Candice, wondering about *life is a journey*, asked:
<snip>
has this master metaphor of "life" been superseded […] and by what?
I nominate "life is a bargain."
<snip>
I don’t think it’s the topos that’s at fault. As though Ulysses' travels led
via Dante's 'Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita' ('In the middle of the
journey of our life') to Dickinson's deathly stagecoach, then fizzled out
with Frost. Prynne’s *The Glacial Question, Unsolved*, for example, takes
the principle underlying *life is a journey* (time as spatial extension) to
deal in history. Opt for *life is a bargain*, on the other hand, and the
result might be Dickinson's 'Publication - is the Auction / of the Mind of
Man'; her 'Some - Work for Immortality - / The Chiefer part, for Time - /
He - Compensates - immediately - / The former - Checks - on Fame -', or even
Frost's *A Peck of Gold*: 'Dust always blowing about the town, /... / And I
was one of the children told / Some of the blowing dust was gold'.
It’s true that *The Road not Taken* does seem euphuistic at what I called
the category level. Applying the same lens and callipers to the opening
lines of *Because I Could not Stop for Death* reveals a greater conceptual
strength. In both cases, what we learn by these means is what we knew
already - only more richly perhaps. Another way of looking at the same thing
might be to compare Frost's literateur's reference to Dante's wood (if that
is what it is) with Dickinson's wholesale re-envisioning (if that is what
*that* is) of Browning's *The Last Journey*. The difference in intellectual
energy between the two is considerable.
For Dickinson *life is a journey* is only a general frame. The
particularities of her version (*life’s journey is a route taken by a hearse
to a cemetery*) - not just the horse and cemetery but also the children,
clothing, fields and bits of house - come from her experience, real or
imagined. Frost’s conceptual process is the obverse of this. It isn’t the
topos but the experiential (paths in a wood) that provides the general
frame. The detail, all of it supporting this somewhat rudimentary scene, is
pretty minimal. Indeed the only ‘precise observation’ concerns the ‘leaves’.
Conversely the frame is particularised into *life is a journey with choices
and choice is a fork in the road* not from ‘experience’ but from the way in
which we all use physical modalities conventionally when speaking of choice
and purpose.
Dickinson explores states of mind via sensation. Her paradoxes and
inconsistencies are dynamic. There is a dramatisation of the innards of the
self in Dickinson’s case; retreat, privatisation and cerebration in Frost’s
perhaps. Which, for example, is the 'road not taken'? Is it 'the other, just
as fair', which 'I took' because 'less travelled by'? Though if the roads
are 'really about the same', then when the speaker walks down the second
road, 'the first' will become 'less travelled' in its turn. Is it, in fact,
'the first [which] I kept for another day', since *keeping* comes about
through *taking*, from having gained possession? Frost responds to *value*
in the poem; its alternative characterisation as *utility* and as *desire*
represents the real fork in the road. But he can only manage indecision. His
prepenultimate line is simply a bald restatement of the original situation:
'Two roads diverged in a wood, and I -', with roads and speaker entirely
uninvolved. At the beginning of the last stanza the speaker declares, 'I
shall be telling *this* with a sigh'. But what’s unsaid is the other half of
the pair, which appears at the end of the stanza (and the poem): '*that* has
made all the difference'. Though what, precisely, has? In short, Frost's
journey is no journey. It is time *limited* by extension: 'long I stood'. It
is contrasted with 'the passing'. It is mere speculation about a future
expressed as distance: 'I doubted if I should ever come *back*'. Stuck at
the moment of departure, Frost’s 'leaves [verb] no step had trodden'
contains the entire non movement of the poem, in which no convincing link is
ever formed between the prospective traveller of the first stanza and the
supposedly completed traveller of the last.
Prynne’s extension of *life* into *history* in *The Glacial Question…* or in
his images of the nomadic may be one way in which the *journey* topos
changes and develops over time. However, what strikes me in much of the
earlier work isn’t just that or how he privileges ‘category’ over frame
(though that is partly where I was heading in my original post) but also how
he returns conceptualisation to its (hypothesised) dependence on the
sensory. *A Note on Metal* considers the conversion of *quality* into
*quantity*. It refers successively to 'Western alchemy, the theory of
quality as essential', to 'the unit of exchange ... still the ingot by
weight and not yet coins by number', to the point at which 'the magical
resonance of transfer is virtually extinct' and to 'Croesus, the first
recorded millionaire ... the first to devise a bimetallic currency, where
even the theoretic properties of metal are further displaced, into the
stratified functionalism of a monetary system [where] we are almost
completely removed from presence as weight [and where] the emergence of a
complete middle class based on the technique of this removal becomes a real
possibility.' The politics are explicit too, of course; but more interesting
(I think) is how closely Prynne's apparently abstract and prosaic
disquisition adheres to the effects of perception (presence as weight, for
example) and how they convert into thoughts.
Dickinson dramatises. Frost retreats. But Prynne exposes even as he
hides, creating ‘presence’ via strategies of reversal; ‘I pass freely from /
habit to form’, as it were: ‘Length is now quite another thing; that is, /
waiting or coming right up slap into the sun’ (*From End to End*), ‘The
street is a void in the sequence of man’ (*The Common Gain, Reverted*) or
‘love is, always, the / flight back / to where / we are’ (from *Airport
Poem*). This may be the real answer to Candice’s interesting question.
And enough green ink for one day.
Christopher Walker
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