Lyricism: At the Back of the North Wind 319may even signal a kind of licentiousness, suggested even in “To the Thawing
Wind” by the uncloistered monk image. The Witch of Grafton is said by her
husband to be out “kiting. / She thinks when the wind makes a night of it /
She might as well herself.” As one who “kites” she becomes a combination of
things: she is one who soars on the wind; she is a bird of prey; she is by
extension a person who preys on others; she is one who knows how the wind
blows and who will, thus, “make a night of it,” with the sexual license this
term connotes. Borne by wind, she is at the mercy of her own rapacious
desire. Similarly, but with less pejorative connotations, the wind in “A Line-
Storm Song” is associated with rising desire that will flood the civilized land
and crush its spokesmen, the lyric birds, with an orgasmic “ancient sea.”
Wind stirs ashes into sparks and drives sparks into conflagrations; both
literally and figuratively, it is a force associated with cataclysm and
purification.
Frost’s speakers consistently place themselves in impotent opposition
to elemental forces; they are there in the poems to choose their stated
correlatives, to claim their own limitations of power—to confess. The
speaker of “Bereft” locates himself clearly in the realm of nonpower; he and
his sagging house are belittled by the roaring wind, which is a masculine
correlative to his feminine powerlessness. The figure in “On Going
Unnoticed” is the very emblem of abasement, and the “you” of which he
speaks universalizes his impotence: grasping the “rugged pleat” of the great
windswept tree, he is an abject figure, a child clinging to his mother’s skirts,
a slave prostrate at the feet of the master, a boy at the feet of a man. The
figure of the speaker is metonymically contained in the phallic failure of the
spotted and pallid coralroot whose “flowers hang meanly down,” and the
plucking out of this feeble root becomes, thus, a gesture encoded with the
sadomasochism implicit in such willful abasement. The confessional
impulses of these speakers reduce the potentially analogous relationships
between man and nature to named metaphors that inevitably place the
human figures in defensive, vulnerable positions: “I am like a woodchuck, or
a coral root, or a fallen leaf, or a helpless, storm-tossed tree”; “I am like the
frozen field of snow, frostbound to impotence”; “I am too absent-spirited to
count.” Even the urbane speaker of “For Once, Then, Something” qualifies
his authority with his defensiveness about placing himself “wrong to the
light,” thus making his Apollonian pretensions at least potentially ironic and
deprecating. It is no accident that in “Spring Pools,” where hunger and the
power to sate it are unqualified, the embodied human presence within the
poem disappears: the trees “have in their pent-up buds / To darken nature”
in a way that a speaking figure cannot, and in fact the distant voice remains