SOURCE: “Learning to Hover,” in Twentieth Century Literature, Winter, 1999, Vol. 45, No. 4, p. 534–52.

In Robert Francis's reminiscence of Robert Frost, A Time to Talk, the entry dated April 4, 1932, contains a poem published the day before in the Springfield Republican and Union. Francis wrote the poem to commemorate Frost's arrival at Amherst. Here are its final stanzas:

Best of all—you've heard?—he comes to stay.
This is his home now. He is here for good.
To leave us now would be running away.
(I too would stay forever if I could.)
While he stays, life that breathless fugitive,
Will stay. While he lives, some things here won't die.
And we, breathing his air, may learn to live
Close to the earth, like him, and near the sky.

An example of Francis's exuberant juvenilia (neither published in book form nor included in the Collected Poems), the lyric was, in his words, “the first pop gun fired in my private campaign to establish a significant relation with this most significant man in town” (48-49). The following January, he befriended Frost in his home on Sunset Avenue in Amherst; thereafter blossomed a relationship in which the younger poet found in Frost a mentor. In fact, he recalled, when he made Frost's acquaintance, he “was still unpublished in book form, a young poet looking for guidance. So Frost took the role of mentor, and much that he said had to do with my own poems and my problems as a poet” (45).¹

After his second book, Valhalla and Other Poems, was published in 1938, the volume “made no stir anywhere” (21), Francis wrote in his autobiography, The Trouble with Francis. But if the book failed to excite critical notice, it brought “some quiet rewards” (21), one of which was a letter from Robert Frost:

I am swept off my feet by the goodness of your poems this time. Ten or a dozen of them are my idea of perfection. A new poet swims into my ken. I can refrain from strong praise no longer. You are achieving what you live for. … You have not only the feeling of a true lyric poet, but the variety of a man with a mind.

(19)

Francis's mention of Frost's letter is important because Frost's praise was a formal recognition of his poetry. The letter also provided evidence of Frost's influence on Francis: note that his praise of Francis's poems is reserved for those that are “[his] idea of perfection” (19). Not surprisingly, then, there is a sort of Frost static everywhere in this volume. Compare a passage from Francis's “Valhalla”—

The valley sees the pasture on the hill.
Below the pasture and above are woods
Up to the wooded peak up to the sky.
The valley sees the darkness of evergreens
Waiting above the pasture to come down
As other evergreens have come or wait
To come to darken pastures on other hills.

—to an excerpt from Frost's poem, “The Mountain”:

The mountain stood there to be pointed at.
Pasture ran up the side a little way,
And then there was a wall of trees with trunks;
After that only tops of trees, and cliffs
Imperfectly concealed among the leaves.(2)

As David Graham observes, the echoes of Frost in Francis's early poems helped shape a critical view that Francis was “a minor lyricist perpetually standing in Frost's broad shadow” (83). Reviews of Francis's early volumes focused on the thematic resemblance of his writing to Frost's. Consider, for instance, Louis Untermeyer's critique of Francis's third book, The Sound I Listened For (1944), whose poems accentuate what he asserts is Francis's “gift for seeing minutiae which are anything but trivial.” “In this,” Untermeyer animadverts, “he reminds the reader of his more illustrious forerunners, especially of one whose background is contiguous. It is nothing against Robert Francis that he often resembles Robert Frost.” And though Untermeyer admires Francis's lyrics for the way in which “they blend observation with imagination,” he adds, finally, “[b]ut we know who wrote them first” (345).

Untermeyer's praise of Francis's perceptiveness provides a critical basis for a comparison of Frost's and Francis's poetry. Like Frost, Francis sees nature emblematically; he reads meaning in the things and creatures of the world. He also approaches Frost in translating his perception of nature's moral significance into a code of conduct. This way of seeing traces back to Emerson, Thoreau, and the influence on them of classical Stoicism, which emphasizes, as Robert D. Richardson Jr. argues, turning to nature for instruction as to “how one's life should be lived” (Henry Thoreau 189).³ However, Francis and Frost depart from Emerson and Thoreau in their willingness to probe nature's dark design, and move even further from them in their readiness to explore a corresponding experiential darkness, which expresses itself as psychological loneliness. While both poets exhibit wariness at entering the darkness they describe, they differ in the stances they take up in relation to it. In Frost's case, this state of mind is defined by Richard Poirier as “a sense of ‘nothingness’ or a condition of vacancy” (204), which he argues Frost contrives in order that he may resist it. When Frost adopts a posture of resistance, he becomes his own ideal version of himself. He then extends his self-idealization from the poems to the fictions he creates about how easily he composed them. In Francis's case, the stance he takes up in the face of loneliness is one of detachment, a detachment that is paradoxically an engagement in that he displays (to borrow Poirier's phrase) a “contemplative receptivity” (211) rather than a resistance to his “vacant” condition. Ironically, Francis adopted this stance on the advice of Frost, whose words are invoked in the poem “For the Ghost of Robert Frost.” Here, Francis pictures detached engagement as the hovering of a hummingbird over a flower, defining, in the process, an important way in which he has outgrown Frost:

“You've got to learn to hover,”
He said. The way a hummingbird
Hovers over a flower, the way
The flower's fragrance hovers over it.
Not to move on, not to
Keep jumping like a nervous grasshopper
But to hover there until you
Have gathered all that is there
For you or anyone to gather.
“You've got to learn to hover.”

The motif of detachment persists throughout Francis's career, but early on reveals itself amid stylistic echoes of Frost. For example, in “Blue Winter,” from Valhalla and Other Poems, his painterly description of a landscape that recedes into the distance and converges at a starry point in the horizon showcases, as Francis records in A Time to Talk, what Frost calls his “ability to fit sentences and lines together” (56). In its concision of expression, its use of conversational language, its shifting of stresses in a line for flexibility and variety, and its blending of sounds (as in “shade” into “shadows”), Francis's poem bears a strong affinity with Frost's writing:

Winter uses all the blues there are.
One shade of blue for water, one for ice.
Another blue for shadows over snow.
The clear or cloudy sky uses blue twice-
Both different blues. And hills row after row
Are colored blue according to how far.
You know the bluejay's double blue device
Shows best when there are no green leaves to show.
And Sirius is a winterbluegreen star.

(48)

Indeed, when Frost showed the lyric to Untermeyer, hoping to persuade him to publish Francis's poetry, Untermeyer replied that Francis's “lyric style, casual yet compact, reminded me so much of Robert's that until I learned better, I thought my leg was being pulled and that Robert Francis was an alter ego Robert Frost had invented by slightly altering his last name” (qtd. in Frost, Letters 270). As “Blue Winter” illustrates, Francis's colloquial idiom and “casual yet compact” style are directed toward a clear perception of nature.

To understand the role that perception plays in Francis's work is to explore the ways in which his poetry most importantly resembles Frost's. Untermeyer's observation that Francis shares Frost's “gift for seeing minutiae which are anything but trivial” suggests that Francis displays in his poems a penchant for perceiving nature “less for itself and more for what it represents” (Mulder 554). While the natural objects he describes reflect a perception decidedly pastoral as far as their literal preoccupations are concerned, his poems, like Frost's, translate nature's forms into emblems of moral values; the things and creatures of the world become metaphors for human conduct. Take, for instance, another passage from “Valhalla,” in which spruce trees serve as an image of endurance:

The dark trees on the peak, the pointed spruces,
Seem to those who see them always the same-
Dark in summer, dark in winter, dark
And undisturbed from year to year by fall
Or wind or rain or frost or snow or spring.
They keep the peak, holding and held by rock,
Holding and fed by soil once tree and rock.
So they endure.

(86)

Similarly, in Frost's “Blueberries,” the thriving of these fruits in a pasture ravaged by fire is, as the speaker suggests, evidence of their perseverance and hardiness:

There may not have been the ghost of a sign
Of them anywhere under the shade of a pine,
But get the pine out of the way, you may burn
The pasture all over until not a fern
Or grass-blade is left, not to mention a stick,
And presto, they're up all around you as thick
And hard to explain as a conjuror's trick.

(59)

The idea of perceiving commonplace natural forms as metaphors for conduct derives from the transcendentalists, in particular from Emerson and Thoreau, in works such as “Nature” and Walden. Emerson set forth the notion of a radical correspondence between humans and nature—what he termed “an occult relation”—in which the “laws of moral nature answer to those of matter as face to face in a glass” (18). Or, as he puts it later in “Nature,” “every natural process is a version of a moral sentence” (23). Echoing Emerson, Thoreau writes in his journal, “the perception of beauty is a moral test” (10:126). As Richardson points out in Henry Thoreau, Thoreau and Emerson turned to classical Stoicism (among other philosophical traditions) for their ideas about seeing nature as an emblem of values. Drawing on the Stoic perception of nature as a “source of trustworthy moral principles” from which one can develop a basis for ethical conduct, Thoreau and Emerson work out, in their writings, “the meaning of the Stoic idea that the laws ruling nature rule men as well” (189, 191).⁴ To the extent that Frost and Francis perceive moral values in nature, they follow the philosophical lead of their literary forebears.

For example, consider Frost's poems that celebrate the virtue of letting nature take its course, a stance that correlates, as he once told Francis, with his “laissez-faire” inclination to “let the world come as it would, only giving it now and then ‘a kick and a touch’” (qtd. in A Time to Talk 19).⁵ To illustrate Frost's inclination, Francis cites two of his poems in A Time to Talk. Francis summarizes the argument of “In Time of Cloudburst” as follows:

[Y]ou wait a geological age for your eroded farm to sink out of sight and for a new farm of rich alluvial soil to rise from the sea. If you protest that this is too long a time, Frost might reply that this is what will actually happen, whether you wait or not.

(94)

In “Something for Hope,” the political implication of the doctrine of laissez-faire is explicit. Here Frost preaches patience if a rocky meadow becomes overgrown with weeds that have “crowded out the edible grass.” Instead of plowing out the weeds, he advises us to do nothing at all. Wait for the trees to “put on their wooden rings,” Frost writes, and come in on their own. Once they are mature,

Then cut down the trees when lumber grown,
And there's your pristine earth all freed
From lovely blooming but wasteful weed
And ready again for the grass to own.
A cycle we'll say of a hundred years.
Thus foresight does it and laissez-faire.
A virtue in which we all may share
Unless a government interferes.
Patience and looking away ahead,
And leaving some things to take their course.
Hope may not nourish a cow or horse,
But spes alit agricolam 'tis said.

(376)

Perhaps less obvious than the way in which Frost's poetics reflect his conservative politics is the attitude toward nature that his inclination implies. To let nature take its course and allow things to grow as they please is to assume a passive attitude, one which, at least in these poems, presupposes that nature's processes are benign. This inclination thus constitutes one aspect of Frost's doubleness in that it contrasts with his stance of resistance discussed later in this essay.

This doctrine is also explicit in what Frost has to say concerning his career, art, and method of poetic composition. About his own success, Frost remarked to Francis, “he had never lifted a finger to advance his career and that what had come to him had just come to him” (qtd. in Francis, The Trouble with Francis 89). (This statement, as I point out later on, proves to be disingenuous.) As in his career, so in his theory for writing poetry. In a comment he made to Francis that was recorded in A Time to Talk, he was adamant that “a poem not only should but must be written in a single free-flowing run” (11). “Like a piece of ice on a hot stove,” he wrote in “The Figure a Poem Makes,” “the poem must ride on its own melting” (Selected Poems 4). In his writing, especially in the longer blank-verse poems, as well as the eclogues and dialogues, Frost's “custom of composing in a free flow” (A Time to Talk 97) is skillfully fitted to open poetic forms that accommodate the flexible iambic rhythms of common speech, and so provide the feel of language spontaneously uttered.

Francis, too, celebrates the virtues represented by nature, but he lives the life in art that Frost only says he will live. A good example of Francis's habit of seeing natural objects as metaphors for conduct is a short poem called “Mountain Blueberries.” Part exposition and part description, it takes as its starting point the poet's response to the appearance of blueberries that he encounters during a solitary mountain walk. After the first stanza, in which he tries to account for his discovery of the berries in so remote a terrain, he uses description in the second stanza to suggest that they represent qualities rich in meaning, qualities similar to those hinted at in Frost's “Blueberries”:

These blueberries belong to birds
If they belong to anyone.
Who else could have planted them but birds
Three thousand feet up towards the sun?
They live on sunshine, dust of granite,
A little rain, a little dew.
In shape a miniature moon or planet,
In color distant-mountain blue.

(39)

Writing about “Mountain Blueberries” in “Two Poets Named Robert,” Donald Hail observes that it is “a poem about making do on little” [119]. As it pertains to Francis's own life, the poem has a special significance. After the poet moved into his own home, Fort Juniper, in 1940, he lived deliberately, along Thoreauvian lines. Determined to “cultivate the art of living without money” (The Trouble with Francis 219), he got rid of his old car and decided not to keep a telephone; he made “full use of everything [he] possessed” and threw out “everything [he] didn't need” [29]; he cultivated a modest garden and grew his own vegetables, herbs, and small fruits; and in a letter addressed to Thoreau that is included in his autobiography, Francis espoused, in Hall's words, “the pleasures and virtues of eating soybeans” [119]. As it reflects a life based on principles of strict economy, “Mountain Blueberries” is a model of resourcefulness, combining brevity of structure with richness of meaning, while satisfying, as Francis writes in A Time to Talk, what Frost means by form: “proportion of thought and its proportioning in the poem” [55].

If the transcendentalists' essential influence on Frost and Francis was to encourage them to read meaning in natural objects, both poets part company with them in their focus on nature's dark truths. Two such poems whose similar subject matter reflects this focus are Frost's sonnet “The Oven Bird,” published in 1916, and Francis's “The Wood Pewee,” published in Valhalla and Other Poems. However, this similarity is less significant than the differences that divide Frost from Francis and here concern their tone and imagery. As in Frost's sonnet, Francis translates the song of a New England wood bird into words, hearing in its midsummer tune a portent of autumn's advent. Just as the ovenbird intones “that leaves are old” and “the highway dust is over all” (119-20), so the wood pewee sings of “the end of summer,” the encroachment of fall, and the waning of the year:

In the shade of a tree in the heat of an afternoon
The wood pewee sings its portamento tune
That summer is over-ripe and autumn is soon.
He sings from a twig after flitting to catch a fly.
And whether he sings September or July
He sings of the end of summer and sings goodby.

(41)

A harsher quality characterizes Frost's poem, one that is born from scattered images of dryness and diminishment that appear in it.⁶ The ovenbird's reminder of the dwindling of flowers from spring to midsummer links nature's diminution to the cycles of birth and death. He says the petals of “pear and cherry bloom” that once fell during brief vernal showers are now overlaid by the “highway dust” that covers “all” (“dust” is itself an intimation of mortality). In the face of seasonal desiccation and the inexorable coming on of autumn, with its withering leaves, the ovenbird knows, unlike “other birds,” not to sing a melodious and winsome tune. Or, as Frost puts it, “he knows in singing not to sing”. …

By contrast, Francis stresses the lyrical beauty of the wood pewee's song, most notably in the shading of vowel sounds in “tree,” “heat,” and “pewee,” and in the choice of the Italian “portamento,” which emphasizes the shifting pitch of the bird's lilting tune. Then, Francis plays on short i sounds to accentuate not only the music of the pewee's tune but also the nimbleness of his movement, as the bird “sings from a twig after flitting to catch a fly.” Of course, Frost too strings sounds together for a lyrical effect (as in the chiming e sounds of “petal,” “pear,” and “cherry” in lines 6-7). It's simply the case that Francis indulges here in a kind of preciousness that tempers the terse and pedagogical conclusion of his poem. Unlike Francis, Frost “knows in singing not to sing.”⁷ As a result, Francis's poems, generally speaking, do not achieve the bleak axiomatic eloquence that is characteristic of Frost's best lyrics. They rarely rise to the bitter pitch of “The Oven Bird,” whose song Frost ultimately “frames in a “question” (“what to make of a diminished thing”), which is answered by the poem itself (the poem is what he “makes” in the face of diminishment).⁸

But Francis is in his own way as bleak as Frost when he discovers unsettling evidence that implies that the natural world reflects an evil design. This terrifying vision is central to his poem “The Orb Weaver” (1960), which, like Frost's sonnet “Design” (1936), centers on the image of a spider entangling its prey as suggestive of nature's malevolence. Though Frost and Francis show a willingness to probe nature's dark design for evidence of an appalling truth (distinguishing them from Thoreau and from Emerson of the First Series Essays), they maintain a safe distance from the horror they depict. Each poem starts with a vivid description and is followed by a series of reflections. As a consequence, a musing sensibility is established, which then moves toward horror and proceeds to confront it. Frost and Francis cope with the horror through figures of speech, as well as through the language of opinion and argument. The malefic trinity of spider, moth, and flower is domesticated by its comparison to a kitchen “broth,” the murderous orb weaver by its similitude to “plumping” fruits at harvest.⁹ The sestet of “Design” and the last stanza of “The Orb Weaver” are attempts to comprehend and rationalize the reality each poem describes. The poets thus muster up all their verbal resources to keep their awareness of terror and darkness at bay.

The tide of Frost's sonnet invokes the classical argument of design to prove God's existence, into which the poet introduces the nettlesome problem of natural evil.¹⁰ At the heart of this argument is the question of whether what we respond to as natural evil—the destruction of one species by another—proves either that such predation is random and God does not exist, or that there is a malevolent maker. In this poem, the terror and darkness derive partly from the central situation and precise description of the white trinity of spider, flower, and moth, and partly from Frost's use of pointed irony, which suggests that a ghastly design in nature lurks behind the spider's and the moth's appearance inside an “innocent heal-all.” Frost reinforces the use of white with words in the octave such as “snowdrop,” which suggests purity, and “froth,” which implies something light and frivolous, heightening the irony and horror that the poem so vividly presents:

I found a dimpled spider, fat and white,
On a white heal-all, holding up a moth
Like a piece of rigid satin cloth—
Assorted characters of death and blight
Mixed ready to begin the morning right,
Like the ingredients of a witches' broth—
A snow-drop spider, a flower like a froth,
And dead wings carried like a paper kite.
What had that flower to do with being white,
The wayside blue and innocent heal-all?
What brought the kindred spider to that height,
Then steered the white moth thither in the night?
What but design of darkness to appall?—
If design govern in a thing so small.

(302)

To intensify the horror, Frost summons up a world of black magic as he likens the trinity to “the ingredients of a witches' broth—” a concoction out of a conjurer's cookbook. In the sestet, he poses the question on which the argument hinges. The verbs “brought” and “steered” suggest that these “assorted characters” are the agents of an inscrutable maker, incapable on their own of voluntary movement. As the sonnet rounds off, the closing couplet offers possibilities. The evidence Frost has presented to prove that the world is governed by a fiendish sorcerer (the “design of darkness to appall”), an argument implicitly supported by the poem's controlled rhyme scheme, is set over against the disquieting possibility that evil in nature results from chance (“If design govern in a thing so small”). The subordinating conjunction complicates the argument that has been built up in the poem to this point.

Where Frost's sonnet encompasses both interpretations of the argument from design, Francis's “The Orb Weaver” is unequivocal in its view that a malevolent creator is accountable for the predation that the poem describes. Francis evokes the maker from whom darkness and destruction emanate by means of his description of the spider's physical characteristics, his use of suggestive diction, and his depiction of predation as an emblem of horror (in these respects, the poem is a true heir of Frost's sonnet), all of which is interwoven in four tercets divided into two sections by an isolated seventh line, whose falling rhythms reflect the poem's formal design:

Here is the spinner, the orb weaver,
Devised of jet, embossed with sulphur,
Hanging among the fruits of summer,
Hour after hour serenely sullen,
Ripening as September ripens,
Plumping like a grape or melon.
And in its winding sheet the grasshopper.
The art, the craftsmanship, the cunning,
The patience, the self-control, the waiting,
The sudden dart and the needled poison.
I have no quarrel with the spider
But with the mind or mood that made her
To thrive in nature and in man's nature.

(197)

Francis's description implies that the spider is designed for its environment. The creature's “jet” and “sulphur” tints, the latter of which is “embossed” on its “plumping” body, like an adornment, blend in perfectly “among the fruits of summer.” With “jet,” Francis associates the spider with evil and emphasizes the sinister quality of its jewel-like beauty, in that the word refers both to a color and to a type of lustrous coal that was used to fashion personal ornaments. In line 2, the verb “devised” suggests that there is a maker (who is vaguely referred to as a “mind or mood” in the last tercet), which intimates that the spider's presence amid such thriving is the result of design rather than chance. Francis's diction helps create the feeling that a maleficent mover is hovering ominously over this grim tableau of a “sullen” predator “ripening” alongside summer's fruits. “Waiting” is the key hover word here.

A close inspection of the last words in each line reveals that a design is built into the poem's structure. The effect of each line's falling rhythms, as in “weaver,” “sulphur,” “ripens,” and “melon,” is twofold. First, it suggests that the poem has a formal design, which supports the argument for an evil design that operates in such small degree in nature (this is also the case in Frost's sonnet). Second, this rhythm sets up expectations so that we come to anticipate a falling off at the end of each line. Francis keeps this rhythm in the isolated line but surprises us with the shocking image of the “grasshopper” wrapped in “a winding sheet.”

The closing tercets, which are sunk deep in the language of opinion and argument, stand in striking relationship to the opening section and the isolated line. After the shock of line 7, Francis copes with the intractable through words that reveal his appreciation for the spider's skills: its “art,” “craftsmanship,” “self-control,” and “patience.” The tone becomes incantatory, with the nouns accumulating one after another in a kind of verbal hold against horror. But rather than marvel at the spider's natural predatory instincts, adaptability, and survival skills, Francis becomes engaged in a “quarrel” with its maker in the last lines, where he introduces the word “I” for the first time in the poem. He uses language that verges on standard rhetoric, as if to capture his effort to comprehend an appalled sense of reality in which evil flourishes “in nature and in man's nature.”

As his “spider” poem shows, Francis, like Frost, incorporates into his poetics a perception of nature that is quite different from the benign view he presents in many of his other poems. Earlier, in discussing Frost, I ventured a brief description of his doubleness as involving contrasting stances toward nature, one of which correlated with his laissez-faire inclination to “let the world come as it would.” At this point, I want to consider (in relation to Francis) the other Frost who aggressively asserts his will in resistance to nature, particularly in poems when this stance masks his characteristic wariness at entering into an experiential darkness. As Richard Poirier defines it, this state of mind expresses itself in Frost's lyrics as “a sense of ‘nothingness’ or a condition of vacancy,” which, according to Poirier, Frost “seems more often to have contrived in order that he may then ostentatiously resist it” (204). “His poems,” Poirier goes on, tend again and again to break away from the condition of “barrenness” by means of some abrupt, syntactically and formally signaled change of tone: “They cannot scare me with their empty spaces,” or so he says in the last stanza of “Desert Places.” (204)

It would appear, then, that Frost evokes this emotional condition not so much to confront it as to shrug it off and flex some poetic muscle. When he takes up this posture, Frost becomes, in Poirier's words, “a performing presence” (205). In contrast, Francis adopts a stance of detached engagement in relation to his “vacancy.” Instead of striking a posture of resistance, he explores his condition by becoming simultaneously an observer and the observed, which is to describe a kind of “hovering” between being both subject and object.

As Poirier's comments suggest, Frost's posturing is a calculated maneuver. His remarks are pertinent to what is perhaps Frost's best-known poem. In “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” Frost's evocation of “barrenness “is a conscious tactic that extends to a strategy of self-idealization, whereby the poet, in shrugging off this condition and asserting his will, disguises his characteristic wariness as tough-minded resistance. At the start, Frost stops his horse in a remote and hauntingly stark landscape on the “darkest evening of the year” between “woods and frozen lake.” His experiential condition is represented here by the darkness of the woods that he watches “fill up with snow.” The prospect of losing himself in their dense deepness is what he must resist, a prospect that is at once seductive (“lovely”) and terrible (“dark”):

The woods are lovely, dark, and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

(224-25)

As Poirier notes, Frost's characteristic way of treating self-erasure is to imagine it “as a snowfall which obliterates signs of life” (206). The poet resists the attraction of losing himself and being swept into oblivion, and thus never enters into the woods. He refuses to submit to nature and, in effect, resists a sort of laissez-faire inclination to go with the natural course of things. Instead, he doggedly asserts that he must get on with living, a realization signaled by the interjection of “But” in the line just before the repetend. The last two lines reinforce that he must be going and attend to the obligations of life.

