untermeyer about his friend’s marital difficulties, illustrates the almost contradictory positions Frost takes on the folk wisdom of the proverbs and the mere formulae that they can become. Thompson patiently takes his readers through Frost’s fascinating attempt to act as Untermeyer’s counselor (Years of Triumph 345–52). Remarkably, Frost puts himself in the position almost of Job’s counselors while trying to maintain the role and tone of Yahweh. After Untermeyer’s divorce from his wife, Jean Starr, his marriage and subsequent divorce from Virginia Moore, and the suicide of his son, Richard, Frost resumed communication with his friend by admonishing him not only about his moral failings in the area of marriage, but more energetically about his self-deception, which Frost regards as a function of his having given in to slogans, clichés, new theories, and selfhelp-like palliatives. After apologizing for his silence, Frost begins to scold Untermeyer by saying he was willing to leave consolation and advice to the author of the author of Elmer Gantry, I mean Alfred [Harcourt] the Sloganist. You would have only to call on him to comfort you with slogans and he would touch your various stops as skillfully as if you were the public and he were just what he is. Can’t I just hear him inspiring what I see by the papers you have been free to say on the subject of faith in life. Honestly it sounds like office talk. Om Mani Padmi Hum. Which is to say the lotus flower has a center that means something . . . Come to me if you want to hear some small part of the truth . . . Don’t say things like that about faith in life where I can come across them because they simply bust me all up in the seat of philosophy . . . if you love me for Christ’s sake find some more poetic way of going irresponsible than in dub sophistries. (The Letters 187)

After Untermeyer remarried Jean Starr and they were on their way to Germany to honeymoon, during which time they would be writing a travel book about their experiences in the Black Forest, Frost once again attacks him for his self-deceptive reliance on palliative sayings: How much better if you had been a staid orthodox Jew and never had run wild after a super-wisdom that doesn’t exist . . . The whole experiment has been a waste of time and energy. You haven’t found out anything that you didn’t know before, that we didn’t know before: and I won’t listen to you if you say you have. That’s the one thing I can’t stand from a person in your predicament. For my sake, if you still care for me, don’t talk about having been chastened or having profited in any way. You’ve lost—time, if nothing else. (The Letters 190–91)

10.1057/9780230109896 - Names, Proverbs, Riddles, and Material Text in Robert Frost, Timothy O'Brien

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-14

76

Proverbs and the Quest for Certainty

77

You have been acting . . . under the pressure of the bad smart talk you have listened to and learned to share in the society you have cultivated in your own New York salons . . . None of it was wise or right or real. What I dread most now is that you will go on the assumption that, though it was folly and landed you in tragedy, it was on the way somewhere and somehow prepared you for greater and fuller life. Shut up. To hell with such comforts. (The Letters 192)

In opposition to this new, false talk, Frost offers something more “original”: Talk no more—unless you can talk unclear, unsophisticated, simple goodness. You tempt me to soak you in milk to renew your innocence. The funny positions people can talk themselves into in a lifetime of tryit-on talk . . . Louis Louis very few people that leave the good old folkways can keep from getting all mixed up in the mind. We can make raids and excursions into the wild, but it has to be from well kept strongholds. (The Letters 193)

Quoting these letters in this much detail offers a clear view of the way in which Frost patterns his advice to his friend upon the Book of Job. Even his scolding—“Shut up” and “Talk no more”—has the finality of Yahweh’s absolute dismissal of any complaint Job offers him. As I have mentioned, though, Frost is also in the position of Job’s proverbial counselors, and he tries to maintain that role without fully occupying the position of those ineffectual providers of palliative reason. He puts Alfred Harcourt and Untermeyer’s “sophisticated” friends in that position, and he represents Untermeyer as compliant rather than resistant like Job. The trouble is that his very last statement in this series of judgments connects him with proverbial wisdom, something original and unadulterated, something “unclever, unsophisticated, simple,” something originating in “the good old folkways.” Not just his poetry, essays and plays, then, but even his private advice to his friend serves as a footnote to his preoccupation with the tension in the Book of Job between proverbial wisdom, with its earnest enforcement of a world of discernable cause and effect, transgression and punishment, obedience and reward on the one hand, and a more authentic alternative, some manly facing of loss, waste, and badness, on the other. Even in this conflicted advice, Frost’s emulation of the Book of Job is thorough: that story, after all, exposes the self-deceit of proverbial wisdom, restores Job to his former life, and then punishes his false counselors. In other words, through Yahweh’s agency, the narrative reinstates

