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.But as through the monotony we ran,We came to where there was a living man.His great gaunt figure filled his cabin door,And had he fallen inward on the floor,183Soundings for HomeHe must have measured to the further wall.But we who passed were not to see him fall.The miles and miles he lived from anywhereWere evidently something he could bear.He stood unshaken, and if grim and gaunt,It was not necessarily from want.He had the oaks for heating and for light.He had a hen, he had a pig in sight.He had a well, he had the rain to catch.He had a ten-by-twenty garden patch.Nor did he lack for common entertainment.That I assume was what our passing train meant.He could look at us in our diner eating,And if so moved uncurl a hand in greeting.The vision of the  great gaunt figure filling the cabin door prompts littlemore than superficial reportage.Four lines in a row begin with the repeated he had ; the man s possessions are then as dutifully listed.It reads as if thespeaker were determined not to make anything out of what he sees.Beyondthese measurements, all we learn about the man is the merest guesswork.Inan Empsonian sense, the poem has a pastoral inclination: it is  assumed thatthe passing train is  common entertainment for the  grim figure in thecabin door and that he must sometimes be moved (even though he is not onthis one occasion, when the speaker has opportunity to see him) to  uncurl ahand in greeting. As in  On the Heart s Beginning to Cloud the Mind,there is scarcely any scene at all here; there is no material for poetry exceptwhat might be guessed if the spectator were in a position to watch longenough.This, then, for all its self-discipline, also becomes a  surface flight,and the best he can do with the image of the giant man in the doorway is tomake a  tall tale, in a grotesque sense of the term, about what might happenat some future time:  And had he fallen inward on the floor, / He must havemeasured to the further wall./ But we who passed were not to see him fall.Frost s evident intentions in the poem are pleasantly confirmed in a speechgiven at Bread Loaf on July 2, 1956, where he said of  The Figure in theDoorway that  it might not be true of him at all, but there is such a thing.I might have been all wrong about him.He might have been a candidate forthe Democratic party (Cook, p.110).These poems are evidence of Frost s congenital circumspection about extra-vagance  about making things up while  in flight, about inventingother people s lives without getting intimately involved with them, about the184Richard Poirierproblematics of mere accidental relationships, mere glimpses of a  fieldlooked into going past ( Desert Places ) or glimpses of a desert or a housefrom a fast train, or something so grandly and therefore remotely conceivedas is  the universe by the young man who cries out at the beginning of  TheMost of It :He thought he kept the universe alone;For all the voice in answer he could wakeWas but the mocking echo of his ownFrom some tree-hidden cliff across the lake.Some morning from the boulder-broken beach 5He would cry out on life, that what it wantsIs not its own love back in copy speech,But counter-love, original response.And nothing ever came of what he criedUnless it was the embodiment that crashed 10In the cliff  s talus on the other side,And then in the far-distant water splashed,But after a time allowed for it to swim,Instead of proving human when it nearedAnd someone else additional to him, 15As a great buck it powerfully appeared,Pushing the crumpled water up ahead,And landed pouring like a waterfall,And stumbled through the rocks with horny tread,And forced the underbrush and that was all.20This is the most powerful of what might be called his spectatorialpoems, those in which a wandering figure tries to locate a  home by theexercise of vision, the making of metaphor, or the making of sound to whichan answering call is expected.Along with the poems being discussed in thissection (and  Neither Out Far nor In Deep )  The Most of It is a poem inwhich  life is being asked to do some or all of a  poet s work.The requestis illegitimate, and it is made not by Frost but by the speakers or spectatorsor would-be poets in his poems.If their calls on  life have a pathos ofinnocence, they also elicit that Frostean exasperation which is aroused byanyone who acts politically, or poetically, as if the world owes him a living, oras if it is easy to be  at home in the metaphors one contrives about the world.Metaphors, like other marriages, are not made in heaven.About this,Frost and Stevens would agree.Metaphors are made by poets, either by those185Soundings for Homewho write poems or by the kind of Emersonian poet who is potentially in anyone of us.Significantly, the poem following  The Most of It is  NeverAgain Would Birds Song Be the Same. There, the world itself has alreadybeen made our  home, partly by the fact that the  birds  from havingheard the daylong voice of Eve / Had added to their own an oversound. Itis a sound that still  persists in the wilderness which is of our presentmoment.But her  sound, her  voice, was not, we have to remember,directed to birds at all in any naive expectation that they would answer herin kind or in any other way.The birds simply heard her voice as it was carried aloft from the intercourse between Adam and Eve, the  call orlaughter of their daily life together before the Fall.To the extent, then, thatthe sound of birds has been crossed with and become an echo of humansound, it is not to be confused with the kind of sound the man in the openinglines of  The Most of It requests as an answering call from the wildernessaround him.Keeping the universe alone, he is an Adam without an Eve.Toparaphrase a passage from Frost s  The Constant Symbol which we havealready looked at, it might be said that he wants to  keep the universewithout spending very much on it.He has not learned the essential lessonthat  strongly spent is synonymous with kept. Or, to make anothercomparison, he  keeps the world the way the old man keeps house in  AnOld Man s Winter Night, forever making sounds, even to  beating on abox, in order to lay some claim to the world around him:  One aged manone man can t keep a house / A farm, a countryside, or if he can / It s thushe does it of a winter s night.The supposed model for this isolate and solitary man, this man who hasnot entered into or engaged upon any kind of  marriage, was, according toThompson, a young poet named Wade Van Dore whom Frost met first inLittleton, New Hampshire, in 1922 and later at the University of Michiganin 1925 [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]