No less calculating than the posture Frost strikes is the account he related to biographer Lawrance Thompson concerning the poem's composition. As Thompson tells it, Frost had just completed a rough draft of “New Hampshire” at dawn in June 1922. After a short walk outside of his home in Vermont, Frost returned inside, “picked up his pen,” began to write a poem, and “seemed to hear the words, as though they were spoken to him, and he wrote them down as best he could, in his fatigue, even though they came so indistinctly at times he was uncertain what he heard” (237). “In a short time,” Thompson writes, “and without too much trouble,” Frost composed the poem. However, Thompson acknowledges that the poet “was extremely inconsistent in his various accounts of how he wrote ‘Stopping By Woods’” (596). Frost often “slipped into the posture of claiming he wrote the entire poem ‘with one stroke of the pen,’” an account that friend and fellow poet John Ciardi reported Frost told him “time and again” (597). At other times, Frost discussed “the difficulties confronted in the writing of it,” as he had in 1946 when his comments were published in Preface to Poetry. But more often than not, as Thompson points out, “thereafter he repeated his idealized version of the event.” Frost's preferred account of the poem's composition has a bearing on Poirier's reading of his poems, for, like the tenacious, willful stance that Frost takes up in them, it implies that he consciously cultivated an “idealized version” of himself, which goes beyond the poems to the fictions he created about how they came into being.

His personal ambition and private grief gave him reasons for cultivating an idealized persona. This image helped shape the public's perception of him as a tough-minded realist, one strikingly at odds with the poet who was insecure about his reputation, and with the troubled man who was emotionally devastated by the calamities that befell his children. Frost's competitive ambition compelled him to guard the reputation he had won for himself when his early books received critical acclaim. In one instance, as Thompson relates, Frost recruited influential publisher Alfred Harcourt to correct what he felt was Ezra Pound's misleading impression in a critique of North of Boston that he had gone to England because “he felt snubbed by American editors” (56). For a man so very conscious of the public eye, “there was,” as Donald Hall writes, “room for only one at the top of the steeple” (Ancient 21). Frost's idealized self-image also served as a guise to protect him from falling into the abyss of despair and suicide. What with the death of his firstborn child from cholera at age three, the institutionalization of the second oldest of his four daughters, the suicide of his son, and the death of his youngest daughter after childbirth, he knew grief and despair. The darkness and the terror in his poems are real. In Hall's words, Robert Frost lived in terror of madness and suicide. … When he wrote the poems that told the terror, and that summoned the intelligence to control the terror, he suffered in the writing. (25)

Frost thus created a persona both for the sake of public approval and for warding off deep-seated, even suicidal, fears.

Francis, on the other hand, doesn't resort to self-idealized assertion. If Frost posits “a condition of vacancy” in his poems to ostentatiously resist it, then Francis is perhaps more receptive than Frost to a detached contemplation of this condition. He explores the “vacancy” by appropriating to himself the role of outside observer. Francis's “The Spy,” from The Face Against the Glass (1950), presents this condition in terms of a consciousness that is dislocated from itself. The paradoxical situation that the poem describes is that of an unnamed man looking through the window into his “empty house … in the moonlight” after he has left it, “spying,” like a Stevensian snowman, “Upon the man who is and is not there”:

To leave his empty house yet not to leave it
But make himself a shadow at a window-
Who is this prowler private in the moonlight?
Then at another window and another
His face against the glass and peering in-
What does he think he sees or wants to see?
Soft as milkweed floss the September night
White as milkweed the untroubled moon
Whose face, though far, is also at the window.
Two faces, but the prowler peers in deeper
Spying upon the empty chair, spying
Upon the man who is and is not there.

(169)

David Graham suggests that the “man who ‘is and is not’ present is … the poet” (87). In his autobiography, Francis described the time in his life during which he was writing the poem as a “period of crisis”:

I wanted to shrink into my psychic shell, … Night after night, soon after supper, my house became dark and inhospitable. … In one sense I was very much at home and in another sense very much not at home.

(83)

(Among the crises he faced at this time were a rejection by Macmillan of The Face against the Glass and the financial burden he incurred when he decided to print the book at his own expense.) The profound isolation that defined his life during this emotionally trying period is imaged in the figure of a “prowler private in the moonlight” and in the “empty” house and chair. The vacant house into which he peers alludes to an emptiness seen from outside, which suggests an inner feeling of isolation.

To this sense of isolation, Francis adds a tinge of anxiety as his description of a picturesque evening lighted by the moon's “untroubled” face invites a comparison with the prowler's spying in at the window. In relation to the face against the glass, the moon's reflection is “far” from the prowler, a distance that intensifies his loneliness. Moreover, the glow of the September night, “soft as milkweed floss,” and the pearly color of the moon, “white as milkweed,” illuminate, by contrast, his condition of inward darkness.

As the poem concludes and the moon and the prowler are directly compared, the “prowler peers in deeper” than the moon. “Spying upon the empty chair,” he cannot see, ultimately, through his inward darkness. Instead of demonstrating Frostian self-assertion and resistance to his condition, the speaker remains as he was at the beginning of the poem: dislocated and uncertain, at home and not at home, there and not there, in and out, detached yet paradoxically engaged in the act of watching himself, as if to see how he might appear to the stranger on the other side of the glass. Hovering on the outside looking in, reflecting on his emotional condition, the prowler is not at all the “aged” figure in Frost's “An Old Man's Winter's Night,” who responds to the “out-of-doors” that looks “darkly in at him” by making noise, by “clomping” in empty rooms” and “beating on a box” (108), by resisting rather than exploring the darkness. Francis's achievement here of hovering, being both subject and object, being detached from himself yet contemplatively receptive to his “vacancy,” defines the way he outgrows Frost's influence.

