Modern American Poetry

(^190) Richard Poirier
great human tradition and a great human predicament. In the expansive
gestures of inclusiveness made at the outset, in the efforts to bring a universe
into the focus of the self and its immediate environments, the poem is about
the attempt to “make” a home by demanding a “return,” a coming back of
sound enriched and transformed by its movements out into the universe. If
the man or “life” asks too much, then the response which they do get by the
end of the poem is at least to that degree more powerfully informative about
the nature of things than if they had asked for too little. If the aspiration is
always to bring “home” what would otherwise be unseen, an element left to
chaos, then at least the effort should show not only what can but also what
cannot be given house room. Apparently that includes this horny-hoofed
creature, if indeed it even exists, who “lands” only to “stumble” and “force”
its way back into the obscurity from which it came. “The most exciting
movement in nature,” Frost says in “The Poetry of Amy Lowell,” “is not
progress, advance, but expansion and contraction, the opening and shutting
of the eye, the hand, the heart, the mind. We throw our arms wide with a
gesture of religion to the universe; we close them around a person.”
The image of this man throwing his arms “wide,” as it were, “with a
gesture of religion to the universe,” dominates the poem only to line 10; after
that, the poem more or less ignores him, and devotes itself to the great buck.
It is said to be an “embodiment” but of what? It is possible to read lines 9 and
10, “and nothing ever came of what he cried / Unless it was the embodiment
that crashed” so that “it” refers to “nothing.” The embodiment in that case
becomes his hallucination of—to quote again the ever-useful phrase from
Stevens—the “nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.” Even if the
embodiment does physically exist, its appearance is wholly fortuitious; it is
no necessary “response” at all. Frost’s use of the word “unless” is
characteristic, as already seen in “A Cliff Dwelling” where “no habitation
meets the eye / Unless in the horizon rim ...” And it functions, as do his
frequent uses of “as if” or “something,” when talking about presences, to
induce in his meditative poems some of the speculative excitement that
belongs also to his narratives of haunts or ghosts, like “The Witch of Coös.”
Symbols are thus poised ready to come into being, but only into the most
uncertain kind of significance. The end of the poem, “and that was all,”
suggests that something happened for which we have no better language.
Doubtless Thoreau would have been satisfied, if we are to believe a passage
from Walden,another example of how various are the writings, including
Cowper’s “The Castaway,” which Frost might have had in mind as he wrote
this poem: