Comparing Conceptions: Frost and Eddington, Heisenberg, and Bohr
“Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” stages its play of opposites at typically Frostian borders between night and day, storm and hearth, nature and culture, individual and group, freedom and responsibility. It works them, not “out” to resolution but in permanent suspension as complementary counters in mens animi, the feeling thought of active mind. The poem is made to make the mind just that. It unsettles certitude even in so small a matter as the disposition of accents in the opening line: “Whose woods these are I think I know.” The monosyllabic tetrameter declares itself as it declares. Yet the “sound of sense” is uncertain. As an expression of doubtful guessing, “think” opposes “know,” with its air of certitude. The line might be read to emphasize doubt (Whose woods these are I think I know) or confident knowledge (Whose woods these are I think I know). Once the issue is introduced, even a scrupulously “neutral” reading points it up. The evidence for choosing emphasis is insufficient to the choice.
One of Frost's characteristic devices is to set up and undermine a case of the pathetic fallacy in such a way that both construction and collapse stay actively in play. In “Stopping by Woods,” the undermining nearly precedes the setting up. “Must” gives the game away, as the speaker (exercising indeterminacy) interferes with the reality he observes, imposing his thoughts and feelings on it. “Darkest” contributes to the pattern. Is the evening, say, the winter solstice, literally darkest? Could it be, given the way that snow concentrates light? Or is “darkest” a judgment the speaker projects? In the next stanza, the speaker's “reading into” nature intensifies to the point where harness bells “actually” speak. Then, as if to emphasize that such speaking is a human addition to a speechless scene, we hear that the only other sound is the “sweep” of light wind on softly falling snow. Those two categories of evidence, the self-consciously imposed and therefore suspect yet understandable human one, and the apparently indifferent yet comfortingly beautiful natural one, seem to produce the description of the woods as “lovely” and “dark and deep,” a place of both (dangerous) attraction and (self-protective) threat. The oppositions are emphasized by Frost's intended punctuation—a comma after “lovely”; none after “dark,” and the double doubleness of attraction and threat complicates the blunt “But” that begins the next line. Which woods, if any, is being rejected? How far does recalling that one has “promises to keep” go toward keeping them in fact?
The poem's formal qualities, while not obviously “experimental,” also contribute to its balancing act. The closing repetition emphasizes the speaker's commitment to his responsibilities. It also emphasizes the repetitive tedium that makes the woods an attractive alternative to those responsibilities. This leaves open the question of just how much arguing is left to be done before any action is taken. The rhyme scheme contributes to the play. Its linked pattern seems completed and resolved in the final stanza, underlining the effect of closure: aaba, bbcb, ccdc, dddd. But is a repeated word a rhyme? Is the resolution excessive; does the repeated line work as a sign of forced closure? None of this is resolved; it is kept in complementary suspension. Similarly, the poem is clearly a made thing, an object or artifact, as its formal regularities attest; it is also an event in continuous process, as its present participial title announces and as the present tense employed throughout suggests. At the same time, the poem has a narrative thrust that tempts us to see the speaker move on (even though he does not), just as too much insistence on the poem as stranded in the present tense falsely makes it out as static. In the words of “Education by Poetry,” “A thing, they say, is an event. … I believe it is almost an event.” Balancing, unbalancing, rebalancing, those acts are the life of the poem, of the poet making and the reader taking it. Indeterminacy and complementarity are implicit in them.
Frost typically produces effects like the ones described, and he does so in a variety of ways. Similar to strategies in “Stopping by Woods” are those of “The Wood-Pile”—with the “small bird” in the role of the “little horse”—and of “Design,” with its subversive string of adjectives, pseudo-rhetorical questions, and “exaggerated” rhyme scheme. A related device is Frost's tendency to conclude poems with apparently certain and resolving epigrams which, upon examination, prove to be enigmas reopening the very issues they had seemed to close.1 Other poems use other methods for keeping opposites in play. The elaborate story of the mad uncle told by the subjective monologist of “A Servant to Servants” works (in the deliberate absence of any way to know which of the two it is) both as an historical and psychological explanation of her own plight and as her imaginative imposition of color on a drab life, that is, as her creative response to her plight.2 The several voices of such poems as “Mending Wall,” “Home Burial,” “The Hill Wife,” or “The Death of the Hired Man” multiply points of view not in order to choose between or among them but in order to show any point of view indeterminate, and to leave all points of view as unresolved complements in action. In such poems as “The Oven Bird,” “Desert Places,” “Come In,” or “Birches,” the drama is in the combined building up and breaking down of a central metaphor. The last deliberately confuses poetry and (scientific) truth, so that they become poetry's truth and truth's fiction. One way it does so is by assigning to the “matter of fact” voice of truth the extravagantly poetic image of the bowed trees as girls kneeling to dry their hair in the sun. In “Birches,” as elsewhere, action (balancing, unbalancing) and event (going and coming back; movement toward, not to) are insisted upon.
In a way, “Birches” marks a turning point, a self-consciousness about inclusion that leads to rather static and programmatic versions of complementarity in such later poems as “West-Running Brook.” The later poems also more often choose sides, whether because of a shift toward more “social,” “light” verse,3 or under the pressures of age, personal suffering, political developments, or public and critical responses to the work. Perhaps they more often take sides because of the commitment to “definiteness of position,” to “passionate preference,” that was always an aspect of Frost's stance in the world. Perhaps they are simply another part of the larger complementary inclusiveness that marks his art. What Frost says of wisdom in “Boeotian” is true of his poetry as well: “I will not have it systematic.” Nonetheless, the major portion of Frost's finest work, early and late, is a profoundly provisional poetry which reflects, expresses, and enacts ideas emerging also in the physics of his time, ideas that are central to our age. In that, he is, if never modernist, most modern.
Notes
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See Robert Langbaum, “Hardy, Frost, and the Question of Modernist Poetry,” Virginia Quarterly Review, 58 (1982), 72.
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See Richard Poirier, Robert Frost: The Work of Knowing (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1977), pp. 113-18.
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Frost: A Literary Life Reconsidered, pp. 206ff.
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In Search of a Past: The Fugitive Movement and the Major Traditionalists
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