Standing Athwart the Floods

The moral guide that directs society is alluded to by Frost in a short poem of only four lines in length, Moral, in which Frost gives this omen,

                        The moral is it hardly need be shown,

                        All those who try to go it sole alone,

                        Too proud to be beholden for relief,

                        Are absolutely sure to come to grief.

To go it sole alone without acknowledgement of those who came before and what experience has taught men throughout the ages is costly. Too proud are they who attempt this, too proud for their own good and they embark on such a journey without much thought of future consequences. There is no moral guide that directs his or her steps. This ought to be instinctively understood by us, he says in the first line, but we ignore it at our peril. In a later poem, Closed for Good, he acknowledges his own indebtedness to those who came before, saying,

                        Much as I own I owe

                        The passers of the past

                        Because their to and fro

                        Has cut this road to last,

                        I owe them more today

                        Because they’ve gone away . . .

                        How often is the case

                        I thus pay men a debt

                        For having left a place

                        And still do not forget

                        To pay them some sweet share

                        For having once been here.

That is humility. This is like Eliot’s understanding in his essay Tradition and the Individual Talent,

                        No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His

                        significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to

                        the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must

                        set him, for contrast, and comparison, among the dead . . . The existing

                        monuments form an ideal order among themselves . . . the past should

                        be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past.

                        And the poet who is aware of this will be aware of great difficulties

                        and responsibilities . . . the difference between the present and the

                        past is that the conscious present is an awareness of the past in

                        a way and to an extent which the past’s awareness of itself cannot show.[1]

            In the poem One Step Backward Taken, Frost gives us an image of chaos all around him and the world sliding away. All of nature is being torn apart and the universe itself is out of balance. Culture and society are virtually wiped out. However, in the midst of this chaos, the poet is able to withstand everything and to even survive, mainly because he takes one step backward into the old and eternal truths that are his bedrock principles, his foundation.

                        Not only sands and gravels

                        Were once more on their travels,

                        But gulping muddy gallons

                        Great boulders off their balance

                        Bumped heads together dully

                        And started down the gully.

                        Whole capes caked off in slices.

                        I felt my standpoint shaken

                        In the universal crisis.

                        But with one step backward taken

                        I saved myself from going.

                        A world torn loose went by me.

                        Then the rain stopped and the blowing

                        And the sun came out to dry me.

It is only because he has held on to ‘the truths we keep coming back and back to’ that he is able to withstand the shocks around him. He’d felt his standpoint shaken, he said, as he may have stepped away from his principles and dabbled in the new theories of the day. He saw the radical progress’ threat to society as it eradicates the old principles. Not only the sands and the gravel, but everything else underneath was torn from their foundations and the flood began that ripped off pieces of land as it went by in a rush. Frightened by this, he retreats to what he knows will be a buffet for him against the chaos. We hear Thomas Jefferson’s quote, “On matters of style, swim with the current; on matters of principle, stand like a rock.” This is what Frost chose to do, to stand on principle. His standpoint being shaken, which is his core being with his core values, he saw the terror that could have been, he chose to stay with what he knew to be true and eternal. He was able to see everything go past him without being caught up in the flood. Surviving the chaos, he was able to stand in the clear sunshine of eternal truth and principle.

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[1] T.S. Eliot, Tradition and the Individual Talent, from The Sacred Wood, pg. 41-3

Burning It All Down for Science: Frost's "The Star-Splitter"

The temptation that the preacher in The Black Cottage resisted is one that Brad McLaughlin succumbed to in The Star-Splitter. The obliteration of memory and custom is explored through the telling of Brad McLaughlin’s infatuation with science, specifically astronomy. Frost was no enemy of science; in an interview in Paris Review from the summer and fall of 1960 with Richard Poirer, he admits to his being influenced by the science of his times. Through Brad McLaughlin, we see the seduction of scientism: in order to acquire a telescope to satisfy his amateur endeavor into astronomy, and to, as he says, inquire into man’s place among the stars, and after several attempts to sell the house and farm that has been handed down to him, that never changed hands, he burns it down to receive the fire insurance money to secure his purchase. “Has a man, I should like to ask, no rights/These forces are obliged to pay respect to?” asks Brad McLaughlin. So, to inquire into this question of his, he decides to give up farming, which he was not successful at.

                        . . . having failed at hugger mugger farming

                        He burned his house down for the fire insurance

                        And spent the proceeds on a telescope

                        To satisfy a lifelong curiosity

                        About our place among the infinities.

                        “What do you want with one of those blame things?”

                        I asked him well beforehand. “Don’t you get one!”

                        “Don’t call it blamed; there isn’t anything

                        More blameless in the sense of being less

                        A weapon in our human fight,” he said.

                        “I’ll have one if I sell my farm to buy it.”

                        There where he moved the rocks to plow the ground

                        And plowed between the rocks he couldn’t move,

                        Few farms changed hands; so rather than spend years

                        Trying to sell his farm and then not selling,

                        He burned his house down for the fire insurance

                        And bought the telescope with what it came to.

                        “The best thing that we’re put here for’s to see;

                        The strongest thing that’s given us to see with’s

                        A telescope. Someone in every town

                        Seems to me owes it to the town to keep one.

                        In Littleton it might as well be me.”

                        After such loose talk it was no surprise

                        When he did what he did and burned his house down.

What was once sacred and ensured a way of life was eradicated in one decision. The sentence “He burned house down for the fire insurance” only some lines apart from each other emphasizes Frost’s deep concern for such an act as this. This rashness caused some talk in the town, mean laughter even, as Frost goes on to say. It is a blasphemous act, yet the townspeople take no umbrage. They were planning, however, to say something to him, yet they decided not to, knowing their own frailty and imperfections, forgiving him, an ancient trait and act in itself.

                        Mean laughter went about the town that day

                        To let him know we weren’t the least imposed on,

                        And he could wait – we’d see to him tomorrow.

                        But the first thing next morning we reflected

                        If one by one we counted people out

                        For the least sin, it wouldn’t take us long

                        To get so we had no one to live with.

                        For to be social is to be forgiving.

There is still speculation, though, on the burning of the house. No lover of mere materialism, Frost shows that property is still a vital part of a stable community, and that a house handed down through generations ensures a certain amount of independence; more than that, it is a reminder of ancestry and identity. In short, to burn away the house is to burn away all the past. They, the townspeople, do not make too much of the house, while not advocating Brad’s action, which none of them would do. They go on to try to reason it.

                                                . . . Well, all we said was

                        He took a strange thing to be roguish over.

                        Some sympathy was wasted on the house,

                        A good old-timer dating back along;

                        But a house isn’t sentient; the house

                        Didn’t feel anything. And if it did,

                        Why not regard it as a sacrifice,

                        And an old-fashioned sacrifice by fire,

                        Instead of a new-fashioned one at auction?

In this reasoning, though, they still do not convince themselves, at least there is no hint of fully understanding and accepting what Brad has done, because a house, though not sentient, is a symbol of tradition, of a family, of personal as well as a community’s history. Frost constantly reminds us of the action Brad has taken, beginning the next stanza with it and the consequence that followed. This repetition contains lament and regret for Brad and is how the reader knows that Frost and the rest of the townspeople, as forgiving as they are, cannot, deep down, accept Brad’s action.

                        Out of a house and so out of a farm

                        At one stroke (of a match), Brad had to turn

                        To earn a living on the Concord railroad,

                        As under-ticket agent at a station

                        Where his job, when he wasn’t selling tickets,

                        Was setting out, up track and down, not plants

                        As on a farm, but planets, evening stars

                        That varied in their hue from red to green.

            It was so easy to burn away one’s foundation (the preacher in The Black Cottage was close to this). In the end, Brad McLaughlin had no way of supporting himself and had to take a job with the railroad company selling tickets. No longer self-sufficient, he had to rely now on being employed by another. Unlike the widow’s cottage which is left untouched by her two sons and serves as a reminder for the preacher (and we remember Burke’s statement about those who are not reflective will never think of tomorrow), Brad McLaughlin’s family’s farmhouse is wiped away in the onslaught of metaphysical speculation under pure rationalism. No enemy of science, Frost joins Brad McLaughlin during his nightly gazing at the stars.

                        He got a good glass for six hundred dollars.

                        His new job gave him leisure for star-gazing.

