Chiasson then goes on to make a brilliant
insight about Frost’s profound grasp of the
ineff able that lies between the lines of
strong poetry: “Vermont tempts poets to
epiphany; then by staying silent, or cold, or
fl inty, it ironizes their praise.”
One of the great ironies of Frost’s career
was the fact that he was misinterpreted as
more of a genial folk poet than a stunning
witness of the sublime. He made an
indelible fi rst impression with
accessible pastoral subject matter and
hypnotic verbal music, “farms and forms”
as the critic Christopher Benfey has
referred to his topics and style. Unlike his
modernist peers—T.S. Eliot, Wallace
Stevens, Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore,
and Hart Crane—he avoided urban
settings, exotic subject matter, and free
verse in favor of local landscapes, rural
narratives, and traditional forms. In short,
he wasn’t a modernist team player,
discovering his “wasteland” in his own
“desert places” at least a decade before his
ex-patriot colleagues became the rage in
the early 1920s. Although he won four
Pulitzer Prizes, his readers failed to
appreciate the sublime nature of his
obsessions, or what he liked to call his
“ulterior meanings.”
In 1958, at Frost’s 85th birthday party at
the Waldorf Astoria in New York City,
Lionel Trilling fi nally set the record
straight about the true nature of Frost’s
poetry, declaring in a speech the poet/
critic Randall Jarrell called a “cultural
moment”: So radical a work, I need
scarcely say, is not carried out by
reassurance, nor by the affi rmation of old
virtues and pieties. It is carried out by the
representation of the terrible actualities of
life in a new way. I think of Robert Frost
as a terrifying poet. Call him, if it makes
things any easier, a tragic poet, but it might
be useful every now and then to come out
from under the shelter of that literary word.
Th e universe that he conceives is a terrify-
ing universe. Frost’s unprecedented initial
popularity existed in direct proportion to his
readers’ fl ight from his sublime genius.
Americans loved him in the way children
love Mother Goose, falling under the
hypnotic spell of such lullabies as “London
Bridge,” “Rock-a-Bye Baby,” and “Jack and
20 VERMONT MAGAZINE
Jill” without realizing they’re listening to
one catastrophe aft er another.
Frost loved Mother Goose also and
acknowledged its infl uence on him, which
one can clearly hear in the one poem out
of all his work he felt approached
perfection, “Stopping by Woods on a
Snowy Evening,” which, indeed, is no less
than a haunting adult nursery rhyme in 16
unfaltering iambic tetrameter lines.
“Poetry is a way of taking life by the
throat,” Frost said, and so he does with his
tight musical poems that grasp his reader
as well by the throat and hold on, even in
their unresolved conclusions.
Frost also said, “In three words I can
summarize everything I’ve learned about
life: it goes on.” Th e “promises” Frost’s
speaker keeps in “Stopping by Woods on a
Snowy Evening” betray Frost’s
commitment to living over dying,
especially following his near suicidal
venture in the Great Dismal Swamp as a
young man following his fi ancée Elinor’s
initial rejection of his proposal.
Acts of gazing out from above and
swinging from side to side, both physically
and cognitively, recur oft en in his most
sublime poems where he suspends his
speakers at the top of trees and staircases.
His poems “Birches,” “Wild Grapes,” “Aft er
Apple Picking,” “To Earthward,” “Mowing,”
“Home Burial,” and “Th e Witch of Coos”
come immediately to mind as examples of
the suspense he found in suspension.
In-betweenness was his fi gurative study
where he either hung or stood in voluntary
discomfort as he contemplated his place
and condition on Earth. In this sense,
he was an utterly earthly poet who was
inclined to crucify his speakers on found
“crosses” where they suff er a pain that
transports them to some higher awareness
about grief, longing, or simply their innate
complexity as human beings.
It is in Frost’s suspenseful extended
metaphors like the ones mentioned above
where he encounters not only joy, but
terror as well, which is the risk his “lone
strikers” encounter in their respective
positions of both physical and
metaphysical suspension. An extended
look at Frost’s early poem “Mowing,” a
Petrarchan sonnet from the poet’s fi rst
book in 1913 titled A Boy’s Will, serves as a
primer for Frost’s later longer poems in
blank verse that combine country narrative
with sage commentary.
A brief analysis of this poem provides a
window into Frost’s genius for combining
pastoral subject matter with human truth.
Mowing
Th ere was never a sound beside
the wood but one,
And that was my long scythe
whispering to the ground.
What was it it whispered?
I knew not well myself;
Perhaps it was something about the
heat of the sun,
Something, perhaps, about
the lack of sound—
And that was why it whispered
and did not speak.
It was no dream of the gift
of idle hours,
Or easy gold at the hand
of fay or elf.
Anything more than the truth would
have seemed too weak
To the earnest love that laid
the swale in rows,
Not without feeble-pointed
spikes of fl owers
(Pale orchises), and scared a
bright green snake.
Th e fact is the sweetest dream
that labor knows.
My long scythe whispered and
left the hay to make.