The Iowa Review
Volume 29
Issue 2 Fall
1999
Robert Frost and the American Landscape
Priscilla Paton
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Paton, Priscilla. "Robert Frost and the American Landscape." The Iowa Review 29.2 (1999): 83-96. Web.
Available at: http://ir.uiowa.edu/iowareview/vol29/iss2/21
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Article 21
Prisc?lla Pat?n
Robert
Toward
exactly
Frost
and
the American
our attachment
the end of the millennium,
according
Landscape
to the land returns,
if not
In literary and philosophic
circles, nature
of environmental
ethics
while explorations
to earlier modes.
a renaissance
writing undergoes
and aesthetics confront both the virus of development
nature calendars, featuring say a gorgeous
red barn,
and the possibility that
are examples of "eco
to
"ecotourism"
brings intense visitation
porn." In the broader population,
in turn stirs debates about how to keep nature lovers
national parks, which
from loving fragile sites to death.
in the late
Frost looks bemused
iconic as the landscape itself, Robert
his hair white, his face lined, posed in baggy clothes before a
photographs,
pasture or barn. The poet in his inevitable setting evokes ruggedness, authen
As
in a century dominated by avant
ticity, and a trace of our origins. However,
we
have
also
become
suspicious of the rural, and
garde experimentation,
Frost has suffered from identification with old fashioned pastoral conventions.
signifiers with little left
"Landscape," "Nature," and "Pastoral" have become
to signify, quaint references to past ideals in a world
strung on the virtual
internet.
of
the
spaces
we may rethink our image of Frost as a farmer poet and
Consequently,
reason Iwish to look again at notions attached to the
for
which
poet farmer,
the dilapidated farm, before return
poet and to his privileged neighborhood,
so closely
ing to passages from North of Boston, the 1914 volume that tied him
to rural New England. Paradoxical
antitheses exist in past and present re
a
to
in his
in
his
and unfathomable
Frost,
sponses
poet "simple"
presentation
indirections. These antitheses not only direct our reading of Frost but delimit
our understanding
of landscape
and of the rural.
of nature alone may have seemed retardaire enough to the elite circles
To present oneself as a farmer was to invite mockery.
of early modernism.
Even friendly readings of Frost often convey an unacknowledged
suspicion
toward earlier English
and American
Emerson,
programs
(Wordsworth,
To write
andWhitman)
binding poetic diction to the common
men
women.
and outside the academy,
and
Within
"ordinary"
Thoreau,
experience of
deep cultural
83
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ambivalence
toward
the farmer hampered Frost
him in curious ways.
sion, yet
skeptic, he could tap our nostalgia for a simple,
criticism of that life tended to verify his darker
it still enabled
and fed his
As
rustic
sense of exclu
virtuous
sage and modern
country life just as
readings
of its isolation
and
dreariness.
at farm
By his own account, Frost was and was not a farmer. He worked
ing, played at farming, was lazy about farming, but he aimed foremost to be
a poet?albeit
a poet who had many farms. Sometimes he
speaks as a laborer
at one with
as in
his work, as in "After Apple-Picking."
Elsewhere,
"Mending
seems
a
newcomer
on
he
relative
unclear
local habits. Occasionally,
in
Wall,"
"New Hampshire"
for example, he announces himself a poet. "Ain't working
the land," he wrote
I don't understand?"
from poetry?I
suppose you know that. ... It
at it now I had much
rather farm than write for
"I won't make much
direction:
seems
to John Bartlett in 1913. "Easier to write about it. Think
But the next year, and to Bartlett again, he reversed his
to me
as I look
late as 1960, Frost maintained
this ambivalence,
telling Richard
Poirier, "I'm not a farmer," but adding, "I haven't led a literary life."
to Thoreau,
The "poetical farmer," according
"does nothing with haste
and drudgery, but as if he loved it." Not only should this figure transcend
money."