                        Often he bid me come and have a look

                        Up the brass barrel, velvet black inside,

                        At a star quaking in the other end.

                        I recollect a night of broken clouds

                        And underfoot snow melted down to ice,

                        And melting further in the wind to mud.

                        Bradford and I had out the telescope.

                        We spread our two legs we spread its three,

                        Pointed our thoughts the way we pointed it,

                        And standing at our leisure till the day broke,

                        Said some of the best things we ever said.

                        That telescope was christened the Star-splitter,

                        Because it didn’t do a thing but split

                        A star in two or three the way you split

                        A globule of quicksilver in your hand

                        With one stroke of your finger in the middle.

                        It’s a star-splitter if there ever was one

                        And ought to do some good if splitting stars

                        ’Sa thing to be compared with splitting wood.

This is some of the most beautiful language ever employed for narration in a poem, especially his journey in the poem from looking through the eyepiece, up the telescope’s barrel, all velvet black inside and then up at the stars. We think again of Brad’s comment earlier in the poem, “The best thing we’re put here for’s to see . . .” They ‘split’ star after star after star nightly. But what do they really see? In these nightly inquiries, is anything learned? The answer to the question of science’s ability to give us the answer to the question that is not scientific in nature is no.

                        We’ve looked and looked, but after all where are we?

                        Do we know any better where we are,

                        And how it stands between the night tonight

                        And a man with a smoky lantern chimney?

                        How different from the way it ever stood?

There are no new answers or no new discoveries about man that can be made through mere scientific means. Science may be able to answer questions that concern our material surroundings, our environment and our physical health, but beyond that, we cannot look to it for society’s salvation. Surely scientism could answer those vital questions that have been asked since time immemorial, and Frost replies in the negative. The challenge Frost poses in this poem is to how to use this science and how it could be implemented in our daily lives. In an unpublished version of an essay called The Future of Man, Frost speaks of science thus,

                        Now science seems about to ask us what we are going to do about

                        taking in hand our evolution . . . Every school boy knows how amazingly

                        short the distance was from monkeys to us. Well it ought not to be

                        much longer from us to supermen. We have the laboratorians ready

                        and willing to tend to this. We can commission them any day to go

                        ahead messing around with rays on genes for mutations or with sperm

                        on ovules for eugenics till they get us somewhere, make something

                        of us for a board or foundation to approve of . . . I am in danger of

                        making all this sound as if science were all. It is not all. But it is much.

                        It comes into our lives as domestic science for our hold on the planet,

                        into our deaths with its deadly weapons, bombs and airplanes, for war,

                        and into our souls as pure science for nothing but glory; in which last

                        respect it may be likened unto pure poetry and mysticism. It is man’s

                        greatest enterprise. It is the charge of the ethereal into the material. It

                        is our substantiation of our meaning. It can’t go too far or deep for me.”[1]

After stating all of this, he then affirms that science is not the be all and end all, that it does not follow its own ways and is the answer for salvation. Eugenics was a method in which its adherents sought to shape society by playing God and to create utopia. There would be no imperfections. A bureaucracy whose power has the last say in everything, even in how the citizens look, would rule this society and it will be a planned society. (It was just such a society that Hitler attempted to create).

                        Still it is not a law unto itself. It comes under the king . . . Science is

                        a property. It belongs to us under the king. And the best description

                        of us is the humanities from of old, the book of the worthies and

                        unworthies. The passing science of the moment may contribute

                        its psychological bit to the book like one of the fleeting elements

                        recently added to the chemical list. As one of the humanities itself

                        it is jealous for their dignity and importance.[2]

These are the thoughts of one who has observed closely the scientific advancements of his time and welcomes them, while being very well aware of the seductions which are as attractive and alluring as Solomon’s harlot who calls outside of her house, enticing the passerby with her lips that drip honey. Science is not its own wisdom and we are not wise, but must follow Wisdom that has been the guide for centuries. 

[1] Robert Frost, The Future of Man (unpublished version), pg. 870

[2] Robert Frost, ibid., pg. 870-71

The Eternal Truths We Keep Coming Back To: Frost's "The Black Cottage"

Frost’s remark about his not being a radical when young for fear that he might be a conservative when old is often quoted by liberals; however, this statement is offset by the following confession in his essay The Figure a Poem Makes: “More than once I should have lost my soul to radicalism if it had been the originality it was mistaken for by its young converts.”[1] To turn radical would have cost Frost something dear – his connection to tradition that sustains the order in his soul and his New England society. In his poem The Black Cottage he confesses his adherence to the eternal truths.

