ROBERT FROST’S POETRY AND THE

AESTHETICS OF VOICE TONES

DR K. P. SARADHI, M.A., Ph. D.

Osmania University Post-graduate Centre, Warangal

The central principle of Frost’s poetic theory emphasizes the notion of a dramatic necessity as fundamental to good and effective poetry. In the “Introduction” to A Way Out (1917), Frost explained this theory in some detail:

A dramatic necessity goes deeper into the nature of a sentence. Sentences are not different enough to hold the attention unless they are dramatic. No ingenuity of varying structure will do. All that can save them is the speaking tone of voice somehow entangled in the words and fastened to the page for the ear of imagination. That is all that can save poetry from sing-song, all that can save poetry from Itself. ¹

By this he meant that what constituted the drama in a poem was the tone of voice of the speaker, but not merely the varying of structure in the sentences. He once said, the only live sentence was one with the tone of voice caught in the syntax, meaning and idiom of it. “What I have been after from first consciously and unconsciously is tones of voice. I have wanted to write down certain brute throat noises so that no one could miss them in my sentences.” ² He further maintained that in his poetry he strove to make the lines expressive of action-gestures by introducing into it various kinds of voice tones, punch-words, word-play and other speech devices. “I have written poetry ever since I was fifteen years old, and there came to be quite a number of people who know how to take me in my wry way, in my twisted way, with the words cocked a little like a cocked hat, like a cocked feather. That is poetry. The large strain of poetry is a little shifted from the straight out, a little curved from the straight.”³ He complained, “What bothers people in my blank verse is that I have tried to see what I could do with the boasting tones, and quizzical tones and shrugging tones (for they are such) and forty-seven other tones. All I care a cent for is to catch sentence tones that haven’t been brought to book.” ⁴

In fact, right from the beginning of his poetical career Frost had resorted to the method of speaking through the mouths of various people with the living voice somehow caught in the syllables. He enjoyed reproducing the tones and inflections of human speech even before he was ten years old. “I first heard the voice from a printed page in a Virgilian eclogue and from Hamlet.” In a letter he wrote to W. S. B. Braithwaite on March 22, 1915, he said:

I was under twenty when I deliberately put it to myself one night after good conversation that there are moments when one actually touches in talk what the best writing can only come near. The curse of our book language is not so much that it keeps forever to the same set phrases...but that it sounds forever with the same reading tone. We must go out into the vernacular for tones that haven’t been brought to book. We must write with the ear on the speaking voice. ⁵

Frost often emphasized phrases like ‘audile imagination’, ‘images to the ear’, ‘vocal gestures’, etc., and said, “you can’t read a single good sentence with the salt in it unless you have previously heard it spoken. Neither can you with the help of all the characters and diacritical marks pronounce a single word unless you have previously heard it actually pronounced. Words exist in the mouth, not books.”⁶ In his own poetry recitations he so modulated his voice as to allow” his poems to speak for themselves.” In 1935 he was quoted as saying,” poetry has to do something to you with sound. I do not care about meaning except as I use it to get meaning out of tones of voice...The tones of voice can only be got by the context.” Again, in answer to the question “Why do you write poems? “, he said, “To see if I can make them sound different.” Commenting on his “Snow” he remarked:

I have three characters speaking in one poem, and I was not satisfied with what they said until I got them to speak so true to their own characters that to mistake could be made as to who was speaking. I would never put the names of the speakers in front of what they said. ⁷

For Frost even words were “a kind of notation and writing down of the voice.” “When literature comes alive, it begins to speak,” was the central canon of his Ars Poetica. He came closest explaining his actual mode of poetic composition when he said that he always began a poem by imagining “the tone of someone speaking.”

Critical evaluations of Frost too have generally credited him with a talent for the short poem, lyric or dramatic, and agreed that what is significant about the poem is its distinctive tone of voice. Reviewing A Boy’s Will for The New Freewoman, Ezra Pound has noted the tonal quality of the poetic lines:

One reads the book for the ‘tone’ which is homely, by intent, and pleasing, never doubting that it comes direct from his own life and that no two lines are the same...⁸

North of Boston, “a book of people”, as Frost has called it, has received extensive critical recognition, and nearly all the poems in it have been singled out as instances of “natural spoken speech”, speeches of people who are “distinctly real.” “His words are simple,” says Amy Lowell in her review of North of Boston, “straight forward, direct, manly, and there is an elemental quality in all he does which would surely be lost if he chose to pursue niceties of phrase.” Though reviewers of Frost’s later collections have drifted attention from analyses of his method of estimates of his contemporary relevance, general evaluations of Frost that started coming out from the early 30’s onwards have emphasized the fact that he is the first to give the short lyric or dramatic poem a greatly increased significance and that he has achieved in it his most conspicuous successes.

Thus, Sidney Cox has remarked that in Frost “the sound is not only as important as the meaning, and part of the meaning, but most of the meaning.”⁹ Reuben A. Brower ranks Frost with Yeats, Pound and Eliot as “one of the renewers of the speaking voice in modern poetry. Frost’s own dissatisfaction appears at about the time Yeats began revising his early lyrics in order to bring them closer to the rhythms of speech.” Allen Angoff commends “Frost’s peculiar talent to give to his most delicate utterance the air of a chance remark, never to stress in his verse a note that would not be stressed in the context of ordinary speech. Reginald Cook thinks that “what Burton, Sterne, Lamb, Twain and Hemingway do with voice tones in prose, Frost does within the straits of English meter.” British critic Lascelles Abercromble has observed that Frost tried “to capture and hold within metrical patterns with the very tones of speech, the rise and fall, the stress pauses and little hurries of spoken language”, and pointed out “novel inflections of meter...designed to reproduce in verse the actual shape of the sound of whole sentences.” Lawrence Thompson, Elizabeth Isaacs, Radcliffe Squires too have commented on the poetic method of Frost.

In spite of this wide acceptance of Frost’s poetic method, surprisingly no attempt to examine the entire range of Frost’s poetry in terms of his aesthetics has been made so far. John F. Lynen in his The Pastoral Art of Robert Frost, however, categorizes Frost’s poetry under different heads as dramatic dialogues, dramatic monologues, pastoral dialogues, philosophical dialogues and narrative monologues, but he makes only a hurried assessment of the poems under each group in terms of their pastoral content much more than their dramatic quality. In trying to assess Frost’s poetry in the light of his aesthetics we must remember that we are dealing with the Speech utterances of characters who speak with distinctive tones of voice in specific action contexts and not with narrative or lyrical utterances in general contexts. This action context may mean literally the context of a person or character acting–not necessarily in an outer plot situation, but in a situation that engages his energies and prompts him to behave and reveal himself through the tone of his voice. In other words, the action context is a situation that presents a character in an engagement with himself or with other persons or circumstances and behaves in a way as to reveal himself. We should also remember that any situation that provokes this behaviour in a character is necessarily one that is particularized or localized that is unique to the speech context, and not one that is general.

In emphasizing the tonal quality of the speech of a character, Frost was, in effect, emphasizing the dramatic context of the speaker’s utterance. However, this ‘dramatic’ context may not always mean the context of an agon or confrontation, but a context to catch the changing moods or responses of a lively character reacting to a vivid setting against which he is projected in tell of the speaker’s own tone of voice. The speaker, thus is an individual with a personal, identifiable voice, though he not be a full-fledged ‘dramatic’ character. What Frost has sought to do, and in a large measure succeeded in doing, is to catch the tones of human voice within the context of a character-situation.

Frost’s method is to take up a situation, or a certain confrontation and try to analyse its inner significance to the mind of the character. He thus works on single, often simple but specific situations or moods, and exploits to the fullest extent the psychology of a character as it reveals forth in the context of the situation or the mood. The character is studied in shifting lights and shadows, as a living microcosm, and his behaviour is caught in terms of language, stress and intonation. In other words, he records a mind’s reaction to a moment of experience, emphasizing every aspect of the nuances of behaviour. At times, this moment is a moment of crisis in the life of the character, but usually it is a moment when the character is self-aware and can explore the implications of the context to himself or to others.

