The polarities and fusions of loveliness and severity and of decay and renewal in the poetry of Robert Frost

Abstract

To Robert Frost the material world manifests itself in a delicate balance or tension between corruption and beauty, light and dark, the minute and the grand, and the chaotic and the ordered. Images of life diminished are as integral with the natural order as images of life regenerated, and decay and renewal and loveliness and severity are complementary opposites that reflect a polarity of life-renewing and life-receding forces. Thus, Frost may recognize a polarity of values in the opposition of man and nature, or he may point out the varied contrasts of beauty and severity that serve to accentuate natural loveliness. Light may be fused with darkness, pain or an underlying tension may be integral with love, and the ephemeral may reflect the enduring. Frost also develops a series of balances or tension between corruption and beauty and between the minute and the grand. Images of severity may grip the natural world with a profound sense of blight and darkness and subdue it to the hard, deathlike, and austere. In contrast, images of beauty may reflect a kind of divine benevolence or prelapsarian simplicity in which life is idealized into pastoral perfection.