Nature's extra-vagrants: Frost and Thoreau in the Maine woods

Papers on Language and Literature, Spring 1997 by Eric Carl Link

As in "The Woodpile," in "The Most of It" the isolated individual who "thought he kept the universe alone" yearns for communication with Nature, but all he receives is a momentary stumbling "through the rocks with horny tread" (307). The individual seeks not mere echoes from Nature, but "counter-love, original response" (307). Nothing ever comes of his cry, except for once, when, like Thoreau's brief and ambiguous communion with the decaying wood chips, Nature sends a reply. But "Instead of proving human when it neared / And someone else additional to him, / As a great buck it powerfully appeared" pushing its way through the rocks and underbrush, "and that was all" (307). Like Thoreau, the individual in Frost's poem seeks the unification of man and Nature, the harmony of subject and object, but he is left with a mysterious and ambiguous response.

Even more so than "The Woodpile" and "The Most of It," "For Once, Then, Something" reconfigures the central epistemological crisis of "Allegash and East Branch," and of The Maine Woods as a whole. In this poem, the narrator, another isolated individual, subject to the taunts of others, has the curious habit of always looking down the shaft of a well "wrong to the light" (208). In this way the narrator never sees "Deeper down in the well than where the water / Gives me back in a shining surface picture / Me myself in the summer heaven, godlike" (208). On one occasion, with the emphasis on Once, the narrator "discerned, as I thought, beyond the picture, / Through the picture, a something white, uncertain, / Something more of the depthsand then I lost it" (208). During that one brief moment-just like Thoreau's moment of wonder at the glow of the decaying wood chips-the narrator saw through the reflective barrier of the water's surface and received a glimpse of what lay beyond. It was but a mere moment, however, and the meaning of the narrator's vision remains unclear. "What was that whiteness?" the narrator asks, "Truth? A pebble of quartz? For once, then, something" (208).

In this poem Frost changes Thoreau's equation significantly. Thoreau actively seeks to pierce through the pasteboard masks of nature, and the vision of phosphorescent wood chips is hailed as a wonderful moment of communication-when the chips fail to glow on the second night Thoreau laments his failure to establish that extra-vagant original relation with Nature. The Frost narrator, however, like the climber of birches who finds a satisfaction in his grounding, only looks beneath the surface of Nature once. There is no explicit reason given to suggest that the narrator could not repeat the action virtually at will-and so the fact that the action was taken only once is significant. The narrator remains content to stare at "Me myself in the summer heaven godlike," which takes on a further irony in relation to the fact that the narrator is taunted by others-do they mock the narrator's timidity at confronting the reality beneath Nature's surface? This would certainly make the narrator's "godlike" selfprojection ironic.