Mountain Interval by Robert Frost

[Saffron]

LONELINESS
(Her Word)

One ought not to have to care
So much as you and I
Care when the birds come round the house
To seem to say good-bye;

Or care so much when they come back 5
With whatever it is they sing;
The truth being we are as much
Too glad for the one thing

As we are too sad for the other here—
With birds that fill their breasts 10
But with each other and themselves
And their built or driven nests.

Emptiness -- empty nest. The couples relationship is vapid, so much so that they must turn to the world outside, away from each other for reminders of vitality. The Hill Wife is aware of what is lacking. Her longing is expressed in the opening line of the poem. She says:
"One ought not to have to care"

[Saffron]

Here is the next poem in the Hill Wife sequence.

HOUSE FEAR

Always—I tell you this they learned—
Always at night when they returned
To the lonely house from far away 15
To lamps unlighted and fire gone gray,
They learned to rattle the lock and key
To give whatever might chance to be
Warning and time to be off in flight:
And preferring the out- to the in-door night, 20
They learned to leave the house-door wide
Until they had lit the lamp inside.


I like this set of lines. For me it perfectly captures the fear I experienced as a child, going upstairs in our house that was not finished yet. or of our empty house when no one else was about. Frost is painting a picture of a couple so estranged from each other that they can not take courage and strength from each other - let alone comfort and companionship. Just think how different the poem might read if there was a sense of two against the world. Isolation breads fear and even paranoia.

[Saffron]

THE SMILE
(Her Word)

I didn’t like the way he went away.
That smile! It never came of being gay.
Still he smiled—did you see him?—I was sure! 25
Perhaps because we gave him only bread
And the wretch knew from that that we were poor.
Perhaps because he let us give instead
Of seizing from us as he might have seized.
Perhaps he mocked at us for being wed, 30
Or being very young (and he was pleased
To have a vision of us old and dead).
I wonder how far down the road he’s got.
He’s watching from the woods as like as not.

I think the Hill Wife's response to the vagabond illustrates that she has become paranoid. I suppose maybe Frost is simply showing her to be a mean spirited person....anybody have any ideas?

[DWill]

(Note: My use of "charming" to desribe this series was sarcastic.)"House Fear" seems to present a reaction natural to most people; at least, I can see myself thinking this way in the same situation. Maybe this is here to represent a first, mild stage of fear that eventually will become exaggerated.

HOUSE FEAR

Always—I tell you this they learned—
Always at night when they returned
To the lonely house from far away 15
To lamps unlighted and fire gone gray,
They learned to rattle the lock and key
To give whatever might chance to be
Warning and time to be off in flight:
And preferring the out- to the in-door night, 20
They learned to leave the house-door wide
Until they had lit the lamp inside.

In the next one, we can see more of the progression toward an abnormal state of mind, brought on probably by a combination of the wife's fragile, sensitive nature and the environment in which she finds herself.

THE SMILE
(Her Word)

I didn’t like the way he went away.
That smile! It never came of being gay.
Still he smiled—did you see him?—I was sure! 25
Perhaps because we gave him only bread
And the wretch knew from that that we were poor.
Perhaps because he let us give instead
Of seizing from us as he might have seized.
Perhaps he mocked at us for being wed, 30
Or being very young (and he was pleased
To have a vision of us old and dead).
I wonder how far down the road he’s got.
He’s watching from the woods as like as not.

In the next, the natural world is coming to represent a dark, sinister force. I like to contrast this with Frost's other poem about a tree by the bedroom window, called "Window Tree."

THE OFT-REPEATED DREAM

She had no saying dark enough 35
For the dark pine that kept
Forever trying the window-latch
Of the room where they slept.

The tireless but ineffectual hands
That with every futile pass 40
Made the great tree seem as a little bird
Before the mystery of glass!

It never had been inside the room,
And only one of the two
Was afraid in an oft-repeated dream 45
Of what the tree might do.

