Lyricism: At the Back of the North Wind 339from place to place every time someone asks “How’s the wife,” because “to
praise or so much as name her” is to defile her. In this later world the nymphs
of “In a Vale” cannot exist, because they, like Paul’s wife, cannot be spoken
of “In any way the world [knows] how to speak.” Frost chooses most
frequently to name both the human and the poetic condition as fallen, his
ironic vision epitomized in the lyric birds whose voices whimper, whisper, or
shout their rational conviction that the world is a diminished, dusty place.
The dewy maidens of “In a Vale” are replaced with women fleeing, like the
wife of “Home Burial” for whom the husband’s “words are nearly always an
offense” because he doesn’t “know how to speak of anything / So as to please
[her].” Even the wind broadcasts the language of separation, isolation,
lovelessness: “Word I was in the house alone ... Word I was in my life alone
... Word I had no one left but God,” wails the speaker of “Bereft.” But Frost
hears other voices even when his speakers have become parrot-like in their
endorsement of the diminished view. In the damp, low-lying vale where
“bird and flower were one and the same” the lyric bird would know more
sensual songs than the Oven Bird’s. These maidens’ “garments / Trail across
the reeds ...” like the silken tent raised by the pole. Yet this is not an
accessible world, even to the boy, who must speak only across a sill. He
listens all night, every night, but he never joins them in the “misty fen,”
never penetrates their territory. For once naming occurs, only the scent of
wholeness remains. But language, erotic, defiled, and irresistible, has the
power to awaken in Frost the ambivalence of one who has known mystical
voices that are, whether perceived as literal or as metaphorical, the echoes of
another world beyond the rational and beyond language.
NOTES- Frank Lentricchia, “Lyric in the Culture of Capitalism,” American Literary History
1, no. 1 (1989): 72. See too Richard Poirier, Robert Frost: The Work of Knowing(New York:
Oxford Univ. Press, 1977), 38. Palgrave’s Golden Treasurywas a favorite of Frost’s; see
“Waiting: A field at Dusk” in A Boy’s Will,where the speaker notes “the old worn book of
old-golden song / I brought here not to read, it seems, but hold / And freshen in this air
of withering sweetness.” - Lesley Lee Francis, “A Decade of ‘Stirring Times’: Robert Frost and Amy
Lowell,” New England Quarterly59, no. 4 (December 1986): 522. See too Sydney Lea,
“From Sublime to Rigamorole: Relations of Frost to Wordsworth,” in Robert Frost,ed.
Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 1986), 85–110, for a discussion of Frost’s
ambivalent regard for Wordsworth and his resistance to “Romanticism.” - Lawrance Thompson, Robert Frost: The Later Years(New York: Holt, Rinehart &
Winston, 1976), 304, documents that Frost wrote this for “the woman who had been his
‘devoted secretary’ for more than twenty years.” See Donald G. Sheehy, “(Re)Figuring