Robert Frost and the Challenge of Darwin

Robert Frost and the Challenge of Darwin

Robert Frost and the Challenge of Darwin

Robert Faggen

Ann Arbor

THE liNIVERSITY

OF

MICHIGAN PREss

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Library

of (�ongress C:ataloging-in-Publication l)ata

Faggen, I�obcrt. l�obert Frost and the c hallenge p.

of I)anvin

/ Iz ob e rt Faggen.

Cln.

Incl udes bibliographical re ferences and index.

ISBN 0-472-10782-H (hardcover: alk. paper) I.

and science-United Stat es -H istorY-20 th century.

lzobert, IR74-1963-Kno\vledge-Natural his tory. I

2.

Frost, Izobert, 1874-1963-Knowledge-Science.

R 0 9- 1 8R 2- Influence.

Literature

3. Frost, 4. l)a[\vil1 , C h arles ,

). Alnerican poetry- English influences.

6. Natural hist or y in literature.

7.

Evolu tion in literature.

1. Title.

PS] 5 I I . lZ9 4 Z6 43 19<)7 8I

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97-448 I

C:IP ISBN: 0-472-08747-<)

For my Father and in memory �f my Mother

It takes all sorts of in and outdoor schoolin
The philos opher says disnliss the idea of purpose. And in the saIne breath he speaks as if the purpose of everything \vas our purpose to conle out on a lllountain top level of peace and equality. He thinks we have sOl1lething in us that won't be got the better of by our needs and greeds. He assunles we have no need of strengthening ourselves in hU111an rivalry to hold our own against nature. ()ur dissatisfaction with we kno\v not \vhat 111a y be the evolutionary thing in our bones-a blind strain-Robert Frost, "Notebooks" (I)artnlouth College Library, 001730)

Acknowledgtnents

In completing this manuscript I realize how rich in friendship and sound counsel I am. D aniel Aaron, Warner Berthoff, Stephen Jay Gould, Barbara Lewalski, D avid Perkins, and Joel Porte gave me great encouragement and advice from the beginning. Over a decade of intense dialogue with my close friends and colleagues­ John Farrell, Tony Kemp, and Blanford Parker-has been invaluable and made life truly grand. I am also indebted to Robert Mezey, who has taught me much about Frost and poetry. And way back there was one great teacher who put me onto the case, Robert Berman. Many helped with the research and editing of the book. I am particularly grateful to Philip Cronenwett of the D artmouth College Archives and Ranjit Ahuwalia of Dartmouth College for their assistance. Nicholas Goodhue and Rochelle and Jay Winderman lent me their discerning and keen eyes. I am most grateful for the exacting readings of Donald Benson and William Howarth. It has been a pleasure to work with LeAnn Fields and Kristen Lare of the University of Michigan Press. Stephen D avis, Ward Elliott, Janet Myhre, James Nichols, Gaines Post, Judith Merkle Riley, and John Roth, colleagues at Claremont McKenna Col­ lege, made the completion of this project a j oy. I am saddened that Robert Feldmeth, my friend and colleague, did not live to see its p ublication. Robert Daseler, Jack Miles, Bonnie Snortum, Jack and Jil Stark, Donald and Marilyn Henriksen, and John Wilson have my deepest thanks. And my students make me realize more every year why teaching is the most rewarding profession. And there are others for whom words are not enough. Arista Cirtautas, Anna Karras, and my father, G. S. Faggen, were there in the longest hours.

x

Ackllowledj?mel1 ts

Selections fronl Complete Poems (�r Robert Frost 1949, copyright 1 9 1 6, 1 92 3 , 1 92 8 , 1 9 3 0 , 1 9 34, 1 9 3 9 , 1 94 3 , 1 94 5 , 1 947, 1 949, © 1 <)67 by H enry Holt and Co. , copyright 1 9 3 6 , 1 942, 1 944, 1 94 5 , 1 947, 1 94 8 , 1 9 5 1 , 1 9 56, 1 9 5 8 , 1 962 by Robert Frost, and copyright 1 964, 1 967 by Lesley Frost Ballantine. bl the ClearillR, copyright 1 942 , 1 94 8 , 1 9 50, 1 9 5 1 , 1 9 5 2 , 1 9 5 3 , 1 9 5 5 , 1 9 56, 1 9 5 8 , 1 9 59, 1 <)60, 1 96 1 , 1 962 by Robert Frost and copyright © 1 970 by Lesley Frost Ballantine. Reprinted by pernlission of Henry Holt and Co. Excerpts fronl the Selected Letters o..f Robert Frost edited by Lawrance Thompson. © 1 964 by Lawrance Thompson and Henry Holt and Co. Reprinted by permission of Henry Holt and Co. Selections fronl the Selected Prose o..f Robert Frost edited by Hyde Cox and Edward Connery Lathem and Robert Frost: Poetry and Prose edited by Edward Connery Lathenl. Copyright © 1 9 3 9 , 1 9 54, 1 966, 1 <)67 by Henry Holt and Co. , Copyright © 1 9 5 9 by Robert Frost, Copyright © 1 9 5 6 by The Estate of Robert Frost. Reprinted by permission of Henry Holt and Co. Selections from The Letters o..f Robert Frost to Lou is Untermeyer edited by Louis Untermeyer. © 1 963 by Louis Untermeyer, © 1 99 1 by Laurence S. Unternleyer. Reprinted by pernlis­ sion of Henry Holt and Co. The essay Frost originally presented at: "The Future of Man " : A Symposiunl sponsored by Joseph E. Seagranl & Sons, Inc. , on the dedication of its headquarters building in New York at 3 7 5 Park Avenue, Septenlber 29, 1 9 59 and selections from manuscript drafts reprinted by pernlission of The Estate of Robert Lee Frost, the Dartmouth College Library, and Joseph E . Seagranl & Sons, Inc. These have appeared in The Library of America edition Robert Frost: Collected Prose, Poems, and Plays edited by Richard Poirier and Mark Richardson ( 1 9<) 5 ) . I anl grateful to Ashley Montagu , one of the participants in the Seagram Symposium, for supplying a copy of the proceedings . Excerpts fronl the notebooks and unpublished papers of Robert Frost quoted with the pernlission of The Estate of Robert Lee Frost and the Dartmouth College Library. Excerpts fronl the nlanuscript notebook of John B. Walker courtesy of the Harvard University Archives. Cover photograph of Robert Frost by Paul Waitt, fronl the Blackington Collection. Courtesy of Yankee Publis/ZinJ?, In(., Dublin, N. H .

Contents

Introduction

Chapter

1

1 13

The Fact Is the Sweetest Dream

Darwin, Pragmatism, and Poetic Knowledge

Chapter 2

53

What to Make of a Diminished Thing

Birds , Insects, and D ownward Comparisons

Chapter 3

101

Play for Mortal Stakes

Labor, Community, and Nature's Chaos

Chapter 4

1 49

Tools and Weapons

Man, Technology, and Nature

Chapter 5 The Lovely Shall Be Choosers

Women, Nature, and Domestic Conflict

Chapter 6 Des cent into Matter

Natural History and the End of Theodicy

245

xu

C'ol1tcnts

Epilogue: Choosing Stars and Picking Apples Notes Bibliography

3 47

Index

3 59

Introduction

The terror of Robert Frost's poetry is nothing new to his readers. Before Lionel Trilling's public proclamation of Frost's Sophoclean terror, Randall Jarrell had called attention to "the other Robert Frost, " "a world pervaded by fear, hate, and limitations . " l This vision of Frost went underground as Lawrance Thompson's biography praised the artistic and spiritual qualities of the work but gave us the portrait of the man as a monster. More recent biographical studies by William Pritchard and Stanley B urnshaw have excavated and corrected the "monster n1yth" of Frost as good poet but bad man. 2 Appreciative critics, most notably Richard Poirier, George Monteiro, and Judith Oster, have brought his intellec­ tual sophistication and subtlety to wider attention by placing him in the context of a line of American pragmatism that runs from Emerson through William James. Frost has become less a terrifying poet than a playfully ironic one whose poetry uncovers the reflexivity of language, the constructed nature of reality, and the interpretative process of reading. While this view makes Frost congenial to contemp orary critical theory's assertion of the arbitrariness of language and the lack of any constraining reality, it misses an important aspect of the context and, therefore, much of the tension in his poetry. The tension generates a terror that reaches to the heart of modern thought. This terror has none of the sublimity of tragedy nor its moral certainty and has been described best by Joseph B rodsky as "controlled uncertainty, " which generates a "fear that has a greater effect upon the imagination than tragedy. " 3 What I argue here is that much of the tension and p ower of Frost's poetry derives from his lifelong engagement with implications of science in general and of Darwin in particular. Understanding of this context will enrich our comprehension of his p astoralism as the creation and destruction of hier­ archies by competing forces in a wilderness of matter. N either a pessimist lamenting the loss of certainty in the knowledge of relations between God, man, and nature nor a j ingoistic advocate of endless

2

Robert Frost and the ChallenRe if Darwin

progress, Frost pointed out and accepted the contradictions and challenges pro­ duced by a culture devoted to science. Frost allied himself deeply with science's endless attempt to frame an intransigent reality, a process in which objectivity and progress rely nlore on description drawn from a few available facts than on that drawn from ontological assumptions and which ends, more often than not, in the discovery of even more epistenlic and natural linlitations. And he explored deeply the contribution Darwin nlade to these tensions: if we are forms pro­ duced by an unstable material world, our own thoughts may be subj ect to the same instability. Rather than producing a liberating nihilism, Frost's version of Darwin stresses the extent to which we are bound to limitations and laws, particularly those of the conditions of existence, sexual and racial conflict, and extinction . Frost thus described a basic paradox in the mythology of modern science: in its attempt at liberation from theological dogma, science leads to a vision of the power of change and freedom but also to a deeply conservative sense of limited knowledge and possibility engendered often by its own suprarational suspicion of hunlan thought. If Darwin's thought appeared to challenge the sacred truths of the Bible, it was Frost's insight and challenge to his readers to see that this contemporary crisis recapitulated the ancient wisdonl-though certainly not the literal account of origins-to be found in Genesis and in Job. Darwin's pursuit of knowledge discovered indeed that we must labor and struggle and that we remain, despite our efforts, dust. If Darwin's Tree of Life bore dark fruit, was adherence to the prelapsarian Tree of Life really different? Did we not always need to labor to keep dominion and follow the need to be fruitful and multiply? Did the world change with an act of sin or were we awakened to an already existant state of possibility amidst hazards and temptations? Obedient and sinless Job suffered inexplicably and, rebuking the dogma of the conlforters , sought reasons from God only to receive the nonanswer of a vast and inhuman theophany that teaches unreason and a woeful awareness of our nl0rtality. The astronomer Harlow Shapley, Frost's contemporary and friend, wrote: "Those interested in the history of science should read Job in order to learn how poetic the sciences can be and how science-touched some poetry. "4 Shapley had unseated the heliocentric view of our galaxy, extending even further the destruc­ tion of man's sense of cosmic centrality that had begun with Copernicus and received its most recent and most devastating stroke from D arwin's conception of descent with modification. In "A Masque of Reason" Frost's Job also encapsu­ lated the irony of science. H oping that the universe and his sufferings were not "merely lucky blunders, " Job tells God, "The artist in me cries out for design . "

Introduction

3

But Frost's Mas q ue of Reason encompasses a tension that runs throughout his poetry, a tension between a human desire for ultimate causes and designs and a natural world that always refuses to satisfy that desire. His poetry bears the stan1p of a moderate heroism and a grand and often sardonic sense of humor in regard­ ing knowledge as a necessary but ultimately futile pursuit of design in an indif­ ferent and wasteful universe. Frost's p oetry remains vital not because it creates a separate spiritual sphere in opposition to the rest of culture but because it pro­ vides a comp elling and critical vision of a reality inextricably bound to the assumptions and findings of science. And Frost uncovers the suprarational and often religious and ethical impulses and conceptions behind scientific endeavor, ones which mysteriously inform its pro cedures and conclusions. The subj ect matter of Frost's poetry will in this context appear less an incidental than a vital part of its form. As he wrote in "The Figure a Poem Makes, " "Theme alone can steady us down. " I have divided this book into discussions of Frost's dominant themes, ones deeply touched by natural science: our relationships to other crea­ tures, the meaning of labor and human equality, technology, the nature of gen­ der, and the ultimate relations of religion and science. The chapter that follows undertakes a more general discussion of Darwin's thought in relation to Ameri­ can romanticism and pragmatism as well as Frost's general views about science and poetic language. Any discussion of Frost must include careful consideration of the poems, and I hope that this study will illuminate the relations of the longer narrative poems to the lyrics and the later verse in which the play of ideas in Frost comes most clearly to the surface. A very few recent studies have begun to explore Frost's interest in science, revealing the ways in which Frost's thinking is consonant with some of the concepts of indeterminacy in modern scientific epistemology and countering traditional views that Frost understood but was antagonistic to science.5 Guy Rotella's essay " Comparing Conceptions: Frost and Eddington, Heisenberg and B ohr" explores the way Frost's ideas about metaphor reflect and criticize twentieth-century physical science, including quantum mechanics. Influenced by James, Bohr and Frost "share with James . . . the suspicion that what we know is not the world but models of the world, metaphors. "6 Ronald Martin, in American Literature and the Destruction of Knowledge, has acknowledged Frost's sense of " the reflexive quality of the human mind, the primacy of experience and the indeterminacy of any ultimate structure beneath it. "7 Frost had a great interest in theoretical p hysics, but I believe that biology and botany had a formative influ­ ence on his thought. The notion of " complementarity" may be useful in describing the conceptual binarism in Frost's dramatic poetry insofar as he pre-

4

Robert Frost a1ld the Challell/
sents in some of the poems-"West-Running Brook" or "Mending Wall"­ contradictory, mutually exclusive perceptions of reality that must be assessed in terms of the assumptions of the speakers . And "indeterminacy" carries some weight in describing Frost's acute awareness of the importance of the frame in any observation-" For Once, Then, Something" or "Tree at My Window. " Frost's epistemology derives nl0re from biology than from p hysics and has deep roots in the history of science. More inlportant, Frost's sense of the limits of epistemology did not liberate hinl into a smug nihilism; he always appears in pursuit of a reality even if the one he finds remains elusive or extremely disturbing. In "Tree at My Window, " though not all its "light tongues talking aloud / could be profound," the tree still enables the speaker to see and becon1es, thereby, a "window tre e . "8 A figure of kno\vledge and the common roots of all life, the tree reveals the inextricable connection between inner and outer worlds, spirit and matter, dream and reality, \vith its emphatic final word, uJeather, itself a figure of the p ower of changing conditions and environment. A tree planted in a hostile environment also reveals the limiting laws of conditions in the somewhat didactic poem "There Are Roughly Zones " : "Why is his nature forever so hard to teach / That though there is no fixed line between wrong and right, / There are roughly zones whose laws must be obeyed" What is man's " nature " if different from the tree's? "What comes over a man, is it soul or mind- / That to no limits and bounds he can stay confined?" Frost resists the more metaphysical terms-soul or mind-answering that our "limitless trait" can only be roughly distinguished from the rest of life. Natural laws govern all life, despite nature's flexibility and possibility. Leo Marx's description of Frost as a thoroughgoing "nihilist" may be right, providing we do not see the "nothing" prophesied in "Desert Places" as only a blank screen upon which anything may be created but rather as the terrifying enroachment of soul-crushing matter. <) The few critics who have recognized Frost's great concern with D arwin still regard the naturalist as a reductive materialist whose theories the poet sought to overcome by reading James and B ergson. 1 () Martin cites James as a way Frost found of combatting the reductionism of science, though he adn1its that "the Darwinian paradigm fascinated him in its application to the experiential facts of the natural world. " 1 1 There is no reason, however, to view empiricism and indeterminacy as somehow in conflict with the "Darwinian paradigm. " For Darwin's thought produced an ongoing dialogue between purposive develop­ ment and chance, design and chaos, which raised profound questions about the reliability of the human observer and the stability of all fixed forms . Richard Poirier was half right in asserting that " Frost seldom misses a chance to bring

Introduction

5

Darwinism into question . " But it was misleading to say as he did that Frost thought that "Darwinian evolution . . . implied too much linear predictability, and while it proposed the necessity of waste it was indifferent to its virtues . " 1 2 Frost challenged popular notions of progress that relied o n Darwin as their prophet of continually improving natural change. Since science is unquestion­ ably the prototype of progress-knowledge adding to and not simply eliminat­ ing or supplanting prior insights-the more complex questions raised by Dar­ win's vision of development, particularly environmental contingency and the relative diversity of successful forms, have serious implications for the meaning of history, progress, and science itself. At a Bread Loaf Conference session in 195 5 Frost talked about Darwin, Marx, Freud, and Einstein as some of the greatest thinkers of the twentieth century. But his discussion of those and others , including Huxley and Frazer, centered on what he called "the Darwinian thing . " 1 3 As Frost's God says in "A Masque of Reason": " I ' m a great stickler for the author's name. / By proper names I find I do my thinking. " With D arwin as a prism Frost was able to view the important tenets that underlie modern science: change, indeterminacy, and relativism, all concepts that imply limits as much as freedom. Frost's alliance with empiricist and Darwinian perspectives is apparent in his admiration for Lucretius, the Roman poet of Epicurean materialism whose achievement as a poet of science became eponymous for Frost's own poetic enterprise. Lucretius, in Frost's estimation, was capable of mastering science, selecting what aspects of its findings were most useful. In Frost's imagination Lucretian flux is represented by a stream that, as he wrote in "Directive," is "too lofty and original to rage" (1. 52). Frost viewed himself, as the title of one poem suggests, as a "Lucretius versus the Lake Poets , " with D arwin as his Epicurus. In a sly rebuttal to Pope, Frost argues for presence of "mind," of philosophic and scientific argufying in poetry: Some say the mind is a dangerous thing and should be left out of poetry. Well the mind is a dangerous thing and should be left in. If someone were to tell you he was going to write a poenl about Darwin and evolution, you would say it was going to be boring. But look at Lucretius. He wrote a poem about Epicurus. It's in and out, sometimes quaint, sometimes intelligent doggerel but a great poem. Now Lucretius admired Epicurus as I admire-let's say-Darwin. The poet must use the mind-in fear and trembling-but he must use it. 1 4

Lucretius' idea of the swerve in the swarming of atoms has long been considered a precursor to D arwin's concept of material variation. Indeed, Lucretius (along with Empedocles) held that animals arose from random combinations of preex­ isting body parts that either proved viable or died out. In describing a material

6

Robert Frost and the Challenge of Darwin

world governed not so much by purpose as by law and inheritance, Darwin is strongly following in the Lucretian tradition. 1 5 Darwin's book TIle Voyage of the Beagle was a major "Epicurean" source for Frost's poetry. It was one of his lifetime favorites-" one of the wonder books , " as he called it. 1 6 Frost thought it as important as On the Origin of Species because it contained all of the geology, biology, and anthropology that went into Darwin's insight that evolution had occurred but still maintained some of the pleasure of a narrative of a man on the verge of a discovery and a variety of encounters with both the human and nonhuman worlds . Frost's speculations about the implications of Darwin's theories continued throughout his life, and there were many aspects of scientific materialism that he never abandoned. What we do find is Frost's attempt to reconcile motion and freedom with law. Freedom in Frost always takes place within the constraints of conditions of materiality. In modernity the circularity of Artistotle's spheres became analogous to the constraints of Bohr's atomic quanta. Frost made an­ other analogy between atomic theory and biology. All entities are really dramatic events, defined by an interplay of "inheritance" and "environment," being and becoming. This complementarity makes all "things" momentary and subj ect to the irreducible constraints and contingencies of chaotic matter. Frost reanimates the Greek emphasis on the circularity of motion in the material world against more modern metaphors of linear motion or time's arrow: " I 'll tell you why all movement is in a circle great or small. It is as every particle in it can be looked at directly across by every particle behind it-acted on directly across as well as from behind by every particle behind it. The action from across is called environ­ ment. The action from behind is called inheritance. " 1 7 One can view any entity in terms of its inheritance or its environment, but all entities then become part of a motion or process that affects all others. While Frost saw the link between Lucretius and romantic desire to achieve freedom from irrational spiritual terrors by living according to nature, the nature Frost came to know was an embodiment not only of eternal agility and an infinitely teeming chaos but also of severe limitations, not only of perception but of reality. Frost's interest in Lucretius also sheds light on his own poetics. The formal accomplishment of his poetry and its humane congeniality have always disarmed readers and hidden its irony and, often, cruelty. His p astoralism works quite deliberately to seduce the unsuspecting reader, and Frost enj oys the "ulteriority" of "saying one thing and meaning another. " 18 In book 4 of De Rerum Natura Lucretius asserts that his own inviting, traditional poetry led his readers to under­ stand the difficult and perhaps disturbing Epicurean cosmology:

Introduction

7

No paths in the Muses' places! None before has walked where I walk. I love to find new founts and drink; I love to gather fresh new flowers and seek the laureate's crown whence Muses never ere now have veiled the brow of any man; for, first, I teach of weighty things, and work man's heart free of religion's garrotte-knot, and next I turn the bright light of my verse on darkness, painting it all with poetry. This, too, I think, is not without good reason. For j ust as doctors, who must give vile wormwood to children, start by painting the cup-lip round with sweet and golden honey: thus the child, young and unknowing, is tricked and brought to set the cup to his lip ; meanwhile, he swallows the bitter wormwood, and though deceived is not infected, but by this trick grows well and strong again; so now since my philosophy often seems a little grim to beginners, and most men shrink back from it in fear, I wished to tell my tale in sweet Pierian song for you, to paint it with the honey of the Muses, hoping that it might fix your attention upon my verse until you clearly saw the nature of things and understood its value. 1 9

Like Lucretius and Dickinson, Frost cultivated a style of telling all the truth slant, easing the lightning to the children. The play in Frost's rhythms often subtly hides a relentless and terrifying meter which almost always has the final say. As in "Pod of the Milkweed, " the butterflies are lured by " a flower that flows / With milk and honey" only to find that it is "bitter milk, " a lure in a game of creation and procreation in which "waste [is] of the essence of the scheme. " Frost's poetry gives an initial impression that purpose and design are govern­ ing forces in the world. The formal mastery of his poetry seems to stand as a seductive argument in and of itself for the ascendancy of art over things of the natural world. The poems remind me, however, of medieval or Renaissance anamorphic p aintings, such as Holbein's A mbassadors, in which civilization ap­ pears glorified from one perspective but mocked by a memento mori, or death's­ head, viewed from another perspective. Sometimes the two perspectives are held in tension; at other times one seems to mask the other. In this way Frost's poetry was, as Frank Lentricchia has put it, " a wolf in sheep's clothing , " subversive of congenial conceptions of nature. 20 Frost is often diabolical, seducing his readers

Robert Fro."t and the (;hall(,I��e (!f Darwill

8

into a \vodd that pronlises clarity, order, and beauty only to show increasing cOlllplexity, irony, and dysteleology. And the style reflects the irony of his vie,;y of nature; it appears lovely but, as l)ar\vin hirnself envision ed, hides cOlllpetition and destruction: "We behold the face of nature bright with gladness, we often see the super-abundance of food; \ve do not see, or \ve forget, that the birds \vhich a re i dly singing round us 1110Stly live on insects or seeds, and are thus constantly d estroyi ng li fe. " 21 Is

na ture cruel, or do \ve just call it so? Frost

e xplo red

this tension but never

that nlan and nature could b e separated. In response to the question "C:an a nlan as sensiti ve to natu re as you are believe that nature is essentially kind?" Frost answered first by rejecting Arnold's view that nlan was nl0rally concluded

superior to and sick of nature's cru elty. He then

went on to tell

the story of a

p rofe sso r

and nunister whose h0111i1y to you ng boys that nature is beautiful and n1an cruel also proved to be \vrong. The shrie king bird and the cotnpeting trees are indicative of Frost's vie\v that all life feels the pain of nature 's cruelty and participates in its struggle. He adds the t\vist that a tree "wanting a place in the sun" is ulti111ately hindered by other trees; nature exhibits coo peration but onl y i n the service o f further c0111petition: kno\v it [nature] isn't kind . As Matthew Arnold said : " Nature is cruel. It's sick of blood. And it doesn 't seenl very sick of it. Nature is always luore or less cru el. Shall I tell you \vhat happened once on the porch of a professor­ l11inister he \vas, too? The \-var \-vas goi n g on, a beautiful moonlight night. He \-vas there with so nle boys, talking abou t the horrors of \var-ho\v cruel l nen \vere to each other and ho\v kind nature \- v as, \vhat a beautiful country this \vas spread bene a t h us, you kno\v-moonlight on it. And just as he talked that \vay, spreading his anTl over i t, a bird beg.ll1 to shriek do\vn in the \voo ds s olnething had got into its nest. Natu re \vas being cruel. The \vood':\ are killing each other any\vay. That's \vhere the ex p ress ion caIne frOnl "a place in the sun." A tree \vanting a place in the sun it can 't get. The other trees \von't give it to it.22 I

111an that's

"

-

Frost's

poetry

ai111s at those who clailll hUInan superiority to nature as \vell as

those of r0111antic sentilnent

\v ho rega rded

nature 's b eau ty as an e x anlp le of i ts

recogn i z e the rnore subtle e x anl ples of the \vay o ther creatures suffer and cOlllpete. The delicate relations betvveen the revelations of the heart and the tlCts of nature can inforrn an ex trenlel y subtle poern, such as

rnoral purity and fail to

"Dust of Snow. " It conveys a 1110n1ent of en lightennlent in the speaker through the elusive Hvvay a crow shook down" the dust of snovv, its sudden black Illotion disturbing the \vhite stilln ess, and " saved SOin e part / ()f a day I had rued." Was sOlnething preserved, saved, that he did not want to relnenlber, or sornething positive \vrested frolll the ruins of the past? The \vords "dust," "henllo ck,"

Introduction

9

"crow, " and "shook down" (and the subtle metric shifts from the iambic to dactylic) all suggest something more ambiguous and possibly ominous. Frost would have known that crows eat the coniferous hemlock seeds in winter and that hemlock trees compete for natural resources, making it difficult for other, weaker plants to grow in their shade. And the bitterness that attends the word

rued is balanced by that fact that its root, rue, denotes an antidote to hemlock poison. Perhaps knowledge of nature 's complexities-the strength and survival of the hemlock tree as well as the images of birth, death, and competition that attend it-render the annunciatory moment of "Dust of Snow" a study in saving the spirit from the excesses of bitterness and regret. The figure a Frost poem makes, as he says, "from delight to wisdom, " is often one from enthusiasm and desire for insight to skepticism and uncertainty, compromise that steps back from assertion or statement to point toward some­ thing, perhaps chilling, beyond our passion. Frost was quite conscious of a relationship with an audience he desired to lead into this uncertain world: My poems . . . are all set to trip the reader head foremost into the boundless. Ever since infancy I had the habit of leaving my blocks, carts , chairs and such like ordinaries where people would fall over them in the dark. Forward, you understand, and in the dark.23

Science is the kind of risky experience necessary for the attainment of wisdom through the escape from as well as the testing of sentiment in the demands of a material world: Science is nothing but practical experience carried to a greater extent. It pushes knowledge from nliles to light years. It teaches us on the j ob what is possible in material strength, speed and finish, what is sufficient to do and think. It teaches us to forget sentiment-not to be anxious about sentiment nor about God who is the king of sentiment. Science teaches us how much less it is possible for us to get along on, how much short of perfection we are permitted to come.24

It is this drama of the pursuit of truth ending in the discovery of limitations that makes science necessary. Hence, science can serve an ethical purpose, leading us out of the sentimentality Frost found rampant in religion. In one of his many displays of anxiety about the cultural ascendancy of science Frost argued that "science cannot be scientific about poetry but poetry can be p oetic about science. It's bigger, more inclusive. " 25 His famous essay "Education by Poetry" attempts to defend poetry's place in the world by making it compatible with science. Poetry would be more widely considered if we were to "treat all poetry as if it were . . . syntax, language, science. " 26 Science and

IO

Robert Frost and the Challenge of Darwin

p oetry both depend on understanding the limits of metaphors, not only because of their self-reflexivity but because of the presence of an ungraspable reality beyond language. Poetry should not becoille merely aesthetic activity or ecriture but an attempt to apprehend the world. The fact that science nlust recognize its dependence on language enabled Frost to see poetry as an important critic and not only the admiring audience of science, as Whitman had prophesied: "If there shall be love and content between the father and the son and if the greatness of the son is the exuding of the greatness of the father there shall be love between the poet and the man of demonstrable science. In the beauty of the poems are the tuft and final applause of science. "27 In Frost there is more of a fraternal rivalry than a loving relationship between father and son, a fulfilling of spermatikoi logoi, seedlike words, of the scientific dispensation. While Frost shared some of Whit11lan's Lucretianism, his irony and more controlled ego reflect less a proclamatory embracing of science than critical observation of its limits. The debate over the rapid acceleration and fragmentation of scientific knowledge affected debates among modernists about how poetry should re­ spond. Frost's years in England ( 1 9 I 2- I 5) included discussions with T. E . Hulme, who was cultivating his own interests in modern science, particularly Bergson's responses to evolutionism. Frost's own copy of Hulme's Speculations contains marginal annotations to the chapter "Classicism and Romanticism. " In one of the marked passages Hulnle invokes neo-Darwinism as providing scien­ tific authority for the classic attitude on the limitations of man as opposed to the romantic view of infinite possibility: Here is the root of ronlanticism: that man, the individual , is an infinite reser­ voir of possibilities; and if you can rearrange society by the destruction of oppressive order then these possibilities will have a chance and you will get progress . One can define the classical quite clearly as the exact opposite to this . Man is an extraor­ dinarily fixed and linlited animal whose nature is absolutely constant. It is only by tradition and organisation that anything decent can be got out of hinl . This view was a little shaken at the time of Darwin. You remember his particular thesis, that new species came into existence by the cumulative effect of small variations-this seems to admit the possibility of future progress. But at the present day the contrary hypothesis makes headway in the shape of DeVries's muta­ tion theory, that each new species conles into existence, not gradually by the accumulation of slnall steps, but suddenly in a j ump, a kind of spurt, and that once in existence it remains absolutely fixed. This enables me to keep the classical view with an appearance of scientific backing. 2 H

Darwin's own confusion of continuity and gradualism does underscore the limits of knowledge about the possibilities of mutation and perhaps some of his own more ideological doubts about the possibilities of sudden revolution. Given the

Introduction

II

importance i n biology of the law of the conditions of existence, neither gradual­ ists nor saltationists could be said to support a vision of infinite growth. Hulme's consideration of biology reflects the extent to which that science had become an arbiter of other fields as though its own theories were completely exempt from social construction. In Hulme's distrust of the romantic view of man's infinite possibilities we also have the beginnings of the modernist embracing of classi­ cism, a sense of the limitations of emotion, and the interest in spare, imagistic language. In Frost we see a peculiar combination of the romantic sense of change but stripped of endless possibility. Frost's own formal classicism-particularly the reanimation of the eclogue-reflects a view of life in form, and public awareness becomes a limit to endless fluidity and possibility. Frost shares the Darwinian view that "natura non facit saltum, " that leaps and inexplicable originality in form violate the predominance of rules and the power of natural law. But his adherence to a poetic tradition associated with natural piety contributes to the tension and power of his subtle unsaying of and deviation from the ronlantic worldview.29 Frost never allowed pure thought to become the arbiter of life. When he appears to poke fun at evolution in the late editorial poem "Etherealizing, " his target is actually the kind of utopian and eugenic fantasy of transcendent perfec­ tion and abstraction in modern art and philosophy. No "theory" should be " held" so long that it becomes a thoughtless creed or religious fundamentalism; only change itself is fundamental. But Frost assumed as true the inextricability of mind and matter and the slow, uncertain direction of physical transformation. Our fantasies about perfection cannot transcend the D arwinian assumptions about our origins and lowly beginnings: A theory if you hold it hard enough And long enough gets rated as a creed: Such as that flesh is something we can slough So that the mind can be entirely freed. Then when the arnlS and legs have atrophied, And brain is all that's left of mortal stuff, We can lie on the beach with the seaweed And take our daily tide baths smooth and rough. There once we lay as blobs of jellyfish At evolution's opposite extreme. But now as blobs of brain we 'll lie and dream, With only one vestigial creature wish: o h , may the tide be soon enough at high To keep our abstract verse from being dry.

12

Robert Frost and the ChallenRe �f Darwin

While denying the fantasy of decoupling mind from matter without becoming again a vestigial creature-a mockery we find both in Wells's Time Machine and Vonnegut's Galapagos-he did so in the narne not only of struggle but also of the humor that comes with accepting the roughness of life and knowledge.

Chapter

1

The Fact Is the Sweetest Dreatn Darwin, Pragmatism, and Poetic Knowledge

The similarities and the crucial differences between Frost and Emerson, Tho­ reau, and James-the writers with whom he is most often linked-can be understood better in the light of the deeper connections between American romanticism and science. David Porter observed that Frost explored anxieties left unconsidered by Emerson. 1 Jay Parini is correct in observing that in Frost's writing Emerson's " certainty is missing" . . . " replaced by a rueful skepticism; the assumed b enevolence of the Creator seems missing too-that dogged faith of Emerson's in a mysterious 'unity' underlying nature. " 2 But romanticism, in its emphasis on the connection between mind and nature and in its rebellion against religious authority, is deeply connected to the rise of modern natural history and SCIence. Emerson was himself a great exponent of science and of the progressive powers of the mind to uncover the ultimate design of creation. In the first essay " Nature," Emerson makes clear his alliance with science in the form of natural philosophy. Science was not so much a method or epistemology but, rather, an assertion of an absolute and independent knowledge of the universe liberated from theological dogma: Undoubtedly we have no questions to ask which are unanswerable. We must trust the perfection of the creation so far as to believe that whatever curiosity the order of things has awakened in our minds, the order of things can satisfy. . . . Let us inquire, to what end is nature? All science has one aim, namely to find a theory of nature. We have theories of races and of functions, but scarcely yet a remote approach to the idea of creation. 3

As Emerson proceeded in this praise of natural history, he became increasingly skeptical. The skepticism in both " Fate" and "Experience" does not represent a 13

14

Robert Frost and the ChallenRe if Darwin

reversal of his earlier essays but should be seen as a necessary consequence of an attempt to ground the self in a reality of flux, yielding only alienation and nescience.4 Emerson's adherence to metanl0rphosis in nature projects his own ethos of "Cherub scorn , " a rebellion from a completed and determinate history proscribed by theology. Even in his darkest moments Emerson held that depar­ ture from the sepulchers of history into the liberating subj ectivity of nature would still yield progressively higher levels of transcendent revelation rather than a debilitating solipsism. Nature in both Emerson and Thoreau became a reliable domain of escape from the confines of history. In Walden Thoreau's self-exile mimed the deliberateness suggested by nature. Nature was ennobling, ultimately answering to our questions and our need for a purifying pilgrimage: And we are enabled to apprehend at all what is sublime and noble only by the perpetual instilling and drenching of the reality which surrounds us. The universe constantly and obediently ans\vers to our conceptions; we travel fast or slow, the track is laid for us.5

Robert Richardson has noted that Walden "was a testament to the centrality and integrity of the individual mind observing nature."6 But a reader of Frost's "The Most of It" or "Design" would hardly find those poems consonant with Tho­ reau 's vision of a reliable nature or the centrality of the human observer. Frost's dialogue \vith Thoreau, I will show, reveals significant dissonances between the two. In an interview in which he praised Walden Frost called himself "Thoro­ sian . " 7 This neologism was a Frostian j oke, acknowledging his debt but also the consequences of " erosion," of both faith and epistemology, which come from descending into the matter of natural history. Thoreau's darker works, Cape Cod and The Mairle Woods, particularly in " Ktaadn , " do place man in a belittled relation to a nature that he sees as, at times, utterly chaotic. Thoreau's speculations about the French-Canadian Woodchop­ per in Walden and Joe Polis in The Maine fVoods also reveal an anthropologist skeptical of his own proj ections. In a fascinating essay "Reflexivity as Evolution in Thoreau's Walden" Frederick Turner has argued that Thoreau anticipates Darwin and the birth of Anlerican evolutionary anthropology. In his encounters with "contemporary savages, " Turner argues, Thoreau intuits the evolution of "civilized nlan fronl the savage. " 8 Thoreau retained a Rousseauian faith in the virtues and genius of the uncivilized nlan, in the recovery of a prelapsarian unity of nature and spirit, and in the modern Crusoe's ability to survive independently. Frost became far more skeptical than Thoreau of the exile's ability to find

Darwin, Pragmatism, and Poetic Knowledge

15

epistemic consonance between inner and outer worlds or to evade severe conflict either in the wilderness or in agriculture. Thoreau, himself, came to be a great ally of Darwin's thought, particularly on the matter of reproductivity in nature. If in the conclusion to Walden Thoreau praised the cypress for being free from the cycles of reproduction, he later came to praise the natural machinery of seed dispersal and reproduction that he found in Darwin . The recent publication of Thoreau's last manuscript, "The Disper­ sion of Seeds , " confirms the extent to which "Wild Fruits , " "Wild Apples, " "Autumnal Tints , " and "The Succession o f Forest Trees" were also deeply indebted not only to Darwin 's theory of natural selection but to the view that reproduction was nature 's highest goal and not to romantic self-sufficiency and independence.9 Robert Richardson has shown that "Thoreau gradually came to accept the view, for which D arwin was one more confirmation, that any order­ ing force in the universe must be sought in the developmental principle. " 1 ( ) That development almost invariably involved a network of interdependencies to make successful propagation p ossible. Frost admired the impulse to liberation that Thoreau found in nature, and he regarded Emerson's " Cherub scorn" of theology a figure for the scientific "penetration into matter. " 1 1 But Emerson also embraced the transcendent as­ pects of Hinduism and the idealism of Platonism, whereas Frost held to the incarnational principle of Christianity and recognized that Western science ex­ tended it rather than diverged from it. It should then be no surprise that Frost would also have been attracted to Darwin 's voyage into the wilds of South America and Australia on the Beagle, which led to his repudiation of Paleyan natural theology and fundamentalist Christianity. Darwin undertook the voyage at the displeasure of his father, who thought the trip "would be disreputable to my [Charles D arwin's] character as a Clergyman hereafter. " 1 2 Viewing the variety and grandeur of life in South America, Darwin came to doubt special creation and the design argument. His scorn of unreasonable religious authority colored his tense relation with the stubborn Captain Fitzroy, who signed D arwin on as the Beagle's naturalist. Dar­ win's Whig politics were opposed to Fitzroy's Toryism, and the naturalist hated Fitzroy's advocacy of slavery. 1 3 Ironically, it was Fitzroy, a religious fundamental­ ist, who gave Darwin a copy of Lyell's Geology, hoping that the young naturalist would be able to find evidence to debunk its challenge to the biblical account of creation. I nstead, Lyell's work and his own observations on the Beagle went far to undermine D arwin's acceptance of Genesis as literal truth. Though Lyell's work was crucial to Darwin, only one book accompanied him everywhere during his travels-Milton's poetry, of which his favorite was

16

Robert Frost and the ChallenRe C!f Darwin

Paradise Lost. 1 4 Darwin 's interest in Milton may have been more than a vestige of faith: admiration of a great heretic who defied accepted theology and boldly reinscribed creation in his attempt at theodicy. 15 In his own distrust of mysticism, and religious and political authority, Milton set his own rationalistic God upon the heavenly throne. Milton the Arminian, Arian, and mortalist abandoned mystical explanations of divine operations; the archangel Raphael (all of Milton 's archangels are material beings) warns the inquiring Adam that all earth's crea­ tures, including man, are "one first matter all" (Book 5 , 1. 47 3 ) . Advising Adam that he can only explain things heavenly in terms of things earthly, Raphael begins to shift from metaphor to synecdoche when he expresses the material continuum between the angels and man. Milton's ambivalence toward fixed hierarchy found expression in Raphael's organic figure of the possibilities of Adam's development, however circ umscribed by the contingencies of choice (see especially Book 5 , 11. 468- 505 ) and his adherence to a hierarchy of natures. Darwin's own exploration of God's laws of development reveals an interpenetrat­ ing and fluid material world, as though Milton's heaven had finally been brought to earth in a pastoral leveling in which God is finally " all in all . " Milton's vision o f the ominpresence o f a primordial, material chaos-the primacy of matter-also made an impression on the young Darwin's imagina­ tion. In 1 8 3 2 , while traveling in Baiha Blanca, Darwin described the landscape in terms of Milton's chaos: "It was impossible to behold this plain of matter, as it were melted and consuming by heat, without being reminded of Milton's descriptions of the regions of Chaos and Anarchy. " 16 I n book 2 of Paradise Lost Satan leaves for his j ourney to earth. The passage emphasizes continual instability, potentiality, and warfare in the "womb of nature . " Milton drew heavily on Lucretius' De Rerum Natura for this vision of primordial nature. Striking refer­ ences to this passage by Thoreau in "Ktaadn" and by Stevens in "Sunday Morn­ ing" bespeak its power as a challenge to the Puritan faith in nature and the American wilderness as a place of salvation: the gates vvide open stood, That with extended wings a bannered host Under spread ensigns nlarching tl1ight pass through With horse and chariots ranked in loose array; So wide they stood, and like a furnace nl0uth Cast forth redounding snl0ke and ruddy fianle. Before their eyes in sudden view appear The secrets of the hoary deep, a dark Illinlitable ocean without bound, Without dinlension; where length, breadth, and highth, And tinle and place are lost; where eldest Night

Darwin, Pragmatism, and Poetic Knowledge

17

And Chaos, ancestors of Nature, hold Eternal anarchy, amidst the noise Of endless wars, and by confusion stand . . . . To whom these most adhere, He rules a moment; Chaos umpire sits , And by decision more embroils the fray By which he reigns; next to him high arbiter Chance governs all. Into this wild abyss, The wonlb of Nature and perhaps her grave, Of neither sea, nor shore, nor air, nor fire, But all these in their pregnant causes mixed Confus 'dly, and which thus must ever fight, Unless th' Almighty Maker them ordain His dark materials to create more worlds, Into this wild abyss the wary Fiend Stood on the brink of hell and looked a while Pondering his voyage; for no narrow frith He had to cross. 1 7

This significant elaboration of the idea of the "tohu-wa-bohu" -formless and void-of Genesis posits the fundamental p ower of a material world existing outside God. Milton populates this abyss of things with warring factions, most notably governed by " chance. " These are God's "dark materials, " which reign except when pressed by the maker "to create more worlds. " Milton's attempt at theodicy in incorporating the knowledge of science becomes a tragedy of knowledge itself-a battlefield of unreconciled contradictions and a view of the creator and his ways that neither j ustifies nor exempts Him from evil. D arwin 's re c olle ction of Satan vi ewi n g chaos as h e viewed Baiha Blanca underscores a parallel. Darwin's own j ourney, like that of his Miltonic forerun­ ner, ushered a terrible, withering knowledge into a world satisfied with its theology, reanimating-without Paradise and redemption-the power of the idea of original sin. The changing conditions of existence and the literal relations of the human to the rest of the animal kingdom became a moral rebuke to human arrogance: "-the mind of man is no more perfect, than instincts of animals to all & the changing contingencies, or bodies of either. -Our descent, then, is the origin of our evil passions! ! -The D evil under form of Baboon is our grandfather! - " 1 8 The epigraph Freud used for The Interpretation of Dreams could well have been the motto for all of Darwin's work: " Flectere si nequeo superos, Acheronta movebo . " Darwin's voyage to the nether regions of the world and, metaphorically, into the deep past of the earth gave him the artillery to move the upper regions of civilized life into a troubling awareness of its lowly origins: "with his god-like intellect which has penetrated into the movements and con-

18

Robert Frost mzd the ChallenRe of Darwin

stitution of the solar system-with all these exalted powers-Man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin. " 1 9 Frost shares the romantic scientist's forbidden quest into the chaotic under­ world as well as the ultimate moral rebuke to the progress and moral and spiritual purity of civilization. Frost, like Darwin and Freud, challenged human narcis­ sism, and science was his weapon of choice. He both feared and enj oyed the struggle and flux, the combat and sexual conflict, implicit in Darwin's vision of survival and renewal. "Every poen1 , " Frost wrote in 1946, "is an epitome of the great predicament, the will braving alien entanglements. " 2 0 This defining state­ ment about poetry and life can be understood better in light of both Darwin and Schopenhauer as far more than an expression of paranoid heroism. The figure of the will braving "entanglenlents" evokes Darwin's conclusion to On the Origin of Species, in which various creatures are pursuing their interests in an "entangled bank" : It is interesting to contenlplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds , with birds singing on bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with wornlS crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around US.21

These entanglements often enough erupt in warfare for limited supplies or through successful propagation. Both Frost and Darwin were attentive readers of Schopenhauer. 22 And Frost's contemporaries duly noted the importance of Schopenhauer in the development of scientific thought. I n his lecture "The Rise of the Doctrine of Evolution, " Royce pointed out that " Schopenhauer's view that the longing and struggling will cannot be described apart from experience . . . brings him very near the position of most students of modern science. Schop enhauer marks, then, in the history of thought, the transition from roman­ tic idealism to the modern realism, the return to the natural order. " 2 3 Behind Darwin's many kinds and the laws that produce them is Schopenhauer's "will-to­ live"-not the individual will but the world's will manifesting itself in individ­ uals: "At botton1, optinlism is the unwarranted self-praise of the real author of the world, nan1ely of the will-to-live which complacently mirrors itself in its work . " This work is "the continuance of the whole as well as that of every individual being, the conditions are sparingly and scantily given, and nothing beyond these. Therefore the individual life is a ceaseless struggle for existence itself, while at every step it is threatened with destruction. "24 " Spring Pools" is a stunning meditation on the limits of reflective con­ sciousness born of and struggling among " alien entanglements" in the material

Darwin, Pragmatism, and Poetic Knowledge

19

world. The p ools "still reflect / The total sky, " with still suggesting both per­ sistence and motionlessness. The mimetic power of reflection is only "almost without defect, " still imperfect. Aside from that limitatio n the pools and "the flowers beside them" will be destroyed by other and more powerful life forms, "roots to bring dark foliage on," which demand nourishment and, in doing so, leave the weaker to perish in the inevitable, silent struggle for existing resources of both water and light. (Dark, then, in describing the foliage of the trees, is both literal and metaphoric.) The second stanza expresses the poet's threat against the "trees" and their "pent-up buds , " attributing evil to what is merely the inevitable and nonmoral. The "flowery waters" and "watery flowers" of the penultimate line mirror each other but become part of a temporary, oneiric world of consciousness. The final line accepts the inevitability of the change and deflates the anthropic grandeur of the preceding imprecation: " From snow that melted o nly yesterday" suggests an acceptance of the transformation and ephemerality of all forms i n the material world, including those vehicles of "reflection . " Most important, the pools owe their existence to prior forms of matter, "snow that melted o nly yesterday. "

Darwin's Long Argument and Nature 's Chaos

To u nderstand the significance of D arwin for Frost and for pragmatism, it is essential to describe the i nterplay of fact and metaphor in Darwin's vision, if only to show that it was anything but crudely reductive and does not simply provide a deterministic account of p rogress with man as the moral and intellectual pinna­ cle. Philosophies of social, psychological, and spiritual evolution in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries reflected the persistence of both Christian and E nlightenment concepts of p rogress. Some of these reconstruc­ tions, however, though often in dialogue with D arwin , had little to do with D arwin himself. B ertrand Russell wrote in 1 9 1 4 : "Evolutionism, in one form or another, is the prevailing creed of our time. It dominates our p olitics, our literature, and not least our philosophy. Nietzsche, pragmatism, Bergson, are phases i n its philosophic development, and their popularity far beyond circles of professional philosophers shows its consonance with the spirit of the age. " 2 5 I n America Henry Adams sought a scientific model t o save history from chaos and entertained D arwinism as a possible paradigm of development. But he found in it only a limiting methodology and recognized the difference between the implica­ tions of Darwin's concept of natural selection and the creed of progressive evolutionism:

20

Robert Frost and the ChallozJ!.e £?f Darwin behind the lesson of the day, he [Adams J was conscious that, in geology as in theology, he could prove only Evolution that did not evolve; Uniformity that was not unifornl; and Selection that did not select. To other Darwinians-except Danvin-Natural selection seet11ed a dognla to be put in the place of the Athanasian creed; it was a fornl of religious hope; a pronlise of ultinlate perfection. Adams wished no better; he warnlly synlpathised with the obj ect; but when he came to ask himself what he truly thought, he felt that he had no Faith; that whenever the next new hobby should be brought out, he should surely drop off fronl Darwinism like a nlonkey fronl a perch; that the idea of fornl , Law, Order, or Sequence had no more value for hinl than the idea of none; that what he valued nlost was Motion, and that what attracted his nlind was change. 2()

Adams was suspicious of evolutionary theory turned into a theology, particularly because he became fascinated by historical change. Longing for the medieval order of a completed universe that could not be regained, Adams became fasci­ nated by its opposite : historical change and, ultimately, chaos . He recognized that Darwin's theory, not the creed of progress that some derived from it, was in its implications a fable of mere change and disorder. Darwin's vision of descent by natural selection contained powerful con­ tradictions that led to the disintegration of any objective conception of nature and that continue to haunt natural science and philosophy. There is a continual dialogue between design and chance, designed laws and a mutability that defies categorization. While enlphasizing the deistic view of a creator separated fronl his creation, which operates according to designed laws , he maintains a sense of providential history and teleology but unknowable from the quotidian con­ tingencies of random events . Asserting the reality of a natural process that gov­ erns history, a limited epistemology governed by inference from fact precludes the possibility of reconstructing that history or of knowing its value. Reversing the Enlightenment and ronlantic privilege accorded to mind, Darwin's epis­ temology is lllore cautious about allowing facts to conform to the tyranny of an a priori conception of the whole or of hUlllan ideas of purpose. Parts and facts becollle the prinlary materials from which \ve must labor to infer larger contexts . Natural selection, the mechanism of Darwin's view of evolution, is based on an analogy to the purposive work of animal breeders in picking traits of animals . He acknowledges that breeders participate in the process but points out that they do so i n a way that is self-interested. I n drawing an analogy between artificial and natural selection, Darwin posits the fact that hunlans "unconsciously" participate in natural selection. All human choices are ironies, often serving purposes other than those consciously intended. H Ulllan fascination with beautiful forms is llleaningless except insofar as it serves the interest of procreation.

Darwin, Pragmatism, and Poetic Knowledge

21

Nature, in contrast to the artificial, selects but without self-interest. How, then, does nature "select" in any purposive sense? It seems only a mindless process of allowing chance variations from some mysterious source fight it out on the battlefield with the winner left standing, more elimination and waste than choosing. For Darwin the metaphor of selection, with its implied sense of consciousness and purposiveness, still had meaning when transferred to nature. He insisted that nature was an altruistic provider, a maternal laborer choosing variations for the benefit of each of her creatures : As man can produce and certainly has produced a great result by his methodical and unconscious means of selection, what may not nature effect? Man can act only on external and visible characters: nature cares nothing for appearances, except in so far as they may be useful to any being. She can act on every internal organ, on every shade of constitutional difference, on the whole machinery of life. Man selects only for his own good; Nature only for that of the being which she tends .27

Darwin j ustifies the imperceptibly slow process of development by natural selection with profoundly moral rhetoric that echoes I Samuel 1 6: 7 : "For the lord seeth not as man seeth; for man looketh on the outward appearance, but the lord looketh on the heart. " This is the moment when Samuel selects D avid to be the future King of Israel. The fact that David is the youngest of Jesse's sons and the last to be presented represents an important dramatic instance of biblical pastoralism: God subverts and overrules human conceptions of primogeniture, hierarchy, and order. The paradox can be found encapsulated in the Sermon on the Mount or in the Gospel of St. Mark, that the meek shall inherit the earth and that the first shall be l as t . In D arwin's world, the small, nlinute, an d the lowly are revealed to have great power beyond artificial forms of human control and prediction . I n additio n t o being altruistic, natural selection will produce perfection: "And as natural selection works solely by and for the good of each being, all corporeal and mental endowments will tend to progress toward perfection. " 2 8 But perfection, here, is only a tendency and at best a fulfillment of a certain potential within the limits of an organism and its internal and external condi­ tions. This maternal altruist-giver may not be self-interested, but what she gives to each is often part of a general weaponry for one creature to fight another i n self-interest. D arwin's nature i s a provider o f supplies and weaponry in warfare i n and against environments that include other creatures: "Thus from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted obj ect of which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of higher animals, directly follows. " 29 Darwin admits, however, that the valuative term higher is empty: " The embryo i n the course o f development generally rises in organization: I u s e this expression,

22

Robert Frost and the Challell<{?e if Darwi11

though I am aware that it is inlpossible to define clearly what is meant by the organization being higher or lower. " 30 Darwin asserts the reality of a temporal hierarchy associated with "fitness" and that those who are currently alive are actually better by definition than their predecessors : There has been nluch discussion whether recent forms are more highly developed than ancient. I will not here enter on this subject, for naturalists have not as yet defined to each other's satisfaction what is nleant by high and low forms . But in one particular sense recent fornls nlust, on nly theory, be higher than nlore ancient; for each new species is fornled having had sonle advantage in the struggle for life over other and preceding fornls. J 1

But Darwin's invocation of a principle of "conditions of existence" threatens the teleology implied in this tenlporal hierarchy. Power resulting from inheritance, the "unity of type," is perpetually unstable because material conditions, internal and external, are always subject to change : For natural selection acts by either now adapting the varying parts of each being to its organic and inorganic conditions of life; or by having them adapted during long-past periods of tinle . . . . Hence, in fact, the law of Conditions of Existence is the higher law; as it includes, through inheritance of former adapta­ tions, that of Unity of Type.J2

Natural selection, then, beconles relative, since it acts ' " chiefly through the competition of the inhabitants one with another, and consequently will produce perfection, or strength in the battle for life, only according to the standard of that country. "33 Assuming a creature has been "selected, " what is it selected for? To make the right sexual selection and produce more of its kind. Successful creatures propagate because that is how they becanle successful. The purpose of life is to produce more life, and success n1eans no rest or reward but the obligation to continue being successful in the battle of life. Individual creatures manifest life 's purposes, with little regard to the individual creature 's own sense of purpose. Teleology fades not only in the random process of creating life forms but also in the ultimate aims of life itself. Since no creature can be perfect because of the inevitable variations and conflicts in nature, this process is nonprogressive and non teleological . Aside fronl the tension between providence and chance in his account of natural process, Darwin's other assumptions about ontology threatens the whole of his (or any) epistenl0logy. He was interested in the origins of new species, not

Darwin, Pragmatism, and Poetic Knowledge

23

i n the beginning or original intention of life : " I must premise, that I have nothing to do with the origin of the primary mental powers, any more than I have with that of life itself. "34 Origin, then, means only circumstances and conditions that produce variant species, not a course of progress. Even the species concept, however, is drawn into question. Linnaean taxonomy and Paleyan concepts of design give way; being becomes becoming, and Platonic, fixed categories disap­ pear. This makes for a radical nominalism that precludes the ability to account for any history of development.35 Classifications become mere words that attempt but ultimately fail to grasp the vast complexity of a world of transitional forms without distinct boundaries: Certainly no clear line of demarcation has yet been drawn between species and sub-species-that is, the forms which in the opinion of some naturalists come very near to, but do not arrive at the rank of species; or, again, between sub-species and well-marked varieties, or between lesser varieties and individual differences. These differences blend into each other in an insensible series; and a series impresses the mind with the idea of an actual passage.36

Evolution, then, is a leap of inference by which individuals are grouped according to an "insensible series, " one which cannot be perceived but must be intuited. This "series , " already a fiction, "impresses the mind, " but only with "the idea of an actual passage . " Any narrative of evolution would be a proj ection of the mind onto the oceanic multiplicity of forms that do not submit readily to human naming. The imperfection of the geological record, which does not reveal the necessary temporal connections of existing and extinct creatures, threatens always to Blake the organic world seenl an "inextricable chaos. " 3 7 The greatest irony in Darwin's thought is the placing of the human mind within natural history and material descent. He completes the Enlightennlent's decoupling of the mind from divinity; mind has its origins in matter, matter developed in unpredictable ways by historical process. Not only is culture histor­ icized, but so is the human mind itself, as it becomes part of the chaos: "We can understand why a classification founded on any single character or organ-even an organ so wonderfully complex as the brain-or the high development of mental faculties, is almost sure to prove unsatisfactory. "38 The human can be only nominally distinguished from the rest of the world and becomes an unstable category. Human thought is brought low and made equal to the survival instru­ ments of other creatures whose own persistence may be of equal or greater value than human intelligence. How can mind know the thing of which it is only a tentative and momen­ tary part? Further, how can we be sure that human intelligence is the ultimate

24

Robert Frost and the (�lzallenJ?e �f Darwin

reality if the concepts of higher and lo\ver forms are eradicated in a material natural democracy with only tenlporary donlinators? This is, to use Pirandello's phrase, the kick that knocks the whole house apart. Ideas are only temporary instruments in a struggle for survival and control. As Frank Lentricchia has pointed out, what " Kantians describe as the inventive factor in consciousness becomes, after Darwin and the pragmatists, not nlerely the ground of a cog­ nitively coherent phenomenal experience but a life-preserving response to a hostile, life-denying world. "3<) An ongoing battlefield in which hierarchies are made and unmade, in which nl0mentary difference collapses into a leveled equality, is the essence of Darwin's pastoral vision. Frost often dranlatizes the pursuit of verifiable entities, acknowledging their transience and the self-deceptions of a nonobjective observer. Framed by an accentual equivalent of classical, deliberate hendecasyllables, Frost's " For Once, Then, Something" conveys a desire to find a reality beyond the narcissism of human self-reflection while satirizing the futility of that pursuit and the way it is framed by culturally given forms. The poenl nlakes us acutely aware that cogni­ tive conceptions of reflection, surface, and depth are met8 phoric and that the pursuit of "truth" is framed by those older constructs, much like the well itself. The " others" of the first line may well be scientists and empiricists who taunt the narrator for looking only at his reflection, which " Gives me back in a shining surface picture / Me myself in the summer heaven godlike / Looking out of a wreath of fern and cloud puffs . " Willing to satisfy those who taunt his narcissism, he denl0nstrates that little else can be known . What he perceives, the "some­ thing, " is lost when "Water came to rebuke the too clear water, " suggesting that the flux of life destroys clear and pernlanent perception. Rebuke, to describe the waves of water, suggests that flux has the moral force of upsetting stagnation and complacency. The title and final line can be taken in two ways: first, once and then are temporal and suggest a single moment in the past obliterated by time. The same words can be taken as part of an emphatic expression of having found "something. " The poenl ends with an unresolved tension between loss and gain, mockery and satisfaction. Sonletlzing and thing are words which resonate through­ out Frost ("The Oven Bird, " "Hyla Brook," "Mending Wall, " "Design") and should not be taken entirely as a j oke. I n a late, powerful lyric, " Choose Some­ thing Like a Star, " the demands for nature to confornl to "Fahrenheit" and "Centigrade" terms of nleasurenlent are rebuked by a star that says only " I burn . " But the star, and the po\ver and force i t elnbodies, "does tell something in the end. " The something is a nloral rebuke to our narcissism and our denlands that the world confornl to inlages, nleasuren1ents, and metaphors appealing to our sensibilities.

Darwin, Pragmatisnl, and Poetic Knowledge

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The pursuit o f "things , " " res, " "facts" i s part o f all Frost's poetry and allies him with efforts of science. If Frost is mocking Enlerson's view of natural facts as signs of spiritual facts, he is nevertheless fascinated by other kinds of inferences that can be made from facts . Darwin's books The Voyage of the Beagle and On the Origin of Species, which Frost read as a special student at Harvard, are, as Hayden White has said, "summas of the literature of fact. "40 I nvolving a variety or cluster of metaphors to describe the process of transformation-" descent," "selection , " "struggle for existence," "warfare o f nature," "variation," and "Tree of Life " ­ D arwin 's "long argument" remained, b y his own admission, open t o the chal­ lenges of new evidence and new experience and in constant need of recapitula­ tion.4 1 These larger metaphors always have for Darwin both a reality and a limitation. The selection of animal breeders is actually part of natural selection. The struggle for existence does actually contain "warfare" of tribe against tribe, although Darwin acknowledges that it also means subsistence on limited re­ sources. The tree of life does literally correspond to a diverging and converging interplay of life forms as well as being a figurative map of lineage. Human selectors do actually participate in natural selection. Aside from its fabric of metaphors, D arwin's On the Origin of Species relies heavily on a continual accu­ mulation of facts that, he hopes, will reveal a process. Observations of individual creatures or situations, such as the intercontinental transfer of seeds in the talons of birds, become figures from which a significant part of the machinery of dissemination, instead of special creation, can be inferred. The continual accu­ mulation of these images make them each a synecdoche, a part that does not quite stand for but provides a sample of the totality. I n trying to show that all creatures are descended from c ommon ancestors, D arwin knew he would have to rely on analogies, specifically homologies that would connect all creatures on the plain of the literal. But he also feared analogy as an inadequate proof of the reality he envisioned. I n attempting to prove common descent of all creatures, D arwin wrote in his notebooks: " I fear argu­ nlent must rest upon analogy. "42 But he wrote later in another notebook that analogies produce insights into the real: "experience has shown . . . that analogy is a sure guide & my theory explains why it is a sure guide. "43 Darwin's distrust of "analogy" kept him from going to a final step in interpreting facts, to a "belief that all plants and animals are descended from some one prototype, "44 and he believed that natural history would eventually " cease to be metaphorical and will have plain signification. "45 Like Thoreau, he would like to speak without meta­ phor. Unlike Thoreau, Darwin's and Frost's desire for "plain signification" does not lead to spirit but, rather, to a completely materialized world that rebukes the observer with its multiplicity and nlutability.

26

Robert Frost and the ChallenRe of Darwin

Frost believed analogy was the basis of thought, but like the scientist, he felt that analogies must bear the test not only of workability but of reality. "Poets and scientists have in COll11110n the biggest thing of all-their ll1etaphors. The poet and the scientist think by ll1etaphor. "46 Facts in Frost serve as momentary points of order, tentative synecdoches for a scheme of coherence. Frost called himself a "synecdochist": " I started calling myself a synecdochist when others called themselves Imagists or Vorticists . . . . Always, always a larger significance. A little thing touches a larger thing. "4 7 There is a literal sense of the contiguity of "things" in the plane of the real, which suggests larger connections and processes, not moments of spiritual epiphany. These things are often the irreducible facts in the poems-orchids, walls, ax helves, butterflies-which clarify and order the chaos by revealing aspects of the way things work, "samples . " Frost's humility about how much "larger a thing" can be realized is an important characteristic of his thought: "My ambition has been to have it said of me: He made a few connections . "4H Nature became to Frost and to his contemporaries a vast chaos in an ongoing battle of forms to which the mind contributes additional forms. This has little to do with progress, and in his notebooks Frost was careful to make the distinction between evolution and progress . Progress is nothing more than a proj ection of recurrent cycles of civilization onto a vast battlefield ofimpercepti­ bly slow change : Much confusion con1es fron1 confusing progress with evolution . Progress goes on visibly around us n10unting fron1 savagery to barbarism to civilization to sophistica­ tion to decadence and so to destruction. Evolution is a change from forn1 to form invisible, in1perceptible and only known if at all by inference like the state of a great battle.49

Frost also reveals his unwillingness to regard any civilization as more than a temporary effiorescence, or growth that rises and falls in the immense and chaotic battle of evolution. Frost's use of the word sophistication to describe the end point of any civilization betrays S0111e of his own pastoral racialism; to

soph isticate means "to adulterate, " and, as I will show, maintenance of clear identity becomes essential to his sense of even temporary survival. Frost appreciated chaos as a weapon in his war against his collectivity and utopianism. In Letter to The Amherst Student the phrase " democratic-socialist­ cOll1munist-anarchist" describes a "progress" from the individual to the collec­ tive and back to the anarchic. We are "born to" and enjoy the anticollective chaos. Form becomes only an " instrument" of ten1porary control, not the way to perfection or divine reality:

Darwin, Pragmatism, and Poetic Knowledge

27

The background in hugeness and confusion shading away from where we stand into black and utter chaos; and against the background any small man-made figure of order and concentration. What pleasanter than it should be so. Unless we are novelists or economists we don't worry about this confusion; we look out on [it] with an instrument to tackle it to reduce it. It is partly because we are afraid it might prove too much for us and our blend of democratic-socialist-communist-anarchist party. But it is more because we like it, born used to it and have practical reasons for wanting it there. 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. If I were a Platonist I should have to consider it, I suppose, for how much less it is than everything. 50

Though the view that the human mind provides constructs to tackle chaos can be found in pragmatism, Frost stops far short ofJames's belief that human addi­ tions complete reality. But the rej ection of Platonism as a determining and controlling reality informs the natural science that gave birth to Darwin, James, and Frost . 5 1 Frost's rebuke of Platonism carries with it as much moral force as epistemol­ ogy. He shares with Aristotle the substantiation of form with matter but extends this to the idea that matter precedes form. I deas have their roots in the noticing of natural traits, their origin in matter that "comes up from below, " "the part of nature not yet human . " Neohumanists and Platonists suffer, according to Frost, the pride that positions the human mind and its ideas in a special relation to a divine or ethereal origin. Nature poetry and nature science share the limited process of noticing details, "from the ground up " : I have a growi n g suspi c i o n , that mi gh t line me u p i n disloyalty to the humanists, that nothing comes down from above but what has so long since come up from below that we have forgotten its origin. All is observation of nature (human nature in­ eluded) , consciously or unconsciously made by our eyes and minds, developed from the ground up. We notice traits of nature-that's all we do. The so-called nature poet, so tiresome to some, toils not neither does he spin like a natural scientist, but it is to the natural scientist he is nearest of kin in his fresh noticing of details . . . . The proud humanists would be right if they said they held themselves above the part of nature not yet human. Or nearer right than when they put on airs of disdain for the praise of outdoors that, without exclamation of wonderful and beautiful, pays tribute by reporting details not previously mentioned. That's nature poetry and nature science. 52

Darwin makes a very similar dig at Platonism in his own notebooks: "Plato says in Phaedo that our ' necessary ideas' arise from the preexistence of the soul, are not derivable from experience. -read monkeys for preexistence. "53 Frost did not follow the romantic view that the individual found limitless power from the

Robert Frost and the Challell�e C?f Darwin

inlpulses of nature, and he distrusted the use of analogies by which the natural serves the spiritual power of the observer. If Frost accepted the lowly and nlaterial origin of our ideas, he also regarded thenl as dependent upon and subject to the same laws that govern nature: growth and decay. In "Education by Poetry" most of Frost's examples of the possibilities and limitations of metaphor derive from science; one of the most instructive is his discussion of "evolution, " and he recognized-before Levi-Straus-the power of metaphor in a culture to structure our thoughts . The figure, he says, is based on the fact of "the growing plant, " or "growing thing, " and is as ancient as Aristotle's discussion of nature in Physics. Frost deprecates extending this figure beyond its observable basis to a nletaphysical principle of unlimited, progressive development; the vulgar use of the the term ellolution has little to do with Darwin's vision of descent and nl0dification through natural selection: Another nletaphor that has interested us in our time and has done all our thinking for us is the nletaphor of evolution. Never nlind going into the Latin word. The lnetaphor is simply the nletaphor of the gro\ving plant or the growing thing. And sOlnebody very brilliantly, quite a \vhile ago, said that the whole universe, the whole of everything was like unto a growing thing. That is all . I know the metaphor will break down at sonle point, but it has not failed everywhere. It is a very brilliant nletaphor, I acknowledge, though I nlyself get too tired of the kind of essay that talks about the evolution of candy, \ve will say, or the evolution of elevators-the evolu­ tion o f this, that, and the other. Everyth in g is evolu t i o n . I en1 a ncipate n1yself by sinlply saying that I didn't get up the nletaphor and so am not nluch interested in it. 54

The term evolution beconles itself a nletaphor for logic or thought that reaches too far beyond its linlits in observation. In "The Literate Farmer and the Planet Venus," the traveler invokes the world of darkness, night, and the unconscious as a rebuke of progressive tracks of logic: 'We need the interruption of the night To ease attention off when overtight, To break our logic in too long a flight , And ask us if our prenlises are right.'

The wide variety of "growths" fronl which we derive figures of thought cannot be readily unified as a linear series; no growth can forget its roots. Frost's concept of nature rej ects the nlonolithic and monometaphorical and embraces a pluralistic and chaotic world barely capable of unified conlprehension except as it follows general rules of developnlent: There are growths. We know no such thing as growth unlimited. All growths we know are to\vard ends-deaths, \vhether of persons , trees, or nations. The purpose

Darwin, Pragmatism, and Poetic Knowledge

29

seenls to be rounding off and rounding off and rounding off Perpetual rounding suggests a rounding off of the whole of existence. That would be evolution by analogy. All analogy breaks down. That means taking too long a view. We can't think of good without evil. Neither can come to an end without the other. The rounding off here could only be in the last of both of them. 55

The romantic desire to unify historical experience in a vision or image of return fails for Frost, in part, because of his doubts about the sanctity or immor­ tality of the soul. Coleridge and Wordsworth presented myths of reintegration with nature that produced a feeling of being at one with the divine or eternal . Coleridge used the ancient circular figure of the ouroboros to evoke the sense of unity desirable in poetry: "The common end of all narrative, nay, of all Poems is to convert a series into a Whole: to make those events , which in real or imagined history move in a straight line, assume to our understanding a circular motion­ the snake with its Tail in its Mouth . "56 In "A Masque of Reason" Frost's Job uses the emblem ouroboros as "the symbol of eternity" or "the form of forms , " only t o say that in modernity i t stands for the circularity of o u r thought-from matter to form and back again-not mysteriously more but "less than I can understand. " Modern science, in denying the grounds of any formal causes, of Platonic form, of the divine or ontological realm, becomes merely circular reasoning. Hypotheses reflect their own operating limitations and have no foun­ dations other than the limited observations from which they grow. Frost quotes a metaphysical assertion in Emerson's "U riel" that "line in nature is not found, / Unit and universe are round, / I n vain produced all rays return" but substantiates the metaphor with Einstein's views about the limits of light emitted by sources whose life ends in deterioration and extinction: I expected more Than I could understand and what I get Is almost less than I can understand. But I don't mind. Let's leave it as it stood. The point was it was none of my concern. I stick to that. But talk about confusion! How is that for a mix-up, Thyatira? Yet I suppose what seems to us confusion Is not confusion, but the form of forms, The serpent's tail stuck down the serpent's throat, Which is the symbol of eternity And also of the way all things come round, Or of how rays return upon themselves, To quote the greatest Western poem yet. Though I hold rays deteriorate to nothing, First white, then red, then ultra red, then out.

30

Robert Frost and the ChallenRe cif Darwin

Frost was less concerned \vith the revision of theories and beliefs than with their abandonment or disintegration. Beliefs as well as theories also demand shedding because " any belief you sink into when you should be leaving it behind is an illusion. Reality is the cold feeling on the end of the trout's nose from the stream that runs away. "57 And Frost's reality is presented as a metaphor, in terms of the struggle to swim against an entropic streanl . Frost did believe in a reality that he defined ethically by the way it is always chilling to our hopes and passions. Religious understanding for Frost involves a perception of a reality that is not a construct but, rather, a letting go of metaphors . There is a distrust of final form: "Our perception of God is that emotion that throws off the metaphors. "5H Closure in theory, forlll, or belief would be tantamount to stagnation and comfort and a betrayal of an impulse of relentless labor in nature : "Believing in God you believe the future in, believe it into existence. Belief is the end of the sentence more felt than seen-the end of the paragraph, the end of the chapter. There is no end so final, no fornl so closed that it hasn't an unclosed place that opens into further form. "59 The scientific distrust of hUlllan thought and the pursuit of reality combine in Frost to emphasize not only the creation of constructs, feats of association, but their abandonnlent. Frost did not hold, however, to Emerson's view that nature or thought produced "asce1lsion, or the passage of the soul into higher forms, "6() nor to James's view that man creates forms that complete reality. Further in Frost does not have the optill1istic and evolutionary resonance that hig her does in E ll1erson; it ll1eans " difference" and not "betterness . "6 1 Frost also expressed his criticism of Emerson's monism, his being "too Platonic about evil, " in geoll1etric terlllS that renlind us of the figures so impor­ tant to Donne and Marvell in describing the shift from the Ptolemaic to the Copernican and Keplerian cosmologies.62 Commenting on Emerson's line "unit and universe are round, " Frost added that "another poem could be made from that, to the effect that ideally in thought only is a circle round. In practice in nature, the circle becomes an oval. As a circle it has one center-Good. As an oval it has two centers-Good and Evil . Thence nl0nism versus dualism. "63 Frost's dualism did not distinguish between heaven and earth but described an inlmanent ongoing conflict. The difference between thought and practice marked the end of the Ptolen1aic and the beginning of the Copernican cosmol­ ogy. And Kepler's suprarational assumption of the sun's power enabled him to go beyond the Copernican assumptions of circular planetary orbits to the possibility of ovals and eventually of ellipses. 64 Frost uses the analogy of a shift in thought about planetary revolutions to describe the moral ambiguities brought about by a scientific revolution which collapsed the hierarchical assumptions of a perfect, heavenly order.

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The concept of endlessly superseding ideas and forms are, of course, part of an organic vision. Frost compared all life to a tree flourishing in perished matter, denying the intervention of divine or supernatural forces and the possibility of escape from the cycle. Frost adheres to the Aristotelian substantiation of form by matter but understood that, if they depart from the classical and medieval ad­ herence to the idea of universals, all forms become malleable and temporary. "The medium in which life alone can flourish is perished matter. The little organized lines in a bath of broken down organisms-disorganisms . The Tree stands growing in its own waste-the b ark it sheds and the branches. There is no evolution-only growth of something in its own waste. "65 Frost's image is remarkably similar to Darwin 's "Tree of Life" in On the Origin of Species. A tree, a part of the organic world standing for the whole of it, illustrates Darwin 's branch­ ing conception of descent from a common ancestor. Its literal ramifications are the individual forms of life. These forms have their own figurative ramifications as synecdoches for the overall process of life. The tree is a figure that D arwin describes as "true," not only because it so vividly illustrates his map of descent but because it is a powerful symbol of the interrelatedness of the organic world he is describing.66 Unlike the chain of being, its great predecessor in cosmol­ ogy, the tree and all its ramifications break down and cover the earth in an image of overgrowth and entanglement rather than in a fully comprehensible design that would correspond to human artifice and the need for finality. The tree is a form that describes the way all forms or growths break down in the process of change: The affinities of all the beings of the same class have sometimes been represented by a great tree. I believe this simile speaks the truth. The green and budding twigs may represent existing species. At each period of growth all the growing twigs have tried to branch out on all sides, and to overtop and kill the surrounding twigs and branches, in the same manner as species and groups of species have tried to overmas­ ter other species in the great battle for life . . . . As buds give rise by growth to fresh buds, and these, if vigorous, branch out and overtop on all sides many a feebler branch, so by generation I believe it has been with the great Tree of Life, which fills with its dead and broken branches the crust of the earth, and covers the surface with its ever branching ramifications. 67

Frost stated in "The Constant Symbol" that " every poem is a new meta­ phor inside or it is nothing. And there is a sense in which all poems are the same old metaphor always. "68 He is describing a Heraclitean paradox of permanence within natural change of the kind embodied in the figure of the Tree of Life; new forms, like branches, are synecdoches of the permanent process of growth and

32

Robert Frost al1d the Challel1J?e �f Darwin

decay. The image of growth and nlovement (and attempts at knowledge and order) anlid decay and waste is an important figure in son1e of Frost's best poems, including "Mowing, " "Birches, " "After Apple-Picking, " "The Wood-Pile, " "Design , " and "The Census-Taker. " The enlotional force of many of these poems comes from being excluded fronl the thrust of life: "As far as we can see it's material, thrust toward sonlething. Our grief, our pain, is our feeling of being cast off fronl this thrust and wasted so to speak. "69 Darwin and the Rise of Pragmatism

Frost had significant indoor and outdoor schooling in the practice and philoso­ phy of science, which lllade his encounter with Darwin unavoidable.7 0 Carl Burrell, a close friend and lllentor of Frost in his teen years, taught him both botanizing-particularly about orchids-and farllling. Burrell was also fasci­ nated by the problellls of evolution and its conflict with religion; he had a large collection of works on the subject, which he shared and discussed with Frost and which included Darwin, Huxley, Spencer, Edward Clodd, Grant Allen, Henry I) rUlllll10 nd, and Richard Proctor. 7 1 When Frost studied at Harvard frolll 1 898 to 1 900, he came into contact with intellectuals who were the direct inheritors of the post-Darwinian con­ troversies. At Harvard Asa Gray had been defending Darwin as having restored teleology to natural phenolllena by his translllutation hypothesis , while Louis Agassiz condelllned it as tantalllount to underll1ining special creation and divine authority. Frost's favorite hobby, botany, was the focus of many of those debates . Some theologians equated Darwin with progressive evolutionism and, there­ fore, a renewal of the Christian idea of redemption, while others welcomed its erosion of sentilllentalislll and certainty in religious thought. Frost studied evo­ lutionary geology under Nathaniel Southgate Shaler, reading Lyell and Darwin's major works . I n his own writing Shaler posited an evolutionary argument for Christianity, stating that "Christ is the sumn1it and crown of the organic series . It expresses the final result of that directed striving which began hundreds and nlillions of years ago, and through infinite toil and pains has led to this supreme accomplishment. It offers the natural line of escape from the evils of hedonisnl, and the curse which self-consciousness brought upon man­ kind. "72 Shaler's position reflects a j ustification for suffering in history similar to Romans 8 and reveals the extent to which Protestant intellectuals saw evolution­ ary theory as consonant with rather than at odds with Christianity. Frost's own attenlpt at reconciling science and religion, as I will show, reflected far greater confli ct.

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Frost also studied philosophy under Santayana while James was o n leave and in his last semester at Harvard was a student in Josiah Royce's introductory survey of modern philosophy. Royce's lectures on philosophy included "The Rise of the Doctrine of Evolution" and another entitled " Nature and Evolution: The Outer World and Its Paradox. " Anxious to reconcile natural science with his idealism, Royce raised a variety of problems that, I will show, remained impor­ tant to Frost.73 I n Santayana, Frost thought he had a friend who argued for " animal faith" but found Santayana's aestheticism an unappealing form of escape from the pursuit of reality. However, Santayana's reaction against sentimentality in literature and his advocacy of Whitman's "passionate preference" and "bar­ barity" found an eager ear in the young Frost.74 "Passionate preference" became Frost's phrase for "sexual selection," the process by which the individual will finds choice in the machinery of life. The influence of D arwin and evolution on the founders of pragmatism­ James, Peirce, Fiske, and Wright-has been documented in Philip Weiner's 1 947 study Evolution and the Founders of Pragmatism. That influence was far from monolithic-from the muted empiricism of Wright to the religious optimism of Fiske. Weiner's study does not document the anxiety that these philosophers faced in attempting to accommodate psychology and philosophy to the author­ ity of science. In Science, Community, and the Traniformation ofA nlerican Philosophy, 1 860- 1 930, Daniel Wilson has argued that James, in Principles of Psychology, was not so much "establishing the state of the science as writing the volume that expressed aptly the pluralism, even confusion, of an era slowly and painfully shedding its reliance on theology and philosophy as the touchstones of culture and yet not ready to declare its allegiance to science. "75 The pluralism and confusion in James parallels what many found in Darwin, a world of change and contingency out of which he tried to save the will to believe from becoming, as his detractors complained, the will to make-believe. William James, whom Frost read widely, was trained as a scientist and physiologist and became a great advo­ cate of Darwinian thought.76 His book Principles of Psychology, which Frost read and taught at the New Hampshire State Normal School in Plymouth in 1 9 1 I 1 2 , argues against the sudden appearance of consciousness i n humans and in favor of its natural development from a primordial source of common descent. Darwin's model of natural selection was adopted byJames as a model for the process of encompassing all of the ideas of change, contingency, and fallibility that one finds in the evolutionary productions of nature. A student's notes from James's introductory course in philosophy reveal the extent to which Darwin played a role in his formulation of pragmatism: "Darwin's idea is known as Natural Selection. Those variations which are useful tend to live. Those which

Robert Frost and the Challenge of Darwin

34

are a detriment die out. These useful variations are transmitted to future genera­ tions. They are inherited and thus better and better animals. "77 I n the sa11le notes the student records Ja111es's principle of selecting ideals and subjecting them to testing. What James saw in D arwin \-vas a scientific principle upon which to ground a liberal philosophy that emphasized process, pluralis11l, and contingency: " From the world of facts choose some ideal but do not be sure you are the o nly one who 11lay be right. Give every other system a show. Act as if all the existing will were yours for the present time. "78 I n Principles of Psychology James described the core of human consciousness as an activity of selection and elimination which is a direct analogue of D arwin's theory of natural selection : The artist notoriously selects his itenls, rej ecting all tones, colors, shapes, which do not harnlonize with each other and with the main purpose of his work. That unity, harnlony, "convergence of characters , " as M . Taine calls it, which gives to works of art their superiority over works of nature, is wholly due to elimination. 79

James reverses the hierarchy of nature over art, which is the cornerstone of Darwin's theory of selection. Darwin reconciles nature and man by arguing that they are both participants in the process and that man is thus an unconscious participant in selection. But James does not deny that consciousness is the re­ sponse of an organism to its environment and describes this in completely en'lpirical tern'ls : Every inlpression which inlpinges on the incoming nerves produces sonle discharge down the outgoing ones, whether we are aware of it or not. Using sweeping terms and ignoring exceptions, we m ight say that every possible feeling produces a movement, and that the I1lOvernent is the movement of the entire organism, and of each and all its parts. 80

Both Darwin and James view nature and human consciousness as an endless succession of experiments to produce organisms better suited to their environ­ ment, but the question of whether "fitness" is progressive or not remains open. Though "selection" implies intention and conscious purpose, both Darwin and James depict an experimenter closer to Schopenhauer's idea of a self-expressive blind will. The dependency of the "outgoing nerves" on sensory data from "incoming nerves" severely limits the interpretation of facts except as they correspond to the biological limitations of the observer. In Darwin and Frost the idea of choice and its relation to art comes into play most clearly in the domain of sexual relations, which holds sway over the isolated designs of any individual. James's j ustification of religion was also set in evolutionary terms . Human longing for God, religious sentiment, has persisted in a variety of experiences and

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feelings, indicating the existence of the divine obj ect. Nonetheless, this view rendered religious belief and truth as a process of verification emptied of content: "True is the name for whatever idea starts the verification process, useful is the name for its completed function in experience. "8 1 Using a more strongly evolu­ tionary and organic metaphor, "Truth grafts itself on previous truth, modifying it in the process, j ust as idiom grafts itself on previous idiom, and law on previous law, " James gives the impression of accretion rather than directionless superses­ sion. 82 There is also a telos and direction in his conception that "reality . . . and the truths men gain about it are everlastingly in a process of mutation-mutation towards a definite goal, it may be-but still mutation. "83 James's own radical empiricism, in which all new forms are both made by and alter the existing order, relies on Darwin's natural selection, in which history is contantly subj ect to uncertain alterations . It is a reality in which divinity has no place and, as he points out, " design," the cornerstone of natural theology, is little more than a "blank cartridge. " Looked at as a model of philosophy, pragmatism follows Darwin in regard­ ing ideas as useful forms that supersede one another depending on the circum­ stances or environment. Behind the alliance of science and pragmatism is an ideology of change and lib eration that destroys the past and unfounds the present. In his seminal essay of 1 909, "The Impact of Darwin on Philosophy, " Dewey embraced Darwin's method of bringing the idea of transition to all spheres of life. What Dewey meant by the new scientific method is not really a method at all but an ethos of continuous change and transformation, instead: prior to Darwin the impact of the new scientific method upon life, mind, and politics, had been arrested, because between these ideal or moral interests and the inorganic world intervened the kingdom of plants and animals . . . . The influence of Darwin upon philosophy resides in his having conquered the phenomena of life for the principle of transition, and thereby freed the new logic for application to mind and morals and life. When he said of species what Galileo had said of the earth, e pur se muove, he emancipated, once and for all, genetic and experimental ideas as an organon of asking questions and looking for explanations. H 4

D ewey's invocation of Galileo in this context also reveals the extent to which modern science has its roots in a revolt against conceptions of ethereal immu­ tability derived not from fact but, rather, from religious and political authority. The idea of transitional forms that he admires in Darwin reflects as much his disdain for religious authority and his hope in the possibility of perpetual escape from it as it does any knowledge of the nature of matter. James also linked science to Protestant liberation from central metaphysical or religious authority:

Robert Frost and the Challel1}
In both Dewey and Jarnes, Darwin's account of the transforrnation of species is imaginatively connected to the purpose of science itself: rebellion against the tyranny of the past. The question for James is what does it mean to say that such a way of thinking is "not irreligious" when the consequences of its instrunlental­ isnl are completely materialistic, if not nihilistic. In June 1 928 Frost wrote a fascinating letter to Louis Untermeyer, which reveals his ren1arkable vision of the consequences of science as rebellion against n1etaphysics and the ideas of the past. Every religion or worldview becomes subj ect to the sanle rebellion, including science itself. Liberated from the abso­ lute, the Kantian subject is subjected to his own circular thinking. These are "vicious circles, " because the self stands only on the shifting ground of histor­ icism; forms of thought, like species, are superseded in a great battle. E choing Hamlet, Frost despairs over the inadequacy of language and its lack of correspon­ dence with any permanent reality. "Logic" grows and breaks down, leaving its rider, like the swinger of birch trees, back on earth, cast out fronl his previous flight. Frost reveals the rnind of a skeptic who sees all worldviews as systems that are not recognized as such until we are outside them, observing them: If I haven't written in a long time, I suppose it is because I haven't found anything very easy to say. My spirit barely n10ves in letter writing anyway under its burden of laziness and disinclination. The least addition of sorrow or confusion to n1y load and I stop altogether. That's an amusing one you call Words Words Words . For a cent I would subscribe to the sentiment. The logic of everything lands you outside of it: the logic of poetry outside of poetry (I needn't tell you how) ; the logic of religion by nice gradations outside of Catholicism in Protestantism, outside of Protestantisn1 in agnosticisn1, and finally outside of agnosticism in Watsonian be­ havioristn: the logic of love, outside of love (if it were only by physical exhaustion) ; the logic of strife, in China. But what leaves the heart of mystery and the sting of death is the fact that when you have eliminated yourselfby logic as clear out as Eenie meenie minne moe, then you are as good as in again. Which is one of several things that has led great men to suspect tin1e and space and motion (however directed) and thought, of being vicious circles-vicious. We are what we are by elimination and by deflection from the straight line. Life is a fight we say and deify the prizefighter. We could go further and say life is a night-club and its presiding deity a retired prizefighter or Bouncer, bouncing us forever out. H6

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Frost also invoked natural selection when h e stated that what we are i s from "elinlination, " deviation from the straight line. He is describing a process of selection that builds edifices of thought even while it eliminates and wastes all that may not be useful. But what, then, are we iflife consists only of shedding and taking on new structures of thought and new entanglements? What can allow us to rest in belief? Frost asserted that beliefhas limits in a self-consciousness that recognizes the system as self-conceived. Science has moved from Plato's and Aristotle's model of a universe of eternal circles governed by an unmoved mover, to a process of the historical supersession of religions and cosmologies governed by impulses and strife. Frost calls this inevitable circularity a process of "vicious circles. " And here we see Frost's departure from the optimism of Emerson's "Circles, " in which Emerson claimed "the life of man is a self-evolving circle, which, from a ring imperceptibly small, rushes, on all sides outwards to new and larger circles, and that without end. " Unlike Emerson's optimistic evolutionism, Frost sees a diminution from Catholicism to Protestantism to behaviorism and sexual and civil strife. Life is not a progression but a fight to maintain tentative constructs of belief. All forms are developments that fight to exist and are supplanted by new forms. In notebooks and poems Frost amusingly calls D arwin "John L. Darwin, " after the American prizefighter John L. Sullivan; the D arwinian world was the "temple of prize-fighter or fight promoter" or "the retired prizefighter. " The metaphors of battle and strife are crucial to understanding Frost's poetry. I n another letter to Untermeyer, Frost describes a shift in culture from Darwin's metaphors of strife to Marxist utopian ideals of human family and back again to strife. The battle and strife metaphors prevail over Marx's, whom Frost contemptuously regards as a "polemical Jew, " meaning a Messianic prophet preaching for heaven on earth. Frost sees "no logical connection" in the tem­ poral shift from metaphor to metaphor, but the instability becomes an endless dialogue between war and shelter, chaos and form: isn't it a poetical strangeness that while the world was going full blast on the Darwinian metaphors of evolution, survival values and devil take the hindmost, a polemicalJew in exile was working up the metaphor of the State's being like a family to displace them from mind and give us a new figure to live by? Marx had the strength not to be overawed by the metaphor in vogue. Life is like a battle. But so is it like a shelter. Apparently we are now going to die fighting to make it a secure shelter. The model is the family at its best. At the height of the Darwinian metaphor, writers like Shaw and Butler were found to go the length of saying even the family within was strife, and perhaps the worst strife of all. We are all toadies to the fashionable metaphor of the hour. Great is he who imposes the metaphor. From each according to his ability to each according to his need. Except ye become as little children under

Robert Frost and the ChalienRe of Darwin

a 300d father and mother! I'm not going to let the shift from one metaphor to another worry me. You'll notice the shift has to be made rather abruptly. There are no logical steps fronl one to the other. There is no logical connection. H 7

While Frost is mildly contemptuous of being "toady to the fashionable metaphor of the hour, " it is the battle metaphor that both recurs and governs the process of metaphorical shift. The only ones who are not toadies are those " great" enough "to impose the metaphor, " a vision that indicates mastery of the battle. The epistemic corrosion created by the intrusion of ever new and unex­ pected obstacles is part of the effect of nineteenth- and twentieth-century science in its exploration of other and previous cultures, thought, and life forms . The geographically remote and strange became associated with the temporally re­ mote. Order was possible so long as the observer could order the remote along a temporal axis of history with his own consciousness as the culmination, or telos. D arwin's science of history, however, with its emphasis on variety and multi­ plicity of fact, vast expanses of time, and continual struggle, displaced the claim any creature might have to being the purpose or end of history. Darvvin's science placed the idea of progress in civilization and, ironically, in science in jeopardy or at least within the confines of inescapable laws of limit and extinction. In Plato and Platonism Walter Pater captured the crisis that the Darwinian consciousness of change posed to the ascendancy of mind and thought in all areas, including SCIence: Darwin and Darwinism, for which "type" itself properly is not but is only always becominR . . [and] the idea of developnlent (that, too, developed in the process of reflection) is at last invading one by one, as the secret of their explanation, all the products of mind, the very mind itself, the abstract reason; our certainty for instance, that two and two make four. HH .

With the extreme loss of certainty and finality inherent in Darwin's thought, theories and ideas cower before the immense possibilities of endless change. Consciousness reaches a growth that it cannot transcend. Wisdom, then, is the awareness of law and limit found in the testing of emotion, invention, thought, form. Hardy entertained a remarkably similar view in his own thoughts on consciousness in the D arwinian age : "We have reached a degree of intelligence which nature never contemplated in framing her laws, and for which she has provided no adequate satisfactions . " 89 For all his late-Victorian assumptions about progress culminating in the scientism of his own era, James Frazer's conclusion to The Golden Bough, of which Frost owned all twelve volumes , is a powerful statement about the corro­ sive effects of historicism and evolution on the sanctity of ideas . He recognizes

Darwin, Pragmatism, and Poetic Knowledge

39

the continuum between magic, religion, and science and admits that the latter may too be one day glimpsed as a passing fable. It is as trenchant a statement as one finds of how evolutionary historicism and pragmatism intersect. Unlike William James, Frazer expresses a humility and uncertainty about such collective proj ections as " universe, " "world, " and the human ability to complete reality: It is probably not too much to say that the hope of progress-moral and intellectual as well as material-in the future is bound up with the fortunes of science, and that every obstacle placed in the way of scientific discovery is a wrong to humanity. Yet the history of thought should warn us against concluding that because the scientific theory of the world is the best that has yet been formulated, it is necessarily complete and final. We must remember that at the bottom the generalisations of science or, in common parlance, the laws of nature are merely hypotheses designed to explain that ever-shifting phantasmagoria of thought which we dignify with the high-sounding names of the world and the universe. In the last analysis nlagic, religion, and science are nothing but theories of thought; and as science has sup­ planted its predecessors, so it may hereafter be itself superseded by some more perfect hypothesis, perhaps by some totally different way of looking at the phenomenon-of registering the shadows on the screen-of which we in this generation can form no idea. The advance of knowledge is an infinite progression toward a goal that forever recedes . . . . The dreams of magic may one day be the realities of science. 90

Frost at times could seem to enj oy these effects of historicism, of the perishing of all thoughts, allowing the unknown to loom larger and more threat­ ening. He loved that science which creates more unknowns and provides neither comfort nor certainty but, instead, greater fear and less knowledge. He dislikes the science that becomes an imperial theory that closes adventure : Think of the great abysses opened up by our study of the atom. Think of the strange and unaccountable actions of the hurrying winds experienced by our trav­ elers of the skies. Think of the marvels of marine life lately brought to us by the explorers of the distant oceans, each more wonderfully wrought than ever mermaid or water sprite of which the poets dreamed. Life has lost none of its mystery and romance. The more we know of it the less we know. Fear has always been a stimulus to man's imagination. But fear is not the only stimulus. If science has expelled much of our fear, still there are left a thousand things from which to shape our dreams.9 1

Science is worthy when it satisfies our need for the "strange and unaccount­ able, " "great abysses" (a phrase that evokes Milton's chaos) , the interstices in continuity that allow for new things to appear rather than a monotonous line of

40

Robert Frost a11d the Clzallell�e if Darwin

enforced progress . The new fOflns are "' each nl0re wonderfully wrought" and Inollify the human nlind's conceptions of beauty. Frost's statement echoes the r0111antic sublimity of the conclusion of On the Origin if Species, in which D arwin proclainls, "There is grandeur in this view of life . . . that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fIxed laws of gravity, from so simple a begin­ ning endless fornls nlost beautiful and nlost wonderful have been, and are being evolved." Darwin acknowledges the fixed laws of cyclical process and N ewto­ nian physics. But biology is a principle of noncyclical, unpredictable creation of new fornls ; life is an indeter111inate rebellion against pure mechanism. Frost's "A Star in a Stone-Boat, " in this light, becomes a dralna of the way unexpected and uncontrolled worlds of life break through the nl0notony of our walled-in uni­ verse of temporary fornls and constructs, revealing the limits of what our imag­ ination can "compass. " The idea that life can originate by traveling in meteors from other planets (a view once held by Lord Kelvin among others) undoes the dognla of special creation while leaving obscure the actual origins of life and the relations between organic and inorganic fornls. The Modern Lucretius

If Darwin functioned as an Epicurus to Frost's Lucretianism, questions remain about the nature and extent of that relationship in the poetry itself. The figure of the strealn as representation of flux is a persistent nletaphor in Frost, recurring in "Hyla Brook, " "West-I�unning Brook, " "The Mountain, " and "The Genera­ tions of Men. " The Frostian strea111 has obscure origins and moves in unpredict­ able and unknowable directions . Thonlpson has noted that Frost "frequently mentioned his adnliration for Lucretius" and speculates that Frost adnlired the Roman poet's attempt to overconle hunlanity's worst fears.92 This Lucretian nletaphor of a flux out which creation occurs was appropriated by janles in his concept of consciousness as a streanl and by Bergson in Creative Evolution. Frost did not accept Bergson's locating Inind in the flux, or stream, of life, finding it, instead, in the process of resisting and surviving flux.93 Frost's interest in Bergson's Creative Evolu tion has been well docunlented, but he was not, as I will show, simply accepting of Bergson's vitalistic creed.94 Frost's views of metrics, which he discussed in England with the Bergsonian T. E. Hulme, counter the idea of fluidity found in free verse. Frost insists on the limit of strict meters to tame and limit the flow of speech. 95 At least as inlportant for Frost as the stream was Lucretius' depiction of nature as consisting of atom and void, a world that is free fronl the control of nlasters and gods. B oth Frost and Lucretius find appeal­ ing a nature that is inconlpatible with vaunting hunlan ideals of purpose and with theology.

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The complexity o f Frost's reinterpretation of Lucretius i n modern terms is encapsulated in "Too Anxious for Rivers. " The title of the poem and its govern­ ing metaphor of rivers suggest a desire for consciousness to find and eradicate the mountain "That someone has said is the end of the world, " an immovable icon he would like to challenge : Look down the long valley and there stands a mountain That someone has said is the end of the world. Then what of this river that having arisen Must find where to pour itself into and empty? I never saw so much swift \vater run cloudless. o h, I have been often too anxious for rivers To leave it to then1 to get out of their valleys.

As rivers become a surprising figure for untamed, swift-running desire, the speaker recognizes an inevitable spilling of its power into a void that, ironically, subverts its own quest for "the truth. " The telos of the search becomes the parabolic canyon "Of Ceasing to Question What D o esn't Concern Us, " a geological version of God's rebuke to Job or Michael's rebuke to Adam not to dream of other worlds. But our naturally driven search for truth and for origins leaves us "lost, " with the dark closing around us "broodingly soon in every direction" : The truth is the river flows into the canyon Of Ceasing to Question What Doesn't Concern Us, As sooner or later we have to cease son1ewhere. No place to get lost like too far in the distance. It may be a mercy the dark closes round us So broodingly soon in every direction.

This inevitable cessation and awareness of the limitations of inquiry render us like Prometheus trembling in the dark not with fire but with a fading candle and becomes, ironically, a mercy saving us from further torture. As in "Desert Places, " the speaker retreats from being scared by the vast interstellar spaces " on stars where no human race is" (race is also sounds like races, underscoring a conception of life as a competition of species) . But there is no real solace, as he is left to "scare himself" with the more immediate emptiness, loneliness, and threat of extinction figured in snowdrift "desert places . " I n "Too Anxious for Rivers" we find that the beginning and end o f con­ sciousness is the impulse of Eros itself, the " essay of love, " a transformation of the paean to Venus that begins De Rerum Natura . Science discovers only its own

Robert Frost a1ld the Challenge �f Darwin

desire to know, circling back ultin1ately to the shifting fables and premises of consciousness, while ends and beginnings ren1ain ungraspable: The world as we know is an elephant's howdah; The elephant stands on the back of a turtle; The turtle in turn on a rock in the ocean . And how much longer a story has science Before she nlust put out the light on the children And tell thenl the rest of the story is dreanling? 'You children nlay dreanl it and tell it tonlorrow.' Tinle was we were nlolten, tinle was we were vapor. What set us on fire and \vhat set us revolving Lucretius the Epicurean nlight tell us 'Twas sonlething we knew all about to begin \vith And needn't have fared into space like his nlaster To find 'twas the effort, the essay of love.

"The world as we know" is a striking phrase, evading the expected it and suggesting a fluid supersession of fables about our ultimate beginnings and ends, such as the ancient analogy of the vvorld as elephant standing on the back of a turtle. Scientific knowledge becon1es a circular dream. Josiah Royce's essay "Nature and the Paradox of Evolution," in his lectures collected in The Spirit of Modern Philosophy, describes a similar predicament for modern science, with strikingly sin1ilar analogies. If the universe appears to be a victin1 of entropic "running down, " a strean1 in which all matter is collapsing into a solid n1ass, then its beginning must have been infinite distance between particles of matter. Royce points out that this incongruity turns our perception of the evolution of the universe, despite spectroscopic evidence, back upon itself as human fiction, " derived from the analogy of a very special and limited experi­ ence of ours, to an infinite regress whose ultin1ate foundation must be a fable like the account of the world resting on an elephant and the elephant on the back of a tortoise" : But a conception that you can't universalize, that seenlS to contradict itself, or gives rise to highly suspicious incongruities, so soon as you press it to the limit, so soon as you suppose it to apply semper et ubique, is thereby shown to be in all probability a conception of an essentially hunlan character or else of no world-wide objectivity. It may have truth about it, but this truth will in part be due to our limited point of view, to our particular station in the universe. This notion will be, so to speak, a mortal conception of things, not a conception of really eternal truth. For example: the notion of the earth as supported by an elephant that stood on a tortoise was such an essentially transient and merely hunlan conception, just because it was derived fronl the analogy of a very special and linlited experience of ours, and was obviously incapable of true universalizationY6

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The scientific search for the origins and destiny of the universe from limited empiricism and assumptions of universal fluidity leads to the collapse of ontology and epistemology, a fundamental contradiction and permanent limitation. I n particular, the assumption that we came from matter, were once "molten" and "vapor, " and developed through a fluid, contingent process provides an even greater caveat to taking anything we might conceive as "well-fo unded" : On the other hand, what more obvious than if one conceives man as the product of a physical evolution of the type that we have heretofore been discussing, if one says that a planet-crust, at a particular stage of its history, brought forth man, while the heat of a slowly dying sun sustained his life, as it had done the lives of his countless animal ancestors before him, -if one holds all this to be true, then one must indeed look with equal wonder upon the power of such a creature to conceive at all of the real universe, or of the eternal, and upon the nai"vete that trusts, without analysis and criticism, his notions of space and time, his natural perceptions of the outer world, as if they were sure to be well-founded.97

The intimation is that the idea of human consciousness as derived from a material and fluid source leads to skepticism about all premises, including the premise of evolution itself. Our p ower and desire to know is left as an unresolvable mystery: The nlarvel of marvels, that this being, evolved from inorganic nature, from the stuff and energy of a cooling solar system, -this mortal bit of mechanism -should after all know, should look forwards and backwards to eternity, and learn so nluch of the nature that gave him birth, -such a marvel surely calls for deeper scrutiny. The world where such things appear is surely not what it seems; and the lesson is that, in critical study ofjust this knowinR power of ours, in the scrutiny of our most funda­ mental ideas, is to be found, if anywhere, the key to these mysteries. We have been so far inquiring into this or that truth. Now, more than ever, we see the need of assailing the problem, What is truth itself?98

Frost's answer to this question is the Lucretian love "moving that in all the ardor burns / For generation and their kind's increase. " Venus , the goddess in Lucretius, and natural and sexual selection, the parallel goddesses in Darwin, have as their ultimate aim moving creatures to success in procreation and leaving progeny. We return also to God's command to Adam and Eve in Eden, "Be fruitful and multiply. " Thus, the plucking of the fruit of knowledge or the venturing far into the world of matter or of nature by Epicurus and Darwin leads b ack to the same humbling wisdom of minding the family. "All science, " Frost liked to remark, "is domestic science, increasing our hold on the planet. "99 This wisdom informs God's rebuke of novelty in thought or science in A Mas q ue �f Reason: "Look at how far we've left the current science / Of Genesis behind. The

44

Robert Frost and the Challen�e of Darwin

wisdol�l there though, / Is j ust as good as when I uttered it. " While the "sci­ ence, " or account of creation, in Genesis has changed with Darwin, the wisdon1 to be gleaned from the new account is the same as the old one. In "Too Anxious for Rivers" Frost adds an important fact to substantiate the fable of the elephant and turtle-nanlely, that the turtle stands "in turn on a rock in the ocean" (emphasis nline) , a sardonic figure of the way the church of modern natural history stands on geology the way the old church of Christianity was founded on Saint Peter's rock. The idea that the beginning of things is like a rock in a vast ocean recalls Darwin's stunning insights about the power of rivers and oceans to change the landscape of the earth. In The Voyage of the Beagle Darwin's geological observations enabled him to confirm the uniformity neces­ sary to premise biological continuity and change over vast periods of time. Though mountains appear stable and final, "the end of the world, " rivers can threaten even their sublime presence. Instead of seeing the world as either com­ plete and static or the result of sudden catastrophic upheavals, Darwin considered that flowing water can create great geological shifts by eroding mountains until they become rocks in the ocean. The buildup of deposits becomes, over vast periods of time, the b eginning of new islands. What was thought of mystically as the end of the world can eventually become, as an island in the ocean, a new beginning. In one powerful meditation D arwin linked the power of the river to erode even the highest mountains to the way species become extinct over eons: The rivers which flow in these valleys ought rather to be called mountain­ torrents. Their inclination is very great and their water the colour of mud. The roar which the Maypu made, as it rushed over the great rounded fragments, was like that of the sea . . . . The sound spoke eloquently to the geologist; the thousands and thousands of stones , which, striking against each other, made the one dull uniform sound, \vere all hurrying in one direction. It was like thinking on time, where the minute that now glides past is irrecoverable. So was it with these stones; the ocean is their eternity, and each note of that wild music told of one more step toward their destiny. I t is not possible for the nlind to comprehend, except by slow process, any effect which is produced by a cause repeated so often, that the multiplier itself conveys an idea, not more definite than the savage implies when he points to the hairs of his head. As often as I have seen beds of mud, sand, and shingle, accumulated to thickness ofnlany thousand feet, I have felt inclined to exclainl that causes, such as the present rivers and the present beaches, could never have ground down and produced such masses. But, on the other hand, when listening to the rattling noise of these torrents, and calling to mind that whole races ofanimals have passed away from the face of the earth, and that during this whole period, night and day, these stones have gone rattling onwards in their course, I have thought to myself, can any mountains, any continent, withstand such waste ? l OO

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Yet this same theory that allows for the erosion o f mountains gives credence to the unmiraculous geological depositing and buildup of life-supporting land elsewhere. Neither a single direction of degradation nor a certain point of beginning can be comprehended. And Darwin draws an analogy between him­ self and a savage pointing to the hairs of his head in making these speculations . Nevertheless, extinction and transformation can occur while the process lies hidden from ordinary human perceptions except by inferences made from a few observable facts. Frost's allegiance to the pursuit and love of fact is apparent in "Mowing, " his favorite poem from his first book, A Boy 's Will. The poem resists closure because of the speaker's inability to ascertain the meaning of the sound of his own isolated labor and the few observations he makes in the field. "Mowing" reflects a desire to unify work and play (after all, he only "scares" the snake) but also expresses the frustration of limited revelation. D eath, labor, and time also dwell in Arcadia, "beside the wood. " This is more a georgic poem than an eclogue; no voice responds to the laborer. Unlike Wordsworth's " Solitary Reaper, " in Frost's poem no one is singing, and no one other than the speaker is hearing it. The emphasis is not on song but, instead, on the laborer and his tool and the surrounding environment. The speaker is, to use Thoreau's phrase, the "tool of his tool , " and the Frostian pastoral does not escape the demands of technology. What, if not "easy gold at the hand of fay or elf, " a magical or mystical understanding, does the "whispering" of his scythe, do the "feeble-pointed spikes of flowers" or "bright green snake " signify? The poem's tentativeness is summarized in accep­ tance that "the fact is the sweetest dream that labor knows. " What can one infer from fact? There are several facts in the poem: the heat of the sun, the snake, the scythe, the hay, the sound all encompassed in the fact of the laborer's activity. Should there be something more? Is fact itself a dream? Does our labor discover something about nature or the world? Is there any knowledge beyond quiet intimations and perceptions? What we see and hear is truth, and " anything more than the truth would have seemed too weak, " compromises of the reality of earthly labor and " earnest love." That fact is the "sweetest dream" has the force of "fact is the only dream," the most of it, as sweet as it gets, and deeply related to the most visceral experience; "sweetness" is a quality that pertains to almost all of the senses-sound, sight, taste, smell. The dramatic perspective of the poem places the seeker and laborer in matter accepting circumscribed consciousness and uncertain progress. The willingness to dwell in fact can be taken either as a compromise from more revelatory understanding or as a release from the burden of seeking, progress, harvest, theories, and ideas. Some of the "facts" of "Mowing" are synecdochic and suggest larger pro-

Robert Frost and the Challenge of Darwin

cesses that haunt the laborer. Frost reserves the small, constrained form of the sonnet-"The Oven Bird, " "Design," "Never Again Would Birds' Song Be the Same" along with "Mowing" -to make some of his largest cosmological sug­ gestions. The "pale orchises" and the "bright green snake" are particularly interesting. In addition to making hay, the speaker is a participant in the destruc­ tion of life. The snake 's color (n10re than an allusion to Coleridge's " Christabel, " i n which a dreaming bard i s startled by " a bright green snake" [1. 545] i s a forll1 of adaptive camouflage, but here it does hilTI little good and even attracts the eye of the mower. The "spikes of flowers" are only "feeble" and do not protect against the blade. The activity of haying participates in a process of destruction and reminds the mower of his own vulnerability beneath the "heat of the sun . " Frost refers t o orchises throughout his poetry; they reflect his deep interest in botany, and their iconography is significant. 1 ( ) 1 Orchids were the most highly prized examples of exotic beauty sought after by American and English botany enthusiasts and a prill1ary subject of the crucial scientific controversies that eclipsed natural theology. 1 02 They were also the subj ect of one of Darwin's most important books, The Various Contrivances by Which Orchids Are Fertilized by Insects. The late Victorians found themselves surprised by this book and similar studies, which showed that the color and beauty of flowers served the purpose of reproduction and cross-pollination rather than the pleasure of human observers . Darwin demonstrated that there was no single ideal type of orchid but, rather, many different orchids. Beauty serves sex, and sex serves healthy cross­ fertilization. In "Mowing" the pale orchises would ordinarily have a selective advantage in reproduction by reflecting light and attracting cross-pollinating moths . The reproductive power of these orchises suggests part of a process of sexual reproduction different from his solitary labor in the field. But that re­ productive power is no match for a scythe. Another poem in North �f Boston, "Rose Pogonias, " is a prayer that the "thousand orchises" should not "in the general mowing" be cut down with the grass. In the pasture there are two kinds of growth : the grass and the flowers . The grass, n10re uniform and comll1on, is cultivated for utility and food. The flowers serve no purpose other than the love of beauty for its own sake. One also suspects that the highly suggestive sexual appearance of these orchids, known as the "bearded ladies," is significant because it represents a pleasurable and equally vital aspect of life aside from the labor of agriculture. Their beauty serves to rell1ind us of sexuality and reproduction, part of the overall n1achinery of life. The object of "right worship " in "Rose Pogonias" is the burning sun, not God, and this conveys a sense of a world ll1aterially governed by environment. In "Mowing" the scythe whispers, perhaps, "soll1ething about the heat of the sun. "

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This is not only a literary reference to the more metaphoric sunburned mind of the first sonnet of Sidney's Astrophel and Stella but also describes the threatening effect of the literal sun, one of many of Frost's stars that has little more to say than-as in "Choose Something Like a Star" - " I burn . " 1 03 The natural "facts" in "Mowing" are not only Emersonian excavations of the laborer turning the world into poetry. The emphasis in these poems on the power of the sun has particular significance in the history of science and the collapse of sacred cosmol­ ogy. Heliocentrism represents the Copernican and Keplerian shift away from an earth-centered and man-centered universe. Kepler's sun worship, as I mentioned earlier, combined with his belief in the imperfection and mutability of all things, preceded and enabled his efforts to bring the Ptolemaic cosmology to collapse. I n this context, "Mowing" also echoes Spenser's final "Unperfite Canto " o f "Mu­ tabilitie, " written in the early ferment of the Copernican revolution, in which the poet laments " . . . this state of life so tickle, / And love of things so vaine to cast away; / Whose flowering pride, so fading and so fickle, / Short Time soon cut down with his consuming sickle. " l o4 Frost's mower appears an agent of time's "consuming sickle" ; his steady motion and sound suggest the passage and effects of time on the perception of a variety of facts . Frost's mower accepts the chal­ lenge of mutability, the process and fact of "mowing, " refusing or perhaps unable to long for Spenser's "Sabaoth's sight. " I n "Mowing" the speaker's "earnest love" contains a tone offrustration and some recklessness; it is a driving energy that not only "laid the swale in rows " but also cut down the "pale orchises" and "scared a bright green snake . " Unlike the speaker of "Rose Pogonias, " whose love might be fulfilled in consonance with the fl o ra, this laborer is left isolated and questioning. I think that the "facts" of the orchises and the green snake suggest something important about the source of his doubt. As a young man, Frost read Carl Burrell's copy of Grant Allen's Colin Clout's Calendar: A Record if a Summer. Praised by Darwin and Huxley, it is a series of pastoral meditations about the operations of natural selection in country life. One chapter, "Haymaking Begins , " describes the persistence of flowers in hay­ fields in a way that makes them weeds to the cultivator. The point is that it is precisely the struggle for life that produces ever more persistent forms of life that can adapt to the cultivated land: See here in the pasture, a large part consists of buttercup stems, uncropped by the cows : of plantains, with their ribbed leaves almost rivalling the blades of grasses and little spreading daisies, with their close rosette of foliage pressed hard and tight against the naked ground, so as to prevent the struggling young seedlings of the grass from pushing their way between the tufts. It is just the same way in the meadow: there, in between the haulms of grass, you get a thick and matted undergrowth of

Robert Frost a11d the ChallellJ!e �f Darwin

Dutch clover, yellow nledick, and rusty-red sorrel, besides all the taller meadow flowers-such as buttercups, corn poppies, and ox-eye daisies. These make up a large and curious group, the true \veeds of cultivation. They are as purely human in origin in n10st cases as wheat or barley: they have assumed their existing shapes under the influence of nlan's handicraft . . . . And yet they differ in one important particular-that they are dependent upon him involuntarily instead of voluntarily: they are the results of his weakness, not of his strength. 1 05

Thus, the flowers in the hayfields develop as they do inadvertently because of the attempt to cultivate grass. As Allen adds the flowers' "only chance of survival is by exactly adapting their own habits to those of the food plants among which they dwell. " The bright green snake, of course, would persist in grassland be­ cause his color is suited to hiding in that environment. But the persistence of flowers renlinds the mower of his weakness, his inability to control completely the environment and his unwitting participation in the creation of stronger forms . (A similar view is expressed in "A Star in a Stone-Boat," in which a farmer beconles frustrated after the intrusion of a meteor that makes the soil hot " And burning to yield flowers instead of grain, / Flowers fanned and not put out by all the rain / Poured on them by his prayers prayed in vain. ") As Allen, following Darwin, stated: " I ndeed no form of selec­ tion is really so severe as that unconsciously exerted by man . " 1 06 Struggling to make his own environment suitable and cultivate food, man also cannot help p articipating in a process of selection that nl0cks his efforts all under the indif­ ferent watch of the "heat of the sun, " which makes labor more difficult but also reminds the laborer of the limited time he has "to nlake hay while the sun shines. " Mowing, like pigeon breeding in On the Origin if Species, becomes a participant in the nlachinery of life. This is a nlore material, less optimistic extension of Emerson's ideal of the pantheistic soul of nature laboring, expressed in his second essay " Nature " : "But if, instead of identifying ourselves with the work we feel that the soul of the workman streanlS through us, we shall find peace of the morning first dwelling in our hearts, and the fathomless powers of gravity and chemistry, and, over them, of life, preexisting within us in their highest fornl. " 1 07 Frost's laborers-in " Mowing, " "After Apple-Picking, " "The Self-Seeker" -do not enj oy Enlerson's idea of separating the soul of the work­ man from work because of their inextricable participation in a machinery of effort and waste that diminishes the individual's power. The "facts" of "Mowing" tell us something more about why the scythe only whispers but does not speak (nluch less sing) . This quietness is in response to a diffidence about the meaning of human pursuits, of the kind mocked in another poem in North o.f Bosto1l, "The I)emiurge's Laugh , " which I will discuss

Darwin, Pragmatism, and Poetic Knowledge

49

in the final chapter. The poem that precedes that meditation on science, "Pan with Us, " concludes with the pagan god of shepherds throwing away his pipes. This may be an expression of belatedness, but its causes are complex. Frost's Pan laments both Christianity and its children-history and science. As Nicolas Berdayev observed, " 'The Great Pan,' who had been revealed to natural man of antiquity, was driven to take refuge in the uttermost depths of nature. A gulf now separated the natural man from the men who had entered upon the path of Redemption. The effect of Christianity was to divorce man from the inner life of nature, which, as a result, became deanimated. This was the reverse side of the Christian liberation of human nature . " 1 0 8 Berdayev also noted the paradox in­ herent in the "Christian liberation, " one that goes to the heart of Frost's poem, that " Christianity alone made possible positive science and technique . . . . it was itself the spiritual result of the Christian act of liberating man from elemental nature and its demons . " 1 09 Something has changed, and the music of poetry can do little more than "the merest aimless breath of air. " "Aimless" air works, at least, for the j unipers and bluets as a medium for cross-pollination. "A boy's will, " Frost's echo of Longfellow reminds us, is but "the wind's will" : Times were changed fronl what they were: Such pipes kept less of power to stir The fruited bough of the juniper And the fragile bluets clustered there Than the merest aimless breath of air. They were pipes of pagan mirth, And the world had found new ternlS of worth. He laid him down on the sun-burned earth And raveled a flower and looked away­ Play? Play?-What should he play?

Ending with an unanswerable question, as do many of Frost's best lyrics, the poem's final dissolution stems from doubts about the "new terms of worth. " Those new terms could b e the Christian world of sin and redemption, which contradicts the world of "pagan mirth . " "Play, " of any kind, is not as important as the work of purification in a Protestant work ethic (evoking a muted pun of "panning for gold") . The world had also found frightening new terms of worth for the name "Pan . " Pan became the term used for the genus of apes that included the chimpanzees, those closest to man in physiology and mental ability. Behind this new term was the idea of the half-human, half-animal (the lower half, of course) nature of the old deity as a metaphor for the living creature most like our remote ancestors. Pan is no longer a god but an indeterminate creature.

50

Robert Frost a n d the Challenge if Darwin

The title "Pan with Us" suggests both America and "Us , " as the tentative indicator of the human, threatened by loss of special identity by being related so literally to "lower" creatures. A world governed by such materialism is evoked by the phrase "sunburned earth, " a nature that is not responsive to the sounds of pIpes. Frost's refusal to claim much in the face of this grand indifference is j ustified by an unabashed appeal to creaturely and limited consciousness of the processes of life and the demands of survival. Though the speaker in "Acceptance" describes the disappearance of the sun and the onset of darkness in grand and apocalyptic terms, "no voice in nature" cries because of a tacit knowledge that this is part of an inevitable process: When the spent sun throws up its rays on cloud And goes down burning into the gulf belo\v, No voice in nature is heard to cry aloud At what has happened. Birds, at least, nlust know It is the change to darkness in the sky.

While one bird but murlllurs something elusive and fades to sleep, another recognizes that darkness is time for him to return to the safety of the nest, which he regains j ust in time. The bird's return is not a triumphant homecoming but, rather, the acceptance of limited knowledge and creaturely safety in the face of a vast and incomprehensible world: Murnluring sonlething quiet in her breast, One bird begins to close a faded eye ; Or overtaken too far fronl his nest, Hurrying low above the grove, sonle waif Swoops j ust in time to his renlembered tree. At nlost he thinks or twitters softly, 'Safe ! Now let the night b e dark for all o f nle. Let the night be too dark for nle to see Into the future. Let what will be, be.'

As in "Mowing, " in which the scythe but whispers, the bird proclaims only limited knowledge as it "thinks or twitters softly. " The bird's hortatory state­ ments reverse God's proclamation of light in Genesis, echoing the same reversal in Job's powerful curse. Combined with the curse here is Job's acceptance after God's terrifying theophany, one that emphasizes man 's limited place in a vast world of creaturely struggle. Poetry might under the weight of science demand adj ustments but not radical change. In this way Frost sets himself in opposition to I. A. Richards's argulllent in Science and Poetry for delllonstrative poetic change :

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Poetry must correspond to our needs, impulses, attitudes, which did not arise in the same fashion for poets in the past, and criticism must take notice of the contemporary situation. Our attitudes toward man, to nature, and to the universe change with every generation, and have changed with unusual violence in recent years. We cannot leave these changes out of account in judging modern poetry. When attitudes are changing neither criticism nor poetry can renlain stationary. 1 1 0

This is a modernist argument that the present is different from the past and requires a radically new art. But Frost's understanding of Darwin is that science reveals a reality in which, in immediate terms, very little is new. Frost's adherence to strict forms and meters places him in a recognizable tradition of English writers, p articularly Wordsworth, Coleridge, Tennyson, Landor, and Hardy. This "old-fashioned way of making things new" underscores his distrust of the concept of originality. Progress is not the province of art. Frost recognized that Emerson's concept of an evolution of art and thought into higher (meaning better) achievements was crippling to the artist's sense of worth: I must have taken it as a truth accepted that a thing of beauty will never cease to be beautiful. Its beauty will in fact increase. Which is the opposite doctrine to Emer­ son's in "Verily know when half gods go the gods arrive " : the p oets and poems we have loved and ceased to love are to be regarded as stepping stones of our dead selves to higher things. Growth is a distressful change of taste for the better. Taste improv­ ing is on the way upward to creation. Nay-nay. It is more likely on the way to dissatisfaction and ineffectuality. A person who has found out young from Aldous Huxley how really bad Poe is will hardly from the superiority of the position this gives hinl be able to go far with anything he himself attenlpts. 1 1 1

Frost had great empathy for those small things that survived or created momentary stays without demeaning their value by considering them only stepping stones. As he concluded in " Hyla Brook, " a meditation on change in nature and art, "We love the things we love for what they are," even if their "being" is always threatened by "becoming. " The poem refers to that ancient pastoral figure of Hylas the singer, Lucretian flux, a brook near Frost's house, and the hyla frogs Darwin writes of in The Voyage if the Beagle. What Frost made of our existence in relation to other creatures explores many of the questions raised by the assumption of common descent.

Chapter

2

What to Make of a Ditninished Thing Birds, Insects, and Downward Comp arisons

M any of Frost's most beguiling p oems are about other creatures, particularly birds and insects . "The Oven Bird," " Design , " "The Most of It," "The White­ Tailed Hornet," "At Woodward's Gardens, " and " Range-Finding" are but a few of the works that explore man's anxiety about his relationship to the rest of the creaturely world. At first they appear to embody the tendency of romantic poetry to anthropomorphize other creatures, creating visionary symbols. This tradition long precedes romanticism, which finds its roots in both Platonic and N eoplatonic animal fables used to convey moral precepts. But the ancient and medieval form of animal fable assumed a transcendent, if not divine, reality that could be recovered by the human mind, itself of supernatural origins . I nvoking this tradition, Frost leads us to expect revelation of the transcendent, and the power of these poems lurks in their subversion of this expectation. I cannot at all agree with Margaret Edwards's argun'lent that Frost "never sought to obfuscate evolution's separation of man and beast . " 1 D arwin's idea of common descent blurred the line between man and other creatures, and Frost's poems consistently point to that uncertainty. And I depart from George Monteiro 's assertion that Frost shared Emerson's notion that "the the existing clear-cut distinctions between man and animal make all the difference. "2 I n making "downward comparisons" Frost mimes the collapse o f hierarchy for­ merly contained in the assumption of a perfect heaven to which one could make " upward comparisons. " Without a point of reference that signifies order and perfection, meaning becomes lost in the shifting relations of creaturely life. Frost both fears and finds delight in this uncertainty. The extension of analogies between the human and the natural world, an important aspect of romantic thought, finds its ultimate irony in Darwin's world, in which analogy becomes genealogy, in which the figurative becomes literal. Frost explored this irony, and his poems often dramatize the way anthropocentric assumptions and Judeo53

54

Robert Frost and the Challenge
Christian n1yths of redemption give way to a world of creaturely struggle. While not as prophetically inhuman as Jeffers, Frost points to a world not readily con1prehensible and threatening to those divine ideals by which humanity had defined itself. Romanticism atten1pted to resuscitate the rest of life from the dead matter it had becon1e under Cartesianism. What it retained was a tendency to preserve the primacy of the human mind, independent of any higher authority or God. Nature became the new mirror of human glory. In pressing the analogy between the human and the natural, romanticisrTI eroded the privilege accorded to mind by making it an inextricable part of what it observes. Darwin's vision of the common descent of all creatures rests upon the tension of perceived imn1anence combined with Baconian scientific detachment, disinheriting God while trying to hold the line with nature. Hun1an consciousness is thrown back upon itself as an epiphenon1enon, listening to its own echo or the barely interpretable sounds of the external world. Admittedly, the analogies between man and animal rescued humanity from the Cartesianism that threatened to turn all other creatures and eventually man into a machine. And it was hoped that the relinking of man with other creatures would revivify our sense of spirit. Instead, it tended to eviscerate the basis of human self-definition and engendered a feeling of loss of control that was uncon­ genial to our rationalisn1. I agree with Robert Langbaum's argument that animals in twentieth-century poetry syrllbolize, "nl0re vividly than landscapes, the vi­ tality of our unconscious life."3 The content of that unconscious life suggests our origins in a wilderness of n1atter and a vitality that often n1eans warfare and survival. William Jan1es's psychology insisted on the Darwinian continuity of con­ sciousness among all creatures. James nevertheless reserved for the human alone the possibility of an analogy that permitted abstract or metaphysical thought: "As the genius is to the vulgarian, so the vulgar human mind is to the intelligence of the brute. Con1pared with nlen, it is probable that brutes neither attend to abstract characters, nor have associations by similarity. " 4 Arguing that ani­ mals make only limited associations of contiguity, James also admits that be­ tween the poles of no abstraction and complete abstraction " every possible intern1ediary grade must lie. " 5 But in Frost's poen1s both humans and so-called "brutes" share this middle zone of consciousness between the abstract and the literal. The sense of nliddleness is n10st poignant in "The Oven Bird, " one of Frost's greatest sonnets, in which both the proximity and the distance between the human and the creaturely ren1ain in constant tension. "The Oven Bird" was inspired by Frost's reading in I)arwin. () I)arwin discusses the ovenbird in The

Birds, I nsects, and. Downward Comparisons

55

Voyage if the Beagle, one of Frost's favorite books, a "wonder book, " which he "liked to be imaginative about. "7 In The Voyage if the B eagle, D arwin also focuses on the singing frogs , known as " hyla frogs" ; Frost's own p airing of "The Oven Bird" and "Hyla Brook" (see the discussion in chap. 6) underscores the impor­ tance of Darwin as the background of these poems. Darwin's discussion of the ovenbird focuses on its remarkable nest, which is constructed very much like a house with an inner chamber. No doubt the idea of a creature whose song could be heard by everyone but that could also retreat to an inner chamber-a "true chamber"-to protect itself intrigued Frost, who created a similar figure of "strategic retreat" in "A Drumlin Woodchuck. " Dar­ win admires the survival skills of the ovenbird, unusual in having to build its nest on the ground, a difficult predicament for arboreal creatures: The genus Funarius contains several species, all snlall birds, living on the ground, and inhabiting open dry countries. In structure they cannot be compared to any European form. Ornithologists have generally included them among the creepers, although opposed to that family in every habit. The best known species is the common oven-bird of La Plata, the Casara or housemaker of the Spaniards . The nest, whence it takes its name, is placed in the most exposed situations as on the top of a post, a bare rock, or on a cactus. It is composed of mud and bits of straw, and has strong thick walls: in shape it precisely resembles an oven or depressed beehive. The opening is large and arched, and directly in front, within the nest, there is a partition, which reaches nearly to the roof, thus forming a passage or antechamber to the true nest. H

The ovenbird also provoked Darwin to begin to contemplate the deeper relations of all creatures, one of those birds "which, from its varied relations to other families . . . ultimately may assist in revealing the grand scheme, common to present and past ages on which organized beings have been created. "9 The idea of a grand scheme of creation in D arwin would eventually make the relations between different creatures not j ust analogous but homologous and literal through common descent; that done, certainty about the centrality of the hun1an mind in ascertaining the order of things would disappear. "The Oven Bird" explores the tension between our proj ection onto the bird of an anthropomorphic sense of order and expectation of spiritual history and revelation and an acceptance of a limited, creaturely consciousness cir­ cumscribed by the difficulties of existence. I agree only in part with Guy Ro­ tella's argument that the poem demonstrates how "we do not see nature itself, but our projections on it. " 1 0 I depart from his assertion that the bird is merely a projecting or sounding board, that "its sayings are our inventions" and "signs of human creative power. " 1 1 While the traps of self-conscious proj ection and tau­ tology haunt this and other poems, the speaker believes in a reality, in meaning

Rohert Frost and the (;hall(,/�(!e (!f' Darwin

and kno\vledge beyond hinlself. This belief constitutes the 11loral force of the poenl . The ovenbird Inay have sOillething to say in its o\vn right that does not confornl to our 111yths and hopes but, rather, stands outside and challenges theln . T he poenl is also attentive to the forrn of the N orth Arrlerican species of ovenbirds' (different fro111 Daf\vin 's) singing patterns, which \vere described vividly by John Burroughs, the e111inent Alnerican n aturalist \vho explored the relations of science and religion in his speculations abollt the n atural \vorld: The sharp, reiterated, alrnost screeching song of the oven-bird, as it perches frotTI the ground, like the \vords "'preacher, preacher, preacher, " or "teacher, teacher, teacher, teacher, " uttered louder, and repeated six or seven tiines, is also f�llniliar to 11l0St ears; but its \vild, ringing, rapturous burst ofsong in the air high above the tree-tops is not so \\lell knovvn. Fronl a very prosy, tiresol1le, un nlelodious si nger, it is suddenly transforrned for a briefI1101nent into a lyric poet of great po\ver. It is a great surprise. The bird undergoes a cOlllplete transf()r1nation. ()rdinarily it is a very quiet, dernure sort of bird. 1 �

The octave of Frost's sonnet nlitn es this sudden , brieftransfortnation into a " lyric poet," though \vhat its song portends is uncertain: There is a singer everyone has heard, Loud, a n1id-sun1111 er and a Inid-\vood bird, Who rnakes the s olid tree trunks sound again. He

says that leaves are old and that f()r flo\vers

M id-su l1ul1cr is to spring as one to ten . He says the early petal-f:l ll i s past When pear and cherry bloonl went dO\\7n in sho\vers ()n sunny days a 1l10111ent overcast.

()ne wonders in reading the octave whether \vhat the bird "says" is a signal associated \vith o ther natural phenOITlena or the bird's reaction to the cycling of the seasons a nd, n10re deeply, an e1110tional response to the the fall of leaves and petals. Though the ovenbird is a "singer" \vho "says " things, not nluch n10re than the cycling of seasons is intinlated. We nlight in terpret the bird's song as a figure of an unrnythical, one Blight say ahistorical, sensibility-a prilllitive rno­ lllent in the developnlent of our consciousness not at odds \vith the rest of the natural \vorld, \vhen cyclical rather than linear, historical tirne dOlninated thought and \vhen life held the possibilities of eternal regeneration. Skeptical tones and darker questions COllle \vith the bef,'11 i ling line HAnd COIlles that other fall \ve nalne the £111" ; its position as the volta of the sestet underscores the intrusion of doubts and disturbance even as it signals the end of the ovenbird's lyrical outburst and its return to the vocal n1onotony:

Birds, I nsects, and Downward Comparisons

57

And comes that other fall we name the fall. He says the highway dust is over all. The bird would cease and be as other birds But that he knows in singing not to sing. The question that he frames in all but words Is what to make of a diminished thing.

On o n e level the first line o f the sestet refers t o the coming o f the season, the fall, named for the falling of leaves. The emphasis on "we name, " however, makes us aware of our own consciousness and the proj ection of our arbitrary demarca­ tions, thoughts, and feelings onto nature and other creatures. This self­ consciousness encompasses both our awareness of our close relationship to other creatures and a difference that makes us uneasy about interpreting their thoughts. The bird had been singing about other seasons, which included "the early petal­ fall. " Is this moment unique? Does it portend something new and worse? Is it the beginning of linear time? The repetition of "the fall" hints at the Fall of Man, a recurring preoccupa­ tion in Frost's work. Here, as in "Never Again Would Birds' Song Be the Same" and "West-Running Brook, " Milton's speculations about the limits of knowl­ edge and original sin haunt Frost's poetry. In attempting to persuade Adam that he did not need a companion, Milton's God argued that other creatures were sufficient because they, too, reasoned: is not the Earth With various living creatures, and the Air, Replenished, and all these at thy command To come and play before thee? Know'st thou not Their language and their ways? They also know, And reason not contemptibly.

(Paradise Lost 8 : 3 70-74)

Before the Fall Adam understood other creatures who are different from him in degree only, not in kind. Adam's transgression, his eating from the Tree of Knowledge, alienated him from communion with the rest of the natural world. The sestet of "The Oven Bird" suggests that moment in which the human desire for knowledge of the world has reached its limit and is mocked by the creaturely world that it has attempted to transcend. The transformation of the ovenbird's song intrudes upon and alters the speaker's sense of the redemptive powers of nature. The ovenbird's soaring mat­ ing lyric has concluded, heralding the end of its own sexual delight and usefulness as well as the end of spring and the approach of harsher seasons. This, of course, is

58

Robert Frost and the Challellge of Darwin

part of a cycle and not the end of a tragic narrative. The Fall in "The Oven Bird" becomes a n10ment of psychological transition through which we feel loss, or "diminishment. " In Frost's work this is not the loss of a real paradise but, rather, an awareness that the world never had a paradise and was always a place of bitter, practical constraints and COllllllon creaturely struggle. The ovenbird is not, as many have claimed, a figure of the belated poet in a desiccated age but a creature who recognizes that the world is lTIOStly a hard place that allows only for brief intervals of joy, or, as Frost liked to say, " lTIOmentary stays against confusio n . " The ovenbird's song also implies that, i fthe world i s n o t getting much worse, it is also not getting much better. The phrase "the highway dust" echoes the use of hig huJay in Isaiah to describe the path of human spiritual regeneration. Here, though, the "highway dust is over all," and the ovenbird-whose song sounds like "preacher, preacher, preacher" -evokes Solomon's grim wisdom in Ecclesiastes, or

the Preacher ( 3 : 1 9-20) as he condell1ned hUll1anity to the dusty death common to all creatures: " For that which befalleth the sons of men befalleth b easts; even one thing befalleth thell1: as the one dieth, so dieth the other; yea, they all have one breath; so that a man have no preell1inence above a beast: for all is vanity. All go unto one place; all are of the dust, and all turn to dust again. " The dust is over all, both man and beast, and one is not greater than the other. In the modern world the " highway" of the spirit has become secular and technological, an ironic 11laterialization of the Judeo-Christian path of redemp­ tion. From the bird's perspective the change is not only the cycling of seasons but also the desiccation left by hunlan dreams of progress, which have their perma­ nent effect on the environn1ent. Ripping ourselves from nature, we create destruction, a forward thrust that leaves the less successful cast off to death. Darwin's own concern for the suffering of other creatures encouraged hilTI to rej ect the notion of hull1an exceptionalisll1 and to posit a common origin for all: " -the soul by consent of all is superadded, animals not got it, not look forward; if we choose to let conjecture run wild then our anill1als our fellow brethren in pain, disease death & suffering & famine; our slaves in the most laborious work, our companion in our amuselllents. they may partake, from our origin there one COlllmon ancestor we 11lay all be netted together.- " 1 3 The predicament of the ovenbird and its song calls into question the limits and particularity of hUll1an aspirations. Concern for the suffering or even the consciousness of so-called lower creatures is virtually absent froll1 the Judeo­ Christian tradition, with the notable exceptions of Saint Francis and Saint Anthony of Padua. One of the 1110St devastating attacks on any theodicy or j ustification of the Judeo-C hristian God would be admitting the illlportance and suffering of other creatures that could not have made 11loral choices and that

Birds , I nsects, and Downward Comparisons

59

could not benefit from the human process of redemption. While the speaker of the sonnet attempts to ascribe the form of human thought to the ovenbird's song, his skepticism as well as the bird's dark tones suggest that other creatures do not celebrate our extended designs and formulations. Frost's ovenbird reminds us of the material and common origins of all creatures and questions the myths of spiritual history and progress. In the Dar­ winian world we are closely related to other creatures; our consciousness is not privileged but, rather, has a natural history. The emphasis on "middleness, " " a mid-summer and a mid-wood bird , " indicates the lack o f knowledge of ultimate beginnings and ends that comes from being an integral part of the thing we are trying to understand. Middleness also indicates the elimination of the extremes of wild and civilized that admitting the continuity of the organic world demands . We have much in common with the ovenbird. We build shelters to protect ourselves from a harsh environment. Moreover, we have lost our belief in a mythic Eden of eternal spring where houses did not exist. The romantic sense that man is fallen from nature is false in the D arwinian world; we torture ourselves with a loss of what we never had. And we cannot pursue the romantic program of returning to the divine by imitating nature. The final two lines express the fundamental tension of the poem: our awareness of our close relation to the bird and of our participation in nature makes its song compelling; yet that same sense of proximity lessens our feeling of having a privileged consciousness that can anthropomorphize the bird's song and make it syn1bolic or strongly metaphoric. The bird "frames a question in all but words, " a phrase that suggests that we are different only in degree, not in kind, from other creatures. The question is whether words are n1uch of an addition to the bird's song, which otherwise encompasses all that needs saying. The force of the poem is not a celebration of the speaker's language or creative power but of its superfluousness in relation to the bird. The division at this point between what humans might say in words and what the bird says in " all but words" underscores a disparity between those who speak and do not know and those who really know and do not speak or say very little, mocking the rhetorical comfort of received forms . This sonnet does not conclude with the traditional resolution or answer but, rather, with a question, "what to make of a diminished thing. " It is a " diminished," not "fallen," world, and the bird perhaps refers to its own mem­ ory of once having dwelt in trees or been able to sing powerfully about the rej uvenation of the world. 1 4 But even a conception of "the world" as a totality is reduced to the vaguely referential "thing," a word that recurs often in Frost in crucial moments and reflects a circumscribed and uneasy knowledge. That the

60

Robert Frost a1ld the Challel1Re of Darwin

ovenbird "kno\vs in singing not to sing" sounds mystical and self-consciously anthroponl0rphic but appears to represent that return to its muted, prosy, unlyri­ cal utterance. Though it soared in lyricislll for a moment, it is constrained by sonle kind of llluted awareness that its environment and the circumstances of survival are unsuited to sustained rapture . The resolution of its song falls short of statement and of positing an answer to the question of what to nlake of a diminished thing. Uncertainty and llluted humility seem its concluding stance. 1 S Frost's willingness to suggest a deeper connection between ourselves and the ovenbird places him very close to l)arwin's own analogizing. The duke of Argyll, a contelnporary and critic of l)arwin's, noted that Darwin's anthropo­ nlorphic language is without "any theological purpose or in connection with any metaphysical speculation. He uses it simply and naturally for no other reason than that he cannot help it . . . . The greatest observer that has ever lived cannot help observing [purpose] in Nature; and so his language is thoroughly an­ thropopsychic. " 1 6 Darwin's own notebooks on metaphysics, mind, and nlate­ rialisnl reveal the desire to show a continuum between the intellect of man and that of other creatures. In writing of the cOlllplicated behavior of bees, he states that " circunlstances having given to the Bee its instinct is not less wonderful than man his intellect . " 17 Darwin's last work, on earthworms, has several chapters on their "mental powers, " and his book Expression £?f the Emotions hI Man and

Animals argues for the natural origin shared by our emotional behaviors. (The argunlent, of course, raises the difficult question of whether lllind, or conscious­ ness, is an essence or an epiphenolllenon.) More important to Frost's poetics is an assumption he shares with Darwin as well as Herder and Rousseau that our language has its origin in the singing of birds and other creatures: "Did our language comlnence with singing-is this the origin of our pleasure in lllusic-do monkeys howl in harmony-frogs chirp-union of birds voice and taste for singing with Mammalian structure. The taste for recurring sounds in Harmony [is] comnl0n to the whole kingdom of nature. " 1 8 In "The Oven Bird," as well as "Never Again Would Birds' Song Be the Sallle" and "The Most of It," the dramatic problem is the speaker or persona's ability to interpret the sounds of nature. In the tension between hearing something " original" and hearing only an echo of our own consciousness, Frost confronts the problenl of interpreting the most inlportant and ungraspable as­ pects of nleaning and of the relation of the human to the rest of the world. "Sound, " Frost wrote in his notebooks, "is what poetry is before it is sight . . . . Poetry is a dwelling on the fact, a gloating over the fact, a luxuriating in the fact. Its first pleasure is in the facts of voice. " 1 9 This emphasis on the prinlacy of voice as a lllatter of fact places Frost in the position not of an

Birds , Insects, and D ownward Comparisons

6r

originator but o f a n imitator who must ascertain and "summon" the various but knowable tones of voice : I speak o f inlagination a s having some part in the sound o f poetry. It is everything in the sound of poetry; but not as inventor nor creator-simply as summoner. Make no mistake about the tones of speech I mean. They are the same yesterday, today, and forever. They were before words were-if anything was before anything else. They have merely entrenched themselves into words. No one invents new tones of voice. So many and no more belong to the human throat, j ust as so many runs and quavers belong to the throat of the cat-bird, so many to the chicadee. The imagination is no more than their summoner-the inlagination of the ear. 2 0

Frost stated elsewhere: " I ' m what you call reproductive. I like best (in my own p oetry at least) not to set down an idea that is of my own thinking: I like to give it as in character when I 'm drawing character. " 2 1 Meaning is implied instinctively by unique sounds: " every meaning has a particular sound which every individual is instinctively familiar with. " 22 Frost's concept of the universal in poetry is rooted in the primordial and instinctive ear, the biological inheri­ tance from preverbal cultures and from other creatures: If we go back far enough we will discover that the sound of sense existed before words, that something in the voice or vocal gesture made primitive man convey a meaning to his fellow before the race developed nlore elaborate and concrete symbols of conlmunicating in language. 23

His conception of the origin of communication and its effect on his poetics reflects closely the argument of Chauncey Wright, a Darwinian empiricist and member of the Cambridge Metaphysical Society to which C. S. Peirce and William James also belonged. In "The Evolution of Consciousness" Wright argued that poetry is the recovery of primordial "sound" and, like Frost, con­ sidered poetry a " reproductive" act of biological inheritance: The poet inherits in his mental and moral nature, or organic memory, and in his dispositions of feeling and imagination, the instinctive thoughts and feelings which we have supposed habitual in the life of the barbarian. In the melody of his verses he revives the habits which were acquired, it is believed, in the development of his race, long before any words were spoken, or were needed to express its imaginations, and when its emotions found utterance in the music of inarticulate tones . The poet's productions are thus, in part, reproductions, refined or combined in the attractive forms of art, of what was felt and thought before science existed; or they are restorations of language to a primeval use, and to periods in the history of his race in which his progenitors uttered their feelings, as of gallantry, defiance, j oy, grief, exaltation, sorrow, fear, anger, or love, and gave expression to their light, serious, or

62

Robert Fro5t and the Challen�e oj Darwin

violent nloods, in nlodulated tones, harsh or musical; or later, in unconscious figures of speech, expressed without reflection or intention of communicating truth . For, as it has been said, it is essential to eloquence to be heard, but poetry is expression only to be overheard.24

The primacy of voice and sound over sight distinguishes Frost decidedly from Emerson's Platonic emphasis on the visual. In his more dramatic poetry, which I will discuss, voice is crucial to cOlllprehending the drama. This emphasis has deeper theological irnplications, particularly in "The Oven Bird, " "The Most of It," and "Never Again Would Birds' Song Be the Same. " If the New Testament's emphasis is on the primacy of God, but rather as the Word and particularly on visual revelation, the Hebrew Bible emphasizes neither the word nor the sight of God but the sound of his voice (particularly in the theophany of the Book ofJob ) . Existence in history, as Northrop Frye has noted, is deprived of clear sight and must rely on sound: "The eye was satisfied before the beginning of history, in Eden where God nlade every tree 'that is pleasant to the sight' (Genesis 2 : 9) , and the eye will be satisfied again in the last day, when all mysteries are revealed. But history itself is a period of listening in the dark for guidance through the ear. " 2 5 When Frost listened in the dark he heard not God's voice but his own or another of nature's orphans . Frost became a sharp critic of the ronlantic uses of the natural to recover our divinity. Wordsworth, Coleridge, Emerson, and Thoreau all emphasize the close affinity of nature to nlind and usually point out the superiority of the one to the other. They stress a process of analogy that allows and even demands the an­ thropomorphizing of the nonhunlan on the premise that mind participates in or can recover divinity or spirit by meditation on the natural world. Coleridge, for example, expresses a romantic admiration for anthropomor­ phosis . For Coleridge art occurs at a confluence of individual human imagina­ tion and divine power through the natural. But it is based on sight and the primacy of pure Platonic forms being remembered by indirect contemplation of the visible world. Nothing is discovered, only recollected: In looking at objects of Nature while I am thinking, as at yonder moon dimglim­ me ring thro' the dewy window-pane, I seenl rather to be seeking, as it were a5kin�, a synlbolical language for sonlething within nle that already and forever exists, than observing anything new. Even when that latter is the case, yet still I have always an obscure feeling as if that new phenonlenon were the dinl Awaking of a forgotten or hidden Truth of my inner Nature. It is still interesting as a Word, a Symbol! It is LO�05, the Creator! and the Evolver!26

Coleridge is interested in how the details of nature lead to their use as mere vehicles to awareness of a divine power of spirit and language within himself. The

Birds, Insects, and D ownward Comparisons

closeness of the ovenbird's awareness to our own consciousness, his song's being " all but words, " suggests far less exaltation of intellect and language than Cole­ ridge proclaims and far more emphasis on an external reality for which human language is superfluous. The end of the introduction of Wordsworth's poem "The Excursion, " which both Frost and D arwin read (Darwin boasted of having read it twice) , proclaims a perfect fitness or harmony between the internal and external worlds, between mind and nature : How exquisitely the individual mind (And progressive powers perhaps no less Of the whole species) to the external world Is fitted; -and how exquisitely, too, This theme but little heard among men, The external world is fitted to the mind.27

D arwin tells us that mind is fitted to the external world but in a way different from Wordsworth's . Mind is given to all creatures in equal kind but in different degree. There is no sense of "the individual mind" being fitted to an external world. I nstead, a blurring of the line between the mind of man and that of other creatures allows for naturalistic meditation but also for limitations on the mind's "progressive p owers. "28 Emerson also believed in the consubstantiality of mind and matter. He allows for what he often considers a "fallen" human awareness to gauge and recover itself by meditation upon the natural. In "The Method of Nature" Emerson outlines nature 's mediation of the divine and the human, maintaining a hierarchy of the mind over nature. As in Coleridge, intellect is pure and nature is but an indirect way of recovering this Platonic purity: I n the absence of man, we turn to nature, which stands next. In the divine order, intellect is primary; nature, secondary; it is the memory of the mind. That which once existed in the intellect as pure law, has now taken body as Nature . . . . Yet we can use nature as a convenient standard, and the meter of our rise and fall. It has this advantage as a witness, it cannot be debauched. When man curses, nature still testifies to truth and love. We may, therefore, safely study the mind in nature, because we cannot steadily gaze on it in mind; as we explore the face of the sun in a pool, when our eyes cannot brook his direct splendors. 29

He insists on the primacy of "intellect" as something other than "nature " ; nature is something we use as a means to an end, as an indirect experience of the divine. Even in his more pessimistic later writings, such as extinction-conscious " Fate, " man can use nature to attest to and develop " character" or to reveal divine power.

Rohert Frost and th e Challen�e of Darwin

And, always, nature has a superior nl oral character as it "testifies to truth and love. " Elllerson's use of nature and natural exanlples is often performative and shows little attention to anything outside the intellect. Thoreau, a devoted reader of Darwin, is nluch Illore of an observant naturalist than E nlerson and is less susceptible to Enlersonian solipsisnl. Considering detail, he moves from awe and to religious and philosophical parable. In "Brute Neighbors , " from Walden, Thoreau speculates on the warfare he observes among ants . He envisions them through the mythic lens of the Iliad, nlaking a strong analogy between nlen and insects. His observation is not behavioral but moral: ants fight for ideals as noble as, perhaps more noble than, nlen's . Though clearly satiric, his downward com­ parison does reduce nlan and insect to the comnlon denominator he finds in his sacred texts of combat, the Iliad and the Bhagavad Gita: I was nlyself excited sonlewhat as if they had been nlen. The nlore you think of it, the less the difference. And certainly there is not the fight recorded in Concord history, at least, if in the history of Anlerica, that will bear a nlonlent's conlparison with this , whether for the nUl11bers engaged in it, or for the patriotism and heroisnl displayed . . . . I have no doubt that it was a principle they fought for, as much as our ancestors, and not to avoid a three-penny tax on their tea; and the results of this battle will be as inlportant and l11enl0rable to those whom it concerns as those of the battle of Bunker Hill , at least .3()

Darwin's observations of ants in The Voya�e of the Beagle and On the Origirz if Species are far less prone to overt satire or religious or nletaphysical parable. But there is an inlplicit and unenlbarrassed anthropomorphisnl in D arwin's observa­ tions of ants that assumes a sympathy with other creatures and an admiration of their nobility. This synlpathy seenlS to precede and will eventually lead to his theory of COlnnlon descent. Consider his "astonishment" at the labors of ants: A person, on first entering a tropical forest, is astonished at the labors of ants: well­ beaten paths branch off in every direction, some going forth, and others returning, burdened with pieces of green leaf, often larger than their own bodies . . . . A small dark-colored ant sonletinles nligrates in countless numbers . . . . The swarm, having crossed the bare space, divided itself, and descended the old wall. By this means many insects were fairly enclosed; and the efforts which the poor little creatures 11lade to extricate themselves fronl such a death were wonderful. When the ants came to the road they changed their course, and in narrow files re-ascended the wall. Having placed a snlall stone so as to intercept one of the lines, the whole body attacked it, and then imnlediately retired. Shortly afterwards another body came to the charge, and again having failed to make any impression, this line of march was entirely given up. By going an inch round, the file might have avoided the stone, and

Birds, Insects, and Downward Comparisons this doubtless would have happened, if it had originally been there: but having been attacked, the lion-hearted little warriors scorned the idea of yielding.31

D arwin's metaphors-"the lion-hearted little warriors , " for example-a �e col­ orful and dramatic but not an attempt to mythologize nature. The natural difficulties, as well as the ants ' response, are literal facts about struggle and survival in the world. D arwin's ants do not fight for an ideal, but their efforts to avoid death are noble enough to warrant attention. Though a number of Frost's poems about other creatures are certainly satiric-" At Woodward's Gardens, " " A Considerable Speck , " and "Departmental"-Frost shares a Darwinian as­ sumption of the continuity of "mind" that goes beyond p arable. And Frost, like Darwin, removes the human from center stage, rendering mankind one creature in a vast unfolding drama, of which we are given only brief glimpses and samples. One of Frost's ways of embracing the impact of Darwinian thought on modern consciousness is to dec enter the human in the drama of his dramas. T his has none of the grandly symbolic inhumanism of Robinson Jeffers, far more willing to draw an artificial line between the human and nonhuman worlds to effect his belittling moralizing. In Walden Thoreau's narrative presence remains central. I n The Voyage if the Beagle, D arwin's own narrative voice rarely intrudes or calls special attention to itself. We are presented, instead, with a panorama of natural observations that include but do not focus on the human. The heading of chapter 5 (which includes the discussion of the ovenbird) gives a sense of the sweep of the book: Bahia Blanca-Geology-Numerous gigantic extinct Quadrupeds-Recent Extinction-Longevity of Species-Large Animals do not require a luxuriant Vegetation-Southern Africa-Siberian Fossils-Two Species of Ostrich-Habits of Oven-bird-Armadilloes-Venomous Snake, Toad, Lizard-Hibernation of Animals-Habits of Sea-Pen-Indian Wars and Massacres-Arrowhead, Anti­ quarian Relic32

" Indian Wars" are given equal billing here with "Two Species of Ostrich" and "Hibernation of Animals" ; the human is just one figure in the vast D arwinian canvas. On the Origin if Species contains no discussion of human development or behavior. The Descent of Man is actually two books, of which the second, and by far the longer and more detailed, is called Selection in Relation to Sex. D arwin is interested in a vast scheme in which , he shows us, man is not necessarily the centerpiece. Though Frost is far more preoccupied with human activity (partic­ ularly in North of Boston) , many of his animal poems dramatically convey man's anxiety about the loss of knowledge of any position in a natural hierarchy or order. " Nature" disappears as fiction against which we can define o urselves.

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Robert Frost and the Challenge if Darwin

With increased uncertainty about place or position came increased uncer­ tainty about the value of our emotions . Sympathy and pity are often mitigated by an awareness of the amorality of nature. Among the poems that convey these conflicts in both serious and humorous ways are "The Vantage Point," "To a Moth Seen in Winter, " "A Considerable Speck," "Range-Finding, " and "The Need of Being Versed in Country Things . " The title of "The Vantage Point, " an early poem from A Boy 's Will, suggests its subj ect: what the world looks like to one who is able to see both the hun1an and the animal from the same perspective. The narrator at first sounds like a romantic who has been led from solitude in the woods back to humanity. His experience of the monotony of "trees" has eroded his ability to view mankind except as unnecessary duplicates. He finds himself between worlds, both participating and detached: I f tired of trees I seek again mankind, Well I know where to hie nle-in the dawn, To a slope where the cattle keep the lawn. There amid lolling j uniper reclined, Myself unseen, I see in white defined Far off the honles of lllen, and farther still, The graves of ll1en on an opposing hill, Living or dead, whichever are to mind.

The narrator's distance from and indifference to the human comes in such p hrases as "far off the honles of nlen" or "living or dead, whichever are to mind . " The poem turns with the narrator away from the domestic and toward the natural. Yet the narrator becomes physically (and dramatically) immanent in his surroundings-his "breathing shak[ing] the bluet" or the "sun-burned hillside " setting his face "aglow" (sun-burned seems a little destructive and threatening) . The freedom expressed in the penultimate triplet gives way to the more halting series of sensory acts, "I smell . . . I smell . . . I look , " as facts consume his being: And if by noon I have too llluch of these, I have but to turn on my arm, and 10, The sun-burned hillside sets my face aglow, My breathing shakes the bluet like a breeze, I smell the earth, I smell the bruised plant, I look into the crater of the ant.

The bluntness of the final line, " I look into the crater of the ant, " leaves us with a matter-of-fact image of the dwelling of another creature, small and rhetorically ordinary. It balances images of human homes "in white defined" and brings them into perspective with survival and domestication, the "homemaking" of ants. Instead of revelation, we are left with a stoic image of survival.

Birds , Insects, and Downward Comparisons

"To a Moth Seen in Winter" and " A Considerable Speck , " a pair of poems in A Witness Tree, dramatize the way our pity toward seemingly helpless creatures hides a fear of human vulnerability. In the former the narrator begins with a strong attribution of human motives, particularly the "venture of eternity, " to the moth's presence out of season: "And now pray tell what lured you with false hope / To make the venture of eternity / And seek the love of kind in winter­ time?" He retreats a little from this romantic projection with the admission that "what I pity in you is something human, / The old incurable untimeliness, / Only begetter of all ills that are . " The speaker's view of the moth is related to the belatedness expressed in "Pan with Us" or "The Oven Bird" as well as "After Apple-Picking, " in which the singer or laborer is persisting out of season, partic­ ularly the season for procreation and survival. Is "untimeliness" a cause? Is the desire for immortality beyond survival needs common to all creatures? Or is the moth's untimeliness j ust an unfortunate accident? The speaker would like to extend his sympathy and consciousness to the moth to ease the pain of his own isolation. His skepticism grows and concludes with a gesture of emotional retreat through which he admits his own vul­ nerability, one "tasked to save [his] own" life, which might last at best "a little while " : But go. You are right. My pity cannot help. Go till you wet your pinions and are quenched. You must be made more simply wise than I To know the hand I stretch impulsively Across the gulf of well nigh everything May reach to you, but cannot touch your fate. r cannot touch your life, much less can save, Who am tasked to save my own a little while.

The poem conveys a feeling of emotional isolation as well as a strong relation to other creatures in the desire for sexual fulfillment and in the struggle against environment. "A Considerable Speck" satirizes the grandiosity of human endeavors as a nearly microscopic mite intrudes a writer's blank-page contemplations. Almost imperceptibly small, the mite makes him consider the possibility of intelligence, or "inclinations , " in creatures usually deemed unimportant in comparison with humans . Here the scientific "microscopic" (the poem's subtitle) serves to under­ mine the observer's importance: the analogies between man and mite in the poem suggest a belittling perspective of man and God, creation and creator. While writing on a "paper sheet so white, " he discovers that a "speck that would

Robert Frost and the Challen,ee
68

have been beneath my sight . . . \vas no dust speck by my breathing blown, / But unmistakably a living mite / With inclinations it could call its own . " The narrator continues t o observe the actions o f the insect and easily ascribes to it the motives and fears of a human afraid of being killed by cruel forces: It paused as with suspicion of nly pen, And then canle racing wildly on again To where nly manuscript was not yet dry; Then paused again and either drank or snlelt­ With loathing, for again it turned to fly. Plainly with an intelligence I dealt. It seemed too tiny to have roonl for feet, Yet must have had a set of thenl complete To express how n1uch it didn 't want to die. It ran with terror and with cunning crept. It faltered: I could see it hesitate ; Then in the middle of the open sheet Cower down in desperation to accept Whatever I accorded it of fate.

This overly dranlatic anthropomorphizing of the mite is mitigated by the some­ what detached, scientific observation that bodily parts, a complete set of feet, and behavior are the basis for ascribing mind to others . Feet (and, figuratively, poetry) are for nothing more than to "express how nluch it didn't want to die, " instru­ ments in a survival game that includes "terror and cunning. " Having overex­ tended his sympathetic imagination, the persona emancipates himself (and the mite) from the excesses of human emotions and particularly the utopian hopes of modern progressivism, enthusiastically mocked in the stunning phrase, "the tenderer-than-thou / Collectivistic regimenting love / With which the modern world is being swept. " If anything, he admires the individual's uncertainty and suffering: I have none of the tenderer-than-thou Collectivistic regimenting love With which the n10dern world is being swept. But this poor nlicroscopic item now! Since it was nothing I knew evil of I let it lie there till I hope it slept.

He swerves back to a limited sense of sympathy with the creature. The final two couplets indicate the narrator's feeling that human displays of mind are neither abundant nor impressive when considered in light of the efforts made by other

Birds, Insects, and Downward Comparisons

creatures, even insects. He also reminds us that mind is not a given state but, rather, a " display" or activity that he finds rare even among humans : I have a mind myself and recognize Mind when I meet with it in any guise. No one can know how glad I am to find On any sheet the least display of mind.

The education or uneducation of human emotions is the focus of "The Need of Being Versed in Country Things" and "Range-Finding. " In these lyrics the human is made almost completely peripheral to the rest of creation. The title "The Need of Being Verse d in Country Things" sounds like a prelude to a piece of moral wisdom, but its folksy sound belies the cruelty of what is to come. "Country Things" echoes Hamlet's question to Ophelia about indecent " coun­ try matters" ; Frost lures his readers to consider nature 's wisdom only to find that the j oke is on them. Like a " diminished thing," "country things" refers both to the destruction of a home by chance fire and to the use of the human ruins by nesting birds. Their fecund nest is in contrast to the images of sexual uselessness surrounding the house; the chimney, not a phallic image, is also like the feminine organ of a flower but lacking the flowers to attract cross-pollination-" a pistil after the petals go" : The house had gone t o bring again To the midnight sky a sunset glow. N ow the chimney was all of the house that stood, Like a pistil after the petals go. The barn opposed across the way, That would have j oined the house in flame Had it been the will of the wind, was left To bear forsaken the place's name. No more it opened with all one end For teams that came by the stony road To drum on the floor with scurrying hoofs And brush the mow with the summer load.

There is a tension in the first lines between our sense of purpose and how nature uses what we produce. The house, a source of human protection, " had gone to bring again / To the midnight sky a sunset glow, " having become a brief orna­ ment for no particular observer and serving, ironically, a "purpose," which is merely the will of the wind. All that is left has survived by accident and has forsaken the "scurrying hoofs , " symbols of human domestication and attempted mastery of other creatures.

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Robert Frost atld the ChallenRe of Darwin

The second half of the poem introduces the birds who freely ignore the barriers hunlans have made to keep them out. The narrator, whose presence in the poelll is Blore that of a distant observer than a participant, begins to attribute human emotions to the birds: "Their murmur [is] more like the sigh we sigh / From too much dwelling on what has been . " His use of like underscores con­ scious analogy making that is uncertain of the relation of our emotions to the expressions of other creatures. Our own unstable "dwellings, " contingent and revocable, become the figurative basis for attempting to impose our sympathies on destructive processes of natural history, readily forsaken and altered by the accidents of life. Rather than sanctified states of mind, some of our emotions appear to be glitches in a world that values only survival. The birds that came to it through the air At broken windows flew out and in, Their murn1ur more like the sigh we sigh From too n1uch dwelling on what has been.

Though human constructs have been destroyed, the trees and flowers sur­ vive. The "pump" and the "fence post, " which once served human purposes, are now put to different uses by nature : they provide perches for the birds. Yet for them the lilac renewed its leaf, And the aged elm, though touched with fire; And the dry pump fiung up an awkward arm; And the fence post carried a strand of wire. For them there was really nothing sad. But though they rejoiced in the nest they kept, One had to be versed in country things Not to believe the phoebes wept.

But a skeptical, scientific suspension of the human, "the need of being versed in country things , " teaches us to suspend the anthropocentric and to recognize that survival, "keeping" the nest, is ultimately the only thing that matters . Sadness is our emotion, and the true need of being versed in country things is to recognize the uselessness of that emotion and to avoid attributing it to other creatures. That the birds are called "phoebes" underscores the name 's lack of signification: named neither for the God of poetry nor of beauty, their name mimes only the sound they make, and so they refuse to become symbols for our art. B eing "versed" l1leans , paradoxically, the extent to which much of what we really know about the world is often of our own making. "Range-Finding" explores, as its title implies, the extent of the proximity between the human and the rest of the natural world in both process and

Birds, I nsects, and D ownward Comparisons

71

emotion. The human world becomes peripheral to a drama of smaller scale observed by the naturalist's eye of the narrator, who leads the reader to see "the b attle" not only as human combat but also a pervasive struggle for survival that includes in its machinery flowers, flies , and spiders .33 The poem in its own machinery of surprise leads the reader to sympathetic appeal to nature as inno­ cent and suffering from the ramifications of human warfare, learning that the battle "rent a cobweb, " "cut a flower, " and came threateningly close to a nest. The speaker unselfconsciously attributes pain and suffering to such simple organic forms as a "stricken flower bent double": The battle rent a cobweb diamond-strung And cut a flower beside a ground bird's nest Before it stained a single human breast. The stricken flower bent double and so hung.

The second quatrain interrupts the images of violence and death, balancing them with instances of regeneration and renewal (cross-pollination) , all integral parts of the metaphoric battle of life: A n d still the bird revisited her young. A butterfly its fall had dispossessed A moment sought in air his flower of rest, Then lightly stooped to it and fluttering clung.

If the destruction of battle make the images of regeneration and innocence in nature appealing, the conclusion of the poem provides a series of undercutting j okes that suggest the reign of amorality and chance throughout life. The spider, surviving in a "bare upland pasture, " has its own technology for life's battle, " a wheel o f thread" and "straining cable s . " Tricked b y the human technology, whose true purposes it cannot comprehend, the spider believes it has trapped some food. I n its own "range-finding" the spider parallels the predatory range­ finding of the bullet seeking its own human prey. And the spider's own action is described in the cunning terms of going "to greet the fly, " the language of civility masking the treachery and killing that underlie the battle for life in all ranges: On the bare upland pasture there had spread 0' ernight 'twixt mullein stalks a wheel of thread And straining cables wet with silver dew. A sudden passing bullet shook it dry. The indwelling spider ran to greet the fly, But finding nothing, sullenly withdrew.

Like the spider, the reader has been tricked into some expectation, perhaps of finding something morally or spiritually edifying, yet, like the spider, finds

72

Robert Frost and the Challenp,e �f Darwill

"nothing" but the quietly capricious n1achinery of life. 34 The use of the adverb sullenly to describe the withdrawal of the spider validates the pervasiveness of some kind of emotion throughout the creaturely world, even if that emotion has been aroused by something as grinl as the failure to kill in the process of trapping and killing food. In Frost's insect world beauty is not its own excuse for being but, instead, an ephemeral instrument in a wasteful scheme of propagation. I n "Blue-Butterfly I)ay" we are attracted to icons of innocence and color that are subverted and crushed. The arrival of colored butterflies, a pleasant feature of spring, is threat­ ened by the persistence of snow. In the second stanza, however, the butterflies are connected to other forms of life as "flowers that fly and all but sing" (en1phasis mine) , one shade away fronl the ovenbird, who all but speaks: It is blue-butterfly day here in spring, And with these sky-flakes down in flurry on flurry There is more unnlixed color on the wing Than flowers \vill show for days unless they hurry. But these are flowers that fly and all but sing: And now fronl having ridden out desire They lie closed over in the wind and cling Where wheels have freshly sliced the April mire.

The concluding lines reveal that the insects ' deaths have nothing to do with the snow but are a fact of their having fulfilled their sexual function, "from having ridden out desire . " The cycle of propagation completed, the butterflies are left dead in the wheel ruts, which become a metaphor for human progress, man and insect perhaps ignorant of the smaller dramatic cycle of birth and death that in reality consumes them. In The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex Darwin describes how the coloring of butterflies is not superfluous beauty but has developed in success­ ful males as a means of attracting females: It seems probable that most of the species of Lepidoptera which are brilliantly colored, owe their colors to sexual selection, excepting in certain cases in which conspicuous colours are beneficial as protection. From the ardour of the male throughout the anin1al kingdonl, he is generally willing to accept any female; and it is the female which usually exerts a choice. Hence, if it is sexual selection which has here acted, the male, when the sexes differ, ought to be the most brilliantly col­ oured; and this is undoubtedly the ordinary rule.35

Darwin goes on to describe the ferocious warfare of male butterflies in the mating process:

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Although butterflies are such weak and fragile creatures, they are pugnacious, and an E lllperor butterfly has been captured with the tips of its wings broken off frolll a conflict with another male. Mr. Collingwood in speaking of the frequent battles between the butterflies of Borneo says, "They whirl round each other with the greatest rapidity, and appear to be incited by the greatest ferocity. "36

This lack of innocence in and about butterfly mating is the basis of Frost's "Pod of the Milkweed. " I nstead of celebrating the " coming out" of a flower in spring and turning it into a nletaphor for the sweetness of love, Frost brings us close to the literal facts of how the flower's j uice, a figure of nature as feminine power, incites sexual warfare : Calling all butterflies of every race From source unknown but from no special place They ever will return to all their lives, Because unlike the bees they have no hives, The milkweed brings up to my very door The theme of wanton waste in peace and war As it has never been to me before. And so it seems a flower's coming out That should if not be talked then sung about.

The butterflies are lured by a flower that "flows / with milk and honey" but learn, ultimately, that "it is bitter milk , " because of the way it makes them fight for more of it. The flower is luring the butterfli es to help in the process of dispersing its seeds and in cross-pollination, indifferent to the warfare and destruction it creates among the butterflies: The countless wings that from the infinite Make such a noiseless tumult over it Do no doubt with their color cOlllpensate For what the drab weed lacks of the ornate. For drab it is its fondest lllust admit. And yes, although it is a flower that flows With milk and honey, it is bitter milk, As anyone who ever broke its stem And dared to taste the wound a little knows . It tastes as if it might be opiate. But whatsoever else it may secrete, I ts flowers' distilled honey is so sweet It makes the butterfli es intemperate. There is no slumber in its juice for them. One knocks another off from where he clings . They knock the dyestuff off each other's wings-

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With thirst on hunger to the point of lust. They raise in their intenlperance a cloud Of mingled butterfly and flower dust That hangs perceptibly above the scene.37

In Thoreau's later notebooks ll1ilkweed served as an important exall1ple of the power of regeneration in nature through the dispersal of seeds over great distances. "Who would believe in prophecies of Daniel or of Miller that the world would end this summer, while one milkweed with faith matured its seeds , " Thoreau wrote in "The l)ispersion of Seeds. "38 While Frost may not have read or known of this late manuscript, he seems to rebut Thoreau's faith in seeds in the conclusion of "Pod of the Milkweed. " The warfare of the butterflies also destroys the flowers . The survivors of these are interested in their future seed. The whole process is a cruel weeding out in which many are wasted to preserve but a few. "Where have those flowers and butterflies all gone" sounds like the folk song "Where Have All the Flowers Gone, " which begins with the thought of the flowers destroyed during warfare and then grown again and picked by young girls . But "science has staked the future" on these flowers, meaning that the exp eriments of cross-pollination on which M endelian genetics is based have become the hope for the future. There is no guarantee, however, of their future existence, given the fact of war and cOll1petition. Here, as in the song, flowers are a metaphor for all creatures who are part of the "scheme" of destruction by which propagation takes place: But waste was of the essence of the schenle. And all the good they did for lnan or god To all those flowers they passionately trod Was leave as their posterity one pod With an inheritance of restless dreanl. He hangs on upside down with talon feet In an inquisitive position odd As any Guatenlalan parakeet. Sonlething eludes hinl. Is it food to eat? Or some dinl secret of the good of waste? He alnlost has it in his talon clutch. Where have those flowers and butterflies all gone That science nlay have staked the future on? He seenlS to say the reason why so much Should conle to nothing nlust be fairly faced. * *

And shall be in due course.

The surviving pod, which hangs in an " inquisitive position , " seems to consider questions similar to the one asked by the ovenbird: what are we to make of a

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world in which sexual struggle, waste, and the threat of extinction rule? There is an apocalyptic suggestion in the final line that warfare will destroy the entire planet, that so much "should come to nothing." Glimpses of sexual prowess and p ower intrude into a chaste and cautious human world, inspiring both renewed love and fear. "Two Look at Two " is exceptional in the way that something of an inspiring message is received from the creaturely world in visual revelation. Beginning and ending with the word love, the poem explores the limits of spiritual communion between the human and the natural and the importance of irreducible sexual prowess. In traveling up a hill path at night, a human couple had lost the impulse to continue. "Love and forgetting might have carried them further, " and it is clear that love of some kind is missing from this timid couple. The "tumbled wall / with barbed-wire bind­ ing" they reach becomes a metaphor for the uncertainty of boundaries between the tame and wild, human and nonhuman worlds. Geological instability and erosion is the only true ground, eventually dominating "the failing path . " Fear­ ing the darkness of the woods and whatever of life the woods might harbor (particularly a footstep nl0ving a stone) , they express relief in stating "this is all , " the limit o f their journey for the night and the end of the unknown: Love and forgetting might have carried them A little further up the mountainside With night so near, but not much further up. They must have halted soon in any case With thoughts of the path back, how rough it was With rock and washout, and unsafe in darkness; When they were halted by a tumbled wall With barbed-wire binding. They stood facing this, Spending what onward impulse they still had In one last look the way they must not go, On up the failing path, where, if a stone Or earthslide moved at night, it moved itself; No footstep nloved it. 'This is all,' they sighed, 'Good-night to woods.' But not so; there was more.

A doe surprises them and unsettles their assumption about the limits of life. The perspective of the poem shifts to a perception of how the doe views them, as "some up-ended boulder split in two, " an analogy which diminishes the couple's vitality to the nearly inorganic. The j uxtaposition of pronouns and chiastic structure of the line " She saw them in their field, they her in hers , " underscore the interpenetration of perception and of consciousness. They see "no fear" in her eyes and the doe's perception and thought is given complete and stunning independence in the line, "She seemed to think that two thus they were safe. "

Robert Frost and the ChalienRe �f Darwin

But at the point of caring, the couple is reduced in her perception only to "something" not worth troubling "her mind with . " The doe's consciousness and "mind" remain unquestioned, and give her fearlessness and indifference the force of spiritual superiority in contrast to the couple's need for comfortable and comprehensible response: A doe fronl round a spruce stood looking at them Across the wall, as near the wall as they. She saw thenl in their field, they her in hers . The difficulty of seeing what stood still, Like some up-ended boulder split in t'\vo, Was in her clouded eyes: they saw no fear there. She seemed to think that two thus they were safe. Then, as if they were something that, though strange, She could not trouble her mind with too long, She sighed and passed unscared along the wall . ' This, then , is all . What nlore is there to ask?'

Another deer shatters their comforting assumption that " This, then, is all . " The narration underscores its sexuality a s "an antlered buck of lusty nostril. " I n this case the buck's robustness challenges the couple's sense o f security i n several ways. It makes them aware of their vulnerability in relation to the environment, their timidity in relation to other creatures, and their weak impulses toward each other. Its motions suggest to then1 a mocking of their frailty and lifelessness, no doubt from a lack of erotic power between them: But no, not yet. A snort to bid them wait. A buck fronl round the spruce stood looking at them Across the wall as near the wall as they. This was an antlered buck of lusty nostril, Not the same doe conle back into her place. He viewed them quizzically with j erks of head, As if to ask, 'Why don't you nlake some motion? Or give sonle sign of life? Because you can't. I doubt if you're as living as you look.'

The thoughts of doe and buck are formulated as poetic ideas, "as if, " and reveal the anxieties of the couple. But there is an assurance about the reality of the deer's consciousness that challenges the couple almost to a response and to something of a revelation. The " all" that had been revealed to them seems to be "love, " the "it" that passes over them like "a wave. " The certainty of the message of mutual observation and looking comes, paradoxically, from its being "unlooked-for, " nothing sought and perhaps something projected too far into but a passing glimpse:

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Thus till he had them almost feeling dared To stretch a proffering hand-and a spell-breaking. Then he too passed unscared along the wall. Two had seen two, whichever side you spoke from. 'This m u s t be all.' It was all. Still they stood, A great wave from it going over them, As if the earth in one unlooked-for favor Had nlade them certain earth returned their love.

Life and earth had reflected themselves in love, but love means erotic power, lack of fear, and a recognition of the lack of firm boundaries between the human and nonhuman worlds. "Two Look at Two " prefigures Frost's exploration of our need for response from the world and the limited love it provides in "The Most of It, " "Never Again Would Birds' Song Be the Same," and "The Subverted Flower. " This cluster from A Witness Tree are among Frost's best and nlost terrifying, which dramatize our need and ultimate failure to find our self-love and desire con­ firnled by the rest of the world. They form a triptych that moves from isolation to revelations of degraded and brutal sexuality. The seeking of a model or memory of love in nature leads only to revelations of emptiness, loss, and loss of control. "The Most of It" is an ironic p ortrait of romantic sublime solitude. The Adamic figure in the wilderness, liberated from divine and social authority, seeks response from the world. Or does he? The distance between the narrator of the poem and the character suggest some irony; he makes too much of his loneliness, and his cry for response really masks his desire to maintain the grandiosity of his solitude. "He thought he kept the universe alone," and he reveals himself to be someone whose thought makes the most-that is, too much-of everything. Frost provided his own ironic commentary on this perspective in "On E xtrava­ gance": "But I look on the universe as a kind of exaggeration anyway, the whole business. That's the way you think of it: great, great, expense-everybody trying to make it mean something more than it is . "39 This character may also be taken as hoping to confirm his isolation as much as attempting to find another voice. I'm reminded of the question put to nature by the secular Prince in Auden's "Memorial for a City " : " Nature was p ut to the question in the Prince's name ; / She confessed, what he wished to hear, that she had no soul . " But we learn that he thought wrong and receives a response that belittles his self-seeking. His desire for "counter-love" is qualified as the paradoxical "original re­ sponse, " something answering to him and yet completely different. He demands the impossible, a confirmation of his own consciousness by something that is

Robert Frost an d the Challen�e �f Darwin

conlpletely independent. Frost later saw this demand as consonant with the aims of science in "Accidentally on Purpose" (which I discuss in the final chapter) and in a late doggerel poem from In the Clearing, entitled "A Reflex" : Hear my rignlarole. Science stuck a pole Down a likely hole And he got it bit. Science gave a stab And he got a grab. That was what he got. "Ah , " he said, " Qui vive, Who goes there, and what ARE we to believe?" That there is an It?

Both poems address the desire of the hunlan seeker to believe in an " It," some consciousness responsive to our own. With much greater power "The Most of It" describes the great conse­ quence of modern science, what Freud characterized as a rebuke to human narcissism. In two lectures delivered in 1 8 80 Asa Gray defended Darwin and insisted that evolution and natural selection maintained and did not destroy teleology. Gray's metaphor in Natural Science and Religion is that nature is a voice that answers our call: We are convinced theists . We bring our theisnl to the interpretation of Nature, and nature responds like an echo to our thought. Not always unequivocally: broken, confused, and even contradictory sounds are sonletinles given back to us; yet as we listen to and ponder thenl, they 11lainly harnlonize with our inner idea, and give us reasonable assurance that the God of our religion is the author of nature. 40

"The Most of It" provides a decided rebuke to Gray's view that nature answers our conceptions, particularly of an anthropomorphic God. The irony of the "echo " is that it is not nature 's voice but our own in "copy speech . " If there is original response, it does not corresp ond to our own but ignores our need to see ourselves in nature. The poenl begins with two four-line sentences in which his cries produce nothing. " [ N] othing ever came of what he cried" with the exception of an " enlbodinlent, " "as a great buck . " Then the torrent of an inhuman reality breaks in on his assumptions. Robert Pinsky has observed correctly that it is never made clear whether the buck enlbodies some ethereal principle or is only a terrifying physical presence:+ 1 I ts appearance is far other than the "nlinlic hootings"

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Wordsworth's Boy ofWinander hears "responsive to his call , " and there is little of the wisdom that comes from the "silence" and "solemn imagery" that enters "far into his heart . " Frost's embodiment is more than silence but does not so much merge with as overwhelm the crier's presence. I ts sound, neither vocal nor intentionally communicative, comes "pouring like a waterfall" (an entropic figure that Frost uses effectively in "West-Running Brook") , both filling the rest of the poem with expectation and then leaving it empty of meaning. And nothing ever came of what he cried Unless it was the enlbodinlent that crashed In the cliff's talus on the other side, And then in the far distant water splashed, But after a time allowed for it to swim, Instead of proving hunlan when it neared And someone else additional to him, As a great buck it powerfully appeared, Pushing the crumpled water up ahead, And landed pouring like a waterfall, And stumbled through the rocks with horny tread, And forced the underbrush-and that was all.

The embodiment that "splashed, " " crashed, " "pushed, " and "stumbled" is a threatening physical presence not unlike Melville 's whale as the final response to Ishmael's initial narcissistic water gazing at "the ungraspable phantom of life. " And, like Mohy-Dick, "The Most of It" evokes God's theophanic response to Job out of the whirlwind, a vision of a vast creaturely world of struggle culminating in the vision of be hen 10th and leviathan. What Robert Alter has observed about the end of the theophany in Job could be said of "The Most of It": it is "on the uncanny borderline between zoology and mythology, where what is fierce and strange, beyond the conquest of man, is the climactic manifestation of a splen­ didly providential creation which merely anthropmorphic notions cannot grasp. "42 I ts masculinity and sexuality are underscored by the phrases "horny tread" and "forced the underbrush . " " [A] nd that was all" doubly indicates that the buck provides no ulterior meaning or revelation as well as the possibility that the embodiment, compared with the human, is " all , " the most of it, a tentative sense of totality. Adam's anguished call for companionship and God's response is also the subj ect of "Never Again Would Birds ' Song Be the Same," which has been characterized as a love poem, and it does appear that the character at its center has found satisfying human response. It has been a trait of Petrarehan love poetry for the speaker to idealize the p owers of his beloved and to attribute to her influence

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all his gifts . But Frost's poem plays with this topos, introducing ironies stenlming from an awareness of the consequences and origins of love and of language. There is a paradox at the heart of the poem, a motive for mythmaking that threatens to undermine itself at the moment of inception. The character wants to know why birds' songs mean so llluch to him, and he seems to be driven by both his hope and his despair that his lover's , " Eve's , " voice has persisted from the garden of the past to the woods of the present. The magnificent title line strikes a most painful chord of loss; we have all heard the words never again strike at the moment of tragic change in perception of the world. The question here, as in "The Oven Bird, " is about interpretation of the Fall. Did the birds' songs literally change because of Eve's advent, or did Adam's conflict with Eve change his consciousness of what the birds had been singing about all along? Eve brought human companionship but also a passion that led to awareness of the animal sexuality that has always governed creation. "Never Again Would Birds' Song Be the Same " meditates on the conse­ quences of having one's call for love answered by "something human" and whether that change does indeed transcend and redeem creaturely existence. This extremely complex sonnet places the speaker, as in "The Most of It, " at an ironic distance fro lll the dramatic mythmaker of the poem, who appears as some kind of Adamic figure preoccupied with his isolation and the need for compan­ ionship as well as the delight and loss it brings . The stunning title line, while suggesting both change and loss, raises questions about the temporal relation of this character to the advent of Eve : was the change something that happened in the primordial p ast or at the present moment of meditation? For the sonnet is both an attempt to account for change by the imposition of human mythmaking as well as the failure of that lllythlnaking. The central story that haunts the poem is not only the Fall but, most particularly, the account of it in Paradise Lost. Adam, feeling alone amid all the other creatures, demands a companion of his own. God's response is that God should be enough, but He eventually grants Adam his wish. What is particularly interesting and relevant to Frost's poem is Raphael's admonition to Adam not to become too passionate about Eve and rattle the power of his Godlike reason. Adam admits Eve's power, and there is a premonition of the change that will eventually befall him, particularly in his relation to other creatures, and the way he will hear the birds' songs : Thus I have told thee all n1y State, and brought My Story to the sun1 of earthly bliss Which I enj oy, and n1ust confess to find In all things else delight indeed, but such

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As us'd or not, in the mind no change, Nor vehement desire, these delicacies I mean of Taste, Sight, Smell, Herbs, Fruits, and Flow'rs, Walks, and the melody of Birds; but here Far otherwise, transported I behold Transported touch; here passion I felt, Commotion strange, in all enj oyments else Superior and unmov'd, here only weak Against the charm of Beauty's powerful glance. Or Nature fail'd in mee, and left some part Not proof enough such Obj ect to sustain, Or from my side subducting, took perhaps More than enough; at least on her bestow'd Too much of Ornament, in outward show Elaborate, of inward less exact. For well I understand in the prime end Of Nature her th' inferior, in the mind And inward Faculties 43 .

.

.

Excessive attention to erotic love threatens to force a loss of his place in the hierarchy of creatures. Raphael admonishes Adam for his incipient passion and for his feeling of inferiority to Eve's beauty. Her attractiveness is part of the same sensuousness (and sensuality) that is important for propagation. This quality is everything to beasts but should not interfere with the "true Love" that "hath its seat in Reason . " Raphael insists on Adam's remaining superior to Eve and beasts: But if the sense of touch whereby mankind Is propagated seem such dear delight Beyond all other, think the same voutsaf't To Cattle and each Beast; which would not be To them made common and divulg'd, if aught Therein enj oy'd were worthy to subdue The Soul of Man, or passion in him move. What higher in her society thou find'st Attractive, human, rational, love still; I n loving thou dost well, in passion not, Wherein true Love consists not; Love refines The thoughts , and heart enlarges , hath his seat In Reason, and is j udicious , is the scale By which to heav'nly Love thou may'st ascend, Not sunk to carnal pleasure, for which cause An10ng the Beasts no Mate for thee was found.44

The opening lines of Frost's sonnet indicate that the character is doing just what Raphael told Adam not to do-praising Eve, not God. The persona's

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investigation of nature recapitulates Adam's loss of reason in Paradise Lost as he becomes increasingly captivated by Eve. The modern naturalist, like Adam, relinquishes the upward comparison of his humanity with God in favor of the downward analogy between hin1self, nature, and Eve as representative of that nature. At the moment of this passion he appears already at a distance from the garden and from any innocence, attempting to explain the change in the way he hears birds : He would declare and could hinlself believe That the birds there in all the garden round Fronl having heard the daylong voice of Eve Had added to their own an oversound, Her tone of nleaning but \vithout the words.

The subj unctive verbs tl'ould and could indicate the extent to which he proj ects a n1yth of E den to explain the inexplicable n1ystery of dawning erotic passion. There in the second line has the force of indicating where the character may be located presently or pointing to a hypothetical place in his imagination, the enclosed garden of myth. His need for explanation is inextricably bound to his praise of Eve as annunciating angel who has brought change. Eve 's voice and tone of n1eaning raise questions about the origin of language that, as I mentioned earlier in discussing "The Oven Bird, " make the tension between myth and reality even n10re con1plex. Frost viewed language as having its evolutionary origins in prin10rdial sound-sound before words. Here, as in Milton, Eve is associated with "lower" creatures. The character of this sonnet ascribes to Eve the power of adding some transcendently human " oversound," a "tone of n1eaning but without the words. " But this again is a wish. In Milton, Eve awakened Adam's passion, a passion that eventually led to the Fall and a change visited upon all creatures. I n Frost's sonnet the character believes Eve changed the birds' song. But what seems to be happening is that Eve's presence changes the way he hears the birds . The question of what the birds were like before Eve is also like asking what the world was like before we were fully awake to its possibilities. Were the birds ever really any different? The lines that follow are filled with qualifiers, beginning with adnlittedly, which could be either the speaker's or the character's, and raise questions about the myth of purposive change and power supplied by Eve: Adnlittedly a n eloquence s o soft Could only have had an influence on birds When call or laughter carried it aloft.

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Eve's "eloquence so soft" is affective only as "call or laughter. " It becomes apparent that the praise of Eve may have less to do with transcendent meaning, an ideal and humanizing language from above, an oversound, than with sounds from below, " carried . . . aloft," which come from the mating game and some of its playful or mocking strategies. Against the anthropomorphic view of the origin of meaning there is the D arwinian view that human art and music-making comes from the song of birds. That singing, as D arwin points out, is often used "to call or charm" the opposite sex: The capacity and love for singing or music, though not a sexual character in man, must not be passed over. Although the sounds enlitted by animals of all kinds serve many purposes, a strong case can be made out, that the vocal organs were primarily used and perfected to the propagation of the species . . . . Their chief, and in sonle case exclusive use appears either to call or charm the opposite sex.45

Birds' and Eve's voices are both erotic and have the effect of waking the character into consciousness about his relation to the laws that govern all other creatures. In being fascinated by Eve, nature, and origins he loses much and gains much. Eve has naturalized the human as much as she has humanized the natural. The character-speaker lets go of his mythmaking about the origins and comes to an acceptance that the eroticism of Eve is inextricably caught up with the birds' song: Be that as may be, she was in their song. Moreover her voice upon their voices crossed Had now persisted in the woods so long That probably it would never be lost.

Crossed suggests the inextricable web of hun1ans and other creatures in a world that is " now" no longer a garden but the "woods . " One way to read the lines is as expressing hope that her voice has "persisted" from the garden to the woods and that her love is not lost in the world of struggle. But those lines also indicate that there is no way to disentangle woman and bird, man and nature, and return to an understanding of the world free from erotic passion. The final lines of the poem are strange and ambiguous. Though at moments this sounds like a poem of praise, the dolorous tone of the phrase " never again" is unmistakable. The phrase "And to do that to birds" has all the sense of having done harm. He reasserts the myth that Eve, or she, has done something to the birds rather than to him . As an explanation of "why she came" he avoids blaming himself for wanting her or blaming her for wanting him. I nstead, the whole

Robert Frost al1d the Challel1,Re �f Darwin

business of explanation beconles an anlusing story over the irreducible fact of our creaturely nature, a fact that this character seems to accept, while the character of "The Most of It" allowed it to go crashing by him. "Never Again Would Birds' Song Be the Same" blends praise and blame on the power of Eve to lead froITI love to sexual conflict and uncertainty. This attribution of power to fenlinine beauty alone is undermined in "The Subverted Flower. " Its central symbol, "the flower, " recalls Emerson's romantic "The Rho­ dora" and its appeal to a pantheistic "Power. " In Frost's poem "beauty is not its own excuse for being" but, rather, serves the ends of sexual encounter. Frost's poenl subverts the ronlantic ideal of pantheistic "power, " embodied in the feminine symbol of the flower; the flower here is but a euphemism for the penis that the nlan holds in his hand: it, not some other and feminine nature, is responsible for the "it" of sexual consciousness. Subversion also refers to the girl's denial of his desire and the bare facts of his sexuality. Though love has become visceral and aninlal, it can only be the naive girl, "willfully unkind," who makes it "bestial " : She drew back; h e was caIrn: 'It is this that had the power.' And he lashed his open paln1 With the tender-headed flower. He smiled for her to sn1ile, But she was eith er blind Or willfully unkind. He eyed her for a \vhile For a W0111an and a puzzle.

Her inability to see the flower as "other than base and fetid, " her denial of the nature of things, beconles partly responsible for nlaking what is merely creaturely bestial : A girl could only see That a flower had 111arred a 111an, But what she could not see Was that the flower might be Other tha11 base and fetid: That the flower had done but part, And what the flo\ver began Her own too rneager heart Had terribly c0111pleted.

The girl , who had been kept secluded behind home walls, was ignorant of her own sexuality. The opposition here between j?irl and (n a n indicates a

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difference of experience and possibly a deprecating attitude toward the emo­ tional immaturity of women. It becomes difficult to tell from the poem the extent to which the man is bestial or to which the girl makes him so. The pursuer is often described in animal terms-"ragged muzzle, " "tiger at a bone , " " hand like a paw, " " obeying bestial laws, " "a brute" -words that suggest the narrator's own condemnation of the man's uncontrollable desire. But the innocence of the girl is not so much broken as revealed to be a thin veil of her bitterness and cruelty: And oh, for one so young The bitter words she spit Like sonle tenacious bit That will not leave the tongue. She plucked her lips for it, And still the horror clung. Her nlother wiped the foanl From her chin, picked up her conlb And drew her backward home.

Home and domesticity seem weak attempts to keep her from participating in the world of sexual desire and conflict, a world that cannot be blamed on anyone but is, rather, part of our animality. Nothing can control it, and no sentimentality can recover a better world, unless it is one in which a man truly keeps the universe alone. The mystery of the origin of sexuality and the attempt to j ustify its demonic power are parts of the problem of theodicy that haunts some of Frost's greatest poems. " D esign " and "On a Bird Singing in Its Sleep " confront the threat that natural science and observation provide to any certainty about the existence of providential deity, much less a benevolent one. Richard Poirier suggested James's discussion of the problem of design in Pragmatism as a possible source for Frost's "Design . " But, for Poirier, Frost merely used this passage in a general search for metaphors.46 What needs to be stressed about Jan1es's discussion of design is that it is an explicit discussion of Darwin's conception of how natural process under­ mines metaphysics and religion. And Jan1es used Darwin as the scientific author­ ity for pragmatism. Frost's poems address the uncertainty created by D arwinian contingency, of which pragmatism is a consequence. D arwin's view of creation contained a conflict between a belief that nature operated according to designed laws and an awareness that many of the facts and details of nature could not be said to make sense according to any plan or myth. D esign in nature had been used as an argument for the existence of God. Observation of nature revealed cruelty, and by extension, a wicked God. IJar-

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win, like Job, liberated God fronl responsibility for this cruelty by making him the author of designed laws rather than being directly involved in each act or event. Design and moral judgnlent of natural processes became the epi­ phenomenon of our limited consciousness . Darwin believed that design might reign in the vast expanses of time but not in the caprices of history. He sum­ nlarized his conflict succinctly in two letters : My theology is a sinlple tnuddle; I cannot look at the universe as the result of blind chance, yet I can see no evidence ofbeneficient design, or indeed of design of any kind, in the details . As for each variation that has ever occurred having been preordained for a special end, I can no lnore believe in it than that the spot on which each drop of rain falls has been specially ordained. 47 On the other hand, I cannot be contented to view this wonderful universe, and especially the nature of man, and to conclude that everything is the result of brute force. I anl inclined to look at everything as resulting fron1 designed laws, with the details, \vhether good or bad, left to the \vorking out of what we may call chance. Not that this notion at all satisfies nle.--I-X

Frost's poem "Design" dranlatizes Darwin's desire to infer order or a plan from the details of nature while also refusing to adnlit that each small occurrence is sonlehow the work of a providential hand. A belief in large-scale design liberated Darwin fronl having to attribute the world's cruelty to malicious acts of the creator. But can God be e x culp a t ed fronl responsibility for creating a cruel game? Of equal inlportance for Frost's poenl is the question Darwin raised of whether a hunlan observer, hinlself a product of chance processes of natural history, is in any position to ascribe nleaning to what he sees and attempts to nlake sense of through analogy. The speaker wants to believe that the different creatures that come together before hinl-all white-are evidence of a guiding force working out a plan. He is seeking the divine in nature. He fails in his attempt to read the scene as a synlbol of anything: I found a din1pled spider, fat and white, On a white heal-all, holding up a nloth Like a white piece of rigid satin cloth­ Assorted characters of death and blight Mixed ready to begin the n10rning right, Like the ingredients of a vvitches' brothA snow-drop spider, a flo\ver like a froth, And dead wings carried like a paper kite. What had that flower to do with being \vhite, The wayside blue and innocent heal-all? What brought the kindred spider to that height,

Birds, Insects, and Downward Conlparisons Then steered the white moth thither in the night? What but design of darkness to appall?I f design govern in a thing so small.

