Out for Stars: A Meditation on Robert Frost

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STREAMLINING is one of the most popular fallacies of our time. If you apply streamlining to poetry the argument runs about as follows: Since the chief aim of poetry is to bring about a formal ordering or integration of the feelings, communication cannot be its main purpose. Consequently poetry that eliminates communication is purer, and hence better, than poetry that admits a “message.” The poem should not attempt to rival ihc scientific textbook; or as Archibald MacLeish has so incisively put it, “A poem should not mean but be.”

With the modernist poet’s fastidious avoidance of meaning (once he has stated his ars poetica), it is instructive to compare the practice of a great poet like Dante, who seems curiously unaware of how much he might have improved his Commedia if he had not sought to use it as an instrument of communication. Instead of reducing the element of meaning to the lowest possible terms, Dante appears almost avid to multiply meanings, to double and redouble the implications of his thought. Can it be that disdain of meaning is a symptom of the poverty of poetry in a time of failing convictions?

A renewed perception of the many levels of implication beneath the innocent-looking surfaces of Robert Frost’s poems reminded me recently of the manifold harmonies of Dante’s great poetic instrument. Reading again in Mr. Untermeyer’s expert selection, Come In, the lyric that so happily lends its title to the book, I became aware that the words of the poem were opening vistas in several directions, as from one spot in the forest the eye may fancy that it discerns colonnaded aisles leading off ahead, behind, and on either hand.

Particularly in the last two stanzas I thought I could detect an effect like “underpainting,” layer upon layer, beneath the plain intent of the words: —

Here is a poem which, though it does not shirk the obligation of lucid statement, is not exhausted when its surface meaning has been communicated. Instead the simplicity and clearness of the incident recorded leave the reader unimpeded by verbal perplexities, not to turn away satisfied unless he is a singularly obtuse reader, but to look further into these limpid depths and perceive what he can, whether of cloudy reflections of his own mind or of ultimate intentions lurking in the poet’s.

After the labor of assimilating to our being much poetry that aims not to mean but to be, the pleasure of encountering a poem that actually conveys a welldefined reading of experience is enormous.

Taken literally, the lines I have quoted record a very ordinary incident of a walk at twilight. A man with an eye for the first stars is distracted momentarily by the poignant beauty of the thrush’s song, but he refuses to follow its lure into the darkening woods or to accept its mood of lamentation. The laconic last two lines confirm the New England setting of the poem.

Indeed the intonations are so characteristic that they can hardly fail to recall to the many persons who have listened to Robert Frost’s remarkable readings from his poems the voice of the poet himself. Every other part of the poem is equally authentic. Much that Frost has written attests his intimate acquaintance with country things: he can be trusted to select the moment of the day when the wood-thrush’s song sounds clearest. His reference to stars is no casual literary gesture, but a tribute to a lifelong passion for astronomy, amply confirmed in other poems.

Not only the person speaking, but the setting of the poem is utterly true to life. It might be any one of the New Hampshire or Vermont farms where Frost has lived, since he has seldom lodged far from the edge of the woods and the companionship of trees. I do not know where this poem was written, nor what landscape was present to the writer’s mind, but to me it seems to fit perfectly the region of Ripton, Vermont, where he has latterly spent his summers.

The dark woods might be the half-mile stretch of state forest, largely pine, between his cottage on the Homer Noble place and “Iry” Dow’s, the homeplace of his current venture in farming. To get from one property to the other by road is a matter of several miles, and it is natural, therefore, to cut through the woods. But if one were going nowhere in particular it would be easy to refuse the walk beneath the trees for a climb to upland pastures, whence as from a shelf hung high on the slope of the Green Mountains one may look off westward across a narrow strip of Lake Champlain to tumbled Adirondack masses on the rim of the world and above them the evening star.

Ripton is typical “Frost country,” though the bulk of his writing was done before he came to live in this neighborhood. It reached the height of its prosperity about the time of the Civil War. The mounting tide of human settlement then flowed up to the higher clearings; since then it has most ly receded, leaving behind a sparse population on “marginal” land and many cellar-holes. Among the people are some whom Frost might name along with the best he has encountered anywhere in rural New England. Others are not to be clearly distinguished from the oddments on any beach at low tide.

There was “Iry” Dow, for example, now departed, who for upwards of forty years professed to make his living as a blacksmith, though prevented by a weak heart from making any strenuous exertions. Consequently a great deal of conversation flowed between blows on the anvil. “That Iry Dow,” said one irritated customer, “is as much slower ’n stock-still ’s stock-still is slower ’n greased lightin’.” The year before he died the village elected him to the legislature so that he might continue his endless talk without the bother of now and then pretending to beat on a horseshoe. Nothing that Frost found among these people would have suggested any need of revising what he had previously written of other little towns north of Boston.

