Reflections on Robert Frost, “The Runaway”

Once when the snow of the year was beginning to fall,
We stopped by a mountain pasture to say, ‘Whose colt?’
A little Morgan* had one forefoot on the wall,
The other curled at his breast. He dipped his head
And snorted at us. And then he had to bolt.
We heard the miniature thunder where he fled,
And we saw him, or thought we saw him, dim and grey,
Like a shadow against the curtain of falling flakes.
‘I think the little fellow’s afraid of the snow.
He isn’t winter-broken. It isn’t play
With the little fellow at all. He’s running away.
I doubt if even his mother could tell him, “Sakes,
It’s only weather.” He’d think she didn’t know!
Where is his mother? He can’t be out alone.’
And now he comes again with a clatter of stone
And mounts the wall again with whited eyes
And all his tail that isn’t hair up straight.
He shudders his coat as if to throw off flies.
‘Whoever it is that leaves him out so late,
When other creatures have gone to stall and bin,
Ought to be told to come and take him in.’

*A Morgan is a distinctly American breed of horse, said to be common in Vermont.

Before getting to the subject of this delightful little poem, I have to comment on form. Bear with me if this discussion makes your eyes glaze over, as it does for many, but for me, much of the delight of a poem is in form. This poem does not fit the pattern of any standard poetic form that I know about, but it appears to be a variation on the sonnet. The sonnet has 14 lines, usually with 3 groups of 4 lines and a couplet (2 lines) to conclude. Here in “The Runaway” we have 21 lines with a complex rhyme scheme. Using letters abcd to designate rhyming words at the end of the line, we find a pattern that appears to divide up the poem into three stanzas, as below, with a new set of rhymes marking the begnning of a new section. Try following it through for yourself —

stanza 1 (6 lines): ab/ac/bc The appearance of the colt (ends at “fled”)
stanza 2 (7 lines): abc/aa/bc The colt and the snow (ends at “know!”)
stanza 3 (8 lines): aa/bc/bc/dd the frightened colt and appeal to the owner [or 6 lines plus 2, if you wish]

Notice that as in a sonnet (though this is not a sonnet, strictly), the last two lines form a rhyming couplet that don’t rhyme with anything else in the poem. The couplet at the end of a sonnet was frequently the moral, or at least the “zinger” of the poem. The poet intends to draw our attention here; we’ll come back to this later.

Also notice that, as in the sonnet, the rhythm, with a few minor deviations, is iambic pentameter: ta-DAH ta-DAH ta-DAH ta-DAH ta-DAH. It’s a familiar rhythm if you’ve read Shakespeare, but what’s remarkable is how Frost can make such structured rhythmic poetry out of the daily language of everyday people. Nothing here sounds forced or artificial, torturing language in a Procrustean bed to make it fit the form and rhyme scheme. The language is relaxed and natural sounding, a realistic sound of everyday country folk out for a ride and talking about what they see. If you’re familiar with Frost’s “Death of the Hired Man,” you see the same thing there: a long conversation between a farming couple, relaxed and natural, but in iambic pentameter. Frost had a particular gift in this regard, seen in many of his poems.

Well, then, what to make of this scene about the lost colt? Most of the poem is what we expect from Frost: sharp observation, humor, affection for the land and living things. You want to smile at the picture of the young colt terrified by snowflakes, as he’s never seen snow. There is no reason to think the colt is in any real danger (“‘Sakes, it’s only weather!”), but his fright is real nonetheless, as much a product of his lack of experience as of the situation he’s in. The same unidentified voice as in lines 9-14 (presumably one of the narrator’s companions) returns at the end: whoever has left this colt out ought to be told to come and take him in. The poem ends without a response to this appeal, really just spoken to the other companions — the owner is not there.