The octave presents the spider, moth, and heal-all using similes that evoke some insidious mystical event, a "morning right" (a pun, of course, on mourning and rite) or "a witches' broth. " Some of the language is playful, and the speaker is somewhere between being amused and being beguiled by the convergence of disparate white figures. The sestet is a more serious inquiry into the cause and meaning of the event. Frost employs the method of historical science: inferring larger principles from minute facts. Rather than innocence or mischief, he seems to discover an evil intent-" darkness" -in what he perceives. But his attribution of evil results from his own symbolism and ideas of cruelty, intent, and agency. A naturalist would know that mutations (the finding of a white instead of a blue heal-all) and extinction are all part of a natural process of development that is amoral and whose cause and direction are neither singular nor purposive. Entomologists argue that the concomitance of whiteness in the scene has a natural explanation. Moths are attracted to light; the spider has a selective advantage in being white ; the heal-all's whiteness is an accidental mutation. While the scene makes one think of designed laws-change, struggle, predation-the drama fails to b ecome a unified design, particularly one that conforms to the moral or spiritual expecta­ tions of the observer. The purpose of the event-which the observer himself has defined-was not "to appall" unless we want to believe in a designing force that has as its end the sensibilities of a human audience. One can take appall in its etymological sense, "make white, " which deflates the emotional value ascribed by the speaker and renders the question a tautology. In the final couplet, the questions reveal the uncertainty from our perspective about causality in a world governed by a web of interactive forces. And our desire to wed value to fact becomes yet another force in the perception of what is real. The questions echo, as does the \vhole poem, the unanswered questions of Blake 's poem "The Tyger, " which meditates on how the ambiguities of creation may or may not reflect the hand of the creator or the eye of the observer: " What immortal hand or eye / Could frame thy fearful symmetry?" In the final line the speaker realizes, however, what Darwin did­ that, if there is a design or designing law in nature, we cannot always infer it from details, from a "thing so small. " The ability to use small natural events as meta­ phors or symbols of design or moral or divine purpose in nature is severely undermined by Darwinian thought.49 We are left with a desire for order that we

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cannot construct fro1n our li1nited perspective. The final line-" if design govern in a thing so sn1all"-is a hun10rous din1inishn1ent of the terror of the preceding line, knocking apart the apocalyptic and revelatory expectations of the preceding lines. As Poirier points out, Frost changed the conclusion of an earlier version of the poem from "Design, D esign ! 1)0 1 use the word aright? " to "If design govern in a thing so small. " 5 ( ) The second ending, aside from being more humorous, moves away fron1 a focus on language to the n10re precise tension between the lin1ited scope of observer and observed fron1 which to make inferences about the cosn10S. However "snlall, " or "din1inished, " Frost believes in the reality of "the thing, " or "something" beyond the mere play of words. Frost is not writing exclusively about language or poetry but also about the world, whatever the lin1its of language and epistenl010gy. While Darwin asserted that nature gives no creature any trait for the benefit of another creature, he did admit that n1any variations are not useful or can in certain circun1stances beconle a hazard. In the poen1 that follows "Design , " entitled "On a Bird Singing in Its Sleep, " Frost shows how we take the traits and survival of certain creatures as evidence of a providential plan that includes ourselves. Seeing the activity of a bird singing in its sleep would, of course, appeal to humans (and poets) because it reflects the value we place on our minds, our dreams, and our singing. The narrator is aware that this activity puts the bird in j eopardy by alerting predators, but he concludes by trying to convince himself that it fits into a plan of life that includes nlan as its end: A bird half wakened in the lunar noon Sang half\vay through its little inborn tune. Partly because it sang but once all night And that fronl no especial bush's height; Partly because it sang ventriloquist And had the inspiration to desist Alnlost before the prick of hostile ears , It ventured less in peril than appears . It could not have come do\vn to us so far Through the interstices of things aj ar On the long bead chain of repeated birth To be a bird while \ve are nlen on earth If singing out of sleep and dreanl that way Had nlade it nluch nlore easily a prey.

The narrator attempts to reason (note the "partly" phrases) that the bird is not in danger. He thinks that it is safe "because it sang ventriloquist / And had

Birds, Insects, and Downward Comparisons

the inspiration to desist. " He may believe some higher spirit is singing through the bird or that it cleverly projects its voice elsewhere-as, ironically, he could be doing in ascribing self-awareness to the bird. The poem concludes with a long, uneasy conditional that links the bird's continued survival with human existence; the phrase " [Tlo be a bird while we are men on earth" intimates an ordained presence or continuity of a plan; a "bead chain" suggests an unbroken link or order, a continuity not unlike the great chain of b eing. That intimatio n con­ tradicts the earlier image of the bush and the bird's unprivileged position on it. Both narrator and reader know, however, that the bird ceased " [A] lmost before the prick of hostile ears" (emphasis mine) . And it has done so only in available ecological niches, the "interstices of things ajar. " It may have survived thus far singing as it does , but there is no guarantee about the future. "At Woodward's Gardens, " "Departmental , " and "The White-Tailed Hornet," extremely perceptive poems, all appearing in A Further Range, explore the way the pursuit of knowledge past limits reduces the human to the level of monkeys and insects. What they actually depict is the subversion of the ideals by which humanity had imagined itself as the child of God. They are fables of science as it undermines itself with "downward comparisons, " leading only to unrecoverable epistemological uncertainty. The title "At Woodward's Gardens" indicates the convergence and confu­ sion of the domestic and the wild, human and animal, which is the essence of the drama. The poem could be a meditation on Darwin's notebook entry of 1 83 8 , in which he mocked the Platonic view of the origin of ideas: "Plato . . . says in Phaedo that our 'necessary ideas' arise from the preexistence of the soul, are not derivable from experience. -read monkeys for preexistence " 5 1 In Frost's poem a b oy, "presuming on his intellect, " attempts to prove that monkeys are in no way capable of human thought. He does this by burning two monkeys in a cage with a "burning-glass, " a tool turned into a weapon. The whole scene, including the monkeys ' seizing the glass, appears a parody of mythic and theological accounts of the origin of knowledge and technology, particularly of Prometheus and Adam. God's relation to man becomes reduced to a fable derived from a sadistic boy who tortures captured and controlled creatures: A boy, presunling on his intellect, Once showed two little monkeys in a cage A burning-glass they could not understand And never could be made to understand. Words are no good: to say it was a lens For gathering solar rays would not have helped. But let him show them ho\v the weapon worked.

Robert Frost and the Challell,Re �f Darwin

He nlade the sun a pin-point on the nose Of first one, then the other till it brought A look of puzzled dinlness to their eyes That blinking could not seenl to blink a\vay. They stood arnlS laced together at the bars, And exchanged troubled glances over life. One put a thoughtful hand up to his nose As if reminded-or as if perhaps Within a nlillion years of an idea. He got his purple little knuckles stung. The already known had once nlore been confirmed By psychological experinlent, And that were all the finding to announce Had the boy not presunled too close and long.

The focus of attention in the dranla shifts from the boy to the monkeys, who react in a decidedly hUll1an way; they "exchanged troubled glances over life . " This cruelty seenlS to awaken consciousness whose origins are uncertain and can be seen in either Platonic or evolutionary terms-"As if reminded-or as if perhaps / Within a nlillion years of an idea . " We are left with the thought that origins of knowledge are unrecoverable and developed in a historical dialogue of the exercise of sadistic power and consequent rebellion. This first part of the poenl is framed by the narrator's reminder that the boy has "presumed too long. " The nl0nkeys seize the weapon: And that were all the finding to announce Had the boy not presullled too close and long. There was a sudden flash of arnl, a snatch, And the glass was the nlonkeys' , not the boy's.

The instability of power and fitness in a world of constant struggle and demands of environment overconles the boy's cruelty, arrogance, and control. The nl0nkeys become the rebels against unfair and arbitrary power, and their possible intelligence undermines the privileged role hUll1anity has accorded to itself. He descends to experinlent with nl0nkeys and discovers something disturbing about his descent. What appears to be relief for the boy comes when the monkeys don't seen1 to know what to do with the glass, itself a metaphor for speculation, and their antics become a parody of scientific invention and inquiry. Nonetheless, we are led to believe they are up to sonlething and that their behavior, "back cage," indicates the little play they are putting on to hide from their audience:

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Precipitately they retired back cage And instituted an investigation On their part, though without the needed insight. They bit the glass and listened for the flavor. They broke the handle and the binding off it. Then none the wiser, frankly gave it up, And having hid it in their bedding straw Against the day of prisoners' ennui, Canle dryly forward to the bars again To answer for themselves: Who said it mattered What monkeys did or didn't understand? They might not understand a burning-glass. They might not understand the sun itself. It's knowing what to do with things that counts.

That the monkeys " hid it i n their bedding straw / Against the day of prisoners' ennui" also becomes a sardonic reminder that destructive human invention is often a product of boredom or frustration in not knowing what to do with an oversized consciousness. They do not "presume" too much. The final j oke of the poem is that the monkeys, not the narrator, ask the questions and make the wise pronouncements which conclude the poem. Understanding, which human beings (presuming on their intellect) believe makes them priv­ ileged, is shown to be a self-j ustifying construct. " [K] nowing what to do with things" can mean both knowing how things can be put to use or, more impor­ tant, knowing that they should not be used at all. The boy has succeeded in losing his instrument and throwing into doubt what he set out to prove or even his ability to prove it. We investigate the natural world hoping to confirm our powers of intuition or to find revelation or divinity. What we find is either limitation of our perception or an awareness that we are a part of an animal world that we cannot transcend. Frost's hilarious n10ck-heroic poem "Departmental" also pokes fun at sci­ entific inquiry taken too far, an attempt by ants to "find out God and the nature of time and space. " The irony is that the more we attempt to become regimented executors of enlightened progress, the more we become like the rigid, utopian regin1es of ant colonies. If Thoreau's ant warfare scene in Walden attempts to give nobility to the insect community by endowing it with human aspirations, Frost's "Departmental" degrades humanity by making it completely analogous to insect activity. The poem's subtitle, " My Ant Jerry, " indicates through the pun the family relations of humans to ants. Relations among the ants are cold at best. More imp ortant, Frost then proj ects the image of the " enquiry squad" and makes the ants out to be scientists in pursuit of ultimate truths:

<)2

Robert Frost and the Challell,«e of Darwin

An ant on the tablecloth Ran into a donnant l1loth Of many ti111eS his size. He showed not the least surprise. His business wasn't \vith such. He gave it scarcely a touch, And was off on his duty run. Yet if he encountered one Of the hive's enquiry squad Whose \vork is to find out God And the nature of titne and space, He would put hinl onto the case. Ants are a curious race;

The perspective beco111es high parody as the queen orders other ants in " For­ Inic, " an ant code, to have a state burial ritual for their "fearless forager" Jerry MCCOr111ic. Frost is connecting the predictable behavior and pro forma language of humans with the i111personal codes of insects: One crossing with hurried tread The body of one of their dead Isn't given a mOlnent's arrest­ SeenlS not even inlpressed. But he no doubt reports to any With whonl he crosses antennae, And they no doubt report To the higher up at court. Then word goes forth in Fornlic: 'Death's COlne to Jerry McCornlic, Our selfless forager Jerry. Will the special Janizary Whose office it is to bury The dead of the conlnlissary Go bring hinl honle to his people. Lay hinl in state on a sepal . Wrap hinl for shroud in a petal . EInbalnl hinl with ichor of nettle. This is the word of your Queen.'

This highly organized and predictable behavior

IS

not 111erely hU111an folly

proj ected onto ants. Ants do behave in a highly organized, hierarchical, and business like way in perfor111ing "state " duties. And presently on the scene Appears a solenln Inortician;

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And taking formal position With feelers calmly atwiddle, Seizes the dead by the middle, And heaving hinl high in air, Carries him out of there. No one stands round to stare. It is nobody else's affair.

The tone of the poem at this point seems entirely matter-of-fact about the limitations of grief when the business of life is still at stake. The same tone of "that's j ust the way things are" marks the couplet concluding "Departmental" : " I t couldn't b e called ungentle. / But how thoroughly departmental. " There is a bemused acceptance of the "increased division of labor" on which Darwin based his discussion of "The Slave-Making I nstinct of Ants" in On the Origin of Spe­ cies. 52 The poem recognizes and accepts the reality of certain behavior through­ out the human and insect worlds that cannot be subj ected to moralizing pieties. "Departmental" also satirizes ideologies of progress based on an appeal to nature and materialism. Engels thought that Darwin's ascription of the struggle for existence to nature parodied the ideals of Enlightenment economics and laissez-faire capitalism by showing that such behavior was the routine among " lowly" creatures. While Darwin may or may not have been conscious of creat­ ing such a satire, Frost certainly was parodying the ideals not only of capitalism but also of all forms of government and imperial institutions for which individ­ uals enslaved themselves. Engels thought that society could raise itself beyond struggle by " conscious organization of social production, " which would also serve the ideals of science: Darwin did not know what a bitter satire he wrote on mankind, and especially on his countrymen, when he showed that free competition, the struggle for exis­ tence, which the economists celebrate as the highest historical achievement, is the normal state of the animal kingdom . O nly conscious organisation of social produc­ tion, in which production and distribution are carried on in a planned way, can lift mankind above the rest of the animal world as regards the social aspect, in the same way that production in general has done this for men in their aspect as species. Historical evolution makes such an organisation daily more indispensable, but also with every day more possible. From it will date a new epoch of history, in which mankind itself, and with mankind all branches if its activity, and especially natural science, will experience an advance that will put everything preceding it in the deepest shade. 53

Engels believed that his idea of organized division of labor would lead to a humanizing evolutionary progress above nature. Frost's "Departmental" suggests that such division of labor is as inhuman as muc h of the D arwinian vision of

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Robert Frost and the ClzallenRe cif Darwin

nature, as the struggle for existence. In this light the natural science in which Engels put so much hope also appears to be a form of inanity. The glorification of science is mocked by a vision of the hUlllan that cannot be ontologically differen­ tiated from the world of the ant. The mockery of ronlantic exaltations of nature and their ultimately corro­ sive effect on man's divine image of hinlself is given its most powerful treatment in the essayistic poem "The White-Tailed Hornet. " An elusive figure, the hornet exemplifies the problem of defining or attributing any kind of purpose or knowl­ edge to what natural scientists had COlne to call "instinct. " No such creature as a white-tailed hornet exists, and it beconles, like "instinct, " a metaphor for an ungraspable phantom of perfection not unlike Melville's whale or the divine white jewel of the gnostic " Hyllln of the Pearl . " The speaker assumes the infallibility of the hornet on the assulllption that it possesses the merciful power of a Christian God: "To err is hunlan, not to, animal . " But divinity has, through " downward cornparisons," becolne cOlllpletely naturalized and subj ect to em­ pirical verification. This reversal has deep roots, but we find one of romanticism's most potent expressions of faith in instinct in Emerson's essay "The Transcendentalist" : I mean we have yet no ll1an \vho leaned entirely on his character, and eaten angels ' food; who, trusting to his sentilllents, found life nlade of miracles . . . Only in the instinct of the lower animals l l 'ej i l l d th e sllJ!.�estiol1s �f the methods if it, and something hij!,her than our understandil1}!. The squirrel hoards nuts and the bee gathers honey, without knowing what they do, and they are thus provided for without selfishness or disgrace.54 .

Emerson's analogies between "angels" and "lower animals" contribute to the collapse of the chain of being as the lowly of nature become endowed with higher wisdom. Frost's narrator, as Monteiro points out, sounds a great deal like Emerson proclaiming "the unerring good sense" of anilllals.55 This romantic faith in nature's divinity led to the blurring of distinctions between man and the rest of nature and the uncertainty with which the poenl concludes. This pastoral­ ism finds itself in the rhetoric of natural science from Thomas Browne and, of course, D arwin himself. But the wisdolll according to instinct became increas­ ingly uncertain as the observations of natural scientists began to link humans and nature to a process of development. Bergson and Fabre attempted to maintain distinctions between lllen and animals that could no longer be held by observing nature, as Thoreau realized in his observation of ants in Walden. Looking at insects, he began to see the deeper connections linking all creatures, including nlan. Comnl0n descent is suggested, even if it cannot be proved.

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95

T h e scientific controversies surrounding the nature of instinct bore directly on the interpretation of evolution, and Frost was well aware of them. He wrote to Untermeyer that Bergson and entomologist]. H. Fabre had found examples of instinct among wasps that "bother our evolutionism . " What Frost meant by evolutionism was the popular and cartoonlike notion of the limitless possibilities of creaturely development ending in human reason. Frost stated that he liked seeing "theories" upset by counterexamples, and those theories no doubt included those of Bergson and Fabre. Frost does not advocate Bergson's or Fabre's views of evolution or of instinct. Rather, he enacts the scientist's distrust of all fixed knowledge in favor of new empirical evidence that bothers whatever dogma or metaphor we have become complacent about: I am very fond of seeing our theories knocked into cocked hats . What I like about Bergson and Fabre is that they have bothered our evolutionism so much with the cases of instincts they have brought up. You get more credit for thinking if you restate formulae or cite cases that fall easily under formulae, but all the fun is outside: saying things that suggest things that won't quite formulate. I should like to be so subtle at this game as to seem to the casual observer altogether obvious. The casual person would assume that I meant nothing or else I canle near enough meaning something he was familiar with to mean it for all practical purposes. Well well well. 56

"The White-Tailed Hornet" was subtitled " or, the revision of theories , " and the poem takes pleasure in unsettling reified metaphors and frozen concepts, about moving from observatio n of facts to transcendent realities. This poem "suggests things that won't quite formulate" while tempting the reader or the persona of the poem to make the formulation. A world of endlessly revised theories and formulations follows from the attempt to establish lasting knowledge on the grounds of empiricism, of making "downward comparisons, " with things that do not conform to order or consistency. Bergson attempted to maintain some transcendent teleology in the evolu­ tionary process with his concept of the elan vital. He also used the example of the hunting wasps to show two lines of evolution, one of instinct and one of intelli­ gence. The human intellect could somehow remain above the world of insect instinct. Fabre, on the other hand, did not believe in Darwin's view of the transfornlation of species or that instinct necessarily represented a form of perfect intelligence, arguing, instead, that instinct acts only in the limited environment, or realm, in which a particular creature lived. The controversy extended beyond the question of instinct to the basic problem of the meaning of evolution and its implications for human intelligence. 57 With o nly self-conceived sentiment be­ hind them, such concepts seem just that-highly metaphoric constructs

Robert Frost and the ChallellJ!,e �f Darwin

grounded in nothing but ephe111eral behaviors and fleeting observations. I n an endnote of his copy of Creative Evolution Frost wrote, "no perfect definition for what's 111erely tendency. " 5 H I think this is also Frost's reaction to such terins as elarz vital as well as illstirzct: they are at best tendencies describable only in metaphors . Darwin was far 1110re cautious than either Fabre or Bergson i n defining instinct, describing it only as s0111ething performed "without p urpose" and with recourse to "experience. " Otherwise, he wrote, "I will not attenlpt any defini­ tion of instinct, " and, 1110re i111p ortant, "I have nothing to do with the origin of the primary mental po\vers, any nl0re than I have with that of life itself. " 5 9 Without appealing to origins, the 111eaning of instinct does indeed b ecome e111pty and the proble111 of trans111ission of behaviors in evolution extremely difficult to comprehend. I nstinct beco111es little more than observation of what creatures do. In "The White-Tailed Hornet" behavior and attitude of both 111an and insect vary and change, but within the confines of their environments. Frost leaves us in an endless cycle of skeptical revision. I nstinct, like nature, was a useless abstraction to which the nineteenth century could attribute first causes and primary 111atters other than God. It becolnes subject more to observations than a priori definitions or ascriptions of value. The first section of the poe111 finds the narrator attributing perfection to the hornet's habits-a perfection he attributes to instinct. But the qualities of in­ stinct, such as "bullet , " "gun , " and "power to change his aim," indicate not only purpose but deliberate violence. If this insect does represent some aspect of nature's prinlary ways, those nlay ultimately be for doing battle. Having exalted the hornet, the narrator wants to limit its perception by qualifying his attribution of perfection to instinct-"such is the instinct I allow" (emphasis mine) : The white-tailed hornet lives in a balloon That floats against the ceiling of the woodshed. The exit he comes out at like a bullet Is like the pupil of a pointed gun. And having the power to change his ain1 in flight, He con1es out n10re unerring than a bullet. Verse could be written on the certainty With which he penetrates n1y best defense Of whirling hands and anns about the head To stab me in the sneeze-nerve of a nostril. Such is the instinct of it I allow.

The p hrase "sneeze-nerve of a nostril" makes us suddenly conSCIOUS of the speaker's own biology, which appears weak in comparison with the hornet's offensive ability to penetrate his defenses . Here the speaker recalls Fabre's obser-

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vations about the remarkable abilities of hornets to defend themselves by striking at the nervous systems of their enenlies. Nonetheless, he wants to assert that the hornet cannot understand his "motives, " his exceptionally human qualities. While exalting its instinct, he wants to preserve for himself a realm that is somehow beyond the natural and prove "the exception I like to think I am in everything" : Yet how about the insect certainty That in the neighborhood of home and children Is such an execrable j udge of nlotives As not to recognize in me the exception I like to think I anl in everythingOne who would never hang above a bookcase His Japanese crepe-paper globe for trophy? He stung me first and stung me afterward. He rolled me off the field head over heels, And would not listen to my explanations.

The speaker's denial that he was after the hornet's house as a trophy reveals that he protests too much. The hornet "knows" quite well what the narrator is up to. Fascinated by the ''Japanese crepe-paper globe, " he becomes bound by his desire for an aesthetic obj ect that for the hornet is home. Betraying his self-proclaimed freedom, the speaker has found himself in a world in which the desire for beauty will be met ferociously by survival interests . But the hornet's certainty disappears in the context of the environment of the speaker's home, where he j ustifies the hornet's behavior in terms of art rather than survival. Out of his own environment the hornet has trouble fulfilling his biological and survival function of finding food-fl i es for his own grubs. The speaker would like to j ustify this failure by projecting his own ideal of a poet onto the hornet busy making all kinds of impressionistic analogies of his own­ comparing fly, nailhead, and huckleberry. But the hornet's ultimate inability to catch the fly contradicts the speaker's belief in its certain knowledge of reality; he becomes " dangerously skeptic" about instinct, his own analogies, and the worth of poetry itself as anything other than an imperfect and wasteful activity in a world of survival: He's after the domesticated fly To feed his thumping grubs as big as he is. Here he is at his best, but even here I watched hinl where he swooped, he pounced, h e struck; But what he found he had was j ust a nailhead. He struck a second time. Another nailhead.

Robert Frost and the Challenge of Darwin

'Those are just nailheads. Those are fastened down.' Then disconcerted and not unannoyed, He stooped and struck a little huckleberry The way a player curls around a football . 'Wrong shape, wrong color, and wrong scent,' I said. The huckleberry rolled hinl on his head. At last it was a fly. He shot and nlissed; And the fly circled round hinl in derision. But for the fly he ll1ight have 111ade ll1e think He had been at his poetry, comparing Nailhead with fly and fly with huckleberry: How like a fly, how very like a fly. But the real fly he nlissed would never do; The nlissed fly nlade ll1e dangerously skeptic.

The narrator has gone too far to project his own certainty onto the hornet. The hornet merely confirms Fabre's claim that insect instinct may be accurate in one environment and useless in another. The hornet, according to Fabre, may be as insightful as a scientist in one realn1 and useless in another: "The sublime inspira­ tions of science and the astounding inconsistencies of stupidity are both its portion, according as the insect acts under normal or accidental conditions. " 6 0 I n his landmark book of 1 9 1 I , The Hunting Wasps, Fabre asserted and denied "the wisdom of instinct. " Instincts useful in one environment are completely useless, if not destructive, i n another. But the insect does have at points "pro­ found wisdom" and "profound ignorance, " and what goes for wasps goes for hUD1an beings : The Sphex has shown u s how infallibly and with what transcendental art she acts when guided by the unconscious inspiration of her instinct; she is now going to show us how poor she is in resource, how linlited in intelligence, how illogical even, in circumstances outside of her regular routine. By a strange inconsistency, charac­ teristic of the instinctive faculties, profound wisdom is accompanied by an ignorance no less profound . . . . Nothing is difficult to instinct, so long as the act is not outside the unvarying cycle of aninlal existence; on the other hand, nothing is easy to instinct, if the act is at all renl0ved frol11 the course usually pursued.61

Fabre shows on one level that the observation of and reverence for nature reveal ambiguities (or at least disj unctions) that challenge the idea of instinct as a form of "transcendental" perfection of knowledge. The consequence of Fabre 's analogy between the insect and human be­ havior has the same devastating consequences for epistemology implied by Dar­ win's view that human intelligence has a natural history that renders it sin1ilar in kind to intelligence in other creatures, differing only in degree. The problem of

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modern scientific epistemology is that in relinquishing both Platonic and Judeo­ Christian ontology or transferring its origin to the natural world, all terms such as instinct, intelligence, or design become little more than endlessly shifting signifiers and tautologies. It has been too easy for some critics to dismiss the conclusion as self-parody or a send-up of pious humanism. As in many poems, Frost teases and j okes, but underneath the fear of uncertainty remains constant. It is to be taken no less seriously than the sense of " diminishment" with which "The Oven Bird" con­ cludes . Frost no doubt wants to liberate himself from the illusions and sentiment of romantic thought. But the sense of loss and doubt engendered by romanticism and its child, natural history, was very real to Frost, and the conclusion to "The White-Tailed Hornet" should be taken as a moment when he gives us a more elaborate explanation of what remained muted elsewhere. Natural science, fol­ lowing romanticism, has made downward comparisons that lead to nothing but uncertainty and " disillusion, " as the chain of being collapses into a mirror of dust: Won't this whole instinct matter bear revision? Won't almost any theory bear revision? To err is human, not to, animal . Or so we pay the complinlent to instinct, Only too liberal of our compliment That really takes away instead of gives. Our worship, humor, conscientiousness Went long since to the dogs under the table. And served us right for having instituted Downward comparisons. As long on earth As our comparisons were stoutly upward With gods and angels , we \vere men at least, But little lower than the gods and angels . But once comparisons were yielded downward, Once we began to see our images Reflected in the mud and even dust, 'Twas disillusion upon disillusion. We were lost piecemeal to the animals, Like people thrown out to delay the wolves. Nothing but fallibility was left us, And this day's work nlade even that seem doubtful.

The speaker follows his skepticism to its logical conclusion: on the brink of declaring the certainty of uncertainty, he admits that his science must leave him doubtful even about fallibility. "Downward comparisons" have left the human mind reflected only in ambiguous "insect certainty. " Frost would have liked to be certain about something, even nihilism, but never allowed himself the facile

1 00

Robert Frost and tlze Challen,Qe qf Darwin

comfort. His thought at the conclusion of " An Empty Threat, " a poen1 about the fear of extinction, indicates that annihilation would be better than endless uncertainty: And, 'Better defeat alnl0st, If seen clear, Than life's victories of doubt That need endless talk, talk To make thenl out.'

Having placed ourselves and our origins back in the animal kingdom, we lose the ability to reify any quality that defines ourselves or our imagination as pern1anent or privileged. Our nletaphors becon1e an endless trial of self-consciously proj ected attempts at order on an intransigent reality.

Chapter 3 Play for Mortal Stakes Labor, Conlmunity, and Nature's Chaos

Frost's most striking formal contribution to modern poetry is the renewal of the pastoral. He plays with the pastoralism in the American imagination, from Jefferson to Thoreau, exploring its assumptions of a rural ideal , the power and independence of rustic and agrarian life. But Frost's poetry is an extreme example of Leo Marx's assertion that works in the pastoral mode "call into question, or bring irony to bear against the illusion of peace and harmony in a green pas­ ture . " l In "Lucretius versus the Lake Poets , " Frost speculated that nature could be regarded as "the Whole Goddam Machinery, " including the inexorable forces of conflict and warfare. The scientific assumption that the reigning principle in nature is survival within the conditions of existence found itself translated into Frost's eclogues and georgics as dramas of conflict with only tentative order between factions . 2 The American hope that the wilderness could become a new Eden, a Blessed Isle, or Utopia becomes a joke before racial conflict and deep anxieties over the reality of any equality beneath the veneer of democratic assumptions. Frost transformed the amoebaean dialogue into a competition of interest; apparent sociability hides fear and threatens violence. Aesthetic pleasure, con­ templation, and prowess-in "The Tuft of Flowers, " "Two Tramps in Mud Time, " "The D eath of the Hired Man , " and "The Ax-Helve"-conflict with and sometimes mask the needs of survival. The fundamental pastoral tension between " high" and " low, " represented in terms of city and country, takes on the tension of racial conflict and equality, a battle to earn and maintain a " human rating." Frost's natural men-the farmer of "The Mountain, " Lafe and Baptiste of "A H undred Collars" and "The Ax-Helve " (both, significantly, French­ Canadian) , and "the old stone savage " of "Mending Wall"-reveal their own racial interests and the foolishness and self-interest of their putatively more "civilized" interlocutors. Often murky or incomprehensible, these threatening 101

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Robert Frost and the Challen.e,e of Darwin

characters provoke fear and often represent the amoral character of the natural and its ability to evade control and create instability. As ethical agents both higher and lower than their observers, Frost's rustics raise disturbing questions about the unity of humanity and the possibility of common labor. The possibilities of progress from labor are always threatened by disparate interests and by reduction to ritual play without purpose or consequence other than conflict itself. Not unlike his defensive "A Drumlin Woodchuck" or the subversive monkeys in "At Woodward's Gardens , " Frost's rustics use their humor as a weapo n to keep others at a distance, so much so that it becomes difficult to tell what game they may be playing at any moment. "I own any form of humor shows fear and inferiority. Irony is a simple kind of guardedness. So is a twinkle, " Frost wrote to Louis U ntermeyer in 1 924. 3 This defensive humor in his relations with his readers and in his characters' relations with one another follows a democratic ethos of allowing latitude for opposing views or to lessen the tension between potential enemies; the play is strategic, defensive masquerade for real interests, for mortal stakes. He went on, to Untermeyer: "At bottom the world isn't a j oke. We only j oke about it to avoid an issue with someone to let someone know he's there with his questions: to disarm him by seeming to have done j ustice to his side of the standing argument. Hun10r is the most engaging cowar­ dice. With it myself I have been able to hold some of my enemy in play far out of gunshot. " The play of dialogue becomes part of the strategy of survival. Characters who feel inferior and threatened in Frost often hold their en­ emies in an "outdoor game, one on a side," as the narrator says in " Mending Wall . " "I have been counting and I find that seven of fifteen of the poems in North of Boston are almost humorous-four almost j okes: The Mountain, A Hundred Collars, The Code, The Generations of Men. It won't do to go into all that," he wrote in I 9 I 6.4 If Wordsworth attempted to evoke the virtues of humility and egalitiarianisnl in his pastorals, Frost demonstrates constantly how those ideals fall short of any kind of reality. At best, humility in Frost means politeness in the service of self-interest, a comic rendering of the moral emptiness of Franklin's ideal of saving the appearances of virtue. "The Literate Farmer and the Planet Venus" gives considerable insight into the interplay of scientific ideas and human drama in Frost's pastorals. The beauty of a "mysterious light, " presumably a star, becomes the pretext for sometimes anxious, sometimes amusing, dialogue between a vagrant seeking shelter and the farmer on whose doorstep he appears. The farmer has a great deal to say about evolution, much of it exaggeration and parody of popular conflations of progress and Darwin's thought that mask his deeper concerns about intelligence, self­ preservation, and the preservation of family interests.

Labor, Community, and Nature's Chaos

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We know from the title, as no doubt the farmer knows, that the star is really the planet Venus . Galileo's observation of the p hases of Venus had led to hinl to the inference of a heliocentric rather than a geocentric model of the universe and the unsettling of human ideas of cosmic centrality and order. Modern astronomy has unmasked Venus as no more than a planet whose apparent beauty hides an inhospitable terrain, a metaphor for what lurks behind the veneer of natural beauty and the pleasant rhetoric of the farmer. Lucretius invoked Venus in The Nature if Things as the goddess of creative love in a material universe. As San­ tayana observed in his brilliant essay on Lucretius, Venus is balanced throughout the poem by the planet-god of war, Mars, in an ongoing process of creation and destruction: " Mars and Venus, linked together in each other's arms, rule the universe together; nothing arises save by the death of some other thing. . . . The Mars of the opening passage, subdued for a moment by the blandishments of love, is raging in all the rest of the poem in his irrepressible fury. These are the two sides of every transmutation, that in creating, one thing destroys another. "5 Here, as elsewhere, Frost pastorals embody the conflicting Lucretian forces of Venus and Mars. For Lucretius the outcome of the conflict would be the triumph of Venus through Rome ; Frost viewed civic virtue as threatening not only to the individual but to the possibility of the rise of the fit though few. I n "The Literate Farmer and the Planet Venus " the negotiation between farmer and vagrant leads to a philosophical dialogue in which the narrator, a vagrant, takes the position of a skeptic al pacifist questioning the farmer's almost j ingoistic advocacy of technological and eugenic progress . The punditry on both sides hides anxieties about social equality. Should the farmer be charitable and take in the vagrant for the night? What are the limits of charity among men when family or tribal interests are at stake? The narrator announces from the start his anxiety about equality, about the farmer's success in producing children, and about the potential for violence both within and without the home: My unexpected knocking at the door Started chairs thundering on the kitchen floor, Knives and forks ringing on the supper plates, Voices conflicting like the candidates . A mighty farmer flung the house door wide, He and a lot of children came outside, And there on an equality we stood. That's the time knocking at a door did good.

The farmer plays with the vagrant, pointing out that the light is not the star of Bethlehem but, instead, an electric light of Edison's, a mocking reminder that we are living in an era in which Christianity has been replaced by the religion of

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Robert Frost an d the Challel1Re �r Darwin

knowledge and technological invention and individual prowess, of which Edison hinlselfbecame a stellar exanlple. The farlner reveals his own tendency to iden­ tify individuals by tribe, calling Edison the "Jerseyite. " And Edison also repre­ sents the denlocratic power of an uneducated individual to rise to the height of Jefferson's natural aristocracy: Between us two it's not a star at all. It's a new patented electric light, Put up on trial by that Jerseyite So nluch is being now expected of, To give developn1ents the final shove And turn us into the next specie folks Are going to be, unless these nlonkey j okes Of the last fifty years are all a libel, And Darwin's proved nlistaken, not the Bible. r s'pose you have your notions on the vexed Question of what we're turning into next .

Is the farnler a bufToon who has absorbed popular accounts of Darwinism, or does he spout this ideology to the vagrant to let him know that he's none too charitable toward his fellow nlan? The vagrant-narrator espouses a skepticism about "prenlises" and about taking logic or nletaphor too far, particularly evolu­ tion. But he has interests at stake, too, especially getting a place to sleep for the night. He uses night as a metaphor for the natural i nterruption of daylight logic, but it also represents his need to disarnl the farmer and persuade hinl to provide a place for hinl to sleep: 'Here conle nlore stars to character the skies, And they in the estinlation of the wise Are nlore divine than any bulb or arc, Because their purpose is to flash and spark, But not to take away the precious dark . We need the interruption of the night To ease attention off when overtight, To break our logic in too long a fli ght, And ask us if our prenlises are right.'

The farmer's agressively unsentinlental response contains an equal nleasure of Frost's divided sensibility, the willingness and courage to attempt great feats, shed weakness , and refuse enslavenlent:

rt

' Sick talk, sick talk, sick sentinlental talk! doesn't do you any good to walk.

Labor, Community, and Nature's Chaos

lOS

I see what you are : can't get you excited With hopes of getting nlankind unbenighted. Sonle ignorance takes rank as innocence. Have it for all of nle and have it dense. The slave will never thank his manumitter; Which often makes the manunlitter bitter.'

He arrives at a more serious peroration of faith in the future and in progress combined with a sense of moral limitation, couched in an absurd eugenic fantasy, ironically a waking dream of science. He reasons that, if we never had to sleep, we would never get out of the wrong side o f bed and would live in a utopian world, free from hate. The irony of this eugenic-utopian fantasy should not be lost on the vagrant-narrator, who started this drama by asking the farmer for a place to sleep for the night. The farmer adds that mankind is "cunningly . . . planned," embodying the opposites of capriciousness and purpose, cruelty and benev­ olence, which govern life on earth: You take the ugliness all so much dread, Called getting out of the wrong side of bed. That is the source perhaps of human hate, And well may be where wars originate. Get rid of that and there'd be left no great Of either nlurder or war in any land. You know how cunningly mankind is planned: We have one loving and one hating hand. The loving's made to hold each other like, While with the hating other hand we strike.

While making fun of superficial notions of evolutionary progress, he reveals the deeper principle of Darwinism, a world of perpetual warfare in which com­ munities are made and destroyed. That " [W] e can't be trusted to the sleep we take " suggests in part that our dreams, including the myths of perfection, cannot possibly overcome dystopian conflict of competing interests . "A disinterested love of all created things"6 was Darwin's view of the goal of moral evolution, but this ethos was clearly undermined by his insistence on the laws of survival and the preservation of both group and individual interests; enlightened love becomes ensnared by the original sin of our "lowly origins" in the chaotic warfare of matter. Disinterestedness and progressivist hopes for the "tenderer-than-thou / Collectivistic regimenting love / With which the mod­ ern world is being swept" cannot escape the determining force of biology and inheritance. In "A Masque of Reason, " Frost's God argues that both his followers and Satan's

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Robert Frost and the ChalienRe
Paul, of " A Masque of Mercy, " advocates the "discrimination" of the selective process, conveying his distrust of the n10tives of socialism and Christianity to limit the " cream from rising," parodying the supernatural idea of resurrection: You mean about success, And how by its own logic it concentrates All wealth and power in too few hands? The rich in seeing nothing but injustice In their illlpoverishll1ent by revolution Are right. But 'twas intentional injustice. It was their justice being ll1ercy-crossed. The revolution Keeper's bringing on Is nothing but an outbreak of ll1ass ll1ercy, Too long pent up in rigorous convention­ A holy ill1pulse towards redistribution. To set out to homogenize ll1ankind So that the cream could never rise again .

But Keeper's ideal of n1ercy remained part of Frost's dialectic. His contempt for the inj ustice of egalitarian homogenization is balanced by a powerfully ironic sense of the lin1itations of all human beings. In "A Roadside Stand" the failure of country folk to survive amid economic depression evokes cruel pity in the observer, a desire to put the least fit out of their misery. But the speaker tempers his cruelty with a tortured awareness of his own sense of failure, moral arrogance, and pain: I can't help owning the great relief it would be To put these people at one stroke out of their pain. And then next day as I COllle back into the sane, I wonder how I should like you to COll1e to llle And offer to put ll1e gently out of my pain.

I nstead of the Emersonian ideal of endless n1eliorism, one good extinguished in light of a better, Frost's world presents the conflict of self-interested forces that supersede one another without moral improvement. "Evil Tendencies Cancel," for example, brings us to the brink of restored faith but leaves us only with an endless struggle to survive. The reader is led to

Labor, Community, and Nature's Chaos

1 07

believe that a parasite blight that threatens the growth of chestnuts will be overcome by the chestnuts' own power of renewal and by the advent of " another parasite. " That parasite lllerely supplants the first one: Will the blight end the chestnut? The farmers rather guess not. I t keeps smoldering at the roots And sending up new shoots Till another p arasite Shall come to end the blight.

The historical background of the poem sharpens the irony and underscores its power as a metaphor of extinction and even of racial conflict. A chestnut blight, first discovered in 1 904 in New York, destroyed almost all of the American chestnut population over a thousand-mile radius by 1 92 5 . Published in 1 93 6 , the poem's depiction of the farmers ' optimism becomes deeply ironic in the light of history. Extinction became a reality. Another fact makes matters more poignant: the blight was imported from Asian chestnuts and, as a fungus, persisted for years in short-lived sprouts and old chestnut roots, particularly between crosses of Asian and American species, a dark commentary on the consequences of immi­ gration. Growing up in San Francisco, Frost's encounters with Chinese immi­ grants made him, he liked to quip, an " ancestor-worshiper, " mocking the tradi­ tions of the Asian community even as he undercut his own pride of ancestry with a Darwinian twist: " I was raised in San Francisco, and with all the Chinese that are there I became an ancestor-worshiper. Later I learned that man was des­ cended from the monkeys, and every day when I come down to breakfast I say to myself, ' How shall I conduct myself so that I won't disgrace my monkey ances­ tors.' "7 Between the chaos of conflicting parasites and the hapless control of the farmers, Frost depicts somewhat admiringly the persistent strength of the chestnut "smoldering at the roots / And sending up new shoots," a figure of the individual braving alien entanglements but ultimately doomed to failure through the competition of self-interested tendencies and the limits of its own roots . Frost conceived of nature as chaos that flowed from individuals into so­ cieties ruled by controlling monarchs. While embracing the idea of nature as changing forms-"transitional as rolling clouds cohere"-this notion of per­ petual metamorphosis troubled him deeply. Though he regarded " humanity" contemptuously as a "ruck," subject to the instability that would lead back to chaos, Frost valued the individual's maintaining identity against both the chaos and the ruck through the creation of form. The D arwinian emphasis on the

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Robert Frost a n d the Challel�!?e �r Darwin

primaL y of individual variation rather than on the collective group or specIes nlerges with a validating of Anlerican individualism: Nature is a chaos. Hunlanity is a ruck. The ruck is the mediunl of Kings. They assert themselves on it to give it sonle senlblance of order. They build into gradations of power narrowing upward to the throne. There are periods of felicity when the state lasts for a reign and even two or three reigns or a dynasty. The people are persuaded to accept their subordinations . But the ruck is a discouraging mediunl to work in. Form is only roughly achieved there and at best leaves the mind a dissatisfaction, a fear of inlpernlanence, and a relative confusion. It is always transitional as rolling clouds cohere-a figure never quite takes shape before it begins to be another figure. Contenlplation turns fronl it in nlental distress to the physicians. The true revolt from it is not into nladness or into a refornl. It is outward in the line proj ected by nature to human nature and so on to individual nature. It is the one man working in a mediunl of paint words or notes-or wood or iron. Nothing composes the nlind like conlposing. Let a nlere nlan attenlpt no more than he is nleant for. 8

Chaos, which cannot be reduced to a mere blank, limits men to psychological survival . Frost is not talking about the Emersonian poet, " the liberating god" who sees through all to "the fir111 nature," but the "11lere 11lan" attempting to survive psychologically in a chaos of fluid forms. The characters in Frost's pas­ torals who want to build walls or ax-helves or bonfires, are form makers, but their order and artworks subversively atomize the possibilities of civic order of all kinds and are part of a process of individuation and 11lomentary survival. Frost's individualist contributes to both order and chaos as the world veers back and forth between the two extremes in a continually unstable development. "A nation has to take its natural course Of Progress round and round in circles Fronl King to Mob to King to Mob to King Until the eddy of it eddies out. "

So says the self-exiled monarch in the late poem "How Hard It Is to Keep from Being King When It's in You and in the Situation," Frost's most succint formula­ tion of the instability and ultimate impermanence of political entities. In that poem, which is an amusing version of the gnostic legend " Hymn of the Pearl , " the king abdicates t o become a n exile and a servant. But his innate ability and the demands of circumstances make it impossible for him to hide his talents, which he reveals in his own selective prowess: choosing the life bearing pearl over the hollow one. But even that pearl contains a teredo, a woodworm, a life form but one ultimately bitter and corrosive. This pattern of exile as a precedent to repentance and renewal informs three

Labor, Conlmunity, and Nature's Chaos

1 09

of Frost's favorite books, Robinson Crusoe, The Voyage of the Beagle, and Walden. What happens in these three works is that the ideal of spiritual growth becomes increasingly reduced to the literal facts of struggle. As Leo Damrosch has pointed out, Crusoe's isolation, instead of fostering contemplation of the self, "beconles the nornlal condition of all selves as they confront the world in which they have to survive."9 Crusoe, the exile, becomes monarch of his own island kingdom of savages, Spaniards, and Englishmen, only to abandon it. In both Robinson Crusoe and The Voyage of the B eagle, the question of what defines an effective natural polity becomes an inlportant problem. Darwin's observations of "savages" lead to ambivalent speculations about the p olitical needs and possibilities of man. In observing the Fuegians, Darwin considered their egalitarianism limiting and primitive. Monarchy, essential for progress, could not occur until one individual demonstrated superiority through property: The perfect equality among the individuals composing the Fuegian tribes, nlust for a long time retard their civilization. As we see those animals, whose instinct conlpels them to live in a society and obey a chief, are most capable of improvement, so is it with the races of mankind. Whether we look at it as a cause or a consequence, the more civilized always have the most artificial governments. For instance, the inhabi­ tants of Otaheite, who, when first discovered, were governed by hereditary kings, had arrived at a far higher grade than another branch of the same people, the New Zealanders, -who, although benefitted by being compelled to turn their attention to agriculture, were republicans in the most absolute sense. In Tierra del Fuego, until sonle chief shall arise with power sufficient to secure acquired advantage, such as the domesticated animals, it seems scarcely possible the political state of the country can be improved. At present, even a piece of cloth given to one is torn into shreds and distributed; and no one individual becomes richer than another. On the other hand, it is difficult to understand how a chief can arise til there is property of sonle sort by which he might manifest his superiority and increase his power. 1 0

Darwin envisioned monarchy and civilization at the opposite end of the develop­ mental spectrum from egalitarianism, which he identified with savagery. But Darwin's anthropology goes farther than mere inscription of his own culture's royalist ideals . Though at first he regarded the Fuegians as needing a monarch, he also recognized their power as castaways and exiles who have nlade their own unique life in exile from some earlier existence. The conflicting poles of authority and rebellion, inherent in Protestant culture, inform his anthropo­ logical j udgment. He observes the Fuegians as both utterly degraded and yet completely suited to their environment. In his discussion of the Fuegians of Tierra del Fuego in The Voyage (�f the Beagle, Darwin wondered whether the "savages" were fully evolved hun'lans :

1 10

Robert Frost and the Challenge �f Darwin

In the morning the Captain sent a party to comnlunicate with the Fuegians . When we canle within hail, one of fo ur natives who were present advanced to receive us, and began to shout nlost vehenlently, wishing to direct us where to land . . . . It was without exception the nlost curious and interesting spectacle I ever beheld: I could not believe how wide was the difference between savage and civilised l1lan: it is greater than between a wild and domesticated animal, inasmuch as in man there is a greater power of illlprovelllent. 1 1

A few pages later, however, he becan1e n10re skeptical about classifying Fuegians as sufficiently developed even to be called human: These poor wretches were stunted in their growth, their hideous faces bedaubed with white paint, their skins filthy and greasy, their hair entangled, their voices discordant, and their gestures violent. Viewing such men, one can hardly make oneselfbelieve that they are fellow-creatures, and inhabitants of the same world. It is a COlllll10n subject of conj ecture what pleasure in life some of the lower aninlals can enj oy: how ll1uch l110re reasonably the sallle question ll1ay be asked with respect to these barbarians! At night, five or six hUlllan beings, naked and scarcely protected from the wind and rain of this tell1pestuous clilllate, sleep on the wet ground coiled up like aninlals. 1 :2

Evolved ll1an is civilized nlan, capable of pleasure and free fron1 the demands of survival. D arwin questions the hunlan status of the Fuegians; his discussions of prill1itive men in The Descent {?f Man turn these "savages" into examples of undeveloped hunlans. But Darwin also conceded that the Fuegians nlight not be undeveloped at all, that their way of life has adapted then1 to their conditions: Whilst beholding these savages, one asks, whence have they come? What could have tel11pted, or what change cOlllp elled a tribe of l1len, to leave the fine regions of the north, to travel down the Cordillera or backbone of America, to invent and build canoes, which are not used by the tribes of Chile, Peru , and Brazil, and then to enter one of the l1lost inhospitable countries within the lil11its of the globe? Although such reflections nlust at first seize the nlind, yet we nlay feel sure that they are partly erroneous. There is no reason to beli eve that the Fuegians decrease in number; therefore we l1lust suppose that they enj oy a sufficient share of happiness, of what­ ever kind it nlay be, to render life worth having. Nature by l11aking habit omnipo­ tent, and its effects hereditary, has fitted the Fuegian to the climate and the produc­ tions of his l11iserable country. 1 J

Darwin cannot cOll1prehend why these people would have left more hospitable conditions, "the fine regions of the north , " and live in a terrible wilderness and invent unique canoes. Yet he adll1its that their isolation has nlade them unique, "fitted" to their environnlent. For the nlonlent l)arwin abandons the metaphysi­ cal hierarchy of nlankind and accepts the idea of relative adaptation.

Labor, Community, and Nature's Chaos

I II

Rural life in Frost becomes a place of exile to build not only individual but also racial strength before engaging again with the city and society's ruck: Poetry is very, very rural-rustic. It stands as a reminder of rural life-as a resource, as a recourse. It might be taken as a symbol of man, taking its rise from individuality and seclusion-written for the person that writes and then going out into its social appeal and use. Just so the race lives best to itself-Jirst to itself, storinR strength in the more individual life if the country, oj the Jarm- then going to market and socializing in the industrial city. 1 4

Frost's rustics attempt to preserve their dignity by befuddling their interlocutors, displaying a cunning that betrays their lack of education. Education and, more generally, knowledge remain the issue in these poems, particularly an anxiety about who decides what should be known and who has the authority to enforce it. Frost harbored a democratic hatred of artificial aristocracies, but he also distrusted "the wisdom of the mob " : "Someone once asked me if I was for democracy or against it, and I could only say that I am so much of it that I didn't know. I have a touchiness about the subj ect of democracy, of America. It amounts to a touchiness. I know how much difficulty there is about democracy, and how much fun it is too. " 1 5 Speaking of the Soviet and American versions of egalitarianism, Frost wrote that the world "is being offered a choice between two kinds of democracy. Ours is a very ancient political growth, beginning at one end of the Mediterranean Sea and coming westward-tried in Athens, tried in Italy, tried in England, tried in France, coming all the way westward to us. A very long growth, a growth through trial and error, but always with the idea that there is some sort of wisdom in the mob. " 1 6 Frost obviously admires the evolutionary triumph of democracy, a "growth" that has succeeded through trial and error and has spread successfully through many nations . But, if democracy appeared an evolutionary success story of the Enlightenment, the egalitarian hold of "the mob " on the rise of the fitter troubled Frost deeply. "Damn Tocqueville, he condemned us to democracy, " Frost once told a congressional committee on the arts in America. Invoking his own version of the principle of natural selection, "passionate preference, " Frost argued against en­ forced egalitarianism and for a hierarchy of worthiness and for making discriminations: The boys say to nle lately, "Are you selective?" Am I selective? Would I prefer one to another? I say, "That's all I do. " And I 've been a very free selector, and this is all toward that, you know.

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Robert Frost and the ChallenRe �f DanlJill

You say, "He won the Pulitzer Prize, " you know. Everybody knows that n1eans sornething, but not too nluch. Maybe a better one got left out and so on. But it's got to go on. We've got to prefer. As I said, talking to S0l11e scientists lately, I said to them, "Have we conle up?" They said, "Yes, " rather reluctantly. They did not know whether we had COl1le up or not, but they said, "Yes . " And I said, "What brought u s up?" And they thought i t was more o r less accident, I guess . I said, " I think it's passionate preference. " Passionate preference. It's done in all ways-in the arts nlore than anywhere else . . . " 1 7

While admitting that mistakes are nlade, a selected meritocracy is necessary for art and culture. And he justifies art as being least democratic and most susceptible to the power of taste or passionate preference. The exercise of passionate prefer­ ence links the aesthetic and nloral donlains, but the question remains to what extent the aesthetic determined the ethical and moral. Frost was also aware that the passionate preference of individuals must meet the strong challenges of the environment, including other people and other creatures. The aesthetic domain's emphasis on instinctive passion and play seenlS superfluous in a world of practical demands . The challenge Dar­ win posed to the romantic Schillerian hopes of a reconciliation between the aesthetic and moral domains was stated succinctly in Santayana's book The Sense (�r Beauty. The aesthetic and nl0ral realnl parallel the distinctions between play and work, the ancient pastoral conflict of otium and labor. But in evolutionary terms play "is a sign of imperfect adaptation, " an "atrophy of human action, " and "proper to childhood. " In biological terms play seenlS useless or super­ fluous: We have here, then, an important elenlent of the distinction between aesthetic and n10ral values. It is the sanle that has been pointed to in the famous contrast between work and play. These terms may be used in different senses and their importance in moral classification differs with the nleaning attached to them. We nlay call everything play which is useless activity, exercise that springs from the p hysiological impulse to discharge the energy which the exigencies of life have called out. Work will then be all action that is necessary or useful for life. Evidently if work and play are thus objectively distinguished as useful and useless action, work is a eulogistic ternl and play a disparaging one. It would be better for us that all our energy should be turned to account, that none of it should be wasted in aimless nlotion. Play, in this sense, is a sign ofinlperfect adaptation. It is proper to childhood, when body and mind are not yet fit to cope with the environment, but it is unseemly in I1lanhood and pitiable in old age, because it I1larks an atrophy of human nature, and a failure to take hold of the opportunities of life. 1 H

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The world of work and socially defined moral commitment leaves the individual artist an unfulfilled potential neurotic. Play as " unseemly in nlan­ hood" reflects a dissatisfaction with feminized, parlor-roolll culture. Santayana's solution to this problem was to divorce the spiritual and the aesthetic from the material, a solution Frost found untenable: "All Santayana thinks is that allll0st all material basis for spirit can be done away with-not quite all: almost all virtue can be stated in terms of taste-not quite all. The spirit needs not person­ ality nor nationality nor any place of order at all. But it must have place, be it no lllore than chaos . It cannot be thought of in complete detachment . " 1 9 The spiritual yearnings of the individual must be expressed in material terms, and Frost's sense of the material world is connected always to place and environment, however chaotic. "The Tuft of Flowers" contains in embryo many of the problems that haunt Frost's greatest pastoral poetry; the tension between work and play, the recon­ ciliation of the individual and the community, and the problem of design and providence in events. It is Frost's most convincing assertion of belief in the common purpose of human labor, even though that purpose, as the speaker reveals, may rest beyond the intentions and wills of individuals. The poem takes up where Emerson's "The Rhodora" leaves off-j ustifying the existence of superfluous beauty and proclaiming a shaping "power" that attracts us to it. Frost's "tuft" is a metaphor for survival of beauty in waste as well as the utilitarian persistence of community out of a variety of isolated efforts . The speaker's sadness grows from an awareness of being a small, isolated part of an inevitable process of production. The mower selects what survives and what dies, and the speaker fears for his own lack of control and power in this process. He expresses a muted recognition of determined participation in a natural process, beyond the wills and intentions of individuals, that includes both mowing or the cutting of hay as well as the creatio n of form in the waste, left to the speaker who turns it. All of this labor appears to him as nothing more than utility, unable to fulfill an irreducible need for play and community. The speaker's first enthymeme posits a machinery using individuals as its instrument: " 'As all must be,' I said within my heart, / 'Whether they work together or apart.' " The speaker's resignation at this gray inevitability finds some relief and, ironically, confirmation in his observatio n of a butterfly. He reads the butterfly as an omen that has led him to a larger figure of human communion-the tuft. What is the butterfly actually doing? He proj ects onto it his own "bewilder­ ment," sadness about a loss of beauty and about purposeless waste. The butterfly does seek flowers for nectar and may be bewildered and disappointed by their disappearance:

1 14

Robert Frost and the Challen�e if Darwin But as I said it, swift there passed me by On noiseless \ving a bewildered butterfly, Seeking with menlories grown dim o'er night Some resting flower of yesterday's delight. And once I marked his flight go round and round, As where some flower lay \vithering on the ground. And then he flew as far as eye could see, And then on tremulous wing came back to me. I thought of questions that have no reply, And would have turned to toss the grass to dry; But he turned first, and led nly eye to look At a tall tuft of flowers beside a brook, A leaping tongue of bloonl the scythe had spared Beside a reedy brook the scythe had bared.

The speaker takes the butterfly's presence personally, as part of a comprehensible design instead of an accident. The butterfly, in his own pursuit of nectar, unwit­ tingly participates in the cross-pollination of flowers . If anything, the butterfly's "message" is that nature uses creatures as instruments in its process of cross­ fertilization. I ts activity unites individual pleasure and procreative necessity. The "leaping tongue of bloolTI , " like the "light tongues" of leaves in "Tree at My Window, " nlay or may not be saying s0111ething profound. Was it spared by the scythe deliberately or only as an oversight, a failure to c ontrol the land­ scape? Is its persistence an irony of agriculture, that some flowers become strong weeds because of the haying process? The presence of the tuft and the butterfly's attention to it may have nothing to do with any mysterious or occult power but only with a series of accidents . The speaker, however, insists on 111eaning, view­ ing the "mower in the dew" as having "spared" the flowers. But "meaning" resides not in any purpose of interpersonal communication nor even concern for the flowers but, rather, as a commonly understood expression of passionate preference, "sheer morning gladness at the brim. "20 This instinct to preserve the flowers expresses the lure of beauty as unconsciously sexual and beyond the sense of p urpose desired by the 111ind; it speaks only to irreducible passions: The nlower in the de\v had loved thenl thus, By leaving thenl to flourish, not for us, N or yet to draw one thought of ours to hinl, But from sheer nlorning gladness at the brim.

The speaker's opposition of "us" to the "n1ower" makes the mower sound like an absent deity or force behind both the cutting of hay and the blossoming of

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flowers . As an instrument of nature, his purposes are not monolithic but, instead, serve both to destroy and to allow growth. In a moment of extravagance that became increasingly rare in Frost, the speaker believes he "had lit upon, / Nevertheless, a message from the dawn, " that there is a common soul or motive in human life that transcends mere work. His conclusion that " 'Men work together,' I told him from the heart, / 'Whether they work together or apart,' " echoes the earlier statement of inevitability that " all must be" but adds some sentiment that common human understanding is actively involved in the way things are. But this instance of the heart-having reasons that reason cannot know leads not to faith but acceptance of an instinctual sense of necessity. The qualified optimism of this early lyric of A Boy 's Will ( 1 906) disinte­ grates to the skepticism of "The Strong Are Saying Nothing" ( 1 9 3 6) : "Men work alone, their lots plowed far apart," a dissonant echo of the earlier poem. The competing self-interests of individual and community do not appear to Frost to be reconciled by the invisible hand of utilitarian moralism but re­ main in conflict. No doubt the experiences of world war and economic de­ pression confirmed Frost's suspicion that the world is a tribal battlefield in which the unity of the species is called into question when practical concerns are at stake. "The Death of the Hired Man" is an elegy to a figure of the laborer as form maker who, despite his practical abilities, cannot survive independently in a world that worships certain levels of achievement and progress. The dialogue between the husband, Warren, and his wife, Mary, is about not only the limits of Silas's worth but also the extent of the human family and the failure of individual­ ism as anything other than ragged. Silas appears j ust as impractical as Harold Wilson, the young boy who once helped him and now teaches college. Warren, reluctantly though somewhat sympathetically, continues to remind Mary that making hay bunches is Silas's "one accomplishment. " The simile Warren uses for the Silas's bunches-"big birds' nests"-calls attention to a patient interest in the biologically nourishing as opposed to the more ambitious and urbane accomplishments of Warren, Harold, or Silas's banker brother. Silas, we learn, was "never . . . straining to lift himself, " and his hay bunches represent a n attempt at fusing the moral, practical, and aesthetic realms: ' I know, that's Silas' one accon1plishment. He bundles every forkful in its place, And tags and numbers it for future reference, So he can find and easily dislodge it In the unloading. Silas does that well. He takes it out in bunches like big birds' nests.

1 16

Robert Frost and the Challell�e �f Darwin You never see hiBl standing on the hay He's trying to lift, straining to lift hinlself.'

Nonetheless, Silas has outlived his usefulness, and Warren can do little for him. Unable to meet the practical den1ands of hired work, he becomes a creature on the verge of extinction, returning to the nest to die. Only "home" cannot be claimed readily without ll1eeting the delnands of labor and success. Even Mary regards him as being like a creature looking for shelter, but she would prefer to regard hon1e as something that all creatures deserve and do not have to earn: 'Honle,' he [Warren] Blocked gently. 'Yes, \vhat else but hOIne? It all depends on \vhat you Inean by hOlne. Of course he's nothing to us, any Inore Than was the hound that canle a stranger to us Out of the woods , worn out upon the trail .' ' Holne is the place \vhere, \vhen you have to go there, They have to take you in.' ' I should have called it S01l1ething you sOlneho\v haven't to deserve.'

This revelation creates further debate between the couple about the extent of honle and fanlily. The hired nlan bec on1es both the sphinx and the n1issing child in their marriage, and he poses the tacit question of the extent of the human fan1ily-"what binds us?"-echoing Cain's question "Am I my brother's keeper? " Warren wonders whether "Silas has better clain1 on us you think / Than on his brother? " Silas's return and death call attention to the lill1its of sYl1lpathy and COll1mitn1ent in a world that defines success in terms of either blood family or useful productivity. Warren has his needs and interests, as does Silas's brother; none of the111 include charity toward those who cannot survive. Despite Mary's 111ercy, their debate has little effect on Silas's recognition of his own demise and his return to this uncertain lair to die. The narrator of "Two Tra111ps in Mud Til11e" conveys his desire to 111ix work and play, love and need, even at the expense of the survival needs of drifting laborers. While he appears to argue for the importance of aesthetic experience through a c0111bination of work and play, his rhetoric masks frustration and violence: "The blows that a life of self-control / Spares to strike for the C0111n10n good / That day, giving a loose to 111y soul, / I spent on the unimportant wood." The "self-control" serves the " C0I111110n good," sparing it from the individual's violent self-interest. He adnlits that his restraint of individual will is in itself the

Labor, Conlnlunity, and Nature's Chaos

1 17

best thing for the common good, indicating his distrust of potentially violent self­ interest in all activity. A Freudian ethos of repression as necessary for civilization informs his moralism. He is aware that he "spends" thus in the activity of waste, his violent energy poured on "the unimportant wood. " The question remains, as Frost asked elsewhere, whether "strongly spent is synonymous with kept. " H e also adopts a progressive, even socialist, stance i n a disdain for a world of pure labor in which individuals are judged only by "their appropriate tool . " An imp ortant impetus for Marx's thought was the idea that a laborer would not be condemned for life to identification with his particular occupation. When Marx did regard Americans approvingly, it was because of their ability to hold a variety ofj obs over a lifetime and not become identified with a particular form of labor. Our narrator holds to this view but remains contemptuous of the two "tramps, " who need to chop wood for employment. The constraints of competition for limited resources in a D arwinian world make a socially progressive resolution of labor and leisure nearly impossible. The narrator's association of the " hulking tramps" with "lumber camps" represents a disdain for the mob as well as doubts about the worth of "striking blows" for "the common good. " Unwilling to "yield" to the "logic" of the tramps, he reduces them to the Yahoos of Gulliver's Travels; coming " out of the mud," these laborers appear to him as primitive, barely human creatures. Their seemingly friendly greeting of " Hit them hard! " is viewed, perhaps correctly, with the utmost suspicion, a masquerade of self-interest. Conceding their need for employment, "pay, " to be the "better right, " we also sense that the narrator isn't interested in logic but, rather, in his idealistic pursuit of unifying "love and need." And he is not as interested in a hierarchy of rights as he is in maintaining a hierarchy of being in which he occupies a higher position than the tramps. The ideal always confronts the " I -deal" motivating it as well as the threat of the claims and needs of others. This moment balances precariously at "mud time, " a time of unstable transition from winter to spring, in which the reflective pools of water can still harbor violence and " [T]he lurking frost in the earth . . . will steal forth" and "show on the water its crystal teeth. " The narrator wants the challenge, though, to make play somehow merge with the mortal stakes of survival. 2 1 War and conflict were seen i n Frost's time as the source o f evolutionary development and necessary, oddly enough, to the moral development of a people, since warfare meant cooperation. But a country of great warriors was unlikely to become one of utopian pacifists. William James, along with Teddy Roosevelt, Treitschke, and Admiral Thayer Mahan, was preaching the virtues of war and nationalism as the threat of immigrant forces became greater. James was a

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pacifist who sought a way to preserve the virtues produced by warfare without its violence. In "The Moral E quivalent of War" ( 1 9 1 0) he advocated a progressive social unity of conflicting classes working together against "nature . " James la­ ments that modern man has lost the demands of combat that made civilization possible through the course of evolution. Unfair class distinctions, the fact that some must suffer hardships and "campaigning" by the accidents of birth while others have the carefree life of"unnlanly ease, " could be remedied by a common struggle against nature : Let me illustrate nly idea nl0re concretely. There is nothing to make indignant in the nlere fact that life is hard, that nlen should toil and suffer pain. The planetary conditions once and for all are such, and we can stand it. But that so many men, by nlere accidents of birth and opportunity, should have a life of nothing else but toil and pain and hardness and inferiority ill1posed upon thenl , should have no vacation, while others natively deserving never get any taste of this campaigning life at all­ this is capable of arousing indignation in reflective minds . It may end by seeming shanleful to all of us that S0111e of us have nothing but campaigning, and others nothing but unmanly ease. If now-and this is nly idea-there were, instead of nlilitary conscription a conscription of the whole youthful population to form for a certain nUlnber of years a part of the arnlY enlisted against Nature, the injustice would tend to be evened out, and nUll1erous other goods to the commonwealth would follow. The ll1ilitary ideals of hardihood and discipline would be wrought into the growing fibre of the people; no one would renlain blind as the luxurious classes now are blind, to Il1an 's relations to the globe he lives on, and to the pernlanently sour and hard foundations of his higher life. 2 2

James revealed his concern with the effects on culture of a fenlinized leisure class unfamiliar with the benefits of nature 's struggle. Accounts of our primitive origins fueled a suspicion that culture had become a neurasthenic and "un­ manly" response to life, and Frost, too, wanted his poetry to be "play for mortal stakes, " "love and need. " Unlike Janles, however, Frost remained skeptical of a society united against nature. Frost was no pacifist, regarding nature as a battleground that could not be escaped or transcended by nloral equivalents . Competition and conflict defined limitations as much as they stirred the possibilities of progress. In a letter to Louis Mertins, Frost outlined an anthropology that stresses war as the law of develop­ ment. But what creates war? Not nlere subsistence but, instead, a vision that inspires the growth of a civilization and brings it into conflict with other civiliza­ tions . He enlbraces Darwin's anthropology, which stresses war, but adds that "the arts" are a "nl0ving spirit," which may be at the bottonl of all struggles: I 've never been a pacifist. Civilization has never COlne by that method either. Just trace it fron1 the Stone Age-tribal wars-national wars-international wars-

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all man's history has been a survival effort. Man is a lazy cuss-hard to stir him up. But, with or without reason, he's been stirred somehow to climb out of the swamps, and it's been wars that stirred him. The crusades, the knightly days, the Norse sea fighters-on back to the earliest rise of civilization in Mesopotamia and Egypt­ everything turned on war. It was the explosion inside the man who had a vision­ big vision-that made war-war in all ages-and that has clarified the atmosphere, j ust as it clarified man's thinking. It's a lot more than Darwin's survival of the fittest. It comes down at last to a definition of what's fit-fitter-fittest. Who's to j udge? I don't want anybody to think I ' m a warmonger. Wars ain't everything. The arts­ you know-the arts . Ever stop to think what has come down to us in America-of the great American past of which the white race had no part? Indian, Aztecs, Toltecs? You've picked up Indian arrows-arrowheads-maybe a stone ax or two. Not much else of Indian artifacts left here in the United States. That's because, aside from a few ruins north of the Rio Grande, the only civilisation the white invaders found under Cortez in Mexico (my first poem was about it) was that of the Aztecs and Toltecs. Their ruins are grand. They show a moving spirit of somebody great. Wars come and go. Civilization leaves tracks . You can follow these tracks from Cambodia to Delphi, from Northern Africa to England. All of the past to be looked for in the ruins .23

Frost's great anxiety here, as in the drama of such poems as "Directive, " "The Wood-Pile," and " A Missive Missile, " is about what message can be preserved in or recovered from the ruins of a civilization. If creative vision is the source of art in a civilization, Frost also sees it as the source of conflict, of the beginning of competition and warfare which threatens to obliterate the achievement in the dust of changing forms of history. Frost reminded Mertins that his first published poem, "La Noche Triste," was inspired by his reading in Prescott's monumental book The Conquest �f Mexico and Peru . The work was also inspiring to Darwin, who read it in 1 849. For both Frost and D arwin it established the immensity of the achievements in civilization of the Azetcs and Incas as well as the tragedy of their disappearance at the hands of the white invaders . As Gillian Beer has pointed out, the work is culturally relativistic in the way it lauds the Aztecs for two hundred pages and admires the conquest of CorteS. 2 4 There is a strong tension in Prescott, in Darwin's The Voyage of the Beagle, and in Frost between the forms that nature and culture produce and the grandeur of the forces of change and conquest, the backbone of the law of evolution. Frost, like D arwin, had a tremendous sympa­ thy with the underdog. In a later poem entitled "The Vindictives, " based on Prescott, the conquered Inca prince finds a way to torture his conquerors by depriving them of their obj ect of greed: Let thenl die of unsatisfied greed, Of unsatisfied love of display,

1 20

Robert Frost and the Challet�!Ze
Of unsatisfied love of the high, Unvulgar, unsoiled, and ideal. Let their trappings be taken away. Let thenl suffer starvation and die Of being brought do\vn to the real .

The rhyming of ideal and real underscores Frost's persistent hatred of the former as a delusion. Frost's appreciation of war and conflict as central elements in human history is not a misreading or bastardization of Darwin or social D arwinism. D arwin's own anthropology embraces the conquest of tribes and continued warfare as a central fact of his vision . I t is precisely the fact of war that makes teleology in human or natural history an impossibility. The observation of tribal conquest as a maj or source of change appears as early as The Voyage if the Beagle, in which Darwin makes clear his belief that war an10ng human tribes is a "mysterious" agency of the warfare of nature: Besides these several evident causes of destruction, there appears to be sonle more mysterious agency generally at work. Wherever the European has trod, death seelllS to pursue the aboriginal. We lllay look to the wide extent of the Alllericas, Polynesia, the Cape of Good Hope, and Australia, and we find the sallle result. Nor is it the white lllan alone that thus acts the destroyer; the Polynesian of Malay extraction has, in parts of the East Indian archipelago, thus driven before him the dark-coloured native. The varieties of nlan seem to act on each other in the same way as different species of aniIl1als, the stronger always extirpating the weaker. 25

Darwin discusses how the "struggle for existence" includes creature versus en­ vironment as well as creature versus creature. But he alternately uses the term "warfare of nature " throughout his writing and never tnitigates his observation that the strong "varieties of nlan " overtake the weaker. The victory is neither good or bad, but regarded as a fact of existence.26 "The Vanishing Red" depicts the ahnost sadistic, unreasonable killing of "the last Red Man in Acton" by the owner of a mill . The Indian is identified by his color, and the dranla suggests the larger fact of one race exterminating another not for a reason but because such action is what is "done . " The machin­ ery by which he is killed suggests nletaphorically the machinery-not neces­ sarily weapons of war-by which race exterminates race: He is said to have been the last Red Man I n Acton. And the Miller is said to have laughed­ If you like to call such a sound a laugh.

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But he gave no one else a laugher's license. For he turned suddenly grave as if to say, 'Whose business, -if I take it on myself, Whose business-but why talk round the barn?When it's j ust that I hold with getting a thing done with.' You can't get back and see it as he saw it. It's too long a story to go into now. You 'd have to have been there and lived it. Then you wouldn't have looked on it as j ust a matter Of who began it between the two races.

The narrator coldly refrains from j udging the Miller's actions-historical reconstruction does not explain cause or give adequate reason or place blame. The Miller's language is abbreviated; we are not allowed into his reasoning. In fact, the main points of his expression and mood are described as a laugh but reduced to the subhuman by qualification-" [I]f you like to call such a sound a laugh . " And the Miller's laugh is in response to "some guttural exclamation" coming from the Red Man that " disgusted" him "physically" because he regards the "Red Man" as transgressing some inherent sense of his own rights and superiority: Some guttural exclamation of surprise The Red Man gave in poking about the mill Over the great big thumping shuffling millstone Disgusted the Miller physically as coming From one who had no right to be heard from. ' Come, John,' he said, 'you want to see the wheel-pit?'

The Miller lures John to his death, angered by his curiosity at his machinery and property. He wants to show him how life really works and the wheel pit and the water, like "frantic fish," beconle analogies for natural processes. A general struggle in nature between creatures similar but different-salmon and sturgeon-one, red and known to die after spawning, and the other, white, known for its longevity. The wheel pit is a metaphor for a machinery that inexplicably allows one creature to extirpate another: He took hinl down below a cramping rafter, And showed him, through a manhole in the floor, The water in desperate straits like frantic fish, Salmon and sturgeon, lashing with their tails. Then he shut down the trap door with a ring in it That j angled even above the general noise,

I22

Robert Frost and the ChallenRe oj Darwin

And canle upstairs alone-and gave that laugh, And said sonlething to a 111an with a nleal-sack That the 111an with the 111eal-sack didn't catch-then . Oh, yes, he sho\ved John the \vheel-pit all right.

Terrifying laughter accompanies the extermination of race by race, driven by nothing more than one group's inherent sadism, born of a belief in their superior rights . I n Darwin's thought race became a term interchangeable with species as well as nation and tribe. His anthropology, however problematic, underpins his overall view of nature, as in the subtitle of 011 the Origil1 oj Species, "The Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life. " Though racial warfare is really the essence of the scheme, what constitutes racial "fitness" is always uncertain, left entirely to the caprice of his n10st in1portant principle, "the conditions of existence. " Development and progress becolne n1eaningless abstractions imposed on a highly unstable dralna: It has been urged by several \vriters that as high intellectual powers are advantageous to a nation, the old Greeks, \vho stood S0111e grades higher in intellect than any race that has ever existed, ought to have risen, if the power of natural selection were real, still higher in the scale, increased in nU111ber, and stocked the whole of Europe. Here we have the tacit assunlption, so often nlade with respect to corporeal structures, there is S0111e innate tendency towards developll1ent in ll1ind and bo dy. But develop­ nlent of all kinds depends on 111any concurrent favourable circumstances. Natural selection acts only in a tentative nlanner. Individuals and races 111ay have acquired certain indisputable advantages, and yet have perished from failing other characters . 27

I ntellectuality is only useful insofar as it serves propagation and tribal suc­ cess. More highly endowed does not correspond to an absolute scale of perfec­ tion but to better suitability for certain conditions: "Progress seems to depend on many concurrent favourable conditions, far too complex to be followed out. " 2 � Ideals of success are always delin1ited by environments and circumstances that produce a supersession of tentatively dominant groups. In "Two Tramps in Mud Tin1e," "The Death of the Hired Man," "The Ax-Helve," "Mending Wall, " and "The Mountain" Frost plays out the questions of whether intellect, artistic proclivity, or n10ral syn1pathy are the best or even the dominant forces in the survival and success of individuals or groups. Certain kinds of "intelligence" may be useless or a hazardous developn1ent in the gan1e of survival. Just like the b oy in "At Woodward's Gardens" presun1ing on his intellect, he risks having his inven­ tion usurped by the n10nkeys in the cage.

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The Inescap able Primal Father

The tension between human invention, "originality, " and the delimiting effects of the law of conditions forms an important p art of Frost's mythos. He provided his most extensive statement on this vision in a symposium on "The Future of Man," sponsored by the Seagram Corporation in 1 9 5 9 . The other participants included the evolutionary biologist Julian Huxley and the anthropologist Ashley Montagu (Bertrand Russell also took p art) . Frost later told his editor, Stanley B urnshaw, that he "started off with a statement so they'd have an idea of how I was taking the future-give them a hint of my thought about science and D arwin, eugenics, even Karl Marx. "29 Though he made the statement late in his life, it reveals preoccupations that inform his pastoralism from the b eginning. Though it has received virtually no critical attention, it is clear from the type­ script drafts among Frost's papers that a great deal of care and thought went into it. Frost challenged the popular idea of evolution as linear progress and posits, instead, a vision of perpetual conflict and competition between nation-tribe­ and race. The historical context is the appearance of atomic weaponry and the arms race, a vicious circle in which war and technological progress spur and limit each other. Frost makes fun of eugenics and other fantasies of scientific control that have faith in the perfectibility of man and the possibility of arresting nature 's limited dialectic. Ages succeed one another without appreciable change or im­ provement in the underlying form of the drama. Success in one war does not mean success in the next. More important, conflicts within the society preclude stability of power. Human history is its own tree (a figure parallel to Darwin's use of the Tree of Life to depict the nonteleological development of natural history) , which blossoms through sexual struggle until eventual extinction. He sees all service as waste, all originality and freedom in human activity as limited by law and social conflict: It's the word " challenge " that interests me, of course-the challenge of the future to the prophet-and I am the prophet. I am going to tell you about the future-I'm not going to advocate the future ; I ' m going to tell you what it will be. The standing challenge-the great challenge-is of lllan's originality to his law and order, to his governlllent. And that will always be the challenge-that of nlan's energy and daring and originality to his law and order. That means that looking ahead into the future with llly eyes shut- I see governlllent paired with government for the championship of its era-to see after whom the period will be named, in this era for instance, us or the Russ . Unfortunately, we haven't a very good nanle for

1 24

Robert Frost and the Clzallell}!e �f Darwin ourselves . All ll1y South Alnerican friends object to our calling ourselves America­ we shall have to call ourselves "us," to rhynle with " Russ . " Add t o that, that there \vill ahvays b e a n issue for the two po\vers to pair off on, and the Lord is the Great Providec H e'll provide the issue. There 's always been an issue, a great issue, a grave issue, like the one between Persia and Greece, Rome and Carthage, Christendonl and Islanl-for every period. We see a great issue today. I never can bear to blackguard an eneIny; I like hin1 to be an intelligible enenlY, a worthy antagonist. Next, are we going on to be another kind of people? Young people of our day, in studying anthropology and listening to the anthropologists, think it's such an anlusing distance between the Inonkeys and us that it will only be another anlusing distance fron1 us to the supernlan . It's a field day for all comic strip teasers, you see, every nlan can nlake his o\vn cOInic strip. Let nle tell you about that-I know just what's going to happen or not happen. Our self-consciousness is tern1inal-there's nothing beyond us. Life in us has reached a self-consciousness that terminates the growth . I saw a little while ago a list of all the thoughts Inan has had-published in Chicago, I think. There weren't over a hundred or two. I looked for the word evolution, and there it was. I looked for the word growth, the plain word growth, and there it wasn't. Apparently in Chicago growth is not an idea but I take it that evolution COlnes under the head of growth. Only it has a strange illusory way of Inaking you think it goes on forever. But all growth is limited-the tree of life is lilnited like a lnaple tree or an oak tree-they all have a certain height, and they all have a certain life-length. And our tree, the tree Yggdrasil, has reached its growth. It doesn't have to fall down because it's stopped gro\ving. It will go on blossoming and having its seasons-I'd give it another hundred or two hundred million years. Make that anything you please. It'll go on leaving out and bloon1ing into successions of the doubleness, I foresee, j ust like the doubleness of the sexes. There'll be two parties always to it, sonle way. I hope that this tree will be self-fertilizing-I guess I hadn't thought of that-and it doesn't need another tree beside it, and in itself has all the doubleness I ask, good and evil, two sexes, one of them good and the other evil. I wish the young people would relieve thetnselves of the responsibility of attending to the future of our height. There's nothing coming beyond us. The tree Yggdrasil has reached its gro\vth . Then I want to say another thing about the god who provides the great issues. He's a god of \vaste, n1agnificent waste. And waste is another nanle for generosity of not always being intent on our own advantage, nor too importunate even for a better world. We pour out a libation to hinl as a syn1bol of the waste we share in­ participate in. Pour it on the ground and you 've wasted it; pour it into yourself and you 've doubly wasted it. But all in the cause of generosity and relaxation of self­ interest. But I think I 've said enough about it. There are nlany details that I had in nlind, but I don't \vant to be too long about it. The point is that the challenge will always be there between nlan's originality and his law and order, his government. I some­ tilnes think the scientists have got theillseives scared; they're afraid they'll run away

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with themselves they are s o original. They needn't worry; the executives will take care of them. 30

Frost remythologizes Darwin's "Tree of Life" into the tree "Y ggdrasil, " its roots extending up and down in a nonlinear cycle of growth and destruction linked to the ambiguous gift of knowledge, sexual conflict, and self-con­ sciousness provided and circumscribed by a morally questionable, unprovidential god who provides (recalling grimly the God who would "provide" the sacrificial lamb in the story of Abraham and Isaac) only "issues" for war. Frost's " God" might as well be no god at all; the idea of a beginning and end to creation is undermined by the self-sustaining tree. A. Hunter D upree has argued that Dar­ win's organic metaphor of " the Tree of Life " to describe evolution undermines Judeo-Christian creation myths: "The fall of the design argument had taken out the Creator and with it both Genesis as scriptural evidence and nature as evi­ dence of God. The metaphor of the tree of life that evolution supplied in its place was finally strong enough as a metaphor to provide the Western world with an alternative creation myth. " 3 1 Darwin eradicated the great chain of being and replaced it with the Tree of Life. Creatures at "the top " of the tree remained so temporarily, only to land among the dead branches at the bottom. D arwin eventually realized that the linear hierarchical conception of the tree needed alteration. No species occupies a knowable hierarchical rank on the Tree of Life.32 But his concept of natural selection implies some kind of agency that shapes random variations into more perfect forms . Complete purposelessness is not p art of Darwin's formulation; otherwise, fitness is merely a tautology and selection a dream. Stephen Jay Gould has argued that Darwin had an independent criterion of fitness and good design, even if he did not advocate a large-scale cosmic process of evolution that meant progress.33 Frost refuses to extend the idea or metaphor of growth too far beyond the observable fact of the " growing thing. " While nature might have reached its growth in humanity, it is not likely that through technology humanity can extend its presence or its consciousness . He is critical of the romantic idea that human consciousness and design, the idea of man as artist, can approximate the artistry of God, thereby allowing human technology to mime the process of development and control the future. Of course, it is a highly self-conscious creature who is aware of his conception of God or nature as being a proj ection. Frost holds to a reality principle that the world is governed by a God of waste while at the same time suggesting that any conception of God or the universe might be only a product of a self-consciousness that is "terminal . " Frost's vision o f human history also undermines the fruitfulness o f searching

1 26

Robert Frost and the ChalienRe if Darwin

for the origins of conternporary civilization in the activities of primal fathers, religious rituals , and homeopathic nlagic. In the opening of The Golden Bough, Frazer presents the threatened irnage of the King of Nemi. It is an office of both priesthood and murder in the pastoral sanctuary of the great tree around which "a grim figure might be seen to prowl. In his hand he carried a drawn sword, and he kept peering warily about hinl as if at every instant he expected to be set upon by some enemy. He was priest and murderer; and the man for whom he looked was sooner or later to murder hinl and hold the priesthood i n his stead. Such was the rule of the sanctuary. A candidate for the priesthood could only succeed to office by slaying the priest, and having slain hinl, he retained his office till he was slain by a stronger or craftier. " 3 4 Frost's own mythology of perpetual conflict engendered by the tree Y ggdrasil seems similar to Frazer's. But Frazer's priesthood and its murderous process of succession can be attributed to the "primitive mind" ; knowledge based on homeopathic nlagic and murders among primi tive men can be tran­ scended, their " errors" corrected. But if our science reveals that the process does not begin with human ritual and error but is the work of an inescapable God, a fight promoter and weapons provider, then the fantasy of improvement vanishes. The Darwinian world is one in which the laws of growth, warfare, and extinc­ tion remain the ultimate reality in history, a vision that reduces contemporary science to yet another priesthood, technology to a series of weapons, and moder­ nity to j ust another episode of power in history's blood-soaked cycle. I n "A Never Naught Song" Frost uses the organic metaphor of the tree to describe an evolution based on nlaterial causes. All "thought" is immanent i n a world with inherent limitations of form: Matter was begun­ And in fact complete, One and yet discrete To conflict and pair. Everything was there E very single thing Waiting was to bring, Clear from hydrogen All the way to men. I t is all the tree I t will ever be, Bole and branch and root Cunningly nlinute.

Frost added later that he "would go on from there to say that people think that life is a result of certain atonlS conling together, instead of being the cause that

Labor, Community, and Nature's Chaos

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brings the atoms together, " and felt that his own toying with the concept o f life as a final cause was an " extravagance. "35 Frost's concept of a poem that "begins i n delight and ends in wisdom" contains unconsciously its e n d in its beginning: " I t has a n outcome that though unforseen was predestined from the first image o f the original mood-and indeed from the very mood. "36 B u t Frost would not hold with Bergson's progressive and optimistic evolutionism of transcendent intelligence: " Life in its entirety, regarded as a creative evolution, is something analogous [to intelligence] ; it transcends finality, if we understand by finality the realization of an idea conceived or conceivable in advance. "37 In reaching its growth up to man, the tree Y ggdrasil does not allow for much originality on the p art of man to alter or transcend that growth. I n criticizing eugenics, Frost denigrates the Lamarckian notion that function creates form. Form is determined by the limitations inherent in the material. Those limits, both internal and external, are what Darwin meant by the term conditions if existence. Simone Weil put it succinctly in A nalysis if Oppression that "Biology o nly started to be a science on the day when Darwin replaced this principle [Larmarck's form-follows-function] by the conditions of existence. "3 8 " Law" in this way c hallenges " originality. " Frost admired Marx's insights about the reality of class struggle, though he regarded all classes as equally bad and each capable of abusing power. Marx's messianic utopianism also troubled Frost in its faith that man could create his own culture, which would transcend nature and lead to some form of social perfection. The scientists, the inventors, would inevitably suffer from conflicts with rival nations and from the political conflicts within their own society-the control of the executives. Weil provided one of the clearest statements of this kind of criticism of Marxism: Thus it is that man escapes to a certain extent from the caprices of blind nature only by handing himself over to the no less blind caprices of the struggle for power. This is never truer than when man reaches-as in our case-a technical development sufficiently advanced to give him mastery over the forces of nature; for, in order that this may be so, co-operation has to take place on such a vast scale that the leaders find they have to deal with a mass of affairs which lie utterly beyond their capacity to control. As a result, humanity finds itself as much the plaything of the forces of nature, in the new form technical progress has given them, as it ever was in primitive times; we have had, are having, and will continue to have bitter experience of this . 39

Nature in Weil and in Frost cannot be escaped: technology extends its laws of conflict, struggle, and limitation. Huxley provided a similar caveat in Evolution and Ethics through his metaphor of the colonized garden, in which all colonizers

128

Rohert Frost

a1ld

the

ClzallellJ?e
were constantly under threat frol11 the already existing indigenous peoples and conditions. Frost's God provides the source of conflict and the means of defense; boundaries create the individual and protect him from others. In "Triple Bronze" Frost defined life not as pervasive but as an exceptional, individuating outgrowth of the non organic, n1aterial world. Inorganic matter predominates, and life becomes an exception to it. Frost takes on the grand assumption of modern biology that life is a precarious, sn1all oddity and not the predominant fact of the universe. As Hans Jonas has put it so well, "the lifeless has become the knowable par excellence and is for that reason also considered the true and o nly foundation of reality. It is the 'natural' as well as the original state of things . Nor only in tern1S of relative quantity but also in tenns of ontological genuineness, nonlife is the rule, life the puzzling exception in physical existence. " 4 0 No essences exist but for the ten1porary and somewhat arbitrary surfaces of b ound­ aries. An individual's "hide, " his barriers or "walls, " and even his comll1unities or "nations" are a progession of defensive growths against this infinite. The need for these barriers is j ustified ironically by an "infinite" presull1ably created by the sall1e "Powers" that "provide" his defenses. The I nfinite's being so \vide Is the reason the Powers provide For inner defense nly hide. For next defense outside I nlake nlyself this til11e Of wood or granite or linle A wall too hard for crinle Either to breach or clinlb. Then a nunlber of us agree On a national boundary. And that defense l11akes three Between too much and 111e.

The group forll1s a tentative, non1inal "null1ber of us, " a collective stripped of essences and certain boundaries. But the final entity that counts is "me," and the group serves to extend the interest of the individual. Bronze suggests the bronze skin of the savage, bronze weapons, and the bronze age, one particularly noted for war betwee n nations. Darwin saw the eventual success of a species as part of its ability to migrate but also to locate within boundaries and barriers and to develop differences before being mixed. The isolated development of an individual group is neces-

Labor, Community, and Nature's Chaos

1 29

sary before it can "seize" on new places. This sounds like the virtues of training an army or team, selected from many " competitors, " before sending it out to combat: The dissimilarity of the inhabitants of different regions may be attributed to nlodi­ fication through natural selection, and in a quite subordinate degree to the direct influence of different physical conditions. The degree of dissimilarity will depend on the migration of the more dominant forms of life from one region into another having been effected with more or less ease, at periods more or less remote ;-on the nature and number of inlmigrants; -and on their action and reaction, in their mutual struggles for life;-the relation of organism to organism being, as I have already often remarked, the most important of all relations . Thus the high inlpor­ tance of barriers come into play by checking migration; as does time for the slow process of modification through natural selection. Wide-ranging species, abounding in individuals , which have already triumphed over many competitors in their own widely extended homes will have the best chance of seizing on new places, when they spread into new countries.4 1

Groups are bound by their environment. Within groups struggles in "the relation of organism to organism" and among individuals who "triumphed over many competitors in their own widely ranging homes" lead to the survival, develop­ ment, and expansion of a species. Frost's own view of p ersonal development is that it parallels national development-first within boundaries followed by a tentative crossing of boundaries-and is commensurate with a strong nationalism, which he con­ sidered an extension of individual identity, order, and strength: I have been where I came near getting up and walking out on the people who thought they had to talk against nations, against nationalism, in order to curry favor with internationalism. Their metaphors are all mixed up . . . . That kind of bad thinking springs fronl a source we all know. I should want to say anyone like that: "Look! First I want to be a person. And I want you to be a person, and then we can be as interpersonal as you please. We can pull each other's noses-do all sorts of things . But, first of all, you have got to have the personality.42

Frost goes on, changing the basic metap hor of the primacy of individuals to the primacy of distinct colors on the painter's palette. It is noteworthy, though, that "the work of art," the mixing of colors , is the place of " conquest" : I should like to use another metaphor on them. I want my palette on my thunlb or my chair, all clean, pure, separate colors . Then I will do the mixing on the canvas. The canvas is where the work of art is, where we make the conquest. But we want all nations to be separate, pure, distinct, things as separate as we can make them; and then in our thoughts, in our arts, and so on, we can do what we please about it.43

I 30

Robert Frost and the Challenge oj Danllin

On Frost's own canvases individuals either "pull each other's noses"-belligerent play-or engage in or threaten some form of conquest as they cross or confront boundaries. Morality for Frost consists in recognizing ethical limits as inextricably re­ lated to biological limits . "The Cow in Apple Time," a georgie, becomes a parable of the Fall, the disastrous consequences of ignoring boundaries and walls, the responsibility of staying within one's own garden: S0111ething inspires the only cow of late To 111ake no more of a wall than an open gate, And think no more of wall-builders than fools. Her face is flecked with ponlace and she drools A cider syrup. Having tasted fruit, She scorns a pasture withering to the root. She runs from tree to tree where lie and sweeten The windfalls spiked with stubble and worll1-eaten. She leaves thenl bitten when she has to fly. She bellows on a knoll against the sky. Her udder shrivels and the nlilk goes dry.

The temptation to j unlp the wall is fueled by a mysterious "something" that appears perfectly natural. But walls are necessary for cows whose susceptibility to this something leaves their udders shriveled. This is a strong rebuke to Thoreau's desire for " extra-vagance, " to speak and be without bounds. The metaphoric implications of the poenl are terrifying; cows as females driven by desire and failing to nlaintain the interests of domestic nourishment. But who are the "wall­ builders?" Fronl the perspective of the cows they are like limiting gods, the powers of "Triple Bronze. " The something that inspired the cow builds and breaks down walls in "Mending Wall. " The narrator of this p oenl presents himself as an enlightened altruist attempting to persuade "an old-stone savage armed" that walls are un­ natural. The conflict between saying " Something there is that doesn't love a wall" and the competing "Good fences make good neighbors" frames the amoebaean eclogue. John Lynen has argued that the view of the speaker repre­ sents surrender to " natural forces," presumably the idea that " nature" doesn't love walls or bour.. d aries .44 But, read in the context of other Frost poems, both sides represent complementary aspects of nature. Mending describes the activity of repair in which both men engage in perpetuu111 and modifies wall in a way that suggests its ability to heal a division. They repair the wall but also "re-pair, " like cells, in an antagonistic and reluctant act of labor that the speaker cannot abandon. As noted in the last chapter, Frost's

Labor, Community, and Nature's Chaos

131

response to a call for an epigram for a United Nations monument, "From I ron," revealed his sense of the inevitability of conflict and of the human as p art of a continuum, not morally separate from the rest of nature : " Nature within her inmost self divides / To trouble men with having to take sides . " Frost's comment on this epigram acknowledges its debt to biology and tells us something about "Mending Wall" : "All life is cellular. We live by the breaking down of cells and the building up of new cells. Change is constant and unavoidable. That is the way it is with human beings and with nations, so why deplore it?"45 Despite the apparent differences in what the two men say, an unstated code exists that keeps them p erpetuating their dialogue and wall building. The wall, like the tuft of flowers in the earlier poem, serves as a mysterious sphinx, quite literally that which binds, bringing humans together in work and play while also keeping them separate. The speaker ironically lets his neighbor know when spring mending time comes around; presumably, mending time means talk time, and our speaker enj oys the give-and-take. He also seems anxious, like the speaker of "The Tuft of Flowers" or in "The Literate Farmer and the Planet Venus, " to bring his neighbor to a position of equality. As in "Revelation , " this speaker feels that "all who hide too well away / Must speak and tell us where they are. " We also find, through a curious aside, that the speaker becomes angry at hunters who destroy the wall. In addition to the something (perhaps, j okingly, "frost") , the work of hunters is " another thing" that knocks the wall down. Is this human or natural, or is the distinction itselfsomething that can only be j ustified by nominal boundaries? Does another connote a qualitatively different force or simply an additional one?: The work of hunters is another thing: I have come after them and made repair Where they have left not one stone on a stone, But they would have the rabbit out of hiding, To please the yelping dogs . . . .

The human world is as much responsible for breaking down walls as the nonhu­ man world. The purpose of the hunters is also curious-not to kill the rabbit but to "have the rabbit out of hiding / To please the yelping dogs . " This sounds like a metaphor for those who would expose creatures, not unlike Frost's "Drumlin Woodchuck," who attempt to defend themselves from attack. The "yelping dogs" sound like the mob that Frost refers to when he speaks of democracy. The speaker expresses sympathy for those who would keep their individuality and defend themselves against the onslaught of the mob, or collectivity. And the speaker, who has presented himself as an opponent of walls, is the one who goes

132

Rohert Frost

and the Clzallel�{!e (?f Darwin

after the hunters for knocking down the stones. The image of the hunters provides an ironic contrast to the work of the speaker and his antagonist. By the speaker's own admission, their work is "j ust another kind of outdoor game, " play without a true object, ritual conflict without nleaning. Like the narrator of "Two Tranlps in Mud Time, " the speaker of "Mending Wall" reduces his own activity to mere play and his antagonist to a less than human "old-stone savage arnled," stone-bearing and stone-age. The difference between the speaker and his neighbor is that the neighbor "will not go behind his father's saying, " a wonderful metaphor that suggests that words are walls that one must " go behind" to understand their origins and reconsider their validity for a new circumstance. But his failure to do this gives the speaker the opportunity for his competing mantra. Ironically, good fences do indeed make good neighbors, creating the basis for communication as well as a necessary limit. The " old-stone savage" has the final say, his words conveying a deeper reality than the narrator's, one in which "goodness" blends the moral and aesthetic, work and play, survival and beauty. Beneath the conflict of "sayings" in "Mending Wall" there is a shared reality of deeds and a tacit understanding. The narrator would like to see himself as superior to the "savage " who threatens violence, but we cannot readily identify Frost with that narrator. In the "The Code" and "The Mountain" there is a fundamental question of whether different cultures have produced completely different modes of understanding or codes and whether these differences reflect a hierarchy of human worth. Is saying "good fences make good neighbors" really a form of barbarianism, or does it reflect a powerful understanding of the nature of the world? Frost assumes that the world is by nature violent and that order and cooperation anl0ng conlmunities are tentative. "The Code" dramatizes the way a common natural understanding exists among men despite the apparent differences created by class and origin. But that understanding involves coopera­ tion only to certain limits before the violence of individual pride manifests itself. "The Code" begins with a precarious balance of sun, cloud, and sudden light­ ning like a "dagger, " images that parallel the uncertainty and potential violence anl0ng a group of farmers laboring in a meadow: There were three in the meadow by the brook Gathering up windrows, piling cocks of hay, With an eye always lifted toward the west Where an irregular sun-bordered cloud Darkly advanced with a perpetual dagger Flickering across its bosom. Suddenly One helper, thrusting pitchfork in the ground,

Labor, Community, and Nature's Chaos

133

Marched himself off the field and home. One stayed. The town-bred farmer failed to understand.

A "town-bred" farmer fails to comprehend why encouraging another farmer "to take pains" in cocking the hay results in his walking off the j ob angry. The dagger of lightning parallels his thrown pitchfork, a tool that could also beconle a weapon. D espite its popular iconography, there is nothing devilish about the pitchfork; it is one of those instruments by which inevitable and natural violence will find its way into human affairs . I n "The Flood" Frost plays on the way tools and weapons both become the points of outlet for "blood" violence. Bloodletting is not the work of the devil but is as natural as the power of water. As the title echoes the Biblical account of God's wrath, the poem suggests that the immanent God of natural events is an amoral fight promoter: Blood has been harder to dam back than water. Just when we think we have it impounded safe Behind new barrier walls (and let it chafe !) , It breaks away in some new kind of slaughter. We choose to say it is let loose by the devil; But power of blood itself releases blood. It goes by might of being such a flood H eld high at so unnatural a level. It will have outlet, brave and not so brave. Weapons of war and implements of peace Are but the points at which it finds release. And now it is once nlore the tidal wave That when it has swept by leaves summits stained. Oh, blood will out. It cannot be contained.

Civility and social order cannot contain the force of "blood" that will erupt in apocalyptic destruction. Blood is also a metaphor for race and for the inevitability of tribal and racial warfare. Of the three farmers in "The Code" one explains to the "town-bred" farmer that, although the farmer who walked off in anger might have misun­ derstood him, he still failed to understand country ways. It becomes apparent that it was not only a misunderstanding but a revelation of the resentment of country folk toward the "town-bred" farmers as well as the resentment of a worker toward his employer: 'What is there wrong?' 'Something you just now said.'

Robert Frost and the C;hallcll,ge (?f Darwin

1 34 'What

did

I say?'

'About our taking pains.' ' To

cock the hay?-because it's going to sho\ver?

I s aid that 1110re than half an hour ago. I

s ai d it

to my s elf as much a s

yo u

.'

'You didn't know. But Janles is one big fool . He thought you Ineant to tlnd tl ult ,-",rith h i s "vork. That's \vhat the avera ge fartHer \vould h a ve meant. Janles would take time, of course, to che\-v it over Before he acted: he's just go t rou n d to act.' 'He is

a

fool

if that's

the \-vay he takes 111e.'

' I)on't let it bother you. You've f()und out sOluething The hand that knows his business vvon't be told To do \york better or f:lster-those t\VO things. I ' m as particular as anyone: M ost likely I'd have served you just the saIne. B u t I kno\v you don't understand our \vays. Yo u \vere just talking \vhat \vas in yo ur Blind, What \vas in all our luinds. and you \veren't hinting.'

.

Words beconle deeds; saying what "vas on his nlind about the need to take pains i n cocking the hay failed to recognize Jalnes �s "ways , " the need of the country hands to have their hun1an dignity resp ected. T ho ugh he appears to

sYlllpathize

with the town farIner, h e goes on tell to

the story ofho\v he once tried to kill his boss \vho spoke to hin1 in a condesc end­ ing way. It turns out that his boss , Sande rs, a highly en ergetic a c hi ever who rarely sleeps, treats his hired hands like anilnals , "bulli ng" thern, ridi n g behind theln and " threaten [ing] to InO\V their legs off. " Violence e rupts when Sanders calls aloft to

his hand

to hurl the haycocks

dov..r n by saying, "let her corne. " The violence does not result fro n1 a lnisunder­ standing of

the

point of b eing

\vords bu t froin the fact that the worke r has reached

pushed

a n d bullie d . The phrase Ill eans sinlply

" ()K,

a

breaking

thro\v do\vn

the hay, " but the hand seizes the ironic possibility o f its nleaning, "let loose all the \vrath that has been pent up. "

(A

sinlilar effect, though n10re obvious, vvo uld

have been a c hieved with the p hrase, "let

l11e have

it.") H e turns his tool,

a

hay, alrnost killing hinl- "God, n1iddle nal1le. " The only code here­

pitchfork, into a \veapon as he buries San ders in I 'd as soon / Murde re d hin1 as left o u t his

ethical or linguisti c-is the capricious individual asserting his hlllllanity through the play of language. But even that code expresses itself through violence. The po\ver of in dividual resistance and possible violence erupts of civilized order:

fronl under the veneer

Labor, Community, and Nature's Chaos

135

'You wouldn't think a fellow'd need much urging Under those circumstances, would you now? But the old fool seizes his fork in both hands, And looking up bewhiskered out of the pit, Shouts like an army captain, "Let her come ! " Thinks I , D ' ye mean it? "What was that you said?" I asked out loud, so's there 'd be no mistake, "Did you say, Let her come?" "Yes, let her come . " He said i t over, but h e said i t softer. Never you say a thing like that to a man, Not if he values what he is. God, I 'd as soon Murder him as left out his middle name.'

The hand has used the occasion of a misunderstanding, taking Sanders literally, to destroy him. The p hrase "let her come" may also have suggested something sexually emasculating and degrading to a man who "values what he is. " H e discovers him later, to some dismay, alive, but humbled for having been buried. The town farmer is surprised when he learns the country farmer had little fear of killing him: 'Weren't you relieved to find he wasn't dead?' 'No! and yet I don't know-it's hard to say. I went about to kill him fair enough.' ' You took an awkward way. Did he discharge you?' 'Discharge me? No! He knew I did j ust right.'

Sanders knew the hand " did j ust right, " because beneath the seemingly incom­ prehensible differences between town and country, employer and hand, there is a common humanity. The real code is the recognition that failure to understand the rights and domains of individuals across cultural and class lines will result in the eruption of violence, undermining the stability of any community. Both Sanders and his hand are morally questionable characters. Country folk and laborers are as bad as the town-bred employers . Frost p okes fun at egalitarian fantasies of pastoral life, which embodies a struggle for power and the maintain­ ing of interests through violence. The sparsely settled communities of "neighbors" in North of Boston become the genesis state to play out the ambiguities of post-Darwinian anthropology­ the diminishment of the exclusive and superior claims of E uropean culture as well as romantic claims about the nobility of the primitive and savage. The soj ourner's bewilderment in "The Mountain" stems from his confrontation with a farmer living in a sparse environment defined by a mountain, a maj or geologi-

1 36

Rohert Frost and the Challell(�e (�r Darwin

cal barrier that has isolated a group of people. This puzzling rustic appears at ti11les to hold different values fronl the narrator and at other times to be pulling his leg or sinlply inconlprehensible. The poe111 is Frost's postromantic eth­ nographic response to Wordsworth's "Resolution and Independence, " in which the leech-gatherer saves the ronlantic, self-obsessed, and tortured wanderer by becoming an icon of 1110ral strength and humility. The persona approaches the old man as one of nature 's puritying wonders : As a huge stone is sonletilnes seen to lie Couched on the bold top of an en1inence; Wonder to all who do the saIne espy, By what 111eans it could thither C0111e, and whence, So that it seelned a thing endowed with sense: Like a sea-beast crawled forth , that on a shelf Of rock or sand reposeth, there to sun itself:-

The analogies between the leech-gatherer and inorganic or subhuman obj ects capture nineteenth-century attitudes of both condescension and reverence to­ ward the lowly as a sign of a fresh beginning from nature's womb. Wordsworth then switches to the Rousseauian r0111antic attitude regarding the savage as a noble, even religious figure : His words ca111e feebly, frol11 a feeble chest, But each in sole111n order follo\ved each, With s0111ething of a lofty utterance drest­ Choice word and 111easured phrase, above the reach Of ordinary 111en; a stately speech, Such as grave do in Scotland use, Religious l11en, who give to God and 111an their dues.

Wordsworth recapitulates the essence of pastoral in which an ethical observer sees himself at once above and below the state of a rustic, one at once less fortunate and deeper. The ethnography of Darwin in The Voyage of the Beagle in his encounter with the Fuegian savages enconlpasses the Wordsworthian pastoral but embraces a skepticisln that undoes it. It is important to recognize sOlnething about the narrator of "The Moun­ tain . " He is probably a naturalist or a geologist, and the opening passage reveals his attention to " new things , " including the facts of landscape. The man he finds laboring behind a plow conles as something of a surprise. And he expresses a dread of crossing into another's domain, particularly S0111eone who labors, fear­ ing the consequences of intruding on his interests, embodied in the self-j ustifying and terrifying line " I t seemed no harm to stop him altogether" :

Labor, Community, and Nature's Chaos

137

The nlountain held the town as in a shadow. I saw so much before I slept there once: I noticed that I missed stars in the west, Where its black body cut into the sky. N ear me it seenled: I felt it like a wall Behind which I was sheltered from a wind. And yet between the town and it I found, When I walked forth at dawn to see new things, Were fields , a river, and beyond, more fields . The river at the time was fallen away, And made a widespread brawl on cobblestones; But the signs showed what it had done in spring: Good grassland gullied out, and in the grass Ridges of sand, and driftwood stripped of bark. I crossed the river and swung round the mountain. And there I met a man who moved so slow With white-faced oxen in a heavy cart, It seemed no harnl to stop him altogether.

The culture the narrator has discovered does not define itselfby civil government but by the isolating fact of environmental limit, and the farmer doesn't mind letting him know that the farmers have defined their growth by the conditions of existence: 'There is no village-only scattered farms. We were but sixty voters last election. We can't in nature grow to nlany more : That thing takes all the roo In! '

The farmer offers the possibility of the spring on top of the mountain as something of interest to the narrator because, as he says, " It's always cold in summer, warm in winter. " This sounds like a riddle, a mystery. The farmer goes on to tell him that it is a source, right at the top, like a fountain, but claims that he has never seen it. The farmer also suggests a universal view, as though aware of the narrator's interest in mysteries and ultimate things, the original font, Antaeus, and Parnassus: "There ought to be a view around the world / From such a mountain-if it isn't wooded / Clear to the top . " The narrator is surprised that the farmer has never been to the top to see the spring and has no interest in climbing the mountain. It is not clear whether or not the farmer is pulling the narrator's nose ; he claims to know of its properties from others who have climbed the mountain. Having gone up the sides of the mountain for hunting, he claims that climbing to the top for its own sake is of no interest to him:

Robert Frost and the Challenj?e
' . . . I 've always Ineant to go And look n1yself, but you know how it is: It doesn't seenl so much to clin1b a mountain You've worked around the foot of all your life. What would I do? Go in n1y overalls, With a big stick, the san1e as when the cows Haven't come down to the bars at milking tinle? Or with a shotgun for a stray black bear? 'Twouldn't seen1 real to clinlb it for climbing it.'

Do we really believe this? The farmer's phrase "you know how it is" is one of several by which he betrays his understanding of how outsiders think while maintaining a strange kind of practical innocence of his own. D enizens of any area are often much less fascinated by the local sights than outsiders. But this gesture may also be a way of saying to the narrator, who has the leisure to go around exploring things, that he has more vital work to attend to and a greater attachment to mortal stakes. The narrator retreats, a little enlbarrassed from his own desire to climb the mountain, and asks whether he can walk around it. The farmer's response em­ phasizes boundaries and the definition of a culture by environment-travel for its own sake or for revelation makes no sense to him: 'You can drive round and keep in Lunenburg, But it's as much as ever you can do, The boundary lines keep in so close to it. Hor is the township, and the township's Hor­ And a few houses sprinkled round the foot, Like boulders broken off the upper cliff, Rolled out a little farther than the rest.'

The town is thus a geological phenomenon, part of and adapted to the landscape. Both reader and narrator cannot quite fathom the farmer, the way Darwin could not fathom the crude life of the Fuegians . A question raised by drama in this poem is whether the farmer's evasiveness and gnomic strangeness is truly other­ a preexisting or inherited state of mind or j ust a way of creating a boundary to keep the sojourner confused and at a distance. Frost's farmer knows something of the narrator's interest in mystery and adventure, and he plays with the narrator's inquiry about the mystery of the brook's temperature : "Warm in December, cold in June, you say?" The farmer lets the narrator know there is really no mystery at all because the the brook is probably a mountain spring from a deep source that keeps it at a constant temperature through changing seasons:

Labor, Community, and Nature's Chaos

1 39

'I don't suppose the water's changed at all. You and 1 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.'

A hot spring is going to seem warm compared with cold air and cold compared with warm air. The "fun" is creating differences among people by sayings as a means of self-definition and keeping others at bay. Underneath the regional differences runs a common humanity, j ust as the apparent relative differences in the brook are really o nly epiphenomenal; we all spring from the same source. But is that difference really an illusion? The poem concludes when the narrator asks him, "You've lived here all your life?" The farmer's response, which is broken off as he gets on with his plowing, is most peculiar: "Ever since Hor / Was no bigger than a- . " The farmer may well be pulling the earnest soj ourner's leg or may actually be a character whose consciousness has been completely molded by his isolated environment. The biblical stories associated with Mount Hor provide further insight on the tensions in the poem. At God's command Moses' brother Aaron was left to die on Mount Hor, a mysterious punishment for the miraculous waters of Mirabah, where "the children of Israel strove with God. " The parallel in "The Mountain " is the conflict of two brothers in the wilderness . The brother who understands the importance of work and the survival value of play may have greater integrity than the wandering "brother" seeking miraculous springs . Crossing boundaries is a more treacherous business in "Blueberries, " which at first seems to be a j ovial eclogue between two vagrant youths eyeing the blueberries of a farmer, Loren, and his family. The rhythm of the poen1.s nlakes it appear a cheerful and innocent ballad. The dialogue between the youths focuses, however, on the limits of freedom, territoriality, and danger. Blueberries them­ selves b ecome a synecdoche, like the tree of life, for the ambiguities and limits of natural growth. They are an extremely delicate, fragile fruit that require a great deal of care but also manage to propagate their seeds in a fire-ravaged area. A farmer who has taken care to produce them is not going to be welcoming to berry thieves. Their desirability as rare items and as food make them an instiga­ tion to possession and conflict. They are metaphors of all the "growths" in life whose blooming also invites predators and pickers. The fruit "fattens" itself only for destruction, its being "picked" or selected is only a prelude to conflict and doom among the pickers. The fruit is a metaphor, like the tuft of flowers, for the persistence of a collective humanity in waste. Underneath their "tan , " the color that also distinguishes fieldworkers ("pickers") from farm owners, there is an " ebony, " a darkness that comes from common human roots in soot:

Robert Frost a11d the Challen(�e C?f Darwin

' I t nlust be on charcoal they fatten their fruit. I taste in them sonletinles the flavor of soot. And after all really they're ebony skinned: The blue's but a mist frol11 the breath of the wind, A tarnish that goes at a touch of the hand, And less than the tan vvith which pickers are tanned.'

But their gro\vth and richness become a prelude to their death: they will be picked either by the two vagrants or by the Lorens, who come into conflict with one another over what they can clainl for themselves outright. Beauty may not be the final end of growth but, rather, a precipitator of destruction and a source of warfare. I n the first edition of North �f Boston ( 1 9 1 4) the p asture of "Blueberries" belonged not to Patterson but to Mortenson. Perhaps Frost changed the name for the sake of subtlety, but it reveals that the pasture in which the Lorens and the two vagrants stake their clainls to the blueberries was owned by someone whose name means "son of death, " instead of Patterson, "son of the father. " The Lorens, the vagrants , and the blueberries are competing entities in the garden of a man who harbors both growth and destruction, competition as well as coopera­ tion. What is given by nature raises questions about claims of possession and property, which the two vagrants in dialogue try to convince themselves won't matter too much to Patterson: 'Does Patterson know what he has, do you think?' 'He nlay and not care and so leave the chewink To gather them for hinl-You knovi what he is. He won't make the fact that they're rightfully his An excuse for keeping us other folk out.'

But, if Patterson is too removed from his pasture to care about the blueberries, one of his farmer tenants, Loren, is less likely to take rights to the blueberries lightly, particularly because he can make money and feed his family with them, and he keeps the berry growth for his family, walled off. The speaker tells his companion that, while the father seems polite, his self-interest is in his "democrat-load" of children. Blueberries are not j ust dessert; they are the means by which Loren feeds and pays for his children's necessities. While he is not about, the vagrants develop large eyes for berries, convincing themselves that the berries represent "what Nature is willing to give" without "forcing her hand with harrow and plow. " But Loren may have himself stolen the berries from pasture owned by Patterson. What, then, are property rights in this case but the seizing and exclu-

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sive control o f land and the fortifying of boundaries? Loren, i n his crude way, seems shrewd about keeping his survival property and protecting it while putting off his enemies by p oliteness and wit. And the narrator reveals his desire to clainl by natural right what food supplies Loren and his children have discovered and kept to themselves: ' I 've told you how once not long after we came, I almost provoked poor Loren to mirth By going to him of all people on earth To ask if he knew any fruit to be had For the picking. The rascal, he said he'd be glad To tell if he knew. But the year had been bad. There had been sonle berries-but those were all gone. He didn't say where they had been. He went on: " I ' nl sure-I ' m sure"-as polite as could be. He spoke to his wife in the door, "Let me see, Marne, w e don't know any good berrying place?" It was all he could do to keep a straight face.'

Behind the veneer of politeness displayed by Loren and the cunning of the vagrant who tries to get him to tell where and how he can get berries, there exist threat and potential violence. Loren has claimed rights to food supplies without having to farm for them. And he has an evasive sense of humor that can keep his enemies at a distance. The pun in berrying place) however, indicates how vicious things might become if boundaries are crossed. Having lost the illusion of a paradise free for the taking, he attempts to reclaim it by asserting his right to eat some of the Lorens's berries. This ganle is theft and immersion in a competitive, dangerous world. In a recollection of their previous experience of berry thieving, one of the vagrants remembers a bird he feared they were keeping from its nest. The bird becomes an example of the way nothing in nature is innocent; any activity can be disrupting or disturbing to the domestic survival of other creatures: 'If he thinks all the fruit that grows wild is for hinl, He'll find he's mistaken. See here. for a whim, We 'll pick in the Pattersons' pasture this year. We 'll go in the morning, that is, if it's clear, And the sun shines out warnl: the vines must be wet . I t's so long since I picked I almost forget How we used to pick berries: we took one look round, Then sank out of sight like trolls underground, And saw nothing nlore of each other, or heard, Unless when you said I was keeping a bird

1 42

Robert Frost and the Challen�e
Away fronl its nest, and I said it was you . "Well, one of u s is. " For complaining i t flew Around and around us . . . .'

He also recalls the fear of losing his companion In this enterprise, recalling Adam's fear of losing Eve when she went to pick fruit. The trope of call and echo in eclogue beconles a necessary instrunlent of survival in their enterprise: 'And then for a while We picked, till I feared you had wandered a nlile, And I thought I had lost you. I lifted a shout Too loud for the distance you were, it turned out, For when you made answer, your voice was as low As talking-you stood up beside t11e, you know.'

The lines "your voice was as low / As talking-you stood up beside me, you know, " demonstrate not only the quelling of his fears but suggest an image of a tenlpter, fooling and caj oling his companion, the snake standing up in the garden. There is also a sexual play between them that is useless compared with the needs of the birds or the Lorens, the concern for either nest. The poem c oncludes with the thought that the garden seems to be a place for play but is a place with "mortal stakes. " The Lorens will b e " d eploye d , " a nl il i ta ry term, to keep out intruders: 'We sha'n't have the place to ourselves to enjoy­ Not likely, when all the young Lorens deploy. They'll be there tonlorrow, or even tonight. They won 't be too friendly-they may be polite­ To people they look on as having no right To pick where they're picking. But we \von't conlplain. You ought to have seen ho\v it looked in the rain, The fruit nlixed with water in layers of leaves, Like two kinds of j ewels, a vision for thieves .'

The speaker and his conlpanion are nl0ved by an irrational desire for the berries as "j ewels"-obj ects of beauty. The speaker expresses this same kind of desire in the opening passage, when he seductively describes the berries as being "as big as the end of your thunlb, / Real sky-blue, and heavy, and ready to drum / In the cavernous pail of the first to one COln e ! . . . You ought to have seen ! " The vagrants' instinct for beauty is sOlnewhere between a form of evil and a form of foolishness . But can they help thenlselves? "Blueberries" are the fruit, the issue that nature has provided; they thus precipitate the conflict between necessity and

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play. The love and need o n both sides i s likely t o come t o war. The speaker's "whim" does not induce freedom but, rather, precedes danger. Both sides make selfish claims . Frost has complicated the Miltonic myth of an innocent garden with a D arwinian story of competition for food supply and potential violence between "neighbors. " The dialogue between opposing factions i n Frost's dramas leads t o ethical and moral questions about which side is right and which way of life is good. In "Blueberries" the Lorens are depicted as "Just taking what Nature is willing to give," without plowing the land. But this ideal, natural world is not innocent; violence and competition, not law and order, reign in a ruthless world of survival ethics. Nature provides no symbols of its beneficence or innocence. Blueberries are the source of violence and competition as much because of their beauty as in spite of it. "A Hundred Collars , " an elaborate pastoral in North of Boston} undermines Jeffersonian ideals of the virtue of agrarian democracy and natural aristocracy as well as James's appropriation of D arwin's theory of natural selection as a model for human history. In his famous letter to Peter Carr, Jefferson argued against the study of moral philosophy, stating that moral judgment is as much a part of a man as "a leg or arm. " The farmer would have as upright a moral sense as any professor: "State a moral case to a ploughman and a professor. The former will decide it as well, and often better than the latter, because he has not been led astray by artificial rules. "46 Jefferson distrusted the " artificial , " by which he means an encrusted, landed nobility. In a letter to Madison, Jefferson contrasts natural and artificial aristocracy, arguing strongly for the virtue of the former: "There is also an artificial aristocracy, founded on wealth and birth, without either virtue or talents. . . . The natural aristocracy I consider the most precious gift of nature, for the instruction, the trusts, and government of society. "47 The ideal of the virtue of the natural over the artificial goes back at least as far as Montaigne's essay "On Cannibals" and Thomas Browne's Religio Medici. In the mid-nineteenth century it is appropriated again by Darwin, who in On the Origin of Species proclaims the power of natural versus artificial selection to choose the fittest. D arwin's fitness does not conform to any equation between the natural and moral fitness but, instead, to a cunning ability to survive. The antagonists of "A Hundred Collars" are a comic duo of a professor, Magoon, and a plowman, Lafe. By chance the professor is forced to spend a night at a railway inn with Lafe, who prides himself on his physical power, his shedding the restraints of collars. The comedy reveals the professor's deep fear of the common man, a " democrat in principle " come face to face with his principles in the form of Lafe's mocking, anti-intellectual presence.

1 44

Robert Frost and the Challen�e �f Darwin

I n "Great Men and Their Environment" William James attempted to for­ mulate a naturalistic ethics based on Darwin. Rejecting the evolutionary deter­ minism of Herbert Spencer, Jalnes appropriated Darwin's theory of natural selec­ tion as the basis for a social theory that maintained ideals of freedom and individualism while ren1aining optin1istic that a selective struggle within the community would produce "great n1en " : The causes o f production o f great nlen lie i n a sphere wholly inaccessible t o the social philosopher. He nlust sinlply accept geniuses as data, just as Darwin accepts spontaneous variations. For hinl, as for Darwin, the only problem is, these data being given, How does the environnlent affect then1, and how do they affect the environnlent? Now I afftrnl that the relation of the visible environment to the great nlan is in the main exactly what it is to the "variation" in the Darwinian philosophy. It adopts or rej ects, preserves or destroys, in short selects him. And whenever it adopts and preserves the great man, it beconles nlodifted by his influence in an entirely original and peculiar way. We all recollect Mr. Darwin's famous statenlent of the influence of cats on the gro,\vth of clover in their neighborhood . . . . Just so the great man, whether he be an inlportation fron1 without like Clive in India or Agassiz here, or whether he spring fronl the soil like Mahomet or Franklin, brings about a rearrangenlent, on a large or slnall scale, of the pre-existing social relations.4x

James prefigures Eliot's theory in "Tradition and the Individual Talent," which allows for continuity but in which new additions do indeed rearrange the preex­ isting order of things, making the line of historical developn1ent unpredictable and contingent. James makes an extended analogy between social theory and biology by which he hopes to save the former from determinism. The social environment-the world of people-selects those obscure variants most adapted to its needs . These variants are capable of modifying, rather than j ust being modified by, their environn1ent. But "biological greatness" is far different fro n1 " n10ral greatness"; Frost's poen1 "A Hundred Collars" reveals the risks and irony involved in a fusion of two realn1s that the idealism of Kant once kept separate. "A Hundred Collars" begins with a description of Professor Magoon as a "great man, " one of the accidental variations that came fron1 a "little town. " (" Lancaster" also recalls the usurpations o f Shakespeare's Henry VI. ) His accom­ plishments are intellectual but betray his desire for power; he is "a great scholar" who can make people "seem afraid" while he's "rifling a printed letter as he talks" : Lancaster bore hinl-such a little town, Such a great nlan. It doesn't see hinl often Of late years, though he keeps the old honlestead

Labor, Community, and Nature's Chaos

1 45

And sends the children down there with their mother To run wild in the summer-a little wild. Sometimes he joins them for a day or two And sees old friends he somehow can't get near. They nleet him in the general store at night, Preoccupied with formidable mail, Rifling a printed letter as he talks . They seem afraid. He wouldn't have i t so: Though a great scholar, he's a democrat, If not at heart, at least on principle. Lately when conling up to Lancaster, His train being late, he missed another train And had four hours to wait at Woodsville Junction After eleven o'clock at night. Too tired To think of sitting such an ordeal out, He turned to the hotel to find a bed.

Stuck at "Woodsville, " a metaphor for the borderland betwee n the civilized and wild, Magoon reveals his aloofness, his undemocratic " heart," by being sus­ picious about sharing a room or a bed with someone, and in this case he may have reason. The night clerk scares him by pointing to a man who refused a bed because " [H] e was afraid of being robbed or murdered. " We learn that Lafe is short for Lafayette, a crude version of the democratic ideal that his namesake fought for in the American Revolution. Lafe also sounds like the "laugh" that this common man is having at the expense of his aristocratic roommate. Even more significant to comprehending his character is that he is French-Canadian and so belongs to a group that became the obj ect of some of the worst racism in turn-of-the-century New England; this racisnl was propa­ gated by prominent American anthropologists and writers including E . A. Ross, Franklin Giddings, and Francis Parkman . Professor Magoon's fear ofLafe reflects this prej udice. And Frost's ability to make him a compelling foil to Magoon reflects his own ambivalence toward the p ower of the natural man. Magoon's name sounds a little like goon. Lafe is monstrous, "a brute, " who is prolific with his outgrown collars. Compared with Lafe, the professor, at "size fourteen , " has stopped growing. He lives in the ethereal realnl of teleology, rationalism, and form- "Professor Square-the-circle-till-you're-tired" -and is metaphorically lame, standing on one leg. Lafe begins both to charm and to intimidate the professor by talking about his enormous neck. He is the human representation of a branch of the tree of life grown to monstrous proportions. The collars become a metaphor for the restraint of social conventions, civiliza-

Robert Frost and the Challen-Re if Darwin

tion, domestication, and religion. He also betrays his own racism when he refers to the innkeeper as "Kike " : The Doctor looked a t Lafe and looked away. A man? A brute. Naked above the waist, He sat there creased and shining in the light, Funlbling the buttons in a well-starched shirt. ' I 'm nloving into a size-larger shirt. I 've felt mean lately; nlcan's no nanle for it. I j ust found what the nlatter was tonight: I 've been a-choking like a nursery tree When it outgrows the \vire band of its name tag. I blamed it on the hot spell we've been having. ' Twas nothing but nly foolish hanging back, Not liking to own up I 'd grown a size. Number eighteen this is. What size do you wear?' The Doctor caught his throat convulsively. ' Oh-ah-fourteen-fourteen.' ' Fourteen! You say so! I can renlenlber when I wore fourteen . And come to think I nlust have back at honle More than a hundred collars, size fourteen. Too bad to waste thenl all. You ought to have thenl . They're yours and welconle; let nle send thenl to you. What nlakes you stand there on one leg like that? You're not nluch furtherer than where Kike left you. You act as if you wished you hadn't conle. Sit down or lie down, friend; you make me nervous .'

The conflict within a democracy may ultimately choose the stronger and more socially clever Lafe as its ideal of a great man but one that fails to transcend the brutishness of natural power. Unexanlined worship of the natural, the primi­ tive, the common man, the biological, and the anti-intellectual empowers this drunken giant, who lords it over an enfeebled educator. No freedom-loving populist, Lafe turns out to be a venal con artist. He works for a newspaper, finding out what people \vant to hear. Worse, he collects Dl0ney from them under the pretense that they are paying for infornlation. Lafe parodies the Emer­ sonian ideal that history and institutions are the shadow of a man. History and fact become the institution of the newspaper, the social mediation between individuals and experience. There is no unnlediated knowledge of the "trans­ parent eyeball" ; only one Dlan's transparent dependence upon and manipulation of the public, even in disregard of his own clailll that he is a "double-dyed denl0crat. " Lafe puts on a show of familiarity and good-naturedness, which

Labor, Community, and Nature's Chaos

I 47

proves to be a confidence trick. To "know" him is "to know the newspaper, " little more than the lowest common denominator of what people pay to hear. Lafe goads the professor into believing that they are "getting on together­ talking. " His interest in working for the Republican newspaper, the public, or the party has everything to do with getting paid and manipulation, being "in with everybody. " Behind what he tells Magoon is "the fun," the play of his business, his labor, is a cruel pleasure in his p ower over terrified, poor farmers. His real "business" turns out to be collecting farm mortgages from bankrupt farmers. He stops only "for meals" with a family that lines up respectfully and probably fearfully to see him. He lets his horse take him to houses where he has no " errand," but his own horse's perception of his sociability turns out to be mistaken-"She thinks I ' m social. I maybe am" : 'You drive around? I t must be pleasant work.' ' It's business, but I can't say it's not fun . What I like best's the lay o f different farms, Coming out on them from a stretch of woods, Or over a hill or round a sudden corner. I like to find folks getting out in spring, Raking the dooryard, working near the house. Later they get out further in the fields. Everything's shut sometimes except the barn; The family's all away in some back meadow. There 's a hay load a-corning-when it comes. And later still they all get driven in: The fields are stripped to lawn, the garden patches Stripped to bare ground, the maple trees To whips and poles. There's nobody about. The chimney, though, keeps up a good brisk smoking. And I lie back and ride. I take the reins O nly when someone's coming, and the mare Stops when she likes: I tell her when to go. I 've spoiled Jemima in nlore ways than one. She's got so she turns in at every house As if she had some sort of curvature, No matter if I have no errand there. She thinks I ' m sociable. I nlaybe am. It's seldom I get down except for meals, though. Folks entertain me from the kitchen doorstep, All in a family row down to the youngest.'

Some of Lafe 's descriptive metaphors reflect, amusingly, a sexual agressiveness toward the people and landscape. He likes "the lay of different farms" (earlier he

Robert Frost and the Challell,Re of Darwin

introduced hinlself to the professor as " Layfayette ") ; he speaks of" garden patches / Stripped to bare ground. " The poem concludes with Lafe's offering his "hundred collars" to the professor as a nl0cking act of friendship and generosity. He has " collared" the professor, and his claim to be afraid of "scared people" who might "shoot [him] in the head" transfers his own threatening nlanner to others to avoid suspicion : ' 1 don't know who 1 rather would have have then1. They're only turning yellow where they are. But you're the doctor as the saying is. I 'll put the light out. Don't you \vait for l1le: I 've just begun the night. You get S0111e sleep. I ' ll knock so-fashion and peep round the door When 1 con1e back so you'll know who it is. There's nothing I ' n1 afraid of like scared people. I don't \vant you should shoot nle in the head. What anl 1 doing carrying off this bottle? There now, you get son1e sleep .'

He shut the door. The I)octor slid a little down the pillow.

Lafe's geniality beconles a nlask for control, his generosity a denl0nstration of strength and intimidation. In allaying the professor's fears of violence and aggres­ sion, Lafe nlakes a belittling renlark that would tend to confirnl them: "Who wants to cut your nunlber fourteen throatl " He proves himself to have great popular appeal, which supplants the authority of the more civilized professor. The "brute" Lafe with his nlassive neck, is the kind of natural "variant" that a society valuing a naturalistic individualisDl might select as its exemplar of " great­ ness . " Here, as in most of Frost's pastorals, both great forces of conflict, the high and the low, are seen to be equally funny in an uneasy moment balanced between threat and coop eration.

Chapter

4

Tools and Weapons Man, Technology, and Nature

Georgie poetry became an important mode for Frost to explore the implications of technology. In addition to "Mowing" and "Mending Wall, " "Out, Out- , " "The Bonfire," "The Self-Seeker, " "The Grindstone," and "The Ax-Helve" present the nl0st simple and primitive technologies as the mysterious sources of both unity and conflict among men, representing the defining moment of hu­ man knowledge and its limiting end . 1 In the eighteenth century georgic poetry became the mode through which to extol technology. Anthony Low has argued in The Georgie Revolution that georgic poetry, with its emphasis on the heroic possibilities of work, was consonant with the rise of agricultural technology and science in the seventeenth century. 2 M oving beyond the longing for an ideal Arcadian past, the georgic mode stresses the progressive and evolutionary efforts to build an ideal world in the future. In Frost's georgics technology becomes an enlblenl both for the incipient 1110ments of human control over nature and for nature 's inescapable control over man. Rather than condemning technology, Frost views man himself as an instrument of nature for uncertain ends. Though his quarrel may be with Marxist fantasies of transcending jus naturale through technology, Frost sees the soul as an inextricable part of natural machinery. I cannot agree with the views of John Hiers or of John Lynen that Frost's emphasis on labor in nature reflects a p astoral retreat from technology-a retreat from social regimentation and supersensual industry, maybe, but not one from technology. 3 Frost has no quarrel with technology except insofar as scientists believe that it can master the forces that brought it forth. Acutely aware of the ancient analogies betwee n technology and nature, he does not intend to eradicate them but only to show that they cannot completely replace the idea of intention and organism with blind mechanism. In considering the mechanistic descriptions of nature and life, Frost insists on the ineradicability of the human element and self1 49

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Robert Frost and the Challenge oj Darwin

reflexivity in the analogy despite deistic attenlpts to p urge and reduce man from it. In his reconstruction of a dialogue about the validity of the metaphor that the "universe is a nlachine" Frost stresses the limits of the analogy by underscoring similitude rather than metaphoric identity. An assumption that analogies are like life and that life is a supersession of forms underlies his criticism of rigid ad­ herence to any analogy: Let nle ask you to watch a nletaphor breaking down here before you. Sonlebody said to lue a little while ago, "It is easy enough for me to think of the universe as a nlachine, as a nlechanisnl . " I said, "You mean the universe i s like a machine?" He said, "No. I think it is one . . . Well, it is like . . . " " I think you mean the universe is like a nlachine . " "All right. Let i t go a t that. " I asked him, "Did you ever see a nlachine without a pedal for a foot, or a lever for the hand, or a button for the finger? " He said, "No-no." I said, "All right. Is the universe like that?" And he said, "No. I mean it is like a machine, only . . " . . . it is different froln a nlachine," I said. He wanted to go j ust that far with that nletaphor and no further. And so do we all. All nletaphor breaks down sonlewhere. That is the beauty of it . . . . It is a very living thing. It is as life itself. 4

The problem for Frost renlained the extent to which humans themselves were instruments being used by some similar, though unknowable, hand produced in the stream of evolutionary fornls: "The question is are we eoliths: that is shapes that might have been shaped on each other in the rush of the stream of things or if you prefer by intention for SOine crude use . " 5 In "Letter to The Amherst Student" Frost posited a developnlental view of nature in which man, one of nature 's forlns, becomes the conduit for a greater form: We people are thrust forward out of the suggestions of fornl in the rolling clouds of nature. In us nature reaches its height of fornl and through us it exceeds itself. When in doubt there is always fornl for us to go on with. Anyone who has achieved the least fornl to be sure of it, is lost to the larger excruciations. ()

The final phrase is ambiguous: do the forms we achieve keep us from or hurl us back into the "larger excruciations?" What are these torments? In several of Frost's p oems technology takes on a life of its o\vn, eventually consunling and destroying its controller and operator. Frost considered Inetaphor a tenlporary instrument for tackling and taming

Man, Technology, and Nature

a chaotic world, a view consonant with pragmatism's transformation of abtrac­ tions and ideas into instruments ratified by their contextual usefulness. In The

Genteel Tradition Santayana dramatically described pragmatism's instrumentalism and its underlying assumption of Darwin's world of survival: There is a feeling abroad now, to which biology and D arwinism lend some color, that theory is simply an instrument for practice, and intelligence merely a help toward material survival. Bears, it is said, have fur and claws, but poor naked man is condemned to be intelligent, or he will perish. This feeling William James enlbod­ ied in that theory of thought and of truth which he called pragmatism. I ntelligence, he thought, is no miraculous, idle faculty, by which we mirror passively any or every thing that happens to be true, reduplicating the real world to no purpose. Intelli­ gence has its roots and its issue in the context of events; it is one kind of practical adj ustment, an experimental act, a form of vital tension. It does not essentially serve to picture other parts of reality, but to connect them. . . . Thus all creeds and theories and all formal precepts sink in the estimation of the pragmatist to a local and temporary grammar of action; a grammar that must be changed slowly by time, and may be changed quickly by genius. To know things as a whole, or as they are eternally, if there is anything eternal in them, is not only beyond our powers, but would prove worthless, and perhaps even fatal to our lives. Ideas are not mirrors , they are weapons; their function is to prepare us to meet events, as future experience may unravel. 7

Frost's highly dramatic poetry places laborers in conflict with their environment, their ideas little more than the tools and weapons-axes, scythes, grindstones, carts, ladders-that civilization has provided to control and order the material world. Frost praises technology as part of God's method i n t he lively three-beat poem "Kitty Hawk , " a paean to our attempts to fly and the inevitability of our participation in the creation of forms that perfect some of the operations of nature. The final section of the poem, entitled "The Mixture Mechanic, " describes both creations a s fluid machinery, open t o alterations and new pos­ sibilities through movement. Our own flight becomes ultimately a form of praise miming the motion of "stars or moon, " and we have been given the duty to act as a further catalyst of movement, a large "kitchen spoon , " to "keep all things stirred. " That we are like a "Titanic" spoon makes an ironic allusion to the ship, a double-edged example of an immanent will working through us to create and destroy: This wide flight we wave At the stars or moon Means that we approve Of them on the nlove.

Robert Frost and the Challel1J!.e of Darwill Our is to be have Like a kitchen spoon Of a size Titanic To keep all things stirred In a blend nlechanic Saying That's the tune, That's the pretty kettle! Matter mustn 't curd, Separate and settle. Action is the word.

This kitchen metaphor dovetails with Frost's statements about science being the kitchen of the human mansion, an association of natural processes with feminine c are and nurturing as nluch as it can be associated with a masculine and cruel destructiveness . Viewing the n1achine God of movement and flight as worthy of thanks, Frost rebukes those who still regard it as " Satan . " I n addition to the Cain­ like enmity and j ealousy that rebukes inventors and defines history, this God also produced the fraternal success of the "brothers Wright" : God of the machine, Peregrine machine, Sonle still think is Satan, Unto you the thanks For this token flight, Thanks to you and thanks To the brothers Wright Once considered cranks Like Darius Green In their honle town, Dayton.

" ' Out, Out- ' " on the other hand, has been read as a VISIon of the inhuman evils of technology, and its violence and bleakness appear to j ustify such a view. But I would argue that the poenl is rather stoic in its ultimate tone of acceptance of the way individual lives become sacrificed unexpectedly in a general tnachinery. Here the machinery, a buzz saw, takes on a life of its own and destroys the hand that created it. Both creaturely and mechanistic sounds are attributed to the machine as it "snarled and rattled, snarled and rattled, / As it ran light, or had to bear a load. " The saw itselfbecomes a figure of burdened laborer, working for the boy-master operating it. So, too, does the boy labor beyond his years for his family, "doing a man's work, though a child at heart . " The narrator sympathizes with the boy's need for a little play in the midst of relentless work: "Call it a day, I wish they nlight have said / To please the boy by giving him the half hour / That a boy counts so nluch when saved fronl work . " As the machine

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is an instrument used by the boy, so the boy is an instrument of his family, a form through which it extends itself. The amputation occurs as a sudden encounter of the twain, though " as if" the saw sought its own satisfaction or revenge on its master and the boy gave in to the opportunity for relief from his labori­ ous life. That the event occurred when his sister said " Supper" suggests a symbol of feminine nature as both nurturer and instigator of feeding and destruc­ tion: H i s sister stood beside them in her apron To tell them 'Supper.' At the word, the saw, As if to prove saws knew what supper meant, Leaped out at the boy's hand, or seemed to leap­ He must have given the hand. However it was, Neither refused the meeting. But the hand!

The boy loses his hand, one crucial part of human anatomy that distinguishes this species from all others and represents that variant that enabled the creation, production, and use of tools. Ironically, it is cut off by the form, the tool that it created. The tool that it created becomes, ironically, a weapon against its creator. Finding form in the technology of a saw, nature reveals its power to facilitate order and to destroy, sparing not even its own self-made, guiding hands . Upon his death the family views him as a failed instrument, a foundation of their futurity, chillingly encapsulated in the phrase " [N] 0 more to build on there . " Through fear and horror the accident does not generate hatred of labor nor of the machine but, rather, a renewed awareness of the limits of sympathy and grief as they "turned to their affairs " : " Little-Iess-nothing! -and that ended it. / No more to build on there. And they, since they / Were not the one dead, turned to their affairs . " Without moralizing about the inhumanity of the child's relatives or about technology, Frost presents them as emblems of the processes of creation and waste in which we participate. "A Lone Striker" provides even more ambiguous images of technology as a vital force and as something to be resisted by the human. The conflict between a laborer's individuality and a factory's collectivity appears to form the basis of a near-polemic for heroic rebellion. Though the narrator describes the mill ini­ tially as stifling, "full of dust of wool," in the next lines he transforms it into a figure of slow, safe continuity. The spinner is a metaphor for the inextricable presence of the human in any machinery including nature's harmonious " harp­ like" oversight of all its individuals. Without any specific mention of what it produces, this machine becomes a thing of beauty in its cooperative power, bringing single strands together not artificially "tied" but fluidly "blend[ ed] " :

1 54

Robert Frost and the Challenj!,e �f Darwin

The air was full of dust and \vo ol. A thousand yarns were under pull, But pull so slow, with such a twist, All day from spool to lesser spool, It seldonl overtaxed their strength ; They safely grew in slender length . And if one broke by any chance, The spinner saw it at a glance. The spinner still was there to spin. That's where the hUll1an still caIne in. Her deft hand showed with finger rings All10ng the harp-like spread of strings . She caught the pieces end to end And, with a touch that never 111issed, Not so nluch tied as made theIn blend. Man's ingenuity was good. He saw it plainly where he stood, Yet found it easy to resist.

The positive description of the hunlanity in the machinery concludes with the aphorism "Man's ingenuity was good, " ironic in the way it ignores the female presence. This may be less the narrator than the narrator expressing the thoughts of his protagonist, who "saw it plainly where he stood. " This is also ironic given that we have been told he is o utside the nlill, which, "though many, many eyed, / Had eyes inscrutably opaque ; / So that he couldn't look inside . " What he thinks about the machinery is what he thought he saw, suggesting the extent of projection of our own inlaginative figures onto inner workings we cannot per­ ceive directly. Nonetheless, the factory has been indifferent to individuals, shutting the gate and taking away livelihood fronl those of insufficient speed. This wasteful indifference, though it may really be o nly his "pittance docked," j ustifies his abandonment of collective labor and his retreat to spring, country path, and " re­ renewing love . " His recognition that the factory " 'twas not divine, / That is to say, 'twas not a church, " liberates him from taking it and, more important, his own life too seriously, as anything more than something he can waste as he pleases. If on the surface "A Lone Striker" appears to be political, deeper down it verges on satire of the humanistic rebellion against technology. "The Egg and the Machine," an almost Aesopian fable, provides even more biting satire on the demonization of technology, responding to the nl0dernist despair of Adams 's "Dynamo and th e Virgin . " An enraged foot traveler proj ects his paranoid hatred onto an approaching train, a prinlitive Inind fearing the "gods in the machine"

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and allowing himself to believe that his hate had actually "roused an e ngine up the road": He gave the solid rail a hateful kick. From far away there came an answering tick And then another tick. He knew the code: His hate had roused an engine up the road. He wished when he had had the track alone He had attacked it with a club or stone And bent some rail wide open like a switch So as to wreck the engine in the ditch.

The would-be hero becomes a caricature of a savage wishing "he had attacked it with a club or stone" but, apparently, lacks even the resourcefulness or ingenuity to make use of primitive instruments. His attempt to find a weapon brings him to the feat of recognizing a turtle's trail and the search for tortoise eggs to hurl at the train. He fails to see the "little turtle mine" (with mine as weapo n and p ossession) as anything other than nine "torpedo-like" weapons rather than magnificent examples of the primordial technology by which life grows and defends itself "with shell of gritty leather" : The traveler's eye picked up a turtle trail, Between the dotted feet a streak of tail, And followed it to where he made out vague But certain signs of buried turtle's egg; And probing with one finger not too rough, He found suspicious sand, and sure enough, The pocket of a little turtle nline. If there was one egg in it there were nine, Torpedo-like, with shell of gritty leather All packed in sand to wait the trunlp together.

The turtles and their eggs recall the aboriginal inhabitants of the Galapagos in Darwin's The Voyage of the Beagle as examples of a creature that has survived a long time thanks to its thick shell and in part to the mother's laying of many eggs in ditches and sandbanks . The locomotive engine, which while it destroys hab­ itats also facilitates travel, is on a continuum with the protective and nurturing shell of the embryonic tortoise. The observant eye, capable of p erceiving the analogy and the persistent foundation of technology in all life, enables the indi­ vidual to transcend the crude exceptionalism and hatred that the protagonist of "The Egg and the Machine" displays . "The Self-Seeker" presents a character of much less egotism and greater complexity whose passion for perfection leads him to recognize and accept

Robert Frost and the Challell(�e �f Darwin

hinlself as an instrunlent of life's technology, affirming simply "what we live by we die by. " This nlill owner decides to sell his property because his feet and legs have been crushed by the lllill 's wheel belt. Called "the broken one," he becomes a figure of technology hinlself, a synlbol of life's processes gone to their limit and breaking down: 'It's hard to tell you how I Inanaged it. When I saw the shaft had nle by the coat, I didn't try too long to pull a\vay, Or fUillble for illy knife to cut away, I j ust enlbraced the shaft and rode it out­ Till Weiss shut off the \vater in the wheel-pit. That's how I think I didn 't lose nly head. But nly legs got their knocks against the ceiling.'

Crippled, he can only dreanl about his prized possession, his beautiful orchids, and his focus on these rarities becollles a 11letaphor for the way our desire to liberate ourselves fronl work and visceral existence leads to our atrophy and extinction, sOlnething Frost returned to in the sardonic "Etherealizing. " Evolu­ tionary fantasies of pastoral contenlplation lead to our becoming, not unlike Wells's Eloi, j ellyfish-like brains . The condition of the "Broken One " 's feet from the accident at the wheel of his own nlill relllinds hill1 of a prinlordial life for111 with parts homologous to human extremities: "I haven't dared to look at them uncovered. / Through the bed blankets I renlind 111yself / Of a starfish laid out with rigid points . " The starfish analogy, like the j ellyfish analogy in "Etherealizing, " reminds us that in our end we find our beginning, a beginning we have tried to forget. We cannot escape a general process of growth, breakdown, and regeneration, which should be seen as neither progressive nor degenerative but cyclical . The starfish becomes a figure of that general technology whose name represents the union of sidereal and telluric forces. The emphasis on the feet, aside from its associations with poetry, also j okingly suggests the way the self-seeker identifies his soul inextricably with his body as well as the way evolutionary anthropology has connected our hU111anity with our bipedalisnl . The lawyer to whom he wants to sell his farm becomes a figure of the "devil, " the rule of pure C0111111erce, trade, and law: 'Willis, I didn 't want you here today: The lawyer's conling for the conlpany. I'n1 going to sell illy soul, or, rather, feet. Five hundred dollars for the pair, you know.'

Man, Technology, and Nature

1 57

'With you the feet have nearly been the soul; And if you 're going to sell them to the devil, I want to see you do it. . ' .

.

The self-seeker becomes a pastoral Oedipus after the doctor tells him, "He thinks I 'll hobble. It's both legs and feet. " The "Broken One" is a modern Oedipus who in his pursuit of knowledge becomes painfully aware of his own mysterious, autochthonic origins . In answering the riddle of the sphinx, Oedipus discovered the path of his own life in the cycle of a human life-from crawling infant to upright man to limping and crutch-bound old man. I n an modern context this can be seen as a figure of the development of the species-from crawler in its infancy to upright biped to cripple aided by instruments. The wheel belt of the mill becomes quite explicitly a sphinx, "that which binds , " in this case binding the workings of the mill and the owner to his machinery. And it is described as part-human, part-beast, as well as an ouroboros, the snake swallowing its own tail, a riddle of the circular nature of life 's pursuits. This belt, like the buzz saw of " Out, Out- , " also rebels against its creator and controller, trapping him in his own technology: 'They say some time was wasted on the belt­ Old streak of leather-doesn't love me much Because I make him spit fire at my knuckles, The way Ben Franklin used to make the kite-string. That must be it. Some days he won 't stay on. That day a woman couldn't coax him off. He's on his rounds now with his tail in his mouth Snatched right and left across the silver pulleys . Everything goes the same without me there.

The belt, like the self-seeker, is so personally obsessed that " a woman couldn't coax him off. " The remainder of the dialogue focuses o n the man's orchids and his control over a young girl named Anne. The orchids mean more to him than money, something he claims his hand, Willis, is too "savage" to understand. Figures of rarity and beauty, the orchids represent a level of superiority over those around him that he won't sell, telling the lawyer, "Don't mind Will: he's savage. / He thinks you ought to pay me for my flowers. / You don't know what I mean about the flowers. " What he does mean may have to do as much with power and prestige as beauty, and what the orchids actually represent may be another figure of entrapping technology in nature. The Broken One's predicament and his obsession with the Cypripedium variety of orchids can be illuminated by H. G. Wells's story "The Strange Or-

Robert Frost and the Challel1Re £?f Darwin

chid" from his collection Thirty Strange Stories, a favorite of Frost's, which he first acquired in 1 890 and kept in his library his entire life. In the story a "shy­ ineffectual man" and naturalist nanled Winter-Wedderburn takes pride in col­ lecting unusual orchids. Nothing ever happens to this bachelor until he acquires an unusually strange orchid. His housekeeper upbraids him and the cult fascina­ tion in England with collecting extraordinary orchids at the expense of poor laborers in the tropics who died in swamps trying to find them. Winter­ Wedderburn beconles fascinated by Darwin's famous researches on orchids, which demonstrated that their various fornls did not serve our sense of beauty but were really contrivances for cross-fertilization and reproduction. Cypripediums are an exceptional case of an orchid in which flowers seem to have nothing to do with fertilization. Winter-Wedderburn takes pride in his extraor­ dinary orchid, wanting to nlake "researches as Darwin did" : "There are such queer things about orchids , " he said one day; "such pos­ sibilities of surprises. You know, Darwin studied their fertilisation, and showed that the whole structure of an ordinary orchid-flower was contrived in order that moths nlight carry the pollen fronl plant to plant. Well, it seems that there are lots of orchids known the flower of which cannot possibly be used for fertilisation in that way. Some of the Cypripediunls, for instance ; there are no insects that can possibly fertilise thenl, and some of theln have never been found with seed . " "But how do they fornl new plants?" "By runners and tubers, and that kind of outgrowth. That is easily explained. The puzzle is, what are the flowers for?" "Very likely, " he added, "my orchid nlay be something extraordinary in that way. If so, I shall study it. I have often thought of making researches as D arwin did. But hitherto I have not found the tinle, or sonlething else happened to prevent it. The leaves are beginning to unfold thenl now. I do wish that you could come and see them . " H

Like Wells's character, Frost's self-seeker prIzes the orchid known as Cypripedium reginae, or lady's slipper, because its flowers appear to serve no purpose except to provide him with the prestige that brings him friends as well as a letter from the renowned American naturalist John Burroughs: 'But what about your flora of the valley?' 'You have nle there. But that-you didn 't think That was worth nloney to nle? Still I own It goes against me not to finish it For the friends it nlight bring 111e. By the way, I had a letter fronl Burroughs-did I tell you?­ About my Cypripedillnl rt:(?illae; He says it's not reported so far north.'

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Considered one of the most primitive forms of orchid because all the stigmas were developed for fertilization, the exterior contrivances of the lady's-slipper turn out to be delicate, shoe-like traps for insects in the process of pollination. Darwin described this fact at great length in his book The various Contrivances by

Which Orchids Are Fertilized by Insects : The basal part of the labellum is folded round the short column, so that its edges nearly meet along the dorsal surface; and the broad extremity is folded over in a peculiar manner, forming a sort of shoe, which closes up the end of the flower. Hence arises the English name of Ladies' -slipper. The overarching edges of the labellum are inflected or sometimes only smooth and polished internally; and this is of much importance as it prevents insects which have once entered the labellum from escaping through the great opening of the upper surface.9

Though the self-seeker appears fascinated by the rarity and beauty of these orchids, the irony is that he, in control and isolation, has missed the point of what orchids are about: an o ngoing and fluid technology of procreation. Darwin becomes explicit in describing orchids ' organs as parts in a machine with "wheels, springs, and pulleys" but one that must be conceived b eyond our limited sense of p urpose and utility and that does not adhere to a fixed design: Although an organ may not have been originally formed for some special purpose, if it now serves for this end, we are j ustified in saying it was specially adapted for it. On the same principle, if a man were to make a machine for some special purpose, but were to use old wheels, springs, and pulleys , only slightly altered, the whole ma­ chine, with all its parts , lnight be said to be contrived for its present purpose. Thus, throughout nature almost every part of each living being has probably served, in a slightly modified condition, for diverse purposes, and has acted in the living ma­ chinery of many ancient and distinct specific forms . 1 o

Natural selection a s opposed t o artificial selection does not design for a single purpose, namely the visual beauty of the breeder, but can modify different parts for different purposes. Darwin, Wells, and Frost knew that what science had found out about orchids repudiated the Victorian fascination with them as rare commodities and aesthetic fetishes . I n his "Prolegomena" to Evolution and Ethics Huxley used, as Darwin did, the figure of the single-minded cultivator or gardener to describe the process of direct or artificial selection as opposed to the "struggle for existence, " until all plants that were wild become domesticated or civilized: The endless varieties of cultivated flowers, fruits, roots, tubers, and bulbs are not products of selection by nleans of the struggle for existence, but of direct selection,

1 60

Robert Frost and the Challell�e
in view of an ideal utility or beauty. Anlidst a nlultitude of plants, occupying the sanle station and subj ected to the saIne conditions, in the garden, varieties arise. The varieties tending in a given direction are preserved, and the rest are destroyed. And the sanle process takes place anlong the varieties until, for example, the wild kale beconles a cabbage, or the wild Viola tricolor a prize pansy. 1 1

But this form of civilizing "art" is always subj ect to the subversion of " nature," which rebels against consistent fornls of hunlan intention and purpose. The self­ seeker attenlpts to control which of his orchids he allows a little girl to pick or leave according to his desire, an exanlple of the way he has attempted to mold all forms to suit his interests . She nlust report sightings of unusual orchids to him, yellow lady's-slippers in particular, and she nl0cks his disdain for flowers that are "too conlnl0n . " The "Broken One" has "broken" Anne o f pursuing her own love o f gather­ ing flowers for a bouquet. Flowers and little girls become misshapen to serve the desires of a more controlling cultivator. Transfornlation and changing configura­ tions rule as he observes that " [PJ ressed into service means pressed out of shap e . " Anne must only say their nanles and leave thenl where they are, shaping h e r own desire to his: 1 2 ' I 've broken Anne of gathering bouquets. It's not fair to the child. It can't be helped though : Pressed into service nleans pressed out of shape. SOinehow I 'll nlake it right with her-she'll see. She's going to do Iny scouting in the field, Over stone walls and all along a wood And by a river bank for water flowers, The floating Heart, with snlall leaf like a heart, And at the sintls under water a fist Of little fingers all kept down but one, And that thrust up to blossonl in the sun As if to say, "You! You're the Heart's desire . " Anne has a way with flowers t o take the place Of what she's lost: she goes do\vn on one knee And lifts their faces by the chin to hers And says their nalnes, and leaves thenl where they are.'

The self-seeker, though, has also been p ressed out of shape in a general process that includes the orchids and the people who work for hinl. The dissonance between his single-nlinded passion and the slow process of cross-fertilization and alteration that the orchids actually obey, however, underscores the subservience of the pursuit of beauty to a barely perceptible but powerful technology of creation and destruction .

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The dissonance between what a n observer proj ects onto the primordial artifacts of technology and their ungraspable power to govern our lives beconles the dramatic focus of "A Missive Missile, " "The Bonfire , " "The Ax-Helve," and "The Grindstone. " All have at their center primitive forms of technology that reveal a continuum between the deep past and the workings of the present as well as presenting a rift created by time and language. Geology and archaeology's creation of a deep sense of time erodes faith in the transcendent power of our own culture's icons. A progressive view of culture and science depends on the accumulation, not mere supersession or abandon­ ment, of ideas through cultural memory, a world of signs and symbols built upon one another. John D ewey believed, despite other threats to culture made by evolution, in the qualitative difference between men and "lower animals" in the extent to which tools could be transfornled into symbols by virtue of memory, "the preservation of past experiences" not allowed to p erish in the flow of time : Man differs from the lower animals because he preserves his past experiences . . . . With the animals, an experience perishes as it happens, and each new doing or suffering stands alone. But man lives in a world where each occurrence is charged with echoes and reminiscences of what has gone before, where each event is a reminder of other things . Hence he lives not, like the beasts of the field, in a world of nlerely physical things but in a world of signs and symbols. 1 3

Frost's own skepticism about the preservation o f cultural memory through synlbols in "A Missive Missile" counters Dewey's optimism and draws heavily on a metaphor used by Lyell and Darwin that the geological record is a multivolume history of the world, " written in a chan gi n g dialect. " Thou gh Darwin insisted

that there was a continuity of fixed laws operating over vast periods of tin1e, he had to admit that the palimpsest of geological history contains o nly a few words or signs to uncover its meaning: For my part, following out Lyell's metaphor, I look at the natural geological record, as a history of the world imperfectly kept, and written in a changing dialect; of this history we possess the last volume alone, relating only two or three countries. Of this volume, only here and there a short chapter has been preserved; and of each page, only here and there a few lines . Each word of the slowly-changing language in which the history is supposed to be written, being more or less different in the interrupted succession of chapters, may represent the apparently abruptly changed forms of life, entombed in our consecutive, but widely separated, formations . 1 4

The title o f " A Missive Missile" suggests that the ancient "pebble wheel" the speaker has found should be a message or a missive, but the pun also means "missing the mark . " And missile indicates the disturbing continuity between

Robert Frost mId the ChallenRe �f Darwill

r 62

primordial technology and tnodern: both may be instruments of con1munication or weapons of destruction. What he has found provides few signs, "two round dots and a ripple streak," and he n1ust proj ect his own sense of intent onto them, faltering and uncertain whether " a n10tive then was still a motive " over a million years ago: 50nleone in ancient Mas d' AziI Once took a little pebble wheel And dotted it with red for ll1e, And sent it to me years and years­ A nlillion years to be precise­ Across the barrier of ice: Two round dots and a ripple streak, 50 vivid as to seem to speak. But what imperfectly appears Is whether the two dots were tears, Two teardrops, one for either eye, And the wave line a shaken sigh . But no, the color used is red. Not tears but drops of blood instead. The line must be a j agged blade. The sender nlust have had to die, And wanted someone now to know His death was sacrificial-votive. So altnost clear and yet obscure. If only anyone were sure A motive then was still a nlotive.

The speaker poses several possibilities about its creator's message, the sad expres­ sion of mortality or the cruelty of religious practice, couched mockingly in the j argon of anthropology as "sacrificial-votive . " That the "teardrops" might be "drops of blood" undermines the romantic and sentimental views of art and c ulture. All of these expressions are inferred by assuming a visceral basis of analogy-the dots for eyes and tears, red for blood, blade for sacrifice-in which spirit cannot be discerned separately from matter. Rather than being mysterious, life through eons may be an all too obvious cycle of creating and killing, sym­ bolized by the simple instruments of technology. Emerson had thought that a return to such primal signs would reanimate the fossil poetry of contemporary language : Because of this radical correspondence between visible things and thought, savages, who have only what is necessary, converse in figures. As we go back in history, language beconles nlore picturesque, until its infancy, when it is all poetry; or all

Man, Technology, and Nature spiritual facts are represented by natural symbols. The same symbols are found to make the original elements of all languages . . . . This immediate dependence of language upon nature, this conversion of an outward phenomenon into a type of somewhat in human life, never loses its power to affect us. It is this which gives that piquancy to the conversation of a strong-natured farmer or backwoodsman, which all men relish. 1 5

Frost's view o f this universal symbolic language i s completely opposite the one given by Emerson, and it shows in his skepticism about the intent of "a strong-natured farmer, " or a primitive man; however compelling, the icon stub­ bornly resists our interpretation. The "symbol lies" in the earth but could also be, as Sydney Lea has pointed out, "a lie" : 1 6 How anyone can fail t o see Where perfectly in form and tint The metaphor, the symbol lies! Why will I not analogize? (I do too much in some men's eyes.) Oh, slow uncomprehending me, Enough to make a spirit moan Or rustle in a bush or tree. I have the ocher-written flint, The two dots and the ripple line. The meaning of it is unknown, Or else I fear entirely mine, All modern, nothing ancient in't, UnsatisfYing to us each.

Though Frost would, like a romantic poet or an ancient magician, "make a spirit moan / Or rustle in a bush or tree," his own self-consciousness leaves him unable to ascribe meaning to it and doubtful of the universality of his own. More important, Frost recognizes that this hermeneutic skepticism extends not only over eons of time but even across the b arriers separating souls. 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. 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 .

Robert Frost a1ld the Clzallel1!<e �r Darwi11

Both poetry and technology attelllpt to bind, to reach across time or souls, but ultimately reveal the limitation of knowledge created by historical consciousness, symbolized by the river of time. 1 7 For all that skepticisnl Frost can hU1110rously depict the human condition as remarkably consistent in the basic laws of survival. "In Time of Cloudburst" underscores not only continuity but also repetition in the geological conflict betwee n catastrophisl1l and unifornlitarianisl1l. Taking on a larger-than-life voice, he issues a hortatory challenge to the catastrophic and apocalyptic promise of deluge, positing faith in our ability to persist. I nstead of the ark, however, there will always be the instrument e l1lbedded in a Huttonian vision of the law of unifornl, recurrent change over vast peri ods of tinle. There is an evolutionary continuity of hUl1lan life, but one inscribed in a cycle of labor, unresolved class struggle, and \var: Let the downpour ro il and toil! The worst it can do to Iue Is carry sonle garden soil A little nearer the sea. 'Tis the world-old way of the rain When it conles to a nlountain farnl To exact for a present gain A little of future har m . A n d the harnl is none too sure, For when all that \vas rotted rich Shall be in the end scoured po or, When nly garden has gone down ditch, Sonle force has but to apply, And all sumnlits shall be imnlersed, The bottom of seas raised dry­ The slope of the earth reversed.

The social and political underpinnings of the poem are unmistakable : " all that was rotted rich / Shall be in the end scoured poor" indicates disdain and mockery of the hopes of social progress and utopia. Class war may be a reality but one that will always be unstable. The farnler renlains a farmer, and he finds his old tool "as ready to wield as now. " Wield suggests again the pernicious use of tools as weapons, the other side of all invention that makes moral progress impossible. The return to the primitive and the natural brings us back not to a p eaceful nature but to a precariously balanced and possibly violent one:

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Then all I need do is run To the other end of the slope, And on tracts laid new to the sun, Begin all over to hope. Some worn old tool of my own Will be turned up by the plow, The wood of it changed to stone, But as ready to wield as now. May my application so close To so endless a repetition Not make me tired and morose And resentful of man's condition.

What seemed like a n ode t o confidence and hope o f survival against environ­ mental onslaught becomes reduced to an acceptance of the inherited and ines­ capable monotony of human life, unable to transcend its basic technological commitment. The futility of social progress and the cultural wavering between invention or discovery and destruction is summarized comically in a late poem, "The Obj ection to B eing Stepped On. " The hoe functions ambiguously as either tool or weapon; it functions metaphorically as "the unemployed" that strike against the complacency of the employed laborer (or, perhaps, the artist) : At the end of the row I stepped on the toe Of an unemployed hoe. I t rose in offence And struck me a blow In the seat of nly sense. It wasn't to blame But I called it a nanle. And I must say it dealt Me a blow that I felt Like malice prepense. You may call me a fool, But was there a rule The weapon should be Turned into a tool? And what do we see? The first tool I step on Turned into a weapon.

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The hue is one of those prinlitive tools with which culture is somehow "pro­ vided"; it could be gift or curse. There is no "rule" that material culture should result in moral progress, in the transformation from weapon to tool. The attribu­ tion of intent, "malice prepense," is an attempt to make conflict in the world something that can be eradicated or improved by confronting a graspable inten­ tional intelligence. In exploring the boundary between the civilized and the savage, the culti­ vated and the primitive, Frost explodes the romantic myth that a return to the world of the natural constitutes moral improvement or a return to innocence. One of the purposes of scientific anthropology was to explain the occurrence of human culture in terms of tools and to explain, too, use in terms of need. I n poems that explore technology-"The Bonfire," "The Ax-Helve," and "The Grindstone"-primitive tools are an irreducible given whose origin is inexplica­ ble and whose uses veer between cultivation and destruction. I n The PsychoaHalysis of Fire Gaston Bachelard described the Empedoclean fire complex in what could be a gloss o n Frost's poem "The B onfire " : "Almost always a case of incendiarism in the country is a sign of the diseased mind of some shepherd. Like bearers of sinister torches, these men of low degree transmit from age to age the contagion of their dreams . " 1 8 Frost, like Bachelard, is exploring the irrational and primitive forces behind psychological fascinations that persist in ordinary life. Frost goes behind scientific explanations of the origins of fire or human use of fire, portraying the primacy of an irreducible desire that coincides with but precedes practical need. Fire represents a force on the borderline be­ tween the natural and the technological, the uncontrollable and the instrumen­ tal. Its control represents the possibility of mastering forces of creation and destruction, for in maintaining its life, fire consumes and destroys others. The laborer in the poem represents the way the lowly subverts and levels those above him by uncovering and mastering the forces of nature. The wild shepherd of "The Bonfire," the most demonic of Frost's eclogues, is a wild shepherd speaking to a group of children. More like a Pied Piper or shaman, he invites them up a hill to build a bonfire "to scare [them] selves . " Framing his exhortation i s the desire o f a frustrated day-laborer t o subvert those around him-the people safe in their homes in the town, those who employ him to do the mean work of collecting their firewood. His enchanting narrative transforms his labor to a heroic encounter with subterranean danger, as he dragged the brush "bough on bough / Down dark converging paths . " Another mover of the infernal regions against the higher powers, he becomes a laboring Prometheus discovering and giving the lesson of fire to a new generation of children:

Man, Technology, and Nature 'Oh, let's go up the hill and scare ourselves, As reckless as the best of them tonight, By setting fire to all the brush we piled With pitchy hands to wait for rain or snow. Oh, let's not wait for rain to make it safe. The pile is ours: we dragged it bough on bough Down dark converging paths between the pines . Let's not care what we do with it tonight. Divide it? No! But burn it as one pile The way we piled it. And let's be the talk Of people brought to windows by a light Thrown from somewhere against their wallpaper. Rouse them all, both the free and not so free With saying what they'd like to do to us For what they'd better wait till we have done. Let's all but bring to life this old volcano, If that is what the mountain ever wasAnd scare ourselves. Let wild fire loose we will . . .'

He exhorts his p upils to stir "both the free and not so free," revealing the liberating power of fear against the complacency of those who have not suffered and have engaged life in safety, and to subvert the hierarchical order. His words echo Job 5 : "Yet man is born into trouble, as the sparks fly upward. / I would seek unto God, and unto God would I commit my cause: . . . To set up on high those that be low; that those which mourn may be exalted to safety. " He responds to the children's fears by recalling his first experience of being scared by an acci­ dental bonfire, telling them how the fear was transformed into p ower and plea­ sure. The fire becomes a figure of the independent self that builds " a pin­ nacle to heaven, " beyond the creaturely needs of the bluebirds for home and safety. But the ideal of individual power proves j ust a projection and illusion as a wind much stronger pushes the fire out of his control. The intrusion of an o utside force beyond his control dispossesses him of his homeopathic magic, the ascription of his own will to inanimate obj ects. The trees do not create breeze and fuel the fire by fanning it. The resulting loss of control and sense of limitation verges on paranoia when he declares "something or someone watching made that gust" : But the wind out of doors-you know the saying. There came a gust. You used to think the trees Made wind by fanning since you never knew It blow but that you saw the trees in motion. Someone or something watching made that gust.

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His consciousness transforn1s itself, shifting fronl a homeopathic to a scientific sense of force, an invisible hand to which he must attribute the reason for the futility of his attenlpts at controlling what he thought was an extension of his soul. The transgressive Pronletheus has been interdicted by chance; his desire has been turned to fear. This sublinle nloment, with its terror and alteration of power, defines the en1ergence of a new consciousness and a frightening knowledge. His self-consciousness also enlerges fron1 the theater created by the towns­ people. He enjoys the power conling fron1 his participation in destruction but cannot resist becon1ing a savior to his audience by putting out the fire : And oh, 1 kne\v, 1 knew, And said out loud, 1 couldn't bide the s1110ther And heat so close in; but the thought of all The woods and town on fire by 111e, and all The town turned out to fight for 111e-that held me. 1 trusted the brook barrier, but feared The road would fail; and on that side the fire Died not without a noise of crackling wood­ Of s0111ething 1110re than tinder-grass and weed­ That brought 111e to n1y feet to hold it back By leaning back 111yself, as if the reins Were round my neck and 1 was at the plow.

With a supporting COn11TIUnity he allows himself to become a laborer, even a beast, feeling the pull "as if the reins / Were round my neck and I was at the plow. " In most of Frost's poetry there is a relentless tension between a character's freedom to transcend society-often by provoking it-and the ineluctable p ull of submitting to its den1ands . Ultimately, he takes pleasure in his triumph not only in stopping the fire from spreading but also in having nlade so much earth "coal-black, " in being a kind of magician who has stunned and baffled his neighbors . This compensates for his "scorched Fourth-of-July feeling," the celebration of independence that had been repressed by the demands of his work. His own fireworks become a game to be won, a triumph over the drudgery of existence: '1 won! But 1 ' n1 sure no one ever spread Another color over a tenth the space That 1 spread coal-black over in the tilne It took n1e. Neighbors c0111ing h0111e fro111 town Couldn't believe that so ll1uch black had COlne there While they had backs turned, that it hadn't been there

Man, Technology, and Nature When they had passed an hour or so before Going the other way and they not seen it. They looked about for someone to have done it. But there was no one. I was somewhere wondering Where all my weariness had gone and why I walked so light on air in heavy shoes In spite of a scorched Fourth-of-July feeling. Why wouldn't I be scared remembering that?'

When the children demand to know why they need to scare themselves, he j ustifies his pleasure in utilitarian terms, convincing them that fear is play for mortal stakes, preparation for the ineradicable reality of war: 'Scare you. But if you shrink from being scared, What would you say to war if it should come? That's what for reasons I should like to know­ If you can comfort me by any answer.'

The children's response, "Oh, but war's not for children-it's for men , " provokes the shepherd's peroration about the inescapability of war, the untamed irra­ tionality that civilization had "forgotten. " The bonfire represents the lowly beginning in a continuum with the bombers, man's most advanced technology, j ust below the unfallen "stars and angels. " Children cannot escape this terror because there is no pretechnological world of pastoral innocence. His own scientific spirit reveals itselfin calling older notions of innocence a "mistake . " His fire becomes a Heraclitean fire, an independent cosmological principle of cre­ ation and destruction. In an almost Heraclitean paradox, he asserts that war, the destroyer and divider, is the thing that unites, that is for everyone: ' Now we are digging almost down to China. My dears, my dears, you thought that-we all thought it. So your nlistake was ours. Haven't you heard, though, About the ships where war has found them out At sea, about the towns where war has come Through opening clouds at night with droning speed Further o 'erhead than all but stars and angels,And children in the ships and in the towns? Haven't you heard what we have lived to learn? Nothing so new-something we had forgotten: War is Jor everyone, Jor children too. I wasn't going to tell you and I nlustn't. The best way is to come up hill with me And have our fire and laugh and be afraid.'

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The wild peroration builds to its revelation of war, for children and by children. And telling them isn't enough; he wants them to act, even though the o nly account of his own recklessness with fire ren1ains in his storytelling. His own seductive rhetoric mixes fear and laughter, fable and truth, work and play, over­ coming their fears with the promise of laughter at the promise of violence. If the destructive power of war and its instrument fire is the ultimate revelation of the rustic of "The B onfire , " Baptiste of "The Ax-Helve" leaves his narrator with an ambiguous but seductively beautiful in1age of weaponry. Though the ax-helve itself demands interpretation, it becomes the central figure in a story whose real tension has to do with racial anxiety and fears about human inequality. The ax-helve stands as an ambiguous icon of the technology and tools that may define humanity, but the dran1a of the poem raises questions about whether the tool of peace could j ust as readily become a weapon of war in a world in which racial conflict threatens all human harmony. I cannot agree with interpretations that hold Baptiste's "natural" ax-helve to be a "representation of the aesthetic values" with which the speaker "receives meaningful friendship" 1 9 nor that Baptiste himself figures as "an outward priest o f nature and a n un­ selfconscious prophet, unwittingly reminding the poet of the 'natural' and 'inno­ cent' pastoralism of the Garden. " 2 0 The narrator of this poem, like "Two Tramps in Mud Time," is an educated Yankee engaged in wood chopping as a form of strenuous play. Baptiste, the French-Canadian woodchopper who interrupts him, also arouses his suspicion, but he raises far more complicated problems than the two tramps, particularly because he appears sympathetic to the ideal of the natural man as bearer of wisdon1 and artistic skill. Baptiste is an appealing figure who extols the virtues of the natural over the artificial and n1achine-made, but we are led to wonder whether his apparent friendliness is a form of seduction and play intended to tease the pride out of the Yankee and relieve his own racial anxiety about being French-Canadian. His appeal is reinforced by the strong reference to Thoreau's French-Canadian woodchopper in Walden and Frost's own remarks about natural-grained ax­ helves as a metaphor for the figure of a poem. Thoreau valued the possibility of Rousseauian natural genius in his woodchopper, even though he remained skep­ tical of knowing hin1 any more than he could fathom the depths of Walden Pond. Thoreau n1akes it clear, however, that this French-Canadian may be too n1aterially bound, too "in1mersed in the animal life," to express or recognize a transcendent spirituality : There was a certain positive originality, however slight, t o b e detected i n him, and I occasionally observed that he was thinking for himself and expressing his own

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opinion, a phenomenon s o rare that I would walk any day ten miles to observe it, and it amounted to the re-origination of many of the institutions of society. Though he hesitated, and perhaps failed to express himself distinctly, he always had a present­ able thought behind. Yet his thinking was so primitive and immersed in the animal life, that, though more promising than a merely learned man's, it rarely ripened to any thing which can be reported. He suggested that there might be men of genius in the lowest grades of life, however permanently humble and illiterate, who take their own view always, or do not pretend to see at all; who are bottomless even as Walden Pond was thought to be, though they may be dark and muddy. 2 1

Thoreau's visitor represents the possibility that the rustic life holds for "re­ origination of many of the institutions of society" while yet being too crude for this power. Emerson painted a similar portrait of the natural genius in "The Transcendentalist" when he described one "who, working for universal aims, found himself fed, he knew not how; clothed, sheltered, and weaponed, he knew not how, and yet it was done by his own hands. Only in the instinct of the lower animals we find the suggestion of the methods of it, and something higher than our understanding. " 22 Both Thoreau and Emerson express the central paradox of Christian pastoralism: that what appears to be "lowest" could possibly repre­ sent the " highest" form of intelligence. Such intelligence came to have less to do with spirituality than with survival, the problems of being " clothed, sheltered, and weaponed . " Frost's own comments about the ax-helves o f French-Canadian woodchop­ pers underscore the confluence of his own poetics with the naturalness of hand carving, describing the placing of " curves on things that haven't any curves" as "false art" : You know the Canadian woodchoppers whittle their axe-handles, following the curve of the grain, and they're strong and beautiful. Art should follow the lines in nature, like a grain of an ax-handle. False art puts curves on things that haven't any curves. 2 3

I n "The Ax-Helve " the distinction between false and true art becomes extended from ax-helves to human beings. The ultimate test of beauty is strength in the service of prowess and survival. If there are men of good and bad grain, "good" and "bad" in "The Ax-Helve" have little to do with morality but, rather, with innate, ineducable, and inherited cunning and power. The name Baptiste and the governing figures of the ax-helve and the branches from which it was cut evoke the preaching ofJohn the Baptist in Luke 3 : 8-9, the spiritual significance of which Frost turns on its head: "Bring forth therefore fruits worthy of repentance, and begin not to say within yout;selves, We

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have Abraham to our father: for I say unto you, That God is able of these stones to raise up children unto Abraham . / And now also the ax is laid unto the root of the trees: every tree therefore which bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down, and cast into the fire . " John the Baptist's warning to the Jews is not to rely on racial heritage as a guarantee of future salvation. Baptiste in Frost's poem reminds the narrator that his successful Yankee provides no guarantee for the future. Instead of pointing to Christian love, Frost's B aptiste literalizes the violence in the biblical figure of the ax being laid to the root of Yankee arrogance. The narrative begins with the narrator's reflection on the way branches of an alder tree have interfered with his chopping at alder tree roots, a metaphor for the way one form of life protects itself gently from the onslaught of another: I 've known ere now an interfering branch Of alder catch my lifted ax be hind n1e . But that was i n t h e woods, t o hold lny hand From striking at another alder's roots, And that was, as I say, an alder branch.

Though the narrator of the poem nlay b e better read than Baptiste, his attribu­ tion of anthropomorphic intent to the alder branches does not merely suggest, as Richard Poirier has argued, his "poetical fanciness. " 2 4 Rather, it brilliantly announces the central problenls of the encounter: the extension of family rela­ tions and alliances within nature's branching Tree of Life and its relation to the Tree of Knowledge. For, if Darwin's Tree of Life holds that all races and tribes of men share a common descent, it also shows that various branches develop that destroy others, that success is ephemeral and largely attributable to inherited and determined traits. The poem's narrator moves from saying how an alder branch defends another alder's roots to talking about how a man surprises and disarms him. The speaker's chopping on "nothing not cut down already" suggests the kind of venting of pent-up violence and frustration that characterizes the speaker in "Two Tramps in Mud Time . " What strikes the speaker about the man is his being both French, a different ethnic (or racial) branch, and also expert and strong. The confrontation, as in "The Mountain" and in "The Literate Farmer and the Planet Venus," p ortends violence. Baptiste recognizes the need to "disarnl" his neighbor before he speaks to him: This was a man, Baptiste, \vho stole one day Behind me on the snow in my own yard Where I was working at the chopping-block, And cutting nothing not cut down already.

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He caught my ax expertly on the rise, When all nly strength put forth was in his favor, Held it a moment where it was, to calm me, Then took it frolll me-and I let him take it. I didn't know him well enough to know What it was all about. There might be something He had in mind to say to a bad neighbor He might prefer to say to him disarmed.

Once again the drama focuses o n boundary crossing, with a considerable sense of threat and menace in the act. The speaker does not know what B aptiste is up to, but possible violence, the need ofbeing " disarmed, " crosses his mind. Baptiste by name and association is the herald of Christianity. But Baptiste 's motives may be more defensive and subversive than fraternal or brotherly. Frost's Baptiste does not foretell that the crooked shall be made straight but that the straight shall be made crooked. He makes fun of the machine-made ax­ helve with a wry allusion to the economic success of the narrator. The narrator uses Marxist rhetoric against taking material culture to heart, against identifying personhood with an appropriate tool: But all he had to tell me in French-English Was what he thought of-not me, but my ax, Me only as I took llly ax to heart. It was the bad ax-helve someone had sold me­ 'Made on lnachine,' he said, plowing the grain With a thick thumbnail to show how it ran Across the handle's long drawn serpentine, Like the two strokes across a dollar sign. 'You give her one good crack, she's snap raght off. Den where's your hax-ead flying t'rough de hair?' Admitted; and yet, what was that to him? ' Come on my house and I put you one in What's las' awhile-good hick'ry what's grow crooked. De second growt' I cut myself-tough, tough ! ' SOlllething t o sell? That wasn't how it sounded. 'Den when you say you cOllle? It's cost you nothing. Tonaght?' As well tonight as any night.

Baptiste interrupts the action of the machine-made civilized world presum­ ably to exhibit a better one. This narrator, however, is skeptical of Baptiste 's motives. He doesn't trust Baptiste 's altruistic friendliness in having nothing to

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sell. Baptiste's warning about the weakness of the helve provides, as Lafe did to Magoon, an intimation of violence: "Yo u give her one good crack, she's snap raght off. / Den where's your hax-ead fl y ing t'rough de hair?" The accent transforms the ax head's flight through the " air" to one's "hair. " As in "A Hundred Collars, " the j okes about violence hide their reality, and Baptiste 's name becomes something of a dark j oke about the potential for beheading. Upon arriving at his house, the narrator states more explicitly what he suspects, that Baptiste 's nlotives in showing him his ax-helves is p art of an attempt to bring him into his world, to ease the tension of feeling displaced and racially inferior to this educated Yankee, who presumably has time for leisure activity similar to that of the speaker in "Two Tramps in Mud Time . " Baptiste does not point to a spiritual life but attenlpts to persuade the speaker to accept him, instead, by virtue of nlaterial prowess. The Frenchman among Yankees seeks his " human rating, " something that the narrator finds both charming and amusing: Beyond an over-warnlth of kitchen stove My welconle differed froll1 110 other welconle. Baptiste knew best why I was \vhere I was . So long as he would leave enough unsaid, I shouldn't lllind his being overjoyed (If overjoyed he was) at having got ll1e Where I lllust j udge if what he kne\v about an ax That not everybo dy else kne\v \vas to count

For nothing in the llleasure of a neighbor. Hard if, though cast away for life with Yankees, A Frenchlllan couldn't get his hUlllan rating!

The would-be lone woodsnlan succunlbs to social needs. The narrator empha­ sizes his national, tribal difference by emphasizing the " Frenchman" 's anxiety about being anlong "Yankees. " The Frenchman 's ritual of showing "what he knew about an ax / That not everybody else knew" amuses the narrator, whonl Baptiste places in the position of j udge ; displays of material power remain the basis for cultural acceptance. Mrs . Baptiste enters the scene and becomes, to the narrator, a metaphor for the process of natural growth and developnlent. Her rocker's back-and-forth motion suggests the conflict between forces that undermine progress while from tinle to time bringing hunlanity close to annihilation: Mrs . Baptiste caIne in and rocked a chair That had as lllany l1lotions as the \vorId: One back and fOf\vard, in and out of shado\v, That got her nowhere; one Inore gradual ,

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Sideways, that would have run her on the stove In time, had she not realized her danger And caught herself up bodily, chair and all, And set herself back where she started from. ' She ain't spick too much Henglish-dat's too bad.'

The appearance of Mrs. Baptiste adds sexual tension to the drama. She notices the narrator first, "brightening on" him, and he recognizes that p art of Baptiste 's display is to prove sexual prowess and ability by reenacting an old game of sexual selection: I was afraid, in brightening first on me, Then on Baptiste, as if she understood What passed between us, she was only feigning. Baptiste was anxious for her; but no more Than for himself, so placed he couldn't hope To keep his bargain of the morning with me In time to keep me from suspecting him Of really never having meant to keep it.

Making his display "needlessly soon," Baptiste provokes the narrator's specula­ tion about whether this showing is to provide him with "the best he had" or only the best he " had to spare," underscoring his distrust and suspicion. Baptiste demonstrates p hysical strength and abundance by sticking to what is " native to the grain. " Needlessly soon h e had his ax-helves out, A quiverful to choose from, since he wished nle To have the best he had, or had to spareNot for me to ask which, when what he took Had beauties he had to point nle out at length To insure their not being wasted on nle. He liked to have it slender as a whipstock, Free froni the least knot, equal to the strain Of bending like a sword across the knee. H e showed me that the lines of a good helve Were native to the grain before the knife Expressed them, and its curves were no false curves Put on it from without. And there its strength lay For the hard work.

Baptiste 's display of his ax-helves becomes a metaphor for his sexual prowess as he chafes the "long white body" of one of them, combining reproductive and practical ability (work) with pleasure and play:

Robert Frost and the Challell,Re C!f Darwin

He chafed its long \vhite body Fronl end to end with his rough hand shut round it. He tried it at the eye-hole in the ax-head. 'Hahn, hahn,' he mused, 'don't need lTIuch taking down.' Baptiste knew how to nlake a short job long For love of it, and yet not waste tinle either.

And the French-Canadian enjoys the ritual "for love of it" as much as for the practical need to nlake good helves. We see Baptiste 's labor as a kind of ritual art whose purpose is power and success, both social and sexual . Baptiste defends his naturalism in terms of keeping his childre n away from school-and from Yankee standards of authority and power. The narrator reveals Baptiste's darker purpose of exerting enough influence and display to make the narrator doubt his own values: Do you know, what we talked about \vas knowledge? Baptiste on his defense about the children He kept fronl school, or did his best to keep­ Whatever school and children and our doubts Of laid-on education had to do With the curves of his ax-helves and his having Used these unscrupulously to bring nle To see for once the inside of his house. Was I desired i n friendship, partly as sonleone To leave it to, whether the right to hold Such doubts of education should depend Upon the education of those who held them?

For Baptiste the argunlent against "laid-on education" serves to defend his own position and abilities, and the narrator's doubts about his own education stem from his failure to withstand Baptiste 's "unscrupulous lure " and the wastefulness of his own leisure activity with a brittle, machine-made tool. Baptiste's motive may ultimately have been to prove that those in power should not and cannot impose their views of education on those who have different standards . Their shared doubts about "laid-on education" reflect the universal power of the skepti­ cal D arwinian view; that education cannot overcome or add to the power of the innate, the biological, the inherited. In his autobiography Darwin affirms this position by citing his cousin Francis Galton, the founder of the eugenics move­ ment: " I anl inclined to agree with Francis Galton in believing that education and environment produce only a small effect on the mind of any one, and that most qualities are innate. " 25 What, if any, innate " qualities" prevail beyond manifestations of physical and inherited force and prowess?

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Baptiste's need to " earn his human rating" has produced a debate and an ax­ helve. Though not machine-made, it still represents technology and stands as the mysterious inspiration of competition. We are brought back to the nlaterial world, not to the spiritual realm, through the aesthetic. Its meaning demands interpretation, and the narrator's point of view, as Richard Poirier has pointed out, should not be taken uncritically. The narrator sees it as an emblem of evil, whereas B aptiste takes it with more sensuous and seductive pleasure : But now h e brushed the shavings from his knee And stood the ax there on its horse's hoof, Erect, but not without its waves, as when The snake stood up for evil in the Garden,­ Top-heavy with a heaviness his short, Thick hand made light of, steel-blue chin drawn down And in a little-a French touch in that. Baptiste drew back and squinted at it, pleased; 'See how she's cock her head! '

The speaker's Puritan consciousness emerges to transform this act of re­ creation into a symbol of the seductive incarnation preceding the Fall. A Yankee racism emerges in the ambiguous p hrasing that merges the p hysicality of the helve, the snake, and B aptiste as the type of the French-Canadian-"Top-heavy with a heaviness his short, / Thick hand made light of, steel-blue chin drawn down / And in a little-a French touch in that . " I n addition to being an icon of the Fall, the words erect and standing up for suggest male sexual potency as well as evolutionary theories of human origins; the old idea of the loss of innocence merges with the new idea that we became " human" when we stood erect and,

metaphorically, "stood up for" for labor and war. Baptiste, completing the dialogue, projects a far less learned and p ernicious image onto the helve but one that evokes the power of feminine seduction-"See how she's cock her head! " The poem leaves us with a feeling that the world is like Baptiste's wife in the rocker, moving back and forth between delicately balanced and ultimately unsta­ ble holders of power in a warfare that goes on indefinitely and is relieved by cooperation only at intervening moments. Like "The Ax-Helve," its companion poem, "The Grindstone," places a primitive tool at the center of an unresolvable conflict between human forces that becomes a metaphor for the instability of human civilization. The narrator invokes the image of a disused grindstone that in every respect has the appearance of an abandoned or wasted creatio n by an unknown hand. The kind of analogy at work recalls Darwin's rationalistic descriptions of the products of nature, unable to escape the union of animism and mechanism:

R obert Frost and the Challenge of Darwin

When we no longer look at an organic being as a savage looks at a ship, as something wholly beyond his comprehension; when we regard every production of nature as one which has a history; when we contenlplate every complex structure and instinct as the summing up of many contrivances, each useful to the possessor, nearly in the same way as when we look at any great mechanical invention as the summing up of the labour, the experience, the reason and even the blunders of numerous workmen; when we thus view each organic being, how far more interesting, I speak from experience, will the study of natural history become.26

Darwin attempted to review the process of creation as being like the imper­ fections in this history of technology, to maintain the idea of an invisible hand while nonetheless allowing for the freedom of history, the possibilities left open by conflict and imperfection. He could not, however, escape the inclusion of the anthropomorphic in his analogy making, even though he hoped to achieve "plain signification." I n "The Grindstone" Frost exaggerates this tension, re­ minding us of the circularity of a metaphoric world that no longer posits an authoritative, active God as the model for the artist, technologist, or poet: Having a wheel and four legs of its own Has never availed the cumbersonle grindstone To get it anywhere that I can see. These hands have helped it go, and even race; Not all the nlotion, though , they ever lent, Not all the nliles it may have thought it went, Have got it one step fronl the starting place.

Frost's grindstone refers to and rej ects Plato's figure of the lathe as the cosmologi­ cal machine. Plato 's lathe nloves in a perfect circular rotation: " and he was made to move in the same manner and on the same spot. . . . And as this circular movement required no feet, the universe was created without legs and without feet. . . . he made it snlooth and even, having a surface in every direction equidistant from the center, a body entire and perfect, and formed out of perfect bodies. " 2 7 Frost's grindstone, like his ax-helve, is anything but perfect and, as through an act of cruelty, has four legs which fail to enable it to progress. The wheel of the grindstone has been worn oblate by strife and time and, u nlike Plato's lathe, is not self-sufficient but needs the help of human hands from which it suffers decay and possibly extinction. An anthropomorphic sense of purpose is collapsed by the "downward comparisons" of technology and biology, which reduce man and his culture to agencies of indifferent, wasteful, and destructive forces. "These hands have helped it go, " but " [N] ot all the nlotion . . . they ever lent . . . [has] got it one step from the starting place." This sense of nonprogressive motion recalls the

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1 79

n10venlent of Baptiste's wife in the rocking chair-going nowhere or verging on destruction. The speaker then introduces the presence of an " apple tree, " which he later describes as " ruinous": I t stands beside the satne old apple tre e . T h e shado\v of the app le tree i s thin Up on it no\v, its feet are fast in sno\v.

All other far rn Inachinery's gone in, And SOBle of it on no m o re l egs and

\-vheel

Than t h e grindstone can boast to stan d or go. (I'm thinking chiefly of the wheelbarrow.) For tnonths it hasn't kno\-vn the taste of steel, Washed down with fUSty \vater in a tin . B u t standin g outdoors hungry, i n the cold,

Except in towns at ni g ht is not a sin . ,

Though the apple tree could be an elnble111 of the Fall, in "The Grind�tone" it beC0111eS an en1ble111 of the inevitability o f gravity (evoking the fable o f Newton's discovery of th e existence of gravitational force as he sat under a tree) , the cycli c al change of the seasons, and the corrosive power of e nvironll1ent. Going to waste is not a sin because sin and tnorality have no place i n a universe of natural la\vs. Grill1 vvasting, the inevitability of growing hungry or of b eing destroyed by natural forces, is part of a natural proc ess, the continuous "ruinous live apple tre e " :

And, an y way. its standing i n the ya rd Under a r u i n ous live ap ple tree Has nothing any nlore to do ,;\lith rn e, E xc ep t that I renlernber ho\v of old ()ne stunmer And

S0111eone

day,

all

day

I

drove

it

hard,

nlounted on it rode it hard,

And he and I bet\veen

us ground a

blade.

The speaker's invocation of an earlier tin1e app ears at first to resurre ct a golden age of innocence and power, but that Ine1110ry b eco111es jarred by the intrusion of the unsettling loss of control in the forn1 of a " Fa ther-Tinle-like ll1an. " They both, like wasteful gods, participate in grinding a blade as they "lnounted" and "rode" the grindstone, recalling the young boy's " riding" the tre es in "Birches , " an inlage of both sexual po\ver and aggression as well as an atternpt to tan1e and Inaster. In " Riders" Frost gives the 1110cking figure of our atten1pt to guide na ture as riding a headless horse . Though it is " s u rely" what \ve are and could not b e

I SO

Robert Frost and the Challel1j!,e
otherwise, technological advance does not produce any real improvement in our control: The surest thing there is is we are riders, And though none too successful at it, guiders , Through everything presented, land and tide And now the very air, of what \ve ride. What is this talked-of nlystery of birth But being n10unted bareback on the earth? We can just see the infant up astride, His sn1all fist buried in the bushy hide.

Our origin as a species and as individuals, "this talked-of mystery of birth , " beconles no nlore than "being n10unted bareback" with "fist buried i n the bushy hide . " This phrase reminds us of our lowly origins as we attempt to control life but remain dependent as children; \ve are "the infant," hanging on to the back of its primitive lTIother. Nature, however, is "a headless horse," which does not submit to any guiding sense of direction. Our ideas are "blandishments" by which we continue to try to control a powerful nature that defies thenl: There is our wildest nlount-a headless horse. But though it runs unbridled off its course, And all our blandishn1ents would seen1 defied, We have ideas yet that \ve haven't tried.