10.1057/9780230109896 - Names, Proverbs, Riddles, and Material Text in Robert Frost, Timothy O'Brien

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-14

Scolding his friend once again, Frost continues to zero in on Untermeyer’s having fallen for bogus wisdom:

Names, Proverbs, Riddles

the proverbial formula of reward and punishment that it has throughout the story emptied of meaning. Frost tells Untermeyer that his friend has fallen for what he has grown accustomed to hear; Frost’s solution is that he should return to the foundational truth of custom. This apparent contradiction, like the simultaneous devaluing and valuing of the name, remains at the center of Frost’s poetry.

“The best way out is always through” At this stage I would like to begin a more detailed examination of the proverbial inclination in Frost’s poetry and the way in which it figures into the exploration of identity that we have been tracing. First, two poems that mark off one extreme in the way Frost represents that inclination. The companion poems from A Boy’s Will, “Mowing” and “Tuft of Flowers,” both end in proverbial-sounding statements. After a series of conjectures about what the scythe of the speaker-worker was whispering to the ground, the penultimate line in “Mowing” asserts proverbially, in an almost isolated sentence that seems far more succinct, studied, and already composed than the casual and associational feel of the rest of the poem, “The fact is the sweetest dream that labor knows” (26).8 In “The Tuft of Flowers,” the speaker recognizes signs left behind by a kindred spirit who has come before him—someone resembling the speaker of “Mowing.” These signs incite him to replace one proverbial-sounding assessment of his experience with a diametrically opposed one. Early in the poem he says about men at work that they all must be alone “Whether they work together or apart.” However, at the conclusion of the poem, after seeing the tuft of flowers as a message left him by another, he concludes: “ ‘Men work together . . . / Whether they work together or apart’ ” (31). The individual experience delivered in each of these poems moves toward and ends with an expression that generalizes into a sort of wisdom-statement about the tendencies in human experience, as if the speaker adopts an already-existing statement, even if it is original with Frost. Though the poems contain this sort of dual force, they hardly can be said to express an awareness of that tension—the saying is presented as something naturally leading out of the described desires. Perhaps the ease with which one proverbial expression can be replaced by its opposite suggests something like a budding suspicion of proverbial expressions, but that is not at all clear. In fact the often remarked note before “Mending Wall” in the original edition of North of Boston—“ ‘Mending Wall’ takes up the theme where ‘A Tuft of Flowers’ . . . laid it down” (970)—could refer to the emphasis in both on

10.1057/9780230109896 - Names, Proverbs, Riddles, and Material Text in Robert Frost, Timothy O'Brien

