A Note on Robert Frost (1874-1963) Part--I

                                

      

Robert Frost is one of the greatest American poets who expressed the American life and natural beauty in a simple typical style through conventional verse. Frost was born on march 26^th,1874 in San Francisco. His father was of New England region and his mother was a Scot woman. When Frost was eleven, his father, working as a head master, died. He attended Dartmouth College in New England. In 1892 he left his studies and did various jobs. In 1895 he married his classmate, Elinor White. In 1897 he joined Harvard to continue his studies. In 1899 he left again. He did shoe-making, edited a country newspaper, worked as a teacher at Pinkerton Academy from 1905 to 1911, and finally worked in his grandfather’s farm near Derry.

As a man who worked in various professions, Frost captured the experiences and feelings of common man in his simple conversational style; yet there is depth of meaning with symbolic undertones beneath his simple use of language. He was known for “his realistic depictions of rural life and his command of American colloquial speech” and “for using them to examine complex social and philosophical themes.”

In 1912 he went to England and made friendship with Edward Thomas, a famous poet. He published “A Boy’s Will” a collection of poems in 1913. According to Edward Thomas these poems are revolutionary because they lack the exaggeration of rhetoric. In 1914 Frost published “North of Boston” which brought him name and fame. He returned to America in 1915 and taught at Amherst College. His other famous works are: Mountain Interval (1916), New Hampshire (1924) and West Running Brook (1928). In 1924 he won Pulitzer Prize for his poetic collection “New Hampshire”. In 1957 he was awarded Honorary degrees from Cambridge and oxford. Frost won Pulitzer Prizes three more times again in 1931 for “Collected Poems”, in 1937 for “A Further Range” and in 1943 for “A Witness Tree” respectively. During his life time he was conferred 44 honorary degrees by various institutions. John Kennedy described him as “the best poet of our time.”

 As a regional poet of New England, more particularly of New Hampshire,  Frost used realistic themes with a broader perspective. Though his descriptions, speech, rhythms and vocabulary are regional, he discovered universal truths in memorable characters in every poem. Wisdom comes distilled from experience processed by insight. Though he is a regional poet, his regional slant has a universal appeal. In this sense he is not a regional poet but is a metaphysical poet in the tradition of Emerson and Emily Dickinson. But his imagery is less complex and his style is more lucid. Frost confessed that poetry to him was essentially dramatic. 

Though like Wordsworth he wrote pastoral poetry, it is not decorative like that of Virgil. Frost defined poetry as “a connection of two things in verse” and as “inclusion of mind and emotions”, something similar to metaphysical concept of “fusion of intellect and emotion”. For him a poem begins with delight and ends in wisdom. It is “a clarification of life”. “The poet is essentially an accidental collector of impressions.” Frost believed in the fusion of form and content. He was not a believer in the saying that art should teach. He believed in endless experimentation in form and content. Regarding his deceptive simplicity, Geoffrey Moore said,” Frost’s poetry is deeper and tougher than it seems.”

As an American poet Frost depicted the pastoral and rural life of America in a sensitive manner. Like Whitman he was concerned with brotherhood and fellowship of man and democracy. Though he is a new England poet, he added universal meaning to his regional themes. Though he is not a visionary like Wordsworth or Shelley, his message is that we should love our work, help our fellowmen, understand their views, accept our limitations, face the life fearlessly, make the best use of our energies and skills, and above all have faith in God and not feel lonely in the world. Elizabeth Jennings noted that there is an almost total absence of despair or pessimism in Frost’s poetry. 

As a Nature poet Frost described Nature in relation to man. His descriptions of Nature are not idealized pictures, but realistic ones. In his view man has to face hardships and challenges in Nature with courage and live with dignity and fortitude. He made rural new England an artistic medium to express the alienation of modern man. Man is helplessly alone in an indifferent universe. Frost brings to our attention the terrible things of human life. Nature is ambivalent to him. A variety of emotions are aroused on different occasions by Nature. He draws his images from Nature which he observed carefully in all its moods and seasons. 

Frost’s treatment of mankind is based on realism, variety in his characters represents different aspects of man’s life. He lets his characters speak freely. A sense of alienation, fear and uncertainty and loneliness are revealed in his characters. A dismal and helpless picture of the common folk against the aggressive urban civilization is poetically picturized. That is the main reason why Lionel Trilling finds a terrifying picture of life in frost’s poems beneath their apparent simplicity and innocence. Yet most of his characters are brave and heroic in the face of adverse situations. Frost looks on the rural characters with a humorous, ironic and sympathetic detachment. He used the speech of common folk. There are philosophical undertones behind his simple use of language. He employs provincialisms. His poems show variety in attitude and approach. Like Yeats and Auden he handled a great number of English meters. His verse is smooth cadenced and flows with ease without any artificial decoration. Regarding his style and diction Frost believed that poetry is derived from common speech. New England speech rhythms and simple diction are used in his poetry. 

His long dramatic poems reproduce with amazing faithfulness the speech and sentiments of the people. (e.g.: “West-running Brooke, “The Death of the Hired man”, “Home-Burial etc.) His vocabulary and syntax are also simple. His allusions and images are derived from common life. He adopts a conversational tone and offers aphoristic wisdom in his poems. Frost’s long poems are studies in various characters. His use of blank verse is suitable for “poetry of talk.” It is a fit vehicle for expression of deep thoughts and feelings. It has the power to blend observation and imagination. It re-enacts the movement of thought in a dramatic way with conversational ease. There is an undercurrent of psychological analysis beneath his light, playful tone. His dramatic dialogues are not rhetorical speeches but short clipped and meaningful ones. They are comparable to dramatic, character-analyzing speeches of Chaucer and Robert Browning. The use of New England speech rhythms with simple diction in loose blank verse gives a spontaneous and realistic touch to his long poems. The abrupt breaks and broken syntax reveal the inner workings of mind with all its moods and reflections.

 According to John E. Lynen "Frost's regionalism is both symbolic and creative."  "Like Faulkner Frost stands forth as both the interpreter and the representative of his regional culture. "He uses New England as a means of revealing what is universal rather than merely local. frost's rural world is interesting because it symbolizes the world, we ourselves know. Our main concern must be to discover how he has shaped his world as an image of everyman's experience." According to Marion Montgomery "His best poetry is concerned with the drama of man in Nature." According to Louis Untermeyer, Frost's poetry lives with a particular liveliness because it expresses living people. "They are drawn with affection but not with a blurring sentimentality."   

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          28th July, 2021                                                    Somaseshu Gutala

     

 

 

     

A Note on Robert Frost’s “Birches”

              

  

This famous poem “Birches” was published in Frost’s third collection “Mountain interval” in 1916. Frost wrote this poem in 1913-1914 which appeared first in “Atlantic monthly” in the August issue of 1915. Frost was inspired by Lucy Larcom’s poem “Swinging on a birch tree” and also by his childhood experience of swinging on birches, a simple game played by many boys of new England region. Originally Frost named his poem “Swinging Birches” and published it in 1916. Lucy Larcom (1824-1893) in her poem described the thrill of swinging on birches  (a popular game for children in countryside) using many apt comparisons and metaphors. This poem was published in 1867 in “Childhood Songs”. The opening lines are “Swinging on a birch tree/To a sleepy tune/Hummed by all the breezes/In the month of June.” The moving leaves make a sound like the “dancing drops of a brook on pebbles”. The boys swinging on birches will feel happy like sailors rocking on a mast flying towards the sky which looks “like a wild blue eye.” The oriole (a song bird) too making a jolly whistling sound looks like a sailor in its hanging nest (hammock) on the top of the elm tree. “Up and down, we see-saw/Down into the grass,” which with scented fern and rose buds seems like a soft velvety carpet below their feet. “Swinging on a birch tree/ This is summer joy? / Fun for all vacation/ Don’t you think so Boy? / Up and down, we see-saw/ Merry and at ease/Careless as a brook is/ idle as the breeze.” Though this poem describes the pleasures of swinging, we do not find any deeper levels of meaning as the poem is meant only for children. But Frost  gives a sensuous description of birches in winter in the first part of the poem. The second part is reflective in content with symbolic interpretation.

