Modern American Poetry

(^336) Katherine Kearns
of language, of prosody, of natural correlatives. Monet’s paint on a canvas,
Frost’s black ink on white paper: in both there is a surface—laid across the
lilies and across the words—that reflects what is finally a
nonrepresentational; extralinguistic version of self. This perhaps is the
glimmer of white beneath the narcissistic pool in “For Once, Then,
Something,” or it could be what Frost’s women see when they look out of
windows, or it could be what that stranger who wanders through the poetry
knows; it is, in any event, what cannot be simply said or simply heard.
One might say in more poetic terms that Frost is entranced by the
elegant paradox of the Fall, when the birds gained at once knowledge and
guilt by listening all day to Eve’s voice. Spoken by a woman, the words will
be by definition both corrupt and arousing. Perhaps, in fact, this is the most
fundamental meaning in Eve’s having been the first to fill her mouth with
forbidden knowledge, for it must take an intrinsically compromised creature
to bring about the compromise God had in mind when he set her up for the
Fall. This is the original model by which it becomes possible not only to
recognize meaning but also to understand its vulnerability: to see in the very
articulation of one’s “knowing” its fundamentally illusory, misleading quality,
its quotient of contamination. In the very beginning things could be truly
named but not explained, and afterward, when it became possible to speak
untruth, their names became mere disguises, at best metaphors for their
variable identities. This discrepancy is, after all, what allows for and
necessitates poetry, this inexorably dying generation of language. Yet the loss
of innocence makes it possible to name desire—by eating the apple Adam
and Eve discover appetite—and to see it as oppositional to reason.
Energized by conflict, the poet may nonetheless give way to nostalgia
for a more holistic view. Frost, in the very early poem “In a Vale,” from A
Boy’s Will,creates a vision of a place where language and desire are close to
being the same, but it is, by implication, only the tenuous receptivity of
boyhood that allows the speaker to hear and value the feminine, prerational
voices.
When I was young, we dwelt in a vale
By a misty fen that rang all night,
And thus it was the maidens pale
I knew so well, whose garments trail
Across the reeds to a window light.
This poem reveals an alternative vision to a world reflective of the masculine
heautocratic struggle. It is an ephebian vision, predictive of the necessary