Frost's Synecdochic Allusions

Robert Frost claimed that, although his poems had simple surfaces, they were in fact layered and complex: they had small points of entry to larger significance. Frost’s name for the phenomenon was synecdoche¹—the name for the part signifying the whole, as in “hands” for “sailors” or “wave” for “sea.” This paper begins with a brief account of Frost’s claims that his poetry is layered and complex and that there is a synecdochic relation between surface and substratum. The rest of the paper presents instances of the phenomenon in three of Frost’s poems: “Reluctance,” “Peril of Hope,” and “Nothing Gold Can Stay.”

Concerning the layering and complexity, Reginald Cook questioned Frost: “I had long wanted to ask Frost about ‘A Winter Eden.’ ‘Is it a two-layer poem?’ I asked. ‘They’re all two-layer,’ he replied, tongue in cheek” (qtd. in Tharpe 139). Frost warned that his poetry was more complex than it seemed at first sight: “[M]y method they haven’t noticed. I am not supposed to have a method. I am a naive person” (Selected Letters 179). His poetry would not be understood by casual readers: “I should like to be so subtle at this game as to seem to the casual person altogether obvious” (qtd. in Untermeyer 47). Casual readers are shut out: “A poem would be no good that hadn’t doors. I wouldn’t leave them open though” (qtd. in Thompson 397). Beyond the closed door, there is ulteriority, and Frost made it clear that he enjoyed “saying one thing in terms of another, the pleasure of ulteriority” (Collected Poems 786); he said that some of his poems were “loaded with ulteriority” (Interviews 185).

An explication by poets of what is implicit and ulterior in their poems would be an admission that the poems had failed: “I prefer in reading the poems ordinarily . . . not to go on with them into anything beyond. But that’s somebody else’s business” (Cook 84). It is the critic’s job to open the closed doors that make poems “good,” to catch the fish that swims below the surface: “I sometimes think a poem is like a pond with a smooth surface, and there’s something in it that once in a while breaks the surface” (“Academy” 69). Some Frost ponds, “Mending Wall” for example, are heavily stocked: “The trouble with this fish pond is that the surface is broken too often with undermeanings” (“Academy” 69). But it is with the surface that the reader’s scrutiny begins: “The first surface meaning, the anecdote, the parable, the surface meaning has got to be good and to be sufficient in itself. If you don’t want any more you can leave it at that” (Cook 43). And if you do want more, the clue to it will be found on the surface, because when he says “[m]ost of the iceberg is under the water” (Interviews 77), Frost is telling us that a tip of an iceberg is visible. With these hints in mind, we are not surprised at the warning: “[I hope] you are not going to make the mistake that Pound makes of assuming that my simplicity is that of the untutored child. I am not undesigning” (Selected Letters 84; my emphasis).

When a Frost door opens into extra meaning, it is an instance of synecdoche. Frost adopted the word in 1912, when, as he says, “I started calling myself a synecdochist. . . . Always a larger significance. A little thing touches a larger thing” (qtd. in Sergeant 325). On another occasion, an interviewer reported that “[h]e calls himself a synecdochist, a thorny Greek term . . . for saying a thing and meaning it, and much more besides” (Drury 148). The “much more” will be found if we explore a surface statement until close reading discovers that it is also an iceberg tip. The search begins to be successful when you can “say in a poem that you see in it the place where it begins to be ulterior” (Cook 80–81), the synecdochic place where “a little thing touches a larger thing.” In the significantly...