Names, Proverbs, Riddles, and Material Text in Robert Frost Names, Proverbs, Riddles, and Material Text in Robert Frost TIMOTHY D. O’BRIEN NAMES, PROVERBS, RIDDLES, AND MATERIAL TEXT IN ROBERT FROST Copyright © Timothy D. O’Brien, 2010. Softcoverreprintofthehardcover1st edtion2 010978-0-230-10265-1 All rights reserved. First published in 2010 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-28705-5 ISBN 978-0-230-10989-6 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9780230109896 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress. A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: July 2010 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 To Benay Contents Acknowledgments ix Introduction 1 1 The Quest for a Name in “Frost” 11 2 Proverbs and the Quest for Certainty 51 3 The Riddle of It All 95 4 The Material Text as Witness Tree 125 Coda 177 Notes 179 Bibliography 193 Index 203 Acknowledgments I thank the Naval Academy Research Council for several summer grants that permitted me to work on sections of this book. Also, I am grateful for the encouragement I have received from members of the Robert Frost Society, especially from Nancy Tuten, David Sanders, Tyler Hoffman, Robert Hass, Jonathan Barron, and Camille Roman, and also for the sup- port of my terrific colleagues in the English Department at the U.S. Naval Academy. Permissions The entire text of the poems “Beech,” “Sycamore,” “To An Ancient, “The Secret Sits,” and The Rose Family” and excerpts from various other Robert Frost poems, from The Poetry of Robert Frost, edited by Edward Connery Lathem. Copyright © 1969 by Henry Holt and Company. Reprinted by permission of Henry Holt and Company, LLC. Excerpts from various letters from Selected Letters of Robert Frost, edited by Lawrence Thompson. Compilation copyright © 1964 by Lawrence Thompson. Reprinted by arrangement with Henry Holt and Company. Letter # 34—February 19, 1912, from Robert Frost to Thomas B. Mosher Letter # 44—February 26, 1913, from R.F. to John T. Bartlett Letter # 79—May 18, 1914, from R.F. to Sidney Cox Letter # 93—December 1914 from R.F. to Sidney Cox Letter # 105—March 22, 1915, from R.F. to William Stanley Braithwaite Letter # 122—June 12, 1915, from R.F. to Edward Garnett Letter # 135—September 18, 1915, from R.F. to Walter Prichard Eaton Letter # 260—November 1927 from R.F. to Leonidas W. Payne, Jr. Letter # 276—September 1, 1929, from R.F. to John T. Bartlett Letter # 290—November 1930, from R.F. to Leonidas W. Payne, Jr. Letter # 331—November 1936, from R.F. to Bernard DeVoto x Acknowledgments Letter # 356—March 7, 1938, from R.F. to R. P. T. Coffin Letter dated January 1, 1917, to Louis Untermeyer from The Letters of Robert Frost to Louis Untermeyer. Compilation copyright © 1963 by Louis Untermeyer. Reprinted by permission of Henry Holt and Company, LLC. Parts of chapter 1 and chapter 4 have appeared in The Robert Frost Review 13 (2003) and 16 (2006) and are reprinted here by permission of the editors. J. B. Lankes has granted permission to reprint his father’s woodcut “The Witness Tree.” Dartmouth Library’s Rauner Special Collections, through the work of Joshua Shaw, has supplied a photograph of that J. J. Lankes woodcut and the painting by Alan Haemer from the dust jacket of A Witness Tree. I am grateful for Dartmouth Library’s permission to use these images. The image from The New England Primer is reproduced with permission from Special Collections, Musselman Library, Gettysburg College. The line drawings of a witness tree and blazes are reprinted from the University of Maryland Fact Sheet 619 with the permission of its authors and of the University of Maryland College of Agriculture and Natural Resources. Kevin Collins has granted permission to use his photograph of the Frost birth plaque on the cover. Introduction Sorry to have no name for you but You When Robert Frost, in “The Figure a Poem Makes,” describes a poem as “[finding] its own name as it goes and [discovering] the best waiting for it in some final phrase . . . ” (777), he provides a glimpse into an important, though largely ignored, theme in his poetry.1 This theme, which I will call the quest for a name, cuts across all stages of Frost’s career and all forms of his poetry—the lyric, the meditative poem, the narrative, the eclogue, and the play. It emerges from Frost’s works in a number of ways—from his naming of the characters in his poems and plays to an entire poem, “Maple,” devoted to the problems loaded upon a child by overdetermined