by Chris Alexion, Copyright January 22, 2007, all rights reserved. 174 views
Both similarities and differences surface when we compare Frost to Puritan poets like Anne Bradstreet. Unlike most moderns, Frost is a friend to traditional meters, and often sets his poems to blank verse or even rhyme, as does Bradstreet. Yet Frost differs from Bradstreet in the content of his poetry. Family and love are much more prominent in Bradstreet. Frost rarely offers a love poem; other themes seem to stir him more. When Frost does speak of love, he does so tentatively, almost regretfully, as in "To Earthward": "Love at the lips was touch / As sweet as I could bear; / And once that seemed too much; / I lived on air."
Bradstreet, on the other hand, glorifies marital love and often writes of her husband. In one poem she thanks God for her husband's safe return from a voyage, and in another she mourns her loneliness (resulting from his death) in traditional iambic pentameter: "Phoebus make haste, the day's too long, begone, / The silent night's the fittest time for moan. . . . / Commend me to the man more lov'd than life, / Show him the sorrows of his widow'd wife . . ."
Frost's and Bradstreet's underlying religious philosophies also differ dramatically. Bradstreet, as a Puritan, descended from the Reformed or Calvinistic tradition of the sixteenth-century Protestant Reformation. Calvinism's strong view of Holy Scripture and the complete sovereignty of God over human affairs clearly had a powerful impact on her poetry. God is usually present, whether as the guiding principle of her thoughts or as the direct addressee of her poems, such as her prayer for her husband's safety. Biblical language and allusions are also key to Bradstreet's work. Her poem "The Vanity of All Earthly Things," for instance, versifies the major themes of the Old Testament book of Ecclesiastes.
Frost's religious views, on the other hand, are less clear. That Frost believes in a God is clear from his poems, but whether this belief is theistic or deistic is uncertain. Frost sarcastically dismisses the theory of materialistic evolution, noting that if Darwinism is correct,
. . . all was rolling blind
Till accidentally it hit on mind
In an albino monkey in a jungle,
And even then it had to grope and bungle,
Till Darwin came to earth upon a year
To show the evolution how to steer.
So while a creator of sorts is necessary for Frost, this creator seems distant, a figure to be referenced when appropriate but not a central concern of the poet. Frost wants to leave the question of God to "the scientific wits. / Grant me intention, purpose, and design– / That's near enough for me to the Divine." A sort of cynicism even envelops Frost's later poetry. "Design" describes Frost's chance observation of a white spider about to feast on a moth while perched on an albino flower. Frost is shocked by the role of white–supposedly the color of innocence–in this cruel scene, and wonders about the purpose of it all: "What brought the kindred spider to that height, / Then steered the white moth thither in the night? / What but design of darkness to appall? — / If design govern in a thing so small." Frost here flirts with fatalism, wondering whether man has any freedom from predestinating forces–forces that have none of the love and wisdom of Bradstreet's God.
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