“The Trial by Existence” is an example of Robert Frost’s strong and brilliant reworking of Dante’s poetic tradition in his own work. He incorporates many of Dante’s images, but he also pushes past the ending silence of “Paradiso” by making the incarnate Christ the sight at the top of the mountain.
But God’s own descent
Into flesh was meant
As a demonstration
That the supreme merit
Lay in risking spirit
In substantiation.
Spirit enters flesh
And for all it’s worth
Charges into earth
In birth after birth
Ever fresh and fresh.
We may take the view
That its derring-do
Thought of in the large
Is one mighty charge
On our human part
Of the soul’s ethereal
Into the material.
– Robert Frost, from Kitty Hawk1
As a man steeped in the poetic tradition, Robert Frost had a deep regard and appreciation for Dante’s work. Scholar John Serio has discovered that Frost had at least four copies of the Divine Comedy in his personal library in both poetry and prose translations, and he has noted numerous Dantean resonances in Frost’s own work.2 However, Frost does not simply translate Dante into his modern poetry unchanged. Instead, Frost models a creative engagement with Dante’s work that boldly reworks classic images and motifs from the Divine Comedy and even subtly criticizes aspects of it.
A key divergence between the two poets is their philosophical approach to Christianity. Dante famously uses the Roman and pagan Virgil as his poet-guide through the Christian Hell and Purgatory. As a devout Catholic, he wrote within a tradition that sought to bring Platonic and Aristotelian philosophy into a synthesis with the Christian faith, and this attempt at harmonization is evident within his poetic work. While Frost’s religious identity is much more obscure, his approach to Christianity was from a radically different angle. In a letter to his friend G.R. Elliot, Frost wrote: “I am an orthodox Old Testament, original Christian,” and “My approach to the New Testament is rather through Jerusalem than through Rome or Canterbury.”3 Frost is strongly opposed to the dis-embodied, anti-material strain of thought that he finds in Greek philosophy and thinks is at least sometimes carried over into Christian theology and poetic imagination. He explicitly criticizes this tendency in Dante in his letters and implicitly does so in his own poetry.
Frost is attracted instead to the relentless concreteness and immanent divinity of the Old Testament: the God who walks in the garden, appears in the burning bush and at Sinai, and reveals His name to a nation inextricably linked to shepherding and agriculture. He also finds Christ as God-in-the-flesh to be an irrevocable affirmation of the material world and focuses on incarnation and kenosis in his interaction with Dante’s poetry, ultimately moving into a highly sacramental vision of the world and human life.
I. Frost’s Letters and Essays
In Frost’s letter to Robert P.T. Coffin, he explains his disagreement with Platonic philosophy and its relation to his criticism of Dante:
“I am not [a] Platonist…. By Platonist I mean one who believes what we have here is an imperfect copy of what is in heaven. The woman you have is an imperfect copy of some woman in heaven or in someone else’s bed…. I am philosophically opposed to having one Iseult for my vocation and another for my avocation…. You see where that lands me on the subject of Dante’s Beatrice. Mea culpa.4
He goes on to say that a consistent and “truly gallant Platonist will remain a bachelor,” since the flesh-and-blood woman will be reduced to “being used without being idealized.”5 Frost believes that a dualistic philosophical framework, where spirit is opposed to and superior to matter, will result in a certain depersonalization. One is incapable of entering into a truly loving and fruitful relationship with another person as a physical being if one is only using their materiality as a springboard to the real thing, which is a kind of abstract spiritual reality akin to Plato’s world of the Forms. This is the problem that Frost sees with Beatrice, who is a spiritualized version of a real woman and, in the poem, acts as this kind of springboard to the divine. Rather unsettlingly, Dante only had brief encounters with the actual Beatrice but chose to idealize her in his poetry despite the fact that he was married to a different woman; Frost in fact seems to allude to this uncomfortable fact in his remark about a man preferring “a woman in heaven” to “the woman [he] has,” hinting that this is a nearly adulterous preference.6 Frost is concerned with this spiritualized objectification of the world, in which materiality is used to access the divine and then discarded, and the danger that this dualistic divorce can pose to the poet who sees his work as a spiritual vocation. If a poet wishes to initiate his readers into divine mysteries, does this mean that he must thus reject or objectify the material world and physical nature of humanity?
