Modern American Poetry

(^188) Richard Poirier
Wordsworth’s poem is closer to Frost’s than its “echoes loud /
Redoubled and redoubled” might superficially suggest. Nature responds, but
only with what is initially rejected as inadequate in “The Most of It” and with
what becomes inadequate in Wordsworth—with “copy speech.” The Boy has
to blow “mimichootings,” an echo of the echo he seeks, before he hears
anything at all, and even this eventually gives way to a “deep silence” that
“mocks his skill.” During these “pauses” the images “carried far into his
heart” may be less awesome but are no less mysterious than “it” or “the
buck.” The poem ends with a “muteness” confirmed by the Boy’s death and
by the reflective man who stands as a “mute observer” beside his grave. We
are left with a mere chronicler of echoes no longer to be heard; the man can
himself call no voices out of silence, even his own. Under circumstances so
imposingly mythological (the Boy is dead before the poem but lives in the
memory of the man and of the cliffs and islands), “deep silence” is not meant
to be lessthan echoing sound, and possibly it is more. So, too, with the
“response” in “The Most of It”: to be told that “that was all” does not,
needless to say, mean that “all” is nothing.
The difference between the Wordsworth and the Frost poems is that
in Frost the spectator can draw no sustenance from memories of anyone like
“The Boy of Winander,” and must face the likelihood that his human
presence is altogether an irrelevance. But that does not mean that the “it” at
the end should be written off, as it generally is, as a mere terrifying negation
of meaning. It is an awe-inspiring and wonderful representation of what we
do not know and cannot name—what poets cannot name any more. The final
words of the poem, “and that was all,” are addressed not to the inadequacy
of the buck to live up to the spectator’s sentimental expectations but to the
incapacity of the spectator, and of us, to find any way to account for the buck,
its power and fantastic indifference. If one wants to talk about irony in the
poem, then the irony is directed not toward the romantic attitude but toward
a naive version of it, one that takes no account of what Wordsworth himself
saw as the merely contingent boundaries of the self in the face of
undefinable, inarticulable influences.
Of the opening, Frost remarked in “On Extravagance,” “It begins with
this kind of person: ‘he thought he kept the universe alone;’ ... just that one
line could be the whole poem, you know.” I think Frost wanted to suggest
that very likely nothing would be “realizable” from the person from whom
the rest of the poem issued, a person who cannot “makethe most of it.” A
benighted version of Wordsworth’s boy who lets whatever occurs be “carried
far into his heart” or “enter unawares into his mind,” this man apparently
will not let himself be satisfied with anything that comes back to him, echo,