Frost's Poetry of Fear

Abstract

DOTH AS PRIVATE EXPERIENCE and as an intruder on marriage, JL)fear is a recurring theme in the poetry of Robert Frost. Since it is alien to love, it can threaten marriage through an outside person like the Stranger in Love and a Question, but his identity varies from poem to poem. Fear is also a private, singly-experienced thing, as in Old Man's Winter Night, a poem that sees fear as related to nature. Nature itself is not fear, nor does it know fear (unless, as with the Old Man, it is shocked at him), but fear can grow out of man's relationship with it. variant is the awe/fear response of human beings in the presence of nature as divinity (Going for Water), or it may be the threat of nature to reclaim human institutions-in various Frost poems nature fills in vacated cellar holes and abandoned roads. But in these matters human neglect is at fault, and the resulting fear is an unrealized expression of that fault. A Brook in the City is about urban neuroses, but we shall consider fear that relates to Frost's country things. This may be as it is experienced by persons together, or alone. An example of the former, Going for Water, tells the love-shared experience of nature as deity. On a cool autumn evening, a couple whose well has gone dry seek a brook in their woods. They run to meet the moonlight coming up out of the trees, but then pause within the shadow: And in the hush we joined to make/We heard, we knew we heard the brook.' poem depicts a shared awe in the presence of the stream nymph. couple were playing with the moon until they entered the darkness, which makes them listen for the brook before they look for it. They do so reverently, the mood in which one should meet nature. Failing in the proper encounter unbalances the awe and turns it into fear. Something close to such fear is experienced alone in The