While some have tried to compare Robert Frost to the Romantics
such as William Wordsworth, a major difference between Frost's treatment of nature and that of
the Romantics emerges. Unlike the poems of the Romantics who extolled nature, for Frost the image
of the spirit immanent in man and nature does not merge to reveal a truth. Instead, for Frost,
the voice of man always speaks. Nature, then, for Frost is a metaphor for the speaker, or it is a
symbol of the strictly human spirit that rises about physical nature. For instance, in Frost's
poem, "The Woodpile," the woodpile itself is insignificant. Its purpose is to assist in a
revelation of human truths.
....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 from from a useful
fireplace
To warm the frozen swamp as best it
could
The man who has cut the firewood
can forget its practical use and value because Man is concerned with "fresh tasks" of creativity,
acts which go beyond the practical level. Here the woodpile is a metaphor for the useful as
opposed to the acts of creativity that are transcendent.
Amy Lowell,
the imagist poet, describes Robert Frost as a poet who captures landscapes and characters. She
states that he uses nature simply because it is what he sees. Says
Lowell,
...He is
confined by the limit of experience....and bent all one way like the limbs of windblown trees of
New England hillsides.
But, for Frost,
always the speaker emerges from this landscape. In his "Stopping by a Woods on a Snowy Evening,"
Frost's narrator comes forth to utter the last lines,
But I have promises to
keep
And miles to go before i sleep
And
miles to go before I sleep
Again in
the poem, "The Road Not Taken," the speaker comes forth at the
end,
I shall be
telling this with a sigh....Two rads diverged in a wood, and
I--I took the one less traveled
by,And that has made all the
difference.
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