Of all the English language poets who have achieved a general readership, it’s likely that Robert Frost is the most misunderstood. I don’t say that to shame that broad audience — after all, in my youth, when asked to read Frost, he seemed too full of tired maxims and quaint commonplace situations. Sure he comforts folks I ignorantly thought, and maybe I undervalued comfort, but that wasn’t what I was looking for.*
I won’t blame that youth I was then too much. I was onto other things — but as far as Frost goes, I was carelessly understanding his best work too quickly. Decades later, partly as a result of this Project, I came to his short lyrical poems, beginning to appreciate their supple word-music — and then once beguiled, I began to see what he’d put in these concise pieces.
“Stopping by the Woods” isn’t about lollygagging when there’s duties to do. “The Road Not Taken” isn’t about the so-consequential road taken. This poem, “Storm Fear” from Frost’s first collection, A Boy’s Will, isn’t about settling down to a little hygge-time in a winter snowstorm. Here’s a link to that poem’s text if you want to follow along.
Maybe it’s its concision, or the careful way Frost uses incremental details, but this poem was first published in 1915 and yet the horror it contains seems to have passed most readers by. As I read it this month, now more attuned to how Frost can work, my first thought was this is as harrowing as Bob Dylan’s “Hollis Brown” or as stark as Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska album.
My first reminder as you read this poem is that it’s set in a circa 1900 rural America that was more isolated than you might imagine today. Farm families didn’t always have daily connections with others, and those institutions that offered connections: churches, shopping towns, exchanged labor, and rural schools were episodic. Long winter nights and snowstorms restricted what travel there was. Frost himself went through a brief attempt at living that farm life in this era. Perhaps he had a writer’s lighthouse-keeper fantasy of splendid, thoughtful isolation. His poetry testifies that he learned the reality.
Frost’s poem opens with a snowstorm in progress in the nighttime. How many poems, stories, blog posts, other accounts portray such a scene? Frost wants to let us know this isn’t a greeting card picture. The wind is a “beast” and it’s curiously imploring “Come out!” How many readers will miss this odd inclusion and take it as so much filler merely indicating that there’s a wind?**
The poem’s speaker, who we’ll find out is a young husband in the house with a wife and child, responds that it doesn’t take much interior debate to not obey what the beast outside is requesting. He’s thinking: there’s a storm, I’m staying in.
Then we get a different calculation. He tells us about the wife and child. They’re asleep, there’s no awake partner to bounce ideas off of. Suddenly he’s worried about the isolated farmhouse’s sole source of heat, a wooden fire. I think the implication here is that at the very least he thinks he needs to visit an outside woodpile. Or perhaps the winter has been hard enough that he’s short on fuel.
In the poem’s concluding scene, he’s now set on going outside. In the snowhills and blowing snow, even the barn looks “far away.” Is he even considering trying to make it to a neighbors for fuel? Is he making a difficult but sane decision, or is his isolation and “cabin fever” such that he’s thinking of making a risky trip for less than necessity?
I thought too of the deadly rural winter isolation of Susan Glaspell’s “Trifles” reading today’s Frost poem.
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Let me note one other thing about the poem. For Frost, the famous formalist, this poem’s form is very irregular. Poetic feet, meter, rhyme scheme? It’s all over the place, though periodic iambs are there in the confusion. Formalists who teach Frost would likely skip over this example for lessons. Workshopping this poem with a formalist? I can imagine the markup.
In setting “Storm Fear” for performance I was able to deal with the irregularities in Frost’s design, but then I’ve worked in this Project with a lot of outright free verse and have found it not as difficult to sing or mesh with music as some might guess. But when you’re performing (rather than writing a page poem) there are a couple of things you might want to add stress to: a sense of repetitive or choral structure and some additional guidance to the listener to intrigue understanding on one listening.
My choice here was to make the poem’s 7th and 8th lines into a refrain that repeats twice more, the last with a variation. The first time we hear “It costs no inward struggle not to go,/Ah no!” we hear it as the easy rejection of the beast-storm’s call. The second time, as the singer thinks of his wife and child, it seems more as a statement of the imperative for him to take action and leave into the storm. And in the final statement at the end of the song, he’s about to enter the storm thinking he must seek aid.
Would Frost have approved of my changes? Who knows. He was a man of strong opinions and an often brusque manner. Many poets or their rights-holders would forbid changing even a word. But this old poem is in the public domain now, I need no permission, and I hope my setting honors the intent of Robert Frost.***
You can hear my musical performance of “Storm Fear” with the audio player gadget you may see below. Is that player snowed out? This highlighted link will open a new tab with its own audio player in those cases.
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*So yes, I was a dolt about Frost, but not singular in that ignorance. Frost’s first two poetry collections were published in England after he left America for there. One reason for that hejira: American publishers were not in the least interested in his poetry. Frost was nearing 40 when A Boy’s Will was published. So at least in 1915, the experts were also misreading Frost.
**Some Faustian readings of this poem take that beast as The Beast — that the poem’s speaker is a sinner being stalked by his sins’ debt collector. Frost may have been aware of that implication, though it doesn’t strike me as consistent with what I understand of Frost’s own theology. Making the wind “howl” or “growl” is a commonplace, and calling it outright a beast may be stronger — but if enough readers miss the eminent dread in this poem, maybe it wasn’t strong enough.
***Generalizing, poets who feel they’ve worked their words with a fine touch are often resistant to editing by collaborative outsiders. Since Faust has entered the chat, I think of the collaboration between Bob Dylan and Archibald MacLeish who were slated to do an adaptation of Steven Vincent Benét’s “The Devil and Daniel Webster” for Broadway. MacLeish knew Benét, and likely thought he could do right by his late friend’s work. Dylan has his ways, and MacLeish had his — so the two fell out, and Dylan’s songs in progress for the play were not used. The eventual Broadway production bombed. Dylan used some of the songs later on his own. His “Father of Night” is often attributed as one of those rejected songs.