On Robert Frost’s “A Star in a Stone-Boat” and “Mending Wall”
By Gabriel Hartley • 22 October 2020
Related Posts—Draft Chapters
- Back Out of All This
- The Mountain Held the Town as in a Shadow
- Of Stars and Stones
- The Woods are Lovely, Dark and Deep
- A Journey of Objective Chance in “The Wood-Pile”
- Or Just Some Human Sleep
- Birches: Going and Coming Back
- The Poet Afield: Robert Frost’s “Waiting—Afield at Dusk” and “Mowing”
εἴην εὑρησιεπὴς ἀναγεῖσθαι πρόσφορος ἐν Μοισᾶν δίφρῳ May I find the right words and fittingly drive forward in the chariot of the Muses — Pindar, Olympian IX
One of the more apparently whimsical poems that Robert Frost wrote is “A Star in a Stone-Boat,” appearing first in the book New Hampshire (1923) along with more famous poems such as “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” “Fire and Ice,” and “Nothing Gold Can Stay.” In “A Star in a Stone-Boat,” Frost deals with the possibility that at least some of the stones that we might find strewn upon the earth have dropped there from the heavens, that at least some of the stones that we use to build our walls and our foundations with might actually be meteorites and, therefore, of stellar rather than earthly origin. What would it mean to acknowledge that we build our worldly structures out of otherworldly materials? What influence might these extraterrestrial stones have on the natural development of our planet and on us along with it?
Whimsy and Nonduality
I say “apparently whimsical” above because Frost’s characteristic use of whimsy allows him time and again to engage with a range of possible stances towards experiences or ideas that we might conventionally call fanciful without committing him to a specific epistemological position on basic metaphysical definitions of reality. I would argue, in fact, that Frost’s whimsy projects a nondualistic space within which he can undo a variety of philosophical oppositions, such as “fanciful” versus “scientific” or “romantic” versus “realistic,” without limiting himself to any of these conventional poles. Whimsy provides Frost with a way of paying tribute to the multidimensional nature of our world while providing him with a cover or a mask that makes it difficult for readers to pin him down, for them to decide how serious Frost might in fact be in his fancy.
If we accept the standard definitions of the whimsical—that is, those rhetorical stances marked by capriciousness, playfulness, and fanciful humor—then I would suggest here that Frost’s poems are not, in the end, simply capricious or fanciful or humorous in any frivolous sense. As any professional comedian will attest, humor can be one of the most serious of analytical tools available to us in a complex world. Whimsy here, then, allows Frost to ask “frivolous” questions seriously while appearing decidedly tongue in cheek. Moreover, this rhetorical turn suggests by extension that his more apparently serious statements might in reality be more whimsical than we might at first assume. Once we enter the nondualistic field of Frost’s whimsy, the serious becomes playful and the playful becomes serious.
We are immediately thrown into this nondualistic flux by the opening tercet of “A Star in a Stone-Boat”:
Never tell me that not one star of all That slip from heaven at night and softly fall Has been picked up with stones to build a wall. (1-3)
The unqualified definiteness of this opening directive, with its stern double negative, most likely leaves readers wondering, “What? Are you serious?” The positive result of the negatives leaves us with the command, “Tell me that at least one star has been picked up and used in the building of a wall.” There isn’t even the slim comfort of potentiality, of possibility rather than certainty, of a “might have been” that at least allows for the possibility of a “might not have been” when confronted with such an unusual assertion. The certainty of the directive leaves us uncertain as to its intention for how we should response to it.
Something There is that Doesn’t Love a Wall
My intention is to take these whimsical gestures seriously, here and elsewhere in the Frost canon, and to see where such a road not traveled might lead. Let’s say that we are, in fact, invited to take such moves seriously. What do we end up with? How do such renewed intentions re-orchestrate the gestures of the poem? What world do we then inhabit? For instance, let’s take another stone poem as an example, Frost’s more famous “Mending Wall” (from his first official collection, North of Boston, published in 1914), before returning to our star in a stone-boat.
“Mending Wall” is a meditation on the origins of the falling down of stone walls as well as what social functions such walls are intended to serve in the first place and, perhaps most importantly, the social fictions deployed to maintain an unquestioning state of consciousness. It is a meditation, then, on creating and maintaining boundaries. The particular policed boundary raised in the poem, the road less traveled by in most readings, that especially interests me is the boundary between human and nonhuman—or we might say “extra-human,” as in the realm beyond the human. We see this in the opening lines:
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun;
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast. (1-4)
I am especially interested in this “something there is.” The common-sensical “scientific” answer for this comes in the second line, “the frozen-ground-swell,” and yet this answer is immediately assigned secondary status by the speaker of the poem. This frozen-ground-swell is not a cause but a tool for the mysterious something-there-is that doesn’t love a wall. (Why “love”? Why not “like”?) The apparently capricious forces of nature will not be assigned a strictly naturalistic definition here. Natural law could not so easily explain the consistency of these disrupting wall-tumbling processes at work in nature, leaving “gaps even two can pass abreast.” Now, one might suggest that Frost is merely indulging in a certain animistic “poetic license” here that allows him to fuse fantasy and naturalism in this personifying way. Frost is simply, it would seem, playfully luxuriating in poetic imagination. But I would respond that such a suggestion debases the meanings of both poetry and imagination by reducing them to mere “speculative” fancy. I choose to believe that Frost is, in fact and not in fantasy, seeking ways of confronting the spirits of nature that we normally are led to consign to the playfully-misguided “romantic” poets and philosophers. The whimsical Frost is at heart a romantic—as, I should admit up front, I myself am.
