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A Terrifying Design
Robert Frost’s Darkness to Appall
In my last essay, I looked at how the great American poet of the last century, Robert Frost — that Yankee poet who seemed to be equal parts homespun, sagacious, and reassuring — quietly harbored a dark and even terrifying view of human existence. He had suffered much in his personal life and that bled into his worldview which bled into his poetry. The essay is here.
What Frost did not suffer was self-pity. Or self-delusion. When he looked at the water at the bottom of a well, he stared long and hard until he saw something beyond his own image on the surface. When he recalled helping a fledgling bird on an outing with his child, a sentimental memory became a pained insight. But he never flinched from looking, and he shared with us in plain language what he saw, hinting at the secrets we unknowingly dance around and the hard truths too sad to face directly.
As I discussed last time, when the literary critic Lionel Trilling spoke about the terrifying reality he found just below the surface of Frost’s poetry, he pointed to two examples of Frost’s darkness that might keep you up at night. I previously discussed Neither Out Far nor In Deep, a poem about our heroically absurd efforts to find meaning in “the empty immensity of the universe,” as Trilling said.
The other sleep-disturber Trilling identified is the poem “Design.”