Is there more to this poem than a delightful scene? Of course. Frost liked to style himself not as a symbolist or allegorist but as a “synecdochist,” referring to the poetic trope of synecdoche where a part represents the whole. In nearly all Frost’s poems, the whole poem can be seen as a small world which in some way points to or characterizes the whole real world. And so here as well. The real world is full of creatures like this runaway colt — creatures on two legs as well as on four — frightened, abandoned to the elements, not really comprehending what’s happening to them, and looking about for help but unsure if those they encounter are helpers or further dangers. Whoever left him out so late “ought to be told to come and take him in” — but there’s no such person around to whom one might direct this appeal.

Hidden in this humorous bucolic scene is Frost’s gentle complaint against God, who often seems to be absent in the face of suffering. This poem hints at a dark element in Frost’s work which is not not widely appreciated. Frost wasn’t above questioning whether all God’s works were lovely and kind (see “Design”), whether the world was a safe place (“Acquainted with the Night”), whether God’s intentions, or some of them, should provoke terror (“Once by the Pacific”). In this poem, there is humor, affection, and sharp observation in Frost’s account of the colt — but the last two lines suggest an unanswered question about why such an innocent creature should be left out frightened and alone. The colt is not about to die, but the anxiety of feeling alone and threatened in a world you don’t understand is just as real a form of suffering as a more tangible threat. And all of us some of the time — and some of us all the time — are as frightened and alone and uncomprehending as this lost colt, and whoever left us out is nowhere we can find to bring us back in. And the One who left us out in the cold, Frost gently suggests, needs to be told — “ought to be told” the poem says — to make it right. To admonish God is not only allowed but an obligation: He “ought to be told to come and take him in.”

What happens to the colt? As a story, the poem is open-ended, so we’re not told. Perhaps the owner will suddenly just appear and take the colt in — it’s possible. Or maybe the colt just stays out in the cold, alone and frightened. But there’s another possible ending, because there is someone else who is there: the “we” of the second line, the narrator and his or her companions who are watching the colt. And perhaps here lies the point: by all rights the colt’s owner, who got him in this situation, should come and take him in. But as the owner’s personal appearance seems unlikely, it falls to “us,” the ones who found the colt and saw his situation — we are the ones who ought to come and take him in. That would be the “neighborly” thing to do for the owner, who will be glad to have the colt back and safe, and the kind thing to do for the colt. And perhaps that is the point. We who come across the frightened creature can act in the owner’s place and bring him to safety, “take him in.”

Someone asked Mother Teresa how one can respond to a world with such an overwhelming amount of suffering. Her response: “Start with the one in front of you.”

One response to the Problem of Innocent Suffering is not philosophy or theology, but simple kindess. To see the lost colt, to take him to his home. Like the Gospel of Mark, the story in the poem is not finished because we must finish it.

Mark A Plunkett
Columbus, GA Feb 2023

Reflections on Robert Frost’s “The Silken Tent”

The Silken Tent

She is as in a field a silken tent

at midday when a sunny summer breeze

has dried the dew and all the ropes relent

so that in guys it gently sways at ease,

And its supporting central cedar pole,

that is its pinnacle to heavenward

and signifies the sureness of the soul

seems to own naught to any single cord,

but strictly held by none is loosely bound

by countless silken ties of love and thought

to everything on earth the compass round.

And only by one’s going slightly taut,

in the capriciousness of summer air

is of the slightest bondage made aware.

– Robert Frost

A poem written by a man in praise of a woman would seem to have the basic features of a love poem, but closer examination shows otherwise. There is no hint of any erotic relationship between the woman and the narrator; for all we know, the woman may be the narrator’s grandmother, or the narrator might also be a woman (note the female voice narrating Frost’s “Wild Grapes”). The real subject of this poem is not the woman as a lover but the qualities observed in her: a delicate tension, like that of a silken tent, between being oriented to the heavens and being bound to the earth. But, as the last line indicates, her being bound to the earth is not really “bondage” in the sense of constraint, but rather she is “loosely bound by countless silken ties of love and thought to everything on earth the compass round.” Though it shatters the realism of the image, this line expresses beautifully one of Robert Frost’s most oft-repeated themes: the natural world as the source of our strength (“supporting cedar pole”) and our authentic existence (“through ties of love and thought”). Thus, with neither cynicism nor sentimentality, Frost offers his alternative to the sterile artificiality of “civilization.” Indeed, this poem, in the end, turns out to be a love poem after all, of a deeper kind – a love poem for the earth. Here Frost speaks love which does not whisk us to heaven or isolate us in pairs, but delicately anchors us in the earth, by countless silken ties.

Mark Plunkett, 1994

submitted as part of my application to Case Western Medical School

with minor revisions July 2018

The Road Not Taken, by Robert Frost

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Robert Frost’s most famous poem is also his most misunderstood, starting from the almost universal misquoting of the title: “The Road Not Taken,” not “The Road Less Traveled.” The poem, it turns out, is not really about taking roads no one else has taken but is really a reflection on all those other roads we could have taken.

As usual, Frost begins not with ethereal reflections on ‘life’ but with concrete observations about a mundane affair: traveling through the woods and encountering a fork in the road. The word ‘traveler’ in the third line is important, because here we have not someone casually perusing local woods that he can go back to again and again but someone on a journey. No signposts are mentioned, the traveler simply has to pick one. But picking a road means going one place, not going another place. How to choose? He can see a little ways down the road, but where the road ultimately leads, who knows?

So the traveler chooses, imagining that he might travel the other road some other day, but on reflection notes that this is really impossible: ‘way leads on to way,’ one road leads to another, and having traveled on, this particular choice will never come up again.

In the last stanza the poet imagines himself telling the story of his journey long afterwards and reflecting on the critical choice he made, and he offers an explanation: he chose the road less traveled by. So as a storyteller, our traveler makes himself out as a rugged individualist who picked a path precisely because few had taken that path.

What is interesting here is that, as in several of Frost’s poems (I’m thinking of “Mending Wall”), there is a contradiction between the memorable conclusion and the rest of the poem. When we go back to our traveler standing at the fork in the road, he notes that one road had “perhaps the better claim, because it was grassy and wanted wear,” but in fact “the passing there had worn them really about the same.” Indeed, he goes on to note that “both that morning equally lay in leaves no step had trodden black.” So the road he chose was not, in fact, the road less traveled. The roads were the same, and since he had to pick one, he picked one. But the choice was in fact not a matter of some high principle, it was essentially arbitrary, a coin-flip, but one that determined the rest of his journey.

Now it is true that Robert Frost was proud of his stance as a rugged individualist who refused to follow the crowd, and any number of other poems preach this approach to life (“The Lone Striker,” “Into the Woods,” and many others). He was indeed exactly the kind of person who would have chosen a road precisely because no one else was going that way. But in this poem Frost turns his dry, teasing sense of humor against himself, imagining himself telling his life story as an application of his personal philosophy of not following the crowds. But the poem gives him away: nothing so grand as following the road less traveled was happening, just a more or less arbitrary choice: “what the heck, I’ll go this way.”

“The Road Not Taken” is, in part, about how we construct stories to make sense of and justify the course of our lives. It doesn’t feel quite right to describe the course of your life as determined by arbitrary decisions, so we concoct stories that make the course of our lives seem determined by high-minded principles (whether it’s rugged individualism or whatever principles you like), as if it had to be this way, had to turn out the way it did. But it’s not true. That other road was wide open, and we could have taken it. It all could have been different, a completely different journey, a completely different life.

So the poem is a gentle rebuke against our tendency to tell our stories and view our lives through the filter of some self-congratulatory lens that makes everything determined by high-minded principles. No better is the unbiblical notion that “God has a plan for your life,” that God has already laid out the map for all these forks in the road and your current journey was picked out by him in advance, so that the story of your life becomes the story of your correct and faithful reading of all God’s signposts – a more subtle but spiritually arrogant misreading of one’s own life. There are many forks in the road for all of us, no obvious way to choose between them, and at any of them we could have chosen another road. It all could have been different.

