The Wood-Pile

Résumé du document

Frost presents to us here a rather enigmatic poem. Upon a first contemplation the reader may experience the feeling that he has read a poem about nothing, and may read and re-read it, endeavoring to discover some hidden meaning. And indeed “The Wood-Pile” is virtually about nothing, a blatant illustration of Frost's delight at saying the ordinary thing and discovering that it is art. From the opening hesitation to the apparition of a ‘small bird' guiding the speaker towards ‘a pile of wood', which provokes in the speaker's mind contemplations about the ‘someone' responsible for abandoning the woodpile, very little action takes place and the poem can be considered more as a meditation than a dramatic narrative, simply offering the soliloquy of a lone figure walking in a winter landscape. Frost purposefully seeks the reader's awareness of this peculiar progression in his narrative. Let us then analyze in the same order as Frost suggests.

Extraits

[...] Frost playfully uses purposefully confusing pronouns in lines 12-13 say no word to tell me who he was/ Who was so foolish as to think what he thought”) to enhance the speaker's intimate identification with the bird whilst simultaneously trying to assert his superiority to it. It is left up to the reader to decide whether it is the bird who is foolish for supposedly fearing the lone walker, or if it is the speaker who is foolish for assuming he can determine the bird's thoughts and that he is at all concerned with him. [...]

[...] The apparent reassuring permanence of the woodpile crumbles with the closer inspection of it: wood was gray and the bark warping off it/ And the pile somewhat sunken”. It seems the woodpile, despite its once majestic stature, is now losing its singular beauty under the inexorable deleterious effect of time: was older sure than this year's cutting,/ Or even last year's or the year's before.” Another major tension is here established, opposing the ephemerality and inexorable destruction by time and thus by nature of man's work to the eternity and strength of a nature which, despite man's desperate attempts at taming it, remains the unchallenged master of its realm. [...]

[...] The reader is thus plunged in a moment of hesitation to which is confronted the speaker. In the first affirmation will turn back from here” springs the possibility of giving way to fear, avoiding the unknown in a desperate attempt to not lose one's bearings. Yet the fear and hesitation are isolated only momentarily for the speaker decides to go on farther, we shall intriguingly adding a mysterious touch of suspense and anticipation, injecting tension in this calm meditative journey. [...]

[...] The wood-pile Frost presents to us here a rather enigmatic poem. Upon a first contemplation the reader may experience the feeling that he has read a poem about nothing, and may read and re-read it, endeavoring to discover some hidden meaning. And indeed Wood-Pile” is virtually about nothing, a blatant illustration of Frost's delight at saying the ordinary thing and discovering that it is art. From the opening hesitation to the apparition of a ‘small bird' guiding the speaker towards pile of wood', which provokes in the speaker's mind contemplations about the ‘someone' responsible for abandoning the woodpile, very little action takes place and the poem can be considered more as a meditation than a dramatic narrative, simply offering the soliloquy of a lone figure walking in a winter landscape. [...]

[...] The woodpile thus becomes the symbol of the necessary equilibrium and synergy that man must respect between his work and that of nature. The end of the description of the woodpile gives way to a meditation on the author of the woodpile itself, a woodcutter which undoubtedly intrigues and fascinates the speaker: thought that only/ Someone who lived in turning to fresh tasks/ Could so forget his handiwork on which/ He spent himself”. In his mind it is evident and unquestionable that the man responsible for this abandoned woodpile is one who delights simply in the fact of exercising a well-done job. [...]