This commentary is about what I think is a major difference between two of our best poets: T. S. Eliot and Robert Frost. One poet faces the crucial moment in his poetry; one poet tends not to face that moment. What led me to these thoughts was a Podcast wherein Randy Reno of the journal First Things interviews the contemporary poet Dana Gioia on an essay he wrote and published in First Things on poetry and Christianity wherein Gioia cited Frost’s Nothing Gold Can Stay as one of his favorite poems (I think; since it’s a Podcast—favorite, best? I’m not certain and can’t stop to find the reference; in any case Gioia really liked it.) Gioia’s choice of this poem struck me as a bit odd since it is another near perfect Frost poem; nevertheless, the poem also reveals to me a problem at the heart of Frost’s poetry: his tendency (as an excellent critic once said) “to hang fire” rather than explode. In other words he turns away from the ontological confrontation possible in the subject matter of the poem. In Woods the ontological confrontation is the being of the narrator with the being of the lovely, dark and deep woods [they are].
The summary and the three critical commentaries that follow [I deleted them and copied them on to a separate page] are clever in their discussion and somewhat helpful in pointing to details in the poem that should be noticed. The website where I found them is litcharts.com. The problem with the information on “litcharts.com” is that it almost totally bypasses the mind of the reader. In other words, take our shortcut and you won’t have to think about the poem at all. The site even offers a line by line analysis of the poem which you must sign up for in order to read. I didn’t. In Eliot’s poetry, or in any highly allusive poetry, a reference that reveals the meaning of obscure allusions could be helpful if it turned the reader back to the poem. The ontological confrontation between reader and poem [literary work] ought to be central. Does it help in Woods to know that the darkest evening of the year might be a reference to the Winter Solstice or does that reference knock the reader out of the poem so that he or she is now looking at the poem rather than from it. In my experience of the poem the superlative [darkest] accomplishes that task. The narrator is thinking about his situation the “betweenness” that at least one of the critics noticed.
The only things moving in the poem are the horse, the wind and the snow. People who insist on seeing the woods as oppressive miss, I think, the ontological nature and significance of the narrator’s insight. Something made him stop. The something that made him stop is the being of the woods, lovely, dark and deep, something the horse as animal could never appreciate but that any human might. Loveliness, beauty, can transform our lives. If the darkness of the woods is oppressive then the reader is caught between two “oppressives,” so to speak: perhaps the thought of eventual death on the one hand and those oppressive “duties and responsibilities” on the other, that critics are so eager to explain. So knuckle down, crack the whip, and get on with it. That’s not, however, the ontological experience from inside. It’s the loveliness that stops us; that’s where the mystery in life resides. We would follow the loveliness, see where it takes us, see what it means. Beauty is truth, truth beauty, /that is all ye know on earth /and all ye need to know. Keats saw it in the Ode; he entered the urn-life to confront what that work of art revealed. All breathing human passion far above. Then he emerged, like Coleridge’s Mariner, a sadder and a wiser man. Frost’s narrator doesn’t risk it. What does the experience of transcendental beauty mean in human life. That line in the poem catches us, makes us stop, almost transforms the poem. For a moment the poem leads us to glimpse the woods as Martin Buber’s THOU, as in I-Thou. The woods in this poem are not an IT. In the future is a world of I-IT, duties and responsibilities, but as long as life contains the possibility of such loveliness life will truly be worth living. But unlike Keats or Coleridge or Buber, the narrator avoids any further confrontation.
I think the same thing is true about Gold. The narrator simply hangs fire, he has the experience reflect back on himself rather than press forward to see what such beauty and transitoriness, such mutability, really mean. Look at the last three lines: Then leaf subsides to leaf. / So Eden sank to grief, / So dawn goes down to day. / Nothing gold can stay. Life is a diminution: subsides/sank/goes down; all here is in decline, emphasized by the last line which is one syllable short of the established trimeter pattern. In our past, as one of our theologians said, man, the human race, experienced an ontological tragedy. Eden sinking to grief is on the ontological level with everything else in the poem and that misses, really misses, the ontological nature of our being human, facing the Shadow of Death that falls across all human lives. Frost is exceedingly memorable—Nothing gold can stay / The woods are lovely dark and deep / Good fences make good neighbors! Ha! The narrator’s neighbor in that last line is seen for a moment like an old-stone savage armed—not Thou; however, if it weren’t for the neighbor [think of the obvious Biblical reference here] these two neighbors would not get together at all, presumably. Art is / ought to be transformational. Where are we at the end of a Frost poem, wonderful and memorable as his lines may be?
Then think about an Eliot poem such as Prufrock, or Ash Wednesday, or The Four Quartets, or The Hollow Men, or The Conversation Gallant or The Hippopotamus, etc.
Prufrock starts out in the world of I-IT and yet Prufrock’s cry of despair in the beginning and throughout is transformed into a lovely lyric at the end of the poem [Eric Thompson], and we just might understand why Prufrock can say that he has heard the mermaids singing, but they won’t sing to him. The rich, imaginative, mythic and real world of love is like the ocean; we live in it, it surrounds us, Thou is always possible if we are willing to take the chance, the risk, to seize the moment—I should have been a pair of ragged claws!
Or, For thine is / Life is / For thine is the: This is the way the world ends, / Not with a bang but a whimper. The Hollow Men live in an I-IT world and focus finally what it is that causes their dissociated sensibilities, but they see by the end of their confrontation with their condition the exact nature of the transformation that needs to take place in their lives in order for them to become real human beings, no longer scarecrows, nor Guy Fawkes’ effigies. In Frost we do not really leave the everydayness that frequently characterizes our lives. The buffered self prevails. With Eliot we begin in the world of the buffered self, but we do more than just catch a glimpse of the way out. As in The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock we actually get to experience the transformation.
Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
BY ROBERT FROST
Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.
My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.
He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound’s the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.
The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
Robert Frost, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” from The Poetry of Robert Frost, edited by Edward Connery Lathem. Copyright 1923, © 1969 by Henry Holt and Company, Inc., renewed 1951, by Robert Frost. Reprinted with the permission of Henry Holt and Company, LLC.
Nothing Gold Can Stay
Nature's first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf's a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.Robert Frost
Mending Wall
SOMETHING there is that doesn't love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun;
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing: 5
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made, 10
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go. 15
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
“Stay where you are until our backs are turned!"
We wear our fingers rough with handling them. 20
Oh, just another kind of outdoor game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
He is all pine and I am apple-orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him. 25
He only says, "Good fences make good neighbors."
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
"Why do they make good neighbors? Isn't it
Where there are cows? But here there are no cows. 30
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down!" I could say "Elves" to him, 35
But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather
He said it for himself. I see him there,
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me, 40
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father's saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, "Good fences make good neighbors."
The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock
[the narrator’s moment of recognition of who and what he really is, and his wonderful lyric song at the end]
No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—
Almost, at times, the Fool.
I grow old … I grow old … 120
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.
Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.
I do not think that they will sing to me. 125
I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.
We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown 130
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.
