The Mountain Held the Town as in a Shadow

Gabriel Hartley • 27 October to 5 November 2020

“If a mountain is covered by green trees and grass, has some spring water 
or brooks flowing on it, the soil is fertile and full of moisture, 
and the stones and rocks in it are magnificent and well-shaped, 
this mountain must contain an abundance of Qi” (54).
— Henry B. Lin, The Art and Science of Feng Shui: 
The Ancient Chinese Tradition of Shaping Fate

“The more the sensibilitist I am / The more I seem to want my mountains wild.”
— Robert Frost, “New Hampshire” (343-344)

[NOTICE: This is a draft of a work in progress. Please do not quote or copy without my permission. Thanks! — Gabriel Hartley]

hartleyg@ohio.edu

Held by the Mountain

Returning to “The Mountain,” we hear the following in its opening lines:

The mountain held the town as in a shadow.
I saw so much before I slept there once:
I noticed that I missed stars in the west,
Where its black body cut into the sky. (1-4)

What does it mean to be held by the mountain? This holding could be protective, like a parent’s embrace of a child, or it could be imprisoning, a notion that could color our response to this holding “as in a shadow.” And yet the hold of a mountain’s shadow can often present itself as protective, nurturing, embracing so as to shelter its inhabitants. The traveler is captivated by the mountain’s presence fairly immediately, seeing so much before going to sleep there once. Again as in many other Frost poems, the sense of sight, of vision, takes center stage here: “I saw so much”; “I noticed.” The traveler grounds himself in relation to the sky that is now eclipsed by the mountain’s looming presence, blocking out the stars that he missed in the west where “its black body cut into the sky.” The traveler saw before sleeping that the mountain blocks out a portion of the western sky, a portion that he is evidently accustomed to seeing at night before sleeping.

At this point, the mountain’s looming presence could be felt as deprivation, blocking out those environmental markers—the stars—by which the traveler normally grounds himself, positions himself between heaven and earth. Yet in the lines that come next, a very different affective response to this shadowing presence comes to the surface:

Near me it seemed: I felt it like a wall
Behind which I was sheltered from a wind. (5-6)

Such is the traveler’s sensory relationship to the looming mountain at night. But the morning offers a new perspective on these things:

And yet between the town and it I found,
When I walked forth at dawn to see new things,
Were fields, a river, and beyond, more fields. (7-9)

The proximity of the mountain now recedes a bit farther into the west as new features of the intermediate landscape come into view at dawn between the traveler and the mountain—fields, a river, and more fields. An entire process of seasonal earth relationships (water shaping earth and stone after spring runoff) becomes evident now:

The river at the time was fallen away,
And made a widespread brawl on cobble-stones;
But the signs showed what it had done in spring;
Good grass-land gullied out, and in the grass
Ridges of sand, and driftwood stripped of bark. (10-14)

The melting mountain snows flow forcefully as they engorge the river and tear away at its banks. The traveler attends to these signs before turning his attention once more to the mountain to the west of the town: “I crossed the river and swung round the mountain” (15).

At this point the human dimension comes into view:

And there I met a man who moved so slow
With white-faced oxen in a heavy cart,
It seemed no harm to stop him altogether. (16-18)

Note the traveler’s consideration for the oxcart man’s time and purpose, which is evidence of the terms of the social contract at work in this mountain village culture. The traveler has stopped the farmer in order to get his bearings:

‘What town is this?’ I asked.
‘This? Lunenburg.’

Then I was wrong: the town of my sojourn,
 Beyond the bridge, was not that of the mountain,
 But only felt at night its shadowy presence.
 ‘Where is your village? Very far from here?’

