12 - Human Presence in Frost’s Universe

Summary

Frost's poems address the ancient theme of the opposition between absence and presence. Here I will discuss (though not chronologically) ten poems published between 1916 and 1942 in which Frost explores this opposition. They all assume a universe without divine order, absent of purpose, awareness, human comprehension; in them humanity is on its own, the only locus of value, intention, self-consciousness, presence. One does well to be aware of the lure of night and of the deceptive whiteness of snow, to be free of any illusions about them. The heroism available to one is small in scale, and its accomplishments, though real, cannot be grand; it is only the upkeep of human self-consciousness and purpose in a universe otherwise void and absent of meaning, and this scope has shrunk since Frost wrote. These ideas, familiar to the last hundred years, comprise one theme common to the ten poems. One could observe as well that the ethos of the New England countryside has its parallels in the cosmic myths of Yeats, the Christianity of Eliot, and the sequence of ideologies in Auden, though my few pages do not admit of a discussion of these parallels. These ten poems display the poet's attachment to traditional forms and his artistry in using them; blank verse, open couplets, quatrains, sonnet-like poems, one true sonnet, terza rima, and various other lyrical stanzas. They are traditional without being “poetic”: as slant rhymes, metrical variations (sometimes bold ones), colloquial diction, clichés, and homely metaphors that very often open onto darkness indicate.