Soundings for Home 181with some sort of ulterior, “creative” intention by a poet-observer from a
passing train. The poems are placed next to one another in A Further Range,
which also includes “Desert Places,” “Design,” and “Provide, Provide.” All
these are meditations on bleakness, a subject of increasing frequency in
Frost’s work beginning with his fourth volume, New Hampshire.They are
different from earlier poems about the failures of “home” to nourish the
imagination in that the narrator is disengaged and relatively dispassionate.
The houses are discovered by accident, and it is implied that the viewer is
somebody who wanders less in a search for signs and embodiments than to
amuse himself with the possibility of their existence.
The title “On the Heart’s Beginning to Cloud the Mind” admits to
something implicit in the other poems in this group: that because the
observer has no active part in whatever is going on inside the house, he
makes things up which are not only fictitious (that, of course, is his right) but
also wrong-headed and banal. The opening of the poem—“Something I saw
or thought I saw / In the desert at midnight in Utah”—is a possible allusion
to Virgil’s Aut videt aut videsse putat,as Reuben Brower observes, or, as likely,
to Paradise Lost,where at the end of Book I, “some belated peasant sees / Or
dreams he sees” some fairy elves. But the comic rhyme “I saw / Utah” makes
the allusion parodistic. We can be reminded also of “For Once, Then,
Something,” which is also a poem about trying to have a vision, trying to see
“something” which is probably only that—“some thing” and not a metaphor
for any thing. Here, the landscape is a barren desert observed from the lower
berth of a fast train. The man sees “A flickering human pathetic light / That
was maintained against the night, / It seemed to me, by the people there, /
With a God-forsaken brute despair.” It is this mere supposition (“it seemed
to me”) which makes him think that his heart is “beginning to cloud” his
mind. The alternative possibility—that the light is a burning tree kept
flaming by various people at their pleasure—is, he has to admit, only “a tale
of a better kind.” But his fictionalizing is at least adequate to a further
conjuration: he invents a domestic scene wherein a woman in the darkened
room of this hypothetical house shares with him a view of the desert scene.
She, however, is without fear or suspicion. He guesses that she knows, as he
does not, what the lights “really” mean, and as the poem nears its end he
manages to “typify” the woman and her husband in a nascently mythological
way:
Life is not so sinister-grave.
Matter of fact has made them brave.
He is husband, she is wife.