ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

For the successful completion of this work, I owe my sincere thanks and gratitude to my supervisor Professor Abdur Raheem Kidwai, whose suggestions and guidance, made this work possible.

While deciding upon nature poets who had played major roles in English and American poetry, I gained insights from Professor Masoodul Hasan. I am indebted to him for his valuable time and interest in the topic.

I am immensely thankful to Prof. Mohammad Rizwan Khan, Chairman Department of

English, AMU, who rendered me his help and guidance when I needed it the most.

My friends, Mr. Farhan Ahamd, Shamsuddhin Mk, Firdous Hussain, Dr. Burhan

Bashir, Khuman Bhagirath, Asad Bin Saadat, Ms. Ritika Gupta, Maryah Charoo,

Roshan Shaikh, Ayush Gaur and Jibraan Fazili, had been with me all these years. I am thankful to them for their support, help and suggestions.

Last but not the least, my parents, without whose constant encouragement and blessings, this would not have seen the light of the day.

Preface

Where there is life there is poetry.1

The essence of Frost’s life consists in his poetry. The above quotation by the poet himself, shows the importance of verse in his life. His poetry and his life has been a subject of analysis for researchers and poetry lovers for decades. But he has been often rendered as a regional poet, whose inspiration primarily rested upon New England. There is however no denying the fact that Frost loved writing about his surroundings, and New England inspired him in all its variety and sameness. But the themes in his poems transcended the barriers of regionalism. They were universal manifestations of emotions. In his poems, the people of New England become the residents of the world, whose problems, sorrows and happiness are mutually shared by the reader too. There is a binary view of Frost, when it comes to critics. For some he is a “homespun philosopher” and for others he is a “terrific poet”, who always mystifies his poems thus making them difficult to analyse. I too had similar dilemmas while analysing his poetry in the light of binary opposition. At one level he seemed to write simply about birch trees, snow, blueberries, flowers, ants, birds, trees and, most importantly, woods. But at the very next time, he would take us deeper into questions of existence, death and faith. His poems are a reflection of his life which too, like his poetry was divided between affirmation and negation, between his view of human sufferings and the possibility of salvation, between nature’s omnipotence and man’s constant struggle to live, despite dissatisfaction. In the present study I have tried to analyse his poems in the light of these binaries.

The first chapter gives a historical background to Robert Frost. His childhood, his years in England and his final acclaim to fame till his death are discussed here. The chapter begins with the history of American poetry which dates back to American independence in 1776. It was after the Transcendentalist movement that poetry coming from this part of the world was strongly realised and marked with distinction. The chapter also traces the journey of Frost as a poet, his dislike for being termed as a “regional poet” and reasons why there is universality in his regionalism. The chapter ends with the loss suffered by the world in general and America in particular because of his death.

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In the second chapter Frost is viewed in relation to other nature poets. It traces the origins of nature poems from the oldest surviving epic poem, Beowulf. From the Anglo- Saxon age it moves towards the Medieval ages describing the contribution of Chaucer, Spenser, Milton and Shakespeare. Coming towards the transition period, the poetry of Gray, Cowper, Thompson and Burns, is discussed. The pre-Romantic and Romantic age has been explained at length because it was during this time when nature poetry as a popular genre emerged on the literary scene. Poets like William Wordsworth, S.T.Coleridge, Shelley, Keats and Byron were some prominent poets of the time. A similar movement also began in America called Transcendentalism. It was also known as the American form of Romanticism. Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson were the forerunners of the movement. Frost did not associate himself with any of the movements or schools of poetry. But his poems are replete with images taken from nature. The chapter ends with a comparison between Frost and some other nature poets before him. His similarity to Robert Burns has been pointed out in particular.

The third chapter discusses the use of binaries by poets other than Robert Frost. Poets like John Donne, Andrew Marvel, and Herbert, used metaphysical conceits to highlight the binaries in their poems. William Blake is the only poet to have used this device at length in his Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience. Poets like Keats and Shelley also made use of contrary images in their verse. Victorian poets like Arnold and Tennyson also employed contrasting symbols in their poems. Yeats, Eliot and Whitman too, used binaries to enhance meanings of their verse.

The Fourth and Fifth chapters are an analysis of Frost’s early and later poetry in the light of binary opposition. In total I have critically analysed ninety poems and highlighted the binaries used by the poet, either in the form of symbols or themes. From A Boy’s Will to In the Clearing, the poems make a full circle. Beginning with the fearless escape of the poet into the trees, and ending with a confirmation that life has to end one day, the poet wavers between confusion and confirmation to reach a conclusion.

Chapter six is a compendium of all the binary opposite words that I came across while analysing Frost’s poems. There are about 322 pair of binaries which I have included in

ii the compendium along with an explanation as to why the pair is a binary and why the poet used them as a binary pair.

In conclusion, a final analysis of Frost’s life and poetry is given in the light of binaries. In his early poems, clear images of binaries occur in the form of two roads, or summer against winter and the like, whereas in his later poems images become more philosophical and complex. I have also given the views of other critics who too have felt that Frost was obsessed with dualism. Critics like Peter.J.Stanlis, have underscored the importance of dualism in his verse and exhorted scholars to probe deeper into the area.

My association with Frost’s poetry began some fifteen years ago, when I read his “Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening” as a student of class sixth. The poem left lasting impressions on my mind. Time and again, I would try analysing it. But each time, I found that there was something strange about the way it was written. I read a number of critical views on the poem and found that each critic had analysed it in their own unique ways. Finally while writing my thesis, when I analysed the poem, I found the answer. The poem had binaries which are otherwise not visible to an ordinary reader. The dark woods and the white snow, stand as binaries. The mysterious pull of the woods is counter balanced by the poet’s urge to move on. He knew that woods were lovely, dark and deep. But at the same time he could not respond to the life of pleasure because his journey was long, and full of promises.

After analysing the poetry of Frost, it becomes very clear that he had an extraordinary eye for details. He viewed everything in terms of the contrary forces which govern them. The world of Frost is a dual world of belief and make-belief, full of dualities. The reader might fear getting lost in this mysterious world of ‘fire and ice.’, ‘desert places’ and ‘Hyla Brook’. But Frost gives them assurance that they will find their way back home. Like a light, he guides them home, from where they had begun this journey.

1 Edward Connery Lathem and Lawrence Thompson .ed. The Robert Frost Reader, Holt, New York,1972, p.333.

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Contents

Acknowledgement

Preface i-iii

Chapter One: Frost in the Historical Context 1-15

Chapter Two: Frost and other Nature Poets 16-44

Chapter Three: The strategy of Binary Opposites in Poetry: A Historical Survey 45-69

Chapter Four: Frost’s Early Poetry (1913-1928) 70-109

Chapter Five: Frost’s Later Poetry (1936-1962) 110-133

Chapter Six: A Compendium of Binary Opposite Words in the Poetry of Frost 134-188

Conclusion 189-196

Bibliography 197-205 CHAPTER ONE

FROST IN THE HISTORICAL CONTEXT

The history of American literature, like all other literatures of the world is unsurprisingly unique and common at the very same time. History testimonies the fact, that, great literature emerges out of many years of silence and oppression. Being a British colony till 1776, America was struggling for its distinctive cultural and literary identity. The country is marked by a long list of writers who were called novelists and who popularised the genre of the American novel. But as Aristotle says, “poetry is something more scientific and serious than history, because poetry tends to give general truths while history gives particular facts.”1 One must surely turn to poetry to know more about the origins of its literary tradition. And in this regard America is a very poetic nation. It has undoubtedly produced poets of extraordinary repute. But it did not begin suddenly. A person had to struggle very hard in America “to justify his existence as a poet”2 , says Roy Harvey. Ezra Pound, T.S.Eliot, Gertrude Stein and many other poets, who are considered giant figures in modern American poetry, left their country for England and rose to fame there. Christopher Beach writes :

The years from 1880 to 1910 were something of a dark age for American poetry. During a time when the novels of Mark Twain, Henry James, William Dean Howells, Theodore Dreiser, Stephen Crane, and Edith Wharton established the undeniable importance of American fiction, poetry was pushed to the margins of the literary world.3

Indeed it was a dark age. Poetry as a career was not much sought after by the youth and people who wrote poems out of passion, were few. The poetic culture of America began with many continuous efforts of the writers to add their voices to the main stream English poetry of the seventeenth century:

On the whole, the development of poetry in the American colonies mirrors the development of the colonies themselves. The early poetry is dominated by the need to preserve the integrity of the Puritan ideals that created the settlement in the first place. As the colonists grew in confidence, the poetry they wrote increasingly reflected their drive towards independence. This shift in subject

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matter was not reflected in the mode of writing which tended to be conservative, to say the least4.

Though this was often taken as an imitation of the British models of form, diction and style, very soon a distinctive American poetic tradition started to emerge which was marked by a freshness of language.

American poetry has a complex legacy which traces itself from the hymns in the Bible to the emergence of Romantic Literature. The poets found their inspiration in the Upanishads, in the mythologies, the newspapers and from their surroundings, without confining themselves to the already established patterns and ideals in poetry. The American poets had no heritage with them like the British. They had no Shakespeare and Wordsworth to follow or to include in a canon. Beach points that :

Writing in an inherited language but on a new continent, American poets have always been forced to make difficult decisions about language, form and subject matter. The poet in England, France, Germany or Italy had a lineage established throughout the centuries by the corpus of great works that constitutes the canon of national literature.5

This fact however could not stop them from following their distinctive way of writing poems. Of those innumerable poets who gave their voices to the canon of American poetry, Edgar Allan Poe (1809-49), Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-82), H. W. Longfellow (1807-82) and Henry David Thoreau (1817-62) are some prominent names. Emerson and Thoreau’s philosophy of Transcendentalism or a distinctive form of American Romanticism popularized the American genre of poetry in the world. It was after the publication of Emerson’s “Nature” (1836) that Transcendentalism started gaining its pace to be identified as a major cultural, intellectual and philosophical movement:

The English philosopher, Locke, had maintained that intellectual action is limited to the world of the senses. The German metaphysician, Kant, claimed that the soul has ideas which are not due to the activity of any of the senses: that everyone has an idea of time and space although no one has ever felt, tasted, seen, eaten, or smelled time or space. He called such an idea an intuition or transcendental form. The transcendentalists, therefore, endeavoured to

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transcend, that is, to pass beyond, the range of human sense and experience. We are all in a measure transcendentalists when we try to pierce the unseen, to explain existence, build a foundation of meaning under the passing phenomena of life.6

The definition is large, and has layers of meanings associated with it, on a deeper level, like the phenomenon itself. The movement emerged as a rejection to the ideas of Unitarianism which laid emphasis on the value of intellectual growth and reason. Emerson’s “Nature” which became an initiator of the movement, ended with a call for a revolution, not only in the society but in the mind-set of people, a revolution which would make them self- reliant and bring them closer to Nature. The movement never really ended and inspired a legacy of writers who wanted to write about nature and to challenge the already existing myths about English language. Amidst this, Walt Whitman (1819-1892) and Emily Dickinson (1860-86), are two prominent poets, who with their daring originality and vision, marked the birth of two major American poetic idioms- the free metric expression and gnomic obscurity. But as mentioned by W.G.O’ Donnell, no American poet of the modern times could come as close to “fame”7 as Robert Frost (1874-1963).

Born on 26th March, 1874 in San Francisco, California, he was taken to New England by his mother Isabelle Moodie after the death of his father in 1885. Isabelle was a Scottish descendant whereas Frost’s father William Prescott Frost. Jr belonged to New England, but was raised in Lawrence, Massachusetts. There was a sharp temperamental difference between his parents which Frost inherited. When Frost was born, William decided to name him Robert Lee Frost, in honour of a general who opposed the Union Army in the American Civil War.8 The name perhaps tremendously affected him, as he happened to be a rebel since childhood. His distrust towards school education compelled him to leave school at Harvard in 1898. This vagabond attitude towards life and love for ‘country things’ forbade him from earning any degree all through his life. It is strange that a man who was awarded more than forty honorary degrees for his unparalleled contribution to poetry did not bother to earn a degree himself. His early life was full of dissatisfied circumstances which even as an adult Frost could never forget. The sudden shift of location from the ‘Gold Rush’ city to a sombre countryside area of New England left the young poet awestruck. The stone walls, the rocky mountain cliffs and the abandoned woods appealed his eyes. He liked the farms and the

3 grasslands but never could forget his acquaintance with the City of Skyscrapers, San Francisco, which is visible in his poem, “Once by the Pacific”.9 Amidst this constant change of places and apartments in New England, New Hampshire and Lawrence, an artist was in the making. Every small or seemingly unimportant thing left a mark on the young poet’s mind. Apart from reading Latin and Greek verses he enjoyed farming and roaming about in the wilderness of the abandoned houses and forests. James M. Cox writes about Frost’s first poem “My-Butterfly- an elegy” and says “When he published “My Butterfly” in the Independent in 1894, Henry James had not entered his major phase and Stephen Crane had not published his Red Badge Of Courage…The careers of Lawrence, Joyce, Eliot and Pound, had not yet begun and Hemingway had not even been born” 10 These facts show that he was writing poetry before the onset of Modernism. He was writing at a time which can be called as a period of transition in America. The editor of The Independent, Mr Ward and his sister introduced Frost to some influential people including a minister in Lawrence, Reverend William.E.Walcott11. Frost already knew Walcott and was elated when a man of considered literary genius agreed to advise him on the art of writing poetry. Walcott commented that Frost’s poems were too close to the speaking voice. The comment was taken positively by Frost, who chose to write in a “speaking voice”12 unique to him. Frost had already tried his hand at teaching and farming apart from writing and he could not be successful in both but somewhere in his heart he knew that, he was meant for verse, that his senses responded to nature. And he decided to follow his heart. But the journey was difficult. Whenever disappointments overshadowed his spirit, his childhood friend and life partner Elinor inspired him to move on. They married in 1895 and remained together till death separated them in 1939, when Elinor died. They faced some worst financial situations which led to many shifts of places and finally they bought a farm at Derry, a place which was going to change Frost’s perception about life altogether. It was at Derry when Frost came close to the language of the rustics and started discovering the flora and fauna of countryside living. In a letter to Louis Mertins, he writes:

To a large extent the terrain of my poetry is the Derry landscape, the Derry farm. Poems growing out of this, though composite, were built on incidents and are therefore autobiographical. There was something about the experience at

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Derry which stayed in my mind, and was tapped for poetry in the years that came after.”13

The years spent at Derry (1901-11) are considered those crucial years in the life of an artist which mature him finally and give him an insight into things which earlier might have seemed useless. Derry inspired him to write many masterpieces which he would include in his collections of poems. The unique colloquial voice of Frost is the gift of this farm, which he cherished all through his life and which brought him his due as a distinct American poet. He wrote a good deal of poems till 1911 but was not satisfied with the response he received from his people. He was not contended with ordinary appreciation and knew that he was meant for bigger ones. He decided to leave the limited circles of New England and explore the world. The publication of some of his poems in magazines and the sale of the Derry farm provided him enough funds with which he could leave his country and take a chance. 14 He says:

I must have been asked once years ago what I was doing in England, and I had forgotten what I was doing… I said to somebody… that I had come to the land of The Golden Treasury. That’s what I went for. One of my theories was that I went to live under thatch… I’m guessing at myself, you know; guessing at ourselves. The beauty of it is the lambent way the mind plays over that guessing.15 There was in him a strong fascination for England, a country which gave the world a legacy of poets and poetic culture to cherish. He sailed for England on 23rd August1912, unaware of the fortune which awaited him there. Frost took no time to settle and started writing on whatever themes appealed to him. He worked hard to write a considerable number of poems which he could include in, A Boy’s Will which was soon going to be his first collection of poems. The title came from H.W. Longfellow’s famous poem “My Last Youth”16

“A Boy’s Will is the wind’s will,

And the thoughts of youth are long, lost thoughts”

The book was accepted by David Nutt and Company and was published in 1912. It was mostly autobiographical, which Frost admitted. According to him, the poems were “pretty near being the story of five years” of his life.17. It was reviewed by poets like

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W.B.Yeats and Ezra Pound, who praised the use of language and aptness of themes. Pound wrote in his review of September 1913 in New Freeman that, “The man has good sense to speak naturally and to paint the thing, the thing as he sees it. And to do this is a very different matter from gunning about for the circumpletious polysyllable”18. Frost’s friend and one of the famous poets of England of the nineteenth century, Abercrombie, warned the literary circles to stop considering the book as simple, because it had themes which are far beyond the understanding of the lesser sensitive. 19 These reviews were more than enough for the poet, who had always sought for appreciation and was denied it, in his own country. Frost was overwhelmed to see these reviews in literary magazines. In a famous American Magazine and Transcendentalist Journal, The Dial, William. M. Payne (1858-1919), wrote, “A dream world of elusive shapes and tremulous imaginings is half revealed to our vision by the subdued lyrics which Mr. Robert Frost entitles 'A Boy's Will ”.20

It was a pleasant surprise for an American poet to receive such a warm welcome in a country which was different from his own. It encouraged him so much that in eight months he was ready with another collection, North of Boston. He had started to realize that the decision to leave America had been tremendously favourable. W.B.Yeats (1865-1939) and Thomas Hardy(1840-1928) were two popular poets of England at that time apart from Rudyard Kipling(1865-1936), Chesterton (1874-1936), Robert Bridges (1844-1930), Walter De La Mare(1873-1956), Abercrombie (1881-1938), Wilfred Gibson (1878-1962), W.H.Davies (1871-1940),Wilfred Owen (1893-1918) and Robert Graves (1895-1985)21 who too were tremendously popular. Amidst these already established poets of the day Frost was afraid to be lost and rejected. But his work was appreciated by the literary circles. Though he was writing in England but was not following the way of the world. His heart still did beat for New England, which had remained his sole source of inspiration throughout his life. He did not follow any established principles for writing poetry apart from following his heart, which rested with the ‘language of the people’. His dialect was colloquial and he was charged of using simple communicative language in his poems. The rustics who inhabit his poems usually speak plainly and with an insight into their daily monotonous lives. However it does not mean that his poems were simple. He was a witty trickster and always enjoyed as he said “saying one thing and meaning another”22. It makes his verse difficult to understand. His attitude should never be confused with what Allan Tate calls,

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“aggressive provincialism”. Though he uses the simple colloquial technique, it does not limit him to the boundaries of New England in particular and America in general. He is a regional poet as much as he is universal. In his attempt to rise above the bounds of ornamental language he has definitely escaped the parochial and the provincial in the most philosophical of ways. New England becomes the microcosm of the macrocosm world of Frost who had always something to teach to the world.

Frost was never biased towards things which came his way. He would not wait for a perfect time of the year to write something - a rose to bloom, a thrush to sing or a river to come up to its brim, but he would accept nature in its raw forms. Everything which involved the natural processes be it the change of seasons, a crow laden with the ‘dust of snow’, a ‘roadside stand ‘or a dried up river, inspired him. He wrote in “Hyla Brook”, “We love the things; we love for what they are”. Sidney Cox, one of Frost’s famous biographers, writes:

He cherishes no ideal image of what person, bird or brook should be. He is therefore hospitable to discrepancies. He welcomes variations. He continues to look, long after he sees what to call a thing, and often finds something to love. If the actual brook has dried up he keeps looking and takes notice of the

Jewel weed,

Weak foliage that is blown upon and bent,

Even against the way its waters went.23

In May 1914, Frost published his second book of poems, North of Boston .Though it was his second book of poems but the first book where he experimented with dramatic monologues. The book was reviewed by Amy Lowell in ‘The New Republic’, introducing Frost to the literary world of America, revealing to the world, the voice of a New Englander who was soon to become famous for his unique use of vernacular language and style. Though the book has been praised as an American classic and received a lot of critical appraisal but it was never appreciated for its reinvention of modern narrative poem. Presenting earthy characters mainly in blank verse narrative and dialogue, it reveals the lives of working people in New England. The book established Frost as a poet of the people, who presented earthly characters with utmost ease and simplicity. It is evident from the moment one reads the dedication on the book,

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“to E.M.F. This Book of People” The title North of Boston, not only suggests a particular area or region in America, but it also suggests the coldness associated with the word “North”. The ‘coldness’ which had become a part of the lives of people who lived there. The word, “North”, stands as a metaphor to the people of New England who were slowly drifting away in a world (America) which was moving towards modernization.

The book comprised seventeen poems, both long and short, including three of his masterpieces- “Mending Wall”, “After Apple Picking”, and “The Woodpile”. In “Mending Wall” he wittily portrays the temperaments of two neighbours who belong to different generations. The poem begins by announcing, “Something there is which doesn’t love a wall”. This ‘something’ remains undiscovered till the poem ends. The reader is bound to question his conscious self, what is that “something” ‘which doesn’t love a wall’? The poet’s old neighbour doesn’t want to challenge the existing beliefs in the society and says, “good fences make good neighbours” whereas the poet is concerned about these man-made barriers. Frost regretted later in life that his poem was spoilt by over analysing. It was subjected to political interpretations and this ruined the innate quality of the verse. Frost himself read the poem publicly in Russia and Jerusalem and said, “I have had lots of adventures with the poem. People are misunderstanding it or misinterpreting it. The secret of what it means, I keep”.24 This statement lays bare the playful mischievous mind of the poet, who is watching his poem being interpreted, knowing that it is misinterpreted, and still enjoying the moment for the sake of poetry. Because he was of the view that poems should be opened to varied interpretations. One must not lock himself into a room of ideas or already established guidelines before reading a verse, because it kills the essence of the work.

North of Boston, was appreciated on a larger scale by the literary circles in London, and received a number of favourable reviews from writers like Pound, Abercrombie, Gibson, Ford Madox Ford and Richard Aldington. Unfortunately the time collided with the Second World War and situations started becoming grim day by day. Frost had no choice other than leaving for America. The thought of leaving England depressed him because of the unexpected warmth and hospitality the country rendered. He bade goodbye to his close friends and left for his home in February 1915. It was like a dream which had finally come to an end. On his return he was pleasantly surprised to find a review of his book North of Boston in the “New Republic”. The review was written by

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Amy Lowell who praised the style of the poems and called it ‘the most American book of verse written so far’. This was followed by many more reviews in newspapers and magazines which finally gave him the idea that things have changed now. The neglected countryside Yankee who aspired to be loved and appreciated as a poet, was welcomed back. Things seemed to have taken a drastic change since his return from England and Frost’s spirit were higher than before. In 1916, his third Volume of poems Mountain Interval was published by Henry Holt and Co., the publication house which continued its association with him till his death. But despite of some favourable reviews, its sales were disappointing. But this reduction in the sales, had nothing to do with the quality of poems in this book, which were appreciated as usual. Paul Muldoon calls this volume as “the finest book of poems of the past century”.25 It comprised, some of Frost’s famous poems like, “Birches”, “The Road Not Taken” and “The Oven Bird”. The poems included in the collection carry serious themes like all other Frost’s collection but with a subtlety and bleakness of form. As Harold Bloom notes:

This is the world of Mountain Interval (1916), where “the broken moon” is preferred to the dimmed sun, where the Oven bird sings of “that other fall we name the fall,” and where the birches:

shed crystal shells Shattering and avalanching on the snow crust— Such heaps of broken glass to sweep away You’d think the inner dome of heaven had fallen.

Mountain Interval abounds in images of the shattering of human ties and of humans, as in the horrifying “Out, Out—.”26

After the publication of Mountain Interval Frost did not publish a book for almost seven long years and this depressed him. He blamed his teaching assignments at Amherst for his inability to pay attention to his passion. But it was the sheer necessity of the time to be able to earn something.Writing for the sake of interest and creativity was acceptable but it was not going to give him his daily bread. Good times were no more accessible and Frost had to find some other modes of earning apart from writing poems. He joined Amherst College as a temporary faculty member27. In the fall of

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1917, Amy Lowell published a book called Tendencies in Modern American Poetry, and included the name of Robert Frost with other poets like Sandburg, Robinson, H.D28. Though Frost was happy to find his name among other celebrated poets of America, he disliked the way Amy labelled him as a regional poet. Though he always drew inspirations from New England and from his own surroundings, his themes were universal. Outraged he wrote to Amy Lowell:

Mother Scotch immigrant. Father oldest New England stock unmixed. Ten years in West. Thirty years in east. Three years in England. Not less than six months in any of these- San Francisco, New York, Boston, Cambridge, Lawrence, London….Twenty Five years in cities, nine in villages, nine on farms. Saw the south on foot. Dartmouth, Harvard two years. Shoe worker, mill hand, farm hand, editor, reporter, insurance agent, agent for Shakespearean reader, reader myself, teacher in every kind of school public and private including psychological normal school and college…Presbyterian, Unitarian, Swedenborgian, Nothing.29

This letter portrays Frost dislike on being called ‘only’ as a regional poet. He was a regional poet but only in terms of the surroundings which inspired him to write. But those landscapes became for him, a stairway to explore varied themes, common to ‘everyman’. He was too walled in by the past. He did not follow the great American tradition started by Whitman, which involved praising of their country, its vastness and its natural beauty. He had seen negligence of his countrymen regarding his poetic skills before going to England and he did not want to return into that same forgetful state and hence was eager to get his work published again. As he wrote in “Birches”:

I’d like to get away from earth awhile, And then come back to it and begin over

The wait was worth it and in 1923 came his another collection of poems, New Hampshire. The book received the Pulitzer Prize in the same year. This was the first of the other three Pulitzer Prizes which he would be receiving for his Collected Poems (1931), A Further Range (1936) and A Witness Tree (1942). He is also the only

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American poet to have received the award four times in his life. New Hampshire, combines some best poems of the writer, including- “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”, “Fire and Ice”, “Nothing Gold can Stay”, “The Aim was Song” and many more. Critics believe that there is perhaps no book on American modern poetry which does not include “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” in it. The last two lines of the poem, give an echoing effect, which by the end had already spell-bounded the reader. In “Fire and Ice”, a poem of only nine lines, he talks about the end of the world.

Some say the world will end in fire, Some say in Ice. From whatever I have tasted of desire I hold with those who favor fire. But if it had to perish twice, I think I know enough of hate To know that for destruction ice Is also great And would suffice30

Within these seemingly insufficient lines, Frost had something greater to say. Something about the world which is so full of hatred. There is perhaps no way out, to put an end to this hatred except the “end” itself.

Maxim Gorky (1868-1936), the famous Soviet writer, once wrote about Anton Chekhov (1860-1904) that : He loved everything simple, genuine, sincere, and he had a peculiar way of making other people simple”31. Superficially “Gorky’s statement seems to fit Frost. If by simple we mean natural, he was his own man, attracting both believer and innocent, approached often humorlessly by the former as though he were a secular saint and more thoughtfully by the latter as wise counselor.”32

His later collections of poems, which include, A Further Range (1936), A Witness Tree (1942), Steeple Bush (1947), You Come Too (1959), In the Clearing (1962), are equally creative and naively woven as the earlier ones. But we might as well pay attention to

11 the mortal man living between the poems, too, for he is a moving image: human, that is, fallible, and, when in the midst of discovering a bending birch tree, or a thaw or a thrush or a crow, when he is suddenly hit by an idea of a poem, he acclaims with delight :

Earth is the right place for love You don’t know when it is likely go better.33

At that point of revelation, we feel one with the poet, whose heart beats for nature, who with his utmost sincerity shares his sorrows and happiness with his readers. He never disguises himself as a philosopher or a seer like Whitman, but prefers the rustic ways of life, to live and to share. And when still hoping to live another hundred years, the poet breathed his last on 29th January 1963, the world had lost, “the most American of American poets”- 34Robert Frost. “His death impoverishes us all, but he has bequeathed his Nation a body of imperishable verse, from which Americans will gain forever joy and understanding”35 said President John F. Kennedy paying his last tributes to the poet of the people. Though he could not succumb to his hope anymore, and finally bade a goodbye, but his “reluctance” to leave is evident everywhere :

“Ah, when to the heart of man Was it ever less than a treason, To go with the drift of things, To yield with a grace to reason, And bow and accept the end Of a love or a season?”36

He continues to inspire those who find themselves lost in the pathless woods, reminding them that they indeed have “miles to go” before succumbing to death. His poems have not lost themselves into the plethora of criticisms that they come across. As he himself said: a poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom. The figure is the same as for love. No one can really hold that the ecstasy should be static and stand still in one place… Read it a hundred times: it will forever keep its freshness as a metal

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keeps its fragrance. It can never lose its sense of a meaning that once unfolded by surprise as it went.37

1 “Aristotle” Wikiquote.(5th January 2016).(10th November 2015) < https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Aristotle#Poetics> 2 Roy Harvey Pearce, The Continuity of American Poetry, (Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1961), p.4 3 Christopher Beach, The Cambridge Introduction to 20th Century American Poetry, (Cambridge University Press, 2003), p.7 4 “American Poetry” Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopaedia. Foundation, Inc., (18th December 2015). (10th November 2015). < https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_poetry>

5Christopher Beach, The Cambridge Introduction to 20th century American Poetry, (Cambridge University Press, 2003), p.4 6 Reuben Halleck, Post. History of American Literature. 1911. Reprint. London, Forgotten Books, 2013.) p. 156-7. 7 W.G.O’Donnell, “Robert Frost and New England: A Revaluation”, Robert Frost- A Collection Of Critical Essays, ed. James.M.Cox, p.46 8 Warren Hope, “A Boy’s Will”, Student Guide to Robert Frost, Greenwich Exchange, London,2004, p.1 9 Robert Frost, “Once by the Pacific”in. West Running Brook, Complete Poems of Robert Frost, (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, New York), p.314 10. James M.Cox, “Introduction”, in Robert Frost: A Collection of Critical Essays,ed. James M.Cox., Prentice Hall,Inc Englewood Cliffs,N.J, 1962, p.1 11 Jay Parini, Robert Frost-A Life, Henry Holt& Co.New York,1999,p.45 12 Ibid 46 13 Ibid 73 14 Warren Hope, Student Guide to Robert Frost, Greenwich Exchange, London, 2004, p.viii. 15 William H Pritchard Frost: A Literary Life Reconsidered, Oxford University Press, New York, 1984, p.3

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16 Poetry Foundation “My Lost Youth”H.W.Longfellow 17, Deirdre Fagan . Critical Companion to Robert Frost: A Literary Reference to His Life and Work. (New York: Facts on File, 2007 p.52.

18 Tyler Hoffman, Robert Frost and the Politics of Poetry, Middlebury College Press, Hanover, NH, 2001, p.54

19 Ibid 66 20 Leonard Diepeveen, . The Difficulties of Modernism. New York: Routledge, 2003,p.186 21 Jay Parini, Robert Frost-A Life, Henry Holt&Co.New York,1999, p.124 22 Robert Frost, “Education by Poetry”, in The Robert Frost Reader, ed. Edward Connery Lathem and Lawrence Thompson, Henry Holt and Co. New York, 1972, p.374

23 Sidney Cox, A Swinger of Birches: A Portrait of Robert Frost, New York, N.Y., 1961, p.36 24 Warren Hope, Student Guide to Robert Frost, Greenwich Exchange, London,2004, p. xi 25 Tim Kendall, The Art of Robert Frost, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2012, p.178. 26 Harold Bloom, Modern American Poetry, Chelsea House Publishers,2005, p.5. 27 Warren Hope, Student Guide to Robert Frost, Greenwich Exchange, London,2004, p ix 28 Jay Parini, Robert Frost-A Life, Henry Holt& Co. New York, 1999, p.188 29 Ibid 189 30 Robert Frost, “Fire and Ice”, Complete Poems of Robert Frost, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, New York, p.268 31 Reginald Cook,” The Masking of a Poet,” Robert Frost- a living Voice, The University of Massachusetts Press Amherst, 1974, p.199. 32 Ibid.199. 33 Robert Frost, “Birches”, Mountain Interval, Henry Holt &Co. New York,1916,p.12 34 William Logan, “Frost at Midnight” in Parnassus- poetry in review, 2008, p.30.

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35Statement on Robert Frost’s death 29 January1963, John. F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum,< http://www.jfklibrary.org/Asset-Viewer/Archives/JFKPOF-042- 032.aspx> 24 January 2016. 36 Robert Frost “Reluctance”, A Boy’s Will, David Nutt and Co. 1913, p43 37 Robert Frost, Selected Prose of Robert Frost, ed. Hyde Cox and Edward Connery Lathem, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, New York.1949, p.20.

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CHAPTER TWO

FROST AND OTHER NATURE POETS

“The poetry of the earth is never dead”1

John Keats

Nature has inspired poets since time immemorial. It requires an observant eye and a sensitive mind to listen to the silent music in the sea waves, to appreciate the beauty of changing seasons and to recreate something in poetry which is otherwise invisible to the naked eye. Nature poetry as a popular genre emerged in the eighteenth century after the publication of William Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads in 1798 and his famous call, "back to nature" which marked the beginning of Romantic Revival :

The world is too much with us; late and soon, Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;— Little we see in Nature that is ours; We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!2

But traces of nature in English poetry dates back to the Anglo-Saxon period, which records one of the oldest surviving epic poems in English, Beowulf. The poem was composed between 975 and 1000, by some anonymous writer, referred to as the Beowulf poet. The poem is about a hero named Beowulf, who comes to the rescue of the king of Danes who had been abducted by a monster. In this poem one finds an amalgamation of three different elements of nature- the land, sea and fire. The hero battles for his life for seven days in the sea and fights various sea creatures during the period. Long writes, “With fourteen companions he crosses the sea. There is an excellent bit of Ocean poetry here (II.210-224)”3 :

The windy headlands, perilous fen paths, Where, under mountain mist, the stream flows down And floods the ground. Not far hence, but a mile.

