Frost as a Poet of Nature
We can form an idea of Frost as a poet
of Nature from a study of the characteristics of his poetry. He can be called a
poet of Nature though not in the sense that Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, and
Keats were poets of Nature. He possessed an attitude to Nature entirely different
from theirs, though on the surface he resembled them to a great extent.
So overtly, Frost was a poet of Nature of
the local and the regional like Wordsworth. The hills, dales, rivers and
forests, flowers and trees and plants, birds, beasts, and even insects are
accurately and succinctly described in his poems. ‘A Hillside Thaw’ gives a
picture of the poet as if he were on his knees trying to feel with his hands
the process of snow turning into water. ‘Birches’ vividly depicts the habit and
the reactions of the birch trees to a storm.
Wordsworth looked upon the pleasant and
beneficial aspects of Nature, but Frost had a keen eye for the sensuous and
beautiful things in Nature as well as for the harsher and cruel and the
unpleasant. Lynen says, ‘Even in Frost’s most cheerful Nature sketches there is
always a bitter sweet quality. Admittedly he can and does enjoy Nature’. His
flowers and trees and animals are all described with affection, yet none of the
Nature poems is free from the hints of possible danger, under the placid
surface there is always the unseen presence of something hostile. ‘A Boundless
Moment’ gives us fresh glimpses of beauty:
Oh,
that is the Paradise-in-bloom, I said,
And
truly it was fair enough for flowers.
But ‘Spring Pools’ gives us a sense of
danger lurking behind the apparent beauty of pools and flowers:
The
trees that have it in their pent-up buds
To
darken nature and be summer woods.
Spring is traditionally a season of
birth, innocence and joy, but in this poem spring ushers in darkness.
Treacherous forces are forever breaking through the pleasant surface of the
landscape.
In the pantheistic poets of Nature,
personality is ascribed to her but Frost is different. He never sees in the
natural world the pervading spirit which Wordsworth saw.
Sometimes Frost speaks directly to
objects of Nature as does Wordsworth, but what is high seriousness in
Wordsworth is fancy or humour in Frost.
Briefly speaking, Frost exhibits an
ambivalent attitude to Nature-an attitude of love, of fear; love for its beauty
and fear for its sinister design. He draws beautiful pictures of Nature, its
flora and fauna, its birds and beasts, but behind them there lurks something
sinister, fearful and hostile to man.
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