THE MEASURE OF MEANING: THE CONCEPT OF ORDER IN THE POETRY OF ROBERT FROST

The driving force presented in Robert Frost's poetry is the urge toward self-preservation. Nature, on the other hand, is motivated by an unappeasable urge to destroy man. Consequently, Frost's world-view is both dualistic and agonistic, involving an unremitting battle between man and nature. Ultimately, this battle becomes subsumed under another, more potent one: the battle between man's will to order and nature's pervasive chaos. Though Frost presents order in tangible physical terms as a defined, delimited enclosure, his primary concern is intellectual: to define the nature of order as a condition of the human mind.;Yet, if one can extract from Frost's poetry a detailed and synthetic theory of order, one can also extract a unified critique of this theory. For, in addition to his urge for self-preservation, man has another urge as profound: the urge to discovery. Though it might, initially, seem that order is an adjunct to knowledge, in fact, order stands between him and a higher, more inclusive perception of Truth. Founded on limit, order necessarily excludes from its province a coherent perception of the Whole.;In the light of the will to knowledge, order undergoes a complete de-valuation. Rather than shelter, order becomes prison, exercising on man a stifling and enervating influence. In addition, the conflict between man and nature, order and chaos, is subsumed under a larger, more inclusive dialectic that becomes Frost's ultimate theme: the conflict between order and Truth.;There are, however, larger metaphysical and epistemological implications to Frost's critique. Enclosure, the image of order, becomes a metaphor for the confinement of consciousness to a limited, spatially derived frame of reference. Conversely, the Infinite, the image of Truth, represents the mind's transcendence of this frame. Insofar as Frost uses a spatial image to convey the idea of transcendence, Frost implicitly demonstrates its unattainability.;One can, in fact, extract from Frost's poetry a coherent and unified theory of order based on the idea of limit and relation. The physical enclosures within Frost's poems represent order's protective efficacy: through order, man fights nature and overcomes its manic urge to destroy him.