            The speaker in the poem is an old preacher in a New England town with whom the narrator is taking a walk in the countryside. They have come upon an old cottage and are sitting on the steps throughout the poem. The cottage once belonged to an old widow who lost her husband in the Civil War, but is now under the ownership of her two sons, one who is out west and the other somewhere nearer, though they never fulfill their plans on spending time there, and will neither sell it nor the things in it. “Everything’s as she left it when she died,” the preacher says. He goes on to say about the cottage, that in this state of being unchanged,

                        It always seems to me a sort of mark

                        To measure how far fifty years have brought us.

Fifty years after the Civil War ends is 1915, a decade and a half into the twentieth century, a time during which American society was changing rapidly: cities were becoming more populous, the agrarian way of life was fading as many people left farms for the cities; with science advancing, the old affections for religious sympathies were being replaced by pure rationalism. A refuge from the constant change, this is what the old cottage serves as, a reminder of the solid and of certainties the preacher refuses to surrender; it also serves as a symbol of a standard and a historical record. Frost is not against progression; neither is he being nostalgic; rather, he questions the kind of progression, and how this progression is occurring; and he recognizes the necessity to preserve the ancient things that are the bedrock of civilization. Later in the poem, the preacher mentions, as he observes the onslaught of too much and too rapid change, the consequences of completely deviating from this bedrock,

                        I shouldn’t be surprised if in this world

                        It was the force that would at last prevail.

When this chipping away at the bedrock is completed, chaos ensues, followed by tyranny. This statement of Frost’s thought via the preacher in the poem is reminiscent of Edmund Burke’s fears concerning the French Revolution, “People will not look forward to their posterity who never looked backward to their ancestors.”[2] It was tyranny that ultimately prevailed in France. We also hear an echo of Alexander Hamilton’s thought in his essay on this same tragic event that once morality is overthrown “(. . . and morality must fall with religion), the terrors of despotism can alone curb the impetuous passions of man, and confine him within the bounds of social duty.”[3] And who can predict what new evils and vices will ensue? Burke again,

                        But power, of some kind or other, will survive the shock in which

                        manners and opinions perish; and it will find other and worse means

                        for its support. The usurpation which, in order to subvert ancient

                        institutions, has destroyed ancient principles, will hold power by

                        arts similar to those by which it has acquired it. When the old

                        feudal and chivalrous spirit of fealty, which, by freeing kings from

                        fear, freed both kings and subjects from the precautions of tyranny,

                        shall be extinct in the minds of men, plots and assassinations will

                        be anticipated by preventive murder and preventive confiscation,

                        and that long roll of grim and bloody maxims, which form the

                        political code of power, not standing on its own honour, and the

                        honour of those who are to obey it. Kings will be tyrants from

                        policy, when subjects are rebels from principle.[4]

And here again,

                        Justifying perfidy and murder for public benefit, public benefit would

                        soon become the pretext, and perfidy and murder the end; until rapacity,

                        malice, revenge, and fear more dreadful than revenge, could satiate

                        their insatiable appetites.[5]

            The ancient morals and obligations that held and ensured the lives and livelihood of the citizens in Frost’s fictional New England town were being slowly replaced by the new thought of the day, whatever it was. And because there was no foundation to them, pragmatism was the only approach. Since pragmatism as a philosophy of living does not possess a view beyond what works for now, beliefs will always go in and out of fashion, they will be as fads, and people will live on the sudden impulse of the moment, always changing and drifting, and looking for the best way to gain for the now, being neither reflective nor having any thoughts towards the future. Living on the sudden impulse of the moment is dangerous, since there is no overarching moral light that operates as a guide, no bedrock principle to which people can cling to protect them from acting erroneously in the sudden impulse. With no such guide, sudden impulses can prove dangerous, for there is no reflection and contemplation. All this is to say that Frost thought along the exact historical vein as Edmund Burke and others when he wrote the following lines, beginning with the preacher’s dallying in considerations of altering the Apostles’ Creed for the younger folk in church, but for the old widow who was to him a reminder of the solid and ancient truths he held back. New ideas were seducing younger attendees and specific parts of the Judeo-Christian faith seemed old-fashioned and out of time; the idea of eternal punishment became antiquated; what was to follow, reasonably, was the throwing away of any idea of an afterlife, heaven included, thus the belief in Providence, in a God who judges men’s actions, this belief that restrains vice. The vacuum would then be filled by a secular worldview in which this life is all that matters, a completely materialistic worldview that emphasizes getting and spending and satiating one’s appetites, the onslaught of Things.