Ideas may be tried, but they cannot, in Frost's view, overcome the basic predica­ nlent of attempting and failing at control. In the Darwinian world cause is no longer talked about in Aristotelian ternls-nlaterial, fornlal, efficient, and final. All of these ternlS are ideas by which we can ride and control nature. Bacon and particularly Descartes e nabled us to talk about animals and inanimate obj e cts as though they were machines. A human or anthroponlorphic sense of perfection beconles the rule for develop­ nlent and enables nlan to control nature-God is like a watchnlaker, and nlan is like God. I n Darwin the Cartesian-Baconian sense of inlmanent cause and formal beauty renlains . Darwin, however, historicizes hunlan culture. The sense of perfection, of the imposition of a lasting human fornl o n nature, is inferior to a larger process of mastery or selection, which is beyond our control and in which we participate. Anthropomorphic fornls of nlastery, obj ects of material culture, fornl the basis for an analogy or nletaphor by which the rest of creation is envisioned. Once we beconle a\vare, ho\vever, of the supersession, crudeness, or develop-

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181

ment of our own culture within a large natural framework, the basis of the analogy becomes tentative; we become the victims of our own metaphor. In The Voyage of the Beagle Darwin devotes several p ages to the methods by which Spanish gauchos tame and domesticate horses in South America. The process is cruel but is a necessary part of breeding. In On the Origin of Species domesticated breeding or artificial selection forms the basis for D arwin's concept of natural selection. The concept of extinction, however, undermines a sense of continuity, design, and purpose associated with human domestication. I n both Origin and The Descent �f Man D arwin uses the Spanish horse breeders of South America as an example of the success of domestication but also of its limitation by larger natural forces. In Descent he associates the extinction of the races of man with the extinction of breeds of horses: Although the gradual decrease and final extinction of the races of n1an is an obscure problem, we can see that it depends on n1any causes, differing in different places and at different tinles . It is the same difficult problem as that presented by the extinction of one of the higher aninlals-of the fossil horse, for instance, which disappeared from South America, soon afterwards to be replaced, within the same districts, by countless troops of the Spanish horse.28

The implication is that one breed of horse supersedes another the way one race of man overrides another-the Spanish conquering the natives of South America. While the Spanish might be successful riders and conquerors of horses and men, they too will be superseded by a larger process of mastery or selection that includes the inroads of conquering tribes. I n "The Grindstone" the two riders becon1e n1etaphors of conflicting forces or factors that could destroy or extinguish the grindstone. They are also metaphorically conflicting impulses of progress and restraint in human culture, choices between being humane and gentle or forceful and progressive. This game is of global significance as it describes the moral problem of human control, in Huxleyan terms, of the pursuit of self-interest versus restraint, either of which in excess can be detrimental to survival: It is further to be observed that, j ust as self-assertion, necessary to the tnainte­ nance of society against the state of nature, will destroy that society if it is allowed free operation within; so the self-restraint, the essence of the ethical process, which is no less an essential condition of the existence of every polity, may, by excess , become ruinous to it.29

The Huxleyan opposition of society and nature is collapsed in Frost's vision of a world governed by machinery. The beginning of the second part depicts the

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speaker as a life-giving force, the other rider as an extinguishing force of time, war, and destruction: I gave it the prelinlinary spin, And poured on water (tears it nlight have been) , And when it alnl0st gaily junlped and flowed, A Father-Time-like man got on and rode, Armed with a scythe and spectacles that glowed. He turned on will-power to increase the load And slow me down-and I abruptly slowed, Like coming to a sudden railroad station.

Both figures are also painfully caught in the process of labor; their conflict hardly seems play. The narrator, whose will has been limited by the force of the " Father-Time-like lllan, " is conscious of becoming part of a mechanism himself-like a train . Lacking control in his ride, the speaker feels the failure of material culture to eradicate labor, warfare, hatred, and self-hatred: I changed frorn hand to hand in desperation. I wondered what machine of ages gone This represented an inlprovelnent on. For all I knew it nlay have sharpened spears And arrowheads itself. Much use for years Had gradually worn it an oblate Spheroid that kicked and struggled in its gait, Appearing to return nle hate for hate; (But I forgive it now as easily As any other boyhood enenlY Whose pride has failed to get hinl anyvvhere) .

The material obj ect, the nlachine, is taken again for a live being, like the " old­ stone savage armed" of "Mending Wall" or the "unemployed hoe" of "The Objection to Being Stepped On." This artifact of man's history metaphorically inspires self-hatred as the speaker beco llles resentful of what it tells us of man's condition. The wheel, already a llletaphor for the head of the four-legged grindstone, becollles a llletaphor for a conflict about Inoral action. Which is better: restraint or pressing fOf\vard, saving oneself or sacrificing oneself for progress? I wondered \vho it \vas the l11an thought ground­ The one who held the \vheel back or the one Who gave his life to keep it going round?

Man, Technology, and Nature I wondered if he really thought it fair For him to have the say when we were done. Such were the bitter thoughts to which I turned.

The third p art of the poem is a meditation on the p ossibility of moral action in material culture. Both are involved in "grinding, " but is either restraint or progress better for the common good? The first lines of this p art are somewhat facetious; through negative constructions, they lead us toward some revelation. But we find the speaker "so far from caring, " abandoning moral concern to laughter: Not for myself was I so much concerned. Oh no! -although, of course, I could have found A better way to pass the afternoon Than grinding discord out of a grindstone, And beating insects at their gritty tune. Nor was I for the man so much concerned. Once when the grindstone almost jumped its bearing It looked as if he might be badly thrown And wounded on his blade. So far from caring, I laughed inside, and only cranked the faster, (It ran as if it wasn't greased but glued) ; I 'd welcome any moderate disaster That nlight be calculated to postpone What evidently nothing could conclude.

The speaker claims not to be concerned for himself. His disinterestedness takes the insouciant posture of welcoming inevitable destruction and doing nothing to prevent it. There is a wicked indifference to his partner's fate and to the enter­ prise of labor. A "moderate disaster" would bring some relief from the endless repetition of a material culture and consciousness that " has reached its growth. " H e becomes concerned only when h e fears that we were "wasting precious blade" - echoing the p hrase "precious blood . " The grinding stands for the violent waste material "progress" makes of human life. Futile labor is also a metaphor for art that comes to no more than "beating insects at their gritty tune . " His partner makes an indifferent "funny-eyed" examination of the blade. His disinterestedness is a form of mocking cruelty. With mild concern the speaker takes the position of restraint, against one "turn" too many. He wants to leave certain things to a control beyond human perspective-j okingly, "to the whetter, " a pun on the action of environment because of this distrust of human motives. Fulfillment is best seen as the compromise in being "satisfied":

Robert Frost and the Challen,Re �f Darwin

The thing that nlade me nlore and nl0re afraid Was that we'd ground it sharp and hadn't known . And now were only wasting precious blade. And when he raised it dripping once and tried The creepy edge of it with \vary touch, And viewed it over his glasses funny-eyed, Only disinterestedly to decide It needed a turn more, I could have cried Wasn't there danger of a turn too nluch? Mightn't we make it worse instead of better? I was for leaving something to the whetter. What if it wasn't all it should be? I 'd Be satisfied if he'd be satisfied.

The question is no longer what is good but how to satisfy desires in conflict. As at the end of "The Ax-Helve," we are left with an ambiguous and perilous image of nonprogressive material culture. The circular grindstone becoming " oblate" subverts Emerson's monistic doctrine of good following from evil. Using the metaphor of concentric circles to describe the moral universe, Emer­ son asserted that "The san1e law of eternal procession ranges all that we call the virtues, and extinguishes each in the light of a better. "3 0 Two ambiguous poles­ one good, one evil-ren1ain in conflict. En1erson's vision of the romantic seeker as scientific experimenter comes closer to Frost's sense of the world's process : " No facts are to me sacred; none are profane; I simply experiment, an endless seeker with no Past at n1y back . " 3 1 Rather than asserting an evil world, Frost wavers between an immanent dualism and a nonmoral, nonteleological sense of waste. Community, utopia, brotherhood, elude us as we become prisoners of the world's machinery. The future of humanity in such a world led Frost to the agnostic and stoic vision of "The Strong Are Saying Nothing. " This georgic asserts the inter­ penetration of the natural and the human, the organic and the mechanistic, in the uncertain process of life. The poem's four stanzas alternate between descriptions of the fragile process of cross-fertilization and the analogous fragility and uncer­ tainty of human labors . The hoe is depicted in the first stanza as the agent of an unseen force, the invisible hand, by which the soil "gets a rumpling . " The n1etaphoric ilnplication is that n1an is an agent of larger processes that have "small regard to the future of any weed" :

The soil no\v gets a runlpling soft and dalllp, And snlall regard to the future of any weed.

Man, Technology, and Nature

185

The final flat of the hoe's approval stamp Is reserved for the bed of a few selected seed.

The "seed" is not the elect of the sower in Saint Matthew but, rather, the "few selected" of the Darwinian world. A large random process disregards the individ­ ual. Men are depicted as isolated and hapless participants in an undirected world of labor and procreation: There is seldom more than a man to a harrowed piece. Men work alone, their lots plowed far apart, One stringing a chain of seed in an open crease, And another stumbling after a halting cart.

The poem returns to an Image of organic fertilization in which beauty serves to stimulate procreation if the e nvironment allows: To the fresh and black of the squares of early nlold The leafless bloom of a plum is fresh and white; Though there's more than a doubt if the weather is not too cold For the bees to come and serve its beauty aright.

The plum is an example of the predicament of all organic life and a metaphor for the uncertain result of human labor. I n the final stanza the cross-fertilizatio n of plants by bees is transformed into the movement of wind, a metaphor for spirit and communication. Spirit bound to a world of immanent, material metaphors leaves us with an uncertain, fatalistic depiction of life : Wind goes from farm t o farnl i n wave o n wave, But carries no cry of what is hoped to be. There may be little or nluch beyond the grave, But the strong are saying nothing until they see.

"The strong" could be any form of life that survives the indifferent cultivation of the material world. Speech or "saying, " often held as one of the supreme human attributes, is countered in its importance. Moral strength lies not in affirmation or progress but in restraint, silence, and patience. Waiting "until they see" is an ironic affirmation of a scientific world that no longer j ustifies faith as the "evi­ dence of things unseen" but must, instead, have all things proved. Futurity rooted in the developments of material culture (including biological science) has made faith little more than a fine invention.

Chapter 5 The Lovely Shall Be Choosers Women, Nature, and Domestic Conflict

The vocal and dramatic prominence of women in Frost's poems is unique among lyric poets and underscores a vision of sexual conflict and dialogue as the central drama of life. "Wild Grap es , " "Maple , " "Paul's Wife," " Home Burial , " "The Witch of Coos , " "A Servant to Servants, " and "The Generations of Men" all reveal the uncertainty, instability, or impossibility of domestic order in the con­ flict between the competing interests of men and women. As extensions of the pastoral conflict of hierarchy in a chaotic landscape, Frost's domestic dramas present women as powerful ethical figures, not merely representatives of frus­ trated desire or wild sexuality. As Joseph B rodsky has observed, Frost's women are "neither to be loved nor to be loving, nor to be judged but ' to be a judge of thee.' " 1 The difficulty in comprehending these women is that they reveal con­ tradictions inherent in the cultural ideas about gender. At times appearing to represent nature, Frost's women also embody a powerful imaginative and 1110ral idealism with which Frost was sympathetic even while recognizing it as futile in a sensibilist's world of survival demands . Frost represents creation as an ongoing dialogue between men and women, each keeping the other within moral limits . In "The Future of Man" a two-party conflict of men and women governs history. According to Frost, the human tree of life , "the tree Y ggdrasil, " grows in doubleness, "j ust like the doubleness of the sexes. There'll be two parties always to it, son1e way. I hope that this tree is self­ fertilizing- I guess I hadn't thought of that-and it doesn't need another tree besides it, and in itself has all the doubleness I ask, good and evil, two sexes , one of them good and the other evil. " While maintaining a moral dualism, attribution of good and evil shifts subtly between the sexes as their conflict drives the endless ramifying of the tree of life. Frost's mythology combines the naturalistic implica­ tions of Darwin's process of natural selection with a mythology that evokes icons from Hebrew mysticism about the emanation of male and female parts of the

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Robert Frost and the Challell�e �r Darwin

soul. I n the synlbolisnl of the Kabbalah, as Gershonl Scholem has shown, in " its root every soul is a composite of Dlale and female, and only in their descent do the souls separate into Dlasculine and feDlinine souls . . . . Especially pronlinent are the iDlages of the tree of souls on \vhich each soul blooDls, and of the river which carrries the souls downward froDl their supernal source. " 2 I n "Wild Grapes," "Maple, " and " Paul's Wife " a nletaphoric connection exists between WODlen and trees and, therefore, nature. But "nature" in Frost emanates from nlysterious sources and produces an inexplicable and often doomed idealism in hunlanity, revealing itself in different instances in both men and women. I depart from Katherine Kearns's view that Frost nlaintains traditional gender roles with men representing rationality and order and WODlen embodying impulse and chaos so that "anything that expends itself in generation necessarily winds down acceleratively to death, but unlike nature and unlike women, men are possessed of the potential rationality by which they Dlight imagine to hold this process in abeyance . " 3 Frost's women seell1 as capable of asserting boundaries and exercis­ ing control as his men. What nlakes the tree grow, flourish, develop, is always the action of both sexes encouraging and contradicting each other. Darwin did more than any Inodern writer to place gender conflict at the center of natural history and the developnlent of an ethical society. In order to explain the seenlingly superfluous, ornamental features and activities of all crea­ tures fronl birds to nlan, D arwin posited sexual selection, beyond natural selec­ tion, as the driving nlechanisnl. Schopenhauer, in his essay "The Metaphysics of Sexual Love , " enlphasized that the aiDl of all love intrigues and sexual desire was actually a concern about the nature of future generations . I n The Descent �f Man Darwin, quoting Schopenhauer, extends this principle as the chief agent of natural selection and, therefore, of history: No excuse is needed for treating this subj ect in sonle detail; for, as the German philosopher Schopenhauer remarks , "the final ainl of all love intrigues, be they comic or tragic, is really of nl0re ilnportance than all other ends in hU111al1 life. What it all turns upon is nothing less than the C0111position of the next generation . . . . It is not the weal or woe of any one individual, but that of the hU111an race to C0111e, which is here at stake . " 4

This has far-reaching inlplications for all o f hUDlan psychology and moral developlnent. Behind what appears to be love is the preservation of the future. But whose future ? There is the preservation of the race but at what cost to the individual? Darwin gave biological authority for the importance of social in­ stincts over individual desires as the basis ofhuDlan survival. In The Descent �fMan Darwin argues at length that the "the first foundation or origin of the nl0ral

Women, Nature, and Domestic Conflict

sense lies in the social instincts, including sympathy; and these instincts no doubt were primarily gained, as in the case of lower animals, through natural selec­ tio n . " 5 Are the social instincts "gained," through an evolutionary process? If sexual selection is the primary agent of natural selection, how does its game encourage or enforce social instincts and morality? Frost embraces the D arwinian emphasis on the primacy of the social in­ stincts against Freud's Rousseauian myth of civilized repression of primal, un­ restricted desire . In "The Constant Symbol" he rails against the " egregiousness" of individualism as an attempt to escape from "the ruling passion" of community. Excessive cultivation of mystery, barrier, or individual control in both men and women can and should be penetrated and judged: We may speak after sentence, resenting judgment. How can the world know anything so intimate as what we were intending to do? The answer is the world presumes to know. The ruling passion in man is not as Viennese as is claimed. It is rather a gregarious instinct to keep together by minding each other's business. Grex rather than sex. We must be preserved from becoming egregious. The beauty of socialism is that it will end the individuality that is always crying out mind your own business. Terence's answer would be all human business is my business. No more invisible means of support, no more invisible motives, no more invisible anything. The ultimate commitment is giving in to it that an outsider may see what we were up to sooner and better than we ourselves . . . . Every poem is an epitome of the great predicament; a figure of the will braving alien entanglements .6

Frost was not simply j ustifying male control over wild female sexuality and rebellion. In his domestic dramas both men and women suffer from egregious­ ness for which both are often to blame. That egregiousness takes the forn1 of moral dissatisfaction with a world that falls short of a Platonic ideal . "By Plato­ nist," Frost wrote in a letter about E. A. Robinson, "I mean one who believes what we have here is an imperfect copy of what is in heaven. The woman you have is an imperfect copy of some woman in heaven or in someone else's bed. Many of the world's greats-maybe all of them-have been ranged on that romantic side. I am philosophically opposed to having one Iseult for my vocation and another for my avocation. "7 Frost would prefer to unmask the Platonic sensibility he finds in both men and women, revealing a life with "no more invisible means of support, no more invisible motives, no more invisible any­ thing. " The "figure of the will, " like the figure a poem makes, must accept the challenges of "alien entanglements. " Spenser's insights into the Petrarchan my­ thology of divine feminine nature are instructive in reading Frost. I n the second "Mutabilitie Canto, " Spenser gives nature the dramatic presence of a goddess but suggests that " her" true gender remains hidden as he echoes Heraclitus' wisdom

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Robert Frost and the Challen,Re
that " nature hides" : "Yet certes by her face and physnomy, / Whether she man or woman inly were, / That could not any creature well descry: / For, with a veil that wimpled every where, / Her head and face was hid, that mote to none appeare . " 8 Frost's passion in these dranlatic poems is to uncover the fluid, ambig­ uous will that takes its various forIns in gendered masks. Havelock Ellis, whose work interested Frost,9 argued that Darwin " had created the theory of sexual selection which made the whole becoming of life art and the secret of it poetry. " 1 () Darwin enlphasized the role of " choice" in the developInent of the nature of each of the sexes, an ongoing drama of aesthetic selection in the service of nl0rality and, ultinlately, biology: He who adnlits the principle of sexual selection will be led to the remarkable conclusion that the nervous systenl not only regulates nl0st of the existing functions of the body, but has indirectly influenced the progressive development of various bodily structures and certain nlental qualities . Courage, pugnacity, perseverance, strength , and size of body, weapons of all kinds, musical organs, both vocal and instrumental, bright colors and ornanlental appendages, have all been indirectly gained by one sex or the other, through the exertion of choice, the influence of love and j ealousy, and the appreciation of the beautiful in sound, colour, or form; and these powers of the mind nlanifestly depend on the development of the brain. 1 1

Darwin describes a circle of biological determinism and free will, as biology influences what the brain selects and the choice of the individual influences the future of the species. There is a particularly significant role for beauty as a means to an end. While preserving the goal of the moral, D arwin nevertheless held that a more irrational passion for beauty and form drives conscious choice. In nature women demand displays of men, fro m which they choose, and are often the powerful agents and guardians of futurity. In his notebooks Frost made similar speculations about a wife's role in the domestic game: "Wife's experiment on her husband to see if his j ealous watchfulness of her was all to make sure of the legitimacy of the heirs to his name and property and the purity of his breed. " 1 2 Frost shared Darwin's fascination with the uncertain power of natural selec­ tion over the monolithic control of artificial selection. Frost's contenlpt for eugenics parallels closely the Darwinian contempt for the limits of " artificial" breeding over the less predictable process of natural selection. Artificial selection becomes a form of historical necessity limiting the give-and-take of play. Eu­ genics, an outgrowth of this attempt to control and perfect, represents "bad taste" because of its idealistic and undenlocratic fixity. His own advocacy of p assionate preference echoes Darwin's nletaphor: Now science seenlS about to ask us what we are going to do about taking in hand our own further evolution. This is sonle left-over business from the great

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Darwinian days. Every school boy knows how amusingly short the distance was from monkeys to us. Well it ought not to be much longer from us to supermen. We have the laboratorians ready and willing to tend to this. We can commission them any day to go ahead messing around with rays on genes for mutations or with sperm on ovules for eugenics they get us somewhere, make something of us for a board or foundation to approve of. But I am asked to be prophetic. As far into the future as I can see with my eyes shut people are still pairing for love and money, perhaps just superstitious enough to leave their direction to what the mystic Karl Marx called historical necessity but what I like to call passionate preference, to the taste there's no disputing about. I foresee no society where artificial insemination won't be in bad taste. 1 3

Taste, then, or passionate preference, a version of sexual selection, represents the dialogue of individual choice tempered both by the limits of the environment and by the demands of community. All forms of aesthetic and sexual passion carry behind them an unconscious concern for the community and the future of the species. No governing authority or scientific plan can eradicate this process. With the lack of any certain authority the world risks the conflict of preferences and the lack, above all, of common purpose. The absence or death of children in many of Frost's domestic poems indicates the failure of men and women to accommodate each other's interests and provide for the future. But Frost took pleasure in this uncertainty because it allowed for freedom in play within the limits of the conditions of existence. He criticized the ground meta­ phor of the family triad-man and woman, marriage, child-which lies at the base of Hegelianism and Marxism. The wisdom of having children represents faith in the future, but in Frost's world that future remains precarious. There may be supersession and change but no "time succession , " by which he means pro­ gress, leading to an end or truth. The p ossibility of dissent or conflict in love undermines the tyranny of "monometap hor" : Hegel saw two people marry and produce a third person. That was enough for Hegel-and Marx too it seems. They j umped at the conclusion that so all truth was born. Out of two truths in collision sprang the one truth to live by tomorrow. A time succession was the fallacy. Marriage, reproduction, and the family with a big F have much to answer for in misleading the analogists. Fire flashes from the flint and steel of metaphor and if caught in lint it may spread, but that is no reason why it should spread to burn the world. That is monomania or monometaphor. 1 4

Frost's distrust of " monometaphor" and the utopian extension of the analogy of the family sheds light on the fact that in many of his pastorals c hildren are conspicuously absent- "The Hill Wife," "The Fear, " "A Servant to Servants , " and, o f course, "Home Burial . " Frost's domestic pastorals become metaphors for the ongoing drama of human self-definition and history. I n that drama the

Robert Frost a11d the ChallenRe
players thel11selves doubt the wisdon1 of having children in a world governed by cruelty and self-interest, and n1en and won1en blame each other. The dialogue between change and progress plays out brilliantly through a couple's dialogue in " I n the Hon1e Stretch . " Their move from a home in the city to the country becomes the start of a debate about their fear of change and their own extinction. Joe, the husband, wants to know what possessed them to move to the country and attempt a fresh beginning, and he becomes an Adam trying to blame Eve for their exile. As is often the case in Frost, the ordinary becomes a n1etaphor for the near-cosn1ic, as Joe's wife upbraids him for seeking the cer­ tainty of the ends of life instead of accepting the uncertainty of "middles . " Both she and her husband created the changes and path of their lives: ' I don't want to find out what can't be known . But who first said the word to conle?' 'My dear, It's who first thought the thought. You 're searching, Joe, For things that don't exist; 1 nlean beginnings. Ends and beginnings-there are no such things. There are only nliddles.'

Joe's own puritanical conten1pt for "fools in towns" with superficial notions of progress has led to their casting off fron1 the tyranny of the city. Their own j ourney follows the Protestant paradigm of pilgrimage, in which the city on a hill of a previous revolution becoll1es the place that ll1USt be renounced to establish a new order and consciousness. But where does it end? And what remains pern1a­ nent in the midst of this endless cycle of revolutions? Joe states that it would take him "forever to recite / All that's not new in where we find ourselves, " a vision en1bracing two tracks of time-one of infinite change and one in which the underlying dialogue of n1an and woman and the necessity of some domestic order remain the only real and inescapable elements of life : 'What i s this?' 'This life ? O u r sitting here by lantern-light together Anlid the wreckage of a fornler hoole? You won't deny the lantern isn't new. The stove is not, and you are not to Ole, Nor I to you .' ' Perhaps you never \vere? ' 'It would take Ole forever t o recite

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All that's not new in where we find ourselves. New is a word for fools in towns who think Style upon style in dress and thought at last Must get somewhere. I 've heard you say as much. No, this is no beginning.' 'Then an end?' 'End is a gloomy word.'

What Joe says renlains something h e heard his wife say before; their dialogue generates life, which can come to a resolution only with death. 1 5 The Christian pilgrimage collapses into the naturalized conflict of male and female in the contingent fight for survival throughout the animal kingdom. The eternal Platonic feminine that once lured to perfection in D ante or Goethe becomes the naturalized woman whose own ideals play a significant role in the future of worldly life. For Darwin the feminine p ower of selection throughout the animal kingdom and among savages forms the central part of his story of development. He also argued that male dominance distinguished the human world from the rest of the animal kingdom, though he was never clear whether this constituted an aberration or progress: With respect to the other form of sexual selection (which with lower aninlals is much the nlost common) , namely, when the fenlales are the selectors, and accept only those males which excite or charm them most, we have reason to believe that it formerly acted on the progenitors of man . . . . But this form of selection may have occasionally acted during later times ; for in utterly barbarous tribes the wonlen have more power in choosing, rejecting, and tempting their lovers, or afterwards, chang­ ing their husbands , than might have been expected. As this is a point of some importance, I will give in detail such evidence as I have been able to collect . 1 6

Darwin goes on t o describe brides who run away from husbands incapable of pleasing them and husbands trying to get them back by force, indicating the extent to which women retain in far more civilized environments the power to control their lovers. By associating females most closely with the active power of selection and by arguing that this power is active among savages, Darwin raised questions about the moral worth of female power and of the process of selection. A decided discontinuity exists in Darwin's thought between the evolved world of civiliza­ tion, in which men appear to have the authority of choice, and the rest of the natural world. He gives to women attributes of maternal love and intuition, which he regards as "lower" than the faculty of reasoning natural to men. Darwin's account of gender difference embraces two views of women: an ancient

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view of women as closer to lo\ver animals and in need of control and the more modern and Rousseauian view of WODlen as domestic civilizers and Dlothers: Wonlen seenl to differ fronl nlen in 111ental disposition, chiefly in their greater tenderness and less selfishness; and this holds good even with savages . . . . Woman, owing to her nlaternal instincts, displays these qualities towards her infants in an enlinent degree; therefore it is likely that she should often extend them towards her fellow-creatures. Man is the rival of other nlen; he delights in competition, and this leads to anlbition which passes too easily into selfishness. These latter qualities seem to be his natural and unfortunate birthright. It is generally admitted that with woman the powers of intuition, of rapid perception , and perhaps of imitation, are more strongly marked than in nlan; but sonle, at least, of these faculties are charac­ teristic of the lower races, and therefore of a past and lower state of civilisation. 1 7

Though men tend toward rivalry, WODlen are the more moral characters, even though their powers of "intuition" and "rapid perception" place them closer to the lower races, which for Darwin, of course, means the past. Feminists drew on Darwin's theory of sexual selectioD to argue for a revolu­ tion in which women would regain their p ower of choice and liberate themselves from the institution of marriage. I n 1 896 Eliza Burt Gamble p ublished The Evolution qf Woman, in which she concluded that new social conditio ns would enable a return to the prehistoric power of women: It should b e borne i n mind that under the new conditions which are approach­ ing, the constructive elenlent developed in human society is again to assume com­ nland over the destructive forces which have been in control since the beginning of the historic period. As this elenlent has been confided to women and as it is by them transnlitted to offspring, it is not difficult to forecast the position which the women of the future will occupy. Only the nlost robust among women will propagate the race. These women, as did the W0111en under early organized society, will choose their n1ates . They will exercise absolute control over the sex-functions . Thus will be avoided the terrible consequences which have resulted from the present form of nlarriage. 1 H

Similar arguments were made by Charlotte Perkins Gilnlan, who argued In Women and Economics that evolution had produced the unfortunate reversal of women being chosen rather than choosing. 1 9 I n Frost there is admiration for and even identification with feminine choice as a principle of freedom as well as fear of its subversive power and judgnlent of male interests. I n "The Lovely Shall Be Choosers" we have a demonic expression of the fear of woman's p ower to reject male authority, to refuse "love safe with wealth and honor. " Her punishment by the cOD1Dlanding male voice to his emissaries becoDles a life of suffering and submission in which her power is coy and passive:

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The Voice said, 'Hurl her down ! ' The Voices, 'How far down?' 'Seven levels of the world.' 'How much time have we?' 'Take twenty years . She would refuse love safe with wealth and honor! The lovely shall be choosers, shall they? Then let them choos e ! '

As the primary voice pronounces the seven levels, they fall into a series o fj oys and griefs, but such that "her grief is secret" and her j oy something she "never deigned to tell" her friends. The possibility of love occurs in the final two levels, when someone becomes interested in her mystery. Her silence and isolation give expression to her grief and suffering, which can be redeemed only by love: Then send some one with eyes to see And \vonder at her where she is, And \vords to wonder in her hearing how she came there, But without tinle to linger for her story. Be her last j oy her heart's going out to this one So that she almost speaks .

The sadness in Frost's domestic dramas can be seen in the terrible isolation of women and men stemming from ancient fears of their wills and desires. 20 While this reticence might have been developed to make domesticity and civilization possible, nature reanimated in the form of woman threatens to uncover some of the masked forces in both sexes that threaten the stability of the home. Beyond "The Lovely Shall Be Choosers , " "Wild Grapes" presents the force of a girl's refusal to submit to her brother's authority and to his ideas about her life and destiny. Ovid's account in Metamorphoses of Apollo's pursuit of Daphne haunts this poem as well as "Maple" and "Paul's Wife." Here the girl's pursuit of the gar­ land of grapes leads to her o\vn "translation" into a tree. Women and trees, as rep­ resentatives of nature, prove elusive, interpenetrating, and transforming in a precarious evasion of human and, often, though not exclusively, male control. Beneath the little fable of a childhood accident whirl numerous myths of trans­ gression. At the center is the woman's voice, refusing to change, refusing to abandon her dreams despite the threatening pressures of survival. The title and the girl narrator suggest less the Bacchic cult of orgiastic maenads than Dionysus­ Bacchus himself, the wine god whose limbs were annually hacked and resprouted in a pre-Christian display of perpetual renewal and regeneration. Her wildness, however, consists in her desire to swerve from expected patterns of development

Robert Frost and the Challel1J<e
and natural law. The desires of her heart conflict with the enlpirical denlands of the world, represented by the l11atter-of-factness of her brother and deeply associated with the old nlythology of the Fall and the new one of natural selection. In the title poem of NeLl! Ha111pshire, a kind of poetic preface or prologue to the book, a Warren farnler says that " [ T ] he matter with the Mid-Victorians / SeenlS to have been a nlan nanled John L . l)arwin. " (His deliberate confusion of Darwin's first name with that of the prize fighter John L. Sullivan underscores his view of Darwin as the prophet of God the fight pronl0ter.) In the first edition of the book Frost included footnotes to the prologue that referred to other poems in the book. His note to the line about I)arwin was "Cf. 'Wild Grapes.' "2 1 "Wild Grapes" explores the uncertainty about origins and about the conflict of sexes, particularly the power of females to choose and the power of men to attempt to exercise control over that choice. The title alludes not only to the Dionysian world of the Bacchae but, more important, to parallels with both Hebrew prophecy and natural history. I n Tho­ reau : A L[fe (�f the Milld Robert Richardson has documented Thoreau's great interest in the Darwin-Agassiz controversy. Thoreau focused on the dispersion of seeds to make "wild fruits" as evidence for Darwin's developmental theory. 22 The girl of the poem is like a wild fruit variant gathered from an unexpected place, a variant necessary for futurity. But Frost stresses that the limiting aspects of Darwin's theory as individuality is tenlp ered by the needs of cooperation and community. The parable of wild grapes in Isaiah 5 describes the children of Israel rebelling against God's law: "My well beloved hath a vineyard in a very fruitful hill: And he fenced it, and gathered out the stones thereof, and planted it with the choicest vine, and built a tower in the midst of it, and also made a winepress therein: and he looked that it should bring forth grapes, and it brought forth wild grapes . " The wild grapes fail to conform to the law of historical and national necessity dictated by God and are considered withered fruit, unworthy of the nation. In Deuteronomy 2 8 : 3 9 one of the curses for disobedience is "thou shalt plant a vineyard, and shalt not gather the grapes thereof. " The speaker of Frost's poem then attempts to vindicate her life after disobedience. That Frost has a woman speaking makes the title particularly poignant: it recalls not o nly Eve's disobedience but also the disobedience of any wonlan who will not "bear fruit" or who will consider the "life I live . . . an extra life / I can waste as I please on whom I please. " Metaphorically, this declaration is a refusal to submit to the male domination and the demand of reproduction. The speaker of "Wild Grapes" announces herself as a gnomic, witchlike figure. The narrative shape of the poem parallels the earlier "Birches" : a present

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feeling of waste and a recollection of past playfulness is followed by a resolution to maintain the childhood play. Here, too, one experiences innocence by swinging on a birch tree. 23 The strong association of women with the childhood of the species was, as Bram D ij kstra and Cynthia Russett have observed, prevalent in the post-Darwinian account of evolution and perhaps linked to a fear of the primordial power of women. 24 In "Wild Grapes" the romantic notion of the innocence of childhood is subverted into a world of false appearances, deception, and sexual rivalry. The speaker begins with mischievous, riddling questions that p oke fun at New Testament parables of moral p erfection and evoke the story of Orpheus and Eurydice as the primal tale of the birth of poetry: What tree nlay not the fig be gathered from? The grape lllay not be gathered frolll the birch? It's all you know the grape, or know the birch. As a girl gathered from the birch myself Equally with my weight in grapes, one autumn, I ought to know what tree the grape is fruit of. I was born, I suppose, like anyone, And grew to be a little boyish girl My brother could not always leave at home. But that beginning was wiped out in fear The day I swung suspended with the grapes, And was come after like Eurydice And brought down safely from the upper regions; And the life I live now's an extra life I can waste as I please on WhOlll I please. So if you see me celebrate two birthdays, And give myself out as two different ages, One of them five years younger than I look-

The first questions mock our traditional knowledge of order and expecta­ tion, an order that for the speaker has been destroyed by her own investigations of matter. This traditional knowledge derives from analogies that abound in the New Testament. In Luke 6:44 Christ p rovides the figure of a tree bearing its proper fruit as metaphor for the ability of only the good to do good works : " For every tree is known by his own fruit. For of thorns men do not gather figs, nor of a bramble bush gather they grapes . " The reference to this passage in the context of the poem and, by Frost's own admission, to Darwin had ominous implications. In the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries that passage was interpreted as an argument for eugenics. Trees that do not bear the proper fruit are racially and genetically less pure and, therefore, to be discarded as less than the best of the human. In 1 926, the American Eugenics Society published A Eugenics Catechism,

Robert Frost and the Challellge �f Darwin

in which this interpretation was made explicit for the general public: "Q: Does Eugenics contradict the Bible? A: The Bible has much to say for eugenics. It tells us that men do not gather grapes from thorns and figs from thistles. " 2 5 The purpose of the book was to bring about "more selective love-making" and to foster more love in marriage. The speaker of "Wild Grapes" tells us that she, like nature, promises nothing in the way of marriage nor in the stability of social institutions. Once "a little boyish girl," her story of origins reflects the power of evolu­ tionary theories of the origin of the sexes against the Judeo-Christian story of Adam and Eve, though the drama of the poem serves to underscore the idea that the primal couple was like a brother and sister. 2 6 As Darwin states in The Descent

of Man: "Hence some extremely remote progenitor of the whole vertebrate kingdom appears to have been hermaphrodite or androgynous. " 27 She also alludes to Eurydice's being "brought down safely from the upper regions" as a kind of salvation, when, in the myth, that abduction is Eurydice's trauma. This incident presents a "beginning . . . wiped out in fear, " a new myth of origins that encompasses the Freudian idea of childhood trauma as the awakening of con­ sciousness, fall, or a primitive act of rebellion recapitulated in the developn1ent of an individual. Her account relies heavily on phylogenetic and genealogical fan­ tasies that historical science brought to bear on the nature of human conscious­ ness, and she struggles to preserve the sanctity of individual experience under the pressure of biological deterlllinis111, responding with demonic force. Her account of beginnings recalls strongly Eve 's being tempted by the forbidden fruit. In this case, however, the possible agency of seduction is either nature itself, in producing this tempting fruit, or her brother, in leading her to the glade. The locus of evil, if there is one, remains hidden in the relations among nlan and woman and nature. Her young imagination has transformed the birch tree into an image of a stately woman, ornanlented by a necklace of grapes. Her desire seems to be fueled by a seeking of her own image in nature, reminiscent of Eve's gazing into the water at her own image in Paradise Lost: One day my brother led me to a glade Where a white birch he knew of stood alone, Wearing a thin head-dress of pointed leaves, And heavy on her heavy hair behind, Against her neck, an ornanlent of grapes. Grapes, I knew grapes fronl having seen them last year. One bunch of thenl, and there began to be Bunches all round me growing in white birches, The way they grew round Leif the Lucky's German; Mostly as nluch beyond nly lifted hands , though,

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As the moon used to seem when I was younger, And only freely to be had for climbing.

To the extent that self-seeking leads to temptation and loss of innocence, the predicaments of Eve and the narrator are similar. But the waters Eve gazed into also represented a reflection of heaven. What in nature produces such visions of perfection that lure individuals to ignore the hazards of the world? The story this narrator tells of her own deep history suggests not o nly Adam and Eve but also the primitive hunting and gathering of food and sexual rivalry. The brother wants to have time to pick grapes for himself. To the girl the tree is a nourishing mother, and the two siblings become rivals for fulfillment of their desires. The brother b ends the branch toward his sister, appearing to help her reach the grapes, but the result is her being hopelessly caught on the branch. The helper of self-sufficiency becomes tempter: My brother did the clinlbing; and at first Threw me down grapes to miss and scatter And have to hunt for in sweet fern and hardhack; Which gave him some time to himself to eat, But not so much, perhaps, as a boy needed. So then, to make me wholly self-supporting, He climbed still higher and bent the tree to earth And put it in my hands to pick my own grapes. ' Here, take a tree-top, I ' ll get down another. Hold on with all your might when I let go.' I said I had the tree. It wasn't true. The opposite was true. The tree had me.

The pursuit of her own passionate preference, in part an image of herself, is met by the alien e ntanglements of the tree and the threat it poses to her safety. No longer a nourishing nl0ther, the tree has become itself an ensnaring temptress. The moment of reaching and touching the fruit means a knowledge in which she recognizes that nature has more control over her than she does over it; there is no change in nature, only in her awareness of its complexity. She is reduced to the philosophy of " hang and let hang, " an ironic, limiting departure from the more liberal "live and let live. " Her experience of nature has led her to think of her own experience and trauma in terms of the primordial history of life , those wild ancestors who lived in trees. The complicated history of struggle and survival those ancestors represent, particularly their need of "mothers" to teach them, reminds the girl of her own biological needs and destiny, which she, as­ serting her independence, would like to forget and leave to the mythmaking of "an evolutionist " :

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The nlinute it was left with Ine alone It caught Ine up as if I were the fish And it the fishpole. So I was translated To loud cries fronl 11ly brother of ' Let go! Don't you know anything, you girl? Let go ! ' But I , with s0111ething of the baby grip Acquired ancestrally in just such trees When wilder 1110thers than our vvildest now Hung babies out on branches by the hands To dry or wash or tan, I don't kno\v which , (You 'll have to ask an evolutionist) r held on unco111plainingly for life. My brother tried to nlake Ine laugh to help 11le. 'What are you doing up there in those grapes? Don't be afraid. A few of thein won't hurt you . r mean, they won't pick you i f you don't thenl.' Much danger of nly picking anything! By that tinle I was pretty well reduced To a philosophy of hang-and-let-hang.

Her brother denleans her lack of knowledge, which he associates demonstrably with her gender: "Don't you know anything, you girl?" The girl's ability, or lack of it, is limited to the realm of instinctive apelike progenitors and does not extend to the realm of her brother's superior knowledge. The brother takes on the role of the Darwinian scientist as moralist, teach­ ing the laws of selection through an Aesopian account of the way "fox-grapes" think they outwit the fox by growing in a strange place. Survival has very little to do with cleverness and a great deal to do with luck. He intensifies the inextrica­ ble relation of all organic relations and biological determinism by referring to her two arms as an extra stem, a nl0rphological and selective advantage in clinging to the tree:

' Now you know ho\v i t feels,' 111y brother said, 'To be a bunch of fox-grapes, as they call the11l, That when it thinks it has escaped the fox By growing where it shouldn't-on a birch, Where a fox wouldn't think to look for itAnd if he looked and found it, couldn't reach it­ Just then C011le you and I to gath er it. Only you have the advantage of the grapes In one ,;yay: you have one more stenl to cling by, And promise 1110re resistance to the picker.'

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The brother's rhetoric turns the world o f struggle and survival into a moral lesson about the limits of cleverness in a world of predation, one in which she, as a grape picker, participates. Considering her superior to grapes by virtue of having " one more stem" of an arm reduces everything to chance and material advantage o nly. The girl resists both her brother's inj unctions and his insults about her lack of knowledge and material advantage. Her p assion for her own vision and her resentment of her brother's authority combine to keep her clinging well beyond what her brother thinks is safe : O n e by one I lost o ff my hat and shoes, And still I clung. I let my head fall back, And shut my eyes against the sun, my ears Against my brother's nonsense; 'Drop,' he said, ' I 'll catch you in my arms. It isn't far.' (Stated in lengths of him it might not be.) 'Drop or I 'll shake the tree and shake you down.' Grim silence on my part as I sank lower, My small wrists stretching till they showed the banjo strings. 'Why, if she isn't serious about it! Hold tight awhile till I think what to do. I'll bend the tree down and let you down by it.'

A sudden gap in her consciousness leads to a dreamlike memory of feeling the ground with "stocking feet" and staring at her " curled-up fingers, " an image that suggests the beginnings of Homo sapiens, the development of consciousness and hands, after our ancestors descended to walk upright from their arboreal dwell­ ings . Her trauma uncovers some of the deeper roots of her origins in nature. No sooner does she come to herself than her brother admonishes her with an inj uction from science about her relative lightness and inferiority as an un­ developed female. Speaking as nothing more than an empiricist, her brother reduces her troubles to the need to weigh more: I don't know much about the letting down; But once I felt ground with my stocking feet And the world came revolving back to me, I know I looked long at my curled-up fingers, Before I straightened them and brushed the bark off. My brother said: ' Don't you weigh anything? Try to weigh sonlething next time, so you won't Be run off with by birch trees into space.'

Her predicament, particularly her awareness of straightening her "curled­ up fingers," evokes the theories of the transition from apelike progenitors living

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in trees to bipedal hOIl1inids using tools and living on the ground. These theories had been hotly debated froIl1 Darwin through the 1 92os, particularly over which " event" in the process came first and at what p oint the "human" appeared. Misia Landau has shown the way in which evolutionary accounts of man's emergence from arboreal progenitors follow Proppian morphology, encompassing within the science hero myths and folktales. 2H The so-called genealogical and scientific approach to human history often merged romantic conceptions of individual heroism with the evolution of n10ral and religious consciousness. The merging of the two approaches is nowhere Il10re prevalent than in Freud's accounts of human history, through which Lan1arckian acquisitions are transmitted and re­ capitulated in individuals as described in the still-debated concept of ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny. 29 Here the entire process of throwing off religious authority seems to be biologized and then psychologized. Though Darwin made possible the idea of human descent with modification, his materialistic theory of human consciousness does not allow n1uch room for the power of human will, except in the process of sexual selection. I n "Wild Grapes" the girl makes the accounts of evolution part of her imagination, with herself as central heroic figure, countering the purely physicalist sensibility of her brother. The bunches of wild grapes becon1e a typ e of golden bough, a trophy of the heroic overcoIl1ing of a great descent into the underworld in order to establish oneself as the new monarch or authority. In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud refers to the story of Aeneas' descent into the underworld to confront his father and his seizing of the golden bough. He quotes the line Virgil gives to Aeneas, " Flectere si nequeo superos, Acheronta Il10vebo" (If I cannot bend the higher powers, I will move the infernal regions) (Aeneid 7 . 3 1 2 ) , to " give a picture of the repressed instinctual impulses. " 3 0 But Freud also gives a picture of his own heroic endeavors as a scientist, uncovering the irrational and then demanding the need for rational control. He used the saIl1e line fron1 Virgil as a Inotto for the entire book, and it describes the work of a man who hin1self is delving into the "infernal regions" of deep human history, demonstrating the way in which the childhood of the species recapitulates itself in the dream life of individuals. Here the girl attempts to bend the "higher powers " of her brother's rationality and empirical reductionism. She insists on maintaining an inner life of will and emotion that does not subn1it to the matter-of-fact demands of natural law in the same way that the speaker of "Birches" refuses to subn1it to truth breaking in "with all her matter­ of-fact about the ice-storn1." In "Birches" desire is a boy's will; in "Wild Grapes" it is a girl's, and the gender of the figure resisting the control of the natural shifts throughout Frost's poetry. The narrator of "Wild Grapes" insists on the impor-

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tance of her soul, in risky contrast with her brother's authority and knowledge and with the conditions of existence. By recognizing the civilizing influence of "mind , " she maintains, however constrained, what she hopes is the private domain of the "heart . " She expresses modern anxiety that conscious and uncon­ scious forces cannot be decoupled from mind, but she wishes to avoid the fall into consciousness .3 1 It wasn't my not weighing anything So much as my not knowing anything­ My brother had been nearer right before. I had not taken the fi r st step in knowledge; I had not learned to let go with the hands, As still I have not learned to with the heart, And have no wish to with the heart-nor need, That I can see. The mind-is not the heart. I may yet live, as I know others live, To wish in vain to let go with the mindOf cares, at night, to sleep; but nothing tells me That I need learn to let go with the heart.

The thrust of her self-j ustification in the face of the difficulties of life is through a series of negatives, oppositions to what she has not learned and will not learn. Her willfulness gains our sympathy, even though her insistence on a separation of mind and heart seems an attempt to deny the inextricable role that both play in the game of life. I n " Wild Grapes" Frost explored the risks of extending analogies between the self and nature, accounting for the limitations of growth within the bound­ aries of a sexual dialogue. "Maple" also examines a young woman's search for self-identity in the relations between her origins, her name, and what that name portends about the p ossibilities of growth. While Maple feels inspired to seek the meaning of her name, what she discovers seems a very cruel lesson about her commitment to a predictable and often cruel biological process. Framed by the problem of naming, the poem subverts the traditional romantic faith in the Adamic namer, and the power of language to mediate between the natural and the spiritual to discover determinate meaning. Maple's mother named her j ust before dying from childbirth, and the name was ratified by her father; creation is worked out together between men and women. Frost was deeply contemptuous of a prelapsarian, fixed realism in naming and enj oyed poking fun at any facile mimetic connection made between man, nature, and divinity purified of social contexts :

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God said to Adanl, "You wait here till I drive up SOlne of these new aninlals for you to nanle. " So God went over into the woods, and pretty soon he came back driving a bear ahead of hinl. And he shouted to Adanl to have a nanle ready to give the bear as he went by. And Adanl nlade his 11lind just as blank as he could, so that when the bear canle into his head there wouldn't be anything else there and he should get a snap result from his first i11lpression . Well, the minute he got a full view of him he got it. He 11lade the first sound that canle into his Inouth, "Bear. " "Bear, " God said, "what do you call hinl that for?" "Because it sounds the way he looks. Don't you think so?" And God said, "It doesn't yet, but it probably will when I 've heard it in connection with hinl often enough. We 'll let it go at that. Men will be childre n . Stay '\vhere you are and I ' ll go drive you up another. " Thus was started one of the most dangerous and foolish theories in poetry. 32

Frost distances himself fronl the Enlersonian vision of the poet as the new Adam whose intellect transforms fact into sign and essence.33 If anything in Frost's tinle helped to undermine the authority of nanling, it was Darwin's nominalism and its eradication of fixed taxonomy in a fluid, transforming world. Maple thinks of other names that suggest nothing about nature except for "Rose , " but she fails to heed her own reflection that the name does not reveal much: "Rose could have a meaning, / But hadn't as it went. " "The Rose Family" provides additional con1mentary on what Darwin's idea of descent had done to undermine the links between language and nature. The poem evokes the poetic family lines in Shakespeare, Stein, and Millay that attempt to assert the eternal essence of the rose as a sign of love. This tradition of poetic saying is unsaid by the Darwinian view of relations among all "growths " against which the essence "rose" becomes an inlposed order, a nlere fiction: 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 '\vill next prove a rose. You, of course, are a rose­ But were always a rose.

God no longer knows , much less directs, the path of growth but only "the dear" expressed in the resigned sigh of the genteel phrase "The dear only knows . " The Tree of Life keeps blossoming into fruits that defy easy classification. In the final couplet the lover addressed resists this change and concludes with something of a sentimental confirmation of the essence of his analogy. Despite growth and

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transformation in uncertain directions, the speaker hopes and insists on some underlying, constant principle. It may be love, but it is the Lucretian and D ar­ winian love of procreation. I n "Maple" different loves conflict and compete in the discovery of a girl's identity-Maple's mother's love, her father's, Maple's self-love, and the love of the man who marries her. What all this portends for the future is uncertain, but it hovers around the n1ystery that begins the poem: the intersection of birth and death. Her mother's death and her father's uncertainty as well as his bumbling sug­ gestion that the name forms some essential connection between herself and maple trees are enough to plant the need for a search for self-identity and meaning: Well, you were named after a nlaple tree. Your mother named you . You and she just saw Each other in passing in the room upstairs, One coming this way into life, and one Going the other out of life-you know? So you can't have much recollection of her. She had been having a long look at you . She put her finger i n your cheek s o hard It nlust have made your dimple there, and said, "Maple . " I said it too: "Yes, for her name . " She nodded. So we're sure there's n o mistake. 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 nlaple tree. H ow like a nlaple tree's for us to guess . Or for a little girl to guess sometime. Not now-at least I shouldn't try too hard now. By and by I will tell you all I know About the different trees, and something, too, About your mother that perhaps nlay help.' Dangerous self-arousing words to sow.

The seeds of self-consciousness will flower into the p ursuit of a phantom. The mother's naming, her father's words, and the girl are all "sown" growths that will take uncertain directions. Her father's knowledge of botany and "the different trees" can o nly illustrate the lessons of reproduction and survival and the difficulties of human categorization. Just as her home shows three stories to the road, the single family represents three individuals whose purposes may not conform to a single ordering purpose. Maple's own flowering differs from " the parent seed, " taking a capricious path of development from both father and mother that does not portend final revelation. Maple goes beyond her father's bemused suggestion about the nature of maple trees to a narcissistic pursuit of

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self, i nspired largely by responding to the notice and attention she gets from the nanle: What he sowed with her slept so long a sleep, And came so near death in the dark of years, That when it woke and canle to life again The flower was different fronl the parent seed. It came back vaguely at the glass one day, As she stood saying her nanle over aloud, Striking it gently across her lowered eyes To nlake it go well with the way she looked. What was it about her nan1e? Its strangeness lay In having too nlUC h nleaning. . . . This difference fronl other nanles 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 lnanner of the girl who bore it.

Her self-seeking lllakes her an unwitting participant in a civilization whose commitment to progress has reached an unnerving limit in the " all-disturbing" roar of an airplane above the city. Maple's " growth" becomes a metaphor for a civilization carried away with its own schellles of progress, i n which writing and thought have been reduced, ironically, to taki ng dictation, " a metaphor for dead, sterile reproduction: "

S o she looked for herself, a s everyone Looks for hinlself, nlore or less outwardly. And her self-seeking, fitful though it was, May still have been what led her on to read, And think a little, and get S O I n e city schooling. She learned shorthand, whatever shorthand nlay Have had to do with it-she sonletinles wondered So, till she found herself in a strange place For the nanle Maple to have brought her to, Taking dictation on a paper pad, And in the pauses \vhen she raised her eyes Watching out of a nineteenth story window An airship laboring with unship-like nlotion And a vague all-disturbing roar above the river Beyond the highest city built with hands.

The " natural tones" of a young lllan who sOlllehow divines her nature-"Do you know you relllind llle of a tree- / A 111aple tree?"-begin a dialogue that leads her away frolll her self-obsession and into courtship. The WOlllan is not wild

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nature but, rather, a figure for the limits of life-giving growth and the possibilities of life outside of love. A man recognizes mysteriously her " nature" and brings her from the city back to the country. Someone else does presume to know her and bring her away from the egregiousness of self-seeking. Yet the strange recognition that leads to her marriage feels less like overt male control than natural process working through quirky, chancy encounters and events. Neither the couple, the narrator, nor the reader ever quite learns the mys­ tery of the name her mother gave her. Maple continues to search for the meaning by speculating on various signs, including a maple leaf her mother left as a bookmark at a certain point in the Bible. After reading the pages, Maple forgot to put the leaf back and lost the place; all that's left of a possible scriptural analogy are her father's fading memories of what her mother said and her own uncertain memory of what she read. Katherine Kearns has focused on the vague memory of the phrase "wave offering" and its reference in Numbers 6:20 to the grotesque punishment of women who are unfaithful or sexually wild. Maple's mother may have been unfaithful, her father unwilling or unable to talk about it for fear of planting more dangerous ideas in his daughter, which is why he tells her only to " [B] e a good girl-be like a maple tree. " I n this context, however, the point seems to be that the Bible has become an uncertain moral guide, fading into oblivion like her mother's own intentions. Yet her mother may well have had in mind the limitations of a woman's life in the difficult labor of reproduction, the curse of her biological destiny and associated with the life of trees. Frost reani­ mates the analogy between the good wife and tree in Proverbs 3 : 1 8 " She is as a tree of life to them that lay hold upon her, and happy is everyone that retaineth her" but with the added twist that this tree of life has a life of its own and will not readily submit to control. The couple believe that her name must mean "something, " and the natural images they seize are suggestive but in ways that they would prefer not to recognize. Both try to keep from thinking about the maples that " [S] tood uni­ form in buckets , and the steam / Of sap and snow rolled off the sugar house," perhaps fearing this as a figure for the way lives are used and drained for the sweetness and pleasure of others. The sight of "the tree the autumn fire ran through / And swept of leathern leaves, but left the bark / Unscorched, un­ blackened, even, by any smoke, " intimates the recurrent cycles of passion and death, sacrifices made in the rituals of rebirth and renewal. One particular tree suggests something more, possibly the cruel labor and death her mother and other women suffer in the process of making their offering to future generations: They always took their holidays in autumn. Once they came on a maple in a glade,

208

Robert Frost and the ChallenRe if Darwin Standing alone with snlooth arnlS lifted up, And every leaf of foliage she'd worn Laid scarlet and pale pink about her feet.

Their search for the meaning of her name has left them with little more than uncertainty and only grin1 possibilities of natural process. Though capable of being "figurative," they no longer have the "faith" to believe in essence to provide continuous meaning across tinle or p erspectives, p articularly as their literal-mindedness has thenl focusing on one particular tree. Time transforms individuals as it transforms the world they perceive, making the pursuit of reality an uncertain adventure : B u t its age kept them frolll considering this one. Twenty-five years ago at Maple's naming It hardly could have been a two-leaved seedling The next cow might have licked up out at pasture. Could it have been another maple like it? They hovered for a llloment near discovery, Figurative enough to see the symbol, But lacking faith in anything to mean The sallle at different times to different people.

The suggestion of a cow's "licking up" the original seedling becomes one more reminder of the way life may be lost to further ends other than its own. Though the narrator appears to regret the fact that Maple's name " ruled" in her life, the moral "Better a meaningless nanle, I should say, / As leaving more to nature and happy chance" seems particularly ironic. "Nature and happy chance" produce little other than mating, reproduction, and death . The poem ends the way it began, with a couple producing the future. Though the narrator may hope that single metaphors do not govern people's lives, he expresses a tacit recognition that a certain reality does indeed govern them and that we might be happier if our consciousness did not deceive us into pursuing deeper meanings . "Paul's Wife" also explores the power of woman as representative of nature and represented in her creation fronl a log. Like Eve, Paul's wife represents in p art a creation out of himself. Frost plays with a little-discussed aspect of the legend of Paul Bunyan . Rather than stressing his in1age as the intrepid individualist whose p ower as logger underscores the human donlinion and control of nature, Frost undermines the legend by exposing Paul's susceptibility to fear of sexual com­ petition and humiliation.34 Though his great feats with wood remain un­ matched, his fello¥l loggers know that raising the issue of wife can drive the hero to " disappear" in shanle. That he "never stopped to murder" anyone who asks

Women, Nature, and Domestic Confl i ct

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about a wife indicates his level of rage and vulnerability about getting and losing a woman: No one was anxious to get rid of Paul. He'd been the hero of the mountain camps Ever since, j ust to show them, he had slipped The bark of a whole tamarack off whole, As clean as boys do off a willow twig To make a willow whistle on a Sunday In April by subsiding meadow brooks . They seemed to ask him j ust to see him go, 'How is the wife, Paul?' and he always went. He never stopped to murder anyone Who asked the question. He just disappeared-

There appears to be some indication of the envy of the other workers, who are fascinated by the p ower this question has over the hero. We also learn something about the ideals of racial p urity behind the Bunyan legend when we are told that Paul must not have "some half-breed squaw" for his wife. The desire for a perfect matching wife leads Paul to try to create her out of inanimate nature, a p arody of the Pygmalion myth of control of nature that extends from primitive magic to eugenics. Paul creates his wife fro m an odd piece of hollow pine (perhaps a pun on his desire) that he drags through water. The references to the pith of the hollow containing an old snake skin are suggestive of a fear and a demonizing of the sexual organs of a woman: He made out in there A slender length of pith, or was it pith? It might have been the skin a snake had cast And left stood up on end inside the tree The hundred years the tree must have been growing. More cutting and he had this in both hands, And, looking fronl it to the pond nearby, Paul wondered how it would respond to water.

Paul's naturalist's curiosity and testing of the p ine is suddenly interrupted by its sudden disappearance and the emergence of a p owerful girl, who immediately arouses his jealousy: Not a breeze stirred, but j ust the breath of air He nlade in walking slowly to the beach Blew it once off his hands and almost broke it. He laid it at the edge where it could drink.

210

Robert Frost and the Challenge of Darwin At the first drink it rustled and grew limp. At the next drink it grew invisible. Paul dragged the shallows for it with his fingers , And thought it must have nlelted. It was gone. And then beyond the open water, dim with nlidges, Where the log drive lay pressed against the boonl, It slowly rose a person, rose a girl , Her wet hair heavy on her like a helnlet, Who, leaning on a log looked back at Paul. And that Inade Paul in turn look back To see if it was anyone behind hinl That she was looking at instead of him.

The simile of the helnlet to describe her wet hair intensifies her image of power and self-sufficiency, which makes Paul fearful that she may be indifferent to him. As she becomes animated, she asserts that self-sufficiency and forces Paul to chase her: There was a nloment of suspense in birth When the girl seenled too water-logged to live, Before she caught her first breath with a gasp And laughed. Then she clinlbed slowly to her feet, And walked off talking to herself or Paul Across the logs like backs of alligators, Paul taking after her around the pond.

From an anomalous piece of sawed pine has arisen an emanation of nature that challenges Paul's power and control in the wilderness. Paul's dream "cre­ ation" cannot be sustained in the world of "brute" threats . When the other members of the camp shout their "brute tribute of respect to beauty, " their voices put out her light, which has little more life than a "firefly. " A fragile conduit of life, Paul's wife does not have the staying light of a star. Becoming " possessed" by his new wife, Paul also becomes "a terrible p ossessor, " whose desire of a perfect union and an ideal wife prove unsustainable in a crude world of external threat and denlands: Murphy told me Paul put on all those airs About his \vife to keep her to himself. Paul was what's called a terrible possessor. Owning a wife with hinl nleant owning her. She wasn't anybody else's business, Either to praise her, or so nluch as nanle her, And he'd thank people not to think of her.

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Murphy's idea was that a man like Paul Wouldn't be spoken to about a wife In any way the world knew how to speak.

I n a passage that echoes E . A. Robinson's poem "Eros Turranos , " Frost drama­ tizes the way in which nature represented by woman inspires the most indepen­ dent of heroes to lose control to their passion and jealousy. Paul's need to create his own wife and his refusal to be spoken to about her "in any way the world knew how to speak" represent his own idealism doomed to be extinguished in the light of the world. Frost's women exhibit a grand ability to cloak their sexual power in displays of spirituality and idealism. The masquerade of "The Witch of Coos" reveals the tension between a woman's representation of herself as independent spirit and medium to a transcendent reality and her having been the demiurge of sexual conflict, j ealousy, and murder. She appears to the narrator a dubious storyteller, a countryside curiosity, and an "old-believer" left with only her son and role not as sorcerer but as "mother. " The title reveals some of the poem's irony: the mother is not really a witch, but " C oos" is not only a county but a New England slang word that means "whore" and that echoes the ancient Greek chaos, meaning primal chasm and source of disorder. The poem can be read, in part, as a satire of the burgeoning spiritualist movement in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in general and the two maj or forces it became associated with: science and feminism. One of the greatest exponents of spiritualism was, ironically, Alfred Russel Wallace, the codiscoverer o f natural selection. Unable to accept the seemin g sup erfluities of

the human mind as the product of only natural selection, Wallace proposed spiritualism, unn1ediated contact between the human mind and the supernatural world, to explain them.35 D arwin rej ected spiritualism cold. His own explana­ tion for the same phenomena rested in the process of sexual selection. In " The Witch of Coos" the pretense of spiritualism hides a visceral game of sexual selection. Her show follows trends in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century of occultism and theosophy born of a desire to maintain distance be­ tween the imagination and the reality of our biological impulses. Ironically, spiritualism also fell to the need to conform to scientific verification. Spiritualism and the women's movement became closely allied. As Ann Braude has argued in Radical Spirits, feminists saw spiritualism as a radical form of liberation from male-dominated institutional religious authority, an extension of the antinomianism of Anne Hutchinson. As a form of freedom, it also expressed the moral and spiritual superiority of women. 36 In "The Witch of Coos" we see

Rohert Frost and the (;hall(,/�(!e (?f Danl'ill

212

the spir itualist h iding deeper sexual desire a n d tna intaining, after the deaths of her l over and of h er

husban d,

control over th e house. But her past \vas anythin g

but pure, and she rClllains bound to h e r 1110therhood. Tho ugh the \vhole story app ears to b e a shovv the Ino ther and son have develo ped for gullible visitors, the 11lother takes her spiritualis11l seriously aDd b CCOI11CS troubled by SOllle of its contradictions, particularly its failure to account fo r the 11laterial re ality of the

body

as \vell as its desire to accol1ll1lodate itself to

the sta n dards of proof of 1110dern science. In spired by "lzall e the Sioux (:ontr01 , " a n odd spiri tualist \vho Inade her ponder the q uesti o n o f \vhether the dead " have souls" or a re souls, she p osits the persistence of a b o dily, visc eral p resence, evoki n g the old religious controversy about what happens to the dead be t\vee n t h e tinle o f death a n d

the

resurrection . (:aught betvveen the Pau line vievv that i n

t h e resurrection w e shall b e given n evv b o dies a n d t h e Neop1atonic view of p u rely spiritual re surre c tion , she fe ars the p o ssibili ty of retnaining in an earthly lirnbo. Christian and p agan intersect in her nlind in a terrifying \vay, and she does reveal h erself to be an old believer, despite the p u t-on \vay she appeals to the evidence of pieces of bone to acconllllodate nlo dern skepticis111:

I stayed the nigh t for shelter at a faral Behind the lllountain, Two

old-believers .

"vith

a lllother

5011,

and

They did all the talking.

MOTHER. Folks think a \vitch '\vho has faTniliar spirits

She

pass a \-v inter evening, be burned at the stake o r sOlnethi ng. S u nllnoning spirits isn't ' B u tton, button, could call up to

B u t \von't, should

Who's go t the button ,' I \vould have thCIll SON. Mother can 11lake a

kt10\V.

C01111110n table rear an a nny lnule .

And kick \-v ith t\vo legs like MOTHER. And \\7 hen

I've done it, \vhat for yo u , l e t In e

good ha ve

I done?

l:tather than tip a table

Tell you "vhat RaIle the Sioux C: ontro l o nce told l1le . t-l e said the dead h a d so uls , b u t \v he n I asked hil11 Ho"v that co uld be- I thought the dead vve re souls, He broke ITly trance. Don't that lllake you suspicious That th ere 's SOll1cthing the dead are ke e pi n g back? Yes, there's sOTncthing the dead are keeping back. S O N . Yo u

\vouldn't

Up attic,

111other?

\vant to tell

MOTHER. Bones-a s keleto n.

hilll

\vha t

\-ve have

Women, Nature, and Domestic Confli ct

2I3

The story about the bones, however, exposes her desire to reanimate lost power, and the skeleton becomes a metaphor for her self. Like the dead, she too is "keeping something back," which makes her more compelling, threatening. Behind her story about the resurrected bones-a skeleton in the closet-is her deeper psychological fear and, above all, guilt about her past. The story about the skeleton tells a great deal about her attempts to over­ come the coldness in her marriage and the cruelty of men. Her husband, Toffile, faults her for going "to sleep before [she goes] to bed, " but one senses that the conditions he has created for her are equally cool, and that he feared her sexuality as much as she feared his control, leaving "an open door to cool the room off / So as to sort of turn me out of it" : MOTHER.

The only fault my husband found with me­ I went to sleep before I went to bed, Especially in winter when the bed Might just as well be ice and the clothes snow. 't he night the bones came up the cellar-stairs Toffile had gone to bed alone and left me, But left an open door to cool the room off So as to sort of turn nle out of it.

As she presents the resurrected skeleton , she creates a fantasy of control over its passion, "balancing with emotion , " and fear of its desire, fire emanating from its mouth and smoke from its sockets . And she reminds herself and the narrator that "in life once" the man used to come at her with hand outstretched, perhaps with some violence. Both fond of what she has provoked and fearing it, she exerts ultimate control by knocking its bones to pieces on the floor and keeping them for proof (or so she would like the narrator to believe ! ) . I never could have done the thing I did If the wish hadn't been too strong in me To see how they were mounted for this walk. I had a vision of them put together Not like a man, but like a chandelier. So suddenly I flung the door wide on him. A moment he stood balancing with emotion, And all but lost himself. (A tongue of fire Flashed out and licked along his upper teeth. Snloke rolled inside the sockets of his eyes.) Then he canle at me with one hand outstretched, The way he did in life once; but this time I struck the hand off brittle on the floor, And fell back fronl him on the floor myself.

214

Robert Frost and the Challen�e C!f Darwin The finger-pieces slid in all directions . (Where did I see one of those pieces lately? Hand me nly button-box-it nlust be there.)

More important is the way she uses her sorcery to seduce her indifferent hus­ band, reducing his egregiousness, and demanding a display of sexual prowess: I listened till it alnlost climbed the stairs From the hall to the only finished bedroom, Before I got up to do anything; Then ran and shouted, 'Shut the bedroom door, To ffile, for nly sake ! ' ' Con1pany?' he said, ' Don't nlake nle get up; I ' n1 too warn1 in bed.' So lying forward weakly on the handrail I pushed n1yself upstairs, and in the light (The kitchen had been dark) I had to own I could see nothing. 'Tofflle, I don't see it. It's with us in the room though . It's the bones.' 'What bones?' 'The cellar bones-out of the grave.' That made hinl throw his bare legs out of bed And sit up by n1e and take hold of n1e .

Toffile, her husband, never saw the skeleton, and she told him that she had trapped it in the attic, pushing the bed against the door, nailing it shut. The in'la g ined p roxinli ty of the skeleton to the bed ke eps excitetnent- through

threat of intrusion and her fantasy-in the rnarriage. As much as she is fascinated by the skeleton and uses it to torment Toffile, it also becomes a taboo by which she remains faithful to Toffile and his memory. She will be "cruel" to the bones for the cruelty she once inflicted on her husband by her infidelity: Let then1 stay in the attic. When they sOlnetinles Con1e down the stairs at night and stand perplexed Behind the door and headboard of the bed, Brushing their chalky skull with chalky fingers, With sounds like the dry rattling of a shutter, That's what I sit up in the dark to sayTo no one any 1110re since Toffile died. Let then1 stay in the attic since they went there. I pronlised Toffile to be cruel to then1 For helping then1 be cruel once to hinl.

We finally learn the deeper tragedy behind her storytelling: Toffile had killed the n1an who had an affair with her and buried hin1 in the cellar. This was more than

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215

enough for both of them to be tormented by the idea of the skeleton, for their guilt in a crime, for the inadequate burial of the dead: SON.

We think they had a grave down in the cellar.

MOTHER. SON.

We know they had a grave down in the cellar.

We never could find out whose bones they were.

MOTHER.

Yes, we could too, son. Tell the truth for once. They were a man's his father killed for me. I mean a man he killed instead of me. The least I could do was help dig their grave. We were about it one night in the cellar. Son knows the story: but 'twas not for him To tell the truth, suppose the time had come. Son looks surprised to see me end a lie We'd kept all these years between ourselves So as to have it ready for outsiders. But tonight I don't care enough to lie­ I don't remember why I ever cared. Toffile, if he were here, I don't believe Could tell you why he ever cared himself. . . .

What we find out or can infer about the "witch" 's life is more horrible than the story she might be concocting to sell to visitors. Sexual j ealousy, murder, loneli­ ness, and fear are the memorable aspects of her domestic experience. She refuses to become spiritually buried by her past, but her spiritualism cannot hide her dependence on the memory of the passion she inspired in her lover and in her husband and of the guilt over the tragedy that it created. Only at the end is there an exasperated disavowal of her attempt to hide her life behind the mask of spiritualism: "But tonight I don't care enough to lie- / I don't remember why I ever cared. " If this is j ust another mask for the narrator, it is a doubt overcome when he sees her husband's name, Toffile Lajway, still on the mailbox. In "Wild Grapes , " "Maple," and "The Witch of Coos , " though analogies exist between women and chaotic nature, the persistent, romantic idealism of these women makes them strong foils to the control of men. In "Home Burial" a wife's angry reticence becomes a moral rebuke to what she perceives as her husband's brutal and selfish way of mourning the death of their first child; the gender hierarchy of civilized and uncivilized, ordered and chaotic, male and female, becomes remarkably fluid. The death of their child, one of the most disturbing possible events in a marriage and an undermining of a fundamental biological order, threatens the purpose of their relationship and reveals , instead of love, a void. The drama of their argument reveals the intensity of her personal interests

216

Robert Frost a11d the Challell}�e �f Darwin

beneath her mask of piety and the force of her husband's will beneath his postures of care and reasonableness. Their debate about the limits of grief becomes defined by gender and whether there is any C0l11nlOn hUl11an ground on which to continue their relationship and a fa n1ily. Anly's declaration of the loneliness of death and others' inability to grieve appears to conforn1 to the Aristotelian view that excessive grief is " unmanly, " associated with women who are weaker and closer to chaotic nature than men. Men are able to grieve alone: People of manly nature guard against nlaking their friends grieve with them, and unless he be exceptionally insensible to pain, such a man cannot stand the pain that ensues for his friends, and in general does not adnlit fellow mourners because he is not hinlself given to nlourning; but wonlen and womanly men enj oy sympathizers in their grief, and love thenl as friends and companions in sorrow. But in all things one obviously ought to inlitate the better type of person. 37

In " Home Burial" this ancient distinction becomes complicated. Amy remains impervious to fellow mourners and provides a powerful though flawed rebuke to her husband's grief and temporary control, which may be little more than the virtue of maintaining his own power within the home. Amy becomes the relent­ less idealist in a world of survival demands . A letter Frost wrote to U nternleyer, which Richard Poirier noted has some parallels to "H0I11e Burial, " reveals a dissatisfaction with excessive sympathy and grief as womanly and mad. Here, however, Frost confesses that the limited sympathy ofmanliness and the desire to have children conform to a brutish world of survival that he has chosen to accept. Ferninized moral culture produces an inability to cope with the world that can lead only to the insanity to which his sister, Jeanne, fell victinl : She Ueaniel has always been antiphysical and a sensibilist. I must say she was pretty well broken by the coarseness and brutality of the world before the war was thought of. This was partly because she thought she ought to be on principle. She has had very little use for nle. I arn coarse for having had children and coarse for having wanted to succeed a little. She nlade a birth in the fanlily the occasion for writing us once of the indelicacy of having children. Indelicacy was the word. Long ago I disqualified myself for helping her through a rough world by nly obvious liking for the \vorld's roughness. But it took the war to put her beside herself, poor girl. Before that canle to show her what coarseness and brutality really were, she had been satisfied to take it out in hysterics, though hysterics as tinle went on of a more and more violent kind. I really think she thought in her heart that nothing would do j ustice to the war but going insane over it. She \vas \villing to go alnl0st too far to show her feeling about

Women, Nature, and Domestic Conflict

217

it, the more s o that she couldn't find anyone who would go far enough. One half the world seenled unendurably bad and the other half unendurably indifferent. A mis­ take. I belong to the unendurably bad. And I suppose I am a brute in that my nature refuses to carry sympathy to the point of going crazy, or of dying just because someone else dies. As I get older I find it easier to lie awake nights over other people's troubles. But that's as far as I go to date. In good time I will join them in death to show our common humanity. 38

Frost's stance against raising oneself too far above the world's badness parallels an argument Freud makes about World War I in "Reflections on War and Death . " Conventional behavior contains too much sympathy for the dead, and Freud reveals his own Rousseauian prej udices against civilization as a constraint on freedom: The culmination of this conventional attitude towards death among civilised persons is seen in our complete collapse when death has fallen on some person whom we love-a parent or a partner in marriage, a brother or sister, a child, a dear friend. Our hopes, our pride, our happiness, lie in the grave with him, we will not be consoled, we will not fill the loved one's place. We behave then as if we belonged to the tribe of the Asra, who must die too when those die whom they love. But this attitude of ours towards death has a powerful effect upon our lives. Life is im­ poverished, it loses its interest, when the highest stake in the game of living, life itself, may not be risked. It becomes as flat, as superficial, as one of those American flirtations in which it is from the first understood that nothing is to happen, con­ trasted with a Continental love-affair in which both partners must constantly bear in mind the serious consequences . Our ties of affection, the unbearable intensity of our grief, make us disinclined to court danger for ourselves and for those who belong to us. We dare not contemplate a great many undertakings which are dangerous but quite indispensable, such as attenlpts at mechanical flight, expeditions to far coun­ tries, experiments with explosive substances. We are paralysed by the thought of who is to replace the son with the mother, the husband with his wife, the father with his children, if there should come disaster. The tendency to exclude death fronl our calculations brings in a number of other renunciations and exclusions. And yet the motto of the Hanseatic League declared : " Navi�are necesse est, vivere non necesse! " (It is necessary to sail the seas, it is not necessary to live.)39

Freud views excessive preoccupation with grief as womanly and part of a death­ obsessed sentimental and moral culture too concerned with the questions of "who is to replace the son with the mother, the husband with his wife, the father with his children." Women, as Rousseauian keepers of domestic order, also maintain the ancient characterization of natural inferiority. The qualities of "sympathy" that D arwin showed as higher in women than in men do not cancel their excessiveness and childish immaturity. Feminized culture becomes a hin­ drance to development that needs to be escaped.

Robert Frost and the Clzallel1(�e (?f Darwin

2I8

Though "Home Burial" focuses on An1y's need to escape the confines of the house and marriage, we learn that her husband found some of his own escape outside the house digging his son's grave, no doubt a form of relief from his wife's moral control. When the narrative begins, we find Amy in a position of meta­ phoric superiority, at the top of the stairs, silent and refusing her husband's gaze from the the bottom. Her silence becolnes a barrier she has created to torment her husband and force hin1 into a confrontation with her fears, one of which is the physical force he exhibits as he "mounts" above her seeking to penetrate her reticence. The absence of question marks at the end of the husband's " questions" reveal the extent to which they are more accurately demands, if not threats : He saw her from the bottonl of the stairs Before she saw hinl. She was starting down, Looking back over her shoulder at sonle fear. She took a doubtful step and then undid it To raise herself and look again . He spoke Advancing toward her: 'What is it you see From up there always-for I \vant to know.' She turned and sank upon her skirts at that, And her face changed from terrified to dull. He said to gain tinle: 'What is it you see,' Mounting until she cowered under hinl. ' I will find out now-you nlust tell nle, dear.' She, in her place, refused hinl any help With the least stiffening of her neck and silence . She l e t him look, sure that h e \vouldn't see, Blind creature; and awhile he didn 't see. But at last he murnlured, 'Oh,' and again, 'Oh.' 'What is it-what?' she said.

'Just that I see.' 'You don't,' she challenged. 'Tell nle what it is.'

She was first the obj ect of his gaze, and one senses that her extra looks back were intended to offset his controlling stare. The narrator tells us that she was "looking back at some fear. " Here, as in "The Witch of Coos" or "The Fear, " the woman's ability to reanimate fear, while seemingly irrational, serves an important moral role, to unsettle the complacency of civil and domestic control . We find this same paradox in James's psychology. Evolution has taken us too far from fear, and he prescribes "an attack of mental disease to teach us the meaning of the word" and save us fron1 optative banality:

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The progress frolll brute to man is characterized by nothing so much as by the decrease in frequency of proper occasions for fear. In civilized life, in particular, it has at last become possible for large numbers of people to pass from the cradle to the grave without ever having had a pang of genuine fear. Many of us need an attack of mental disease to teach us the meaning of the word. Hence the possibility of so much blindly optimistic philosophy and religion. The atrocities of life become "like a tale of little meaning though the words are strong" ; we doubt if anything like us ever really was within the tiger's jaws, and conclude that the horrors we hear of are but a sort of painted tapestry for the chambers in which we lie so comfortably at peace with ourselves and with the world.40

Amy has succeeded in rousing fear in her husband, sufficient fear for him to break his own barrier of silence and demand to know what it is she sees. She denies his ability to see, and she demeans him as imperceptive and crude, becoming a "blind creature . " The husband, not Amy, has been reduced to brutishness and lower mental capacity. The husband's response to the challenge reveals part of what Amy fears: she is being used as a childbearing instrument in her husband's house. The husband "frames" the family graveyard with the window-diminishing its size and, figur­ atively, its import-turning it into a portrait in his family gallery. And he makes the terrifying analogy between the bedroom and the graveyard, revealing his own ability to lacerate Amy with but a few words. Love leads not o nly to death but to the memorial of his people : 'The wonder is I didn't see at once. I never noticed it from here before. I must be wonted to it-that's the reason. The little graveyard where my people are ! So slllall the window frames the whole of it. Not so nluch larger than a bedroonl, is it? There are three stones of slate and one of marble, Broad-shouldered little slabs there in the sunlight On the sidehill. We haven't to mind those. But I understand: it is not the stones, But the child's lllound- '

He refers to his own relatives in an extraordinarily cold way, making an analogy between their persons, "broad-shouldered, " and the "slabs." The " child's mound" remains the one as yet indeterminate part of the "family plot," to which Amy has become destined to contribute. Her pain and anger bear resemblance to the feelings and actions of Laban's third wife in "Place for a Third, " as she refuses to be buried with the previous two and become another of his "children in a

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burial row. " In the death of Alny's child she sees her own death and burial as part of his family story. Having penetrated the lnystery of her fear and revealed his own capaci­ ties for cruelty and his own less than elevated motives, she erects new bar­ riers, pleading that he desist: "Don't, don't, don't, don't," as though her words portended violence. Retreating to a p osture of male reason-"Can't a man speak of his own child he's lost?" -the husband irritates Amy even more by referring to it as "his child. " The underlying issue here on both sides is possession, self-interest, and control. She seizes control again by attacking his innate lack of ability to speak, a crudeness inherent in men: "I don't know rightly whether any nlan can" (r(�lz tly could refer both to her "knowledge " and to the ways of nlen) . But I doubt that Amy believes that her husband does not know how to speak. His words and her silences speak powerfully of their individual and conflicting interests . Anly nlakes hinl dance, forcing him back on hinlself and denlanding behavior that suits her interests . We wonder who the "someone else" was that Anly fled to after an earlier argument-a lover or comforter. No doubt Anly fears her husband's violence, revealed not only by her desire to leave the house but also by his pronlise not to come down the stairs: ' Arny! Don't go to sorneone else this tit11e. Listen to 11le. I wo n't C 0 111e down the stairs .' He sat and fixed his chin between his fists. 'There's something I should like to ask you, dear.' 'You don't kno\v ho\v to ask it. ' 'Help n1e, then .' Her fingers 1110ved the latch for all reply.

The narrator's observation of the husband sitting with his " chin between his fists" calls attention onlinously to physical force that might have been used in the past . Anly wants her husband to bend to her denlands , but she may also want to be independent of hinl altogether. The husband feels the strain of meeting his wife's demands of beauty, and, while he wants to please her, he also wants to remain true to his sense of self and purpose, which is inextricably bound up with his "being a nlan. " As soon a s h e asks to b e "given a chance," he then veers to reducing her concerns to her sex, to her "nl0ther-Ioss . " Frustrated that he nlust "partly give up being a nlan / With wOlnen-folk," he suggests an " arrangement" by which he'd "keep hands off' anything she lnight nanle. Language on her part has becolne not a source of Iniscol1ununication but, instead, a barrier that she can

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erect. But words alone may not be the only failure o r offense. H e may well be "hands on" in other ways that are terrifying. In a couplet riddled with negatives, what seems to be a plea for no barriers, he seems on the verge of recognizing that there is no love in their marriage, only fear and competing interests : 'My words are nearly always an offense. I don't know how to speak of anything So as to please you . But I might be taught I should suppose. I can't say I see how. A man must partly give up being a man With women-folk. We could have some arrangement By which I 'd bind myself to keep hands off Anything special you're a-mind to name. Though I don't like such things 'twixt those that love. Two that don't love can't live together without them. But two that do can't live together with them.'

His maxim that " Two that don't love can't live together without them. / But two that do can't live together with them" indicates how little actual love exists without completing the dialectic with a child, both a bond and a barrier. The husband feels the pressure of her moral judgment, pleading for her to talk about her grief "if it's something human," a phrase that barely conceals his anger at being reduced to a brute. Her sentimental unworldliness becomes to him j ust as inhuman. Both their excesses threaten to undermine the possibility of any domestic order and leave the question of what it means to be human balanced across gender lines: She nl0ved the latch a little. 'Don't-don't go. Don't carry it to someone else this time. Tell me about it if it's something human. Let me into your grief. I'm not so much Unlike other folks as your standing there Apart would make me out. Give me my chance. I do think, though, you overdo it a little. What was it brought you up to think it the thing To take your mother-loss of a first child So inconsolably-in the face of love. You 'd think his memory might be satisfied- ' 'There you go sneering now ! '

He emphasizes Amy's grief as particular to her sex, a "mother-loss, " even while wondering whether this way of grieving may not be innate but taught, some­ thing she was "brought up" to think. Referring to her upbringing reduces her to the status of a selfish child, one who does not recognize that sacrifice ( or waste) is

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the essence of the larger scheme. Amy retaliates by reducing her husband to a brute, his logic nothing more than a "sneer. " In recounting his digging of their child's grave, Amy demonstrates her ability to speak and characterize in a way that reinforces her husband's lack of verbal ability and, thereby, his lack of hunlanity. Her portrait of him depicts a coarse, unfeeling laborer, associated with dirt and " everyday concerns " : 'You can't because you don't kno\v how t o speak. If you had any feelings , you that dug With your own hand-how could you? -his little grave; I saw you from that very window there, Making the gravel leap and leap in air, Leap up, like that, like that, and land so lightly And roll back down the mound beside the hole. I thought, Who is that nlan? I didn't know you. And I crept down the stairs and up the stairs To look again, and still your spade kept lifting. Then you came in. I heard your runlbling voice Out in the kitchen, and I don't know why, But 1 went near to see with my own eyes. You could sit there with the stains on your shoes Of the fresh earth fronl your own baby's grave And talk about your everyday concerns. You had stood the spade up against the wall Outside there in the entry, for I saw it.' ' I shall laugh the worst laugh I ever laughed.

I ' nl cursed. God, if I don't believe I 'ln cursed.'

Richard Poirier notes the novelistic detail with which Amy recounts her hus­ band's activity right down to " the stains on your shoes / Of fresh earth from your own baby's grave. " 4 1 More than detail, the hurling of the phrase "stains on your shoes" becomes a metaphor for her heaping sin on his soul. Her husband's response of laughing and accepting his curse echoes the urging of Job's wife to " C urse God and die " (Job 2 : 9) , only in this situation the wife has replaced God as the moral authority. The husband feels cursed both by the loss of a child as well as his inability to make his wife understand him, something she attributes to the innate qualities of his sex. Amy's interpretation of her husband's words in the kitchen reveals, iron­ ically, that her husband nlay be far more subtle and sophisticated in expressing himself than she understands . Her question is really an accusation, and she believes not only that he would not care but that he is fundamentally incapable of carIng:

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'1 can repeat the very words you were saying. "Three foggy mornings and one rainy day Will rot the best birch fence a man can build. " Think of it, talk like that a t such a time ! What had how long i t takes a birch t o rot To do with what was in the darkened parlor. You couldn 't care ! The nearest friends can go With anyone to death, comes so far short They might as well not try to go at all.'

She takes his saying "Three foggy mornings and one rainy day / Will rot the best birch fence a man can build" quite literally as some musing about the weather and fence building and fails to recognize the power of his own metaphor. The time it takes for a birch to rot represents the husband's naturalistic way of talking about what his loss means and has everything to do with what is in "the darkened parlor. " Amy thinks in terms of civilization and parlor culture, her husband in terms of survival against the natural decay of elements . The birch fence is, like the child, a barrier between the threatening environment and his future as well as a barrier between himself and Amy. Amy charges that her husband and the world are "evil" because they cannot grieve sufficiently, cannot follow the dead into the beyond. The inescapable self­ interest of all human beings, or at least her husband, leads her far into the position of an ascetic Christian's denial of the world, one that would make life impossible: '. . . No, from the time when one is sick to death, One is alone, and he dies more alone. Friends make pretense of following to the grave, But before one is in it, their minds are turned And making the best of their way back to life And living people, and things they understand. But the world's evil. 1 won't have grief so If 1 can change it. Oh, I won't, I won't! '

Her eloquent expression of despair-" from the time when one is sick to death, / One is alone, and he dies more alone"-reverses Jesus' words in John I I after the resurrection of Lazarus: "This sickness is not unto death, but for the glory of God, that the son of God might be glorified thereby. " Her despair denies a facile Christianity and affirms the necessity of a heroic existential suffering similar to what Kierkegaard described in The Sickness unto Death as evidence of man's ascendancy over beast: The possibility of this sickness is man's advantage over the beast, and it is an advantage which characterizes him quite otherwise than the upright posture, for it

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bespeaks the infinite erectness or loftiness of his being spirit. The possibility of this sickness is the Christian's advantage over natural man; to be cured of this sickness is the Christian's blessedness. 4�

Amy comes close, then, to sounding like a representative not of nature but of Christian philosophy and its assertion of the distinction of man from other creatures. She sees her own being "sick to death," a sickness that is unending because "To be saved fror11 this sickness by death is an impossibility, for the sickness and its tornlent-and death-are precisely to be unable to die. " Though povverful, An1y's stance renders fall1ily survival impossible, a form of ill1moral purity as it attell1pts to transcend the demands of survival. She may not sound like Antigone or Cordelia, but her piety may be at least as damaging as theirs. Her attitude describes a crisis in civilization that Freud commented on in "Our Attitude toward Death" ( 1 9 1 5) , published the year after North of Boston: "Consideration for the dead, who no longer need it, is dearer to us than the truth, and certainly, for 1110st of us, is dearer also than concern for the living. " 43 Freud and Frost challenge Christian culture to conform to a conception of truth provided by science, one in which the dell1ands of survival reign . Amy refuses to conforll1 to manly and scientific conceptions of the lirnits of grief, and her war with her husband is an attell1pt to ll1ake the world conform to her standards and accept her authority: "I won't have grief so / If 1 can change it. a h, 1 won't, I won't ! " Her husband must realize that failure to n1eet her demands will result in the dissolution of the home and his concern for furthering his people. In treating her cOll1plaint as a form of therapy, her husband condescends to her and ll1akes her pain seenl j ust talk. For her to give in would be to give up being who she is, and she pushes her threat beyond "talk. " Her husband's lack of tender love and rationality is unnlasked in the final exchange, as her refusals push hill1 to threaten force to keep her. Her "I won't" is met with a decidedly passionate " I will " : 'There, you have said i t all and you feel better. You won't go now. You're crying. Close the door. The heart's gone out of it: why keep it up. Amy! There's sonleone coming down the road! ' ' You-oh, you think the talk is all. I 111ust go­ S0111ewhere out of this house. How can I lnake you-' 'If-you -do ! " She was opening the door wider. 'Where do you mean to go? First tell 111e that . I 'll follow you and bring you back by force. I will !-'

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The proliferation o f dashes i n the last two parts indicates a world o f emotional reality beyond words, a world that is actively, physically threatening. The dash after " will I" indicates that she has escaped the house and brought him to taking action. The drama lacks closure or "settling down , " but this ambiguity is pre­ cisely what reveals the power struggle lurking beneath moral and ethical positions. The line between grief and madness is a fine one, and Amy's desire to escape can be seen as a response to the suffocation of servitude. The woman of "A Servant to Servants" describes her desolation from hard labor and domestic service to her husband, Len, and the men who work for him. But much of her story in this dramatic monologue is speculation about her own madness. Is she really mad, or has she suffered from the scientific diagnoses of an age that was all too willing to regard the despair of poor women as inherited and an evolutionary failure? "A Servant to Servants" reflects, then, a form of complementarity in ethics brought about by biological science. Is our narrator a "sinner" or is she " ill"? Can the sense of moral responsibility for our condition be supplanted by clinical notions of inherited madness or genetic defect? The narrator explores powerfully and painfully the implications of what it means for her to have " all gone wrong. " And her repeated lament, "But I don't know" takes on signifi­ cance beyond its power as a colloquial gesture of despair as an expression of deep uncertainty about the power of the will. The title is revealing in this respect, a variation on Noah's curse on Ham, the father of Canaan: " and thou shalt be a servant of servants. " The curse became a j ustification for the enslavement of the Canaanites by the Jews . In America this curse was interpreted as the biblical j ustification for slavery, but Frost's use of it here shifts the focus to the predicament of a poor woman who was vie\ved by science and society as destined to a life of virtual slavery. I n this monologue she is a servant not only if servants-poor laboring men-but speaking to servants, other women. We learn that her audience is a group of traveling botanists from one of the questions she asks them: Our Willoughby! How did you hear of it? I expect, though, everyone's heard of it. I n a book about ferns? Listen to that! You let things more like feathers regulate Your going and coming. And you like it here?

Her apparent friendliness toward her audience may be slightly facetious, as her own situation certainly allows none of the leisure and freedom that allow things "more like feathers " to "regulate " their " going and coming. " Botanizing, one of Frost's favorite activities, was popularly, though not exclusively, a leisure activity

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primarily for girls and won1en. In the nineteenth century it became associated with self-improvement, education, and even natural theology. Their encounter with this speaker is striking, then: in a bookish and genteel venture into nature they find a woman, far froll1 the city, who reveals that country life is no asylum or sanctuary but a madhouse of loneliness, subjugation, and waste.44 The extent of the shocking effect her story ll1USt have had on the genteel na·ivete of her audience should not be underestimated. She announces how pleased she is to have them there camping on her land but is fully aware that they have little understanding of her suffering, how there was little self except " a voice-like left inside." I didn't nlake you know how glad I was To have you come and camp here on our land. I pronlised nlyself to get down some day And see the way you lived, but I don't know! With a houseful of hungry nlen to feed I guess you'd find. . . . It seenlS to me I can't express my feelings any 1110re Than I can raise my voice or want to lift My hand (oh, I can lift it when I have to) . Did ever you feel so? I hope you never. It's got so I don't even know for sure Whether I am glad, sorry, or anything. There's nothing but a voice-like left inside That seems to tell me how I ought to feel, And would feel if I wasn't all gone wrong.

The rest of the poem reveals what she believes happened to her-why she is " all gone wrong. " She tells of ll1aking sacrifices for her husband, Len, who appears to be an unsuccessful entrepreneur, building cottages in remote areas . Len, however, i s shown t o be a fool o r willfully cruel i n believing that i n science, "doctoring, " i s the cure for his wife's fractured self, instead o f recogniz­ ing that relief fron1 his own demands and inadequacy is what she really needs. Only one doctor admits that "medicine" is not the answer. She wants "rest" from laboring for men, something she has to struggle to admit: It would be different if nlore people came, For then there would be business. As it is, The cottages Len built, sonletimes we rent thenl, Sometimes we don't. We 've a good piece of shore That ought to be worth sonlething, and nlay yet. But I don't count on it as 111uch as Len. He looks on the bright side of everything,

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Including me. He thinks I 'll be all right With doctoring. But it's not medicineLowe is the only doctor's dared to say soIt's rest I want-there, I have said it out­ From cooking meals for hungry hired men And washing dishes after them-from doing Things over and over that just won't stay done.

Len uses her as a laborer in his futile efforts at success. While she concedes Len's alleged wisdom, what she says about him makes him seem no more profitable to the family enterprise than she. Len, like her, is something of a "hired man , " trying to j ustify an unproductive existence. Len also decided that she would b e less likely t o become mentally ill by living "ten miles from anywhere . " This only intensifies her isolation, as does his forgetting that "work ain't all," no doubt referring to his lack of attention to her need for pleasure from him. His vision of the virtue oflabor- "the best way out is always through"-describes the possi­ bility of laboring to escape difficulties and achieve a goal but becomes tragic in light of her endless effort at "doing / Things over and over that j ust won't stay done . " She reveals that her husband, who is " into everything in town , " leaves her alone, exhausted and j oyless. And his attempts at success appear to be little more than making waste; they amount to very little escape or happiness. Caught between accepting the dogma of a family's insanity and escaping into service to her husband, she remains the prisoner of heredity and environ­ ment. The assumptions about her insanity and her role in life are largely defined by the sexual science of D arwinism: the inescapable law of inheritance, the lower mental capacities of women, and the fate of the poor. Like the woman of "Wild

Grapes," she turns these assumptions into life stories in an effort to maintain her inner voice, however pained, against their pressures. They are pressures so great that often she does not even know how to feel, and they are enforced by her husband, whose knowledge and civility are questionable compared with hers. Just at the point when she begins to reveal her sexual fantasies about the men who board in the house, she describes her "fancies" as a form of inherited madness that " runs in the family. " Weakness of mind became, after D arwin, a question of descent and genetics, a new form of determinism. I t was as though she had convinced herself that "the place is the asylum" for those who are so troubled, rather than admitting the cruelty of the circumstances that create the "madness . " In her father's household and in Len's submission without affection is the order of things. I have my fancies: it runs in the family. My father's brother wasn't right. They kept him

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Robert Frost and the CJzallen,{!e C?f Darwin Locked up for years back there at the old farnl. I 've been away once-yes, I've been away. The State Asylum. I was prejudiced; I wouldn't have sent anyone of nline there; You knovv the old idea-the only asylunl Was the poorhouse, and those \vho could afford, Rather than send their folks to such a place, Kept thenl at honle; and it does seenl nlore hunlan. But it's not so: the place is the asylunl. There they have every nleans proper to do with, And you aren't darkening other people 's lives­ Worse than no good to theIn, and they no good To you in your condition; you can't kno\v Affection or the want of it in that state.

