On Looking Up By Chance At The Constellations (Robert Frost, 1928)
On Looking Up By Chance At The Constellations
Robert Frost
You’ll wait a long, long time for anything much
To happen in heaven beyond the floats of cloud
And the Northern Lights that run like tingling nerves.
The sun and moon get crossed, but they never touch,
Nor strike out fire from each other nor crash out loud.
The planets seem to interfere in their curves—
But nothing ever happens, no harm is done.
We may as well go patiently on with our life,
And look elsewhere than to stars and moon and sun
For the shocks and changes we need to keep us sane.
It is true the longest drought will end in rain,
The longest peace in China will end in strife.
Still it wouldn’t reward the watcher to stay awake
In hopes of seeing the calm of heaven break
On his particular time and personal sight.
That calm seems certainly safe to last to-night.
There comes a point when poetic structural analysis—the counting of meters and feet, the finding of rhymes—has to cease, and we must confront what the poet is actually saying. Currently I’m in the middle of reading Timothy Steele’s All the Fun’s in How You Say a Thing, which is an excellent introduction to matters of formal verse; but which (so far at least) doesn’t address the freedom that poets can achieve when they break the rules they’ve learned by heart. Steele mentions Frost’s poem in a discussion of added syllables in iambic meter. Frost speckles his short poem above with numerous examples of what Steele calls “loose iambic pentameter,” the definition of which doesn’t matter in the context of this essay. What matters is that Frost wrote a poem about the constellations, and excellent as his poem is in terms of formal structure, it is surprisingly bad in terms of what ideas Frost is trying to communicate. Let me show you what I mean.
You’ll wait a long, long time for anything much
To happen in heaven beyond the floats of cloud
And the Northern Lights that run like tingling nerves.
Frost’s first three lines present his thesis: nothing of consequence happens in the vault of the sky. “Much” is, here, the key word, for Frost admits that some things do indeed happen up there: clouds, eclipses, aurorae, even planetary alignments and conjunctions—the stuff of astrology. Some events occur but they aren’t real events: they don’t matter, there’s no fire, no boom.
But nothing ever happens, no harm is done.
We may as well go patiently on with our life,
A “real” event, according to Frost’s parallelism in line 7, would be one where harm is done; a real event would, at the very least, have some sort of effect or some kind of lasting consequence, one which would shake up the old order of things. Frost expects us to want those kinds of events: his use of the word “patiently” in line 8 implies as much. He could have said “happily” or “cheerfully” or some other such word but he doesn’t. Why, though, if our lives are in fact comfortable or satisfying, would we want to be alarmed and unsettled by heavenly events? Here’s why:
For the shocks and changes we need to keep us sane.
That, Frost says, is why: to be kept sane. Here is where my objection to this poem’s philosophy rises to its peak. To say that one is “kept sane” by shocks and changes, by disruptive life events, is too much of a generalization. There is, I’ll admit, a kind of life which falls into complacency; a kind of life that would benefit from having an abrupt and sudden altering of its circumstances. But not all lives are like that. To say that a life of stability, routine, and predictability isn’t sane is, well, insane in its own way.
“To keep us sane” is just about as important for the poem’s argument as was “much” from earlier. The poem stands or falls on whether the reader agrees or disagrees with Frost’s conception of these ideas. Oftentimes poets will assume a shared worldview between themselves and their reader; in this case, though, Frost’s effort fails—for me at least. He tries to be broadly inclusive with his plural pronouns (“us,” “we”) but I can’t count myself among the number of people who either feel that sudden events give sanity to life, or that nothing of note happens in the heavens—I’ve lived at the same house, and lived with the same woman, all my adult life; and I look at the starry sky all the time; and find all three of them fascinating.
It is true the longest drought will end in rain,
The longest peace in China will end in strife.
Still it wouldn’t reward the watcher to stay awake
To those who would argue that we should, actually, look for those kind of events in the heavens, Frost presents these lines. Curiously, he seems at first to affirm the objection that all things must change, must pass, and the heavens will indeed offer us the “shocks and changes” that Frost wants. But then he shoots down the argument rather perfunctorily, without bothering to engage the hypothetical interlocutor who points to peace in China and then to the starry sky.
This would have been a great place for Frost to take advantage of the rhetorical structures available in the sonnet form, the fixed form which his poem most closely resembles. His first ten lines conform to a sonnet’s first two quatrains, which traditionally are used to develop a thesis or idea. The next quatrain in a sonnet usually complicates that idea and presents additional material in tension with that of the first two quatrains, which the poet then nicely resolves in the volta (a sonnet’s last two lines). But Frost doesn’t follow that model. I don’t see any reason, rhetorically, why he had to put in these two lines about drought and war, only to hand-wave them away in line 13.
In hopes of seeing the calm of heaven break
Again, we come to a crucial word choice which reveals Frost’s underlying world and life view. “Hopes”—not “fears” or even a neutral word—are what he assumes we will have when thinking about the breaking of the heavenly calm. Apparently he expects us to want this kind of heavenly breaking; this is really what he has been saying the whole poem through. His implication is this: “staring at the night sky is a tedious waste of time; a person would only do it if they were wanting some big change to happen in the stars up there.”
I’ll grant Frost’s point for a moment. The last time a really big change, a Frost-level cataclysmic event, happened in the heavens was in 1604. Johannes Kepler was working on calculating the orbit of the planet Mars and while doing so became perturbed by contradictory data that seemed to indicate Mars’ orbit was not a perfect circle as had been believed ever since the time of the ancients. In October of that year he saw a new star in the constellation Ophiuchus. In those days the idea that any change could happen among the stars was practically heretical; the astronomical establishment was steeped in the opinions of the ancient Greeks and would admit of no possibility of heavenly mutability. Kepler was not the only person who saw this new star: it was so bright that for three weeks it could be observed in full daylight, and for eighteen months it was visible at night to anyone who bothered to look for it (this was before the invention of the telescope, so people didn’t even need fancy equipment to observe the new star). Kepler was able to use this new star (today known by the rather boring name of “SN1604”) and his observations of Mars to finally refute the old Aristotelian conception of the solar system and the heavens. I highly recommend Arthur Koestler’s account of Kepler’s researches in his book The Sleepwalkers for anyone who wants to know more about the astronomical controversies of Kepler’s day; for our purposes we can be content with knowing that sudden and shocking events in the sky do indeed have the potential to shake things up here on earth, just like Robert Frost desires. But surely we don’t want such stellar prodigies to happen all the time? How often, Frost, must “shock and change” happen in the starry dome for you to be satisfied?
That calm seems certainly safe to last to-night.
Frost ends his poem on a note of irony: “safe,” here, is not the happy and secure state we expect it to be. Instead its a boring place that will drive us crazy. I can imagine Frost standing outside, looking up at the night sky in full glimmer, with a friend who is anxiously scanning the heavens for something—anything—to disrupt the unvaried placidity; Frost, finally, turning back to the house and delivering this line in a tone dripping with sarcasm, and, chuckling under his breath at the folly of stargazers, going back in to where it is warm and bright and doing whatever he did with his evenings while his friend keeps staring at the eternal stars. Perhaps such an event did happen in the poet’s life: I don’t know.
I was mildly surprised when I first read this poem. Frost doesn’t seem to me the kind of poet who would roundly dismiss the stars as he does here. But it really does fit his mood well: Frost is the preeminent poet of doing things with one’s hands and looking down—mending walls, gathering leaves, picking branches up off the flowers. So it makes sense that he is nonplussed by the stately and eternal heavens; but I think it’s a sad thing for him to esteem the constellations so lightly. Is it not their very eternality, their unchangingness, that is the most valuable thing about them? Imagine a sky full of stars zooming around and crashing into each other—what would such a sky be useful for? Our static and changeless celestial vault is a supremely good gift—it has allowed us to navigate the empty oceans, to find our location in even the most trackless wilderness, and to number our months and years. It has served as a memory palace, used by people the world over to encode their most precious legends and beliefs. Surely, as well, the psalmist was thinking of the unchanging heavens when he wrote that they declare the glory of God. What would a heavens in constant flux say about God’s glory?
I’ve written before about the need for an art of being instead of becoming: an art which celebrates the values of stability and certainty, settledness and calm. This poem is certainly not an example of such an art; in fact, Frost is arguing the opposite values. And as such I’m not impressed with Frost’s technical efforts. He puts his poetic skill, here, to poor use. Poetry, at times, and like all the other arts, can act a poisoned apple. It entices us with its beauty and skillful craft, its rhyme and rhythm, all the while subtly feeding lies to us. But it is of vital importance that poets, while exhibiting the heights of technical achievement, put a high value on telling the truth.