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The mere stands, over which hang death-chill groves The wood fast-rooted overshades the flood; There every night a ghastly miracle Is seen, fire in the water.4

The description of the path with ferns, the mountain mist, the stream and the fire in water, is all the way similar to the description of nature in many contemporary and modern poems. Following the traditional pattern of discussion, if poetry is to be traced from its origins in English literature, one cannot, however, ignore the immense contribution of the famous English poet, Geoffrey Chaucer (1343-1400), who had been hailed in as the “Father of English Poetry” by John Dryden. Apart from his other pieces of work like “The Book of the Duchess”, “The House of Fame”, “Parliament of Foules”, “The Legend of Good Women”,etc. “The Canterbury Tales”, gave him his acclaim as a poet. While he composed several magnificent works, his reputation as a master poet rests chiefly upon “The Canterbury Tales” published in 1387. The poem is about a group of 29 pilgrims en route to the shrine of Saint Thomas A Beckett. From an amusing and light-hearted description to profoundly moralistic, the Tales mirror not only the customs and manners of 14th century England but also throw light on the independent characters of the speakers. Chaucer joins the group of pilgrims as the chief speaker and observer at the same time. The Prologue gives full length sketches of the pilgrims , including a Knight, a Squire, a nun, a Yeoman, a Monk, a Prioress, a Summoner, a Pardoner, a Doctor, a Reeve, a Ploughman, and the Wife of Bath to name a few. The opening lines of the poem allude to the month of April and March and paint a beautiful picture of seasons. Here according to the poet, April rain has put an end to the drought of March :

Whan that April with his showres soote The drought of March hath perced to the roote5

The references to seasons, rains, zephyrs, crops, heath, birds and the like clearly depict Chaucer's interest in nature. Though the tone of the poem changes from natural surroundings to the description of human nature, the opening lines set the festive theme of the poem. Spring symbolically represents beginning and the reference to Spring and the month of April hints that the Pilgrimage is a new beginning for all the pilgrims who

17 will discover their own selves in the journey. In another very important poem called the “Book of Duchess” he uses the ‘dream vision’ technique which was made popular during the mediaeval times by various poets, including Chaucer. The speaker in the poem describes a dream where once he lay in his bed in the month of May and was awakened by the chirping of birds outside his room. He is delighted by the melodious song and finds it harmonious. Once again Chaucer’s use of birds who sing melodiously upon a window sill in the month of May throws light on his capabilities as a poet who could paint a picture of natural surroundings with ease and comfort. Although Chaucer's poetry is chiefly associated with "human nature" because portraying the actual follies and customs of his times was his primary concern, his poetic earnestness and honest picturesque descriptions about people and places, prompt Matthew Arnold to comment that "with him is born our real poetry"6. After Chaucer's great body of work the next poet who can be considered as a major contributor to the canon of English Poetry is Edmund Spenser (1522-1599). Spenser gave to English poetry a tradition of pastoral poems and the famous style named after him called the Spenserian sonnet. “The Faery Queen” is one of his most popular poems in English literature. It is a collection of six books, each dealing with a particular virtue like holiness, temperance, chastity, friendship, justice and courtesy. Una in the allegory is symbolic of truth who is to be saved from falsehood, which is represented by Duessa. Finally after a number of combat battles the Red Cross knight succeeds in saving Una. The poem has immense allegorical significance. The imagery taken from both nature and religion, is grand and thus it makes the poem a perfect example of a religious allegory. Another major work by the poet is “The Shepherd's Calendar” written in 1579. It consists of around five different forms of heroic lines or ten syllabled lines. The tradition of pastoral poetry dates back to the Greek poet, Theocritus and the famous Roman poet, Virgil whose “Ecologues” are considered as the primary inspiration behind Spenser’s “Shepherd's Calendar”. “The Shepherd's Calendar” is a pastoral poem with the speaker as a Shepherd and the surroundings representing the rural English countryside. In a pastoral poem, the poet usually disguises himself as a shepherd. In this poem Spenser disguises himself under the name of Colin Clout. Pastoral poetry usually presents an idyllic form of rural life. Spenser’s poem comprises twelve ecologues, each representing a different month of the year. The love-story of Rosalinde and Colin Clout is the central theme of the poem. The entire setting of the poem and the full circle it

18 makes beginning with January and ending with December, itself sets nature both in the backdrop and forefront of the poem :

You naked trees, whose shady leaves are lost, Wherein the byrds were wont to build their bowre: And now are clothd with mosse and hoary frost, Instede of bloosmes, wherwith your buds did flowre: I see your teares, that from your boughes doe raine, Whose drops in drery ysicles remaine.7

The description of leafless trees, covered with frost and snow, which could not provide shades for the wandering birds paints a picturesque image of winter. The last Ecologue, “December” ends with Colin Clot’s final goodbye. Since winter is symbolic of death, December too becomes for the Shepherd a remainder of the inevitability of death. He bids adieu to the surroundings, his sheep, lambs, woods and everything which had been a part of his journey. The entire episode from January to December is replete with nature imagery and pastoral elements. The shepherds lament over love, discuss life and give critical views and satiric comments over philosophical questions involving man and his surroundings. Finally the long poem ends with the following lines :

Gather together ye my little Flock, My little Flock that was to me most lief: Let me, ah! let me in your Folds ye lock, E'er the breme Winter breed your greater Grief. Winter is come, that blows the baleful Breath, And after Winter cometh timely Death.

Adieu Delights, that lulled me asleep; Adieu my Dear, whose Love I bought so dear; Adieu my little Lambs and loved Sheep; Adieu ye Woods, that oft my Witness were8

Though Spenser is often acclaimed for his long narrative poems like “The Faery Queen” and “The Shepherd’s Calendar”, one cannot, however, put aside his sonnet

19 sequence, Amoretti, which is also one of his best collection of poems. “One Day I Wrote her Name” belongs to this collection, which has been praised by critics, for its lyrical quality and romantic imagery. The themes of love and time are commonly seen among the Elizabethan writers. Spenser too laments over the transitoriness of life but finds solace in the power of his verse and promises his beloved that their love would last for eternity.

Where when as death shall all the world subdue

Our love shall live, and later life renew.9

The victory of love against the ravages of time is manifested perfectly in the sonnets of William Shakespeare (1564-1616). He delves deep into the ideas of death, time, love and eternity. Primarily concerned with beauty and human relationships in all their complexity, these sonnets have outlived the damage caused by time, as promised by the poet himself. The word ‘Time’ occurs around seventy-eight times in the entire collection of his 154 sonnets. This points to Shakespeare’s pre-occupation with the ruinous effects of time on beauty, age and memory. He universalises these themes using various images from nature. Nature abounds in all its variety and playfulness in the forms of seasons. Seasons are very often mentioned by him in many of his sonnets. In sonnet 5 he writes:

For never resting time leads summer on

To hideous winter and confounds him there10

In sonnet 7, he refers to sunlight and compares man’s life with the rising and falling hours of the day. Again in sonnet 12 he refers to the transitoriness of summer which soon gives way to winter. Likewise man too is subject to death and decay. One can see how beautifully he transforms an object of nature into a remainder of death. Clear references to seasons can be seen in sonnets 5, 7, 12, 18, 53, 56, 97, 98, 102. Not only seasons, but in his sonnets we can see flowers of different kinds with intricate details. His reference to roses, lilies, cankers and other summer flowers occur in sonnets 25, 35, 94, 95, 98, 99, 124. Other aspects of nature like rain, clouds and storm can be seen in sonnets 14, 33, 34, 35, 90,117. The reference to celestial objects like the sun, moon, and stars can be noted in Sonnets 14, 15, 25, 35 etc.

20

Seasons are mentioned in the following sonnets :

For never-resting time leads summer on (Sonnet 5) And summer’s green all girded up in sheaves (Sonnet 12) Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? (18) Speak of the spring and foison of the year (53) Or call it winter, which being full of care/ Makes summer’s welcome thrice more wished, more rare. (56) How like a winter hath, my absence been (97) From you have I been absent in the spring (98) Our love was new, and then but in Spring (102)

References to flowers can be seen in the following :

But as the marigold at the sun’s eye (Sonnet 25) Roses have thorns, and silver fountains mud (Sonnet 35) Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds (Sonnets 94) Which like a canker in the fragrant rose (Sonnets 95) Nor did I wonder at the Lily’s white (Sonnet 98) The roses fearfully on thorns did stand (Sonnet 99) Weeds among weeds, or flowers with flowers gathered (Sonnet 124)

Thunder, Rain and clouds are visible in the following sonnets :

Pointing to each his thunder, rain and wind (Sonnet 14) The region cloud hath masked him from me now (Sonnet 33) To let base clouds overtake me in my way (Sonnet 34) Clouds and eclipses stain both moon and Sun (Sonnet 35) Give not a windy night a rainy morrow (Sonnet 90) That I have hoisted sail to all the winds (Sonnets 117)

Celestial objects can be seen in :

And constant stars, in them I read such art (Sonnet 14) Whereon the stars in secret influence comment (Sonnet 15)

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But as the marigold at the sun’s eye (Sonnet 25) Clouds and eclipses stain both moon and Sun (Sonnet 35)

Victor Hugo in his book, William Shakespeare, writes :

In Shakespeare the birds sing, the bushes become verdant, the hearts love, the souls suffer, the cloud wanders, it is hot, it is cold, night falls, time passes, forests and crowds speak, the vast eternal dream hovers about. The sap and the blood, all forms of the fact multiple, the actions and the ideas, man and humanity, the living and the life, the solitudes, the cities, the religions, the diamonds and pearls, the dung-hills and the charnel-houses, the ebb and flow of beings, the steps of the comers and goers,—all, all are on Shakespeare and in Shakespeare; and this genius being the earth, the dead emerge from it.11

Hugo’s observations sum up the exceptional potentialities in the poet and dramatist, William Shakespeare. His use of nature and human life in his works, his acute observations regarding the changing seasons, the celestial objects, the stormy skies and the flowers, all bring together the nature poet hidden behind those long dramatic soliloquies that put human existence into question. Indeed he has every bit of an observation which makes him a poet of nature.

Time, according to Shakespeare, is the biggest enemy of life and beauty but time’s heavy hand cannot dishearten the poet who believes in the eternal power of his verse. Time is indeed merciless which takes away all that man loves and preserves, but love can conquer this fear of death. The poet’s faith in his work compels him to claim eternity in a world where nothing is permanent.

So Long as Men can breathe or eyes can see

So Long lives this and this gives life to thee.12

Shakespeare had a whole list of admirers, who referred to him time and again in their works and held him in high regards when it came to being an inspiration to poets and dramatists. Percy Bysshe Shelley in his Defence of Poetry writes, “Shakespeare, Dante, and Milton ... are philosophers of the very loftiest power”13. Not only Shelley, but writers like Samuel Johnson, and Dryden consider Milton to be a true successor of the

22 late dramatist and poet, Shakespeare. John Milton’s (1608-1674) poems offer to us a great deal of variety, including pastoral poems, religious and political satires, hymns and sonnets. William Wordsworth in his poem “London”, which was written as a tribute to Milton, writes :

Thy soul was like a Star, and dwelt apart: Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea: Pure as naked heavens, majestic, free.14

“Gerard Manley Hopkins, in his Letters to Robert Bridges and R.W. Dixon, acknowledges Milton as a major influence upon his own radical, iconoclastic experiments with sprung rhythm and counterpoint.” 15 Indeed Milton paved the way for many poets to experiment with new forms of writings like elegies, and religious satires. Out of his entire collection of poetry, “Lycidas” stands in the prominent ones. The poem was written in 1637, as a pastoral elegy to mourn the death of Milton’s friend and classmate at Cambridge, Edward King. The Renaissance poets used the pastoral form of poetry to present an ideal state of life. Milton too uses the same genre to highlight his loss and grieve the death of his beloved friend. Mark Womack asserts that, “By naming Edward King "Lycidas," Milton follows "the tradition of memorializing a loved one through Pastoral poetry, a practice that may be traced from ancient Greek Sicily through Roman culture and into the Christian Middle Ages and early Renaissance."16 The poem opens with the following lines :

Yet once more, O ye laurels, and once more

Ye myrtles brown, with ivy never sere,

I come to pluck your berries harsh and crude,

And with forc'd fingers rude

Shatter your leaves before the mellowing year.

Bitter constraint and sad occasion dear

Compels me to disturb your season due;

For Lycidas is dead, dead ere his prime17

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From the very first line we find a reference to nature and its beautiful sights. The poet says that he wishes to prepare a wreath of flowers for his dead friend, but he is sad to pluck the flower buds before they mature. It reminds him of Edward’s pre-mature death. He is grief stricken and hence everything in the surroundings appear as if they shared his loss. Describing their routine at the Cambridge University where they studied together, he writes :

For we were nurs'd upon the self-same hill,

Fed the same flock, by fountain, shade, and rill;

Together both, ere the high lawns appear'd

Under the opening eyelids of the morn,

We drove afield, and both together heard

What time the gray-fly winds her sultry horn,

Batt'ning our flocks with the fresh dews of night,

Oft till the star that rose at ev'ning bright

Toward heav'n's descent had slop'd his westering wheel.18

The University is referred to as the “self-same hill” where the poet and his friend were “nurst” Milton paints a picturesque image of Cambridge countryside, where he and his friend are in the guise of the shepherds who take their sheep to pastures and remain together till the sun descends. The reader almost loses himself in the description and finds it realistic and surreal at the same time.

Milton affirms the fact that death of someone in the world corresponds and coincides with the death of something in Nature too. :

As killing as the canker to the rose,

Or taint-worm to the weanling herds that graze,

Or frost to flowers that their gay wardrobe wear

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When first the white thorn blows:

Such, Lycidas, thy loss to shepherd's ear.19

Barbara K, writes in her Life of John Milton : A Critical Biography, :

The first collapse of pastoral obliterates the poignantly nostalgic pastoral scene enjoyed by the youthful companion shepherds, in which nature, humankind, and poetic ambitions seem to be in harmony, unthreatened by the fact or even the thought of mortality. Lycidas’s death shatters this idyl, revealing in nature not the ordered seasonal processes of mellowing and fruition that pastoral assumes, but rather the wanton destruction of youth and beauty: the blighted rosebud, the taintworm destroying the weanling sheep, and the frostbitten flowers in early spring.20

Barbara’s assertion about the relationship between man and nature in “Lycidas” is appropriate in Miltonic terms. The poet believes that his loss is reciprocated by Nature itself. Everything which was lively had turned eerie and desolate after Edward’s untimely death.

Thee, Shepherd, thee the woods and desert caves,

With wild thyme and the gadding vine o'ergrown,

And all their echoes mourn.

The willows and the hazel copses green

Shall now no more be seen

Fanning their joyous leaves to thy soft lays.

…

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The glowing violet,

The musk-rose, and the well attir'd woodbine,

With cowslips wan that hang the pensive head,

And every flower that sad embroidery wears;

Bid amaranthus all his beauty shed,

And daffadillies fill their cups with tears.21

The poet’s effortless description of natural surroundings and the minute details in the poem portray his skills as a unique nature poet. William Hazlitt writes, “The gusts of passion come and go like the sounds of music borne on the wind’, by which he means that the poem’s structure and mood appear to replicate the fluctuating emotional registers of death and loss”.22 Hazlitt thus highlights the lyrical quality of the elegy, which truly moves like the ebb and flow of tides. The words seem to appear and play upon a chord of an old musical instrument which has no name but one can relate to the song, long after it stops playing. This element of musicality and use of nature as a medium of expression by Milton, is not only limited to “Lycidas”. But it can be seen in various other poems by the poet, like the companion poems “L’Allegro” and “Il’Pensroso”. According to Barbara K :

L’Allegro portrays the lifestyle of youth as a cyclic round, beginning with Mirth’s man awakening from sleep and ending with the drowsing Orpheus. Melancholy’s man begins with the evening and ends in waking ecstasy, the vision of heaven, all embracing scientific learning, and prophecy. In these poems Milton stages an ideal solution to his youthful anxieties about slow development, lifestyles, and poetry23.

The “slow movement” referred here best suits to pastoral imagery where people still derive joys from basic things. A critic says : Most of ‘L’Allegro’ draws its pleasure from an idealized version of the countryside, with whistling ploughmen and singing milkmaids; like the

26

pastorals of Theocritus, they reflect the experience of a comfortable city dweller in the countryside, not that of one who has ploughed a Weld or milked a cow. 24 One can find references to birds, winds, roses, violets, cankers, lark, hills, greenery, furrowed land, shepherds, daisies, hamlets, elms, rain, etc. in the poem which add more to the pastoral element of the verse. Milton’s genius as a poet of nature rests primarily upon his use of pastoral imagery which reflects picturesque images of the English countryside. Milton belonged to the Puritan age, which was known as the age of reawakening or second renaissance because it marked the intellectual reawakening of man. William. J. Long writes, “Poetry took new and startling forms in Donne and Herbert and prose became sombre as Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy”25 Milton was the only poet of this age whose huge body of work fetched him immense recognition. The age saw metaphysical poets like Donne and Herbert and Cavalier poets like Marvell, Crashaw, Cowley, Vaughman etc. From the Puritan age to the beginning of eighteen century, there was a major decline in nature poetry. The Puritan age gave way to the Restoration period (1660-1700) which was marked by sheer portrayal of realism and hence the poetry of the age could find no respite in Nature. To this spirit of stoic realism, James Thomson (1700-1748) responded differently. Thomson's great merit lies in his restoration of nature to the domain of poetry from which it had been banished by Pope and his school. He dared to dispute, and he disproved by his own practice and the astonishing success which at once accompanied it, the dictum of Pope that in matters poetic 'the proper study of mankind is man'. His wonderful observing power and his enthusiasm for his subject went far to make his treatment of nature a success. He was sincerely and healthily enamoured of nature. The wild romantic country was his delight.26

This is true that Thomson’s delight was the countryside, but this should not be overlooked that he never limited himself to the countryside or pastures. He made every bit of nature part of his poems. His most cited poem is The Seasons which was published in 1730, is considered his best work. It is a collection of four poems, beginning with Spring and ending with Winter, thus making a full circle. The opening lines set the festive tone of the poem.

27

Come, gentle Spring, ethereal mildness, come; And from the bosom of yon dropping cloud, While music wakes around, veiled in a shower Of shadowing roses, on our plains descend.27

Everything is lit with colour and moisture in Spring. The description of this season has a reference to flowers, rain, breeze, greenery and the like, which added more to the Spring effect.

In heaps on heaps the doubling vapour sails Along the loaded sky, and mingling deep Sits on the horizon round a settled gloom; Not such as wintry storms on mortals shed, Oppressing life; but lovely, gentle, kind, And full of every hope and every joy, The wish of Nature. 28

“Lovely, gentle and kind” is how he describes Spring. A subtle feeling of joy and celebration mark the very innate layers of the poem. Similarly Summer, Autumn and Winter mark their own distinctive features. Thompson’s Seasons has everything which adds to the canon of nature poetry, William Hazlitt in his Lectures on English Poets, says :

All that is admirable in the Seasons, is the emanation of a fine natural genius, and sincere love of his subject, unforced, unstudied, that comes uncalled for, and departs unbidden...The feeling of nature, of the changes of the seasons, was in his mind; and he could not help conveying this feeling to the reader, by the mere force of spontaneous expression.29

Thompson’s poems had the capacity to surpass boundaries of time and space. The reader is slowly transported to the world of four seasons, where everything appears beautiful, be it death in winter or gloom in autumn. David Daiches asserts :

Though the Augustan poets believed that the proper study of mankind was mind, they were far from indifferent to the beauties of Nature, and throughout the eighteenth century is found a strain of descriptive and meditative poetry in

28

which natural description prompts moral reflections on the human situation. The pioneer here was James Thompson, whose four long poems on the seasons- Winter (1726), Summer (1727), Spring (1728), and Autumn (1730)…employ a quasi-Miltonic blank verse in describing the countryside at different times of the year.30

To this progress towards Nature poetry or ‘romantic revival’, Thomas Gray (1716-71), was a major addition. He is often regarded as a pre-Romantic or transitional poet. His “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” is considered as one of the most popular poems in the history of English poetry. A large part of his uniqueness rests primarily on the fact that the poet unlike his predecessors was more sensitive towards his subject. The opening lines of the poem have a solemn effect on the mind of the reader who cannot help but be a part of the landscape that the poet presents. The poem opens with the description of a day which is nearing its end.

The Curfew tolls the knell of parting day

The lowing herd wind slowly over the lea

The ploughman homeward plods his weary way

And leaves the world to darkness, and to me.31

The description of the evening with the sound of a death bell in the background hints at the sombre theme of the poem. The poet does not refer to evening directly, but calls it a ‘parting day’, which will soon give way to night and everything will come to an end. The owl perched on the deserted tower and the lonely traveller who wanders in its haunting premises, adds more to its eerie imagery. It also suggests the loneliness associated with night and likewise, also with death. This shows that Gray leaves no stone unturned to prepare ground for a solemn theme.

The poem was a result of Gray’s visit to a countryside graveyard at Stoke Poges. The poet while wandering in the lonely graveyard speculates upon the temporariness of life and the permanence of death. The description of the landscape, the approaching night, the owl, the trees, the cock’s echoing shrill, and the woods are some clear examples which affirm Gray’s preoccupation with Nature. When he mentions the “rude

29 forefathers of the Hamlet”32 who were buried under the elm trees, perhaps he wished to present an ideal resting place for the dead. The dead irrespective of their status or ambition lie with nature. The poem concludes with an epitaph which reads :

Here rests his head upon the lap of Earth33

This states in clear words that someone has died. There was nothing he could boast of, neither ambition nor fame. He died and hence returns back to earth, where we all belong.

The poem has a universal appeal because it deals with something which is inescapable - death. Its tone is melancholic and the poet asserts that “the paths of glory lead but to the grave”. Gray is recognised as a transitional poet because in him we find visible progression towards the Romantic Age. The Romantic poets were lovers of Nature who usually symbolised Nature for eternity. Unlike them Gray used Nature as a reminder of death.

Though the “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” is Gray’s most appreciated work, one cannot however ignore his other poems like “Ode on the Spring”, “The Progress of Poesy” and “The Bard”. As the name suggests “Ode on the Spring” by Gray alludes to the charm of Spring as a season. Each stanza describes some observations the poet had while he notices the season. In the first stanza Gray draws a picture of a beautiful Spring day, which boasts of colourful flowers, pleasant breeze and lingering fragrances. In the second stanza he mentions the oak trees with thick branches, which give shade to the poet, who sits by a river. In the third stanza he mentions the lives of those insects, which enjoy the season of Spring unlike the poet who is thoughtful of his miseries. In the last two stanzas the insects become a metaphor for happiness. Unlike human beings who spend their time imagining their future, the insects live for the moment and die unnoticed. They leave the poet with a message:

Thy sun is set, thy spring is gone— We frolic, while 'tis May.34

The poem does not deal with a new theme or subject matter, because speculating on seasons had been in vogue since the Elizabethan age or even before that. But Gray is

30 the first poet of his age who used vivid imagery from his surroundings and captured them in the form of his poems. “Ode on the Spring” is one of those poems which the poet wrote using nature as a medium of lamentation over death. Robert Burns (1759-96) is another poet of the age, who though comes in the category of a minor poet, but his lyrics and scenic songs compel one to include him in the list of Nature poets who deviated from the main line poetry of the neo classical age and infused it with a new colour and vibrancy. Long observes, “After a century of cold and formal poetry, relieved only by the romanticism of Gray and Cowper, these fresh inspired songs went straight to the heart, like music of returning birds in springtime”35. Burns’s poems are referred to as the songs, because the most distinctive quality in them is their lyricism. His Poems Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect, are quoted time and again for their simplicity and lyrical quality, which perhaps no other poet in the history of Scottish poetry possessed. Poems like, “A Red, Red, Rose”, “To a Mountain Daisy”, “To a Mouse” etc, are few examples which depict Burn’s fondness for simple rustic surroundings around him. A critic points out, Robert Burns is the most lyrical of the rural poets, and perhaps the most universal. A ploughman himself, he was the closest to nature of his contemporaries. When he turns up a field mouse’s nest with his plough, he realises that he has destroyed a complete world, wrecked the hopes and plans of a ‘sleeket, cowran’, tim’rous beastie’.

But Mousie, thou art no thy-lane, In proving foresight may be vain:36

One thing is common in his poems- his love for simplicity. This can be felt by noticing the central figures or elements around which his poems revolve, for example, a flower, a mouse, a mountain. Not only simplicity but Burn’s poetry is very close to the soil. His verse echoes with Scottish dialect and his inspirations primarily remind one of the Scottish countryside. Nature is found in abundance in his poems, be it crimson daisy or rose, or mouse which lived on a farm. Every bit of his poems is soaked into simple things within nature. Tim Fulford remarks, “Burns became a key figure for English Romantics, for he demonstrated that rural culture and rustic language could give the poet a language of moral power and critical authority that the polite poetry produced in commercial, metropolitan London utterly lacked”.37 Indeed Burn’s poetry is soft and

31 simple. It was not poetry for poetry’s sake. The sheer simplicity of its language, and imagery marks Robert Burns as one of the chief exponents of nature poetry.

Wee, modest, crimson-tippèd flow'r, Thou's met me in an evil hour; For I maun crush amang the stoure Thy slender stem: To spare thee now is past my pow'r, Thou bonie gem.38

The list of Nature poets in the pre-Romantic age may be rendered incomplete, if one does not mention the poetry of William Blake (1757-1827). The Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience are perhaps his most acclaimed works because of the simplicity of language and complexity of the varied themes. For every poem in the Songs of Innocence there is a counter poem in The Songs of Experience, each dealing with two contrary states of the human soul. Apart from this distinctive feature in his poetry, one cannot put aside the nature imagery in his poems. Poems like “The Echoing Green” and “Nurse’s Song” are two best examples to portray how nature forms an integral part in the poetry of Blake. The children in the “Nurse’s Song” are playing in fields until it is dark and the nurse calls them because soon it would be night : Then come home my children, the sun is gone down And the dews of night arise; Come, come, leave off play, and let us away Till the morning appears in the skies … Besides in the sky the little birds fly, And the hills are all covered with sheep39

The children playing in the fields, against the backdrop of the setting sun, where little birds are flying towards their nest and the hills are full of sheep, are representations of English countryside. In “The Echoing Green” too, nature has been used to appeal to the reader, and to impart a child like innocence to the description of the surroundings. The simplicity of an event where the sun rises and the skies reflect the happiness and the

32 bells ring to welcome the changing of seasons, is all the more suitable to be called nature poetry :

The Sun does arise, And make happy the skies The merry bells ring To welcome the Spring The Skylark and the thrush The birds of the bush Sing louder around40

Nature is found in abundance in many other poems by Blake like, “The Lily”, “To Autumn”, “To Morning”, “To Summer”, “To Winter”, “The Birds”, “The Wild Flower’s Song”, “The Blossom”, “Night”, “Ah! Sunflower” etc. The above interpretations trace the development of Nature poetry over the years. The poetry of Gray, Collins, Blake and Burns was like a relief from the stereotypical poetry of the Neoclassical age, which aimed at moralising and mirroring the society. The Romantic period was basically the age of Nature poetry. This period saw some great poets of nature, including William Wordsworth, John Keats, Percy. B. Shelley, Byron, Coleridge etc. Among these poets, William Wordsworth’s name stands out with all its uniqueness and superiority when it comes to the poetry of Nature. His “Lyrical Ballads” mark the beginning of the Romantic Movement in the history of English Literature. It is a collection of nature poems by Wordsworth and Coleridge, written in and around 1798. The collection included some famous poems like, Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey”. “The Lyrical Ballads” became a landmark in changing the course of English poetry and the new dawn of Romanticism. The poetic diction and style of Wordsworth was very different from those of other Nature poets. In fact all the Romantic poets of the age differed from one another. In Wordsworth one can easily find the mysterious “presence” which is not found in any other nature poet. As a child he loved spending hours in the lap of nature, befriending trees, streams, flowers, and every bit of nature which came his way. He grew up with mountains and finally concluded that there is a “presence” amidst the scenery he loved. This theory of a certain mysterious presence lurking behind nature is

33 seen in many of his poems but very prominently in “Lines Composed a few Miles above Tintern Abbey” and “The Prelude”.

And I have felt A presence that disturbs me with the joy Of elevated thoughts, a sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns And the round ocean and the living air And the blue sky and in the mind of man A motion and a spirit that impels All thinking things, all objects of all thought And rolls through all things (93-102)41

It would not be wrong to call “Tintern Abbey” as the spiritual autobiography of the poet, because it traces his growth not only as a human being but also as a poet. Nature as a source of inspiration at various stages of the poet’s life is the central theme of the poem. Amidst the hustle and bustle of city life, the poet turns towards nature to find solace :

In darkness and amid the many shapes Of joyless daylight; when the fretful stir Unprofitable, and the fever of the world, Have hung upon the beatings of my heart-- How oft, in spirit, have I turned to thee, O sylvan Wye! thou wanderer thro' the woods, How often has my spirit turned to thee!42

This “call back to nature” is not only limited to “Tintern Abbey” but also forms a central theme in the sonnet, “The World is Too Much With Us”. This poem became a landmark and is often cited by critics as Wordsworth’s plea to “return back to Nature”. The ease and the simplicity of language are two most important factors in the poetry of Wordsworth. The “Daffodils” dance with the breeze, while the solemn song of the

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“Solitary Reaper” transcends barriers of age, language and class. This is the beauty of Wordsworth’s nature, which differentiates him from any other nature poet of the age.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), was a close friend of Wordsworth and one of the major poets of the Romantic age. He is known for introducing the bizarre and supernatural elements in genre of nature poetry. His major works include “Ode to Dejection”, “Rime of the Ancient Mariner”, “Kubla Khan” etc. Though supernatural elements always form a prominent part in his poems but one cannot overlook his powerful nature imagery which gives the minutest details of the scenery he talks about. For example in “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” he mentions everything from landscape to seascape with exact preciseness and accuracy. To describe the descending night in the tropical regions he writes :

The sun’s rim dips: the stars rush out At one stride comes the dark43

In “Kubla Khan” one can see the perfect amalgamation of the supernatural and natural. The imaginary tomb of Kubla Khan has been described picturesquely by Coleridge. As the poem ends, it leaves the reader in awe :

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan A stately pleasure-dome decree: Where Alph, the sacred river, ran Through caverns measureless to man Down to a sunless sea. So twice five miles of fertile ground With walls and towers were girdled round; And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills, Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree; And here were forests ancient as the hills, Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.44

It would not be an overstatement to say that in no other nature poet one can find this peaceful co-existence of the natural and the supernatural. Coleridge and Wordsworth

35 belonged to the group of early Romantics. The younger or later romantics included poets like, Byron, Keats and Shelley. John Keats introduced the sensuousness in nature poetry whereas Shelley’s poems seem pre occupied with the power of nature. Long observes, “The very spirit of nature which appeals to us in the wind and the cloud, the sunset and the moonrise, seems to have possessed him, at times and made him a chosen instrument of melody”45 Shelley’s lyrics were infused with a symphony which pleased the reader. Like Wordsworth, he too believed that nature has the power to heal man’s soul and self. At times, he becomes a poet who loves the miracle in nature and rest of the times he becomes an idealistic poet like Byron who aimed at transforming the world into a better place. A combination of both these ideas can be seen in his “Ode to the West Wind”, where he invokes the West Wind amidst chaos and lifelessness and in the end pleads it to make him its instrument of music.

Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is:

What if my leaves are falling like its own!

The tumult of thy mighty harmonies

Will take from a deep autumnal tone,

Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, spirit fierce

My spirit! Bee thou me, impetous one.46

Unlike Shelley, Keats never aimed at reforming the world, but only saw “Beauty” in different forms of nature. He believed that “poetry should be, not the vehicle of philosophy, religious teaching or social and political theories, but the incarnation of beauty. The famous opening line of Endymion- A Thing of beauty is a joy forever’ – strikes the key note of his work.47” He was obsessed with the concept of eternity, truth and most importantly beauty. Realising that soon he would fall a prey to death because of his incurable tuberculosis, he started finding the bliss of eternity in art, nature and beauty. In most of his poems one can see the concepts of immortality and mortality. In “Ode to a Nightingale” the song of the bird becomes a symbol of eternity, in “Ode on a Grecian Urn” the inscriptions on the Urn become symbolic of eternity once again. Each poem by him casts a spell on audience who cannot deny the mesmerising aftermath of

36 reading Keats. His odes, smaller poems and long poems are fused with Greek mythology and hence portray Keats’s inclination towards Greek literature. Sometimes his fancies would go above anticipation and this tendency to escape reality and seek refuge in an ideal world make him appear as an escapist. This escapism is part of many of his poems like “Endymion”, “Ode to a Nightingale”, “Lamia”, etc where the poet wishes to leave the earth for a better place, where there would be no worries and no death :

Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget What thou among the leaves hast never known, The weariness, the fever, and the fret Here, where men sit and hear each other groan; Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs, Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies; Where but to think is to be full of sorrow And leaden-eyed despairs, Where Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes, Or new Love pine at them beyond to-morrow.48

The nineteenth century appeared as an age of nature poetry. Be it the pantheism of Wordsworth or sensuousness of Keats, nature poetry in the nineteenth century never failed to amuse the reader in a sensitive manner. This tide of change from moralising and classic poetry to Romanticism was not only limited to England but also touched upon the literary circles of America. In America this movement towards nature and self, was known as “Transcendentalism”. This may also be referred to as the American Romanticism. Many poets and philosophers came under its spell and started writing about man’s relation to his surroundings, to his own self and most importantly to nature. Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson were the initiators of this movement. Later many famous poets of the continent joined this literary movement. Prominent among them was Walt Whitman (1819-1892). He was a bard, who united the past, present and future in his poems. His voice was the voice of freedom and realism, which made his verse unique and largely acceptable by his nation and beyond.

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I am of old and young, of the foolish as much as the wise, Regardless of others, ever regardful of others49

Though Whitman was basically a mystic and used many personal and universal symbols in his poems, his poetry seems to be loaded with “seascapes”. He was in love with the sea, be it the sea in “Out of the Cradle endlessly Rocking” or “On the Beach at Night”, his poems are full of symbols taken from the sea :

On the beach at night, Stands a child with her father, Watching the east, the autumn sky.

Up through the darkness, While ravening clouds, the burial clouds, in black masses spreading, Lower sullen and fast athwart and down the sky, Amid a transparent clear belt of ether yet left in the east, Ascends large and calm the lord-star Jupiter, And nigh at hand, only a very little above, Swim the delicate sisters the Pleiades. 50

Ezra Greenspan in The Cambridge Companion to Walt Whitman , maintains :

The sky, the sea, plants, trees, roots, buds, sunshine, animals, the infinite universe. None of these natural phenomena had figured much in his early poetry and fiction, but suddenly they seemed all-important. He dreamed of his nature- filled poetry having an immense impact on American life. "The poets I would have must be a power in the state, and an engrossing power in the state," he wrote in his notebook (NP, I: 144). If America saw its problems and its people recast amid nature imagery, perhaps it would change. Sectional divisions could be repaired by an absorptive, poetic "I" who traveled joyously through all regions and who reveled in the cycles of nature. Corruption could be positively counteracted by a poetic re-creation of nature's beauties. The metaphors Whitman used to describe his mission were little less than messianic. Leaves of Grass was "the new Bible," to be read' outdoors by everyone every season of

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the year. The poet was "the age transfigured." The proof of the poet was that his country absorbed him as affectionately as he absorbed it. Wishful thinking, to be sure.51 The above statement sums up the importance of nature in the poetry of Walt Whitman. A contemporary of Whitman, was Emily Dickinson (1830-1886), who was also a Transcendentalist but she refused to relate herself to any school of poetry. She was a Puritan and hence grew up in a typical Christian family and poetry was the only way where she could be a non-conformist. A free thinker, a candid individualistic being, Dickinson was taken aback by the death of people close to her, which affected her in the worse ways. Out of her entire collection of poetry, more than a thousand poems deal with death as a principal subject. Her poems are a perfect example to portray her minute observations of nature. She would notice the migratory birds searching for a resting place, buds laden with frost, a grasshopper sitting idly on a cold winter afternoon and how seasons melt into another seasons of hopes and hopelessness :

NATURE, the gentlest mother, Impatient of no child, The feeblest or the way wardest,— Her admonition mild

In forest and the hill By traveller is heard, Restraining rampant squirrel Or too impetuous bird.

How fair her conversation, A summer afternoon,— Her household, her assembly; And when the sun goes down

Her voice among the aisles Incites the timid prayer Of the minutest cricket, The most unworthy flower.

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When all the children sleep She turns as long away As will suffice to light her lamps; Then, bending from the sky,

With infinite affection And infiniter care, Her golden finger on her lip, Wills silence everywhere52.

Thus, it can be concluded that Nature has been a primary source of inspiration for poets across ages and continents. Be it the anonymous Beowulf poet of the Anglo-Saxon age or William Wordsworth of the nineteenth century, Nature poetry as a genre has evolved efficiently over the years. In Chaucer, Nature formed the backdrop of his narrations. One can identify the natural elements employed by him in his poems. In Spenser, this was brought out more prominently in the form of pastoral poetry, which was full of idyllic descriptions of English countryside. In Shakespeare “nature” as an inspiration features in almost all his sonnets, where seasons, celestial objects, flowers etc are used by the poet to demonstrate man’s fate. In the Restoration period, nature poetry was replaced by the realistic, moralistic and aphoristic poetry of Pope, Dryden, Congreve and Swift. This was short-lived and Nature as a main theme in poetry returned with James Thomson and more strongly with Thomas Gray. Poets like Robert Burns and William Blake, too added to the canon of nature centred poems in the pre-Romantic age. The eighteenth century was basically the age where the poetry of the clubs and coffee houses shifted to the poetry of nature. Popularly called the Romantic Age, this was the main period during which Nature poetry was experimented, tested and tried and finally emerged as the main theme which inspired almost all the major poets of the age, namely, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Keats and Shelley.

This spirit was not limited to the English literary circles, America also had a similar renaissance of nature poetry, which is termed as Transcendentalism. Major poets of the period include Whitman, Dickinson and Frost. Whitman on the one hand proclaimed himself as the bard whereas Dickinson was happy and contented to write for her own

40 sake. Frost was a mixture of both. He did not accept an alliance with any school of poetry but was partly inspired by the Transcendentalists. He wrote poems soaked in nature imagery, in colloquial language, and on topics which usually did not catch the normal eye. In William Wordsworth, the mysterious “presence” pervaded his hills, lakes, songs and silences. In Keats, his love for eternity and Greek mythology, in Shelley his fascination for the power in Nature and its elements, and in Byron the endless depths of the ocean and the night may be noted. The poetry of Robert Frost stands in contrast to this typical form of Nature poetry. He was a farmer poet like Burns and wrote in a language which was very close to speech. His inspiration included anything and everything which he came across, during his stay at New England. It sometimes appears that his poems were regional pieces of writing but his characters and their problems transcended barriers of boundaries; they were universal manifestations of emotions rendered as poetry. His poetry began indoors and then slowly moved out to fields, butterflies, thorns, abandoned barns, a fallen star, a burnt tree, homeless birds and boys, deserted places and crowded spots. Perhaps, nothing around him remained untouched in the nine books of poetry he wrote. According to Reginald Cook : Frost was a poet whose passionate devotion to the profession of poetry and consummate knowledge of art, whose tangy wit and ability to play provocatively with ideas, whose delight in an understanding of nature, and whose searing personal awareness of the tragic “tears in things” enabled him to evoke a searching vision of the simple but profound truth in human experience.53

1 John Keats, “On the Grasshopper and Cricket”, Poetry Foundation, < https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/53210/on-the-grasshopper-and-cricket> 2 William Wordsworth, “The World is Too Much with Us”, Poetry Foundation 3 William.J.Long, English Literature :its History and Significance, Surjeet Publications, New Delhi, p.11 4 Ibid p.13 5 Geoffrey Chaucer, “The Canterbury Tales”, Kalyani Publishers, New Delhi,1998, p.61

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6 Matthew Arnold, “Study of Poetry”, quoted from, “Chaucer’s Contribution to English language and Literature” 7 Edmund Spenser, “The Shepheardes Calender”, Poetry Foundation 8 Edmund Spenser, “Shepheardes Calender December XII” 9 Edmund Spenser, “One Day I wrote her Name”, Fifteen Poets, Oxford University Press, 1941, p.53 10 William Shakespeare, “Those hours that with gentle hours frame”, in Shakespeare’s Sonnets ed. A.L.Rowse, Macmillan, London, 1964, p.12 11 Victor Hugo, William Shakespeare, Boston Publishers, 1864, p.36 12 William Shakespeare, “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”, in Shakespeare’s Sonnets ed. A.L.Rowse, Macmillian, London, 1964, p.38 13 Percy B.Shelley, Defence of Poetry, in “ Sidney to Macaulay : The Harvard Classics (1909-14)” < http://www.bartleby.com/27/23.html> 14 William Wordsworth, “London”, Golden Treasury, Oxford University Press ,1964, p.211 15Richard Bradford,The Complete Critical Guide to John Milton, Routledge London and New York, 2001, p.118 16Mark Womack, "On the Value of Lycidas". Studies in English Literature, 1500- 1900. 37 (1): 1 January 1997, p. 119–136. 17 John Milton, “Lycidas”, Golden Treasury, Oxford University Press, ,1964, p.55 18 Ibid 19 Ibid 20 Barbara K Lawelski, Life of John Milton : A Critical Biography, Blackwell Publishing, 2003 ,p.83 21 John Milton. opcit, p.55 22 Richard Bradford ,The Complete Critical Guide to John Milton, Routledge London and New York,2001,p.115 23 Barbara K Lawelski, Life of John Milton : A Critical Biography, Blackwell Publishing, 2003,p.52

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24 Gordon Campbell and Thomas N Corns, John Milton : Life, Work and Thought, Oxford University Press ,2008, p.78 25 William.J.Long, English Literature its History and Significance, Surjeet Publications, p.189 26 James Thompson, Poetical Works, Project Gutenberg Australia 27 James Thomson, The Seasons, Project Guttenburg 28 Ibid 29 William Hazlitt, Lectures on English Poets, 1873 Press, New York, 1825,p.106 30 David Daiches, A Critical History of English Literature Vol-II, Supernova Publishers, New Delhi, 2010, p.652 31 Thomas Gray, “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”, Golden Treasury, Oxford University Press, New Delhi,1964, p.145 32Ibid 33 Ibid 34 Thomas Gray, “Ode on the spring” Golden Treasury, Oxford University Press, ,1964,p.139 35 William.J.Long, English Literature its History and Significance, Surjeet Publications, New Delhi, p325. 36Ronald Carter and John Mc Rae, The Routledge History of Literature in English, London and New York, 1997, p.205 37 Tim Fulford, “Poetry, Peripheries and Empire” in The Cambridge Companion to British Romantic Poetry ed. James Chandler and Maureen, Cambridge University Press, 2008,pp202 38Robert Burns, “To a Mountain Daisy”, 39 William Blake, “Nurse’s Song”, Songs of Innocence, < https://hellopoetry.com/poem/1004/nurses-song-innocence/> 40 William Blake, “The Echoing Green”, Songs of Innocence, 41 William Wordsworth, “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey”, 42 Ibid

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43 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “The Rime Of the Ancient Mariner” < https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/rime-ancient-mariner > 44 Ibid 45 William.J.Long, opcit, p.410 46 Percy. B. Shelley, “Ode to the West Wind”, Golden Treasury, Oxford University Press, New Delhi,1964, p.295 47 W.H.Hudson, An Outline History of English Literature, A.I.T.B.S. Publishers, New Delhi, 2007,p204-5 48 John Keats, “Ode to a Nightingale” Golden Treasury, Oxford University Press, ,1964, p.249 49Walt Whitman, Song of Myself : 1892 version, < https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45477/song-of-myself-1892-version> 50 Walt Whitman 51Ezra Greenspan, “ The Cambridge Companion to Walt Whitman, Cambridge University Press, p89 52 Emily Dickinson, The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, “Nature” ed. Thomas.H.Johnson, Little Brown and Company, Boston, 1924, p.385 53 Reginald.L.Cook, “The critics and Robert Frost” Frost Centennial Essay, University Press of Missippi, Jackson,1974, p.30

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CHAPTER THREE

THE STRATEGY OF BINARY OPPOSITES IN POETRY: A HISTORICAL SURVEY

“Without contraries is no progression”1

William Blake

The statement hints at something very prominent in nature, the binaries which form an integral part of the world we live in. Things whether animate or inanimate exist in pairs. Binaries permeate at various levels of perception and deception, as the presence of something is usually realised by the absence of the other. There are opposites like the body and the soul, male and female, true and false, and black and white, which hardly have an independent existence. They are often defined by comparing them with their respective antonyms. Blake’s statement asserts the fact that contraries are essential for life to progress. This dual nature of the world has inspired poets of all times and ages. Thus we can say that the history of binary oppositions is not something very new. Writers, philosophers and poets have been using this device to rediscover the force which governs nature and art in one way or the other.

In the poetry of the metaphysical poet, John Donne (1572-1637), one finds an abundant use of metaphysical conceits. These conceits are marked by the unusual comparisons between two things which have prima facie nothing in common. T.J. Bachus says :

John Donne…was declared by Dryden to be the greatest of English wits. He was a representative of the highest type of the extravagances of his age. His ideal of poetical composition was fulfilled by clothing every thought in a series of analogies, always remote, often repulsive and inappropriate. His versification is singularly harsh and tuneless, and the crudeness of his expression is in unpleasant contrast with the ingenuity of his thinking.2

His poems are known for their abrupt beginnings and extraordinary use of conceits. In “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning”3 he has used the image of a compass to show the difference of emotions between him and his beloved. He says that his beloved is the fixed leg of a compass whereas he is the moving counterpart. He moves all around her, just to make a full circle and to come back. There is a union in this sense of wandering.

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The lover wanders to revert to its origin. But this union emerges out of the binaries which is conveyed by the image of the “twin compass”, of which one end is fixed while the other keeps moving. The lines containing binary words are mentioned below:

Thy soule fix’d foot, makes no show

To move, but doth, if th’ other doe

And though it in the centre sit,

Yet when the other far doth roam

It leans, and hearkens after it,

And grows erect as it comes home.

And makes me end where I begunne.

The binary pair of words in the above poem include:

Move Fixed Sit Roam Leans Erect End Begun

In “The Sunne Rising” he compares his beloved to the Indian spices and also uses hyperbolic statements like, “She is all states and all princes I”. Comparison of her beauty to Indian spices, her eyes to the sun and love to princely states, underscores Donne’s preoccupation with paradoxes and conceits. They have nothing in common, but in the world of the poet, all walls crumble to pave way for conceits. According to a critic,

His vision of a mystical coherence in all experience leads one to believe that Donne was primarily interested in making a study in contrast and that the subjects fascinated him only for their being mutually antithetical. But the qualities of contrariness and anti-thesis served him only as a handle to set in motion, mystical mechanisms of his mind which revealed to him a natural coherence in all experience.4

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This statement is true of the poetry of Donne who uses contrast to portray uniformity or homogeneity. There is binary in this thought which reveals sameness with the help of opposites, like the two legs of the compass which do not meet, yet they make a perfect circle which symbolises love without a beginning and end, a uniform, complete circle. For example:

Thy beams, so reverend, and strong

I could eclipse and cloud them with a winke

If her eyes have not blinded thine

Look and tomorrow late tell mee

Ask for those kings whom thou saw’st yesterday

All honor’s mimicque

This bed thy center is, these walls thy sphere.

The list is as follows:

Beam Eclipse

Eyes Blind

Tomorrow Yesterday

Honour Mimic

Center Sphere

In poems like, “Canonization” the main conceit lies in the title which has religious connotations yet the poem talks about love. Love in Donne’s poetry is a physiological fact, susceptible of all kinds of metaphysical interpretations; his love verses are abstruse alternations between

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the fact and its metaphysical renderings; and that element in which most love poets dwell, the exquisite intermediate psychology, is all but wholly omitted.5 In “Canonization”, he also uses the conceit of the Phoenix riddle and states that just like a Phoenix which is born out of its own ashes, lovers too, are reborn with death because their love transcends the barriers of time and death. “All sense of duality disappeared because ‘thou’ and ‘I’ merged into one common entity and the true lovers could claim with some justification”6 : The Phoenix riddle hath more wit

By us, we two being one, are it.

The journey from “two” to “one”, once again confirms the uniformity which Donne highlights by his use of conceits and contrasts. Binaries appear in the following lines :

With wealth your state, your minde with Arts improve

Or the Kings reall, or his stamped face

Call her one, mee another flye

We are Tapers too, and at our own costs die.

And wee in us find the Eagle and the Dove

We can dye by it, if not live by Love

You to whom love was peace, that now is rage

By us, we two being one, are it

The list of binary opposite words in the poem are :

Wealth Arts

Real Stamped

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Fly Taper

Eagle Dove

Die Live

Peace Rage

Two One

“Andrew Marvell is as great a poet as Donne and Herbert, but remains a party-of-one, an original creator without English literary antecedents, and no affiliation to the metaphysicals,”7 says Harold Bloom. Andrew Marvell (1621-1678), remains an equally popular name after Donne, who made an extensive use of satire and conceits in his poems. Bloom further says that Marvell is “an unclassifiable poet, (who) has nothing in him of Donne or of Herbert...and is an unique poet, without precursors in English...Marvell matches Donne in variety and has also a rich strangeness entirely unique to him.”8Indeed, Marvell’s “rich strangeness” is entirely unique to him, yet his use of metaphysical conceits places him in the category of Donne and Herbert. One of his famous poems, “To his Coy Mistress”, is a carpe diem poem which deals with the age old theme of the brevity of life. But the poet gives it a new colour when he asserts that though life is short but man can overcome its brevity with the help of his passions. It is a combination of two contradictory emotions: levity and classical elegance soaked in paradoxes and conceits. The poet compares himself and his beloved to “amorous birds of prey” who are full of energy. When these birds mate in the air, they conjoin themselves like a circle or ball. The ball symbolises perfection in the poem. The poet desires a similar perfection and completeness where the lovers would defeat time by being like that ball, perfect and complete. The poet knows the fact that time never stops for anyone, but he still hopes that in the lover’s microcosm world, love shall transcend all boundaries. William Blake (1757-1827), wrote in his famous book, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, that, “Without contraries is no progression. Attraction and repulsion, reason and energy, love and hate are necessary to human existence. From these contraries spring what the religious call Good and Evil. Good is the passive that obeys Reason. Evil is

49 the active springing from Energy. Good is Heaven. Evil is Hell”9. This predominance of evil and good, heaven and hell forms the essential line of difference between the Songs of Innocence and the Songs of Experience. In these two volumes, we find a unique use of symbols like the rose, urizen, night, lamb, tiger, etc. These symbols are peculiar to Blake since they are not universal but personal symbols. Most of the symbols used in Songs of Innocence have their opposite in the Songs of Experience, as for example, the Lamb and the Tyger. One could easily differentiate between the worlds of Innocence and Experience by the titles of the poems and the symbols employed by Blake. Songs of Innocence is replete with the fragrance of wreathes and flowers whereas in its counterpart artificial incense is found. In the former, themes of freedom, childhood games, shepherds, dew, spring, wild birds, green grasslands etc. are found. Tigers, chains, wolves, roses with thorns, nets, cages, arrows, cankers, worms etc. form the symbols in the latter. Likewise, the Songs of Innocence are introduced by a Piper, who has absolutely no experience of the world and lives for the moment whereas the Songs of Experience are introduced by a Bard, who “present, past and future sees”10. The innocent Piper stands in a sharp contrast to the Bard, who has an experience of the ‘Holy World’.

Some poems in both the books have same titles, for example, “Holy Thursday”, “Nurse’s Song”, “The Chimney Sweepers” etc. Despite having same titles, the thrust of the poems varies. In the “Nurse’s Song” in the Songs of Innocence, the nurse calls the children inside their homes, because evening is approaching. But the children are happy in their own games and seek some more time. The nurse happily allows them to play till the “light fades away”. There is innocence and beauty in the attitude of both the nurse and the children. The nurse is happy to see the children playing with their friends. On the contrary, in the “Nurse’s Song” in the Songs of Experience, as the nurse watches the children playing outside, she gets jealous. She is reminded of her own age and her face grows, “green and pale”. Finally she cries in abhorrence:

Your spring and your day are wasted in play

And your winter and night in disgust

The attitudes of the nurses in both the poems are sharply contrasted. In the former, the hills echo with children’s laughter and everything around them seems happy and contented whereas in the latter, the children are seen “whispering” among themselves.

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A similar contrast is found in “The Chimney Sweeper” which like the “Nurse’s Song” appears in both the books with the same title. The chimney sweeper in the Songs of Innocence, is unaware of the hell in which he is forced to work. He was sold by his own father to work as a sweep, but the innocent child does not realise the tragedy of his life. He knows that his work is worship and “if all do their duty, they need not feel harm”11. On the other hand, the chimney sweeper in the Songs of Experience, cries in misery. He knows that his life is full of darkness and soot. He blames his parents, the society and Church for his condition. Once again we see the difference between both the poems with same titles but binary themes. The chimney sweeper in the former poem has a hope that things will be fine and this hope arises from his faith in God. On the other hand, the chimney sweeper in the latter poem is disillusioned who believes that God “makes up a heaven of our misery”12

The poems in the Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience are not only contrasted against one another but there are binaries within them. Let us take the example of the poem, “The Tyger”. One can see how the tone of the poem suddenly changes into something very opposite in the last two lines. As the poem begins, the poet is full of praise for the Creator whose creation is so symmetrical and beautiful. The poem appears as if it is a hymn in praise of the all powerful God who created an animal so ferocious and beautiful at the same time. But these praiseworthy statements are suddenly contrasted when Blake questions:

Did He who made the Lamb

made thee?13

It seems as if the poet had been singing praises of God willingly, to reach this desired conclusion, where he would juxtapose the meek lamb with the awesome tiger. Blake’s question stirs man’s faith to the extent that one is bound to think that how could the Creator be so indifferent to His own creation? How could He create an animal, so gentle, modest and passive like the Lamb and a beast as fierce and barbaric like the tiger, eventually to feed on the lamb. The poet, however, does not seem to appreciate the idea of diversity or the law of the jungle where the strong preys on the weak but he is rather unhappy over the bias. His statement not only hints at his dissatisfaction but also confirms his earlier belief that evil is dominant in a world where good aspires to

51 dwell. Once again it becomes clear that things always have their binary or opposite around them; one needs to be sensitive to identify them :

In such a dualistic world, Blake does not encourage us to remain innocent, however. In his later writings, most notably in “The Book of Thel”, Blake suggests that naive innocence must of necessity pass through and assimilate the opposite state of experience and reach the third state called “organised innocence” which comprehends but transcends the first two states, if one is to arrive at perfection.14

The reference to perfection and the “organised innocence” brings him closer to Hegel’s philosophy of duality, where opposites combine to create a perfect whole. Perhaps this perfection can be achieved in the poet’s imagination. Blake’s poems are full of such symbols and examples which come under the category of binaries:

They laugh at our play (The Echoing Green)

Are ready for rest (The Echoing Green)

When we all girls and boys (The Echoing Green)

Among the old folk (The Echoing Green)

In our youth time were seen (The Echoing Green)

From the morn to the evening he strays (The Shepherd)

But I am black, as if bereaved of light (The Little Black Boy)

All round my golden tent like lambs rejoice (The Little Black Boy)

And I am black, but Oh! My soul is white (The Little Black Boy)

All flowers and trees and beasts and men receive. (The Little Black Boy)

Sound the flute (Spring)

Now its mute (Spring)

Day and Night (Spring)

Tho’ the morning was cold, Tom was happy and warm (The Chimney Sweeper)

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Can I see another’s grief? (On another’s sorrow)

He doth give his joy to all. (On another’s sorrow)

The Little Boy found (The Little Boy Found)

The Little Boy lost in the lonely fern (The Little Boy found)

Who Present, Past and Future sees. (Introduction)

Your spring and your day are wasted in play (Nurse’s Song)

And your winter and night in disguise. (Nurse’s Song)

If I live (The Fly)

Or if I die (The Fly)

Then let Lyca wake (The Little girl Lost)

If my mother sleep (The Little girl Lost)

And build’s a Heaven in Hell’s despair. (The Clod and the Pebble)

So sung a little Clod of Clay (The Clod and the Pebble)

But a Pebble of the Brook (The Clod and the Pebble)

I was angry with my friend. (The Poison Tree)

My foe outstretched beneath the tree. (The Poison Tree)

That so many sweet flower bore (The Garden of Love)

And binding with briars my joys and desires (The Garden of Love)

The Sun does arise, (The Echoing Green)

The sun does descend (The Echoing Green)

To the bells’ cheerful sound (The Echoing Green)

Till the little ones, weary (The Echoing Green)

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The list is as follows:

Old Youth Play Rest Girls Boys Rejoice Bereaved Beast Man Cold Warm Present Past Wake Sleep Heaven Hell Flower Briar Morn Evening Laugh Cry Spring Winter Live Die Clod Pebble Friend Foe Black White Day Night Sound Mute Joy Grief Lost Found Arise Descend Cheerful Weary

Man’s mortality and its contrariness to Nature’s eternity is a common theme for the Romantic poets. In the poetry of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries one finds themes where life is placed against death, death against rebirth, and permanence against change. This thematic binary is summed up in the poem of Lord Alfred Tennyson, whose Brook sings the song of its eternity against man’s temporal existence:

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For men may come and men may go

But I go on forever.15

“I” here refers to the Brook but actually it alludes to Nature which never dies but changes forms. The brook continues to flow in order to meet the sea. The meeting may diminish the existence of the brook but it will always be there in the water of the sea in some way or the other.

When Percy. B. Shelley wrote, “Ode to the West Wind”16 in 1819, the entire generation of readers waited in anticipation for the prophetic words to disperse and watched in awe as the words cast their spell over them. The message of humanity and hope reached everyone as the fire in the poets’s heart rekindled the ashes in the hearts of the readers. His final announcement to the world brought the chaos to an end:

“If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?”17

“Ode to the West Wind” like all other odes, begins with the invocation of the subject- the West Wind. In the poem, the West Wind is the centre of all praise and appeal, it is the charioteer which drives the dead leaves until the “azure sister of spring” blows. This may be the reference to the East Wind or the one which blows in spring unlike the West Wind which blows in autumn. The colours mentioned in the first stanza like, yellow, black, pale and hectic red symbolise death whereas the reference to the east wind contrasts the colours of death with “living hues and odours plain and hill”18. Amidst the very visible binaries between the east and the west winds, spring and autumn, yellow and green, a major binary appears. The West Wind is described both as a destroyer and as a preserver : Destroyer as it takes away all the dead leaves which had been sticking to the branches and preserver because it also becomes a carrier of seeds which shall be buried under the soil and will be reborn in spring. Thus he alludes to the fact that to every end a new beginning always awaits. Once again, “tameless, swift and proud”19 wind, is contrasted against the life of the poet who is nearing his end. The wind shall always remain mightier but the poet is afflicted by the ravages of age and time. Finally the poem ends at a positive note where the poet is hopeful of a new beginning:

“If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?”

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The meaning of the line emerges from the binary opposition between spring and winter. The entire poem is based upon the interplay of binaries, where seasons are contrasted and death and rebirth are placed against the mortality of man. The lines containing binaries are as follows:

If Winter comes can Spring be Far behind?

Thou on whose stream, mid the steep sky's commotion

Loose clouds like earth's decaying leaves are shed

Destroyer and preserver; hear, oh hear!

Thou who didst waken from his summer dreams And saw in sleep old palaces and towers

Of the horizon to the zenith's height,

Shook from the tangled boughs of Heaven and Ocean

All overgrown with azure moss and flowers

The impulse of thy strength, only less free A heavy weight of hours has chain'd and bow'd

Like wither'd leaves to quicken a new birth!

Drive my dead thoughts over the universe.

The list is as follows: Winter Spring Earth Sky Destroyer Preserver Sleep Waken Heaven Ocean

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Zenith Horizon Moss Flowers Chained Free Birth Dead

John Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn”20 is a perfect example of binaries which affirm art’s eternity against man’s life which is time bound. The Urn in the poem becomes a symbol of art which has surpassed the limitations of time and death. The people carved on the urn or the artist who carved them may have died long ago but the urn is there to narrate the history of the past. Jack Stillinger comments:

On the painted surface of one side of the urn (the subject of stanzas 2–3), the piper’s melodies are imagined to be “unheard” and therefore “sweeter”; the piper never tires; the lovers, pursuing and pursued, never age or lose their beauty (“She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss, / Forever wilt thou love, and she be fair!”); the “happy” trees never shed their leaves (it is eternal “spring”). Everything is “far above” the “breathing ... passion” of living humans, who are subject to “a heart high-sorrowful and cloy’d, / A burning forehead, and a parching tongue.” On the other side of the urn (stanza 4), a sacrificial procession of “mysterious priest,” lowing heifer, and townsfolk is stopped forever on the way to some “green altar”; they will neither reach their destination nor go back to their “little town” (though the heifer will never reach the altar, and the people, like the lovers, will not age or die). This is different from the process of life in the real (the poet’s) world.21

This highlights the huge point of difference between the life of man and life of ‘art’. The urn belongs to the latter category which is not subject to decay. However, it can be a boon and a bane at the same time. The timeless quality of the inscription on the urn can also be a reminder that things drawn there will not change. The piper will always be playing the pipe, the lovers will forever be trapped in one state of expression and the trees will never be bare and hence will never experience the beauty of autumn or winter. For them it will be spring always. Thus it can be concluded that Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” is a perfect example of binary oppositions which demarcates the difference between the mortality of man and immortality of art :

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What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard Are sweeter;

When old age shall this generation waste, or ever young;

Of deities or mortals, or of both,

Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought As doth eternity

For ever warm and still to be enjoy'd,

Cold Pastoral!

A list of binary words in the poem is as follows:

Man Gods Heard Unheard Young Old Warm Cold New Old Eternity Mortal

In “Ode to a Nightingale”22 Keats plays upon the binaries like appearance and deception, imagination and reality, life and death, pain and pleasure, freedom and bondage, and permanence and change. The song of the “immortal bird” drags the poet out of his sleep and brings him to a half waking situation where he is standing between unconsciousness and consciousness, life and death. The bird is not immortal but its song makes it so. The song hurls the poet into a “drowsy numbness”23 and compels him to question whether he “wakes or sleep?” The condition between waking and sleep

58 hints at the subconscious state of existence where the song of the bird exists. The nightingale may be a figment of his imagination or may be a reality but Keats’s words do not bring out the truth. The binary between the reality visible to the naked eye and the invisible nightingale forms the crux of the verse.

Fled is that music:—Do I wake or sleep? Was it a vision, or a waking dream?

Here, where men sit and hear each other groan

Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain—

Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains O for a beaker full of the warm South,

But being too happy in thine

Where but to think is to be full of sorrow happiness,—

The weariness, the fever, and the fret

But being too happy in thine happiness,—

The list of binary words in the poem is as follows :

Wake Sleep Vision Waking Dream Emptied Full Sing Groan Happy Sorrow Happiness Weariness

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By the mid of nineteenth century the Romantic age was nearing its end and it was marked by the gradual decline in man’s religious faith. The publication of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859) challenged man’s conviction. It gave scientific explanations to most of the occurrences in nature and the evolution of man. Precisely known as the Victorian age, the later nineteenth century witnessed spiritual crisis and chaos. This wind of change mostly affected writers and poets who were the sensitive and educated lot. This is visible in the poetry of Matthew Arnold, Lord Alfred Tennyson and Robert Browning, to name only a few. In Arnold’s “Dover Beach”24 the receding sea waves symbolise man’s weakening belief in the ‘sea of faith’. There is a pervading sense of serenity in the verse. The calmness of the sea, the description of the receding waves, the moon blanched land echoes with silence and peace:

The sea is calm to-night

The tide is full, the moon lies fair

Upon the straits; - on the French coast the light

Gleams and is gone.25

But as the poem reaches the last two lines, the mood and tone is completely changed. From a surreal world of romance one is suddenly thrown into the present day where “ignorant armies clash by night”26. Arnold’s world is a world of ‘make belief’ where the land meets the sea amidst promises made by lovers. The reader is amused by the picturesque description of the sea waves but the tranquillity is juxtaposed with the sudden reference to war zones and armies. This contrast between the serenity of the seascape and chaos highlights the trauma and tragedy of the age where man is trapped between religion and modernity.

Begin, and cease, and then again begin,

Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

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Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;

List of the binary opposite words is as follows:

Begin Cease Sea Land Joy Pain

Like William Blake, W.B. Yeats too, uses symbols peculiar to him. His symbols are not universal but personal ones. In many of his poems one can find use of symbols like Roses, Stones, Gyres, Mythological figures, Water and imaginary places like Byzantium and Innisfree. “The contrast between the colonised and the coloniser, between Ireland and the British Empire, the dominated and the dominant further underscores the crisis in contemporary society depicted in the poetry of W.B. Yeats”27 says Mozumder. In him one witnesses a lost soul who wanders in the wilderness of the city to search for an ideal place to live in. He loved contrasting the past with the present, the ancient with the modern, the moving with the static, youth and age, body and soul, being and becoming, and the dancer and the dance. Though Yeats is a modern poet, he had the soul of the bygone era. His poems celebrate the glorious past of Ireland, which he always missed. This innate desire in him for perfection and peace is seen in poems like “Lake Isle of Innisfree” and “Wild Swans at Coole” etc. The scenic description of Innisfree seems similar to Thoreau’s Walden. The poet’s heart is sick of the city life and he wishes for an escape to a place where he would stay in ‘a mud house with bee hives and flowers shedding dew drops, amidst the song of the cricket’. The poem begins with a sudden statement : “I will arise and go now”28, which suggests that the poet is in a hurry to leave his present state and occupation and reach his ideal dwelling place. This stands in a sharp contrast to the first line of the second stanza, where, “peace comes dropping slow”29. The hurried anxiety in the poet is contrasted with the slow dropping of the dew drops in the lines. Also, the pervading sense of tranquillity in the poem is shaken by the introduction of the present in the last two lines.

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From Innisfree one is pulled into a busy world of traffic jams and pavements, full of people. Yeats created a perfect place for modern man’s escape in the form of the imaginary city of Innisfree. He establishes a contrast between today’s busy world and the busy world of bees, both sounding similar but diametrically opposite to one another. When the poet stands amidst a, “roadway or on the pavement grey”30 his heart misses the serenity of Innisfree. The lines containing binaries are :

There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,

I will arise and go now, for always night and day

Here are the binary pairs of words:

Midnight Noon Night Day

In “Wild Swans at Coole”31, the poet establishes a contrast between the life of swans and human beings, and also hints at the difference between their ways of life. On a beautiful autumn day when the poet visits a place where he used to go long ago, he is taken aback by memories. He imagines and relives all the gone years in a few moments. The swans used to come to the place with their mates and the poet had been observing their companionship, love and youth for a very long time. He would come to watch them, “paddle in the cold companionable streams or climb the air”. But this time his heart grew sore. David Ross asserts: “Yeats counts 59 swans upon the lake, and he cannot but reflect that it has been 19 years since he first made his count: thus opens the poem’s movement of elegiac retrospection.”32Though he was nineteen, still he felt that he was wearied of life and its responsibilities. Perhaps life had taken away his youth much before time and the swans were still youthful and beautiful. They had not changed over the years unlike the poet. Their beauty and mysterious youth transcended the barriers of time and age. Finally the poet concludes that perhaps it is because, “their hearts have not grown old”. The contrast in the lives of these swans and the life of the poet forms the central theme of the poem. Unlike the poet, the swans lived for the moment and enjoyed life to the brim. The binaries emerge from the fact that both the creatures had been experiencing joy and warmth at Coole but their approaches change with time. The swans remain the same even after the passage of many years whereas

62 the poet’s life has completely changed. He no longer derives happiness from their joy, but is concerned about the transitoriness of things and also of this experience. Man cannot live for the moment because he is trapped in a web of culture, tradition and family whereas the swans lived for the moment because perhaps they had no memory to lament and no hopes for the future.

Like Yeats, T.S.Eliot too, has used a number of binary opposites at the level of language and theme. “The Wasteland” is a perfect example which portrays a long list of contraries like Fertility/Sterility, Life/Death, Past/Present, Love/Lust, Silence/Speech etc. To highlight the fragmented and disjointed society of the twentieth century, he adopts a style which itself uses fragmented sentences and thoughts to mirror the crisis. This style very much symbolises the existential problem of the modern man. Eliot’s contrast between life and death demonstrates that the people of Wasteland are more fascinated with sterility, lust and death, than with fertility, love or life. Life is actually lifeless for them; they survive for the sake of survival. According to Cleanth Brooks, “Life devoid of meaning is death; sacrifice, even the sacrificial death, may be life giving, an awakening to life”33

Water is a universal symbol of life and rebirth but in the Wasteland, the Phoenician sailor dies by drowning in water and the London Bridge falls in water. Thus, ‘water’ in the Wasteland symbolises death. Like water, the opening lines of the poem contain words like, ‘memory’, ‘desire’, ‘dull roots’, ‘spring rain’, which suggest binaries. Gabrielle McIntire remarks : Eliot’s terms forcefully conjoin the incommensurate temporal pulls of memory and desire while highlighting the “cruel[ty]” of such a mixing: memory is intrinsically backward looking – it casts its gaze to what is sealed off “in time,” even as it insists that the rules of temporality and closure are unpredictable – while desire pushes to the future for its realization. In Eliot’s poem, “April is the cruellest month” because it links what are otherwise potently disparate (birth and death, “Memory and desire,” “dull roots” and “spring rain”) through a sudden revolution of the earth’s cycles.”34 Eliot’s use of binaries and their realisation by the reader is difficult since his technique is very complicated. The paradoxes, binaries or antinomies used by him, though borrowed from nature and human nature, they never fail to shock the reader instead of surprising them. In, “The Hollow Men”, the repetition of the words, “Hollow/Stuffed” suggests

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the binary levels on which the poem operates. According to S. Mozumder, “This duality of human mind creates a crisis in society and gradually leads it to the dissection of its bond. In the fifth part of the poem the poet shows the opposition between ‘idea/reality, ‘motion/act’, ‘conception/creation’, ‘emotion/response’, ‘desire/spasm’, ‘potency/existence’ and ‘essence/descent’...35

While talking about a philosophy where opposites collide to give meaning to absolute wholes, the poetry of Walt Whitman cannot be overlooked. His philosophy of dualism which emerged out of his inspiration from the Transcendentalists gave way to his masterpieces soaked in binary oppositions and paradoxes. In “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”36, he discusses the past, present and future of America with the to and fro motion of the ferry. Each traveller who crosses the river has his own point of view regarding the journey but according to the poet there is a symmetry in their thoughts. Thus, once again it is seen that there is uniformity in contradiction:

The impalpable sustenance of me from all things at all hours of the day

The simple, compact, well joined scheme, myself disintegrated, everyone disintegrated yet part of the scheme.

