Robert Frost Metaphor of the Dual

Robert Frost Said ,‖A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a
lovesickness‖.A poetry obviously has methaporical images, it includes methapor.

Possibly related to reading and writing metaphors is one of Frost’s metaphors of poetry: “I wouldn’t
have a poem that hadn’t doors. I wouldn’t leave them open, though.”1 The basic conceptual
metaphor,2 is that of a structure (which a poem, after all, is). If a poem has doors that open and close,
it may be represented as a house, where leaving doors open could leave the resident vulnerable to
intrusion, even theft or harm. We may ask once again whether closing the door means walling in or
walling out, or both. On the other hand, a house with doors can also be inviting; the one standing
outside may be invited in. A door, after all, is meant to be opened as well as shut. A word like
“something,” for example, used as Frost uses it, opens it at least a crack: “Something there is that
doesn’t love a wall” (“Mending Wall,” CPPP, 39); or: “What was that whiteness?/ Truth? A pebble of
quartz? For once, then, something” (“For Once, Then, Something,” CPPP, 208). A poem, then, can be
an invitation, but not an unlimited one, not always, and not to everyone. We may get invited in and
challenged to play the game, but we are not assured of a perfect score.

More directly a love and metaphor poem is “The Rose Family”:

The rose is a rose

And was always a rose.

But the theory now goes

That the apple’s a rose,

And the pear is, and so’s

The plum, I suppose.

The dear only knows

What will next prove a rose.

You, of course, are a rose –

But were always a rose. (CPPP, 225)

How close can metaphor come to being identity? In his insistence that the rose that was always a rose
really is a rose, Frost seems to be interrogating the metaphor’s “breaking point.” If the addressee is
indeed a lady, we must realize, as he must, that no matter how lovely, or genuine, or traditional she is
(how rose-like), she cannot really be a rose. Not unless the addressee is a rose. In that case it is we who
make the assumption that the rose is really a lady. We do so because people usually address other
people, and because of all the poetry we have read. Frost would not be the first to address or speak of a
rose literally; Waller’s “Song” that begins “Go, Lovely Rose” does so, as does “The Romance of the
Rose.” But we remember that in both of those poems, we (and the ladies) are meant to see rose-as-
woman. What happens to the rose will happen to you. The roses are metaphors. Can one compromise
be suggested by the word “family”? Do these terms “go together” either by association, or tradition, or
aptness that the listener/reader is able to see? Does “rose” radiate possibilities that plums just do not?
In this scenario, the writer – or lover – is being cautioned to use metaphors judiciously, to make
connections that work. Frost’s poem also plays with the possibility of denying metaphor altogether, but
at the same time, questions how much we would be able to say without it. How else to “flash bright,”
flash genuine feeling through language long made dull, create new expression without creating a new
lexicon? Putting this and that together: to Frost, we remember, this is not only metaphor, it is the whole
of thinking. From “everything out of its place,” it becomes “a triumph of associations” – for him, a mark
of intellect as it combines with imagination: “The only thing that can disappoint me in the head is my
own failure to make metaphor. My ambition has been to have it said of me: He made a few
connections.”

I found a dimpled spider, fat and white,

On a white heal-all, holding up a moth

Like a white piece of rigid satin cloth –

Assorted characters of death and blight
Mixed ready to begin the morning right
Like the ingredients of a witches’ broth –
A snow-drop spider, a flower like a froth,
And dead wings carried like a paper kite.
What had that flower to do with being white,
The wayside blue and innocent heal-all?
What brought the kindred spider to that height,
Then steered the white moth thither in the night?
What but design of darkness to appall?
If design govern in a thing so small. (302)

Frost himself said of the “Design” that it is very “undramatic in the speech entirely”, which according to
Poirier gives it an induced feeling of near stasis. In other words, it resembles an equilibrium, where not
much happens at the level of surrounding reality.

