secretive-playful epiphanies of Robert Frost: Solitude, companionship, and the ambivalent imagination, The

Papers on Language and Literature, Summer 2002 by Bidney, Martin

"A Dream Pang," Frost's playful, interpersonal epiphanic paradigm, displays-in a characteristic mood of intense ambivalence and uneasy equivocation-his recurrent motion pattern (hide-and-seek), shape (enclosure of trees), and interactive elements (woods and wind), his ambivalent blendings of sound and silence (muffled song, white noise of leaves), and the equally central related theme of invisibility. The oneiric power of this oddly unregarded11 dialogic dream sonnet is exemplary, as is the Frostian dialogue between the perspectives of the wouldbe Companion in the opening octet and the would-be Solitary in the sestet's antiphonal response. The two-part epiphany is a play scenario involving secretiveness and pursuit, hide-and-seek:

I had withdrawn in forest, and my song

Was swallowed up in leaves that blew always

And to the forest edge you came one day

(This was my dream) and looked and pondered long

But did not enter, though the wish was strong.

You shook your pensive head as who should say,

"I dare not-too far in his footsteps stray--

He must seek me would he undo the wrong." (1-8)12

The dream game is by no means pure pleasure. It may be narcissistically gratifying that the Companion purportedly has such a strong wish to enter the forest where the Solitary is hiding. But this powerful desire of the Companion may be merely fantasized, while the enunciated reproach is all too real. The Companion's reluctance to "dare" to enter the forest may seem timid, but the reproof is bold: the Solitary has strayed from the true path and must "undo" such a "wrong." This accusation may be a spouse's or a lover's, but it sounds more like a parent's reprimand stipulating how the child must rectify the offense he has committed; one readily imagines the early childhood origin of the tense dream scenario.13 Not only is the Solitary made to feel guilty in relation to an authoritative Companion, but even the poetic achievement he has effected through his solitude is highly equivocal: the swallowing of his song in leaves, as if in the dark cylindrical throat of the forest, threateningly renders the poet mute. But perpetually blowing leaves can magically make a lovely, quasi-musical rushing sound, and the Solitary may well feel comfortable surrounded by this waterlike white noise, auditory insulation from unwelcome human company. In the sestet we hear his revealingly equivocal reply to the proffered charge of aloofness:

Not far, but near, I stood and saw it all:

Behind low boughs the trees let down outside;

And the sweet pang it cost me not to call

And tell you that I saw does still abide.

But 'tis not true that thus I dwelt aloof,

For the wood wakes, and you are here for proof. (9-14)

The singer admits a continuing sense of guilt, or at least regret. Yet he rejects the imputation of willful coldness. The waking of the wood may mean that the slumbrous dream was not real anyway, that daytime reality has now supervened, replacing defiance with pleasant companionship. Yet the waking of the dream-wood may equally well mean that the nocturnal rebellion was real and that its reality survives into daytime-that the poet's triumphant, secretive defiance in the dream was real then and is real now. The guiltily playful epiphanist-persona, like a rebellious growing child, is torn between apology and apologia.