                        Do you know but for her there was a time

                        When to please younger members of the church,

                        Or rather say non-members in the church,

                        Whom we all have to think of nowadays,

                        I would have changed the Creed a very little?

                        Not that she ever had to ask me not to;

                        It never got so far as that; but the bare thought

                        Of her old tremulous bonnet in the pew,

                        And of her half asleep was too much for me.

                        Why, I might wake her up and startle her.

                        It was the words ‘descended into Hades’

                        That seemed too pagan to our liberal youth.

                        You know they suffered from a general onslaught.

                        And well, if they weren’t true why keep right on

                        Saying them like the heathen? We could drop them.

                        Only, there was the bonnet in the pew.

                        Such a phrase couldn’t have meant much to her.

                        But suppose she had missed it from the Creed

                        As a child misses the unsaid Good-night,

                        And falls asleep with heartache; how should I feel?

                        I’m just as glad she made me keep hands off . . .

            To throw away the old truths is a hazard mankind cannot afford to even venture, Frost says. The temptation of the preacher to dally with the Apostles’ Creed might appear trifling, but he was conscious of his weakness to accommodate with the times, to change and move away from the truths and traditions that have held the Church intact for two thousands years, and in fact, since the birth of civilization. To accommodate the younger attendees may be an invitation to evils too strong to survive. Remembering the old widow, courteous of how she may react, and held by fear of the realization of what he could be doing, he checks himself. Here is Burke,

                        When ancient opinions and rules of life are taken away, the loss

                        cannot possibly be estimated. From that moment we have no compass

                        to govern us; nor can we know distinctly to what port we steer.[6]

Frost continues, and here is one of the most brilliant and brilliantly concise statements on dallying with philosophic fads and on the importance and endurance of the eternal truths.

                        For, dear me, why abandon a belief

                        Merely because it ceases to be true?

                        Cling to it long enough, and not a doubt

                        It will turn true again, for so it goes.

                        Most of the change we think we see in life

                        Is due to truths being in and out of favour.

                        As I sit here, and oftentimes, I wish

                        I could be monarch of a desert land

                        I could devote and dedicate forever

                        To the truths we keep coming back and back to.

“To the truths we keep coming back and back to.” It is adherence to the permanent things, the foundation of civilized life, the belief in a transcendent and objective moral Authority, and in a transcendent order or natural body of law, which rules society as well as conscience, quoting Russell Kirk. It is this belief that links all generations, guiding mankind throughout history. The emphasis on the eternality and vitality of this belief is shown in the double use of back and the altogether we keep coming back and back to. There is no way to truly step away from it and to really forget it; it is instinctively in us and sown in us, no matter how we may, in St. Paul’s words in his epistle to the Romans, suppress the truth. As history moves on and societies improve, and new discoveries in science are made, undoubtedly changes will occur and conditions must be improved for the betterment of all men; however, Man does not change. And to apply an axe to the tree will only result in the felling of that tree upon those whose hands are holding the axe, whose arms are swinging daily at the trunk. In his poem The Star-Splitter Frost addresses this temptation, especially in relation to the allurement of what is called scientism, the worship of science and pure rationalism, which has substituted prescriptive religious feeling and ancient custom.

