Modern American Poetry

(^320) Katherine Kearns
cautionary, warning, “Let them think twice before they use their powers.”
Like the birds that symbolize Frost’s stated version of his lyric voice, these
figures do not claim to be lofted skyward, nor do they particularly wish to
be—“May no fate willfully misunderstand me / ... and snatch me away,” they
pray.
“Misgiving” seems in this context a consciously parodic version of
Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind,” where the wintry West Wind drives the
sickened and pestilential leaves before it along with the winged seeds that
will give birth to spring. Shelley’s speaker wants to be lifted by the wind,
driven “Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth!” He begs to be taken
and tossed by a wind so powerful that it can lift the clouds “Like the bright
hair uplifted from the head / Of some fierce Maenad.” But Frost’s poem
embodies an antithetical desire for rest and safety, a fear that when given the
chance to be translated to some “knowledge beyond the bounds of life” he
will prefer to rest like the sleepy leaves. The leaves first cry, “We will, go with
you, O Wind!” having promised themselves ever since spring that they will
“follow him.” But they become oppressed by sleep, “And they end by bidding
him stay with them.” Unable to rise, they seek the shelter of walls, thickets,
and hollows in which to rest, answering the wind “with an ever vaguer and
vaguer stir.” The speaker sees himself as like the autumn leaves, just as
Shelley envisions himself as an autumnal forest, but Frost’s vision is without
the fire implicit in Shelley’s hectic reds, yellows, and blacks that will scatter
ashes and sparks of prophecy among humankind. His speaker’s prayer is not
to be lifted from the thorns of life, but is far more modest: “I only hope that
when I am free ... It may not seem better to me to rest.” He identifies himself
with the leaves who choose an inglorious sleep and who ultimately seem
more hibernatory than sacrificial.
For Frost, whose “The Bonfire” re-creates the romantic scenario of
wind and fire in seriocomic, quasi-heroic terms, the generative effects of
wind are compromised by its equal potential for subverting control. In “The
Bonfire” the wind takes a flame that, in the breezeless, quiet afternoon,
makes “a pinnacle to heaven” and spreads it in tongues across the ground.
The mystical route from earth to heaven, the unmoving pillar of flame, is
replaced with moving, all-consuming fire, and the speaker spends himself
ecstatically in rubbing it out, thus saving civilization—the town—from wind-
fed destruction. His battle with the fire that the wind awakens must be read
at one level as an erotic one, and thus the victory may be seen as pyrrhic.
Ecstatic release is accompanied in this case by acres of “coal-black,” charred
earth, yet he does, significantly, quell the wildfire before it reaches
civilization. In actuality, Frost saved his home from the fire he had set, and