This is a speechless series of poems, I mean in the sense that the people do not speak, even to themselves, which seems unusual. There should be some direct expression of their emotion, but that there isn't is probably intentional on Frost's part, because the absence of emotional expression may be the cause of the wife's madness. I'm assuming that madness is what Frost is suggesting. The wife might just be giving her silent husband the heave-ho, but the last several words, "finalities/Besides the grave," make me think that's not it. Sorry for hogging the rest of the poems, by the way. I'm sure there is more to say about them.

THE IMPULSE

It was too lonely for her there,
And too wild,
And since there were but two of them,
And no child, 50

And work was little in the house,
She was free,
And followed where he furrowed field,
Or felled tree.

She rested on a log and tossed 55
The fresh chips,
With a song only to herself
On her lips.

And once she went to break a bough
Of black alder. 60
She strayed so far she scarcely heard
When he called her—

And didn’t answer—didn’t speak—
Or return.
She stood, and then she ran and hid 65
In the fern.

He never found her, though he looked
Everywhere,
And he asked at her mother’s house
Was she there. 70

Sudden and swift and light as that
The ties gave,
And he learned of finalities
Besides the grave.

[Saffron]

In the next, the natural world is coming to represent a dark, sinister force. I like to contrast this with Frost's other poem about a tree by the bedroom window, called "Window Tree."

Nice! I like thinking about both poems together.

THE OFT-REPEATED DREAM

She had no saying dark enough 35
For the dark pine that kept
Forever trying the window-latch
Of the room where they slept.

Living under a very large magnolia that taps to come in each time we have a windy night, I can appreciate these lines and how Frost may have come to write them.

This is a speechless series of poems, I mean in the sense that the people do not speak, even to themselves, which seems unusual. There should be some direct expression of their emotion, but that there isn't is probably intentional on Frost's part, because the absence of emotional expression may be the cause of the wife's madness. I'm assuming that madness is what Frost is suggesting. The wife might just be giving her silent husband the heave-ho, but the last several words, "finalities/Besides the grave," make me think that's not it. Sorry for hogging the rest of the poems, by the way. I'm sure there is more to say about them.

I agree that it is odd the characters never speak for themselves. It is a portrait that Frost has painted for us. I also think that it is the silence that is implicated in the wife's madness. The support for this idea is that the poem begins with "Loneliness (Her word)" And again Frost reinforce this with these lines from "The Impulse"

It was too lonely for her there,
And too wild,
And since there were but two of them,
And no child,

Clearly the Hill Wife feels isolated and lonely and is driven mad and I also concur with DWill's thinking, that she does him in. There are many stories captured in the diaries of frontier women during the 1800s of the deadly consequences of isolation and loneliness.

To DWill: Glad you chimed in! It was getting a bit lonely discussing this poem with myself -- oh dear, did I really say lonely?

To all: please excuse all the spelling problems my computer is having a great deal of difficulty this morning. I will come back to edit them out as soon as my computer is working again.

[Saffron]

Looks like next up is Bonfire. Anyone still reading? I think it would be alright if we don't hit each poem. So, skip on to a different poem if you want.

[Saffron]

Any thoughts on A Girl’s Garden? This one seems like a sort of joke to me. I can almost hear someone telling it.


Here are the last 10 lines of The Exposed Nest.

We saw the risk we took in doing good,
But dared not spare to do the best we could
Though harm should come of it; so built the screen
You had begun, and gave them back their shade. 30
All this to prove we cared. Why is there then
No more to tell? We turned to other things.
I haven’t any memory—have you?—
Of ever coming to the place again
To see if the birds lived the first night through, 35
And so at last to learn to use their wings.


