The Introverted Poem, Blog 3: Frost's Metaphorism

When Pound brought Frost and a young Irish poet named W.B. Yeats to the same café table in London after the publication of Frost’s first book, North of Boston, he did so sort of as a master builder might place the foundation stones for a particular pile he was about erecting sooner rather than later. The edifice Pound was contemplating was Modernism and, as the Christians had built their basilicas on the grounds of defunct pagan temples, Pound’s great palace was to occupy the rubble of the overwrought nineteenth century stuff he’d come to despise—perhaps during his studies at Penn—for what he saw as its refined and ornate diction, its moralizing, its sentimentalism, and its refusal to face the newly industrialized world as it was.

Industrialism, by abandoning the epochs-long sense of kinship humans had felt with the natural world, had discovered and unleashed vast primal energies locked up in that world’s chemical and physical configurations. Pound felt poetry and literature in general—art in general—needed to liberate a similar trove of primal forces in the human sensorium that would match the Vesuvian one that was the scientific-capitalist-industrial complex. Yeats’s championing of Celtic mythology and pre-Christian folk beliefs regarding the sidhe, or what we call the faeries, aligned, Pound thought, with this project, while Yeats’s poetic voice, though incantatory, was decidedly unsentimental, almost rugged, evidencing little of late Romanticism’s effeteness and twilit yearning. This was the point of intersection Pound saw between these two extremely dissimilar poets. Frost’s embrace of Yankee pragmatism had engendered an analogous ruggedness in syntax and voice, along with an approach to meaning that looked a lot like Pound’s notion of ‘imagism,’ which called for a poetry that consisted only of imagery, without any annoying—and unscientific—tendency to make images mean anything, to make them speak.

As it turned out, Frost didn’t like Yeats much. He found the Irishman’s talk of faeries and dance circles and magic rabbits highly objectionable, embodying exactly the sort of decadent claptrap Americans had left in their wake when they’d come to the New World. The Yankee mindset gave zero credence to “easy gold at the hand of fay or elf,” as Frost puts it in “Mowing.” As for Pound’s imagism, Frost demurred on that point as well, especially as he developed his ideas about poetry going forward. While in North of Boston Pound saw images unadorned by ‘meaning,’ Frost was already discovering the centrality of metaphor as the primary way of understanding the unknown or ineffable. This understanding, Frost came to believe, is of the essence of the lyric imagination. When faced with either, as he eventually expressed it, the mind understands it by comparing it to something it already knows. It’s a double comprehension because the mind is equally aware of the difference(s) between the two terms. In metaphor the mind knows both terms of the comparison as simultaneously different and alike to the point almost of identity. For instance, whoever first saw a mountain peak covered with snow and called the apparition a “snowcap” knew at one and the same time that the awe-inspiring phenomenon was both exactly a hat and not a hat at all. This simultaneity of apprehension—metaphor—was in Frost’s view the defining aspect of the lyric mode, its mystery, its achievement of unity among disparate elements, a unity that cannot be approximated in prose, and certainly not through scientific inquiry.

Frost’s Yankee-ism led him to a particular approach to the development of his metaphors that incorporated the notion of shrewdness, the tendency to keep one’s hand close to the vest as it were, to develop the thing ‘compared to’ almost to the exclusion of the thing, notion, or feeling in need of comparison. One got the image in full; one got its ‘meaning’ in glimpses. Thus in “Stopping By Woods” we get the woods, their darkness and peacefulness, and a solitary man’s implied fascination with the idea of leaving his route, getting out of his sleigh and going off to lose himself in oblivion. There is hardly any clue, however, as to the nature of the more mysterious feeling these images embody, which might be summed up by reference to Freud’s notion of the death wish, the desire to put down life’s burdens and seek peace in the eternal silence and non-consciousness of death—the notion of death as, in Hamlet’s words, “a consummation devoutly to be wished.” Frost’s horse understands the queerness of the moment to which the speaker gives human expression, but the only tipping of the metaphorical hand is the echo-ic repetition of the last two lines with their emphasis on sleep, in which a reader might hear the Dane’s famous predication: “To die, to sleep. No more.”

