Paul Muldoon

excerpt from The End Of the Poem: "The Mountain" by Robert Frost

The sense of the phrase "The End of the Poem" on which I'll focus here has to do with the influence of one poem on another within the body of work of a single poet, whereby the "gaps" or "blanks" in one poem are completed or perfected by another--whereby what is missing in "The Mountain," for example, is also bodied out in "Directive"--and that the "body" of the work is indivisible from the "body" of the poet.

That this consideration of what is missing might be one of the "subjects" of "The Mountain" is signaled from the outset:

The mountain held the town as in a shadow.
I saw so much before I slept there once:
I noticed that I missed stars in the west

The very first line contains another clue to the secret life of "The Mountain," part of which has to do with Frost's own name. We'll meet the poet's name more obviously in lines 50-54, where the "man who moved so slow" is describing a stream:

'One of the great sights going is to see
It steam in winter like an ox's breath,
Until the bushes all along its banks
Are inch-deep with the frosty spines and bristles--
You know the kind.'

In line 1, there is already a cryptocurrent of Frost's name, missing like the "stars in the west," since another way of rendering the first image would be "The town was in the lee of the mountain," an idea substantiated by lines 5-6:

I felt it like a wall
Behind which I was sheltered from the wind.

The speaker of the poem, a speaker not unlike the historical character Robert Lee Frost, named after the historical character, General Robert E. Lee, is announcing from the outset that a major concern of this poem will be one thing being overshadowed by, or sheltering behind, another--town overshadowed by mountain, writer overshadowed by writer, poem overshadowed by poem. Let's look again in detail at those first two lines. The first thing to be said about the opening words "The mountain" is that we've just had them, in the title of the poem. The second thing to be said is that these two words don't quite mean the same thing to the reader who meets them in this somewhat similar, but slightly different, context of the opening line. What has happened? At least two events have taken place, I suggest. To begin with, the repetition of the title confirms its significance as the title, that this title belongs to that class of titles which act as signposts, pointing as this one does towards the significance of "The Mountain" as the central focus of the poem, a significance underscored by line 28:

The mountain stood there to be pointed at.

The second thing that has happened is that the phrase "the mountain" has a new context in terms of rhythm. You'll notice that line 28 falls into what will, by the time we reach it, have emerged as the dominant metrical pattern of the poem, the unrhymed iambic pentameter, what we term blank verse. As usual, I appeal to the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetic Terms for the scuttlebutt on "blank verse":

Blank verse first appeared in Italian poetry of the Renaissance as an unrhymed variant of the endecasillabo, then was transplanted to England as the unrhymed decasyllabic or iambic pentameter... "Blank" as used of verse (the earliest OED citation is by Nashe in 1589) suggests a mere absence (of rhyme)... One associates rhyme with symmetries and closures. Omission of rhyme, by contrast, encourages the use of syntactic structures greater and more various than could be contained strictly within the line, and so makes possible an amplitude of discourse, a natural-seeming multiformitiy, not easily available to rhymed verse.

So spiny and bristling is Robert Lee Frost that, rather than establish a pattern in line 1, say, and break with it in line 2, he prefers to do the opposite, so that it's only in line 2-3 that the iambic pentameter is set up:

I saw so much before I slept there once:
I noticed that I missed

Now, I want to try to connect two of the key elements mentioned in that definition of blank verse--"absence" and "omission"--with the "absences" and "omissions" which are the subject matter of the poem, and to suggest that the "blank" form of the poem is indivisible from its "blank" content.

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Paul Muldoon, who was born in Northern Ireland in 1951, is the author of eight collections of poetry. His Poems 1968-1998 is due from Farrar, Straus & Giroux in April 2001. He is Howard G. B. Clark '21 Professor in the Humanities at Princeton University and Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford. contents | previous