Her reference to the old vie\v that " the only Asylun1 / Was the poorhouse" reflects the change that the l)ar\vinian revolution had brought to psychology. Before D arwin insanity was viewed as conditioned by environment­ particularly by poverty and deprivation. After Darwin poverty and insanity becalne evidence of innate inferiority. I t was a biological revival of a cruel form of Calvinistic predestination. The solution that Darwinian psychology brought was the coldness of segregation of the new asylunl. In The Female Malady Elaine Showalter has described the shift in treatment of the "insane," reminding us that " driftland" and "borderland" were the predominant nletaphors used by psychol­ ogists to describe the minds of the mentally ill. This definition is pertinent to many of Frost's characters-Baptiste, the Starks, the Witches, Silas, and others­ who attempt to survive and maintain their " human rating. " They literally drift or live in a borderland, on the fringe of " civilization": Contempt for the insane as evolutionary failures characterized the discourse of psychiatric Darwinisn1. The rhetoric of heredity, inheritance, and degeneracy which appears obsessively in the nledical literature of the time is also closely linked to class prejudice and to ideas of race superiority. The rich and well educated, although they were increasingly vulnerable to the neuroses of modern civilisation­ to wit, the denizens of Driftland-were essentially seen as a reservoir of mental health, while the poor and disreputable were the breeding ground of madness . While the moral nlanagers had hoped that the insane poor could be cured, the Darwinians thought that they could be segregated; in the long run, physicians hinted, their numbers could be reduced through stricter immigration laws and selective breeding.45

The eugenics movenlent targeted women as the source of persistent low-animal sexuality and promiscuity. Daniel Kevles, in his disturbing book In the Name �f

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EUj!enics, recounts an actual sanction ry an American asylum that supported this view of women: Eugenicists gave a good deal of attention to sexual behavior of the "feeble­ n1inded, " some authorities discerning excessive sexuality among males, others claiming that mentally deficient males were actually undersexed. Whatever the disagreement about males, there had long been no dispute about females; they were reputed to be sources of debauchery, licentiousness, and illegitimacy. In the eighteen-eighties, the trustees of the New York State Custodial Asylum for Feeble­ minded Women had argued, typically, that retarded women required special care because they were " easily yielding to lust. "46

In addition to admitting her lustful fancies, the narrator goes on to recount the horrific story of her mad uncle, who was caged. Whether the story is true or concocted, it is a revelation of domestic horror and denial of love and affection akin to that felt by the mother in "The Witch of Coos , " a domestic tragedy kept secret. The story underscores a putative relation between madness and animality that to the victim is really about being "crossed in love" and imprisoned and treated with the greatest cruelty by one's own family: My father's brother, he went mad quite young. Some thought he had been bitten by a dog, Because his violence took on the form Of carrying his pillow in his teeth; But it's more likely he was crossed in love, Or so the story goes. It was some girl. Anyway all he talked about was love. They soon saw he would do someone a mischief If he wa'n't kept strict watch of, and it ended In father's building him a sort of cage, Or room within a room, of hickory poles, Like stanchions in the barn, from floor to ceiling,­ A narrow passage all the way around. Anything they put in for furniture He'd tear to pieces, even a bed to lie on. So they made the place comfortable with straw, Like a beast's stall, to ease their consciences. Of course they had to feed him without dishes. They tried to keep him clothed, but he paraded With his clothes on his arm-all of his clothes. Cruel-it sounds. I s'pose they did the best They knew. . . .

She goes on to describe a more subtle type of imprisonment, her mother's "accommodat [ing] her young life" to her father's in marriage; her mother had to

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listen tv "love things made dreadful" by her brother-in-law's shouts. The crude music her brother-in-law made with the bars of the cage parallels her own struggle to make some art and play out of her pain and possibly gain the sympathy of those who are supposed to love her. His shouting tragically depletes his strength; " his voice died down slowly from exhaustion . " Our narrator adds a terrifyingly suggestive detail that her mother and father "found a way to put a stop to it" (reminiscent of Browning's "Porphyry's Lover" and "My Last D uchess") and hints darkly at what her parents may have wanted to do to her: And just when he was at the height, Father and mother married, and mother came, A bride, to help take care of such a creature, And accommodate her young life to his. That was what marrying father meant to her. She had to lie and hear love things made dreadful By his shouts in the night. He'd shout and shout Until the strength was shouted out of hinl, And his voice died down slowly from exhaustion. He'd pull his bars apart like bow and bowstring, And let them go and make thenl twang until His hands had worn them smooth as any oxbow. And then he'd crow as if he thought that child's play­ The only fun he had. I 've heard thenl say, though, They found a way to put a stop to it.

She admits never having seen her uncle, only the cage in the attic-a grim reminder and more believable version of the bones in the attic in "The Witch of Coos . " Our narrator may be trying to terrify her audience with a little horror story about country families or may be providing a vivid parable of her own situation. She continued the woman 's role of accommodating her life to her husband's. Even though Len wanted them to move away from her parents ' troubled home, the madness goes with them. We cannot tell whether her difficulties were inherited and inescapable or environmental and habitual: He was before nly tilne-I never saw him; But the pen stayed exactly as it was There in the upper chamber in the ell, A sort of catch-all full of attic clutter. I often think of the smooth hickory bars. I t got so I would say-you know, half fooling­ 'It's time I took my turn upstairs in jail'Just as you will till it becon1es a habit. No wonder I was glad to get away.

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Mind you, I waited till Len said the word. I didn't want the blame if things went wrong. I was glad though, no end, when we moved out, And I looked to be happy, and I was, As I said, for a while-but I don't know! Somehow the change wore out like a prescription. And there's more to it than just window-views And living by a lake.

Her own speech p arallels the effort of a soul-saving art that has been diminished to the unreliable utterances of the inferior and insane. Her appeal derives from the tension between admitting that she has some type of breakdown and yet sounding so accepting and sane. She is someone, as Pirandello once remarked about the oppressed, who reasons because she suffers. There is a "voice­ like" that sounds beyond the roles-wife, feeble-minded woman, servant-that society has forced her to play. Her accounting of her life is not a fantasy but, rather, the slight consolation (and perhaps freedom) gained by recognizing her life as a role. She accepts her role, the "road" she keeps and her need "to be kept" fronl it, as though that performance gives form to her being. She also recognizes that everyone is engaged in a kind of servitude-her husband, her uncle, her father, her mother, the doctors, and her audience: I'm past such help­ Unless Len took the notion, which he won't, And I won't ask him-it's not sure enough. I s'pose I 've got to go the road I ' m going: Other folks have to, and why shouldn't I? I almost think if I could do like you , Drop everything and live out o n the ground­ But it might be, come night, I shouldn't like it, Or a long rain . I should soon get enough, And be glad of a good roof overhead. I 've lain awake thinking of you, I 'll warrant, More than you have yourself, some of these nights . The wonder was the tents weren't snatched away From over you as you lay in your beds. I haven't courage for a risk like that. Bless you, of course, you're keeping me from work, But the thing of it is, I need to be kept. There's work enough to do-there's always that; But behind's behind. The worst that you can do Is set me back a little more behind. I sha'n't catch up in this world, anyway. I 'd rather you'd not go unless you must.

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Her emphatic rather seems a dramatic gesture asserting freedom to will and choice while also revealing her pained uncertainty and diffidence. The pos­ sibilities of talk, one fornl of play and culture, save her from her servitude and endless labor, revealing a hunlanity denied to her by Len and the allegedly scientific assulllptions about her hUlllan worth . She finds asylum only in her own relatively brief perfornlance. The relentless burden of both keeping and being kept generates the woman's despair in "A Servant to Servants . " In "The Housekeeper" a live-in servant engenders despair and llladness in the man who keeps her, John Hall. Their cOlllpeting interests lead to a cOlllplete breakdown in the farm and the illlpossibility of any family or future. The ll10ther-in-comlll0n-law housekeeper tells how her daughter, Estelle, ran off to nlarry someone other than the house owner, John Hall. According to her, Hall is a man who has " made up his mind not to stand / What he has got to stand. " She has sought to ensure her future by marrying her daughter to her enlployer. The incestuous pressure of country duties, including managing the fann and having children, have driven Hall into a neurotic retreat from any responsibility. His is a revolt against life and nature that seems to stem from the denlands of the housekeeper-a maternal presence who becomes a metaphor for authority gone out of control. The housekeeper has obviously become an anathenla to Hall, large and grotesque, who dominates the entire home: ' . . . He and I only hinder one another. I tell them they can't get nle through the door, though : I 've been built in here like a big church organ. We've been here fifteen years .'

No doubt the housekeeper and her daughter have become like family to Hall, but the relationship is incestuous and deadening. Once hired as servants to him, they have becollle his tasklllasters . He wanted them to help hilll, but he winds up allowing them to control hinl. The mother-housekeeper failed to do what her name tells us she was supposed to do-keep the house. Instead, she and the house are aging and in decay. Her nl0thering control, furthering the interests of family, produce a revolt and rebellion in John Hall . Hall's farnl is a chaos, everything has gone to ruin, and it seems from the housekeeper's perspective that his childishness can be blamed, ironically, on being raised by his nl0ther, lacking strong male influence: ' . . . If h e could sell the place, but then , he can't: No one will ever live on it again .

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It's too run down . This is the last of it. What I think he will do, is let things smash. He'll sort of swear the time away. He's awful! I never saw a nlan let family troubles Make so much difference in his man's affairs. He's just dropped everything. He's like a child. I blame his being brought up by his mother.'

John Hall beco111es a n artist, indifferent to the demands o f home, family, women-precisely because of their power. Estelle, at some point, wants not only marriage but also children, and H all is not interested. The difficulties of farming as well as his domestic relations serve to bring Hall's productive farming to a halt. His hay is rained on, and he throws his hoe into an apple tree, an emblem of frustration with the supposedly useful knowl­ edge and technology of agriculture : ' . . . He's got hay down that's been rained on three times. He hoed a little yesterday for me: I thought the growing things would do hinl good. Something went wrong. I saw him throw the hoe Sky-high with both hands. I can see it now­ Conle here-I ' ll show you -in that apple tree. That's no way for a man to do at his age: He's fifty-five, you know, if he's a day.'

I nstead of tending to practical farming, he and Estelle had turned everything into art, particularly the breeding of prize c hickens, rebelling against anything practi­ cal or useful. But this turning away from the responsibilities of farming raises questions in the housekeeper's mind about H all's strength, and particularly, his masculinity. The "nice things" Hall is "too fond" of include the "smell of the wet feathers in the heat," and one begins to suspect a perverse erotic passion for the hens he can control over the women he cannot: ' . . . You see our pretty things are all outdoors. Our hens and cows and pigs are always better Than folks like us have any business with. Farmers around twice as well off as we Haven't as good. They don't go with the farm. One thing you can't help liking about John, He's fond of nice things-too fond, some would say. But Estelle don't complain: she's like him there. She wants our hens to be the best there are. You never saw this room before a show,

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Robert Frost and the Challenge if Darwin Full of lank, shivery, half-drowned birds In separate coops, having their plumage done. The smell of the wet feathers in the heat! You spoke of John's not being safe to stay with . You don't know what a gentle lot we are : We wouldn't hurt a hen! You ought t o s e e u s Moving a flock o f hens from place t o place. We're not allowed to take thenl upside down, All we can hold together by the legs . Two at a tinle 's the rule, one on each arnl, No nlatter how far and how nlany tinles We have to go.'

Hall's obsession with chicken breeding becomes his own controlling creativity within the confines of the household matriarchy. Frost was once a poultry farmer and contributed a number of prose anecdotes to farm and poultry periodicals about local farmers and their efforts at breeding better chickens . Of John A. Hall from Atkinson, New Hampshire, Frost wrote that he was a "breeder's breeder, " who "will sometinles forget his surroundings and accesso­ ries in the superior interest of the birds themselves. " All of the essays are about various practices of artificial selection in the interest of prize winning or egg laying for the farmers. In alnl0st all cases the breeders go too far in their use of trap nests, for example, and in their pursuit of perfection in general, while ignoring the cruelty and waste they inflict. The essay demonstrates the hazards and failure that come from all attempts at perfection.47 The poultry breeding exemplifies artificial selection and eugenic practices that attempt to overcome the limits of nature born of a neurotic frustration with the limitations of ordinary life. The virtues of agriculture and labor, as I mentioned in the last chapter, were extolled as emblems of the progress of technology and science. Darwin's own science, however, denigrates the significance of human workmanship in breeding in comparison with nature 's work. After Darwin the rise of the eugenics move­ ment was largely an attempt to create progress in human society through correct breeding. The eugenics movement was dissatisfied with the extraordinarily slow process of natural selection and attempted to make biology work toward improv­ ing the species. The housekeeper complains of John Hall's lack of interest in farming and his willingness to spend his money on a prize cock (which certainly suggests a sexual narcissisnl) . They paid in "wampum" to get something so rare and precious from "The Crystal Palace, London, " referring to the Paxton's building for the Great Exhibition of 1 8 5 I , which became a metaphor for the triumphs of Victorian technology and cultural superiority. In his insightful inter-

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pretation o f the Crystal Palace, Stanley Jaki describes how the Great Exhibition was a celebration of progress against the dark background of the Napoleonic Wars .48 John Hall is a eugenicist, in that he exchanges all of the trouble of farming and his local tribalism for an example of the best workmanship, the best example of breeding, that England has to offer: 'What's this? ' 'A bill­ For fifty dollars for one Langshang cock­ Receipted. And the cock is in the yard.' ' Not in a glass case, then?' 'He'd need a tall one: He can eat off a barrel from the ground. He's been in a glass case, as you nlay say, The Crystal Palace, London. He's imported. John bought him, and we paid the bill with beads­ Wanlpum, I call it. Mind, we don't complain. But you see, don't you, we take care of him.' 'And like it, too. It makes it all the worse.'

In A Further Range Frost published "A Blue Ribbon at Amesbury (or, small plans gratefully heard if) , " about a chicken farmer who has a prizewinning hen. The farmer "meditates the breeder's art, " a fantasy about improving creation, with the hen as "Mother Eve . " Here the man has become the "keeper. " In an ironic sense he must, indeed, have only "half a mind" to contemplate breeding a new race from chickens. But, of course, they are a metaphor for his desire for control and a fantasy of perfection in the midst of what Frost had called "hugger­ mugger farming." Eve, the earth mother, not God, has a cycle or "ritual" that mimics or mocks divine creation, laying six days and resting one. The one who gave her ankle-band, Her keeper, empty pail in hand, He lingers too, averse to slight His chores for all the wintry night. He leans against the dusty wall, I mmured almost beyond recall, A depth past many swinging doors And many litter-muffled flo ors . He meditates the breeder's art. He has a half a mind to start,

Robert Frost and the ChallenRe of Darwin \"':'ith her for Mother Eve, a race That shall all living things displace. 'Tis ritual with her to lay The full six days , then rest a day; At which rate barring broodiness She well may score an egg-success. The gatherer can always tell Her well-turned egg's brown sturdy shell, As safe a vehicle of seed As is vouchsafed to feathered breed.

The keeper's meditation becomes a eugenic dream of the creation of a new or better species from existing matter, fron1 the selection of " an almost perfect" hen. The success of this plan, however, depends not only on the keeper-breeder but also on the quality of the material with which he has to work-the willfulness or broodiness of the hen herself. Frost's mockery of eugenics lies not only in a moral objection to controlling others but in its failure to recognize the lin1itations of the creatures being toyed with as well as the threats from the environn1ent, in this case the snowstorm o utside the domesticating pen: N o human specter at the feast Can scant or hurry her the least. She takes her time to take her fill . She whets a sleepy sated bill. She gropes across the pen alone To peck herself a precious stone. She waters at the patent fount. And so to roost, the last to mount. The roost is her extent of flight . Yet once she rises to the height, She shoulders with a wing so strong She makes the whole flock nlove along. The night is setting in to blow. It scours the windowpane with snow, But barely gets from thenl or her From comnlent a conlplacent chirr. The lowly pen is yet a hold Against the dark and wind and cold To give a prospect to a plan And warrant prudence in a nlan.

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The "prospect" o f breeding the bird i s gloomy because of the rebellious and noncomplacent nature of the creature. At this point the bird almost becomes a symbol of the feminine, which refuses to remain dOlllesticated, manipulated, or controlled-to be used simply as a "vehicle of seed. " The pen, an ironic meta­ phor for Eden and a pun on the instrument of literary order, is not much of a hold against a difficult environment that is part of the nature of the world. The poem does pose a myth of sexual conflict in which men view women as breeding material and women attempt to escape this role without a promising prospect for the future. Frost mocks the Baconian ethos of science as the attempt to control nature with the D arwinian account of nature's mysterious resistance to artificial breeding. All that this "prospect" can do is "warrant prudence in a man . " John Hall returns t o the house and finds the neighbor in conversation with the housekeeper. The remark he makes in greeting has an ominous ring of disgust and aggression born of his dissatisfaction with the state of his world: "How are you, neighbor? Just the man I'm after. / Isn't it Hell . " The house­ keeper has the final curse-"Who wants to hear your news, you-dreadful fool?" The housekeeper's account eventually reveals the great enmity between herself and John Hall, an enmity she has repressed for the sake of appearances. If "The Housekeeper" is something of a tragedy, "The Generations of Men" is an elaborate j oke about the lack of God's providence in human history and the failure of family genealogy to provide any continuity or order in an incestuous and competitive community. The j oke is apparent from the title, which refers to the repeated phrase in Genesis "These are the generations of men . " The priestly writers of Genesis were trying to show that the history of Israel was providential and not accidental, shaped by the hand of God creating its chosen. In his conclusion to On the Origin of Species D arwin posited the need for a new classification of species based on genealogy but warned, "We possess no pedigrees or armorial bearings; and we have to discover and trace the many diverging lines of descent in our natural genealogies, by characters of any kind which have been inherited. " 49 Genealogy may tell the tale, but figuring out the "many diverging lines" results in either proj ection or endless riddling. What are the limits of family and the rules of the game of courtship? In Frost's drama the order of the past becomes the imaginative construction of a man and woman's speculation on the abyss, the cellar hole of the putative common history. Futurity will not be left to God's providence but to the caprices of how this couple act toward each other. The poem is not only about the generations of men but also of women and their powerful role in the game. The family name Stark, and the name of the town, B ow, are part of the poem's humor. Stark implies emptiness and barrenness, foreboding, as a family

Robert Frost and the ChalienRe
name. It is also, of course, a fallliliar adverb for llladness, "stark raving mad," which is an underlying j oke about the two speakers. Bow echoes the covenant God made with Noah in Genesis 9: 1 2 - 1 3 : "And God said, This is the token of the covenant which I make between me and you and every living creature that is with you, for perpetual generations: I do set my bow in the cloud, and it shall be for a token of a covenant between llle and the earth . " Here the family reunion in Bow is the basis for a new covenant with the earth . The fact that it is canceled because of rain hunlorously evokes Noah but with much greater uncertainty about the future. In this poenl there is no God but, instead, a wasteland, and the name Bow also evokes the Hebrew tolzu ula-bhohu, the ghost-town limbo of Isaiah 24: 1 0, the biblical equivalent of primordial chaos. The "tribe" will derive order fron1 the "ancestral past, " at a " crater's verge " of an "old cellar hole" believed to be the origin of the family tree. Metaphorically, this suggests the evolutionary nlyth of diverging lines of descent from the womb of the earth. Josiah Royce defined the problenl posed by evolutionary theory for grounding social order in idealisnl. I n The Spirit of Modern Philosophy he argued that evolution implies capricious drama , not providence, in shaping "the genera­ tions of men . " Those forces frolll the past produce not a steady progression from "lower to nobler" but one often "blind" and "selfish, " producing no guarantees for the future, particularly nloral improvement: As for the outc 0111e of all this fer111ent, it was inevitably the conception of the

higher hunlan life as one vast and connected growth from lower to nobler condition with episodes, indeed, of stagnation and degeneracy, and with vast outlying regions of almost changeless barbaric or inlperfectly civilised mankind, but with a meaning, after all, about even the saddest of its p henomena, such as the moralizing historians of fornler generations had never understood. This meaning lay in the physical dependence of nlan, for his whole civilisation and culture, upon the former genera­ tions of nlen. After a fashion people had, of course, always recognized such depen­ dence. But how deep and how concrete the new history found our dependence to be! Our language, our institutions, our beliefs, our ideals, whatever, in short, is nlightiest and dearest in all our world, all this together is a slow and hard-won growth, nobody's arbitrary invention, no gift fronl above, no outconle of a social compact, no inunediate expression of reason, but the slowly formed concretion of ages of blind effort, unconscious, but wise in its unconsciousness, often selfish , but hunlane even in its selfishness . The ideals win the battle of life by the secret conni­ vance, as it were, of nunlberless seenlingly un-ideal forces.50

Royce enlphasizes that the developnlent of present ideals of civilization is depen­ dent upon fornler generations and has been developed fron1 "secret connivance" and "battle. " He recognizes the Nietzschean critique of morals that can be formulated by this kind ofhistoricisnl. In Frost's poem it is precisely the matter of

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establishing ideals that s o troubles the b oy, who meets resistance t o his efforts from the girl. The cellar hole is a womblike vestige of both home and origin, a metaphor for the feminine natura naturans, which creates and becomes a cite of ruins: A governor it was proclaimed this time, When all who would come seeking in New Hampshire Ancestral memories might come together. And those of the name Stark gathered in Bow, A rock-strewn town where farming has fallen off, And sprout-lands flourish where the ax has gone. Someone had literally run to earth In an old cellar hole in a by-road The origin of all the family there. Thence they were sprung, so numerous a tribe That now not all the houses left in town Made shift to shelter them without the help Of here and there a tent in grove and orchard. They were at Bow, but that was not enough: Nothing would do but they must fix a day To stand together on the crater's verge That turned them out on the world, and try to fathom The past and get some strangeness out of it.

Both here and in "Directive," which I will discuss in the next chapter, Frost builds on Thoreau's vision of the cellar holes in the " Former Inhabitants" section of Walden . The continuity of past and present and the validity of our speculations seen1 corroded in light of the ruins of natural history; each age becomes locked in the temporary dialect of its own speculations. Looking at the ruins of an old house, Thoreau speculates that its inhabitants must have discussed matter funda­ mental to moral philosophy but that their knowledge has been lost: These cellar dents , like deserted fox burrows, old holes, are all that is left where once were the stir and bustle of human life, and "fate, freewill, foreknowledge absolute, " in some form and dialect or other were by turns discussed. But all I can learn of their conclusions amounts to j ust this, that " Cato and Brister pulled wool" ; which is about as edifying as the history of more famous schools of philosophy. 51

Frost expands on the insights of Thoreau and Royce that natural history and anthropology yield no guiding philosophy or ideals. While he might agree with Thoreau's j oke that philosophy may be j ust "wool pulled" over our eyes (by yarn spinning) , he shows how the game of social order has to be made through the game of courtship, a game for which neither nature nor the whim of any

Robert Frost and the ChallenRe of Darwin

individual provides adequate guidance. The past looms but with little more guidance than the myths with which we supply it. I n the new evolutionary view, as Royce pointed out, our metaphors and customs and identity are products of history, not divinity, and they reflect the process of selection that created thenl; they are part of racial history that expresses itself in our language : You can read in history your personal instincts written in the language of evolution. You can watch the human spirit in its growth with a deeper sense of the "That art Thou" than you had ever before possessed. The metaphors of your heathen ances­ tors are crystallized in every word that you utter. The very horrors of their supersti­ tions are the true though hunlble origin of your loftiest and most sacred devotions. Humanity never really forsakes its past. The days of nlankind are bound each to each in mutual piety. 52

While Royce asserts the persistence of the past into the present, he remaIns optimistic that history is readily recoverable, interpretable, and, most important, agreeable to all mankind. In Frost's poen1 agreement about the binding power of a common ancestry is challenged in the dialogue of boy and girl as they attempt to fathom an unrecoverable heritage. The direction of life fron1 this alleged point of origin becomes as uncertain as the broken-off road and "shattered seedpod" of a home nearby indicate. The roaring brook becomes a metaphor for an underlying nlotion and flux in the nature of things that eradicate permanence and meaning; its "sound, " then, "means " silence. While the boy listens for meaning, the girl is in the position of judging the worth of what he discovers : The situation was like this: the road Bowed outward on the mountain halfway up, And disappeared and ended not far off. No one went home that way. The only house Beyond where they were was a shattered seedpod. And below roared a brook hidden in trees, The sound of which was silence for the place. This he sat listening to till she gave judgnlent.

The young woman has already taken authority of judgment. The play between them turns to the nlatter of ancestry and madness. The first part of their dialogue involves the comparison of cards that display the extent of their genea­ logical proximity to being an original Stark. Playing a game of genealogical priority, the girl withholds herself fronl the boy, who insists that her inbreeding is

Women, Nature, and Domestic Conflict "

likely to produce madness . The girl responds that she may be mad" (emphasis mine) . She becomes like Hamlet pretending to be mad while speculating on cloud shapes with Polonius. While inbreeding does lead to madness, she may be playing with the boy to keep him at a distance, to make him dance in the courtship game. The boy insists that "Yankee pride of ancestry" and looking into the cellar hole of the past for an oracle of the future amount to madness. But the girl enj oys the uncertainty of the game, which gives her power to resist the advances of the boy: 'On father's side, it seems, we're-let me see-' 'Don't be too technical. -You have three cards.' ' Four cards, one yours, three mine, one for each branch Of the Stark family I ' m a member of.' 'D 'you know a person so related to herself Is supposed to be mad.' ' I may be mad.' 'You look so, sitting out here in the rain Studying genealogy with me You never saw before. What will we come to With all this pride of ancestry, we Yankees? I think we're all mad. Tell me why we're here Drawn into town about this cellar hole Like wild geese on a lake before a storm? What do we see in such a hole, I wonder.'

He attempts to assert his claim to her, and she is resisting that claim and authority. An imaginative, pastoral competition ensues in which each takes turns in projecting myths of origin: ' The Indians had a myth of Chicanl0ztoc, Which means The Seven Caves that We Came out of. This is the pit fronl which we Starks were digged.' 'You must be learned. That's what you see in it?' 'And what do you see?'

The girl returns the boy's challenge with another question, as the sexual power struggle begins. The boy looks into the pit and provides a literal account of what's there, while the girl asserts her imaginative power and goads the boy into doing the same, forcing him to show his imaginative plumage :

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Robert Frost and the Challenge cif Darwin 'Yes, what do I see? First let me look. I see raspberry vines-' 'Oh, if you 're going to use your eyes, j ust hear What I see. It's a little, little boy, As pale and dim as a match flame in the sun; He's groping in the cellar after j anl, He thinks it's dark and it's flooded with daylight.' 'He's nothing. Listen. When I lean like this I can make out old Grandsir Stark distinctly, ­ With his pipe in his nlouth and his brown j ug­ Bless you, it isn't Grandsir Stark, it's Granny, But the pipe 's there and smoking and the jug. She's after cider, the old girl, she's thirsty; Here's hoping she gets her drink and gets out safely.'

His own vision proj ects some sexual struggle into the life of the ancient house­ hold, as " Granny Stark , " seeking the intoxicating pleasures of cider, appears threatened by the potential violence of "Grandsir Stark. " This teasing goes o n until the boy tries t o take matters a step further by consulting the "purer oracle" of the brook. The boy believes he can get meaning out of its "wild descent" the way he can from underlying rhythms of machines or speech. Here prin1al sound has deeper meaning than visual revelation, but this brook's "wild descent" is a metaphor for the entropic chaos of the natural world, from which man cannot easily recover ancestral guides. Both boy and girl try to establish an order from the brook, but their own natural pride, wild descent from Yankee ancestors, and resistance to being bound make for an inconclusive dialogue: ' . . . I wanted to try sonlething with the noise That the brook raises in the enlpty valley. We have seen visions-now consult the voices. Sonlething I nlust have learned riding in trains When I was young. I used to use the roar To set the voices speaking out of it, Speaking or singing, and the band-nlusic playing. Perhaps you have the art of what I nlean. I 've never listened in anlong the sounds That a brook makes in such a wild descent. It ought to give a purer oracle.'

The girl defl a tes the boy's inlaginative and sexual challenge by telling him that he is only proj ecting out of hinlself what he "wish [ es] to hear" and that his

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imaginings are nothing more than a "picture on a screen. " The b oy counters by insisting that, whether heard or proj ected, the voices give what they wish. Their dialogue is a power dance but also a brief meditation on poetic authority: ' It's as you throw a picture on a screen: The meaning of it all is out of you; The voices give you what you wish to hear.' 'Strangely, it's anything they wish to give.' ' Then I don't know. It must be strange enough. I wonder if it's not your make-believe. What do you think you're like to hear today?' ' From the sense of our having been together­ But why take time for what I'm like to hear? I 'll tell you what the voices really say. You will do very well right where you are A little longer. I musn't feel too hurried, Or I can't give myself to hear the voices.'

She wonders whether projections are deep oracles from the ancient past or j ust "make-believe . " The boy manages to p ersuade the girl to stay while he consults the voices, insisting that what the " old stock" wanted is not as important as the "ideals . " In a world relying on evolution and material history, however, there are no ideals, only " I-deals" and a dialogue of power. Though the boy asserts that what " co u n ts is the ideal s , " they are left unknown , as the girl refuses to be convinced by her suitor. She escapes being chosen helplessly by telling the boy that his imaginative show was part of her power of seduction: " I let you say all that. " The struggle over who is the chooser or selector in love leaves the future between the two uncertain. In the end the girl leaves the boy uncertain about their friendship and even goads him into picking a flower for her. The dialogue concludes with a tentative sense of a future meeting, largely determined by her preference and the force of the weather: "Will you leave the way to me?' 'No, I don't trust your eyes . You've said enough. Now give me your hand up. -Pick me that flower.' 'Where shall we nleet again?'

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'Nowhere but here Once l110re before we nleet elsewhere.' ' I n rain?' 'It ought to be i n rain. Sonletilne in rain. In rain tOll1orrow, shall we, if it rains? But if we ll1ust, in sunshine.' So she \vent.

NouJ/zere, elseuJlzere, and sOlnetilne punctuate the conclusion of their dialogue, which portends an uncertain, conditional future. And the girl has the final dran1atic "say, " the power of choice by refusal, in her going. Uncertainty about sexual authority and power makes an insoluble problem out of what to say and how to conduct courtship and love. Elusive nature finds its greatest dran1atic expression in the desires of men and women as they seek both to control each other and to escape that control. And both men and women alternately take on the roles of idealist and realist in endless conflict. Hon1e is itself a battlefield and at best only a n10mentary point of order between the ruins of the past and the threats of the future.

Chapter

6

Descent into Matter Natural History and the End of Theodicy

Sonle of Frost's best lyrics, "The Trial by Existence, " " West-Running Brook, " and "After Apple-Picking, " give the promise of divine revelation through the activity of struggling, laboring, and seeking in the natural world. Strong qualifi­ cations and limitations undermine and often mock the promise of a fulfilling spiritual pilgrimage. Frost recognized the extent to which science had taken over, from religion and theology, the p ursuit of reality; that pursuit fails from a descent into matter that erodes knowledge and leaves us with a faith tested by environ­ ment and the skepticism of our own self-consciousness. Frost often addresses the old problems of theodicy, the justification of God's goodness through reason, but he almost always arrives at an acceptance of contradiction or unreason. Thonlas McClanahan's view that Frost was "a sophisticated philosophical poet who developed a theodicy which builds on that of William James" 1 points to impor­ tant preoccupations but misses the unsettling implications of the poenls: try as we may, no theodicy can be built on the quicksand of empiricism, natural history, or reason. Frost made his view of God as the fight promoter and waste nlaker explicit. I n his "The Future of Man" address the question remained about the worth of religious sacrifice to such a god:

Then I want to say another thing about the god who provides the great issues. He's a god of waste, nlagnificent waste. And waste is another nanle for generosity of not always being intent on our own advantage, nor too importunate even for a better world. We pour out a libation to hinl as a symbol of the waste we share in­ participate in. Pour it on the ground and you've wasted it; pour it into yourself and you've doubly wasted it. But all in the cause of generosity and relaxation of self interest. 2

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Robert Frost and tlze Clzallen�e if Darwin

This cruel vision depicts religious sacrifice as incapable of escaping the circle of the wasteful creator. Religious experience becomes only an onanistic activity, "the relaxation of self interest," the snake swallowing its own tail. Frost's sense of waste is infor111ed by a worldview in which the fullness of life does not conform to a human sense of purpose or improvement; our efforts "participate " in this general waste, whose ends are far beyond the comprehension of our momentary ail11s. This lin1ited and limiting cosmology reflects William James's depiction of the end of theodicy at the hands of science in general and Darwin in particular. In The Varieties �f Religious Experience James describes how the Darwinian world of chance occurrence in a vast sea of change undermines the individual's perception of God congenial to his consciousness and his "pal­ triest of . . . private wants" : The Darwinian notion o fchance production, and subsequent destruction, speedy or deferred, applies to the largest as well as the snlallest facts. It is impossible, in the present temper of the scientific inlagination, to find in the drifting of the cosnlic atoms, whether they work on the universal or on the particular scale, anything but a kind of ainlless weather, doing and undoing, achieving no proper history, and leaving no result. Nature has no one distinguishable ultinlate tendency with which it is possible to feel a synlpathy. In the vast rhythnl of her processes, as the scientific mind now follows thenl, she appears to cancel herself. The books on natural theol­ ogy which satisfied the intellects of our grandfathers seem to us quite grotesque, representing, as they did, a God who confornled the largest things of nature to the paltriest of our private wants . . . . He cannot acconlmodate his processes to the convenience of individuals. The bubbles on the foam which coats many a stormy sea are floating episodes, l11ade and unnlade by the forces of the wind and water. Our private selves are like those bubbles, -epiphenonlena . . . . Their destinies weigh nothing and deternline nothing in the world's irrenlediable current of events. 3

Lucretian metaphors of the current of life and its atolnization as well as an identification of nature with the fen1inine, "the vast rhythm of her processes, " pervade James's and Frost's representation o f the Darwinian universe. James atte111pted to rescue the reality of God fro111 the fact of the universal reality of religious experience. Frost became nl0re skeptical of religious experience, caught between viewing God as either nonexistent or powerless before cruel sublunary powers. I n "Bereft" the speaker is left without hunlan comfort, in a dilapidated h0111e before vast and threatening natural forces. When he recollects the indif­ ferent wind that " [C] hange [sJ . . . to a roar, " he echoes Job hearing the belittling voice out the whirlwind. The world see111S to hiln governed by wicked and blind elenlents: "Leaves got up in a coil and hissed, / Blindly struck at my knee and nlissed" ; they are like those fornls wasted fro111 the Tree of Life, part of a process of struggle that tenlpts hinl into unbelief, one that also left hinl alone. When he

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says, "Word I was in my life alone, / Word I had no one left but God," it is the torment of blind faith before a terrible God. God here, as elsewhere in Frost, follows the Epicurean division of being either omnipotent but evil or else good but removed from the world, which is left to the play of an evil demiurge, the factors of change and decay implied by wind, the "frothy shore," "the p orch's sagging floor, " and the "leaves. " He fends off a feeling of complete emptiness and disorder only by the personification, perhaps paranoid, of unknown enemies to whom the word was out. Ifhe has no one left but God, there is but little comfort. Frost's poetry participates in the romantic desire to achieve divine knowl­ edge through acts of art inspired by nature. But he was also held by a sense of sin and evil as well as of law and limits, which made their recasting in natural science appealing to him. The tension between the ideals of freedom and change and the limitations of the conditions of existence presents itself in almost all of Frost's work. While he maintains the forms of religious expression, he brings a profound skepticism to bear on his use of religious tropes. In this way Frost explores and maintains tensions that Emerson avoided and rejects more of the "cosmic opti­ mism" of his predecessor. 4 Emerson formulates his optimism through the myth of the Fall, an existen­ tial doubt, from which he believes we can recover through a Rousseauian return to an original relation with nature. In "Experience" Emerson's proclamation of our fallen condition appears as a consequence of modern science. His earlier glorification of transparent vision in the first essay, "Nature , " is undermined by the limitations of "lenses, " referring both to questions about the design of the human eye and to questions about the instruments of scientific perception, particularly the microscope and telescope. The "subject-lenses" may be only self-reflexive. Further, his deprecation of the fossilized ideas of the past and the emphasis on creating new forms has devolved into a radical skepticism that regards everything, including God, as a passing fable: It is very unhappy, but too late to be helped, the discovery we have made that we exist. That discovery is called the Fall of Man. Ever afterwards we suspect our instruments . We have learned that we do not see directly, but mediately, and that we have no means of correcting these colored and distorting lenses which we are, or of computing the amount of their errors. Perhaps these subj ect-lenses have a creative power; perhaps there are not obj ects . . . . Nature, art, persons, letters, religions , obj ects, successively tumble in, and God is but one of its ideas . . . . The street is full of humiliations. 5

Though Emerson asserted that this condition is "too late to be helped, " the overall force of his writing tends to suggest the communion of self and divinity through nature.

Robert Frost and the Challetl�e �f Darwin

In "A Concept Self-Conceived" Frost n10cks pantheism as another fable engendered by the rebellious and childish romantic imagination and subj ect to the same law of skeptical supersession, a new form in a historical acceleration of spiritual trends , "the latest creed" of our " childish catechism. " He also regarded Emerson as one such fashion, enj oyed by his n10ther and superseded by others: "The smart thing when she was young was to be reading Emerson or Poe as it is today to be reading St. John Perse or T. S. Eliot."6 " Self-conception" can be meaningful only if one trusts the divinity of the self and the imaginination. But all we have left is a disinherited n1ind that atten1pts to create icons of worship arbitrarily out of itself: The latest creed that has to be believed And entered in our childish catechisnl Is that the All's a concept self-conceived, Which is no nlore than good old Pantheisnl. Great is the reassurance of recall. Why go on further with confusing voice To say God's either All or over all? The rule is, never give a child a choice.

Pantheism may be happy belief. But our self-consciousness cannot preclude the troubling question of whether worship of the world risks confusing God with his creation, destroying the possibility of a transcendent reality and the imll10rtality of the soul. God is either "above " and inaccessible or immanent and without p ower over matter. Our ability to have choices (which provided for the trouble in Eden) and to ask further questions of our own conceptions leads to deeper confusions. I ntellectual freedon1 collapses, ironically, into the need of a " rule," a limitation on choice for children incapable of handling freedom. The view of ll1an as an insufficiently developed creature to trust its self­ conceptions remains one of the in1portant ironies of Darwin's vision. Our con­ ception of a beneficent creator, identical with nature or "good old Pantheism, " or even with a first cause, remains in conflict with the reality of change and suffering. The choice between these conceptions leads Darwin into his own agnosticism, one he preferred to thinking of the creator as malicious or cruel: "the very old argun1ent from the existence of an intelligent First Cause seems to ll1e a strong one; whereas, as just ren1arked, the presence of much suffering agrees well with the view that all organic beings have been developed through variation and natural selection ."7 The partly capricious process of natural selection enabled Darwin to dismiss our theisn1 as fundan1entally untrustworthy:

2 49

Natural History and the End of Theodicy

I feel compelled to look to a First Cause having an intelligent mind in some degree analogous to that of lllan; and I deserve to be called a Theist. This conclusion was strong in my mind about the time, as far as I can remelllber, when I wrote The Origin if Species, and it is since that time that it has very gradually, with many flu ctuations, becollle weaker. But then arises the doubt-can the mind of man, which has, as I fully believe, been developed from a mind as low as that possessed by the lowest animals, be trusted when it draws such grand conclusions . S

The effect of Darwin's own reasoning is to put humanity in the position of being an unreasonable creature whose thoughts may be nothing other than fleeting tautologies. And it saves God from any responsibility by consigning him to a realm beyond comprehension. Following this logic far enough, his own conception of natural selection should also succumb to the same criticisn1. Scientific reason leads to the undoing of reason and a supersession of intellectual edifices, which collapse for lack of foundation. Frost's corrective analogy is that the God who we believe created us might be as much of a cruel, extravagant waster as his creature. Frost regarded any "grand conclusions," transcendent theism or Platonism, as mere proj ection from empirical observation. But he also suggests in poems from "Mowing" to "A Cabin in the Clearing" that empirical fact brings nothing except a dream of reality. We investigate nature, as the distant voice of "Mist" says of us in "A Cabin in the Clearing, " in "the fond faith accumulated fact / Will of itself take fire and light the world up. / Learning has been a part of their religion . " From early on Frost stressed acceptance of the limits o f knowledge even while admitting the ineluctable power of the quest for an ultimate reality, "the all"

or "the universe . " "A Prayer in Sprin g , " i n Frost's

first

book, A Boy �\ Will,

reveals a poet working with confidence within a tradition of religious lyrics . Being one of Frost's most beautiful and gentle poems, it trusts a God above, not immanent, who "sanctiflies] " love in nature "to what far ends He will . " Our obligation is not to think of those ends or " the uncertain harvest" but, rather, to remain in "the springing of the year. " That means participation in growth and procreation: And make us happy in the darting bird That suddenly above the bees is heard, The meteor that thrusts in with needle bill, And off a blossom in lllid air stands still.

Happiness is not only in the aesthetic pleasure of nature but in what its signs say about the processes of life. He adds emphatically that "this is love and nothing else is love," as if to chide ascetic, metaphysical, and transcendent agape.

Robert Frost and the Challenge oj Darwin

For Frost the true faith means woe, and modern science serves this end through the lenses of the microscope and telescope-glorifications of the human intellect and the desire to know that betray their intent of human control and progress by leading us deeper into an oceanic world of teeming and immense matter. In "The Lesson for Today" Frost linked science and religion in the way they both serve to hunliliate nlan. From the biological perspective of the micro­ scope we are Inicrobes; from the astrononlical perspective we are part of a minor planet, "sick with space," echoing but not complying with Blake's revolt against Newton: The groundwork of all faith is hun1an woe. It was well worth preliI1linary I1lention. There's nothing but injustice to be had, No choice is left a poet, you I1light add, But how to take the curse, tragic or C 0I11ic. It was well worth prelinlinary I1lention. But let's go on to where our cases part, If part they do. Let I1le propose a start. (We 're rivals in the badness of our case, Remember, and I1lust keep a solemn face.) Space ails us moderns : we are sick with space. Its conten1plation nlakes us out as sn1all As a brief epidemic of I11icrobes That in a good glass Illa y be seen to crawl

The patina of this the least of globes. But have we there the advantage after all? You were belittled into vilest WOrI11S God hardly tolerated with his feet; Which C0I11eS to the sanle thing in different terms . We both are the belittled hunlan race, One as compared with God and one with space. I had thought ours the I110re profound disgrace; But doubtless this was only I11y conceit. The cloister and the observatory saint Take cOI1lfort in about the SaI1le cOI1lplaint. So science and religion really l11eet.

Frost takes "the curse" as neither purely tragic nor purely comic but a blend of both, a happy-sad humility without resolution that neither belittles nor exagger­ ates suffering. But Frost's world was as sick with time as with space. Looking through the telescope became a look backward in time, to the origins of an evolutionary process that eventually produced earth and nlan. Frost did not allow himself to

Natural History and the End of Theodicy

become sick with the fact of waste in the development of the universe, j ustifying its end as the expense paid for our emergence. But he reminds us that we're "puny, " providing an ounce of teleology and a pound of mockery. Man acts in imitation of this "wasteful spending" God: What an extravagant universe it is. And the most extravagant thing in it, as far as we know, is man-the most wasteful spending thing in it. How stirring it is, the sun and everything. Take a telescope and look as far as you will. H ow much of a universe was wasted just to produce puny us. It's wonderful . . . fine.9

Here Frost does not mention an agent, j ust "the universe, " which wastes and is wasted. If man is god like at all, it is because he behaves in a similarly extravagant, wasteful way, a view that can j ustify a great deal of cruelty. Darwin's work presented a vision of nature as a system in which there are great losses for every success, in which each "selection" involves the waste of innumerable elin1ina­ tions; every success is only tentative and possibly a prelude to greater loss and cruelty. It is a world in which individuals are sacrificed to an enormous process of change without certain purpose or goal. In On the Origin of Species Darwin writes that this process is somehow ennobling: "When I view all beings not as special creations, but as the lineal descendants of some few beings which lived long before the first bed of the Silurian system was deposited, they seem to b e become ennobled. " 1 0 Why "ennobled" ? Perhaps because the process of change, struggle, and survival lends some heroic sense to the historical process, one that would be left out if God's hand were directly involved in creation. D arwin gave up recon­ ciling the ways of creation with a j ust God, remaining instead in the modern Manichaean position of seeing the world as the work of the devil: "What a book a devil's chaplain might write on the clumsy, blundering, low and horribly cruel works of nature ! " 1 1 D arwin pushed Frost to the limit of the American tradition of turning the material world into scripture, a tradition that, as Perry Miller and others have pointed out, began with the Puritans and continued into the nineteenth cen­ tury. 1 2 Philip Gura has shown the extent to which, among nineteenth-century American thinkers, "natural facts flowering into various difficult truths had replaced the Old and New Testaments as guideposts to moral direction in the world. " 13 Miller has also pointed out that the idea of Christian eschatology gave way to an ethos of secularized progress, bolstered by naive views of D arwin. 1 4 But a wilderness governed by laws of survival and selection could lead only to revelations of an evil demiurge. Protestant intellectuals attempted to reconcile religion and science, abandoning the old design argun1ents. In doing so, they faced a crisis-either abandon religion altogether as old superstition or grant that

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Robert Frost and the Challel1,Re if Darwin

its reality has an instrumental and evolutionary or survival purpose. Fiske, Willianl James, and Alfred North Whitehead were among those attenlpting this reconciliation. The reconstruction in philosophy engendered by what was known as evolution was in full force in the United States and England from the late 1 8 80s through the 1 92os, a period in which Frost experienced most of his education and development as a poet. Fronl the late nineteenth century through the early twentieth century Dar\vinisnl was the nlaj or subj ect of contention among Protestant intellectuals. Since Protestantism had persisted in holding that nature is a revelation of God (views apparent in Emerson and Thoreau as well) , many Protestant intellectuals were willing to concede that scientists were nature 's greatest interpreters. Protestant intellectuals were living in an age in which scientists had taken over the business of truth from theologians. 1 5 Frost rejected the donlinant Victorian metaphors describing the relation of religion and science: warfare and conversion. Rather than adopting science as a new religion, he saw that what appeared to lTIany as new in science was really old religion. In an address to students at Dartmouth Frost advised, in discussing the effects of evolution, "don't get converted, stay. " Maintaining that we are "from mud," he allows the possibility of its being "prepared, " though in the poems we find that it nlust have been a preparation for great suffering. What appears to be "waste" is ascribed the value of expense, mixing randomness and teleology. Frost pokes fun at the iconography of Christianity. Worshiping the " cod" leads us to accept waste, not the sacred symbols of a religion he thought precious : You canle fronl "the Bible belt , " say. You were confronted with the fact of evolution. It was supposed to disturb you about your God. But you found a way to say-either with presence of nlind, wittily, or slowly with meditation-you found the way to say, "Sure, God probably didn 't nlake nlan out of mud. But he nlade hinl out of prepared IllUd. " You still had your God, you see. You were a Bostonian and you had been brought up to worship the Cod. To you the cod was sacred and her eggs precious. You were confronted with the facts of waste in nature. One cod egg is all that survives of a nlillion. And you said-what did you say? You found sOIllething to say, surely. You said, " Perhaps those other eggs were necessary to nlake the ocean a proper broth for one to grow up in. No waste, just expense . . . . My obj ect has been to hold with whatever's going-not against but with. 1 ()

Frost's answer to eschatological thought is that the world has always been the sanle and that, in anything seenlingly new, there is an essential reality compatible with the wisdom of the Hebrew prophets . Frost envisioned science as the out­ growth of Judeo-C hristian thought, reaninlating some of its deepest wisdom.

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"Kitty Hawk, " a late and brilliant poem, clarifies the continuity between Christianity and modern science and technology. A paean to the spirit of science, rec alling man's first flight, it extols rather than laments our passion for the world, our descent into matter. In the debate that followed "The Future of Man" talk, Frost describes his admiration for science in the same language he uses in " Kitty Hawk " : " I ' m lost in admiration for science. It's the plunge of the mind, the spirit into the material universe. It can't go too far or deep for me. " In another conversation, he added a sardonic note to this praise : if science "penetrates straight to hell, then that's all right, too." 17 In Frost the old fears of hell and sin are supplanted by the possibilities of extinction, cruelty, and the lurking realities of self-gratification and self-interest. 1 8 In " Kitty Hawk" Frost makes an important connection between the mate­ rialization of the spirit in the flesh, the sacramental mystery of Christianity, and the advent of both science and history. The Fall for Frost is a story of freedom and departure that represents the first act of science, the pursuit of knowledge, which in its attempt to ascend only leads deeper into matter. All human history is a recapitulation of the myth. Frost's description of science as the "plunge" and "thrust" suggests the force of Eros in our quest for ultimate knowledge. Those metaphors also pervade "All Revelation , " which concludes with the ambiguous phrase "All revelation has been ours , " implying that it is a human dream that reveals nothing but its own desire. Frost interprets the Fall and Christ's descent as the basis of a recurring revolt of individual freedom against the obstacles of environment. This essential pat­ tern, "the will braving alien entanglements," can be viewed as the essential element of a dynamic view of history. Christianity, ironically, became the least transcendent of all world religions, one that led to an anthropocentric view of the world and the possibility through progress of lifting humanity above the rest of nature by liberating it from the fear of environment and pagan demons . Tec hnol­ ogy and positive science do not contradict this ethos but are, rather, an extension, however ironic, of its hopes. Herbert Butterfield's insight is right in suggesting that "the modern idea of progress owes something to the fact that C hristianity had provided meaning for history and a grand purpose to which the whole creation moved. In other words the idea of progress represented the seculariza­ tion of an attitude, initially religious, that looked to a fine fulfillment in some future, far-off event and saw history, therefore, as definitely leading to some­ thing. " 1 9 In Frost's early life this sense of progressive hope reached an apotheosis in the flight at Kitty Hawk, extending the basic worldview set in motion by Christianity. Only the most ascetic forms of Christianity attempt to escape this ethos.

254

Robert Frost and the ChalienRe oj Darwin

In this plunge the mind does indeed risk becoming "lost" as the entangle­ ments of the material world threaten human self-definition and erode the pos­ sibilities of transcendence to a spiritual realm of perception. Frost rebukes the " censure" of a passion for earth as sin and treats "that fall" more playfully as a recurrent process of descending into matter. Frost finds a love of the risk and difficulty of the material world recurrent in religious accounts of incarnation. He considers this desire consonant with the scientific development of Western civili­ zation as part of an "inherited design," part of our "instinctive adventure," which leads us deeper into matter; heredity becomes our destiny, limiting the self­ glorifying power of choice. While Frost holds to a view, supported by some archaeology, in which the United States is in the vanguard of cultural progress ("West Northwest") , he also undermines the p uritanical idea that progress will lead to heaven. The skies are "but further matter" : Pulpiteers will censure Our instinctive venture Into what they call The material When we took that fall From the apple tree. But God's own descent Into flesh was meant As a denlo nstration That the suprellle merit Lay in risking spirit In substantiation. Westerners inherit A design for living Deeper into nlatter­ Not without due patter Of a great nlisgiving. All the science zest To materialize By on-penetration Into earth and skies (Don't forget the latter Is but further matter) Has been West Northwest.

Frost admired the risk of "substantiation" of the soul rather than transcendence, our descent rather than ascent. Frost also collapses his anthrop omorphic God's creation of Adam, the Fall, the incarnation of Christ, science, and exploration into " one mighty charge," a

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pun that combines the heroic and the scientific speculation of creation as begin­ ning in the release of hydrogen's energy. Incarnation is always a beginning, not an end, of human history, as it is in Christian eschatology. Frost's view of history is biological and generative, a soul risking itself in fresh birth: Spirit enters flesh And for all it's worth Charges into earth In birth after birth Ever fresh and fresh. We may take the view That its derring-do Thought of in the large Was one mighty charge On our human part Of the soul's ethereal Into the material.

Most importantly, Frost moves from references to God to something done " [O] n our human part. " Phrases such as "for all it's worth" and "We may take the view" reveal the playful skepticism toward his assertion of human heroism. This poem was the epigraph for Frost's final book, In the Clearing, and its emphasis on the spirit's descent into the material world echoes a chord struck in "The Trial by Existence," from his first book, A Boy 's Will. Frost preferred to see the difficulties of visceral existence as a challenge and test of the soul's power. All professed biological struggles also become, in Frost's imagination, "trials" before an audience that seems to shift in his poetry from being otherworldly to being human. In "The Trial by Existence" Frost is willing to speak of souls in the world, brought forth from their "white " origin in God. The title is an alteration of the Darwinian phrase "struggle for existence, " which the young Frost believed could dovetail with a theological belief in the value of a life of risk on earth. John Fiske combines the romantic hatred of a fixed and mechanistic world and hope of infinite progress with a puritanical fantasy of autonomy through hardship. I n an attempt to j ustify the suffering incurred in the sacrifice of individuals in the evolutionary process, he invoked the principle of struggle and evolution as having a moral and ethical purpose: A world of completed happiness might well be a world of quiescence, of stagnation, of automatism, of blankness; the dynamics of evolution would have no place in it. But suppose we say that the ultimate goal of the ethical process is the perfecting of the hunlan character? . . . Consummation of happiness is a natural outcome of the perfecting of character, but that perfecting can be achieved only through struggle, through discipline, through resistance.2o

Robert Frost and the ChallellRe of Darwin

Frost's use of the n1etaphor "trial" is revealing in that it suggests the exis­ tence of a God as j udge but one whose ultimate intentions are unclear in respect to his creations, a creator who forces us into a predicament but does not neces­ sarily answer our demands for justice. It is a concept from which natural science atten1pted to escape, placing the responsibility for life's progress either on designed, and presun1ably fair, laws or on individual power and strength. Mal­ thus's Essay on the Prillciple of Populatioll, an important influence on Darwin, is in large part a theodicy, an attenlpt to j ustity the world's cruelty as compatible with the foreknowledge of God. Malthus rejected the idea of life as a trial, attempting to see the process of life on earth as inherently moral and teleological . I nstead, nature becon1es a "n1ighty process" n10ving " chaotic matter" up to "spirit. " The ideas of a developmental view of life, allowing for change and some freedom, are preserved: A state of trial seen1S to in1ply a previously forn1ed existence that does not agree with the appearance of n1an in infancy and indicates son1ething like suspicion and want of foreknowledge, inconsistent with those ideas which we wish to cherish of the Supren1e Being. I should be inclined, therefore, as I have hinted before in a note, to consider the world and this life as the n1ighty process of God, not for the trial, but for the creation and forn1ation of Inind, a process necessary to awaken inert, chaotic matter into spirit, to sublin1ate the dust of the earth into soul, to elicit an ethereal spark fron1 the clod of clay. And in this view of the subj ect, the various impressions and exciten1ents which tnan receives through life may be considered as the fornling hand of the Creator, acting by general la\vs, and awakening his sluggish existence, by anin1ating touches of the Divinity, into a capacity of superior enjoyment. The original sin of man is the torpor and corruption of the chaotic Inatter in which he n1ay be said to be born . 2 1

" T h e forming hand" i s another expression of the "invisible hand" that o n e finds in Paley's Natural Theology or in Adam Sn1ith's Wealth of Natiolls. This hand supposedly shapes the providential design of the world. When Darwin's own invisible hand of natural selection revealed a process of endless cruelty, it became increasingly difficult not to keep the creator in1plicated in the world's evil, even by arguing that he works by "designed laws . " The progress from matter to spirit disappears and becomes the struggle, or trial, of different forms over vast periods of tin1e. In "The Trial by Existence" Frost embraces the idea of human life as an ongoing pilgrimage with no certainty about any futurity. He maintains in the idea of " trial " what Malthus had called "suspicion " and "want of foreknowl­ edge , " implying a process that is not always beneficent or providential. Those souls who "give up paradise " do so only for "some good discerned," a phrase that

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257

indicates that the goal and purpose may or may not be real. What i s real i s the sacrifice made of these "souls. " The proclamation of "the trial by existence " is compelling to the unknowing and unsuspecting for its "suggestion of what dreams" : And from a cliff-top is proclainled The gathering of the souls for birth , The trial by existence named, The obscuration upon earth . And the slant spirits trooping by In streams and cross- and counter-streams Can but give ear to that sweet cry For its suggestion of what dreams ! And the more loitering are turned To view once nlore the sacrifice Of those who for some good discerned Will gladly give up paradise. And a white shinlmering concourse rolls Toward the throne to witness there The speeding of devoted souls Which God nlakes his especial care.

The energy and stoicism of this religious vision recalls Milton's Sonnet 1 9, in which "thousands at his bidding . . . speed and post over land without rest. " Frost also emphasizes the religious heroism and heavenly approval that greets Milton's Abdiel or Christ-and, later, the worship that Christopher Smart ac­ cords to David. He also echoes Milton's mortalism, in which spirit, literally the wedding of breath to matter, will not "admit" the constant "memory" of a predetermined soul. There is no design in either poet's work for a soul's "prog­ ress . " For Milton and for Frost this inextricable wedding of spirit and matter provides no guarantee of salvation. The risk, "the earthly woe," and "the agony of strife" alone nlake religious experience meaningful. God proclaims that fate rules and " [A] dmits no memory of choice . " Life will b e the experience of a terrible determinisnl in which spirit and matter are inextricably fused. The phrase "till death come" makes one wonder whether that will be the p oint at which the spirit is released from matter or, in the mortalist tradition, dies with the body: But always God speaks at the end: 'One thought in agony of strife The bravest would have by for friend, The memory that he chose the life ;

R obert Frost and the Challen,Re of Darwin

But the pure fate to which you go Admits no memory of choice, Or the woe were not earthly woe To which you give the assenting voice.' And so the choice nlust be again, But the last choice is still the sanle; And the awe passes wonder then, And a hush falls for all acclaim. And God has taken a flower of gold And broken it, and used therefrolll The nlystic link to bind and hold Spirit to matter till death COllle.

The "essence of life " on earth is a feeling not of control but of torture "on the wrack, " without the assurance of purpose or goal, "nothing but what we some­ how chose " : 'Tis o f the essence o f life here, Though we choose greatly, still to lack The lasting memory at all clear, That life has for us on the \vrack Nothing but what we sonleho\v chose; Thus are we wholly stripped of pride In the pain that has but one close, Bearing it crushed and mystified.

The purpose of life is o nly being "wholly stripped of pride . " Life is a form of dying and "pain. " That it has "but one close" is more disturbing as a clarification of the earlier speculation on death: there is no resurrection, only the fact of spirit being " crushed and mystified" in matter. The process is cyclical and nonprogres­ sive, and heroic " choice" is none at all: "the last choice is still the same . " As he states at the beginning of the poenl, "the utmost reward / Of daring should be still to dare," indicating no final goal but, instead, a continual participation in the process of suffering. In a letter written in I 906 Frost remarked how colleagues at the Pinkerton Academy were startled by his poem "The Trial by Existence," which he suggests "grafts Schopenhauer onto Christianity. " 22 Early on he read Schopenhauer's work The World as Will and Representation, to which he refers often in his note­ books. Much later, in a discussion of Milton, Frost refers to himself as an Old Testament Christian, complaining that the New Deal emphasized mercy instead of j ustice. 2 3 These seemingly self-contradictary epithets actually make more sense if we see that, for Frost, Christianity meant neither redemption nor salva-

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tion but acceptance of suffering and mortification. The Fall, not the resurrection nor the apocalypse, becomes the central story of the Judeo-Christian experience. Schopenhauer describes his own vision of life on earth in terms of " debt" repaid through "punishment and atonement" in hellish existence and sees the Hebrew myth of the Fall conforming to the redemptive trial by torture : Far from bearing the character of a gift, human existence has entirely the character of a contracted debt. The calling in of this debt appears in the shape of the urgent needs, tormenting desires, and endless misery brought about through that existence . . . . Accordingly, if man is regarded as a being whose existence is a punishment and an atonement, then he is already seen in a more correct light. The myth of the Fall of man . . . is the only thing in the Old Testament to which I can concede a metaphysi­ cal, although only allegorical, truth; indeed it is this alone that reconciles n1e to the Old Testament . . . . That Christianity also looks at our existence in this light is proved by a passage from Luther's Commentary o n Galatians, ch. 3 : "In our bodies and circumstances, however, we are all subj ect to the devil and are strangers in this world, of which he is prince and lord. Hence everything is under his rule, the bread we eat, the beverage we drink, the clothes we use, even the air and everything by which we live in the flesh." An outcry has been raised about the melancholy nature of my philosophy; but this is to be found merely in the fact that, instead of inventing a future hell as the e quivalent of sins, I have shown that where guilt is to be found, there is already in the world something akin to hell; but he who is inclined to deny this can easily experience it.24

In a short lyric, "A Question," Frost's universe asks "men of earth" whether the suffering of existence is not too much of a debt, too much "to pay for birth " : A voice said, Look m e i n the stars And tell me truly, men of earth, If all the soul-and-body scars Were not too much to pay for birth.

The "voice" here is only "a" voice, not unlike that from the whirlwind but less of a God than of a riddling sphinx represented in the material fire of the stars (echoed later in " Choose Something Like a Star, " in which the star responds to scientific inquiry only by what it does - " I burn") . The distinction between material and ethereal disappears; all scars are "soul-and-body, " indicating a com­ plete continuum between the spiritual and the material . I n the first edition of A Boy 's Will Frost provided an interesting pun in the gloss to the poem "Stars " : "There i s n o oversight in human affairs" (emphasis mine) . We ask questions, then, of material obj ects, which become proj ections of our all-too-human human desires. The phrase "look me in the stars" mocks our need for an overseer we can comprehend.

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Religion, if it is nleaningful at all, nlust deny a connection between the world and heaven. As Job 's wife quotes her husband in "A Masque of Reason," faith can only be real and powerful in torture and uncertainty. The idea of a trial always seems far more humane to Frost than the lassitude or certainty of utopia: For instance, is there such a thing as Progress? Job says there's no such thing as Earth '5 beco111ing An easier place for nlan to save his soul in. Except as a hard place to save his soul in, A trial ground where he can try hi111self And find out whether he is any good, It vvould be l1leaningless. It nlight as well Be Heaven at once and have it over with.

Frost's sense of religious experience occurs In the trial of struggle and battle through living, not in the experience of transcendence or ecstatic vision. A powerful nlythic relationship binds the worlds ofJob, Darwin, and Frost. All three clainl that the ways of the divine are incomprehensible to men, counter to n1an's sense of order, design, and j ustice. I)arwin's rhetoric continually under­ scores the human inability to comprehend the grand expanses of time taken to develop fornls, to conceive of Ininute variations. Science underlnines totalizing theologies and turns nature into a grand schenle of superseding and limited forms surviving in contingent situations. In a superb essay, "The Long View: D arwin and the Book ofJob, " Robert Pack argues that "understanding Darwin's Jobian nlentality in which a belief in God is preserved, even though God cannot be comprehended as having created the hunlan race in his own image, or in having a purpose that corresponds to the human longing for j ustice, seems crucial to me. " 2 5 The title of Pack's essay (and of the book in which it appears) is "The Long View, " the subtitle of Frost's "In Time of Cloudburst, " in which Huttonian geological metaphors undermine pre-Darwinian catastrophisnl . The endless and nonprogressive drama of hunlan trial, success and failure, before an indifferent God, brings forth a plea to restrain resentment: May Illy application so close To so endless a repetition Not make me tired and nlorose And resentful of man's condition.

Frost enj oys stripping history of conceptions of both progress and decline that he associated with a whiggish and self-serving sentimentality. "We have no way

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of knowing that this age is one of the worst in the world's history. Arnold claimed the honor for the age before this. Wordsworth claimed it for the last but one. And so on back through literature. I say they claimed the honor for their ages. They claimed it rather for themselves. It is immodest of a man to think of himself as going down before the worst forces ever mobilized by God. " 2 6 Frost takes on a Jobian moralism, attacking poets who grandstand as Jeremianic prophets. 2 7 His criticisms of Arnold and Wordsworth also indicate his distrust of the intuitions of the artistic self harping on the strings of belatedness. The author ofJob, Darwin, and Frost all refuse a completely pessimistic or tragic view of this world of waste. I n his powerful study ofJob, Harold Fisch has observed the way the Hebrew work goes beyond Greek tragedy and comedy in leaving us with a sense of an ongoing trial: The Hebrew poet sets his face not only against thana tos, the dark desire for death, but against the aesthetic form that it yields. The loss of responsibility in death gives us the beauty of the marvelous downward curve of tragic destiny as the hero descends in his nobility and grandeur, to assert his ultimate freedom. Against this perfection of tragic form, Job gives us the more untidy, less deternlined pattern of a test, an ongoing pilgrimage, a trial . 28

I n Darwin's conclusion to On The Origin of Species we find him acknowledging lack of closure for his own narrative as he acknowledges the open-endedness of creation, which goes on destroying as well as creating new forms, countering our expectations both of tragic and comic c ompletion. The ongoing, uncertain trial and quest provide the underlying mythology of some of Frost's best poems, including "The Demiurge's Laugh , " "The Wood­ Pile, " "The Road Not Taken," and "Directive . " The quest results in failure ; the human sense of control and purpose is challenged or mocked by a world that does not conform to its distinctions and perceptions. The idea of progress is the metaphor of the human pilgrimage, a metaphor that constantly breaks down in the chaos of the natural world. In confusing the natural world with God instead of regarding it as a manifestation of God, we are condemned to the grim comedy of being lost. But Frost also could view God as a fear-producing demiurge who drives everything forward: As we are driven in flight by those behind us, so we drive others in front of us and then others in front of them. All is flight from fright and force behind. Progress is escape. Civilization [is] sublimation emerging in terrified flight from someone emerging in terrified flight from someone emerging in terrified flight from God. So we find God again. He is the primordial fear that started all this escaping. He started the drive of existence. No one gets anywhere except from the fear of God. 29

Robert Frost and the Challenge of Darwin

Frost's earliest and one of his most terrifying versions of the flight into the wilderness from a fear of God is "The Demiurge's Laugh , " a poem subtitled significantly "About Science" in the first edition of A Boy 's Will. Contrasted with the disappointed figure of Pan in "Pan with Us, " the man-beast demiurge laughs at the futility of human effort to escape him. I nvoking not Plato 's demiurge but, instead, the Manichaean lord of the world, Frost raises the trou­ bling question of whether the American and scientific fascination with finding God in nature's wilderness leads nowhere but in a circle. An important point of departure for the poem is the loon passage in Walden, which Frost admired greatly: " I ' m sure I [']m glad of all the unversified poetry of Walden-and not merely nature-descriptive, but narrative as in the chapter on the play with the loon on the lake, and character-descriptive as in the beautiful passage about the French Canadian woodchooper. "3o The loons of Walden became a figure of nature's mocking the naturalist's search for meaning and prefigures the laughter of the seeker in "The Demiurge's Laugh " : His usual note was his denloniac laughter, yet somewhat like that o f a water-fowl; but occasionally, when he had balked rne Illost successfully and COllIe up a long way off, he uttered a long-drawn unearthly howl, probably more like that of a wolf than any bird; as when a beast puts his muzzle to the ground and deliberately howls . This was his looning-perhaps the wildest sound that is ever heard here, making the woods ring far and wide. I concluded that he laughed in derision of my efforts, confident of his own resources. J 1

But Frost takes this mockery further. It is as though the modern naturalist, recapitulating the antinomianism of the second-century gnostics, finds himself in pursuit of a demon who is a mask for his own desire. The demon's sound, his laughter, is behind him, as if to mock the quest for the new ahead. Sound in Frost, as I mentioned earlier, means evolutionary and racial memory prior to language that cannot be transcended or escaped: The sound was behind me instead of before, A sleepy sound, but mocking half, As of one who utterly couldn't care. The Demon arose from his wallow to laugh, Brushing the dirt from his eye as he went; And well I knew what the Demon meant.

That the speaker was "on the Demon's trail" means that not only was he pursu­ ing a demon rather than "a true God" but that the trail and the pursuit itself are creations of the demiurge, who goads us to chase our own tails and laughs at the

Natural History and the End of Theodicy

comedy. Without explanation the primal laugh is immediately comprehensible to one who also embodies its spirit. This serves as a parody of Emerson's praise of moving onward in nature, following an ideal that he b elieves never falls behind: Thus journeys the mighty Ideal before us; it never was known to fall in the rear. No man ever came to an experience which was satiating but his good is tidings of a better. Onward and onward! In liberated moments we know that a new picture of life and duty is already possible; the elements already exist in many minds around you of a doctrine of life which shall transcend any written record we have.32

The demon's lack of interest or half-interest c ounters the pursuit of the speaker, who is j oyfully on the quest for knowledge. I nstead of the "mighty Ideal , " there is only a beastlike creature wiping dirt from his eye. The demon's presence in the "wallow" also suggests the material, visceral origins of life from mud and slime rather than the ethereal realm of purified enlightenment sought by science. Humiliated, the speaker pretends to be looking for something less grandiose and soon sits under a tree, among the fallen leaves, a merging of the Fall with an awareness of the unsettling bestiality of nature. The "wallow" of "The Demiurge's Laugh" prefigures Frost's swamp in "The Wood-Pile, " also a narrative poem about a quest for spiritual knowledge and rebirth by penetration of the wilderness. Thoreau's "Walking" j oins the re­ creation of the self with the process of regeneration in nature-migration and adaptation to new environments . Civilization and cultivation deaden the power of the self, which needs to be remade in the most primal and chaotic wilderness, the swamp in particular: They who have been traveling long on the steppes of Tartary say,-"On reentering cultivated lands, the agitation, perplexity, and turmoil of civilization oppressed and suffocated us; the air seemed to fail us, and we felt every moment as if about to die of asphyxia." When I would recreate myself, I seek the darkest wood, the thickest and most interminable, and, to the citizen, most dismal swamp. I enter a swamp as a sacred place, a sanctum sanctoru m . There is the strength, the marrow of Nature. The wild wood covers the virgin mold, -and the same soil is good for men and for trees.33

For Thoreau the swamp is a "sacred place" as a symbol of primordial freshness but also because it seems most " dismal" to civilization and cultivation. In "The Wood-Pile" the narrator finds in his frozen swamp ambiguous evidence of order and cultivation that does not yield simple revelations. The facts-the behavior of the bird and the woodpile itself-become hard to read in this ecologically complex environment.

Robert Frost and the Challen.Re C!.f Darwin

The narrator's purposes renlain obscure, though he seems ambivalent about them. Is he escaping, fleeing, or seeking sOlnething? At first he wants to "turn back" but then continues with "we shall see. " See something literally or collo­ quially, as in "see what will happ en"? There is a ruefulness in his recognition that he is "far from home " : Out walking i n th e frozen S\Val11p one gray day, I paused and said, ' I will turn back frol11 here. No, I will go on farther-and \ve shall see.' The hard snow held nle, save \vhere now and then One fo ot went through . The vie\v was all in lines Straight up and down of tall sliln trees Too l11uch alike to n1ark or nal11e a place by So as to say for certain I \vas here Or son1ewhere else : I was just far fronl hon1e.

Ungraspable, beyond our nalning or talning, the place is inhun1an. One senses that the narrator is testing hin1self, atten1pting to overcome his fears and expecta­ tions in an environment indifferent to his ego. All the while he convinces himself of a decision and of his power of choice, both of which are soon mocked. What he eventually sees are indications of life and form-the little bird and the woodpile-that do not conform to the uniformity of the trees; they are evidence of the Lucretian swerve of independence and order in a chaotic world. H e atten1pts to infer some intention, purpose, or design from these facts, which resist comprehension. The bird, probably a white-tailed junco, becomes the target of the narrator's proj ections about purpose. According to the narrator, this bird is defensive, sure that he is after him for his white tail feather. But the narrator checks his own anthropon10rp hism with the wonderfully ambiguous qualifying phrase "Who was so foolish as to think what h e thought . " The real problem is the antecedent of the relative pronoun tv/zo, the bird or the narrator. Is the narrator foolish to try to think what the bird thought, or is the bird foolish for thinking that the narrator is after his tail feather? Both readings reveal son1ething about the narrator and his quest for meaning: A small bird flew before n1e. He \vas careful To put a tree between us when he lighted, And say no word to tell 111e who he was Who was so foolish as to think what he thought. He thought that I was after him for a feather­ The white one in his tail; like one who takes Everything said as personal to hiI11self.

Natural History and the End of Theodicy

On one level the narrator appears to be mocking the bird for his paranoia and egotism, "like one who takes / Everything said as personal to himself. " But the foolishness may be the narrator's for proj ecting onto the bird his own thoughts and his human tendency to see the world in terms of his own ego. But the narrator's attention to the white feather in the bird's tail suggests that the bird may well indeed have something to fear; the narrator's attention to it betrays his lack of indifference to an unusual trophy, a thing of beauty, that he might want to capture or possess (not unlike the narrator seeking the trophy nest in "The White-Tailed Hornet") . The narrator asserts his own freedom from this desire with the line " One flight out sideways would have undeceived him , " while confirming his own inability t o liberate himself from this desire t o take o ff "the way I might have gone," if he were still not bound t o his instincts. The bird goes behind the woodpile, according to the narrator, "to make his last stand" : One flight out sideways would have undeceived him. And then there was a pile of wood for which I forgot him and let his little fear Carry him off the way I might have gone, Without so much as wishing him good-night. He went behind it to make his last stand.

Why does the bird go behind the woodpile? Probably not to make his last stand. Rather, the woodpile is the location of his nest, as the j unco is the kind of bird who builds nests in fallen logs and close to the ground. The white feather, despite the attention of the narrator, serves the purpose of mating, not beauty for human eyes. A carefully cut " cord," perhaps a play on chord, of the hardwood maple, it seems a religious sacrifice or a work of art, at least purposefully ornamented and finished by the clematis. But the clematis itself is seeking material upon which to grow. And it might also show the bird's real motive in going to the woodpile­ seeking the seeds of the clematis for food. There is a network of growth and destruction. These aspects of the tangled swamp are lost on this seeker of ordered perfection comprehensible in human terms: It was a cord of maple, cut and split And piled-and measured, four by four by eight. And not another like it could I see. No runner tracks in this year's snow looped near it. And it was older sure than this year's cutting, Or even last year's or the year's before. The wood was gray and the bark warping off it

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And the pile somewhat sunken. Clenlatis Had wound strings round and round it like a bundle. What held it though on one side was a tree Still growing, and on one a stake and prop, These latter about to fall.

Its isolation and age are remarkable indications of what appears to have been an inexplicable and, more important, deliberate action of waste. The environment overwhelms , threatens, and destroys any angular form of human order that can be imposed upon or made from it. The tree growing next to it-like the Darwinian Tree of Life, which encompasses both life and extinction-supports the pile, while the man-made stake and prop are " about to fall. " The human destruction of a tree to create form is subsumed by the larger Tree of Life. The temporal relation of the observer to the woodpile is important. The speaker is moving forward in time, seeking something in the future. But, like the demiurge, the future is something from the past, an image of growth and decay that links past, present, and future in a network, an organic whole. I mages of solitary remnants of unsuccessful human attempts at survival and order in the wilderness pervade The Voyage �f the Beagle. It is important to note Darwin's use of the metaphor of inanimate nature acting as a "sovereign, " indicating the pleasure he takes in the way nature overthrows the colonizing power of his own nation: Our course lay due south, down that gloonlY passage which I have before alluded to, as appearing to lead to another and worse world. The wind was fair, but the atnl0sphere was very thick; so that we nlissed tl1uch curious scenery. The dark ragged clouds were rapidly driven over the nlountains, from their summits nearly down to their bases. The glimpses which we caught through the dusky mass, were highly interesting; jagged points, cones of snow, blue glaciers . . . . At the base of the lofty and nl0st perpendicular sides of our little cove there was one deserted wigwam, and it alone reminded us that man sonletimes wandered into these desolate regions. But it would be difficult to imagine a scene where he seemed to have fewer claims or less authority. The inaninlate works of nature-rock, ice, snow, wind, and water­ all warring with each other, yet combined against man-here reigned in absolute sovereignty. 34

Darwin also meditates on the slow decaying of wood that had been cut by colonists. His reference to these boles as vestiges of the presence of "fugitive Royalists" is also indicative of his contempt for hUlnan sovereignty and provides a n10cking commentary on the unlin1ited possibilities of escape and freedom in a new wilderness. But the marking of how the tree boles take thirty years to turn to mold is a powerful image. Man has come and made a temporary settlement,

Natural History and the End of Theodicy

dominating the environment. But man is now absent, and the vestiges of human presence return to the process of regeneration. The slow decay of the bole becomes imaginatively linked to the passing of a p articular human colonization of an area. In his great Tree of Life simile in On the Orig in of Species the dead and decayed branches represent extinct species. But their matter will go to perpetuate the ever-regenerative tree: I wanted to go to a house about a mile and a half distant, but my guide said it was quite impossible to penetrate the wood in a straight line. He offered, however, to lead me, by following obscure cattle-tracks, the shortest way: the walk, nevertheless, took no less than three hours . . . . These facts convey a good idea of the imprac­ ticability of the forests of these countries. A question often occurred to me-how long does any vestige of a fallen tree remain? This man showed me one which a party of fugitive Royalists had cut down fourteen years ago; and taking this as a criterion, I should think a bole a foot and half in diameter would in thirty years be changed into a heap of mould. 35

The speaker of "The Wood-Pile" seems surprised that someone could build such an altar as the woodpile, "far from a useful fireplace . " As a form set against the chaos of nature, it appears to serve no survival function, and that is its glory. What kind of individual would do this? I thought that only Someone who lived in turning to fresh tasks Could so forget his handiwork on which H e spent himself, the labor of his ax, And leave it there far from a useful fireplace To warm the frozen swamp as best it could With the slow smokeless burning of decay.

The speaker's revelation is ambiguous. His own quest for perfection (the white feather, the perfect work of art) is mocked by the thought of a creator who moves on from form to form. There is a Lucretian lesson in this, that the fear of death and the concern with immortality are likely to produce fear and foolishness. The woodpile is an example of waste for its own sake. Its creator moves on with little concern for how others perceive what he has done or for the future of what he has made. But was his motive the "sheer morning gladness at the brim," as the speaker of "The Tuft of Flowers" said in hope of discovering a common faith? If the woodpile is a metaphor for a human effort at form or art or individuation­ free from practical constraints-it reveals only that all attempts at transcendence lead back to some form of ecological function in the material world: "To warm the frozen swamp as best it could / With the slow smokeless burning of decay. "

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The woodpile takes on a life of its own. Like Darwin, Frost moves past thinking about who made the cut wood, a creative agent of change, to the wood itself, which serves a purpose even in its death . Indeed, its presence and decay allow for clematis, and the clematis provides seed for birds. And it does in its decay actually allow enough warming so that trees can grow, from the bacterial breakdown into methane, though the phrase "as best it could" indicates the limits Frost tends to ascribe to any single effort. The woodpile with its apparent merging of fornlal and final causes at the hands of an absent creator would be an example of l' art pour / ' art were it not for the fact that its apparent ecological function defeats the proj e ctions and hopes of the narrator. Here too, Daphne eludes Apollo. The speaker would be as indifferent as the bird, as indifferent as the woodchopper, and indifferent to the woodpile itself as its purpose and design c ollapse into the swampy chaos of biological interp enetration and transformation. The conclusion expresses a recognition of the vanity of hunlan pursuit in a pluralistic and inhu­ man unIverse. Frost's own comlnentary on the concluding lines of "The Wood-Pile" reveals his preoccupation with understanding the world obj ectively and finding obj ects that depict beyond nletaphor the processes of life. Frost allows for the human comprehension of the "thing in itself" : There is sonlething in the Gernlan notion of Ding an Sich. I remember a queer nlixture of wonder and satisfaction when the phrase canle out in "The Wood-Pile" about "the slow smokeless burning of decay"; that's right, you know; that's what it really is. It's better than a lesson. Isn't that the weakness of personifying things in nature? We are really disregarding the Thing Itself and making it masquerade in false clothing.36

This attitude toward fact is a change from Emerson's view that for the poet "facts . . . are symbols of the passage of the world into the soul of man, to suffer there change and reappear a new and higher fact. "37 The woodpile is not personified or transformed into something " higher. " Frost views the human and the natural as interpenetrating, without the limitations of categories. It is closer to what happens, as Santayana observed, to facts in Lucretius: "We seem to be reading not the p oetry of a poet about things, but the p oetry of things themselves. Things have their poetry not because of what we make them symbols of, but because of their own movement and life, is what Lucretius meant once for all mankind. "38 The ultimately limited power of the woodpile to warm the woods is carried in the resigned phrase "as best it could," reminiscent of the resigned tone in "Mowing, " that the "fact is the sweetest dream. " The "fact, " or "thing-in­ itself, " is the limitation and eventual failure of individual effort. Frost's allusion to

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post-Kantianism points to his persistent fascination with Schopenhauer's view of the world as will. He follows Schopenhauer's view that poetry in its highest form as tragedy reveals directly the operations of the world. Behind everything is a

principium individuationis, supporting an egoism that disintegrates in an act of self­ mortification. This is consonant with the slow decay of the woodpile and Frost's comment in "The Figure a Poem Makes" that a poem "rides on its own melting" (seeing through the form of the phenomenon) : Tragedy is to be regarded, and is recognized, as the sumlllit of poetic art . . . . here is to be found a significant hint as to the nature of the world and existence. It is the antagonislll of the will with itself which is here most completely unfolded at the highest grade of its obj ectivity, and which comes into fearful prominence. It be­ comes visible in the suffering of mankind which is produced partly by chance and error; and these stand forth as the rulers of the world, personified as fate through their insidiousness which appears almost like purpose and intention. In part it proceeds from mankind through self-mortifYing efforts of will on the part of the individuals, through the wickedness and perversity of most. It is one and the same will, living and appearing in them all, whose phenomena fight with one another and tear one another to pieces . . . . Here and there it reaches thoughtfulness and is softened more or less by the light of knowledge, until at last in the individual case this knowledge is enhanced and purified by suffering itself. It then reaches a point where the phenomenon, the veil of Maya, no longer deceives it. It sees through the form of the phenomenon, the principium individuationis; the egoislll resting on this expires with it. The motives that were previously so powerful now lose their force, and instead of them, the complete knowledge of the real nature of the world, acting as a quieter of the will, produces resignation, the giving up not merely of life, but of the whole will-to-live itself. 39

Frost's subtle sense of failure is informed by the idea of the world as " quieter of the will . " And the D arwinian-ecological view that individuation is part of an ongoing process of creation and destruction in a tangled bank mitigates the apocalyptic finality of pure tragedy. "The Road Not Taken" is an ironic commentary on the autonomy of choice in a world governed by instincts, unpredictable contingencies, and limited possibilities. It p arodies and demurs from the biblical idea that God is the "way" that can and should be followed and the American idea that nature provides the path to spiritual enlightenment. The title refers doubly to bravado for choosing a road less traveled but also to regret for a road of lost possibility and the elimina­ tions and changes produced by choice. "The Road Not Taken" reminds us of the consequences of the principle of selection in all aspects of life, namely that all choices in knowledge or in action exclude many others and lead to an ironic recognition of the limitations of our achievements . At the heart of the poen1 is

Robert Frost and the ChallenRe �f Darwin

the ronlantic mythology of flight from a fixed world of limited possibility into a wilderness of many possibilities combined with trials and choices through which the pilgrim progresses to divine perfection. I agree with Frank Lentricchia's view that the poem draws on "the culturally ancient and pervasive idea of nature as allegorical book, out of which to draw explicit lessons for the conduct of life (nature as self-help text) . "40 I would argue that what it is subverting is something more profound than the sentimental expectations of genteel readers of fireside poetry. In the context of An1erican thought it is indebted, as is "The Wood-Pile" and "Directive," to Thoreau's essay " Walking. " That late essay, published a month after the author's death in I 862, represents his attempt to reconcile evolutionary theory with personal and American ideals. "Walking" describes the j ourney of the fettered, cultured European into a wilderness by which the past is continually transformed. I agree with Max Oelschlaeger's insight that in "Walk­ ing" Thoreau "brilliantly weds the implications of evolution with epistemology itself: knowledge itself evolves, and intu itiofl is fundamental to the process. "4 1 Oelschlaeger adds that Thoreau's insight conveys the "essential notion that cul­ tural forms, j ust as inorganic and organic ones, fflust evolve in response to changing circumstance. . . . the same evolutionary process that underpins life also nourishes the individual. "42 The walk westward represents both a quest for the Holy Land and a search for n1ythic origins in a prin10rdial wilderness stripped of the layers of civilization: We go eastward to realize history and study the works of art and literature, retracing the steps of the race; we go westward as into the future, with a spirit of enterprise and adventure. The Atlantic is a Lethean strean1, in our passage over which we have had the opportunity to forget the old world and its institutions. 43

Thoreau naturalizes our "walking" escape and quest, making it analogous to great n1igrations of wildlife, son1ething he views as ennobling rather than degrading in its effect on the idea of individual will and choice. Animal instinct and choice are praised as representing providence: I know not how significant it is, or how far it is an evidence of singularity, that an individual should then consent in his pettiest walk with the general moven1ent of the race; but I know that son1ething akin to the n1igratory instinct in birds and quadrupeds, -which, in son1e instances, is known to have affected the squirrel tribe, impelling then1 to a general and n1ysterious moven1ent, in which they were seen, say son1e, crossing the broadest rivers , each on its particular chip, with its tail raised for a sail, and bridging narro\ver streall1S with their dead, that son1ething like the furor which affects the don1estic cattle in spring, and which is referred to as a worn1 in their tails, -affects both nations and individuals fron1 time to time. 44

Natural History and the End of Theodicy

The passage in Thoreau's essay to which Frost refers most pointedly in "The Road Not Taken" expresses a willingness to trust our choice to the magnetism of nature. It is only our "heedlessness" that makes for a wrong choice. The actual world, according to Thoreau, will mirror both an interior and an ideal world: What is it that makes it so hard sometimes to determine whither we will walk? I believe that there is a subtle magnetism in Nature, which, ifwe unconsciously yield to it, will direct us aright. It is not indifferent to us which way we walk. There is a right way, but we are very liable from heedlessness and stupidity to take the wrong one. We would fain take that walk, never yet taken by us through this actual world, which is perfectly symbolical of the path which we love to travel in the interior and ideal world, and sometimes, no doubt, we find it difficult to choose our direction, because it does not yet exist distinctly in our idea.45

"The Road Not Taken" appears on one level to support Thoreau's idealism and its ultimate alliance with the magnetism of nature. Dramatizing the way our ideals are often in discord with the contingencies of experience, Frost places us at the moment of decision in which our "choice" appears much more uncertain and nature's signals less magnetic or more ambiguous. The drama of the poem is of the persona making a choice between two roads. As evolved creatures, we should be able to make choices, but the poem suggests that our choices are irrational and aesthetic. The sense of meaning and morality derived from choice is not reconciled but, rather obliterated and can­ celed by a nonmoral monism. Frost is trying to reconcile impulse with a con­ science that needs goals and harbors deep regrets. The verb Frost uses is taken, which means something less conscious than chosen. The importance of this opposition to Frost is evident in the way he changed the title of "Take Something Like a Star" to "Choose Something Like a Star, " and he continued to alter titles in readings and publications . 46 Take suggests more of an unconscious grasp than a deliberate choice. (Of course, it also suggests action as opposed to deliberation.) I n "The Road Not Taken" the persona's reasons wear thin, and choice is con­ fined by circumstances and the irrational: Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, And sorry I could not travel both And be one traveler, long I stood And looked down one as far as I could To where it bent in the undergrowth; Then took the other, as just as fair, And having perhaps the better claim, Because it was grassy and wanted wear;

Robert Frost and the Challell�e �f Darwin

Though as for that the passing there Had worn thenl really about the sanle,

Both roads had been worn "about the same, " though his "taking" the second is based on its being less worn. The basis of selection is individuation, variation, and " difference": taking the one "less traveled by. " That he "could not travel both / And be one traveler" means not only that he will never be able to return but also that experience alters the traveler; he would not be the same by the time he came back. Frost is presenting an antinlyth in which origin, destination, and return are undermined by a nonprogressive development. And the hero has only illusory choice. This psychological representation of the developmental principle of divergence strikes to the core of Darwinian theory. 47 Species are made and survive when individuals diverge fronl others in a branching scheme, as the roads diverge for the speaker. The process of selection inlplies an unretracing process of change through which individual kinds are permanently altered by experience. Though the problem of making a choice at a crossroads is almost a common­ place, the drama of the poem conveys a larger mythology by including evolution­ ary metaphors and suggesting the passage of eons. The change of tense in the penultimate line-to took-is part of the speaker's proj ection of what he " shall be telling, " but only retrospectively and after " ages and ages. " Though he cannot help feeling free in selection, the speaker's wisdom is proved only through survival of an unretraceable course of experIence: And both that nlorning equally lay In leaves no step had trodden black. o h, I kept the first for another day! Yet knowing how way leads on to way, I doubted if I should ever come back. I shall be telling this with a sigh Somewhere ages and ages hence: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I­ I took the one less traveled by, And that has nlade all the difference.

The poem leaves one wondering how much "difference " is implied by all, given that the "roads" already exist, that possibilities are limited. Exhausted possibilities of human experience diminish great regret over "the road not taken" or bravado for "the road not taken" by everyone else. The poem does raise questions about whether there is any justice in the outconle of one's choices or anything other than aesthetics, being "fair, " in our nloral decisions . The speaker's impulse to

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individuation is lllitigated by a moral dilemma of being unfair or cruel, in not stepping on leaves, "treading" enough to make them "black. " It might also imply the speaker's recognition that individuation will mean treading on others. Frost makes this metaphor more explicit later in "A Leaf Treader, " in which survival values and toughness are regarded above pity for those who do not succeed: I have been treading on leaves all day until I am autumn-tired. God knows all the color and form of leaves I have trodden on and mired. Perhaps I have put forth too much strength and been too fierce from fear. I have safely trodden underfoot the leaves of another year.

The figure of the tree evokes the Tree of Life, the Fall of man, the Dantean figure of the souls crossing into hell, and the Homeric image of p assing time. The Fall is also in play to remind us, as does the "yellow wood" in "The Road Not Taken, " that we live in an imperfect world of continual natural decay. I n "A Leaf Treader" such phrases as "all the color and form of Ie aves" call attention to the Darwinian world of struggle and competition among races and species. The speaker won­ ders whether he has "put forth too much strength and been too fierce from fear, " a regret about the costs of survival. The individualist's strength makes him so­ ciety's "fugitive. " Though the poem concludes with a tough, resolute tone, one is left with a sense that the individual's success is marred by a consciousness of his cruelty. In many of Frost's dramas it is unclear which behavior (including the artist's) is moral; success is bought at moral expense.48 "Directive" retreats from the uncertainty ahead and points to an imagined order in the past, a search for origins that will provide the certainty of honle. The problem is that the past order is just that, imagined, and "Directive" on one level parodies the archaic yearnings of modernism.49 Like the "governor" of "The Generations of Men," in which two young people are led to the ruins of a house only to find themselves thrown into the confusion of their own imaginative play, the " guide . . . only has at heart your getting lost. " The poem provides a myth of simple origins but implies that the original location is a wasteland of a former town. The repetitions of " a farm that is no more a farm / And in a town that is no more a town" parody Eliotic locutions of "The Wasteland" : Back out o f all this now too nluch for us, Back in a time made simple by the loss Of detail, burned, dissolved, and broken off Like graveyard nlarble sculpture in the weather, There is a house that is no more a house Upon a farm that is no more a farm

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And in a town that is no more a town. The road there, if you'll let a guide direct you Who only has at heart your getting lost, May seem as if it should have been a quarry­ Great monolithic knees the fornler town Long since gave up pretense of keeping covered.

Frost appeals to the reader's desire for a place "Back in a time made simple by the loss / Of detail. " He also appeals to the "height of adventure" in finding the origin of two village cultures (as though it were an archaeological venture) , only to tell us that the cultures are lost. There are two metaphors governing his conception of the j ourney. One is a branching and diverging image of complex­ ity growing out of sinlplicity, two village cultures developing out of one. By going backward, the narrator suggests arrival at a unified source. His concept of j ourney must move against this complexity with his "ladder road . " These are competing icons of natural divergence and human order: The height of the adventure is the height Of country where two village cultures faded Into each other. Both of thenl are lost. And if you're lost enough to find yourself By now, pull in your ladder road behind you And put a sign up CtOSED to all but me. Then make yourself at hon1e. The only field N ow left's no bigger than a harness gall.

All that the guide might show you has to be imagined or could be found as a story in a book. The narrator describes a place in which labor occurred, " a house in earnest, " as well as "the children's house of make believe . " The would-be follower is led into a world of childish sentimentality about the children's house and playthings, to " [W] eep for what little things could make them glad, " which takes a decidedly sardonic tone toward the sentimental. The relinking through myths of a return to archaic ideals of primitive order was part of the appeal of Bachofen, Frazer, and Weston to T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, and other modern­ ists in search of religious symbols. In Frost this desire appears as a highly personal desire for hermetic knowledge, inaccessible "to all but me" and veering between childlike and childish. The " house of make believe" makes the source of religious satisfaction childish fantasy: First there's the children's house of l11ake believe, Son1e shattered dishes underneath a pine,

Natural History and the End of Theodicy

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The playthings in the playhouse of the children. Weep for what little things could make them glad.

The narrator's directive to "weep" over the imagined playthings o f this former house echoes Thoreau's meditation in the " Former Inhabitants" section of Walden when he gazes on the overgrowth on former houses: "What a sorrow­ ful act must that be,-the covering up of wells! coincident with the opening of wells of tears. " 5 0 Frost's meditation, like Thoreau's , considers the loss of a prior cultural experience, behind which there is only Lucretian stream of change, "too lofty and original to rage . " But it is also noted that this same flux can become a source of great destruction-"valley streams that when aroused / Will leave their tatters hung on barb and thorn. " The very few critics who have noted the connection between "Directive" and Walden have failed to see Frost's underscor­ ing of its ironic implication: nature does not yield a source and does not permit recovery of the past. 5 1 Lilacs in their beauty belie the destruction and death upon which they grow, the former dwelling of another creature, and in this respect are elegiac in the tradition not only of Walden but also of Whitman's poem "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed" and Eliot's reference to Whitman in the opening of the "The Wasteland . " Water provides sustenance for future growths even as it destroys others. If "Directive" is supposed to conflate "source" and "destination," those prove to be the "destiny" of the endless destruction and creation of forms in time and in the horror of historical duration, not beyond them: Then for the house that is no more a house, But only a belilaced cellar hole, N ow slowly closing like a dent in dough. This was no playhouse but a house in earnest. Your destination and your destiny's A brook that was the water of the house, Cold as a spring as yet so near its source, Too lofty and original to rage. (We know the valley streams that when aroused Will leave their tatters hung on barb and thorn.)

The narrator, who tries to keep his distance, parenthetically intrudes to remind us of the self-consciousness required to believe in this imaginary quest. He concludes by telling us there is a treasure that must be kept secret "Under a spell so the wrong ones can't find it, / So can't get saved, as Saint Mark says they mustn't. " It is hard to take this other than as a sarcastic interpretation of Jesus' justification for speaking in parable as little more than an attempt to establish a

Robert Prost and the Challen,r,e of Darwin

sect or cult by charismatic power. 52 In stating that he has "kept hidden . . . / a broken drinking goblet like the Grail , " he appeals to the Messianic longings of the religious quester only to undern1ine then1 by stating parenthetically, "I stole the goblet fron1 the children's playhouse " (en1phasis n1ine) : I have kept hidden in the instep arch Of an old cedar at the waterside A broken drinking goblet like the Grail Under a spell so the \vrong ones can't find it, So can't get saved, as Saint Mark says they n1ustn't. (I stole the goblet froll1 the children's playh ouse.) Here are your waters and your watering place. Drink and be whole again beyond confusion.

While the directive pron1ises that these waters of origin will make the wanderer whole again, we still feel they are a fantasy to which the narrator lures us- " your waters. " Many of Frost's journey or quest poen1S lead to dissatisfaction and symbols of disillusion and decay, not revelation or wholeness . "Directive" re­ n1ains a striking exan1ple of Frost's relationship with his readers, that of a pied piper of the diabolical. Believing or Believing In ?

