By Gabriel Hartley • 20 August 2020
[NOTICE: This is a draft of a work in progress. Please do not quote or copy without my permission. Thanks! — Gabriel Hartley]
Related Posts—Draft Chapters
One thing about matter-of-factness that is rarely discussed is that nothing comes to us as a matter of fact. Everything we see or discuss or choose to write has been selected from an infinite range of other things equally present to us as matters of fact. Everything is preselected by us and for us before we can then pretend to grasp such things as facts, as the facts. So when I say, as I am about to, that this or that aspect of a Robert Frost poem must be taken as a matter of fact, I only do so out of the desire to dampen the impulse to symbolism that predominates over so much literary criticism. To repeat a truism that has been previously repeated ad nauseum (a little nausea is sometimes instructive), sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. (I have always found this expression annoying.) And yet . . .
Robert Frost’s poem “The Wood-Pile” opens in a very matter-of-fact way:
Out walking in the frozen swamp one gray day, I paused and said, “I will turn back from here. No, I will go on farther—and we shall see.” (1-3)
When I say these opening lines should be read in a matter-of-fact way, I am simply urging us not to immediately start asking ourselves, “OK, what does the frozen swamp symbolize? What kind of mood does the gray day suggest?” My point is that woods can be lovely, dark and deep, without at the same time suggesting that Frost wants to snuff himself out in the dark wilderness. Sometimes woods are lovely, dark and deep, and that fact is cause for awe, for joy, for communion with one’s environment. That Frost has written fairly dispassionately enough about boys bleeding to death after cutting off their arms with chainsaws might suggest to us that, had he wanted to suggest to us that he was feeling a little suicidal, he might simply say so.
So what might this frozen swamp on this one gray day say to us? Indulge me for a moment and let me say what it says for me (assuming that there might be room for “us” in this aside). For, as someone who also walks out in frozen swamps on gray days, I immediately find in this opening moment a very familiar set of circumstances, no matter how warm the day might be when I am in fact reading this poem. In fact, everything about the circumstances of this frozen-swamp walk resonates deeply with me and within me. There is a crispness and a clarity (despite the grayness) that clears the lungs, the heart, the head on such days, in such moments. And there is an openness to possibility. Notice again how the speaker grounds us in the second and third lines:
I paused and said, “I will turn back from here. No, I will go on farther—and we shall see.”
What makes the speaker pause and consider turning back from here? What is his original goal and in what ways is it being met—or not—at this point in the frozen swamp? Is the speaker turning back because he has accomplished his goals? Or because those goals have not been met? The latter seems to be suggested by the “No, I will go on farther—and we shall see.” Notice how the I becomes we as we are carried along into the progress of the journey along with the speaker. “We shall see” suggests that there is some as-yet-unspoken plan at work here that the swamp walk has not yet fulfilled. The walk is now in some way a quest. It is a strange matter-of-factness once we recognize this. What does the speaker—and we—seek in this indeterminate journey in which whichever road we take seems equally unpredictable (which is not necessarily a bad thing)? The speaker’s seeming indecisiveness indicates a certain level of openness to and in this journey.
A curious thing happens (or should happen) when we read the next two lines:
The hard snow held me, save where now and then One foot went through. The view was all in lines . . . (4-5)
What is the function of this statement? On a matter-of-fact level, the speaker is simply giving us more detail about the situation we are now all in. But here we find ourselves in a typical Frostian elliptical mode of communication. We assume that people say things for a reason, that the facts that they present serve a purpose in some larger statement, and that these facts serve as an answer to some question or problem. But what unstated question is being answered by telling us that the snow is hard enough to hold him, except in the few places where one foot or the other falls through? What do we learn about the speaker’s circumstances in this added detail?
Well, one possibility is that the speaker might be assuming that we, as engaged readers, are at this point already fairly uncertain about what’s going on here, about why the speaker is walking here and why he might consider turning back and then change his mind and go on instead, as if we were asking, “What is it about these circumstances that made you want to turn back? Were the snowy conditions of the frozen swamp proving too difficult?” If this were the case, then the answer is, “No, the snow held me up for the most part.” The speaker anticipates our question and answers it before we can perhaps even fully formulate that question in our own heads.
I will for now refer to this Frostian mode of conversation as retroactive ellipsis. In this way, the readers are constantly carried along by means of a largely unstated series of propositions, questions, and conclusions that create the basis of the sense we make (or not) as we travel along through the poems.
