I'm taken, as I so often am with Frost, by the fact that every time I read this I find new shades of meaning. The progression you observed from complexity to simplicity, and from the not-so-quiet rhetoric of the first quatrain to what Sharon referred to as a "quiet" tone, seems to follow the shift in focus from the male narrator, with his capacity for articulation and his complex capacity for both skepticism and belief (would declare and *could* himself believe) to Eve's stereotypically feminine "eloquence so soft."
All of which leads me to wonder whether, as in some of his other poems, Frost was writing about the abstract and emotional, the musical, elements that differentiate poetry from prose, that constitute "tone of meaning but without the words," and which become part of the language of the multiplicity. Cf. the "bird of loudest lay" in the Phoenix and the Turtle--herald sad and trumpet to those "whose chaste wings obey."
I'd love to see the other poem of the pair.
Josh
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