I remember as a high school senior deciding between going to TCU or to Transylvania for college. Nothing earth-shaking or grand here, everyone goes through this. But reflecting on the consequences of this one decision illustrates Frost’s point about how ‘way leads on to way.’ Going to TCU set the rest of my journey in more ways than I can count: exploring religion and psychology with Ken Lawrence, biblical theology with Bill Baird, from there going to graduate school in biblical studies, and also the people I befriended, meeting my first wife at TCU and the children we had together, and now grandchildren. Everything in my life, it seems, followed one way or another from that simple choice: TCU in Fort Worth or Transylvania in Lexington? If I try to re-imagine my life along that other road – what if I had gone to Transylvania? – it all would have been different: different family, different children and grandchildren, different career path. Would it have been a better life? A worse life? Who knows? Could I get a ‘do-over’ if I wanted to, and go back to take the other road? No, even if I enrolled at Transylvania, today, it’s obviously not the same thing. Frost was right: way leads on to way, and there’s no going back.

Realizing the consequences of such decisions can be paralyzing when you’re standing there at the cross-roads. How am I going to choose? What if I pick the wrong road? Especially for young people, it can feel like the weight of the world on you to realize what’s at stake when you make these choices: take this job or that one, move or stay here, go to college here or there, marry this person or that one or no one for now, buy this house or not, keep this job or switch. It is tempting to fall back on one of various schemes to put responsibility for choosing on someone other than myself, whether this means grand principles or thinking God is going to make the decision for me. These approaches are false, inauthentic, because as tempting as it is in decision-making, and consoling as it is in hindsight as a storyteller, to attribute our choices of road to grand principles or divine guidance, these approaches disguise the real situation, which is that the course of our lives depends on choices made by us, and no one but us, without being able to see precisely where the road is going.

Authenticity means seeing things as they are, that our entire lives in past and present could have been entirely different than they are, and that our life in front of us could go any of various directions but when faced with choices we can only see a little down the road. To accept this is to acknowledge ourselves as human, mortal, able to see only from where we stand and unable to see all roads at once.

The authentic approach to life is part of what it means to have faith: not that God has made all these decisions for me but that whichever road I take, God is with me and I am with God. Should I pray for guidance at the crossroad? Of course. Should I use my best observation and judgment to weigh different roads in front of me? Should I choose in a way that I remain faithful to God, to my family, to my community, to my country and the human race? Of course. But all those high-sounding notions don’t necessarily result in an arrow pointing down one fork in the road. Most of the time, ‘both roads equally lay,’ and we just have to choose.

So choose. Bonhoeffer described faith as ‘throwing oneself into life,’ and so we must, taking a road without looking back, trusting to God for faithfulness along the road we’re on, trusting God that even if we can’t go back, we can make course corrections along the way. And in faith we can look back over our lives authentically, that even though (for better or worse) it all could have been different, we can be grateful for the blessings we have and not bitter over the roads not taken, humble in the grace that has brought us safe so far, even with momentous but arbitrary choices, rather than constructing self-serving accounts of how our grand principles have put us on a predetermined path and outcome.

It all could have been different, and who knows what’s down the road, but in the end what matters most is not which road we take but our faithfulness along the road we take.

Mark A Plunkett
Columbus, GA

2017

Human and Divine Love and Yeats’ Girl with the Yellow Hair (“For Anne Gregory”)

For Anne Gregory

“NEVER shall a young man,
Thrown into despair
By those great honey-coloured
Ramparts at your ear,
Love you for yourself alone
And not your yellow hair.’

“But I can get a hair-dye
And set such colour there,
Brown, or black, or carrot,
That young men in despair
May love me for myself alone
And not my yellow hair.’

“I heard an old religious man
But yesternight declare
That he had found a text to prove
That only God, my dear,
Could love you for yourself alone
And not your yellow hair.”

–W. B. Yeats

I’ve always loved this poem. Yeats has a wonderful way with words: concise but eloquent, few words but the right ones. But most of all is the discovery that on close observation there’s more here than a pretty girl with yellow hair.