Francis had made it a project of sorts in his writing to retire from view and detach himself from his poems. “My aim is to get outside myself by means of my poems,” he once observed in an interview (qtd. in Tetreault 12). “That is, I want to give birth to poems that will detach themselves from me and have a life of their own” (14). In his comments, Francis deemphasizes his presence in favor of the poem itself, a characteristic that Donald Hall noted in writing about Francis's work in “Two Poets Named Robert”: “He's invisible—one would not consider him confessional!—yet the imprint of an idiosyncratic vision gives [his] poems their textured particularity” (121). To return to “The Spy” for a moment, where the prowler-poet “make[s] himself a shadow at a window,” Francis, in this context, suggests a link between the self-effacement he aims for and the writing of poetry. The English word poet comes from the ancient Greek word for maker. For Francis, writing poetry is closely connected to the aim of detached engagement implied by this image of the prowler; his “making” is a shadowing of the self rather than an asserting of the will.

It should come as no surprise that Francis found a metaphor for detached engagement in nature. The poem “Cypresses,” published in The Orb Weaver (1960) but written in 1957 during the year he spent in Italy as a fellow of the American Academy of Rome, entwines his habit of seeing natural forms as emblems of conduct with the Stoic turning to nature for instruction. In this case, he draws on the symbolic association of cypresses with mourning to emphasize the “dark” lesson they impart; the trees teach “birds … How to be shadows.” Like the birds, Francis is detached in darkness but engaged in singing:

At noon they talk of evening and at evening
Of night, but what they say at night
Is a dark secret.
Somebody long ago called them the Trees
Of Death and they have never forgotten.
The name enchants them.
Always an attitude of solitude
To point the paradox of standing
Alone together.
How many years they have been teaching birds
In little schools, by little skills,
How to be shadows.

(199)

Francis's choice of birds as the objects of nature's instruction might seem curious at first, but a brief consideration of the source of the poem, as well as the particular context in which he used this image, or had seen it used by Frost, make readily apparent the reason for his choice. His own earlier use of the bird in “The Wood Pewee,” which echoed Frost's “The Oven Bird,” and the fact that “Cypresses” owes its origins to the visits he paid to the graves of Shelley and Keats, shaded by “the tall cypresses of the Protestant Cemetery” in Rome (The Trouble with Francis 114), are hints that he regarded the bird as an image of the poet. In the context of his aim to detach himself from his poems, the withdrawal of birds into trees to become “shadows” strikes a personal chord for Francis, one that is more resonant perhaps than his homage to poets for whom the birds are surrogates.

This notion of withdrawal accords with Francis's disposition against a poetry of idealized self-assertion. Writing about the poetry of his contemporaries in The Satirical Rogue on Poetry, Francis's reflections on their work reveal his own predilection for detachment: “What I suffer from in other people's poetry is many things, according to poet and poem. But perhaps most of all from the too obtrusive presence of the poet himself” (39). Later in the same book, he adds, “Much poetry today [1968] gives us the poet himself or herself in massive doses” (81). Coming from a man who took Thoreau literally and withdrew into near seclusion on the outskirts of Amherst, his reflections are consistent with the principles by which he lived. Francis's predilection for detachment, as well as his disinclination to write about himself, explain why he avoids self-promotion in his poetry (in contrast to Frost) and takes up an idiosyncratic perspective as an onlooker of himself. From this perspective, he achieves a distance that allows him to explore, engage, and ultimately accept his “condition of vacancy” even though what is being “accepted” (as in “The Spy”) is defeat of a sort.

As I pointed out earlier, it was Frost himself who gave Francis advice that he later transformed into the stance he takes up in his poems. In A Time to Talk, Francis jotted down what he remembered Frost had said to him during one of their visits in an entry dated April 2, 1933. One remark, in particular, stands out: ‘You've got to learn to hover,” Frost told him. This remark makes its way into one of the last poems Francis wrote before he died in 1987, “For the Ghost of Robert Frost.” The poem is at once a tribute to his mentor and a personal anthem, for out of these words he forges a metaphor for detached engagement, which describes his rigorous way of life and the aim of his writing:

“You've got to learn to hover,”
He said. The way a hummingbird
Hovers over a flower, the way
The flower's fragrance hovers over it.
Not to move on, not to
Keep jumping like a nervous grasshopper
But to hover there until you
Have gathered all that is there
For you or anyone to gather.
“You've got to learn to hover.”

Through the image of a hummingbird fluttering over a flower, Francis describes a moment of equipoise. At this point, poise and contemplation are in harmonious balance. As we have seen in Francis's dark-spirited poems, he converts hovering to imaginative activity, detachment to receptivity (rather than resistance), and self-effacement (rather than self-assertion) to engagement. In the end, Francis took Frost's advice more to heart than Frost ever did.

