My Frost is xenial.
Frost would not like the word, as he stressed heavily the importance of sentence sounds as a poet. But it is the Greeks, the ones who, as he mentioned in Notebook 4, “taught us everything,” who made the word. Although the sound is unnatural in the English language, the message of “hospitable relations” applies profoundly to Frost’s work.
The poem “Love And A Question” deals with the Stranger’s visit to the newly married couple’s house, and his action to “mar” the love between the two. The Stranger is invited into the house, despite how he is “harboring woe in the bridal house.” This could have a variety of interpretations: maybe the Stranger is fear itself, or it’s simply an actual stranger who begged for trust. But the man tells the Stranger “let us look into the sky” as if there is another possibility for another life. What does the bridegroom want to escape? The predicament of trying to be away from the Stranger? Does he want to be free of the apprehension behind his new situation of being married? The poem makes it seem like the decision is zero-sum, all or none: “A heartfelt prayer for the poor of God, or for the rich a curse.”
The choice seems like a naïve one in "A Boy's Will": the bridegroom that believes that the Stranger and the bride are incompatible in the same house, and that love and marriage can’t have the ambiguity and uncertainty that accompany a stranger’s presence. He thinks that her heart was made of a “case of gold” and “pinned with a silver pin.” These are ideals of the woman that are unattainable, visions of people that are unattainable. She is not described with the slightest detail, so does the bridegroom really know her? Can they truly have a knowing and satisfying marriage without the “woe?” It seems like bridegroom thinks not.
Later, in “The Pasture,” Frost tells the reader that “I shan’t be gone long. - You come too.” It bears such an inviting tone that can be described as nothing less than xenial: the placement of “The Pasture” by Edward Connery Lathem at the very beginning of the collected poems of Robert Frost indicates that others think so as well. The narrator in “The Pasture” describes actions that aren’t so grand: “I’m going to clean the pasture spring; I’ll only stop to rake the leaves away,” doesn’t sound like it was written by a man who thinks of himself as the greatest poet of all time. “I’m going to fetch the little calf/ That’s standing by the mother,” bears a similar feeling of attainability, like that’s something we can do easily too.
These are common tasks of a farmer that should not take long. By joining him, he shows that he wants to spend as much time with the reader as possible, even though the actions in themselves can be burdensome and not too important. My Frost is xenial because he shows us that by fetching the little calf, he’s open to renewal and doing something new, which he certainly does in long, blank verse dramatic poems in "North of Boston."
Perhaps Frost’s most xenial poem into the woe presented in “Love and a Stranger” is “Come In” where “Thrush music went - /Almost like a call to come in/ To the dark and lament.” The thrush music in “Come In” immediately strike me as Frost’s poems that terrify in their darkness. We see this in the chilling poems, and “Home Burial” rings out to me in particular. But the narrator does not comply. “I was out for stars: I would not come in. I meant not even if asked, and I hadn’t been.”
Frost puts this narrator as myself, the reader, since I initially saw Frost as a regular nature and inspirational poet who wasn’t all that special. I rejected the fact that he could be dark, that he could be terrifying. Even though the thrush music is “too dark in the woods for a bird,” the poems “still could sing.” I get the sense that thrush music Frost describes, the poems that are so dark and full of woe - those poems are the ones he took the most pride in were the darkest ones. In fact, his own favorite poem, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” takes place on “the darkest evening of the year,” and describes the woods as “lovely, dark, and deep.” My Frost is xenial in making these dark poems comfortable and plain.
In the poem “Directive,” we finally come in on a dark, mystical adventure. In it, Frost acts as a guide, “Who only has at heart your getting lost.” There is a significant time difference between when Frost wrote “Love And A Question” and “Directive.” By that point: his wife, Elinor, had died, and his son, Carol had committed suicide. Through a life of horrible tragedy, Frost writes with a more mature lens and eyes, describing the brokenness of a “house that is no more a house, upon a farm that is no more a farm, and in a town that is no more a town.” It’s not just the brokenness of his life: but the brokenness of the time after the end of World War II and the tragedy that came with the Holocaust and dropping of the atomic bombs. Nevertheless, Frost wants the reader to come in and join him on this journey.
Frost says that there is a “broken drinking goblet like the Grail.” With this simile, he gives something that has been torn apart a sense of power in comparing it to the Grail. He later says “I stole the goblet from the children’s playhouse,” which maybe says that he himself possesses this power, or that he is simply this powerful as a poet. He would say that in “for house that is no more a house, but only a belilaced cellar hole, now slowing closing like a dent in dough.” The cellar hole is desolate, but there is still hope and tremendous value in the “belilaced” nature of it. And what Frost says about the broken goblet is that things need to be broken to be compared to the grail. Was Jesus Christ broken? Did he suffer? By the end of his life, on the cross? Without a doubt. Frost knew this too, at this point of his life – that if God would let his only son be broken and suffer so, so he would let us too to truly “make ourselves at home.” The Book of Job is my favorite in the Bible because it answers this question of “why do the righteous suffer?” Because we are the Job and the goblet – we can’t live and be whole without first being broken.
The allegory for brokenness in “Directive” combines seemingly contradictory themes of insurmountable grief and hopeful fulfillment. Frost, in “Directive,” finally answers the conflict of the bridegroom in “Love And A Question” – that the bridegroom must invite both the woe that accompanies the Stranger into his marriage. Grief and hope are not mutually exclusive, but instead they complement each other. What the end of “Directive” reminded me of was a climactic scene in a New England movie, "Manchester by the Sea." An estranged ex-wife and ex-husband, whose marriage was marred by the death of their children, see each other one day in town and stop and talk. The ex-husband, Lee, has one emotion on his face the whole movie: depressed stoicism. He never cries despite his despair and never opens up his emotions. What the ex-wife says tries to break that mold: “my heart was broken – cause it’s always gonna be broken, and I know yours is broken, too.”
My Frost is xenial because that what he teaches us on this journey.
