A History of American Literature

354 Making It New: 1900–1945

And then – the watcher at his pulse took fright.

No one believed. They listened at his heart.

Little – less – nothing! – and that ended it.

No more to build on there. And they, since they

Were not the one dead, turned to their affairs.

This is death stripped of any sense of occasion, denied preparation or ceremony.

Unanticipated, greeted with incomprehension, stilted phrases and awkward

reactions, and followed by numbness, together with the indelible feeling that the

dead are gone while the living must continue, this is death as the terrifying, universal,

and in some sense inconsequential fact that it is – and as very few writers have been

willing to acknowledge it.

Fear and dread lurk close to the surface of a poem like this, certainly; but in other

poems Frost’s playfulness, his willingness to entertain all kinds of doubts and

possibilities leads him in the contrary direction – not to transcendence of facts,

perhaps, but to a wondering, joyful apprehension of their potential, to the sense that

nature might after all be whispering secret, sympathetic messages to us. “The Most

of It” belongs in this second group. It presents us with a situation familiar enough in

Romantic literature, and one that American writers like Cooper, Emerson, and

Whitman were particularly fond of exploring: the protagonist – the “he” of the

poem – stands looking across a lake toward some distant hills, seeking comfort and

instruction from nature. In accordance with the tradition, Frost’s protagonist cries

out to the hills, seeking what the poet calls “counter-love, original response,” some

sign that nature sympathizes and that he has not “kept the universe alone.” But, in

this case at least, there is no clear reaction. All he seems to get back is the “mocking

echo” of his own voice, confirming him in his isolation. Or does he? This, after all, is

the concluding description of the echo:

As a great buck it powerfully appeared,

Pushing the crumpled water up ahead,

And landed pouring like a waterfall.

And stumbled through the rocks with horny tread,

And forced the underbush – and that was all.

If a symbol is, in Jung’s phrase, “the best possible expression of a relatively unknown

fact,” then this is the purest of symbols. Perhaps all the protagonist apprehends is the

echo of his voice. However, that echo is described with such dramatic bite, such

vitality, that perhaps he apprehends more: perhaps he has glimpsed, if not the

Emersonian Over-Soul, then at least some of the strange, animistic forces that give

life dimension and energy, that transform “fact” into “dream.” He, and we, cannot be

sure, and it is the achievement of the poem that we cannot be – that we are left, in

short, with a feeling of mystery.

Although Frost was born in San Francisco, he spent most of his life in New England,

and, like Robinson, his poetry is indelibly marked by the vocal habits of that region

and an ingrained regional tendency to fluctuate between irony, melancholy,

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