CHAPTER 21

In a Speaking Voice (1939)

Review of Robert Frost’s Collected Poems

Soon after he started to publish, in 1912, it was evident that Frost was to have a curative effect on the speech of poetry. A special effect. From the beginning, he said nothing that did not placate and soothe and reconcile. All the disturbances were natural, nothing was said that could not be stated without raising the voice. Patience and resistance and the pains of responsibility temper his lines, in lyric, short dramatic piece, or narrative, with his neighborhood stamped on all his work. Frost stands now, in this latest collection of his poems, as a mean in the measure, with no effort to rake up to consciousness, or to impose a unity of meaning from above; he stands at the level of articulation into conversation.1 Average, if you like, in tone; reliable in the solid garden way, plus its articulation, so that the constant and delightful play of a combining charm is on the surface. He makes a place his own; coming from California to New England, he took over as unmistakably as Jeffers, traveling opposite, took over the Coast; but without the great expanded images, the stridings, the toppled forests and families and the victimized love.2 Here is photography of the effects of snow and heat, sorrow, exuberance to a point, sun in the pines, on the bushes, lives turning slowly as leaves under warmth, householders living day-to-day; a realism of the senses, Frost gives us, blueprints of that countryside. New England, which he came to young, and claimed; the wild, neat states of exaggerated seasons.

There is not much development in over four hundred pages. There is reworking and turning over, and one looks naturally to farm comparisons. The first book has the voice already, and much of the later craft, in “Storm Fear,” “October,” “A Tuft of Flowers,” “Mowing.”3 But the language is stilted; one questions how it could ever have appeared honest: “and lo,” “fay or elf,” “abide,” “aloof,” “zephyr,” “limns,” “The languor of it and the dreaming fond.”4 What saves the book and marks it is its flatness, inflection of casual speech, scapes laid on stroke by stroke:

The crows above the forest call;

To-morrow they may form and go.

and

When the wind works against us in the dark,

And pelts with snow

The lower chamber window on the east . . .5

The next book, the successful North of Boston, which had its English furore and set Frost’s standard, contains sixteen of the most sufficient, local, and convincing poems he has done. The list begins: “Mending Wall,” “The Death of the Hired Man,” “The Mountain,” “A Hundred Collars,” “Home Burial” . . .6 If you open the book and read straight through, it is during these poems that you get taken up, catch the rules of conversation and attitude, and see the limitations the man has set himself. He comes through now, as a mild man to orient himself by the most permanent facts he can find: season force, constants in life and work and death to see him through his responsibilities. All of these poems, with three exceptions, are narrative, and dramatic, and conversation-pieces; the three are “After Apple-Picking,” one of the most beautiful poems Frost has ever written, “The Wood-Pile,” and the final lyric.7 The stories are lifelike, typical, moving against static backgrounds: the two startled people confronted by a face at the dark house; the descendants of Starks, met at a rainy reunion; the house with a room-size cage for the insane uncle; the clenched father who had dug his child’s grave and come into the kitchen for weather-gossip; the collector drinking in a shared hotel room—exposing their lives in the calm monologue that Frost makes the world speak.8

The third book, Mountain Interval, has the short uneven poems whose top level is struck in “The Hill Wife,” “Birches,” and “The Bonfire.”9 England was put behind, and Frost was living in New Hampshire, famous, after the foreign success. Twenty years of obscurity and inability to get published were over. It seems now, from the outside and much later, that here was a place for choice. There was no turn; Mountain Interval was a variation on the one established theme; and New Hampshire, published seven years later, summed up all the previous work, taking the three books along together, repeating the early words with more affection, greater intimacy, a finer precision of the senses.10 From the title-poem, through “Fire and Ice,” and “Good-Bye and Keep Cold,” and “Gathering Leaves,” the level comes up in sureness of handling. West-Running Brook, published in 1928, and A Further Range, which appeared in 1936, take Frost back into the compact lyric, becoming more and more didactic, sorrowful, affectionate, and cross.11