Frost thus often unfolds the drama of a thought process. In his dramatic monologues and narrative poems which are often lengthy, there is an ‘incident’ or a ‘story’ unveiled, and the unfoldment is at times effected through a series of character confrontations. In the short poems he takes up a single event, or action, or thought, and works out its implications to himself or presents the idea involved in it in the way he may explain it to himself.

A survey of Frost’s major poems will reveal that there are subtle differences of form and tone and varying degrees of dramatic intensity. There are the dramatic monologues like “A Servant to Servants”, “The Pauper Witch of Grafton”, “Build Soil”, which achieve the liveliness of an enactment. “A Servant to Servants” is a moss thorough realization of the drama of self- revelation The drama consists in the gradual unfoldment of the personality and the thought process of the speaker. Here Frost handles a situation close in nature to poems like Browining’s “Andhrra del Sarto.” “The Pauper Witch of Grafton” too is a monologue with a situation reminiscent of some of Browning’s best monologues. There are also the poems which, despite their outward monologue form, are only instruments of discourse. Poems like “The Lesson for Today” or “An Empty Threat”, despite the initial psychological clash and the break with reality develop a narrative structure as they proceed. Here too the voice of the speaker is felt, but it is more subdued and less articulate and is without the broad dramatic gestures that the characters in “A Servant to Servants” or “The Smile” or “Meanding Wall” indulge in. We may call such poems imperfect monologues.

There are then the dramatic dialogues, dialogues conducted entirely in terms of character exchanges. Poems like “Blue Berries,” “The Code,” “The Housekeeper,” “The Self-seeker” are cast in a dramatic frame without the narrator intervening anywhere in the poem. The exchange of the arguments by the characters becomes lively as they speak with their own peculiar conversational tones, with the quirks and oddities, and the dramatic quality of the argument itself is brought out by the interspersion of casual remarks throughout the poem. “Home Burial,” “The Death of the Hired Man,” “The Fear,” “The Snow,” “The Black Cottage” too, are conducted in terms of character exchanges, but here the narrator also pops up at places, either to set the scene or to hook up the conversation. That is, in these poems we hear the voice of the narrator in addition to the voices of the characters exchanging talk which invests the poem with the overall framework of a narrative. However, these poems have a gripping situation, and the narrator often acquires a life of his own, thus forming into another character. Such dialogues we may call quasi-dramatic. In “Home Burial” Frost presents a crisis situation wherein one of the protagonists has grown so desperate as to be mad. She does not listen to the reasoning of her husband, and so persistently scolds him for what she considers his lack of involvement in the crisis wrought on her by the death of their son, that it ultimately leads to the rupture of their domestic life. “Home Burial” is an intensely dramatic poem built round the idea of social adjustment in human relationship. In “The Fear” and “The Snow” the narrative parts are at a minimum, almost like stage directions, and the opening narrative comment serves as the description of the scene in which the drama is to begin. When the characters break into utterance against the stage background, this speech gains in significance. The theme of action of “The Fear” moves round the idea that mental uncertainty could be as terrible as a calamity. The woman is afraid that the voice she has heard or the apparition she has seen must be of someone waiting to ‘avenge’ her–her own husband. But when the apparition does appear, it turns out to be not that of her husband or that of anyone “he’s sent to watch” on her, but that of a “disinterested visitor.” Coming after all the suspense and high tension the denouement has a crushing impact–it is more powerful than any physical violence overtaking the woman.

Frost has discovered the true bent of his genius in the short ‘personative’ lyrics many of which may be cited as striking cases of the speaking voice–cases where a speaker’s response to a situation is presented in an unmistakable tone of voice. The situation, that is as hardly needs to be, is used to reveal character. Most frequently the scene or problem or idea and the main character are those immediately present in the poem. That is, we hear the character who is analysing himself, his mood or predicament, often in the physical limits of the scene itself. At times, however, the speaker analyses the problem not relating to himself, analyses other character or characters, or narrates in his own tone of voice the star, of the idea or problem or significant action. Even here, the mood and the character of the speaker are seldom of secondary interest. The rhythms, tones and inflections vary according to the situation and the mood of the speaker. Thus, the tone and posture of the speaker in “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” are different from the tone and posture in “After Apple Picking” or “Birches” or “Mowing” or “Come in.” There is the low meditative tone of “The Wood Pile” or the indifferent voice of “The Sound of Trees.” There are subtleties in tone and voice which signify sharp distinctions in gesture and behaviour. That is why, in spite of the fact that a majority of Frost’s poems are in the ‘personative’ form, most of them sustain our interest.

