Modern American Poetry

(^318) Katherine Kearns
left of the window will not suffice to keep the wind at bay. It will enter the
monklike “narrow stall” and toss the tools of introspection, the books and
pictures, about; it will “Scatter the poems on the floor; / Turn the poet out
of door.” A force of excess, the wind subverts vigilant moderation, inviting
explicitly nonintellectual, nonmonkish pleasures.^7 By implication the
Christian totem, the crucifix, has little power in this scenario of melting
barriers.
In “Bereft,” in the teeth of a powerful wind the figure on the porch is
feminized, subject to violation and no longer in control of “the word.” He
sees the wind as an aggressor that might mistake his presence as a kind of
availability: “What would it take my standing there for?” he wonders, as if his
motives might be misapprehended in the same way that the girl / poet of
“The Fear of Man,” buffeted by wind and dust, might be misunderstood in
what she/he means. He feels that the wind is there specifically because word
has gotten out of his abandonment—“Word I was in the house alone /
Somehow must have gotten abroad, / Word I was in my life alone, / Word I
had no one left but God.” This escaped “word” has been transformed to
howling wind, much as Frost’s escaped women are transformed elementally,
and has become antithetical to order as it urges the world to the border of a
storm. The wordless human figure, neither in nor out, neither man nor
woman, is bereft of effective language as certainly as he is bereft of love: his
“house” is sagging, indeed, as he is divested simultaneously of the woman
and of the erotic power of the word. The wind’s sound is a deep masculine
roar, and the speaker hears “Something sinister in the tone.” As if to provide
a mocking symbol for the speaker’s impotent rage at his abandonment, it has
whipped the leaves up into a snakelike, hissing coil that strikes “blindly” at
the speaker’s knees and misses its mark: the snake that can only strike blindly
and ineffectively is both phallically and verbally impotent, neither
penetrative nor persuasive. The wind has churned the lake at the bottom of
the hill into froth, as if to provide a symbol, too, for the absent female who
has left the speaker “in [his] life alone.”^8 The wind possesses, in short, the
clear capacity to animate the speaker as well, for his feminized, passive state
invites penetration, but with its words and not the speaker’s own.
Frost’s speakers, aware that submission to desire subverts their
commonsensical version of how language is to work, thus seldom bare
themselves willingly to feel the wind against their bodies, and so they tend to
seem, like the urbane, ironic Drumlin woodchuck who is “instinctively
thorough / About [its] crevice and burrow,” the very embodiment of
prudence. In keeping with the implication that to be ruled by outside forces
signals a culpable appetitive uncontrol, the willingness to take on the wind