Frost is asking a question I think we have all faced in one way or another -- to do good is sometimes to do more harm. How difficult it can be to decide what's to be done or left undone. Funny too, how we forget to go back and look. A few years ago I found myself in a situation akin to this. I was driving on a deeply sunken dirt road in rural Loudoun County. Out in front of my car a very tiny fawn, not more than a foot high, scampering and terrified. I was wary of trying to capture it, thinking that my smell might put off the mother. I grabbed a towel that I had in the car, scoped up the little creature and put it up on the top of the steep bank, nestled in the brush. I hoped the momma would come to reclaim it. When I got home I looked up stranded/abandon fawns. From the descriptions given on the internet, the little fella was only a few days old.

I did come back to check on the fawn, about an hour later, the fawn was indeed gone.

[DWill]

I didn't like "Bonfire" very much; maybe I didn't bear with it long enough. It seemed never to come to a point, though, or was somewhat pointless in terms of my concerns. The next one I come to in the collection that interests me is "Out, Out--". This one is truly strange, a bit horrific and bizarre. The title is a pretty obvious quote from MacBeth's famous speech, but how Frost intends us to interpret his use of the words is unclear to me. It could be an ironic use: in contrast to MacBeth's grand and bitter soliloquy, we have this plainspoken and rather unagonized view of the transience of life. Is the boy's life "the tale told by an idiot...., signifying nothing?" Not to the boy, certainly.

I checked into some readers' responses to the poem, and many saw it from a sociological perspective. It's about child labor and the hardness of life typical of a culture in which children are made to do the work of adults. The people don't seem to care much about the boy's death, some said; no adult expresses any sadness, and they just go back to their work after he dies, because they have to. I think it's possible that Frost does intend the poem as a kind of tragedy. Here these people are in the midst of beautiful nature (ll. 4-6), yet they don't notice and are only bent on working. Worse, they rob the boy of not only a "half hour" that would have given him a little respite to actually be a boy, but they rob him of his life, in a sense, by pushing him beyond his limits.

Frost got the idea from a newspaper story. The poem is almost the equivalent of a newspaper story, giving facts in a detached and unemotional way, except for the quotations from the boy. It's even less personal than a newspaper story, in a way, in that the boy is nameless.

[Saffron]

The next one I come to in the collection that interests me is "Out, Out--". This one is truly strange, a bit horrific and bizarre. The title is a pretty obvious quote from MacBeth's famous speech, but how Frost intends us to interpret his use of the words is unclear to me. It could be an ironic use: in contrast to MacBeth's grand and bitter soliloquy, we have this plainspoken and rather unagonized view of the transience of life. Is the boy's life "the tale told by an idiot...., signifying nothing?" Not to the boy, certainly.

The title, "Out, Out--" has been playing in my mind; perplexing me. It must, as you say, be a reference to the famous lines from Lady MacBeth's speech. Here are the lines:

Lady Macbeth:
Out, damn'd spot! out, I say!—One; two: why, then
'tis time to do't.—Hell is murky.—Fie, my lord, fie, a soldier, and
afeard? What need we fear who knows it, when none can call our
pow'r to accompt?—Yet who would have thought the old man to
have had so much blood in him?

Now, here is what I have come to:

With the utterance of "Out, damn'd spot! out, I say!" Lady MacBeth implicates herself in the murder of King Duncan. It is her own guilty conscience working against her, driving her to madness. Is the title of the poem then an indictment by Frost? Or maybe it is more accurate to say the poem is an owning of guilt for tolerating child labor and its consequences.

[DWill]

Somebody else mentioned the other "out" reference in MacBeth, the Lady MacBeth speech you quoted. The one that's most often presumed to be alluded to in Frost's title is MacBeth's "She should have died hereafter" speech (V,v,17), which goes on to contain the words "Out! Out! brief candle". I just thought of the words I left out in my own quotation from it, which are "full of sound and fury," and I wonder whether the sound and the fury of the buzz saw are kind of a literal representation of MacBeth's metaphor.
I'm also thinking that since the tragic figure is a boy, it's also literally truer that he "Struts and frets his hour upon the stage,/and then is heard no more." Or maybe not.