Lines highlighting the binaries in the poem are as follows:

Crowds of men and women attired in the usual costumes, how curious you are to me!

The simple, compact, well-join’d scheme, myself disintegrated, every one disintegrated yet part of the scheme, The similitudes of the past and those of the future, Others will see the islands large and small;

Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky, so I felt,

In the day among crowds of people sometimes they came upon me, In my walks home late at night or as I lay in my bed they came upon me

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Live, old life! play the part that looks back on the actor or actress! Play the old role, the role that is great or small according as one makes it!

Throb, baffled and curious brain! throw out questions and answers!

The list of binary opposite words in the poem is:

Men Women

Joined Disintegrated

Past Future

Large Small

River Sky

Day Night

Actor Actress

Questions Answers

Great Small

In another very evocative poem, “Out of the Cradle endlessly rocking”37, Whitman uses the sea as a symbol of death which keeps on rocking the cradle of life. The endless process of birth and death marks the central theme of the poem. The word “cradle” evokes images of baby or birth, and the word “endless” in the title suggests something eternal. Thus, the title as a whole implies the endless process of birth. However, on the contrary the poem is about death and how the death of something may result in the birth of something else.

Out of the endless movement of the sea waves, the poet is reminded of a lost childhood memory. He remembers how as a child he was affected by the death of a bird and the song of its mate stirred his inner self to an extent that he started identifying himself with it. The song of the bird transcended barriers of life, death and language. Once

65 again Whitman explores his philosophy of dualism through examples like life, death and after life. The death of the bird causes the birth of a poet. The sea which rocks the cradle of death, becomes a witness to his birth. The lines having binaries are quoted below :

Down from the shower’d halo, Up from the mystic play of shadows

From your memories sad brother, from the fitful risings and fallings I heard, A man, yet by these tears a little boy again,

I, chanter of pains and joys, uniter of here and hereafter,

Winds blow south, or winds blow north, Day come white, or night come black, And every day the he-bird to and fro near at hand, And every day the she-bird crouch’d on her nest, silent, with bright eyes, O madly the sea pushes upon the land,

Silent, avoiding the moonbeams, blending myself with the shadows, Recalling now the obscure shapes, the echoes, the sounds and sights after their sorts,

High and clear I shoot my voice over the waves, Low-hanging moon! Delaying not, hurrying not,

I, chanter of pains and joys, uniter of here and hereafter

The list of the binary opposite words is as follows :

Up Down Risings Fallings Man Little Boy Pains Joys

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Here Hereafter He-bird She-bird South North

Day Night Sound Silent

Black White

High Low Land Sea Delaying Hurrying

Thus it can be seen that the history of binary opposites in poetry is not something new. Poets belonging to different ages and nationalities had been using this device, either in the form of conceits like Donne and Marvell, or in the form of paradoxes and juxtapositions like Blake. Poets like Keats, Shelley, Yeats and Eliot used symbols to express this and others like Arnold and Whitman presented the duality in their own solemn and subtle ways using Nature as a metaphor. Whatever the theme or inspiration may be, the strategy of binary opposition in poetry kept inspiring poets from centuries and still continues to do so, thus affirming that things can be explained in a better way by referring to what they are not or by comparing or contrasting them with their opposites.

1 Willaim Blake, Wikipedia 2 T.J.Backus, John Donne: The Critical Heritage, ed. A.J.Smith, Routledge, 1996, New York, p.25 3 John Donne, “ Valediction : Forbidding Mourning” Poetry Foundation 4 Masood ul Hasan, Donne’s Imagery, Faculty of Arts, Muslim University, Aligarh, 1957-58, p.85. 5 John Donne: The Critical Heritage, ed. A.J.Smith, Routledge, 1996, New York,

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6 Ibid, pp5 7 Harold Bloom, John Donne and the Metaphysical Poets, Bloom’s Literary Criticism, p.xv 8 Ibid 9 Willaim Blake, Wikipedia 10 S. Sen, Songs of Innocence and of Experience- A Critical Evaluation, Unique Publishers, Noida, p.89 11 William Blake “The Chimney Sweeper”, Songs of Innocence, 12William Blake, “The Chimney Sweeper”, Songs of Experience, 13 Ibid, p.103 14 Chung-hsuan Tung, “Blake’s Dialectical Vision”, in Journal of The College of Liberal Arts, Vol27, June 1997, p.193 15 Alfred Tennyson, “Brook”, Poetry Foundation < https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-brook-2/> 16 Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Ode to the West Wind”, Fifteen Poets, Oxford University Press, p 339 17 Ibid 18 Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Ode to the West Wind”, Fifteen Poets, Oxford University Press, p. 339 19 Ibid 20 John Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn”, Bartleby, 21 Jack Stillinger, “The story of Keats”, John Keats, ed. Harold Bloom, Chelsea House Publishers, New York, 2007, p.220 22 John Keats, “Ode to a Nightingale”, Fifteen Poets, Oxford University Press,p.359 23 Ibid 24 Matthew Arnold, “Dover Beach”, Fifteen Poets, Oxford University Press, p483 25 Ibid

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26Ibid 27 Subrata Chandra Mozumder, “The Theme of Crisis in the Poetry of Yeats and Eliot” Journal, Vol4, 2013, Metropolitan University, p.67 28W.B. Yeats, “Lake Isle of Innisfree” Poetry Foundation 29 Ibid 30 Ibid 31 W.B.Yeats, “Wild Swans at Coole”, Poetry Foundation < https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43288/the-wild-swans-at-coole> 32 David.A.Ross, A Critical Companion to William Butler Yeats, p.287 33 Cleanth Brooks, “The Wasteland: Critique of the Myth”, T.S.Eliot: The Wasteland, ed. C.B.Cox and Arnold.P.Hinchliffe. Macmillan, London, p.129. 34 Gabrielle McIntire, Modernism, Memory and Desire : T.S.Eliot and Virginia Woolf, Cambridge University Press,New York, 2008, p.2 35 Subrata Chandra Mozumder, “The Theme of Crisis in the Poetry of Yeats and Eliot” Journal, Vol4, 2013, Metropolitan University, p.75 36 Walt Whitman, “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” Poetry.org 37 Walt Whitman,Poetry.org “Out of the Cradle endlessly Rocking”,

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CHAPTER FOUR

THE STRATEGY OF BINARY OPPOSITES IN FROST’S EARLY POETRY

(1913-1928)

Poetry begins in trivial metaphors, pretty metaphors, "grace" metaphors, and goes on to the profoundest thinking that we have. Poetry provides the one permissible way of saying one thing and meaning another. People say, "Why don’t you say what you mean?" We never do that, do we, being all of us too much poets. We like to talk in parables and in hints and in indirections — whether from diffidence or some other instinct. 1

The above statement made by Frost in his Preface to The Collected Poems (1946) underscores his wit and reveals an utmost desire in him to be speculated. He never wanted to be clear about his thoughts and at times, loved being misunderstood. There is duality, visible in his poetry as well as in his life. This is perhaps one reason for which Frost always appears naive to his readers. His poems, reveal layer by layer their inner ‘designs’ and meanings. The reader of Frost’s poems is confused and awestruck at times to discover, what the lines seem and what they meant. The inherent paradoxes found in his poems, sometimes take the veil of metaphors and become less apparent, but they make their presence felt some way or the other in the course of the poems.

His first collection of poetry appeared in 1913, when he was 39. This was quite a late age to begin his career as a poet. But despite many rejections and hardships his heart refused to skip a beat for something other than poetry. The book was entitled A Boy’s Will, and it opened with “Into My Own”2, which was marked by the fearless escape of the poet into the darkness of the trees. Frost seems to be haunted by this desire to be lost and not to be found again:

I should not be withheld but that some day Into their vastness I should steal away, Fearless of ever finding open land, Or highway where the slow wheel pours the sand.3

This desire to be lost in the old and firm trees is counter balanced by his urge to be searched. Though this is not stated in the poem, but there lingers a desire in the poet, to be traced, which can be felt while reading the last two lines :

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Who should miss me here

And long to know if still I held them dear”4.

The element of dualism is visible in the very first poem of his first collection of poems. He desires an escape and yet wishes to be found out, and followed. It ends up being a search for confirmation rather than confusion.

They would not find me changed from him they knew

Only more sure of all I thought was true”.5

Nature is beautiful in all its obscurity and simplicity. Frost’s sense of seeing a duality in things around and within him, give rise to the phenomenon of Binary Oppositions. In “Stars”6 (1913), he paints the picture of the night sky, where ‘Stars’ ‘congregate’ in the sky in infinity. The stars unlike human beings are devoid of emotions. The most apparent binaries in the poem are “Love” and “Hate”, which appear without much effort but in the last line there is an another set of binaries. The word “eyes” has been used in opposition to the phrase, “without the gift of sight”7. The stars appear as if they are looking at the human affairs from the far away heavens. But according to the poet, man cannot depend upon the stars for assistance or prediction of future (reference to ancient art of fortune telling), because the stars are cold. They lack humanistic qualities like “love” or “hate”. Thus the contradictions lie between the world of humans and the world of stars.

Just like the previous poem, “Storm Fear” too talks about the contrast between man and elements of nature. In “Stars” the stars were depicted as inhuman stones deprived of emotions, indifferent to man’s existence or problems. In “Storm Fear”8 too, the speaker fears an approaching storm but later questions the storm’s willingness to harm him. The poet imagines that why would the storm, which is much mightier than him, like to destroy a family of three. He doubts why it would even bother, to destroy powerless, unaided people only to deprive them to death.

And my heart owns a doubt

Whether’ tis in us to arise with day

And save ourselves unaided9

The mighty storm calls them out, but the speaker’s family refuses to go, because they know that man cannot withstand the wrath of nature. Thus man’s powerlessness is

71 juxtaposed with nature’s power. There is a binary between the storm within the four walls of the house, and the storm without.

How the cold creeps in as the fire dies at length.

It is to be noted that the word, “cold” has been purposely used in contrast to the reference of “fire”, which heightens the contrast in the verse.

The poet in, “The Vantage Point”10 (1913), expresses his desire to turn towards “mankind” since he had been occupied with the “trees”. He uses the word “Trees” suggesting that he has been influenced with Nature for a very long time and hence desires an escape. He looks around and notices grasslands, lawn, huge Juniper tree and the graveyard. But by the evening, he could not withstand his desire to seek mankind because there was always, “the sun-burned hillside”11 and the smell of the earth, which provided him solace in the end. The poem begins with his desire to explore or to return back to society but it ends with his ultimate redemption in the world of nature as he would always cherish, looking, “into the crater of the ant”12. The entire theme of the poem is built on a sense of contrast where the poet seeks for a refuge from Nature into the world of men, but ends up seeking for Nature again.

The next poem, “Going for Water”13 describes an evening when the speaker along with his sister, ran towards a nearby brook in search of water. The journey from their home to the brook was adventurous but scary at the same time. It was autumn and the leaves had fallen on the ground, leaving the trees leafless. The entire atmosphere was full of bleakness:

The barren boughs without the leaves,

Without the birds, without the breeze.14

The children ran towards the brook and paused in the middle of the woods to listen to some sound coming from an unknown place. And finally conclude that it may be the sound coming from the water. The poem moves between hopelessness and hope. The autumn symbolised death and decay, whereas the brook was symbolic of life. When the children reach the site, they find the brook frozen. Thus the hopelessness in the weather is contrasted with the hope within the children who run, “as if to meet the moon” with love and hope that will surely find the brook.

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In the next poem, “Revelation”15, the poet speculates upon human nature. He says that man reveals bits of his inner self in front of others and thus it deceives them to believe something about the person which may be far different from reality. Thus there lies a thin line difference between reality and illusion. The poem thus deals with the inner and outer self of people, one which they hide from others and one which they reveal. But in the end he warns the readers to be honest and descriptive about their feelings, otherwise they may be subjected to misunderstanding.

In “The Tuft of Flowers”16 (1913), Frost describes men at work and how their sense of isolation can take another form, when they feel one with Nature. The poem begins with the poet entering a field to dry the grass which had been cut by some unknown fellow worker. As the poet does his work, he has a sense of loneliness and imagines,

And I must be, as he had been-alone

“As all must be,” I said within my heart,

“Whether they work together or apart”17

But suddenly his eyes catch the sight of a tall tuft of flowers which had been spared by some unknown companion, who had mowed the grass and left the flowers to bloom in the breeze. The poet’s eyes shine at the sight and he appreciates the idea of leaving the flowers while mowing the grass. It became for him a mode of realisation that the fellow worker whom he had not seen or met, was perhaps as sensitive to nature as he himself is. The thought makes him happy and he immediately changes his perception about work and writes:

“Men work together,” I told him from the heart,

Whether they work together or apart”18

The binaries in the poem, “together” and “apart” suggests a shift of mood, and the final realisation of the farmer poet that no one can be alone because there are people like us whom we may not know, but their presence never lets us feel alone in this wide universe. Thus there is togetherness in being apart, the togetherness of humanity and love.

In an extremely short poem of eight lines, “Now Close the Windows”19 (1913), the poet urges the readers to close the windows because no birds are singing. He asks them not to hear the wind but “see all wind stirred”20, which might refer to the trees which toss with

73 strong winds. The binaries in the poem are the sense of sight and hearing which are used by the poet to refer to the wind.

The next poem, “The Hardwood Groves”21, deals with a common theme of decay and rebirth in nature. The poet is amazed that the same leaves which gave shade on a sunny day, have fallen to become “one texture of faded brown” in autumn. The leaves have two functions, to provide shade when alive and to make fertilizer when dead.

Before the leaves can mount again

To fill the trees with another shade,

They must go down past things coming up.

They must go down into the dark decayed.22

Thus, the contrast becomes clear that they must fall, in order to rise again to life.

The last poem of A Boy’s Will, “Reluctance”23 (1913), has been regarded by critics as a poetic failure. The poet begins by talking about the end of a season but by the end of the poem we realise that he has been talking about the end of love. Man’s reluctance to let go off the things which he loves are portrayed beautifully in this twenty-four line poem. The binaries present in the poem are the act of ‘climbing’ and ‘descending’. The poet says that he climbed the hill and held the view in his sight and descended. There is a contrary desire to leave and the question as to “where” in the poem.

“The heart is still aching to seek

But the feet questions whither”.24

The heart’s desire to travel is juxtaposed with the feet’s anxiety to know the destination. There is a to and fro motion in the poem which is affirmed by the poet’s reluctance to admit the end of Love or a season but finally succumbing to its inevitability.

Ah! When to the heart of man,

Was it ever less than a treason

To go with the drift of things,

To yield with a grace to reason,

And bow and accept the end

Of a love or a season?25

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The book which began with a desire to escape into the dark trees, ends with a “Reluctance” to let go, thus, making a full circle of the sequence in which the poems are arranged. The very next year Frost was ready with another collection of poems, North of Boston (1914), bearing the dedication, “To E.M.F. This Book of People”. This includes some of the best dramatic monologues written by him, representing the unique voice of Frost which was going to make him famous in the years to come. The collection begins with the famous poem, “Mending Wall”, which is perhaps one of his best poems in terms of language, theme and, most importantly, binaries.

In “Mending Wall”26 (1914), the wall as a physical entity underscores the metaphoric overtones which imply two contrasting temperaments in people, who belong to two different generations respectively. The difference apparently visible in the poem is not the difference between tradition and modernism but between tradition and rationalism. Elaine Barry remarks, “The narrator questions the need for a wall at all, since he has an apple orchard and his neighbour pine trees”27 The voice of the young neighbour seems to be the voice of the poet, but Frost, however, does not take any side and the wall does not come down even when the poem ends. The binary words in the poem may not appear as binaries but their inherent applicability is to the contrariness they carry, e.g. “Love” and “Wall”. Love, suggests a boundless emotion, which is free from worldly ties, whereas “Wall” means a barrier. The old neighbour seemed to be occupied by the idea of “Good Fences make good neighbours” and the young neighbour is suspiciously behind his ‘self- created’ idea that “Something there is which doesn’t love a wall”28. Both of them do not come out of their self-made barriers to understand the other.

In the next poem, “The Mountain”29, the binaries are not very apparent, except for the fact that, the brook on the top of the mountain, “is cold in summer and warm in winter”30. The poet gives an unusual description of a brook, which nobody ever saw but only anticipated its existence. The description of the brook by an old man who lived near the mountain, took the poet by surprise. He wanted to reach the top of the mystic mountain to experience and see the strange natural phenomenon of the brook.

The poem begins with the description of the mighty mountain which held the “town in a shadow” but later when the poet enquires about the town to the old man, he replies:

There is no village- only scattered farms”31

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This made the poet realise that things might appear different from a distance but when one comes near, they are exactly the opposite. The poet visited the place to climb the mountain, but the old man’s description of the trek, convinced him that one cannot reach the top of the mountain. The binary existed on two levels, one between reality and expectation and the other between reality and culture. The farmer did not know the reality behind the spring on the top of the mountain, but his belief was rooted in his culture which compelled him to believe on something he never saw. On the other hand the poet’s perception about the mountain from a distance, was very different from reality. His description about the mysterious stream was so powerful that the poet who himself was an educated and rational person, quits his trekking plans.

The next poem, “Home Burial”32, in many aspects is similar to “The Death of the Hired man” and also to “The West Running Brook”, where a conversation occurs between a married couple. Home Burial’s theme and subject matter is much more grotesque as compared to the other poems. The poem is about a couple who lost their son recently, and are depressed in their own different ways. The wife is too engrossed in her thoughts to notice her husband’s state of mind. She continuously stares outside the window, from where the little grave of her child is visible. The husband tries to console her, but fails because she refuses to listen to him. As the poem progresses we can see the deep emotional distance between the two. The binary here is the male/female or husband/wife, duo, each one of them is unable to understand the other. Amy, the wife, is disturbed to see her husband’s reaction over the death of their child.

I saw you from that very window there

Making the gravel leap and leap in air

Leap up, like that and land so lightly33

But actually Amy has failed to understand the turmoil her husband had been facing within. There is a binary in the way in which both of them deal with death, pain and depression. The wife is over sensitive to the situation whereas the husband tries to hide his feelings. He tries to keep himself busy with daily chores to avoid thoughts about his dead child. He is concerned about his outer appearance too, so that people may not find that he is undergoing a tough time dealing with the loss. On the other hand, Amy is too reckless and not at all concerned about her outer appearances or behaviour.

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In “After Apple Picking”34 (1914), the speaker, who is a farmer, is overtaken by the desire to harvest his apples before they fall or before he falls asleep. The poet is haunted with the idea of ‘sleep’ but he is confused with the kind of sleep which awaits him. It can be anticipated that the apples metaphorically represent the creative thoughts of the poet, which are very much there in his mind, ready to be reproduced on paper, before they disappear or before he falls prey to death (sleep). He represents a contrast between the “human sleep”35 or the permanent sleep (death) and the sleep undertaken by the animals in winter- “hibernation”. The binary opposition in the poem is the difference between the two kinds of sleep, the temporary sleep of the Woodchuck and the permanent sleep of death. Another example of binaries implicit, is the poet’s desire to pluck all the apples before they rot or fall, and his succumbing to the harvest , since he “ is overtired of the harvest already done”36.

The next poem, “The Fear”37 just like “Home Burial” deals with an emotional and physical tussle between a husband and wife who suspect someone outside their home in the dark. From the very first stanza the woman is terrified because she presumes that there may be someone hiding in the dark. The conversation between them shows that the man in the dark maybe the ex-husband or the ex- lover of the woman. The poem oscillates between the present and the past. The couple while trying to search for some unknown encroacher, is reminded of someone from the past whom they expect to be spying on them. The lurking fear is relieved with the sudden appearance of a man with a child.

You don’t see- I have a child here by the hand A robber wouldn’t have a family with him.38

But the fear returns as the light goes out suddenly and the lantern, “struck, it clattered and went out". The movement between the past and present, between darkness and light between fear and security are the binaries on which the poem works.

The next poem, “The Self Seeker”39 presents the figure of a mill owner who met with an accident, which crippled him for life, by crushing his legs. He wished to get an insurance money as accident cover, and calls it a bargain.

I am going to sell my soul

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His friend “Willis” does not like the bargain because he knew the importance of his friend’s “feet”. The poem is actually a parody of man’s miseries and tragic circumstances which may force him for something he never thought, like “bargaining” his soul. Each of us might have suffered a loss that was irreparable or bargained a bit of our conscience or soul for some temporary happiness.

The poem strikes a contrast between the attitudes of a simple countryside mill owner to that of a Boston lawyer, who represented the city. The lawyer is too practical and self- centred to understand someone’s loss. “The title is a bit vague as well, referring perhaps to The Broken One, who, with the loss of his feet, has lost his essential self, his “soul.” But it might just as well be applied to the lawyer, who, by signing people’s lives away in hasty settlements, is a “Self-Seeker” of the worst kind”.40 The feet whose loss the mill owner bargained was actually a loss of his soul. It could take him to places, which were very close to his heart.

In the next poem, “The Woodpile”41, once again the poet seems to be indecisive about his escape into the woods. The cold, frozen winter forest compels him to reassure his decision:

I paused and said, "I will turn back from here.

No, I will go on farther—and we shall see."42

His contrary desire to step in and out of the cold winter forest and his ultimate submission to explore the woods, brings before us the old desire of the poet to be lost in the dark woods, his irresistible urge, “not to be found again”. He had no one to accompany him except a bird, who was suspicious that the speaker is following it for the white feather in its tail :

Who was so foolish as to think what he thought.

He thought that I was after him for a feather—

The white one in his tail;43

His movement into the pathless woods of the forest, is suddenly disrupted by his encounter with a woodpile, which was perhaps left there by a labourer long time ago. The poet wonders who might have laboured so hard to make perfect slices of wood and then forgot to take it with him? The wood pile was already decaying, though it had to decay someday either in the fire, providing warmth to someone, or rotting there as it was. Samuel Coale writes :

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The woodpile signifies man’s encounter with nature; it becomes the emblem of that encounter and though abandoned becomes for Frost the final emblem of nature’s usefulness (however humanly unfulfilling in this instance) and completeness. He suggests not that decay is good, but that waste is not utterly bad from a natural point of view.44

There is a contrary desire in the poet to move in and move out of the forest. He finally decides to wander in Nature and is distracted by the sight of the wood-pile (a man- made thing). The binaries in the poem, work below the surface level to suggest the permanence of Nature (woods) and the impermanence of man and man-made objects like the wood- pile.

The last poem of the collection, “Good Hours”45 remind us of an another poem by Frost, named, “Acquainted with the Night”, where a lonely traveller wanders in the night. He is alone but not isolated. He walks on a deserted road, but the cottages he passes by are lit, which suggests that people are awake there. He overhears a few noises from those houses which too affirm that he is not alone. But on his return the people are asleep and he is left all alone to walk on the empty street. The contrast is between being alone and being lonely. The stillness of the night is contrasted with the noise made by his feet.

By the time Mountain Interval (1916) was published, Frost’s fan following had increased tremendously. The reviews on his earlier collections were satisfactory enough to let him keep moving with his voice, which was uniquely, the voice of New England. Some of his masterpieces became a part of this collection like “The Road not Taken”46, where binaries become apparent in the form of two roads, which “diverged in a yellow wood”47. Frost minutely describes the roads which have their own contrasting claim to be travelled by the poet. But the poet chooses the one “less travelled by”48 as he wished to explore something which had not been discovered so far. At a deeper level the poem indicates the realisation that man cannot travel on two roads at the same time. He is bound to make a choice in life. The decision had always been a difficult one because there will always remain in him a desire to know what lay on the other road. But life is all about choices, and about binaries. One has to decide between the two, as the poet did:

I shall be telling this with a sigh,

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I-

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I took the one less traveled by

And that has made all the difference.49

Winter has often been used by writers as a symbol of death. In “An Old man’s Winter Night”50 (1916), Frost stoically presents the lonely and burdensome life of an old man on a winter night. The poem is replete with instances which hint at the pathetic life of the old man who had nothing except his fading memory to his rescue. His inability to remember why he came to his room, hints over the grim situation. The poem progresses with more bleakness both inside and outside the room till the poet suddenly announces, “A light he was to no one but himself”51

In the end the shifting of the log of wood disturbs him but that does not interrupt his sleep. This is not the sleep of death which is referred to in the “After Apple Picking” but a temporary sleep which will end in the morning. The images of darkness, winter, night combined with old age symbolise man’s ultimate submission to an end but the sudden introduction of “light” in the form of fire, juxtaposes the environment of the poem and suggests its contrary, which is life beyond hardships and an old man’s desire to live beyond his loss.

The next poem, “In the Home Stretch”52, imitates many other poems by Frost, where a conversation takes place between a husband and wife. It is soaked in paradoxes which are difficult to point, but can be marked as the poem unfolds into deeper philosophical questions relating to life, existence and permanence of feelings.

The poem is about a couple who had shifted from a city to a village, and thus the first binary is the sharp contrast between their lives in the city and the country. They find it difficult to adjust with the sombre nature of the countryside which was opposite to the hustle and bustle of the city. Apart from the city and country binary, the poem oscillates between the past and the future. The husband wants to know about how certain things began, while the wife philosophically answers his question, and debunks his idea of beginnings and ends:

There are no such things as beginnings and ends, only middles53

The conversation between the two, about no beginnings or ends explains the lack of understanding between the two partners who lived under the same roof, yet like strangers.

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There are many Frostian poems in which the binary opposition appear in the title, as for example, “Fire and Ice” (1923), “Bond and Free” (1916), to name a few. “Meeting and Passing”54 (1916), is one of them. In this poem, Frost describes an incident when once he met a woman, on a hill. They talked and walked together for some time and shared their feelings for each other and then departed. Their meeting was temporary as “Footprints in Summer Dust”55. The poem delicately unravels the beginning of love, where young lovers ‘meet’ and depart after some time. This act of ‘meeting’ and not staying together, and finally ‘departing’ is the binary in the poem.

There are many symbols which are used by poets time and again to refer to a particular thing in Nature or in life. For example, the Brook is a symbol of life, vitality and rebirth. The Oxford English Dictionary defines a brook as “a small stream”56. It reminds us of the famous poem by Tennyson, in which the brook pronounces to the world, its eternity:

For men may come and men may go

But I go on forever57

But Frost’s “Hyla Brook”58 (1916) stands in sharp contrast to ‘life’. It is dried and consists of only weeds and ‘weak foliage’ remain. The brook remains a brook only in the memory:

“A brook to none, but who remember long”59

There is nothing in the dried up field, which may symbolise life, except for the memory which cannot forget its existence. The poem is built on the notion of contradiction. The symbol of the ‘brook’ is often used to suggest vitality and movement, but Frost’s Hyla Brook becomes a symbol of stagnancy and death, and exists nowhere in reality but in memory. Thus, it refers to life and death at the same time.

The next poem in the series is “The Oven Bird”60. The oven bird is a native bird of America, which is popularly called, the teacher bird. Thus, there may be a reason that Frost chose the bird as the speaker of the poem. The bird in the poem, like the speaker himself is sensitive to the changing of seasons. It marks the transition from spring to autumn, where leaves of the Cherry Blossom and Pear tree succumb to the “fall”. The poem begins with the line:

There is a singer, everyone has heard61

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But in the upcoming lines, he uses the phrase, “he says” thrice. This may put into question the bird’s act of singing or saying or both or neither of the two. If it sings, what does it say then? There is a difference between the bird song, which is not actually a song but a noise made by the bird due to continuously pecking of wood. The poet makes it clear that the bird “knows in singing, not to sing”. The line however justifies the binaries in the poem. The bird doesn’t sing, yet has a song. It sings yet says and says because it “knows in singing, not to sing”. The complex say/sing, symbols used by the poet highlights the paradoxical element in the poem.

“Bond and Free”62 (1916), is another poem in which there lies a contradiction in the title itself. The poet brings out the difference between “Love” and “Thought”. Love, according to the poet is earth bound and remains intact within the walls of the world, and does not dare to take a leap. “Thought”, on the other hand, unchains itself from the earthly bond of love and fear, and takes flight into the Universe.

Love by being thrall

And simply staying possesses all

In several beauty that Thought fares far

To find fused in another star.63

In the next poem, “Birches”64 (1916), Frost is taken back in time as he witnesses a bended birch tree. He recalls, “So was I myself, a swinger of birches”65 and wishes to go back in time as life has become “weary of considerations”66. He speculates over the to and fro motion of the tree, and says :

I would like to go away from earth awhile,

And then come back to it and begin all over67

He imagines that some boy had been swinging on it for a long time which made the tree bended. This movement of going away and coming back to the original point is repeated. This hints at the binary opposition on which Frost has laid the foundation of the poem. His desire to swing on the birch trees because life is getting tough day by day and his desire to stay on earth because, life can get better any moment. When he expresses his desire to swing on the tree “towards heaven”68, he suddenly realises that it might sound

82 as a pessimistic and escapist attitude, and he immediately corrects his statement and affirms :

May no fate wilfully misunderstand me and snatch me away,

Never to return.

Earth is the right place for love,

You don’t know when it is likely to get better69

The binaries can be seen in the very first line, when the poet says, “When I see birch trees bend to left and right”70. But the binary opposition does not end with these words, it is carried to the metaphorical level, whereas the poet desires an escape, yet decides to stay back. There is in him a contrary desire to stay and move at the very same time. As Elaine Barry points out, “it is a metaphor for the ideal human attitude finely balanced between pragmatic acceptance of life as it is on earth, and a sense of dissatisfaction from it”71.

The next poem is a sonnet, “Putting in the Seed”72, (1916), it presents a picturesque image of a rural household, where a farmer is busy burying the “white soft petals from the apple tree”73. He buries the petals so that the seeds may be born out of them. There are several binary words used in the poem like, “burial” and “birth”, “smooth” and “wrinkled” and most importantly, “you” and “I”. The poet has interwoven the binaries and has made an appropriate use of them so that the meaning of the verse can be intensified. He writes, “smooth bean and wrinkled pea”74 which depicts how minutely he observes the intermixing of two different elements from nature.

In an another small poem of ten lines, “A Time to Talk”75(1916), Frost presents a commonplace incident in which he is busy with gardening and trimming of bushes and his friend stops by and calls his name. Though he is busy with his work but he knows that meeting his friend is more important and he leaves his work and goes near the fence to meet him.

The poet’s claim that “I don’t stand still and look around”76, suggests that he is eager to meet his friend, but the use of the word “plod” shows resistance on his part. Furthermore, he walks down to meet his friend, but remains under the limits of a “stone wall”77. The willingness to meet is juxtaposed by his reluctance to move quickly and ‘plodding’ to meet him at the fence. The binary in the poem, thus, is the act of meeting

83 and the reluctance to cross the stone wall. The poet faces both the situations simultaneously, and it becomes an example of contradictory emotions.

The next poem, “The Cow in Apple Time”78 is about a cow, who has never tasted anything except the hay and fodder given to her. One day she breaks the barriers of satisfaction and escapes into a world of discovery. In the outside world she tastes apples and other seasonal fruits. Robert Faggen writes, “The Cow in Apple Time” a georgic, becomes a parable of the Fall, the disastrous consequences of ignoring boundaries and walls, the responsibility of staying within one's own garden”79 Deirdre Fagan writes, “she has moved from innocence to experience by having tasted fruit.”80 The world behind the four walls of the barn and the world beyond it, are the binaries in the poem.

The next poem, “The Hill Wife”81 is a collection of five poems, each dealing with a different kind of tension between a young married couple. In the first two poems, the hill wife is the speaker, while in the last three poems the poet himself becomes an omniscient speaker. In the first poem, “Loneliness”82, the wife refers to the sadness, which stays with them when the migratory birds leave for another continent. Their arrival is celebrated by the young childless couple, and likewise their departure is mourned. But the feelings are not reciprocated. The birds don’t feel anything for the couple, they simply are irrelevant to them. The wife knows that loving too much, brings expectations and expectations causes sadness.

One ought not to have to care

As much as you and I

Care when birds come around the house

To seem to say good by.83

Again in the second poem, “House Fear”84 the couple is depicted as suspicious of someone inside the house since they had been out the whole day. A Home signifies safety and security but here, it becomes a symbol of fear. They rattle their keys to confirm if they are safe to step inside.

In both these poems, the image of arrival and departure is prominent. The arrival of the birds and their sudden departure effects the couple in negative ways and in “House Fear” their arrival to their own house, results in fear instead of security.

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In the last poem of the series, “The Impulse”85, the arrival is juxtaposed with a sudden strange departure. The Hill wife, follows her husband to his field of work and goes out to get an alder bough and never returns. This sudden departure to some unknown place shocks the husband and he learnt of “finalities beside the grave”86.

We as readers too, get shocked over the ending of the poem, because one cannot anticipate the place where the Hill wife departed finally, never to return. The circle of arrival and departure, finally ends with an uncertain departure.

“A Girl’s Garden”87(1916) begins in a flashback in which a woman recollects her childhood days when she asks her father for a small piece of land so that she can grow her own garden there. She labours day and night and finally her piece of land bears a ‘miscellany’ of vegetables and fruit trees. It had little bits of everything but nothing was in abundance.

A little bit of everything

A great deal of none”.88

Her garden was small in size but her labour was great and so was her satisfaction. Now when she looks back at the yesteryears, she calls it “a childlike thing”89 though, but still is proud to share her story with the new comers. The binary in this poem is the difference of attitude of a same person, regarding the same thing, after the passage of time. Earlier she desperately wanted to own a garden, so that she could groom it and make it reproductive, and now when she looks back, she calls it, “a childlike thing”. This paradox in one’s attitude is universal. We find ourselves different with the passage of time.

