Frost and Shakespeare

“Frost is the author of the best sonnets in English written by someone who was not Shakespeare.” The statement, by David Bromwich in the Introduction to his 2007 Library of America anthology of American Sonnets, is the kind of summary judgment that the present folio might very well seek to unsettle. But the remark invites us to think what might be the connection between these two masterful poets, and here the assertion becomes more interesting.

Frost seems to have signaled this possibility early on in his career in the opening poem from his first volume of poetry, A Boy’s Will (1913). A sonnet in couplets, “Into My Own” alludes to the familiar line from Sonnet 116 that closes off the third quatrain of that poem on a triumphantly transcendent note: “Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, / But bears it out even to the edge of doom.” Shakespeare’s poem then concludes with the famous couplet: “If this be error and upon me proved, / I never writ, nor no man ever loved.”

Frost opens his sonnet with a more modest gesture, but the echo from 116 is still striking:

One of my wishes is that those dark treesSo old and firm they scarcely show the breeze,Were not, as ‘twere, the merest mask of gloom,But stretched away unto the edge of doom.

Frost’s sonnet turns out to be an early vocational promise, not a statement about love’s enduring power but about his own “will” going forward in his evocative pursuit of “those dark trees.” If we hear the under-song of Shakespeare’s sonnet, we also hear some youthful chutzpah in Frost, even if we leave aside the reference to his forbearer’s first name in the book’s title, A Boy’s Will.

After several centuries of near silence, Shakespeare’s sonnets were everywhere in the 19^th and early 20^th centuries, but where to go in Frost after this venturesome beginning is more puzzling. Bromwich turns to the late sonnet, “The Silken Tent” from A Witness Tree (1942), remarking that “in tone and theme” the poem has “something in common” with Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18 (“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day”), but he quickly slides off the comparison with Shakespeare in favor of a learned reference to a line from Donne’s The First Anniversary—hardly a sonnet—and then leaves Shakespeare altogether by offering a subtle reading of the reflexive imagery in Frost’s poem. He concludes with a reference to Keats, reminding us of the curious and capacious ways that sonnets keep invoking their past.

But to stay with the initial comparison a bit longer, what brings Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18 to mind is not just the mention of comparable summery seasons, but the figure of comparison itself: “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”; “She is as in a field a silken tent” (emphasis added), after which, with the seed planted, Frost invites us to witness, in that remarkable, spiraling, single sentence of 14 lines, the poet hoisting his own perfectly structured Shakespearean sonnet: three quatrains in alternating rhymes; syntax loosely connected by conjunctions at the end of the first and second quatrains; the quiet, momentary pause at the end of the third quatrain, with poet then tenderly tightening the knot at the end in the concluding couplet, lightly rhyming “air” with “aware.” So familiar, yet so different.

What these two poems have in common is a tone of whimsicality (“capriciousness” is Frost’s word) generated by the idea of making similes for love, with Frost playing wistfully with the form Shakespeare made famous, and also making something of his own out of it. A woman is like a silken tent in a summer breeze, which is like a poem, the one you are reading, and perhaps other sonnets you have read. The poem contains, in fact, a reminiscence of Sonnet 116 in its reference to the tent pole as a “pinnacle to heavenward [that] signifies the sureness of the soul,” but Frost’s treatment of this...