ROBERT FROSTの死生観 : "FIRE AND ICE"の一展開

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Robert Lee Frost (1874-1963) depicts like Hesiod's 'chaos' what we ourselves were in "Too Anxious for Rivers," and says that the universe' the world, we, and the mind are the same in roundness in "Build Soil." Chaos and roundness being seemingly contradictory, I feel Aristotle's or Emerson's circular philosophy, and Frost's 'soul-from-soul abyss' ("A Missive Missile"), and get conscious of the vacuity as if a halo seen frequently in Frost's poetry. But a sympathetic correspondence going forth and back through this vacancy often indicates Frost's dual trend rather than the inconsistency or shyness of his thought. It may be said that, in particular, though the metaphor of "Fire and Ice" looks incoherent at a glance, he succeeds in unifying it very intelligently. The hesitation of 'passive' Frost, who has momentarily been absorbed in the aphorism reminiscent of Heraclitus, changes into 'intentional' awakening accompanied with a supposition; to Frost, man is at once a circulating existence and there is a limit to time extention-this disillusionment makes me feel instantly Pascal's discontinuity pointed out by T. S. Eliot, but Frost does not reveal so earnest a desire to enter religion as to desert the self and says it is intention, purpose and design that let man near divinity. It may be mentioned, therefore, that his stumbling denotes a conflict between passive recognition and original response, as confined in 'a pair of dauntless wings ' ("Bond and Free"). This I call Frostian duality, which is not grasped in Emerson with whom Frost gives the impression of having agreed in circularity. Fire and ice here cannot be shifted to life and death immediately, but "Provide, Provide" has the same hypothetic construction: to Frost, life is carried out in the hypothesis of death which happens in the contingency of life. Prepared to admit that the contingency of life is inevitable, he tries to make this inevitability meaningful. But he does not by force, but sometimes shows daily experience, as in "'Out, Out-'" and "Home Burial," symmetrically constructed each. Besides, Frost, with more brutal apathy than in these two poems, deals with death in "The Death of the Hired Man," and his dialogue of the 'home' gives a deeper feeling than nostalgia. Such the dramatic construction of Frost, who offers how importan the 'home' is in life and death, develops a genuine insight into the resemblance of the position of the 'home' in daily life to the relationship of the 'soul' to the flesh. Frost expounds in "Kitty Hawk" that spirit enters flesh, and that it charges into earth, which may signify the 'underground' ("Hyla Brook") of the flesh, ever fresh and fresh, and suggests his 'evolution' ("Education by Poetry") or Bergson's 'creative evolution.' Thoreau's 'pond' symbolized the 'earth's eye,' and he, analogous to Emerson, saw the soul in the eye, but Frost squeezes the site of his 'soul' into man's brain and likens it to the micrographic picture of the 'tree' ("A Never Naught Song"), I think, and seems to approach science rather than religion. Having receded from such the so-called positivism, however, he lays emphasis upon the importance of metaphor, and appeals a mystic insight as Bergson or Blake. I perceive the dualism of a circular 'microcosm' in this 'tree' participating in the current of life, which, Frost says, renders nil the whole Yggdrasil. But 'something like' which controls the waves of life is a mystery; Frost's 'spirit' walking alone like Crabbe's dreamy world, of which he will not make clear, as well, while no mechanic judgment that death means the destruction of an essential part of the human body can be seen in the vision of Frost, who reminds me of Cartesian tendency in his suggestion of intentionality and duality. Lucretius, Plato, and so on discovered that death was caused by the departure of the soul, almost a synonym for Frost's 'spirit,' from the body; similarly may Frost, but he forbears from prying with regret where spirit will go. Frost banteringly says only that the complaint of 'something like' is in a position to make science and religion go together, and remarks cynically that he is not a shriner. The melancholy wisdom of Frost, having felt thus the limit of science, religion or all metaphysical thinkings, not to speak of his own thought, appears as "Earth's the right place for love." ("Birches") For Frost, who has reached the thoroughness of Emerson's saying, "Give all to Love" ("On Emerson"), I feel natural love rather than for Emerson, who let fall a compensatory love like an algebraic equation even though reluctantly. Frost is sure to think that what man is is the production of love itself: as above-mentioned, in his 'earth' which has come in line with either the earth or the flesh, I see the bond of love, and simultaneously the essay of love. This enables me to state that Frost's view of life and death tends to be related to the duality at the bottom of the soul, or, the subconscious love which forms acceptance, his greatest disposition, as intuited most assuredly in "Acceptance." The 'waif,' a time traveler, in "Acceptance," like Thoreau's or Nietzsche's 'bird' emblematic of free will, makes the Goethe's humanitarian retreat pointing to the construction of a free world. In Frost's dark saying like a misty wreath of the ice put on a hot stove to which he refers as a figure of love, I feel as if seeing an endlessly circulating universe-a fusion of Heraclitus' philosophy of vicissitudes and Lucretius' atomism. Frost himself says that poetry always comes back to love, and implies that love circulates by poetry, but, of course, it will be impossible to sense gorgeously such the circulation of love in his poetry. To Frost, love identifies itself with no fiction, but what is enveloped in his poetry, namely, the poetry itself; to love is to live; to love, to live circulating-to circulate in company with the chaotic actuality containing life and death; and to circulate, such the actuality must be incessantly accepted. Whether consciously or not, acceptance is always being done in everyday life. Yet he, almost as a rule, represents that there is no acceptance where there is not the slightest intention, and that he has had a quarrel with this world because he loves it. That is to say, acceptance involves intention; the inside of Frost, who is apparently generous, is considered to be supported by a compound subconsciousness of passiveness and intentionality. Here I see that it is through a most creative intellect apt to be negligible in Frost, which may be latent and working behind his mask of inconsiderable simplicity, that he is capable of making out naturally such an inner universe as love produces in the abyss of the soul.
1970-03-30

ROBERT FROSTの死生観 : "FIRE AND ICE"の一展開

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