Modern American Poetry

(^334) Katherine Kearns
larger formal structure of the poem. After all, the movement from delight—
pleasure, desire, aphrodisia—to wisdom—rationality, knowledge, logos—must
be a careful progress between two seemingly antithetical states. The good
Greek may in theory rise above desire so that wisdom isdelight, thus
becoming free to act and to rule, but in a more visceral reality the play of
appetite against virile moderation produces an essentially unnamable
condition of potentiality. The recurrent image of black over white
throughout Frost’s poetry is suggestive of the linguistic borderland in which
this condition resides, for if one sees the “black branches up a snow-white
trunk” as ink on paper, the full poetic meaning nonetheless resides in the
calligramic cage formed in the meeting of opposites. The word does not take
precedence over the background but gains its full significance only in
juxtaposition. The image of the nighttime snowfield becomes endlessly
evocative, as its substance resides as much in the animals buried by the sheet
of snow and in the overlay of night upon it as in the snow itself. Frost’s
calligram of resilient prosodic bars is constructed to contain such burgeoning
language, even as the cell poles may be twanged “like bow and bowstring” by
the love-crazed madman. But the subversion of form and meaning are
interdependent, a dynamic that can be neither completely contained nor
halted.^29
If Frost’s personas are the speaking masks of one aspect of his being, his
formal control is just such another mask, more stylized perhaps, but designed
as well to encase the shadow self—the “real” self—in a disguise that may be
seen. He would, in fact, give the oversound priority over the literally stated
message available even to eye readers, so that a combination of discrete
particles, not language but sound, an abstraction of “meaning,” takes
precedence. By handling the symbol of lyricism—the bird—over to the
speakers whose assertions make up only half of the story, he approximates a
modernist skepticism about the possibility and even about the value of
locating oneself relative to others: the traditional lyric voice is inadequate to
the task of communicating that self which is generated perpetually out of the
ashes of quelled desire. Not the Oven Bird so much as the phoenix, he is like
the figure in “The Bonfire” who kneels to reach into flame and then rises up
out of the charred field, most potently defined at the instant of
transfiguration.^30 The orgasmic moment epitomizes that most essentially
oxymoronic condition, an epiphany of desire quelled, like the simultaneous
victory and defeat of the man who rubs out the fire. The metaphor for
lyricism is thus revealed as a completely artificial construct, a mere pretense
of self-revelation as it is used to refer explicitly to a series of personas that are
at best partial versions of the poet.