Robert Frost, romantic - poet

Twentieth Century Literature, Winter, 1996 by Sheldon W. Liebman

Thus, "having a moment" is an event of some significance, for although the experience yields neither information nor explanation, it provides something more important: not consolation, but realization - a kind of feeling that is also a kind of knowing. Such moments are not, however, unambiguous and unequivocal. They cannot be verified, and they cannot be communicated, unless, perhaps, the reader shares some common ground of experience with the poet. "The great thing," Frost says in "Poetry and School" (1951), "is to know when you have one" (Poetry and Prose 413). And the challenge to Frost's readers is to know when he had one (or at least described one in his poetry). As Frost suggests in "One More Brevity," he gets, at best, "An intimation, a shot of ray" (Clearing 20). In this poem, Frost implies that spiritual and celestial realities are embodied in material and earthly things. And when he experiences them they seem to convey "A meaning [he] was supposed to seek, / And finding, wasn't disposed to speak" (Clearing 26). In a letter to Untermeyer in 1924, he said that the best kind of "belief" came from moments in which he was "rapt" (Letters 300). Therefore, his objective was, he says in "In a Glass of Cider, "to get now and then elated" (Clearing 94). The "brevities" seem to have possessed for him, then, a meaning and a value that eludes those who do not see them for what they are - or at least what they were to Frost.

Frost makes this point even more emphatically in "All Revelation," "Take Something Like a Star," and "An Unstamped Letter in Our Rural Letter Box." In the first poem, a scientist looks into the crystal-lined cavity of a geode with a cathode ray. As (figuratively) "his head thrusts in as for the view," he asks a series of questions about the geode. The event of seeking and questioning lasts only a "moment," however. The speaker concludes that either the geode as a thing-in-itself or the scientist's presumably tentative answers to his own queries were merely a "Strange apparition of the mind" - that is, a mental projection. Yet, having said this, the speaker acknowledges that "the impervious geode / Was entered," and its crystals "glowed / In answer to the mental thrust." Implicitly asking the same question that is asked in "Two Look at Two," "The Most of It," and "For Once, Then, Something," the speaker answers that the glow was a response of like to like, or "mind" to "mind": "Eyes seeking the response of eyes / Bring out the stars, bring out the flowers." As Frost says in a notebook he kept during the 1940s, "What life craves most" is not meaning in the ordinary sense but "signs of life." And in poems like "Two Look at Two" and "All Revelation," life gets what it wants: "The certainty of a source outside of self - original response" (quoted in Hall 40). In other words, the scientist's observation of the geode is a special case of the quest of "life" for "life." And when the geode glows, Frost can unequivocally conclude, "All revelation has been ours" (444).