`The Pastoral surface belies the dark undercurrents in much of Robert Frosts poetry Discuss.

Robert Faggen (49) tells us that to call Robert Frost a pastoral poet is at once to say too much and too little. In this statement, Faggen implies that Frost is both less and more than a pastoral poet; his verse is to be considered lacking in some aspects that would make him a true poet of the pastoral genre, but beneath the surface contains much more than would be expected. One of these extra elements to Frosts pastoral poetry could be the dark undercurrents that run throughout much of his work. In this essay I will examine a selection of Frosts poetry, including Out, Out-, Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening and Desert Places, for evidence that the poems are both written in the pastoral mode and contain darker, more sinister elements. In order to decide if Frosts poetry has a pastoral surface as well as some darker elements, it is first necessary to ask the question; what is pastoral poetry? The pastoral mode of poetry, often associated with poets such as Virgil and Spenser, is considered to portray or evoke country life, typically in a romanticised or idealized form. Frost himself (49 quoted in Faggen) has commented that his poetry is more often of the country and is very very rural rustic. Much of Frosts poetry is indeed set in an American rural landscape and his speakers, such as in the dramatic monologue A Servant to Servants, are more often than not rustic country-dwelling folk. As Pirini (3) notes, Frost is so intimately associated in the readers mind with rural New England, that it would be easy to immediately assume that he is only a pastoral poet. Faggen (50), in his essay Frost and the Questions of Pastoral, outlines for the reader the conventions of the pastoral mode. In poetry of this kind, the dialogue and singing of shepherds is often found, as well as the search for a beautiful and peaceful landscape. These elements are not to be found in Frosts poetry. However Faggen (49) himself admits that the pastoral is a rich and complex tradition. Not onlya set of conventions. According to Lynen (16), the best pastoral poetry uses the traditional materials but reinvigorated with a large measure of realism. It is true that Frosts poetry does not contain singing shepherds or flowery diadems. Instead we have rural people living on isolated farms, such as the ageing farmer depicted in An Old Mans Winter Night. The speakers in Frosts poems often adopt the rhythms of everyday speech and colloquial language that roots them firmly in their rural surroundings, as we see throughout Frosts dramatic duologue, Home Burial. Here the husbands rustic speech is an example of Frosts poetry reinvigorated with what Leah (85) calls a stubborn earthiness:

 We could have some arrangement By which Id bind myself to keep hands off Anything special youre a-mind to name. Though I dont like such things twixt those that love (ll.53-56) Walcott (94) captures the essence of the readers surface impression of Robert Frosts poetry when he describes it as: the icon of Yankee values, the smell of wood smoke, the sparkle of dew, the reality of farm-house dung, the jocular honesty of an uncle. Considering this view of Frost, as a jocular avuncular character, it is difficult to see that his poetry would contain dark undercurrents beneath smell of wood smoke and sparkle of dew. However, as we have seen Frosts poetry does not comply strictly with the conventions of the pastoral mode, nor does it always emphasize the beauty and simplicity of country life. Faggen (49-50) tells us that Frosts poetry explores complex modern attitudes and that his rural landscapes are a place of labour, struggle and warfare, placing emphasis on the urgencies and uncertainties of the moment. In his poem Out, Out , Frost shows the reader his interest in the natural and the modern world as well as the hardship of life in a rural setting. Here Frost contrasts the beauty of the New England pastoral landscape with the brutality and horror that can be the result of the modern world. The opening description of the breathtaking Vermont mountains under the sunset (l.6) and the sensual detail of the smell of sweet-scented (l.3) wood in the breeze, is compounded on either side by the violent sound of modern machinery, the buzz saw, in the yard. Lynen (32) enlightens us that this long opening description has the important function of defining the world in which the poem is set. It is of course the rural world. The buzz saw too, although a piece of modern machinery, could also be equated with the natural world as it takes on an animalistic quality when its sound is described as snarled and rattled, snarled and rattled (l.7). It also appears to have a life of its own when the poet describes the saw as knowing what supper meant (l.15) and that it seemed to leap out of the boys hand of its own accord. Pirini (14) tells us that in Out, Out , there is an underlying awareness that any moment of stasis, however idyllic, can easily be shattered. The peaceful natural world is further contrasted with the chaos and pain that the modern world can bring by the fact that Frost creates a still image of the boy about to finish his work for the day before interrupting it with what Heaney (86) calls that fiercely direct account, of the boy loosing his hand. Frost slows down the pace of the poem by placing a caesura in

the middle of a line : And nothing happened: day was all but done (l.9). The reader here takes a breath and stillness enters the scene. The peace is soon shattered by the rueful laugh (l.19) of the boy as he holds up his almost severed hand to keep the life and blood from spilling (l.22). As Lynen (32) comments, this episode illustrates the way in which horror bursts through the peaceful and familiar surface of life. So too, this poem could be considered an example of the horror of the modern world bursting through the peaceful and familiar surroundings of nature. The poem could be considered tragic; the effect of pathos is certainly powerful. The reader learns how the boy was Doing a mans work though still a child at heart (l.24) and that he has not even been given a half hour of the day that a boy counts so much when saved from work (l. 12). According to Lynen (35) the poem: symbolises a tragic aspect of the human situation: the fact that mans economic means, for the very reason that they are mechanical in nature, can destroy him. The poem also ends on a grim note as the boys relations turn from his dead body and on to their work: And they, since they/ Were not the ones dead, turned to their affairs. This could be considered evidence of the callous nature of the boys family. However it is more likely to be read as an indication of the harsh life that is lead by the inhabitants of Frosts rural landscape; it is a place of hard labour and struggle with little place for grief or sentiment. So we see in Frosts Out, Out , both evidence of natures beauty and of the harsh reality of living in such a landscape. We also see a suggestion of Frost as a modern poet; he is concerned with the complexities of modern life and these concerns represent a darker aspect to his poetry. It would be easy to dismiss Frosts popular poem Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening without consideration. The poem with its snowy scene and little horse giving its harness bells a shake (l. 9), could be associated with Christmas and can be read and understood by children as young as primary school. The poems regular rhyme scheme and easy rhythm gives reassurance to the reader, and the image of the woods in the third stanza is one of idyllic quiet: The only other sounds the sweep/ of easy wind and downy flake (ll.11-2). However, even this simple poem can be also used to showcase the darker undercurrents in Robert Frosts poetry. Heaney (65) comments that: this poem gives access to the dark side of Robert Frost, which was always there behind the mask of Yankee hominess.

At the centre of the poem is the question; why does the central character stop in the woods on this cold snowy evening? The poem could be read as a retreat into nature; a theme which is considered by Faggen (51) as crucial topos of the pastoral mode. Perhaps the woods, lovely dark and deep (l.13), provide some comfort for the lonely horseman as they are still quiet and removed even from the village where their owner lives. However, for Frosts character, as Faggen (50) notes, no landscape provides innocence or happiness except, perhaps, a momentary stay against confusion, . The horseman may have derived some peace from the snowy scene but he cannot rest here for long; in the back of his mind there is the constant reminder of the outside world with promises to keep (l.15). It is also worth considering that nature in the poem, whether comforting for the central character or not, is not the typical nature of pastoral poetry. Here we find no shepherds or flowery wreaths. Instead the woods are considered lovely but also dark and deep (l.13). The lake is frozen and it is the darkest evening of the year (ll.7-8). Although the quiet of the scene could be considered peaceful, it could also be considered frightening in its isolation. Seamus Heaney, in his essay Over the Brim, believes that Frost manages to balance the light and the dark aspects of Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening. Heaney (63) articulates the notion that Frost was always ready to hang his negative recognitions in the balance against his more comfortable imaginings. Therefore, as demonstrated above, there is a cold shadow figure behind the warm-blooded image of Frosts generally beloved horseman (Ibid.). Desert Places, from A Further Range, may be considered a poem in a similar vein to Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening. However this poem, even more so than the former, illustrates the underlying darkness in Frosts poetry. Benfey (1) in his New York Times review of Jay Pirinis Robert Frost: A Life, calls Desert Places a downbeat masterpiece, and uses it to illustrate Trillings (1 qtd. in Benfey) idea that Robert Frost is a terrifying poet. In this poem, the speaker finds no comfort in nature. Instead the vastness of nature, the empty spaces (l.13) between stars and the blanker whiteness (l.11) of snow remind the poet of his own inner emptiness or desert places (l.16). The effect of nature in the poem is one of alienation. Frost chooses to describe the snow as benighted, a word both with connotations of ignorance and of the night. The snow is thus both a blank whiteness and an empty darkness. The meter in the first stanza is far from the comforting easy pace found in Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening. The hurried rhythm of the first line: snow falling and night falling fast, oh, fast (l.1) produces a

