[In the following essay, the author compares Wilbur's use of nature imagery with that of Henry David Thoreau and Robert Frost.]

When Amherst College presented Frost with his twenty-first honorary degree in 1948, the poet was cited for having “taught generations of Amherst students that for gaining an insight into life, a metaphor is a sharper and brighter instrument than a syllogism.”¹ This remark was meant to characterize the poet, as well as the teacher that Frost, try as he might, could never cease being. But the remark could have been made, and undoubtedly was made in some form or other, about other native poets: Emerson, for one, whose work, especially his finest essays and lectures, overwhelmed its audience by metaphor and image but spurned logic; and for another, Thoreau, who chose to argue and persuade not by line and number but through word-play, narrative, parable.

The last of these terms—parable—has been applied to Frost as well as Thoreau. Reginald L. Cook's paper at the Thoreau Centennial meetings in New York City in 1962 distinguishes usefully between Frost and Thoreau as “complementary parablists,” linking them in their devotion to making the parable an effective, and liberating, form for poetic expression.² If Frost never publicly defined his own relationship to Thoreau in quite this way, he left behind enough hints to convince us that this view of their affinity, as far as it goes, is not off the mark. “I prefer my essay in narrative form,” he wrote once. “In Walden I get it and always near the height of poetry.”³ As he told Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant, with him Thoreau was “a passion.”⁴

Frost's feeling for Walden did not diminish through the years. The early existence of strong affection is apparent in Lawrance Thompson's recent selection of Frost's letters,⁵ and the depth of his commitment to Thoreau is made clear in an interview with Reginald Cook, taped for the B. B. C. in 1954.⁶ In his last college lecture at Dartmouth, scarcely two months before his death, Frost took as his theme the idea of “extravagance,” the substance of a striking paragraph at the conclusion of Walden—and he did so, moreover, without feeling the need to mention Thoreau at all.⁷

In recent years we have had a few limited studies of Frost's specific debts to Thoreau. His borrowings from Walden in such poems as “Directive” and “Paul's Wife,” for example, have been examined in detail.⁸

The present essay begins with a reading of Frost's poem “The Ax-Helve” in the context of its roots in Walden. It then turns to an associated task: relating the way in which Walden and Frost's poetry, along with a source held in common, Emerson's Nature, may serve to illuminate the poems of Richard Wilbur—in particular, poems such as “Digging for China,” “Junk” and “The Beautiful Changes.”

Frost once took the time to complain that some recent books of prose could have been written in verse, and that perhaps they should have been. Still, Frost took pains to prevent any possible misunderstanding by his correspondent, for he went on to make his point perfectly clear, and, in so doing, to acknowledge a pervasive debt to Walden:

Far be it from me though to regret that all the poetry isn't in verse. I'm sure I'm glad of all the unversified poetry of Walden—and not merely nature-descriptive, but narrative as in the chapter on the play with the loon on the lake, and character-descriptive as in the beautiful passage about the French-Canadian woodchopper. That last alone with some things in Turgenieff must have had a good deal to do with the making of me⁹

Frost's letter is dated July 15, 1915, and perhaps Frost was thinking even then about writing the poem which shows the most literal effect of Thoreau's “beautiful passage” about the woodchopper—a poem he was “shaping,” apparently, the following spring. For an interview in 1916 quotes him:

Love, the moon, and murder have poetry in them by common consent. But it's in other places. It's in the axe-handle of a French Canadian woodchopper. … You know the Canadian woodchoppers whittle their axe-handles, following the curve of the grain, and they're strong and beautiful. Art should follow lines in nature, like the grain of an axe-handle. False art puts curves on things that haven't any curves.¹⁰

The resemblances between Walden and “The Ax-Helve” are pervasive. They include fundamental parallels in the characterizations of Thoreau's woodchopper—whose “so suitable and poetic a name” made the author sorry he could “not print it,” Thoreau tells us¹¹—and Baptiste, Frost's own French-Canadian woodsman looking for what the poet calls his “human rating.”¹² Baptiste's taut pride in his woodsman's skill has its analogue in Walden:

He was a skilful chopper, and indulged in some flourishes and ornaments in his art. He cut his trees level and close to the ground, that the sprouts which came up afterward might be more vigorous and a sled might slide over the stumps; and instead of leaving a whole tree to support his corded wood, he would pare it away to a slender stake or splinter which you could break off with your hand at last.

