著者

駒村 利夫

出版者

一般財団法人 日本英文学会

雑誌

英文学研究 (ISSN:00393649)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.46, no.2, pp.117-127, 1970

---

<p>Robert Lee Frost (1874-1963) depicts like Hesiod's 'chaos' what we ourselves were in "Too Anxious for Rivers," and says that the universe' the world, we, and the mind are the same in roundness in "Build Soil." Chaos and roundness being seemingly contradictory, I feel Aristotle's or Emerson's circular philosophy, and Frost's 'soul-from-soul abyss' ("A Missive Missile"), and get conscious of the vacuity as if a halo seen frequently in Frost's poetry. But a sympathetic correspondence going forth and back through this vacancy often indicates Frost's dual trend rather than the inconsistency or shyness of his thought. It may be said that, in particular, though the metaphor of "Fire and Ice" looks incoherent at a glance, he succeeds in unifying it very intelligently. The hesitation of 'passive' Frost, who has momentarily been absorbed in the aphorism reminiscent of Heraclitus, changes into 'intentional' awakening accompanied with a supposition; to Frost, man is at once a circulating existence and there is a limit to time extention-this disillusionment makes me feel instantly Pascal's discontinuity pointed out by T. S. Eliot, but Frost does not reveal so earnest a desire to enter religion as to desert the self and says it is intention, purpose and design that let man near divinity. It may be mentioned, therefore, that his stumbling denotes a conflict between passive recognition and original response, as confined in 'a pair of dauntless wings ' ("Bond and Free"). This I call Frostian duality, which is not grasped in Emerson with whom Frost gives the impression of having agreed in circularity. Fire and ice here cannot be shifted to life and death immediately, but "Provide, Provide" has the same hypothetic construction: to Frost, life is carried out in the hypothesis of death which happens in the contingency of life. Prepared to admit that the contingency of life is inevitable, he tries to make this inevitability meaningful. But he does not by force, but sometimes shows daily experience, as in "'Out, Out-'" and "Home Burial," symmetrically constructed each. Besides, Frost, with more brutal apathy than in these two poems, deals with death in "The Death of the Hired Man," and his dialogue of the 'home' gives a deeper feeling than nostalgia. Such the dramatic construction of Frost, who offers how importan the 'home' is in life and death, develops a genuine insight into the resemblance of the position of the 'home' in daily life to the relationship of the 'soul' to the flesh. Frost expounds in "Kitty Hawk" that spirit enters flesh, and that it charges into earth, which may signify the 'underground' ("Hyla Brook") of the flesh, ever fresh and fresh, and suggests his 'evolution' ("Education by Poetry") or Bergson's 'creative evolution.' Thoreau's 'pond' symbolized the 'earth's eye,' and he, analogous to Emerson, saw the soul in the eye, but Frost squeezes the site of his 'soul' into man's brain and likens it to the micrographic picture of the 'tree' ("A Never Naught Song"), I think, and seems to approach science rather than religion. Having receded from such the so-called positivism, however, he lays emphasis upon the importance of metaphor, and appeals a mystic insight as Bergson or Blake. I perceive the dualism of a circular 'microcosm' in this 'tree' participating in the current of life, which, Frost says, renders nil the whole Yggdrasil. But 'something like' which controls the waves of life is a mystery; Frost's 'spirit' walking alone like Crabbe's dreamy world, of which he will not</p><p>(View PDF for the rest of the abstract.)</p>