Soundings for Home 183He must have measured to the further wall.
But we who passed were not to see him fall.
The miles and miles he lived from anywhere
Were evidently something he could bear.
He stood unshaken, and if grim and gaunt,
It was not necessarily from want.
He had the oaks for heating and for light.
He had a hen, he had a pig in sight.
He had a well, he had the rain to catch.
He had a ten-by-twenty garden patch.
Nor did he lack for common entertainment.
That I assume was what our passing train meant.
He could look at us in our diner eating,
And if so moved uncurl a hand in greeting.The vision of the “great gaunt figure” filling the cabin door prompts little
more than superficial reportage. Four lines in a row begin with the repeated
“he had”; the man’s possessions are then as dutifully listed. It reads as if the
speaker were determined not to make anything out of what he sees. Beyond
these measurements, all we learn about the man is the merest guesswork. In
an Empsonian sense, the poem has a pastoral inclination: it is “assumed” that
the passing train is “common entertainment” for the “grim” figure in the
cabin door and that he must sometimes be moved (even though he is not on
this one occasion, when the speaker has opportunity to see him) to “uncurl a
hand in greeting.” As in “On the Heart’s Beginning to Cloud the Mind,”
there is scarcely any scene at all here; there is no material for poetry except
what might be guessed ifthe spectator were in a position to watch long
enough. This, then, for all its self-discipline, also becomes a “surface flight,”
and the best he can do with the image of the giant man in the doorway is to
make a “tall tale,” in a grotesque sense of the term, about what might happen
at some future time: “And had he fallen inward on the floor, / He must have
measured to the further wall. / But we who passed were not to see him fall.”
Frost’s evident intentions in the poem are pleasantly confirmed in a speech
given at Bread Loaf on July 2, 1956, where he said of “The Figure in the
Doorway” that “it might not be true of him at all, but there is such a thing.
I might have been all wrong about him. He might have been a candidate for
the Democratic party” (Cook, p. 110).
These poems are evidence of Frost’s congenital circumspection about
“extra-vagance”—about making things up while “in flight,” about inventing
other people’s lives without getting intimately involved with them, about the