Modern American Poetry

(Sean Pound) #1

(^340) Katherine Kearns
Love: Robert Frost in Crisis, 1938–42,”5 New England Quarterly63, no. 2 (June 1990):
179–231, on Frost’s relationship with Kathleen Morrison after the death of Elinor in 1938.
A stately Elizabethan sonnet and a love poem, it also suggests a premeditated and
predetermined fall from pure song to song crossed with language: “Never again would
birds’ song be the same. / And to do that to birds was why she came.”



  1. In the Phaedo,85, a–b, Socrates affirms that birds do not sing when they are
    hungry, cold, or distressed. When swans sing before their deaths, it is because they “have
    prophetic powers and ... because they know the good things that await them in the unseen
    world, and they are happier on that day than they have ever been before.”

  2. See Lawrance Thompson, Robert Frost: The Early Years, 1876–1915(New York:
    Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1966), 304: Maeterlinck’s The Blue Birdwas read to Frost by
    his father; Frost calls this poem “The Blue Bird to Leslie” in Letters,355.

  3. See Michel Foucault, The Use of Pleasure: The History of Sexuality,vol. 2, trans.
    Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon, 1985), 82–3. While Frost claims that a poem never
    begins in thought but “as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a
    lovesickness” (Letters,199), he also holds firmly that enthusiasm must be “taken through
    the prism of the intellect” (Prose,36). This is to subvert what he calls “sunset raving,”
    where “It is oh’s and ah’s with you and no more.” Lentricchia, in “The Resentments of
    Robert Frost,” American Literature62, no. 2 (June 1990): 176–7, locates Frost’s contempt
    for “sunset raving” lyricism, which derives its energy from pretty things, in his shared
    contempt for what Eliot called “the Feminine in literature.”

  4. See too the poem immediately preceding this, “Wind and Window Flower,” in
    which the wind is a potential lover of the flower just inside the frozen pane of glass.

  5. In “A Servant to Servants” the woman is drawn to look at the lake, “Like a deep
    piece of some old running river / Cut short off at both ends,” as the wind whips “the slow
    waves whiter and whiter and whiter”; this is clearly a correlative for her imminent and
    immanent anger/madness.

  6. Thompson, The Early Years,301.

  7. Plato, Symposium,in The Collected Dialogues,ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington
    Cairns (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1989), 561.

  8. One is drawn to think of all of the poems in which Frost pictures figures brought
    to the classic posture of supplication, as they find themselves in kneeling or bowing
    positions before a retributive or indifferent power, positions the prostrate figures
    themselves usually detail: “The Subverted Flower,” “On Going Unnoticed,” “To
    Earthward,” “Putting in the Seed,” “The Bonfire,” among others, place men in positions
    of self-abasement, about which they speak. The dynamic in “Birches” is resonant, as it uses
    the erotic image of the girl on hands and knees to balance against the taut, downward-
    arching saplings ridden by the boy into submission.

  9. In “The Thatch,” the speaker, outside after a quarrel with someone upstairs (by
    implication, in the bedroom), finds “The world was a black invisible field. / The rain by
    rights was snow for cold. / The wind was another layer of mold.” Once the house is
    abandoned, its “wind-torn thatch” lets in the rain and ends the life of the house. This
    living thatched house with its angry woman upstairs acts as a metonym for the speaker,
    who himself is windy-headed with anger. The birds living in the thatch are displaced by
    his sudden presence outdoors at night, and their fall into “mulch and mire,” their inability
    to rise out of it until daylight comes and flying is “safe,” is also indicative of the speaker’s
    lyric impotence.

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