“The Birches” consists of a series of beautiful pictures of nature and of man, and is lyric in content. But the way in which the theme is rendered is dramatic. The sudden shifts in the imagery and the warmth of the human element in it give the poem a dramatic force and intensity. The theme of “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” is simple. It is the description of the scene of the woods and the circumstances under which the speaker has stopped there. But behind the seeming simplicity there runs a meaning which is far-reaching in its effects. This climax of responsibility is wrought in the poem by a crafty adjustment of the tone of the speaker to the occasion. The voice is so calm and simple, it is so clear in tone and movement, that it can be mistaken to be a prose utterance. It indeed is, if we forget that it is in metrical form. But the lines are neither to be read strictly in metrical rhythmic order nor as ordinary speech. To understand the meaning of the poem, we must get at the tone of the speaker by accommodation, adjustment between tones. Then the speech becomes the living voice of a character–a dramatic speaker’s voice.

Some of the short poems, however, are descriptive in intent. A lyrical element is often present in them which swallows up the voice and emotions of the speaker. Poems like “A Live Storm,” “To ET,” “Spring Pool,” “Iris by Night” are more subjective than dramatic. The speaker, instead of dramatizing experience, narrates a story with himself as the chief participant. We might call these poems descriptive lyrics.

There are then the narratives at times conducted wholly in terms of the narrator’s own tone of voice and at times making extensive use of direct narration. In the later type which we might call mixed, direct speech is used to enliven narration within the narrative. The speaker quotes another man’s speech in the latter’s own language and tone of voice. By this the reported speech is rendered to us with immediacy. At times, we also hear the narrator mimicking the other man’s tone of voice. The pure narratives like “The Gum Gatherer, “The Bear,” “An Old Man’s Winter Night” have a gripping story and the narrator punctuates his voice in the course of the narration in such a way as to bind the readers’ interest to the central idea or character of his story. In “Brown’s Descent,” of the mixed type, Frost studies a human character in lighter moods. The narrator himself, like the happy-go-lucky Brown, is in a gay and vigorous mood and allows his imagination to hop along lovely nature. The light, playful tones of “Brown’s Descent” are in contrast to the grim and tragic notes of “The Vanishing Red” where a Red Indian’s life is unfolded. The Red Indian, John’s only mistake, if that were a mistake, was that he gave a “guttural exclamation of surprise...in poking about the mill,” which the Miller took as an affront on him particularly because it came from one “who had no right to be heard from.” And with a casual “come, John,” the Miller leads the credulous John to his burial ground. The poem is close-knit and most poignant.

¹ (N. Y. Harbor Press, 1922), p. iii.

² Quoted in Elizabeth Sheply Sergeant, Robert Frost: The Trial by Existence (N. Y. Holt, Rinehart and Winston. 1960), p. xix,

³ Quoted in Reginald L. Cook, The Dimensions of Robert Frost (N. Y. Rinehart and Company, Inc., 195)) p. 99.

⁴ Seleeted Letters of Robert Frost, ed. Lawrence Thompson (N. Y. Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1964), p. 191.

⁵ Quoted in Warner Berthoff, The Ferment of Realism: American Literature 1884-1919 (N. Y. The Free Press, 1965) p. 565.

⁶ Quoted in A Swinger of Birches, op. cit., p. 82.

⁷ Quoted in Berthoff, The Ferment of Realism, p. 277.

⁸ Robert Frost: Original ‘Ordinary Man’ (N. Y. Henry Holt and Co, 1929 ). p. 36.

⁹ The Poetry of Robert Frost: Constellations of Intentions (N. Y. Oxford Univ. Press, 1963), p. 4.

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