As
mere work, he should transcend class issues. As much as Frost
participates in
this ideal, he also experienced
the grueling,
routines
of turn-of
low-paying
a
rift between
the poetical and the
the-century
farming. His work discloses
unpoetical farmer, between the agrarian ideal and the drudgery, isolation, and
lower class status linked to rural life. His reception became caught up in these
in their sentimentalization
issues?and
and debunking.
"Rustic" and "clown" have long been synonymous,
and Frost drew on
their pairing. "All men were created free and equally funny," he said in a
1937 talk ("What Became of New England?").
"Before you laugh too much
at that, take another look at it. Four hundred years ago the
only people who
.
.
.
were
come
Now,
funny were yokels.
today, even kings are funny. We've
a
long way." That equality
always seems to condescend
has not quite seeped into Frost criticism, which
to the rural Frost or to wish to discover some
In aNew Yorker essay, Joseph Brodsky called Frost "the poet
... a
old gentleman farmer. . . .
folksy, crusty, wisecracking
as apple pie." For Derek Walcott,
an
similarly, Frost means
thing else in him.
of the countryside
as American
"icon of Yankee
house
84
dung"
values,
the smell of wood
(New Republic, November
27,
. . . the
reality of farm
1995). William
Logan, in "The
smoke
the something
Frost" (The New Criterion, June 1995), provides
him
Vermont
farmer
half
and half
"a
else, calling
schizophrenic,
maple-syrup
raw granite." Only Seamus Heaney,
in that group and in a Salmagundi essay of
other
other
on his own rural back
provides a notable exception. Drawing
affirms "the inner evidence of Frost's credentials as a farmer
ground, Heaney
he
and
praises Frost's "grim accuracy" in presenting rural life. Perhaps
poet,"
we can best allow an Irish poet to speak without
apology for the countryside
1990-1991,
and folk
are re
and Heaney
(The essays of Brodsky, Walcott,
slight revision in Homage to Robert Frost, Farrar Straus Giroux,
traditions.
printed with
1996).
Logan and others intend in part to puncture a
Brodsky, Walcott,
and
redeem
Frost, they partake of the prejudice they mean to
image
a provincial New
dismiss. While
sensing Frost could not be Frost without
While
"false"
England, their casual stereotypes reflect their absorption of cultural biases that
in rural life suspect. Those
make Frost's participation
stereotypes became
in
the
late
nineteenth
and
the
first decades of the
century
especially prominent
Frost was working
his first reviews?and
farms, teaching, seeking to be published,
and receiving
they mark a shift from support and ideali
zation of farm life as central to the nation to condescension
toward a rusticity
a
in
that increasingly seemed
attitude, includ
marginal aberration. This shift
twentieth?when
ing an association of the rural with the inevitably backward and degenerate,
has been chronicled by Hal Barron (Those who stayed behind: Rural society in
1984), and David Danbom
(The
nineteenth-century New England, Cambridge,
Resisted Revolution:
Urban America
Iowa State,
1979 and Born
1930,
and the Industrialization
of Agriculture, 1900
in the Country: A History of Rural America,
1995).
Johns Hopkins,
Caricatures of rural types had long been present, but they had been over
ridden by faith in the morality
and civic purpose of a life attuned to nature
land. Of course, the country mouse
and to the potential of the American
the
could mock
too, and rural attitudes toward the increasingly
city mouse,
dominant urban culture voiced animosity and anxiety. In an 1854 editorial,
"Stick to the Farm," which Barron found
of rural life hammered on the demeaning
You,
master,
who
typical of such attitudes,
corruption of the city:
intended
by birth and education,
and to be no man's
servant, would
errand boy of the shop, to fetch
...
a defender
to call no man
become
at first,
and carry like a spaniel,
the
then the
85
...
to bow
and smile and cringe and flatter?to
attend
. . .
of
of
and
form
every painted
upon
humanity
padded
.
.
.
of mammon
and
and finally, to become a trader, a worshipper
in the end, to fail, and compromise with your creditors and your
salesman
the wish
conscience,
But most
and sigh for your native
readers did not heed
of New
known
hills.
this turn-of-the-century
advice, thus the well
Soon
the
England.
"upright" yeoman became
depopulation
to rural histo
the rube requiring the salvation of urban expertise. According
were
as
sources
of
families
viewed
rians, country
increasingly
"illegitimacy,
save
retardation."
To
the
farm
and
and the
insanity,
population
criminality,
as a whole,
country
urban "experts,"
supported by President Theodore
Life
Not much came of the
the
Movement."
sponsored
"Country
as
it influenced the farmer's social status: before the twen
except
Roosevelt,
movement,
. . .Now
the "typical person was a farmer.
tieth century, as Danbom writes,
farmers had become peculiar. They were objects of concern."
of regional
images of farm life still surround us in promotions
barns, apple orchards, fall leaves, clear ponds and the like. On
Wholesome
tourism?red
television,
a healthy-looking
in a Grant Wood
farm woman/actress
landscape
the synthetic fat, Olean. Reacting
against such sentimental com
which go back at least to Currier and Ives, "serious" litera
mercializations,
ture occasionally
thrives on the reverse, on rural and backwoods
decadence,
advocates
as in James Dickey's Deliverance, Carolyn
Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres.
Chute's
The Beans of Egypt, Maine,
or
of Andrew Wyeth's
incredibly popular painting,
a
broad appeal precisely because it plays on this mix of
Christina's World, has
latent responses to the rural. The gaunt figure, the browned
landscape, and
the dilapidated house evoke admiration for Spartan simplicity and persever
The
related
"realism"
is no longer healthy nor part
Such a life in decay, however,
stream aspirations. That crawling, perhaps crippled woman
could
Olean to aging yuppies. It's as if looking at thin, dignified Christina,
indulge in nostalgic admiration while taking comfort in the fact that
ance.
not taken by most of us has come down to images confirming
in many ways should, belong to an irretrievable past.
Thus
Frost
can write
"Mowing,"
"The
86
not
sell
we
can
this road
that it does, and
or "Two
in
Tramps
yeoman whose avocation
Code,"
and play on our nostalgia for the Yankee
are one. But he can also dramatize
and vocation
Mudtime"
of main
"illegitimacy,
criminality,
in "A Servant
to Servants,"
"The Housekeeper,"
"The Witch
of
Coos," and others. Respected
literary traditions lie behind Frost's vernacular
classical
the philosophic
eclogue,
experiments?the
searching of British ro
and whimsy
of Emerson and Thoreau.
the idealism, practicality,
manticism,
insanity"
were
also precedents
for his bleak portrayals of rural Ufe, including
a rural
The Blithedale Romance, which punctures
Hawthorne's
utopia with
romance
on
and
Its
of
focus
remains
power.
schemings
though
city-bred so
are
no
the farm folk
stock characters with
phisticates, while
insight into the
There
pain of a sensitive
On the whole,
and imaginative Zenobia.
the mid-nineteenth
century
of the same. John Greenleaf
against wariness
Winter
Idyll" fills up with sympathetic fireside
set a comforting pastoralism
a
Whittier's
"Snow-Bound,
portraits of rustics and guests.
Its reception also demonstrates how early such a life seemed a well lost past.
in 1866, James Russell Lowell
lamented that "Snow-Bound"
is of
Already
historical interest, describing "scenes and manners which the rapid changes of
our national
habits will soon have made as remote from us as if they were
or
ancient.
Already, alas! even in farm-houses, backlog and forestick
foreign
are obsolescent words"; but he adds what by now we should expect, that
stoves chill the spirit while they bake the flesh with their grim
"close mouthed
to return.
hospitality." And he does not volunteer
This heritage of the idealized simple life set against increasing urban conde
scension toward and even fear of the rustic created a peculiar opportunity for
and undemonstrative
Frost, who
If he wrote
of country
and dying
worst
found himself
a New
Englander despite his California childhood.
endearingly of fetching a calf, an audience was ready to be assured
If he wrote bleakly of lonely old men,
skittish wives,
goodness.
farm hands, an audience would
the
accept them as confirming
of rural isolation.
