Modern American Poetry

Soundings for Home 179

to cliché. The reader is asked to indulge in a cliché, and to do so without
irony, without even the patronizations of compassion. After all, that paint
cost money; it truly means something in the life of a couple who share a
community of deprivation and respond to it with practical imagination. A
reader and writer who conspire in a sympathetic understanding of domestic
and social clichés are in a different relationship to one another than are a
reader and writer who conspire in the understanding of literary allusions or
the pressure of one literary text or tradition on another. Frost asks us to be
bothkinds of readers; and his unique difficulty is in the demand that we be
common and literary all at once. Which is a way of suggesting, again, the
great difference sometimes between Frost, whose extensive literary
allusiveness is always less apparent than are his allusions to clichés, and any
of the other great figures of the first half of this century.
West-Running Brook, where “The Investment” appears, has other
poems of deprivation, some well known, like “Bereft” and “Acquainted with
the Night,” but also some little known, like “The Cocoon”:

As far as I can see, this autumn haze

That spreading in the evening air both ways

Makes the new moon look anything but new

And pours the elm tree meadow full of blue,

Is all the smoke from one poor house alone,

With but one chimney it can call its own;

So close it will not light an early light,

Keeping its life so close and out of sight

No one for hours has set a foot outdoors

So much as to take care of evening chores.

The inmates may be lonely womenfolk.

I want to tell them that with all this smoke

They prudently are spinning their cocoon

And anchoring it to an earth and moon

From which no winter gale can hope to blow it—

Spinning their own cocoon did they but know it.

Once again, “a poor house alone,” with scarcely a sign of habitation or
embellishment; once again, an observer with some admitted limitation of
view (“As far as I can see”); once again, a question about the nature of a
“home” when there are almost no signs of life around it. The observer is
much like the man in “The Census-Taker” who wonders “what to do that
could be done— / About the house—about the people not there.” “The