(pp. 100-1)

Baptiste, as Frost makes explicit, had a talent for knowing “how to make a short job long / For love of it, and yet not waste time either”;¹³ so did Thoreau, who tells us he “made no haste in [his] work, but rather made the most of it” (p. 29). And if Baptiste worries that his wife “ain't spick too much Henglish,” Thoreau, with no attempt at reproducing the dialect of his French-Canadian, reports that his woodsman “considers the best thing he can do in this world,” besides maintaining his French, is “to keep up and add to his English” (p. 73).

Such parallels, though substantial, are, after all, elementary, and as such far less telling than the deeper affinities between the two works. Baptiste's adherence to “the curves of his ax-helves” and his faith in the “native … grain” suggest Thoreau's similar insistence, after making his purchase of old boards, upon “spreading the boards on the grass … to bleach and warp back again in the sun” (p. 30). And Frost's ultimate insistence that the expression of the good helve is, as a metaphor, opposed to “laid-on education” may be related to Thoreau's observation that his woodsman's formal instruction has been severely inadequate. Yet if the complaint of Frost's woodchopper against the compulsory “laid-on” education (like the first helve, “made on machine”) that works against his natural right to keep his children from school, has behind it a larger question—the question of “whether the right to hold / Such doubts of education should depend / Upon the education of those who held them?”—in Walden, Thoreau, attracted to the romantic innocence and natural goodness of his “Homeric man,” is much concerned over the way he has been taught: the “innocent and ineffectual way in which the Catholic priests teach the aborigines, by which the pupil is never educated to the degree of consciousness, but only to the degree of trust and reverence, and a child is not made a man, but kept a child” (p. 101).

Thoreau continues his complaint against his woodsman: “I never, by any manoeuvring, could get him to take the spiritual view of things,” he writes; “the highest that he appeared to conceive of was a simple expediency, such as you might expect an animal to appreciate … his thinking was so primitive and immersed in his animal life that, though more promising than a merely learned man's, it rarely ripened to anything which can be reported” (pp. 103-4). Yet Thoreau, sometimes transcending these strictures, at least momentarily, does detect something of importance in his visitor:

There was a certain positive originality, however slight, to be detected in him, and I occasionally observed that he was thinking for himself and expressing his own opinion, a phenomenon so rare that I would any day walk ten miles to observe it, and it amounted to the re-origination of many of the institutions of society. … He could defend many institutions better than any philosopher, because, in describing them as they concerned him, he gave the true reason for their prevalence, and speculation had not suggested to him any other.

(p. 103)

If Thoreau sometimes wondered whether his woodsman “was as wise as Shakespeare or as simply ignorant as a child, whether to suspect him of a fine poetic consciousness or of stupidity,” he knew the answer well enough: “In him the animal man chiefly was developed … the intellectual and what is called spiritual man in him were slumbering as in an infant” (p. 101). Thoreau's major concern in Walden is the development of the spiritual man; but in “Visitors” he addresses himself specifically to the question of such growth through education.

Frost's poem has notably little to do with Baptiste's skill as a woodsman per se. It does have a great deal to do with “knowledge” and with Baptiste's opinions on education, matters inherent to the analogy the speaker makes for the perfectly “expressed” ax-helve. In the apparent strength and willful curves of this helve is the explicit suggestion, compressed into metaphor, of the “snake [that] stood up for evil in the Garden.” It is as if Frost, seeming to espouse pastoral values and natural forms, has had to express with honesty the “grain” of his own metaphor. Sympathetic as Thoreau was to his natural man of “strong body and contentment,” all attempts “to suggest a substitute within him for the priest without, and some higher motive for living” (p. 103) were failures. His natural philosopher remained something of a natural, ready to “live out his threescore years and ten a child” (p. 101). In a sense, so must Frost's French-Canadian, Baptiste, remain an outward priest of nature and an unself-conscious prophet, unwittingly reminding the poet of the “natural” and “innocent” pastoralism of the Garden.

Ultimately both Frost's poem and Walden confront the Romantic idea that natural man is an embodiment of virtue. That Frost's Baptiste and Thoreau's woodchopper are themselves unaware of the implications of the serpent in Eden (Thoreau, of course, does not emphasize this aspect of the myth) reaffirms the idea that men of undeveloped spirit endanger human culture and the fostering of its values.

