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.
[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
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