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Love and a Question by Robert Frost A stranger came to the door at eve, And he spoke the bridegroom fair. He bore a green -white stick in his hand, And, for all a burden care. He asked with the eyes more than his lips for a shelter for the night, And he turned and looked at the road afar Without a window light. The bridegroom came forth into the porch With, 'Let us look at the sky, And a question what of the night to be, Stranger, you and I. The woodbine leaves littered the yard, The woodbine berries were blue, Autumn,, yes, winter was in the wind; 'Stranger, I wish i knew. Within, the bride in the dusk alone Bent over the open fire, Her face rose-red with the glowing coal And the thought of the heart's desir. The bridegroom looked at the weary road, Yet saw her but within, And wished her heart in a case of gold And pinned with a silver pin. The bridegrooom thought it little to give A dole of bread, a purse, A heartfelt prayer for the poor of God, Or for the rich of curse; But whether or not a man was asked To mar the love of two By harboring woe in the bridal house, The bridegroom wished he knew.
Literary Critisism On July 4, 1913, Roberst Frost Wrote to john Bartlett, his former student: ''To be perfectly frank with you I am one of the most notable caftsmen of my time. That will transpire presently. I am possibly the only person going who works on any but a worn out theory (principle I had better say) of Versification.'' Unfortunently for Frost, 'that' did not transpire presentil, at least as far as thre supporters of Eliot, Stevens, Yeats, and Pound were concerned, and Frost consistently found himself denied recognition as a major modern artist primarily because he refused to organize a formal aesthetic or construct a coherent myth. Not that he lacked supporters; but the question of Frost's modernity aided so many detractors that nearly fifty years following the barlett letter John Lynen correctly felt the need to defend the poet in an essay titled ''Frost as Modern Poet.'' Frank Lentricchia's Robert Frost: Modern Poetics and th Lanscapes of Self is the latest effort to argue Frost's importance as a twentieth-century author. It is also the most comprehensive. Lentricchia's aspirations are high indeed. Offering his book as a ''full-length responce'' to George Nitchie, whose Human Values in the Poetry of Robert Frost (196 0) remains the most wide-ranging attack on the poet's canon, Lentricchia states his pointof view in a ''polemical preferance'': that the dramitic tension in Frost's poems ''can be felt as a struggle betweeen the fiction-making imagionation and the antifictive of the given enviornment, social and natural'' (p. xii). Lentricchia offers us Frost as profound ironist, a creator of metaphor who paradoxically teaches that the real world may be preferable to imaginative creation because the fictive world may lead to delusion, even madness. Happily, he does not try to disprove Nitchie point by point. He suggests, rather, that Frost's so called ''withdrawal'' from crises, his use of wit in the face of grim circumstances--in short., what Yvor Winters disparagingly calls his ''drifting''--is not hedging but an exercise of poise which illistrates psychic toughness. Lentricchia argues, and i surley agree, that too many specialists have dismissed Frost from the company of his theory-conscious peers because of what these critics assume to be an absence of sophistication, something unacceptable in any artist claiming allegiance with modern literary thought. Rather than ignore modernist theories, Frost unifies the romantic notion that art offers value in a disorderd world with the common-sence suggestion that art cannot affest objective reality. Frost's detractorshave consistently viewed this mediating stance as evidence of the poet's inability to make formative decisions, of his tendency to meet the alarming crises of modern despair with a wink and a wisecrack, but they are mistaken. Discussiing Frost's rreading of willam James, Lentriccchia shows how the poet uses the philosopher to arrive at an artistic position of coherence and control. If Frost owes a debt for his famous goal--creation of ''a momentary stay against confusion''==it may be to James's idea of tension between the formless objective world and the formal creative act. Lentricchia's definition of ''l 'Lndscape' suggests both a configuration of objects really there in nature and, as well, the phenomenological notion that any particular landscape is coherent because the mind of the artist makes it so'' (p.. 4). The opening chapter is largely theoratical, developed primarily to a discussion of Frost's use of william James. The poiint is not one of influence but rather that the poet's rading of the philosopher confirmed some of his own intuitions about the self relationship with nonhhuman other. Declaring that Frost's psychic life is evoked by the objects in his poetic landscape, Lenttricchia suggests that the subjectivity behind the poem is present in the poem itself, espite the protests of New Critics and the cultural pressures which tend to negate the poet's identity. All this seems well argued, but many readers will question the need for phrases like ''noe-romantic expressive poetic or ''linguistic preservation of a landscape engaging act of consciousness,'' phrases which unfortunently turn the reader from Frost's poetry to Lentricchias meaning.
Robert Frost (Poem Status)
My poem is about a man who is simply looking for a place to say and he convinces the woman with his eyes. He was under his spell . Then he falls in love with the woman.
