352 Making It New: 1900–1945repetition gives it particular resonance. This could, after all, be a metaphorical
reference to the brief span of human life and the compulsion this puts the narrator
under to take risks and explore the truth while he can. Only a few “miles” to go before
“I sleep” in death: such a chilling memento mori perhaps justifies stopping by the
woods in the first place and considering the spiritual quest implicit in the vision they
offer. Perhaps: the point is that neither narrator nor reader can be sure. “The poem is
the act of having the thought,” Frost insisted; it is process rather than product, it invites
us to share in the experiences of seeing, feeling, and thinking, not simply to look at
their results. So the most a piece like “Stopping by Woods” will offer – and it is a great
deal – is an imaginative resolution of its tensions: the sense that its conflicts and irres-
olutions have been given appropriate dramatic expression, revelation, and equipoise.
“It begins in delight and ends in wisdom,” said Frost in his remarkable definition
of “the figure a poem makes’:The figure is the same for love ... It begins in delight ... and ends in clarification
of life – not necessarily a great clarification, such as sects and cults are founded on, but
in a momentary stay against confusion.The incessant coupling of opposites, the felicitous, serious play that ends in “a
momentary stay against confusion” is precisely what characterizes Frost’s work. It
makes all his best lyrics, like “Stopping by Woods,” essentially dramatic in that they
enact internal conflicts, savage dualisms of thought and feeling. In turn, it makes all
of his best dramatic poems, like “The Death of the Hired Man” and “West-Running
Brook,” essentially lyrical in that they reproduce, in beautifully individualized form,
those same conflicts, turning them into intimate human communication. In “The
Death of the Hired Man,” for example, the event that gives the poem its title is merely
the occasion for a loving argument between husband and wife that brings out their
differences of speech and approach. The husband’s voice is abrupt, with many stops
and few connectives, full of imperatives and willful declarations, turning aside for
brusque rhetorical or cross-examining questions. The seal of his tone is set by his
caustic description of home: “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, /
They have to take you in.” His character, clearly, is that of the maker of good bargains,
the shrewd calculator of motives, the uncompromising champion of harsh truth.
The wife is very different, as her definition of home suggests: “I should have called it /
Something you somehow haven’t to deserve.” Far more hesitant, her speech has
breaks of another kind from her husband’s – of someone reaching for the right word,
more sympathetic and imaginative, using emotion and a kind of lyric responsiveness
to soften the hard edges of fact. Very different in character, and in their reactions to
the hired man who returns to them after a long absence looking for work, they are
nevertheless in intimate touch with each other; and they are drawn even closer
together by the hired man’s sudden death. They never entirely agree; their differences
are no more resolved than the differences in “Stopping by Woods” are. But, like
“Stopping by Woods,” they suggest the possible coexistence of these differences, a
marriage or, to use Frost’s own phrase, “happy-sad blend” of realism and romance.GGray_c04.indd 352ray_c 04 .indd 352 8 8/1/2011 7:53:49 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 53 : 49 AM