Hello MaryAnn,

I was afraid you might ask.

I confess that I have always viewed the poem from a straightforward and "serious" angle from the first time I read it till now. If what you suggest is true then I would have to agree with those critics that you mention. If the most skillful and,(in my opinion), most compelling part of the entire poem is really intended as a form of subtle sarcasm and that Frost is revealing his true intention and meaning only at the end and actually dissing the ideas and poetics he seems to have skillfully assembled, then why bother? This attitude belittles the effort and seems to defile the work.

I took a quick look at the time lines between Charles Darwin, and Frost.
It's clear that Frost was an admirer of Darwin and his theory of Evolution but it's also clear that he was and remained a dualist:

Stanlis, Peter J. Robert Frost: the Poet as Philosopher
American Midland Naturalist, The, April, 2008 by: Stephen Curley


"Frost saw metaphor as the springboard to understanding--it is for him the language of revelation"

".... Peter Stanlis, a retired humanities professor and leading authority on Edmund Burke, constructs a painstaking step-by-step argument--a corrective to Thompson's damning misapprehension--that reveals dualism behind Frost's every poem and utterance. First, Stanlis gives us some background in the history of ideas. Philosophical dualism, the dominant Western philosophy up to the Eighteenth Century, posits a reality consisting of matter and mind (Frost preferred to use the term "spirit" for the latter). Early Greeks were monists who saw reality as either matter or mind: for instance, Lucretius was a materialist; Plato, an idealist. Each strained to interpret all phenomena in terms of a single unifying theory. Then came Aristotle who regarded both matter and spirit as permanently in conflict and co-existent. Frost found Aristotle's outlook more congenial. The dualistic philosopher, Frost said, operates as an impartial judge who weighs conflicting claims from both sides of the case. Frost strived to maintain that balancing act in what he saw as a world of irreconcilable opposites: good-evil, justice-mercy, church-state, free will-necessity, objective-subjective, space-time and the like.

By the end of the Nineteenth Century science had emerged as the approach that would eventually lead to understanding everything. Frost, a die-hard humanist, countered claims made for the all-inclusiveness of science, which he categorized as "merely one of the humanities." He often quoted the dictum of Samuel Taylor Coleridge that in order to enter a work of art one had first to willingly suspend disbelief. In other words, faith is prerequisite to understanding: we believe in order to understand. In that sense, said Frost, "Art is closer to religion than it is to science, because it is necessary to believe in a subject or situation in order to understand it, and not make rational understanding the basis of belief." Frost agreed with C.P. Snow that science and humanities were two cultures. Science describes physical phenomena; it cannot create normative principles in ethics, aesthetics or religion. Science and religion are two contrary ways to understand reality. In the end any apparent contradiction, when properly considered, between true religion and true science will disappear.

Nowhere is that more evident than in Darwin's evolution. Frost called evolution "a very brilliant metaphor"--high praise from a poet who believed that all sound thinking is metaphorical. His own exploration of reality through story may also help explain why Frost much preferred the narrative version in Voyage of the Beagle to the more theoretical version in Origin of Species. As a poet, Frost saw metaphor as the springboard to understanding--it is for him the language of revelation. (Darwin once said that after a lifetime of thinking about science he had lost his taste for reading poetry, which had given him so much pleasure in his youth; Frost found that admission unspeakably sad.) The problem lies not with Darwin's theory but its abuse in the hands of smaller minded people like Tyndall, Spencer, Wells--and most especially--T. H. Huxley who molded science into a golden calf or god to be worshipped. Frost denigrated Huxley's uncritical faith in the absolute power of science as "scientism." Despite what Huxley claimed, Darwin was not a social Darwinist, nor did he emphasize progress of the species. According to Frost, human beings do not progress in any fundamental sense: technology, though it ameliorates conditions, makes it no easier for us to be decent, uphold our integrity and attain salvation. Frost objected to purely mechanical evolution; in fact he objected to anything that purports to explain all of reality in a single unified theory. The metaphorical complexity of Frost's dualism in regard to evolution may be seen in his half-humorous statement that "God made man out of prepared mud"

It seems likely that Frost is trying to make a serious philosophical point using the the extended metaphor of "assorted characters of death and blight...like the ingredients of a witches broth" to make it. My vote says he is dead serious and believes in a dualistic world where good and evil battle it out.



Eljem