David Wright has sent in a wonderful followup to
yesterday's poem (Poem #984) - this would make an interesting theme if anyone
else would like to contribute...
( Poem #985) Once by the Pacific The shattered water made a misty din.
Great waves looked over others coming in,
And thought of doing something to the shore
That water never did to land before.
The clouds were low and hairy in the skies,
Like locks blown forward in the gleam of eyes.
You could not tell, and yet it looked as if
The shore was lucky in being backed by cliff,
The cliff in being backed by continent;
It looked as if a night of dark intent
Was coming, and not only a night, an age.
Someone had better be prepared for rage.
There would be more than ocean-water broken
Before God's last 'Put out the Light' was spoken.
-- Robert Frost |
Maybe poems come in sets, like waves. At any rate, after pulling out
Whitman's "On the Beach at Night" recently, I stumbled on this Robert Frost
poem - another 'looking out to sea' poem - in a litcrit book I'm reading:
"The Pleasures of Reading in an Ideological Age," by Robert Alter. Alter's
observations helped me appreciate Frost, a poet I've felt ambivalent about
in the past - the studied folksiness always turned me off a little. The
analysis below is his: it is given in the context of his anti-
deconstructionist argument that literature is something special - not merely
a text but a work and a world of a special type. (I know how it sounds, but
he's actually quite a good critic, much less reactionary and pious/pompous
than, oh - say - Harold Bloom.) This is quite long, but those who
appreciate a good, close reading of a poem should enjoy it. He begins by
referring to a statement by poet A.R. Ammons that in every work of
literature "a world comes into being about which any statement, however
revelatory, is a lessening." ("In all intellectual humilty, a critic should
always keep in mind the lessening, though it may be a price often worth
paying for the sake of the revelation.")
"I will begin with what would be in Ammons' terms the most drastic
kind of lessening, a thumbnail paraphrase that is in no way revelatory:
the speaker in the poem stands by the Pacific shore watching the waves
pounding and thinks apprehensively of the destruction of all things. The
paraphrase in a way does no more than describe the stimulus of the poem,
since it seems safe to assume that Robert Frost was actually moved to this
somber musing by looking at the Pacific breakers. How do such thoughts
generate a world in which as readers we powerfully experience a sustained
moment of highly distinctive menace, waves raging and apocalypse
impending? I say highly distinctive recognizing that each of us will bring
to the reading of the poem his or her own literary and personal
associations but also assuming that the elaborate structuring of language
in these fourteen lines makes them quite different from any other modern
apocalyptic poem (Yeats' "Second Coming," the end of T.S. Eliot's "The
Hollow Men," and so forth), whatever the vagaries of our individual
readings.
Frost's use of rhyming iambic pentameter in a fourteen-line piece
indicates that the poem is meant to be taken as a variant of the sonnet.
But the rhymes are a sequence of couplets (AA, BB, and so forth),
producing no divisions into quatrains or octet and sestet as in the
traditional sonnet form. The sense of neat containment, then, generated
by the structure of the traditional sonnet is blurred. There may be an
underlying tension between the prosodic form of the poem, whether we call
it quasisonnet or heroic couplets, and the conspicuously colloquial
diction preserved consistently throughout, reflected in the avoidance of
the subjunctive after "it looked as if" (using "was," not "were"), and
flaunted in phrases like "You could not tell," "the shore was lucky,"
"someone had better*." The only word in the entire poem that points
toward a more literary diction is "intent," a choice dictated not merely
by the rhyme but by the need to suggest something vast, vague, and ominous
as the spelling out of the apocalypse moves to a climax - moves, moreover,
through the only very pronounced enjambment in the poem: "a night of dark
intent / Was coming." The colloquial diction is the matrix for a peculiar
quality of Frost's poetry here and elsewhere that might be called
expressive vagueness, and that is felt, as several critics have observed,
in his general fondness for words like "something" and "someone." The use
of these words provides an instructive instance of how ordinary language
is transmuted as it participates in the world-building of the poem. The
source in spoken English for this usage would be an idiom employed in a
situation like the following: an angry child says to another child,
"Somebody better watch out" - meaning, of course, YOU - or, "I'm going to
do something to you" - meaning, whatever I will do will be so terrible
that I would rather not say exactly what. The extraordinary effectiveness
of the poem is in part the result of transferring these locutions, with
their associations of colloquial vehemence, to a cosmic scale while never
committing the sin or pretentiousness I have just committed in using a
word like "cosmic."
