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reassuring warmth to Frost's pragmatic and Jamesian "will to believe,"
-which
Thompson documents with much convincing detail.
Common readers and literary critics will be mainly interested in
The
Early Years
for the light it throws on the poetry. In general Thompson's
discovery of the biographical setting or occasion of particular poems adds
further, rarely conflicting, meanings to what we can infer from the
text itself. The references to Frost's mother in "The Lovely Shall
be
Choosers" and the many allusions to his wife in love poems are jus–
tified by all sorts of evidence. But occasionally Thompson presses the
biographical reference to the point of distorting or even sacrificing the
poem. An important meaning of "Bereft," we are told, is that the poet
"had been robbed by the loss of someone dear." The one piece of evi–
dence, Frost's note to the poem, "As of about 1893," Thompson connects
fairly enough with the autumn when Frost was left alone after spending
a summer with Elinor White and her family. But the speaker of the
poem never alludes to love, only to "something sinister" and "a secret."
The poem expresses just this vague feeling of guilt and terror in the
autumn world, not the "loss of someone dear."
If
the poem has a
biographical meaning, it is more probably of a less public and less syrupy
kind.
Thompson's insistence on Frost's "basic piety" leads him to take
the dark poem "Design" as an example of "carrying a sentimental notion
to an absurd extreme." While admitting that Frost was "perfectly capable
of understanding-and even of sympathizing with the possibility that his
little study in white could be interpreted as akin" to Melville's "The
Whiteness of the Whale," Thompson takes the occasion to assert Frost's
desperate need of "the consolation of positive religious belief." The aim
of the poem is "to tease and mock those whose religious beliefs seemed
to him to be sentimental." We can agree that the poem is a kind of joke
and that the last line is open to humorous as well as frightening inter–
pretations, without accepting so drastic a deflation of Frost's vision of
"design of darkness to appall." The text from James cited in support of
his reading is one of James's trickiest displays of pulling metaphysical
rabbits out of pragmatic hats. "Design," says James, "worthless tho it be
as
a mere rationalistic principle set above or behind things ... [is] a term
of
promise.
A vague confidence in the future is the sole pragmatic mean–
ing at present discernible in the terms design and designer." The life
recorded in
The Early Years,
so full of illness, frustration and aloneness,
testifies eloquently to the dark vision that the poem discloses with mis–
leading gaiety. That Frost managed to do what he did in the difficult
years
before the publication of
A Boy's Will
is an achievement little
short of heroic.
