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.
No comments:
Post a Comment