Modern American Poetry

(^186) Richard Poirier
Through outer trees to shade grown black
I peered and saw, like strips of snow
That form in rocks the ages crack
The trunks of birches, half aglow.
Again I called, and now I stirred
A fearful bird to swiftly fly.
Far off I heard his angry scream,
But not a gladdened human cry.
It seemed I could not overthrow
The brooding barrier of the trees.
My voice grew swift, my call more keen,
But always backward came the word
Of it to me, that seemed to sigh
For him I sought, for all reply.
Or this passage from “Man Alone”:
If he should loudly call, then stand and wait
Until the sound had traveled far and made
A voice reply, he’d know the forest held
No mate for him. An echo would reply,
Giving him back his lonely call and word.
A deer might start....
The similarities of circumstance and phrasing between these poems
and Frost’s “The Most of It” are extensive enough not to need comment, and
it seems probable that Van Dore’s poems were an incentive for Frost’s. But
to treat “The Most of It” as an ironic “reply” to Van Dore is to miss the
altogether more important fact that Frost’s poem is too powerful for such
irony. Van Dore provided no more than a nudge, if that, pushing Frost in the
direction of a poem already waiting in him to be written, a great poem that
is a culmination of the motifs and themes we have been looking into. In some
sense, too, it brings into sharper focus many of his poems about echoing and
shows the degree to which his poetry absorbs and continually comments
upon the echoing streams, hills, and rocks of pastoral poetry, the “Sweet
Echo, sweetest nymph that lives unseen” of Milton’s “Comus,” and especially
the echoes that greet Wordsworth’s Boy of Winander. The poem exists
within a large poetic context of “echoing” that has been best located in
English poetry by John Hollander and Angus Fletcher. In that sense,
Wordsworth’s “There Was a Boy” must be thought to have had a stronger