Lyricism: At the Back of the North Wind 323consistency to be taken analogically, as rather obvious metaphors for the
poet’s commitment to the earth’s being the right place for love, even if that
means that love becomes a quarrelsome, mundane affair tainted by Eve’s first
betrayal. But Frost is contriving a way to sing that transcends words, goes
beyond words to an aural source that is uncompromised and subverts
rationality: he seeks “the abstract vitality of ... speech” that is “pure sound—
pure form” (Letters80). In this he is enacting a Frostian version of the
Schopenhauerean premise that holds music forth as transcendent, a medium
that moves one with a power beyond the rational, even as he repudiates the
traditional poetic uses of music as a model by which harmonized vowels and
consonants are brought to sing pretty songs (Letters79).^16 In rediscovering
and exploiting the “cave things,” the sounds “living in the cave of the mouth”
that “were before words were,” he seeks to bring to poetry the true power of
music, which may not be mimicked by language alone and which may not be
sung by what Wallace Stevens calls, in “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a
Blackbird,” the “bawds of euphony” (Letters191). The lyric bird may know
in singing not to sing, but the poet with his virile oversound drums out the
flagging lyric voice: he sets out “to make music out of what I may call the
sound of sense” (Letters79). The language of love, with its ambivalent
impulses toward confession and aggrandizement and toward guilt and
rapture, is dominated by a more powerful song.
Lyric poetry is exactly that locus which is most problematized for
Frost, for at the same moment in poetic history when the lyric form is being
indicted for its effeminacy and for its failure to accommodate the modern
world, it is also having attributed to it the explicitly sexual energies seen as
intrinsic to the revelatory mode.^17 By the time Frost gets to it, the lyric,
classically associated only in part with love poetry, is caught in an inescapable
tautology whereby it gradually removes itself from all that is not in some way
correlative to sexual desire: love thus moves from a subset of lyric content to
the standard by which lyric is measured. The underlying assumption that
informs this tautology is based on a presupposition, articulated with detailed
precision in Freud and long suspected as an implicit truth, at least literarily,
before he so baldly laid it out: reality is sex.^18 One uncomfortable with this
minimalist assertion might turn instead to Plato, who articulates a similar
preoccupation with sex, which, codified and divested of its essential disorder,
becomes the first necessary step toward Love, or the supreme Good, or the
absolute Spirit; recognizing what he sees as love’s preeminence, Plato makes
the first of many philosophical attempts to integrate (sexual) love as an
initiatory movement toward the divine.^19
Or, in fact, one uncomfortable with this assertion might turn to Frost