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-14

78

79

the proverbial drive toward discovering general truths that shape human interaction.9 A similar proverblike conclusion occurs in two very different poems: “A Passing Glimpse” and “At Woodward’s Gardens.” In both, the apparently invented proverbial expression names the experience, which perhaps could have been left unnamed. “A Passing Glimpse,” as we have seen in our discussion of Frost’s occupation with naming, expresses the train-riding speaker’s fleeting sense of having seen some flower that he cannot name— “Was something brushed across my mind / That no one on earth will ever find?” (227). The experience itself and this question about it, rather than standing on their own, then yield to a final couplet: “Heaven gives its glimpses only to those / Not in position to look too close” (227). As with the two mowing poems, the proverblike saying, though it follows from what has gone before, stands in an uneasy relationship with the rest of the poem. Responding to the inability to name, even while having shown off his ability to name all the flowers that were not part of his glimpse, the speaker uses another trope of naming, the proverblike expression, to quell the feeling of poetic powerlessness. On the one hand, the reader is invited into the personal exploration and questioning of the individualized lyric; on the other hand, the saying comes from quite a different “tone,” to use one of Frost’s favorite terms. It is the tone of the folk, of the seemingly wellaccepted truth, even if devised by the author. Thus a poem that hints at the sense of the special individuality of the speaker—he having had something brush by his mind “that no one on earth will ever find”—concludes with an expression whose proverbial tone undermines that highly individualized feeling. The more obviously anecdotal and satiric tone of “At Woodward’s Gardens” better prepares us than “A Passing Glimpse” for its closing saying, one that Frost used as well in some of his talks. In its “once upon a time” and illustrative treatment of the boy, the poem’s opening establishes a tone that almost requires a “moral”: “A boy, presuming on his intellect, / Once showed two little monkeys in a cage / A burning-glass they could not understand . . . ” (266). The anecdote continues to develop the monkeys’ lack of understanding and then to show that that lack does not matter, as one of them snatches the magnifying glass from the boy. That act leads to the closing proverbial saying: “It’s knowing what to do with things that counts.” As different as these poems are from each other and as different as they are also from “A Tuft of Flowers” and “Mowing,” they resemble these early poems in simply using the saying without representing an attitude toward the value of the proverbial inclination. In a number of other poems, Frost works with existing proverbs, recasting them or faintly alluding to them. In most of these cases, again, the poem does not confirm or negate the value of the proverblike saying,

10.1057/9780230109896 - Names, Proverbs, Riddles, and Material Text in Robert Frost, Timothy O'Brien

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-14

Proverbs and the Quest for Certainty

Names, Proverbs, Riddles

but rather develops the curious mixture of the need for individual expression and assertion of identity with the force of the communal truth. “A Peck of Gold” modifies interestingly the American proverb recorded in Taylor and Whiting, “We must eat our peck of dirt before we die” (297). The poem’s retrospective view betrays a sense of disillusionment, as the speaker was one of the children told that the dust blowing about San Francisco was partly made up of gold: “And I was one of the children told / Some of the blowing dust was gold “ (228). By the end of the poem the twice repeated refrain gets modified: “And I was one of the children told, / ‘We all must eat our peck of gold’ ” (228). The modification of the proverb from dirt to gold, the hints of the Golden Age and Eden, and the notion that gold comes in measurements more applicable to fruit than precious metal make the poem highly allusive.10 Typically, the proverb is connected with the oral realm: it comes to the child by word of mouth, apparently handed down from the older generation. Unlike the poems of this kind that have the proverblike expression tacked on at the end, this one dramatizes the use of the proverb, makes it part of the speaker emerging in his individuality from the folkways of proverbial wisdom. The modification of “dirt,” or in some of the original versions of the proverb “dust,” to “gold” obscures the obvious darkness of the saying (and the darkness of the expression “bites the dust” which also lurks behind the wording) and relies instead on the more haunting allusions to myths of mortality and immortality. In such a light-sounding, seemingly inconsequential poem, Frost turns what he configures as a local, customary proverb into a mythic expression. The proverb in this case works for Frost in the way Faggen discusses—as a “think.” In “Dust in the Eyes,” Frost also personalizes a proverb recorded in Taylor and Whiting: “throw dust in your eyes,” as in, “The opposition folks throw dust in your eyes” (114). Instead of advancing from the notion that dust thrown in the eyes is a kind of deception, the poem takes the form of a bold, personalized, even self-injurious challenge: if “dust thrown in my eyes,” says the speaker, will keep me from “getting overwise,” then “Let it be overwhelming, off a roof / And round a corner, blizzard snow for dust, / And blind me to a standstill if it must” (244). We recognize in this description, of course, an element of the fire-and-ice signature trope that we have already examined. Moreover, this bold, almost literal-minded take-off on the proverbial saying not only undoes the sense of deception that it figuratively expresses (“dust in my eyes”), but also alters the indirection of its metaphor through that literalizing act. It takes the figurative proverb literally, just as the speaker in “Mending Wall” measures the neighbor’s traditional saying, an actual proverb, as Monteiro observes (Robert Frost 126), in literal terms—“There where it is we do not need the

