Love and Need by Adam Plunkett

Author:Adam Plunkett
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

With the season turning, wind blowing, leaves blown, and Frost on “that far-off day” letting the wind drive him “deathward,” singing of death, Frost has conjured the scene of “My Butterfly.” No butterfly is mentioned. In describing the scene but not letting us share in it, the recollection is the opposite of an elegy. Rather than preserving the interior without the exterior, Frost recalls himself as if from outside, estranged from himself as in “Carpe Diem.” His tone of recollection is wistful but abstracted. He returns to the scene of inspiration to call its fruits into question. Was it worthwhile to play the ill with the good, to pursue a life of verse, if it meant “That any song in which he mourned / Would be as if he prophesied”?

Frost’s sense of misgiving is easy to understand biographically. It shares the retrospective futility of “Carpe Diem” and of Frost’s new life story as good-for-nothing. His misgiving is a variation on the attack of Lesley’s that would trouble him for years, on the harm done by being an artist. Literarily, the misgiving is harder to formulate. Frost laments clearly enough that his writing has cost him the capacity for unadulterated emotion, lamented also in Coleridge’s “Dejection.” “And yet ’twould seem that what is sung / In happy sadness by the young / Fate has no choice but to fulfill”: a habit of finding happiness in sadness would make him fated to insulate himself from true sadness. It was the only use of the word “fulfill” in Frost’s poetry since “A Prayer in Spring,” a prayer for pure emotion proportional to his love for his wife, which was what “Carpe Diem” said he had never fulfilled. The associations cohere as habits become character and character is fate, but Frost charges his style of mourning not merely with effects on himself but with the burden of prophecy. He seems to be looking for ways to blame himself and finding them in his old inspiration for “My Butterfly” and “Twilight,” Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind” with its climactic prophecy. It was a return to the idealism of Twilight in a dark mirror, from which he prayed for a reprieve by means of rain.

II

Flowers in the desert heat

Contrive to bloom

On melted mountain water led by flume

To wet their feet.

But something in it still is incomplete.

Before I thought the wilted to exalt

With water I would see them water-bowed.

I would pick up all ocean less its salt,

And though it were as much as cloud could bear

Would load it on to cloud,

And rolling it inland on roller air,

Would empty it unsparing on the flower

That past its prime lost petals in the flood,

(Who cares but for the future of the bud?)

And all the more the mightier the shower

Would run in under it to get my share.

’Tis not enough on roots and in the mouth,

But give me water heavy on the head

In all the passion of a broken drouth.

And there is always more than should be said.

As strong is rain without as wine within,

As magical as sunlight on the skin.

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