Modern American Poetry

(^184) Richard Poirier
problematics of mere accidental relationships, mere glimpses of a “field
looked into going past” (“Desert Places”) or glimpses of a desert or a house
from a fast train, or something so grandly and therefore remotely conceived
as is “the universe” by the young man who cries out at the beginning of “The
Most of It”:
He thought he kept the universe alone;
For all the voice in answer he could wake
Was but the mocking echo of his own
From some tree-hidden cliff across the lake.
Some morning from the boulder-broken beach 5
He would cry out on life, that what it wants
Is not its own love back in copy speech,
But counter-love, original response.
And nothing ever came of what he cried
Unless it was the embodiment that crashed 10
In the cliff’s talus on the other side,
And then in the far-distant water splashed,
But after a time allowed for it to swim,
Instead of proving human when it neared
And someone else additional to him, 15
As a great buck it powerfully appeared,
Pushing the crumpled water up ahead,
And landed pouring like a waterfall,
And stumbled through the rocks with horny tread,
And forced the underbrush—and that was all. 20
This is the most powerful of what might be called his spectatorial
poems, those in which a wandering figure tries to locate a “home” by the
exercise of vision, the making of metaphor, or the making of sound to which
an answering call is expected. Along with the poems being discussed in this
section (and “Neither Out Far nor In Deep”) “The Most of It” is a poem in
which “life” is being asked to do some or all of a “poet’s” work. The request
is illegitimate, and it is made not by Frost but by the speakers or spectators—
or would-be poets—in his poems. If their calls on “life” have a pathos of
innocence, they also elicit that Frostean exasperation which is aroused by
anyone who acts politically, or poetically, as if the world owes him a living, or
as if it is easy to be “at home in the metaphors” one contrives about the world.
Metaphors, like other marriages, are not made in heaven. About this,
Frost and Stevens would agree. Metaphors are made by poets, either by those