The surrounding country, dominated by the ridge of the mountains, once partly settled, then unsettled again, is full of the wild things, both animals and plants, that the poet has so often observed and described. A great lover of woodlands and Morgan horses, the late Joseph Battell, once possessed much of Ripton, and his will is still reflected in the quantity of standing timber. So bold and numerous are the deer that vegetable gardens need the protection of an electrically charged wire. Overgrown roads follow the brooks and lead to abandoned mowings high on the ridges.

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IN ONE respect, however, Ripton is peculiar. It contains Bread Loaf, the summer school of English which Frost helped to found some twenty-five years ago and which he still benevolently frequents. Frost, in fact, would not be fully himself unless there were an educational project somewhere in the offing for him to cherish and humorously despair of, for he is a born teacher with a knack of charging dry subjects with intellectual excitement and a large patience for struggling learners.

Teaching to him is a natural extension of his unfeigned interest in people. I have seen him ask friendly, insistent questions about the little country town where a man was born and brought up, and have watched the man, at first answering with diffidence because for years he had been apologetic about his simple beginnings and anxious to live them down, gradually warm to his memories, discover a fresh respect for the sources of his being, and go out from the interview (as he said later) with a new dimension added to his personality. I doubt if Frost knew how much that conversation meant to the other man. He was just expressing an interest in the ways of little towns.

It is against the background of Ripton, then, that I picture Frost hearing thrush music, as it is there that I recall him in many other postures: a stocky figure but alert, in motion, wearing an old suit and scuffed shoes, a freshly laundered soft shirt open at his throat, his white hair tousled in the wind, his seafarer’s blue eyes twinkling. One would find him skirting a mowing field, crossing a stone wall to a pasture where blueberries grew, measuring the water in the spring, or playing softball with younger friends on a diamond wrung from the hayfield, where running for a fly was an adventure. Then would come hours of such converse as I never expect to repeat.

For me the poem I have quoted is inseparably bound up with these personal memories of the man and the region. But for anyone, even for anyone ages hence, it is marked with authentic traits of individuality, images to the ear and to the eye, that distinguish it from conventionalized writing just as readily as a portrait can be told from an idealized face when archaeologists study the sculptures found in the buried cities of Yucatan.

In the first instance, then, the poem is justified by its absolute integrity of substance. Whatever it speaks of is something that the poet has absorbed completely into himself, generally by seeing it, hearing it, living through it; less frequently by imaginative reading. But though the poem may appear simple and complete on the literal level, its texture may be dense with implied cross-references. In such poetry it is not inappropriate to look for undermeanings, at one’s own risk, of course. The meanings may be all in the reader’s eye, or again they may attain to a certain significance if they are confirmed by what the poet has elsewhere written.

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FROST himself may be held responsible if readers persist in looking in his poems for more meaning than meets the casual eye. Though he denies a didactic intent, he is not unwilling to have his poetic records of experience flower in explicit apothegm. Only there is seldom or never any indication of his writing for the sake of the moral. In that respect he differs completely from makers of fables. La Fontaine, as Mr. Untermeyer claims, might conceivably have shaped the substance of Frost’s “At Woodward’s Gardens” into an apologue entitled “The Boy, the Monkeys, and the Burning-Glass,” ending with the epigram; —

It’s knowing what to do with things that counts.

But Frost’s first instinct is to make sure of the reality of his material; nine-tenths of his poem is painstakingly devoted to picturing his monkeys, not as actors in a fable, but as actual monkeys. He calls our attention to their “purple little knuckles,” and condenses all the confusion of the simian brain into one delicious line; —

They bit the glass and listened for the flavor.

Not until that has been fully done does he turn to the moral as a means of rounding the poem. To call such a piece of writing a fable, as at least two good critics have recently chosen to do, is to label it as something less than it actually is.

Except where Frost has completed his poem by attaching an abstract meaning to it — not necessarily a statement of the poem’s whole meaning — he is entitled to insist that his intention has been to present, not the symbol of a thought, but an image of an experience. To this there is only one answer; that experience as Frost absorbs and interprets it often spreads out into so many ramifications that thoughts get tangled in it like stars seen through tree branches.

To consider now more searchingly the stanzas that I have quoted about the thrush, would it not be possible to read the episode as a literary parable? A poet of our time hears a birdlike voice from the dark wood (ancient symbol of error) singing of irremediable ills. The call to “come in to the dark and lament” awakens an impulse to become a modernist poet of the decadent school, to take the veil (or, as Frost once put it, " take the blanket”) of calculated obscurity and imitate the fashionable lead of the French Symbolistes. The summons, however sweetly conveyed, can be resisted by a poet who has long considered it inappropriate “to write the Russian novel in America,” and who prefers to keep on in the way he was going.

