The New Lyrics of Robert Frost

by DONALD A. STAUFFER

IN New England, steeple bush is a weed that has evidently as poignant and specific associations as loco in the West or aspidistra in London. Steeple bush crowds out the edible grass and is in turn crowded out when the maple, birch, and spruce take over. It is, then, halfway between cultivation and something dark and deep and primitive. That is Robert Frost’s position in his latest volume, Steeple Bush.

The cultivation is still there: in his “post Franconian, recent Riptonian” period, Frost can make of a drinking cup and a brook near an abandoned house a poem as clear and refreshing as any that have celebrated Falernian wine or the Bandusian fountain. But there is more Lucretius now than Horace, more granite than herbs. Though Frost may be ironically humble in “Astrometaphysical,” or ironically aware of his own limits in “The Middleness of the Road,” such poems are no contented celebrations of the Golden Mean, but realizations of stars, sky, space, and time, of

Even in such a perfect reflection as “A Young Birch,” tenderness and beauty become elegiac in the contrived succession of t he Order of Contents.

These poems, then, are not so much simple as they are elemental. Precipices and dark chasms open beyond the walls of the world, and the vistas through time make a century like the tick of a pendulum. Frost is uncompromisingly aware of an agonizing universe, and creates apocalyptic twentieth-century visions no less grim than Hardy, Yeats, Eliot, and Auden. Frost collects “Five Nocturnes” in this book; there are not an equal number of aubades. “I put no faith in the seeming facts of light,”

The underpainting for Steeple Bush is an unforgiving cosmos. But in poetry, subject matter — or even emotional situation — is trivial in comparison with what the poet does with his material. Beauty may be born out of its own despair. This little volume of forty-three poems is inspiriting. Frost is one of the very small company of living poets whom it is an immediate pleasure to read. No harm can come from revealing his open secret, for although it may be described, it cannot easily be imitated. His mastery depends upon absolute control of technique and of thought.

While other writers talk about the problem of including the multiplex modern world in a poem, Frost goes ahead and does it. Wordsworth wrote of poetry as “the smile upon the face of science.” If this means anything at all, what better example could we find than these lines from Frost’s “Skeptic,” addressed characteristically to a far star?

To put into two lines a whole astronomical theory of the present state of the universe, including the supporting data dependent upon the wave lengths of light, and then to add psychology and philosophy to science by denying the theory, is perhaps as much metaphysical complexity as is good for half of any quatrain. Yet Frost is accused of simplicity!

What he achieves, of course, is the reduction to common speech, almost as Dante does, of difficult ideas, yet without destroying overtones. He seems simple only because of his language, and because he has done in advance the work of resolution and thought which other poets, more lazy or careless, are content to leave to their readers. Where Yeats threw aside the old embroideries of language to discover that “there’s more enterprise in walking naked,” Frost from the beginning has more consistently taken what he calls “my barefoot stand.” His capacity to generalize in ordinary terms makes him quotable and memorable on every page. Take two noble single-line meditations on restraint: —

Opposed to those many moderns who strive for the unusual and clashing adjective or the puzzling turn of thought, Frost seems to work for a kind of harmonious inevitability which triumphs most when its easiness passes unnoticed. Calculation is made to appear instinct, and the writer’s labor becomes the reader’s pleasure. Frost’s serious puns are no accidents: —

While the trees put on their wooden rings And with long-sleeved branches hold their sway.

Or: —

Or (for an Eskimo speaker protected from the long Arctic night): —

His structures are no less pleasurable. “Were I in Trouble” is a lesson to poets in patterning minute sound effects. One of his most successful forms is the triple wave of a Shakespearean sonnet followed by a turn or conclusion, though not necessarily in the proportions of 4-4-4-2. “The Planners,” for example, comes out in fourteen lines, but the divisions are three triplets in parallel thought and a five-line conclusion. And “The Middleness of the Road” is cunning craftsmanship: its sixteen lines are divided by structure into four quatrains, and by sense into 3, 4, 4, and 5, so that the quatrains run on, coalesce, and slip together into a single firedrop of lyric. If this were the place, a whole review might be spent on the singing qualities that Frost builds from interjecting three-syllable feet in basic twosyllable patterns, or from rhyming monosyllables with twoor three-syllable words.

The imagery is no less his own. It grows out of respect for little things and for one’s native land and language. A “belilaced cellar hole” of a deserted house slowly closes in “like a dent in dough.” The myth of the lock of hair turned into a constellation, which Pope modulates at the end of The Rape of the Lock and which Yeats intensifies in

becomes, in Frost’s wry speech: —

What George Herbert did for the church at Bemerton, Frost does for the country around Ripton, Vermont, using “A Steeple on the House” as Herbert used “The Pulley” or “The Collar” or “The Altar.”

The bells are in full chime in Frost’s belfry — imagery, structural harmony, language, singing rhythms. And the steeple stretches toward the sky.

The central drive of the volume cannot suggest its variety — its wistfulness toward the “young and unassuming,” its ancestral ruminations in “A Cliff Dwelling” and “To an Ancient,” the humorously magnificent compliment of “Iota Subscript” (the love poem of Browning’s grammarian), the metaphysics of near and far, of a thinking reed in an icy universe. The satiric note is strong. Frost includes the most devastating and funny quatrain of hate since the days of Doctor Fell, and in the course of the volume draws blood (it may be a mere pinking, it may be a decapitation) from the planners, the wagers of holy wars, the believers in clichés and mass opinion, the worshipers of size and of abstraction, the officious, the fearful, the philological deans, the fashionably intellectual, and the scientific materialists. The satire proceeds to the final page of owlishly uninformative “Notes” which would not be so effectively ridiculous if Eliot’s Waste Land and Auden’s New Year Letter had not preceded them.

The gayety, and at times the extravagant abandon, of the style is a necessary balance to the dark philosophy which makes many of Frost’s contemporaries look like his callow fanatic whose “mind is hardly out of his teens.” Frost’s mind grows clearer and sharper, less sentimental, with the years. Although he may deliberately protect the independence of “all those who try to go it sole alone,” although he may assume the value of skepticism and the need for reticence, Steeple Bush contains its trinity of intimations on hope, courage, and love. He still knows that the withered leaves of a young beech in March may be, in some strange world of truth, “the Paradise-in-bloom.”

Yeats took for his symbol as an artist the singing metal bird. Here Frost has chosen steeple bush, intervening for a century as an interval of rest in the cycles of the cultivators of the soil. Its spire points toward heaven, and in its rocky pastures it allows us to develop hope and patience, “to make up for a lack of meditation” in case we are too serious, too hurried, and too cultivated in our economics, our pacifism, our etherealizing, our learning, and our scientific “complacent ministry of fear.” There is partial irony in calling steeple bush “a lovely blooming but wasteful weed.”