In the title of the poem, “The Last word of a Bluebird”90 (1916), the word, “last” suggests finality. But the poem talks about renewal and eternity by using the symbol of spring. The binaries in the poem are the metaphors, “ice” and “north wind” which stand for winter and death and the word, “spring” which stands for rebirth and renewal. Since the poem is written for children, “As told to a child”91, the poet has wittily chosen the speaker as a “Crow”, who brings out a message for Lesley, from the Bluebird. It says that the Bluebird had sent him to convey to Lesley that the ice and North Wind had made him sick and he has to fly off somewhere without bidding her good bye, but she must not be sad since he would return in spring with his song. The speaker in the poem, a Crow communicates all this to the child, in such a manner that she is bound to believe him. He

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is the voice of the poet, the Bard, who announces to the world that the Bluebird will be back with his song, in the spring. The poem throws light over the eternity of nature and the transience of man. The Bluebird is a part of nature and will never die; there will always be a bluebird that would eventually come with spring, unlike man who cannot. There is permanence in the song of the Bluebird, which the humans lack, due to the ephemera of their existence.

The last poem of the book “The Sound of Trees”92 describes the to and fro motion of the trees in the wind. Throughout the poem, one can find the reference to the noise made by the leaves of the trees, as they rustle in the heavy wind. Though the ‘noise’ referred by the poet, is actually in contrast to the ‘sound’ made by the trees. Noise is unpleasant whereas the sound may have a positive or negative connotation. Another important binary in the poem is the contrast between stability and movement:

They are that talks of going

But never gets away93

When the trees sway due to the heavy gushes of wind, they seem to be moving, but after the wind passes by, they are stable, and are stuck to their own permanent places. Deirdre Faggen writes, “The poet embraces stability and fixity as he reflects on the ways nature affects us and how much we are a part of it. Just as when the trunk is bigger and the tree is older, it can no longer lean or be uprooted, the more fixed we become in our “joys,” the less we sway in the breezes that catch us by surprise and throw us off balance”94.

Nature never failed to amaze the child in Frost. He would always find something exciting about life, despite its shortcomings. But life was getting tough and busy day by day and it took almost seven long years for him to publish another book. New Hampshire came out in 1923 and was published by Holt. The book received mixed reviews and it was one of the other three books for which Frost would get the Pulitzer Prize. The volume is best known for the poems like, “Stopping by Wood on a Snowy Evening”(1923), “Fire and Ice”(1923), “The Aim was Song”(1923), to name a few.

The first poem in the book carries the name of the book itself. In “New Hampshire”95, the contrast between Frost’s microcosm world and the macrocosm world of the people belonging to places other than New England is highlighted. He draws a clear distinction between people of New England and people belonging to different parts of America. The poet believes that New Englanders are less commercial and yet more satisfied than others.

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To some it may appear a prejudiced view of life, and it compels many readers, to believe that he is a regional poet, but Frost negates the possibility and writes:

Because I wrote my novels in New Hampshire

Is no proof that I aimed them at New Hampshire.96

According to him, New England had everything which is needed of a happy life, but it never boasts of its assets. The most important asset was the large number of poets and writers it produced. It highlights the difference between quantity and quality of things produced by New England and other places:

A state producing precious metals, stones,

And-writing; none of these except perhaps

The precious literature in quantity

Or quality to worry the producer

About disposing of it. Do you know,

Considering the market, there are more

Poems produced than any other thing?

No wonder poets sometimes have to seem

So much more business-like than business men.

Their wares are so much harder to get rid of97.

He further adds that someday he may be asked to choose between his life as a poet and as a farmer:

Well if I have to choose one or the other

I’d choose to be a plain New Hampshire farmer.98

Thus his answer is clear; he would always choose New England over anything and everything in life. It is true that Frost was pre occupied with the place, and his poems

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reflect this up to a great extent. But one cannot underestimate the fact that his poems are universal in nature. They may talk about New England and its people but their problems are general human problems which are common to everybody irrespective of their place of belonging.

In “The Census Taker”99 the poet assumes the role of a census recording person whose work is to count the number of dead in a particular area. The poem deals with the sombre aspect of death and emptiness. He crosses many deserted houses in the place and feels sad and sorry for the task assigned to him.

This house in one year fallen to decay

Filled me with no less sorrow than the houses

Fallen to ruin in ten thousand years100

He imagines that the number of dead people had outlived the living and thus, the binary arises between the inevitable death and man’s desire to live, knowing that his end is near. The poem concludes with the following lines:

It must be I want life to go on living.

The next poem in the series “Maple”101 apparently looks like a simple poem written for children. A girl is named “Mable” by her mother, who died while giving birth to her. The child had absolutely no memories of her mother.

You and her just saw each other in passing

In the room upstairs

One coming this way to life, and one

Going the other out of life-You know?102

Thus the birth and death metaphor forms the first binary in the poem. The mother leaves the world as the child begins her life. The poem progresses with utmost simplicity with the child trying to discover the real meaning of her name. Her father would skip her questions by saying:

I don’t know what she wanted it to mean,

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But it seems like some word she left to bid you

Be a good girl-be like a maple tree.103

With quaint assumptions about the name, the young child grows into an adult and gets married. She had accepted that her name was strange because people believed that it was unlikely for a person to be named after a tree. Then there comes a day when she realises the beauty of a Maple tree:

Once they came on a maple in a glade,

Standing alone with smooth arms lifted up,

And every leaf of foliage she'd worn

Laid scarlet and pale pink about her feet.104

Finally amidst autumn, maple realises that her name is meaningful. That maple tree is beautiful too, like her. And her search is complete. Frost concludes the poem by saying that it is better to have a meaningless name, as it never compels a child to behave according to a strict meaning associated with the name he carries. One should be given a meaningless name, in order to live life in exploration, adventure and discovery.

Better a meaningless name, I should say,

As leaving more to nature and happy chance.

Name children some names and see what you do.105

Thus, the poem moves between wandering and discovering; meaninglessness and meaning. The poem is not too philosophical unlike his other poems, but has a moral attached to it. The moral that sometimes aimless wandering leads us to our destination.

In the next poem, “The Grindstone”106, the binaries arise in the form of decisions one takes while they are young and the regrets they suffer when they realise their mistakes, later in life. The speaker in the poem stares at his “Grindstone” which had been lying under an apple tree, since a very long time unaided and dysfunctional. He recollects his days when as a young boy he used to ride on the machine and work on it, enjoying his task. But something happened which hurt the young boy’s ego and he abandoned working on it. Later in life, as a grown up man he stares at his grindstone which once was his favourite machine to work with and says:

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(But I forgive it now as easily

As any other boyhood enemy

Whose pride has failed to get him anywhere)107.

This difference of attitude of the same person over the same issue highlights what time and experience can change in us. Even though circumstances remained the same with the speaker, but he was ready to forgive the machine (his old friend) because he learnt from his experiences that pride takes man nowhere. Thus the difference of attitude within the same person, or his transformation from an impulsive boy to an understanding and forgiving adult, is the binary in the poem.

In “Fire and Ice”, says Jay Parini, “the poet-narrator seems to have been through the torrid and frigid zones, to have loved and hated.”108 It is one of those poems in which the title itself becomes a binary, which further adds to the inherent contradictions in the poem. There is a complexity in the poem’s simplicity which strikes the reader as he recites the poem aloud. A poem of only nine lines, and it delves into one of the most perennial questions of the Universe- How the world would come to an end? The poet is concerned about the two forces in the Universe which according to him are equally capable of destroying the world- Desire and Hatred. He points to the overpowering tendencies of both and says,

From whatever I’ve tasted of desire

I hold with those who favour fire.”109

Yet he immediately changes his statement in the very next line and writes sarcastically:

But if it had to perish twice, I think I know enough of hate To say that for destruction ice Is also great And would suffice110

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He therefore leaves readers in between desire and hatred, to answer for themselves, which one according to them is more likely to end the world. The question of duality which often concerns Frost’s readers is explicitly explored here. The poem seeks to answer a complex question by using the binaries- fire and ice.

“In a Disused Graveyard”111 (1923), the poet has brought about the contrast between the living and the dead, by using the word “graveyard” with reference to the “living”. He describes how the living often visit, an old disused graveyard to read tombstones. The tombstone says:

The ones who living come today

To read the stones and go away

Tomorrow dead will come to stay112

In a way, the verse written on the stone, mocks the transitory lives of visitors who come there walking over the grasslands and walk away after reading them, forgetting that one day they will come never to return. But the stones are disappointed because no one comes there to stay, which suggests that the graveyard is no more used by people. The last stanza brings about cohesion in the poem, when the poet says:

It would be easy to be clever And tell the stones: Men hate to die And have stopped dying now forever. I think they would believe the lie.113

First he personifies tombstones which lie in the vicinity of a disused graveyard and then says that one must tell the stones that “men hate to die” and “have stopped dying now forever”114. In the next line he declares that it is a lie but still the stones would believe in it, keeping in view the present scenario of the place. Frost takes up one of the very common themes of the 18th century poetry- death’s inevitability, but by using death’s binary, -‘life’. There exists a demarcation between the living and the dead, until we are told that one day the living would come there as dead. The binaries are combined into one, beautifully, yet maintaining their contrariness.

“Stopping by Woods On a Snowy Evening”115 (1923), became an anthem in America. The poem leaves an everlasting impression on the readers, irrespective of their age or place of belonging. It deals with the subjective experience of the poet, who is travelling to an

91 unknown destination and suddenly encounters a wood. There is a binary in the very first line wherein the poet asks a question and he himself answers it:

Whose woods these are?

I think I know116

There is a mysterious quality in the poem which can be felt from the moment the poem begins. The reader is drawn towards the mysterious pull of the text as the poet was drawn towards the dark woods. He desires to explore the hidden depths of the place but suddenly remembers that he has “Miles to Go”117 before he sleeps. There is a dream like quality in the poem which allures the poet to fall asleep in the dark woods. But this pull is balanced by the contrary reminder that he cannot succumb to the life of pleasure which the woods seem to offer. The life in the woods (surreal, dream-like and mysterious) is opposed to the life of promises (hard, uncertain and real). Both the opposite forces working upon the subconscious mind of the poet are perfectly balanced in the poem and the last stanza further adds to the everlasting echo, which inspires perhaps everyone who reads the poem:

Woods are lovely, dark, and deep

But I have promises to keep

And miles to go before I sleep,

And miles to go before I sleep.118

In the long run it may suggest that the poet longs to be free and independent. He desires an escape into the woods, so that he can enjoy the sight as the “woods fill up with snow”119. But he is bound by his duty as a poet and this compels him to move on. There is a paradox in the entire poem as the darkness of the woods is juxtaposed with the white Snow, and the call for sleep is negated by the urge to move on.

“For Once then Something”120 is about the concrete and abstract in poetry. It may also be taken as a difference between perception and reality. The poet says that he often stares in a well, which reflects a “godlike” image of his. Once he tried to look beyond the reflection but :

The water came back to rebuke the too clear water121

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A drop fell in the clear water, causing ripples and blurring everything at the bottom. The poet was suspicious of something white at the bottom of the well, but he could not be sure if that “something” was substantial or merely an illusion. Thus, the poem moves between the substantial and the unsubstantial. Man may be lured by hidden depths of certain things, he may even perceive something out of nothing or vice versa, but it may not always take him to a discovery. At times, we may perceive an illusion to be a reality and sometimes the foundation of something concrete may be an abstract idea. Thus the relationship between the reality and illusion, concrete and abstract is the binary in the poem.

What was that whiteness?

A Truth? A Pebble of Quartz?

For Once, then, Something.122

Frost’s poems are often born out of nature’s left remnants, which usually do not catch the normal eye. Unlike Keats, who was impressed by a Nightingale, or Shelley who found the Skylark, a bird of heaven, Frost was inspired by a crow. In “Dust of Snow”123 (1923), he used two negative symbols to create a positive one, creating again a binary of meanings and metaphors in this eight lines poem. The speaker of the poem is depressed because of some unknown reasons and takes shelter under a “Hemlock” tree. A Crow shakes the branch of the tree and some, “dust of snow” accidently falls on the speaker, ultimately making him happy. It is noticeable that a person who is undergoing severe depression is lighted up to happiness, by such a small and insignificant act. This shows the poet’s ability to notice the smallest of acts, which happen by chance, in the world. A Crow is often symbolic of “black magic” or is regarded as an inauspicious bird of bad omens. Similarly a Hemlock tree is a poisonous plant, which again becomes a symbol of death and darkness, like the Crow. But the poet has used these two negative symbols to create a positive one and the simple poem of eight lines changes its theme and becomes paradoxical. The incident perhaps hints that happiness sometimes comes from the most unexpected places, but one needs to be sensitive to his surroundings. There are no binary words in the poem but the entire theme of the poem veers from depression to happiness and this highlights the paradoxical tendencies between words.

It is widely proclaimed that, ‘Change is the only law of Nature’. G.K. Chesterton (1874- 1936), writes.

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The moderns do not realise modernity. They have never known anything else. They have stepped on to a moving platform which they hardly know to be moving, as a man cannot feel the daily movement of the earth. But he would feel it strongly if the earth suddenly moved the other way. The older generation consists of those who do remember a time when the earth moved the other way.124.

In “A Brook in the City”125 (1923), Frost also presents the concept of change, and how painful it can be for people to watch something die in front of them. In this case, it is the “city brook’’ which has been replaced by buildings. He begins by saying.

The farmhouse lingers through averse to square

With the new city street it has to wear

A number in.126

The word, “linger” conjures up images of nostalgia, where we can feel how much the speaker is pained at the thoughts which still wander in his mind, though things around him have changed. The poet has presented this by using the contrast between the young and the old. The ‘City Brook’ and the ‘farmhouse’ are symbolic of the old, whereas, the sewage and ‘the new-built city’ stand for the change that has taken place. The poet painfully describes that no one will know that the ‘sewer dungeon’ in the city, was once a beautiful brook, but it fell prey to modernization and lost its identity. By expressing this, the poet has portrayed the brook to be almost dead, which is unlikely to be for a stream of Nature. The contrast is eventually felt when the poet begins with the memories of a farmhouse and uses hyperbolic metaphors while explaining the meadow grass which has been replaced by the concrete jungle:

The meadow grass could be cemented down

From growing under pavements of a town”127

Change remains the only permanent thing in the life, besides death. In “A Boundless Moment”128(1923), the poet begins with a description of March, and how March brings about thoughts of Spring. The poet describes man’s resistance to change. He uses the symbol of a beech tree leaf, which had fixed itself to the tree, refusing to leave in autumn. Similarly man too desires to stay at the spring of his age. He refuses to let go off

94 things which make him happier. There is a constant pull in the poem towards submission and man’s refusal to accept the eternal pull of death and change.

We stood a moment so in a strange world

Myself as one his own pretense deceives;

And then I said the truth (and we moved on)

A young beech clinging to its last year’s leaves.129

But the speaker finally realizes that the desire is vain and one has to succumb to change, which is the only permanent thing in Nature. The binary oppositions exist in the form of these two opposite pulls in the poem, one which man desires and one which Nature does.

“Misgiving”130 (1923), begins with the description of autumn, where leaves desperately wait to taste their freedom from the bondage of the tree, but as the wind blows they fall prey to sleep.

A sleep oppresses them as they go,

And they end by bidding him stay with them.131

These leaves had never imagined that they will lie under the snow, for the whole of winter because they wanted to fly. They wanted to taste freedom, but now they lie helpless on the ground, waiting for their final fate.

The leaves had promised themselves this flight,

Who now would fain seek sheltering wall

Or thicket, or hollow place for the night.132

The poet was once impressed by their untamed spirit to take flight, but this helplessness does not impress him and he takes a pledge that when his soul becomes free of his body, he would not take rest like these leaves, but shall go on a quest. He presents a sharp contrast between the after-life of a leaf and the after-life of a man. The leaf shall die and will be reborn in spring, whereas the man has only one life to live. There can be yet another meaning to the poem which may imply that the life of a leaf is short lived but the speaker, a poet, will continue to live even after his physical disappearance. Thus the contradiction between the life of a leaf and life of a poet is expressed by using autumn as a symbol.

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In “Plowmen”133(1923), once again he presents the difference between tradition and modernity and also between usefulness and futility. By using his gifted trait of sarcasm Frost talks about a modern tool, which is used to, “plow the snow”134. The tool is called a “plow” which is an imitation of the traditional “Plough” which is used to prepare the land for crop cultivation. The modern “plow” is used to remove the snow from the roads. The poet comments on the futility of this exercise and also on the name which is derived from tradition. Yet it is a mockery that the derived name would not carry the usefulness of the traditional act of ploughing. The binary in the poem is the very act of ploughing, and the futility of it, since the ploughing would not fetch any results. This is a mockery of the modern age, that men are wasting their time on something which will not yield them any results, unlike the yesteryears where ploughing had a purpose.

A plow, they say, to plow the snow,

They cannot mean to plant, it no-

Unless in bitterness to mock

At having cultivated rock.135

The title, “A Lockless Door”136 (1923), gives us an image of either an unsafe place or something which can be easily accessed. But when we read the poem we find that the house with a lockless door had been a hiding place for the speaker, who had been living there in isolation. This is a binary in itself that the house with no protection of a “Lock” is not curiously visited by anyone. But after many years of living peacefully, finally the speaker is terrified to hear a knock:

It went many years

But at last came a knock”.137

This sudden knock on the door frightened the speaker and he wondered who was at the other end. He blew out his candle and climbed his window and descended, shouting “Come In”. This act of leaving his house for an unknown vicinity and place, to seek for a hiding place is a contradiction in itself. Though there are no binary words except - “climbed” and “descended” but the very thought of leaving a house for the “world” to “hide”, is a binary in itself.

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The man rushes out of his hiding place, to seek shelter in the outside world, which is unknown to him. It is a paradox that a man in order to hide from the world, returns to the world once again.

So at a knock

I emptied my cage

To hide in the world

And alter with age138

In the last poem of New Hampshire, “The Need of Being Versed in Country Things”139 (1923), Frost demarcates a line between the natural world and the human world. He presents a vivid image of a burnt house, which is survived only by a chimney and a barn. The barn stood amidst the burnt house like , “a pistil after the petals go”140. It is evident that the place had been subjected to a tragedy, but it makes no difference to the birds that still fly ‘in and out’ of the broken windows. Even the elm tree and the lilacs renewed their leaves as,

For them there was really nothing sad141

Words like “aged elm” and “Lilacs”, are used to highlight, the contrast which lies between the world of human beings and Nature. We are stuck into situations and the past unlike nature which has its very own way to overcome the loss, by renewal and rebirth :

For them there was really nothing sad

But though they rejoiced in the nest they kept,

One has to be versed in country things

Not to believe the Phoebes wept.142

New Hampshire established Frost’s colloquial voice more prominently than his previous volumes of poetry. Jay Parini observes, “Each of these poems is distinct and peerless, representing another crest in Frost’s development- like a jagged mountain range with numerous peaks”.143 Within five years Frost was ready with another collection, West Running Brook (1928). With the publication of this volume, it became clear that Frost’s genius was not limited to being a regional poet. But he had concern for man’s universal predicament. The book included a number of masterpieces like, “Once by the Pacific”

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(1928), “Acquainted with the Night” (1928), “West Running Brook” (1928) and “Bereft” (1928).

Like most of Frost’s speakers, the protagonist in “Acquainted with the Night” is again a lonely traveller, who is aimlessly walking towards an unknown destination.

I have walked out in rain—and back in rain

I have outwalked the furthest city light144

The more he tries to escape from people, something or the other keeps interrupting him, like the watchmen and a cry from somewhere.

I have passed by the watchman on his beat And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain. When far away an interrupted cry Came over houses from another street145

The speaker is unwilling to answer the questioning looks of the watchmen and lowers his gaze and keeps on moving. Paradoxically the universe too failed to provide an answer to his wandering soul and the “luminary clock” further added to his confusion. The poem is apparently an analysis of the modern man’s chaotic bewilderment in the world. It is full of contradictions which again add to the binaries which had been explored by Frost, time and again. Man’s escape from human habitations is juxtaposed by the sudden emergence of the watchman and “an interrupted cry” from society. The universe is seen as an answer to man’s spiritual rootlessness, but in this poem the Moon fails to answer it :

And further still at an unearthly height One luminary clock against the sky Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right. I have been one acquainted with the night.146

In “Fireflies in the Garden”147 (1928), he distinguishes between the stars on the sky and the stars on the earth- Fireflies. Both look equally beautiful, though the latter are fewer in number and are marked by the transience of life. The binary in the poem is the apparent contrast between permanence and temporariness. The fireflies are accessible unlike the stars and are soothing to the eyes, but they cannot be a permanent counterpart like the stars :

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Achieve at times a very starlike start.

Only of Course, they can’t sustain the part.148

Stars, on the one hand, symbolise the permanence of Nature and Fireflies on the other, stand for transience of human beings and every other thing which is subjected to decay.

In a small poem of four lines, “Devotion”149 (1928), Frost defines the meaning of devotion by evaluating the symbol of the ocean and its shore :

The heart can think of no devotion

Greater than being shore to the ocean-

Holding the curve of one position

Counting an endless repetition.150

The “Ocean” and the “Shore” are two binary words which have been perfectly blended in the poem to depict attachment and love. The shore is constant and still, and is never subjected to changes, but on the contrary the Ocean changes every minute. It had never been static. Nor can it be, because it always desires to meet its shore and crash its waves over it. This bond of these two opposite elements impresses the poet and it becomes for him a definition of “Devotion”. No matter how heavily the waves crash against the ocean, its desire to meet the shore never subsides.

In “A Passing Glimpse”151 (1928), the poet describes his view of the passing landscapes, as he sits in a moving car or a train. His hunger for the acuteness of description is not fulfilled because the moving vehicle dims the view at length. He wants to know which flowers he passes by, and admires them for some time, by going back behind the tracks, but is helpless. Finally he comes to his contradictory conclusion that:

Heaven gives its glimpse only to those

Not in position to look so close152.

This again lays bare the duality that things come to those who cannot hold them. The poet is allured towards those flowers which he could not see properly and which perhaps go unnoticed by other passers-by, who are very near to them.

The presence of trees in Frost’s poetry cannot be undermined. They either make permanent figures in his poems or companions to lonely travellers. In short, Frost’s characters seldom escape from these natural boundaries. “Tree at My Window”153 (1928)

99 is yet another poem where the tree is set to contradict the life of a human, who finds a similarity between himself and the tree at his window.

Tree at my window, window tree,

My sash is lowered when night comes on;

But let there never be curtain drawn

Between you and me.154

The speaker had observed the tree tossing and moving with the wind, and he imagined that, the tree too had watched him as he tossed in sleep due to his worries. Though he feels that there is a similarity between the two, yet he knows at heart that their problems are different. The contradiction arises in the end, as the speaker reveals that:

Your head so much concerned with outer

Mine with inner, weather 155

The binary words are clearly mentioned in the last two lines-“inner” and “outer”. The irony lies in the fact that the tree had been tossing because it enjoyed the breeze and the speaker had been tossing in bed because of the cobwebs which entangled his mind and caused sleepless nights.

Frost had a strong fascination for the Ocean. Time and again he would think about his childhood days in San Francisco. “Sand Dunes”156 (1928), reminds us of the hungry waves in “Once By the Pacific”, which terrified the young poet, who imagined an upcoming tragedy. Once again in “Sand Dunes”, he talks about the Ocean’s desire to crush mankind, but at the same time establishes man’s power over it. The poem talks about the tussle between Nature and Man, but man’s superiority is portrayed in the end. The binary words- green and brown, wet and dry, sea and land, explain in their own ways what relationship the poet seeks to create in between the Sea and Man. The ocean’s desire to destroy man, is juxtaposed by man’s decision making skills which outwit the ocean’s temptation. Ultimately the ocean waves destroy the empty huts which are left over by men. The ultimate distinction lies in the fact that the ocean has might and man has mind. The poem can be seen as emotional urge to proclaim man’s superiority over Nature. The Ocean can destroy man, but mankind cannot be destroyed by it.

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They are the sea made land

To come at the fisher town

And bury in solid sand

The men she could not drown.157

Analysing Frost’s early poetry collections in the light of binaries bring him out as a master player on contraries. After reading his poems it becomes clear that binaries are everywhere in the world. Sometimes they may appear as clearly as Black and White and sometimes they hide behind metaphors and symbols. He could hint towards the dualities in Nature with utmost ease and wit. Amidst many other important pieces on binaries, “West Running Brooks”158, remains an important one. It is a dramatic monologue between a practical husband and a romantic wife. The contrariness of their temperaments give rise to the initial tension in the poem. The poem begins as the wife is amazed to see a brook running West instead of East.

"What does it think it's doing running west

When all the other country brooks flow east To reach the ocean?”159

The wife names the brook as the “West Running Brook”, and starts comparing the brook to their own lives. She wants to make it a part of their family :

We've said we two. Let's change that to we three.

As you and I are married to each other,

We'll both be married to the brook. We'll build

Our bridge across it, and the bridge shall be

Our arm thrown over it asleep beside it.160

The wife gets excited to see the white wave as it strikes the rock and imagines that it is waving to them in acceptance. But Fred (the husband), philosophically explains the importance of the white wave as it comes in contact with the black.

(The black stream, catching on a sunken rock, Flung backward on itself in one white wave,

101

And the white water rode the black forever, Not gaining but not losing, like a bird … "That wave's been standing off this jut of shore Ever since rivers, I was going to say,

Were made in heaven. It wasn't waved to us."161

“The dark stream of mortal life throws up in dissidence to itself a contrary, in guise of the white wave. Its irrational paradox can be gauged in juxtaposition to the brook’s earlier established pattern of infraction.”162 He further takes the example of a pirouette, which, “stands still and dances” but “it runs away”, it “seriously, sadly runs away to fill the abyss’s void with emptiness”. The pirouette rotates due to the gravitational pull of the earth and it tries hard to dance but finally succumbs to the stagnancy, unwillingly. Symbolically, man tries hard to live longer without thinking of the fact that each rising sun lessens a day to live. Willingly or unwillingly man has to submit to the “universal cataract of death”,

That spends to nothingness—and unresisted, Save by some strange resistance in itself, Not just a swerving, but a throwing back, As if regret were in it and were sacred.163

The poem is replete with binary opposite words like, “East/West”, “down/up”, “two/three”, “black/white”, and it deals with some of the most philosophical questions of life, afterlife and the futility of existence.

It is from that in water we were from

Long, long before we were from any creature.

Here we, in our impatience of the steps,

Get back to the beginning of beginnings,

The stream of everything that runs away164

Jay Parini, one of Frost’s biographers writes, “Frost is not a poet who developed in any obvious ways from book to book, as did Yeats or Eliot or Stevens. Instead he grew by

102 accretion.” 165 This is true up to some extent because there is no visible progression in his Volumes, but he grew in terms of his use of language. The language he was uncertain of in the beginning became his hallmark. His Collections had always been mixed collections of poetry, which comprised poems about anything and everything around us and around him. He had this extraordinary ability to universalize the very insignificant in Nature. Amidst this upward, and not so upward movements of poetry compositions one thing remained constant- his use of Binary Oppositions. His eye for acuteness and his equal conviction for the opposites in nature, increased poem by poem and book by book.

1 Robert Frost, “Education by Poetry: A Meditative Monologue”, in. The Robert Frost Reader: Poetry and Prose, ed. Edward Connery Lathem and Lawrence Thompson, (Henry Holt&Co.New York,1972), p.374

2 Robert Frost, “Into My Own”, The Poetry of Robert Frost, ed. Edward Connery Lathem (St. Martin’s Griffin. New York, 1979), p.5

3 Ibid

4 Ibid

5 Ibid

6 Robert Frost, “Stars”, The Poetry of Robert Frost, ed. Edward Connery Lathem (St. Martin’s Griffin. New York, 1979), p.9 7 Ibid

8 Robert Frost, “Storm Fear” opcit, p. 9 9 Ibid

10 Robert Frost, “The Vantage Point”, opcit. p.17 11 Ibid

12 Ibid

13 Robert Frost, “Going for Water”, opcit. p.18 14 Ibid 15 Robert Frost, “Revelation”, opcit. p.19 16 Robert Frost, “The Tuft of flowers”,opcit, p.22

103

17 Ibid

18 Ibid

19 Robert Frost, “Now Close the Windows”, opcit, p.25 20 Ibid

21 Robert Frost, “In Hardwoods Groves”, opcit, p.25 22 Ibid

23 Robert Frost, “Reluctance” opcit, p.29 24 Ibid

25 Ibid

26 Robert Frost, “Mending Wall” opcit. p.33

27 Elaine Barry, Robert Frost, (Frederick Ungar Publishing Co. New York,1973), 11

28 Robert Frost, “Mending Wall”,opcit.p.33

29 Robert Frost, “The Mountain” opcit. p.40.

30 Ibid 31 Ibid 32 Robert Frost, “Home Burial” opcit. p.51

33 Ibid 34 Robert Frost, “After Apple Picking” opcit. p68

35 Ibid

36 Ibid

37 Robert Frost, “The Fear” opcit. p89

38 Ibid

39 Robert Frost, “The Self Seeker” opcit. p92

40 The Cambridge Companion to Robert Frost, p.303

41 Robert Frost, “The Wood-Pile”,opcit.p.101 42 Ibid

43 Ibid

104

44 Samuel Coale, “The Emblematic Encounter of Robert Frost” Frost: Centennial Essays, University Press of Mississippi, 1974, p.98

45 Robert Frost, “Good Hours” opcit. p.102

46 Robert Frost, “The Road Not Taken” opcit. p.105 47 Ibid

48 Ibid

49 Ibid

50 Robert Frost, “An Old Man’s Winter Night” opcit. p.108

51 Ibid

52 Robert Frost, “In the Home stretch” opcit. p110

53 Ibid

54 Robert Frost, “Meeting and Passing” opcit, p.118 55 Ibid

56Oxford Dictionaries(4thApril2016 )(29thMay2016)

57 Alfred Tennyson, “The Brook” Poem Hunter (2nd February2016)(27th May2016)

58 Robert Frost, “Hyla Brook” opcit. p.119

59 Ibid

60 Robert Frost, “The Oven Bird” opcit. p.119

61 Ibid

62 Robert Frost, “Bond and Free” opcit. p.120

63 Ibid

64 Robert Frost, “Birches”opcit.p.121 65 Ibid

66 Ibid

105

67 Ibid

68 Ibid

69 Ibid

70 Ibid

71 Elaine Barry, Robert Frost, (Frederick Ungar Publishing Co. New York,1973),p.113

72 Robert Frost, “Putting in the seed” opcit. p.123

73 Ibid

74 Ibid

75 Robert Frost, “A Time to Talk” opcit. p.124

76 Ibid

77 Ibid

78 Robert Frost, “A Cow in Apple Time” opcit. p.124

79 Robert Faggen, Robert Frost and the Challenge of Darwin, The University of Michigan Press, 2003,p.129

80 Deirdre Faggen, pp76

81 Robert Frost, “The Hill Wife” opcit. p.126

82 Robert Frost, “Lonliness” opcit. p126

83 Ibid

84 Robert Frost, “House Fear” opcit. p.127

85 Robert Frost, “The Impulse” opcit. p.128

86 Ibid

87 Robert Frost, “After Apple Picking” opcit. p.133

88 Ibid

89 Ibid

90 Robert Frost, “The last word of a Bluebird”, opcit. p.135

91 Ibid

106

92 Robert Frost, “The Sound of Trees”opcit.p.156

93 Ibid

94 Deirdre Fagan, “The Cambridge Companion to Robert Frost”, p.312

95 Robert Frost, “New Hampshire” opcit. p.159

96 Ibid

97 Ibid

98 Ibid

99 Robert Frost, “The Census Taker”opcit.p.174

100 Ibid

101 Robert Frost, “Maple”, opcit.p.179

102 Ibid

103 Ibid

104 Ibid

105Ibid

106 Robert Frost, “The Grindstone” opcit.p.188

107 Ibid

108 Jay Parini, Robert Frost- A Life, Henry Holt& Co. New York,1999. p.198

109 Robert Frost, “Fire and Ice”,opcit.p.220

110 Ibid

111 Robert Frost, “In a Disused Graveyard”opcit.p.221

112 Ibid

113 Ibid

114 Ibid

115 Robert Frost, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” opcit.p224

116 Ibid

107

117 Ibid

118 Ibid

119 Ibid

120 Robert Frost, “For Once then Something”, opcit.p225

121 Ibid

122 Ibid 225

123 Robert Frost, “Dust of Snow” opcit.p221

124 G.K Chesterton, “The Pleasures of No Longer being very Young”, in. Art of the Essayist, ed. C.H Lockitt, Longman.1949, p.163

125 Robert Frost, “A Brook in The City”, opcit. p.231

126 Ibid

127 Ibid

128 Robert Frost, “A Boundless Moment”, opcit, p.233

129 Ibid

130 Robert Frost, “Misgiving”, opcit.p236

131 Ibid

132 Ibid

133 Robert Frost, “Plowmen”, opcit.p.238

134 Ibid

135 Ibid

136 Robert Frost, “A Lockless Door”, opcit.p.240

137 Ibid

138 Ibid

139 Robert Frost, “The Need Of being versed in Country Things”, opcit.p 241

140 Ibid

141 Ibid

108

142 Ibid

143 Jay Parini, Robert Frost-A Life, Henry Holt&Co.New York,1999,p. 224

144 Robert Frost, “Acquainted with the Night”, opcit. p.255

145 Ibid

146 Ibid

147 Robert Frost, “Fireflies in the Garden”, opcit. p.246

148 Ibid

149 Robert Frost, “Devotion”, opcit.p.247

150 Ibid

151 Robert Frost, “A Passing Glimpse”,opcit.p.248

152 Ibid

153 Robert Frost, “Tree at My Window” opcit.p. 251

154 Ibid

155 Ibid

156 Robert Frost, “Sand Dunes”, opcit.p. 260

157 Ibid

158 Robert Frost, “West Running Brook”,opcit.p. 257

159 Ibid

160 Ibid

161 Ibid

162 Kaniz Khwaja Ahmad, “The Play of Contraries in Frost’s “West Running Brook” in Journal: Faculty of Arts, AMU, p 80, 2004 163 Ibid

164 Ibid

165 Jay Parini, Robert Frost-A Life, Henry Holt& Co. New York,1999,p.248

109

CHAPTER FIVE

THE STRATEGY OF BINARY OPPOSITES IN FROST’S LATER POETRY

(1936-1962)

By 1936, Frost was successful in achieving his place as one of America’s most loved poets. In June, the same year, another collection of his poems was published. It was called, A Further Range. “It was taken by the Book-of-the-Month Club as a selection, which meant a sale of fifty thousand copies right on top”1, writes Jay Parini. But the poet suffered a jolt when suddenly the book was reviewed negatively by many reviewers in the countryi. This, however, did not dent Frost’s popularity among his readers. He received the Pulitzer Prize, for the same book, the next year in 1937. This was an extraordinary achievement for a poet who was conferred the award for the third time in his poetic career. The book comprises poems which are comparatively stronger and more accurate in terms of images and language. The first poem of the Collection was, “A Lone Striker”2, which is cited time and again by critics for the varied perceptions it gives. The poem presents the difference between the life of a person in factory and his life in the woods in general and the difference between man and machine in particular. The poem begins with the description of a workplace where a late comer waits outside the gate, for it to open. “While the radical reader or listener might want to pause here and express an angry condemnation of the kind of heartless capitalism that treated a worker so harshly, Frost quickly goes on to say that the locked out worker knew another place ‘a wood’ to which he could repair”3 Inside the factory, yarns of wool are spun by machines but there is still a worker who takes note of the work because the machine may cut the wool accidently. This shows that though machine has taken the place of man in the modern times but still man’s importance cannot be denied. The machine after all is a man-made object and hence can never be independent of its master, the man. The late worker, for whom the gates of the factory remain close, decides to wander about in the woods. He realises the sharp difference between his life in the factory and his life in the woods.