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[1] Robert Frost, The Figure a Poem Makes from American Poetic Theory, ed. George Perkins, pg. 210

[2] Edmund Burke, Reflections on the French Revolution, pg. 172

[3] Alexander Hamilton, writing under the pseudonym Titus Manlius in the series of papers called The Stand, dated 7 April 1798, from The Portable Conservative Reader, ed. Russell Kirk, pg. 80

[4] Edmund Burke, Reflections on the French Revolution, pg. 214-5

[5] Edmund Burke, ibid., pg. 218

[6] Edmund Burke, ibid., pg. 215

Matthews' "Moving Again"

Divorce forces changes, often changes of residence. It also forces changes internally and the outlook someone once had is also affected. Nothing, in effect, stays the same. But memory keeps the past alive and with it, regret. William Matthews’ poem Moving Again brings all of these changes and their permanent residence in our memory together.

                        At night the mountains look like huge

                        dim hens. In a few geological eras

                        new mountains may

                        shatter the earth’s shell

                        and poke up like stone wings.

                        Each part must serve for a whole.

                        I bring my sons to the base

                        of the foothills and we go up.

                        From a scruff of ponderosa

                        pines we startle gaudy swerves

                        of magpies that settle in our rising

                        wake. Then there’s a blooming

                        prickly pear. “Jesus, Dad, what’s that?”

                        Willy asks. It’s like a yellow tulip

                        grafted to a cactus: it’s a beautiful

                        wound the cactus puts out

                        to bear fruit and be healed.

                        If I lived with my sons

                        all year I’d be less sentimental

                        about them. We go up

                        to the mesa top and look down

                        at our new hometown. The thin air

                        warps in the melting light

                        like the aura before a migraine.

                        The boys are tired. A tiny magpie

                        fluffs into a pine far below

                        and farther down the valley

                        of child support and lights

                        people are opening drawers.

                        One of them finds a yellowing

                        patch of newsprint with a phone

                        number penciled on it

                        from Illinois, from before they moved, before

                        Nicky was born. Memory

                        is our root system. “Verna,” he says to himself

                        because his wife’s in another room,

                        “whose number do you suppose this is?”

The poem begins in the present with the poet looking at the external scenery and contemplating what may occur in another era after he is gone. What he is seeing may be shattered and changed, new mountains taking the place of the ones he is looking at. In a manner, we are already coming upon some foreshadowing of what we will find out has happened. Each part of the land must serve a purpose as part of the whole, he says.

            He then moves on to the active hiking up of the mountain with his sons, one of whom still carries the awe of a little child after seeing magpies swerving after being disturbed. “Jesus, Dad, what’s that?” he asks, excitedly. Matthews then answers indirectly, that the blooming prickly pear is “like a yellow tulip/grafted to a cactus: a beautiful/the cactus puts out/to bear fruit and be healed.” We then find out the reason for this sentimentality, which is that he does not live with his sons all year, that there has been a divorce and that his children spend part of the year with their mother. But because he now has time with them he indulges in the sentimentality, which is partly necessary and partly natural. “If I lived with my sons/all year I’d be less sentimental/about them.”

            They continue their hike to the top of the mesa “and look down/at our new hometown[,]” hence the title. But it is not his sons’ new hometown, really, it is his only, since he does not live with his sons all year round, as he told us some lines before. Up at the top of the mesa the thin air changes and his comparison is excellent, it “warps in the melting light/like the aura before a migraine.” It is as if the change in the air is mentally affecting him and in a way it does, for it brings on a memory, an unpleasant one at that, thus alluding to the onset of a migraine is suitable.  His sons are tired and again he sees a magpie as it flies down into a pine that’s far below, but the poet moves further, imagining life “down in the valley/of child support and lights” and again alludes to divorce. He takes us to the interior of the mind as well as of place. The unpleasant memory finds the port back in his former house in Illinois as he opens a drawer in his bedroom and “finds a yellowing/patch of newsprint with a phone/number” written on it. This was before the move, he tells us. Someone cheated on somebody and this cannot be forgotten, thus the line “Memory is our root system.” Memory keeps us rooted to ourselves and to our origins, to where we were born, where we were raised (if it’s same place we were raised); but it also keeps the regrets alive, the guilt we feel that we cannot escape no matter how many times we move.

            The picture he paints at the end is devastating, that of him finding the phone number, which he is surprised to find. It is a bit unclear if it is a phone number his wife has hidden or the poet himself. He calls his wife’s name, but only to himself, because she is in another room, and asks whose number it is. Was it a number he should have thrown away? Was it a number she hid? No matter, as it was a reason, if not the reason, for the change in location.