‘There is no village—only scattered farms.
 We were but sixty voters last election. (19-25)

If we were to plot out the locations that the traveler lays out in the poem, we know these things so far: The traveler spent the night in a town east of the river that itself is east of the mountain. The town of the traveler’s sojourn was not Lunenburg but some other larger town. Lunenburg, made up simply of scattered farms inhabited by sixty voters and not even large enough to be considered a proper village, lies on the west side of the river between the town and the mountain. And the reason for the small size of Lunenburg’s population is the size of the mountain itself:

We can’t in nature grow to many more:
That thing takes all the room!’ He moved his goad.
The mountain stood there to be pointed at. (21-23)

The Mountain Stood There to Be Pointed At

“The mountain stood there to be pointed at”: This could be one of the most consequential lines in all of Frost’s poetry. It draws into focus an entire set of phenomenological relationships. The mountain serves as the index of all our other terms of grounding and location. Where are we when we feel “at night its shadowy presence” (22)? East in the town that is east of the bridge that spans the river that is east of the village that lies at the base of the mountain. It is due to this need for orientation in relation to this mountain that the traveler stops the oxcart man to ask where he is. Where am I? What town is this? Where is your village? Very far from here? Then I was wrong.

If we were to take the place names of the poem literally and find Lunenburg on the map, we would discover that the town of sojourn to the east of Lunenburg, Vermont is Lancaster, New Hampshire on the eastern shore of the Connecticut River that separates Vermont from New Hampshire. The mountain that looms in the west over Lunenburg is Miles Mountain (2674 ft. / 815 m.). But given that Lancaster is roughly twelve miles from the base of Miles Mountain (too far for a pre-breakfast morning hike) and that the description of the river runoff damage doesn’t seem appropriate for the conditions of the Connecticut River, then this actual Lunenburg location (and Miles Mountain along with it) is probably not the location indicated in the poem, unless Frost has shaped the contours of this actual spot to fit his poetic purpose. We will return to this question as the poem offers more potential clues.

Mount Orn Bridge — Lunenburg, Miles Mountain in Distance

But first, to return to the qualities of the mountain that keep Lunenburg and its farms from growing any larger:

Pasture ran up the side a little way,
And then there was a wall of trees with trunks:
After that only tops of trees, and cliffs
Imperfectly concealed among the leaves.
A dry ravine emerged from under boughs
Into the pasture. . . . (29-34)

But the boundaries of Lunenburg are not really the traveler’s concern, not what led him out on this morning walk. His goal is to scope out future access to the mountaintop:

. . . 'That looks like a path.
Is that the way to reach the top from here? —
Not for this morning, but some other time:
I must be getting back to breakfast now.’ (34-37)

The mountain stood there to be pointed at, and one reason for doing so is for us to see it as an invitation or a challenge. Recognizing the traveler’s desire, the oxcart man advises him: “‘I don’t advise your trying from this side. / There is no proper path’” (38-39). One needs a proper path for such ascents.

‘. . . but those that have
Been up, I understand, have climbed from Ladd’s. [40]
That’s five miles back. You can’t mistake the place:
They logged it there last winter some way up.
I’d take you, but I’m bound the other way.’ (39-43)

A challenge such as this has not posed itself to the oxcart man, who has never been tempted, it seems, to climb the mountain where he has spent his life:

‘You’ve never climbed it?’
‘I’ve been on the sides
Deer-hunting and trout-fishing. . . .’ (44-45)

But he has at least heard about what might be on the top. And the tops of mountains, for a variety of reasons, seem to be the most symbolically potent aspect of mountains for us. In most geomantic and mythological explorations of mountain terrain, one of the key features to look for at the top are the fountain sources of springs and, ultimately, streams and rivers that cascade down to the mountain slopes to the seas. And this mountain is no different:

'. . . There's a brook
That starts up on it somewhere—I’ve heard say
Right on the top, tip-top—a curious thing.
But what would interest you about the brook,
It’s always cold in summer, warm in winter.
One of the great sights going is to see
It steam in winter like an ox’s breath.
Until the bushes all along its banks
Are inch-deep with the frosty spines and bristles —
You know the kind. Then let the sun shine on it!’ (45-54)

Not only do we find a spring on top that falls downward as a brook but one that remains so steady in temperature as to confound the normal conditions we attribute to the seasons. Its effects are outright magical and stunning in winter, steaming like an ox’s breath (or so the oxcart man would see it) until the bushes are covered in frost and glowing in the sunshine. For someone who has never actually attempted to scale the mountain, the oxcart man recounts with great clarity the ecstatic details of this mountain brook phenomenon.

But the traveler remains unmoved by the oxcart man’s attempts to convey the glorious nature of this brook and returns to his focus on climbing to the mountain top:

‘There ought to be a view around the world
From such a mountain—if it isn’t wooded
Clear to the top.’ I saw through leafy screens
Great granite terraces in sun and shadow,
Shelves one could rest a knee on getting up —
With depths behind him sheer a hundred feet;
Or turn and sit on and look out and down,
With little ferns in crevices at his elbow. (55-62)

Such points of perspective from mountain tops—“a view around the world”—serve as another reason for trying to reach the top. And yet the oxcart man is compelled to repeat his own sense of the mountaintop’s importance:

‘As to that I can’t say. But there’s the spring,
Right on the summit, almost like a fountain.
That ought to be worth seeing.’ . . .

“If it’s there. / You never saw it?” (65-66), the traveler asks skeptically. The oxcart man is puzzled by this skepticism, with a reply that leads to an almost comical back-and-forth between the oxcart man, who believes without the need for personal encounter, and the skeptical traveler, who needs to see for himself:

. . . 'I guess there's no doubt
About its being there. I never saw it.
It may not be right on the very top:
It wouldn’t have to be a long way down
To have some head of water from above,
And a good distance down might not be noticed
By anyone who’d come a long way up.
One time I asked a fellow climbing it
To look and tell me later how it was.’

‘What did he say?’

'He said there was a lake
Somewhere in Ireland on a mountain top.’

‘But a lake’s different. What about the spring?’

‘He never got up high enough to see.
That’s why I don’t advise your trying this side.
He tried this side. . . .

The traveler completely misses the mythical resonance of the reference to a lake “Somewhere in Ireland on a mountain top” and insists in his determination to be given a proper account of the nature of the mountain spring. To which the oxcart man replies:

[. . .] I've always meant to go
And look myself, but you know how it is:
It doesn’t seem so much to climb a mountain
You’ve worked around the foot of all your life.
What would I do? Go in my overalls,
With a big stick, the same as when the cows
Haven’t come down to the bars at milking time?
Or with a shotgun for a stray black bear?
‘Twouldn’t seem real to climb for climbing it.’ (80-88)

The daily details of a life lived at the base of the mountain do not naturally lend themselves to the desire to change one’s clothes and climb just for the sake of climbing. “‘Twouldn’t seem real.” And yet the oxcart man’s experience of the mountain remains profoundly woven into his mundane quotidian existence. We sense here a mild and bemused rebuke of the traveler’s insistence on being told the details of the mountain, which passes the traveler by completely as he continues asking about the mountain’s measurable details:

‘I shouldn’t climb it if I didn’t want to —
Not for the sake of climbing. What’s its name?’

‘We call it Hor: I don’t know if that’s right.’

‘Can one walk round it? Would it be too far?’

‘You can drive round and keep in Lunenburg,
 But it’s as much as ever you can do,
 The boundary lines keep in so close to it.
 Hor is the township, and the township’s Hor —
 And a few houses sprinkled round the foot,
 Like boulders broken off the upper cliff,
 Rolled out a little farther than the rest.’ (89-99)

What’s in a Name?

The line “‘We call it Hor: I don’t know if that’s right’” is striking in many ways. First, given what an overwhelming presence this mountain seems to be on the physical consciousness of the people in its shadow—the ways it creates the boundary lines by which people identify where they themselves begin and end, who, in fact, they are—what does it mean to not know the mountain’s proper name? The houses past the village line, edging up to the foot of this mountain of uncertain name, themselves appear as pieces broken off of the mountain itself. The people and their houses in many ways are the mountain, and yet they do not seem to know its name.

A second striking aspect of this indeterminate name of the mountain is that the identity of the Biblical mountain, Mount Hor, after which this mountain in New England has possibly been named, cannot be exactly determined. Scholars argue whether the properly Biblical Mount Hor is the mountain marking the northern boundary of the land of Israel (whose proper name has also shifted from Jacob to the wrestler of God) or possibly the mountain by the same name overlooking the southern border of the Dead Sea in the land of Edom, a mountain that according to Wikipedia also goes by the name of the Jebel Nebi Harun (“Mountain of the Prophet Aaron” in Arabic) (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Hor).

