The Cruelties of Succession

I Suggest That as Frost left behind the Derry friends who lacked his opportunities, and as he turned their hardship and poverty into his own success, he felt vulnerable to the charge of opportunism. Just as the lyric “Reluctance” calls it a “treason … to the heart” to “accept the end / Of a love or a season,” no matter how necessary that end may be, so we might imagine Frost’s own turning away from his Derry attachments, however right for himself and his family, to carry underlying feelings of betrayal.

“Nature is always more or less cruel,” Frost has said, illustrating his idea with the ruthless competition for light among forest trees. In portraying the struggle for survival and the particulars of natural succession, Frost’s lyrics often focus on the casualties of this process, making the corollary point that we, with our human awareness of mortality, rarely share nature’s indifference. To Frost’s perennial lyric persona, who readily identifies with other living things, who values them for their beauty, and who knows the mortal implications of all time and change, nature’s routine destructions often feel cruel, giving rise to tones of lament and complaint that border on accusation. In “The Oven Bird,” for example, the poem’s protagonist, a woodland warbler who “says” rather than sings his story of “diminished things” and clearly speaks for the poet, is strident and persistent in pointing out the losses brought on by the advancing season. Other poems articulate a more direct resistance. The speaker of “A Leaf Treader” hears the autumn leaves “threatening under their breath” as they fall, feels their “will to carry me with them to death,” and pushes back: “But it was no reason I had to go because they had to go. / Now up my knee to keep on top of another year of snow.”

Still other poems offer tones that subtly undercut an ostensible acceptance of nature’s way. From the first line of “Spring Pools,” for example, the speaker understands that an exquisite moment in early spring — the meeting of sky and flowers in the reflecting surface of forest pools — cannot last, for the trees overhead will need all their water to produce another year’s leaves.