To place this interpretation on the poem (and I do not imply that the poem demands it) is to emphasize Frost’s remarkable independence of the contemporary note in letters. Though he has studied the experimental poetry of recent years with attention — and some amusement — he has never felt called to share in any experiments except his own, which have been more far-reaching in their metrical subtlety than many readers realize. Ever since as a young poet barely out of his teens Frost was advised by a New York editor to try to write like Sidney Lanier, he has been set in his determination to write like no one but Robert Frost.

His aloofness has been held against him. It has been asserted that any sensitive spirit of our time must be wounded by the spectacle of the world as it exists, and must respond by exhibiting his mutilations in public. Frost’s obvious cultivation of soundness and balance, therefore, has been taken as indicative of a refusal to face the bitter realities that really matter, of his retreat to a protected backwater safe from the storm. This to a man who, unlike many of his critics, has worked in the factory and on the farm, who has known poverty as well as grief, and who has waited twenty years for recognition of his work to overtake him!

If Frost has not been willing to come in to the dark and lament, it has not been because he was unacquainted with the night, but because he had something to do that pleased him better. Perhaps he has felt that the business of putting love in order, of creating form out of the formless, can be better done by a poet who declined to be warped by the pressures of modern living. At any rate he has been unwavering in his allegiance to an Emersonian conception of human wholeness.

His deep-seated instinct for centrality and balance brings us back to the poem of the thrush to discover its meaning as ethical symbol. We are not disappointed. What else does the poem portray but one of the familiar dilemmas of man’s existence? His walk lies between the two extremes represented by the dark woods and the stars. To the heavenly extreme he can never attain, to the other he is unwilling to let himself descend, but he may be aware of both and may on occasion incline a little one way or the other. That is what our living is, discovering where the extremes lie and where we belong on a sort of scale drawn between them.

There are innumerable such scales in politics, in religion, in education. If we do not complete the scale, we risk falling into the illusion of progress — that is, of supposing that we are drifting inevitably toward a far-off divine event; or we are conscious only of what we have fallen from and invent the myth of original sin. Looking toward one extreme only, we commonly speak of savagery in contrast to civilization. Frost recently made us aware of the other end of the scale when he declared, “The opposite of civilization is Utopia.” Thus the scale is completed, and man is put back between the poles — where he belongs.

One result of thinking of the normal human position as somewhere midway between two extremes is to awaken a fierce distrust of extremists and totalitarians, no matter how high-minded they may be. Once we are forced as far as we can go toward either extreme, we are committed, we lose our power to maneuver, we must adopt the party line. Only from a central position can we be said to have the ability to choose that makes life dramatic. Frost would not trade the freedom of his material in the world as he finds it for any number of freedoms in Utopia. What he holds precious is the privilege of meeting the exigencies of life by apt recalls from past experience, with only enough newness to freshen thought.

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BUT what if the world’s crisis is so desperate as to justify a concerted movement to one extreme or the other in the attempt to alleviate it? Are we always to see life waste away into war, insanity, poverty, and crime and do nothing about it? Here indeed we touch on ultimate values. In an address to Amherst seniors a few years ago Frost declared that the thought of coming to condone the world’s sorrow is terrible to contemplate. It is our darkest concern. Yet unless I misread the poem, Frost has indicated the inevitable response of a wise man in the poem we have been discussing. To be resolutely “out for stars ” is not to be concerned overmuch with the still, sad music of humanity.

The poet must nerve himself to say with Housman: “Be still, my soul, and see injustice done.” It is his function to realize the millennium, not in terms of social adjustments, but either

Frost has spoken with deep compassion of the Shelleyan natures who insist on bearing their share, or more than their share, of the world’s miseries, but he has not hesitated to proclaim that the call to struggle for society’s betterment is “poetry’s great antilure.” He is not attracted by

The poet, in so far as he is a poet, must not be too cognizant of mankind’s wounds or his own. His business is not to make humanity whole, but to explore the uses of wholeness. It is naïve to hang the class struggle on his shoulders. In the American tradition one does not have to join the army to be a good citizen.

If anyone still should ask, Why is the function that the poet performs so important that he may seek exemption from duties incumbent on his fellows? the best answer is read once again the lovely stanzas of “Come In” or the new poem that stands as an afterword in the anthology of Frost’s writings that Mr. Untermeyer has just compiled. Is it nothing to us that someone should be out for stars? Is it nothing in a universe where every star we can examine seems to be engaged in radiating incredible light and heat — is it nothing in our preoccupation with war and wages and prices, to be reminded of the sense in which a star by its mere existence can “ask a little of us here”?