In Robert Frost’s poem “New Hampshire,” published during the heyday of William Jennings Bryan’s crusade against the theory of evolution, a friendly farmer reports that “The matter with the Mid-Victorians / Seems to have been a man named John L. Darwin.”
Frost’s little joke is as much on Charles Darwin as it is on the state of New Hampshire: the farmer’s conflation of Darwin and the prizefighter John L. Sullivan is the poet’s wry comment on Darwin’s violent universe. In fact, as we learn from Lawrance Thompson’s massive biography of the poet, Frost’s sympathies during the Scopes Monkey Trial lay with Bryan; he thought Clarence Darrow lacked the imagination necessary to solve the riddle of human existence.
Yet Frost, as Robert Faggen demonstrates, was more troubled by Darwin than such mockery might suggest. Critics have made much of Frost’s interest in the theories of spiritual evolution offered by William James and Henri Bergson. But it was Darwin’s own bleak naturalism, Faggen insists, that cast the longest shadow on Frost’s poetry. As Faggen reminds us, one of Frost’s favorite books was The Voyage of the Beagle, which, along with The Origin of Species, he first read while studying geology at Harvard with Nathaniel Shaler, one of many turn-of-the-century modernists who attempted to harmonize evolutionary theory with Christian faith in a grand vision of human progress. But Frost would have none of Shaler’s utopianism, finding in Darwin, Faggen suggests, the same ancient wisdom he found in Job: the wisdom of meaningless suffering, of necessary limitation, of human ignorance.
Critics who read Frost as a religious poet—notably Dorothy Judd Hall and, more recently, Ed Ingebretsen, SJ – -also acknowledge these themes as part of Frost’s “grammar of belief.” As far as Faggen is concerned, however, reading Darwin made it all but impossible for Frost to believe in a benevolent deity. In his concluding paragraph, Faggen quotes Frost’s famous couplet “Forgive, O Lord, my little jokes on Thee / And I’ll forgive Thy great big one on me,” commenting that “the little jokes are the poems, which mock or question God’s power or morality; the big joke is that a creature came to exist that torments itself about a God that either doesn’t exist or is the demiurge in a wilderness of matter.” Talk about a Hobson’s choice.
The problem with Faggen’s grim conclusion is that it doesn’t square with his own account of Frost’s sense of the limits of human intelligence. As a student at Harvard, Faggen reminds us, Frost heard the idealist philosopher Josiah Royce lecture on the “paradox of evolution,” namely, that a creature evolved from matter should develop the capacity for knowledge in the first place. (Recently, the philosopher Alvin Plantinga has developed Royce’s paradox into an “evolutionary argument against naturalism”: if evolution is true, then naturalism is improbable, since our survival as a species can be explained without the assumption that we form true beliefs—including true belief in naturalism.) If Darwin taught Frost to be skeptical about human intelligence, as Faggen insists, wouldn’t Frost have kept the door to religious faith open?
Of course, one might question Faggen’s conclusion and still agree that “much of the tension and power of Frost’s poetry derives from his lifelong engagement with implications of science in general and of Darwin in particular.” The question is, How much? How much of Frost’s oeuvre is illuminated by reference to Darwin?
There are, to begin with, a few poems in which Darwinism is the explicit subject, notably “Accidentally on Purpose”:
They mean to tell us 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.
They mean to tell us, though,
the Omnibus
Had no real purpose till it got to us.
Never believe it . …
These poems, as Faggen admits, typically mock Darwinian orthodoxy.
A second class of poems includes those which, while they do not refer explicitly to Darwin or evolution, are meant to be read in the context of evolutionary theory. The well-known sonnet “Design” is a good example:
I found a dimpled spider, fat and white,
On a white heal-all, holding up a moth
Like a white piece of rigid satin cloth—
Assorted characters of death and blight
Mixed ready to begin the morning right,
Like the ingredients of a witches’ broth—
A snow-drop spider, a flower like a froth,
And dead wings carried like a paper kite.
What had that flower to do with
being white,
The wayside blue and innocent heal-all?
What brought the kindred spider to
that height,
Then steered the white moth hither in the night?
What but design of darkness to
appall?—
If design govern in a thing so small.
Here, Frost’s argument presupposes Darwin’s challenge to traditional theodicy. Faggen supplies a pertinent quotation from Darwin’s letters: “My theology is a simple muddle: I cannot look at the universe as the result of blind chance, yet I can see no evidence of beneficent design, or indeed of design of any kind, in the details.” It is tempting to think that Frost had this very letter in mind when he wrote “Design.”
A third class includes poems which, while they do not need to be read in conjunction with Darwin, nevertheless have their probable source in Darwin or his fellow naturalists. Take “The Oven-Bird”:
There is a singer everyone has heard,
Loud, a mid-summer and a mid-
wood bird,
Who makes the solid tree trunks
sound again.
He says that leaves are old and that
for flowers
Mid-summer is to spring as one to ten.
He says the early petal-fall is past,
When pear and cherry bloom went
down in showers
On sunny days a moment overcast;
And comes that other fall we name
the fall.
He says the highway dust is over all.
The bird would cease and be as
other birds
But that he knows in singing not to sing.
The question that he frames in all
but words
Is what to make of a diminished thing.
As Faggen points out, there are passages on the oven-bird in The Voyage of the Beagle as well as in John Burroughs’s Ways of Nature, a book Frost also admired. The passage from Burroughs, which describes the oven-bird as “a very prosy, tiresome, unmelodious singer,” is the probable source of Frost’s poem.
Finally, there are poems for which Darwin is not a likely source, but which bear comparison with Darwinian images or concepts. Recall one of Frost’s best-known poems, “The Road Not Taken”:
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other … .
Here is Faggen’s attempt to connect the poem to Darwin:
This psychological representation of the developmental principle of divergence strikes to the core of Darwinian theory. Species are made and survive when individuals diverge from others in a branching scheme, as the roads diverge for the speaker. … Though the problem of making a choice at a crossroads is almost a commonplace, the drama of the poem conveys a larger mythology by including evolutionary metaphors and suggesting the passage of eons [“I shall be telling this with a sigh / Somewhere ages and ages hence”].
In this case, alas, Faggen’s commentary strikes me as more ingenious than illuminating.
To return, then, to the question posed above: How much of Frost’s oeuvre is illuminated by reference to Darwin? Certainly Faggen’s research sheds new light on the first three classes of poems; his discovery of hitherto unsuspected Darwinian and other naturalistic sources stands as an original contribution to Frost scholarship. I am not so sure about the fourth class, where the relevance of Darwin is more tenuous. Here the reader may be left with the impression that Faggen sees Darwin lurking under every Frostian rock.
But if Robert Frost and the Challenge of Darwin is less persuasive than its author would hope—and more ponderous than it needs to be—it is still a timely book, one whose publication coincided with Stephen Jay Gould’s latest attack on what he labels “Darwinian fundamentalism.” (Faggen, it is worth noting, warmly acknowledges Gould’s encouragement and advice.) As Faggen reminds us, Frost, too, was a critic of orthodoxies, whether scientific or religious. If this skepticism left Frost without the consolation of faith in either humanity or God, as Faggen implies, it also kept him from succumbing to the pretensions of social Darwinism or liberal Protestantism. It is this sturdy skepticism regarding human pretension that, for Faggen, defines the wisdom of Frost’s poetry.
Mark D. Walhout is professor of English at Seattle Pacific University.
Copyright © 1999 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture Magazine. For reprint information call 630-260-6200 or e-mail bceditor@BooksAndCulture.com.