A more “realistic” possibility would be that hunters have torn the walls apart, “Where they have left not one stone on a stone, / But they would have the rabbit out of hiding, / To please the yelping dogs” (7-9). Yet this answer doesn’t satisfy the speaker’s sense of deeper forces at work: “The gaps I mean, / No one has seen them made or heard them made, / But at spring mending-time we find them there” (9-11). Having engaged his neighbor in this annual ritual of reinforcing the boundary line between one’s property and another’s, the speaker admits: “We have to use a spell to make them balance: / ‘Stay where you are until our backs are turned!’” (18-19). Such work, in reality, is “just another kind of out-door game” (21) designed to reinforce the social fiction that says, “‘Good fences make good neighbors’” (27)—as well as the social fiction that leaves the explanation of such happenings to frozen ground-swells.
Yet there is something in the speaker himself that cannot rest in such conformity:
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
‘Why do they make good neighbors? Isn't it
Where there are cows? But here there are no cows. (28-31)
Here we have the only named force (so far) that seems to be at work behind the disruptions recounted in the poem: Spring, “the mischief in me” that leads me to wonder, and specifically to wonder about the original of the notions in our heads. “Why?” And this Spring influence leads to a more expansive question: “Before I built a wall I’d ask to know / What I was walling in or walling out, / And to whom I was like to give offense” (32-34). The issue here, the poem has already pointed out, is not the walling in or out of apples or cows or pine trees. This Spring influence seems to lead the speaker into a more intuitive mode of perception, enough so to repeat and elaborate on the opening statement:
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down.’ I could say ‘Elves’ to him,
But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather
He said it for himself. . . . (35-38)
The poise of the statement suggests that while this something-there-is is “not elves exactly,” it is also not not elves exactly. Not exactly, but like enough so as to suggest such an entity behind these greater-than-naturalistic nature forces at work in the disturbance of walls, enough so that “I could say ‘Elves’ to him, / But I’d rather he said it for himself.” The neighbor’s ability to see something akin to elves at work in these wall disturbances would mean that he had attained a mode of consciousness that would allow for a different architecture in our built relationships with what we wall in and what we wall out. But instead, the speaker sees his neighbor’s relationship to stone as darkly archaic:
. . . I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father's saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, ‘Good fences make good neighbors.’ (38-45)
Rather than reviving the animistic consciousness of ancient tribal cultures for whom elves would be frequent companions in the working with stone and earth, this neighbor represents instead the limitations on consciousness resulting from the presumed stone-age cultural resistance to going “behind his father’s saying” in this simple-minded repetition of unquestioned social boundaries in this newer Yankee reiteration.
What the speaker of “Mending Wall” seeks, it seems, is a new stone age in which the violent savagery of the slogan-bound mindless neighbor, stone in each hand poised as if to crush in an enemy’s skull, enacting a dance of stone and stupidity, is supervened by what we might call the New Stone Age Man or the Cosmic Stone Age Man—the person for whom the mysteries of the universe play themselves out in the simplest instances of what are typically called physical forces by that modern stone worker, armed with the stones of science, who would want to assign these mysteries to gravity or ground swell. Gravitational Man (we could call him) stands no less imprisoned within the discursive fields of modern scientific explanation than does the self-pleased stone age neighbor happily trapped in tradition. The poem’s speaker—like most of the speakers in Frost’s poems—stands once more removed beyond both the traditional and the scientific stone age men of this world, seeking an alternative order that sublates these mutually-excluding dullnesses called tradition and science. The speaker perceives an underlying relationality and causality that could more accurately be called elfin rather than physical—perhaps not elfin exactly, but at least this speaker nevertheless risks saying it for himself and for any other new stone worshipers among his readers. The poem seems to gesture towards without ever mentioning the relational ethos of the communal stone workers of the past who built the complex sacred structures of Stonehenge, Newgrange, Chaco Canyon, and Machu Picchu—aware of the importance of appeasing those Spring-like forces that do not love a wall if it merely separates one human from another. The speaker of “Mending Wall” seeks to mend entire modes of consciousness that remain deaf to the mischievous calls of Spring in us that recreates spaces in our walls through which two can pass abreast once more.