Yet if Walden does not dwell on the “evils” of natural men, Thoreau does find that the nature of his society compels him to redefine “economy” in humanistic terms, before he can begin to make matter say spirit. Thoreau's basic complaint against society reappears in “The Ax-Helve,” more narrowly focused perhaps, but not more sharply expressed; for the shape of the poet's jerry-built ax-helve, two strokes across it, is both serpentine and “economic.” Artificially crooked, this helve, scorned by Baptiste, who prefers second-growth hickory that “grow[s] crooked,” is in a sense the true product and the natural expression, not of the wood from which it is made, but of the machine which cuts it.¹⁴

Frost's criticism of the machine in this poem continues in another, somewhat curious, way. But first, Thoreau. In “House-Warming” Thoreau complains that “a small cooking-stove,” acquired for the sake of economy, “did not keep fire so well as the open fireplace … [for] the stove not only took up room and scented the house, but it concealed the fire” (p. 174). Behind this observation is Thoreau's vigorous protest in “Economy” against all forms of overheating, particularly overheating through clothing and housing. He calls attention to what might be termed the feedback of external, physical heat acting upon the inner fire, vital heat, of spirit, fostering torpor as a consequence, and injuring the creativity of a man who has work to do. As always, Thoreau's ultimate plea is for the periodic return to those natural, unaccommodated beginnings that are essential to personal growth and spiritual renewal.

The excess of heat at Baptiste's house, an “over-warmth of kitchen stove,” like the host's “overjoy,” disconcerts the poet. He toys with the idea that the stove endangers Baptiste's wife:

Mrs. Baptiste came in and rocked a chair
That had as many motions as the world:
One back and forward, in and out of shadow,
That got her nowhere; one more gradual,
Sideways, that would have run her on the stove.

When seen cosmically and comically the rocking of Mrs. Baptiste is a fitting analogue for the motion of the world. The earth's movement, seen in this way—a “rocking” in and out of shadow, in danger of destruction through sideways, crab-like slipping into the sun—contains its own principle of self-correction. If the earth seems to right itself periodically, so too does the wife: parodying such physics, she too “realized her danger / And caught herself up bodily, chair and all, / And set herself back where she started from,” away from the danger of “overwarmth.”

Such motions, “one back and forward” and “one more gradual, sideways,” interpreted for us by the poet as analogy, are more relevant to those themes of knowledge and education that Baptiste brings up seemingly out of nowhere than may at first appear. The poet watches Baptiste's handling of the ax-helve:

                                        He chafed its long white body
From end to end with his rough hand shut round it.
He tried it at the eye-hole in the ax-head.

While Baptiste—in an act described deliberately in sensuous terms—“chafe[s]” the “long white body” of the helve, they talk.

Do you know, what we talked about was knowledge?
Baptiste on his defense about the children
He kept from school, or did his best to keep—
Whatever school and children and our doubts
Of laid-on education had to do
With the curves of his ax-helves …

Whereupon the poet is made to wonder if he must decide (in lines previously quoted) “whether the right to hold / Such doubts of education should depend / Upon the education of those who held them.” Baptiste's views on education are not entirely alien to those of Frost at this time (“our” doubts, the poet says). Note, for example, the emphasis of his remarks to his friend Sidney Cox in 1915, the year preceding Frost's Phi Beta Kappa reading of “The Ax-Helve” at Harvard:

School is for boning and not for luxuriating. We don't want much school even when we are young, that is to say, we want a great deal more of life than of school. And there is no use in this attempt to make school an image of life. It should be thought of as a thing that belongs to the alphabet and notation. It came into life with these. Life must be kept up at a great rate in order to absorb any considerable amount of either one or the other. Both are nonsense unless they mix well with experience. … Too much time spent on them is either an injury to the infant or a waste of time on the infant that refuses to be injured.¹⁵

But if such must be noted, neither is Frost's personal view on education wholly consonant with that of his rude woodchopper.

