March 26 marked the 146th birthday of Robert Frost. This made me think about revisiting some of his poetry, especially given these uncertain times, to hunt for perhaps, a different message, something that I might not have noticed before. Since Frost is known for his deceptive simplicity and understatement, one has to approach his poetry with both caution and a sense of abandon. That is how one experiences the cosmic sweep of his poetry.

Before I embark upon trying to read Frost’s poems anew in the present context, it would be instructive to say that his attitude towards nature is inspired by “practical idealism” presented in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Nature and Henry David Thoreau’s Walden. He does not baulk at espousing Tennyson’s view (expressed in In Memoriam) that nature shrieks against God’s law of universal human love, and is sometimes, “red in tooth and claw.” He prefers not to jump on Wordsworth’s bandwagon to worship Mother Nature unconditionally. In this context, it might not be surprising that the coronavirus issue demands a renewed critical engagement with Nature.

Desert Places is one of Frost’s signature poems. It scares you out of your wits unless you are a stickler for interpretation. My first hunch after reading this poem is that it is a fine example of objective correlative when it insists on gazing in on the internal ‘desert places’ instead of watching a sense of desolation in the outer environment. What makes it a typical Frost poem is the insistence of the first-person narrator that, he has his own subjective horrors to be scared of and he doesn’t need markers of fear and loneliness staged outside to be reminded of the horrors that exist. In my reading, it underscores the idea that fear is all subjective and congenital. Human beings are born with it.

Reading this poem in the days of the new pathogen plaguing our world, we observe that tropes of ‘snow’ and ‘woods’ instantly morph into the State’s measures of security and caution clamped on people everywhere.

Lines like “Snow falling and night falling fast, oh, fast,”

“The woods around it have it - it is theirs/All animals (read humans) are smothered in their lairs,”

“And lonely as it is, that loneliness/Will be more lonely ere it will be less”,

seem to press their sinister meaningfulness into contemporary readers’ minds. Those who know already that they have been grappling with demons inside them will be less scared these days.

Mending Wall has already been sufficiently unpeeled in terms of anti/pro-globalisation. At least, in the times of this new infectious agent, readers tend to endorse the narrator’s neighbour who moves in the darkness, with stones in hands, like “an old-stone savage armed” and “will not go behind his father’s saying” that “Good fences make good neighbors.” What is unsettling for Frost’s readers is that though he does not seem to be supporting either of his two characters in the poem, he begins it with a stunner of a line,

Does the world have to end in fire? Frost holds this view on the basis of what he has experienced: “From what I’ve tasted of desire / I hold with those who favor fire.”

“Something there is that does not love a wall.”

This “something,” it transpires later, is Nature that “spills the upper boulders” on the wall (separating the lands of two characters), “makes gaps,” and seems to be sending a message every Spring that “There where it is we do not need the wall.” With the current virus scourge in mind, we feel impelled to read that nature has suddenly changed its priorities and wants us to think that walls are good for humans (now). We need to carry our fences against our neighbours (as a precaution) wherever we go and live on our respective islands. Are we now practising Samuel Beckett’s view in Waiting for Godot?: “To every man his little cross. Till he dies. And is forgotten.”

An Old Man’s Winter Night is a poem sister to Desert Places in terms of its pitching an old man against the power and horror of nature. “All out of doors” that “look darkly in” at the old man in a farmhouse at night accumulatively constitute the natural phenomena. He is so old that his age keeps him “from remembering what it was/ That brought him to that creaking room.” He is set against “the roar of trees and crack of branches.” In order to assert his human power and presence, he scares the cellar under him and the outer night by clomping off here and there.

What is important to note is that “A light he was to no one but himself,” which means that he does not have the comfort of family life. He is one of many loners in Frost’s poetry peopled with lonely characters. In the wake of this pandemic, shall we think about the lonely old people who are already quarantined within their families with no one to talk to? Corona has brought them no surprises.

It would be remiss to overlook Fire and Ice that discusses, through apt metaphors, the disastrous consequences of human desire and apathy in tandem. The coronavirus calamity has brought to the fore, very effectively, that vanity and fire of the human desires have pushed this world to the brink of a catastrophe. That is why, the world has to end in fire. The poet holds this view on the basis of what he has experienced: “From what I’ve tasted of desire / I hold with those who favor fire.”

Now the lockdowns all over the world have brought the rush of human desire almost to a halt. The roads and shopping malls have been deserted and parks no more echo with children’s voices as if we had been hurled into a vacuum. The situation calls attention to the fact that keeping their lust for more and politics of territorial imperative aside, people, nations and countries need to get empathetic with one another in order to save the world from perishing twice. We had better heed now what Frost warned us about more than a century back:

But if it had to perish twice,

I think I know enough

of hate

To say that for

destruction ice

Is also great

And would suffice.