Handling Stars
So imagine the conversation the speaker of “Mending Wall” might have with his neighbor, now not about elves and traveling stones but about building good fences with stars (to return to “A Star in a Stone-Boat”). For such a neighbor, a stone is a stone, nothing particularly remarkable:
Some laborer found one faded and stone-cold,And saving that its weight suggested goldAnd tugged it from his first too certain hold,He noticed nothing in it to remark.He was not used to handling stars thrown darkAnd lifeless from an interrupted arc. (4-9)
Ignorant of such interrupted arcs, this wall builder lacks the speaker’s perceptive abilities (revealed to us as the poem develops) to notice, to recognize, to see, and to know the ephemeral starry nature of such stones. In one of the more stunning statements in the poem, the speaker declares: “He did not recognize in that smooth coal / The one thing palpable besides the soul / To penetrate the air in which we roll” (10-12). Perhaps the soul, akin to other such beings who penetrate our air, provides us with this ability to recognize such family relationships. Like any Bird of Paradise, these interrupted stars were not meant to land on Earth:
He did not see how like a flying thing It brooded ant eggs, and had one large wing, One not so large for flying in a ring, And a long Bird of Paradise's tail (Though these when not in use to fly and trail It drew back in its body like a snail) (13-18)
When such a celestial orb is thrown to the Earth, the less-perceptive stone picker does not see “that he might move it from the spot” (19) and so remains oblivious to the effects of earth-bound stars:
The harm was done: from having been star-shot The very nature of the soil was hot And burning to yield flowers instead of grain, Flowers fanned and not put out by all the rain Poured on them by his prayers prayed in vain. (20-24)
The attempts by humans to domesticate the landscape fail in such star-shot spots now forever given over, in their stellar fire, to wildflowers. We learn here of the speaker’s sensitivity to such energetically-transformed patches of earth, whose radiance is available to all who would see and whose local walls and foundations issue forth the signs of their extra-terrestrial nature.
In the ninth and tenth tercets (lines 25-30) we find one of the potentially whimsical moments in the poem as the speaker translates the farmer’s labor into its proper mythological dimension:
He moved it roughly with an iron bar, He loaded an old stone-boat with the star And not, as you might think, a flying car, Such as even poets would admit perforce More practical than Pegasus the horse If it could put a star back in its course. (25-30)
Unlike Zeus, who has his Pegasus-drawn chariot handy for carrying his thunderbolts across the heavens, the farmer performs his labor by means of the humbler stone-boat. As Wikipedia tells us, a stone-boat is “a type of sled (sledge) for moving heavy objects such as stones or hay bales.” With horses or oxen dragging these sleds on timber runners or “a flat bottom of planks secured together to slide over soft ground or snow” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone-boat), the farmer could thus clear his fields of stones and the occasional fallen star in ways that Zeus with his flying car could only dream of, without, however, putting the star back in its now properly terrestrial course:
He dragged it through the plowed ground at a pace But faintly reminiscent of the race Of jostling rock in interstellar space. (31-33)
As the poem continues, some readers might begin to feel a bit edgy as the whimsy seems dangerously close to spinning out of its proper course. The speaker of the poem, “as though / Commanded in a dream,” here acknowledges his own star-steering quest:
It went for building stone, and I, as though Commanded in a dream, forever go To right the wrong that this should have been so. Yet ask where else it could have gone as well, I do not know—I cannot stop to tell: He might have left it lying where it fell. From following walls I never lift my eye, Except at night to places in the sky Where showers of charted meteors let fly. (34-42)
Unlike his townsmen, mindlessly going about their domesticated duties, leaving their engagement with cosmic mysteries to the conventional stories told in school and church, the speaker goes about the fields searching for these unhappily misplaced stars:
Some may know what they seek in school and church, And why they seek it there; for what I search I must go measuring stone walls, perch on perch; Sure that though not a star of death and birth, So not to be compared, perhaps, in worth To such resorts of life as Mars and Earth— (43-48)
In one of the most remarkable passages I have found in all of Frost’s poetry, we see that the speaker, this proper handler of stars and stones, devotes himself to his vocation of fallen-star spinner by reanimating each star-stone’s natural polar spin by fusing his own “strange tangents” with those of the star:
Though not, I say, a star of death and sin, It yet has poles, and only needs a spin To show its worldly nature and begin To chafe and shuffle in my calloused palm And run off in strange tangents with my arm, As fish do with the line in first alarm. (49-54)
If we take this image—worthy of William Blake—seriously for a moment, what a miraculous shift in earthly consciousness are we allowed to witness. The speaker, recognizing his own bodily energetic kinship with such fallen stars, picks this particular one up, spins it in his palm, and creates a marvelous glowing electrical continuum that in itself illustrates the human role of serving as the bridge between heaven and earth. In these brief moments of transcendental connection, this mad local star handler becomes the microcosmic embodiment of our universal cosmic dance:
Such as it is, it promises the prize Of the one world complete in any size That I am like to compass, fool or wise. (55-57)
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