10.1057/9780230109896 - Names, Proverbs, Riddles, and Material Text in Robert Frost, Timothy O'Brien

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-14

80

81

wall . . . / My apple trees will never get across / And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him” (39). Complicating this seemingly straightforward challenge even more, the “Let it . . . ”, in yet another coincidence of Frost’s preoccupation with the Book of Job and his exploration of proverbial expressions, both echoes God’s creation in Genesis and reproduces the kind of language Job uses in parody of Genesis when he demands that he be undone, that he and existence as he knows it be “uncreated.”11 This unexpectedly complex poem also involves a fascinating use of a proverb to debunk the kind of selfsatisfaction associated with proverbial wisdom; at least that is the case if talk “getting overwise” equates to the Old Testament tradition of wisdom as partly expressed in Proverbs. The proverb about dust thrown in the eyes, then, becomes the impetus for the speaker to seek a remedy for the kind of wisdom that traditionally relies on the unexamined “truth,” in fact, expressed in proverbs. At the same time, though, he turns the apparent safety and retreat value of the proverb, a refuge in accepted wisdom from the harshness of confrontation with existential reality’s lack of meaning, into an almost apocalyptic, agonistic, heroic encounter. The speaker calls upon the forces of obliteration to have at him, in other words, but those forces amount to the literalized elements of a proverb that means to let yourself be blinded not by, but from, the truth. As so often happens in Frost’s most fascinating poems, then, the sentence sounds of the piece work against the play of its words and its intertextuality; just as its obvious identity claim in a commitment to some form of naming is undercut by the slipperiness of the language carrying that claim. Because this poem first appeared in broadside form as an advertisement for West-Running Brook, its use of the proverb also invokes the sense of a common folk voice and thereby, though it seems simple to say, attracts the broad, general audience that Frost sought, as opposed to the purely academic one (Cramer 99). The various commentaries on “Leaves Compared with Flowers” ignore the extent to which it too incorporates and reconfigures in fascinating ways three different proverbial sayings.12 Throughout the five quatrains in couplets that produce almost a chant, the poem relies on the physical features of a tree—with a brief reference to fern and lichens as a hint of the inevitably downward movement in life—to express how experience, perhaps a series of sad experiences as suggested by Foster (243), has led the poet/speaker to feel an affinity for the darker aspects of the tree: leaves and bark rather than petals, flowers, and fruit. Perhaps the most noticeable proverbial saying that echoes within these stanzas is the one Jesus offers in Matthew 12:33 about knowing the tree by its fruit: “Either make the tree good, and its fruit good; or make the tree bad, and its fruit bad; for the tree is known by its fruit” (New Revised Standard). Taylor

10.1057/9780230109896 - Names, Proverbs, Riddles, and Material Text in Robert Frost, Timothy O'Brien

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-14

Proverbs and the Quest for Certainty

Names, Proverbs, Riddles

and Whiting have collected two other sayings that also inform the poem: “Durable trees make roots first” (381) and “the word with the bark on it” or “the truth with the bark on it” (17), suggesting directness rather than guile and euphemism.13 The poem begins with a modified version of “durable trees make roots first”: A tree’s leaves may be ever so good, So may its bark, so may its wood; But unless you put the right thing to its root It never will show much flower or fruit. (270)

In recasting a proverb and thereby adopting the tone of proverbial truth, the poem seems to end as soon as it begins: its first stanza sounds conclusive and complete. Through an apparently personal, experiential response, however, it continues by undermining that opening truism and even the value of the fruit, as expressed in the saying about knowing a tree by its fruit. The speaker postures as one who might not even care for the commonly held value of the tree—the fruit that it produces: “Leaves and bark may be tree enough.” Thus the speaker abandons the palliative wisdom of two sayings and enters into an apparently more authentic realm of his own personal experience, into his mood, which is all about leaning against the bark, almost in a self-punishing way, and listening to the darker tone of the leaves: Leaves and bark, leaves and bark, To lean against and hear in the dark. Petals I may have once pursued. Leaves are all my darker mood. (270)