The overtly religious or Christian tune of this sonnet hardly remains unnoticed. It seems proved beyond
doubt that the speaker is pondering about the ways of nature and God, and whether there is a
possibility of design to all things.It is often the case that the facts and beliefs are pulling in opposite
directions, and as a consequence, Frost’s poetic language is caught between expressions of belief and
unbelief. The metaphoricity of the imagery overruns the iconic value of the phrases in “Design”; we are
lead into reading the poem for its symbolical value. Certainly at play are the conceptual metaphors, for
example “Life is a possession” and “Nature is a devourer”, 84 mixed together with the diabolical and yet
unstated image of the spider’s web. On one hand, it seems that the web in all its fragility and symmetry
would necessarily have to be an element of the divine design, yet on the other, the purpose of the
design is the destruction of another life.
Thus, the specific metaphor of “Design” is an inventive mixture of the image and concept metaphors,
where most of the power of the text comes from the epiphoricity of the imagery. It evokes several
schemas in the mind of the reader, on two occasions rather bluntly with simile constructions (“Like a
white piece of rigid satin cloth–”, “Like the ingredients of a witches’ broth–”), which seem to carry the
reading towards biblical interpretations of funerals and witchcraft. Hence, the sense of the poem
becomes more stressed than does the sensa, the message more emphasized than the form. This poem
craves to be put into context, examined as a representation of a greater scheme.

Duality
Frost was an unsystematic philosopher, but he emphatically affirmed the bedrock of his
views of man, God, nature, and history when he said: “I am a dualist” (4). Dualism for Frost
meant that all reality is comprised of matter and mind, or as he preferred, matter and spirit;
as opposed to a monism that sees reality comprised of one element, spiritual or material.

What Frost had seen or heard through his doubled perception is expressed appropriately in "The
Demiurge's Laugh," the single overt expression of dualism in A B o y 1s W i l l . In this poem, where it is
acknowledged that the demon or demiurge is "no true god," Frost provides a summary of Gnostic
dualism in three short stanzas. As a summary of Gnostic dualism, or the dualism that is the underlying
structure of Gnosticism, "The Demiurge's Laugh" has as its focus the nonunity of God, i.e., the
opposition of a higher God of spirit, light, and pure essence to a lesser god of materialistic creation,
forming together the basic duality underlying the various systems of the Gnostic heresy.

In "The Demiurge's Laugh," Frost distinguishes between the creator of the material world (or the illusion
of the material world) and the highest God. The demiurge or demon becomes perceptible and audible
only in the half-light that gives way to darkness.
The poem “Stars “ contrasts a charming winter scene with an uncharming and morethan-hostile view of
the universe. But the true significance of "Stars" is that it is a study in white - a color with a multitude of
dualistic implications and one which Frost weaves into his most ambiguous efforts. Prom the
"tumultuous snow," the snow-covered trees, the snow-blowing wintry wind, and the "snow-white"
stars, which Frost tentatively equates with a "white rest, and a place of rest," Frost ends the poem with:
"And yet with neither love nor hate,/Those stars like some snow-white/Minerva's snow-white marble
eyes/Without the gift of sight." This is the proverbial other side of the coin. White, the symbol of the
Gnostic higher God, the "white rest" at the core of the universe, also symbolizes the uncaring, unloving
"snow-white marble eyes" of a hostile universe.

Conclusion

Although Frost’s poems cannot be said to be especially religious in character, there is an extraordinary
amount of specific metaphors that serve to define the basic metaphors of biblical nature, “Man has
been banished from paradise” and “Realm of nature is that of paradise”, for example. When
conjoined with the basic metaphor “Nature is a mystery” and the differences in systems of
epistemology that nature and man profess, it seems that the gates of paradise are likely to stay closed
for Frostian characters. In the meantime, truth must be found in the sounds and visions of little things,
the sweet scent of apples, soft whisper of the scythe, depths of the dark forest, or pebbles at the
bottom of the well. Such is the stuff that Robert Frost’s poetry is made on.