Frost has his theme. He was recognizable from the beginning, and he never chose again. He stokes and banks, and gauges the fires; there is little work of enduring intensity. Fancy and imagination are very close in all his work; when the description is clean, striking the senses immediately, a lasting impression is made; but there is a double exposure, and behind the picture is a quiet and in many ways a desperate man, keeping his grip on his poems, but forcing them to be distal to his own much more intense problems and choices. The poems are end-products, and Frost has contempt for “poets / Who fall all over each other to bring soil / And even subsoil and hardpan to market.”12 Markets are what he hates, but he has his product, and is at his counter; and when he chooses to be a plain New Hampshire farmer, in answer to the literary choice, “Choose you which you will be—a prude, or puke, / Mewling and puking in the public arms,” he still does not choose to farm.13 His obligation as poet has kept him at his self-controls, until one wonders whether he has not turned himself out a self-controlled prude, a self-controlled puke, by not choosing either of them, but choosing self-control. He falls into fears he says he has escaped. He writes, “I never dared be radical when young / For fear it would make me conservative when old.”14 And is conservative. Look, here is the mild man, quick to see, quick to love glints and delicacies, and sturdiness and thrift. He has no dependence on a shabby personal legend, none of the city shabbiness. He walks around an object, delimiting it, catching the surface well, doing this at the normal speed of walking and talking; not at the speed of the imagination, not seizing hold nor letting go fast.15 This is not poetry that strikes immediately at invention and the spirit; it is delimiting, and at the end one knows the object in area and in impact on the senses; but whatever insight there is comes as recognition.

Frost took a country that he came to very young, and received it fresh on himself. It was lucky that he was not born in New England; he chose his home. He chose his work; caring enough for college to leave Dartmouth and return to Harvard, caring enough for academic standards and the classic, as Untermeyer points out in Modern American Poetry’s useful introduction to Frost, to get his best marks in Greek, and leaving it all behind in his work—except, perhaps, for the true bucolic flavor, which becomes New England flavor of apple and blueberry, snow and granite face—traveling, having his family, teaching, he cuts all of this out of his life in poetry, gripping hard for faith to New England simples.16 With this passage of time, we see that he has the colors and sharp tastes of his countryside, and remember startled how he used to be accused of being colorless. But the strain and violence and sharp contrasts have been controlled out of his poems. They are in his country, and one sees them in his rejections; he has stayed away from them. He has his responsibility, he is firm in his craft, with a steady checking influence on the language of American poetry, in the line of recorded speech that includes Frost, Robinson, Masters.17 Of the three, Frost evades most. He comes to the edge: read “The Bonfire,” and “A Servant to Servants,” and “Two Witches”—he almost goes over the edge. One need not require a line of development from Frost, any more than from Fearing—these are people working and always working with one implement.18 But Frost has developed through certain apprehensions, with a certain nervousness. One thinks of Yeats, his generous full developing mind.19 Frost stays close, and guards. He is a village-spirit, deep in village-life. I started to reread many of these poems (and they should be dated, and they should have an index) believing that I admired them and that they were not enough what I needed to hear to let me like them.20 But as I read, I knew they were near, I did like them too; I was occupied by their warmth and mocking and turning, by the neat perception of physical detail, strict enough to let one smell these trees and animals, I saw that glare on snow. I wanted more, by then. Frost has articulated much that was not spoken for. Early in life, he drew his circle around himself, and plainly said, I will deal with this. The attitude does not come through as self-control, but as a rigid preconception of life. He wants his poem to have “the wonder of unexpected supply”; he says, “it begins in delight and ends in wisdom” in his note to this book, “The Figure a Poem Makes.”21 He cultivates his own garden, grouping with art so that everything there may be discussed in the same tone of voice. Meet him on these his own terms, and there is fine work, rewarding place-love, folk-love, solemn or gay recognitions. They are the recognitions of a man desperately determined that this is really all there is, and that this will be enough. It is not all, and it is not enough.

(Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, 1939)