Well...golly.
This is a much stronger poem. I have been going through this for about 90 minutes and it keeps improving. The analysis I offered above, I believe, is still valid as observation...but not as critique. The choices Frost made in the fifth section were artful, not naive.
There is a shape to this cycle: the punch is in the IIIrd middle section. Bracketed by two more lyrical, but less intense, sections-- and further enveloped by the outer sections, which are parodies of the wife and husband, respectively. The (truly) flat writing I detected in section five, and the (clumsy) meter are representative of the husbands stolidity and confusion.
And this:
One ought not to have to care
So much as you and I
...can you imagine Frost beginning a lyric poem in his own voice with a line (only the opening clause in a longer sentence) as dreadful as that!? This is truly awful-- but it represents "her word", and suggests that the young wife is a shade more sophisticated than her mate-- not really, though...just compared to him. She's even more wordy than him-- the lines alternate Tetra- and Trimeter, as opposed to Tetra- and Dimeter.
On another thread, I posed as an open question whether Frost could handle a literary assignment with the kind of scope tackled by Yeats and Eliot-- perhaps this goes some way toward it. A very ambitious poem, and mostly successful.
I have misgivings about placing the strongest part in the middle. It's something Mozart always did-- in Mozart's day music was always realised in live performance, and only infrequently. By Beethoven's time, recording was an idea (B. composed for "player-pianos") and regular professional repetory orchestras were becoming common-- Beethoven preferred a strong climax. What do you think?
My take on the poem is that the vagrant may have something more to do with this...there is a hidden seduction/abduction theme-- which would (either way) explain why the husband actually couldn't find her.
Section III may be a snub at Williams...it's the poem WCW wished he could write. (Sec. I might be a slap at Stevens...I believe they didn't like each other, and it has some of Stevens artificial verbosity). II could have been written by Robinson, but that may be EA Poe on both of them.
Thoroughly enjoying this, though it hasn't satisfied all my misgivings about Frost (I still think he's yesterday's man).
Anyone to comment on "Thawing Wind".
[This message has been edited by MacArthur (edited May 03, 2001).]
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