extent of New England's "fail
The backdrop for Frost's pastoralism?the
amatter of debate. There have been and continue to
ure" as a farm region?is
be prosperous
farms. It is also easy to see, particularly
in the less visited
sections of Vermont,
shackle buildings
proves the notion
New
and Maine, derelict
Hampshire,
and pasture reclaimed by forest. While
of "extraordinary
nineteenth
century, he acknowledges
men
of young
and women,
and posits
places with ram
Hal Barron dis
and decay" at the end of the
the extensive out-migration,
especially
that New England communities became
decline
more
stable, homogeneous?and
stagnant. Poverty and degeneracy may not
have been certitudes in the hill country, yet farming there seemed increas
87
ingly distant from the professionalism,
that came to define the urban. Remote
efficiency, variety, flux, and "progress"
in literal and figurative ways, the farm
to
became prone
suspicion. As Barron explains, "American culture then, as
now, had little tolerance for a situation that did not give at least the illusion of
advance."
rapid growth and progressive
A surface reading of North of Boston, Frost's "book of people,"
firm that decline. The poems include deaths of old and young,
cottages, cellar holes, poor children, bad farmers, all set in what
erations
of Men"
describes
in "What Became
off." Frost?again
nant impression,
pain.
as a "rock-strewn
of New
could con
abandoned
"The Gen
town where
farming has fallen
that domi
England?"?resisted
saying North of Boston "got praise in a way that cost me some
as a book about a decadent
and lost society." He
described
a "distinguished"
critic's contrast of Europe's "Catholic peasantry,"
It was
rejected
which
"renews
"Puritan peas
through the ages," to New England's
"has dried up and blown away." But Frost limited his rebuttal
itself
antry," which
to saying, "The first mistake,
of course, was
the word
peasantry."
as he claims to speak for other
the poet?insofar
allows himself, or is granted by others, a superior sensitivity to
men?often
"yeomen and peas
landscape. Inspired by solitary reapers and leech-gatherers,
As
is
his
David Bromwich
the
articulate
ants,"
poet
genius.
by
distinguished
writes ofWordsworth
(A Choice of Inheritance: Self and Community from Edmund
In the romantic
tradition
Burke toRobert Frost, Harvard,
1989), the "pleasures of landscape will
to the poet alone, and be felt at the intervals of his self-questioning;
belong
to the
figure who confronts the poet, on the other hand, landscape hardly exists." A
number of Frost's poems, however,
present rural figures who meet the poet
own
on
his
introspective grounds.
naturally
In North of Boston, Frost drew on several acquaintances,
"colorful" charac
ters but also individuals with conflicted responses to their circumstances. These
included Carl Burell, who returned to high school (where he met Frost) in his
twenties, worked on one of Frost's farms, and was an amateur botanist whose
Lawrance
Linnaeus
and Darwin;
John Hall, whom
a
as
describes
having "little schooling" but
"picturesque vocabu
Thompson
a
the
French-Canadian
and
with
and
farmer,
animals;
way
lary," "ready wit,"
us
are
to
known
These
individuals
largely through Thompson's
Napoleon Guay.
readily calls them "back-country"
people and
biography of Frost. Thompson
references
depends
88
included
heavily
on the poems
as evidence
of their character.
who presents the
local of "The Mountain"
slow moving
on
spring and provides a poetics of sort?more
enticing images of a mountain
to
to
and
War
him later. A local minister,
the
Civil
Shelley's
perhaps
alluding
It is the similar,
the nature of faith and idealism in "The Black
"Ozymandias,"
contemplates
two "stranger cousins" flirt and
In
"The
Generations
of Men,"
Cottage."
the mystery of "an old cellar hole" that contains the "origin of
contemplate
all the family." Their discussion alludes to Homer's Nausica? and Shakespeare's
Viola, as well as to the "madness" resulting from inbreeding.
the native
"A Hundred Collars" develops around the uneasiness between
left to be transformed
who
into a "great" scholar?a
man who
stayed,
"democrat,/
If not at
at least on principle"?and
"brute" Lafe. This poem
heart,
naked
formula
beyond
the intimidating half
is an extended joke loosely based on the
that the bumpkin gets the better of the sophisticate, though itmoves
can easily out-talk "Professor Square
simplistic reversal. Lafe, who
that his job as collector for a newspaper
he forces people to pay (he doesn't), but because
scenes
of rural life:
the
the-circle-till-you're-tired,"
appeals to him not because
he enjoys
realizes
I like best's
the lay of different farms,
on
out
from a stretch of woods,
them
Coming
Or over a hill or round a sudden corner.
What
I like to find folks getting out in spring,
the dooryard, working near the house.
Raking
Lafe conveys a conscious appreciation of the rural scene. Other responses are
less benign. The bereaved mother of "Home Burial" is haunted by the view
of the graveyard, and the overworked wife of "A Servant to Servants" finds
dramatic,
in the view
mind
To
though insufficient, respite
off doughnuts
and soda biscuit/
of the lake: "It took my
and take the water
step outdoors
dazzle."
based on a mill
that happened to Burell, both
stereotypes. The speaker, whose
injury
employs and challenges city-country
or
not
to
cannot
the
settle
does
wish
leave
him
meager
may
fight
crippled,
ment offered by the condescending
in Bos
"stockholders
lawyer representing
"The Self-Seeker,"
accident
real loss is less his ability to work than to continue his botanical
studies and to hunt wild orchids. His sensibility ismore refined and complex
than that of the lawyer who is a mere factotum of commerce. Frost's rustics
ton." His
89
are more
The
as an encounter
than clich?s,
on a hillside
further discloses.
is a relatively
"Mountain"
Frost's work
poem. Although
neglected
seem
not
to the
this
calls
those
tensions
class-conscious,
may
poem
extremely
surface: the uneasiness between
the well-off
and
stranger and native, between
between
not-so-well-off,
cultivation
and wilderness,
between
imaginative seeing
and practical work. At several different levels, it hints at the difficulties of
a poet of New England. The poet seems unsure of his alliances as
becoming
the speaker wavers between allying himself with the quester who would climb
or with
the mountain
keep his place at its foot. In this,
England that can figure the sublime and
romantic impulses in the name of practicality and
the worker
who would
on a New
"The Mountain"
touches
lively talk while
dour habit.
repressing
Frost does not play the poetical farmer, but an outsider. His position,
differs from what we find in aWordsworthian
however,
poem. Along with
the superiority of imagination
that enables him to partake of the landscape's
Here
theWordsworthian
pleasures,
observer-poet
presumably has a speech, man
and
dress
that
would
him
from
the rustics. It is difficult to say
ner,
distinguish
whether
Frost's speaker would present a very different appearance from the
man
he
stops:
the circumstantial
evidence
of photographs
from the poet's
illustrates the blurred boundary
the ordinary man and the poetic
years suggests not. "The Mountain"
Deny
between native and stranger, and between
"visionary."
In "The Mountain"
Frost both relies upon
shared by nineteenth-century
scape conventions
lime mountain,
the middle
and rewrites
poetry
land
"highbrow"
and painting: the sub
of human
the human figures
cultivation,
ground
that provide scale and access for the viewer/reader,
the concept of the pros
an
that
divine
of nature, and political
vision,
pect
suggests
understanding
control. Frost rarely extols the breath-taking
vista. Like Robert Burns, who
was
seldom
for Wordsworth,
grand enough
Frost approaches nature in the
scrutiny leads outward, as in "De
immediate, present, which under
"The
Mountain"
may echo Wordsworth
sign."
disavows grandeur:
small,
The mountain
I saw so much
I noticed
Where
Near me
90
held
and Shelley
the town as in a shadow.
before
that Imissed
I slept there once:
stars in the west,
its black body cut into the sky.
it seemed: I felt it like a wall
distantly,
but
it
Behind which
I was
sheltered
from a wind.
scene inspires neither the sublimity of
nor expanded
inexplicable forces
vision and control. The mountain's
is
power
mostly negative: it "held
the town as in a shadow." Though perhaps a protective wall, it is oppressive
The
human
nevertheless.
size and inaccessibility hint at
to a "middle ground" of fertility: "And
this black mass, whose
However,
the sublime,
reassuringly gives way
the town and it I found,/ When
I walked forth at dawn to see
yet between
new
fields, a river, and beyond, more fields."
things,/ Were
These lines evoke a fertile vista, like that of Thomas Cole's painting, The
Oxbow, in which one sees "new things" at "dawn," as if happening upon
Eden. However,
the river, "fallen away" since spring and making
"a wide
on
brawl
had
left
"Good
and in
out,
cobblestones,"
spread
grassland gullied
the grass/ Bidges of sand, and driftwood
stripped of bark." These
images
could be read as picturesque,
they also present a diminished
New
depicting the landscape irregular and wild. But
scene, making this middle ground suggestive of
decline and so thwarting Arcadian conventions.
England's agricultural
The poet meets a local, a seemingly Wordsworthian
figure, "who moved
so slow/ With white-faced
oxen in a heavy cart," that a tension develops
between the traveling/tourist
poet and the local farmer, as between the moun
tain and a cultivated,
prosperous
land. The
farmer,
responding
to a question,
claims
is no village?only
but sixty voters
There
We
were
We
can't
That
in nature
grow
scattered farms.
last election.
to many
more:
thing takes all the room!
strikes an independent figure as small town democracy
struggles against
an older romantic tradition. The limits on human
seem the inevi
population
table result of nature's force. Meanwhile
Nature,
though the source of power,
is hardly aggrandized by the vernacular complaint, "That thing takes all the
He
following Une exposes the act of seeing a place as a landscape.
seems created "to be
pointed at," yet that "fact" raises ques
tions about why we look at such a scene and what we look for. More
specific
room!" The
The mountain
to this situation, what do a native and a traveler, who are not Romantic
seems to invite response and
tourists or bards, make of a mountain which
91
even as its inhuman mass
attention
frustrates
them?
even from such "ordinary" folk as these
invites exploration,
two. The traveler inquires about climbing the mountain
and imagines a god
like prospect of possession and knowledge,
followed quickly by practical doubts:
The unknown
From
ought to be a view
such a mountain?if
Clear
to the top.
There
around
the world
it isn't wooded
statements that the poet's eye, more
Such a hope may recall transcendentalist
than the deeded farmer's, possesses the landscape. As Thoreau writes inWaiden,
seen a poet withdraw,
"I have frequently
having enjoyed the most valuable
the crusty farmer supposed that he had got a few wild
part of a farm, while
apples only." Frost denies this attitude in several ways. No one here becomes
"monarch"
of all he surveys. And yet, while neither figure "owns"
tain, this "crusty" farmer seems quite able to imagine the view:
the moun
I've been on the sides,
and trout-fishing. There's a brook
Deer-hunting
That starts up on it somewhere?I've
heard say
curious thing.
Right on the top, tip-top?a
But what would
interest you about the brook,
It's
cold
always
in
summer,
warm
in winter.
of the great sights going is to see
It steam in winter like an ox's breath,
Until the bushes all along its banks
One
Are
You
inch-deep with the frosty spines and bristles?
know the kind. Then let the sun shine on it!
never climbed the
Early responses found the farmer's admission that he has
to be convincing
mountain
evidence of his limitations. But in a 1971 essay,
Laurence Perrine denies that the "clod" farmer represents "the whole
terrible
inertia which
hills."
settled upon these people dwelling
among the unyielding
instead the "poetry" of the farmer's expressions.
emphasizes
to simplify the farmer, though, reflects long-standing
attitudes
has
Perrine
The
tendency
about rural doltishness
of the two men.
92
and assumes
that those tensions define
the relationship
lead to the local man's admission that he does not
poet's questions
know the view from the top, but he knows the "fact" of the spring: "Right
on the summit, almost like a fountain/ That ought to be worth seeing." And
The
seeing? Why would we seek out "one of the great
for enlightenment?
