Robert Frost: “Star in a Stone Boat” REVIEW
This poem is growing on me (as do many of Frost’s poems). I always strive to understand a Frost poem in the exact way that I think he intended it to be understood but there are times when I think that he will be forgiving if I “see it my way” and not his. This may be one of those poems.
In trying to understand this poem, I began with the dedication “For Lincoln McVeagh.” The original published poem did not include this dedication, but Frost seems to think it was an oversight not to have done so at first. So, who was Lincoln McVeagh and how might knowing the answer that question be a clue to understanding the poem?
We get a hint from an excerpt of a letter that Frost wrote to G.R. Elliot on Nov 16, 1920.
“I’m just going to tell you a matter that may amuse you. You know I left Amherst all so irresponsible. You must have wondered how I could go and come as I pleased on nothing but poetry and yet seem to be taken care of as if I hadn’t defied fate. I’ve wondered myself. The latest interposition in my favor when I had ceased to deserve further clemency is an appointment as Consulting Editor of Henry Holt and Co. I owe this under Heaven to Lincoln MaeVeagh a younger member of the firm. The pay will be small but large for a poet …”
It turns out that McVeagh was a functionary in a publishing company that provided Frost with a small bit of income from editing that allowed him to survive being a poet just long enough to make a living at it. It may well be that Lincoln McVeagh was offering Frost a permanent position that Frost ultimately refused. If that were the case, the 1923 dedication of this poem makes some sense.
The poem is about a piece of meteor (a star) that a New Hampshire farmer is digging out of the ground and inserting into a stone wall. Frost begins the poem by asserting that, though he has not personally witnessed such things happening, he knows that they must have at some time. It is, he argues, inevitable that at some point, someone has tried to put a divine thing (like a meteor or creative genius for example) into a mundane system (like a stone wall or a corporation for example). Perhaps this poem is about Frost’s own experience as a literary genius who almost got turned permanently into a New Hampshire chicken-farmer, high school teacher, and publishing house editor because no one recognized him for what he was? The poem begins with the following challenge:
Never tell me that not one star of all
That slip from heaven at night and softly fall
Has been picked up with stones to build a wall.
Even though the hypothetical laborer who committed this atrocity against the star is clueless, Frost insists that there were clues.
Some laborer found one faded and stone-cold,
And saving that its weight suggested gold
And tugged it from his first too certain hold,
He noticed nothing in it to remark.
He was not used to handling stars thrown dark
And lifeless from an interrupted arc.
He did not recognize in that smooth coal
The one thing palpable besides the soul
To penetrate the air in which we roll.
He did not see how like a flying thing
It brooded ant eggs, and had one large wing.”
In spite of the fact that the rock would have felt different than common stones, the laborer does not stop to reflect that he might be holding something that had travelled through space and that had a greater density and destiny and a finer purpose than what appeared on the surface.
“He noticed nothing … He did not recognize … He did not see …”
And later in the poem,
“He did not know …”
One is reminded of that passage from the New Testament Gospel of John
“He was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him. He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him.”
And the later passage about the stone the builders reject becoming the chief corner stone.
What does this star represent in the poem? It is interesting that the first time it is referred to as an “it” but over the next few lines, it begins to anthropomorphize. What was regarded as an “it” comes alive. Frost refers to this piece of star as “the one thing palpable besides the soul.” Something that is palpable is something that, while technically not material, is so felt by the senses that it is regarded as if it were “real.” i.e. “The tension was palpable.” When Frost says that this star-shard is like a soul, he is telling you how to understand the symbols of the poem. The star in the poem is a soul and the stone boat represents all the things short of that glory that souls deserve that we do with souls.
And if I had to guess, the poem is about taking people with a divine inner light and a poetic genius and thoughtlessly relegating them to clerical work. “Don’t tell me that it does not happen,” Frost insists. He ought to know. It almost happened to him. Makes me think of the life of Frederick Douglas and how his culture tried to take this great mind and relegate it to picking cotton his entire life.
What does the laborer do with this divine star? He loads it onto a wooden sled used for dragging stones out of a field (like a bucket loader or a tow truck).
He moved it roughly with an iron bar,
He loaded an old stone boat with the star . . .
He dragged it through the plowed ground . . .
Frost contends that divine souls are, even so, compelled to live their lives in obscure jobs and meaningless purposes because no one recognizes them for what they are. For Frost, this is inexcusable, and he declares that he will not allow it to happen on his watch.
It went for building stone, and I, as though
Commanded in a dream, forever go
To right the wrong that this should have been so.
It may perhaps be the work of the poet to see and publish the divine in things thought mundane. Perhaps it is the poet’s burden, like a prophet of old, to traverse the world of mortal men and say, over-and-over again, “This thing too is precious and more than you realize.”
I can’t help but think of the passage in Thorton Wilder’s play, Our Town, where the stage manager has the following exchange with Emily:
“EMILY: "Does anyone ever realize life while they live it...every, every minute?"
STAGE MANAGER: "No. Saints and poets maybe...they do some.”
At the end of the play, Emily says,
“Let's really look at one another!...It goes so fast. We don't have time to look at one another. I didn't realize. So all that was going on and we never noticed.”
And the Stage Manager delivers his homily:
“Now there are some things we all know, but we don't take'm out and look at'm very often. We all know that something is eternal. And it ain't houses and it ain't names, and it ain't earth, and it ain't even the stars… everybody knows in their bones that something is eternal, and that something has to do with human beings. All the greatest people ever lived have been telling us that for five thousand years and yet you'd be surprised how people are always losing hold of it. There's something way down deep that's eternal about every human being.”
For Frost, that single rock is an entire planet – a world – a thing of infinitely more worth than has been ascribed to it. And even if he does not know what that purpose is, he refuses to let that common laborer, with all his ignorance, haul it off and put it in his publishing company (stone wall) when it came here from somewhere beyond and was on its way to greater things.
Question for Comment: Have you ever felt like a star in a stone boat?
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