Can Poetry Save the Earth?: A Field Guide to Nature Poems

FROST AND THE NECESSITY OF METAPHOR 129

the last of earth left to discover

Is that which was the beginning;

At the source of the longest river

The voice of the hidden waterfall

And the children in the apple-tree.

“Directive” and “West-Running Brook,” with its “backward motion toward
the source,” part from Eliot in Frost ’s reliance (like Thoreau and Whitman) on
American idiom and terrain. He found personal and national sources in a more
rustic vein than did William Carlos Williams (also Eliot ’s antagonist). All these
poets meant to save us somehow.
“But all the fun’s in how you say a thing.” Frost really meant “all,” everything
poetry does to save some part of a day. From his deathbed in January 1963, a
last letter said: “Metaphor is it and the freshness thereof.” October grapes, ax-
helve, apples coming in, summer air, dust of snow, woods, brook.