naming, to a short play, A Way Out, dramatizing the theft of a name and identity. It occurs in about forty poems partially or entirely devoted to the need to name and the limits of naming. And it shows up in, and in some cases controls, the structure and descriptive details of about forty other poems that express the author’s search for his poetic signature, for versions of a more authentic name than his own, some original sense of self that resists the vagaries of language and the material world. In depicting the poet as namer, Frost both follows Emerson and Thoreau and creates space between himself and them. As it emerges imag- inatively from a large cross-section of his poetry, but in a concentrated way from West-Running Brook, this concern with names and naming takes on an impressive level of sophistication, treating such matters as the actual linguistic status of the name, the connection between name and identity, and the relationship between name and thing. Haunting this concern is Frost’s deep-seated questioning about his own name and his own identity, amounting in some cases to confessions about whether or not even the des- ignator “I” points to anything that really exists. The body of Frost’s work displays a full array of positions on naming, ranging from the arrogant persona of New Hampshire, who easily labels people as either “prudes” or “pukes,” to the committed narrator of “Kitty Hawk,” who sees the human 2 Names, Proverbs, Riddles need for “nomenclature” as the force driving us toward a union of spirit and material, and to the hopeful, yet resignedly puzzled, Narcissus figure in “For Once, Then, Something,” who finally spots an object at the bot- tom of the well into which he habitually peers, a presence beyond the mere reflection of himself, but can only name it “something.” This abiding interest in naming and the name that a poem arrives at as if by some magic of language and landscape underpins the other con- cerns that occupy this study, concerns that have been largely ignored in the sophisticated body of commentary on Frost’s poetry, politics, and life. One of these preoccupations is the proverb—in simple terms, a slightly longer version of the name in that it too identifies and captures, contains and packages, a human problem. As a testament to how fully commenta- tors have ignored this proverbial inclination in Frost, the most thorough- going examination of it occurs as just a small part of Robert Faggen’s introduction to The Notebooks of Robert Frost. Those notebooks, as Faggen observes, display the ways in which Frost’s mind naturally turns toward the short, aphoristic observation, a “think,” to use the term favored by Frost (xviii-xix). About this tendency, Faggen makes three points that d eserve repeating. The first relates to this notion of the proverbial expres- sion as a “think”: Frost uses such expressions in his notebooks, letters, and poetry as openings for thought, not as closures to it. However, Frost’s use of proverbial-like expressions in his poetry has created the problem for many readers, as Faggen states it: “The power and lure of his aphorisms has made him both one of the most remembered and yet widely misap- prehended of modern poets” (xx). The second point worth repeating from Faggen’s remarks is that Frost distinguished between obscurity in poetry, which he criticized, often when thinking of Eliot, and what he called in a 1961 reading at Yale, “dark sayings” (xxii). Frost explained: “Some people don’t know the difference between obscurity and what are called in ancient times ‘dark sayings,’ that you go deeper, darker in your life. But obscurity isn’t that. Obscurity is a cover for nothing. You go looking for it and it comes out ‘A stitch in time saves nine.’ But there are dark sayings” (qtd. in The Notebooks xxii). Faggen offers a further explanation: “A ‘dark say- ing,’ as Frost well knew, was the ancient Hebraic phrase for proverb, and it appears in both Proverbs and Psalms. The Hebrew word for proverb was mashal, which meant ‘coupling’—in other words an association of ideas demanding considerable thought and interpretation. Frost reminded his audience that the power and validity of ‘dark sayings’ was neither their inherent gloominess nor their opacity, but their power to inspire continued thought” (xxii). The third observation that Faggen makes about Frost’s attraction to the proverb is that it speaks to the poet’s notion that conflict is essential in real thinking and that it is part of his cultivation of a posture