Robert Frost and the darkness

A reconsideration

Robert Frost. 1959. Library of Congress.

The Book:

Robert Frost: Speaking on Campus: Excerpts from His Talks, 1949-1962
Edited by Edward Connery Lathem
W. W. Norton & Company
2009

The Talk:

It ain’t right what happened to Robert Frost. Frost’s reputation, some sixty years after his death, remains at odds with his body of work. In a nation where free verse is de rigueur and 80% of the population lives in cities, Frost has been shelved among the traditional, the institutional, and the sentimental. The Currier and Ives of poetry. Greeting card stuff.

And yet when I think of Frost, I think of darkness. Endless darkness, frightening, seductive, stretching from the deepest center of the mind to the farthest horizon.

Robert Frost: Speaking on Campus: Excerpts from His Talks, 1949-1962 brings together highlights from the informal talks Frost gave before his public readings in the final years of his life, when he was in his eighties. By that time, Frost was an American icon, lauded and awarded at universities across the country. He even traveled internationally as a goodwill ambassador for the United States to countries like Israel and Russia.

Within these talks with mostly college students, Frost attempts to sum up what his poetry is about and his general outlook on the world. There’s a lot going on underneath. And what comes through is not a genteel or pastoral mind, but an ego wrestling mightily with modernity and its crisis of meaning—in the same way that Pascal, Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, Eliot, and Hemingway did.

I have been one acquainted with the night

Frost’s poems are confrontations, conflicts. At minimum, unsettlings. The first confrontation in Frost is with a primeval darkness.

In one of his early poems, “Into My Own,” the speaker imagines the dark trees before him “stretched away unto the edge of doom,” and he fantasizes “stealing” away forever into the darkness. He imagines someone coming after him, wonders if they would miss him. In the final couplet, the ego is asserted against the doom:

They would not find me changed from him they knew—
Only more sure of all I thought was true.

“Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” almost a sequel to “Into My Own,” begins with the suggestion of trespass. Or something off. The speaker shouldn’t be there. Or shouldn’t be stopping. The horse is disturbed. The speaker pauses to watch the snow fall on “the darkest evening of the year.” (What can he even see then?) The sounds are just barely above silence. (What can he hear?) He is drawn to the darkness, and it almost takes him in, but his responsibilities and commitments (a hint of drudgery?) drag him on. The poem ends with the suggestion that he will return one day to the emptiness, the visionless soundless void, once his living his done.

In “Acquainted with the Night” the speaker walks through a city in the dark. He has just left somewhere. He refuses eye-contact (potential confrontation) with the watchman. A stranger’s cry is cut off in the distance. Someone is not calling for him or begging for him to return. The clock proclaims the time that is “neither wrong nor right.” And the final refrain “I have been one acquainted with the night” suggests that the night has no wrong or right either. And Frost is part of it, a late-night ambler—a possible suspect of a crime?—drawn to a shadowy existence beyond society, law, morality.

Some say the world will end in fire

The second confrontation in Frost is that of the dialectical:

The surest thing you know is that everything in the world comes in pairs that you’re living between in great uncertainty.

Our existence is trapped between two choices, and this theme of ambivalence repeats through Frost’s poems.

“The Road Not Taken” begins with the title pointing to the road the speaker didn’t take, as if his mind is still wondering about that other road, the slightly more popular road. He admits the two roads had been worn “really about the same.” The ending stanza starts “I shall be telling this with a sigh / somewhere ages and ages hence”—which could be read as telling an over-dramatic tale “with a sigh.” He will exaggerate to someone about how big a deal it was—when the facts can no longer be verified. He also admits he will likely never see that path again, so how can he even know what difference it made? Who ever really knows how things would’ve gone if we did things differently?

In “Fire and Ice” we are give another choice between destruction by love or destruction by hate. The speaker says that both options would be equally sufficient to destroy the world. (The time is neither wrong nor right.) He sides with love, but could’ve gone the other way just as easily.

Notably, his judgements are based on his own personal experiences of desire and hate, suggesting he has felt within himself whatever it would take to destroy the world. In all five of the poems mentioned above, there’s a whiff of mischief, rebellion, or wickedness.

In his talks Frost uses the verse from the Bible, “Lord, I believe; help thou my unbelief.”

“And you’re there between those two or you’re not alive,” he says.

A stay against confusion

What is the solution then to these two problems: the chaos and the “difference”? Frost’s answer is poetry:

I often think a poem is nothing but a momentary stay against confusion.

A poem is like a temporary shelter, a small structure of order in a world (and mind) of chaos. This is one reason why, it seems, Frost is bound with an iron grip to poetic form. Where the free verse poet seeks ego liberation, Frost seeks an ego redoubt.

This is also the reason why, he explains, the rhyme and the couplet are so central to his work:

I’ve very fond of the symbol, apparently, of what might be called the symbol of all symbols: the couplet, the rhymed couplet.

But that’s the symbol, isn’t it, of all — of all — all things like that; the way things come together? They separate and come together, separate and come together.

Where there is difference and dialectic, the rhyme and the couplet make a connection. Frost believes that the magic of a poem is the way it brings together an association. This is what he calls “wisdom,” sometimes small and fleeting, but a kind of brief resting spot for the mind to land on for a moment. (Stopping by woods)

Frost famously described free verse as playing tennis with the net down. Frost uses tennis as a metaphor for poetry quite a lot in his talks, and it works on several levels.

One, a tennis court has a fixed size—it has a defined “form.”

Two, in tennis the ball pops back and forth across the net in a rhythm, like meter and rhyme. Each line of a poem is running to get to the right spot to serve back to the other side, which it can do artfully or artlessly.

Three, the players of a tennis match are in competition, they are a performance of opposition. They are aiming for a win, and neither side is going easy. An athletic dialectic.

So the tennis court metaphor is not just about the challenge of writing poetry but also the interplay of the ideas. The surest thing you know is that everything in the world comes in pairs that you’re living between in great uncertainty.

The great bravery

But, you see, that’s the kind of confidence — if I radiate anything — the kind of confidence in just waiting till this remark and that remark, this insight and that insight — (All separate; don’t worry about ‘em.) — as the time darkens, as your life darkens, they constellate; they make figures. And then you’ve got convictions. That’s all of that.

All that’s in the poems, too, that kind of interest. Not giving it up anywhere, that’s the great bravery; just to wait, to give it time.

In his talk at Berkeley in 1958, Frost describes how he started off writing poems not trying to connect them to each other at all, but just going forth confidently, and as he gets older, he starts to make out connections as the doom of mortality approaches. (“As your life darkens”) But he also says, “All that’s in the poems, too… Not giving it up anywhere, that’s the great bravery.”

The danger, according to Frost, is that we withdraw from the world. He calls it “the great misgiving,” the spirit’s fear of entering matter. Instead we have to go deeper into matter, we have to “plunge” into the physical.

I’m a materialist, and the most physical part of my poems are the parts I like best, where they’re really physical. There are other words for that, but I like it: “physical.”

This plunging is an act of the will and of the ego. And this we see in Frost’s poems—the self, the personality, the executive function at the helm.

In “The Gift Outright,” Frost identifies Americans as weak when they withhold:

Something we were withholding made us weak
Until we found out that it was ourselves
We were withholding from our land of living

The altar of victory

And so I think people ought to take a fresh look at Robert Frost.

Frost saw himself more like an athlete than an academic. He studiously avoided putting any references in his poems that someone would have to look up. You can just pick up his work and go. For this reason, he will likely never be of major interest to many academic poets or scholars.

He wrote to be accessible to everyone, but he also often left in multiple layers of meaning and counter-meaning. He was sly, slippery, and subversive nearly all the time. (The phrase “such as we were” in “The Gift Outright” to my mind nearly deflates the whole thing.)

If he was an athlete, he was an early 20th Century ball player, an entertainer and something of a tramp, a vagabond, perhaps a bit immoral, certainly not respectable, a boy up to no good.

Some girl said to me — granddaughter of mine, graduating from Smith, a year or two ago — she said to me, “Don’t you think it’s everybody’s duty to do good in the world?” And I said, “I’d rather do well than good.”

Here Frost means to do a craft excellently. He’d rather write fine poems than help people. It’s all right there: The ambition, the ego, the pride. The going forth.

The most striking image of the book, perhaps its most revealing, comes down to this:

The Romans dragged Christians to the altar of victory. If they wouldn’t bow down to that, they fed ‘em to the lions. But they wanted ‘em to bow to the idea of victory […] That’s vitality, to want to win.

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