In Education by Poetry, Frost explains the nature of his own poetic vocation. Rather than a divorce between them, Frost seeks to bring about a marriage between matter and spirit. He writes:
“Greatest of all attempts… is the philosophical attempt to say matter in terms of spirit, or spirit in terms of matter, to make the final unity. That is the greatest attempt that ever failed. We stop just short there. But it is the height of poetry, the height of all thinking, the height of all poetic thinking, that attempt to say matter in terms of spirit and spirit in terms of matter” (italics mine).7
Frost’s reference to the “greatest attempt that ever failed” and that poets “stop just short” of saying spirit in terms of matter seems to be a veiled reference to the end of Paradiso. In the final canto, Dante the pilgrim sees a vision of God in philosophical terms. His description of God as “eternal Light” recalls Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, and the lines “[You abide] in yourself alone / knowing yourself alone, and, known to yourself / and knowing, love and smile upon yourself” echoes Aristotle’s definition of God as thought thinking itself.8 Dante moves towards what could be a more fleshly vision when he focuses on the middle circle of the incarnate Son. He says that it seems “to be painted with our human likeness,” and he wants to understand “how our image fuses / into the circle and finds its place in it,” that is, he wants to know how it is that matter and divinity can be reconciled.9 However, although Dante says that he was given a flash of insight, he does not actually depict the incarnate Christ. His greatest attempt of poetry falls short of making this “final unity.” Dante writes, “My wings were not meant for such a flight…. / Here powers failed my high imagination,” and ends with the gorgeous but admittedly not very material description of God as the “Love that moves the sun and the other stars.”10
Frost is not satisfied with this apophatism. As a writer with a strong feeling of vocation, he feels a burden to “make this final unity” as the height of his poetic work. Later in the same essay, he defends himself against the objection that this union entails a kind of materialism:
“It is wrong to call anybody a materialist simply because he tries to say spirit in terms of matter, as if that were a sin. Materialism is not the attempt to say all in terms of matter. The only materialist… is the man who gets lost in his material without a gathering metaphor to throw it into shape and order. He is the lost soul.”11
Frost is careful to clarify that unifying the spiritual and the physical is not the same as reducing the spiritual to the physical. Instead, he is speaking about a highly sacramental and incarnational way of understanding the world. In this view, one never gets beyond the physical in order to understand the spiritual any more than one would get beyond Christ in order to understand God or get beyond the sacraments in order to understand divine grace. The spirit always rests on and is expressed in matter; thus, humanity’s mode of knowing the spiritual must always incorporate the physical. This in fact embodies Dante’s paradoxical logic in Inferno: The descent is an ascent. Frost does not think that human reason is capable of understanding or articulating this union. The eyes of faith must see it, and the voice of a poet must speak of it. Frost explicitly roots this “scandalous” truth in orthodox Christianity and poetic faith in his essay On Emerson:
“Emerson was a Unitarian because he was too rational to be superstitious and too little a storyteller and lover of stories to like… pretty scandal. Nothing very religious can be done for people lacking in superstition. They usually end up abominable agnostics. It takes superstition and the prettiest scandal story of all to make a good Trinitarian. It is the first step in the descent of the spirit into the material-human at the risk of the spirit” (italics mine).12
II. Frost’s Poetry: “The Trial By Existence”
As Richard Poirier observes, “The Trial by Existence” is a “magnificent Dante-esque poem.”13 One of the early poems in A Boy’s Will, “The Trial by Existence” deals with the fate of souls after death and presents a soul choosing to be born into earthly life as the epitome of courage: “Even the bravest that are slain / Shall not dissemble their surprise / On waking to find valor reign…. / To find that the utmost reward / Of daring should be still to dare.”14 The setting of the poem recalls images from Purgatorio and Paradiso. The eternal “light of heaven” falls on the streams of “slant spirits” who are speeding towards paradise.15 Frost’s description of the souls speeding up towards the throne of God in a “white shimmering concourse”, all driven on by the “sweet cry” from the cliff-top and the “angel hosts” guiding them under the sound of the “far-distant breaking wave,” strongly echoes the opening cantos of Purgatorio.16 In the second canto, Dante also sees streams of the souls that come across a shimmering sea in a boat driven by an angel and surrounded by the sound of waves and heavenly music.17 After the souls land on fields very like Frost’s “pasture” in his poem, they are commanded to ascend Mount Purgatory; the angel admonishes the souls that linger for too long and urges them on to pursue their own purification.18 Similarly, Frost writes that the more “loitering” souls “are turned / To view once more the sacrifice / Of those who for some good discerned / Will gladly give up paradise.”19
Frost’s description of the ascending spirits as “streams and cross- and counter- streams” also recalls the souls that wash themselves in the river Lethe flowing through the Garden of Eden at the top of Dante’s purgatory.20
Along with his Dantean echoes, Frost also pervades his poem with a Platonic atmosphere.
