Soundings for Home 169(without all kinds of subtle vernacular modulations and deflations) the
sustained rhetorical eloquence he admired in a poem like Shirley’s “The
Glories of Our Blood and State.” Having met the challenge that no one can
turn certain kinds of New England and especially household experience into
metaphor, he then, with an exquisite pride, wants to show that he does not
choose ostentatiously to extend his metaphor into a fashionable literariness.
A great poem like “Home Burial” thus has to win its way, with a lean and
sinewy and finally irresistible necessity, to a reading that tells us not only
about lives but about Frost’s own life in the writing of poetry and about his
rescue of a life for poetry out of his own desperate need for circumscriptions.
He is a poet who finds his freedom of movement out of a sense of
restraint: the movement to one extreme is provoked by the imminence of the
other. “The Wood-Pile” is like a sequel to “Home Burial,” with the man in
this instance wandering from a “home” that seems little more than an
abstraction to him and to us. More a meditation than a dramatic narrative, it
offers the soliloquy of a lone figure walking in a winter landscape. It is a
desolate scene possessed of the loneliness of “Desert Places.” Attention is
focused on the activity of consciousness in this isolated wanderer, and
nothing characterizes him as a social being or as having any relationships to
another person. While the poem has resemblances, again, to Wordsworth’s
“Tintern Abbey,” or Coleridge’s “Dejection: An Ode,” it is more random in
its structuring and has none of the demarcations of the descriptive-reflective
mode. A better way to describe the poem is suggested in a talk by A.R.
Ammons, “A Poem as a Walk.” “A walk involves the whole person; it is not
reproducible; its shape occurs, unfolds; it has a motion characteristic of the
walker” (Epoch,Fall, 1968, p. 118).
The man in the poem is not, like Stevens’ Crispin, “a man come out of
luminous traversing,” but more like the “listener” in Stevens’ “The Snow
Man.” In each poem is a recognition of a wintry barrenness made more so in
Frost by a reductive process by which possibilities of metaphor—of finding
some reassuring resemblances—are gradually disposed of. At the end, the
speaker in Frost’s poem is as “cool” as is the listener in Stevens, and also as
peculiarly unanguished by the situation in which he finds himself. It is as if
the wintry prospect, the arrival at something like Stevens’ First Idea, a cold
clarity without redeeming deceptions, has in itself been an achievement of
the imagination. It is something won against all such conventional
blandishments as the “misery” of what Harold Bloom calls the “Shelleyan
wind” in “The Snow Man” or the flirtatious bird in “The Wood-Pile.”
The persistent difference between Frost and Stevens applies here, too,
however. It resides in the kind of context the reader is asked to supply for