Unqualified Offerings

our poets to do this most of the time. We’d do it ourselves except poets are ever so much better at it.

If you want to get away from that sort of thing, you go to Frost, who recognizes the temptation and spends much of his time relentlessly demoralizing his surroundings. That’s the whole point of “The Need of Being Versed in Country Things,” to teach us “not to believe the phoebes wept.” If he weakens (”What but design of darkness to appall?“) he immediately slaps himself across the face again (”If design govern in a thing so small.”). Even in his comparative juvenilia (”The Vantage Point“) he lampoons the poet’s relentless hunt for human significance in nature:

My breathing shakes the bluet like a breeze,
I smell the earth, I smell the bruisèd plant,
I look into the crater of the ant.

Frost was a relentless skeptic who, during his time in London, got himself disinvited from Yeats’ salons by snickering at some anecdote involving leprechauns. He even twits - Thomas Hardy. Hardy wrote (on “31 December 1900″) “The Darkling Thrush,” in which the poor bird has to bear quite a lot of significance indeed:

At once a voice arose among
The bleak twigs overhead
In a full-hearted evensong
Of joy illimited;
An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,
In blast-beruffled plume,
Had chosen thus to fling his soul
Upon the growing gloom.

So little cause for carollings
Of such ecstatic sound
Was written on terrestrial things
Afar or nigh around,
That I could think there trembled through
His happy good-night air
Some blessèd Hope, whereof he knew
And I was unaware.

Here is a bird with a soul, as fanciful a creature as ever an aged Irish spinster related to Mr. Yeats. And just over forty-one years later, Frost lets Hardy have it:

Come In

As I came to the edge of the woods,
Thrush music — hark!
Now if it was dusk outside,
Inside it was dark.

Too dark in the woods for a bird
By sleight of wing
To better its perch for the night,
Though it still could sing.

The last of the light of the sun
That had died in the west
Still lived for one song more
In a thrush’s breast.

Far in the pillared dark
Thrush music went –
Almost like a call to come in
To the dark and lament.

But no, I was out for stars;
I would not come in.
I meant not even if asked;
And I hadn’t been.

Hardy’s “Thrush” - composition deliberately though surely fancifully dated so precisely by the author - is taken to symbolize the hope of the new century. One Great War done and another on the way and that hope looks, in hindsight, premature. Frost’s is surely an “answer poem” to Hardy’s, and the immediate inclination is to read it as an answer poem in kind, full of symbols of lost hope. The sunlight “that had died in the west,” the “pillared dark” - it’s Spenglerian as it gets, right? And in light of Frost’s staunch opposition to the prospect of US entry into the Second Great War, the ending reads like an isolationist fable: “NO. I was out for STARS!” (And stripes, presumably.) TTFN, Old Europe! “I would not come in,” not having been “asked.” (”Come In” first appeared in the February 1941 Atlantic Monthly.)

But that’s not it either. Because Frost’s real answer to Hardy is on another level entirely. This thrush is relentlessly a bird. Its song is “almost” like a call, and that’s it. Almost. The bird being a bird means the poet is just a poet, not the United States at all. A man in the presence of a whole composition of putative objective correlatives for melancholy, feeling that pull (”to come in / To the dark and lament”) and reminding himself that the so-called objective correlative is not objective at all - it’s stuff we put there. He wouldn’t go “even if asked,” he insists, but the point is, I hadn’t been.

Silly Thomas Hardy, Frost says. Did you really think it was about you? Frost sacrifices his own political allegory to make the larger point. He’s the only poet I know whose poems really do deconstruct themselves, by design. No, not Ashbery. Ashbery’s poems ship deconstructed from the factory. They’re the poetical equivalent of pre-faded jeans. It is, vis a vis poststructuralist criticism, Stockholm Syndrome poetry. Frost’s poems are like the magician’s boxes that look solid and colorful when you first see them, but keep opening out until even the bottom has fallen away. They are the magician too.

(Postscript: That same thrush makes an uncredited appearance in my own “The Subject Was Bric-a-Brac,” published here last month, as “some bird” whose “song is stubbornly its own.” He keeps finding work. Rather, we keep finding work for him.)