The narrator warns her that no young man will be able to love her “for herself alone and not her yellow hair.” It’s a mixed message: her beauty will be striking enough to throw young men into despair, but her beauty will also be a barrier of sorts, preventing anyone from seeing past her hair to seeing her. So in the middle stanza she objects to this arrangement; she wants to be loved for herself alone, not her yellow hair. And who could blame her? Who wants to be loved because of some external feature, like a room decoration? She even suggests altering this one distinctive feature of hers, her hair color, precisely so anyone who loves her will love her, not her hair.

And this is where the twist comes: the narrator says it won’t work – even if she dyes her hair, people will love her for her yellow hair. How is that? How is it that with her hair dyed black, people will still love her for her yellow hair? Something else is going on here.

The key is deciding just what is meant by “yourself alone” and just what her yellow hair signifies. The yellow hair is clearly a synecdoche, a figure of speech where a part stands for the whole. She may dye her hair, but her beauty, of which the yellow hair was simply a part, remains.

But she need not give up her appropriate wish to be loved for herself alone, for there is one, and only one, who can and will love her for herself alone, and that is God. This is no small consolation, and we’ll come back to it. But why does it take God to love her for herself alone? Why couldn’t some faithful human lover, who knows her well and cares for her as a person, love her for herself alone?

I doubt Yeats had any particular biblical text in mind that his “old religious man” discovered, but I think the story of Samuel choosing David (1 Sam 17) illustrates well the biblical idea behind Yeats’ reflections on love. Samuel is instructed to go to one of the sons of Jesse and anoint a king for Israel. At God’s direction, Samuel passes over David’s older brothers, who have all the visible characteristics of sturdy manhood, but Samuel is commanded to anoint David, the scrawny youngest brother. The explanation is that “the LORD does not look at the things humans look at. Humans look at the outward appearance, but the LORD looks at the heart.” (1 Sam 16:7). The story of David and Goliath in 1 Sam 17 shows that Samuel chose right.

“Humans look at the outward appearance, but the LORD looks at the heart.” This is why God can love her for herself alone, and why humans cannot.  For “herself alone” is essentially what the Bible calls the “heart,” the inmost self, the real self where one’s true inclinations and loyalties lie.  None of us can really see the heart of another. You can hardly be sure of what’s in your own heart without self-deception. So the desire to be loved for yourself alone, while understandable, is doomed to disappointment among humans.  You can be married for fifty years and not really know what it is in the heart of the person next to you.  We humans look at the outer appearance because that’s all we have access to.  What else are we supposed to look at?  Human love is inevitably what the Greeks called eros.

Erotic love (eros) in the original sense is not strictly sexual love but any kind of love that is evoked by the characteristics of the beloved. We may love a lover for their beauty, a landscape for its majesty, a food for its taste, a friend for their personality. Even love for a person based on what modern folk would say is “on the inside” – their personal qualities – is still erotic love, because it’s based on inferences from the externals: what people say and do. We can only infer, not see, what’s inside another. Erotic love is not to be despised because it’s based on externals: it’s simply the love humans are capable of.

So there’s no point castigating the young men in despair who love her for her yellow hair. Indeed the whole poem is intended as a kind of elaborate compliment to the young daughter of Yeats’ friend, as if to say, “you’re beautiful, and you might as well get used to the fact that no one can look at you and not see it.” No one ever accused W.B. Yeats of denigrating human beauty and erotic love. Nor should he. All beauty, along with excellence of any kind, belongs to the goodness of the created order, and appreciating it glorifies God.

But there’s more. The girl’s objection in the middle stanza suggests that as fine as erotic love is, we humans long for something more, to be “loved for myself alone.” No other human, Yeats suggests, will ever be able to do this. And in this respect it turns out that Anne Gregory’s predicament is no different than anyone else’s, for all of us, whether or not we have fine yellow hair, have characteristics that people may (or may not) love us for, but it won’t be our real selves, our “self alone.” There is only One who loves us for ourselves alone, the One who has searched us and known us (Ps 139). When human love fails, or at least fails to reach our real selves, it is the divine love that sustains us.

Mark Plunkett, Columbus GA Jan 2016