So, as with the machine that spews out ax-helves, false education attempts to impose form from without, ignoring thereby the primal grain. Baptiste's simple proposition may be put: as with good hickory so with French-Canadian children. His implicit analogy is a reminder that “laid-on education,” undermining letter and spirit, and violating the root meaning of the word, denies the concept which sees education as “bringing out,” “bringing forth.” If the values are Thoreau's, they are also those of Emerson, who spoke of the artist's attendance upon form within the “conscious stone,” and who, in the flush of his momentous commitment to nature, it may be recalled, warned man from the book, the lamp and the library.

But in this poem it is the emerging shape, “the long white body” of the true helve, that counts. Watching Baptiste brush “the shavings from his knee” and watching him stand the ax “on its horse's hoof. / Erect,” the poet perceives the analogy to the moment “when / The snake stood up for evil in the Garden.” Myth has it that knowledge for Adam and Eve came through knowledge of good and evil; this poem seems to say that Baptiste's art is also knowledge, but knowledge that, significantly, is in itself evil and good. Perhaps in this section of the poem Frost owes something else to Walden. The resemblance to Thoreau's parable of the artist of Kouroo has been recognized by others, but the matter is put concisely, and in the most useful context, by Charles R. Anderson, writing in the Saturday Review, at the time of Frost's death.

… knowledge is the basis of the human condition. Without it man would still be a babe in the Eden woods. With it he is a worker wielding his axe in the clearing, better still an artist shaping forms. This central metaphor, together with the first line of the concluding stanza (“now he brushed the shavings from his knee”), recalls for the reader familiar with “Walden” … the fable [of the artist] of Kouroo, who devoted his life to carving a perfect staff only to discover that in the process he had gained immortality. The final worry expressed by God when Adam threatened to turn creator was just that: “lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live forever.” The danger of a concomitant pride the First Creator well knew from personal experience, as the early verses of Genesis reiterate: “And God saw everything that he had made, and, behold, it was very good.” So with Baptiste as he surveys his finished creation: “See how she's cock her head.”¹⁶

Undoubtedly Frost is both wary of, and drawn to Eden, to natural innocence and the innocence of nature. Such doubleness is also crucial to Thoreau, who writes in “Higher Laws”: “I found in myself, and still find, an instinct toward a higher, or, as it is named, spiritual life, as do most men, and another toward a primitive rank and savage one, and I reverence them both” (p. 144). Nor is the force of this admission diminished when a few paragraphs later Thoreau admits: “We are conscious of an animal in us, which awakens in proportion as our higher nature slumbers. It is reptile and sensual, and perhaps cannot be wholly expelled; like the worms which, even in life and health, occupy our bodies” (p. 150). Thoreau's recognition of the animal in man (“reptile and sensual”) corresponds to Frost's perception of the “Edenic” moment, the poet's encounter with the great “Adversary” in the midst of “natural” wisdom and “good” organic form.

Yet it must be noted that, in a Romantic sense, the snake in Eden may stand also for human consciousness, and, implicitly, for the possibility of man's spiritual development. As such, then, the analogy is a reminder to the poet that even in its snake shape Baptiste's ax-helve is good. The serpent as a traditional image of healing—in the caduceus, for example—contradicts the serpentine dollar sign of the poet's first ax-helve.

But Frost as craftsman knows that for this poem “good and evil” could be too weighty a topic, and consequently attempts to make light of it, just as Baptiste's “thick hand” makes “light” of the ax, “top-heavy with heaviness.” And, as in Baptiste's case physical grace is matched by surprising verbal prowess, the “heaviness” of “good and evil” is handled dexterously with a pleased, mildly sinister observation: “See how she's cock her head!” Unlike his wife, who says nothing at all, Baptiste, paralleling the poet, but without his knowledge, anneals word to gesture, and in so doing manages to evoke matter and substance far beyond his comprehension.