The factory was very fine;

i Newton Arvin,"A Minor Strain," review of A Further Range, by Robert Frost, Partisan Review,Vol3. No5, June1936

Horace Gregory, “Robert Frost’s New Poems”, review of A Further Range, by Robert Frost, The New Republic, June24, 1936 Issue

110

He wished it all the modern speed.

Yet, after all, 'twas not divine,

That is to say, 'twas not a church.4

The difference between life in a factory, and life in the woods is same as the difference between modernity and divinity.

Frost took thirty- nine long years to decide upon his career as a poet, because he was not satisfied with other jobs which life was offering him. He believed in the union of love and work. This is partly evident from his next poem, “Two Tramps in Mud Time”5 where he plays on the difference between the themes of avocation and vocation. The poet-speaker is busy with his work of chopping wood when he is suddenly interrupted by two tramps. There is a sharp difference in the attitude of the tramps who are aimless and the speaker who has an aim. The tramps judged the speaker in the manner in which he held his axe. But he was not moved by their opinion and disliked their presence. He had been chopping wood because he liked the work, and not because of the money which he made out of his profession. His aim had always been to unite his avocation and vocation so that his work did not appear burdensome. Tim Kendall notes, “By speaking of poetry in an ulterior fashion, through mowing, orchis hunting, tree selling or here, woodcutting, Frost escapes his own distrust of the sedentary trade.”6 The statement, throws light over the speaker as a poet who took solace in writing poems, but it digresses from the main crux of the poem, the distinction between avocation and vocation or in a way the unification of the two.

In the next poem, “In Times of Cloudburst”7 the poet compares future and present gains. The poem begins with a speculation about the harmful effects of rain on the soil. The poet optimistically suggests that there is always a better aspect to cloudburst than we may apprehend otherwise. Deidre Fagan opines, “The poem becomes a speculation about present gain versus future harm, but the sort of harm that can be caused is not entirely specified”8. Actually the rain is a blessing in disguise. For farmers it brings hope, and they can easily view their present gain in the downpours. However they do not intend to look deeper into the problems which rain may cause in future. The poet though mentions “future harm” but also believes that the harm is negligible.

Frost’s poetry is preoccupied with things which are usually ignored by the normal eye. The subject of his poems usually revolve around abandoned woods, lonely graveyards,

111 a withered flower and here, a “roadside stand”9. “The Roadside stand”, is one of Frost’s most popular poems. Like many other poems this too, deals with a very common day to day occurrence, which usually goes unacknowledged. There is a unique pull in this sheer simplicity which draws our attention to many such sights in our surroundings which need our love or help. The “Roadside Stand” referred in the poem is a symbol of an old world which depends upon the new one for its sustenance. The city is the source of financial stability for the countryside. The owner of the stand belongs to an old world, who has not experienced any change in his lifestyle. He strives for the fulfilment of his basic needs whereas the passers by are rich, born and bred people who strive for perfection. The poem employs binaries right from the very first line when the poet describes, “the little old house”10 with a “little new shed”11. Further, the lives of the people who live in the countryside and the lives of the city dwellers are poles apart. Their basic needs and their outlooks differ vastly. The rich onlookers are too insensitive to pay heed to the basic needs of these roadside stand owners whose economy and financial stability is mocked each time a car passes by their shop.

In, “The Old Barn at the bottom of the Fogs”12 the poet ridicules modern man’s mentality who pays no attention to his natural surroundings and gets himself busy in hiding his, “treasure under glass”13. Modern man is devoid of sensitivity and hence cannot look for beauty in simple things like a barn which is abandoned to grow on its own. He pities them since they value those things which are of less value and can be bought with money and “leave such lovely shafts outdoor to perish”14. Soon the barn would become a relic and the trees it supported would be no more there. There is a difference of opinion between a tramp who values the barn and the rich who abandon barns to die a natural death.

In the next poem, “At Woodward’s Garden”15 a human being’s perception of an animal and an animal’s perception of a human being, is discussed. A young boy chaffed over the ‘foolishness’ of two monkeys who are caged in a garden. He takes a solar lens and pin-points the glass’s rays over their nose. It brought a “puzzled dimness to their eyes”16 as they “exchanged troubled glances over life”17. Perhaps the monkeys too, had a similar perception about humans. One do not care about their point of view because after all they are animals. The poem deals with a duality of thought where a human sneers at the inhuman existence of two monkeys in a cage whereas the monkey’s level of imagination and thought remains undiscovered. They might be more concerned

112 about things which mattered in their lives rather than thinking of glasses, humans and the sun.

Who said it mattered What monkeys did or didn't understand? They might not understand a burning-glass. They might not understand the sun itself.

It's knowing what to do with things that counts.18

In “Lost in Heaven”19 the poet depicts a lost traveller who has no idea about his whereabouts on a starry stormy night. He questions the universe, “Where, Where in heaven am I?”20 and the next moment rules out any possibility of an answer and writes, “Let’s let my heavenly lostness overwhelm me.”21 The poet’s description of an unwelcoming dark night with thick clouds and rain suggests his sense of fear of the unknown or possibly of the unseen future, which appeared dark. But the poem takes a contrary turn at the end when the poet wishes to remain in that “lostness” and wills that it rejoices him. The same darkness which frightened him at the beginning seemed friendly at the end. There is a binary of opinion in the poem since the poet seems disturbed at the beginning and the tone changes in the end when he finds happiness in his solitude.

Alienation and isolation form an integral part of Frost’s poetry. There is always a sadness which lurks beneath his poems, sometimes reflecting a pessimistic view on isolation and sometimes embracing the loneliness. The poet as a person was fond of taking long winter walks in the woods. In this connection, “Desert Places”22 is one of Frost’s most popular and thematically obscure poems. Time and again it has been subjected to varied explanations and many critics find it a sister poem of, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” because in both poems snow forms a prominent element. But the most important element in the poem is not snow but night. In the very first line the whiteness of snow is contrasted with the darkness of the night. The field though becomes smoother with snow, yet there are a few weeds which hinder the smooth movement. Thus the poem is full of binaries which are present throughout the poem. Winter symbolically suggests death and Snow too, refers to the whiteness of death. But this death is temporary as the plants buried by snow would be reborn in spring. But

113 man’s death is forever. As the poet walks alone on a deserted night he realizes his identity in the wide universe. The desert places inside him were much more terrific than the deserts outside him. Snow pauses life for a moment but the loneliness in his heart had silenced him for years. There was nothing in the universe which could scare him now. The desert places inside him had overcome his fear of loneliness and death :

They cannot scare me with their empty spaces Between stars-on stars where no human race is. I have it in me so much nearer home

To scare myself with my own desert places.23

The next poem of the series is, “Leaves compared with Flowers”24, where the poet compares leaves with flowers and with bark, and bark with roots and days with nights. There is a long list of binary opposite words in the poem. Frost believes that leaves, flowers or tress have their own respective times to bloom. One can see the beauty of a flower during day but it needs a dark windy night to hear the leaves rustle and appreciate their sound. On the other hand, both the leaf and the flower would eventually wither away while the tree would remain intact. The poet as a young person loved flowers because he could not then see the beauty of darkness. With age and experience he started finding happiness and beauty in everything which was around him. He learnt to adapt himself to his circumstances.

The symbol of land versus the sea is not a new one in poetry but in “Neither Out Far Nor in Deep”25 it is linked with the existential crisis of modern man. Though the poem appears to be a simple comparison between the predictability of sea and unpredictability of land, it has many layers of meaning to it. The poet is full of criticism against the people who turn their back towards land and look towards the sea waves. They are more interested to know, how the sea would change but are not concerned about the land. This refers to the futility of their gaze and hints at the meaningless lives they lead. The poet has deliberately used the word “look” four times in the poem to emphasize the emptiness of this ‘looking’. They aimlessly gaze into the sea and not the land because they can make it out from the direction of the wind how the sea waves would move in the near future. They feel that the sea’s predictability is more pronounced than the land’s.

114

The land may vary more, But wherever the truth may be- The water comes ashore,

And the people look at the sea.26

Elaine Barry contemplates whether, “it is a commentary on tragic limitations of man’s perception? Or it goes further than that to postulate a blank and absurd universe that mocks the very attempt to “look”? The ambiguity is unresolved, the poem ends in a question”27. The poem echoes with the existential crisis from which modern man suffers. The binary pair of words in the title, “Out/In” hint at the near sightedness of the people who live on land. They can neither look far nor deep. Their sight is devoid of vision. Even while looking towards the sea they had no intention to look far or deep. They exist for the sake of existing.

The next poem in the Volume is, “Voice Ways”28 in which the poet voices an opinion in the first line and then refutes it throughout the poem. The poem begins with an assurance that, “Some things are never clear”29 and in the very next line the poet says, “but the weather is clear tonight”30. There is, however, no link between the first line of the poem and the lines which follow it. In fact they are binary opposed and contradictory to one another. Though the poet was sure that nothing is clear yet he walks ahead and says that the weather is clear because rain has cleared clouds from the sky, mountains appeared clear and stars shone brighter and thus how can one say that nothing was clear?

Some things are never clear But the weather is clear tonight, Thanks to a clearing rain. The mountains are brought up near, The stars are brought out bright. Your old sweet-cynical strain Would come in like you here

'So we won't say nothing is clear'31

The poem moves in two different directions in the course of a few lines. The poet’s assertion of a fact and his negation of the same , strike a binary note in the verse.

115

“Ten Mills”32 is a collection of ten very short poems, each with a different theme and symbol. The first poem, “Precaution”33 is more of an axiom than a poem as it ends in two lines. The young poet expresses his reluctance to be radical as it can make him conservative when old. The poem echoes with the young neighbour’s opinion in “Mending Wall”34 who hates boundaries of any kind. On the other hand, the old neighbour is bent on building a wall since he believes in the old saying that, “Good fences make good neighbours”35. Similarly the poet in “Precaution”36 fears being radical because he does not wish to turn conservative in his later life :

I never dared to be radical when young,

For fear it would make me conservative when old.37

Words like ‘Radical’ and ‘Conservative’ throw light over the central theme of the poem, the difference between the young and the old and thus the ultimate binary between radicalism and conservatism.

In the second poem of the series, “The Span of Life”38 Frost lays bare the difference between an old dog and his earlier self when he was a pup. The dog barks backwards without getting up and this shows his helplessness and lack of strength. Again the poem is a couplet which ends in two lines :

The old dog barks backward without getting up

I can remember when he was a pup.39

The contrast is between the old dog who has left all hopes of survival and the young pup he was once upon a time. Hence he does not bother about getting up or barking, “his bite is now his bark”40 writes, Deirdre Fagan.

“Pertinax”41 is another short poem of three lines where the poet mischievously describes the life of a poet. He wishes that the chaos in his mind cause a storm to rise and the storm let the clouds to form a shape. The ‘form’ here may refer to the poet’s verse, which has a shape:

Let chaos storm!

Let cloud shapes swarm!

I wait for form.42

116

The poet awaits a form in the midst of chaos. This is the binary opposition in the poem as he talks of storms yet looks forward to form. This perhaps is a hint at the process of thought formation in the mind of a poet, whose mind may be full of turbulent storms but the result is always a masterpiece.

The last poem under, “Ten Mills” is, “In Dive’s Dive”43 which talks about a game of cards gambled in a bar. The poem begins with the speaker who is losing a game of cards but is “steady and unaccusing”. He is not affected by his loss but is concerned about the game which he may win next. There is a pun in the word Dive which is generally associated with swimming or water bodies, but in this context, it refers to a small club or a low quality bar. The poet’s description of his lost game and his hope for a win in a game yet to be played mark the binary in the poem.

It is late at night and still I am losing,

…

Let’s have a look at another five.44

In “The Bearer of Evil Tidings”45 the bearer stands on crossroads, similar to the crossroads in “The Road not Taken”. One road led to the throne And one went off to the mountains And into the wild unknown

The bearer chose the mountains and path of adventure, instead of power. The speaker in both the above mentioned poems faces the same dilemma. The dilemma of choosing any one, out of the two paths. The bearer, like the poet goes for the mountains instead of power and is satisfied with his choice. Both the contrasting paths had their own claims to life, and they present the two binary images in the poem.

“Iris by Night”46 is one of the concluding poems of the volume and it deals with some strange phenomenon in nature which is experienced by the poet with his friend. Unfortunately his friend does not live long to share his experience with the readers and Frost is the only surviving witness to the miracle. The poem begins with the description of an evening where the poet and his friend are walking down “a Malvern’s side”47. Suddenly they spot an ‘Iris’ on the horizon. Iris here refers to a rainbow which unites 117 the heaven and earth. The binary opposition arises from the fact, that, a rainbow can never be witnessed in the dark. It is caused by the dispersing of sunlight. The juxtaposition of the fact that a rainbow is witnessed in the evening is strange yet contrary to the justification of the phenomenon in nature. The speaker further adds that the rainbow encircles them as if in a ring and it seems as if it wanted them to stay safe from “all division time or foe can bring”48. The concept of a rainbow in the night and the unusual interference of nature into man’s life is a contradiction in itself.

Frost’s political career was often targeted by critics because one could see hints of his political inclinations in his poems. The poem “Mending Wall” was considered as a satire on the division of USSR, by many writers. “To a Thinker”49 is a similar one where Frost talks about the left and right wing political thoughts. He plays with the contraries present around us and invokes the reader as a thinker who would think again and again and change sides likewise.

These binary pair of words lay bare the two extreme thought processes which may prevail in the human mind. Throughout the poem, Frost oscillates between the two perceptions and asks the thinker to shun imagining things and taking sides because one has to repent one day. The poem ends with his proud assertion that the reader should believe in his instincts since he is – “a bard”.

After the publication of, A Further Range, till a new collection of his work appeared in 1942, two major events occurred in Frost’s life. His wife and his only son, Carol died unfortunately and left him wavering between depression and hopelessness. It took six long years for him to regain his stability and bring out a full collection of lyrics, A Witness Tree, once again to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize for the fourth and the last time in his life. If North of Boston was best known for its long narratives, A Witness Tree in this regard was a book of lyrics. The short and symbolic lyrics in the Volume underscore Frost’s mastery over the lyric as a form and brevity as an art. It comprises many of his best known and loved poems. The book carried a dedication to K.M, “for her part in it”. It is to be noted that after the death of Frost’s wife, he was fighting with depression and came back to his senses only after his friendship with Kay Morrison who counselled him out of his darkness. Frost was indebted to her for this gesture all his life. ii

ii Jay Parini, “Depths Below Depths”, Robert Frost-A Life, Holt Paperback, New York,1999, p315 118

The first two poems of the book perfectly prepare the readers for the upcoming lyrics. The first poem of the collection, “Beech”50 deals with the traditional theme of the difference between imagination and reality yet it approaches the subject in a much contemporary way. The poem asserts the fact that a poet’s imagination may be scarred or wounded but it is always committed to ‘memory’. On the other hand, the poet may be confident about his world of imagination yet is always “circumstanced with dark and doubt”51. William Pritchard writes :

Frost considered the notion of being “bound” in a less fervently affirmative way. In Beech he bends an imaginary line into woods, stakes out a corner with some rocks, and then directs attention to the beech tree, announcing that:

One tree, by being deeply wounded,

Has been impressed as Witness Tree

And made commit to memory.52

The poem works at binary levels. In the first few lines he ascertains the power of imagination and as the poem ends, he questions the poet’s ability to live up to that imaginary world. The world of doubt and conformity are juxtaposed in the poem. “Beech” in a way becomes a high altitude place from where the reader views all other poems in the collection.

In “Come In”53 once again a similar theme of enchantment is referred, where the speaker is allured to come into the woods but he resists the pull. It reminds one of the irresistible desire to set in the strange woods of, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”. The woods in “Come in” echo with the same strangeness as in many other Frost’s lyrics. The reference to Thrush, rings similar bells as Keats’s nightingale or Shelley’s Skylark, but unlike other nature poems the speaker here is not moved by the bird’s song. He has no desire to follow the music in the woods because he has to go somewhere. Thus, the mysterious elements in the woods which prompt the poet to come inside and explore fail to enchant him. The poem again moves on binary levels where the woods, thrush and other mysterious elements in nature stand on the way of the poet but fail to attract him. He stands on the threshold of the woods yet does not step in because he was, “out for stars”. He ends the poem by saying :

119

But no I was out for stars:

I would not come in.

I meant not even if asked,

And I had’nt been54

In, “I could give all to time”55 reluctance is implicit in the title itself. In the course of the poem it becomes clear that the poet ‘could’ give all to time but he would not like to give all. This underlines the inherent binaries in the poem. The poem shows time as ‘grave’ and ‘contemplative’ which moves slowly with its own pace, irrespective of the changes it causes to the nature. This statement is contrary to the general supposition one has of time as something which waits for none. Frost challenges the stereotypical characteristic one attributes to time and calls it insignificant which can take away only those things which the poet allows. The theme and subject matter points to the Shakespearean sonnets where the poet establishes the immortality of his verse against the ravages of time. Contrary to this universal belief Frost refuses to part with what he “posses”. Time is unmoved by the changes it brings to people and their lives and thus becomes irrelevant, but the poet portrays himself as more powerful and relevant than time who would not part with what he “kept”.

In “Carpe Diem”56, Frost brings about the difference between experiencing the present, imagining the future and contemplating the past. According to him, man cannot enjoy the present because either he is busy thinking about his future or regretting his past:

It lives less in the present Than in the future always, And less in both together Than in the past. The present Is too much for the senses, Too crowding, too confusing Too present to imagine.57

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Children may be happy and live in their present, but no one can actually seize the day. Thus, the difference between past and present, present and future, form the binary in the poem.

In the next poem, “Wind and the Rain”58, the poet hints upon the change of attitude within the same person due to age. He begins by saying that, when he was young he would enjoy walking in the rain and thinking about death in a pensive mood, unaware of the fact that : The many deaths one must have died Before he came to meet his own59 Later, age taught him that there are worse things in life than death. The actual suffering is not death but life. In the second part of the poem he points towards those flowers which strive to bloom in a desert. They get little amount of water which sustains their survival, but limit their growth. According to the poet, if he would have got a chance, he would have definitely provided them enough water which would not only help them to survive but bloom. In the last part of the poem, he says that now when it rains he no longer wishes for death or sadness but the rain reminds him of his tears. Rain was the tears adopted by my eyes That have none left to stay60

The poem is not the first of its kind. There are few other poems discussed in the previous chapter which too deal with the binaries within a person, which develop because of age.

In the next poem, “The Most of It”61 Frost defines a well known phenomenon of science, called, “echo”. The word usually refers to the reverberation of one’s own voice while one shouts from over a cliff or a place of void. But Frost emphasises that, people who shout their names from “some tree-hidden cliffs” expect someone else’s voice in return. In short the poem exposes modern man’s alienation and loneliness in a world and his innate desire for company. It portrays man’s inner self, his expectations from the world and his ultimate acceptance of his fate. The binary in the poem is between man’s inner self, which desires to hear someone else’s voice from the cliff and his portrayal of satisfaction in front of the world, when he hears his own echo:

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He thought he kept the universe alone;

For all the voice in answer he could wake

Was but the mocking echo of his own

From some tree-hidden cliff across the lake62

In the next poem, “The Quest of the Purple Fringed”63, the poet takes a quest walk wherein he is in search of a purple orchid, which may reveal if the weather is about to change or not. The poet does not depend upon the weather forecasts or intuition, but completely depends upon the purple fringed flower. The poem begins in a quest and ends in a discovery. The poet walks for miles but could not locate the orchid, and hence follows a path made by a fox. To his surprise, the path leads him to his destination. The flowers lay there under a tree, pale in colour, thus assuring the fact that summer is on the verge of its end. The poet walks back with confirmation that fall is just round the corner. The poem shows man’s dependability on Nature. Nature may be indifferent to man’s needs but man is dependent on Nature in some way or the other. The binary in the poem is the poet’s quest for an answer, and his confirmation that fall has arrived. The poem thus moves from confusion and confirmation.

In “The Gift Outright”64 the poet talks about two contrasting approaches- the man’s and the land’s regarding one another. The poem begins with the lines, “The land was our’s before we were the land’s”65. This hints at the two main feelings discussed in the poem- the feelings of national integrity and nationhood. According to Reuben. A. Brower, the poem is “better described as poetic definition of an American state of mind, a combat psychological essay on colonialism”66. But contrary to this, it comments sarcastically on people’s attitude towards their motherland. It would at once appeal to every colonial country which had been ruled by an empire in the past. The poet says that the land belonged to the people (Americans) but they belonged to the colonists. There is a very apparent binary in the statement, which highlights people’s attitude towards their own freedom and the freedom of their land. People want to be unpossessed, yet remain possessed. They want freedom, yet do not resist being slaves. This contrariness delays the process of freedom and it depresses the poet.

“To a Young Wretch”67 is all about the spirit of Christmas. It deals with Christmas’s excitement on one hand and the poet’s disheartenment on the chopping off of a Christmas tree on the other hand. He feels sad for the tree which was chopped by a trespasser, but

122 also feels happy because after all it was Christmas. There is again a binary of approach within his thoughts, though he tries his best to deviate his mind from the tree but ends up lamenting that there were still ways to celebrate without, “keeping my tree at your window bay”68. Frost finds it cruel to crop a tree and snatch away its life only to keep it as a show piece on Christmas eve. Though it might sound as a very pessimistic approach to life but it depicts the sensitivity of a poet’s heart and his emotions when his tree is cut by an unknown trespasser for Christmas celebration. The thought appeals to the sensitive reader who realises how cruel it is to chop a tree, to derive some temporary happiness. Thus happiness is contrasted with sadness:

It is your Christmases against my woods. But even where thus opposing interests kill, They are to be thought of as opposing goods Oftener than as conflicting good and ill69 The next poem, “A Loose Mountain”70 describes meteor showers and man’s indifference to nature. The poet gives references from the Bible where stars formed an important part of man’s lives in the past. Frost alludes to Leonid, a cluster of stars which guided three wise men to Bethlehem when Christ was born. But now stars and meteors are rendered useless by people of the modern age. Electricity has replaced natural light and man tends to appreciate artificiality more than nature. Thus, the binary in the poem is the difference between natural and artificial. The heartless and enormous Outer Black Is still withholding in the Zodiac But from Irresolution in his back About when best to have us in our orbit, So we won't simply take it and absorb it.71

In 1947, Frost came out with another collection of his poems, Steeple Bush. The book is marked by two major poems written by Frost in his career, including “Directive”, and “Too Anxious for Rivers”. “Directive”72 is one of Frost’s most speculated poems. Soaked in paradoxes and contradictions, the poem is one of the finest examples of binaries. The poet takes us with him in a world of past which is: Burned, dissolved and broken off Like graveyard marble sculpture in the weather73

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Frost’s world is a strange world of make belief, which somehow resembles Eliot’s The Wasteland. Indeed, this is not a modern wasteland but a wasteland of the relics or reminiscent of the past which do not exist anymore. A quaint feeling of strangeness dominates the poem, as the reader is guided by the poet, who himself is lost and who believes that one must be lost in order to be found. Found not by others, but by his own self:

Both of them are lost And if you're lost enough to find yourself By now, pull in your ladder road behind you

And put a sign up CLOSED to all but me Then make yourself at home.74

He takes us to a place where things exist and do not exist at the same time, creating a binary of images in the description:

There is a house that is no more a house Upon a farm that is no more a farm And in a town that is no more a town. The road there, If you'll let a guide direct you Who only has at heart your getting lost75

Tim Kendall writes, The uncertainty befits a poem which journeys through ruined present and pristine past simultaneously, keeping each visible and allowing dominance to neither. The logical contradiction in the “house that is no more a house” exemplifies this dual status: summoned by poetic will, the past both exists and is lost, as the fourfold reiteration of “now” insists on the inescapability of the present.76

In the next poem, “The Middleness of the Road”77, Frost, like many of his other poems demarcated between the world of man, his limitations and nature’s limitlessness. He does this by using the metaphor of a road which ends where the skies begin. It may go

124 into a wood, or may end into nothingness but it has to end. It cannot go on like nature, like woods, like skies and everything that nature possess. Man in the end stands in the middle of a road and tries to look beyond its length. He cannot go beyond the road, because nature begins where the road ends. His limitations are juxtaposed with the eternity of nature : The road at the top of the rise Seems to come to an end And take off into the skies. So at the distant bend78

The next poem, “Too Anxious for Rivers”79 states the poet’s curiosity to find the course of a river’s life and final death. Thus, the poem functions on the two metaphors of life and death, beginning and end. The river begins where the mountain ends:

Look down the long valley and there stands a mountain That someone has said is the end of the world. Then what of this river that having arisen Must find where to pour itself into and empty80

The poet’s mind runs into ceaseless depths of a river, its origin and end. But it may also be suggestive of man’s course of life. He parodies his philosophical questions with a myth, which says that:

The world as we know is an elephant's howdah, The elephant stands on the back of a turtle, The turtle in turn on a rock in the ocean.81

Thinking about life, its origin and its end is futile because it is something which takes away the essence of living. One must flow like a river, because like a river our lives too would eventually end with a fall in the canyon of death. Thus, the interplay of life and death, beginning and end are the binaries on which the poem works. The next poem, “Skeptic”82 like its name, oscillates between belief and disbelief. The poem highlights the binaries from the very first stanza where the poet believes and disbelieves at the same time: 125

I don’t believe I believe you’re the last in space83

The poet says that he believes in outer space or the universe and contradicts his own statement. He speculates upon the vastness of the universe but could not come to a conclusion and thus wavers between belief and disbelief.

In the next poem, “Two Leading Lights”84 the two leading lights are the sun and the moon, which have been personified as male and female simultaneously. It is a fact that the sun shines throughout the day and the moon throughout the night, highlights the binaries in the poem. For the Sun, Frost says:

The Sun is satisfied with days

He never has in any phase

That I have heard of shone at night

And yet he is a power of light85

These lines depict Sun’s power and majesty during the day. Referring to the Moon at night, he writes:

The Moon for all her light and grace

Has never learned to know her place

The notedest astronomers

Have set the dark aside for hers86

It is thus very clear that the Sun stands for the light or the day and the Moon stands for the night or the darkness. The Sun is mighty and powerful and knows its worth, whereas the Moon “has never learned to know her place”. Both the celestial objects have their own spaces, likes and dislikes, which highlight their contradictions.

After Steeple Bush, a volume called Collected Poems was published in the year 1949. Frost was slowly entering into the final phase of his poetic career as well as life. In 1962, he came up with his last book of poems, In the Clearing. “All that Frost thought was true attained its final refinement in the themes of dualism involving spirit and matter in In the Clearing.” wrote, Peter.J.Stanlis. He further adds : There is nothing mechanistic about Frost’s extension of his dualistic beliefs, because his eclectic and complex mind was never fixed rigidly upon any one

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philosophical system, but was always open to consider and absorb whatever he found valid through his experiences of life. The continuity recognizable in his final volume therefore, is not merely a logical extension of his previous art and thought. It includes fresh developments and intuitional insights in the form, style, techniques and content of his poems and the themes of his beliefs as a dualist… In the Clearing provides a continuity and unity that is the fitting climax of his positive beliefs. 87 “Does No One At All Ever Feel This Way in the Least?,”88 states a comparison between the old and new America. The poet is concerned about the things which changed over the years. The boats are replaced by motorboats and the sea is slowly being replaced by the buildings. Children no longer know the difference between various kinds of water bodies. The teachers shows them a pool and call it a sea, so that they may know how Sinbad was a sailor. The comparison between the two worlds, old and new marks the binaries in the poem:

So far inland the very name of ocean Goes motionless except in baby school When teacher’s own experiences fail her And she can only give the class a notion Of what it is by calling it a pool And telling them how Sinbad was a sailor.89

“The Objection to being Stepped On”90 is a small poem which deals about the difference between a weapon and a tool. The poet talks about a “hoe” which although is a tool, but becomes a weapon for the farmer. The poet accidently steps upon a hoe and gets hurt. The incident compels the poet to speculate upon the usefulness of things and their ability to harm us if one is careless towards them. For the poet, the hoe was a tool, but it became a weapon very soon. The subtle difference between a tool and a weapon are the two contrary elements in the poem. In a brief poem of two lines, “For Iron”91, Frost expresses his attitude towards nature. The reference to nature is perhaps a hint towards human nature as well. According to the poet, man is so complex a being that he forever struggles within his own self. His nature of liking and disliking things compel him to take sides and this becomes the root of all conflicts. The binary oppositions within us makes human survival complicated: 127

Nature within her inmost self divides To trouble men with having to take sides.92

The final poem from In the Clearing best describes that emblematic encounter with nature which Frost, with the remarkable exception of “Stopping by Woods On a Snowy Evening” took to be the raison d’etre of his art. As usual he goes “against the trees”, his force pitted against nature’s own, not in a cosmic struggle for supremacy but in a momentary action that outlines both man and nature against that point of active encounter. As he leaves with his maple cut low, “I link a line of shadowy tracks/ Across the tinted snow”. He moves across and through nature, his existence “shadowy” yet somehow a “link” with it, a link to some wider, ultimate encounter. Nature has not been defeated “in one tree’s overthrow”. Nor has man been defeated in his retreat “for yet another blow”. Both exist to encounter each other a new, and all that Frost would ask of us is “You come too”.93

The above quotation is a reference to the last poem of Frost’s last book, In the Clearing. The poem is called “In Winter in the Woods”94 and it reminds us of the first poem in his first book, “Into my Own”. It deals with Frost’s fascination with trees, and his desire to live, work and wander in the woods. In the poem, the poet of New England retreats into his inner world and describes an evening where he goes out to chop a branch of a Maple tree. He stands in the wood, amidst tall trees and realises man’s uncertainty and temporal existence as compared to Nature, which is eternal. He finds in them an echo of Nature’s unconquered will, something which can never die. The poet on the other hand waits for the final blow of death:

I see for Nature no defeat In one tree’s overthrow Or for myself in my retreat For yet another blow.95

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Samuel Coale asserts : Man and nature exist to confront one another, to encounter each other from each other’s own “territorial imperatives”. In Frost’s affirmation of separateness exists the vague outline of man’s “equality” with nature, though man must finally submit to nature’s superior power displayed eventually at his desk. Nature remains a permanent “other” impersonally unified beyond man’s ability to comprehend it. Man and Nature share some undeclared element of divine force, but each embodies the force independently with as much mutual antagonism as respect. The outcome of such an encounter, though never in doubt since man knows he will die, is never as important as the actual confrontation, the direct action of the encounter itself.96 The encounter between man and nature, is not something new. Time and again, it has made its presence felt in the poems of Frost. He perhaps loves to put man amidst nature either to find solace or discover with awe the uncertainty of his life against nature’s eternity. Indeed, Frost’s poems beginning with A Boy’s Will (1913) and ending with In the Clearing (1962), make a full circle of his life. The poet wavers between confirmation and confusion, belief and disbelief to reach to a conclusion of uniformity. The binaries in his early poems look more prominent whereas the binaries in his later poems appear more promising. The older Frost played more with minds than with paradoxes:

Far in the pillared dark Thrush music went- Almost like a call to come in To the dark and lament.

But no, I was out for stars: I would not come in. I meant not even if asked, And I hadn’t been.97

And still, the poet refuses to come in. He refuses to be carried away by anything apart from poetry. The woods had been mysterious and the song of the thrush was enchanting,

129 but the poet still wishes to go on with his journey into the unknown, undisturbed “even if asked”.

1 Jay Parini, Robert Frost- A Life, (Henry Holt &Co.New York,1999)p305 2 Robert Frost, “A Lone Striker”, The Poetry of Robert Frost, ed. Edward Connery Lathem (St. Martin’s Griffin. New York, 1979),p. 273 3 The Sadness that Lurks : Robert Frost and the poetry of Poverty, Thomas Duddy, The Hudson Review, Autumn2011, 64,3; Pro Quest Research Library, p.449 4 Robert Frost, “A Lone Striker”, The Poetry of Robert Frost, ed. Edward Connery Lathem (St. Martin’s Griffin. New York, 1979), p.273 5 Robert Frost, “Two Tramps in Mud Time”, The Poetry of Robert Frost, ed. Edward Connery Lathem (St. Martin’s Griffin. New York, 1979), p.275 6 Tim Kendall, The Art of Robert Frost, (Yale University Press, New York, 2012), 348 7 Robert Frost, “In Times of Cloudburst”, The Poetry of Robert Frost, ed. Edward Connery Lathem (St. Martin’s Griffin. New York, 1979), p.285 8 Deidre Fagan, Critical Companion to Robert Frost, (Facts on Files, New York) p191 9 Robert Frost, “The Roadside Stand”, p286.opcit 10 Ibid 11 Ibid 12 Robert Frost, “The Old Barn at the Bottom of the Fogs”, p289, opcit 13 Ibid 14 Ibid 15 Robert Frost, “At Woodward’s garden”, p293.opcit 16 Ibid 17 Ibid 18 Ibid 19 Robert Frost, “Lost in Heaven”, p295.opcit 20 Ibid 21 Ibid 22 Robert Frost, “Desert Places”, opcit.p296. 23 Ibid

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24 Robert Frost, “Leaves Compared with Flowers”opcit, p296 25 Robert Frost, “Neither Out Far Nor in Deep”, opcit, p301. 26 Ibid 27 Elaine Barry, Robert Frost, (Fredrick Ungar Publishing Co. New York, 1973)p.36 28 Robert Frost, “Voice Ways”,opcit, p301. 29 Ibid 30 Ibid 31 Ibid 32 Robert Frost, “Ten Mills”, The Poetry of Robert Frost, ed. Edward Connery Lathem (St. Martin’s Griffin. New York, 1979), p.308 33 Robert Frost, “Precaution”, opcit, p29 34 Robert Frost, “Mending Wall”,opcit, p33 35 Ibid 36 Robert Frost, “Precaution”, opcit.p308. 37 Ibid 38 Robert Frost, “The Span of Life”,opcit. p308. 39 Ibid 40 Ibid 41 Robert Frost, “Petrinax”, opcit. p 308 42 Ibid 43 Robert Frost, “In Dive’s Dive”,opcit. p310. 44 Ibid 45 Robert Frost, “The Bearer of Evil Tidings” opcit, p. 313. 46 Robert Frost, “Iris By Night”, opcit, p315. 47 Ibid 48 Ibid 49 Robert Frost, “To A Thinker”, opcit, p325. 50 Robert Frost, “Beech”,opcit, p331 51 Ibid 52 William.H.Pritchard, Frost: A Literary Life Reconsidered ,Oxford University Press, 1984, p229 53 Robert Frost, “Come In”, p334,opcit. 54Ibid

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55Robert Frost, “I Could Give all to Time”,p334,opcit 56 Robert Frost, “Carpe Diem”,opcit.p335 57 Ibid 58 Robert Frost, “The Wind and the Rain”,opcit. p336 59 Ibid 60 Ibid 61 Robert Frost, “The Most of it”,opcit. p338 62 Ibid 63 Robert Frost, “The Quest of the Purple Fringed”opcit.p342 64 Robert Frost, “The Gift Outright”, p348.opcit 65 Ibid 66 Reuben.A.Brower, Poetry of Robert Frost-Constellations of Intention,(Oxford University Press, New York, 1963)p.202 67 Robert Frost, “To A Young Wretch”, opcit.p349 68 Ibid 69 Ibid 70 Robert Frost, “A Loose Mountain” opcit, p.360 71 Ibid 72 Robert Frost, “Directive”, opcit. p377 73 Ibid 74 Ibid 75 Ibid 76 Tim Kendall, The Art of Robert Frost, Yale University Press, 2012, p380 77 Robert Frost, “The Middleness of the Road”, opcit.p388 78 Ibid 79 Robert Frost, “Too Anxious for Rivers”, opcit.p379 80 Ibid 81 Ibid 82 Robert Frost, “Skeptic”, opcit.p389 83 Ibid 84 Robert Frost, “Two Leading Lights”,opcit. p390 85 Ibid 86 Ibid

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87 Peter J Stanlis ,Robert Frost: The Poet as Philosopher, ISI Books, USA, p289 88 Does No One At All Ever Feel This Way in the Least” opcit.p.446 89 Ibid 90 Robert Frost,“The Objection to being Stepped On” opcit, p450 91 Robert Frost, “For Iron”, opcit.p468 92 Ibid 93 Samuel Coale, “The Emblematic Encounter of Robert Frost” Frost: Centennial Essays, University Press of Mississippi, 1974, p106 94 Robert Frost,“In Winter In the Woods”opcit. p.470 95 Ibid 96Ibid, p94 97 Robert Frost, “Come In”, opcit. p334

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CHAPTER SIX

A COMPENDIUM OF BINARY OPPOSITE WORDS IN THE POETRY OF FROST

S.No Poem Text Binary Words Comment 1. Ghost House Of new wood New Old The old wood and old where has been the woodpecker contrasted with chops. the new one. The woodpecker chops the wood irrespective of its texture. 2. And a cellar in Daylight Night During the day which the the speaker daylight falls. finds himself And purple – amidst “purple stemmed wild stemmed wild raspberries raspberries”. grow But as night descends, the Night comes; place grows the black bats eerie and is tumble and visited by the dart. bats. 3. Love and a And question You I The difference Question what of the between the night to be, groom and the Stranger You stranger is and I. reflected in the words, you and I. The stranger wants a shelter, but the groom wishes for privacy. 4. A heartfelt Poor Rich The bridegroom prayer for the denies the poor of God stranger, shelter. But in turn gives Or for the rich a him a dole of curse. bread and some money. If he be poor, he would appreciate the bread and if he were rich, he

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would love the money. 5. A late Walk Up from the Weed Flower The weed tangle of saddens the withered weeds poet, but a flower makes Of the last him happy, and remaining aster he forgets about flower. autumn. 6. Stars And yet with Love Hate The stars are neither love nor devoid of love hate. and hate, they Those stars like look at us from some snow- the heavens in white an objective Minerva’s snow way. white marble eyes, without the gift of sight. 7. Storm Fear How the cold Cold Fire A contrasting creeps as the relationship fire dies at between both. length. The temperature in the room decreases as fire dies. 8. Wind and To come again Dark Light The darkness of Window at dark. the night is Flower contrasted with And warm the light coming stove window from the stove. light. 9. Who lay that Night Morning A sleepless night awake. night is contrasted with And morning the morning found the breeze. breeze. 10. A Prayer in Like nothing Day Night The orchids Spring else by day, like provide ghosts by night. happiness during the day, whereas ghosts are synonymous with the night. 11. Waiting That, silenced Song Silenced The silence of by my advent the deserted place was And on the counter

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worn book of balanced by the old golden song in the song. poet’s heart. 12. The Vantage Myself unseen, See Unseen The poet hides Point I see in white amidst trees and defined. watches the world. He stands unseen, yet he sees the world. 13. Living or dead Living Dead Standing on the whichever are hill, the poet to mind. speculates upon the ones who are living and the ones who are dead. 14. Far off the Homes Graves The dwelling homes of me, place of the and farther still. living is contrasted with The graves of the burial places men on an of the dead. opposing hill. Homes of the living are contrasted with the graves, where the dead permanently rest. 15. Trial By In streams and Streams Counter Both refer to Existence cross and Streams streams but counter streams flowing in opposite directions. 16. That opens Good ill Good and Ill, earthward good both form an and ill. integral part of our lives, according to the poet. 17. And the mind Mind Heart Mind and Heart whirls and the are often treated heart sings. as opposite forces, when it comes to decision making. 18. Of those who Earthly Paradise One needs to let for some good go off the discerned, will earthly bond in

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gladly give up order to reach paradise. Paradise. So it may be taken as Or the woe a contrary. were not earthly woe. 19. Spirit to matter Death Life The end of life till death come. is death. Thus the closest ‘Tis of the binary of life is essence of life death. here. 20. The Tuft of “As all must Together Apart There is a kind Flowers be”, I said of togetherness within my in being apart, heart, between men “Whether they who work on work together fields and farms. or apart” They might seem lonely but their hearts are united. 21. Seeking with Night Noon Both are memories contrasted on grown dim over the basis of the night. visibility of sun. The night lacks And weary, the light of the sought at noon. sun, whereas the noon is full of it. 22. And dreaming Speech Noiseless The as it were, held communication brotherly between two speech. men at work is On noiseless inaudible, wing a noiseless like a bewildered butterfly, but it butterfly. is there like speech. 23. Who mowed it Sun Shade He has used in the dew these words to before the sun. show that an entire day has And weary, passed. sought at noon with him the shade. 24. The The sound was Behind Before The poet Demiurge’s expected behind me laugh someone to be

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instead of walking before him, but heard a before. sound behind him, which aroused feelings of fear. Following someone and being followed by someone are two contrasting feelings, which may arouse awe and fear respectively. 25. In Hardwood They must go Go Down Coming Up The leaves must Groves down past go down and things coming decay up. themselves in order to be born once again on the trees, in the form of new leaves. 26. Before the Mount Fall The subtle fall leaves can of the leaves and mount again nature’s cycle is They fall from shown by using giving shade these two words. above. 27. A-Line Storm What matter if East West Refers to the we go clear to east and west the west. winds.

Oh, never this whelming east wind swells. 28. October O hushed Mild Wild Mild October October morning has morning mild, been contrasted with the wild Tomorrow’s wind. wind if it be wild. 29. My Butterfly Thine emulous Life Dead The life of a fond flowers poet is are dead. contrasted with the dead flowers Against my life. and the dead butterfly.

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30. And I was glad Me Thee Highlights the for thee difference between the poet And glad for speaker and the me, I wist. butterfly. 31. Reluctance I have climbed Climbed Descended The poet the hills of view wanders between And looked at accepting and the world, and rejecting. He descended. climbs up a hill and the next moment descends it. 32. I have come by Come Go The poet has the highway come by the home highway, and the leaves of the And let them go Oak are going scraping and away from the creeping. branches. 33. No longer Hither Tither The leaves are blown hither lying still and tither. without being The last lone moved or aster is gone. huddled by the wind. The words signify the chaos which the wind may create, throwing the leaves hither and thither. 34. Mending And spills the Sun Shade The sun is Wall upper boulders contrasted with in the sun the shade where the old Not of woods neighbour only and shades finally of trees. disappears in darkness. 35. But they would Rabbit Dogs One is a prey, have the rabbit and the other is out of hiding. the predator. To please the yelping dogs. 36. The Death of She ran on Down Up The servant the Hired tiptoe down the moves up the Man darkened hill to meet his passage master, and the

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lady walks When I came down to see up from Rowe’s him. There is a I found him binary of here. movements. 37. And nothing to Backwar- Forward Warren, the look backward d hired man, had to with pride no memories of the past, and no And nothing to hopes for the look forward future. Thus to with hope. backward and forward did not exist for him. 38. He never did a Bad Good The hired man thing so very was neither bad good nor bad, he He don’t know was in between. why he isn’t quite good. 39. The The mountain Town Village A tourist from a Mountain held the town as town, visits the in a shadow. mountain to find about a mystery There is no related to a village- only mountain. The scattered farms. mountain was in a village. 40. It’s always cold Cold Warm The mountain in summer and was famous for warm in winter. a stream which existed on the top, which was said to be warm in winter and cold in summer. A paradoxical phenomenon. 41. It’s always cold Summer Winter Same as above in summer and warm in winter. 42. Great granite Sun Shadow The visitor terraces in sun imagines that and shadow. the mountain would look beautiful in the sun and shadow. 43. It may not be Top Down The brook flows right on the on the top of the very top mountain and

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after climbing It wouldn’t the top, one can have to be a look down. long way down. 44. Warm in December June December is December and associated with Cold in June. winter, and June with summer. Again the poet highlights the strange quality of the brook, which remains warm in winter and cold in summer. 45. A Hundred Sit down or lie Sit Down Lie Down The speaker Collars down, friend asks his you make me companion, a nervous. stranger, to either sit down or lie down, because his appearance was making him nervous. 46. Let me send You Me It refers to two them to you. strangers, who are supposed to share a room in a hotel. They are of contrasting temperaments and are conscious of each other’s presence. 47. Coming out on House Woods House is man- them from a made, whereas stretch of woods are woods. symbolic of the natural habitat Raking the or God-made. dooryard, working near the house. 48. Lie down- let Sleep Awake The speaker yourself go and asks the stranger get some sleep. to have some Suppose you sleep, but is also

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aren’t awake conscious of his when I come awakening. back. 49. Home Burial Blind creature; Blind See Both words and awhile he have been used didn’t see. together to lay emphasis on the lack of sight. 50. Can’t a man Man Woman The pair lacked speak of his understanding own child he and unity, they has lost? had contrasting temperaments. God, what a woman! 51. No from the Life Death The death of the time when couple’s child is someone is sick contrasted with to death their life, which is worse than And making the death. best of their way back to life. 52. The Black In due to truths In Out There are times Cottage being in and out in life when we of favor. suffer in both ways, either by keeping things inside us, or throwing them out. 53. Blueberries Like two kinds Jewels Thieves Metaphorically of jewels, a jewels refer to vision for Blueberries and thieves. thieves in the poem refer to the people who conspire to steal the blueberries from the neighbourhood. 54. A Servant to Women and Men Women Though the poet servants men will make believes that them all the there is no point same. in comparing the two, but still does the same, and states that they are

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different in their sameness. 55. To have inside Locked Unlocked The speaker the house with imagines being doors unlocked in a house with the door Locked up for unlocked, and years back there relates it to his in the town. uncle’s locked door at the asylum. 56. Worse than no Worse Good People are sent good to them. to asylum in the hope that it would be good for them, but actually it makes them worse. 57. I have heard too Old Young It refers to an much of the old old fashioned fashioned way. belief that even My father’s the slightly brother, he abnormal should went mad quite be sent to an young. asylum because it will help them being better. This old fashioned belief is contrasted with the speaker’s uncle who went mad, at a very young age. 58. Like stanchions Floor Ceiling Refers to a cage, in the barn, or a room with from floor to bars all around ceiling. from floor to ceiling. 59. Men will make Men Beast A mad person in them, all the an asylum is like same an animal. His life is in no way Like a beast’s similar to that of stall to ease a man, he is their treated like a consciences. beast. 60. Father and Father Mother Once again non-

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mother married, cordial relation and mother between a came. husband and wife is depicted. The speaker’s father is an abnormal person whereas his mother is innocent and normal. 61. After Apple My long two- Heaven Earth The contrast Picking pointed ladder’s between heaven and earth is very Toward heaven prominent here. still, The poet imagines that That struck the his ladder is earth. going towards heaven, but actually he is too much on earth. 62. Magnified Appear Disappear The apples just apples appear like his and disappear. imagination appear and disappear at the same time. 63. The Code Marched Field Home The discomfort himself off the of the field is field and home. contrasted with the comfort of home. 64. Daylight and Daylight Lantern These words are lantern light Light used to depict were one for the course of a him. day, from morning till night. Also, daylight is natural while the other is artificial. 65. For the man ,up Up Down The man climbs on top, of up the hill, and throwing down. rolls hay and throws it down. There is thus upward and

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downward movement in his work. 66. The The sound of Sound Silence The silence had Generations which was actually a sound, of Men silence for the the sound of place. silence. 67. In a new New Ancient The new cottage cottage in an had been built at ancient spot. an ancient spot, thus a contrast in itself. 68. The Let people in In Out The Housekeeper then I can keep housekeeper them out. cannot let people come in, because she is old and has problem in walking to the door, hence they remain out. 69. To live together Together Apart The speaker and and then pull John had been apart. living together, yet they are separated by silence. They are apart in their togetherness. 70. The Fear Shone on a man Man Woman A couple and woman in speculates upon the door. being encroached, in the dark. Both are of contrasting temperaments. 71. Nearby all dark Dark Light The darkness in in every glossy the surroundings window. is juxtaposed by the light coming She said, “As from the lantern. the light on the dashboard ran” 72. The Self I am going to Worse Better The victim Seeker be worse, knows that he instead of expected to be better. better but the deal will make

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him worse. 73. What we live Live Die One has to die by, we die by. in the end, for the things he lived by all his life. 74. Will pencil do? Pencil Pen Things written Then please with a pencil your fountain can be erased, pen. but pen stands for permanence. 75. The Straight up and Up Down He is referring Woodpile down of tall to the trees from slim trees. top to bottom. 76. To warm the Warm Frozen The woodpile frozen swamp might have been as best as it used to warm a could. frozen swamp. 77. With the slow Smokeless Burning Burning of smokeless wood causes burning of smoke, but the decay. poet uses the word smokeless with it. Thus it is a paradox. 78. A Christmas The city has City Country Demarcates withdrawn into between the life itself. in a city and And left at last countryside. the country to the country. 79. Where the sun Sun Moon Each gives way shines now no to the other. The warmer than the sun shines moon. during the day and the moon during the night. Sun stands for warmth, and the moon is supposed to be cooler. 80. We climbed the North South The speaker and pasture on the his customer south, crossed walked towards over south, to reach the north. It is a And came paradoxical down on the description of north. seeking

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something and finding the other. 81. An old Man’s So late arising- Sun Moon The sun shines Winter Night to the broken during the day moon and the Moon during the night. As better than sun in any case. 82. As better than Sun Snow Sun, melts the sun in any case snow. Thus both For such a cannot exist charge, his together. The snow upon the poet refers to the roof. snow on a roof, with the sun above. 83. In the Home I only see the Come Go It is a reference Stretch years, they to the years come and go, in which come and alteration with go like weed in the weeds. a garden. 84. To lighted city City Country A couple has streets we, too left the luxuries have known. of a city, to dwell in But now are countryside. giving up for country darkness. 85. To lighted city Lighted Darkness The lighted city streets we, too streets have have known. been contrasted with the dark But now are country roads. giving up for country darkness. 86. Have we a Candle Moon One stands for piece of candle artificial light if the lamp and and the other is oil are buried a source of out of reach? natural light.

Can you tell what time it is by that? Or by the moon? 87. “Good boys Good Bad Good boys have they seemed been contrasted

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and let them with times, love the city.” which may render them bad. Its seeming bad for a moment makes it seem. 88. Ends and Ends Beginnings The wife beginnings believes that there are no there is nothing such things. like an ending or a beginning, all that matters is the middle. 89. The first thing Morning Night A reference to in the morning the good night call, and good To drag you out morning being for just a good the first thing in night call. a morning. 90. Her light won’t Light Dark The dark night last us long has been contrasted How dark it’s against the getting. moonlit sky. 91. The Oven He says that Spring Fall A reference to Bird leaves are old two contrary and that for seasons of the flowers, mid- year. summer is to spring as one to ten.

And comes that other fall, we name the fall. 92. Bond and Love has earth Earth Heaven Both the words Free to which she have been used clings with reference to Love. Some say His gain in it is earthly, Heaven is what while some they are. believe that Love is heavenly. 93. Birches When I see Left Right The birch trees Birches bend to bend in opposite left and right. directions, without breaking their branches.

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94. Loaded with ice Sunny Ice The winter a sunny winter morning is morning. marked by the appearance of the sun, hence a reference to the sunny winter morning. Both ice and sun are presented together to create a dual meaning. 95. That would be Going Coming The poet wishes good both, to leave earth going and because life is coming back. hard, and at the same time wants to come back, because earth is the right place for love. 96. Whose only Summer Winter The swinger of play was what birches does not he found bother about the himself, weather. He Summer or loves swinging winter, and either it is a could play sunny summer alone. or snowy winter. Images from both the seasons are used throughout the poem to balance the description, just like children who balance themselves on the birch tree. 97. Putting in the Mingled with Smooth Wrinkled Smooth beans Seed these, smooth are contrasted beans and with the wrinkled pea. wrinkled pea. 98. An Encounter A tree that has Down Raised It refers to a been down and tree, which had raised again. been cut, but has risen again. 99. House Fear And preferring Out Inside The couple in the out to the the poem prefers

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indoor night. staying out of Until they had their home, lit the lamp instead of inside. coming inside, because of their fear that someone might have encroached it, in their absence. 100. The Smile Perhaps he Young Old The couple is mocked at us young, but they for being very imagine that young. they might appear old to And he was some people, pleased to have who give them a vision of us vicious smiles. old and dead. 101. The Bonfire Down dark Dark Light Dark paths have converging been contrasted paths between with the light the pines. coming from the bonfire. Of people brought to window by a light. 102. Rouse them all, Free Not so free Both the words both free and are used in not so free. connection with the people who witness the wood burning as bonfire. The speaker says that when they burn huge logs of trees, it will create a chaos among the onlookers, who might anticipate it to be a volcano. He divides them into two groups- free and not so free. 103. I walked so Heavy Light The speaker felt

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light on air in that though his heavy shoes. shoes were heavy, but he felt very light, as if he was walking on air. 104. Out-Out As it ran light Dark Light Both words hold or had to bear a special load. significance in the poem The doctor put because the him in dark of boy’s world ether. suddenly turns dark when the axe chops off his arm. 105. Brown’s Faster or Faster Slower There was no Descent slower as he consistency in chanced. his steps. He would walk fast or slow according to his wish. 106. The Line They plant trees Living Dead The dead refers Gang for the living, to the poles that and he dead. were placed in place of trees, to connect telephone wires. Thus people were planting dead poles, for the living ones. 107. Snow I called you up Good Good Refers to the to say Good Night Morning distance night from here between morning and Before I went night. to say good Morning there. 108. Only you Men Women The poet has women have to used both the put these airs terms, to on to impress highlight the men. difference between the two sexes. 109. Trying to turn Backward Forward It refers to the itself backward speaker’s or forward, I’ve inability to

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had my eye on make a choice it to make out between going which. ahead or stepping back. 110. Quiet and light Warm Cold Warm air and warm, in coming from the spite of all lamp is contrasted with The illimitable the cold storm. dark and cold. 111. Quiet and light Light Dark The light and warm, in emitted from the spite of all lamp, is contrasted to the The illimitable darkness outside dark and cold. the room. 112. After a downy Snow Warmth Snow on the storm, he surface of the passed our ground is place contrasted with And found me the warmth banking up the inside the house with ground, which snow. causes a hissing And I was sound as the burrowing in cold snow deep for touches the warmth. warm ground. 113. Mrs. Cole’s Inner Outdoor It was cold voice came outside but the from the inner temperature room. inside the room was warm. You don’t suppose? She wouldn’t go outdoors. 114. The Sound of They are that Going Stay The words are Trees talks of going used with but never gets reference to the away. trees which appear to be That now it moving away means to stay. due to wind, but actually they never go. 115. New She has one Old Young Both words are Hampshire witch-old style. used to refer to the witches in The witch was the poem. One

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young and is old fashioned beautiful. and the other is young and beautiful. 116. The precious Quality Quantity It refers to the literature in quality and quantity quantity of a work of Or quality to literature. The worry the poet believes producer. that quality is more important. 117. Thick end to Thick Thin Two states have thin end and been compared thin end to thick to a shape end. similar to a wedge. Thick end and thin end, both complement each other. 118. For art’s sake Better Worse Few people one could mock New almost wish Hampshire of them worse. producing little literature. But Rather than according to the better. poet, that little is better than their contribution which is of no use. 119. Here I am Day Night The poet is overfertile in restless, he suggestion and keeps awake cannot rest from day till from planning night to make day or night. way for his country, to enter into the mainstream. 120. A Star in Some may School Church Children go the Stoneboat know what they school to seek seek in school for knowledge, and church. and they go to the Church to seek for God. They seek different things. Also, anyone

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can go to a school without any reference to his religious beliefs, but a Church is a religious body, meant for the worship of the Holy Christ. 121. So not to be Mars Earth One is a red compared planet whereas perhaps, in the other a blue worth planet. One To such resorts lacks water and of life as Mars the other and Earth. abounds in water bodies. 122. Sure that Death Birth The poet feels though not a that the fallen star of death star must not be and birth. compared to important planets like Mars, because it has already fallen and so it must be believed that it was not a star of death or birth. 123. That I am like Fool Wise The poet to compass, imagines fool or wise. whether the farmer who mistook the fallen star as stone, was a fool or the poet is wiser because he understood that the stone used to build a wall was a fallen star. 124. The Census And that not Men Women The place was taker dwelt in now by uninhabited by men and both, men and women. women. The poet could have used the word

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“people” but specifically mentions men and women to point that they are two different kinds of human beings. 125. Of year or day Year Day Though a year is the way it made up of 365 swung a door. days but here it has been used to suggest that a year is very long as compared to a day. 126. Maple Thus had a Meaning Meaning- Names with name with less meanings are meaning, given contrasted with in death. names without meanings in the Better a poem. The poet meaningless believes that we name, I should should be given say. meaningless names, so that our lives become meaningful while searching for meanings. 127. The Ax helve One back and Back Forward This describes forward, in and the movement out of shadow. of a rocking chair. 128. One back and In Out This too forward, in and describes the out of shadow. movement of a rocking chair. 129. One back and Same as above forward, in and out of shadow. 130. Baptiste know Short Long All workers in how to make a general know short job long. how to make a short job, appear long. 131. The And some of it Stand Go “Stand” Grindstone on no more legs signifies and wheel Than stability while

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the grindstone “go” depicts can boast to movement. stand and go. 132. Paul’s Wife Object to being Question Answer Not all asked a civil questions have question. answers, but all answers have Short of a questions. fighting word. You have the answers. 133. With both his Ceiling Floor Both exist on feet at once opposite ends in against the a room. Ceiling ceiling, refers to the And then land upper most part safely right side in a room, up again, whereas floor is Back on the the lowest floor, is fact or surface in a pretty near fact. room meant for walking. 134. Paul darkly, Light Darkly The darkness of like her a shadow is shadow. All the contrasted with light was from the light emitted the girl herself. from a star.

135. Wild Grapes As still I have Heart Mind The heart and not learned to mind are with the heart. believed to be in a contrary To wish in vain relationship. to let go with The decisions the mind. made with the heart are emotional and the ones made by using the mind are logical. 136. Place for a One man’s Man Woman The difference third three women in of opinion a burial row. between the opposite sexes is highlighted in the poem. 137. The Witch of Father had gone Upstairs Downstairs The father was Coos. upstairs; upstairs when mother was the mother was

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downstairs. downstairs. Perhaps they preferred to remain at two opposite positions. They have different destinations just like their opposite positions. 138. An Empty For God, man Man Beast Man and beast Threat or beast’s sake. are two binaries, for one is civilised whereas the other is not. 139. For God, man God Man Man is mortal or beast’s sake. whereas God is immortal. 140. It is to say “You You I The speaker and I” distances To such a himself from the ghost. listener or the reader. 141. A Fountain, Ascending to Ascending Descend Walking over a A Bottle, A descend to mountain may Donkey’s reascend. not be easy. One ears, and has to ascend in some Books. order to descend. 142. I Will Sing Awake that Day Night The poet awaits You One-O night the night to end To call it day. and the clock to announce that a day has begun. 143. Awake that Sleep Awake The poet night and give remains awake up sleep. all night, and wishes to sleep but cannot. He wanders between a sleepless night, wishing that the day arrives and he can officially be awake. 144. They spoke of Sun Moon Often mentioned the Sun, Moon in the binary

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and stars. terms, the sun remains supreme during the day and the moon during the night. Both cannot shine together. 145. Fragmentary Since earth is Earth Heaven Although the Blue earth, perhaps opposite of not heaven. heaven is hell, Though some but the poet has savants make used Earth in earth include opposition to the sky. heaven. He makes it clear that few people may consider them a whole but they are different. 146. Since earth is Earth Sky Again earth has earth, perhaps been used not heaven. against sky. The Though some levels and savants make binaries used by earth include the poet changes the sky. metaphorically. According to the poet, though few learned people may consider earth and sky to be one, but actually they are different. 147. Fire and Ice Some say the Fire Ice Frost speaks of world will end two extreme in fire, some ways through say in ice. which the world may come to an end. One by burning and the other by freezing. 148. In a disused The living come Living Dead The living, visit Graveyard with grassy the dead in a tread graveyard, but they forget that But never soon they would

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anymore the be there waiting dead. for visitors. 149. The ones who Today Tomorrow Man is ignorant living come of what awaits today. him in the future, he might Tomorrow dead be living today will come to and be dead stay. tomorrow. 150. To E.T The victory for Lost Gained Victory is what is lost and always about gained. gain and loss. It brings gain for some and loss for the other. 151. The war Me You There is a seemed over for marked you than me, difference But now for me between the poet than you- the and his friend, other way. who was a soldier. The war was over for his friend, but for the poet it continued, because he had lost his friend in it. 152. First soldier, Poet Soldier A soldier thempoet, then believes in war, both. guns and battlefields. But a poet believes in the power of his verse. Both are very different as careers. One is marked by sword and the other by pen. 153. The Aim was The wind once Day Night The wind in the Song blew itself poem is untaught, and aimlessly did its loudest wandering day and night. without a purpose. Day and night alike, it moves from

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one direction to another. 154. He took a little North South The poet in his mouth, describes a man and held it long who takes some enough for air in his mouth north. To be in the north, and converted into when he blows south. it out, it is south. This may hint that the man had an ability to convert the cold wind into a warm wind of the south. The man may metaphorically refer to a poet who has abilities to transform things into opposites. 155. Stopping by To watch his Snow Dark The darkness of Woods on a woods fill up the woods is Snowy with snow. contrasted with Evening. the whiteness of The woods are the snow. lovely, dark and deep. 156. The Onset As one who Life Death The poem overtaken by evaluates the the end onset of winter Gives up his and how it errand and lets causes death death descend. everywhere.

More than if life had never been begun. 157. Goodbye and This saying Cold Warm The speaker is Keep Cold good by on the worried to leave edge of the dark his orchard in And the cold to the night an orchard so because it is young in the cold, yet he bark. thinks that if it gets warmer, it But one thing may invite about it, it insects and

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mustn’t get animals, which warm. may be bad for his trees, so he wishes that the orchard remains cold. His mind oscillates between warm and cold. 158. Not to Keep Under the Living Dead The soldier is formal writing sent to his he was there, home. His wife Living. is happy to find him living. But How else, they his condition is are not known no better than to send the being dead. He dead. is living but like a dead. 159. The Onset As one who Life Death The poem refers overtaken by to the onset of the end, winter and , Gives up his Frost has errand, and lets transformed the death descend. onset of winter into the arrival More than if of death. But he life had never realises that his been begun. life has not yet started and so he cannot succumb to death and life has to progress. 160. Brook in the The apple trees Flame Water The water in the City be sent to brook is hearthstone contrasted with flame. the apple tree logs which Is water wood would be burnt to serve a brook in fire. the same? 161. The Kitchen Its not that I am Fire Rain Fire and smoke Chimney greatly afraid of in the chimney fire. are contrasted with rain, which And the smell may cause fire of fire drained to die, and leave in rain. the pungent smell of smoke around.

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162. Gathering I may load and Load Unload It refers to the leaves unload again act of gathering and again. leaves where the speaker loads leaves in a spade and unloads them, in order to load them again. There is a note of futility in this act. 163. The Valley’s I was asleep Asleep Awake The poet is Singing Day. under the asleep, but the dripping roof, bird had been But I should awake to sing a awake to song. The poet confirm your gets inspired story yet. and decides to awaken as well. 164. Our Singing It snowed in Dry Wet The snowfall Strength spring on earth occurred in so dry and spring and it warm. took loads of snow, to make Hordes spent the dry soil wet, themselves to because the make it wet and earth was not cold. yet prepared for snow. 165. It snowed in Cold Warm The cold snow, spring on earth touched the so dryand warm ground. warm.

Hordes spent themselves to make it wet and cold. 166. They made no Black White The white snow white left no impression on impression on the black. the black ground, because it melted very soon. 167. A whir among Great Small All kinds of the branches great and small great and small. branches of the tree were covered by the

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white flakes. 168. And all go back Spring Winter Spring is the to winter but season of birth, the road. while winter stands for death. In spring more But it snows in mortal singers spring in the than belong. poem, causing chaos in the natural world. 169. The Need of The broken Out In It refers to the Being versed windows flew opposing in Country in and out. directions in things. which the wind blows, causing the windows to flow in and out repeatedly. Also, it refers to the to and fro movement of the birds, who come and move out of the room. 170. Fireflies in Here come real Earth Skies The poet has the Garden. stars to fill the once again used upper skies, the earth and sky as a binary And here on by highlighting earth come the difference emulating flies. between the fireflies which illuminate the earth and the stars which enlighten the skies. 171. The Cocoon They prudently Earth Moon It alludes to the are spinning rotation of the their cocoon earth and Moon. And anchoring The earth it to an earth revolves round and Moon. the sun, while the moon revolves round the earth. 172. A Peck of Some of the Dust Gold Frost equates Gold dust was really dust with gold, gold. the priceless with the useless,

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referring to the city of his birth, San Francisco. 173. Acceptance When the spent Sun Darkness Both the words sun throws up are used with its rays on reference to the cloud. sunrise and sunset. It is the change to darkness in the sky. 174. Tree at my Your head so Outer Inner The tree in the Window much poem is concerned with personified, outer, mine which tosses in with inner the breeze weather. because of the outer weather. But it tosses because of the outer weather and the poet tosses on his bed because of the inner turbulence within his mind. 175. The Thatch Of a certain Darkness Light The poet upper window wanders in light. darkness in search for light, Into the which can guide darkness. him home. 176. The Flood Weapons of War Peace The absence of war and war means implements of peace. peace. Sometimes blood may become a weapon of war and sometimes may pave the way for peace. 177. Blood has been Blood Water The saying goes harder to dam that blood is than water. thicker than water. The poet too wishes to establish the same contrariness in

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the poem. 178. Acquainted Proclaimed the Wrong Right The speaker with the time was wanders in the Night neither wrong midnight to seek nor right. for answers to some unanswered questions and speculates whether the time is right or wrong to do so. 179. West The black White Black The black water Running stream, of the brook Brook catching on a looks white sunken rock when it makes foam. Flung backward on itself in one white wave. 180. Not gaining but Losing Gaining The white and not losing like a black water bird. move together towards an end, without gaining or losing anything. 181. And pirouette Still Dances The pirouette forever in one dances by place stands standing or still and dances. sticking to one place on the ground. Thus the dance itself marks of contradictions. 182. And it is time, Substance Unsubst- Things with strength, tone, antial meanings and light, life and substance may love. Substance anytime change lapsing into unsubstantial. unsubstantial. Life is unpredictable and all things lead to death. 183. Our life runs Runs Sending up Everything down in Down around us has sending up the two movements. clock. Nothing is

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static. Life is a journey towards death. 184. The There was an Old Renewed The poem has a Investment old house, reference to an renewed with old house which paint. has been renewed with paint. 185. All that piano Old New The new paint is and new paint contrasted with back there. old love.

Was it some money suddenly come into or old love on an impulse not to care. 186. What Fifty When I was Young Old Young students said young, my are contrasted teachers were with the old old. teachers. They cannot understand each other. 187. I went to school Past Future Students who to age to learn are generally the past. believed to be the future of a I go to school to country are youth to learn taught about the future. their past in schools. This is a paradox. But the poet as a teacher himself, goes to learn from the younger generation. 188. On Looking The sun and Sun Moon Both have their Up moon get time of the crossed, but universe, they they never do not interfere touch. with each other’s time. 189. The Bear He paces back Back Forth Man is and forth but constantly never rests. moving back

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and forth, he is never at rest. 190. The telescope at Microsco Telescope A telescope is one end of his -pe used to see far beat away objects At the other end while the microscope. microscope is used to view micro objects. 191. A Lone And though at Ran Idle The worker’s Striker that the tardy unrest is ran, one failed contrary to the to make the machine which closing gate. remains idle inside the To see if some factory. forlorn machine was standing idle for his sake. 192. That’s where Human Machine A Machine may the human still be independent came in. but it would always need To see if some human forlorn machine intervention at was standing some point of idle for his time to function. sake. 193. The factory was Church Factory The worker very fine. loved his work the factory, but That is to say, he believed that ‘it was not a it was not as church’. divine as a Church. 194. There was a God Man The rules in the law of God or world are either Man. made by God or by man. Man- made rules are subject to change, whereas God’s word is the last. 195. Two Tramps The sun was Warm Chill The warm rays in Mud Time. warm but the of the sun stood wind was chill. in contrast to the wind which was cold.

