30 The New York ReviewFrost at Midnight
Dan Chiasson
The Letters of Robert Frost,
Vo l u m e 3 : 1 9 2 9 –1 9 3 6
edited by Mark Richardson, Donald
Sheehy, Robert Bernard Hass, and
Henry Atmore.
Belknap Press/Harvard University
Press, 818 pp., $39.95On April 29, 1934, Robert Frost wrote
to his friend Louis Untermeyer that
his “favorite poem long before I knew
what it was going to mean to us was
[Matthew] Arnold’s ‘Cadmus and Har-
monia.’” In the original myth, Cadmus,
founder of Thebes, and his wife, Har-
monia, endure the deaths of their five
children as retribution for Cadmus’s
killing a serpent prized by the god
Ares. Arnold’s version picks up late in
the couple’s story, after the “grey old
man and woman” have begged to be
transformed into “placid and dumb”
snakes, “far from here” among the
grasses and mountain flowers of Illyria.
There, “The pair/ Wholly forgot their
old sad life, and home,” writes Arnold.
No longer rel iv i ng “the bi l low of ca la m-
ity” that “Over their own dear children
roll’d, / Curse upon curse, pang upon
pang,” Cadmus and Harmonia are at
last “placed safely in changed forms.”
A few days later, Frost again wrote to
Untermeyer, reporting that his young-
est daughter and favorite child, Marjo-
rie, had died of a postpartum infection.
“Here we are Cadmus and Harmonia
not yet placed safely in changed forms.”
But the letter describing Marjorie’s
final days, one of the most power-
ful Frost ever wrote, is itself a change
of form from the raw distress that it
describes:Marge always said she would
rather die in a gutter than in a
hospital. But it was in a hospital
she was caught to die after more
than a hundred serum injections
and blood transfusions. We were
torn afresh every day between the
temptations of letting her go untor-
tured or cruelly trying to save her.
The only consolation we have is the
memory of her greatness through
all. Never out of delirium for the
last four weeks, her responses were
of course incorrect. She got little
or nothing of what we said to her.
The only way I could reach her was
by putting my hand backward and
forward between us, as in counting
out and saying with overemphasis
You—and—Me. The last time I
did that, the day before she died,
she smiled faintly and answered
All the same, frowned slightly and
made it Always the same.Though it feels cruel to notice it,
you can find in this tragic last scene
between father and daughter the pri-
mal elements of a Frost poem: that
“counting out” and meaning- making by
selection and “overemphasis” is his pros-
ody in action. He dreamed of sentences
stripped of their words, pared down to
their “sentence sounds,” those “brute
tones of our human throat that may once
have been all our meaning.” Here the
entirety of English has been painfully
reduced down to six words, Frost’s three
and Marjorie’s three. The “brute tones”and the accompanying pantomime
alone communicate the meaning. Once
extraneous language enters the picture,
confusion and frustration—Marjorie’s
smile turning into a frown—soon follow.
Frost’s “not yet” (“Here we are
Cadmus and Harmonia not yet placed
safely in changed forms”) was wish-
ful. He and his wife, Elinor, had good
reason to hope that the prophecy of
Arnold’s poem had finally revealed its
entire “meaning”: Marjorie was the
third of their six children to die. A son,
Elliott, was lost in 1900 at the age of
four, after a homeopathic remedy for
cholera failed. A baby daughter died
three days after her birth in 1907. But
“Cadmus and Harmonia” bore further,
still unimagined, implications. In 1938,
four years after Marjorie’s death, after
years of marital discord, Elinor died of
heart disease, refusing to call Frost to
her deathbed. Their son Carol, trou-
bled by mental illness since childhood,
slid into despair and killed himself with
his hunting rifle in 1940. His body was
discovered in the kitchen of their stone
farmhouse by his fifteen- year- old son,
Prescott. Frost found reasons to blame
himself for every one of these tragedies.
His two living children, Irma and Les-
ley, sought a protective distance from
the maelstrom that had swept most of
their family away.