Although, as I have indicated, it is not in principle possible to
enumerate all the kinds of interconnections that engender the world of a
literary text, I would point here to the four salient aspects of the poem
which, together with the expressive vagueness of something/someone,
combine to produce the distinctive mood and tone of this version of
apocalypse. These are: the chiasm and synesthesia of the first line (more
of which in a moment), the pervasive personification of natural forces,
the prominence of looking, and the allusions to the first chapter of
Genesis. A formal element of a literary text may contribute significantly
to the building of a world through its placement, through repetition,
through the rhetorical emphasis it gets, or through any combination of the
three. Thus, zeugma and catalogs help define the world of 'The Rape of
the Lock' because they are repeated so frequently, with such inventive
variations; and on the smaller scale of "Once by the Pacific," that is
true of personification and the reiterated verb "looked." On the other
hand, the first line features two spectacular rhetorical devices that do
not occur again in the poem, but because they form the archway through
which we enter into the world of the poem, they play an important part in
determining our vision of that world. The line is symmetrical (two nouns,
two modifiers, joined by the verb "made" at the midpoint of the line) in
the form we call chiastic: ABBA (shattered/water/misty/din). The formal
crossover of the chiasm reinforces a crossover between different sensory
realms in the imagery (that is, synesthesia): the din is "misty," though
mist logically belongs to sight and touch, not sound; and the water is
"shattered," as though it were hard and solid, not quite a synesthetic
image but coming close in its transgression of the borders between
different physical states. This coupling of chiasm and synesthesia begins
the poem with a terrific sense of the violent interfusion of opposing
spheres, solid and liquid, sight and sound, land and sea, and that
interfusion is the precondition for the poem's apprehension of apocalypse.
The violent mixing of realms is a reversal of one of the organizing
thematic features of Genesis 1: there, creation begins with the spirit of
the Lord hovering over the face of the formless waters, and it proceeds
through an ordered sequence of acts of separation, between the upper and
the lower waters, between sea and dry land, between night and day. The
allusion becomes explicit only at the end of the poem, but it is prepared
for at the beginning.
As befits a reversal of the work of the anthropomorphic God of the
Bible, the force of destruction pulsing through the breakers is
personified and felt throughout as a malevolent will: "Great waves looked
over others coming in, / And thought of doing something to the shore*."
Perhaps the pronounced personification somehow justifies the rather
strange image of the clouds as locks of hair, though I am not so sure of
that. In any case, the active "looked" of the personified waves is
disturbingly reflected by the impersonal "it looked as if," twice stated,
which betokens the looking of the observer at the appearance of those
looking waves, that cliff, that descending night. What I called the
mnemonic power of the literary work, * here operates more visibly within
the limits of fourteen lines. The mind shuttles back and forth among the
three occurrences of "looked," finds itself in a world of menacing
appearances behind which there lurks some kind of baleful presence endowed
with will.
*..God's 'Put out the Light' in the last line of "Once by the Pacific"
is, or course, a canceling of the divine 'Let there be Light' in Genesis
1, and, as we noted, makes explicit the intimations of an undoing of
biblical creation earlier in the poem.
Because literary traditions repeatedly recapitulates itself,
allusions may be layered, and I suspect that is true here. A reversal of
Genesis, running the reel back, as it were, from seventh day to chaos and
void, presides over the conclusion of Pope's Duciad:
Lo! thy dread Empire, CHAOS! is restor'd;
Light dies before thy uncreated word;
Thy hand, great Anarch! lets the curtain fall;
And Univeral Darkness buries All.
(IV:653-656)
'Put out the Light' is also exactly the sentence Othello says, twice, in
the brief soliloquy just before he murders Desdemona. Are we intended at
the end of Frost's poem to recall Shakespeare's image of a dark man
enraged with jealousy about to destroy the beautiful woman he passionately
loves? There is no way of knowing whether Frost meant that echo to be
heard, but the very possibility of its presence suggests how the
accumulate d images, themes, and actual verbal formulations of literary
tradition become charged particles in the mind of the writer (and "mind"
is surely more than what is conscious and intentional) and of the reader."
-David
[Martin adds:
One other device that particularly struck me when I read the poem was the
unusual use of 'if' as an end-rhyme; this is doubly emphasised, not just by
the rhyme but by its unexpectedness. That this is deliberate can be inferred
from its pivotal position in the centre of the poem - indeed, if one makes
the almost invited comparison of the poem's structure to that of a wave, the
'if' marks the point at which the wave, having reached its point of maximum
advance, breaks on the shore and retreats, leaving an ominous brooding
silence that is merely a waiting for the wave to come.
]
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