Imagery and Metaphor in Into My Own
Robert Frost's Poetic Techniques Enhance the Eternal Message
Robert Frost's poems are always highly metaphorical and filled with images. One of his first published poems, "Into My Own," demonstrates what eventually became a life-long use of poetic devices.
Images Trigger the Reader’s Imagination
The poem begins with an image that all readers should be able to understand:
“…those dark trees,/ so old and firm they scarcely show the breeze”
This brings an immediate scene to the mind, perhaps of a row of trees at the edge of the quad at college, or at the edge of the village green in a New England town. The tower above the surroundings, aged with thick trunks. These are not birches, bent from years of resisting prevailing winds. These are tall elms, or maples, or oaks—maybe even pine trees.
Since the trees are described as a mask, they would appear to be a covering of what is beyond them. With this phrase, “the merest mask of gloom,” Frost turns the image into a metaphor.
Metaphor for Ambiguity
The trees, Frost says do not “stretch away unto the edge of doom.” Rather, they are thin—“the merest mask of gloom.” If indeed they stretched away, the speaker would steal away into their vastness. Here image again mixes with metaphor, for alone with the vastness is denseness. The speaker does not care whether, after entering the vastness, he should ever find open land or a highway. Staying in those dense and vast trees, so old, firm, and dark, is good enough.
This leaves the reader to interpret the metaphor. What do the trees represent? The dual image is presented of what they are and are not: not vast, not stretching away, a thin mask. A mask, though thin, still hides something. But what? Some interpreters equate the trees with death, similar to the metaphor of the forest in Frost’s “Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening.” However, since later Frost talks about not turning back, and for others to willingly follow along the same track on which the speaker steals away, it would seem death is not the intention of the metaphor.
If the trees are both dark and a mask that hides something, the trees likely refer simply to the unknown, or perhaps a crossing or rite of passage. The speaker wants to get away from his present circumstances. Is he unhappy? Behind held back? Ambitious? In a rut? What’s wrong with “those who [would] miss me here”? These are questions the metaphor does not answer, but which careful thought about the metaphor and visualization of the images bring to the reader’s imagination.
A Dated Image
In the second stanza, in describing what the speaker would do if the trees were vast, the fact that the speaker does not care if he finds open land “or highway where the slow wheel pours the sand” describe the character of what the trees aren’t. But the highway where vehicles pass with slow wheels that pour the sand is an image foreign to modern readers. Our highways are asphalt or concrete pavement. Wheels turn fast on them, not slow.
So the modern readers must try to think about what “highway” meant to Robert Frost. It probably meant any improved rural road that was suitable for wheeled travel, improved slightly from a simple farm to market road. The material would be earthen, not manmade. A slowly turning wheel does not travel gracefully along the surface, but rather disturbs the sand, possibly bogging down.
To Frost, the highway would represent the presence of other, the movement of people and goods along a significant distance, and even civilization itself. The highway is presented as a negative thing, something the speaker does not care to happen upon in his vast forest.
This image, and the metaphor it presents, may bring up so many possible interpretations that perhaps this is what Frost was hoping for. Why should he lay the entire meaning on the table, in inverted pyramid organization as in a newspaper? Better to give the reader an image that would be understood, that would trigger the imagination, and would become a metaphor that leads to multiple interpretation.
That is part of Frost’s genius. The inexact metaphor allows each reader to interpret the poem as best fits the reader’s circumstances, which in turn enhances the enjoyment. With each reading, “Into My Own” becomes more dear.
See also an overview of "Into My Own."
See also a discussion of word choices in "Into My Own."
Robert Frost 1910
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