Soundings for Home 173The wood burns of itself, with a warmth that cannot be felt and without
giving any evidence whatever that it belongs in the world of men and women.
“With the slow smokeless burning of decay” is a line whose sound carries an
extraordinary authority and dignity because it has emerged out of the more
sauntering vernacular movements at the beginning of the poem. It induces a
kind of awe because it is the acknowledgment of nature as a realm wholly
independent of human need or even human perception, and it belongs not
only in what it says but in its very cadence with Wordsworth’s evocation at
the end of his sonnet “Mutability” of “the unimaginable touch of Time.”
If the speaker “resembles” anything at the end of the poem, it is the
wood-pile itself, something without even a semblance of consciousness; it is
wholly self-consuming. As in “Desert Places,” another poem about a lonely
man walking in a landscape of snow, the man in “The Wood-Pile” could say
that “The loneliness includes me unawares.” This line is a little poem in
itself. It has a syntactical ambiguity more common in Stevens than in Frost.
It can mean both that the loneliness includes him but is unaware of doing so,
and that the loneliness includes him and heis not aware of its doing so by
virtue of his near obliteration. In either case he is not so much included as
wiped out; he is included as if he were inseparable from, indistinguishable
from, the thing that includes him. He is on the point of being obliterated by
the landscape, rather than allowed to exist even as an observer of it, much less
a mediating or transcending presence.
Despite Frost’s devotion to Emerson, it was impossible for him ever to
feel that to become “nothing” on a “bare common” is also to become, as in
the opening paragraphs of Nature,a “part or parcel of God.” For Frost’s
lonely walkers, far from “home,” nothing can come from such nothing, and
they therefore must try to speak again and in such a way as to make known
an ordinary human presence. Frost in this mood is bleaker than Stevens. He
resists the transcendentalist willingness to disentangle the self from the ties
of “home” and from any responsibility to domesticate whatever might be
encountered while one is “extra-vagant.” Stevens, but not Frost, could say
with Emerson that on that “bare common,” faced with evidences of a primal
and impoverished reality of “snow puddles at twilight under a clouded sky,”
it is possible by the power of heightened imagination so to transform reality
that
the name of the nearest friend sounds then foreign and
accidental: to be brothers, to be acquaintances, master or servant,
is then a trifle and a disturbance. I am the lover of uncontained
and immortal beauty. In the wilderness, I find something more