 On seeing the bent branches of birches, Frost thinks that some boy might have been swinging them but later he realizes that the ice storms had bent the branches “loaded with ice” on a sunny winter morning after a rain. The boy remembers his boyhood experience and wishes that the birches might have been bent down by some boy instead of the ice-storm. 

 The snow-covered branches make a cracking sound as the ice crystals break and are scattered all over the ice-covered floor like heaps of broken glass. Under the sunlight they shine with many colours as if a dome of heaven had fallen. The bent tree branches with trailing leaves spread all over the ground appear "like girls on hands and knees that throw their hair/Before them over their heads to dry in the sun." The poet uses this beautiful image to express his love of Nature in a very sensuous manner. A highly sensory description of freezing and thawing of ice and the reality of winter is seen. The stanza abounds in many figures of speech like alliteration (“cracks and crazed”) , onomatopoeia (click, shattering, cracks) and use of sibilance (“soon the sun’s warmth makes them shed crystal shells”). The use of present participle forms and enjambment (verse flowing from one line another line) captures the unstoppable momentum of the melting ice. (“shattering and avalanching on the snow-crust”). A poetic language is used to describe a scientific phenomenon. The first twenty lines are largely devoted to description of the effect of ice-storms on the birches.

 Though the poet knows the truth, still he prefers the imagination of a boy swinging and bending the branches. He felt a sense of triumph in subduing those branches. As a boy, he used to climb carefully up to the top branch and suddenly press the branch down with force to bend it to the ground with a swishing sound in the air.  As a boy he was a swinger of branches and now in a nostalgic mood wishes to be so whenever he becomes weary of the world and when life becomes confused “like a pathless wood” covered with cobwebs and when he feels the blows as if unseen branches strike against his face with a lashing movement causing his eye to weep with burning. The images “cobwebs” and “twigs” show the complex, discomforting and painful nature of worldly life.  The poet used a very simple but appropriate image to bring out the sorrows and uncertainty of worldly life.

 The poet remembers the skill required to climb the branches to the top and swish “kicking his way down through air to the ground.” It requires much caution and care to do so just like one has to fill the cup up to the brim or above the brim. There is a limit to which the boy can climb the tree and he has come down after some time. Maintaining balance is of great importance in life. There is a limit to what a cup can hold and there is a limit to which the boy can climb a tree.

In this poem the act of swinging on birches is symbolically represented as a way to escape from the harsh realities or truth of the adult world. The boy climbs the tree as if he is climbing toward heaven to a place where he can be free. But he has to come back again because the earth is the right place for love. So man is like a swinger of branches leaving this world for a while, and coming back again. Thus the poet reveals his love for humanity and the and the world in spite of uncertainty and unexpected troubles. 

 This sense of Romantic escape from earthly burdens is seen in the poems of many poets of the Romantic age. John Keats in his famous poem “Ode to a nightingale” wishes to escape from “the weariness, the fever and the fret” of realistic world “where but to think is full of sorrow and leaden-eyed despairs” into the joyful world of nightingale on wings of imagination. But his flight is not sustained for long. He is dragged back to his real world as he says that fancy is “a deceiving elf.” In his famous ode “On a Grecian Urn” the poet tries to enter the immortal world of beauty and art which later turns out to be a “cold pastoral” lacking in life and dynamic change. On the other hand, William Wordsworth in his poem “To a sky lark” shows the bird as a wise minstrel which flies but never roams away from home. It is “true to the kindred points of heaven and home.” Frost, too like Wordsworth, finds intimate connection to earth in spite of worldly troubles and tribulations.

 Frost highlights the narrator’s regret that he can no longer become a swinger of branches because he is an adult and he cannot leave his responsibilities behind. In fact, the narrator is not able to enjoy the imagined view of a boy swinging on the birches. He is forced to accept the truth that the bends are caused by winter storms and not by a boy swinging on them. The poet’s wish to re-enact his childhood experience of swinging on the branches and climbing towards heaven to escape from the rational world remains inconclusive. The freedom of imagination is appealing and wondrous but the narrator still cannot avoid returning to the earth and bearing his responsibilities in life. The imaginative escape is only a temporary phase. 