sense of panic. As Heaney (67) says, the meter is full of the hurry and slant of driven snow, its unstoppable, anxiety-inducing forward rush, all that whispering turmoil of a blizzard. The reader is therefore aware immediately that the speaker of the poem is not regarding the snow fall as a leisurely retreat, as in Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening, but as something much more sinister. Heaney (68) informs the reader that there is an urgent, toppling pattern created by the use of language in Desert Places; for example by using the line In a field I looked into going past (l.2) instead of the more grammatically complete In a field that I looked into going past Frost creates a slippage towards panic in the line (Heaney 68). Any natural life that is described in the poem is almost obliterated by the vast weight of the snow, there are few weeds and stubble showing (l.4) through the blanket, and the animals are smothered in their lairs. In the last stanza the poet moves from describing the terrifying emptiness of nature to his own inward blankness. The repetition of the image of the stars has, according to Heaney (70), Dantesque starkness. By brining his imagery outwards from the local scene to one regarding the vast void of space between the stars, Frost truly ends his poem on a terrifying note. Having examined some aspects of pastoral poetry, it is easy to see why Lynen (8) tells us that, it is now not unusual to hear Frost casually referred to as a pastoral poet. Robert Frosts poetry is certainly to do with the country; it is set in a rural New England landscape and his characters speak with a colloquial, rustic voice. However, as demonstrated above it often does not comply with many of the conventions of pastoral poetry making Frost, as Faggen implies, less than a pastoral poet. However, his seemingly simple poetry has many additional features which make Frosts poetry much more than the pastoral surface at first implies .His poetry I more modern than the traditional pastoral mode; instead of singing shepherds we have an isolated old man struggling to keep his farm and a rural couple driven apart by grief over their dead child. His landscapes are not always the idyllic settings associated with the pastoral and country life is not always peaceful and simple. In their place we have the calm of a rural setting interrupted by the horror of an unexpected death in Out, Out-. Here, the grim reality and harsh existence of life in a rural setting is also exemplified. Some of Frosts poems manage to balance both the light and the dark elements. A typical feature of the pastoral poetry is retreat into nature. It may be said that at times Frosts characters do retreat into nature, such as in Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening. However the nature which is retreated into is not a serene and beautiful place. It

is dark, isolated and frightening. In other poems, such as Desert Places, Frosts imagery and use of language is weighted to pull the reader much more into the dark than the light. Here the natural world conspires to reinforce the speakers own inner dark thoughts. Overall we see that in much of Frosts poetry, he takes the pastoral mode and infects it with a degree of uncertainty and struggle. We see the struggle and uncertainty of physical existence in such a landscape and the poet wrestle with inner uncertainty reflected around him in the dark aspects of nature. With this in mind it is easier to agree with Trilling (1 qtd. in Hepburn) that the universe that Frost conceives is a terrifying universe.

Works Cited Benfey, Christopher. "A Terrifying Poet" New York Times on the Web 25 April 1999. 10 November 2011<www.nytimes.com/books/99/04/25/reviews/990425.25 benfyt.html>.

Faggen, Robert, Ed. The Cambridge Companion to Robert Frost. Cambridge: Cambridge, 2001.

Frost, Robert. Desert Places. Robert Frost Selected Poems. Ian Hamilton. London: Penguin, 1973. 175

---. Home Burial. Robert Frost Selected Poems. Ian Hamilton. London: Penguin, 1973. 59-68

---.Out, Out . Robert Frost Selected Poems. Ian Hamilton. London: Penguin, 1973. 89

---. Stopping by Woods in a Snowy Evening. Robert Frost Selected Poems. Ian Hamilton. London: Penguin, 1973. 130

Heaney, Seamus. Above the Brim. Homage to Robert Frost. Ed. Derek Walcott. London: Faber 1997. 93 117

Hepburn, James. "Robert Frost and his Critics" The New England Quarterly 35.3 (1962): 367-368. Academic Search Premier. JSTOR. 05 November 2011 <http:www .jstor.org/stable/363826>.

Lea, Sydney. From Sublime to Rigamarole: Relations of Frost to Wordsworth. Modern Critical Views: Robert Frost. Ed. Harold Bloom. Broomall: Chelsea House, 2002

Lynen, John. The Pastoral Art of Robert Frost. New Haven: Yale, 1960 Desert Places. Robert Frost Selected Poems. Ian Hamilton. London: Penguin, 1973.

Parini, Jay. Robert Frost: a life. London: Pimlico, 2001.

Walcott, Derek. The Road Taken. Homage to Robert Frost. Ed. Derek Walcott. London: Faber 1997. 61 - 88