Modern American Poetry

(^332) Katherine Kearns
and perhaps for spiritual purposes he is part of the woods, for if they burn so
too will the house and the “town” that abuts them. His poetic vision
reiterates this ambiguous placement, and in examining as he does “the line
where man leaves off and nature starts” (“New Hampshire”), Frost sets
himself a more complex task than the birds’ stated functions of qualifying,
inspecting, defining, evaluating, and reminding: he looks directly at the place
where transformation occurs, where words are coming unformed because
meaning is always in flux. There are no formal gardens in the borderland he
inhabits, no topiaries, no artificial, miniaturized grottos, and no Penshursts
that embody the optimistic assumption that a man may order his physical and
spiritual estates; even the small stream captured underground in concrete at
the city limits in “A Brook in the City” retains its dark power to keep a city
“from both work and sleep,” the two states most necessary to the
maintenance of an ordered physical and spiritual life. The bird/poet in the
cage metaphor of “The Lockless Door” is, thus, a highly artificial construct,
almost intrinsically ironic in the context of Frost’s spatial arrangements. The
walls he erects are in natural, uncontrolled landscapes that defy them to hold,
so that as the drama implicit within the poetic structure unfolds formalism
becomes its only containment.^28
If Frost’s perception of one’s obligation to moderate appetite with
control is classical, the reiterated sense of the futility of this effort predicts a
modernist preoccupation with the decentered self and how one might
translate that existential precariousness into language or into art. There is no
condition, no state, no speaker in Frost’s poetry for whom the heautocratic
struggle is resolved into what would be, for the good Greek, its expected
payoff in the ability to act upon and to influence others: it is by these terms
emblematic that in Frost’s poetry no man can persuade a woman to return to
him or not to leave him, that men are reduced, as in “The Subverted
Flower,” to choking on words “Like a tiger at a bone,” that they are brought
to threaten, as in “Home Burial,” “I’ll follow and bring you back by force.”
This impotence is doubly fraught, for it signals both a social and a lyric
insufficiency. Frost’s unstable irony disperses the forward movements by
which he claims to proceed—the “sentence sound” and the iambic surge are
not sufficient to override the meanderings through which one must go to
approach meaning(s). He creates a medium in which, ironically, the word
takes precedence by default, rising up in all its contaminated, erotic force to
suggest possibilities above and below and between the lines. He does not need
to be “poetic” in his diction or syntax or even in his choice of subjects, and
he thus protects himself from the most unmanly elements of lyric poetry;
language works its own subversions on linear, forward-moving progress