As is the case in “Dust in My Eyes,” however, the apparently radical, individualizing departure from the common truth of proverbial wisdom is underwritten by another equally common proverbial phrase: something about having experience, life, truth unadorned—“with the bark on it.” As with the poems that stage the speaker’s search for an authentic name, these poems propose an advance toward some confirmation of an unreplicated, meaningful self by way of a naming device that ultimately undermines any prospect of such confirmation. With all the attention given to the moralizing, even proverbial conclusion of “Two Tramps in Mud Time,” the sense of it having been partly built, like these other poems, from proverbs has escaped the attention of commentators. Just as the poem deals with two competing notions of work and two opposed political positions, so does it unfold in terms of two

10.1057/9780230109896 - Names, Proverbs, Riddles, and Material Text in Robert Frost, Timothy O'Brien

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-14

82

83

opposing proverbial sayings. One of these actually deals with the separation between work and play to which the poem’s speaker objects: that saying involves some variation of “all work and no play,” as “in all work and no play make _____ a dull ____” (Taylor and Whiting 413). The speaker justifies his not giving the passing tramps the job of splitting his wood for money through an independent reworking of this saying: Only where love and need are one, And work is play for mortal stakes, Is the deed ever really done For Heaven and the future’s sakes. (252)

Instead of all work and no play, the speaker makes play of work, and thus, as we have seen before, modifies proverbial wisdom. It does not matter, apparently, that the moralizing proverb does not actually fit the circumstances. After all, the stakes for the speaker, as he admits earlier, really are not mortal: the “blows” he strikes are ones that he knows he ought to “[spare] for the common good” instead of spending “on the unimportant wood.” No mortal stakes in “unimportant wood.” The moral only works, as I have suggested earlier in our discussion of the specular name, if the speaker and the tramps are ultimately conflicting parts of a single psyche. The other proverb lurking behind this poem is more puritanical and conservative: it unfolds in various ways as versions of “them that don’t work should not eat” (Taylor and Whiting 414). It echoes most fully in the nextto-last stanza in passages such as ““I had no right to play / With what was another man’s work for gain” and “My right might be love but theirs was need “ and “Theirs was the better right—agreed.” The proverbial saying about work and gain—or just survival—works in two directions at once: on the one hand it suggests, according to the typical formula of Proverbs— that life is a system of exertion and appropriate reward: work and you eat, or strive morally and you will be rewarded in a spiritual way. On the other hand, it also implies, especially in the context of the Great Depression (when the poem was first published), that people ought to be allowed to work in order to eat. My assumption here, of course, is that Frost was likely aware of the proverbial subtext of his poem, as aware of that as he was of what he occasionally denied—the poem’s political meaning in partial opposition to the New Deal. Given what we have seen of Frost’s investment in the folkways, his reading in Thoreau and Emerson, and his own attraction to Proverbs, wisdom literature generally, and the oral culture, it is difficult to imagine that his poem is not partly formulated around these competing proverbs.14 Once again in this poem the speaker strives individualistically against a proverb and confirms another; and what is more, he

10.1057/9780230109896 - Names, Proverbs, Riddles, and Material Text in Robert Frost, Timothy O'Brien

