My thanks also to Sharon for posting "The Most of It." The two poems side by side offer some of Frost's most revealing reflections on the subject of gender. Close reading could find many echoes of these themes in other Frost poems. For example in "Come In," I have long been struck by how feminine the bird voice seems, how Frost places in opposition a masculine outer world and a feminine inner one, the impenetrable thicket from which the sweet song comes. Evidently, for him, the gulf between the sexes was very wide indeed. Femininity is an alien (avian) presence that invites and repulses simultaneously. Yet without it, he cannot feel complete. He needs that "counter-love, original response," which he had seemingly not found in his marriage.
Answering your final questions, Sharon, might require more amateur psychopoetics than I would care to venture. Still, it is tempting to regard the buck as an idealized self-visualization for an old man infatuated with a brilliant, much younger woman.
Alan
[This message has been edited by Alan Sullivan (edited 09-03-2000).]
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