This double inclusion reflects his explicitly stated conviction that Dante approached his own faith through the lens of Platonic philosophy. The river at the top of the mountain, besides imaging Dante’s stream in Purgatorio, also recalls the river Lethe in the Republic, from which the souls drink before being reborn.21 In Frost’s poem, the souls likewise are presented with an opportunity for embodiment but told that they will “lack / The lasting memory at all clear” of their choice.22 The opening stanza, where the souls are “surprised” at the light that is “whole and white / and… not shattered into dyes,” reflects Plato’s famous story of the cave and the escaped prisoner’s initial blindness and shock in the sudden sunlight in full strength.23 Frost’s collapsing of images here is fascinatingly complex. Dante’s stream causes the souls to forget their earthly life, while Plato’s river causes them to forget their heavenly one. This would appear to be a contradictory tension between the two, but Frost simply unites both effects in these otherworldly waters. As he wrote in his letters, Frost considers Dante’s vision to ascend to the heavenly at the expense of the material, perhaps in a similar way that Socrates appears to encourage others in Phaedo to free their soul by shedding the body. Frost seems to see the ascent into Purgatory and the ascent into the world of the Forms as a similar process of dematerialization: with both of these classic authors, it can appear that for something to be more spiritual, it must become less bodily and include a renunciation of earthly life and memory. Although technically Dante does reference the incarnate Son of God at the end of his poem, his apophatic silence results in the impression that “flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God.”24 The Platonic parallels and merging of imagery with Dante brings out Frost’s perceived affinity between the two authors.
However, Frost introduces his own poetic shift in these braided traditions by suddenly plunging into an incarnational focus at the end of the poem with the Christological figure of the brave soul. In the sixth stanza, he writes, “Nor is there wanting in the press / Some spirit to stand simply forth / Heroic in its nakedness, / Against the uttermost of earth…./ And the mind whirls and the heart sings, / And a shout greets the daring one…. / And the awe passes wonder then, / and a hush falls for all acclaim.”25 Frost’s previous reference to the daring souls as those “that are slain” and the description of this choice as a “sacrifice” is strongly reminiscent of the thirteenth chapter of Revelation, where silence falls in heaven before Christ appears as the Lamb “slain before the foundation of the world.”26 Scholar Cai Pei-Lin has noted that, besides the biblical resonances, Frost also appears to allude here to Milton’s figure of the Son of God.27 In Book III of Paradise Lost, God asks if anyone in heaven is willing to descend to earth to “redeem / Man’s mortal crime, and just the unjust to save.” The angels stand “mute / And silence was in heaven,” until the Son stands forth to become mortal flesh for man’s sake, telling the Father: “Behold me then: me for him, life for life / I offer…. / Account me Man; I for his sake will leave / Thy bosom, and this glory next to thee / Freely put off.”28
Frost’s allusion to Milton indicates that the sacrifice of this soul that all the other spirits behold at the top of the mountain is, in fact, the sacrifice of the Son of God in becoming flesh. Pei-Lin has also noted that Frost’s later description in “The Trial by Existence” of this event as God breaking “a flower of gold” is another reference to Milton. Further on in Book III, after the Son has declared his intention to become incarnate, Milton moves into a description of amaranth and gold as flowers connected with the Tree of Life and divinity itself: “Their crowns inwove with amaranth and gold / Immortal amaranth, a flower which once / In Paradise, fast by the tree of life / Began to bloom, but soon for man’s offence / To Heaven removed where first it grew, there grows / And flowers aloft shading the fount of life.”29 The association of this golden flower with the Son means that its “breaking” in the final stanzas points to a certain cruciform move inherent in the Incarnation itself. Thus, Frost pushes past Dante’s reticence by emphasizing that the vision at the top of this purgatorial-type mountain is Christ: in other words, the beatific vision is God-in-the-flesh. The human souls in his poem ascend the cliffs in order to look with “awe [passing] wonder” on Christ as the “brave soul” that chose to become flesh and broken for our binding together.30
From this turn towards the Incarnation, Frost moves into a deeply sacramental view of the world, one in which spirit and matter are irrevocably knitted together and purified by Christ’s presence. After describing the Son of God as a broken flower of gold, Frost continues to explain that God has used this broken flower as “the mystic link to bind and hold / Spirit to matter until death come.”31 Christ is portrayed here as ultimately fulfilling what Frost sees as the essential poetic vocation: to unite spirit and matter. The Incarnation is the final word, there will never be a future in which the spiritual is disconnected from the material. For Frost, paradise cannot be the place where one beholds pure spirit; instead, it is the place where one is finally able to experience their full unification in a divine affirmation of creation and matter.
