FROST AND THE NECESSITY OF METAPHOR 127Coleridge in England ’s Lake District fastened on a scooped rock throwing up
a ceaseless white wave, an exact “Shape... forever overpowered by the stream
rushing down in upon it, and still obstinate in resurrection.” Like Coleridge
and countless others, Frost fastens on flux taking form, motion holding still—in
effect, loss regaining.
Here again nature offers an image of life, and of poetry too, going and staying
at every line break. Summing up existence as “The stream of everything that
runs away,” “The universal cataract of death / That spends to nothingness,”
Frost finds an energy for “not losing” in the brook near his home:
It is this backward motion toward the source,
Against the stream, that most we see ourselves in,
The tribute of the current to the source.
It is from this in nature we are from.
It is most us.The tribute of the current to the source: as sacred a creed as Frost was likely
to hold.
He dearly needed one in March 1938 when Elinor died, his friend and wife of
forty-six years. She ’d wanted her ashes scattered among the alders along Hyla
Brook at Derry, where the children grew up and so much goodness and pain
transpired. But when Frost went back there, the grounds seemed too derelict
for that act. He foundered for months until a friend, Kathleen Morrison, became
his savior and secretary-manager. Frost ’s perfect sonnet for her, “The Silken
Tent,” begins “She is.. .”—and that ’s gently all we hear of her, as metaphor
takes over:
She is as in a field a silken tent
At midday when a sunny summer breeze
Has dried the dew and all its ropes relent,
So that in guys it gently sways at ease,
And its supporting central cedar pole,
Which is its pinnacle to heavenward
And signifies the sureness of the soul,
Seems to owe naught to any single cord,
But strictly held by none, is loosely bound
By countless silken ties of love and thought
To everything on earth the compass round,
And only by one ’s going slightly taut
In the capriciousness of summer air
Is of the slightest bondage made aware.After speaking this Frost once said, “It ’s a one-sentence sonnet,” turned quizzi-
cal, and asked, “But what if there isn’t any pole?” A dozen teenage boys, dazed