123“white water rode the black forever”
Frost and the Necessity of Metaphor
ummer 1914 saw war looming, as Frost ’s
North of Boston came out in London to enthusiastic reviews. No less than three
of these came from Edward Thomas, a younger Welsh writer deciding whether
to enlist. The two men found personal and literary sympathies, and both loved
plant life. Their friendship quickly became intense. Meanwhile North of Boston’s
popularity in America opened up Frost ’s reach. He bought a farm near New
Hampshire ’s White Mountains, then later moved to another in the Green Moun-
tains of southern Vermont. Besides poetry, he pursued teaching and lecturing
that flourished for the next half-century. “Barding around,” he called it.
On one such occasion in May 1953, a small high school group had the fortune
to sit at Frost ’s feet. The venerable poet spoke about aspiring poets. “You know,
I get lots of letters,” he said. “I open them up and if the poems haven’t any rhyme
I toss them right in the trash. Now if they’re rhymed, and one word belongs
there for the sense while the other’s dragged in to make a rhyme, I throw them
away too. But if I can’t tell which is which, if both rhyme words belong, why
those are the poems I read!”
Of course there ’s more to it all than rhyming. Frost told an Oxford audi-
ence “about poetry—it ’s the ultimate. The nearest thing to it is penultimate,
even religion.” What rhymes can do happens in “Fire and Ice,” where nature ’s
metaphors converse about passion and catastrophe. Best memorized, these lines
get their clout from tempo and one jolting rhyme.
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