Uncertainty and New Meaning, Poetry:

Uncertainty And The Search For New Meaning In The Poetry Of Hardy, Yeats, Frost, And Stevens

During the mid-nineteenth century, Darwin's "Origin of the Species" and the advent in England of the historical-critical method of studying the Bible irrevocably altered the fundamental beliefs of English-speaking societies.  The authority of the Bible, which had for so long been unquestionable, was no longer certain.  The crisis precipitated by this uncertainty affected the lives of many people, including the poets of the late nineteenth and the twentieth century; causing a new skepticism and search for meaning.  This skepticism and the desire to find new meaning can be seen in modern poetry.  Hardy, Yeats, Frost, and Stevens all react to the crisis of uncertainty in different ways in their poetry. Hardy reacts with bitterness towards his times and a sense of the irrational sequence of life's events; Yeats creates a personal mysticism that incorporates the events of the times as a part of an all-encompassing system; Frost comments on man's inability to acquire transcendent knowledge; and Stevens decides that man's perceptions are all he has.

The poetry of Thomas Hardy is filled with references to the uncertainty of rationality in the forces that shape men's lives.  In one of his earlier poems, "Hap," Hardy closes with:

        --Crass Casualty obstructs the sun and rain,
        And dicing Time for gladness casts a moan...
        These purblind Doomsters had as readily strown
        Blisses about my pilgrimage as pain.  (p.47)

Hardy is skeptical about the idea of a governing, rational God.  Instead, he has substituted blind chance as the ruling force with time beside it throwing dice, an idea he illustrates in more detail in "The Subalterns."  In this poem, the "leaden sky," the north wind, "Sickness," and "Death" take turns reassuring the narrator of their lack of malice against him and of their position as subordinates of "crass Casualty" and "dicing Time."  Hardy refers to God in "New Year's Eve," but Hardy's God is not rational and seems to be a persona for chance and time.  When the narrator asks God his reasons for doing things, God replies:

                  My labours--logicless--
        You may explain; not I:
        Sense-sealed I have wrought, without a guess
        That I evolved a Consciousness
        To ask for resons why. (p.56)

Hardy's portrait of an irrational God and of man's position as a misguided searcher for God as the universal consciousness or ultimate rationality is far from orthodoxy and shows the deep-seated distrust generated by the uncertainty injected into traditional Christianity with the questioning of the authority in Scriptures and the scientific evidence of inaccuracies in the Bible.

The God of "Channel Firing" also shows an element of chance and lack of specific planning when he chortles:

        Ha, ha.  It will be warmer when
        I blow the trumpet (if indeed
        I ever do; for you are men,
        And rest eternal sorely need)." (p.57)

For this God, the day of the last Judgement is arbitrary, if it will ever exist.  Hardy again comments on Time's throwing of dice in the poem "Going and Staying."  In the first stanza the narrator enumerates "things we wished would stay" and determines that "they were going."  "Things we wished would go" are the subject of the second stanza; but, of course, "they were staying."  However, the narrator dispels the idea of any malice on the part of time in the third stanza:

        Then we looked closelier at Time,
        And saw his ghostly arms revolving
        To sweep off woeful things with prime,
        Things sinister with things sublime
              Alike dissolving. (p.65)

The arbitrariness of the forces that shape man's existence is a focal point of Hardy's poetry.

Hardy also focuses on his unhappiness with the time that he lives in.  He envisions the year 1967 as being in "A century which, if not sublime, / Will show, I doubt not, at its prime, / A scope above this blinkered time." (p.54)  Hardy does not embrace his conclusion that the forces that control humanity are irrational and arbitrary without regrets.  In "The Oxen," a past Christmas is described:

        We pictured the meek mild cratures where
        They dwelt in their strawy pen,
        Nor did it occur to one of us there
        To doubt they were kneeling then. (p.62)

He concludes, "So fair a fancy few would weave / In these years!"  Hardy resents the change and the uncertainty that he has to cope with in his life.  He recognizes that this uncertainty was absent in the near past.  Hardy cansiders himself "one born out of due time, who has no calling here." (p.52)

Yeats has a different approach to the uncertainty of the time.  He creates his own certainty in which the apparent deterioration of Christianity plays a part.  The system of the gyres of time that his wife created is based on the flux of thesis and antithesis.  According to Yeats, the gyre of Christianity has long since peaked and is being replaced with its opposite (a cycle that takes 2000 years).  This process of change is shown in "The Second Coming:"

        Turning and turning in the widening gyre
        The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
        Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
        Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
        The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
        The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
        The best lack all conviction, while the worst
        Are full of passionate intensity. (p.131)

The poem goes on to describe the second coming, which to Yeats is the coming of the Antichrist.  Thus, Yeats sees the uncertainty of Christianity after Darwinism and the historica-critical method of studying the Scriptures as merely a part of the breakdown of the gyre of Christianity which peaked in the year 1000.

Yeats also speaks of the gyres in the poem "The Gyres."  Here he refers to the gyre of paganism taking power from the gyre of Christianity in much the same way that Christianity took power from the paganism of the Greeks and Romans.  He says of the gyre with the Delphic Oracle (Old Rocky Face), "The workman, noble and saint, and all things run / On that unfashionable gyre again." (p.153).  Yeats sees the uncertainty of the time as a continuation of a fixed order other than the one that was disrupted by progress.

In the poem "Under Ben Bulben," Yeats once again mentions the gyres, but adds a reference to the uncertainty of the time:

                                        Gyres run on;
        When that greater dream had gone
        Calvert and Wilson, Blake and Claude,
        Prepared a rest for the people of God,
        Palmer's phrase, but after that
        Confusion fell upon our thought.  (p.161)

For Yeats, confusion is a small part of a long process that is inevitable, and his system of timeless gyres encompasses and overwhelms the uncertainty of the immediate time.

Robert Frost views the uncertainty generated years before as a limiting thing.  He regards humanity as unable to reach any transcendent knowldege; where before man at least seemed able.  In "The Oven Bird," "the question that he [the singing bird] frames in all but words / Is what to make of a diminished thing." (p.197)  Frost mentiones the limitations of sight (man's insight) in "For Once, Then, Something."  The narrator cannot see beyond his own reflection into the depths of the well he is looking into, but:

        'Once,' when trying with thin chin against a well-curb,
        I discerned, as I thought, beyond the picture,
        Through the picture, a something white, uncertain,
        Something more of the depths--and then I lost it.
                              ...What was that whiteness?
        Truth?  A pebble of quartz?  For once, then, something. (p.205)

The narrator does not know know what his moment of insight showed him, he only knows that there is something beyond himself.

Frost makes the same comment in "Neither Out Far Nor In Deep:"

        They cannot look out far.
        They cannot look in deep.
        But when was that ever a bar
        To any watch they keep? (p.211)

The people unanimously choose to look at the sea rather than the land even though they cannot see "out far nor in deep."  The wisdom of this practice may be questioned by Frost,

        The land may vary more:
        But wherever the truth may be--
        The water comes ashore,
        And the people look at the sea. (p.211)

but the image of people looking for some sort of truth beyond themselves and being stopped by their human boundaries from finding anything remains.

In "The Woodpile," the narrator is looking for truth on land, in a frozen swamp.  He also does not find a transcendent truth among the trees, but only  reflection of himself (although he may believe that the woodpile has Meaning).  He has fallen into the trap that the little bird has before him by taking "Everything said as personal to himself." (p.195)  Frost also makes the point that when one decides to actively search for truth, one is most easily deceived.  The narrator of "The Woodpile" has been "Out walking in the frozen swamp" when he decided "I will turn back from here. / No I will go on further--and we shall see." (p.195) His determination to "see" something causes him to take everything "as personal to himself."

Frost reacts to the uncertainty of the time by observing that men cannot see the truth because of human boundaries.  But Wallace Stevens takes this a little further by concluding that the truth is related to defined capabilities.  His poetry shows man's perceptions of the world around him as the only truth that he can know.

In the poem, "The Idea of Order at Key West," the narrator hears a woman singing as she walks along the beach and postulates that man creates his own order out of his surroundings, and that this woman creates her own world with her song:

        She was the single artificer of the world
        In which she sang.  And when she sang, the sea,
        Whatever self it had, became the self
        That was her song, for she was the maker.  Then we,
        As we beheld her striding there alone,
        Knew that there never was a world for her
        Except the one she sang and, singing, made. (p.252)

The singing woman's perception of the sea is her created order; she can never know the sea in any objective sense, because everything she sees is colored by her perspective.  In "The Man with the Blue Guitar," "They said, 'You have a blue guitar, / You do not play things as they are.' // The man replied, "Things as they are / Are changed upon the blue guitar.'" (p.252)  The poetry of Stevens reacts to the uncertainty of the time by showing that human beings, by the very nature of their perception, not only cannot find any kind of transcendental truth, but cannot even know "things as they are."  "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" also shows that a person's reality is a product of his mind reacting to and distorting some objective and therefore unknowable reality.  The eighth way of looking at a blackbird comments:

        I know noble accents
        And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
        But I know, too,
        That the blackbird is involved
        In what I know. (p.250)

The narrator is aware that all of his knowledge is a product both of his mind and something external.  For Wallace Stevens, man is necessarily uncertain of any truth beyond; he only knows his reactions to whatever objective reality exists.

Modern poetry has to deal with a crisis of uncertainty that did not exist before the latter part of the nineteenth century.  One of the distinctive features of modern poetry is the presence of that crisis and the need to evaluate the possibilities for new meanings in life in art.  Modern poets do not agree on one meaning; each comes to his own conclusion.  Hardy concludes with regret that the forces that control human life are irrational and arbitrary; Yeats decides that the seeming disorder is really only a part of a larger order; Frost believes that human beings are too flawed to see any transcending truth; and Stevens determines that man's limitations are his truth.  Subjects and points of view change as the modern poets define newer meanings in their poetry.


FOOTNOTE:

"The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry," Fifth Edition (edited by Richard Ellmann and Robert O'Clair) (W.W. Norton & Company, New York) 1976, 1979. (paperback edition)