Frost the woodpile. J. Donald Crowley: On "The Wood 2022-10-25
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Frost the Woodpile is a poem by Robert Frost that captures the quiet beauty of a winter landscape. The poem begins with the speaker coming upon a woodpile in a field, covered in frost. The frost has transformed the woodpile into a thing of beauty, with the frost crystals sparkling in the sunlight.
As the speaker observes the woodpile, they are filled with a sense of peace and contentment. The frozen woodpile is a reminder of the natural world's ability to withstand the harshness of winter, and the speaker takes comfort in the thought that the wood will be there to provide warmth when spring arrives.
The speaker also reflects on the hard work that went into gathering and stacking the wood, and how the frost has given it a new, almost magical, quality. The woodpile becomes a symbol of the resilience and determination of the people who gathered it, and the speaker is filled with a sense of appreciation and respect for their efforts.
In the final stanza, the speaker turns their attention to the wider landscape, noticing how the frost has transformed everything it touches. The trees and grass are covered in a layer of sparkling frost, and the world seems to be holding its breath, waiting for spring to arrive.
Overall, Frost the Woodpile is a beautiful and evocative poem that captures the quiet beauty of a winter landscape. Its themes of resilience, determination, and the natural world's ability to withstand the harshness of winter make it a timeless and enduring work of literature. So, the poem Frost the Woodpile is a great piece of literature that portrays the beauty of nature and the resilience of man.
J. Donald Crowley: On "The Wood
Now, although the speaker is completely at home in this place, his meditation does not lead to any reassuring consolation or benevolent resolution that would cancel these tensions and contrarieties; instead, it reaffirms and heightens them. A small bird flew before me. Counterbalancing the gradual emergence of clarity and shape in the landscape is the gradually emerging personality of the speaker: at every stage of the poem, we know the speaker only to that extent which the speaker himself has come to know and understand the landscape. A carefully cut "cord," perhaps a play on chord, of the hardwood maple, it seems a religious sacrifice or a work of art, at least purposefully ornamented and finished by the clematis. The speaker is, in effect, taking nature as personally conversing with him—as if nature were concerned with what decision he makes, whether he goes back or keeps on, whether he goes after a bird or watches a woodpile.
The condition that allows him this intimacy, however, is his physical separation from the bird, marked by the one tree standing between subject and object. And not another like it could I see. On another level of its structure, beneath the relaxed surface of the language, the poem progresses by way of a series, almost a system, of oppositions, ambiguities, and contrarieties that might be called Hawthornian. However, as the poem unfolds it becomes more apparent that he is in fact lost, or perhaps not sure of himself or which way he should go. He is, he says, "just far from home.
If it is with outer humor, it must be with inner seriousness. Either way, this places nature in the position of control. Clematis Had wound strings round and round it like a bundle. They could mean that the bird was foolish to think that the man had this particular design upon him. In a Frost poem, however, to see is always to know that there is a point at which the thing to be seen resists and defies penetrability, a point of its being beyond which it is alas unknowable. This poem speaks to the integrity of work. Bird and man now embrace the woodpile, bind it by both courage and fear; and what the speaker sees there is conditioned, then, by his awareness of the bird on the opposite side.
The view was all in lines Straight up and down of tall slim trees Too much alike to mark or name a place by So as to say for certain I was here Or somewhere else: I was just far from home. One flight out sideways would have undeceived him. The woodpile, according to Frost's poetic theory, had its beginnings "in something more felt than known" 339. In "The Wood-Pile" Frost clearly takes himself neither simply as an amusement nor as a wonder but as both. The latter is the special task of him who would be poet and person.
The pile is described so as to bring out the fact that it has been around for some time. Neither one alone without the other under it will do" 351. Frost wrote in a way that conveyed the economic situations of the time period in which he lived and he did it in an easily relate-able way. As soon as he resolves himself to do so, a guide in the form of an animal appears and leads him onward. More a meditation than a dramatic narrative, it offers the soliloquy of a lone figure walking in a winter landscape. A small bird flies ahead of him, interacting with him cautiously.
There at its center are the solitary speaker, a familiar figure, and his story, this one—like Frost's others—told in the inevitably simple, straightforward and calm, almost laconic language that characterizes dozens of Frost's other narrative lines. A few more questions the reader might ask herself: Why is the speaker in the swamp, and why does he decide to keep going? What he eventually sees are indications of life and form—the little bird and the woodpile—that do not conform to the uniformity of the trees; they are evidence of the Lucretian swerve of independence and order in a chaotic world. The man in the poem is not, like Stevens' Crispin, "a man come out of luminous traversing," but more like the "listener" in Stevens' "The Snow Man. No runner tracks in this year's snow looped near it. Clematis Had wound strings round and round it like a bundle. It is essentially primordial, totally unformed.
On "The Wood-Pile" On "The Wood-Pile" J. The speaker simply appears in our field of vision and—to use Yvor Winters' negative criticism in a positive way—seems to be "spiritually drifting. In its apparent permanence it has a homeostatic capacity that heroically confronts the ephemeral and formless flux of the entropic environment. The effect is almost that the terrors of "homelessness," of being lost in undifferentiated space, comprise a condition the speaker has known before and finds so persistent and multifarious as to demand his constant re-engagement. If all this is to some degree comic, it is feverishly so, the product of intense loneliness and displacement.
Leave a Reply Your email address will not be published. The fear and confusion are isolated only momentarily, however, since they are immediately answered to by the courage of the counter-resolution of line 3. In one sense, Frost himself provides the best gloss on the way the poem works when he says that "it makes us remember what we didn't know we knew" 394. All you can assuredly know about "here" is that you are far from "home": Out walking in the frozen swamp one gray day, I paused and said, "I will turn back from here. In its four-by-four-by-eightness there is a marvelous solidity as well as form, a substantiality that makes it not only palpable but, at least initially, permanent.
In "The Wood-Pile" Frost clearly takes himself neither simply as an amusement nor as a wonder but as both. I thought that only Someone who lived in turning to fresh tasks Could so forget his handiwork on which He spent himself, the labor of his ax, And leave it there far from a useful fireplace To warm the frozen swamp as best it could With the slow smokeless burning of decay. But was his motive the "sheer morning gladness at the brim," as the speaker of "The Tuft of Flowers" said in hope of discovering a common faith? And the parodistic possibility is increased by the syntax of the lines about the bird's tail-feathers. He sees merely one-dimensional lines without shape, and the measure of his plight is that he cannot find a language to give a name to the place. These tones are visible throughout the work, from the beginning when the narrator questions himself on whether or not to turn back, to his neurotic description of the bird in the poem. Even when he thinks of a fireplace it is not with images of conviviality but only with the observation that it would be "useful.
All this is registered against the blankness, the flatness of the minimally specified "one gray day. What he discovers is sparse indeed, his reassurance equally so, as we can note in his rather pathetic exactitudes: It was a cord of maple, cut and split And piled -- and measured, four by four by eight. If accepted, your analysis will be added to this page of American Poems. The tree, like the mending wall, signifies one of those barriers without which the world would, for Frost, not make sense. Art without utility though its original intent was utilitarian the wood-pile now stands as art.