The descent of spirit into n1atter and the turning of providential history into natural history proves the end of religious certainty. Rather than providing a vision of the future, natural history en1phasizes individual facts. The mutability of natural facts that Darwin's vision brought to the world leaves a sense of the "essential" in things only through the process by which things change. Looking at present facts and the past for a sense of futurity leaves us with the obscured and obliterated record of an unusable past-the ancient ruins in "The Generations of Men," "The Black Cottage," and "The Wood-Pile" or the absence of ruins in "Directive . " We cannot construct or reconstruct our origins from a factual record that has becon1e obliterated. The choosing of natural facts as metaphors for the imlTIortality of the soul leads to pride-killing skepticisn1 . 53 The ten1ptation for belief in God to becon1e no n10re than a fiction was a great threat of Darwin's conception of human development, one captured well by Santayana in The Sense �f Be a u ty The objects of our belief have undergone a .

process of developn1ent, have been recast and n1ay not correspond to any truth: But ho\vever descriptive of truth our conceptions 111ay be, they have evidently grown up in our 111inds by an iI1\vard process of developll1ent. The nlaterials of

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history and tradition have been melted and recast by the devout imagination into those figures in the presence of which our piety lives. 54

Counter to Santayana's tendency to turn the obj ects of religion into an imagina­ tive construct is John Fiske 's assertion that evolution has been moving toward the creation of a creature capable of recognizing its kinship with God and the reality of religion: The lesson of evolution is that through all these weary ages the Human Soul has not been cherishing in Religion a delusive phantom, but in spite of seemingly endless groping and stumbling it has been rising to the recognition of its essential kinship with the ever-living God. Of all the implications of the doctrine of evolution with regard to Man, I believe the very deepest and strongest to be that which asserts the Everlasting Reality of Religion. 55

The only way out of the trap of this historicism was to disregard religion altogether as prescientific or attempt to purge religion of its superstitious ele­ ments by making it somehow scientific; religion should become practical and useful. William James's response to this controversy over the reality of religion was to assert that reality because of its practical effects in the world. Belief in the unseen world might as well be real because it has consequences "in the natural world upon our regenerative change " : Yet the unseen region i n question i s not merely ideal, for i t produces effects in this world. When we con1mune with it, work is actually done upon our finite personality, for we are turned into new men, and consequences in the way of conduct follow in the natural world upon our regenerative change. But that which produces effects within another reality must be termed a reality itself, so I feel as if we had no philosophic excuse for calling the unseen or mystical world unreal. S ()

James insists always on change and conversion, and belief in the spiritual world is a driving force in that change. In another attempt to accommodate both biology and religion, James insisted that religion is a necessary instrument for the survival of a nation and relied on Darwin to j ustify the "reality" of religion as he j ustified individualism and the rise of " great men . " In "Reflex Action and Theism, " in The Will to Believe, he argued that religion gives a selective advantage to the people who possess it; a nation with only empirical science and no religious sentiment "will just as surely go to ruin, and fall prey to their more richly constituted neighbors, as the beasts of the field, as a whole, have fallen prey to man. "57 Even in James the reality of religion is as a tool in the struggle for existence. Frost, too, saw religious belief as an instrument of survival but one that benefited from being tested in the face of the superseding visions of scientific

Robert Frost and the ChallenRe �f Darwin

truth. In an extensive notebook entry about the effects of the Copernican revolution, Frost welcomes the challenge of science to our faith. Science in its emphasis on change and finding ever new uncertainties always demands new courage in the assertion of belief. Frost would indeed rather scare himselfwith his own desert places and accept the Lucretian materiality of a soul-denying universe than live in the conlfort of an anthropocentric one: Was I thrown off nlyself when I had to change from the Ptolemaic geo-centric to the Copernican no-centric universe. It seemed to me a not very different universe I felt j ust as much at honle in only if possible a l11uch l1l0re magnificent space for us to be the only living thing in. I felt our importance all1lost exaggerated. It has taken me some years of l1ly life to accept our position; but I see no way out of it. There is apparently not a soul but us alive in the whole business of rolling balls , eddying fires, and long distance rays of light. It l1lakes any cozyness in our nook here all the more heartwarming. Sonle are not like me in this respect. While I hug l1lyself in a corner, they are out rolling up the sleeves in readiness to see if we cant do something about occupying a star or two besides this one. 5�

"Phrases of salvation," Frost continued, are all that he felt he had for "survival, " and those phrases only have meaning i n the context o f being tested against " truth. " Truth for Frost has the function prinlarily of demanding "fresh courage " and "skill" in nlaintaining belief So I have found that for Iny own survival I had to have phrases of salvation if I was to keep anything worth keeping. Truth , what is truth? said Pilate; and we know not and no search can make us know, said someone else. But I said, can't we know? We can know well enough to go on with being tried every day in our courage to tell it. What is truth? Truth is that that takes fresh courage to tell it. It takes all our best skill too. 59

The opposition of belief and truth remains one of the marks of the impact of science on religion. Truth always turns out to be something difficult and de­ manding, as though its true essence is only a function in a language game for being the opposite of whatever we find conlforting or of whatever has become the dead metaphor supporting the foundation of institutionalized belief, "a great clarification upon which sects and cults are founded. "6 0 So as nluch as Frost insisted on the power of metaphor, he insisted on restraint in its use. He distrusted the use of good words, the rhetoric of virtue, and the rhetoric of nl0ral progress to convince others of their virtue : Take the way \ve have been led into our present position l1lorally, the world over. It is by a sort of nletaphorical gradient. There is a kind of thinking-to speak

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metaphorically-there is a kind of thinking you might say was endemic in the brothel. It is always there. And every now and then in some mysterious way it becomes epidemic in the world. And how does it do so? By using all the good words that virtue has invented to maintain virtue . . . . I suppose we may blame the artists a good deal, because they are great people to spread by metaphor. The stage too-the stage is always a good intermediary between the two worlds, the under and the upper, -if I nlay say so without personal prejudice to the stage. In all this I have only been saying that the devil can quote Scripture, which simply means that the good words you have lying around the devil can use for his purposes as well as anybody else. Never mind about my morality. I am not here to urge anything. I don't care whether the world is good or bad-not on any particular day. 6 1

I n "The Black Cottage," "Snow, " "Directive," and "West-Running Brook" one finds attempts at visions of religious unity and perfection that often turn out to b e ironic or subversive performances and displays o f power or prowess. Frost's distrust of the virtuous language used to maintain virtue is quite similar to Darwin's distrust of b eliefs as actual evidence for the existence of God: The fact that many false religions have spread over large p ortions of the earth like wild-fire had some weight with me. B eautiful as is the morality of the New Testa­ ment, it can hardly be denied that its perfection depends in part on the interpreta­ tion which we now put on metaphors and allegories.62

For Darwin the teaching of the New Testament is too dependent on the retro­ spective interpretation of tropes and too distant from reality, a reality he sees existing outside figurative language.

Frost is equally skeptical of taking metaphors too far or holding them too long, and he regarded belief as an endless supersession of attempts to talk of "matter in terms of spirit. " This great attempt always fails, for fear of confusing reality with belief, truth with imagination. Metaphors break down the way all material objects do: Greatest of all attempts to say one thing in terms of another is the philosophical attempt to say matter in terms of spirit, or spirit in terms of matter, to make the final unity. That is the greatest attempt that ever failed. We stop just short there. But it is the height of poetry, the height of all thinking, the height of all p oetic thinking, that attempt to say matter in terms of spirit and spirit in terms of matter. It is wrong to call anybody a materialist simply because he tries to say spirit in terms of matter, as if that were a sin. Materialism is not the attempt to say all in terms of matter. The only materialist-be he poet, teacher, scientist, politician, or statesman-is the man who gets lost in his material without a gathering metaphor to throw it into shape and order. He is the lost soul. 63

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If this p assage appears optinlistic, it linlits its hope to metaphor as a temporary instrument of order in the nlaterial world, not something able to transcend it. If, however, those figures are but hunlan constructs, what is to nleasure the continuity of religion, what constitutes a "constant symbol" through which our piety can be manifested? This is the ultinlate challenge of evolution and histor­ icisnl to the would-be religious poet: to overconle the corrosive fear that re­ ligious synlbols are just instrunlents of history and cunning products of a self­ conceiving hunlan inlagination. h 4 Man is a fornl-producing creature in a world that produces creatures as new fornls . All old forms give way to new ones without purpose or end. Frost clings to the prill1acy of belief. Belief is an enabling impulse that, like Whitman's patient spider, seeks as its obj ect to create a covenant for the future. Frost concludes the essay with an assertion of a fourfold web of belief that culnlinates in "the God-belief. " There is a gradient fronl the individual to the collective and national, to the artistic, to God and the future. We don't believe i n G o d but believe G o d i n , create hinl by our impulses, "some sort o f enl0tion": "And then finally the relationship we enter into with God to believe the future in-to believe the hereafter in. " 6 5 Does belief in God or believing God in provide an argument for his exis­ tence? Frost's criticisnl of both religion and science involves being skeptical of the " gods" created by belief: Did you ever think about his question of the inductive or the deductive, of whether what we know con1es down fron1 above or whether it con1es up? Most scientists would tell you that nothing, no generation that has con1e up-once it gets up there you can deduce fronl it, you can bring down. There's nothing COll1es down frolll God. You created the gods and then you work down froll1 them.6()

Induction and deduction are part of a circular process of creating metaphors and treating thenl as realities. Is there, for Frost, a reality beyond this process? In " Sitting by a Bush in Broad Sunlight" Frost is explicit about the way evolution and nlaterialisnl have threatened faith. His answer, though, asserts that religion has always demanded building a tentative bridge across the vast gulf separating nlan, the world, and God. And his reconciliation of religion and science confirms the power of the nlaterial as the force behind our religious inlpulses. The opening image of light caught "between thumb and fingers" refers both to the scientific demand for evidence and to the evolutionary theory that man diverged fronl apes by the morphological change of an opposable thumb. Our awareness that only a slight morphological distinction divides us from other creatures erodes our belief in our exceptional relationship to God.

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Frost goes on to insist on " only one" act of creation, dispelling the expecta­ tion in the first stanza of a miraculous descent of the creator. Frost echoes Darwin's phrase at the end of On

the Origin of Sp ecies

-

"there is grandeur in this

view of life, with its several powers, having been originally

breathed

into a few

forms or into one" :67 When I spread out nly hand here today, I catch no more than a ray To feel of between thumb and fingers; No lasting effect of it lingers. There was one tinle and only the one When dust really took in the sun; And from that one intake of fire All creatures still warmly suspire.

He accepts the theory that all creatures "suspire" from an inorganic com­ munion of mud and the sun's energy, "fire, " not unlike the Heraclitean fire that encompasses change and the eternal: And if men have watched a long time And never seen sun-smitten slime Again come to life and crawl off, We must not be too ready to scoff.

The fact that no one has ever seen "sun-smitten slime " come to life should be no more disturbing than the fact that God has not spoken to or presented himself to anyone as he did to Moses. The penultimate stanza attempts a reconciliation of the story of Moses at the burning bush and the incipient animation of matter, portraying both as worthy of being considered historical fact and historical fiction. The evocation of Moses questioning God in the burning bush becomes a parable of the modern scientific attempt to establish religious belief through knowledge, an attempt that must be rebuked by the "veil " : God once declared h e was true And then took the veil and withdrew, And relnenlber how final a hush Then descended of old on the bush.

The final stanza places God's speech and its persistence as "our breath" equal or even secondary to the materiality of the sun's fire as the source of " our faith. " " Flame" was a traditional symbol of faith, but Frost emphasizes the literal and material by making faith an "impulse" from "the sun " :

Robert Frost and the Challenge of Darwin

God once spoke to people by nan1e. The sun once imparted its fian1e. One impulse persists as our breath; The other persists as our faith .

Frost pushes the mortalism of Milton and other radical Puritans even further by insisting on the materiality of creation and the inextricable bond of spirit and flesh .68 " Faith" becomes a fire more physical and literal than figurative. That we "persist" through our impulse to faith is the most we can be sure of. 69 Dialogues toward Salvation

"The Black Cottage" provides a decaying syn1bol of human order and hope set against speculations about war, race, human equality, and the persistence of faith. The speculations of a minister about the won1an who once lived there become a dialogue about the meaning of ideals over time. The " ideals" are at bottom a conflict across gender lines, underscoring a game of sexual struggle as the driving force of human life. Frost's poem parallels closely the form and theme of Words­ worth's poem "The Ruined Cottage," which makes up the first part of The

Excursion. Instead of an old man, a minister leads Frost's wanderer-narrator to a cottage. Both poems focus on the woman-housemother who has experienced great loss in war. Wordsworth's old man emphasizes both Margaret's tenacious hope for the return of her husband and the inertia that has led to her family's decay. Frost's minister speculates on the woman's tenacious faith in a religious and ideological principle that j ustifies her loss of a husband in the American Civil War. Frost's poem emphasizes the forces of civil violence, waste, and decay working against the persistence of human ideals and the establishing of a perfect ordering in the wilderness. In his autobiography Darwin boasted of having read The

Excursion twice; Frost's poem reflects Wordsworth's vision passed through

the alembic of Darwinian contingency. By creating a poem echoing Words­ worth's, Frost forces the reader to consider carefully the subtle shift in attitudes toward nature over a century. From the beginning the minister appears more interested in the cottage as a point of departure for his own religious speculations (akin to Baptiste's lure in "The Ax-Helve") than in the story or feelings of the woman. He leads the narrator to a picturesque cottage-"pretty"-only to begin relating how the dead woman's sons n1aintain possession without returning. He adds that "they won't have the place disturbed" after he has invited the narrator inside and claimed that "no one will care " :

Natural History and the End of Theodicy They say they mean to come and summer here Where they were boys. They haven't come this year. They live so far away-one is out westI t will be hard for them to keep their word. Anyway they won't have the place disturbed.

The focus shifts to some sentimentality about the artifacts of the house, like the line drawing from a daguerreotype of the husband who died in the Civil War. What the minister says reveals a lack of faith in relics-their "power to stir. " An understated and cruel facetiousness underlies his casual admission of not remem­ bering whether the husband died at Gettysburg or Fredricksburg: " . . . He fell at Gettysburg or Fredericksburg, / I ought to know-it makes a difference which: / Fredericksburg vvasn't Gettysburg, of course. " To a historical consciousness that accepts waste and annihilation as a matter of course, no detail could make much of a difference. He remains uncertain whether the woman's incipient lifelessness comes from having lost her husband and having had her sons move out (she never expresses any great emotion) or from her own values of " conside­ rate neglect. " The old woman and the black cottage are metaphors for each other, both ordering maternal sources whose productions have been lost or have gone to waste. The woman, as the minister describes her, felt the terrible loss of her family and the terrible loss of war and attempted to j ustify them by sentimental attachment to higher principles. The minister reveals his own ambivalence to­ ward the moral authority of women who, like the cottage, also "pull out their nails" and need a more rational force " to put them in their place. " It always seems to me a sort of mark To measure how far fifty years have brought us. Why not sit down if you are in no haste? These doorsteps seldom have a visitor. The warping boards pull out their own old nails With none to tread and put them in their place.

What the minister tells of the woman is her sentimental and stubborn attachment to her own ideas, to a principle that she had held like a creed: "all men are created free and equal . " The references to William Lloyd Garrison and John Greenleaf Whittier place her in the genteel tradition of social reform and fireside poets. Her gift outright had to be based on a self-evident truth of enlightenment and an optimistic sense of purpose that rides on " quaint phrases" and dead metaphors. The purpose of the war itself remains unclear, and what it accomplished was somehow not good enough to satisfy her giving:

Robert Frost alld the Challel1Re if Darwill

She had her own idea of things , the old lady. And she liked talk. She had seen Garrison And Whittier, and had her story of then1. One wasn't long in learning that she thought Whatever else the Civil War \vas for, It wasn't just to keep the States together, Nor just to free the slaves, though it did both. She wouldn't have believed those ends enough To have given outright for theIll all she gave. Her giving somehow touched the principle That all nlen are created free and equal . And to hear her quaint phrases-so renloved Fronl the world's view today of all those things.

The minister goes on to speak more of the change in views precipitated by D arwinian ideologies of change, racial conflict, and warfare. Royce, in his lec­ tures entitled The Spirit if Modern Ph ilosophy, states directly the threat that evolu­ tionary theory posed to the Jeffersonian view that "all men are created equal " : A s for nlan, h e had one characteristic type o f inner life, that was i n all ages and stations essentially the same, -in the king and in the peasant, in the master and in the slave, in the nlan of the city and in the savage. The glory of science lay just in its power to perceive this essence of the eternally hunlan everywhere in man's life. The dignity of human nature, too, lay in just this its pernlanence. Because of such permanence one could prove all nlen to be naturally equal, and our own Declaration of I ndependence is thus founded upon speculative principles that, as they are there stated, have been rendered nleaningless by the nlodern doctrine of evolution.7 0

The minister entertains Royce's view of the threat posed by evolutionary theory to Jefferson's " hard mystery. " Yet he distances himself from disavowing its power. I nstead, he emphasizes the power of "planting ideas . " The struggle is over which conceptual "force" will persist-Darwin's ideas, Jefferson's ideals, or the old lady's "innocence. " While turning Jefferson into the author of a scripture that will "trouble" us with reconsideration for a millennium, the minister also calls him "the Welshman, " to locate and circumscribe his own interests by ethnic or racial origin. The woman's faith, the minister suggests, stems from an untested a priori belief that "all men are created free and equal," implying that her views have not been challenged by experience; she had "scarcely" seen "black , " and "yellow never. " A sentimental rationalist, the woman trusted even war and conflict to lead to fulfillnlent of the ideal of equality through the invisible hand of natural law. Darwinism posed a problem for the use of the word create, because his process of imnlanent change and differentiation does not have the purposive force of unitying groups into something " hunlan, " a distinct group, much less a

Natural History and the End of Theodicy

moral purpose of making its members "free and equal . " Different races will not necessarily mix or continue to fight for p ower when placed together in the same country. War occurs without purifying or "settling" anything, as the old lady thought it did. She did entertain a perception that the invisible hand may indeed not be creating free and equal human beings, asking, "But how could they [people] be made so very unlike / By the same hand working in the same stufi? " : That's a hard mystery ofJefferson's . What did h e mean? O f course the easy way Is to decide it simply isn't true . It may n o t b e . I heard a fellow say so. But never mind, the Welshman got it planted Where it will trouble us a thousand years . Each age will have to reconsider it. You couldn't tell her what the West was saying, And what the South to her serene belief. She had some art of hearing and yet not Hearing the latter wisdom of the world. White was the only race she ever knew. Black she had scarcely seen, and yellow never. But how could they be made so very unlike By the sanle hand working in the same stuff? She had supposed the war decided that. What are you going to do with such a person? Strange how such innocence gets its own way. I shouldn't be surprised if in this world I t were the force that would at last prevail.

" Innocence" becomes paradoxically a great instrument, or "force," that may "get its own way" and "prevail" both in war and in the foundations of religion. The minister, though condescending toward the woman's idealism, appears hirllself deeply troubled by the scientific skepticism eroding religion, the " gen­ eral onslaught" of the young liberals or " non-members in the church" who want the harrowing of hell or Christ's descending into Hades removed with the Apostles' Creed. The existence of a literal hell had long been the obj ect of ridicule and contempt by rationalists, and Darwin's rej ection of what he called a " damnable doctrine" (ironically religious in its phrasing) is one of the most vehement parts of his autobiography? l The separation of the realms of religion and science had also been one of the cornerstones of the liberal restructuring of theology after D arwin to cool the warfare of science and religion. Ending natural theology meant that any descent of spirit into matter would be incompatible with the doctrine of God's providential hand in the shaping of history, his saving

Robert Frost a n d the ClzallellJZe �r Darwin

286

the innocent in the harrowing of hell, or his purposive intervention in the hell of the Civil War. He holds to the belief in God's providential hand n10re out of sentill1ent for the old lady, "the bonnet in the pew, " than from any religious conviction. He expresses a failure of religion that has suffered from science, the experience of history, and froll1 sentill1ental convictions.72 The "liberal youth" are those Prot­ estants, taken with the " general onslaught" of science, who want to keep religion alive by purging it of its unscientific and primitive remnants . But what they want to purge is essential to Christian faith, Christ's descent into the world and the harrowing of hell :

Do you know but for her there was a tinle When to please younger l11el11bers of the church, Or rather say non-nlenlbers in the church, Whol11 we all have to think of nowadays, I would have changed the Creed a very little? Not that she ever had to ask nle not to; It never got so far as that; but the bare thought Of her old trenlulous bonnet in the pew, And of her half asleep \vas too Inuch for nle. Why, I nlight wake her up and startle her. It was the words "descended into Hades" That seel11ed too pa g an to our liberal youth . You kno\v they suffered frol11 a general onslaught. And well, if they weren 't true why keep right on Saying thenl like the heathen? We could drop thenl. Only-there was the bonnet in the pew. Such a phrase couldn't have nleant nluch to her. But suppose she had nlissed it fronl the Creed As a child nlisses the unsaid Good-night, And falls asleep with heartache-how should I feel?

Maintenance of "belief, " not giving in to changes of popular "favor, " whether of the "liberal youth" or of the " old lady, " becoll1es a matter of pure sentiment that the ll1inister feels for the old lady. The ll1inister has been torn by his sentimen­ tality, his awareness of the claillls of science and his experience of radical and dissenting factions within the church. The ll1inister desires but cannot proffer a clear sense of the usefulness of belief if it no longer corresponds with with what is "true. " He wants to cling to his beliefs, though the phrase "dear nle" reveals either his facetiousness about his ovvn belief or his extren1e sentinlentality :

Natural History

of Theo di cy

and the End

1 '111 just as glad she ITlade me keep hands off,

For,

dear rne , vvhy abandon a belief

Merely be cau se i t c e a ses

to

C:ling to

and n o t a

i t l o ng enough,

be tru e .

doubt

It "vill turn true again, fiJ r so it goes . Most of the change Is due

to

\ve

think "\ve see in life

t ru ths being in and out

of tavor.

He continues \vith a vision of u topia, one characterized by his o\vn force as tnonarch over a " desert lan d . " This utopia devoted to " truths " detnands geo­ graphic and physical isolation that nlakes it seenl unworthy of "conquering to force cha nge on. " Such a utopia \vo uld be a place barely habitable, \vhere the " sand storI11 [would] / It etard nlid-\vaste n1y co\ver ing caravans." This eloquent burst o f heroic faith in the Nativity, the eternal verities, and the possibility of lasting peace is interrupted by the corrosive po\ver of bees, "fierce heads, " in the decaying walls of th e co ttage : ' . . . Ac:, I sit here, and oftentilnes, I "\vish I co ul d be l110narch of a des e rt land

I could d evote and dedicate forever To the truths "\ve keep cOining back and back to. So de se rt it wo u l d h ave to be, so "valled By Inountain ranges half in suuuner sno\v, No one "vould covet it or think it \vorth The pains of conquering to force change 011 . Scattered oases \vhere nlen (hvelt, but 1110Stly

Sand dunes held l o os ely

Blo\vn

in

taluarisk

over and over thernselves in idleness.

Sand grains should sugar in the na tal dew The babe born to the dese rt

,

the sand

storm

ltetard mid-"vaste Illy cowering caravansThere are bees

in this "vall . He struck the clapboardc:" Fierce heads l ooked out; s111all bodies pivo te d We rose to go. Sunset bl a ze d on the \vindo\vs. '

.

Fronl a naturalist's perspective , inse cts i n general and bees in particula r b ecollle a rich rebuke to the lllinister's vision of a stable n10narchy.

A

nlaj or part of ()1l the

Origill
288

Robert Frost and the Challenge cif Darwin

on its "inequalities" having been "leveled . " Indeed the "leveler" has been one of the lowliest of creatures, namely the worn1. He gives biological expression to the paradox of Christian pastoralisn1, nan1ely that the meek shall inherit the earth, the low shall be raised up. The little laborers of Darwin's georgic vision under­ mine the arrogance of human technology: When we behold a wide, turf-covered expanse, we should remember that its smoothness, on which so nluch of its beauty depends, is mainly due to all the inequalities having slowly been levelled by wornlS. It is a marvellous reflection that the whole of the superficial mould over any such expanse has passed, and will again pass, every few years through the bodies of wornlS. The plough is one of the most ancient and most valuable of nlan's inventions; but long before he existed the land was in fact regularly ploughed, and still continues to be thus ploughed by earth­ \vormsJ3

The cottage, like the woodpile, has begun in its decay to serve purposes other than human. The narrator describes the bees' heads as "fierce" and their motion as mechanical-exan1ples of the natural changes and forces that under­ n1ine all human constructs and din1inish the claims of metaphysics or theology. Bees forn1 highly organized conlmunities in which factions are governed by the fen1inine, the queen, who beconles the 1110narch by election. In that election the losers pay with their lives. When the monarch has brought the community to a certain lin1it of prosperity, it nlust find another colony. Maeterlinck wrote in the The Life (?f the Bee that "the spirit of the hive . . . fixes the hour of the great annual sacrifice to the genius of the race . . . when we find a whole people, who have attained the topmost pinnacle of prosperity and power, suddenly abandoning to the generation to COlne their wealth and their places, their homes and the fruits of their labor; thenlselves too content to encounter the hardships and perils of a new and distant country. "74 Maeterlinck's description of the bees suggests their significance for "The Black Cottage . " Nature continually undermines all forms of power, all ideals, all dwellings, all n10narchs . It creates hierarchies and stability only for a n10nlent before its relentless warfare cancels and levels inequalities, insect and hunlan alike. "West-Running Brook" finds a couple lost, trying to find direction, power, and faith between themselves by interpreting the flux of a brook. The brook becon1es their book, the founding fiction, by which they attenlpt to discover or perhaps create a livable sense of location, purpose, and direction in life. The stream dominates Lucretius' coslnology and William James's psychology, in which the processes of the n1ind parallel natural selection. And, of course, it is a Heraclitean synlbol for the paradox of infinite change within permanent identity. Like whiteness and snow, it resists our narcissisnl, reflecting nothing, expressing

Natural History and the End of Theodicy

nothing, while suggesting the relentless movement of time. " Hyla Brook" and "West-Running Brook" explore both the failure of nature to provide meaning and our doubts about our ability to impose meaning upon the flux. If nature could provide a language of things that might b ecome metaphors for a larger cosmology, that possibility appears undermined by its basic assump­ tion of the temporal succession of forms. " Hyla Brook" is so named for the kind of frogs that dwell within it. Yet the disappearance of the " Hyla breed" and even the brook itself through the course of natural change undermines the poet's or namer's ability to confirm dominion over the world. Words are at best elegies to the facts they signify, truly natural history. Frost placed this lyric next to "The Oven B ird" in Mountain Interval, calling attention again to Darwin's world of unrecoverable change by alluding to the small creatures, like ovenbirds, of which Darwin writes in The Voyage of the Beagle. D arwin remarked upon these "singing frogs" because of their resemblance to what we consider " human" behavior. With his own pastoral rhetoric, he set the hyla against the haughtiness of "Euro­ pean performers" and lauded these " humble" singers performing in a difficult theater. But, even as their great concert fades, the observer's attention turns to other insects in this teeming wilderness : Nature, in these climes, chooses her vocalists from more humble performers than in Europe. A small frog, of the genus Hyla, sits on a blade of grass about an inch from the surface of the water, and sends forth a pleasing chirp : when several are together they sing in harmony on different n otes . I had some difficulty in catching this specimen of frog. The genus Hyla has its toes terminated by small suckers; and I found this animal could crawl up a pane of glass, when placed absolutely perpen­ dicular. Various cicadae and crickets, at the same time, keep up a ceaseless shrill cry, but which, softened by the distance, is not unpleasant. Every evening after dark this great concert commenced; and often have I sat listening to it, until my attention has been drawn away by some curious passing insect.75

In Frost's poem the stream becomes a figure for the changing attention of both mind and nature, which preserves little or nothing in memory. Both the stream and the " Hyla breed" have been extinguished: By June our brook's run out of song and speed. Sought for nluch after that, it will be found Either to have gone groping underground (And taken with it all the Hyla breed That shouted in the mist a month ago, Like ghost of sleigh-bells in a ghost of snow) ­ Or flourished and come up in jewel-weed, Weak foliage that is blown upon and bent

290

Robert Frost a11d the Challell�e �f Darwin f. 'ren against the way its \vaters \vent.

Its bed is left a faded paper sheet Of dead leaves stuck together by the heat­ A brook to none but \vho renlelllber long. This as it will be seen is other far Than with brooks taken othenvhere in song. We love the things we love for \vhat they are.

As a metaphor of the poet's effort, the streanl pronlises some freshness and regeneration. After it has gone, personified as a struggling creature, "groping underground, " it transfornls itself as "j ewel-weed" (beauty and waste) but o nly "weak foliage, " a growth flourishing against the flux, resisting the entropic. The poet sees and hears life in terms of tenlporary figures, "the hyla breed," "j ewel­ weed," and eventually " dead leaves, " which suggest a world like a palimpsest of ideas created and remaining only in the nlenl0ry of namers . Referred to at the end only as vaguely signifying it, the streanl and that which had marked it beconles an anti-essence, a "brook to none but who remember long. " Here the brook is referred to increasingly as "it, " invoking the eerie sense that continuity in the world is available to " none but who remember long. " This leaves the human adrift in the world. The final line, overstepping the bounds of the tradi­ tional Shakespearean resolution of love, asserts love for what is no longer name­ able except as "things " : "We love the things we love for what they are." But what a re they? W h a t does is, the h ol y word of being, mean in a world of becoming in which life is demarcated by ephenleral analogies? That the brook has run out of "speed" in addition to "song" is a metaphor for its loss of grace, a source of spirit and redemption. I n "West-Running Brook" the attempt to restore sacred cosmology, to situate man's place in nature and in a world circumscribed by darkness and flux, depends on the sexual dialogue of man and woman. Two questions engender and dominate the dialogue: where are we, and who are we? Origins and the direction of history become a crisis for beings who have disinherited minds. Later, in "A Cabin in the Clearing, " the voice of "snl0ke" raises a similar problem about the people whose " cabin" represents temporary order in a new wilderness: If the day ever conles when they know who They are, they may know better where they are. But who they are is too nluch to believe­ Either for them or the onlooking world. They are too sudden to be credible.

Fred and his lover create a reality in dialogue, but Frost provides an "onlooking" reality that renders even their most passionate convictions half-truths.

Natural History and the End of Theodicy

291

While Fred's speech is the highlight of the poem, that speech cannot be read without close evaluation of the sexual drama that produces it. The poem, by the speakers' own admission, "goes by contraries. " Frost alludes, significantly, to the imn1anent dualism in the opening argument of Blake's Marriage of Heaven and

Hell: Without Contraries is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human existence. From these contraries spring what the religious call Good and Evil. Good is the passive that obeys Reason. Evil is the active springing from Energy. Good is Heaven. Evil is Hell,76

Of course, the moral dimension in Frost is far more ambiguous, drawn across the lines of male and female, the rational and the intuitive, the ethereal and the telluric, in this case a man named Fred (how worldly!) and his mate. This kind of sexual dialogue has its precedent in Milton in the arguments of Adam and Eve, and Frost's poem derives its power from combining the pre- and postlapsarian psychology of our ancestors. The poem owes much to the drama of Eve 's water gazing in book 4 of Paradise Lost and the hierarchy of God, Adam, and Eve that is a rebuke to her narcissism. Here both man and women have recourse to "reflec­ tion" in nature without the authority of God. And both proj ect more of them­ selves than the brook or the rest of nature is able to reflect. The title and the woman's first question, " Fred, where is north?" indicate that the couple are lost and, metaphorically, east of Eden. Frost's poem undermines religious and meta­ physical knowledge of the hunlan position in relation to origins, sexual hier­ archy, and faculties of perception. The poem begins with an act of naming, generated by the lover's question about their location-" Fred, where is north?"-which was traditionally the work of the poet and, even more traditionally, the work of the man-Adam. Here the woman begins the dialogue and acts as the namer. The uncertainty of sexual hierarchy and power and the desire to form a constant symbol for the union of a marriage covenant drives the dialogue. Anxiety about the possibility of establishing such a symbol, a feeling of being lost and lacking direction, produces the woman's opening question. The hesitation in Fred's response indi­ cates his uncertainty about the direction of "north. " His added response about the brook indicates that he knew already, before we came into the poem, why his wife was asking the question. There is an unspoken, atemporal understanding of contrariness that is the source of generation between them, a law of conflict that is antecedent to any particular moment.

292

Robert Frost and the Challenge if Darwin

' rred, where is north?' 'North? North is there, nly love. The brook runs west.' 'West-running Brook then call it.' (West-running Brook men call it to this day.)

The parenthetical intrusion of the narrator, matter-of-fact in tone, jars our sense of reliance on linear historical development, a sure past. Initially, one thinks of the woman asking a question, the man answering it, and a reasonable conclusion being reached as a dialectic. Fred's uncertain response is directed as much to the challenge of his partner's intuition as to his own knowledge of any facts. Naming "West-running Brook" confirms her ability to raise and establish her freedom. Her then has the force of "why not, then , " as in the settling of an argument. That "men" call it "West-running Brook" emphasizes the power of the community to retain names whether or not they correspond to any reality. (There is also a bemused recognition that in history men retain the authority in naming, even if women have an equal or even greater part in the process.) Here the woman takes on naming the brook and interpreting it according to its name. The scene has a dark dramatic precedent in Paradise Lost, in which Eve is first struck by her difference from Adam through a reflection in a pool of water. A voice warns her that she should avoid that narcissistic refl e ction and think onl y of bearing the human race to Adan1: Not distant far from thence a nlurmuring sound Of waters issued fronl a cove and spread Into a liquid plain, then stood unnloved Pure as the expanse of heav'n; I thither went With unexperienc't thought, and laid me down On the green bank, to look in the clear Smooth lake, that to me seemed another sky. As I bent down to look, just opposite A shape within the wat'ry gleam appeared Bending to look on nle : I started back, It started back, but pleased I soon returned, Pleased it returned as soon with answering looks Of sympathy and love ; there I had fixed Mine eyes till now, and pined with vain desire, Had not a voice warned me: 'What thou seest, What there thou seest, fair creature, is thyself, With thee it comes and goes; but follow nle, And I will bring thee where no shadow stays Thy coming, and thy soft enlbraces, he

Natural History and the End of Theodicy

293

Whose image thou art, hin1 thou shalt enjoy Inseparably thine, to him shalt bear Multitudes like thyself, and thence be called Mother of human race . . . '77 .

Eve's own "descent" into matter leads to troubling questions of descent, "ori­ gin, " and future descent. By the end of "West-Running Brook" we don't know what the woman will be called; her interest in her own freedom and her desire for bondage to Fred create a conflict that makes the future between them uncer­ tain. Naming, while an inevitable part of desire for order, creates an order that will erupt again in chaos. Appearing to lead Fred to naming the brook "west, " she invokes the desire for exploration beyond confines-in this case, the explora­ tion and population of America. West also implies the direction in which the sun sets and is metaphorically associated with "Eve," darkness, and the Fall. Having established the name "West-Running Brook , " the woman turns the brook into a metaphor for freedom and trust in a sexual relationship, which " ' Can trust itself to go by contraries / The way I can with you-and you with me- . " The dash between mention of what she can do and what Fred can do is a space of authority she wants to maintain while still permitting his participation. She knows that brooks east of the Continental Divide should flow to the eastern ocean in order to pour out their identity. By establishing the existence of a "West-Running Brook," she insists on the possibility of maintaining individu­ ality and authority in a marriage while still participating in the institution. Their dialogue, principally hers, goes on to attempt to establish the brook as a natural symbol of a marriage covenant, one that overcomes the fragility of merely saying "we two" as the answer to the disturbing problem of not knowing who they are. Again, we are left only with the uncertain reality of "something" : 'What does it think it's doing running west When all the other country brooks flow east To reach the ocean? It must be the brook Can trust itself to go by contraries The way I can with you-and you with me­ Because we're-we're- I don't know what we are. What are we?' 'Young or new?' 'We must be something. We 've said we two. Let's change that to we three. As you and I are married to each other, We 'll both be married to the brook. We'll build Our bridge across it, and the bridge shall be

294

Robert Frost and the Clzallell1<e �f Darwin

Our arnl thro\vn over it asleep beside it. Look, look, it's \vaving to us \vith a \vave To let us kno\v it hears Ine.'

The won1an allows the brook to becorne a personal syn1bol, which, though it is "waving to us, " is doing so in response to her effort-"it hears m e" (emphasis mine) . This atten1pt at establishing power brings on Fred's response, with the condescending "nly dear, " that she is projecting too much onto nature, making a symbol of something that should not be taken personally. The narrative voice intrudes parenthetically into Fred's resp onse, an intrusion to which I shall return shortly. The woman insists on her private power, invoking the wave as a gesture of "annunciation , " the announcenlent of the incarnation to Mary. Fred won't put up with this exclusion fronl the process of creation or power. She becolnes, for him, like an Anlazon; her power, originally expressed in Christian terms, be­ conles something associated with primitive nlatriarchy and telluric power: ' Why, nly dear, That wave's been standing off this jut of shore-' (The black streanl, catching on a sunken rock, Flung backward on itself in one white wave, And the white \vater rode the black fo rever, Not gaining but not losing, like a bird White feathers froIll the struggle of whose breast Flecked the dark streanl and flecked the darker pool Below the point, and \vere at last driven \vrinkled In a white scarf against the far shore alders.) 'That wave's been standing otT this jut of shore Ever since rivers , I was going to say, Were nlade in heaven. It \vasn't waved to us.' 'It wasn't, yet it was. If not to you It was to nle-in an annunciation.' 'Oh, if you take it off to lady-land, As't were the country of the AlllaZOnS We nlen nlust see you to the confines of And leave you there, ourselves forbid to enter,­ It is your brook! I have no Blore to say.' 'Yes, you have, too. Go on. You thought of sOlllething.'

The wonlan concedes the stage to Fred to go on about \vhat it means to him. The parenthetical intrusion is crucial to understanding the poem's dramatic irony. I t stands in stark and inhulllan contrast to AlllY'S annunciatory vision and

Natural History and the End of Theodicy

29 5

Fred's heroic one. The black and white water forms one "white wave, " which the narrator compares to a "bird / White feathers from the struggle of whose breast / Flecked the dark stream and flecked the darker pool. " This phoenix image, stated in Darwinian terms of "struggle," creates a metaphor of life that is " [N] ot gaining but not losing, " which includes waste and falling but not decay. This counters Fred's Platonic assertion about rivers, life, and marriage : "Ever since rivers, I was going to say, / Were made in heaven. " The parenthetical intrusion, truth breaking in \vith matter-of-factness, provokes in him anxiety about waste and eternity, the direction of development, and the permanence of life. This limited statement is an expression of Frost's anti-Platonic view of creation: "My backers [the American Academy of Arts and Letters] could only bring me in a Humanist-which means Platonist. I'm actually so unhumanistic, so in tune with the nature piety of the scientist today, that I ' m more of an Aristotelian. I think there's probably nothing up there but a stockpile of nature observations that came from earth. "78 Fred's dismissal of his partner's revelation in favor of his own entropic vision reminds us of Bacon's polemic "The Mas­ culine Birth of Time, " in which the ethos of developing models to fit the c hallenges of nature becomes a masculine quality against the feminine quality of maintaining unfounded, imaginative, and religious icons of the past.79 Frost's temperament, however, always pushes him away from grand cosmologies, partic­ ularly one as tragic and self-serving as Fred's; reality always serves to diminish hunlan thought. Fred's speech employs metaphors of entropy and progress that incorporate various vestiges of idealism that are far more comforting than the zero-sum image of endless, nonprogressive creation and destruction. He employs nleta­ phors and images developed in response to the Darwinian revolution by Bergson, Whitehead, and Sir Arthur Eddington, part of an effort to fight the corrosive materialism of biological thought-in particular, the desire to find a sustained and sustaining reality in a world dominated by ontologically corrosive flux. The monologue reveals the extent to which science and philosophy root their defenses of human consciousness in the material world. Underlying Fred's use of these metaphors is a desire, like Meserve's in "Snow," to make the brook a source of his own vision, independent of the woman. Most important is his use of the dominant metaphors of science to create his own prophetic scripture. Transcen­ dence of time is the common theme of these works, something that stands above the fall and change of matter. The woman's intuition of annunciation inspires her fearful and competitive husband into an extraordinary display of metaphoric prowess. Appealing to the rational, he seeks ultimate and final causes, purpose and intention like his own.

Robert Frost a1ld the Challen(t,ze �f Darwin

Upon the brook, already a nletaphor for flux and change, he projects an entropic vision suggestive of contenlporary attempts to j ustify human reason in the face of the annihilating materialism and epistemological uncertainty of evolutionary conceptions of the universe. Bergson has been observed by many critics, from Thompson to Poirier, to be its source. But Fred's speech does not represent a simple reformulation of Bergson, nor can his answer be taken as the ultimate truth extracted from the dranla of the poem. The challenges to the implications of evolution by Arthur Eddington and Alfred North Whitehead also shed light on Fred's attempt to restore sonle form of cosmology to a universe that science itself had eroded into a hopeless dialogue between materialism and solipsistic fantasy. Frost once remarked in an aside about Alfred North Whitehead that "We might never get another vast philosophy. " H O Vclst is the important word, here, indicative of Frost's awareness that the inlplications of biological evolution for epistemology were deadly to anything approaching sacred cosmology. Frost knew Whitehead and apparently engaged him in extended conversation on many occasions. The argument of Whitehead's work The Function of Reason) published the year after West-Running Brook ( 1 928), closely approximates Fred's monologue in its attempt to elevate consciousness above the historical lapse of evolution. Whitehead preserves reason by inlposing a vision of two movements in history-one downward, embracing entropy, and one upward, embracing progressive evolution: History discloses two nlain tendencies in the course of events . One tendency is exemplified in the slow decay of physical nature. With stealthy inevitableness, there is degradation of energy. The sources of activity sink downward and downward. Their very matter wastes. The other tendency is exemplified by the yearly renewal of nature in the spring, and by the upward course of biological evolution. In these pages I consider Reason in its relation to these contrasted aspects of history. Reason is the self-discipline of the originative elenlent in history. Apart from the operations of Reason, this elenlent is anarchic. 8 1

Whitehead goes o n to argue that the desire for Platonic speculation beyond the confines of scientific methodology, " Reason , " is the originating cause of the "upward trend" in life . Fred, like Whitehead, renlains in the realnl o f empirical and material sci­ ence in seeking the " originative elenlent in history. " Through the brook and the wave he considers the "upward" tendency of organic life against the "down­ ward" tendency of material decay. He strives to find something human in "the beginning of beginnings , " a highly Platonic concept of something beyond creaturely descent:

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297

'Speaking of contraries, see how the brook I n that white wave runs counter to itself. It is from that in water we were from Long, long before we were from any creature. Here we, in our impatience of the steps, Get back to the beginning of beginnings, The stream of everything that runs away. Some say existence like a Pirouot And Pirouette, forever in one place, Stands still and dances, but it runs away, It seriously, sadly, runs away To fill the abyss' void with emptiness.

Fred sidesteps Havelock Ellis's figure of existence as a dance of man and woman, Pirouette and Pirouot, as his own contradictions take center stage, running into the grandiosity and extravagance of such phrases as "seriously, sadly" and "abyss' void with emptiness . " We become increasingly aware of Fred's theory as a poem and a performance, one that reveals some of the metaphors that dominated philosophical attempts to define human reason in the face of evolution. Sir Arthur Eddington argued for the theory of thermodynamics and en­ tropy in The Nature of the Physical World, published in 1 9 2 8 , the same year as West­ Running Brook. Eddington admitted the religious basis of his argument against "an endless cycle of rebirth and matter, " feeling that it made him more " content" that the world once had a plan or scheme from which it has lapsed: At present we can see no way in which an attack on the second law of thermodynamics could possibly succeed, and I confess that personally I have no great desire that it should succeed in averting the final running-down of the uni­ verse. I am no Phoenix worshipper. This is a topic on which science is silent, and all that one can say is prej udice. But since prej udice in favor of a never ending cycle of rebirth of matter and worlds is often vocal, I may perhaps give voice to the opposite prejudice. I would feel more content that the universe should accon1plish some great scheme of evolution and having achieved it lapse back into chaotic changelessness, than that its purpose would be banalised by continual repetition. I am an Evolution­ ist, not a Multiplicationist. It seems rather stupid to keep doing the same thing over and over again. H 2

Stupid and unreasonable though it might seem to Eddington to be a Phoenix worshiper, the multiplicationist view expressed in this figure is precisely what breaks in on Fred's earlier response to his partner: And the white water rode the black forever, Not gaining but not losing, like a bird

Rohert Frost and the Challcl1,1!,e �f Darwil1

White feathers froln the struggle of \vhose breast Flecked the dark streanl . . . .

Kelvin's entropy appeared to contradict the Darwinian view of continuous mul­ tiplication and change of fornls without direction . Why should this be the truth that breaks into the dialogue of "West-Running Brook"? What claim on reality does it have? For Frost the quality of not confornling to any comforting concep­ tion of the world, a cold indifference to what we would like to believe, always conles closest to reality. Extending knowledge far beyond the bounds of anything observable, Fred projects onto the contradictory nlotion in the water a heroic resistance to an entropic void, stating that the vague "it" of " existence, " the being of human consciousness, nlust resist the flow of tinle. He insists on a fixed attention to the past, a longing for origins, "a throwing back, / As if regret were in it and were sacred" : ' . . . I t flows beside us in this \vater brook, But it flows over us. It flo\vs bet\veen us To separate us for a panic nl0nlent. I t flows between us, over us, and with us. And it is tinle, strength, tone, light, life, and love­ And even substance lapsing unsubstantial; The universal cataract of death That spends to nothingness-and unresisted, Save by sonle strange resistance in itself, Not j ust a swerving, but a throwing back, As if regret were in it and were sacred. It has this throwing backward on itself So that the fall of Inost of it is always Raising a little, sending up a little . . . . '

Frost pushes beyond the Lucretian "swerve " of atonlS to create fornl, to a complete resistance, " a throwing back , " as the basis of consciousness. B oth Thompson and Poirier have interpreted this part of Fred's speech as an embodi­ nlent of Bergson's philosophy in Creative Evolu tion ( 1 9 I I ) . �3 Frost did play with Bergson's use of the "wave " nletaphor to describe the relation between duration and individual consciousness, and his character Fred explores an interpenetration in the brook-inert nlatter that "spends to nothingness" j uxtaposed with life that opposes the downward nl0venlent. Bergson, in his conlprehensive and systenlatic assault, nlakes it 1110st unclear, as Etienne Gilson has pointed out, what he nleans by "life" and at \vhat point it can be distinguished from inert nlatter :

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Life as a whole, from the initial impulsion that thrust it into the world, will appear as a wave that rises, and which is opposed by the descending movement of nlatter. In the greater part of its surface, at different heights, the current is converted by nlatter into a vortex. At one point alone it passes freely, dragging with it the obstacle which will weigh on its progress but will not stop it: at this point is hunlanity; it is our privileged situation. On the other hand, the rising wave is consciousness, and like all consciousness it includes potentialities without number which interpenetrate and to which consequently neither the category of unity nor that of nlultiplicity is appropriate, Inade as they both are for inert nlatter. �4

The power of Bergson's writing rests in the creation of a single image, the wave, as a metaphor for the mOlnent of "consciousness , " which is our "privileged situation . " The metaphor, however, fails to account for the interpenetration of consciousness with inert matter-the way of distinguishing whether any part of man remains eternal beyond the material. But Bergson's vision of life as a wave rising above descending matter becomes much harder to make sense of than Fred's vision of a resisting motion within the water itself, inseparable from it. Unlike Fred, however, Bergson insisted that "individual consciousness" must detach itself from this backward turn toward the made obj ects of being into the world of becoming if it is to participate in the life force, his elan vital. This violent act of willing becomes incomprehensible as it moves toward transcending all its own metaphors: Our own consciousness is the consciousness of a certain living being, placed in a certain point of space; and though it does indeed move in the same direction as its principle, it is continually drawn the opposite way, obliged, though it goes forward, to look behind. This retrospective vision is, as we have shown, the natural function of the intellect, and consequently of distinct consciousness. In order that our con­ sciousness shall coincide with something of its principle, it must detach itself from the already-nzade and attach itself to the being-made. It needs that, turning back on itself and twisting on itself, the faculty of seeing should be nlade one with the act of willing-a painful effort which we can make suddenly, doing violence to our nature, but cannot sustain for more than a few moments. �5

Fred insists, however, on the backward motion in the wave ; he proj ects onto it the human and religious impulse of consecrating the past, recognizing more powerfully that this act of seeing is an act of religious make-believe and nothing more - " [A ] s if regret were in it and were sacred" (elnphasis mine) . When Fred attempts to present a unified cosmology with an origin and causality comprehensible in human terms, he calls attention to the artificiality of his own language, which becomes increasingly forced and entropic. The heroic effort of the present to uncover and worship its deep past from its present flux and

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divergence plays on the nletaphoric entailments of the stream metaphor­ "tribute of the current to the source"-and their inextricable relation to the empirical: ' . . . Our life runs down in sending up the clock. The brook runs down in sending up our life. The sun runs down in sending up the brook. And there is something sending up the sun. It is this backward motion toward the source, Against the strean1, that nlost \ve see ourselves in, The tribute of the current to the source. It is fron1 this in nature we are fron1 . It i s most us.'

This peroration wavers between affirmations of projection and reflection. The phrase "most we see ourselves in" indicates a projection of the anthropomorphic onto the natural. Fred holds to the specificity of man's emanation from this motion in nature when he adds, " It is fronl this in nature we are from. " His final line, " I t is nl0st us, " reflects a hesitancy or awareness of the linlitation of his speculation on the motion that cannot be " all" but only "most us . " In writing on speculative Reason, Whitehead insists that the desire for an infinite ideal is what distinguishes hunlans from animals. This distinction oper­ ates, he adnlits, only "waveringly and dinuy. " In Whitehead, too, this desire represents a movenlent toward the "source, " what Fred mysteriously calls "some­ thitzg sending up the sun" (emphasis Inine) . Both Henry Adams and Alfred North Whitehead attempted to reconcile the concept of evolution and its association with the power of mind and the competing concept of entropy, which suggested that progress met participation in increasing natural decay and disorder. H6 In his nleditation on the possibility of a science of history Henry Adanls saw that the development of reason must conflict with the second law of thernl0dynamics: progress nleant degradation. In proposing a reconciliation of the two nletaphors with a vision of human history, Adanls argued that "the figure of rise and fall has done infinite harnl since the beginning of thought. That of expansion and contraction is far more scientific, even in history. " H 7 Frost proposed a similar figure when he wrote: The n10st exciting nloven1ent in nature is not progress, advance, but expansion and contraction, the opening and shutting of the eye, the hand, the heart, the n1ind. We throw our anns wide \vith a gesture of religion to the universe; we close them around a person. We explore and adventure for a while and then we draw in to consolidate our gains. The breathless s\ving is between subject n1atter and forn1. RR

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Fornl attempts t o stay the confusion associated with venturing too far into the complexities of the material world. The figure of expansion and contraction provides an alternative myth to the linear one of progress; it implies holding a position rather than arriving or returning and can be conceived in terms of our most simple gestures. I n a talk at B ryn Mawr in 1 924 Frost stressed the biological relation of mind and spirit to the movement of plant life, insisting that "tropism" in poetry and thought derived from heliotropism, the movement of a plant " upward to the light, " or geotropism, which he found equally compelling, as in "To Earth­ ward. " 8 9 In The Function ofReason (published two years later, in 1 929) Whitehead defended the growth of reason against entropy by emphasizing its heliotropic tendencies . He described reason in biological terms-"a tropism to the beckon­ ing light" (emphasis mine) : The speculative Reason is in its essence untranlmelled by method. Its function to pierce into the general reasons beyond limited reasons, to understand all methods as coordinated in a nature of things only to be grasped by transcending all method. This infinite ideal is never to be attained by the bounded intelligence of mankind. But what distinguishes men from the animals, some humans froin other humans , is the inclusion in their natures, waveringly and dimly, of a disturbing element, which is the flight after the unattainable. This element is that touch of infinity which has goaded races onward, sometimes to their destruction. It is a tropisnl to the beckoning light-to the sun passing toward the finality of things, and to the sun arising from their origin. The speculative Reason turns east and west, to the source and to the end, alike hidden below the rim of the world.90 IS

Whitehead's concept of Reason grew fron'! his own hi ghly fi gurative vision of

religion acconlmodating the scientific spirit: "The worship of God is not a rule of safety-it is an adventure of the spirit, a flight after the unattainable. The death of religion comes with the repression of the high hope of adventure. "9 1 In The Function C?f Reason he linked this adventure to the biological advance of the species, which has darkly "goaded races onward, sometimes to their destruc­ tion. " Evolution becomes a force that leads to both enlightenment and destruc­ tion, an inescapable movement driven by biology-" tropism toward the beck­ oning light," the physical alpha and omega of life. In Frost that movenlent of speculation is more figuratively the tropism and speculation in poetry. These fli ghts, Meserve's in "Snow" or Fred's in "West­ Running Brook, " find themselves coming down or back to the commitments of their relation to other individuals. More specifically, they return from flights of individual speculation to attention to other humans and the limits of the inlme­ diate and worldly. The Coles come to call at Meserve's home, hear that he has

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302

returned, and hear an infant crying in the background. Fred ends his tropic flight and turns to his lover again. Their dialogue renews the problem that began the poem: an argument over nanling, in this case what to name the day. Her initial response to Fred's grand monologue seenlS a little facetious, and his response both compliments and blames her for starting the argument by insisting on a name: ' Today will be the day You said so.' 'No, today \vill be the day You said the brook was called West-running Brook.' ' Today will be the day of \vhat we both said.'

The poenl ends with the wonlan's reconciliation of their j oint p articipation in the venture. This rest seems only nlomentary, for "today, " and emphasizes only what was said. We are left with an uneasy sense of what will be done and whether p hrases of salvation such as they have uttered can provide purpose, direction, or a j ustification of the future.

Epilogue Choosing Stars and Picking Apples

Stars figure in Frost as the light to whic h we aspire, in part to escap e from the bondage of earth. In "Bond and Free" l ove, "straining in the world's embrace," is distinguished from freedom of thought, which has "shaken his ankles free . " Thought aspires t o the stars, "cleaves the interstellar gloom," but cannot outdo the "staying" of love on earth. In Frost's view the force behind science is that tropism toward light. Thought and science as ultimately isolated activities re­ move us from the pressures of community and collectivity but become ironic as the stars themselves prove to be further matter. The desire, and the irony of attempting, to find God in matter form the dramatic center of Frost's astronomical poems, particularly "The Star-Splitter" and "Choose Something Like a Star. " In "The Star-Splitter" the narrator tells the story of Brad McLaughlin, who b ought a telescope to satisfy a lifelong curiosity about " our place among the infinities, " a p hrase taken from one of Frost's favorite books by the astronomer Richard Proctor. Frost read the book in his youth, and it remained important to him: "One of the earliest books I hovered over, hung around, was called Our Place among the Infinities, by an astronomer in England named Proctor. . . . I mention that in one of the poems: I use that expression ' our place among the infinities' from that book that I must have read as soon as I read any book, thirteen or fourteen. " 1 Proctor's book probes the conflict of religion and science yet does not present a reconciliation of the two but, rather, a defense of science. Proctor attempted to apply the principles of evolution to an understanding of the origin and evolution of the solar system. But Proctor concludes that such an evolutionary reconstruction of the solar system cannot be attained, invoking the developmental principle over vast periods of time as a permanent limitation on the possibilities of ascertaining our origins, much less "our place among the infinities" :

Robert Frost and the Challel�{!e �f Darwin

I think we arrive here at a point \"here speculation helps us as little as it does in atteillpting to trace the evolution of living creatures across the gap which separates the earliest forill of life froill the beginning itself of life upon the earth. Since we cannot hope to deterilline the beginning of the earth's history, we need not at present atteillpt to pass back beyond the earliest stage of which we have any clear inforillation.2

Behind the epistemological problems appear to be Proctor's own theological or antitheological inclinations, for he insisted a priori that human claims to perfect knowledge must renlain merely analogies, conforming to human needs. He j ustified his own claims of the infi nite evolution of the solar system and the infinitude of space and tinle, in part, on the ground that they do not comfort those who want to see a purposeful God's design in everything. Proposing a power always beyond hunlan comprehension, Proctor rebuked those who insist that science nlust prove the divine. But what began as an argument from science ends with the lessons of Job, a prophetic insistence on human nescience : Proctor quotes Zophar's admonitions that, however pat, pre­ figure God's condernnation of nlan's inadequate knowledge : The wave of life which is no\" passing over our earth is but a ripple in the sea of life within the solar system; this sea of life is itself but a wavelet on the ocean of eternal life throughout the universe. Inconceivable, doubtless, are these infinities of time and space, of matter, of Illotion, and of life. Inconceivable that the whole universe can be for all tiI11e the scene of the operation of infinite personal power, oI11nipres­ ent, all-knowing. Utterly incoI11prehensible how Infinite Purpose can be associated with endless Illaterial evolution. But it is no new thought, no Illodern discovery, that we are thus utterly powerless to conceive or cOillprehend the idea of an Infinite Being, Almighty, All-knowing, Oillnipresent, and Eternal, of whose inscrutable purpose the Illaterial universe is the unexplained manifestation. Science is in the presence of the old, old mystery; the old, old questions are asked of her, - "Canst thou by searching find out God? canst thou find out the almighty unto perfection? It is as high as heaven; what canst thou do? deeper than hell; what canst thou know?" And science answers these questions, as they were answered of old,- "As touching the Almighty, we cannot find hiIll OUt . " 3

In another chapter, entitled "The Seenling Wastes of Nature, " Proctor argues that science and religion should remain separate realms . But Proctor really does not mean what he says, unless he means to exempt God completely from the universe he created. Rather, I think that Proctor was attempting to keep the religious thinkers from condenlning science or diluting it with teachings that prevent the revelation of a terrible reality. Like Darwin, he pokes fun at those who seek natural theology and answers and consistently invokes science's power to dispossess us of facile or conlforting notions of the creator:

Epilogue In a word, our faith Inust not be hanlpered by scientific doubts , our science must not be hampered by religious scruples. It is very necessary in this age of great scientific discoveries to bear this rule in mind. Again and again it has been proved, as science has advanced, that the interpretation of observed facts by those who viewed science specially with reference to religious teachings, had been erroneous, and again and again the mischief thus temporarily wrought has been remedied after a longer or shorter interval of suspense . . . . . . . But we must renlember that the believer also cannot expect to be able to interpret all that science reveals . And recognizing this, we should, as I think, study science with singleness of purpose, not seeking on the one hand for evidence of design whereby to discomfit those from whom we differ, nor fearing, on the other hand, that our faith will be shaken by discoveries not according altogether with the ideas we had formed as to the Almighty's mode of dealing with his universe.4

Brad McLauglin's attempt, in "The Star-Splitter, " to pursue " our place among the infinities" certainly begins and ends with no interference from religious scruples; in his adventurous flight from his failure at " hugger-mugger farming" he commits arson to collect insurance money for a telescope: So Brad McLaughlin mingled reckless talk Of heavenly stars with hugger-mugger farming, Till having failed at hugger-mugger farming, He burned his house down for the fire insurance And spent the proceeds on a telescope To satisfY a life-long curiosity About our place among the infinities .

Another of Frost's ragged and ruthless individualists, his unworldliness appears driven by the demon. The narrator grants that Brad is somehow beyond the unforgiving, moralizing " mean laughter" of the people in town. His j ustification becomes the primitive need for some form of ritual or violent sacrifice: But a house isn't sentient; the house Didn't feel anything. And if it did, Why not regard it as a sacrifice, And an old-fashioned sacrifice by fire, I nstead of a new-fashioned one at auction?

Once again the pagan and primitive become the root of religious practice as the telescope becomes both a tool and a weapon. McLaughlin (whose name invokes the laughter of "The Demiurge 's Laugh" and "The Bonfire") calls it "a weapon in our human fight," not only against the enemy he makes out of the indifferent constellation Orion but also against the other farmers in his attempt to rise above

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conlmon labor. His otherworldliness has as much to do with power and self­ definition as it does with the object of curiosity. If Brad's telescope does little to release him fronl the worldly realnl, it leads hill1 ironically to satisfying conversa­ tion with our narrator: Bradford and I had out the telescope. We spread our two legs as we spread its three, Pointed our thoughts the way we pointed it, And standing at our leisure till the day broke, Said some of the best things we ever said.

Science, in its failure to lead us into anything except the uncertainty of matter, nevertheless has some of the redeeming quality of uniting human beings in common recognitio n of limitation or even failure. Astronomical knowledge has provided no constant symbol; by the turn of this century science had revealed that what look like single stars are actually binary, splitting and sharing a conlmon center-literally, common matter. The image of Brad, the narrator, and the telescope with legs together in mud reveals how science leads us nlore inextricably into the material: That telescope was christened the Star-splitter, Because it didn't do a thing but split A star in two or three the way you split A globule of quicksilver in your hand With one stroke of your finger in the nliddle. It's a star-splitter if there ever was one And ought to do sonle good if splitting stars 'Sa thing to be conlpared with splitting wood.

The word christened-the nanling of the telescope-makes a little j oke out of the nocturnal nlingling of men's legs and talk. Perhaps sexual or communal, it is nonreproductive ; as a fornl of leisure, it is an escape from labor, of both working and multiplying. What "good" it does can be compared with something as tentatively useful as "splitting wood" (as the narrators of "The "Ax-Helve" and "Two Tranlps in Mud Time" try to argue) . The poenl concludes with a series of questions that underscore how, despite ages spent in pursuit of knowledge and in sacrifice to unknown gods, we arrive at no knowledge other than our own striving, bolstered by a need for companionship. The limits of matter and life preclude us from "looking out far" and "in deep," even though life also spurs us to keeping the watch . Our spiritual "position" can never be ascertained but only obscured by deeper descent into nlatter :

Epilogue

3 07

We've looked and looked, but after all where are we? Do we know any better where we are, And how it stands between the night tonight And a man with a smoky lantern chimney? How different fro m the way it ever stood?

As " a man with a smoky lantern chimney" against the night, Brad is a diminished Prometheus, the spark of liberating knowledge reduced to a small light sur­ rounded by an abyss of doubt, reflecting on the inescapability of the world of labor. The distance between Brad, his community, the narrator, heaven and earth, the deep past and the present has been made equal by this investigation into matter. A similar kind of moral rebuke is made in " Choose Something Like a Star. " To the demand that it speak in the anthropomorphic language of science-"Talk Fahrenheit, talk Centigrade. / Use language we can comprehend"-the star responds only literally with what it does: " I burn . " But its moral import is unmistakable; we may "stay" our minds upon it in order to be "staid. " The "height" that the star " asks of us" is the height of humility and self-control. Though the poem recalls Shakespeare's sonnet I I6 and Keats's "Bright Star, " it points to the necessity of choosing, selecting, or taking " something like a star, " as a way of achieving moral height. The star can be observed for its qualities of immense power and steadfastness, particularly against "the mob." But, as all material obj ects disintegrate and break down, it is not to become the single obj ect of worship. Two poems from the beginning and end of his life, "After Apple-Picking" and "Accidentally on Purpose, " encompass Frost's thought on the impact of Darwin upon the relationship of science and religion, and both draw powerfully on the power and limits of "tropism. " "Accidentally on Purpose" appeared in In the Clearing as the first of five poems entitled " Cluster of Faith , " a clever reference to the inextricable relationship between the material of stars and the impulses of religion as well as to the inability of individuals ever to become completely unified or reconciled. Though it appears at first to be an attack on D arwin, it is really a cartoon history of cosmology and a caricature of ideas of evolution that begins with the Platonic idea of the circular motion of the universe from the Timaeus

and the Lucretian bombardment of atoms :

The Universe is but the Thing of things , The things but balls all going round in rings . Some of them mighty huge, some mighty tiny, All of then1 radiant and ll1ighty shiny. They mean to tell us all was rolling blind

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Till accidentally it hit on nlind In an albino l110nkey in a jungle And even then it had to grope and bungle, Till Darwin Cal1le to earth upon a year To show the evolution how to steer. They l1lean to tell us, though, the O I11nibus Had no real purpose till it got to us. N ever believe it. At the very \vorst It l1lust have had the purpose froll1 the first To produce purpose as the fitter bred: We were just purpose cOl1ling to a head. Whose purpose was it? His or Hers or Its? Let's leave that to the scientific wits . Grant l1le intention, purpose, and design­ That's near enough for Ine to the Divine. And yet for all this help of head and brain How happily instinctive we renlain , Our best guide upward further to the light, Passionate preference such as love at sight.:;

The "they" of the second stanza are the "evolutionists, " the scientists and cos­ nl010gists who attempt to reconstruct a history of man's origins in the context of a cosmic plan. Poking fun at Whiggish and popular conceptions that hold that "it hit on mind / In an albino nlonkey" (en1phasis n1ine) to produce the superior lLJlz ite race, Frost also raises an interesting question about the origin of conscious­ ness. The phrase "it hit on nlind" is semantically evasive : is it an agent or a nonsemantic part of a colloquial phrase that suggests an inexplicable occurrence? Accident and divine design become uneasy partners in the historical process, which needs an anointed visionary to explain it. In suggesting Darwin for the role, "Till Darwin canle to earth upon a year / To show the evolution how to steer, " Frost echoes Pope's All Essay 011 Man, "Epistle I I , " in which N ewton figures as the ape of angels, above nlost nlen but still of linlited knowledge : Superior beings, when of late they saw A 1110rtal Man unfold all Nature's law, Adnlired such wisdol1l in an earthly shape, And showed a Newton as \ve show an Ape. ()

Darwin showed that both he and Newton descended not fronl "superior beings" but fronl apelike progenitors. In echoing Pope, Frost points to the extent to which l)arwi n's "downward c0111parison" has led to the corrosion of a worthy genealogy of hUl1lan understanding.

Epilogue

3 09

D arwin eliminated the possibility of ever knowing man's position in the "omnibus, " much less proclaiming that we were its "purpose. " Frost interrupts this evolutionary cartoon history in the third stanza: "Never believe it. " The phrase appears to mock D arwin but really mocks any large-scale cosmology that claims to be based on natural history. Instead of sacred cosmology, we are left only with the indeterminate it, echoing the "The Most of It" and the conclusion to Fred's monologue in "West-Running B rook. " Significantly, Frost never uses the word man o r mankind i n this poem, only the indeterminate pronouns us and we. D arwin's work exploded the possibility of reconstructing a linear, purposive history of man primarily by eradicating the categories of species necessary for such a history. In "The Task of Cultural History" ( 1 926) Johann Huizinga makes the important observation that histor­ ical consideration of a biological subj ect historically becomes profoundly meta­ phoric: "And when one considers such a historical entity-through-the ages as an 'organism,' one is already working with a poetic metaphor. "7 Frost found the limitations of the short poetic drama a necessary consequence of a world that viewed individuals as biological organisms. One could not extend their stories too far without extending metaphors b eyond the bounds of infinitely complex factors . "Accidentally on Purpose" reveals Frost's need to believe in some purpose, but here purpose finds the human as its telos; purpose, the mysterious "it, " does not originate with the human: " . . . At the very worst / It must have had the purpose from the first / To produce purpose as the fitter bred: / We were j ust purpose coming to a head . " "We" are not the "fittest, " the end of creation, but only a tentative, "fitter" breed, an instrument of a larger purpose that appears to occur through a series of accidents. This is a fair assessment of Darwin, because the law of conditions of existence make all success tentative and contingent. Frost understood, as D arwin and Huizinga did, that historical consciousness devoid of some sense of purpose becomes incomprehensible. As Huizinga wrote: When one goes to endow such a historical "organism" with inherent tendencies that give direction to its " evolution," one is already knee-deep in teleology, for such an organism, unlike a biological organism, is coherent only in so far as it has an aim. There is nothing against that, either; history is a way of thought which is final par excellence-a final explanation of the course of history is the only thing our minds will allow. 8

I n the conclusion of "Accidentally on Purpose" Frost abandons, as he always does, the metaphor of " evolution , " with its implications of a purposive, unfold­ ing course from a knowable original cause: "Whose purpose was it? His or Hers

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Robert Frost and the Challeni�e if Darwin

or I ts? / Let's leave that to the scientific wits . " Theological "wits" were certainly more likely to say something about the prime mover, and Darwin avoided it. What the idea of descent frOll1 alld into the ll1atter of cosmology leaves us with is not cosmology but, rather, prayer that our minds might have some correlation to an ultimate reality: "Grant me intention, purpose, and design- / That's near enough for me to the Divine . " No longer speaking of "we," he shifts to the individual, "me, " who seeks power through his religious aspirations. It is unclear, however, to whom the prayer is directed; the poem implies that there may be no "Divine" and that the best we can do is only " near enough" to satisfy our desires. There is a final, hUll1bling retreat from the seeking of design (as in the final bemused question of "Design") . The collective "we" returns with an appeal to the motives of instinct, particularly in sexual selection, over the work of " mind" : And yet for all this help of head and brain How happily instinctive \ve renlain, Our best guide upward further to the light, Passionate preference such as love at sight.

The penultimate line contains literally what Whitehead called "tropism, " the biological movement o f a plant toward light. Darwin himself made a strong connection between the movements of plants and those of other creatures, including man, arguing that the radicle of a plant is literally related to the animal brain: We believe that there is no structure in plants more wonderful, as far as its functions are concerned, than the tip of the radicle . . . . When the tip is excited by light . . . the adjoining part bends from the light; but when excited by gravitation the sanle part bends toward the center of gravity. . . . It is hardly an exaggeration to say that the tip of the radicle thus endowed, and having the power directing the movements of the adj oining parts, acts like the brain of one of the lower animals; the brain being seated within the anterior end of the body, receiving impressions from the sense-organs, and directing the several nl0vements.9

In addition to heliotropism Darwin also discusses the way plants often engage in geotropism; being pulled down to earth often has a selective advantage in making the plant more durable. Plants react sensitively to pressures or injury from without by turgescence, a thickening of some of the cells accompanied by various forms of " circumnutating"-a spiraling but horizontal movement along the ground. The biological phenoll1enon of plant 1110vement and survival grounds "To Earthward," Frost's Danvinian answer to Goethe's romantic organicism. A hurt

Epilogue

311

lover speaks as a wounded flower who, weary from being picked, touched, and cross-pollinated, seeks transformation into the toughness of a plant: Love at the lips was touch As sweet as I could bear; And once that seemed too much; I lived on air That crossed me from sweet things, The flow of-was it musk From hidden grapevine springs Down hill at dusk? I had the swirl and ache From sprays of honeysuckle That when they're gathered shake Dew on the knuckle. I craved strong sweets, but those Seemed strong when I was young; The petal of the rose It was that stung. N ow no j oy but lacks salt That is not dashed with pain And weariness and fault; I crave the stain Of tears, the aftermark Of almost too much love, The sweet of bitter bark And burning clove.

The speaker's craving for "burning clove," "bitter bark , " and "salt" is a desire for a perverse intensity in love but also for a toughness and maturity that would b elong to plants less delicate than flowers . In the final two stanzas his own self-abuse in love is expressed in terms of a tree or turgescent plant-"stiff and sore and scarred"-that has managed to survive in grass and sand. He longs as one crawling or knocked down for more than support of feet or " hand . " The plant has grown earthward enough to guard against more wounding. That " hurt" is still not enough; more will make him tougher, will give him "weight and strength" : When stiff and sore and scarred I take away my hand

3 12

Robert Frost and the CJzallen�e �f Darwi1l

Fronl leaning on it hard In grass and sand, The hurt is not enough: I long for weight and strength To feel the earth as rough To all n1y length .

Of course, a Freudian would argue that the final lines describe a masochistic psychology linking sexuality and death. Freud's formulation of the two instincts is related to his interpretation of evolution; that we have a desire to progress and a desire to return to our inorganic origins . The poem is also expressive, however, of an existing connection and desire for a stronger connection to the instinctive tropism of plants . Its cruelty and nihilistic longings have at bottom the pain of a wounded lover who finds conlfort in SOlne of the possibilities for survival through the loss of consciousness and a return to our biological roots. No doubt Frost, himself an anlateur astrononler, admired astronomy for its tradition of debunking religious authority and knocking into cocked hats ac­ cepted views of the universe, j ust as Milton admired Galileo (the only contempo­ rary he mentions in Paradise Lost) . But the ability to condenln and escape the ordinariness of the world does not lead to satisfactory revelations or understand­ ing. Eden, if the world ever had one, cannot be found in the wilderness, and God cannot be j ustified by observin g nature. I n dependence is noble, but i t ends in a deeper sense of failure. Frost's interpretation of Milton's Puritan ideals reveals an acceptance of the heroic impulse to independence but also a belief that it leads, in the end, to a cruel understanding of human failure : It is too easy to understand Milton. He faced and liked the harshness of our trial . He \vas no nlere N e\v Testanlent saphead. (I should like to think Cromwell was none; but have hinl your own \vay for the tinle being. You 'd better read up on your Deuteronomy before I see you again .) Milton loved Cromwell for his Ironsides and Michael for licking the Devil . He had a hunlan weakness for success; he wanted the right to prevail and vias fairly sure he knew what right was. Within certain linlits he believed in the rewards of nlerit. But after all was said for the best of us he was willing to adnlit that before God our whole enterprise fron1 the day we put on fig leaves and went to work had been no better than pitiful. 1 ( )

For all that Frost thought that the work of even "the best of us" was "no more than pitiful, " he still went ahead with the labor of creating form. And, like Milton, he loved to ask the kind of questions that only an epic theodicy could answer. As Milton's great theodicy had to incorporate science, and was to some

Epilogue

degree constrained by Copernicus, Frost was even more limited in his poetic efforts by the ironies of D arwin's vision. "After Apple-Picking, " one of Frost's greatest lyrics, blends the myth of the Fall with consequences of modern science. The "two-pointed ladder" figures as both the instrument and the technology of tropism toward "heaven" that ulti­ mately leads to the oneiric hell of uncertainty and of waste and struggle. Order, progress, and the harvest of knowledge are as much a part of the inextricable order of the garden as the great tree upon which we sway precariously: My long two-pointed ladder's sticking through a tree Toward heaven still, And there's a barrel that I didn't fill Beside it, and there may be two or three Apples I didn't pick upon some bough. But I am done with apple-picking now.

In such a casual phrase as "there may be two or three / Apples I didn't pick upon some bough" we feel the speaker's indifference toward perfection. The rest of the poem moves away from heaven, which has been the theological place of perfec­ tion, to meditation on exhaustion from contemplation of the world's immense ungraspability, its superfecundity and waste. The image of the ladder will evoke that of Jacob's dream as well as Emer­ son's more metaphysical use of that ladder in "Experience. " We also see the ladder failing as a human construct by which to transcend nature. 1 1 The opening line of Frost's poem enforces a sense of physicality-"two-pointed" and "stick­ ing through a tree. " The latter phrase sounds sexually suggestive, as does the "long scythe" in "Mowing. " Unlike Jacob 's, this ladder is a human construct that rests and depends on the tree and is left to nature as an artifact of human effort. And the speaker's oncoming dream is not of angels but, rather, of the details of apples and of labor. If anything is retained in the allusion to Jacob, it is the sense of an impending struggle. In Lyric Time Sharon Cameron has pointed out that the speaker's dreaming, begun before the event of the poem, appears to begin again during the poem and announces its recommencement sometime after the poem. 1 2 I will add to this observation that Frost is repeating the strange mixture of fact, dream, labor, and knowledge found in "Mowing" -"The fact is the sweetest dream that labor knows"-reminding us of the inescapable limits of consciousness. In "The Koine of Myth, " Northrop Frye describes the way human types persist, and he specifically addresses the figure of the ladder. The ladder, he observes, began to

Robert Frost alld the Challenge if Darwin

break down as a metaphor after the eighteenth century as a construct that symbolized the path from God to earth, the scala (Latin for ladder) , or chain of being. In moving between dreanl and objectivity, the ladder and the human laborer sway precariously on the verge of disintegration. As Frye observed: "Within the limitations of human life, the most highly developed types are those whose lives have become, as we say, a legend, that is, lives no longer contemplat­ ing a vision of objective revelation or imprisoned within a subj ective dream. " 1 3 I n Frost, t o use Frye's terms, action and awareness continually clash with each other in a way that ultimately prohibits the establishing of a lasting mythos. "Essence" is inextricably tied to nlatter and to sleep, "the scent of apples" and "drowsing off. " The sensuous pull of the earth overcomes the speaker: Essence of winter sleep is on the night, The scent of apples: I anl drowsing off. I cannot rub the strangeness fronl nly sight I got from looking through a pane of glass I skimnled this morning from the drinking trough And held against the world of hoary grass. It nlelted, 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 nly dreaming was about to take.

Though claiming some mystery in " the strangeness" he " got from looking through a pane of glass, " the speaker reminds us that this looking glass is but a temp orary instrument and inextricable p art of the fluidity from which it came: a drinking trough used for bodily rather than spiritual sustenance. It both enables and distorts sight. Ifhe faces God as Job did in the theophany or as Jacob did after wrestling at Peniel, it is an overwhelming and immediate p hysical manifestation of the facts of growth, "stem end and blossom end , " as well as the "flecks of russet" and not the Pauline promise of seeing God spiritually face to face in the future. His dreams are not of angels or of heaven but of the troubling abundance and waste of apples that are beyond his "picking, " expressing the physical "ache" of his foot, his sensuous desire to touch. Moreover, the preponderance of first­ person pronouns expresses an ego inspired and burdened by its own desire : Magnified apples appear and disappear, Stem end and blossom end, And every fleck of russet showing clear. My instep arch not only keeps the ache, It keeps the pressure of a ladder-round.

Epilogue I feel the ladder sway as the boughs bend. And I keep hearing from the cellar bin The rumbling sound Of load on load of apples coming in. For I have had too much Of apple-picking: I am overtired Of the great harvest I myself desired.

The obsession with the physical and sensuous approaches a literalism by which the speaker seems to transfer his anxieties of exhaustion to the apples, so many thousands of which are beyond the control of his selection. "Magnified apples" merges both the oneiric world of human desire and the scientific world of instrumental examination. Close examination of nature in its great plurality and in its waste ultimately diminishes the significance of the observer. At once he sees the massive abundance and waste of nature, which overwhelm his own desire: There were ten thousand thousand fruit to touch, Cherish in hand, lift down, and not let fall. For all That struck the earth, No matter if not bruised or spiked with stubble, Went surely to the cider-apple heap As of no worth.

The largeness implied by "ten thousand thousand" and " earth" along with the diminished sense of human control parallels the grandeur Darwin attributes to natural selection in contrast to man's selection. The laboring of the speaker is analogous to selective operations of the Calvinistic God in Through Nature to God. In Fiske's mind "natural selection" is a materialized version of theistic " election" ; as such, evolution loses its progressive qualities: Increase in richness, variety, complexity of life is gained only by the selection of variations above or beyond a certain mean, and the prompt execution of a death sentence upon all the rest. The principle of natural selection is in one respect intensely Calvinistic; it elects the one and damns the ninety and nine. In these processes of Nature there is nothing that savours of communistic equality; but "to him that hath shall be given, and from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath . " Through this selection of a favoured few, a higher type oflife­ or at all events a type in which there is more life-is attained in many cases, but not always. Evolution and progress are not synonymous terms . 1 4

D arwin based his metaphor o n a n inextricable analogy between human efforts and natural efforts . He personifies nature as having an inexhaustible ability of

3 16

Robert Frost and the Challel�«e �f Darwin

"scrutinising, " like an artist or a scientist, and " \vorking, " like a God who rej ects the "bad" and is "adding up all that is good " : Under nature, the slightest difference i n structure o r constitution may well turn the nicely-balanced scale in the struggle for life, and so be preserved. How fleeting are the wishes and efforts of nlan! how short his tinle! . . . It nlay be said that natural selection is daily and hourly scrutinising, throughout the world, every variation, even the slightest; rejecting that \vhich is bad, preserving and adding up all that is good; silently and insensibly \vorking, whenever and wherever opportunity offers, at the inlprovenlent of each organic being in relation to its organic and inorganic conditions of life. We see nothing of these slow changes in progress, until the hand of tinle has marked the long lapse of ages, and then so inlperfect is our view into long past geological ages, that we only see that the fornls of life are now different fronl what they fornlerly \vere. 1 S

If man is a laborer, Darwin tells us, then nature is a far greater one. Our "view" is "imperfect. " The laborer of "After Apple-Picking" works in a state that is a continual confusion of dream and knowledge, between the human idea of nature and its elusive reality ahvays on the verge of transformation. A con­ sciousness of a limited view and of a larger process of selection to which we are subj ected is the darker fruit of our o\vn knowledge. And what are wasted apples for humans who select for beauty and perfection become food for a hibernating woodchuck or further the spread of apple seeds. The apple tree evokes the loss and displacenlent of the Fall-the Tree of Knowledge. But it also becomes the donlinant metaphor of life and death in the new scripture of Darwin. Darwin's Tree of Life represents both nature's diversity as well as the common descent and destiny of all living creatures including man. I n his emphasis on survival no creature or branch is given certain privilege in the hierarchy; no future is certain. It is therefore not surprising that, after considering the apples "as of no worth, " the apple picker wonders about the relation of his own "sleep, " a metaphor for loss of control and death in our self-consciousness, to that of another creature, "the woodchuck," for whom sleep hibernation is at least protection against the environment: One can see what will trouble This sleep of mine, whatever sleep it is. Were he not gone, The woodchuck could say whether it's like his Long sleep, as I describe its coming on, Or just sonle hunlan sleep.

The apple picker, however, turns to another creature at the end of his labor only in hope of finding a way out of his troubling isolation and fears-and there may

Epilogue

be no way out of what he can "describ e . " He persists on the ladder, somehow failing to accept the biology of sleep (and the purpose of dreaming to keep us asleep) , while other creatures have gone. The gerund in the title expresses the perpetual refusal to submit, as does the gerund in " Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening. " Just in the final line expresses a diminished sense of " human sleep, " a diminished sense of the labor, knowledge, and aspiration by which our species once thought itself elect. Talk as the religious may about " much or little beyond the grave," Frost reverts continually to the more stoic stance that "the strong are saying nothing until they see, " an echo of King Lear's model of all patience. Whispering with only soft eloquence, Frost continued to offer "one more brevity, " perhaps to make his "sacrifice acceptable in heaven's sight. " Frost's poetry invites u s to see a human enterprise o f labor, struggle, and waste. And this is because we are products of a blind and wasteful creator. In the couplet " Forgive, 0 Lord, my little j okes on Thee / And I 'll forgive Thy great big one on me, " God seems at best a bungling child, implied in the phrase " great big one, " or a self-created phantom; deal making masquerades as prayer. The little j okes are the poems, which mock or question God's power or morality; the big j oke is that a creature came to exist that torments itself about a God that either doesn't exist or is the demiurge in a wilderness of matter.

Notes

Notes to Introduction I.

Lionel Trilling, "A Speech on Robert Frost: A Cultural Episode," Partisan (summer 1 9 5 9) : 445 - 5 2 . Randall Jarrell, "The Other Frost, " in Poetry and the Age (New York: Ecco Press, 1 9 5 3 ) , 3 0 : "And so far from being obvious, optimistic, orthodox, many of these poems are extraordinarily subtle and strange, poems which express an attitude that, at its most extreme, makes pessimism seem a hopeful evasion; they begin with a flat and terrible reproduction of the evil in the world and end by saying: It's so; and there 's nothing you can do about it; and if there were would you ever do it? The limits which existence approaches and falls back from have seldom been stated with such bare composure . " This remains one of the finest general assessments of Frost's vision. 2 . William Pritchard, Frost: A Literary Life Reconsidered (New York: Oxford Uni­ versity Press, 1 9 84) . Aside from illuminating consideration of the formal qualities of Frost's poetry, Pritchard reassesses the harsh view of Frost in Thompson's biography by emphasiz­ ing the poet's sense of irony and the gnomic, muted revelations in his work. Stanley Burnshaw, Robert Frost Himself (New York: George Braziller, 1 9 86) , 2 2 5 -26. Burnshaw is particularly useful in showing how reviewers of Thompson perpetuated the " monster myth. " 3 . Joseph Brodsky, interviewed by Annie Epelboin, July 1 9 8 1 , " Evropeyskiy vozdukh noad Rossiey, " Strannik, 1 99 1 , no. 1 : 3 9 . 4. Harlow Shapley, " Out of the Whirlwind," in Beyond the Observatory (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1 967) , 1 4 1 . David Layzer, professor of astronomy at Harvard University, recounted several conversations and debates he witnessed between Frost and Shapley. I discuss Frost's interest in astronomy in chapter 6 . 5 . Early critics o f Frost have addressed his strong interest i n science. Reginald Cook's study The Dimensions ofRobert Frost (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1 968) , 1 8 1 -94, gives some general impressions of Frost's command of scientific theory and his knowledge of the principles of quantum mechanics. Hyatt Waggoner's study The Heel of Elohim : Science and values in Modern A merican Poetry (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1 9 50) has a valuable essay on Frost which stresses primarily his antagonism to science. John T. Hiers's essay " Robert Frost's Quarrel with Science and Technology, " Georgia Review 2 5 ( 1 97 1 ) : 1 8 2-20 5 , also sees Frost as objecting to scientific materialism for its failure to account for humane aesthetic pleasure . My quarrel with this position is that Frost often Review 26

319

320 saw science and poetry as allied in their pursuit of knowledge by providing and abandon­ ing nletaphors . Frost was also deeply distrustful of the aesthetic and of art as ultinlate satisfactions for hunlan consciousness . In "The Instinct of a Bard: Robert Frost on Science, Logic, and Poetic Truth , " Essays ill A rts a n d Sciences 9 , no. I ( I 9g0) : 59-7 5 , Darrel Abel argues that James and Bergson strongly influenced Frost in his rebuke of "obj ective" science, particularly as it nlakes claitns to truth. Frost's rejection of popular conceptions of scientific certainty, however, does not put hinl at odds \vith 111uch of the enlpirical science that infornls the work of Darwin and Jalnes. 6 . Guy Rotella, "Col11paring Conceptions: Frost and Eddington, Heisenberg and Bohr, " American Literature 5 9 , no. 2 (May 1 9 8 7) : 1 8 4. Frost did read Eddington but stood apart frot11 the entropic view of the universe expressed in The Nature of the Physical World ( 1 92 8) , prinlarily because of its Platonisnl. See the discussion of "West-Running Brook" in chapter 6. 7. Ronald E. Martin, A merican Literature and the Destruction if KnowledRe: Innovative Writillj? in the A<�e if Epistemoloj?Y (Durhanl, N . C . : Duke University Press, 1 99 1 ) , 1 3 7. 8. All quotations fronl Frost's poetry are fronl the texts he established in Complete Poems (New York: Henry Holt, 1 949) or In the Clearinj? (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1 962) . 9 . Leo Marx, "Robert Frost: A Literary Biography, " a review of Pritchard's study, in The Pilot and the Passenj?er (New York: Oxford University Press, 1 9 8 8 ) , 1 0 1 - 1 0 . 1 0 . See Hildegard Hoeller's essay "Evolution and Metaphor in Robert Frost's Po­ etry, " South Carolina Review 2 3 , no. 1 (spring 1 990) : 1 27-34. Hoeller is right to point out that Darwin's thought was crucial to Frost's contenlporaries, particularly Janles and Bergson, and sOlllething he had to consider in thinking about the nature of metaphor. I depart fron1 her general view that I)arwin was too theoretical for Frost and that either Janles or Bergson was less so. 1 1 . Martin, American Literature and the Destruction if Knowledj?e, 1 3 7 . Robert Langbaunl has renlarked on the Darwinian din1ension of Frost's poetry in "The N ew Nature Poetry" ( 1 970) , reprinted in The Wordfrom Below: Essays on Modern Literature mId Culture (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1 9 8 7) , 1 5 9-79. 1 2 . Richard Poirier, Robert Frost: The Work if KnowinR (New York: Oxford Univer­ sity Press, 1 977) , 26 5 . 1 3 . Robert Frost's talk was given o n 2 8 July 1 9 5 5 and i s reprinted i n Reginald Cook's book Robert Frost: A LivillR Voice (Anlherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1 974) , 8 8 - 1 0 5 . Cook notes that the tape recorder failed tenlporarily during Frost's discus­ sion of Darwin, Marx, and Freud, and, unfortunately, there are no other records of his renlarks . 1 4 . I nterview with Frost in IVew York Times, 27 Novenlber 1 949. 1 5 . See the enlinent geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky's discussion of precursors in the concept of natural selection in MallkiHd Evolvinj? (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1 962) , 1 3 0- 3 2 . See also Gillian Beer's discussion of the long history of ideas about transformation in nature (prec eding the enlergence of " evolutionism") , in Darwin s Plots (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1 9 8 3 ) ; and Charles Gillispie, Genesis and GeoioRY (Canlbridge : Harvard University Press , 1 9 5 1 ) .

Notes to Pages 6- 1 3

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1 6 . Frost and his biographers have noted his lifelong love of The Voyage if the Beagle. In a 1 9 5 4 interview Frost remarked that when people make "a list of the hundred best books . . . they put in Darwin's On the Origin of Species. This other one- Voyage if the Beagle-this where he thought of it-on that enterprise. That's the beauty of it. A beautiful story-people and things and animals and observations, great world travel. It's one of the \vonder books" (Reginald Cook, Robert Frost: A Living Voice, 6 5 ) . Frost often referred to The Voyage if the Beagle in the context of two other favorites, Robinson Crusoe and Walden, both of which also raise the question of man's place in nature. See Edward Connery Lathem, ed. , Interviews with Robert Frost (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, I 966) , 1 42. Frost's library contained three editions of The Voyage if the Beagle, published in 19 I 0, 19 I 2 , and 1 926. The edition was an inscribed gift from Clarence Little, president of the University of Michigan, when Frost was Ticknor Fellow in Letters there. See also Lawrance Thompson, Robert Frost: The Early Years (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1 966) , 1 5 3 - 5 6 ; and Robert Frost: The Years if Triumph (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1 970) , 302. 1 7 . Dartmouth College Library, Ms. Frost 928940. I . 1 8 . Frost, "The Constant Symbol," in Selected Prose if Robert Frost, ed. Hyde Cox and Edward Connery Lathem (New York: Collier Books, 1 968) , 24. 1 9 . Lucretius, The Nature if Things 4. 1 -2 5 , trans . Frank o. Copley (New York: W W Norton, 1 977) , 8 3 . 20. Frank Lentricchia, "Lyric in the Culture of Capitalism," A merican Literary His­ tory (spring 1 9 89) : 6 3 - 8 8 . I depart from Lentricchia in suggesting that Frost's movement between the appearance of beauty and the reality of terror has as much to do with his view of nature as with a desire to appease (and appall) a Fireside Poetry audience. 2 1 . Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species (Cambridge : Harvard University Press, 1 964) , 62. 22. Wisdom: Conversations with the Elder Wise Men if Our Day, ed. James Nelson (New Yo rk: W W Norton, 1 9 5 8 ) , 1 6 . This interview was conducted in 1 9 5 2 by Bela

Kornitzer in Frost's home in Ripton, Vermont. 2 3 . Lawrance Thompson, ed. , Selected Letters if Robert Frost (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1 964) , 3 44. 24. Dartnl0uth College Library, Ms. Frost 00 1 729. 2 5 . From an interview with Maurice Dolbier, in Lathem, Interviews with Robert Frost, 1 96 . 26. Frost, "Education by Poetry, " i n Selected Prose if Robert Frost, 3 4 . 2 7 . Walt Whitman, Complete Poetry a n d Collected Prose, ed. Justin Kaplan (New York: Library of America, 1 9 82) , 1 5 . 2 8 . T. E. Hulme, Speculations (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1 924) , 1 1 6- 1 7 . 29. See the section on Frost in David Perkins, "Unsaying the Romantics, " In A History if Modern Poetry (Cambridge : Harvard University Press, 1 976) , 243 - 47 . Notes t o Chapter I

1 . David Porter, Emerson and Literary Change (Cambridge : Harvard University Press, 1 97 8 ) , 22-2 3 .

322 2. Jay Parini, "Emerson and Frost: T h e Present Act o f Vision," Sewanee Review 8 9 ( 1 9 8 I ) : 2 1 5 . Parini adds: "Yet certain key Enlersonian notions persist i n Frost: the con­ centration on the individual quest for selfhood, the belief in an occult relationship be­ tween man and nature, and the reliance on the natural world for sustenance." I regard Frost as departing fronl these notions significantly. Individualism in Frost is often count­ ered by great conflicts and crippling irony. The relationship between man and nature is much more visceral than occult. Parini's assertion that Frost shares especially Emerson's faith in vision conflicts with the nlany doubts about perception that occur in lyrics and especially in the dramatic poenlS and his enlphasis, above all, on voice and sound. George Monteiro, Robert Frost and the New England Renaissance (Lexington: U niver­ sity Press of Kentucky, 1 9 8 8 ) , reads alnlost all Frost's poems in reference to works by Enlerson, Thoreau, and Dickinson and the tradition of American transcendentalism. 3 . Ralph Waldo Enlerson, "Nature," in Selections from Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Stephen E. Whicher (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1 9 5 7) , 22. 4. For a comprehensive view of Enlerson and science, see David M. Robinson's "Fields of Investigation: Emerson and Natural History, " in American Literature and Science, ed. Robert J. Scholnick (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1 992) . Robinson shows how Emerson incorporated Lyell's geology into his own evolutionary thinking, still believing that the end of that progression is the imnlortality of the soul. I agree with Robinson's view that Emerson canle to recognize how "Nature's metamorphic energy leads to a kind of estrangement, in which the individual is distanced from the reality of nature " ( 1 0 5 ) . 5 . Henry David Thoreau , Walden (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1 97 3 ) , 97· 6 . Robert D . Richardson, Hellry Thoreau : A Life l?f the Mind (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1 986) , 3 8 4. 7 . Robert Frost, "A Conversation between Robert Frost and Dr. Reginald Cook" ( 1 9 5 4) , in Interviews with Robert Frost, ed. Edward Connery Lathem (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1 966) , 1 42- 46. In the same interview Frost also mentions Dar­ win's The Voyage of the Beagle and Defoe's Robinson Crusoe as favorite books. Both, of course, were important to Thoreau's idea of living deliberately in the woods. Cook seems to observe sonlething funny about Frost's coinage: " ' Thorosian,' is, I admit, a new word-so new I haven't decided how to spell the second ' 0 ' sound in it-but it is coining even as you and I converse, and so on its way into the dictionary. " 8 . Frederick Turner, Natural Classicism : Essays on Literature and Science (New York: Paragon House, 1 9 8 5 ) , 1 7 1 -20 1 . "What I wish to argue is that, however faulty Thoreau's theory of cultural evolution may have been, he is right in assuming the cultural journey cannot properly take place without a personal one. Except ye become as a little child, ye shall not enter the kingdom of another culture" ( 1 9 I ) . 9 . Henry David Thoreau, Faith in a Seed: The Dispersion of Seeds and Other Late Natural History Writings, ed. Bradley P Dean (Washington, D. C . : I sland Press, 1 99 3 ) . 1 0 . Richardson, Thoreau, 3 8 4. I I . Frost played with lines in "Uriel" in a way that shows his difference from Emerson, particularly on the nlatter of evil . In "Uriel" from "the good of evil born, / Canle Uriel's voice of cherub scorn." Uriel's voice is the good coming fronl the evil of his rebellion. In a 1 9 5 5 talk at the Bread Loaf writers' conference, Frost quoted the line in the context of a discussion of Puritanism and Milton's Comus. Referring to the lines in Comus

Notes to Pages 1 5 - 1 8

323

in which good and evil are supposed to separate (594 -98) , Frost digs a t the Puritan hope of separating good from evil, citing Comus's own assertion that we should not live "like Nature 's bastards" instead of "her sons . " Frost concludes his remarks with a sly alteration of the Emerson line " ' Out of good is evil born . . . Cherub scorn.' Now that's my part . " Frost rej ects the Protestant hope that rebellion will result in greater purity o r goodness, an aspiration he associated with Marx. See Reginald Cook's transcript of this talk in Robert Frost: A Living Voice (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1 974) , 9 5 -96. 1 2 . Charles Darwin, The Autobiography of Charles Darwin, ed. Nora Barlow (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1 9 5 8 ) , 2 2 8 . 1 3 . Darwin wrote t o Henslow on 1 8 May 1 8 3 2 : "The Captain [Fitzroy] does every thing in his power to assist me, & we get on very well. -but I thank my better fortune he has not made me a renegade to Whig principles: I would not be a Tory, if it was merely on account of their cold hearts about that scandal to Christian Nations, Slavery" ( The Correspondence of Charles Darwin, vol. I ; 1 82 1 - 1 836 [Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1 9 8 5 ] , 2 3 8) . 1 4 . Darwin, Autobiography, 8 5 . 1 5 . Gillian Beer discusses the central debate i n Milton's Comus, between selfish appropriation of nature's bounty and a more even distribution of plenty, in relation to Darwin's distinction between artificial and natural selection (Darwin -s Plots [London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1 98 3 ] , 3 4 - 3 6) . That the center o f Paradise Lost is the battle in heaven might also have been imag­ inatively interesting to Darwin. In one of his letters from the Beagle voyage, Darwin describes a volcanic eruption by alluding to the heavenly warfare : " I t appeared to be a representation of Milton's battle of the Angels as described in Paradise Lost" (Darwin, Correspondence, 1 :479) . 1 6 . Charles Darwin, Charles Darwin -s Diary of the Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle, ed. Nora Barlow (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1 9 3 4) , 1 07 . 1 7 . Paradise Lost 2 : 8 8 4 -920, in John Milton , Complete Poems a n d Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (Indianapolis : Bobbs-Merrill, 1 9 5 7) , 2 5 3 - 5 4 . 1 8 . Charles Darwin, " Notebook M , " in Charles Darwin-s Notebooks, 1 836- 1 844, ed. Paul H. B arrett et al. (Ithaca, N.Y. : Cornell University Press, 1 9 87), 549. 19. Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1 9 8 1 ) , 40 5 . This edition is a photographic reprint of the 1 8 7 1 edition. 20. Robert Frost, "The Constant Symbol , " in Selected Prose of Robert Frost, 24. 2 I . Darwin, On the Orig in of Species, 4 8 9 . 2 2 . Darwin cites Schopenhauer i n The Descent of Man o n the matter o f sexual selection, referring to "The Metaphysics of Sexual Love," a supplemental chapter of The World as Will and Representation (see chap. 4) . For an interesting discussion of the relation of form and function in Schopenhauer and Darwin, see E. S. Russell, " Schopenhauer's Contribution to Biological Theory, " in Science, Medicine, and History, ed. E . A. Under­ wood (London: Oxford University Press, 1 9 5 3 ) , vol . 2 . Frost refers t o Schopenhauer i n the context o f his poem "The Trial by Existence" (see chap. 6) . In his notebooks he makes several references to Schopenhauer, including the following: "At least a year on the book's name before reading the book. The World as Will" (Dartmouth College Library, Ms. Frost 001 7 1 4) .

3 24

.'\;otes to Pa,{!es

1 8- 2 6

2 3 . Josiah Royce, The Spirit (�r Alodern Ph ilosophy (I 892; reprint New York: Dover Books, I 98 3 ) , 266. 24. Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, trans . E . F. J. Payne (I ndian Hills, Colo. : Falcon's Wing Press, I 9 5 8 ) , 5 84 . 2 5 . Bertrand Russell, Our Kllowled�e C!f the External World as a Field for Scientific Method in Philosophy (London: Open Court Publishing, I 9 I 4) , I ! . 26. Henry Adanls, The Education of Henry A dams (Boston: Houghton Miffl i n, 1 97 3 ) , 2 3 1 (emphasis nline) . This appears in the section entitled "Darwinism ( 1 867- I 868) , " and the concepts of natural selection and evolution continue to trouble Adams throughout his search for a scientific way out of the labyrinth of supersessive history. 2 7 · D arwin, 011 the Or(fZin l?f Species, 8 3 · 2 8 . Ibid . 489. 29· Ibid. , 490. 30. Ibid. , 44 1 . 3 1 . Ibid. , 3 3 6-3 7 · 3 2 . Ibid., 206. 3 3 . Ibid. , 20 5 . 3 4 . Ibid., 207· 3 5 . David Hull, Darwin and His Critics (Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 1 97 3 ) , 5 6 : "Evolutionary theory had even nl0re devastating consequences for immanent teleol­ ogy. If essences are static and if the general goal toward which all things strive is to realize their essence, then the wholesale progressive change entailed by evolutionary theory is impossible. If evolution has occurred, then either essences are not static or else things must strive, not to fulfill their own essence, but the essence of some other species . " .

3 6 . Darwin, On the Ori,«in C?f Species, 5 I .

Ibid. , 462 . 3 8 . Darwin, Descent of Man, 1 8 8 . 3 9 . Frank Lentricchia, Robert Frost: Modern Poetics and the Landscapes ifSelf(Durham, N. C . : D uke University Press, I 97 5 ) , I 5 5 . 40. Hayden White, Tropics of Discou rse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press, I 978) , I 3 1 . Harvard University Archives (HUG 3 04) lists Frost's enrollment in Nathaniel Southgate Shaler's Geology 4 and 5 courses in 1 89 8 -99 . The syllabus for those courses includes Darwin's nlajor works, On the Origin of Species and The Descent of Man. 4 1 . Darwin, On the Origin of Species, 4 5 9 : "As this whole volume is one long argument, it may be convenient to the reader to have the leading facts and inferences recapitulated. " 4 2 . Darwin, "C Notebook," in Notebooks, 294. 4 3 . Darwin, "E Notebook," in Notebooks, 4 3 4 . 4 4 . Darwin, O n the Ori�in of Species, 4 8 4 . 4 5 · Ibid. , 4 8 5 . 46. Louis Mertins, Robert Frost: Life a n d Talks- Walking (Norman: U niversity of Oklahoma Press, 1 96 5 ) , 3 6 8 . 4 7 . Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant, Robert Frost: The Trial b y Existence (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1 960) , 3 2 5 . 37.

Notes to Pages 26-30

325

4 8 . Robert Frost, Letters of Robert Frost to Louis Untermeyer, ed. Louis Untermeyer (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1 96 3 ) , I 89. 49. Dartnl0uth College Library, Ms. Frost 00 I 729. 50. Robert Frost, " Letter to the Amherst Student, " in Selected Prose of Robert Frost, I 07 · 5 I . See William James, Pragmatism (Cambridge : Harvard University Press, I 97 5 ) , I 22-2 3 . James held that the flux of man "engenders truths" and completes reality and that the "universe" is readily "malleable" by human thought: We build the flux out inevitably. The great question I S : does it, with our additions, rise or fall in value? Are the additions worthy or unworthy? . . . Lotze has in several places made a deep suggestion. We naively assume, he says , a relation between reality and our minds which may be the opposite of the true one. Reality, we naturally think, stands ready-nlade and complete, and our intellects supervene with the one simple duty of describing it as it is already. But nlay not our descriptions, Lotze asks, be themselves important additions to reality? And nlay not previous reality itselfbe there, far less for the purpose of reappearing unaltered in our knowledge, than for the very purpose of stimulating our minds to such additions as shall enhance the universe's total value? . . . It is identically our pragmatic conception. In our cognitive as well as in our active life we are creative. We add, both to the subject and predicate part of reality. The world stands really malleable, waiting to receive its final touches at our hands. Like the kingdom of heaven it suffers our violence willingly. Man engenders truths upon it. In Frost's dramas humans attempt to impose their ideals, always encountering limitations within themselves, from the environment, or from others. There is little completion of anything as grand as "the universe. " 5 2 . Dartnl0uth College Library, Ms. Frost 00 I 2 7 5 . 5 3 . Darwin, " M Notebook," i n Notebooks, 5 5 I . 5 4 . Robert Frost, "Education by Poetry, " in Selected Prose of Robert Frost, 3 8 - 3 9 . 5 5 . Dartmouth College Library, M s . Frost 00 I 7 30. 5 6 . Coleridge to Joseph Cottle, 7 March I 8 I 5, in Collected Letters, 4 : 5 4 5 ; quoted in M. H . Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism (New York: W W Norton, I 9 7 I ) , 27 I . 5 7 . Dartmouth College Library, Ms. Frost I 720. 5 8 . Ibid . , Ms. Frost 928940. I . 5 9 . Ibid . , Ms. Frost 00 I 729. 60. Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Poet, in Selections from Ralph T%ldo Emerson, ed. Stephen E. Whicher (Boston: H oughton Mifflin, I 9 57) , 2 3 2 . 6 I . Frost made this distinction i n a talk a t Bread Loafin I 9 5 9 recounted i n Reginald Cook's Robert Frost, 2 I 2 . 62 . See Marjorie Nicholson's seminal study o fthe impact o fscience on the symbolic use of the circle in The Breaking of the Circle: Studies itt the Effect of the ((New Science " on Seventeenth- Century Poetry (New York: Columbia University Press, I 960) . 63 . Robert Frost, "On Emerson, " in Selected Prose of Robert Frost, I 1 8 .

Notes to Pa,Res 30-35 64. For an excellent discussion of Kepler's religious thought and, in particular, his sun worship see E. J. Dij ksterj uis's The Mechanization of the World Picture, trans. C. Dikshoorn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1 96 1 ) , 305 - 1 1 . 6 5 . Dartmouth College Library, Ms. Frost 00 1 27 5 . 66. Gillian Beer observes that "Darwin's n1etaphor o f the tree i s a formal analogy whose function is purely diagramn1atic, describing a shape not an experience. Its initial value for Darwin lay undoubtedly in the fact that the diagram declared itself as tree, rather than being foreknowingly designed to represent a tree-like shape for descent. On the page, however, it could as well be interpreted by the eye as shrub, branching coral, or seawood. But D arwin saw not only the explanatory but mythic potentiality of this diagram, its congruity with past orders of descent"( Darwi 11 5 Plots, 92-9 3 ) . I would add that Darwin's use of the tree is part of his search for "plain signification, " beyond metaphor in which any part of nature can actually represent the whole. 67. Darwin, On the Origil1 of Species, 1 3 0. 68. Robert Frost, "The Constant Syn1bol," in Selected Prose if Robert Frost, 24. 69. Dartn10uth College Library, Ms. Frost 00 1 27 5 . 70. For a general overview of Frost's early interests i n science, see Kathryn Gibbs Harris, "Robert Frost's Early Education in Science, " South Carolina Review 7, no. 1 ( 1 974) : 1 3 -3 3 · 7 1 . Lawrance Thon1pson, Robert Frost: The Early Years (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1 966) , 89. ThoInpson eillphasizes Frost's interest in Proctor's book Our Place among the InJinities, which I discuss in chapter 6 . 72. Nathaniel Southgate Shaler, The Interpretation of Nature (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1 8 9 3 ) , 275 . 7 3 . Josiah Royce's introductory lectures on philosophy were publ is he d as The Spirit of Modern Philosophy ( 1 892; reprint, New York: Dover, 1 9 8 3 ) . 74. Frost used the phrase "passionate preference" i n "Accidentally o n Purpose" and elsewhere in his talks and writing including "The Future of Man . " It was a psychological forn1 of natural selection sin1ilar to Jan1es's appropriation of selection as a psychological n1etaphor. Santayana uses the phrase to discuss Whitn1an in The Sense of Beauty (Can1bridge: MIT Press, 1 9 8 8 ) , 72. 75. Daniel Wilson, Scie1lce, Community and the TratL�formation �f American Philosophy (Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 1 990) , 96. 76. See Robert J. Richards, Darwin and the Emergence of Evolutionary Theories if Mind aHd Behavior (Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 1 98 7) , chap. 9, "The Personal E qua­ tion in Science: Willian1 jan1es's Psychological and Moral Vision of Darwinian Theory. " See also Morton White, Science a1ld Sel1timel1 t ill Anzerica (New York: Oxford University Press, 1 972) , 1 70-2 1 7 . 7 7 . john B. Walker, Notes to Philosophy 3 ( 1 8 8 3 - 84) , Harvard University Archives. 7 8 . Ibid. 79. Willialnjan1es, Psychology, Alnerican Science Series, Briefer Course (New York: Henry Holt, 1 8 92) , 1 70. I cite this edition rather than the full Prirlciples if Psych 0 10,RY since that is the edition Frost used in his teaching. 80. jan1es, Psychology, 3 76 ; enlphasis nline. 8 1 . jan1es, Pra.«matism , 9 8 . 8 2 . Ibid. , 1 1 6 .

Notes to Pages 3 5 -46 8 3 . Ibid . , 1 07. 84. John Dewey, "The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy, " in The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy and Other Essays in Contemporary Thought (New York: Henry Holt, 1 9 1 0) , 46. 8 5 . James, Pragmatism, 62. 8 6 . Robert Frost in Letters of Robert Frost to Louis Untermeyer, 1 8 8 -89. 8 7 . Robert Frost, " Letter to Louis Untermeyer, November 25, 1 9 3 6 , " ibid. , 2 8 5 . 8 8 . Walter Pater, Plato and Platonism, vol . 6 o f The Works of Walter Pater (London: Macmillan, 1 9 1 0) , 2 1 . See also Philip Appleman, "Darwin, Pater, and a Crisis in Crit­ icisll1 , " in 1 859: Entering an Age of Crisis, ed. Philip Applebaull1, William A. Madden, and Michael Wolff (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1 9 5 9) , 8 1 -9 5 . 8 9 . Florence H ardy, Th e Early Years of Thomas Hardy (London: Macll1illan, 1 92 5 ) , 213. 90. James George Frazer, The Golden Bough, abridged ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1 922) , 8 2 5 -26. 9 1 . Edward Connery Lathem, ed. , Interviews with Robert Frost (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1 966) , 64. 92. Lawrance Thompson, Robert Frost: The Years of Triumph (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1 970) , 624 - 2 5 . Thompson also speculates that Lucretius' belief that no visible obj ects perish without contributing to new formations was consonant with the Pauline dualistic view that life perishes to be reborn in imperishable spirit. I would argue that Lucretius and St. Paul are at opposite ends of the spectrum of materialism and that Frost found them consonant in their emphasis on change. 93 . Thompson notes that Frost referred to Lucretius in an aside while giving a reading of "West-Running Brook" (Robert Frost, 624) . See my discussion of "West­ Running Brook" in chapter 4. 94. Thompson, Robert Frost, 3 8 1 -8 2 . Thompson says that Frost read and reread the English translation of Bergson's Creative Evolu tion when it was published in En glish in 1 9 1 I . My own examinati o n of Frost's copy of Bergs o n , which is in the Fales Collection at New York University, shows that Frost's marginal annotations to Bergson stop after ninety pages of the four-hundred page work. Not all of those annotations indicate enthusiasm for Bergson (see my discussion of " A White-Tailed Hornet" in chap. 2) . The most in-depth treatment of Frost's reading of Bergson is John F. Sears, "William James, Henri B ergson, and the Poetics of Robert Frost," New En��land Quarterly 48 ( 1 975) : 3 4 1 -6 1 . Bergson's metaphors are en1ployed by Frost most pron1inently in "West­ Running Brook , " though Frost departs from them in significant ways (see my discussion in chap. 6) . 9 5 . Elaine Barry, ed. , Robert Frost on Writing (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1 97 3 ) , 1 8 . 96. Royce, Spirit of Modern Philosophy, 3 2 1 -22. 97· Ibid . , 3 3 8 . 9 8 . Ibid . , 3 3 8 - 3 9 . 9 9 . Cook, Robert Frost, 2 1 2 . 1 00. Darwin, Voyage of the Beagle, 3 1 9 . 1 0 1 . I n a letter t o Susan Ward in 1 8 95 Frost writes " I a m botanizing will I nill I . . . I am overwhelmed with books on the subj ect" (Selected Letters of Robert Frost [New York:

Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1 964 ] , 2 8 ) . Orchids figure pronlinently in Frost's poetry, particularly in the sOinewhat neglected drainatic poenl "The Self-Seeker, " which is discussed in chapter 4 of this study. 1 0 2 . See Nicolete Scourse, The Victorialls alld Their Flowers (Beaverton, Oreg. : Tinl­ ber Press, 1 9 8 3 ) , esp. chap. 8, "The Passion for Detail," and chap. 9, "Scientific Con­ troversies . " Scourse notes in her discussions of Darwin's botanical researches and work on orchids: "Darwin looked in detail at the incident of color and scent and found that white flowers are by far the most favored in nature in wealth of perfume" ( 1 79) . 1 03 . Richard Poirier, Poetry and Pra��matism (Cambridge : Harvard University Press, 1 992) , 8 8 . 1 04. The Faerie Queelle T 8 , in Ednlund Spenser, Poetical Works, ed. J. C . Smith and E . de Selincourt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1 979) , 406. 1 0 5 . Grant Allen, Colin Clou t �, Calendar: A Record of a Summer, April- October (Lon­ don: Chatto and Windus, 1 8 8 3 ) , 107. 1 06. Ibid. 1 07. Ralph Waldo Enlerson, Essays and Lectu res, ed. Joel Porte (New York: Library of Anlerica, 1 9 8 3 ) , 5 5 4 . 1 0 8 . Nicholas Berdayev, TIle J.Weanill!<, if History, trans. George Reavey (London : Centenary Press, 1 9 3 6) , I 1 5 . 1 09. Ibid. , 1 1 7. 1 1 0. I. A. Richards, Science and Poetry (New York: W W Norton, 1 926) , 54. I I I . Dartnlouth College Library, Ms. Frost 00 17 I 4. Notes t o Chapter 2

1 . Margaret Edwards, " T h e Play of ' D ownward Conlparisons' : Anilnal An­ throponl0rphism in the PoenlS of Robert Frost," in Frost: Centennial Essays II, ed. Jac Tharpe Oackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1 976) , 245 . 2 . George Monteiro, Robert Frost and the New E1l!<,land Renaissance (Louisville: University Press of Kentucky, 1 98 8 ) , 1 3 2 . 3 . Robert Langbaunl, The Word frorn Below (Madison: University o f Wisconsin Press, 1 987), 9. 4. William James, Psycholo��y, Anlerican Science Series, Briefer Course (New York: Henry Holt, 1 892) , 2 3 4 . 5 . Ibid. 6. See George Monteiro, "Robert Frost's Solitary Singer, " New En!<,lal1d Quarterly 44 ( 1 97 1 ) : 1 3 4 - 40 . I depart here fronl Monteiro's argunlent that the poenl draws froin Thoreau's journal entry on ovenbirds, although Thoreau had, as he indicated in Walden, read The VoyaRe �f the Beagle. I also depart from Monteiro's view that Frost, like Thoreau, found nature a source of redemption. See also George Monteiro, "Redemption through Nature: A Recurring Theme in Thoreau, Frost, and Richard Wilbur, " American Quarterly 20 ( 1 968) : 795-809. 7 . Edward Connery Lathenl , ed., Interviews with Robert Frost (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1 966) , 1 42 ; and an inscription 111ade in an edition of three poems ( 1 9 3 5) not included in his cOlllplete works , now in the Clifton Waller Barret Library at the University of Virginia.

Notes to Pages 5 5 -63 8. Charles Darwin, The Voyage if the Beagle (New York: Anchor Books, 1 962) , 96. Darwin discusses Hyla frogs on p. 29. Frost's " Hyla Brook" appears next to "The Oven Bird" in Mountail'l Interval. 9. Darwin, Voyage of the Beagle, 96. 1 0 . Guy Rotella, Reading and Writing Nature (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1 990) , 79. I I . Ibid. 1 2 . John B urroughs, l1Ic1ys if Nature (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1 90 5 ) , 40- 4 1 . Frost's set of Burroughs's conlplete works is i n the Fales Collection at New York Univer­ sity. Burroughs is mentioned directly in "The Self-Seeker. " 1 3 . Charles Darwin, "Notebook D, " in Charles Darwin 's Notebooks 1 836- 1 844, ed. Paul Barrett (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1 9 8 7) , 228-29. 14. Misia Landau, " Paradise Lost: The Theme of Terrestriality in Human Evolu­ tion," in The Rhetoric if the Human Sciences, ed. John S. Nelson, Allan Megill, and Donald N. McCloskey (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1 9 8 7) , 1 1 1 -24. In a fascinating analysis of the narratives of human evolution Landau shows a connection between the idea of a moral fall and the descent from the arboreal to the terrestrial world in the process of human development. The movement of the ovenbird from a tree-dwelling to a ground­ dwelling creature would parallel that figure as one of inexplicable expulsion from a safe haven. 1 5 . Robert Pack, "Frost's Enigmatical Reserve," in Robert Frost, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 1 9 86) , 1 0- 1 2 . Pack calls attention to the tension in the poem between the sense of metaphor as fact and fact as metaphor and the unwillingness of the poet to take meaning too far. 1 6 . Duke of Argyll, The Philosophy if Beliif; or, Law in Christian Theology (London: Murray, 1 896) , 74. 1 7 . Charles Darwin , Metaphysics, Materialism, and the Evolution if Mind: Early Writ­ ings if Charles Darwin, transcribed and annotated by Paul H. Barrett (Chicago : University of C hicago Press, 1 9 80) , "N Notebook," 90. 1 8 . Ibid. , 74. 1 9 . Dartmouth College Library, Ms. Frost 00 1 7 1 4 . 2 0 . Ibid. , Ms. Frost 00 1 7 1 4. 2 I . Frost to Lewis N. Chase ( 1 9 I 7) , in Robert Frost on Writing, ed. Elaine Barry (New Brunswick: Rutgers Unviversity Press, 1 97 3 ) , 70. 22. Interview with William Stanly Brainwaithe, in Interviews with Robert Frost, 6. 2 3 · Ibid. , 7 . 2 4 . Chauncey Wright, "The Evolution o f Self-Consciousness, " in Philosophical Discussions (New York: Henry Holt, 1 8 77) , 2 5 0 . 2 5 . Northrop Frye, The Great Code: The Bible as Literature (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1 9 82) , 1 1 7 . 2 6 . Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Notebooks, ed. Kathleen Coburn (Princeton: Prince­ ton University Press, 1 9 5 7) , 2 : 2 546. 27. William Wordsworth, Poetical Works, ed. Thomas Hutchinson and E. de Selin­ court (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1 949) , 590.

330

Notes to Pages 63- 89

2 8 . Gillian Beer, Darwin s Plots (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1 9 8 3 ) , 49-76. Beer provides the best available discussion of "fitting and misfitting" in Darwin's use of anthropomorphic metaphor. 29. Ralph Waldo En1erson, Essays and Lectures, ed. Joel Porte (New York: Library of An1erica, 1 9 8 3 ) , 1 1 8 . 30. Henry David Thoreau , Walden (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1 97 3 ) , 2 3 °· 3 1 . Darwin, Voyage of the Beagle, 3 4 . 3 2 . Ibid. , 8 0 . 3 3 . I agree with Judith Oster's insight that the unseen rifleman "shares the qualities of the spider laying snare for the fly" (Judith Oster, Toward Robert Frost: The Reader and the Poet [Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1 99 1 ] , 4 1 ) . 3 4 . The poem also seems to b e a reworking of Whitman's more romantic, self­ consciously anthropomorphic poem "A Noiseless Patient Spider. " 3 5 · Charles Darwin, The Descent of Mall and Selection in Relation to Sex ( 1 8 7 I ; reprint, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1 9 8 1 ) , 2 : 403 . 3 6 . Ibid . , 2:408 . 3 7 . Robert Frost, In the Clearing (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1 962) , 13· 3 8 . Henry D. Thoreau, "The Dispersion of Seeds," in Faith in a Seed, ed. Bradley P Dean (Washington, D. C . : Island Press, 1 993) , 9 3 . 3 9 . Robert Frost: Poetry and Prose, ed. Ed\vard Connery Lathem and Lawrance Thonlpson (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston , 1 972) , 44 8 . 4 0 . Asa Gray, Natural Scie11ce and Rel({!iol1 (New York, Charles Schribner's Sons, 1 8 8 0) , 8 4 - 8 5 . 4 1 . Robert Pinsky, The Situation of Poetry (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1 976) , 67. 42. Robert Alter, "The Characteristics of Ancient Hebrew Poetry, " in The Literary Guide to the Bible, ed. Robert Alter and Frank Kernl0de (Cambridge : Harvard University Press, 1 9 8 7) , 622 . 43 . Paradise Lost 8 : 5 2 1 - 42 in John Milton Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (Indianapolis : Bobbs-Merrill, 1 9 5 7) , 3 7 5 . 44· Ibid. T 5 79-94, p. 3 76 . 4 5 · Darwin, Descent of Man, 2 : 3 7 5 · 46. Willian1 Janles, Pragmatism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, T 9 8 I ) , lec­ ture 3 . 47. Charles Darwin, 1 2 July 1 8 70, in More Letters C?f Charles Darwin, ed. Francis Darwin (London: J. Murray, 1 90 3 ) , 1 : 3 2 1 . 4 8 . Charles Darwin, 22 May 1 86o, in Francis Darwin, The Life mld Letters of Charles Darwin (London: J. Murray, 1 8 87), 2: 1 0 5 . 49. See Stephen Jay Gould's brief discussion o f "Design" i n Hen s Teeth and Horse s Toes (New York: W W Norton, 1 9 8 3 ) , 4 5 . 5 0 . Richard Poirier, Robert Frost (New York: Oxford University Press, 1 977) , 24552. 5 1 . Charles Darwin s Notebooks, 1 836- 1 844, Paul H. Barret, ed. e t al. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press , 1 987), 5 5 ! .

Notes to Pages 9 3 - 1 09

331

5 2 . Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1 964) , chap. 7, 207-44· 5 3 . Frederick Engels, Dialectics of Nature, ed. and trans . Clemens Dutt (New York: I nternational Publishers, 1 940) , 1 9-20; emphasis mine. 5 4 . Ralph Waldo Emerson, "The Transcendentalist, " in Selections Jrom Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Stephen E . Whicher (Boston: Houghton Miffiin, 1 9 5 7) , 1 97 ; emphasis mine. 5 5 . Monteiro, Robert Frost and the New England Renaissance, 1 3 2 . 5 6 . The Letters of Robert Frost to Louis Untermeyer, ed. L. Untermeyer (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1 96 3 ) , 47. 57. B. J. Sokol, in an illuminating article on the complexities of "The White-Tailed Hornet," has pointed out that one of Frost's marginal notes in his copy of Bergson, "life dives under, " indicates some disparity between Frost's view of life and Bergson's assertion of an upward-moving elan vital (Sokol, "Bergson, I nstinct, and Frost's 'The White-Tailed Hornet,' " American Literature 62, no. I [March 1 990] : 5 3 ) . 5 8 . Robert Frost's marginal notes to his edition o f Henri Bergson's Creative Evolu­ tion, trans. Arthur Mitchell (New York: H enry Holt, 1 9 1 I ) , 408 . This edition is in the Frost collection at the New York University Library. 5 9 . Darwin, On the Orig in of Species, 207. 60. J. H . Fabre, The Insect World of] Henry Fabre (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1 949) , 6 5 . 6 1 . Ibid . , 5 5 - 5 6 . Notes t o Chapter 3 I . Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden (New York: Oxford University Press, 1 964) , 2 5 . Both of Marx's concepts of America as an Arcadia of plentitude and an Arcadia to be controlled fail in Frost because of the rivalry among people. 2. John F. Lynen, The Pastoral A rt of Robert Frost (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1 964) , 1 6- 1 8 . Lynn notes that scientific empiricism had already by the eighteenth century made the pastoral an outmoded form and that Frost was distant from the senti­ mentality of the rural mode expressed by his contemporaries, the Georgians. Lynen believes that Frost was still using the pastoral as a symbolic mode, but it is not clear for what rural ideal. 3 . The Letters oj Robert Frost to Louis Untermeyer, ed. L. Untermeyer (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1 96 3 ) , 1 66 . 4. Ibid . , 60. 5. George Santayana, Three Philosophical Poets ( 1 9 1 0; reprint, New York: Double­ day, 1 9 5 4) , 42-44. 6. Charles Darwin, The Descent ofMan and Selection in Relation to Sex ( 1 8 7 I ; reprint, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1 9 8 I ) , 1 0 5 . 7 . Edward Connery Lathem, ed. , Interviews with Robert Frost (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1 966) , 2 5 8 . 8 . Dartmouth College Library, M s . Frost 00 1 7 1 4 . 9. Leopold Damrosch, Jr. , God 's Plots and Man 's Stories (Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 1 9 8 5 ) , 1 94. 1 0 . Charles Darwin, The Voyage of the B eagle (New York: Anchor B ooks, 1 962) , 2 3 0- 3 1 .

332 I I . Ibid., 205 . 1 2 . Ibid., 2 1 3 . 1 3 · Ibid., 2 1 7. 1 4· Interviews with Robert Frost, 76; enlphasis l11ine. 1 5 · Ibid., 1 24. 1 6. Ibid. , 240 1 7 · Ibid. , 226. 1 8 . George Santayana, The Sense (?f Beallty (Cal11bridge : MIT Press, 1 9 8 8) , 1 7- 1 8 . 1 9 · Dartnlouth College Library, Ms. Frost 928940 . I . 20. I agree with Willianl Pritchard's point that both "The Tuft of Flowers" and "Mowing" raise doubts or at least place linlits on the extent to which events in nature, in which hUl11ans are inextricable participants, confornl to the designs or aspirations of any individual or group of individuals (Pritchard, Frost: A Literary Life Reconsidered [New York : Oxford University Press, 1 9 84] , 2 5 ) . 2 I . See Denis Donoghue's essay o n Frost i n COllnoisseurs of Chaos (New York: Columbia University Press, 1 9 84) , 1 60-89. I) onoghue pushes the Darwinian implications of this poenl even farther: "The narrator has need and love on his side, hence he survives and nature blesses hinl as the best l11an. The tral11ps are unfit to survive because they have only their need, and the Darwinist la\v is that they should not survive . " I would add that this is what the narrator hopes for, but in the \vorld of the poenl the realms of work and play renlain separate, and both sides appear to be at a loss. 2 2 . Willianl janles, "The Moral Equivalent of War, " in Memories and Studies (New York : Longnlans, Green, 1 9 1 I ) , 276. 2 3 . Louis Mertins , Robert Frost: L[fe a1ld Talks- Walking (Nornlan: University of Oklahonla Press, 1 9(5), 3 9 R -99. 24. Gillian B eer, " I)arwin's l�eading and the Fictions of Developnlent, " in The Darwiniml Herita�r,ze, ed. David Kohn (Princeton: Prince,ton University Press, 1 9 8 5 ) , 566. 2 5 . Darwin, Voyage C!f the Beagle, 43 3 - 3 4 · 26. I differ slightly with George Levine's excellent critique o f the tendency t o regard Darwin's use of struggle to nlean literal battle: "Struggle and dependence are so closely interwoven that the inlage of war is entirely inappropriate : struggle in Darwin's sense has as nluch to do with successful procreation as \vith any battle" (Levine, Darwin and the lVovelists [Can1bridge : Harvard University Press, 1 9 8 8 ] , 1 03 ) . While Darwin certainly does discuss the way struggle l11eans noncon1petitive survival and dependence, he nev­ ertheless never abandons the idea of "the strong extirpating the weaker" as an irreducible phenol11enon and a "nlysterious fact" that precipitates change. He never abandons this sense, the social inlplications of which are underscored in his subtitle to On the Or(r,zin oj Species, "The Preservation of Favored Races . " The extent to which the ideas of race and species were intertwined and to \vhich racial warfare constituted part of the natural process cannot be eradicated fron1 a reading of l)arwin, even though Darwin did not present hil11self as a racial il11perialist. 27. Darwin, Descel1 t C!f A1al1 I 7 � L 2 8 . Ibid. , 1 66. 29. Stanley Burnsha\v, Robert Frost Himself (New York: George Braziller, 1 9 86) , 1 14-15. ,

Notes to Pages 1 2 5 -26

333

30. Robert Frost's talk originally presented at "The Future of Man , " a symposium sponsored by Joseph E. Seagram and Sons, Inc. , on the Dedication of its H eadquarters Building in New York at 3 7 5 Park Avenue, 29 September 1 9 5 9 . The manuscript is in the Dartmouth College Library (Ms. Frost 9 5 9 5 2 5 ) . I am grateful to Ashley Montagu , one of the participants , for providing nle with a copy of the full symposiunl proceedings and for accounts of his conversations with Frost during and after the event. 3 1 . A. Hunter Dupree, in God and Nature: Historical Essays on the Encounter between Christianity and Science, ed. David Lindberg and Ronald L. Numbers (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1 9 86) , 3 6 3 . 3 2 . Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species (Cambridge : Harvard University Press, 1 964) , 1 29-34. Gillian Beer discusses the importance of merging in Darwin's use of the tree, enconlpassing earlier mythic uses. His image supplants the teleological image of the chain of being (Beer, Darwin 5 Plots : Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot, and Nineteenth- Century Fiction [London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1 9 8 3 ] , 3 7 , 92-9 3 ) . 3 3 . Stephen Jay Gould, "Darwin's Untimely Burial, " i n Ever since Darwin (New York: W W Norton, 1 977) , 42: " I n nature, Darwinian evolution is also a response to changing environnlents. Now, the key point: certain morphological, physiological, and behavioral traits should be superior a priori designs for living in new environments . These traits confer fitness by an engineer's criterion of good design, not by the empirical fact of their survival and spread. " Gould is adamant, however, in denying that Darwin's sense of evolution was compatible with the Victorian ideology of progress: "Darwin did two very separate things : he convinced the scientific world that evolution had occurred and he proposed the theory of natural selection as its mechanism. I anl quite willing to admit that the COlnmon equation of evolution with progress made Darwin's first claim more palat­ able to his contemporaries. But Darwin failed in his second quest during his own life­ tinle . . . . Natural selection is a theory of local adaptation to changing environments. It proposes no perfecting principles, no guarantee of general improvenlent: in short, no reason for general approbriation in a political clinlate favoring innate progress in nature " (44 - 4 5 ) . Peter Bowler, i n The Non-Darwinian Revolution : Reinterpreting a Historical Myth (Bal­ timore : Johns Hopkins University Press, 1 9 8 8 ) , follows Gould in maintaining that Haekel's and Spencer's evolutionism must be strongly distinguished from Darwin's non­ developmental and nonrecapitulational theories of natural change. Both Gould and Bowler have met criticism by Robert J. Richards in The Meaning of Evolution (Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 1 992) , who claims that the separation of Darwin from evolutionists will not hold up after close examination of the historical development of their theories. Richards argues that Gould and Bowler have their ideological reasons for saving Darwin from the racisnl and progressivism of most nineteenth-century science. The controversy over Darwin's advocacy of progress will continue because of the ambigu­ ities of his rhetoric. Darwin's ideology is often ambiguous-believing in and skeptical of the possibilities of human progress, affirnling and denying the reality of hierarchy in nature. 3 4 . James George Frazer, The Golden Bough, abridged ed. (New York: Macnlillan, 1 922) , 1 .

334 3 5 . Robert Frost, "On Extravagance," in Robert Frost: Poetry and Prose, ed. Edward Connery Lathenl and Lawrance Thompson (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1 972) , 4 5 3 · 3 6 . Robert Frost, "The Figure a Poenl Makes, " in Complete Poems (New York : Henry Holt, 1 949) . 3 7 . Henri Bergson, Creative EvolutioH, trans . Arthur Mitchel (New York: Random House, 1 944) , 244-45 · 3 8 . Simone Weil, Oppression and Liberty (Anlherst: U niverstiy of Massachusetts Press) , 5 8 . 3 9 . Ibid., 8 3 · 40. Hans Jonas, The Phenomenon if Life: Toward a Philosophical Biology (New York: Dell, 1 966) , I O . 4 1 . Darwin, On the Origin of Species, 408 . 42 . "Education by Poetry, " i n Robert Frost: Poetry and Prose, 3 3 9 . 43 . Ibid. 44. John F. Lynen, The Pastoral Art ofRobert Frost (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1 964) , 29. According to Lynen, the two views of the wall "represent general attitudes toward life-the one a surrender to the natural forces which draw human beings together, the other, the conservatisnl which persists in keeping up the distinctions separating thenl . " Ironically, the building of the wall does bring both together. 4 5 . Interviews with Robert Frost, I 79. 46. ThomasJefferson to Peter Carr, I O August 1 7 87, in The Portable ThomasJifferson, ed. Merrill D. Peterson (New York: Penguin Books, 1 97 5 ) , 42 5 . 47. Thomas Jefferson to John Adalns, 2 8 October 1 8 1 3 , ibid . , 5 3 4 . 4 8 . William James, "Great Men and Their Environment," in The Will to Believe (New York : Dover Publications, 1 9 56) , 2 2 5 -26. The book was first published in 1 897, the year before Frost entered Harvard. Notes to Chapter 4

1 . Ezra Pound, "Modern Georgics , " Poetry 5 (Decenlber 1 9 1 4) : 1 27 - 3 0 . Without elaborating on his title, Pound C0111111el1ts on Frost's realism rather than his archaism: "Very well, then, Mr. Frost holds up a ll1irror to nature, not an oleograph." 2 . Anthony Low, The Georgie Revolu tion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1 9 8 5 ) , esp. chap. 4, "The New Science and the Georgie Revolution . " 3 . John T. Hiers, "Frost's Quarrel with Science and Technology, " Georgia Review 2 5 ( I 97 I ) : 1 9 3 : "Although Frost does not condell1n the overthrow of nature from a pantheistic point of view, he does realize the aesthetic uplift from an individual confronta­ tion with nature through p hysical labor and is offended by the reckless waste of technol­ ogy. Indeed, Lynen Inaintains that one basic tenet of Frost's regionalism may be 'to recapture that old sense of connection between 111an and his physical environment which is lacking in nlodern industrial society.' " Frost emphasizes that "waste was the essence of the sche111e" in both nature and hU111an technology, the latter an outgrowth of the former. His contelllpt for society does call for individual freedoll1 but one that cannot escape nature's chaos or its 1110nlentary instru111ents of control.

Notes to Pages I 5 0-64

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4 . Selected Prose of Robert Frost, ed. Hyde Cox and Edward Connery Lathem (New York: Collier Books, 1 968) , 40- 4 1 . 5 . Dartmouth College Library, Ms. Frost 00 1 729. 6 . Robert Frost, " Letter to The Amherst Student, " in Selected Prose of Robert Frost, 1 06 . 7. George Santayana, The Genteel Tradition : Nine Essays by George Santayana, ed. Douglas L . Wilson (Cambridge : Harvard University Press, 1 967) , 5 6 . 8 . H . G . Wells , "The Strange Orchid, " in Thirty Strange Stories (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1 897) , 8-9. 9 . Charles Darwin, The Various Contrivances by Which Orchids A re Fertilized by Insects (Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 1 9 8 4) , 2 2 8 . 1 0 . Ibid. , 2 8 4 . I I . T. H . Huxley, "Prolegomena, " i n Evolution and Ethics, ed. James Paradis and George C. Willianls (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1 9 8 9) , 73 . 1 2 . These orchids may also be a painfully ironic metaphor for the self-seeker's extinction. Oakes Ames, the preeminent American botanist and orchid expert, wrote that orchids become " decadent" when they have a lavish yield of seed and sparse distribution. He makes the analogy between flamboyance in orchids and flamboyance in art as signs of impending extinction: "Just as flamboyancy in art has in the struggle for existence marked the passing of a civilisation, so in the animal and vegetable kingdoms an excessive develop­ ment of iridescence and fantastic excrescences indicates types of organic development that precede decadence and extinction" (Ames , "Observations on the Capacity of Orchids to Survive in the Struggle for Existence," Orchid Review 30 [ 1 922] : 2 3 1 ) . 1 3 . John Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy (New York: Random House, 1 920) , I . 1 4 . Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species (Cambridge : Harvard University Press, 1 964) , 3 1 0- 1 I . 1 5 . Ralph Waldo Emerson, " Nature , " in Selections from Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Stephen E. Whicher (Cambridge : Riverside Press, 1 9 5 7) , 3 3 . 1 6 . Sydney Lea, " From Sublime to Rigmarole: Relations of Frost to Wordsworth, " Studies i n Romanticism 1 9 (spring 1 9 80) : 94. 17. Paul Ricoeur describes how the genealogical method was appropriated by Freud and Nietszche to demonstrate the low or enlpty basis of culture and religion: Nietzsche and Freud have developed in a parallel manner a type of reductive her­ meneutics which is at the same time a kind of philology and a kind of genealogy. It is a philology, an exegesis, an interpretation insofar as the text of our consciousness can be compared to a palimpsest, under the surface of which another text has been written. The task of this special exegesis is to decipher this text. But this hermeneu­ tics is at the same time a genealogy, since the distortion of the text emerges from the conflict of forces, of drives and counterdrives, whose origin must be brought to light. I t is evident that this is not a genealogy in the ordinary chronological sense of the word. For even when it refers to historical stages, this genesis does not lead back to a tenlporal origin but rather to a possible source or, better, an empty place from which ethical and religious values emerge. The genealogical task is to reveal the emptiness of this source. (Paul Ricoeur, The Conflict of Interpretations [Evanston, Ill . : North­ western University Press, 1 9741 , 442 - 4 3 )

Notes to Pa,szes 1 66- 91 1 8 . Gaston Bachelard, 711e Psych oanalysis C?f Fire, trans. Alan C. M. Ross (Boston: Beacon Press, 1 (64) , 1 3 . 1 9 . Hiers, "Frost's Quarrel with Science and Technology, " 1 97 . 20. George Monteiro, Rohert Frost alui the New En�land Renaissance (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1 ( 8 8 ) , 6 1 . 2 1 . Henry David Thoreau, Walden (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1 (7 3 ) , 1 47-50. 2 2 . Selections Jrom Emerson, 1 <)7. 23. Robert Frost, "Of Ax Handles and Guide Book Poetry, " in Interviews with Rohert Frost, ed. Edward Connery Lathenl (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1 966) , 1 9 · 24. Richard Poirier, Robert Frost: The VV(JYk C?f Kllowin� (New York: Oxford University Press, 1 977) , 280. 25. Charles Darwin, AutobioJ?raphy (Ne\v York: Harcourt, Brace, 1 ( 5 8 ) , 43 . 26. Darwin, 01"1 the Orig in C?f Species, 486. 27. Plato, Timaeus, trans. Benj anlin Jowett, in Plato 's Dialogues, ed. F. M. Cornford (Princeton: Princeton University Press, I <)6 I ) , I 1 64 - I 1 6 5 . 2 8 . Charles Darwin, The Descent C?fMall and Selection i n Relation to Sex ( 1 87 1 ; reprint, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1 ( 8 1 ) , 2 3 <) . 29. Huxley, "Prolegomena , " 8 9 . 30. Emerson, "Circles," i n Selections Jronz Emerson, 1 74. 3 1 . Ibid . , 1 76 . Notes t o Chapter 5

I . Joseph Brodsky, Less thall One (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1 9 86) , 1 00. 2 . Gershom Scholem, Kabbalah (New York: New American Library, 1 974) , 1 5 7. 3. Katherine Kearns, Robert Frost and a Poetics oj Desire (Canlbridge : Cambridge University Press, 1 (94) , 2 . 4 . Charles Darwin, The Descent C?f Alan and Selection i n Relation to Sex ( 1 8 7 1 ; reprint, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1 98 I ) , 3 5 6. 5. Ibid . , 9 8 . 6 . Robert Frost, "The Constant Synlbol," i n Selected Prose C?f Robert Frost, ed. Hyde Cox and Edward Connery Lathenl (New York: Collier Books, 1 (68) , 24. 7. Robert Frost, Selected Letters C?f Robert Frost, ed. Lawrance Thompson (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1 (64) , 462 . 8 . The Faerie Queen T 5 , in Ednlund Spenser, Poetical Works, ed. J. C. Smith and E . d e Selincourt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1 (79) , 400. 9. Frost gave a talk titled "Metaphors " at Bryn Mawr College on 1 5 January 1 926. Havelock Ellis, Lucretius, Freud, and Bergson were the subj ects, according to a record of the talk, though no text exists . See Lawrance Thonlpson, Robert Frost: The Years C?f Triumph (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1 (70) , 624. 10. Havelock Ellis, The Dance (�f Ltfe (New York: Modern Library, 1 (29) , 1 2 3 . I ! . Darwin, Descent (?f Man . 2 : 204. 1 2 . Dartnlouth College Library, Ms. Frost <)28940. 1 . 1 3 . Froln a section of a draft of "The Future of Man" (essay) in the Dartmouth

Notes to Pages 1 9 1 -98

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College Library (Ms . Frost 9 5 9 5 2 5 ) . Frost stresses the problems of eugenics and artificial insemination in the draft, which he subsequently left out of the talk he gave at the Seagram dedication in 1 9 5 9 . 1 4 · Selected Letters if Robert Frost, 466. 1 5 · Laurence J. Sasso, " Robert Frost: Love's Question , " New England Quarterly 42 ( 1 969) : 9 5 . Sasso points to the ways in which Frost's lovers are "wary, skeptical competi­ tors . " The struggle in Frost is not for or with other possible lovers but, rather, in the choices and sacrifices each sex lllakes in order to make domestic order possible. 1 6. Darwin , Descen t of Man, 2 : 3 72 . 1 7 . Ibid. , 2 : 3 26-27. 1 8 . Eliza Burt Galllble, The Evolution of Woman (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1 894) , 399. Gamble revised the work, which was reissued as The Sexes in Science and History (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1 9 1 6) . 1 9 . Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Women and Economics ( 1 8 9 8 ; reprint, New York: Harper and Row, 1 966) , 86. 20. Robert H . Swennes, "Man and Wife: The Dialogue of Contraries in Robert Frost's Poetry, " A merican Literature 42 ( 1 97 1 ) : 3 6 3 -72. I agree with Swennes's observation that each sex adopts postures in order to protect itself. 2 1 . Robert Frost, " New Hampshire," 1. 1 64, in New Hampshire (New York: Henry Holt, 1 92 3 ) . The subtitle of the book was "A Poem with Notes and Grace Notes . " 2 2 . Robert D . Richardson, Thoreau : A Life if the Mind (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1 986) , 3 7 3 - 8 4 . Richardson details Thoreau's profound interest in Dar­ win's works, particularly The Voyage of the Beagle and On the Orig in if Species. While Frost lllight not have known Thoreau's later writings, his own "wild fruits" analogy reveals a shared interest in Darwin. 2 3 . Katherine Kearns, " ' The Place Is the Asylum': Women and Nature in Robert Frost's Poetry, " American Literature 59 ( 1 987) : 203 . Kearns argues that in Frost there is a "metamorphosis of woman into tree," which "is far more powerful than mere silllile, taking his femininizing of nature beyond metaphor to myth. " I agree that "Birches , " "In Hardwood Groves," " Paul's Wife," and "Wild Grapes" are examples of this "mythology, " though I believe the source i s i n part Darwin's powerful image o f the Tree o f Life a s a modern complement to Ovid's visions of arboreal punishlllent and transformation. The myth also encompasses both genders. 24. Bram Dij kstra, Idols of Perversity: Fantasies if Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siecle Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1 9 86) , 1 67 : "The equation of the intellectual capacities of women and children was, of course, a simple continuation of the fetishized idealization of woman-equivalent, in her innocence, to the child-which had been perpetrated by such mid-century ideologues as Michelet and Comte. " Cynthia Eagle Russett, Sexual Science: The Victorian Construction if Womanhood (Cam­ bridge : Harvard University Press, 1 9 89) , 20 1 : "Scientists became prophets of an updated Calvinism, ordaining sOllle-the white, the civilized, the European, the lllale-to evolu­ tionary maturity, and others-the dark-skinned, the primitive, the female-to perpetual infancy. " 2 5 . A Eugenics Catechism (New Haven: American Eugenics Society, 1 926) , 2- 3 , 1 0 . This i s cited i n Daniel J . Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1 98 5 ) , 6 1 .

26. See Robert Langbaum's essay "Freud and Sociobiology, " in The Wordfrom Below (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1 9 8 5) , 1 5 . Langbaum is bemused by the fact that Fliess and Freud "took seriously Darvvin's tantalizing suggestion that human beings are descended from a bisexual, tide-d\velling nlarine aninlal whose feeding and reproductive habits depended on changes of tides and nloon. (What a poem on life's rhythms might be made out of that suggestion!)" 2 7 · Darwin, Descent if Man, 207· 2 8 . Misia Landau , "Hunlan Evolution as Narrative," American Scientist 7 2 ( 1 984) : 262-6 8 . 2 9 . For a full account o f the ronlantic origin and persistence o f the idea o f ontogeny

recapitulating phylogeny, see Stephen Jay Gould, Ontogeny and Phylogeny (Cambridge : Harvard University Press, 1 977) , 1 5 5 . 3 0 . Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation 0..( Dreams, trans. James Strachey (New York: Avon Books, 1 96 5 ) , 647 . 3 I . See Robert Langbaul11's conlnlent on the Darwinian influence on Freud's view that thinking occurs at nlany levels of consciousness : Freud "confirnled and elaborated through analysis the romantic intuition and Darwin's suggestion that there is no clear line between thinking and non-thinking. Once we possess the notion of unconscious thought, \ve can understand that we are thinking even when we suppose we are not thinking­ when we dream, feel an enlotion, or receive sensations-and that some mode of thought goes on even in the lowest organisnls, even in single cells which seenl to 'know' what to do. Darwin demonstrates how tenuous is the line between what we call 'instinct' and what we call thought" (" Freud and Sociobiology, " 9) . 3 2 . Dartnlouth College Library, Ms. Frost 00 1 729. 3 3 . See Elaine Barry's discussion of " M aple," i n

Robert Frost on Writing,

ed. Elaine

Barry (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1 97 3 ) , 29-3 I . Barry concludes that the poem does draw on Emersonian thenles but that fresh correspondences do not quite yield nleaning in the realm of ongoing experience: "If Frost here seenlS in the realm of I . A. Richards and Wittgenstein, this does not necessarily mean that he had read either one of them. His puzzling about the nature of language, and the relation of , Nature' to language, goes back rather to Enlerson, but the nature of his preoccupations here places him in the same arena as sonle of the nl0re sophisticated critical theorists of the twentieth century. " I agree with Barry about Frost's departure fronl Emerson and suggest that his nominalism derives from the elusive notions of nature, chance, and consciousness that developed fronl late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century natural science. 34. See Daniel Hoffillan's discussion of "Paul's Wife," in Paul Bunyan: Last if the Frontier Dem(�ods (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1 9 8 3 ) , 1 2 8 - 3 2 . According to Hoffnlan, Frost "refashions a popular legend to restate Frost's most constant theme-the sanctity, dignity, and inviolability of the individual . " I would add that Frost's sense of individualism veers frol11 ragged to ruthless. Hoffnlan also points out correctly that, while " Frost's wry farmer nlay really represent New Hanlpshire character, it is probably true that they are spokesnlen for a view of hunlan existence everywhere . " He adds that Frost's source for the poem was probably not a New England writer but a western collection by I da Virginia Turney entitled Paul BU1lyan Comes West, which contains one of the rare nlentions of Bunyan's \vife and says that he found her in the heart of a great white pine.

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3 5 . For the most thorough discussion of Wallace's shift to spiritualism to explain evolution, see Malcolm Cotder, "Alfred Russel Wallace, the Origin of Man, and Spir­ itualism," Isis 65 ( 1 974) : 1 4 5-92. 3 6 . Anne Braude, Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women 5 Rights in Nineteenth­ Century America (Boston: Beacon Press, 1 9 8 9) , 80: "Spiritualists distinguished themselves among woman's rights activists by their radicalism, their association with anarchism and socialism, and their critiques of marriage, which earned them all the label ' free lover.' " Frost's "witch" reflects these characteristics . Unlike Braude, who saw spiritualism as a positive, liberating force in the woman's movement, Frost appears to expose its pretense of piety and the anxieties it masks . 3 7 . Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics, trans. David Ross (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1 99 1 ) , 2 4 5 . 3 8 . Robert Frost, Th e Letters of Robert Frost t o Louis Un term eyer, e d . Louis Unter­ meyer (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1 96 3 ) , 1 02 - 3 . 3 9 . Sigmund Freud, "Reflections upon War and Death , " i n Character and Culture, ed. Philip Rieff (New York: Macmillan, 1 96 3 ) , 1 2 3 . 40. WilliamJames, Psychology, American Science Series, Briefer Course (New York: Henry Holt, 1 892) , 2 7 5 . 4 1 . Richard Poirier, Robert Frost: Th e Work of Knowing (New York: Oxford Univer­ sity Press, 1 977) , 1 3 2 . 42. S0ren Kierkegaard, Th e Sickness unto Death, trans . Walter Lowrie (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1 974) , 4 5 . 43 . Freud, "Reflections upon War and Death , " 1 2 3 . 44. Elizabeth B . Keeney provides an excellent discussion o f the relationship of botany and gender roles in The Botanizers : Amateur Scientists in Nineteenth- Century A merica (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1 992) , esp. chaps. 5 -6. Keeney describes how botany became "an opportunity to extend women's sphere subtly without directly challenging dominant notions of gentility" (82) . It also became an activity "widely popular throu ghout the nineteenth c entury by s atistyin g both the traditional

attraction of work and the new interest in play" (84) . "A Servant to Servants" subverts genteel ideas of women's self-improvement as well as the hope that botany would confirnl natural theology's belief in a good, designing God. 4 5 . Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture, 1 830- 1 980 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1 9 8 5 ) , 1 0 8 . 4 6 . Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics, 1 07. 47. See Robert Frost: Farm-Poultryman, ed. Edward Connery Lathem and Lawrance Thompson (Hanover, N.H . : Dartnlouth Publications, 1 96 3 ) , eleven stories Frost pub­ lished in Farm-Poultry and Eastern Poultryman. 48. Stanley L . Jaki, The Purpose of It All (Washington, D. C.: Regnery Gateway, 1 990) , 8 . Jaki also discusses Herbert Spenc er's pronouncements that the Crystal Palace exhibition represented proof that "progress is not an accident but a necessity. " See also o. B. Hardison's treatment of the Crystal Palace in Disappearing through the Skylight (New York: Viking, 1 9 89) , 87-89. Particularly noteworthy is his discussion of the way the palace became a religious icon. He cites Prince Albert's view that it was a " cathedral celebrating the goodness of the Creator, " who develops in man " the faculties of inven­ tion" ( 8 8 ) .

3 40 49. Charles Darwin, 011 the Onjzil1 (?F Species, 486. 50. Josiah Royce, "The Rise of the Doctrine of Evolution," in The Sp irit oj Modern Philosophy (New York: l)over Publications , 1 9 8 3 ) , 2 8 3 . The book is a collection of Royce's introductory lectures on philosophy given at Harvard and first published in 1 8 92. 5 I . Henry David Thoreau, filalden (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1 97 3 ) , 5 2 . Royce, Spirit oj A10denl Philosophy, 2 8 4 . Notes t o Chapter 6

I . Thonlas Mc Clanahan, "Frost's Theodicy, " in Frost: Centennial Essays II, ed. Jac Tharpe Oackson : University of Mississippi Press, 1 976) , 1 1 2 . 2 . Frost's address was given a t a 1 9 5 9 synlposiunl, "The Future of Man," sponsored by the SeagraIll Corporation . The ful l text is given in chapter 3 of this study. 3 . Willianl Janles, The �7arieties oj RelzRious Experience ( 1 902 ; reprint, New York : Viking Penguin, 1 9 8 5 ) , 492-9 5 . 4 . Frederick Willianl Conner, Cosm ic Optimism : A Study oj the Interpretation if Evolu tion by A merican Poets Jrom Emersol1 to Robinson (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1 949) , 3 4 3 - 49. Conner gives relatively little attention to Frost prinlarily because he sees him as diverging significantly fronl the Enlersonian view of the identity of the hunlan nlind and nature and the linlitless potential for growth, a skepticisnl that he sees correctly as an outgrowth of Darwinian anlbiguities . Conner observes that Frost is unwilling to accept "rational evolutionisIll" (348) . 5 . Ralph Waldo Enlerson, "Fate, " in Selectiol1s Jrom Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Stephen E. Whicher (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1 9 5 7) , 269. 6. Robert Frost, Selected Prose C?f Robert Frost, ed. Hyde Cox and Edward Connery Lathenl (New York: Collier Books, 1 968) , 1 1 2 . 7 . Charles Darwin, The AutobioJ?raphy if Charles Darwin, ed. Nora Barlow (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1 9 5 8) , 64· 8. Ibid . , 66. 9 . Robert Frost, "Exerpt fronl an Address , " in Robert Frost: Poetry and Prose, ed. Edward Connery Lathenl and Lawrance Thompson (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1 972) , 42 I . 1 0 . Charles Darwin, 011 the Ori>?ill of Species (Canlbridge : Harvard University Press, 1 964) , 4 8 9 · I I . More Letters of Charles Darwin : A Record oj His Work i n a Series oj Hitherto Ul'lpublished Letters, 2 vols . , ed. Francis Darwin and A. C. Steward (London: ]. Murray, 1 90 3 ) , 1 : 94· 1 2 . Clark Griffith, in "Robert Frost and the Anlerican View of Nature" (American Quarterly 20 [ 1 968] : 22-2 5) , reviews Frost's link to Puritan thought in the way nature could be regarded as a place of divine instruction: "And precisely because nature was so overpoweringly real to hinl, the Puritan canle to regard it as sonlething more than a force to be reckoned with. He caIne to think of Nature as his teacher, fraught with lessons \vhich had been sent by God for nlan's profit and instruction . " He points out accurately that Frost regarded nature as "the aIllbiguous teach er. "

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Mason Lowance, i n The LanRuaRe if Canaan: Metaphor and Symbol in New EnRland from the Puritans to the Transcendentalists (Cambridge : Harvard University Press, 1 9 80) , asserts: "Clearly Robert Frost shared the Puritan penchant for regarding nature to b e a veil of the spirit, as his narrative poem ' After Apple-Picking' suggests . " But Lowance goes on to note, in an observation that is something of an understatement: "Like many modern writers , Frost was not a Puritan typologist in the strict sense. He is coy and timid in some of his own spiritualizing of nature, and he shies away from doctrinal allegorizing" (8) . 1 3 . Philip F. Gura, The Wisdom if Words: LanJ?uaJ?e, TheoloJZy, and Literature in the New EllJ?land Renaissance (Middletown, Conn . : Wesleyan University Press, 1 9 8 1 ) , 1 70. 1 4. Perry Miller, Errand into the Wilderness (Calllbridge: Harvard University Press, 1 9 5 6) , 2 3 5 . I 5 . For the most complete treatlllent o fthe response o fAmerican Protestant theolo­ gians and intellectuals, see Jon H. Roberts , Darwinism and the Divine in America : Protestant Intellectuals and OrJ?anic Evolution, 1 859- 1 900 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1 9 8 8 ) . According to Roberts, "Most American Protestant intellectuals assumed that scientists were the most reliable interpreters of natural history. These thinkers participated in the growing tendency of educated All1ericans to confer cultural authority on 'experts'; if they remained convinced that nature was a revelation of God, they were equally convinced that scientists were its most able expositors" ( 1 8 8 ) . 1 6 . Frost, " Excerpt from a n Address , " 420-2 I . 1 7 . Edward Connery Lathem, ed. , Interviews with Robert Frost (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston , 1 966) , 266. 1 8 . Yvor Winters called Frost's faith "spiritual drifting." Winters is right in asserting that Frost retains some of the trappings of E mersonian romantic pantheism with little of the belief " In Frost . . . we find a disciple [of Emerson] without Emerson's religious conviction: Frost believes in the rightness of the impulse, but does not discuss the pan­ theistic doctrine which would give authority to the impulse; as a result of his belief in impulse, he is of necessity a relativist, but his relativism, apparently since it derives from no intense religious conviction, has resulted mainly in ill-natured eccentricity and increasing ll1elancholy" (Winters, "Robert Frost, or the Spiritual Drifter as Poet," in The Function of Criticism: Problems arld Exercises [Denver: Alan Swallow, 1 9 5 7] , 1 62) . Frost's sense of the impulse COll1es from biological materialism. He at once admires the power of biology and is pained by its soul-corroding implications. Unlike Winters, I think Frost's poetry is hardly " ill-natured eccentricity" but, rather, represents his wrestling with the void left by romantic pantheism. He depicts the consequences and irony of the romantic escape from authority as it becomes ensnared by individualism and materialism. His courage is his unwillingness to assert a facile optimism. 1 9 . Herbert Butterfield, The OriRins if Modern Science (New York: Free Press, 1 96 5 ) , 225 · 20. John Fiske, ThrouRh Nature to God (Boston: Houghton Miffiin, 1 899) , 1 1 4 . 2 I . Thomas Malthus, A n Essay on the Principle if Population ( 1 79 8 ) , e d . Philip Apple­ lllan (New York: W W Norton, 1 976) , 1 1 7- 1 8 . 2 2 . Robert Frost to Susan Hayes Ward, 1 2 January 1 907, i n Selected Letters if Robert Frost, ed. Lawrance Thompson (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1 964) , 3 8 . 2 3 . Lawrance Thompson, Robert Frost: The Years if Triumph (New York : Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1 970) , 656.

3 42

Notes to Paj?es 25 9- 75

24. Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, trans . E . F. J. Payne (Indian Hills, Colo. : Falcon's Wing Press, 1 9 5 8 ) , 2 : 5 80-8 1 . 2 5 . Robert Pack, The Long View: Essays on the Discipline if Hope and Poetic Craft (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1 99 1 ) , 20 1 . 26. Robert Frost, "Letter to The Amherst Student, " in Robert Frost: Poetry and Prose, 343 · 2 7 . Ibid. 2 8 . Harold Fisch, Poetry with a Purpose: Biblical Poetics and Interpretation (Bloomington : Indiana University Press, 1 9 8 8 ) , 3 8 . 29. Dartnlouth College Library, Ms. Frost 00 1 729. 3 0 . Robert Frost to W P Eaton ( 1 9 1 5 ) , in Selected Letters if Robert Frost, 1 8 2 . 3 1 . Henry David Thoreau, Waldcn (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1 97 3 ) , 236. 3 2 . Ralph Waldo Enlerson, "Experience," i n Selections from Ralph 'Waldo Emerson, 268-69. 3 3 . Thoreau, "Walking," in Great Short Works of Henry David Thoreau, ed. Wendell Glick (New York: Harper and Row, 1 9 82) , 3 1 2 . 3 4 . Charles Darwin, Thc Voya<�e l?f the Beagle (New York: Anchor Books, 1 962) , 242. 3 5 . Ibid . , 302- 3 · 3 6 . F. Cudworth Flint, " A Few Touches o f Frost, " Sou thern Review, n.s. 2 , no. 4 (October 1 966) : 845 . 3 7 . Emerson, "The Poet," in Selections from Ralph Waldo Emerson, 230. 3 8 . George Santayana, Three Philosophical Poets ( 1 9 1 0; reprint, New York: Double­ day, 1 9 5 4) 3 8 . 3 9 . Schopenhauer, World as Will and Represelltation, 1 : 2 5 3 . 40. Frank Lentricchia, "Lyric in the Culture o f Capitalisln , " American Literary His­ tory (spring 1 9 89) : 8 5 . 4 1 . Max Oelschlaeger, The Idea l?f Wilderness (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1 99 1 ) , 1 67 . 42 . Ibid . , 1 6 5 . 43 . Thoreau , "Walking," 3 04· 44. Ibid. , 3 0 5 . 4 5 . Ibid . , 303 . 46. See Edward Connery Lathenl's editorial note on the history of this change in his edition of The Poetry of Robert Frost (New York: Henry Holt, 1 969) , 5 7 3 . 47. Dov Ospovat, The Development l?fDarwi1l 5 Theory (Cambridge : Cambridge Uni­ versity Press, 1 9 8 1 ) , 1 9 1 -209. Ospovat discusses the way Darwin's theory changed from one enlphasizing diversity to one enlphasizing divergence and difference through isolation. 48 . Robert Frost, "On Enlerson," in Selected Prose of Robert Frost, 1 1 2- 1 8 . 49. See George Knox, "A Back\vard Motion toward the Source, " Personalist 47 ( 1 966) : 3 6 5 - 8 1 . Knox sees "Directive " as participating in the same myth of return that informs Eliot's Four Quartets. I see the poenl as a parody of Eliot, not an affirmation. I adnlit, however, that Frost felt the desire for a return to origins, even if he felt that its fulfillment was inlpossible. 50. See S. P C. Duvall, "Robert Frost's , [)irective' out of Walden, " American Litera-

Notes to Pages 275-80

343

ture 3 1 (January 1 960) : 482- 8 8 . Monteiro also points t o this "source" in Robert Frost and the New England Renaissance. 5 I . Henry David Thoreau, Walden (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1 97 3 ) , 263 . See also the discussion o f Frost's poem "The Generations of Men" i n the previous chapter. 5 2 . Sydney Lea, " From Sublime to Rigmarole : Relations of Frost to Wordsworth , " Studies i n Romanticism 1 9, n o . 1 ( 1 980) , 8 3 - 1 08 . L e a argues powerfully that Frost departs from Wordsworth's faith in the natural and the ritual to arrive at the spiritual in Michael. I n "Directive" ritual has degenerated into whimsical make-believe, the scriptural allusions at the end are deliberately near-facetious, the Grail of Romance is a shattered plaything, and other romance or supernatural elements-the "eye pairs out of forty firkins," for example-are dismissed as upstarts. 5 3 · For a dissenting view, see Arthur M . Sampley, "The Myth and the Quest: The Stature of Robert Frost, " South Atlantic Quarterly 70 ( 1 97 1 ) : 287-98. Sampley argues that Frost was following both Yeats and Eliot in creating a lasting myth in an uncertain universe-a myth of return to New England life. I argue that Frost is distinctly different from Yeats and Eliot in not proposing any myth but the antimythological myth of a descent into matter. 54. George Santayana, The Sense of Beauty (Cambridge : MIT Press, 1 9 8 8 ) , 1 1 6. 5 5 . Fiske, Through Nature to God, 1 9 1 . 5 6 . William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York: Viking Penguin, 1 985), 343 · 5 7 . William James, " Reflex Action and Theism," in The Will to Believe (New York: Dover Publications, 1 9 5 6) , 1 3 2 . James attempts to justify a distinction between man and other creatures on the basis of an excess of higher mental qualities: "Man's chief difference from the brutes lies in the exuberant excess of his subjective propensities,-his pre­ eminence over them simply and solely in the number and in the fantastic and unnecessary character of his wants , physical, moral, and intellectual" ( 1 3 I ) . James's attempt to recon­ cile evolutionary theory and religion receives detailed treatment in Robert J. Richards, Darwin and the Emergence of Evolutionary Theories ofMind and Behavior (Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 1 98 7) , 440- 50. 5 8 . Dartmouth College Library, Ms. Frost 00 1 27 5 . 59. Ibid. 60. Robert Frost, "The Figure a Poem Makes, " preface to Complete Poems (New York: Henry Holt, 1 949) : " [A poem] begins in delight, it inclines to the impulse, it assumes direction with the first line laid down, it runs a course of lucky events, and ends in a clarification of life-not necessarily a great clarification, such as sects and cults are founded on, but in a momentary stay against confusion. " Frost repeatedly conveys an antiteleological view of poetic form and subj ect matter; one "clarification" supplants or supports another without conclusion. 6 1 . Robert Frost, "Education by Poetry, " in Selected Prose of Robert Frost, 40. 62 . Darwin , Autobiography, 86. 63. Frost, "Education by Poetry, " 4 1 . 64· Ibid. , 3 8 - 3 9 . 6 5 · Ibid. , 4 5 ·

3 44 66. Fronl a talk Frost gave at Bread Loaf, 2 7 July 1 96o, in Reginald Cook, Robert Frost: A Livil1<-� Voice (Anlherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1 974) , 1 7 1 . 67. Darwin, 011 the Or(f?in oj Species, 490; enlphasis nline. 6 8 . Nornlan T. Burns, Christian Mortalism Jrom Tyndale to Milton (Cambridge : Har­ vard University Press, 1 972) , 1 4 8-9 1 . Milton believed that "spirit" literally meant wind that was breathed originally into Adanl, not a preexisting soul. According to Milton, the soul died with the body and was resurrected at the Last Judgnlent. The tradition of lTIortalisln persisted in Puritan thought in Anlerica in various fornls. See also Keith W F. Stavely, Puritan Le,Racies : Paradise Lost and the New El1,Rland Tradition, 1 630- 1 890 (Ithaca, N.Y. : Cornell University Press, 1 9 8 7) , 2 5 8 . Other Frost poenls relevant to this issue include "The Ainl Was Song" and " Innate Heliunl . " 6 9 . Charles Berger, "Echoing Eden: Frost and Origins, " i n Robert Frost, e d . Harold Bloonl (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1 9 86) , 1 5 2- 5 3 . Berger makes the valuable point that the poenl wavers in its sense of loss for an unrecoverable moment and its hUlnorous distance fronl belief in origins . I do not agree with Berger's assertion that the poenl is overtly about entropy; rather, it describes a myth of displaced consciousness against the background of conlpeting stories of origin. 70. Josiah Royce, The Spirit (?f J.\1oderll Philosophy (New York: Dover Publications, 1 9 8 3 ) , 2 7 5 . This excerpt is fronl Lecture 9 , "The Rise of the Doctrine of Evolution . " 7 1 . Darwin, Autobio,Rraphy, 87. 72. Jon H . Roberts, Darwinism and the Divine in America: Protestant Intellectuals and O��al1ic Evolution, 1 859- 1 900 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1 9 8 8) . Roberts argues that the scientific acceptance of evolutionary theory assaulted the foundations of Christianity, forcing Protestant thinkers into a sharp division between those who accepted it as part of religion and those who rej e cted it cOlnpletely.

73 . Charles Darwin, The Formation (if Vc,Retable Mould, throu,Rh the Action of Worms (Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 1 9 82), 3 1 3 . 74. Maurice Maeterlinck, The Life �f the Bee, trans. Alfred Sutro (New York: Blue Ribbon Books, I 90 1 ) , 44. 7 5 . Darwin, Voya,Re if the Beagle, 29· 76. Willianl Blake, The Marria,Re �fHeavell and Hell, in The Complete Poetry and Prose (if Willimn Blake, ed. David V Erdlnan, with conunentary by Harold Bloom (New York: Anchor Books, I 98 2) , 3 3 . 77. Paradise Lost 4:449-77, in John Milton Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (Indianapolis : Bobbs-Merrill, I 9 5 7) , 2 8 9 . 7 8 . Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant, Robert Frost: The Trial b y Existence (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston , I 960) , 309. 79. Francis Bacon, "The Masculine Birth of Tinle," in The Philosophy if Francis Bacon, trans. Benj anlin Farrington (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1 964) , 6072. 80. Richard Poirier, Robert Frost: The Work if Knowing (New York: Oxford University Press, I 977) , xi. 8 1 . Alfred North Whitehead, The FU llction �f Reason (Boston: Beacon Press, I 9 5 8 ) , " Introductory Sunllnary. " This exalnple does not show that Frost influenced Whitehead; it provides an example of the philosophic concerns and nletaphors current at the tinle.

Notes to Pages 297- 3 I 3

345

8 2 . Arthur Eddington, The Nature �f the Physical World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1 92 8 ) , 86. 8 3 . Lawrance Thompson, Robert Frost: The Early Years (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1 966) , 3 8 1 . Thompson interprets the poem through Fred's speech as a Bergsonian allegory. In Robert Frost: The Work of Knowing, Poirier criticizes the poem as a complacent appropriation of Bergson (22 3 ) . 8 4 . Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans . Arthur Mitchell (New York: Henry Holt, 1 9 1 I ) , 2 5 0 . 8 5 . Ibid. , 2 3 7 . 86. Henry Adams, The Tendency if History (New York: Macmillan, 1 9 1 9) ; White­ head, Function of Reason. 8 7 . AdarTIs, Tendency of History, 76. 8 8 . Robert Frost, "The Poetry of Amy Lowell , " in Robert Frost on Writing, ed. Elaine Barry (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1 97 3 ) , 1 3 6 . 8 9 . Thompson, Robert Frost: The Years if Triumph, 292 . 90. Whitehead, Function if Reason, 6 5 · 9 1 . Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (New York : Macmillan, 1 92 5 ) , 1 92 . Notes t o Epilogue

I .

Robert Frost, "The 'Paris Review' Interview" ( 1 960) , in Interviews with Robert Frost, ed. Edward Connery Lathem (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1 966) , 2 3 I . 2 . Richard Proctor, Our Place among the InJinities (New York: D. Appleton, 1 8 76) , 5-6. 3· Ibid., 34· 4· Ibid . , 3 8 - 3 9 . 5 . Robert Frost, " Accidentally on Purpose , " In the ClearinJ! (New York : Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1 962) , 3 4 . 6. Essay o n Man, "Epistle I I , " 3 1 - 3 4 , in Alexander Pope Selected Poetry and Prose, ed. William K. Winlsatt (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1 972) , 203 . 7. Johann Huizinga, "The Task of Cultural History, " in Men and Ideas (New York : Meridian Books, 1 9 59) , 3 5 . 8 . Ibid. , 3 6 . 9. Charles Darwin, The Power if Movement i n Plants, assisted b y Francis Darwin (New York: D. Appleton, 1 896) , 5 72-73 . 1 0 . Robert Frost, "On a Passage in Paradise Lost: A Letter, " in Robert Frost: Selected Poetry and Prose, 3 9 1 . I I . See Philip F. Gura's discussion ofEnlerson's version ofJacob's ladder as the poet's nleans of ascending through nature to God: "When man reads the true poet's works, Emerson believes, he finds himself on a version ofJacob's ladder, the rungs of which are assembled from the world's natural facts and by which he is to climb to view the world of the spirit" ( The Wisdom of Words [Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1 9 8 1 ] , 1 02) . If Emerson's symbols are fluxional, it is clear that their use in Frost never reaches a view of spirit but, rather, breaks down into materiality and doubt.

Notcs to PaRes 3 13- 1 6 I 2 . Sharon Cameron, Lyric Time (Baltilllore: Johns Hopkins University Press, I 979) , 1 20 . I 3 . Northrop Frye, Myth and Metaphor, ed. Robert C . Denham (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, I 990) , I 7 . I 4 . John Fiske, ThrouRh Nature to God (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, I 899) , 6 5 -66. This work was published during the first year of Frost's study at Harvard. 1 5 . Charles Darwin , On the OriRin of Species (Cambridge : Harvard U niversity Press, 1 964) , 8 3 - 84 ·

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Bi hIi(�{!rapll y The Tendency C!f History. N e\v York : MaClnillan, I 9 I 9. Allen, Grant. Colin Clout�, Calendar: A Record (�f a Summer, April- October. London: Chatto and Windus, 1 8 8 3 . Alter, Robert. The A rt C!f Biblical Poetry. N e\v York: Basic Books, 1 986. Alter, Robert, and Frank Kernlode, eds . The Literary Gu ide to the Bible. Canlbridge : Harvard University Press, I 9 87. Appleman, Philip, Willianl A. Madden, and Michael Wolff, eds . 1 859: EnterinR an ARe C!f Crisis. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, I 9 59. Argyll, the [Eighth] Duke of. The Philosophy (�f Beli�{,- or, Law in Christian TheoloRY. London: ]. Murray, 1 896. Auden, W. H. Secondary Worlds. London: Faber and Faber, 1 96 8 . Auerbach, Eric. Alim es is, translated by Willard Trask. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1 96 8 . Bachelard, Gaston. The Psychoanalysis (�f Fire. Boston: Beacon Press, 1 964. Bacon, Francis. The Philosophy C!f Francis Bacon, translated by Benj anlin Farrington. Liver­ pool: Liverpool University Press, I 964. Bagby, George. Robert Frost and the Book C!f ..i\Jatllre. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, I 993 . Barry, Elaine, ed. Robert Frost 011 Writill<{!. New Brunswick, N.] . : Rutgers University Press, 1 97 3 · Beer, Gillian. Darwin �, Plots : Evolutionary lVarrative in Darwin, GeorRe Eliot, and Nineteen thCentury Fiction . London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1 9 8 3 . Berdayev, Nicolas . The Meallill<� C!f History, translated by George Reavey. London: Centen­ ary Press, 1 9 3 6 . Berger, Charles. "Echoing Eden: Frost and Origins , " i n Robert Frost, edited by Harold Bloon1. New York: C helsea House, 1 9 8 6 . Bergson, Henri. Creative Evolution, translated by Arthur Mitchell. N e w York: Henry Holt, 1 9 1 I . Blake, Willianl. The Complete Poetry and Prose, edited by David V Erdman, with a com­ mentary by Harold Bloon1. New York: Anchor Books, 1 98 2 . Bloom, Harold, ed. Robert Frost: Modern Critical Views. New York: Chelsea House Pub­ lishers, 1 9 8 6 . Bowler, Peter. Th e Non-Darwinian Revolution: Rein terpretinR a Historical Myth . B altimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1 9 8 8 . Braude, Ann. Radical Spirits : Spiritualism and Women 5 Ri,Rhts i n Nineteenth- Century America. Boston: B eacon Press, 1 9 8 9 . Brodsky, Joseph. Interview with Annie Epelboin Strannik, 1 99 1 , n o . I : 3 6-42 . . Less Than One. New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1 9 86. . "Robert Frost, Yankee Virgil. " New Yorker, 26 Septen1ber 1 994, 70- 8 5 . Brower, Reuben . Th e Poetry C!f Robert Frost: Constella tions of Intention. New York: Oxford University Press, 1 963 . Burke, Kenneth. A Grammar of Motives. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1 969. Burns, Norman T. Christian Mortalism from TY11daie to Milton. Cambridge: Harvard Uni­ versity Press, 1 972. Burnshaw, Stanley. Robert Frost Hinlse!f. New York: George Braziller, 1 986. Burroughs, John. Ways C!f IVature. Boston: H oughton Mifflin, 1 90 5 . ---

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Index

Abel, Darrel, 3 2 0 Adams, Henry, 1 9, 3 00; Dynamo and the VirRin, 1 5 4 Allen, Grant, 3 2 ; Colin Clout's Calendar: A Record of a Summer, 47 Alter, Robert, 79 Aristotle, 6, 27, 2 8 , 3 7 , 295 Arnold, Matthew, 8 Auden, W H . , Memorialfor a City, 77

Butterfield, Herbert, 2 5 3

Bachelard, Gaston, Psychoanalysis of Fire, The, 1 66 Bacon, Francis, Masculine Birth of Time, The, 295 Barry, Elaine, 3 3 8 Beer, Gillian, 1 1 9, 3 20 B erdayev, Nicolas, science and Christianity, 49 B ergson, Henri, 4, 94, 9 5 , 1 27 , 29 5 , 298; Creative Evolution, 40, Blake, William, 2 5 0 ; Marriage of Heaven and Hell, 29 I ; Tyger, The, 8 7 - 8 8 B ohr, Neils, 6 Bowler, Peter, 3 3 3 Braude, Ann, 2 I I Brodsky, Joseph, I , 1 87 Browne, Thomas , 94; ReliRio Medici, 1 4 3 Browning, Robert: My Last Duchess, 2 3 0 ; Porphyry 's Lover, 2 3 0 Burns, Norman T. , 3 44 Burnshaw, Stanley, I , 1 2 3 , 3 1 9 Burrell, Carl, 3 2 , 47 Burroughs , John, 56, 1 5 8

Damrosch, Leo, 1 09 Dante, 1 9 3 Darwin, Charles: and analogy, 2 5 ; and chaos, 2 3 ; conditions of existence, 22; and consciousness, 5 8 ; and Darwinism, 5 ; Descent C?f Man and Selection in Rela­ tion to Sex, 72, 1 8 8 , 1 9 8 ; on design problem, 86; and eugenics, 1 76; evolu­ tion and evolutionism, 1 9; evolution of morals, 1 0 5 ; Formation if VeRetable Mould ThrouRh the Action if Earthworms, The, 60, 2 8 7 ; and hierarchy (higher and lower creatures) , 22; on instinct, 96; and James, 3 4 ; and mechanistic conception of nature, 1 77; and Milton, 1 6; nominalism, 2 3 ; origin of language, 60; OriRin of Species, The, 6, 2 5 , 64, 267; pastoralisnl, 24, 2 8 7 ; and perfec­ tion, 2 I , 22; and Plato and Platonism, 89; of progress, 1 9; race, 1 22 ; race in anthropology, 1 09- 1 0 ; and religion, 2 1 , 276- 80; and Schopenhauer, 1 8 , 1 8 8 ; selection , artificial versus nat-

Cameron, Sharon, 3 I 3 Clodd, Edward, 3 2 Coleridge, Samual Taylor, 29, 62, 6 3 ; Christabel, 46 Conner, Frederick William, 3 40 Cook, Reginald, 3 1 9 Copernicus, Nicolaus, 30, 3 I 3

359

3 60

buiex

Darwin, Charles (contin ued) ural, 20-24; selection, sexual, I Y 3 - Y 4; and song, 8 3 -84; and suffering, 5 8 ; and theism, 248 ; and theodicy, 86-87; Tree of Life, 3 1 , 1 2 5 , 1 72 , 3 1 6; on tropisnl, 3 1 o; various Contrivances by rvJlich Orchids Are Fertilized by Insects, The, 46, 1 59; Voyage if the Beagle, The, 6, 1 5 , 2 5 , 44, 5 1 , 5 5 , 64, 1 09, 1 1 9, 266, 2 8 9 ; warfare in, 1 20; and Wordsworth, 63 Defoe, Daniel, Robinson Crusoe, l O Y Dewey, John, 1 6 1 ; The Impact of Darwin on Philosophy, 3 5 Dickinson, Emily, 7 Dij kstra , Branl, 1 97 Donne, John, 3 0 Drumnlond, Henry, 3 2 Duke of Argyll, The, 60 Dupree, A. Hunter, 1 2 5 Eddington, Sir Arthur, 2 9 5 , 297 Edison, Thonlas Alva, 1 0 3 , 1 04 Edwards, Margaret, 5 3 Einstein, Albert, 5 , 29 Eliot, T. S., 2 4 8 , 273 , 274; Tradition al1d the bldividual TaleHt, 1 44 Ellis, Havelock, 1 90, 297 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 1 3 , 62, 64, 1 6 3 , 1 8 4, 247, 268; Circles, 3 7 ; Experience, 1 3 , 3 1 3 ; Fate, 1 3 ; Method of Nature, The, 63 ; Nature, 1 3 ; Nature (second se­ ries) , 4 8 ; Rhodora, The, 84, 1 1 3 ; Tran­ scendentalist, The, 94; Uriel, 29 E nlpedocles, 5 Engels, Friedrich, 93 Fabre, J. H., 94, 95; Hunting Wasps, The, 98 Fisch, H arold, 26 I Fiske, John, 3 3 , 2 5 2 , 277; Through .1.Vature to God, 3 I 5 Franklin, Benjamin, 1 02 Frazer, Janles George, 5 , 274; Golden Bough, The, 3 8 , 1 26 Freud, Signlund, 5 , 7 8 , 1 89 , I y 8 , 3 1 2 ; 111terpretation C?f Dreams, The, 17, 202; Our

Attitude toward Death , 224; R�flectiolls on War and Death, 2 I 7 Frost, Jeanie, 2 1 6 Frost, Robert, Poems : Acceptance, 50; Ac­ cidentally on Pu rpose, 7 8 , 307- 1 2 ; After Apple-Picking, 3 2 , 4 8 , 67, 245 - 46, 3 07, 3 I 3 - 1 7; A t Woodward s Gardens, 65, 89-9 1 , 1 02 , 1 22 ; Axe-Helve, The, 1 0 1 , 1 2 2 , 1 49 , 1 6 1 , 1 66, 1 70-77, 2 8 2 ; Be­ r�ft, 246; Birches, 3 2 ; Black Cottage, The, 276, 279, 2 8 2 - 8 8 ; Blueberries, 1 3 9-43 ; Blue-Buttetfiy Day, 72; Blue Ribbon at Amesbury, A , 2 3 5 - 3 7 ; Bonfire, The, 1 49 , 1 6 1 , 1 66-70, 3 0 5 ; Cabin in the Clearing, A, 249; Census- Taker, The, 3 2 ; Choose Something Like a Star, 2 4 , 47, 2 5 9 , 27 1 , 3 ° 3 , 3 °7; Code, The, 1 3 2-3 5 ; Concept Self- CotlCeived, A , 248; Con­ siderable Speck, A, 65, 66, 67-69; Con­ stant Symbol, The, 1 89; Cow in Apple Time, The, 1 3 0; Death if the Hired Man, The, 1 1 5 - 1 6 , 1 22; Dem iurge 's Laugh, The, 26 1 -63 , 3 0 5 ; Departmental, 6 5 , 89, 9 1 -9 3 ; Desert Places, 4, 4 1 ; Design, 1 4 , 24, 3 2 , 46, 5 3 , 8 5 , 3 1 0; Directive, 5 , 1 1 9, 2 3 9 , 26 1 , 270, 273 -76, 279; Dru mlin Woodch uck, A, 5 5 , 102; Dust of Snou� 8 ; Egg and the Machine, The, 1 5 4 - 5 5 ; Empty Threat, An, 1 00; Ethere­ alizing, 1 I , 1 5 6; Evil Tendencies Cancel, 1 06; Fear, The, 1 9 1 , 2 I 8 ; Figure a Poem Makes, The, 3 ; For Once, Then, Some­ thing, 4, 24; Flood, The, 1 3 3 ; From Iron, 1 3 1 ; Generations if Men, The, 40, 1 8 7, 23 7-44, 273 , 276; Grindstone, The, 1 49, 1 6 1 , 1 66, 1 77-84; Hill Wife, The, 1 9 1 ; Home Burial, 1 8 7, 1 9 1 , 2 1 5 -2 5 ; Housekeeper, The, 2 3 2 - 3 7 ; How Hard It Is to Keep from Being King rvIlen It 's in You and ill the Situation, 1 08 ; Hundred Collars, A, 1 0 1 , 1 43 - 48 ; Hyla Brook, 24, 40, 5 I , 2 8 9-90; In the Home Stretch, 1 92 ; liz Time C?f Cloudburst, 1 64; Kitty Hawk, 1 5 1 , 2 5 3 - 5 5 ; La Noche Triste, 1 1 9; Leaf- Treader, A, 273 ; Lesson for To­ day, The, 2 5 0 ; Literate Farmer and the

I ndex

Planet Venus, The, 1 02-4, 1 3 1 , 1 72; Lone Striker, A, 1 5 3 ; Lovely Shall Be Choosers, The, 1 94; Lucretius versus the Lake Poets, 5 , 1 0 1 ; Maple, 1 8 7, 203 - 8 , 2 1 5 ; Masque
3 0 9 ; White- Tailed Hornet, The, 5 3 , 8 9 , 94, 96-99, 2 6 5 ; Wild Grapes, 1 87, 1 9 5 , 1 96, 1 9 8 -203 , 2 1 5 ; Witch o.f Coos, The, 1 8 7, 2 1 1 - 1 5 ; Wood-Pile, The, 3 2 , 1 1 9, 26 1 , 263 -69, 270, 276 Frost, Robert: astronomy, 3 0 3 - 4 ; and botany, 3 2 , 1 5 8 - 5 9 ; Christianity, 49, 2 5 3 , 2 5 8 , 2 5 9 , 286, 3 1 2 ; on Darwin, 5 -6, 1 27; and democracy, I 1 1 - 1 2 ; Ed­ ucation by Poetry, 9; education in sci­ ence, 3 2 - 3 3 ; and eugenics, 1 2 3 , 1 909 1 , 1 97, 2 3 4 ; Future of Man, The (an address) , 1 2 3 , 1 87, 2 4 5 ; Georgie po­ etry, 1 49; on Heraclitus, 1 6, 3 I , 1 67 ; humor i n , 1 02 ; o n instinct, 9 5 ; Letter to The Amherst Student, 26; and Lu­ cretius, 6, 40; on Marxism, 1 27, 1 9 1 ; and pantheism, 248; and pastoralism, I , 6, 94, 1 0 1 , 1 4 8 , 1 7 1 , 2 8 8 ; and Plato­ nism, 27, 5 3 ; on progress, 26; and race, 1 0 1 , 1 7 1 -72, 1 76; and sound, 60; on Thoreau, 1 4 , 1 7 1 ; on tropisnl, 3 0 1 -2 ; on Voyage of the Beagle, The, 6, 5 5 ; warfare in, 1 20; work and play, 1 1 21 3 , 1 1 6- 1 7 Frye, Northrop, 62, 3 1 3 Galilei, Galileo, 3 5 , 1 0 3 , 3 1 2 Gamble, Eliza Burt, The Evolution qf Woman, 1 94 Garrison, William Lloyd, 2 8 3 Giddings, Franklin, 1 4 5 Gihnan, Charlotte Perkins, Women and Economics, 1 94 Gilson, E tienne, 298 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 1 9 3 , 3 1 o Gould, Stephen Jay, 1 2 5 , 3 3 3 Gray, Asa, 3 2 ; Natural Science and Religion, 78 Griffith, Clark, 3 40 Gura, Philip, 2 5 1 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 1 9 1 Heraclitus, 1 6 , 3 1 , 1 67, 1 89 Hiers, John, 1 49 Hoeller, Hildegard, 3 20

Index Hotlnlan, Daniel, 3 3 8 Holbein, Hans, Ambassadors, 7 Huizinga, Johann, 3 09 Hull, David, 324 Hulme, T. E., 40; Speculations, 10 Hutton, James, 260 Huxley, Julian, 1 2 3 Huxley, Thomas Henry, 5 , 3 2 ; EllolutioH and Ethics, 1 27, 1 59 Isaiah, 5 8 ; parable of wild grapes, 1 96 Jaki, Stanley, 2 3 5 James, William, 1 , 4, 1 3 , 27, 1 1 7- 1 8 , 2 1 8 , 245 , 2 5 2 , 277, 2 8 8 ; on fear, 2 1 9 ; Moral Equivalent oj War, The, I I 8 ; Pra�­ matism, 8 5 ; Principles of Psycholo�y, 3 3 ; Reflex Action, 277; Varieties of Relz�«ious Experience, The, 246; Will to Beliel'e, The, 277 Jarrell, Randall, 1 Jefferson, Thonlas, 1 4 3 , 284 Job, 2 , 62, 79, 1 67, 222, 246, 260-6 1 , 3 04 Jonas, Hans, 1 2 8 Kearns, Katherine, 1 8 8 , 207 Keats, John, Bri� ht Star, 3 07 Kepler, Johannes, 3 0 Kevles, Daniel, 228 Kierkegaard, Soren, 223 Lanlarck, Jean Baptiste de, 202 Landau, Misia, 202 Langbaunl , Robert, 54 Lawrence, D. H . , 274 Layzer, David, 3 1 9 Lea, Sydney, 1 6 3 Lentricchia, Frank, 7, 24, 270 Levine, George, 3 3 2 Levi-Strauss, Claude, 28 Low, Anthony, GeorJ.?ic Revolu tion, The, 1 49 Lucretius, 2 7 5 , 2 8 8 , 298; Nature (�f Tlzin�s, The, (De Rel1 u11l i"\Tatura) , 5 -6, 1 6 , 40, 43 , 1 0 3

Lyell, Charles, 1 6 1 , Principles of Geology, 15 Lynen, John, 1 3 0, 1 49 Madison, Janles, 1 4 3 Mahan, Admiral Thayer, 1 1 7 Martin, Ronald, 3 Marvell, Andrew, 3 0 Marx, Karl, 3 7 , 1 2 3 , 1 27 , 1 49, 1 9 1 Marx, Leo, 4 , 5 , 1 0 1 Mc Clanahan, Thomas, 245 Melville, Hernlan, Moby-Dick, 79, 94 Mertins, Louis, 1 1 8 Millay, Edna St. Vincent, 204 Miller, Perry, 2 5 1 Milton, John, 2 5 7 , 2 5 8 , 2 8 2 , 3 1 2 ; and Darwin, 1 6- 1 7; Paradise Lost, 1 6 , 5 7 , 80-82, 1 9 8 , 29 1 , 292 Montagu , Ashley, 1 2 3 Montaigne, Michel Eyquem, On Can­ nibals, 1 4 3 Monteiro, George, I , 5 3 , 94 Newton, Isaac, 2 5 0 Oelschlaeger, Max, 270 Oster, Judith, 1 Ouroboros, 2 8 Ovid, Metamorphoses, 1 9 5 Pack, Robert, 260 Paley, Willianl, Natural Theolo�y, 2 5 6 Parini, Jay, 1 3 Peirce, Charles S., 3 3 Perse, St. John, 248 Petrarch, 1 89 Pinsky, Robert, 78 Pirandello, Luigi, 24, 23 I Plato, 3 7 , 1 7 8 Poirier, Richard, 1 , 4, 8 5 , 8 8 , 2 1 6 Pope, Alexander, 5 , 308 Porter, David, 1 3 Pound, Ezra, 3 3 4 Prescott, William, and Frost's and Dar­ win's reading of The Conquest o..f Mexico and Peru , 1 1 9

Index Pritchard, William, I , 3 1 9 Proctor, Richard, 3 2 ; Our Place among the I11:.finities, 3 0 3 Propp, Vladimir, 202 Ptolemy, 3 0

Smith, Adam, Wealth if Nations, 2 5 6 Solomon, Ecclesiastes, o r the Preacher, 5 8 Spenser, Edmund, 47, 1 8 9 Stein, Gertrude, 204 Stevens, Wallace, Sunday Morning, 1 6

Richards, I . A . , Science and Poetry, 5 0 Richards, Robert j . , 3 3 3 Richardson, Robert, 1 4 ; Thoreau: A Life of the Mind, 1 96 Ricoeur, Paul, 3 3 5 Robinson, E . A . , 1 8 9; Eros Turranos, 2 1 I Roosevelt, Theodore, I 1 7 Ross, E . A . , 1 4 5 Rotella, Guy, 3 , 5 5 Rousseau, Jean Jacques, 1 89 , 1 94, 2 I 7 Royce, Josiah: "Nature and the Paradox of Evolution , " 42 ; " Rise of the Doctrine of Evolution , " I 8; Spirit if Modern Philosophy, The, 3 3 , 42, 2 3 8 , 2 3 9 , 284 Russell, Bertrand, 1 2 3 ; on evolutionism, 19 Russett, Cynthia, 1 97

Thompson, Lawrance, I Thomson, William (Lord Kelvin) , 40 Thoreau, Henry David, 1 3 , 64, 1 96, 27 1 ; Autumnal Tints, 1 5 ; Cape Cod, 1 4 ; and Darwin , 1 5 , 6 5 ; Dispersion if Seeds, The, 74; Ktaadn, I 4 , I 6 ; Maine VVoods, The, 1 4 ; Succession if Forest Trees, The, 1 5 ; Walden, 1 4 , 6 5 , 9 1 , 1 09, 1 70, 2 3 9 , 262, 27 5 ; Walking, 270; Wild Apples, 1 5 ; Wild Fruits, 1 5 Trilling, Lionel, I Turner, Frederick, I 4 , 3 22

Saint Anthony of Padua, 5 8 Saint Francis, 5 8 Sampley, Arthur M . , 3 4 3 Santayana, George, 3 3 , 2 6 8 ; Genteel Tradi­ tion, The, 1 5 I ; on Lucretius, 103 ; Sense if Beauty, The, 1 1 2 , 276 Schiller, Friedrich, I 1 2 Scholenl Gershom, 1 8 8 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 1 8 , 1 8 8 , 2 5 8 , 269 Sergeant, Elizabeth Shepley, 324 Shakespeare, William, 204 Shaler, Nathaniel Southgate, 3 2 Shapley, Harlow, 2 Showalter, Elaine, Female Malady, The, 228 Sidney, Sir Philip, Astrophel and Stella, 47 Smart, Christopher, 2 5 7

Untermeyer, Louis, 3 7 , 9 5 , 1 02 , 2 1 6 Vonnegut, Kurt, Galapagos, 1 2 Waggoner, Hyatt, 3 1 9 Wallace, Alfred Russell, spiritualism, 21 1-12 Weil, Simone, Oppression and Liberty, 1 2 7 Weiner, Philip, 3 3 Wells, H . G. : Strange Orchid, The, 1 5 7; Time Machine, The, 12, 1 5 6 White, Hayden, 2 5 Whitehead, Alfred North, 2 5 2 , 2 9 5 , 3 1 0; Function of Reason, The, 296 Whitman, Walt, 1 0 , 2 80; When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed, 275 Whittier, John Greenleaf, 283 Wilson, Daniel, 3 3 Wordsworth, William, 2 8 , 62, 79, 1 02 ; Excursion, The, 63 , 2 8 2 ; Resolution and Independence, 1 3 6 ; Ruined Cottage, The, 2 8 2 ; Solitary Reaper, The, 45 Wright, Chauncey, 3 3 , 61