Lyricism: At the Back of the North Wind 321in the poetic version the speaker saves the entire town;^9 in both cases the
virile containment of the appetitive, tonguelike fire ensures domestic and
civil order.
For the most part, Frost’s equating of the wind with passion makes it a
force productive of ambivalence and confusion. Without the wind, the fire of
“The Bonfire” remains spiritually oriented, upright and heaven-directed like
the central pole of “The Silken Tent,” which may contain both soul and
phallus simultaneously. In this manifestation love may be generative of a
more immortal beauty, a Platonic communion of desire and spirit that
produces, not human offspring, but “something lovelier and less mortal than
human seed.”^10 This state is, however, by nature tenuous, for a sudden wind
can transform the spiritual flame into a “flaming sword.” His speakers, who
eschew the heroic stance, tend thus to find the low bushes and walls that
make windbreaks and they mostly keep their windows closed. Outside, they
find their correlatives in silently falling snow or in gray, windless landscapes;
but “When the wind works against us in the dark / ... And whispers with a
sort of stifled bark / The beast, / Come out! Come out!— / It takes no inward
struggle not to go.” “Lodged” presents the image of a bullying pair, the wind
and the rain, lashing the piteous flowers into submission: “They so smote the
garden bed / That the flowers actually knelt, / And lay lodged—though not
dead.” “I know how the flowers felt,” the speaker says, again, as in “On
Going Unnoticed,” proclaiming metonymically his own humiliation
envisioned in terms of enforced prostration and sadistic physical
punishment.^11 In two poems where speakers are subjected to powerful
winds—“The Thatch” and “Bereft”—they have been driven outside by
domestic troubles, and as in “Storm Fear,” they perceive the wind as actively
aggressive, more dangerous than inspirational.^12 In an early poem, “Now
Close the Windows,” the speaker asks that the windows be shut to silence
even the sounds of the wind, saying “So close the windows and not hear the
wind, / But see all wind-stirred.” He is able thus to create his own illusions,
making this significant qualification: “No bird is singing now, and if there is,
/ Be it my Joss.” The lyric birds who would sing in a winter gale are not birds
he would want to hear, for the wind brings subversion of control and may
awaken the passion that bruits down the sound of sense.
Even the trees that otherwise are filled with power and beauty, as the
queenly maple in “Maple” or the sibylline trees of “On Going Unnoticed,”
lose their preeminence when the speaker of “Tree at My Window” associates
them with himself. In “On Going Unnoticed” the trees sweep leafily by the
dwarfed figure below, and they are “engaged [presumably in conversation] up
there with the light and breeze” as equals. But in “Tree at My Window” the