Robert Frost, romantic - poet

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

In the same fashion, the speaker in "Take Something Like a Star" implores another object - this time, a star - to reveal its nature. He grants it the right to "obscurity" and "mystery," but he wants something: "to be wholly taciturn / In your reserve is not allowed." In response, the star only says, like the geode, "I glow," an answer that does not initially satisfy the speaker. However, he claims that the star "does tell something in the end" although he neglects to say what it is. Furthermore, apparently because of its response, the speaker refers to the star as "steadfast," which, if nothing else, gives it the capacity to "stay our minds" (575). The letter-writing tramp in "An Unstamped Letter" similarly comes "face to face . . . with universal space," in which he sees two stars merge to make "the largest firedrop ever formed." Just as the speaker in "All Revelation" can elicit a response from the stars (as well as the flowers), here the coalescing stars inspire a like response in the tramp, in whose mind two memories join together. At this point he claims, "And for a moment all was plain, / That men have thought about in vain" (524). That is, he too has had a revelation that remains unexplained.

As I said earlier, the poet's flashes and insights are also moments of illumination. A "perfect moment of unbafflement," Frost says in "How Hard It Is to Keep from Being King When It's in You and in the Situation," provides the poet with an opportunity to "summons out of nowhere like a jinni" not only the words he needs to complete his thought or fulfill his vision, but also the vision itself. The "Freedom to flash off into wild connections" is "The freedom of [the poet's] own material" - which is, ironically, spiritual as well as material. And the experience - whether it is a poet's, a tramp's, or a scientist's - is so exhilarating that no one can help desiring it again: "Once to have had it nothing else will do" (Clearing 83). Thus, one may "blame the stars / For looking and not participating," but their "detachment," their transcendence, does not preclude their accessibility, their immanence, as Frost implies in this poem and demonstrates in "Take Something Like a Star" and "An Unstamped Letter."

This view of Frost's poetry suggests yet another connection with romanticism - the belief that visionary experience is not only inspiring but redemptive. It is life-changing and lifesaving because it is not a projection of one's own needs or desires. Rather, it is actually cognitive. The spiritual reality that such experience discloses is, after all, real. And the perception of it is an intuition that is felt to be the basis for all knowledge. This intuition is not achieved when the self-as-subject either passively perceives the other-as-object or actively imposes order and value on it. It is a mutually creative act in which subject and object open up to each other and reveal their essence, their spirit. Again, "Eyes seeking the response of eyes / Bring out the stars, bring out the flowers." That is, as any Neoplatonist, Bhuddist, or Christian mystic would argue, when the self becomes spiritualized, it acquires the capacity to perceive the world spiritually. For, as it undergoes this process of self-transcendence, the cosmos is likewise liberated from its material embodiment and discloses the sacred.