Making It New: 1900–1945 353Another, simpler way of describing the circuitous, serpentine character of Frost’s
work is to say that he is the supreme example of the skeptic in modern American
poetry: the person who mistrusts categorical answers and who, for reasons he
thoroughly articulates, cannot or will not make up his mind. In “For Once, Then,
Something,” for instance, he plays on the traditional idea of looking down into a well
in search of the truth. The narrator, we are told, once peered into the subterranean
darkness and, for a moment, saw “a something white, uncertain,” but then a ripple
in the water “Blurred it, blotted it out.” “What was that whiteness?” the narrator asks
himself, and can find an answer only in his own indecision: “Truth? A pebble of
quartz? For once, then, something.” “Something” might be everything or nothing.
Having wound, in slow, meditative hendecasyllabics, through the mysteries of
exploration, the poem ends in a series of questions that only underline the difficulties
of knowing. A comparison with an earlier New England poet, Emily Dickinson, is
relevant here, for in “What mystery pervades a well!” Dickinson pursues exactly the
same theme. Dickinson, however, concludes that “nature is a stranger yet”: she is at
least sure that she has seen nothing, or at least very little, and so measured the
dimensions of what she called her “magic prison.” For Frost, even this radically
limited degree of certainty is impossible. He cannot gauge the size or nature of his
cell; he cannot be certain whether the “something” he has seen is trivial or significant.
Dickinson at least knows that she cannot know. Frost, by comparison, cannot know
even this. The limits to perception, the nature and scope of knowing and naming,
the accessibility of truth: all these things remain hidden from him, and so he falls
back on the ultimate weapon of the impotent and irresolute, irony.
Irony is by no means Frost’s only weapon, though. As his autobiographical poem
“The Oven Bird” makes clear, he is a poet struggling to find “what to make of a
diminished thing.” Transcendence is not available for him in the way it was for^ earlier
writers like Emerson and Whitman. Consequently, he must do what he can with
what has been called “a minimal case.” This sometimes involves ironic meditations
on the human pursuit of knowledge, as it does in “For Once, Then, Something” or
“Neither Out Far Nor In Deep.” But just as often it precipitates tentative inquiry into
the mysteries that hover on the edges of experience, the possible sources of fear and
wonder. The more unnerving results of such an inquiry emerge in poems like “Out,
Out – ” and “Design.” “Out, Out – ” begins with what seems like a gently nostalgic
piece of rural portrait-painting:The buzz saw snarled and rattled in the yard
And made dust and dropped stove-length sticks of wood,
Sweet-scented stuff when the breeze drew across it ...From this, the poet moves slowly, in an almost relaxed fashion, into an account of an
apparently minor accident: we are told, in quietly seriocomic terms, how one of the
workers, a young boy, cut his hand on the buzz saw. Things grow more serious when
the possibility emerges that the boy might lose his hand. Just the same, we are hardly
prepared for the final lines:GGray_c04.indd 353ray_c 04 .indd 353 8 8/1/2011 7:53:49 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 53 : 49 AM