How do social
fun, for a challenge,
sights going"?for
a
roles affect that seeking? This spring suggests myth of origins, and the brook
it engenders "transcends" the natural order to become a wonder and aesthetic
it be worth
why would
crosses over
pleasure, as the guide's colloquial manner
with lines that anticipate the ice-storm in "Birches."
into the marvelous
farmer also shows himself capable of a simile: the mountain
sends a
near
into
it
ravine"
the
the
few
and
makes
houses
appear "Like
pasture
"dry
boulders broken off the upper cliff,/ Rolled out a little farther than the rest."
His image reinforces the superior strength of the mountain,
but it also blurs
The
the distinction
between
ably poetic powers.
The farmer remains
seen, is "Right
right to climb
the two men
by making
secure in his faith that the spring, which he has never
almost like a fountain," but less secure of his
on the summit,
the mountain.
He
tells of a hiker who
enough to see" and in a self-mocking
attempting the ascent himself:
It doesn't
You've
What
evident his own companion
seem so much
worked
would
around
I do? Go
or regretful
"never
tone explains
got up high
the oddity of
to climb a mountain
the foot of all your
life.
in my
overalls,
a big stick, the same as when the cows
come down to the bars at milking
Haven't
time?
a
a
Or with
stray black bear?
shotgun for
With
'Twouldn't
seem real to climb for climbing
it.
as a mystic emblem of poetic or imperial power seems contrary to
cannot
the rural work of the character who, despite his vivid descriptions,
a
or
tool
the
weapon. Though
imagine himself climbing without
purposeful
Nature
seems privileged with a "natural" appreciation
and knowledge,
the
more
in British art. The
passage suggests class differences
easily accepted
moral and aesthetic landscape is for upper classes, who have the leisure, money,
rustic
and acquired sensibility for proper appreciation. The farmer cannot forget his
chores to repossess the land as the Poet. He cannot change the meaning of the
93
to work on; he cannot cross the middle
landscape that he will continue
Like the neighbor
in "Mending Wall,"
this
ground to reach the wilderness.
farmer will take his freedom and self-awareness only so far?he will tease but
not upset the accustomed
The traveler, however,
ways.
is reluctant
as superior in
class or inferior in practicality, and so becomes caught between his quest for
and his wish to blur the difference between himself and the local.
experience
"I shouldn't climb it if I didn't want to?/ Not for the sake of climbing," he
to assert himself
either
in a Thoreauvian
says. Though he may have thought to possess the mountain
sense, he discovers he cannot get any closer.
The tone lightens as the poem ends, teasing us with just how we should
take the mountain
and its stream. "Warm
traveler asks. And
the local replies,
in December,
cold
in June?"
the
suppose the water's changed at all.
and I know enough to know it's warm
Compared with cold, and cold compared with warm.
I don't
You
But all the fun's in how you
say a thing.
last Une is frequently
Frost's
quoted out of context as characterizing
a
to
too
to
But
the
rustic
words
the
limited
climb
the
farmer,
poetics.
belong
That
yet capable of imagining its sights and to find in them both similes
and chiasmas ("warm/ Compared with cold, and cold compared with warm").
Unlike Wordsworth's
rustics, he talks humorously,
familiarly, and "equally"
with the visitor, another hill dweller who finds time for a long walk. The
mountain,
to his audience,
anticipates Frost's invitations
supposedly on his level, in poems such as "The Pasture" and "Birches." Drawn
from John Hall,
this character implies that Frost learned to be a poet from
"below," picking up dialect and its suggestions of play from the tongues of
farmer's
"You
and I know"
neighbors.
