THE INDIVIDUAL ANIMAL IN POETRY137part of the poem is the confusion reflected and created in the phrase
“And say no word to tell me who he was / Who was so foolish as to think
what he thought.” Who, after all, is “who” here? It is, or can be, both bird
and speaker, each thinking foolishly of the other, though to be fair to the
bird, it is unlikely it would have perceived an earth-bound man making
postholes in the snow as he crosses a frozen swamp as a threat to one of
its feathers. In the end, beyond the speaker’s own self-centeredness, the
encounter ironically reflects our need to find agency and purpose in
the life of another creature, a need prompted by the registered presence
of an animal.
Frost wrote two other excellent poems of animal encounter, both in
the form of short narratives with powerful climaxes that echo Word-
sworth’s “Boy of Winander”: “The Most of It” and “Two Look at Two.”
Like Wordsworth’s poem, “The Most of It” is about a solitary figure
shouting across a lake and receiving an “echo of his own [voice] / From
some tree-hidden cliff.” The poem’s protagonist is alone in a wilder-
ness, seeking a “voice” to echo his own, “not its own love back in copy
speech, / But counter-love, original response.”^28 This too is an echo of
Wordsworth’s desire to find clear signs in the natural world of a “sense
sublime... / a motion and a spirit, that impels / All thinking things, all
objects of all thought.”^29 The external sign that Frost gives in this poem
is “nothing... / Unless it was the embodiment that crashed / In the
cliff ’s talus on the other side,” which is, “instead of proving human... , /
a great buck” that swims toward the calling man and stumbles past him
along the shore. The poem presents this encounter as a primal scene, the
spectacle of the animal’s power, and as nature’s only response (which
may not even be a response) to the man’s invitation. Although deer can
vocalize, this one remains silent. The individual animal body, its power
and movement (in contrast to the man’s inertia), and its effect on the
water and landscape are all signs of its will and agency. It is evidence of
the sufficient force of life and individual will in the world, an animal
force mocking the man’s ineffectual loneliness.
The poem “Two Look at Two” is the optimistic counterpart to “The
Most of It,” featuring a couple whose “love and forgetting” have led them
to hike far up a mountain, and whose contentment suggests they are