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-14

Proverbs and the Quest for Certainty

Names, Proverbs, Riddles

self-conflictingly builds his own concluding proverbial gesture out of his attempted departure from existing proverbial wisdom. In other poems, Frost’s engagement with this proverbial inclination, which is always an engagement with a powerful tendency within him, represents an ironic attitude, even an openly condemnatory treatment of the tendency in human nature to handle complexity and anxiety in terms of sayings. Read in many ways, and more often misread than read with understanding, that seldom-ignored poem in Frost’s canon, “The Road Not Taken,” documents the willfulness that leads to misunderstandings of it and, more to our purposes, the origin of the need to construct a proverblike saying to cover over an inability to understand one’s rationale for a decision. The speaker’s difficulty in locating a clear reason for choosing between two indistinguishable alternatives (two roads that on inspection were actually the same in terms of how many people traveled them) leads to the only predictable truth: that he will construct a saying to cover up the haphazardness of whatever choice he makes and eventually to calcify that choice into essential meaning: “Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— / I took the one less traveled by, / And that has made all the difference” (103). Here we’re back at the photo session with Job, his wife, Satan, and God. The construction of a saying, a formulaic expression, serves as a stay against confusion, just as Milton’s sonnet consoled the poet about his blindness. Perhaps it is even worse: the saying serves to reinforce generational hegemony whereby the seemingly wise old man will proclaim a wisdom statement (this could be about taking a risk to go to war, or quitting school, for instance) that does not, in fact, match his actual experience. The poem curiously compresses time: the narrator at once looks back and, in the present time, projects what he, with all the sound of cultural wisdom because of the formulaic, drumroll of “ages and ages hence,” will be saying in the future. This compression is the poem’s genius because it represents the Dante-like young man, not seeking any advice from a Virgil about his choice, inescapably conscious of the fact that he will dispense proverbial sounding wisdom when he becomes the old man.15 The saying, though, provides little in the way of useable advice. The “by” in “I took the one less traveled by” can mean both “via” or “bypassed”—the one less traveled by people or the one less passed by. Confusing these contradictory alternatives even more, the words “made all the difference” remain entirely too vague to be of use. Does making “all the difference” imply something good or bad? Nor does the sigh provide any help, it too having at least two suggestive possibilities: a sigh of despair or a sigh of knowledge and experience, slightly histrionic in its introduction of a wisdom statement. In any case the poem’s irony about recourse to proverbial sayings mixes with an equally strong suggestion that recourse to formulae is an inevitable

10.1057/9780230109896 - Names, Proverbs, Riddles, and Material Text in Robert Frost, Timothy O'Brien

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-14

84

85

part of human experience, an inescapable impediment to discovering some original identity. “The Times Table,” from West-Running Brook, provides a more severe criticism of the proverbial response to life. A typically resistant animal in a Frost poem, the farmer’s mare slows down the wagon and lets out a “monster sigh” because, apparently, she normally stops for a drink at a certain spring with a broken drinking glass. She lets out this sigh whether or not the farmer intends to drink. His response, however, is just as much a routine application of a saying: “A sigh for every so many breath, And for every so many sigh a death. That’s what I always tell my wife Is the multiplication table of life.” (241)

The narrator ends the poem with eight lines of commentary on the farmer’s use of the saying: The saying may be ever so true; But it’s just the kind of a thing that you Nor I nor nobody else may say, Unless our purpose is doing harm, And then I know of no better way To close a road, abandon a farm, Reduce the births of the human race, And bring back nature in people’s place. (241)

In having the male farmer respond to a mare in terms of what he usually tells his wife, Frost marks off the proverbial response as an insensitive gesture of male control over what the male sees as unprogressive and feminine. Without observing the importance of the routine proverb-like saying, Richardson links this poem with “Home Burial,” “A Servant to Servants,” and “The Housekeeper,” for instance, in its representation of “the circumscribed lives of country wives” (240). This poem then fits with the stereotype in Frost of male expression aligned with convention. Yet that conventional response is just the kind of thing that is likely to close a road, the road being a symbol of manly, routine normalcy in this poem, as it is in “Stopping by the Woods,” for instance. The farmer’s saying leads to the abandonment of a farm. Abandonment of the farm, however, suggests the kind of uncontainable female response captured in, say, “The Hill Wife.” The saying can “reduce births of the human race”; birth, though a female activity, represents male potency, as for instance in terms of Frost’s own identification of his impregnations of Elinor with

10.1057/9780230109896 - Names, Proverbs, Riddles, and Material Text in Robert Frost, Timothy O'Brien

