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

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

Always wrong to the light, so never seeing

Deeper down in the well than where the water

Gives me back in a shining surface picture

Me with myself in the summer heaven, godlike,

Looking out a wreath of the fern and cloud puffs. (1-6)

The community-voice within the mind of the solitary epiphanic persona decries his desire to see himself reflected in a watery mirror as playful childlike Narcissus, so flatteringly enclosed in an epiphanic circular poet-praising wreath uniting the natural beauties of earth and heaven. (The classical hendecasyllabic meter chosen for this lyric melodiously prompts us to seek ancient mythic analogues.) But the reflectiveness of solitude has deeper resources, revealed in a category-defying epiphanic game of hide-and-seek:

Once, when trying chin against a well-curb,

I discerned, as I thought, beyond the picture,

Through the picture, a something white, uncertain,

Something more of the depths-and then I lost it.

Water came to rebuke the too clear water.

One drop fell from a fern, and lo, a ripple

Shook whatever it was lay there at bottom,

Blurred it, blotted it out. What was that whiteness?

Truth? A pebble of quartz? For once, then, something. (7-16)

Quartz, which can be both crystalline-mirrorlike and white (the inclusive all-color), now seemingly appears at the bottom of the deep, dark well, the Frostian cylindrical epiphanic enclosure, to create a black-and-white epiphany of the ambivalences of poetic solitude: narcissism-transcending yet resolutely independent, reflection-penetrating yet reflective, questionable yet possibly, strangely, truth-telling. The epiphany is indeterminate, its meaning undecidable (only a seeming white "something" amid a dark nothing), a tantalizing perceptual and ontological hide-and-seek game.

In "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," where the color-transcending interrelated opposites black and white are starkly contrasted as a Solitary watches woods "fill up with snow" on the "darkest evening of the year" (14,8), the Frostian epiphanic motifs of music and glass together signal the Solitary's ambivalently capricious-but-privileged moment. When the horse gives its "harness bells a shake / To ask if there is some mistake," playfully16 dramatizing what seems the traveler's highly capricious choice to stop suddenly at the forest's border, we note in this signal a musical, crystalline token of an ambivalent revelation-to-come from a Frostian dark enclosure: "The woods are lovely, dark, and deep" (9-10, 13). "But I have promises to keep, / And miles to go before I sleep, / And miles to go before I sleep" (14-16)-the voice of communitas tells of social responsibilities to be heeded, promises to be honored. Communitas directs the pattern of motion (along the social road of duty, not into the solitary wood of desire), yet it hardly has the last word. That final word, "sleep," belongs instead to the delights of the beckoning, re-echoing, dark sylvan enclosure, to the ominous deeps of ever-- ambivalent solitary inwardness with its riddlingly two-sided closure-and-opening into unconscious sources of death-and-life.17