If the sudden mention of the hardness of snow was surprising, the details that we are given in the lines that follow are perhaps even less expected:
[. . .] The view was all in lines Straight up and down of tall slim trees Too much alike to mark or name a place by So as to say for certain I was here Or somewhere else: I was just far from home. (5-9)
Why is the speaker suddenly describing the linearity of the view before him? We get a description of linear indeterminacy that makes the marking of a “place” too difficult. The function of a place here seems to be a point in terms of which one can determine one’s location, especially in relation to one’s home. But why tell us this here? Would knowing one’s place make the speaker more or less likely to turn around and go back home? Is the poet suggesting that he went onward simply due to a breakdown in his self-placing capacities in this indeterminate forest of straight up and down tall slim trees too much alike to mark or name a place by? And is determining his place even the goal here? The speaker now seems to be in the process of eliminating practical reasons why he might choose either to go on or go back: No, the snow was capable of sustaining me, so I didn’t leave due to lack of grounding support; and no, I was not disturbed by not knowing exactly what my relationship to home was due to a lack of place—those were not the circumstances moving me forward to some as yet undetermined spot (which might or might not be determined as a “place”). He was presumably comfortable in this state of being as yet out of place.
And then “A small bird flew before me” (10). Let’s simply take my “and then” as a linking phrase in relation to the development of the lines in the poem rather than in the logical relationships between one moment or circumstance and another. In other words, is the mention here and now of the small bird meant simply as another detail in the circumstances? Or is it meant to give us a reason for the speaker’s choice of direction? In other words, which transitioning words are elided here: “And then” or “because”? “I decided not to go back and then a bird flew before me” versus “I decided not to go back then because a bird flew before me”? I am suggesting here that Frost’s gesture of retroactive ellipsis draws us into the logical unfolding of a set of circumstances whose logic is never defined for us. We are in the position to be writing the events of the poem along with the poet as we read, and perhaps at some point we shall see.
I will take this openness to me as a reader, then, as a permission slip of sorts. I will explain the apparent indecisiveness and indeterminacy of the speaker’s journey in the poem in terms of my own frozen swamp walks and my own engagements with the birds who fly before me. If I imagine that the speaker in the poem is motivated by the same deliberate openness to chance as that which often drives my own forest journeys, then the opening lines make perfect sense. I frequently go into the woods (or into the city, for that matter) not with a predetermined destination or place in mind but rather with the desire to open myself up to the magic of what will open itself up to me along the way. If I let way lead to way, where might I end up? Who or what might I meet along the way? What might I learn that would simply pass me by were I walking according to my own predetermined plan, towards my own chosen destination? Just as the Surrealist poets often approached the path of writing as an embrace of chance and contingency, what if I approach the events of my open-ended journey in the same spirit? What might the universe have to show me that I would otherwise miss along the way?
With this sense of open-endedness in mind, this embrace of what André Breton called “objective chance” [hazard], the speaker’s apparent indecisiveness at the beginning of the poem now appears as an openness to chance: Should I turn back? (I will wait for some feeling of confirmation of this possibility.) “No, I will go on farther—and we shall see.” And now— Aha!—this little bird has volunteered to be my guide! I will see where he leads me.
The bird is welcoming yet cautious as he engages me in this chance journey:
[. . .] He was careful To put a tree between us when he lighted, And say no word to tell me who he was Who was so foolish as to think what he thought. (10-13)
The speaker has as yet no sense of place nor sense of this being’s identity who is not yet willing to say a word to disclose who he is. At this point, as is so typical in Frost’s poems, the speaker engages in an inner dialogue in which he debates the pros and cons of “objective” versus “imaginative” perspectives (a dichotomy all too often reduced to the simplistic opposition of “fact” and “fancy”). What person in his right mind would be so foolish as to imagine that he could read the bird’s mind? (Perhaps the same person who might speak to the sleeping woodchuck once he awakens?) The sceptic loses out, nevertheless, with the wonderful line break that flips the two instances of “he thought”: “so foolish as to think what he thought. / He thought that I was after him for a feather” (13-14). The speaker has quickly accepted his intuitive, telepathic capacity for joining in this inner exchange:
He thought that I was after him for a feather— The white one in his tail; like one who takes Everything said as personal to himself. One flight out sideways would have undeceived him. (14-17)
Notice now how the pronouns become increasingly indeterminate: the “he” of “he thought” at first seems to refer to the bird. But perhaps once we have entered into the thoughts of the bird, the “him” of “himself” now refers back to the speaker as the little bird passes judgment on the apparent self-importance of the speaker. “If I, the little bird, were to fly out sideways, I then ‘would have undeceived’ the speaker.” In what way is the speaker deceived? And who has done the deceiving? On the other hand, if we imagine the “he” to continue referring to the bird, then it is the bird who is deluded in his own projection onto the consciousness of the speaker. “Ha! He thought I was after his white feather! But if he were to fly out sideways and see that I was no longer interested in him or his feathers, then the little bird would then be undeceived.”