The third striking thing in relation to the uncertainty of the mountain’s name is that the geographical details outlined in the poem itself do not seem to add up to a specific single location for our mountain. As I have detailed above, the actual town of Lunenburg, Vermont does not appear to fit the geographical description of the town in the poem (especially in terms of the proximity of the poem’s “Lunenburg” to the poem’s mountain named “Hor”). In the biography Robert Frost: A Life, Jay Parini writes, “[In] the summer of 1909 [Frost] and his family camped throughout the worst part of hay-fever season on Lake Willoughby in northern Vermont. The little town was dominated by Mount Lafayette, which inspired his poem ‘The Mountain’” (99-100).

mount-lafayette-left — Mount Lafayette from the Frost Place—Franconia, New Hampshire

In reality, however, the Vermont town on Lake Willoughby is named Westmore, and is dominated by an actual Mount Hor (see letter ‘A’ on the map below). The town of Franconia, New Hampshire is dominated by Mount Lafayette, one of Frost’s favorite mountains, but this is not likely the mountain of the poem “The Mountain” if we take seriously the fact that the mountain of the poem is to the west of the town, which is not the case for Mount Lafayette’s relationship to Franconia (see letter ‘C’ on the map). If we judge according to the name given to the mountain of the poem, then Westmore would be the town with Mount Hor to the west. But if we judge the location based on the poem’s statement that the town is in the Lunenburg area, then the mountain to the west would be Miles Mountain (the “boundary lines keep in so close to it”) (see letter ‘B’ on the map).

Which Mountain? A. Mount Hor; B. Miles Mountain; C. Layayette

It seems likely that, for whatever reasons, Frost took liberties in terms of actual places and place names when he constructed the landscape for his poem. This suggests that Frost might be going after the universality of our human relationship to the mountain rather than the particularities of actual towns and mountains that he knew. To that extent, any Mount Hor will do when what we seek is to be held by the mountain. For the particulars of any given mountain and the ways in which we thereby measure our own being are simply relative to the other lines of relationship that we bring to the mountain in the first place.

All the Fun’s in How You Say a Thing

In the long poem “New Hampshire,” title poem of the collection by that name (1923), the speaker (presumably Frost himself) compares the mountains of New Hampshire to those of Vermont: “The Vermont mountains stretch extended straight; / New Hampshire mountains Curl up in a coil” (213-214). And yet the proper comparison for mountains is the actual to the ideal: “The only fault I find with old New Hampshire / Is that her mountains aren’t quite high enough” (310-311). But high enough as compared to what? The problem is that the speaker had a sad accident earlier in life:

. . . the sad accident of having seen
Our actual mountains given in a map 330
Of early times as twice the height they are—
Ten thousand feet instead of only five—
Which shows how sad an accident may be.
Five thousand is no longer high enough. (329-334)

The actual mountains of New Hampshire are magnificent in themselves but come to be dwarfed by our predisposed notions of what their proper height should be. “The more the sensibilitist I am,” the speaker explains, “The more I seem to want my mountains wild” (343-344).

Just so, as “The Mountain” comes to a close, this drama of proper measurement comes to a head:

‘Warm in December, cold in June, you say?’

‘I don’t suppose the water’s changed at all.
You and I know enough to know it’s warm
Compared with cold, and cold compared with warm.
But all the fun’s in how you say a thing.’ (100-104)

The water’s temperature remains constant; it is only the external contingencies that we bring to it—such as the varying temperatures of the seasons—that transform that uniformity into the relative extremities of warm and cold. And these same external contingencies color everything we have to say about our experience. When brought into contact with the systems we apply to measure our relationship to our world, the mountain itself—which hitherto has held us in its protective embrace—becomes subject to our own comical expectations of growth and development:

‘You’ve lived here all your life?’
                                                           'Ever since Hor
Was no bigger than a—’ What, I did not hear.

He drew the oxen toward him with light touches
 Of his slim goad on nose and offside flank,
 Gave them their marching orders and was moving. (105-109)

alpilles — “Les Alpilles,” Vincent Van Gogh

5 November 2020

The Mountain Held the Town as in a Shadow

Related Posts—Draft Chapters

Held by the Mountain

The Mountain Stood There to Be Pointed At

What’s in a Name?

All the Fun’s in How You Say a Thing

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