In the last stanza, Frost turns to the experience of earthly life. Although spirit and matter are bound together in Christ as the broken flower, this does not mean that persons have this perception during their life. In fact, forgetfulness and lack of perception are a key aspect of earthly suffering. Frost draws attention to this in his recognition that “the essence of life here” is “still to lack / The lasting memory at all clear, / That life has for us on the wrack / Nothing but what we somehow chose.”32 These lines express how earthly life is often characterized by an inability to perceive meaning or freedom within suffering; Frost thinks this is because we cannot remember our own will to become enfleshed. However, he finds comfort in the fact that we are not alone in the suffering of earthly experience: “in the pain” there is “one close, / Bearing it crushed and mystified.”33
The description of this “one” as “crushed” and “bearing” human pain immediately recalls the image of Christ as the crushed flower in the previous stanza. His sharing in human flesh means that he is capable of being “close” in human suffering, and this proximity of divine presence is capable of transforming that experience. Frost’s grammar here is creatively ambiguous: one can read “crushed and mystified” as applying both to Christ himself and to the pain that is borne. This connection reinforces the idea of transformation. The descriptor “crushed” alludes to the breaking of the flower and also likely to Isaiah’s prophecy of Christ as “crushed” for man’s healing.34 The description “mystified” likewise contains a multilayered significance. Its more modern and common meaning of confusion echoes the forgetfulness of human experience that Frost attended to earlier in the poem. However, it also has the etymological source and older meaning of “full of mystery,” “mystical… of secret rites,” and mystic as “one who has been initiated.”35 This reading of the word in Frost’s final line emphasizes the sacramental significance of human experience and all of physical creation. Finally, Frost says that it is through this union that we are “wholly stripped of pride.”36 The binding together of spirit and matter allows for a process of purification that is a creative reworking of Dante’s Purgatorio, closely linking purgation as well as paradise closely to earth.
“The Trial by Existence” is an example of Frost’s strong and brilliant reworking of Dante’s poetic tradition in his own work. He incorporates many of Dante’s images, but he also pushes past the ending silence of Paradiso by making the incarnate Christ the sight at the top of the mountain. For Frost, the Incarnation is the religious pinnacle and affirmation of his poetic vocation to unite spirit and matter. It means that no matter how deeply one may enter into the spiritual, one never gets beyond the physical: they always mutually reveal one another. The religious concept of a sacrament or mystery expresses this very thing and is thus deeply incorporated into the ending of Frost’s poem. These theological themes make sense of the way that Frost continually uses his poetry to ascend to the highest spiritual places and yet always return with the conviction that “Earth’s the right place for love,” for Christ is the one in both these movements come together: in which divine descent and human ascent are united.37
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Notes:
1 Robert Frost, “Kitty Hawk,” in The Complete Poems of Robert Frost, ed. Richard Poirier and Mark Richardson, (New York: Henry Holt and Co, 1970), 774.
2 John N. Serio, “Frost’s Fire and Ice and Dante’s Inferno,” The Explicator, Vol. 57, 218-221, (Washington: Taylor & Francis Group, 1999), 220.
3 Robert Frost, “To G.R. Elliot,” in Selected Letters of Robert Frost, ed. Lawrence Thompson, (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1964), 525-526.
4 Robert Frost, “Letter to Robert P.T. Coffin,” in The Complete Poems of Robert Frost, ed. Richard Poirier and Mark Richardson, (New York: Henry Holt and Co, 1970), 774.
5 Robert Frost, “Letter to Robert P.T. Coffin,” 774.
6 Ibid.
7 Robert Frost, “Education by Poetry,” in The Complete Poems of Robert Frost, ed. Richard Poirier and Mark Richardson, (New York: Henry Holt and Co, 1970), 723.
8 Dante, Paradiso, trans. Robert and Jean Hollander, (New York: Doubleday Publishing Group, 2007), 827.
9 Dante, Paradiso, 827.
10 Ibid.
11 Robert Frost, “Education by Poetry,” 723-734.
12 Robert Frost, “On Emerson” in The Complete Poems of Robert Frost, ed. Richard Poirier and Mark Richardson, (New York: Henry Holt and Co, 1970), 886.