And so by 1940, at the age of sixty-
six, Frost, perhaps the most famous and
beloved American poet, had suffered a
series of losses almost unimaginable to
the fortunate among us. By one way of
counting, he was more or less alone in
the world.This period that broke Frost also led
to his seeking audiences (and, more
and more, poems that pandered to
them) as a distraction. Stories abound
from his later years of the poet’s wear-
ing his students and friends out by
performing long into the night. Rarer,
though, were the intimate confidences
imparted to Robert Lowell, his young
“friend in the art”—the art of writing,
but also of bearing misery, and perhaps
the specific misery of bipolar disorder.
In a sonnet published in 1969, Lowell
memorably captured the elderly Frost
as he combed through the debris of his
personal life:Robert Frost at midnight, the
audience gone
to vapor, the great act laid on the
shelf in mothballs,
his voice musical, raw and raw—
he writes in the flyleaf:
“Robert Lowell from Robert
Frost, his friend in the art.”
“Sometimes I feel too full of
myself,” I say.
And he, misunderstanding,
“When I am low,
I stray away. My son wasn’t your
kind. The night
we told him Merrill Moore would
come to treat him,
he said, ‘I’ll kill him first.’ One of
my daughters thought things,
knew every male she met was out
to make her;
the way she dresses, she couldn’t
make a whorehouse.”
And I, “Sometimes I’m so happy I
can’t stand myself.”And he, “When I am too full of
joy, I think
how little good my health did
anyone near me.”The set list Frost liked to read for
audiences in his old age excluded some
of his best, and almost all of his most
revealing, poems—“Home Burial,”
“The Subverted Flower,” “A Servant
to Servants.” These poems were in
essence suppressed. The process of
retrieving Frost from the spectacle of
his own self- erasure—Randall Jarrell
called him “the Only Genuine Robert
Frost in Captivity”—began soon after
his death.With every volume of his letters that
appears, Frost grows more vivid, even
as “the great act” fades from memory.
The poet we meet at the beginning of
The Letters of Robert Frost, Volume 3:
1929 –1936, edited by Mark Richard-
son, Donald Sheehy, Robert Bernard
Hass, and Henry Atmore, is nearly
fifty- five, at the height of his artistic
powers and on the cusp of literary ce-
lebrity. He is in the midst of a period of
bold, if frantic, accumulation—of sta-
tus, along with property. In 1928 Frost
purchased a second farm, which he
named the Gully, in the Vermont town
of South Shaftsbury, a mile or so from
the stone house that he had given as a
present to Carol and his family in 1924.
Frost looked forward to the publica-
tion of his Collected Poems by Henry
Holt in 1930; as part of the deal, he was
made a shareholder in the firm.
In 1926 Frost had again taken up
teaching at Amherst College, on envi-
able terms—terms that were, indeed,
noted with considerable envy by his col-
leagues. Though his duties were light,
soon he bought a house in Amherst, a
fine stick- style Victorian, built for the
president of the Massachusetts Agri-
cultural College, with distant mountain
views. The Frosts also owned a summer
house in Franconia, New Hampshire,
high in the mountains above the rag-
weed line (Frost suffered terribly from
hay fever). Owning four houses means
that you’re not at home even when at
home—which, in any case, Frost often
wasn’t: a busy countrywide touring
schedule, made necessary, in part, by
all those expenses, put him in front
of rapturous audiences from coast to
coast. “If you see me start a real estate
agency pretend not to notice,” he wrote
to a friend, Lew Sarett. “Oh yes I have
some of the arts of the salesman.”
We know from the pedagogy laid out
in Frost’s poems how to understand, at
metaphysical scale, the contradictory
drives—toward building, toward tear-
ing down—that troubled him during
this period, but the letters often tally
human costs unexplored in those well-
known formulations. In “The Wood-
Pile,” Frost comes across a “cord of
maple, cut and split/And piled—and
measured, four by four by eight,” aban-
doned in a snowfield, “far from a use-
ful fireplace.” Its meticulous making
and measuring is just the sort of work
a poet does with language against the
white field of the page. Also like a
poet, whoever built this thing forgot allRobert Frost; illustration by Yann KebbiChiasson 30 35 .indd 30 11 / 17 / 21 4 : 50 PM