Notes

1. Later in A Time to Talk, Francis recalls when Frost came across his poem “Roots” in the New York Herald Tribune and recommended changes in it. On one of Frost's subsequent visits to Francis's house in November 1934, Francis showed him a new version of the poem in the Virginia Quarterly Review (October 1934) “and told him its revised form was due wholly to his criticism last June” (72).

2. All quotations from Francis's poetry except “For the Ghost of Robert Frost” are from Collected Poems, 1936-1976. All quotations from Frost's poetry are from The Poetry of Robert Frost, except as otherwise noted.

3. William Mulder maintains that Dickinson and Frost read “nature and society as manuals of instruction,” with “facts flowering into truths of conduct … into ethics, a secular sermon.” Mulder differs from Richardson in limiting this habit of perception “to a tradition which runs from the New England Primer to Poor Richard's Almanac to Walden” (550).

4. For more on the impact of Greek Stoicism on Emerson's perception of nature, see Richardson 233-34.

5. Francis first published his thoughts about Frost's “laissez-faire” inclination to “let things take their course” in “Robert Frost from His Green Mountain” (117).

6. In his comment on the poem, George Monteiro emphasizes these images: “Frost's ovenbird reminds us dryly and matter-of-factly that spring's luxuriance of flowers diminishes by midsummer in the ratio of ‘one to ten’” (98).

7. This view of Francis's preciousness, his contrast with Frost, and the reflection that he seldom attains Frost's bitter lyricism underlie David Graham's discussion of his poems. In A Time to Talk, Frost in fact “defined [Francis's] greatest danger as preciousness” (69).

8. Robert Pack observes about “The Oven Bird”: “The poem itself … is indeed what the poet has made. It is an order, a design, to set against uncertainty, to set against ‘the fall’ and against death” (12).

9. George Monteiro compares “Design” to Frost's earlier version of the poem, titled “In White” (1912). One of the changes Frost made in the final version was to incorporate “the important metaphor of kitchen domesticity” into “the tableau of spider, moth, and ritual death which he has observed” (36-37).

10. In American literature, Jonathan Edwards, leader of New England's religious revival in the 1740s, has in mind the “Argument from Design” in a 1723 document known as his “Spider letter,” in which his close description of spiders spinning their webs reflects an eighteenth-century belief in a benevolent God. Edwards remarks on “the exuberant goodness of the Creator who hath not only provided for all the necessities but also for the pleasure and recreation of all sorts of creatures, even the insects” (5).

Works Cited

Edwards, Jonathan. A Jonathan Edwards Reader. Ed. John E. Smith, Harry S. Stout, and Kenneth P. Minkema. New Haven: Yale UP, 1995.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Selected Writings of Emerson. Ed. Donald McQuade. New York: Modern Library, 1981.

Francis, Robert. Collected Poems, 1936-1976. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1976.

———. “For the Ghost of Robert Frost.” Painted Bride Quarterly 35 (1988): 20.

———. “Robert Frost from His Green Mountain.” Dalhousie Review 33.2 (Summer 1953): 117-27.

———. The Satirical Rogue on Poetry. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1968.

———. A Time to Talk. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1972.

———. The Trouble with Francis. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1971.

———. Valhalla and Other Poems. New York: Macmillan, 1938.

Frost, Robert. The Letters of Robert Frost to Louis Untermeyer. Ed. Louis Untermeyer. New York: Holt, 1963.

———. The Poetry of Robert Frost. Ed. Edward Connery Lathem. New York: Holt, 1975.

———. Selected Poems of Robert Frost. New York: Holt, 1963.

Graham, David. “Millimeters and Not Miles”: The Excellence of Robert Francis.” Painted Bride Quarterly 35 (1988): 81.

Hall, Donald. Their Ancient Glittering Eyes, New York: Ticknor, 1992.

———. “Two Poets Named Robert.” Ohio Review 18.3 (1977): 110-25.

Monteiro, George. Robert Frost and the New England Renaissance. n.p.: UP of Kentucky, 1988.

Mulder, William. “Seeing ‘New Englandly’: Planes of Perception in Emily Dickinson and Robert Frost.” New England Quarterly 52.4 (1979): 550-59.

Pack, Robert. “Robert Frost's Enigmatical Reserve: The Poet as Teacher and Preacher.” Modern Critical Interpretations of the Poetry of Robert Frost. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea, 1986. 9-21.

Poirier, Richard. The Renewal of Literature: Emersonian Reflections. New York: Random, 1987.

Richardson, Robert D. Jr. Emerson: The Mind on Fire. Berkeley: U of California P, 1995.

———. Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind. Berkeley: U of California P, 1986.

Tetreault, Philip, and Kathy Sewalk Karcher. Francis on the Spot: An Interview with Robert Francis. Portage: Tunnel, 1976.

Thompson, Lawrance. Robert Frost: The Years of Triumph, 1915-1938. New York: Holt, 1970.

Thoreau, Henry David. The Writings of Henry David Thoreau. 20 vols.

Walden edition. Ed. Bradford Torrey and Francis H. Allen. Boston: Houghton, 1906.

Untermeyer, Louis. “New Books in Review.” The Yale Review 34 (Winter 1944-45): 345.