Deceived or not (bird or not), the speaker has, as a matter of fact, been led by the bird along to his next step:
And then there was a pile of wood for which I forgot him and let his little fear Carry him off the way I might have gone, Without so much as wishing him good-night. He went behind it to make his last stand. (18-22)
The speaker had apparently been happy enough to let the bird continue being his guide along “the way I might have gone”—but then two roads diverged in a wood as the wood-pile loomed up onto the scene. Upon spotting the wood-pile, the speaker in his open-to-chance journeying is no longer captivated by the little bird—or so he claims. We see through this ruse, however, as we witness the speaker’s continuing sense of the bird’s imagined fear and disappointment at being so suddenly ignored, as well as the attention paid to the bird’s desire “to make his last stand” behind the wood-pile in one last desperate attempt to recapture the speaker’s imagination.
But what makes the wood-pile a striking enough object to distract the speaker from his communion with the bird? If we recall the opening of the poem, with its emphasis on the gray indeterminacy of the frozen swamp in the forest, we might get a clue about why this particular object might catch his eye:
It was a cord of maple, cut and split And piled—and measured, four by four by eight. (23-24)
Unlike the stand of living tall slim trees “all in lines / Straight up and down,” “Too much alike to mark or name a place by,” the trees composing this wood-pile have been cut, split, piled, and measured very precisely. A curious thing about this wood-pile that goes unmentioned is that only a wood cutter who is regularly concerned with the sale or purchase of firewood would be so precise in splitting and stacking exactly one cord, “four by four by eight.” This fact seems to cross the speaker’s mind when he states, “And not another like it could I see” (25). Had this pile been part of a woodcutter’s business operation, then why would there be just one cord here and no other to be seen? And if it were for the cutter’s personal use, why take the effort to measure it so exactly? Were there no other unstacked logs cut and lying randomly on the ground? And why—apparently the most pressing question of the poem on the stated level—would such a person leave all of this work, so carefully measured, behind to rot in the woods so far from home?
One immediate assumption (if we indulge Frost’s slipping back into retroactive ellipsis) would be that the woodcutter has simply gone off to some other task with plans for returning to the woodpile. This possibility is what seems to trigger the speaker’s line of questioning regarding how much time might have passed since the woodpile had been stacked here:
No runner tracks in this year’s snow looped near it. And it was older sure than this year’s cutting, Or even last year’s or the year’s before. The wood was gray and the bark warping off it And the pile somewhat sunken. Clematis [30] Had wound strings round and round it like a bundle. What held it though on one side was a tree Still growing, and on one a stake and prop, These latter about to fall. . . . (26-34)
One unspoken question then answered is, “Was this wood cut, split, and stacked into the pile sometime earlier this year?” No. We can tell that it was not left behind this year because there are no tracks remaining in the snow. And we can tell that it had not been abandoned one or even two years earlier (the next unspoken question) because of the state of decay of the logs and their reclamation by the forest in the rounds of clematis rings “round and round it” as well as the tumbling state of the stake and prop designed to keep the pile upright.
In perhaps the most compelling instance of retoractive ellipsis, the speaker silently asks not simply why someone would do this but who would do this. The why is implicit in the who. The answer to this unstated question is thus:
. . . I thought that only Someone who lived in turning to fresh tasks Could so forget his handiwork on which He spent himself, the labor of his ax, And leave it there far from a useful fireplace (34-38)
Interestingly, a much likelier answer would be not that the woodcutter lived on after turning to fresh tasks but had died before having a chance to return to gather up “the labor of his ax.” He spent himself indeed and thus has no need for “a useful fireplace” or the wood to feed it if this is the case.
This possibility might lead one to a state of sorrow or dejection, a meditation on loss and death and wasted labor in the unpredictability of life. But this is not, apparently, how the speaker wishes to leave things. Instead, he turns the ravages of fate into a field of choice and decision. This unknown someone had turned to fresh tasks that were so compelling that he would leave the fruit of his labor to do its intended work not in its usual useful place—in the fireplace of home—but left here “To warm the frozen swamp as best it could / With the slow smokeless burning of decay” (39-40). Subject to the contingencies of life and death, of growth and decay that mark out our places by the fireplace at home or in the frozen swamp, the woodpile embodiment of purposeful human activity lives out its intended purpose by transforming the frozen indeterminacy of a distant swamp into the slow burning warmth of the home that is everywhere once we have learned how to see it.
The poem “Design” is one of the few poems in which Frost asks the real questions out loud and foregoes his characteristic retroactive ellipsis. What “dimpled spider, fat and white, / On a white heal-all, holding up a moth” do we find in “The Wood-Pile” if “design govern in a thing so small”? Where has this journey into objective hazard led this speaker? In his actively-willed forest journey into the realm of chance, the speaker achieves his goal and fulfils his quest. He recognizes that whatever befalls us as we journey deliberately or by chance through this world—from loss to communion to revelation—we will find ourselves, led by whatever small bird, even in the unknown moment of death, enfolded within unexpected patterns of indeterminate design in such a way that we might finally name our place among the lines of tall slim trees that we encounter.
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