This line from Frost's
second book poses several questions. What
kind of
poet has he learned to be? Will he be a postcard poet clever at the dialect of
an increasingly sentimentalized
region, or will the sounds he catches convey
some abiding "sense"? Does Frost leave his readers as frustrated as this guide
the speaker and audience learned to see and hear of
the sublime (and its absence), or only to dismiss it in wordplay
that gets
nowhere? How we view the farmer and Frost's poetic endeavor depends in
leaves the traveler? Have
94
illustrates, as does
part on our attitudes toward the rural. "The Mountain"
out a new poetic language includes
most of North of Boston, how working
among the poet, the people who provide his subject
testing relationships
and
matter,
Frost
his
readers.
as much.
surely realized
In a 1915 letter toWilliam
traces his evolution
somewhat
ashamedly
of a rural community:
a member
from
he
Braithwaite,
a "fugitive" from the world to
to say it (and you musn't* quote me as
I
interest in
suppose the fact is that my conscious
saying it) but
no more
than an almost technical interest in
people was at first
I used to call their sentence sounds?the
their speech?in
what
seem absurd
It would
sense.
of
sound
. . .
came a day about
ten years ago when Imade the discov
I wasnt
reference to
ery that though sequestered
living without
in doing
other people. Right on top of that Imade the discovery
There
of the Hired Man
The Death
more
than merely
that Iwas
in neighbors for
always had been.
interested
their tones of speecli?and
By now "the sound of sense" has a long history as
His own "voice," especially for those who remember
on
awareness of its dependence
times overwhelmed
a
care
to
sentence
cent
I
"All
is
catch
for
1915,
a key to Frost's poetics.
it in performance,
has at
others. As he wrote
tones
that havent
in
been
I dont say to make them, mind you, but to catch them." His
three
years later in a copy of North of Boston reasserted the value of
inscription
"catching": "I am as sure that the colloquial is the root of every good poem
as I am that the national is the root of all thought and art. . . .One half of
to say the other half was
individuality is locality: and I was about venturing
brought
to book.
colloquiality."
Englanders often tests the boundaries between cari
and authenticity.
"The Mountain"
deviant
cature, sentimentality,
obsession,
ideas of landscape. The poem refigures the
integrates these matters with
Frost's portrayal
*
Frost's
spelling
of New
and punctuation
can be most
casual.
95
scene of limits, which
England landscape as a moralized
not completely?social
arrangements written upon it. The
to "catch" the sounds of others in a way that credits the rural with
unprofitable New
"transcends"?but
poet works
indications
of the sublime without
ever denying
its compelling
social
stric
tures.
of the land can throw us back into "country stores" reek
candles, or they can return us to a history that
a range of voices, high and low, meditative
and comic, revealing
speaks in
are more
intertwined
than we tend to
that the natural and social worlds
Representations
ing of potpourri
and wax
this range. Though his weaker poems offer smug rejec
stance that would
shame
and urban life, a reactionary
ones speak from a conservatism
that renews a bond with
admit. Frost embodies
tions of innovation
Thoreau,
his better
and challenges what we
other things, we've
Among
place
have become.
a bit envious
become
of the rustic. Now
we
have "agritainment"
2, 1997): people visit
(The New York Times, November
corn mazes, pick fruit, and eat homemade
pie, in
ing farms to go through
to
confine
will
extend
search, I suppose, of authenticity.
(I doubt this
hog
concern, where owners live at a distance, leav
sites, a current Midwest
waste
of thousands of hogs for the locals to enjoy.)
ing the "aura" and
farmers miss their privacy, but as one admitted, "It's more profit
Agritainment
ment
able than growing
crops for wholesale."
but, I hope, resist such surrender. "I never gave up
love
I've
had," Frost claimed; "I don't give up New England
any
willingly
too easily. I don't give up these words that I've cared for, these phrases; I long
to America was the
to renew them." "The thing New England gave most
Frost might
understand,
a stubborn clinging to meaning."
Our postmodern
thing I am talking about:
us jaded, mistrustful
not
if
indifferent
often
leaves
to, meaning.
of,
sensibility
we must
and our knowing
Amidst rising pollution
rural-life-as-theme-park,
to hear
our
to
nature.
harder
it
has
become
But
sided
relation
many
reimagine
to three percent of Americans
farm. A sympathetic reading of Frost, though, won't permit us to quite give
up on that either. More than ever we need Frost's history, his ironic imagina
all sides of the conversation
tion, and complex
then
96
at
least,
when
only
two
sympathy for rural people
"pastoral,"
"landscape,"
and
and places. Given
"nature"
may
resonate
that, now
once
and
more.