Lyricism: At the Back of the North Wind 317safety well out of the lyric-inducing wind. The standard romantic metaphor
for inspiration, wind among Frost’s speakers tends instead to be perceived as
a force of disruption; internalized, it creates “inner weather” so turbulent as
to threaten the careful poetic process. Inspirative possession is potentially
dangerous, and for Frost’s avowed purpose of bringing about wisdom
through pleasure, it is more invasive than generative. That which is invasive
or penetrative, that which transports a man outside his reason is, as we have
seen, subversive of manliness; to be overwhelmed bespeaks a passivity as
regards one’s self that is defined as feminine and thus as highly suspect.^6 The
manly course involves controlled choice and the imposition of a self-
generated order that asserts Platonic shapeliness—as the speaker says in
“Pertinax,” “Let chaos storm! / Let cloud shapes swarm! / I wait for form.”
As “The Aim Was Song” (ironically?) points out, a little inspiration—
translated here to mean, literally, an indrawn breath that penetrates no
further than the lips and throat—may tame the “untaught” wind, which
blows too loud and too hard: “He took a little in his mouth, / ... And then by
measure blew it forth” to transform noise to song. The small taste of wind
may be warmed and molded; one merely holds it “long enough for north /
To be converted into south.” By implication, the sounds the wind makes on
its own are loud and wild; it thrums no aeolian harp, but shrieks
indiscriminately across “any rough place where it caught.” Too much of this
wind, taken upon the body or into the lungs where inspirative singing begins,
makes a bellows of the singer. This speaker seems to believe that it is better
to sing a small song—the sound he produces, ambiguously described, may
even be whistling—better to be a careful, self-controlled bird than one that
is lofted by the wind to soar and sing uncontrolled.
“To the Thawing Wind” suggests explicitly that the wind-warmed
natural world is subversive of the domesticated and tamed poetic vocation,
causing a surrender of barriers that transforms the careful poet into a spring-
fed rioter. In an image that suggests molten heat, the speaker imagines that
the warm wind will “Bathe my window, make it flow / Melt it as the ice will
go.” As the window goes, so goes the house of words that makes a poem; the
windowpane of ice that breaks in “After Apple-Picking” signals entrance into
the half-world of dreams as barriers dissolve. The window that separates the
sleeper in “The Hill Wife” from the wind-tossed “dark pine” with its tireless
hands reduces the ominous tree to “seem as a little bird / Before the mystery
of glass”; broken, the window would reverse the transformation of power to
impotence—turning the lyric bird back into the ineffable tree—and the
wind-animated tree is not seeking entrance to speak, but to “do.” Once the
panes in “To the Thawing Wind” are melted, the “Hermit’s crucifix” that is