The Poetry of Robert Frost
(continued)
[from Literature: An Introduction to
Poetic Characteristics. Robert Frost’s poetic style remained fairly consistent throughout his career; we do not see significant development or change in his work. We can find in his poems a clear sense of the land, of history, and of human nature. The poetry seems, at first, to be simple, lucid, straightforward, and descriptive. Further reading, however, reveals the subtleties of wit, humor, and irony that often underlie Frost’s meditations on common events or objects.
Frost’s
language and diction are conversational: his words are plain and his phrases
simple and direct. More often than not,
he uses and refines the natural speech patterns and rhythms of
In terms of poetic structure, Frost’s poems often move from an event or an object through a metaphor to an idea in a smooth, uninterrupted flow. Within this pattern, Frost usually describes a complete event rather than a single vision. The heart of the process is the image or metaphor. Frost himself saw the metaphor as the beginning of the process. In Education by Poetry (1931) he wrote that “poetry begins in trivial metaphors, pretty metaphors, ‘grace’ metaphors, and goes on to the profoundest thinking that we have. Poetry provides the one permissible way of saying one thing and meaning another.”
Frost’s poems also reflect traditional poetic forms and meters. The poet once asserted that writing “free verse” was like playing tennis without a net. Consequently, we find conventional rhyme schemes and clear iambic meters in much of his work. Similarly, we find such closed forms as couplets, terza rima, quatrains, sonnets, and blank verse.
Poetic Subjects. Frost’s poetic subjects are generally common and rural events, objects, and characters: digging gardens, mending walls, cutting wood; snow, trees, insects, spring, and fall; children, parents, husbands and wives. Often, the poems move from these objects, events, or characters to philosophical generalizations about life and death, survival and responsibility, nature and humanity, that are so simple and right as to verge on the obvious.
Poetry, Delight and Wisdom
from The Figure a Poem Makes
by Robert Frost
It should be of the pleasure of a poem itself to tell how it can. The figure a poem makes. It begins in delight and ends in wisdom. The figure is the same as for love. No one can really hold that the ecstasy should be static and stand still in one place. It begins in delight, it inclines to the impulse, it assumes direction with the first line laid down, it runs a course of lucky events, and ends in a clarification of life – not necessarily a great clarification, such as sects and cults are founded on, but in a momentary stay against confusion. It has denouement. It has an outcome that though unforeseen was predestined from the first image of the original mood – and indeed from the very mood. It is but a trick poem and no poem at all if the best of it was thought of first and saved for the last.
No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader. For me the initial delight is in the surprise of remembering something I didn’t know I knew. I am in a place, in a situation, as if I had materialized from cloud or risen out of the ground. There is a glad recognition of the long lost and the rest follows. Step by step the wonder of unexpected supply keeps growing. The impressions most useful to my purpose seem always those I was unaware of and so made no note of at the time when taken, and the conclusion is come to that like giants we are always hurling experience ahead of us to pave the future against the day when we may want to strike a line of purpose across it for somewhere. The line will have the more charm for not being mechanically straight. 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 . . .
Like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting. A poem may be worked over once it is in being, but may not be worried into being. Its most previous quality will remain its having run itself and carried away the poet with it. Read it a hundred times; it will forever keep its freshness as a metal keeps its fragrance. It can never lose its sense of a meaning that once unfolded by surprise as it went.