13 Richard Poirier, Robert Frost: The Work of Knowing, (California: Stanford University Press, 1990), 50.
14 Robert Frost, “The Trial by Existence” in The Complete Poems of Robert Frost, ed. Richard Poirier and Mark Richardson, (New York: Henry Holt and Co, 1970), 28.
15 Ibid.
16 Ibid., 28.
17 Dante Alighieri, Purgatorio, trans. Robert Durling (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 37.
18 Ibid., 41.
19 Robert Frost, “The Trial by Existence,” 27.
20 Ibid., 28.
21 I am indebted to Cai Pei-Lin for this observation in her article on Frost’s view of the soul. Cai Pei-in, “‘The Trial by Existence’: Frost’s Early View on the Soul,” Journal of Literature and Art Studies, Vol. 10, No. 7, (July 2020), 629-632 .10.17265/2159-5836/2020.07.015.
22 Robert Frost, “The Trial by Existence,” 30.
23 Ibid., 28.
24 1 Corinthians 15:50, King James Version.
25 Robert Frost, “The Trial by Existence,” 29.
26 Revelation 13:8, King James Version.
27 Cai Pei-Lin, “‘The Trial by Existence’: Frost’s Early View on the Soul,” 631.
28 John Milton, Paradise Lost, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 89.
29 Ibid.
30 Robert Frost, “The Trial by Existence,” 29. Frost was not necessarily confident that his poetry had succeeded where Dante had remained silent. In the same letter where he identifies himself as an “Old Testament Christian,” Frost makes a reference to Dante’s poetry, saying that he he longer has a fear of God based on judgment of sins: “All that is past like a vision of Dante.” Instead, he says, in reference to his own poetry, “My fear of God has settled into a deep inward fear that my best offering may not prove acceptable in his sight.” Robert Frost, “To G.R. Elliot,” 525.
31 Robert Frost, “The Trial by Existence,” 30.
32 Ibid.
33 Ibid.
34 Isaiah 53:5, King James Version.
35 Online Etymology Dictionary, “Mystify,” April 15, 2019.
36 Robert Frost, “The Trial by Existence,” 30.
37 Robert Frost, “Birches” in The Complete Poems of Robert Frost, ed. Richard Poirier and Mark Richardson, (New York: Henry Holt and Co, 1970), 118.
Bibliography:
Alighieri, Dante. Paradiso. Translated by Robert and Jean Hollander. New York: Doubleday Publishing Group, 2007.
Alighieri, Dante. Purgatorio. Translated by Robert Durling. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.
Cai Pei-Lin. “‘The Trial by Existence’: Frost’s Early View on the Soul.” Journal of Literature and Art Studies, Vol. 10, No. 7, (July 2020), 629-632 .10.17265/2159-5836/2020.07.015
Frost, Robert. “Birches.” In The Complete Poems of Robert Frost. Edited by Richard Poirier and Mark Richardson. New York: Henry Holt and Co, 1970.
Frost, Robert. “Kitty Hawk.” In The Complete Poems of Robert Frost. Edited by Richard Poirier and Mark Richardson, 774. New York: Henry Holt and Co, 1970.
Frost, Robert. “Letter to G.R. Elliot.” In Selected Letters of Robert Frost. Edited by Lawrence Thompson. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1964.
Frost, Robert. “Letter to Robert P.T. Coffin.” In The Complete Poems of Robert Frost. Edited by Richard Poirier and Mark Richardson. New York: Henry Holt and Co, 1970.
Frost, Robert. “On Emerson.” In The Complete Poems of Robert Frost. Edited by Richard Poirier And Mark Richardson. New York: Henry Holt and Co, 1970.
Frost, Robert. “The Trial by Existence.” In The Complete Poems of Robert Frost. Edited by Richard Poirier and Mark Richardson. New York: Henry Holt and Co: 1970.
Milton, John. Paradise Lost. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.
Poirier, Richard. Robert Frost: The Work of Knowing. California: Stanford University Press, 1990.
Serio, John N. “Frost’s Fire and Ice and Dante’s Inferno,” The Explicator, Vol. 57, 218-221.
Washington: Taylor & Francis Group, 1999.
The featured image, uploaded by David Tiller, is a photograph of the Robert Frost Homestead, Derry. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