Frost once admitted that he was a realist in poetry, if the term meant “one who before all else wants the story to sound as if it were told the way it is because it happened that way. Of course the story must release an idea,” he was quick to caution, “but that is a matter of touch and emphasis, the almost incredible freedom of the soul enslaved to the hard facts of experience.”¹⁷ “The Ax-Helve,” the poem that deals with shaped and machine-made ax-helves, natural knowledge and “laid-on” education, good and evil, art and commodity, conveys the “realist's” sense of the natural curve in a dramatic situation. But it also illustrates Frost's own successful practice—a practice defined in an exhortation to all poets: “See how figurative you can make a thing beyond the figure that is in it.”¹⁸

If Walden has fostered “The Ax-Helve,” Frost's poem has its own immediate relationship to Richard Wilbur's “Anglo-Saxon” poem “Junk,” first collected in Advice to a Prophet and other poems (1961). The resemblance of Wilbur's poem to Frost's in theme and image is clear enough throughout, but it is most explicit in the opening lines:

An axe angles
                                                                                          from my neighbor's ashcan;
It is hell's handiwork,
                                                                                          the wood not hickory,
The flow of the grain
                                                                                          not faithfully followed.
The shivered shaft
                                                                                          rises from a shellheap
Of plastic playthings,
                                                                                          paper plates,
And the sheer shards
                                                                                          of shattered tumblers
That were not annealed
                                                                                          for the time needful.
At the same curbside,
                                                                                          a cast-off cabinet
Of wavily-warped
                                                                                          unseasoned wood
Waits to be trundled
                                                                                          in the trash-man's truck.(19)

The axe angling from the first line, static and moving again toward what it was, needs no comment. But the “cast-off cabinet / Of wavily-warped / unseasoned wood,” though it echoes Frost as well, stems clearly from Walden. In particular, Wilbur's poem goes back to Thoreau's parable of the Kouroo artist. The epigraph to “Junk,” a quotation from a fragmentary Anglo-Saxon poem, is translated by Wilbur: “Indeed, Wayland's handiwork, the sword Mimung, which he made, will never fail any man who knows how to use it properly.”²⁰ Yet, judging by the vision manifested in this poem, it is evident that Wayland's handiwork, along with all of man's “junk,” cannot last. If we apply the values of Wilbur's poem, we shall see also that the staff carved by the Kouroo artist cannot endure; nor will Baptiste's ax-helve, perfect ax-helve that it is. What might endure is a poem, if Thoreau is right, a poem “carved out of the breath of life itself” (p. 71).

If echoes of Frost and Thoreau give Wilbur's poem a poetic and “historical” context, they do not narrow its meaning, for the poem goes ultimately its own direction, accomplishes some different purposes and in vision moves beyond Frost, the Frost of this poem at least.

“Junk” laments and celebrates: it laments the spiritual decay manifested in jerry-built things and it celebrates the return of such things to natural form and pure element. Decrying man's betrayal of his instinct for form and of his bent for art, the poem, in celebrating natural process, a condition for sadness usually, is no less a celebration of “hell's handiwork,” nature's ceaseless redemption of matter constantly betrayed by man. Apparently echoing the calculated misanthropy of a Robinson Jeffers, but only initially, Wilbur is here closer in attitude to Frost the leaf treader, the confronter of facts. But his attitude, close as it is to Frost's, is even closer in spirit to the transcendental attitudes expressed by Walden and Nature: if in part his attitude seems to echo Thoreau's occasional bitterness, especially in his Journals—“What [man] touches he taints,” writes Thoreau²¹—it reflects even more closely one aspect of Emerson's romantic judgment of “Art” (necessarily a lesser thing when compared to nature): Man's “operations taken together are so insignificant, a little chipping, baking, patching, and washing, that in an impression so grand as that of the world on the human mind, they do not vary the result.”²² Wilbur's poem, concerned with “Art” undoubtedly, but more exactly with man's debasement of nature through art (recalling Emerson's definition of Art as “nature passed through the alembic of man”²³) concludes with a version of Emerson's transcendent unity, moving as always in Wilbur through the “things of this world”:

The sun shall glory
                                                                                          in the glitter of glass-chips,
Foreseeing in the salvage
                                                                                          of the prisoned sand,
And the blistering paint
                                                                                          peel off in patches,
That the good grain
                                                                                          be discovered again.
Then burnt, bulldozed,
                                                                                they shall all be buried
To the depth of diamonds,
                                                                                in the making dark
Where halt Hephaestus
                                                                                keeps his hammer
And Wayland's work
                                                                                is worn away.

Throughout Emerson's Nature the evidence for such betrayal and redemption appears in many ways and virtually on every page, but in the section on “Language” Emerson put the matter as clearly as he ever did (and more directly than Frost would dare, one might add). It is quoted here as a native source for what seems to me a basic principle of both Thoreau's and Wilbur's epistemology and aesthetic.

The problem of restoring to the world original and eternal beauty is solved by the redemption of the soul. The ruin or the blank that we see when we look at nature, is in our own eye. … The reason why the world lacks unity, and lies broken and in heaps, is because man is disunited with himself.²⁴

Thoreau deplored the vanity which drives man to build monuments to himself. “As for your high towers and monuments,” he writes in “Economy,” “there was a crazy fellow once in this town who undertook to dig through to China, and he got so far that, as he said, he heard the Chinese pots and kettles rattle” (p. 40). In “Digging For China” Wilbur writes similarly about a fellow—perhaps the poet—who once undertook the same task, and who in the course of doing so succeeded in “los[ing] the world,” as Thoreau advised (p. 118). Here are the first two stanzas of a total of three:

“Far enough down is China,” somebody said.
“Dig deep enough and you might see the sky
As clear as at the bottom of a well.
Except it would be real—a different sky.
Then you could burrow down until you came
To China! Oh, it's nothing like New Jersey.
There's people, trees, and houses, and all that,
But much, much different. Nothing looks the same.”
I went and got the trowel out of the shed
And sweated like a coolie all that morning,
Digging a hole beside the lilac-bush,
Down on my hands and knees. It was a sort
Of praying, I suspect. I watched my hand
Dig deep and darker, and I tried and tried
To dream a place where nothing was the same
The trowel never did break through to blue.(25)

One recalls in this connection Thoreau's winter looks at the bottom of Walden Pond through blue ice, and his eagerness for a sight of the bottom of a neighboring well. And one recalls the quest Frost describes in “Directive,” and even more so, the memorable experience of “For Once, Then, Something”:

Others taunt me with having knelt at well-curbs
Always wrong to the light, so never seeing
Deeper down in the well than where the water
Gives me back in a shining surface picture
Me myself in the summer heaven godlike
Looking out of a wreath of fern and cloud puffs.
Once, when trying with chin against a well-curb,
I discerned, as I thought, beyond the picture,
Through the picture, a something white, uncertain,
Something more of the depths—and then I lost it.
Water came to rebuke the too clear water.
One drop fell from a fern, and lo, a ripple
Shook whatever it was lay there at bottom,
Blurred it, blotted it out. What was that whiteness?
Truth? A pebble of quartz? For once, then, something.(26)

Like Emerson and Thoreau, Frost is here concerned with the possibilities for perception that goes beyond “the blank … we see when we look at nature.” True, Frost's perception in this instance has been minimal. He does not know what, finally, he has seen, but he is certain that he has seen something; something that is not illusory.

Now we can look at the third and final stanza of Wilbur's “Digging For China”:

Before the dream could weary of itself
My eyes were tired of looking into darkness,
My sunbaked head of hanging down a hole.
I stood up in a place I had forgotten,
Blinking and staggering while the earth went round
And showed me silver barns, the fields dozing
In palls of brightness, patens growing and gone
In the tides of leaves, and the whole sky china blue.
Until I got my balance back again
All that I saw was China, China, China.

“For once, then, something.” It might be said that Wilbur has himself seen something in Thoreau's incident that Thoreau had apparently not thought of, for Thoreau had ended his account of digging for China, by saying disdainfully: “I think that I shall not go out of my way to admire the hole which he made” (p. 40). But if Thoreau did not see the full possibilities of the experience itself, he knew well enough that the “monument,” the hole dug, was in itself worthless. For Wilbur the restoration to the world of “original and eternal beauty” has come, if I read this poem correctly, through the upsetting of the illusory modes of the day-in-day-out habits of sight, through recreating the possibility for original and fresh perception. What the poet learns—and it is his reward—is that the sky in New Jersey is like the sky in China, but only when he really sees the New Jersey sky.²⁷ Emerson begged us to acknowledge the miracle of each evening's stars. Thoreau, knowing that all miracles are local, would not follow rumors of red snow: he would wait in full certainty to see such snow fall in Concord.

The title poem of Wilbur's first volume, The Beautiful Changes and Other Poems (1947), is also about local miracles. It begins:

The beautiful changes as a forest is changed
By a chameleon's tuning his skin to it;
As a mantis, arranged
On a green leaf, grows
Into it, makes the leaf leafier, and proves
Any greenness is deeper than anyone knows.

And the poem ends with the lines:

                                        … the beautiful changes
In such kind ways,
Wishing ever to sunder
Things and things' selves for a second finding, to lose
For a moment all that it touches back to wonder.(28)

“The Beautiful Changes” anticipates in vision the transcendentalism of the later poem “Junk”: the “second finding” of man and man-made things “wast[ing] in the weather toward what they were” presents a later proof, and a different kind of proof—but one more difficult to accept easily and gracefully—that “any greenness is deeper than anyone knows.” Both poems can be viewed as responses to Emerson's concern with the problem of “restoring to the world original and eternal beauty,” but “Junk” confronts the wasting away of all man's “chipping, baking, patching,” along with the wasting away of man himself, with an acceptance that even Emerson seldom achieved.

And Wilbur has continued to see man's problem as one of vision, even as one of poetry, if you will, poetry in its full sense. In an interview in 1964, stating his preference for the “classical” in poetry, and choosing to make his reference to Blake—not, I think characteristically, to Thoreau or Emerson—he said:

the word romantic makes me think of Novalis, for example, of Jena School German romantic imagination, and its preference for vagueness, and its love of the blue flower that's in the blue distance. I prefer not to situate the beautiful and the spiritual at a vague distance. I prefer William Blake's classical eye. I think of William Blake as a classicist in this sense. He can see all the spiritual truth he needs to see in the sand-grain near at hand, and in the other immediate properties of his world.²⁹

The significance of Wilbur's statement is not so much that it adds to our understanding of his poems but that it directly reaffirms his commitment to the romantic vision which has always been at the heart of his poetry. “My eye will never know the dry disease / Of thinking things no more than what he sees,” concludes “Poplar, Sycamore,” another poem in The Beautiful Changes.³⁰ If these lines are uniquely Wilbur's, their commitment Wilbur shares with Thoreau, Emerson and Frost.

Notes

1. Quoted in Charles W. Cole, “Metaphor and Syllogism,” Massachusetts Review, IV (Winter 1963), 241-42.

2. “A Parallel of Parablists: Thoreau and Frost,” The Thoreau Centennial, ed. Walter Harding (New York, 1964), pp. 65-79.

3. Books We Like: Sixty-Two Answers, preface by Edward Weeks (Boston, 1936), p. 142.

4. Quoted in Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant, Robert Frost: The Trial by Existence (New York, 1960), p. 191.

5. Selected Letters of Robert Frost, ed. Lawrance Thompson (New York, 1964), pp. 182, 278.

6. “Thoreau's Walden: Discussion between Robert Frost and Reginald Cook,” introduction by J. Isaacs, The Listener, LII (Aug. 26, 1954), 319-20; reprinted in Interviews with Robert Frost, ed. Edward Connery Lathem (New York, 1966), pp. 142-47.

7. “Robert Frost on ‘Extravagance,’” Dartmouth Alumni Magazine (Mar. 1963). I am grateful to Hyatt H. Waggoner for calling my attention to this speech.

8. S. P. C. Duvall, “Robert Frost's ‘Directive’ out of Walden,” American Literature, XXXI (Jan. 1960), 482-88; Daniel G. Hoffman, “Thoreau's ‘Old Settler’ and Frost's Paul Bunyan,” Journal of American Folklore, LXXIII (July-Sept. 1960), 236-38; George W. Nitchie, Human Values in the Poetry of Robert Frost (Durham, N. C., 1960), pp. 19-20, 43 et passim; Charles R. Anderson, “Robert Frost, 1874-1963,” Saturday Review, XLVI (Feb. 23, 1963), 17-20; Thornton H. Parsons, “Thoreau, Frost, and the American Humanist Tradition,” Emerson Society Quarterly (IV Quarter 1963), 33-43. Less specific in their treatment of Frost's indebtedness to Thoreau but of central significance to anyone interested in the subject, are the studies of Reginald L. Cook, The Dimensions of Robert Frost (New York, 1958), passim; Reuben A. Brower, The Poetry of Robert Frost: Constellations of Intention (New York, 1963), passim; Lawrance Thompson, Robert Frost, The Early Years 1874-1915 (New York, 1966), pp. 272 et passim. The fact remains, however, that despite these studies we have made no more than a beginning along this line. As Thompson says, “Much has been written on the kinship between R[obert] F[rost] and Thoreau and Emerson; but not enough. The task which remains is to separate likenesses and differences” (p. 550).

