20 pages • 40 minutes read
Robert FrostWest-Running Brook
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1928A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Historical Context
The poem is very much a poem of the Roaring 20s. People were exhausted emotionally and spiritually by the trauma of the Great War (it was not yet known as the First World War). Many in this generation felt that the Judeo-Christian notion of an all-knowing, all-wise Creator was absurd. They explored and delighted in the material world and sensory experience.
Frost, in forties, was too old to be an entirely convincing modernist. “West-Running Brook,” explores the existential dilemma about how to live knowing you have to die and the inability to entirely abandon the concept of a spiritual universe. Frost reflects two towering philosophers, that of existentialism and Christianity. Both inform poem’s metaphor of a brook able to move in contrary directions. The wife’s romantic and tender perception of a universe of profound emotion and deep spiritual significance reflects the influence of Ralph Waldo Emerson (1802-1874), particularly his conviction that the material universe revealed an all-embracing spiritual essence that unified and animated the material universe. His was an optimistic philosophy that celebrated how the material universe transcends the limits of what the senses can register. The husband Fred, however, reflects the philosophy of William James (1842-1910), another New Englander. James believed in the absolute reality of the material universe. Living practically was the only way to engage fully in a world that offered no quantitative evidence of a higher power, of there being anything more than a magnificent complex of matter in perpetual motion.
“West-Running Brook” doesn’t pretend to have a tidy resolution. Rather, shows a dialogue of contraries. It brings together historic perceptions of the cosmos that collided in Frost’s own lifetime: the joy and manic energy of the Emerson’s transcendentalism and the stern, sobering industriousness of James’s pragmatism.
Literary Context
What begins as a narrative poem, two characters, a husband and wife, momentarily lost while walking along a stream in the woods of southern New Hampshire, quickly evolves into a poem that tests opposing philosophical positions. In this, “West-Running Brook” is a philosophical poem. Unlike poems that share a story from which a reader gains insight into how to live better or confessional poems in which introspective poets share the joys and agonies of their lives in the hope that such revelation might illuminate the lives of others, a philosophical poem derives its power from its intellectual impact. These poems unapologetically explore big questions about the meaning of life, the purpose of the soul, the mystery of love, the place of a God in a material universe, and supremely the role of the poet in bringing such difficult and thorny questions into the form of poetry.
Often philosophical poems feature only the poet, troubled and thinking through the implications of some difficult question. If such poems introduce characters at all, the characters are rarely multi-dimensional constructs with motivation, individual backstories, or signature psychologies; rather, they represent philosophical positions. Philosophical poems defined the iconic poetry of Britain in the seventeenth and eighteenth century and shaped the theological poetry of America. In America, you had the Puritans, most notably Anne Bradstreet’s towering “Contemplations;” the moral, often satiric treatises of the so-called Connecticut Wits in the decades after the American Revolution, most notably Joel Barlow’s The Anarchiad; the nature poetry of Ralph Waldo Emerson; and the wisdom poetry of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. In the tradition of philosophical poems, “West-Running Brook” uses an unremarkable New Hampshire stream as an occasion to explore how a person is to live knowing they are to die.
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By Robert Frost
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