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196. A cloud comes Sunlit Frozen The description over the sunlit of a sunlit arch arch, is paradoxically A wind comes presented with a off a frozen frozen peak. peak. 197. My object in Avocation Vocation The poet is living is to willing to unite unite his avocation My avocation and vocation. and vocation. 198. As my two eyes Two One The speaker’s make one in eyes are two, sight. but they look towards one and the same thing. There is unity in being binary. 199. Only where Love Need Often love and love and need need are are one. supposed to be binaries, but according to the poet when love and need become one, we can enjoy our work. 200. And work is Work Play As stated above, play for mortal when love and sorts. need become one, or when avocation and vocation turns one, work no more remains work and turns to play. 201. In Times of Let the Dry Downpour The cloudburst Cloudburst. downpour roil imparts moisture and toil. to the dry soil.

The bottom of the seas raised dry. 202. The worst it can Sea Soil The downpour do to me is causes the soil carry some to flow near the garden soil sea, and get A little nearer wasted in turn.

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the sea. 203. To exact for a Gain Harm The poem draws present gain a comparison A little of between present future harm. harm and future gain. 204. For when all Rich Poor After all the soil that was rotted gets washed rich away by rains, Shall be in the the rich farmer end scoured shall feel poor. poor. 205. A Roadside The little old Old New The old house Stand house was out got a new shed. with a little new The people shed. living there decided to sell small goods to sustain their livelihood. 206. The polished Polished Artless Polished and traffic passed elite people in with a mind cars are ahead compared to the artless At having the signboards on landscape the roads. marred with artless paint. 207. Here far from City Country The people the city we belonging to the make our city, did not pay roadside stand. heed to the small roadside No in country stand beside the money, the country road. country scale of gain. 208. It would not be Fair Mean The poor are fair fair to say for a because they dole of bread. decide to sell goods instead of You have the begging, while money, but if the rich are you want to be mean who do mean, why not bother to keep your look at the money and go roadside stand. along. 209. The advantage- Advantage Disadvan- It refers to the

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disadvantage of tage two storey doors these doors was which have their that tramp own advantages taking and sanctuary there. disadvantages. 210. The Old Barn Was that tramp Locked Unlocked The rich lock at the Bottom taking their precious of the Fogs. sanctuary there, things under must leave glass, and do not them unlocked pay heed to to betray his barns, which are presence. priceless.

They could be locked but from the outside only. 211. Like waking in Sleep Waking The rich sleep a cage of silver under bars. mortgaged houses and the Who sleeps in tramp sleeps in houses of their the barn, yet he own, though is more satisfied mortgaged. and happy when he wakes up to the morning light instead of silver bars. 212. On Heart’s But my heart Heart Mind The poet’s Beginning to was beginning emotions are Cloud the to cloud my clouding his Mind. mind. reasoning capabilities. 213. A Record So the thick Thick Thin Both the phrases Stride skins needn’t skins skinned have been used act thin skinned to refer to a pair of shoes which are worn out due to over use and so have become thin skinned instead of thick. A difference between their past and present state. 214. Desert Places And the ground Smooth Stubble The smooth almost covered snow which smooth in covered the

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snow, ground is contrasted with But a few the weeds which weeds and grew on the stubble ground, and showing last. hindered its smoothness. 215. Leaves Leaves for Smooth Rough The smooth Compared smooth and leaves are With bark for rough. contrasted with Flowers. the rough barks of a tree. 216. Some giant Giant Small The giant trees trees have which have tiny bloom too flowers are small. mentioned so as to present a binary image. 217. Late in life I Fern Flower The beauty of a have come on flower is fern contrasted with fern, which is Which is fairer, not appreciated. flower or leaf.

218. Leaves by night Night Day According to the and flowers by poet, the beauty day. of a flower or a leaf depends upon the day or night. Leaves may shimmer in dark, and flowers look appealing during the daytime. 219. Leaves and Leaves Petals The leaves of a bark, leaves and tree are bark. compared to the petals of a Petals I may flower. People have once may appreciate pursued. the beauty of a flower when they are happy, but in a pensive mood they tend to appreciate the beauty of a leaf in the night.

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220. A Leaf I have been Autumn Summer Rotten leaves in Treader treading on autumn are leaves all day compared to the until I am leaves in autumn- tired. summer, which are full of life All summer and colour. long they were overheard, more lifted up than I. 221. Neither out They look at Sea Land People on the Far Out nor sea all day. land look in Deep. towards the sea The land may to find if there is vary more. a high tide, and they forget about the land. They are unaware of the fact that land can be as equally unpredictable as the sea. 222. There are We sit indoors Indoors Outdoors The poet hints at Roughly and talk of the people who sit Zones. cold outside. indoors and talk about the cold outdoors. 223. That to no Limits Limitless The poet limits and wonders if bounds he can man’s thought is stay confined? full of limits and his heart is It can blame limitless. this limitless trait in the hearts of men. 224. That though Wrong Right For nature there there is no fixed are no laws, line between nothing right or wrong and wrong. right. 225. Precaution I never dared be Radical Conserva- The poet never radical when tive dared to be young. radical while young, because For fear it he feared that it would make me would turn him

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conservative conservative when old. when old. 226. I never dared be Young Old Same as above. radical when young

For fear it would make me conservative when old. 227. The Span of The old dog Old Dog Pup The poem Life. barks backward contradicts the without getting life of a dog up. when he was a pup and when I can remember he grew up into when he was a an old dog. pup. 228. The Wright’s Time cannot get Wright Wrong The word Biplane. that wrong. “Wright” has been used as a For it was writ pun for right. It in heaven stands for both doubly Wright. right and Wright brothers who invented the Airplane. 229. Pertinax Let chaos storm Storm Form The poet waits for the storm to I wait for form. calm down into a form. The contradiction between storm and form is apparently clear. 230. Iris By Night So watery as to Watery Airy The poem seem submarine describes a strange natural Its airy pressure phenomenon turned to water when the water weight. turns into airy pressure and a rainbow is seen surrounding it. 231. From all Foe Friends Time may turn division time or friends into foes, foe can bring. and vice versa.

In a relation of elected friends.

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232. Build Soil Leaving love’s Joy Grief Love may alternations, joy alternate and grief. between joy and grief. 233. The weather’s Summer Winter Weather may alternations, alter between summer and hot and cold, winter. summer and winter. 234. If earth were Earth Sun The poet thought about speculates on to change its what if the earth axis. decides to change its axis. Or a star We all know the coming to dilate fact that the the sun. earth revolves around the sun. 235. There is only Democratic Socialism Democracy is a democratic form of socialism. government by the people, for the people and of the people. Socialism is the Marxist form of government. 236. Monarchic Monarchic Oligarchic King or Queen socialism, is the head of oligarchic- the state in a The last being Monarchy what they seem whereas in an to have in Oligarchic form Russia. of government, the power is vested in the hands of a few persons. 237. What should Socialised Unsocialised The poet tries to you mean by find out the socialized? difference between Unsocialized, is socialised and ingenuity. unsocialised forms of governments. 238. Made good for Good Bad Inventions of everyone-things science may be like inventions- good for the public, but

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We sometimes sometimes they only get the bad may be bad, or of them. we may not know how to derive good from them. 239. The writer and Writer Talker The writer talker free believes in the speech and free power of the pen press. while the talker believes in the power of speech. 240. We are national National Internati- National refers and act as onal to one nationals. pertaining to a particular Just so we’re country, and international. international refers to one pertaining to various nations. 241. So the effect Mixed Unmixed The poet when they are presents an mixed on image where he canvas. compares the colours kept on The colors are an unmixed kept unmixed palate, to the on the palette. ones mixed on canvas. 242. Divine Divine Human The poet Love,Human love Love distinguishes love, parental between love different kinds Roughly of love. Divine discriminated love may be for the rough. termed as unconditional and human love is conditional. 243. Philosophised Body Soul When all the together into love is united, it one- causes sickness, One sickness of either of the the body and body or of the the soul. soul. 244. Needless to say City Country Frost makes it to you, my clear in the argument poem that he is

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Is not to lure making the city to the comparisons not country. because he wishes to please the city or the country people. 245. And made fun Business Art Art should be of by business, for art’s sake law, and art. and hence it cannot co-exist with business. 246. Don’t join too Many Few The poet warns many gangs. the reader to Join few if any. join few groups instead of many. 247. To A Thinker From form to Form Content Form usually content and represents the back to form. outer appearance of a thing and content the inner. 248. From norm to Norm Crazy The poem crazy and back highlights to norm various binary pairs which the world contains like being normal or crazy. 249. From bound to Bound Free Everything may free and back to go from bound bound. to free and again come back to being bound. Like our thoughts. 250. So back and Back Forth Thoughts may forth, it almost go back and scares. forth in search of a form. 251. In less than no Tongue Pen Some believe in time, tongue the power of the and pen, you’ll tongue, while be a democrat the others in the again. power of words. 252. And least don’t Mind Instinct The reader is use your mind warned not to too hard, But think too much trust my and believe in instinct-I’m a the instincts of

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bard. the poet because he is a bard. 253. A Missive So almost clear Clear Obscure The reason of Missile and obscure. sacrifice in the poem is clear yet obscure. 254. Enough to Bush Tree A bush is tiny make a spirit and small as moan compared to a Or rustle in a tree. bush or tree. 255. All modern, Modern Ancient The binary nothing ancient words refer to in it. the modern man’s inability to hear the voice of the ancient. 256. That sad-with- River Beach Rivers do not distance river have beaches. beach. And here both are used together to create a binary. 257. Beech Where my Real Imaginary According to the imaginary line, poet, there is a Bends square in thin line woods, an iron between the real spine. and imaginary. Man may have And pile of real boundaries, and rocks have been he may have founded. imaginary boundaries and call it real. 258. I Could Give Nor is he Overjoyed Low Time is All to time. overjoyed when personified as a they lie low. neutral being who is not overjoyed or sad. 259. And I could Joy Grief Time is neither share Time’s happy nor grief lack of joy or stricken over the grief. change of circumstances or environment. 260. What now is Inland Ocean Isle Time may inland shall be change an inland ocean isle. into an ocean isle. What is

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land may turn into water after a certain period of time. 261. Carpe Diem He knew not Homew- Outward Refers to the to whether ard and fro motion homeward, of people. Or outward from the village. 262. It lives less in Present Past Man never lives present than in in the past and the past. never focuses on the present.

263. It lives less in Present Future People are not present than in happy in their the past. present, but are more likely to Than in the be speculating future always. about their future. 264. The Wind To let the half Good ill The poet and the Rain of life alone emphasises on And play the the necessity of good without ill, in order to the ill. appreciate the good. 265. In happy Happy Sadness The child sings sadness by the a song of young, Fate has prophesy, no choice but to whatever he fulfil. sings becomes his fate. Thus happiness and sadness comes likewise. 266. That past its Past Future When the poet prime lost was young, he petals in the enjoyed the rain. flood But with age, it reminds him of (Who cares but his tears and for the future of sorrows. Earlier the bud?) he loved to see flowers drooping in the rain, but now he is concerned about the petals

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which may be washed away by heavy rainfall. A difference of the same person towards life has been depicted. 267. The Many lovers Divorced Marriage The poem deals Discovery of have been with the the Madeiras divorced. extremes of love, life, To be her only sickness and marriage lines. death. Marriage and divorce become metaphors of binary oppositions in the poem. 268. When after talk Men Woman The poem with other men distinguishes between the two A man comes sexes. The man back to a is portrayed as woman again. hard hearted and the woman as a symbol of meekness. 269. Whereat in a Truth Untruth The story about moment of the death of the cross untruth lovers is crude and terrific, the He thought, All woman in the right if you poem cannot want the truth. accept the fact that it is true. She is willing to hear that it was untrue. She cannot anticipate the end of love in death. 270. Our Hold on We may doubt Good Ill The poet the Planet the just believes that proportion of nature had been good and ill. better to man than ill, but man forgets what Nature has been

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giving him. 271. Including the Peace War Nature had been human nature, supporting man in peace and in peace and war war. alike. Nature may have harmful effects on mankind, but it has always given more than it took away. 272. To A Young Oftener than as Good Ill The poet Wretch. conflicting mentions good good and ill. and ill as two contrasting things because one has to take a side, one cannot play on both the sides and be called just. 273. And though in Chain Rope Both the words tinsel chain and are used popcorn rope together, My tree a perhaps to captive in your contrast the window bay. longevity of a chain as compared to a rope. 274. The Lesson A sordid peace Peace War Man is never at For Today or an peace, he always outrageous war. desires things which he cannot have. Even peace can be as tormenting as war. 275. So science and Science Religion Often science religion really and religion are meet. considered as binaries, for religion does not have scientific explanations for everything. 276. A Semi- I advocate a Semi Total The poet is Revolution semi revolution. Revolution Revolution against a complete The trouble revolution

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with a total because revolution is according to that it brings him, it helps the the same class rich to become up on top. richer and thus he advocates a semi revolution. 277. The Literate In sunset light, Light Darkness It is a reference Farmer and you’d think it to the remaining the Planet was the sun. light after a Venus. partial sunset, Yet there to which precedes watch the darkness. darkness coming on. Like someone dead permitted to exist. 278. The sun sets the Day Night Day and night example in the follow a set day. pattern, each gives way to the We need the other, yet both interruption of are binaries. the night to ease attention off when overnight. 279. We can’t be Sleep Awake One cannot trust trusted to the his sleep, and so sleep we take, needs to be And simply awake. Sleep must evolve to can be deceptive stay awake. according to the poet. 280. One Step Then the rain Rain Dry Rain has been Backward stopped and the juxtaposed with Taken. blowing. the word dry.

And the sun came out to dry me. 281. Directive If you’re lost Lost Find According to the enough to find poem, we need yourself. to be lost in order to discover ourselves. 282. An So once you Dark Light The darkness of Unstamped rose and lit the the night is

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Letter in Our light. contrasted with letter Box the light from a So regular that bulb. in the dark. 283. No, in your City Rural The tramp in the rural letter box. poem leaves a letter in the rural The place was letter box for a like a city park. farmer to let him know that he had used his pasture for a night and he felt as if he was in a city park. The difference is clear. 284. Were I in Away on the Up Down The traveller Trouble mountain, up while climbing far too high. up a mountain catches a And began to glimpse of a bounce down a light coming granite stair. from a house perhaps, and is comforted that he would not be alone when he reaches the top. 285. In the Long There would be Raw Cooked Both the words Night fish raw and are used to refer cooked too. to the fish preserved by the eskimos in their igloo. 286. The Fear of If you rise from Nowhere Somewhere The journey God Nowhere up to from nowhere to Somewhere. somewhere, from being a wanderer to reaching a destination, is difficult and hence God must be thanked for it. 287. From being No- No One Someone From being no One up to being one to someone Someone. must again be owed to an

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“arbitrary God”. Both the words are used together to highlight the contradictions they carry. 288. A Steeple on We do not go Day Night The poet uses the House up there to the phrase sleep at night. “sleep at night” in contrast to We do not go “live by day”, to up there to live create a binary by day. image. 289. Iota Subscript Seek not in me, Big Small Both the words the big. are used in So small am I connection with as an attention the small and beggar. capital letters. 290. The letter you Alpha Omega Alpha is the first will find me letter of the subscript to Greek alphabets Is neither and Omega the alpha, eta, nor last. omega. 291. The They deal with Near Far The poet’s car Middleness near and far. cannot reach the of the Road. horizon because it deals with near and far distances which can be measured. 292. But have almost Flight Rest This refers to nothing to do the difference with the between a absolute flight person’s change and rest. of thoughts. Flight and rest of emotions are part of it. 293. Astrometaph- At least it ought Up Down The poet desires ysical to send me up, to be sent up, not down. rather than come down. 294. Have loved it High Low High and Low clear and high, are contrasted Or low and against each stormy. other in terms of the high and low

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skies. 295. Have loved it Clear Stormy The poet loves clear and high, the skies, the Or low and high and clear stormy. ones, as much as he loves the low and stormy ones. 296. Two Leading The Sun is Days Night Days and Night Lights satisfied with are symbolic of days. light and darkness. Day He never has in gives way to any phase night and vice That I have versa. heard of shone at night. 297. And yet he is Dark Light Same as Above. power of light.

The notedest astronomer have set the dark aside for hers. 298. Etherealizing We can lie on Smooth Rough Referring to the the beach with sea weeds the the seaweed. poet uses both And can take the words, our daily tide which may be a baths smooth metaphor for the and rough. smooth and rough in life as a whole. 299. An Importer Most of all the Productio Destruction Frost mass -n sarcastically production comments over new scientific Destined to inventions prove our produced by destruction. America which may some day lead to their own destruction. He equates production with destruction. 300. No Holy Good is a thing Puny Great Great states are Wars that they, the compared to the great, can do. puny states

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which can prove But puny little life changing states can only during war be. alliances. 301. The Broken The drought Rain Drought Both the words drought was one no spit are used in of rain could juxtaposition to cure. highlight the metaphoric meaning of the poem. The prophesy of a drought is mocked by sudden rain, but the rain does not promise that there cannot be a drought. 302. Earth would Earth Moon The Earth being soon be inhabited by uninhabitable humans is contrasted with As the Moon. the Moon which is uninhabited. 303. Take Since dark is Dark Light It needs Something what brings out darkness to like a Star. your light. appreciate light, like sadness to understand the importance of happiness. 304. From Plane And June was Rainy Fire The poem has to Plane not much strange better, cold and comparisons and rainy. symbols, like rain and fire He only stayed cannot exist to set the together, but summer on fire. they have been used to lay emphasis on the binaries around us. 305. He only stayed Summer Winter Both the seasons to set the along with their summer on fire. differences have been mentioned Is in the sign of in the poem. sickness in the

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winter. 306. A Cabin in I will not have Happines Despaired In the poem the Clearing. their happiness -s Smoke and Mist despaired of. are personified as speakers who speculate upon the dwellers of a house in the woods. They however do not want to wake them up and change their happiness to despair. 307. America Is Remember he East West The poet Hard to See. had made the comments that test. Columbus sailed towards West, to Finding the find east. The East by sailing statement is West. contradictory in itself. 308. From fifty North South Opposite North to Fifty directions have South. been used in the poem to highlight the vastness of America. 309. For John. F. The verse that Beginning End Every end has a Kennedy in beginning and acknowledgme- every beginning nt I bring an end. The poet Goes back to here refers to the the beginning age old tradition of the end. of hurling praises on the newly elected rulers. 310. Kitty Hawk When in Aries Taurus Both refer to heartless zodiac signs. chorus, Aries Aries is and Taurus. represented by a ram and Taurus by a bull. 311. Gemini and Gemini Cancer Both are zodiac Cancer mocked signs, Gemini is me for an called the twin answer. sign and the

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animal symbol of Cancer is Crab. 312. Wandering to To Fro Frost refers to and fro in the his journey of Earth alone. sixty years as a poet, where he wandered to and fro on streets and reached his destination. 313. Has been West- East West The poet refers Northwest. to the difference between the If it was not eastern and wise, Tell me western why the East. sensibilities. 314. Your separation Old New The Pacific of us from the Ocean separates Old the Old America from the New. That should have made the New World newly great. 315. And now, O Aeroplane Boat In the modern sea, you’re lost times sea by aeroplane. journeys are replaced by Our sailors ride aeroplanes. a bullet for a Thus the poet boat. lays emphasis on the convenience of aeroplanes in comparison to sea journeys which are tiresome. 316. The The weapon Tool Weapon There is a subtle Objection to should be difference being stepped turned into a between a tool on. tool? and a weapon. A farmer steps on a tool and it hurts his feet, so the tool turns into a weapon. 317. Freedom is Freedom Slavery Some poets slavery some believe that

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poets tell us. freedom is slavery of a kind. This is a paradox in itself. 318. Quandary Never have I Sad Glad The poet is been sad or neither sad nor glad. happy to find that for everything there is a binary. 319. It was by Good Bad It takes evil to having been appreciate good. contrasted This is the belief That good and of many and of bad so long had the poet too. lasted. 320. If only to Love Hate We need our discriminate thinking ‘Twixt what to capabilities to love and what decide whether to hate. to hate or love a thing, or to take sides.

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CONCLUSION

I shall be telling this with a sigh Somewhere ages and ages hence: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I- I took the one less travelled by, And that has made all the difference.1 Indeed, the poetry of Robert Frost made all the difference, striking the chords of simplicity and naivety. His poems speak to us in a voice which is natural yet specific in its own ways. His short lyrics or long narrative poems running into several pages reveal to us the complex working of the poet’s mind who was fond of enchanting his readers with his simple yet meaningful verses. When Frost read his “Mending Wall” at a public gathering in Soviet Russia in 1962, people felt that the poet was commenting sarcastically on the Berlin wall. Perhaps Frost wanted to create a doubt among the listeners, because he liked his poems to be understood and anticipated in different ways. He said, “I have had a lot of adventures with the poem. People are frequently misunderstanding it or misinterpreting it. The secret of what it means, I keep”2 Though “Mending Wall” happens to be a very simple aphoristic poem which warns the reader about neighbours by mentioning, “Good fences make good neighbours”. Still, Frost invented ways where he could puzzle his readers into wondering whether the poem was as simple as it appeared to be in the first glance. It is commendable that an event of repairing a wall by two people of opposing beliefs in New England became an event of universal significance after this poem came into scene. His fascination with New England, its landscape and people projected him as a regional poet, but his poems never spoke of regionalism in any sense of the word. He talked about his surroundings and derived inspiration from the simplest of things around him, but his poems always universalised them. His characters belonged to New England, but they were residents of the world, with their own sorrows and happiness.

Frost’s long and tedious life was full of tragedies, be it the death of his alcoholic father or of his children, and suicide of his only son. There was also a temperamental difference between his parents which he inherited. His God-fearing mother and reckless father did not make a good home. This binary in their attitudes is manifest in the poetry

190189 of Frost. The pessimism in his life makes an important part of his poems, but his optimistic spirit overshadows his pessimism. In “Birches”, he wishes to “get away from earth awhile” because he is “weary of considerations and life is too much like a pathless wood”. But he corrects his statement in the very next line and says, “May no fate wilfully misunderstand me and half grant my wish”. He wishes to leave the earth and also wants to remain here because, “Earth is the right place for love”. The tendency to love and hate, to be bonded and be free, to find solace in nature and a desire to stay away from it, are seen prominently in his poems. He wishes to climb a hill in order to descend; he wishes to accept the end of love or a season but with reluctance. His poems are pregnant with meanings which are contrary to each other. The visible darkness in his poems is balanced by the poet’s attitude towards life, which is light. In “Desert Places” the darkness of the night is counter balanced by the presence of snow, which is white. Here the emptiness in the poet’s heart is contrasted with the void in the universe. Both the voids are equally scary and dark, but the deserts in the poet’s heart are much bigger and deeper as compared to the universe. Similarly in “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” the mysterious attraction of the woods is contrasted with the subtle reminder that he has “miles to go” before succumbing to death or sleep. The world of the woods and the world of the poet are binaries, one is full of adventure and the otherfull of promises. Jay Parini feels that “In many of Frost’s better poems, one finds him musing on his art surreptitiously, keeping the focus elsewhere. “You don’t want to say directly what you can say indirectly” he once remarked, echoing Emily Dickinson’s injunction to, “Tell the truth but tell it slant”3 This is true for most of his poems. In “The Tuft of Flowers” he talks about the act of mowing and clearing grass. But as the poem ends, we realise that it deals with lonely workers united by the act of working. There might be different alienated workers, labouring day and night to make their both ends meet but there will be others in different parts of the world, with similar issues. They might not work together, but their work unites them. There is a similarity within the distinction: “Men work together” I told him from the heart,

Whether they work together or apart.

In another poem, “The Mountain”, the title is deceptive because it is about a brook which is “cold in summer and warm in winter”. The brook is located on the top of the mountain but it is the mysterious quality of the brook which caught the poet’s attention

190 and not the mountain. Still he chose to name it, “The Mountain”. Perhaps this is a typical Frostian trait to play with images, symbols and metaphors. In an essay “The Constant Symbol” he writes, “There are many other things I have found myself saying about poetry, but the chiefest of these is that it is metaphor, saying one thing and meaning another, saying one thing in terms of another, the pleasure of ulteriority.4 This was what he liked and this was what he meant, “saying one thing and meaning another”. Peter. J. Stanlis, writes:

As early as the summer of 1939, after several meetings and conversations with Frost, I was made aware in general of his philosophy of dualism through his belief in “the two-ness of everything” on earth and his comments on pairs of opposites and his distinction between apparently unresolved “contradictions” and “contrarieties” that could be harmonised in some degree of unity…I thought I understood the nature and importance of dualism in Frost’s philosophy. But I didn’t know of the full range and complexity of Frost’s thought”.5

The assessment of Stanlis is very important because it is not based upon an analysis Frost’s work or life but is taken directly from the poet’s conversations with his friends and students. However, it must be noted that the use of binary oppositions in poetry is not a very new development. Poets had been using it to heighten the symbolic and thematic concerns of their poems. John Donne, William Blake and many others used conceits and binaries as a medium of expression.William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience, are perfect examples to depict the use of binaries by other poets. Each poem in the Songs of Innocence has a contrary in the Songs of Experience. The former dealing with the innocence and simplicity of childhood whereas the latter portraying the chaos of adulthood. The former has references to flowers, wreathes, birds, grasslands and rivers while in the latter one finds the use of artificial incense, predator birds, thorns etc. On the one hand the Songs of Innocence are introduced by a Piper, who enjoys the moment and plays his music, on the other the Songs of Experience are introduced by a Bard, who is aware of the past, present and future of things around. Blake’s contribution to the duality of things is unique and commendable. However, in the poetry of Robert Frost, binaries do not appear to be a part of a poetic device or a wilful attempt towards creating metaphoric overtones, rather it comes out naturally. In some poems the juxtaposition is present in the title itself as in “Bond and

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Free”, “Fire and Ice” and “Meeting and passing”. But in most of his poems binaries are present in the form of contrasting images. For instance, the use of the word “snow” against the word “dark”, or the use of two different roads to signify choices in a person’s life or the image of a man-made wall to highlight the differences between the approaches of a young and old person towards life. There are instances when a single word has been contrasted with multiple words. Like earth has been used against heaven, moon and sky. Man has been juxtaposed with God, beast and woman. This shows that Frost’s attempt to highlight the binaries was not a rigid effort towards establishing a form of poetry but his inherent temperamental attitude to admit and negate at the same time. In his early poems, clear images of binaries occur in the form of two roads, day and night, summer against winter and the fire against ice. Whereas in his later poems, the images appear to be more complex and philosophical. In the first poem of his first book, “Into my Own”, he wishes to be lost in the wilderness of the trees. This desire to be lost is juxtaposed by his willingness to be searched by someone. Similarly in “The Vantage Point” he likes to move away from nature because he is preoccupied with “trees” and wants to turn towards mankind. But he contradicts his statement because he realises that at the end of the day he would miss looking “into the crater of the ant”. This desire to be lost and found, to move away and come back, shows an enigmatic approach of the poet towards life. Poems like “Desert Places”, “Come In”, “Directive” and “Too Anxious for Rivers” belong to his later collection of poetry. In “Desert Places” he compares the void in his heart to the emptiness of the universe. “Come In” echoes with similar mysterious elements as in “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”, which allures the poet to explore the hidden depths of a wood. In another poem, “Directive” the poet adopts the role of a guide who himself is lost. He describes, “a house that is no more a house”, a farm that “is no more a farm” and a town that is “no more a town”. George. W. Nitchiewrites :

In “Directive” we are invited to make a symbolic journey to an abandoned house on an abandoned farm in an abandoned New England hill town, into a different and simpler order of time, beyond that in which ledge, woods and silence have come back into their own. In making that journey, we are to experience a kind of ordeal of initiation by responding emotionally to the life that was once there and that has vanished, to the children’s games of

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housekeeping and to the real house, reduced now to an almost vanished cellar hole, its human function over and done with.6

The poem is based upon binaries, which has references to things which exist in memory and not in reality. The poem reminds us of The Wasteland, by T.S. Eliot where the sun beats and “the dead tree gives no shelter”. Frost’s lost traveller moves towards a vague destination. He is about to reach a place where two cultures fused but none remained. The house that is no more a house, farm that is no more a farm shows the binaries between the past and present nature of things. The past exists in the present but in the form of memory. This takes us back to “Hyla Brook” which was “A brook to none but who remember long”. Robert Hass remarks, “Although the brook has literally disappeared, one can find it again if one is willing to accept the proposition that the brook survives in sustained moments of imaginative reverie, where all of the particulars of transience can be subordinated to an abstract permanence of continual change”7 The brook too, like the strange town in “Directive” belonged to the past. The present only has a memory of it. Since “Hyla Brook” belongs to Mountain Interval (1916) and “Directive” belongs to the later poems, still there lies a connection between the two. Indeed the poems in the later books of poetry are much more complex, as compared to the early ones, but this does not mean that his early poems lack depth. While throwing light over the limitations of tracing Frost’s development as a poet, Parini writes:

Frost is not a poet who developed in any obvious ways from book to book, as did Yeats or Eliot or Stevens. Instead he grew by accretion. His peculiar method of hoarding poems (going back to them, often decades later, to revise) only adds to the difficulty of discerning “development”. In a sense, Frost achieved his vision early, and he restates, re-creates, refigures this original vision in book after book. There are no great leaps forward only deepenings, confirmations, and subtle extensions.8

There is a kind of uniformity in this distinction. Each poem is different, yet it is connected to a stream of thought. This eventually makes it difficult to trace the development and growth of Frost’s use of contrasts, because there is no linear development in his poems when it comes to the use of binaries, but a consistency from the first poem to the last one.

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Frost carried forward the tradition of Nature poetry which was initiated by William Wordsworth, Coleridge and other Romantic poets in England and by Thoreau and Emerson in the United States of America. Frost’s name comes among the famous nature poets in English but he believed that he was a poet of man rather than a poet of nature. His poems often revolve around people at work, farmers, lonely wanderers and tramps. He talks about them with ease and honesty. There is exactness in his description which records even the minute details of his subject. Pastures, woods and the countryside form as much a part of his poems as people involved in household chores, or workers in factories or couples in argument. According to Nitchie: Nature, one is most persistently aware of in his poems is expressed in terms of mountains and brooks, woodlots and pastures and small farms. Such phenomenon donot require an elaborate philosophical apparatus for their apprehension; they are simply there, and though we are free to define our relationship with them in philosophical terms, we are not compelled to. Eliminating the necessity for complex intellectual formulations or social adjustments, they enable Frost’s characters to demonstrate a simplicity, a clarity of attitude, sometimes luminous and sometimes stark, that for Frost is more difficult of attainment in other surroundings.9

This makes his poems close to reality. He talks of things as common as the Birch trees, Snow, Blueberries, Seasons, Brooks etc. and as unusual as a home burial of a child, a woman who fears being attacked by a tree, and a monkey’s perception about life and human beings. His mastery lies in the fact that he can turn an object of commonplace into a reminder of man’s existential dilemma. In “Acquainted with the Night” the lonely wanderer roams on deserted streets in the night without any purpose. He suddenly looks up towards “the luminary clock”, perhaps to find answers to some unanswered questions. The speaker portrays the rootless wandering of the modern man in the world. After spending a life, travelling without a destination, when man looks up to search for an answer, he meets with disappointment.While highlighting the existential dilemma portrayed by Frost in his poems, Elaine Barry writes, “Exploratory and speculative, they represent a lonely pondering on the central problems of existence: man’s identity and freedom, his relation to the natural world and the flux of time, his

194 defences against and engulfing chaos, the place of human suffering and the possibility of salvation”10

Frost’s life and poetry has been subjected to many interpretations, be it in the form of biographies or critical analysis of his poems. But there has not been a single work till date which focuses on the trait of duality or the use of binaries by the poet. Writers like Jay Parini, Sidney Cox, Elaine Barry, to name a few, had talked about the contradictions in the poet. But still a full length study is lacking in the area. Peter. J. Stanlis is perhaps the only writer to have discussed at length, the dualities in the poetry of Robert Frost. He writes:

Frost’s dualism accounts for his view of God, man and nature, that it permeates much that he said about science, religion, art and poetry, society and politics, and education and finally, that it provides the characteristic qualities in his brilliant and witty conversation. Dualism as the basis of Frost’s philosophy is the foremost single element that scholars and literary critics need to consider in any study of his life and thought, including the themes of his poetry.11

A Boy’s Will, begins with the poet’s fearless retreat into the world of trees. He desires to lose himself in nature to discover the hidden layers of his inner self. He sets afoot on a journey of self-discovery and by the end of the poem he finds his answer. He anticipates that if his journey ends, he will be “more sure of all” he “thought was true”. The young poet wavering between confusion and freedom finally succumbs to confirmation. He knows that now there is no turning back. Book by book, this confirmation is strengthened. By the time his last book was published the undying unwavering spirit of the poet found a resting place. “In Winter in the Woods”, which is the last poem of his last book, he stands amidst tall trees only to realise how uncertain man’s life is. He finds in them an echo of Nature’s unconquered will, something which can never die. The poet on the other hand waits for the final blow of death. His collection of poetry thus makes a full circle, beginning with a journey and ending with the confirmation that death spares none. The poet travelled long and wide, through oceans of uncertainty with his optimism, struggling with the contradictions in his soul, to reach the end. The world had always been lovely, dark and deep. But Frost’s life was promising and so was his poetry. The enchantment in the woods, could not stop the

195 poet from fulfilling his promises, because he had “miles to go” before succumbing to death.

1Robert Frost “The Road Not Taken” The Poetry of Robert Frost, ed. Edward Connery Lathem, St. Martin’s Griffin. New York, 1979,p.105 2 Warren Hope, Student Guide to Robert Frost, Greenwich Exchange London, 2004,pxi 3 Jay Parini, Robert Frost: A Life, Henry Holt &Co.New York,1999, p.86 4Edward Connery Lathem and Lawrence Thompson.ed.The Robert Frost Reader , Holt,1972,p.446 5Peter.J.Stanlis, Robert Frost: The Poet as a Philosopher, ISI, Wilmington, Delware, 2007, p.314 6 George. W. Nitchie, “Robert Frost : The imperfect Guru” Frost: Centennial Essays, University Press of Mississippi, 1974, p.46

7 Hass, Robert. Going by Contraries: Robert Frost’s Conflict with Science, Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2002, p.81 8 Jay Parini, Robert Frost-A Life, (Henry Holt&Co.New York,1999),p.248 9 George W. Nitchie, Human Values in the Poetry of Robert Frost, Duke University Press, Durham, 1960,p.13 10 Elaine Barry, Robert Frost,FredrickUngar Publishing Co. New York, 1973, p.101 11Peter.J.Stanlis, Robert Frost: The Poet as a Philosopher, ISI, Wilmington, Delware, 2007,p.1

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