Soundings for Home 189silence, or embodiment. But he stands there bathed in a mythological
heroism nevertheless. What does happen at the end, in fact or in his mind, is
far too awesome and magnificent to have been conceived merely as an ironic
commentary on a pathetic but hardly disreputable desire to find “counter-
love, original response” in nature. Though the spectator does not get what
he apparently wants, he does get, and the reader with him, a vision of some
fabulousness beyond domestication.
“The Most of It” is a kind of poem which creates adherents rather than
readers. Any “analysis” is resented as reductive, and of course it is. The poem
suspends itself brilliantly in such a large but wavering mythological context
that its grandeur depends upon our not being able very precisely to answer
those questions which, again, Frost himself persistently wanted to put to a
poem: “By whom, where and when is the question” (Preface to A Way Out).
As for “whom,” the wholly elusive “he” is never characterized even by a
speaking voice, and yet “he” is placed over against an immense “where,” the
“universe” and later the “boulder-broken beach” that looks toward a cliff
hidden by trees. As for “when” his calling could have taken place, line 5 hints
at a specific time (“Some morning”), but lines 9 and 10 (“and nothing ever
came of what he cried / Unless it was the embodiment ...”) suggest that he
“called out” whenever he felt like it. To specify a specific dramatic situation
here or in other crucial poems by Frost, like “Spring Pools” or “Hyla Brook”
or “The Silken Tent,” is to expose to ridicule both the situation and the
person speaking. By its impressive generality of reference, to “the universe,”
to “life,” to “counter-love,” the poem implicitly requests us notto localize.
Indeed, grammatically at least, the evidence is that “life” itself wants an
answer as much as does the man: “He would cry out on life that what it wants
/ Is not its own love back in copy speech, / But counter-love, original
response.” Those phrases are peculiar; their rather technical angularity
makes it sound as if a prescription were being called for. And “original
response” is close to oxymoronic since to call for a sound that has an
unprecedented origin is to deny its capacity to be “re-sponsive,” a word
which in the Latin sense means to pledge back something that has once been
received. It is as if “life” itself were making the demand on the world through
the demand of this single man in it, and as if life’s demands were inherently
wonderful as well as impossible.
In the best and simplest sense the poem is exciting for the largeness of
its embrace, and because the man is beautifully anxious that “life” be allowed
to exalt and enrapture itself. So that even without knowing classical literary
analogues in echo literature, and all that is implied therein about man and his
relation to the universe, any reader feels the presence and pressure here of a