This poem was written in blank verse with a particular emphasis on “the sound of the sense.” Frost describes the cracking of ice crystals on the moving branches, selecting similar sounding syllables to match with the meaning: “soon the sun’s warmth makes them shed crystal shells/Shattering and avalanching on the snow-crust.” To produce the sounds of swinging birches the poet uses repetition of sibilant “s” sound: “I should prefer to have some boy bend them.”

 Written in a conversational language the poem moves between the imagination and reality. The earth, though not perfect, is a better place for going on. The poet shows an agnostic approach when he views heaven as a fragile concept when he says “the inner dome of heaven had fallen.” This poem is a nostalgic celebration of youthful joy juxtaposing boyhood pleasures and carefree life with worldly troubles and worries of adult life. The use of contrast is seen throughout the poem as seen in use of words like: black/white, ideal/real, heat/cold, old age/adolescence, fact/fiction etc. He draws a comparison between the straighter and darker trees with the arched trunks of birches with trailing leaves on the ground. The truth of the boy swinging the birches serves as an antidote to the matter-of -fact truth of the ice-storms.

 The poet seems to suggest that limits of the real world must exist as a basis in order to enjoy the imaginative world. The poet thinks that life is beautiful and more tangible than momentary pleasures of heaven. The poet makes it clear that neither is he an escapist nor is he espousing escapism to get away from the rigors of life which demand duty and entrusts responsibilities. Rather what he desires is a brief respite from the harsh realities of existence. The poet wishes to climb the birch tree and momentarily transcend the monotony of life. Once he swings on the birches, the cobwebs of existence quit like ice crystals on the tree when the sun is up. The moment of ecstasy going beyond oneself is an imaginative act. The leap of imagination must yield finally to the conditions of reality. Viewed from this angle the poem becomes a commentary on the relationship between life, truth and art. Imagination cannot live outside the world.  The poet desires to go beyond fact and reality but does not wish to raze the truth of birches like an ice-storm. Structurally “Birches” is a poem with no stanza breaks. This gives the poem a free, flowing tone enhanced with the use of enjambment.

Some critics like Alvarez deny Frost as a nature poet and confirm his role as a rural or country poet who describes nature with objective reality. “He is a country poet whose business is to live with Nature rather than through Nature. --- he is essentially a poet of pastures and plains, mountains and rivers, woods and gardens, groves and bowers, fruits and flowers, seeds and birds.” Frost himself denied being a nature poet. In his words, “I am not a Nature poet… there is always a person in my poems.” Yet we can fully feel the poet’s affection to nature’s beauty and grace.

According to some critics “Birches” is one of the poems that begins with insight and finishes with joy. The poetry of Frost does not raise and resolve questions. He explores problems and examines alternatives rather than taking sides between conflicts. Robert Frost uses Nature as a background to illustrate people’s psychological struggles with everyday life. His poems are usually observations on Nature and proceed to the human situations such as loneliness, helplessness, confusion, isolation and indifferent conditions.

Frost has a tendency to philosophize but is free from didacticism. It has been explained by Lewis in these words, “He is a serious moralist as well as a serious artist; but his peculiar intimacy with nature prevents him from being openly didactic: He teaches, like nature, in parables: sometimes merely presenting a picture, a mood, a narrative, and leaving you to draw your own conclusions, never permitting himself more than the tender, humorous sort of comment we find at the end of ‘Birches’.

C.D. Lewis makes the following comment on its rhythm - the upward and downward movement of the rhythm fully reflects the going up to and coming down of the swinger of birches. But when the poet moralizes the rhythm becomes slow.” In the words of Untermeyer, “Birches”, one of Robert Frost’s most widely quoted poems, beautifully illustrates the poet’s power, the power to blend observation and imagination. 

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              12th July,2021                           Somaseshu Gutala