Modern American Poetry

(^180) Richard Poirier
Cocoon” is a poem of seeing more than of walking, and the extravagance
consists in the effort to sustain the metaphor of a “cocoon” when there is so
little to support it. The observer is offered some chimney smoke, to be
sure—more, at least, than “the smokeless burning of decay” in “The Wood-
Pile”—and this is apparently enough to warrant an “investment” of
imagination, a kind of poetic imitation of the action of the couple who renew
the paint on their old, old home. Nonetheless, the speaker here is
bothered—he has been looking at the house “for hours”—by the disparity
between his rather modest metaphor, on the one hand, his bit of
extravagance about the curling smoke, and, on the other, the lonely
obliviousness of the people—if, indeed, there are any inside the house—to
the significance of their fire smoke. Clearly, there is nothing extravagant
about them; the house keeps whatever life it has “close and out of sight.” He
“wants to tell them” they are spinning a cocoon, and that in so doing they are
making a link between heaven and earth. But this is something that they do
not and cannot “know.”
There is a desire, not urgent but nonetheless humanly and poetically
challenging, to see what can be “made” of the “poor” house here, the old
house in “The Investment,” and even the house that has been left behind in
“The Wood-Pile,” with its merely “useful fireplace.” The places and persons
in these poems are not so much drab as stripped and bare, and the details
given about them dispel rather than suggest any possibility of character or of
eccentricity. It is a barrenness that is exemplary or even mythological in
tendency, establishing a testing ground for observers who want to make
something up about it—not a supreme fiction, perhaps no more than “some
color and music” or an encouraging metaphor.
These poems are thus somewhat different from the dramatizations
already looked into of marital struggles or of ambulatory itineraries away
from home and back again. They are not the kind most commonly associated
with Frost and are seldom anthologized or discussed. As a result they have
not as yet established a context for themselves by which the familiar Frostean
disengagement from any sort of motionlessness or stasis can be seen not only
as a moral but as a literary act. In these particular instances, the literary
element, the degree to which the poems become a species of literary
criticism, is especially strong because the speaker in something like “The
Cocoon,” even more evidently than in “The Wood-Pile,” is a poet as well as
a chance observer. But he is a poet about whom Frost, as an overarching
presence, exercises some of his most subtle and most gentle discriminations.
Two other poems in this group, “On the Heart’s Beginning to Cloud
the Mind” and “The Figure in the Doorway,” are about houses looked at