The repetition of the last two lines, of course, also emphasizes the Freudian notion of work, obligation, the pursuit of one’s business in the world as a counter-balancing force to the desire to put one’s burdens down. The fact that the speaker has “miles to go,” as linked with his also having “promises to keep,” makes clear that however potent the desire to enter those woods might be it will not draw him away from his life, his relationships, his sense of responsibility to other people. His poetry perhaps. The moment is a complex one even as mediated by its metaphorical elements, which are internal and “quiet” as it were—delicate, even.  Frost is relying heavily in this poem on the reader’s ability to draw inferences from such elements. He’s also relying on the reader (as more overtly in “The Road Not Taken”) to be mindful of centuries of association of routes or roads and of travelling along such routes or roads allegorically to “the road of life.” In addition, there’s the longstanding association in literature of woods with the darker areas of the soul, along with winter’s aspect as the death of the year, this latter emphasized in the poem, perhaps, by the information that this is the year’s “darkest evening,” i.e., the winter solstice. Unlike Eliot Frost does not provide footnotes or directly evoke specific literary works to nudge the reader along.

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Many readers do not make these inferences and so experience the poem the way Pound apparently experienced Frost’s early verse—as an exercise in imagism. Or perhaps more precisely readers feel the details of the poem as Eliot argued they should—that is, as “objective correlatives,” images in which certain emotions inhere, the way rain, say, always seems to embody sadness and tears. Atmospherics in a poem are not to be pooh-poohed. They are crucial to the process whereby the reader’s imagination and memory are engaged in a way that is definitive of fictive literature as opposed to non-fictive prose. They are what evokes the feeling that is the ultimate referent of the metaphorical nature of the imagery, whether the imagery is understood as such or not. In short, readers love atmospherics, so woe to the poet who decides he or she is somehow above their deployment.

Frost didn’t think he was. He placed great value on the imagery and music of a poem and was not at all above going out of his way to provide them for you, for me, for Sister Michael in her sadness on that long-ago afternoon. As per Sister Michael, too, Frost placed great value on the notion of “discovery” in a poem, both for the poet as he is writing it and for the reader as he or she reads and re-reads it.  Discovery for Frost was as essential to the lyric experience as metaphor was, or atmospherics, and what was being discovered was precisely the metaphorical nature of the imagery. The discovery is experiential, an act of imagination more than of intellect. It’s inductive rather than extrapolative. As such, Frost’s “metaphor-ism” is not just a gambit, a role of the dice as to whether the reader will get some “hidden meaning.” It’s an existential dilemma. Just as a play does not exist without an attentive audience, a poem does not exist as a lyric experience without a reader who is inclined to draw imaginative inferences. In this sense, poems are in fact shy, introverts, hardly there unless someone asks them about themselves, unless someone draws them out—seeks, that is, to comprehend and experience their metaphors.

Thus, unlike Eliot, Frost did not conceive of a poem’s achievement as primarily intellectual. For him it was in fact emotional, spiritual even, and mediated by its music and imagery. As  regards “Stopping by Woods,” as Sister knew, there is indeed so much music and of such a lilting, mystical quality, that many readers will want to punch you in the chops for implying a further  meaning hidden among its words. The beauty is enough for them and rightly so. The poem’s imagery as well, to give Pound and Eliot their due, is haunting, evocative, magical. To hear the poem’s strains, to visualize its moment, one we can all relate to without any groping for meaning, is to have areas of our souls brought into our working consciousness and in this way restored to us. These are areas that come into play when we suddenly see the world with a measure of astonishment at its beauty, say, or its brilliance, its pulsing vitality. And that is enough.  For that alone we will go back to the poem time and again, and each time the experience will be fresh, vibrant, resuscitative even, given the deadness and faux-ness of modern life. And the more frequently we return, the more likely we are to notice patterns, connections, echoic effects, quirks in the language, structural quirks, all of which might prompt us to say, “Wow, what’s going on there?”—which may turn out to be the beginning of the process of discovery Frost valued so much.