| |
Robert Frost was perhaps the most beloved poet in America. Even at the age of 85, his public reading of his own poetry in a tremulous, barely audible voice still attracted thousands of young listeners satisfied with just being there are and hearing the cadence of the verses. He had become the un-official poet laureate of America. In the mind of his readers he was the country poet, the farmyard poet, not of the great farms of the West but of the man-size farm of New England, only slightly mechanized in fact, and not at all so in Frost's poetry. He was the wise old man who had lived a long life in communion with nature and could still look at her with fresh eyes, a sense of her beauty and an uncanny penetration of her teachings.
To the 20th century man, industrialized, urbanized, and divorced from nature, Frost's poetry: brings a renewed contact with her. Guided by the poet, he learns to observed her and draw lessons from her; it is a kind of return to the good old days when life was simple and its problems could be solved with common sense, a life close to nature following the rhythm of her season rather than the rhythm of complex economics.
Frost's success did not come easily. In 1912, when he was 38, his poems had all been rejected by publishers. He could hardly make a living at various jobs-teaching, newspaper work , shoemaking, and farming. His farm yielded more poetry than profit. He then decided to try his luck in England. He sold his farm and sailed for Europe with his growing family where he met Ezra Pound and succeeded in having A Boy's Will and North of Boston, two collections of poems, published in London. Surprisingly, these poems full of New England imagery were well received by the public and the critic. In 1915 he came back to America and was astonished to find himself already famous. From then on he was read, appreciated, and loved, receiving all sorts of prizes for his later collections of poems-New Hampshire (1924), West-Running Brook (1928), A Further Range (1937), A Witness Tree (1942), A Masque of Reason (1945), Steeple Bush and A Masque of Mercy (1947), In the Clearing (1962). He was the guest poet at the Inauguration of President Kennedy in 1960. In 1962, aged 88, he was sent on a cultural mission to Russia where he read "Mending Wall" in all innocence, so he said, although many thought he was making an indirect reference to the infamous Berlin Wall.
Frost preserved his public image with great care until his death at 89 in 1963. Since then, probes have been made into his private life and a recent work by his long time friend, Lawrance Thompson, entitled Robert Frost: The Early Years, 1974-1915, has created a stir among admirers of Frost by damaging the well established myth of the wise, old, and kind country poet. Thompson shows that Robert Frost was in fact a neurotic, tormented by guilt over the death of two of his children, haunted by fears and nightmares, twice threatening murder, given to temper tantrums and spells of jealousy, often sulking and brooding on suicide. In The Figure a Poem Makes (1939), Frost had already confessed that for him composing a poem was momentary stay against confusion. For all poets, of course, poetry brings order to the disordered reality of the world and of life. But for Frost it seems to have meant also order in the turmoil of his feelings.
Frost's public image of the serene old man to whom a life-long communion with nature had brought wisdom was perhaps, to use T.S. Eliot's reflection on calm old age, "a receipt for deceit." It hid the emotion storms of the real man behind the image. This duality is reflected in Frost's poetry. The beautiful countryside images of nature and of man attuned to her expressed in a language that is a subtle rhythmic re-ordering of the actual speech of New Englanders have been the elements of Frost's poetry which endeared him to so many readers. But the most perceptive critics had probed beneath the peaceful pastoral surface of Frost's poems so refreshing to industrialized, departmentalized modern man, and discovered the age old disturbing preoccupations of man-the meaning of life; questionings about life after death; the despair of the swift, destructive passing of time; a sense of decay. Death was one of Frost's greatest obsessions. In "Departmental" it appears as a huge moth, a giant in the eyes of ants. Particularly, there is almost omnipresent in Frost's poetry a basic death-wish, which psychologists find is the deepest subconscious desire of contemporary man living in a time of cultural decadence.
The speaker in Frost's poems is often a tired old man wishing for release from the pain of living. "Stopping by Woods" with the speaker's attraction to darkness, the snow covering the earth like a winding-sheet in the dead of winter (the darkest day of the year), the life giving water dead-frozen, and sleep itself taken all together form an almost overt statement of the death-wish. "After Apple-Picking" presents the same tired old man desiring a kind of sleep that is much like the sleep of death. "The Death of the Hired Man" is the death of a defeated old man trying to preserve some dignity to the last. "Birches" with all its pleasant imagery of boyhood pleasures on the farm reveals finally the desire of the old speaker to get away from earth at least for a while. In "Departmental" the speaker is shocked that the obsession with death is not the obsession of every man but is left in ant-like society to the care of a specialized group.
The speaker in Frost's poems seems to be facing a difficult choice between dying and continuing to live, work, and suffer. He chooses life but not out of attraction to beautiful nature, but rather with reluctance, dreaming about the choice he did not make, the road not taken. In "Birches" the old speaker dreams of swinging birches; in "After Apple-Picking" he dreams of magnified apples. Both these dreams are views of life beyond nature. In a dream-like illusion, the old man of "The Death of the Hired Man" thinks he had saved his dignity in death.
Frost does not state this particular feeling directly. He is the master of the implied statement as well as of the understatement. What he wants most to say he says indirectly, in lines full of ambiguities, leaving to the reader the task of discovering it is he cares to penetrate beneath the beauty of mother nature and perceive her cruelty. Frost the lovable wise old man reveals himself in his poetry as a disturbed and disturbing artist.
|