9. Selected Letters, p. 182.

10. “Of Axe-Handles and Guide-Book Poetry,” Interviews, p. 19; first published in The Public Ledger (Philadelphia), Apr. 4, 1916.

11. Henry David Thoreau, Walden, in Walden and Civil Disobedience, ed. Sherman Paul (Boston, 1957, 1960), p. 99. All references to Walden are to this edition.

12. In Walden Thoreau chose not to give the name of his woodchopper, it may be recalled, even though his Journals reveal it as Alek Therien. Faced with a similar choice, Frost decided to name his woodchopper. But why name him Baptiste? It may be speculated, reasonably I think, that Frost, making his Baptiste something of a wise fool, is drawing upon, and slyly manipulating, a familiar French-Canadian folk tradition. “In popular speech,” observes Gerard J. Brault, “Baptiste is often used in addressing a child familiarly or as a humorous exclamation; in modern French patois it may designate a fool” (“Five Canadian-French Etymologies,” Romance Philology, XIV [Aug. 1960], 19-20).

13. Published originally in Atlantic Monthly, CXX (Sept. 1917), 337-39, “The Ax-Helve” was collected by Frost in New Hampshire: A Poem with Notes and Grace Notes (New York, 1923), and later in Complete Poems of Robert Frost (New York, 1949). A comparison of these printings turns up only minor textual differences. All quotations from the poem are to the Complete Poems.

14. Attempts at creating natural form by the artificial means of machinery and instruments continued to plague Frost. For example, in his most famous essay, “The Figure a Poem Makes,” he writes: “We enjoy the straight crookedness of a good walking stick. Modern instruments of precision are being used to make things crooked as if by eye and hand in the old days” (Complete Poems, p. vii). Since 1939, this essay has introduced the various editions of Frost's collected poems. It is reprinted in Selected Prose of Robert Frost, eds. Hyde Cox and Edward Connery Lathem (New York, 1966), pp. 17-20.

15. Selected Letters, p. 181.

16. Saturday Review, XLVI, 20.

17. Selected Letters, p. 179.

18. Quoted in Reginald L. Cook, “Emerson and Frost: A Parallel of Seers,” New England Quarterly, XXXI (June 1958), 205. Italics added.

19. Advice to a Prophet and other poems (New York, 1961), pp. 15-17.

20. This is the way Wilbur translated the lines when he read the poem at the Library of Congress on Oct. 24, 1962 (see Proceedings, National Poetry Festival, Held in the Library of Congress, October 22-24, 1962, foreword by Louis Untermeyer [Washington, 1964], p. 335). But in the note to the poem in Advice to a Prophet, p. 64 (reprinted in The Poems of Richard Wilbur [New York, 1963], p. 58), he translates the epigraph a little differently: “Truly, Wayland's handiwork—the sword Mimming which he made—will never fail any man who knows how to use it bravely.”

21. The Journal of Henry David Thoreau, Vol. IV, Writings, ed. Bradford Torrey (20 vols.; Boston and New York, 1906), X, 445. Later in the same entry Thoreau writes: “Pile up your books, the records of sadness, your saws and your laws. Nature is glad outside, and her merry worms within will ere long topple them down” (p. 446).

22. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature, in Selections from Ralph Waldo Emerson: An Organic Anthology, ed. Stephen E. Whicher (Boston, 1957), p. 22.

23. Nature, p. 31.

24. Nature, p. 55.

25. Things of This World (New York, 1956), p. 28.

26. Complete Poems, p. 276. Like “The Ax-Helve,” this poem was first collected in New Hampshire (1923).

27. “It was a favorite habit of Thoreau's,” notes Walter Harding, “to bend over and peer at the landscape through his legs, thus providing a novel (and framed) view” (The Variorum Walden [New York, 1962], p. 297, n. 29).

28. The Beautiful Changes and Other Poems (New York, 1947), p. 54.

29. Robert Frank and Stephen Mitchell, “Richard Wilbur: An Interview,” Amherst Literary Magazine, X (Summer 1964), 63.

30. Beautiful Changes, p. 44.