Learning to Hover: Robert Frost, Robert Francis, and the Poetry of Detached Engagement

Twentieth Century Literature, Winter, 1999 by Andrew Stambuk

"You've got to learn to hover,"

He said. The way a hummingbird

Hovers over a flower, the way

The flower's fragrance hovers over it.

Not to move on, not to

Keep jumping like a nervous grasshopper

But to hover there until you

Have gathered all that is there

For you or anyone to gather.

"You've got to learn to hover."

The motif of detachment persists throughout Francis's career, but early on reveals itself amid stylistic echoes of Frost. For example, in "Blue Winter," from Valhalla and Other Poems, his painterly description of a landscape that recedes into the distance and converges at a starry point in the horizon showcases, as Francis records in A Time to Talk, what Frost calls his "ability to fit sentences and lines together" (56). In its concision of expression, its use of conversational language, its shifting of stresses in a line for flexibility and variety, and its blending of sounds (as in "shade" into "shadows"), Francis's poem bears a strong affinity with Frost's writing:

Winter uses all the blues there are.

One shade of blue for water, one for ice.

Another blue for shadows over snow.

The clear or cloudy sky uses blue twice-

Both different blues. And hills row after row

Are colored blue according to how far.

You know the bluejay's double blue device

Shows best when there are no green leaves to show.

And Sirius is a winterbluegreen star. (48)

Indeed, when Frost showed the lyric to Untermeyer, hoping to persuade him to publish Francis's poetry, Untermeyer replied that Francis's "lyric style, casual yet compact, reminded me so much of Robert's that until I learned better, I thought my leg was being pulled and that Robert Francis was an alter ego Robert Frost had invented by slightly altering his last name" (qtd. in Frost, Letters 270). As "Blue Winter" illustrates, Francis's colloquial idiom and "casual yet compact" style are directed toward a clear perception of nature.

To understand the role that perception plays in Francis's work is to explore the ways in which his poetry most importantly resembles Frost's. Untermeyer's observation that Francis shares Frost's "gift for seeing minutiae which are anything but trivial" suggests that Francis displays in his poems a penchant for perceiving nature "less for itself and more for what it represents" (Mulder 554). While the natural objects he describes reflect a perception decidedly pastoral as far as their literal preoccupations are concerned, his poems, like Frost's, translate nature's forms into emblems of moral values; the things and creatures of the world become metaphors for human conduct. Take, for instance, another passage from "Valhalla," in which spruce trees serve as an image of endurance:

The dark trees on the peak, the pointed spruces,

Seem to those who see them always the same-

Dark in summer, dark in winter, dark

And undisturbed from year to year by fall

Or wind or rain or frost or snow or spring.

They keep the peak, holding and held by rock,

Holding and fed by soil once tree and rock.

So they endure. (86)

Similarly, in Frost's "Blueberries," the thriving of these fruits in a pasture ravaged by fire is, as the speaker suggests, evidence of their perseverance and hardiness: