Octavio Paz and Robert Frost: El polvo y la nieve que se deshacen entre las manos

Comparative Literature, Summer 1995 by Zubizarreta, John

(Collected Poems 484-87)

And so we return to words: the sounds of the words of poets: "El sonido del agua vale mas que todas las palabras de los poetas" ("The sound of water is worth more than all the words of poets"). Converstly, in "Una mujer de movimientos de rio" ("A Woman Whose Movements Are a River's"), Paz suggests that, in fact, the sound and sense of words are worth a world:

Una mujer de movimientos de rio De transparentes ademanes de agua Una muchacha de agua Donde leer lo que pasa y no regresa Un poco de agua donde los ojos beban Donde los labios de un solo sorbo beban El arbol la nube el relampago Yo mismo y la muchacha.

(A woman whose movements are a river's Transparent gesturing that water has A girl made of waer Where may be read the irreversible present A little water where the eyes may drink The lips swallow in a long single drink The tree the cloud the lamp Myself and that girl.

(Early Poems 28-29)

The original Spanish resounds, an endless flow of words, gestures, desire: the language becomes gesture, desire; the woman becomes the river; the poem becomes a clarification of life, an immaculate end. Woman, river, poet are one in the alert tension of the poem.

At the end of the interview, Paz reflects on his meeting with Frost and likens the American's poetic strategies, especially the use of humor as defense against the spending rush of the universal all, to the "gravedad sonriente" ("smiling gravity") of the Spaniard Antonio Machado. Though there is much dust in the work of Machado, Paz muses, and much snow in the poems of the other, the two would have enjoyed each other as artists predominantly concerned with the essential risk of words. "El campo es...la experiencia de la soledad" ("The country is an experience in solitude"), Paz had remarked to Frost earlier, but so is poetry ("Visita" 36; "Visit" 8). In the act of forging meaning out of either dust or snow "que apenas se toca se deshace entre las manos..." ("which, when you barely touch it, sifts through your fingers..."), the poet is truly alone, as in love and death.

Paz's later analysis in El Laberinto de la Soledad (The Labyrinth of Solitude) clarifies the connection between the solitude of the creative act and the solitary experiences of love and death, a formula in which "[c]reacion y destruccion se funden...y durante una fraccion de segundo el hombre entreve un estado mas perfecto" ("[c]reation and destruction become one...and during a fraction of a second man glimpses a more perfect state") (177; trans. mine). Jason Wilson indicates that "Paz's love is a metaphor of...freedom" and suggests that we "[r]eplace 'love' with 'poetry'" in Paz's sweeping analysis of the "dialectic of solitude" to see how integrally tied the two are, an interpretation that returns us to Paz and Frost's agreement that poetry (and for Paz, evidently, love, too) is an experience of freedom because it is one of life's highest creative acts (56). The intimacy of creative, poetic language, as Paz agrees in a 1986 interview with Melinda Porter, is like "an oceanic feeling that one also feels when in love" (79). As Poirier reminds us in his essay on Paz, the equation of creativity (which includes poetry and life itself) with love as set against the world's unalterable course towards death would have pleased Frost, for in 1939 Frost wrote: "The figure a poem makes. It begins in delight and ends in wisdom. The figure is the same as for love. No one can really hold that the ecstasy should be static and stand still in one place. It begins in delight, it inclines to the impulse, it assumes direction with the first line laid down, it runs a course of lucky events, and ends in a clarification of life...a momentary slay against confusion" (Poirier, "Paz" 6; Frost, Prose 18). In turn, Paz, a poet of kindred mind, would have been pleased to know, if only by premonition, that Frost would eventually make the Mexican's great themes of solitude and creativity the focus of one of the last poems he wrote, in his final year of life: