Soundings for Home 185who write poems or by the kind of Emersonian poet who is potentially in any
one of us. Significantly, the poem following “The Most of It” is “Never
Again Would Birds’ Song Be the Same.” There, the world itself has already
been made our “home,” partly by the fact that the “birds” “from having
heard the daylong voice of Eve / Had added to their own an oversound.” It
is a sound that still “persists” in the wilderness which is of our present
moment. But her “sound,” her “voice,” was not, we have to remember,
directed to birds at all in any naive expectation that they would answer her
in kind or in any other way. The birds simply heard her voice as it was
“carried aloft” from the intercourse between Adam and Eve, the “call or
laughter” of their daily life together before the Fall. To the extent, then, that
the sound of birds has been crossed with and become an echo of human
sound, it is not to be confused with the kind of sound the man in the opening
lines of “The Most of It” requests as an answering call from the wilderness
around him. Keeping the universe alone, he is an Adam without an Eve. To
paraphrase a passage from Frost’s “The Constant Symbol” which we have
already looked at, it might be said that he wants to “keep” the universe
without spending very much on it. He has not learned the essential lesson
that “strongly spent is synonymous with kept.” Or, to make another
comparison, he “keeps” the world the way the old man keeps house in “An
Old Man’s Winter Night,” forever making sounds, even to “beating on a
box,” in order to lay some claim to the world around him: “One aged man—
one man—can’t keep a house / A farm, a countryside, or if he can / It’s thus
he does it of a winter’s night.”
The supposed model for this isolate and solitary man, this man who has
not entered into or engaged upon any kind of “marriage,” was, according to
Thompson, a young poet named Wade Van Dore whom Frost met first in
Littleton, New Hampshire, in 1922 and later at the University of Michigan
in 1925. Frost helped Van Dore with the publication of his first volume of
poetry, Far Lake,in 1930, which included one poem, “Man Alone,” and
excluded another, “The Echo,” whose superficial resemblances to “The Most
of It” encourage Thompson to claim that Frost’s poem, especially under its
original title “Making the Most of It,” was meant as an “ironic reply” to Van
Dore’s work (Thompson, II, 361). And indeed some passages from Van Dore
might easily have provoked Frost, like the following from “The Echo”:
Made mellow by a wall of trees
My call came swiftly back to me.
My word the forest would not take
Came bounding back across the lake.