PARTISAN REVIEW
Clf
-
you
-
do!' She was opening the door wider.
cWhere do you mean to go? First tell me that.
I'll follow and bring you back by force. I
will! -'
353
One
is
shocked that the entire 116-line poem ends so abruptly; the argu–
ment hasn't ended, and the pathos is that one suddenly realizes it never
will. The final dash emphasizes the lack of resolution, and has a kind
of symbolic weight.
Throughout his life Frost continued to revise his poems, and at
times we can see him pushed into radical or untraditional solutions to
tricky passages. "The Tuft of Flowers" is a good example. For the
1949 Complete Poems
he dropped an entire stanza. In 1939, he changed
the punctuation of the second line of these two stanzas:
But he had gone his way, the grass all mown,
And I must be, as he had b.een
-
alone,
CAs all must be,' I said within my heart,
cWhether they work together or apart.'
"Alone" seems to me too abrupt; the line is sadder if the rhythm is
more regular, if "alone" has a kind of large inevitability. For whatever
reason, Frost was dissatisfied. He added a comma after "been," and the
line then reads: "And I must
be,
as he had been, - alone." To my
ear, this is an excellent solution (particularly when read in context, in
the cadence of the whole poem). Frost kept it in all the later editions
that he supervised.
Lathem goes back to the first version. The decision is symptomatic
of his taste in handling variants throughout his edition. In many poems
he restores readings Frost later rejected, and in all the cases that I have
noticed, he simply seems to me wrong. Unlike many poets (unlike, in
many cases, Wordsworth), Frost revised excellently.
The single merit of Lathem's volume is the listing of variants and
dates of first publication at the back. One aches that he didn't stop
there. Frost's brilliant essay "The Figure a Poem Makes" has been
dropped. Lathem prints it in
Selected Prose of Robert Frost,
and I sup–
pose he decided that, buried there, he need not include it. It has served
as the preface for every collected edition of Frost's poetry since 1939,
and Frost obviously wanted it in that exemplary position. Its absence is
a fitting symbol of the betrayal of Frost that this volume represents.
Frank Bidart