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-14

Proverbs and the Quest for Certainty

Names, Proverbs, Riddles

masculine power.16 The saying is also the type of thing that will “bring back nature in people’s place”—an archetypal feminine advance of the wilderness upon male established civilization if there ever was one. In other words, the male gesture of regularizing control, of making a stay against confusion, in its unthinkingly systematic application, actually brings upon a kind of feminization of the world, at least from the perspective of the typical masculine world view. Apart from the specific negativity of the saying—its mechanized and fatalistic sense of an unvarying operation of the human body and psyche—the poem’s speaker ruthlessly attacks the proverbial tendencies in human nature as uncivilized, while at the same time interrogating the easy attribution of that tendency to a particular gender, even though the poem’s inclusion of man, mare, and wife invites such attribution.17 Reminiscent of Shelley’s “Ozymandias,” the early composed but late published “The Ingenuities of Debt” deals with proverbial words carved into stone resting amid a setting of decay that partially undermines those words and thereby asserts the vanity of human works.18 Frost combines an existing aphorism, “The art of life is passing losses on,” with the first part of a saying actually left on the remains of a palace in the city Ctesiphon, “Take care to sell your horse before he dies.”19 The combination creates a proverblike saying whose truth the imagery of the poem undermines and yet in a certain way sustains. Despite its self-awareness as expressed in that proverb, the city itself could not escape inevitable doom—“judging by what little of it stands.” Sand has overtaken its structures; and the single living thing amid the debris, a serpent resting on its chin, waits only “Till it can muster breath inside a hall / To rear against the inscription on the wall” (363). In Shelley’s poem the desert sands undermine Ozymandias’s proud boast, “Look on my works ye mighty and despair”—despair, the Pharaoh means, of ever rising to his level of power; despair, the carving sculptor knows, of ever creating something that endures until the end of time. Amid this vision of human vanity, though, the poem asserts the lasting power of the artist, even his ability to make living expressions out of cold stone. Similarly, Frost’s poem, while having a kind of last laugh on a city’s self-satisfied, proverbial wisdom, at the same time represents that proverb cut into the stone wall as still resisting decay, still surviving, and still worth considering. On the one known occasion that he read this poem, during a 1949 talk at Dartmouth College on perhaps his favorite phrase, “It seems as if,” he discussed the way in which this proverbial inclination we have been discussing is the primary element that survives, and has to be dealt with, in poetry. The “he” in this quote is a scientist who, Frost says, came out of his lab one day and confessed to the importance of literature and art,

10.1057/9780230109896 - Names, Proverbs, Riddles, and Material Text in Robert Frost, Timothy O'Brien

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-14

86

Proverbs and the Quest for Certainty

87

There are many precepts in poetry; they always stick in my mind. I’ve lived by them to a certain extent, lived in the spirit of their creed, and found some other strength according to my need. But I wonder if he didn’t mean that it was a kind of general guide in a way to take life. It’s full of precepts, controversial precepts that nobody would dispute. And you learn to have to live with controversial precepts and not dispute them, and you do that by living with poetry. (Sitar 3)

One of Frost’s various definitions of poetry, this passage equates both reading and writing poetry with the struggle for individualizing identity as it works against, and finally must come to terms with, the force of precepts, convention, and proverbial wisdom. More far-reaching interrogations of the proverbial tendency than we have so far seen occur repeatedly in North of Boston. That volume’s poetry—it is not going too far to claim—is dominated by sayings and by the more inclusive problem of ever being able to say just the right thing. Of this book’s sixteen poems, six hinge on a saying or two, and four more—“The Generation of Men,” “The Code,” “After Apple-Picking,” and “The Mountain”—circle around the issue of how to find a way, some conventional and at the same time acceptable way, of talking about the unknowable. The poems dealing most explicitly with proverblike sayings are “Mending Wall,” of course, “The Death of the Hired Man,” “Home Burial,” “The Black Cottage,” “Servant to Servants,” and “The Housekeeper.” Here is a list of sayings at the center of these poems: (1) “Good fences make good neighbors” and the narrator’s own “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall”; (2) in “The Death of the Hired Man,” Silas’s mechanical “come home to ditch the meadow” and Warren’s proverbial definition of home—“Home is the place where, when you have to go there, / They have to take you in”; (3) in “Home Burial,” the husband’s “Three foggy mornings and one r